#249 – Spencer Greenberg on staying sane while trying to save the world

Transcript

Cold open [00:00:00]

Spencer Greenberg: Often when people are doing things like constantly checking news that’s stressing them out, they’re engaging in kind of weird coping behaviours that actually don’t allow their brain to become more OK with the thing.

Imagine you had a magic dial and you could control how much of different emotions you would feel. Take your fear: would you dial it down to zero?

I think I’m prone to throwing more hours at things. That is not the best way to be more productive.

It’s like thinking that the way that you win a race is by going at maximum speed at every single moment. No, that’s actually how you get injured or burn out.

Failing to accept your limitations can actually be disastrous towards the goals that you care about.

There’s actually a mathematical equation we came up with. It’s about how much value you produce, and it splits into three factors…

Spencer is back — for a 5th time! [00:00:40]

Luisa Rodriguez: Today I’m speaking with Spencer Greenberg. Spencer is the founder and CEO of clearerthinking.org and coauthor of the book The 12 Levers: The Complete Psychological Toolkit For Improving Your Life — which is actually being released today, so congratulations, Spencer. Thanks for coming on.

Spencer Greenberg: Thanks so much for having me.

Managing the psychological toll of working on existential risks [00:01:00]

Luisa Rodriguez: So at 80,000 Hours, we ask people to think deeply about some genuinely very distressing things — pandemics, AI, human extinction, factory farming.

But taking these issues seriously is very difficult for multiple reasons, including for me personally. They’re hard emotionally: we’re talking about suffering and death on an enormous scale. They’re also really hard to truly comprehend: I think the human brain struggles to actually fathom the things that we at 80K think might be true — everyone on Earth might die in the next decade or sooner, humans and other sentient beings might suffer extraordinarily at some point (or already). Even in the best case, the world might transform, maybe for the better, but beyond recognition in the span of a few years — which, despite that being a positive thing, I still find very scary.

I think all of that makes thinking about these issues emotionally fraught and also epistemically fraught.

And some of these issues are further exacerbated when you decide to spend your career trying to solve these problems.

• We have to grapple with the fact that we might be able to help, and every moment we spend playing board games or on vacation is time that we don’t spend trying to reduce existential risk or help animals that are suffering.
• There’s also just so much uncertainty about these risks, so we might kind of simultaneously believe our work has incredibly high stakes, but also maybe we’re wrong about the whole AI thing and we’re all wasting our careers.
• Some of us have to decide whether to have kids in the next few years, or delay or skip it entirely, because maybe the next few years could be the most important ones in our careers.
• And we have to grapple with the fact that we think AI, pandemics, factory farming, and other issues are massive world problems, when many of our friends and relatives don’t understand why we think that or don’t care enough to change their behaviour.

And working on these problems can also be a source of incredible meaning, so there’s a big positive too, which we’ll talk about. But I think we want to give some airtime to the way that this is costly — both to kind of normalise some of these issues, to talk about some things that can help, and then also just to be like, “Thank you for working on these problems anyways. We see that you’re doing that, and it’s hard, and we would like to help how we can.”

I guess to start, do any of these things resonate with you? Do you struggle with any of them personally?

Spencer Greenberg: Yeah, they absolutely resonate with me. And I think we should acknowledge these are incredibly difficult topics to work on psychologically. You know, we have constantly changing things in the AI space. I can absolutely relate to the fear that this could go really badly on many different levels — from more benign harms to very severe harms, or even existential catastrophe. Topics like animal welfare, the amount of suffering involved is staggering, and even thinking about it can be really disturbing. So I absolutely relate to these things, and also say, yeah, these are challenging topics.

Luisa Rodriguez: Yeah, nice. I’m glad that we’ll get to draw on both some of that life wisdom and then also a bunch of your learned expertise.

Luisa and Spencer surveyed people working on existential risk [00:04:23]

Luisa Rodriguez: You have a lot of expertise on self-improvement and trying to be a better, more flourishing person in general. But neither of us, I would say, are experts on the particular intersection of mental health and existential risk — though I think your book is super relevant, even though it’s not tailored to it.

But to get a better sense of what issues come up for people working on x-risk, we did a bit of research ourselves: I spoke to a couple of therapists who mostly treat patients working on existential risks, and your team ran a survey for people working on very important but neglected global problems — so x-risks, factory farming, building the EA [effective altruism] community — and then we’ve got your book that also, again, is super relevant.

To start, can you say a bit about the survey you ran?

Spencer Greenberg: Yeah. We surveyed people who work on these high-impact cause areas like existential risk and, as you mentioned, animal welfare and AI. We ended up getting about 60 to 110 respondents, depending on the question — because some were optional and some people dropped out during the survey.

The basic questions we were asking about are:

• Do you experience psychological challenges in this work?
• How big are those challenges?
• What are the nature of those challenges?
• What kinds of things have you done that you think might be helpful to yourself, or that you think might help others?

And yeah, I think we have a lot of really interesting results from that.

Luisa Rodriguez: Can you say a bit about the headline results?

Spencer Greenberg: Yeah. I’ll first note that these tended to be younger people that responded, typically aged about 25 to 45, and typically working for less than 10 years in the field.

What we found is that very few people were suffering from what you might call a clinical disorder or generalised anxiety disorder or major depressive disorder, but the majority of people do seem to find this work psychologically challenging. So usually it doesn’t get to the point of full-blown depression or anxiety, but it doesn’t mean it’s easy. In fact, not only did most people say that they experience at least somewhat difficult psychological challenges around it, but many people have even considered leaving or reducing their work in it because of these challenges.

Luisa Rodriguez: Yeah, that is kind of surprising, especially the last part: people have considered leaving their work but aren’t currently reporting depression and anxiety. Do you think there could be some other explanation, and people actually are experiencing some depression and anxiety? Or do you think maybe those two questionnaires aren’t really capturing what makes this so hard for people? Or it’s actually just not that hard, and people aren’t depressed or anxious as a result of these topics?

Spencer Greenberg: Well, generalised anxiety disorder and major depressive disorder reflect certain patterns in the mind that can be really painful and difficult, but they don’t reflect all that can be really difficult psychologically. I think what we’re seeing here is that people are struggling psychologically; they’re just not getting to the point of having those particular disorders.

When we ran the survey, we asked people which of a variety of different psychological challenges they face from a list. In fact, the median number selected was six different psychological challenges of doing this work. Forty-five percent said they at least considered cutting back or leaving, and also 52% said that it at least moderately hurts their effectiveness or productivity.

