Spencer Greenberg

speaker

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 he would give me these funny homework assignments of like, okay, this weekend you're going to go to a bar, and you're going to strike up a conversation with five strangers alone.

And I found this just so frightening.

But we started small with the idea of, okay, I'm just going to go up and ask them the time.

Like, I could do that, right?

It was still scary to me, but it felt bearable, right?

If I had to go in and just immediately, you know, start a conversation, maybe that would be too much, right?

But it started easy, and then it would build up.

It would be like, oh...

what do you what drink are you drinking that looks good you know it could build up to there which is a little more stressful for me and then eventually it culminated in really wacky exercises where i would uh i would go up to men i didn't know and say hey would you mind giving me a hug and like my brain predicted that i was going to get punched in the face that like they were going to get really angry at me and like the funny thing is like nobody had a bad reaction now i'm not recommending you do this like maybe in your area they would have a bad reaction but in new york at the time like nobody had a bad reaction i just thought that was so funny because the difference between what my brain predicted and what happened was

Yeah, intriguingly, so there's kind of the two opposite ends of the spectrum.

There's gradual exposure, which is where you build up, which is what I would recommend for almost everyone.

And then there's flooding, where you start at the other end, you just do the most intense, difficult thing.

And interestingly enough, flooding, where you do the most intense, difficult thing, actually can work, and it might even work faster.

But, yeah, but the challenge is that a lot of people do things during flooding that kind of screw up the lesson.

and make it not work.

So that's why I don't recommend... Well, first of all, a lot of people aren't willing to do it because it's so frightening.

But it's prone to people doing things during it that kind of cause the wrong learning.

For example, freaking out and running away, which could reinforce the fear.

Or engaging in massive coping mechanisms during it.

So that's why it's kind of usually not recommended.

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