Spencer Greenberg

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1,056 appearances 1 recordings 1 series first heard Jul 2026 last heard 28 Jul

Spencer Greenberg’s voice in public audio — every appearance, attributed to the second.

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Recordings per month over the last 12 months — 1 in all, peaking in Jul 2026 with 1.

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80,000 Hours Podcast · #249 – Spencer Greenberg on staying sane while trying to save the world · 28 Jul 2026 podcast

And the idea behind it is that my co-author and I, Jeremy Stevenson, we studied over 100 of the most popular self-improvement books and over 20 of the most used therapies, so cognitive behavioral therapy, but also many, many others.

And what we were looking for is them saying any kind of method or technique or telling you to do something to change your life.

And we made a giant database of everything they said, which is almost 500 different techniques.

And then our question was, what are all of the psychological strategies for improving your life?

Like what's the high level meta pattern here?

And I was worried we'd have 50 different kind of high-level patterns, but actually, to my surprise, we were able to boil it down to just 12 high-level psychological strategies for improving your life.

And that's where the name of the book comes from, The 12 Lovers.

We also looked at the evidence for these different levers, and the goal of the book is to teach you about what each lever is, how you can use it effectively, and give you specific concrete steps to put it into action.

Each lever has multiple techniques around it.

Sometimes there are even dozens.

So we try to pick what we think are the most useful techniques around each lever.

I think it's actually really common because if you have new information that makes you feel like you have special knowledge that's important to the fate of the world, that's an incredibly attractive idea.

And we can see that kind of idea growing in popularity in many different domains, right?

There's nothing unique about these ideas in that way.

People are drawn to special knowledge.

In addition, it can really give meaning to life, right?

Having the sense of there's something important and meaningful for me to work on, that can be really, really motivating.

And furthermore, it can make you feel connected to a community, right?

If there's other people involved, you can feel connected to that community through these shared ideas.

So yeah, I think in a way it can be really appealing.

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