So I think the answer is that people experience a lot of psychological challenges; they just usually aren’t these full-blown disorders.

Luisa Rodriguez: Right. Were there any other findings that felt particularly surprising to you?

Spencer Greenberg: One was that the most common challenges people said they faced — which are not necessarily the most severe, but it’s still interesting to look at — were difficulty switching off or having boundaries around work: 68% of people said they had trouble switching off after work. I think that actually really is an issue, because it elevates your stress level, makes it difficult to relax. I think that can actually, even if it doesn’t get to a full-blown disorder, have pretty negative consequences over the long run.

Luisa Rodriguez: Yeah, yeah. What were the next couple of most common things?

Spencer Greenberg: Imposter syndrome was really common, at 60%. For those of you that don’t know, that’s when you kind of secretly harbour the fear that you’re not good enough, or that you’re there by some kind of mistake and you know you shouldn’t really be there.

And then we also have burnout: 59% said they had some experience with burnout, which can mean different things to different people. It can be a loss of motivation, it can just be feeling too stressed to function. So a wide range of things can contribute to burnout.

Fifty-six percent said they experience guilt, and then 54% said they experience anxiety or worry around their work.

Luisa Rodriguez: Yeah, OK. Those just feel like very high numbers to me. We’ll talk about most of those things, and a couple of others.

Before we start getting into some of the concrete issues, can you say a bit more about the book? Kind of what it covers and your process for writing it?

Spencer Greenberg: Yeah. So our new book — and we would really love for you to check it out if it sounds interesting — is called The 12 Levers: The Complete Psychological Toolkit For Improving Your Life.

The idea behind it is that my coauthor, Jeremy Stevenson, and I studied over 100 of the most popular self-improvement books, and over 20 of the most used therapies — so cognitive behavioural therapy, but also many others. 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? What’s the high-level meta pattern here? And I was worried we’d have 50 different 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 Levers.

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.

Luisa Rodriguez: Yeah, nice. Again, it’s helpful for all sorts of issues you might have, but I was kind of blown away when I was preparing for this interview. It’s just a very relevant toolkit for this subset of issues too.

How to sustain your motivation [00:11:13]

Luisa Rodriguez: Let’s talk about some of the specific issues that come up for people working on x-risks. Actually I kind of want to start with a slightly different point, which is that I actually had a high when I first started getting really bought into existential risks being real. I guess not just x-risks, but there being very pressing global problems that people weren’t tracking, and that plausibly could get a lot better.

I think it felt like I learned something important and true about the world, and as a result I got to have this big opportunity to work on something high stakes that not many people were taking seriously. It felt exciting and it felt like an opportunity. And I think the ideas are also just intrinsically interesting, almost like a good sci-fi novel.

So I think there’s something enjoyable about that, which I feel kind of strange and awkward about. But from the conversations I’ve had with therapists who work with people working on these issues, this is kind of a common experience. Did you have anything like this, or do you know people that did?

Spencer Greenberg: 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 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. Having the sense of, “There’s something important and meaningful for me to work on,” that can be really motivating. Furthermore, it can make you feel connected to a community 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, while it could also be frightening if you kind of grapple with the gravity of it all.

Luisa Rodriguez: According to some of the therapists I spoke to — and it seems like the survey backs this up — after learning about these ideas, starting to work on them, maybe some people have a bit of a high, but then people can start to experience a kind of chronic, low-grade emergency state. So kind of the threat system being perpetually on, because you’re regularly aware that humanity is under threat, or that factory farming is causing enormous unimaginable suffering right now, and we’re not really on track to solve these issues.

I think this can come with kind of hypervigilance, and compulsive monitoring of news sites and X, and the sense that you can’t slow down or stop working — because things are on fire, and we don’t have that much time before things get catastrophically bad.

Do you personally experience anything like this?

Spencer Greenberg: I, for my whole life, have had the kind of mind that tends to look for things that could go wrong. So I’m a kind of worrier personality; that’s always something that I’ve dealt with. And over the years I’ve improved tremendously on this, and it’s much less of a problem for me now than it was when I was younger. You know, like on the weekends I’d have trouble even relaxing or enjoying the weekend because I’d stress myself out with my thoughts.

So I feel like I’ve found a number of tools that really help, but I do think that’s my fundamental disposition. Like I don’t ever expect to have a different brain that’s not a worrier brain, but I do expect to have tools that make it all kind of easier that I can continue to use.

But I think, especially with topics like this — where they feel so big and important, where they feel like they’re changing, where people feel morally responsible to contribute — you’re going to find this at especially high rates, not just among people born with brains like me, but probably among a lot of other types of brains too.

Luisa Rodriguez: Yeah. Do you buy that this is a bad thing? I ask because there are plenty of things that I worry about in my day-to-day life that I give more worry than I think they deserve. But these problems are exceptionally big, and probably deserve more worry than we give them. If we were actually going to have worry that was proportionate to the size of the issue, how much anxiety is the right amount of anxiety?

Spencer Greenberg: There’s a lot to unpack there. And if you go to cognitive behavioural therapy, let’s say for anxiety, an exercise sometimes that you’ll engage in is one where you consider the evidence. So they’ll be like, “You’re worried about this thing. You’re worried about how your friend didn’t text you back. What’s the underlying thought there?” Maybe the underlying thought is like, “Maybe my friend doesn’t like me anymore.” And then they’ll be like, “OK, why don’t you consider the evidence for and against?” You’ll consider the evidence for and against, and often people will feel better after that, and it will help them have more realistic thinking.

And there’s a temptation, I think, if someone goes to a friend who doesn’t buy into these [existential risk] ideas, or even goes to a therapist who’s used to practicing that technique, where they’ll be like, “Consider the evidence.” And that’s actually really unhelpful in this situation, because chances are, if you’re listening to this podcast, you’ve already thought a lot about the evidence — and if someone’s like, “Consider the evidence for and against this problem that you think is a horrible problem being really bad,” you’re like, “Yeah, I’ve thought about the evidence, and I think it actually is really bad.” So that’s not the way to go in these kinds of situations, right?

But I think it’s also important to ask the question, what is hypervigilance, and what’s the point of it? Effectively it’s a state that’s preparing you to take drastic action. Like there’s something dangerous that’s coming: you’ve got to go, you’ve got to act. Unfortunately, it’s really not a healthy state to be in all the time. It’s not good for your body, it’s not good for your mind. It can literally mess up things like digestion, because it actually affects your digestion when you’re in a hypervigilant state.

You know, I like to think about professional athletes here. Do professional athletes want to be stressing their bodies all the time? If you’re training to be in the Olympics, and all you care about is the goal of winning the Olympics, are you just stressing your body to the absolute limit? The answer is absolutely no, because that is not the performance-optimising move. The performance-optimising move involves genuine rest; it involves variation of things. You’re not always working just on that one skill set. You’re going to have off days. You’re going to have days where you’re practicing other things or doing cross training or whatever — and that’s even if you just care about optimising for the goal.

So I think we have to be realistic about like, what is this state, what is it doing for us? And what kind of beings are we realistically?

Luisa Rodriguez: Yeah, I think the “what kinds of beings are we realistically?” feels really important to me. Part of my brain thinks that I can just not be a human. I don’t know what gave me this idea. I think it is something about this community really valuing self-improvement and feeling like changing parts about yourself is kind of possible.

I think some people think people can’t change, people can’t improve. Spending lots of time around the kinds of people who think they can make big improvements to the world, I think you also spend time around the kinds of people who think that they can better themselves — and that includes things like, “I can work harder; I can boost my productivity.”

Spencer Greenberg: Well, I think there are a few issues going on here.

One is that people can have a sense that the way they get social credit is by being the hardest worker or the one who’s doing the most good or whatever. If you’re in a community that values that, that can become a kind of optimisation metric — even to the point of it being unhealthy, and even past the point of it actually really being admired. It’s just sort of the sense that, “I’ll be admired more if I push this way.” And I think that can be an unhealthy dynamic of competing over who can grind themselves the hardest. I don’t think that is the way anyone would want the community to be. But sometimes, maybe people can perceive that, and that can have negative consequences.

The other thing is that, even if your goal were just to get the maximum performance, you have to be realistic about what kind of body you have and what kind of mind you have — and grinding all the way is not actually the way to get maximum performance. It’s a naive version of trying to get maximum performance. It’s like thinking that the way that you win a race is by going at maximum speed at every single moment. No, that’s actually how you get injured or burn out, right? That’s not the way you win the race.

Luisa Rodriguez: One thing that especially resonated with me was this idea that status is part of the motivation. I think I have this narrative that the reason I want to work harder is purely because of impact, but I think if I really reflect, you know, there is a part of me that wants people to think I work hard just because they’ll admire me more. And there’s a part of me that wants my manager to think I work hard because I want to be a good student.

So why does this feel important? I think it feels important because when I try to interrogate why I find it so hard to rest, I think the main motivation is impact. But I think that the fact that actually these other motivations are in there feels important for me to notice — because really, deep down, it isn’t all about impact. Yeah, it feels like there’s something there. I don’t know. What do you think?

Spencer Greenberg: Yeah. This goes back to the question of what kind of beings are we? I would argue that we’re beings with many different drives.

And some of them are very low level — like generally people will avoid taking on extra effort unless they have some reason to. Literally they’ll walk in straight lines instead of curved lines, right? They’ll take the path of least resistance. Well, why is that? I think we have some drive to reduce energy expenditure. Of course, you can override it. You could have a goal that overrides it. But I think it’s worth noticing that that’s a drive.

I actually think we have dozens of these drives. We have a drive to be accepted by our social community, probably because we would literally die if we weren’t 50,000 years ago.

I think we have all these overlapping drives, and then we have this kind of reasoning, more rational part of our minds that’s coming up with principles to live by and ideas that we want to follow and things we believe in, et cetera — but that’s operating amidst all of these drives. It doesn’t override all these drives. And that actually can create a lot of internal conflict when the drives and that more rational part are not gelling that well.

Luisa Rodriguez: Yeah, I want to come back to the internal conflict stuff. I think a lot of what we’re going to talk about today has to do with that.

Before we do, I’m curious if there’s anything you found helpful in recognising and accepting that the type of person you are is a human with limitations. I just want to be the kind of being that can work as hard as my values make me feel like I should. Have you done anything, something like kind of dealing with the grief of it or something?

Spencer Greenberg: Well, I mean, it is a very powerful idea, that we’re such limited beings, and that no matter how hard we work to be unlimited beings, we’re never going to get there. All of these things are just ideals that we strive for and we won’t come close.

For example, I really care about trying to be rational, and I regularly see how far I am from that goal. And you could let that kind of undercut your motivation, being like, “Oh man, I’m so far from that,” or you can turn that around and you can say, “Hey, I can keep becoming a better version of myself and move incrementally towards this more ideal form.” And that can be exciting. I don’t think it has to be demotivating. It can be motivating, actually: being limited, but seeing how you can progress and improve.

But I would also say that failing to accept your limitations can actually be disastrous towards the goals that you care about. So the more accurately you can see yourself — what you are, what your limitations are — the better you can be at all the things that you care about. Denying them is actually a strategy that’s going to undercut you.

Luisa Rodriguez: Yeah, totally.

Why you shouldn’t read the news [00:23:54]

Luisa Rodriguez: I guess there are a couple of threads there, and I want to put pins in a few of them and stay on this idea of the threat system always being on, and that being a thing that can feel maybe truth tracking and important — because in some ways it feels like the world is genuinely on fire — but also not good for you as a human being. Not good for your work, if you assume something like… Actually, not just assume: I believe that it is probably just bad for your work if your threat system is always on and you are constantly feeling chronically on fire.

One common way that people end up entering this threat system and staying in it is tracking world events. So maybe there’s the release of a new model that seems super impressive, or a blog post or an interview with someone talking about how AI timelines are even shorter than they thought, or bad news about policy, AI regulation stuff. What approach seems most helpful to you in handling these kinds of triggers?

Spencer Greenberg: I’ll use a parallel because I think it’s helpful: news consumption broadly. Many people find news of the world stressful because the news tends to focus on bad things, and also there’s bad things happening in the world. So they read an article on X and they’re like, “Ahhh, things are falling apart!” And then a friend posts on Facebook and they’re like, “Ahh!”

So my strategy for helping deal with this challenge is I subscribe to a service that just gives one news story a day, and that is my news. Basically the idea is: if it’s not important enough to be the top news story of the day, it’s probably not important enough to care about. And in fact, funnily enough, many days that’s not even important enough for me to want to read it, and you know, they’re picking one news story a day. It’s kind of crazy to think about, but so much of this is noise, right?

And I find that helpful for me: staying on top of the important things happening in the world, but not getting sucked into it and not wasting time, and you’re not getting stressed out about things needlessly, but still knowing kind of what’s happening.

Now, let’s say you’re in the field of AI, and things are moving so fast. It may be even more difficult to deal with, just because there is information you really want to stay on top of and it is changing a lot. And there, I would say the same kind of strategy can be useful: being really aware of where am I getting my news, what are the good news sources, what’s the stuff that’s going to keep me up to date?

And then trying to block out all the noise, right? You don’t need to constantly scroll down and get every single new post on X about AI, a bunch of which are probably complete exaggerations anyway or bad takes. You know, figure out your trusted news sources and that’s where you’re going to get your information. That’s how you can stay on top of things, and then you don’t need to just constantly passively consume all this other information.

Luisa Rodriguez: Why do you think people are so inclined to doomscroll?

Spencer Greenberg: Well, it’s a bit of an irony, because often people go to social media as a form of avoidance or as a form of attempting to unwind, right? So they’re like, “I don’t want to think about this thing. I’m stuck on this thing. Let me open up social media.” Or like, “I’ve just been working hard, let me unwind.” And the irony is that they end up often in this sort of hypervigilant state when they’re on social media, where it’s like not even necessarily doing a good job of getting them to relax, or maybe they’ve avoided this one thing and now they’re stressed out about this other thing they’re looking at. So it often doesn’t serve the purpose that it’s intended to.

This actually connects to an idea from our book, The 12 Levers. In our beta testing, we were having people read the book. This idea is one of these ideas that our beta testers just kept bringing up, like this was an unlock for them.

It’s this idea that we call “glad you did it” activities. The idea is that often we do things that are serving some need, or that we believe are serving some need — like rest, relaxation, et cetera — but when we actually really get down to it, we could swap them with a different activity that serves the same need, but afterwards you’re like, “I’m glad I did that.” You’re not like, “That was a giant waste of time.”

I think a mistake people often make is that they try to swap out those activities with things that don’t serve that need. So you as a human have a need to rest, but what you might be doing to rest is going and scrolling social media — which, you know, maybe it is a little bit restful, but maybe it doesn’t even serve that person very well, and then afterwards you’re probably like, “Why did I do that? That was not a good use of time.”

Well, what else is restful? What else shares that same need? Maybe walking your dog or going for a walk in nature or having a call with a friend or whatever it is. And maybe it takes a little bit more planning to make that happen; it’s not quite as mindless — but if you could swap it out with something that serves the same need at least as well, hopefully better, but where afterwards you’re like, “I’m glad I did that; that was a good use of time,” it can not only serve our needs better, but actually make life more meaningful and fulfilling, and I think be more restorative so you are more ready when now you have to go take action in the future.

Luisa Rodriguez: Yeah, nice. I can imagine that’s in contrast to what maybe I’d be tempted to do if I had this problem of doomscrolling. I’m actually not a doomscroller. I am a scroller, but I’m not a doomscroller. I think I’d be tempted to be like, “A virtuous thing would be to work” or do something that’s a good use of time according to unrealistic values. It feels like a really key thing about this is it’s meeting the rest need; it’s not meeting the goal of “be a more productive person all the time.”

Spencer Greenberg: Exactly, exactly. And that’s a mistake people constantly make. They’re trying to swap one need for another, which often doesn’t work. You need to do meaningful work, that’s great, but you’re trying to replace your need to rest, and it doesn’t satisfy your need to rest. It’s a different thing. And actually, you can kind of grind yourself to a pulp and make it hard for you to function if you’re never letting yourself actually satisfy that rest need. Or if your “rest” is not actually restful, like you’re actually stressed out doing your rest because you’re scrolling stressful AI news or whatever it is.

Luisa Rodriguez: Yeah, that makes tonnes of sense. One need that people are trying to get met is rest. It feels like for some people there probably is another. I’m kind of just guessing, because this isn’t a problem I relate to as much, but I wonder if there’s something like, “This is a true thing about the world. It’s scary. I need to look at it. I need to know the true thing so that I can be able to track it, and not be snuck up on or something.” It’s like wanting to watch a danger approach because it feels safer, even though that’s triggering the threat system. Does that sound plausible?

Spencer Greenberg: Absolutely. When people feel like there’s a frightening thing in the world, they’ll often track it. You look at early days of the COVID pandemic, people were absolutely glued to any source of information, couldn’t talk about anything else. And I think it is that vigilant system of like, “This really scary thing is there. We’ve all got to monitor it really closely.”

And that goes back to some of what we were talking about before: you need a system for monitoring it. That is important if that’s your field, if that’s what you’re focused on. But once you have that in place, it actually can give you permission to not monitor other times, right? But if you don’t have a good system in place, then you might always feel like “I might miss something critical” or “I might need to monitor” because you don’t trust that it will be monitored.

It actually reminds me of this idea of the Getting Things Done productivity system, where oftentimes when people have never done complex work before, they have very ad hoc systems for keeping track of things, so they never really are sure that they’re on top of what needs to be on top of, or that all their to-dos are there. And one of the insights of Getting Things Done is: have a single trusted system. Anytime you have something to do, it goes in the trusted system, so you know you will never miss it. And that just removes the need for this vigilance of like, “But what if I missed this thing?” blah, blah. You’re like, “No, I just have this one system, and it will always tell me what I need to do.”

Luisa Rodriguez: Cool. And so the version of that that kind of applies to these kinds of risks is: in your case, figure out what news you want to receive, and know that you’ll know about the worst thing that’s happening in the world. You’ll know the thing that you need to know. You don’t need to track every single news article. Is there anything more to say on that?

Spencer Greenberg: I think it’s important to understand a bit about the nature of anxiety. It can actually be quite confusing, and people can misunderstand what it’s like, because you might think, “If I’m tracking all the newest AI news stories and they’re stressing me out, then I’m exposing myself to the scary thing and that’s somehow good for me” — like, “That’s going to make me hardened and robust,” or, “The psychologically healthy thing is not to avoid it.”

But there’s this really strange thing about the way anxiety works, which is that there’s exposure that works, that hardens you and makes you stronger to the thing, and then there’s exposure that doesn’t work, that ends up being an unproductive just kind of worry.

I think it’s useful to give an example here. I have a friend who’s extremely afraid of flying, and he flies regularly. So you might wonder, if exposure works, if being exposed to things you fear makes you less afraid of them — which is generally a true principle, by and large — then why has he not become less afraid? And you can kind of inspect what is he doing and what is his mind doing when he goes to fly? It turns out what he’s doing is he’s constantly checking the weather reports, and he’s always on top of exactly what the weather is. And if the weather’s perfect, he’ll fly. And if the weather’s iffy, he’ll cancel the flight, or he’ll find some other way to get there.

So you could think about what is his brain learning from this process? His brain doesn’t learn the rule “flying is safe.” His brain learns the rule of, “If you’re hypervigilant and you constantly check the weather and the weather’s perfect, then flying is safe.” But that’s very far from the rule “flying is safe.” It’s actually a really, really different rule. It’s a rule that actually will maintain anxiety rather than reduce it over time.

And I think it’s really important to realise that often when people are doing things like constantly checking news that’s stressing them out, they’re engaging in weird coping behaviours, not consciously, but that actually don’t allow their brain to become more OK with the thing.

Luisa Rodriguez: Yeah. And I suspect that people who struggle with this are going to be like, “But flying is pretty safe. Existential risks are not actually safe.” But I think the key is something like: it’s true that existential risks are not under control, and we are not safe in some particular sense, but you are not actually making yourself safer by tracking every single update in the AI space. Yes, we should do the things that we think actually make us safer, but this thing is a different thing. It’s harmful to you. It’s kind of a weird coping mechanism, but it’s not actually the productive thing to do here.

Spencer Greenberg: Absolutely. And I would also say, probably 97% of the time or higher, when you’re checking that news article, you didn’t actually find out some new danger; you’re simply being reminded. Why weren’t you stressed right before you checked the news article? You already knew about that thing in some sense, or you predicted that it was going to happen, or you know AI is changing. You maybe didn’t know that exact change was going to happen, but you knew it was going to change. So there’s some way in which you haven’t fully adapted to the information you already have if every new news story is stressing you out.

Luisa Rodriguez: Yeah, right. So with that in mind, I can see how, yes, definitely find out the important updates in the space that are relevant to you and your work, but every story seems like that’s not the helpful thing.

Why guilt isn’t an optimal source of motivation [00:36:28]

Luisa Rodriguez: We’ve brought up rest a few times, and I think a related issue for me is guilt about rest: feeling like rest is undeserved or self-indulgent.

We’ve already mentioned how much it came up in the survey that people find it very hard to switch off. I think not switching off was the number one thing, and then burnout and exhaustion were the number [two and] three things, and guilt was the number four thing that came up. So these are some of the biggest issues for people.

There’s a good quote too, that felt illustrative: “Because the need in the world is effectively unlimited, no amount of work registers as enough, and ‘I did enough today’ almost never arrives.”

So clearly there’s something especially tricky about these issues, because it feels like it puts one’s moral values in direct tension with more selfish values, rest. And it just feels really hard to justify kind of sacrificing those moral values for selfish ones.

I know that we’ve talked about we’re human beings with limits. I’ve found that that is a helpful first step, but that it still doesn’t get me all the way to thinking about rest and guilt the way I think I endorse on an intellectual level. How do you think about this for yourself?

Spencer Greenberg: Well, the irony is that there’s so many different frames you could have on this, although it’s easy to get sucked into one frame. But a different frame you could have is you could feel really good about all the good that you’re doing and you could feel even happier when you’re able to do more.

So there’s this idea of what are these kind of motivational sticks and carrots that we have? One thing I’ve tried to cultivate is a feeling of enthusiasm and excitement for improving. But you could do the exact opposite: you could just beat yourself up for not being already better. And those are both motivational tools, right? Carrots and sticks.

I think we often kind of assume the motivational tool has to be the one we’re using, but it’s possible you could achieve just as good of outcomes, and actually feel a lot better and be more productive, if you were somehow — and I’m not saying it’s easy — able to feel good about the good that you’re doing, and feel even better about doing more, and feel excited to push the edge on how much good you can do. It’s sort of like this baked-in assumption that you have to feel bad about it, and that’s the way to get the outcome.

Luisa Rodriguez: Totally, yeah. That feels really interesting to stay on for a minute. I’m curious — I think this applies to a bunch of the issues that we’re going to talk about and have talked about — where does motivation come from? Does it come from guilt or shame, or does it come from excitement and opportunity, feeling like you get to play a role in shaping the world? Not like, “I failed at my duty and obligation to help the world a little bit more.” How do you actively influence how your own brain thinks about these things? Because I think I very much live in my own world that it’s just true that if you aren’t doing more, you should feel guilt. It feels kind of crazy to me that you’d be able to change that.

Spencer Greenberg: So I have a podcast called Clearer Thinking, where I bring on guests each week and I ask them to pick four ideas they think really matter, and we have an intellectual discussion about those.

Recently I had on Stephen Zerfas, and he had this really interesting idea that I’ve been thinking about ever since then, which is the idea of clean fuel versus dirty fuel. This is this idea of how are we motivating ourselves to get stuff done?

A lot of really high-achieving people use what he calls “dirty fuel,” which is essentially we beat ourselves up or are really harsh on ourselves as a way to get really good performance. And the irony of it is often it does work for people, but it has tremendous psychological costs, and also it can be unsustainable. It might actually be bad in the long run where they burn out or actually don’t achieve their goals because of the psychological costs. And then there’s this idea of “clean fuel,” which is other ways to motivate yourself that don’t have the psychological costs, or even have psychological benefits.

I think a lot of this goes back to people figuring out how to get themselves to behave the way they want. So I don’t know your own situation, but you can imagine, like when you were younger, you’re trying to get yourself to do a good job or be excellent, and then you develop these psychological strategies. And you kind of observe that, when you apply the psychological strategy of like, “I’m not doing enough” or whatever it is, you get better performance out of yourself.

And this happens to all of us. We learn these psychological strategies to get things done. The thing about those is that they’re kind of scary to get rid of, because that’s how we get things done. Like, if I didn’t have the taskmaster whipping me, then I’m not going to achieve my goal, right? That’s how I’ve always gotten it done.

So I don’t think we can just be like, “OK, I’m just gonna swap wholesale: I’m using a totally new psychological strategy.” But I think taking a little bit of a more playful approach, saying, “Let me experiment around small things with other forms of motivation.”

And there are actually a lot of forms of motivation. Being human, there are a lot of ways we can motivate ourselves. One of them is telling ourselves we’re never doing enough or feeling guilt, but we can have other forms of motivation. We could have social motivation: maybe I’ll collaborate with someone, and that will motivate me. We can have reward-based motivation: if I do this, I’ll give myself this cool reward. Et cetera, et cetera. There are many forms of motivation. I could try to develop a feeling of excitement around this project in particular. I don’t think there’s like a switch we can flip, but we can experiment in small ways on lower-stakes things on other ways to motivate ourselves, and see if it actually works as well or even better, and is “cleaner fuel,” as Zerfas would say.

Luisa Rodriguez: Yeah, I really like the clean fuel idea. I guess I’m still unsure how I actually go from… I think for me, fear is a lot of motivation. It’s like fear of disappointing others, fear of people judging me.

Let’s say the thing I really want to be motivated to do is I want to learn about a subject that I don’t know that much about. And at the moment, maybe I want to learn about it because I think people will judge me if I don’t know enough about it. How, really concretely, do you end up fostering motivation that’s like excitement or curiosity?

Spencer Greenberg: It’s going to be so personal. But you have to think about, is there any other reason you’re actually motivated to learn that thing? Maybe the answer is no. Maybe you literally have no other motivation other than just to not have people judge you, right? And then that’s just worth noting, like, “OK, interesting.” Or maybe you notice this actually is kind of an interesting subject, or this actually can help me achieve things later that I care about achieving in the world. And that’s a motivation.

So what I would say is just do genuine reflection. You may actually have no other motivation, and that’s worth knowing about yourself. It’s worth knowing about what you’re really like, rather than just sort of thinking of yourself as this idealised being. But there’s a decent chance you realise there are other motivations, and then if there are, you could try to actually start leveraging those forms of motivation.

Luisa Rodriguez: And so is that like you giving yourself a pep talk?

Spencer Greenberg: I think it depends. So let’s say you’re like, “Actually, I think this is actually just really interesting to learn about,” then you could start thinking about, “How do I approach it in a way that is also taking into account my interest in it?” — like, is allowing myself to get excited and enjoy the process of learning it. Maybe I’m going to have a project to do a certain thing with it or understand it in a certain way that I actually feel some excitement around, rather than, let’s say, try to approach it in the most efficient way possible — which might just satisfy the dirty fuel of like, “OK, I’ve ticked this off, and nobody’s going to think I’m an idiot for not knowing it.”

Breaking the boom-and-bust cycle of burnout [00:44:41]

Luisa Rodriguez: Pushing on: we’ve been talking about motivation, including alternatives to guilt. I want to talk about a topic that’s related to guilt and fear and rest and overdoing it.

The therapists that I spoke to said that as people work on these issues for longer, there’s another cluster of issues that starts emerging more and more: the chronic stress becomes burnout, and there can be a kind of boom-and-bust cycle of periods of giving work kind of everything you’ve got, sprinting really hard, but then neglecting your own needs and eventually crashing.

One quote from the survey that I related to was: “I swung between being frantic and anxious, and working as hard as possible to being deeply burnt out and procrastinating.”

What other advice do you have for people who have this kind of boom-and-bust cycle thing?

Spencer Greenberg: Well, I think we first have to acknowledge that the boom and bust — where you get really freaked out and you work really hard, and then you feel burned out and you need to take a rest — is just not the most effective way to achieve your goals. It’s not the most effective way to achieve altruistic goals, but it’s also not the best way to achieve your other values, like being happy.

So it’s just like a bad strategy. Not to criticise people that do it. It’s completely understandable why you would do this, because you feel afraid, so you push really hard, but then that’s unsustainable and you burn out, right?

But I think the first thing to accept is just on a cognitive level, this is not a healthy and not an effective strategy. And then if you accept that, then the question is like, which of those emotions are serving you, and when they’re not serving you, what can you do about that?

I think it is interesting to think about how would you want to act in these difficult situations? What would the ideal version of you do? Let’s say you think that there’s a really high chance that existential risk is on the horizon. Suppose you believe that. Would you want yourself to just be freaked out 100% of the time? Is that actually the ideal version of you? And what is the ideal version of you? How often would you be freaked out, and to what degree? And what would that fear do for you?

I think when you kind of do that thought experiment, you realise that actually just being freaked out all the time is like, on some level it feels maybe proportionate to you, but it’s actually not what you would want of yourself. And the ideal version of you wouldn’t be in that state.

Luisa Rodriguez: Yeah, it’s interesting. I think I am still a little drawn to that is just the correct way to feel. It’s proportionate to the truth. I think the thing doing some work is that it just is very sticky for me that fear and guilt will make me work on the problem to the level that I would like to believe I could work on it.

Spencer Greenberg: This brings up another idea, actually, that another fascinating guest on my podcast Clearer Thinking talked about. His name is David Burns, and he was one of the psychologists that really popularised the idea of cognitive behavioural therapy. And his book sold millions of copies about this thought experiment he has, that I think is really valuable, which is the magic dial.

Imagine you had a magic dial and you could control how much of different emotions you would feel. Let’s take your fear: where would you dial that dial? Would you just leave it? You’re like, “No, I actually feel the optimal amount of fear”? Would you dial it down to zero?

And I think part of his insight, and why he developed this idea, is he realised, working with patients over decades, that actually sometimes they feel like therapists are trying to push them down to zero. Not that that’s achievable, but they might feel that, and they may actually have resistance to that because they might feel like zero is not the right level, right? So then he asks, “Well, what is the right level?”

So I’d ask that of you: would you actually leave the dial exactly where it is?

Luisa Rodriguez: Yeah, yeah. This one’s really helpful, because now it’s totally clear to me that I would turn it way down. I wouldn’t turn it to zero, but I think much nearer to zero than it is now. So yeah, that works really well.

Spencer Greenberg: Another thing I think that’s useful to understand there is that the way emotions work is you don’t feel them consistently all the time. Suppose a loved one dies, like someone you really deeply love and are connected to. There’s this naive model of emotions sometimes people have, which is like, you’re just going to feel equally sad or depressed for like weeks or months. But if you’ve had this happen to you, you know that is not the way emotions work. You know, you will literally, three or four days later, at some point, you’ll be eating breakfast and not thinking about the fact that your loved one died. And then later you’re going to be swept up in emotion, maybe in the afternoon, of deep, intense sadness.

And emotions work this way, I think, for really good reason: because it’s absolutely not functional to feel the emotion all the time at that level. In fact, it’s deeply dysfunctional, in the sense that it prevents us from doing useful things. If you just always felt equally sad after a loved one dies, you would be completely dysfunctional. But it comes in waves, and that is functional.

One way, for example, a fear can go wrong is if we feel fear all the time. That’s actually not the way the emotion works functionally. I sometimes think about how people today think they’re in this unprecedented era of uncertainty. A lot of people worried about climate change destroying the world are like, “We’re dealing with this impossible thing,” or a lot of effective altruists are like, “We’re dealing with this impossible thing around AI.”

And yeah, that’s really difficult. But I also think back, and I think, you know what? My grandfather thought Nazis were going to take over the entire world, and he had pretty good reason to fear that, and he went and fought against them, right? And then you think back, you know what? In the early 60s, people thought the world was going to be destroyed by nuclear weapons, and they had pretty good reason to actually think that, and they were deeply afraid of that.

And then I think back even further to our ancient ancestors, like 20,000 years ago, and imagine there was some tribe nearby that had destroyed other tribes and was much more powerful, and one day could just show up and kill you and everyone you love and everyone you’ve ever cared about and your entire world ceased to exist.

My point here is not to undermine these feelings, but just to say this is not a unique thing. Humans in history have dealt with this. There’s something human about this. And they found different ways to deal with it. And some of those ways have been very functional, where they’ve been able to act in the face of incredible adversity, and other ways dysfunctional, where they let the fear actually disable them from being effective.

Luisa Rodriguez: Yeah, that feels really useful. My brain can actually take it in rather than reject it, which is a pretty common thing I feel.

Specialness and saviour complex [00:51:46]

Luisa Rodriguez: A slightly different angle to this kind of guilt boom-and-bust thing for me: I feel like I’ve had to kind of admit to myself that part of what contributes to my feelings of relentless guilt and my own kind of cycles of sprinting really hard, feeling like I have this sense of duty to do as much as I can, is related to feeling like I’m special; that I might be one of a few people who can make a difference to whether we solve these global problems.

So a bit of a saviour complex. It feels kind of uncomfortably entangled with feelings of grandiosity and narcissism, which feels yucky saying aloud. But yeah, I find myself attached to the idea that me specifically, I might have a lot to contribute. It feels kind of related to having to main character energy.

And the fact that I’m really beating myself up for not eking out a few extra hours a week to work does just feel like it’s really coming from this “maybe I’m special and I’m going to make a difference.” Whereas really, realistically, I think the more correct thing is, “I am playing my part. My part is not enormous. Whether I work a few extra hours this week is not going to save the world or determine whether things go well or badly.”

I don’t know if this resonates with you, but I’m curious, if you’ve seen this in people, if you think there’s something real about it?

Spencer Greenberg: First, I want to point out that it’s really important to understand your own psychology and not try to force a fake psychology that’s not yours. So I appreciate that you’re saying, what is my actual psychology around this?

And I also like to feel special. I think that’s something that’s important to me. I think it’s important to a lot of people. The idea of wanting to feel special can actually be at odds with doing good. Or sometimes I think about, imagine there’s a child drowning and then like three people are fighting to be the one that saves the child, right? Like knocking each other over. You don’t want that. So there’s a cost, but there’s also a benefit for this.

But you can imagine other people working on these big challenges motivated very differently. For example: motivated socially by the community and wanting to be a good community member, or motivated by the intellectual challenge of like, trying to align AI is the greatest intellectual challenge.

So there’s a lot of different motivational structures that could allow someone to contribute. But I would suspect that specialness is one for a non-negligible number of people who work on these challenges, and it gives them the freedom to say, “I can try to do something great that really matters.”

Luisa Rodriguez: Yeah, I guess it feels tricky because… I mean, one of 80,000 Hours’s ideas that it tries to spread is that we should all be more ambitious because these are really hard problems, and it’s ambitious solutions and ambitious careers that are going to have a bigger impact kind of by their nature.

But this kind of meme feels like it creates this expectation that then the guilt comes from. And I feel confused about what to do about it, because, for my own kind of selfish wellbeing and reducing of guilt, I think it would be better for me to feel more humble. You know, “I’m just one person, I can’t save the world alone. I don’t need to feel terrible about the fact that I’m not spending every waking moment because I’m the person who’s going to solve all these problems.” It feels like that would be kind of good. But it also seems like 80,000 Hours, as an entity that wants people to be ambitious, it would feel counterproductive for that mission. What’s your take?

Spencer Greenberg: I would go back trying to understand the detailed causal structure. I could see why if you didn’t feel special, you may not feel guilty, because you’d say, “If I’m not special enough to actually make any difference here, then, well, I guess I’m off the hook. I don’t have to work on it” — because you’re only responsible for things you can actually do or something like that. So your specialness ties into feeling like you can actually do something here, and then that gives you a moral responsibility.

But that’s not the only thing your guilt comes from. And if I were trying to help you feel less guilty, I don’t know that that would be the causal avenue I would approach. I would probably approach it a different way, maybe thinking about: what is this guilt doing for you, and what’s its cost? On that magic dial, how much guilt would you choose to feel? Would you choose to feel the amount on the magic dial if you could control it? Is the guilt actually helping you do a better job, or is it actually impairing you and making you do a worse job?

And then also guilt, if we think about what it is, what is it detecting in the smoke detector model? It’s detecting a feeling like you’ve done wrong or you’ve violated a moral standard. And then I would ask the question: have you really? Like, I don’t know how much you work, but is working 80 hours required as a moral standard? Should everyone feel guilty for not working 80 hours if they could make a difference, like you believe you can, et cetera?

My point being, not to psychologise you too much, is just that there’s a lot of causal structures here that could be explored, and it’s going to be individual. And you really have to get down to that micro level of where is that guilt coming from?

Luisa Rodriguez: Cool.

If you’re certain we’re doomed, you’re overconfident [00:57:36]

Luisa Rodriguez: OK, pushing on. This is a kind of different issue. I understand from the therapists that I spoke to that some people struggle with kind of the opposite of the thing we were just talking about: there can be a growing sense of hopelessness, powerlessness, and even nihilism as people start to realise that the problem is harder to solve than they thought, and they start to feel like maybe actually none of their efforts matter because we’re doomed anyways. How much did this come up in the survey?

Spencer Greenberg: In the survey, we bundled depression with feeling hopeless. The reason we did that is just because they tend to be very intertwined: depressed people very often feel hopeless or a sense that they can’t do anything that matters, or that the future has no value in it.

And actually, it was somewhat common, but not that common. Only 29% of people reported experiencing this. That’s enough that it’s concerning, but it’s not what most people are dealing with, interestingly enough.

Luisa Rodriguez: OK, so it came up, but it isn’t the most common thing. For those for whom it is something difficult, the survey actually had kind of a striking pattern, where people said their anxiety went down once they started actually working on the problem — that doing something, even something small, was more bearable than just passively dreading.

I think we even had a question in the survey that was like, “How difficult for your mental health has working on these issues been?” and [the options were] like, zero, a little, a lot, that kind of thing. And a couple people in the survey were like, “You didn’t have the option that it made this better. Hopelessness was one of my biggest issues, and actually it really resolved that.” It feels like for some people, there’s something like agency that is actually really helpful for them. Does that seem true?

Spencer Greenberg: Absolutely. Just the feeling that you can do something that’s worthwhile is actually a critical part to feeling hope in general. It’s useful maybe to talk about, what is depression? Because I think it’s really linked to the sense of hopelessness.

My model — and I will say this is not shared by everyone — of depression is it tends to happen when you feel like there’s no value left. You can’t produce anything of value. The future has no value. Imagine you went into a cave to go exploring, and the front of the cave collapses. So you’re stuck in there. You have enough water, maybe there are mushrooms you can eat and you could survive, but there’s nothing of value to do. You’re just stuck. And then your body goes into this very low-energy state, where you just kind of lie around with no motivation because there’s nothing worth doing.

I think that’s an analogy to what it feels like when you feel hopeless or depressed. There’s nothing worth doing. What’s the point of anything? Like, it’s all going to be meaningless in the end.

Now, you might think that to get out of the state, you need to solve some existential challenge. Like maybe, as people who are intellectually inclined, that’s where we want to go with it.

But the hilarious thing is that the evidence says that you don’t need to do that — you just have to start doing stuff. One of the most effective treatments for depression is what’s known as “behavioural activation.” The idea of that is depressed people stop doing things that they find valuable and meaningful and pleasurable, and it creates this feedback loop where you feel down, so you don’t feel like going out, so you skip seeing your friends, and then that means you’re at home all day lying around, and then that makes you feel even worse, and that makes you even more likely to kind of disengage from the world.

So in behavioural activation, they’ll literally have people write down, “What are the things that you enjoy typically?” — even if you predict you’re not going to enjoy them, because depressed people often do predict that they’re not going to get much out of these activities. And they just have them do them as experiments: “Why don’t you rate how much you think you’re going to enjoy it, and then you’re going to go do it, and then you’re going to rate after how much you enjoyed it.” And usually they enjoy it more than they predicted, and it tends to break them out of this spiral.

So even if they have this existential angst around nothing mattering, oddly, getting really pragmatic and just working on the behaviour can often make people feel a lot better. And that tracks with “find a problem and go work on it,” even if you have this existential angst.

Luisa Rodriguez: Yeah, I can imagine someone with this being like, “No. But I think, in fact, more likely than not, we are doomed. There isn’t actually something that we can do to solve this problem well enough that we’re going to be OK.”

A thing that I’ve found helpful, and I’m curious if it kind of tracks with any of the techniques that you’ve put together in the book, is I’ve found it helpful to be like, we’re talking about different probabilities of different outcomes — and I would be very surprised if there’s absolutely no chance that we succeed at our goals. I think there’s some chance at least that things could go well.

And I find it helpful to think about how I’m going to help in the set of worlds where this is a tractable problem. I’m not going to help in the set of worlds where it isn’t tractable and we’re doomed from the start. I’m also not going to help in the set of worlds where it isn’t a problem at all. But in the set of worlds where what we can do could make a difference, I’m going to play a part, and that’s really meaningful.

So I let go, and I feel sad about the worlds where I couldn’t have done anything at all to make a difference, but I act as if I’m in the worlds where I can — because that’s all I can do, really. I don’t know. Do you have reactions to that?

Spencer Greenberg: If you’re certain that we’re doomed, then I would say you’re overconfident. And if you’re not certain that we’re doomed, then there’s hope and there’s something to focus on. There’s something to try to act on, there’s something to try to do to make the world better. So we don’t need really high probabilities of success to feel hope or to have something meaningful to contribute to.

Luisa Rodriguez: Yeah, nice.

We’re all (probably) going to die [01:03:50]

Luisa Rodriguez: I know that some people working on existential risks struggle with fear of death and a kind of grief that human extinction is very possible if you take these risks seriously. Can you say how much this came up in the survey?

Spencer Greenberg: People didn’t select it that often as one of the psychological challenges, but it’s still a reasonable number: 22% selected fear of death — which could be for yourself, loved ones, or others. Then in our open-ended responses about what challenges you face, about 9% mentioned it explicitly.

Luisa Rodriguez: OK, so not the most common. But my sense is that it does bother some people and can feel quite extreme for them.

I guess fear of death isn’t totally unique to existential risks. We’re all going to die, and so are our loved ones. I personally tend to avoid thinking about this, because I think it just doesn’t sink in for me. It doesn’t feel real. But I know that some people do think quite a lot about it, and some have had to learn to cope with it as part of the human condition very explicitly because it really troubles them. Do you have a sense of what helps people accept and cope with the fact that we are all going to die?

Spencer Greenberg: Well, first it is worth acknowledging this is really not just related to this topic. Lots of people do fear death, and think about it a lot. We have actually done some research on this in the general population, and there’s extreme divergence around this question. There are people that think about death like five times every day, and there are people that go a year-plus without thinking about it a single time. So it’s an interesting individual variable.

Luisa Rodriguez: Where do you land on it?

Spencer Greenberg: It’s interesting. I used to think about it more often, and now I would say maybe once a month.

Luisa Rodriguez: OK, interesting. I think I could easily be a once-a-year-at-most person. Did you learn much about what the people are like that are thinking about it five times a day?

Spencer Greenberg: Yeah, I don’t know what drives that. I think it would be a really interesting research topic, but it is something fundamental that all humans face, this idea of, “Oh, we’re going to die.” You know, you think about the first time a child learns about death, and then they usually don’t put it together that they’re going to die. And then there’s another moment when they first put together they’re going to die, and that’s a frightening moment in your development, right? “Oh shit, I’m not permanent. Oh my god.” So yeah, it’s worth grappling with the difficulty of that.

There are different ways that people cope with death. Some people are spiritual, obviously, or religious, and for them death may not be the end. So death may not have the same significance, and it may even mean paradise or something fantastic, or reincarnation or whatever. So that is one way that people cope with death: if they have beliefs that make them feel like it’s not the end, then that makes it a lot easier.

For people that don’t believe in an afterlife or are atheists and just think that’s it, that you’re done, there are kind of classic philosophical arguments of why you shouldn’t worry about death. One of them is that you’ve already been dead from the entire history of the universe until the moment you were born, and that was fine. It doesn’t feel like anything. So you’ve got a lot of experience — or really, lack of experience — with this. So that’s one, and some people, that resonates with them.

Luisa Rodriguez: Yeah. I mean, I guess I’m not afraid of not being alive. It does sound like a whole lot of nothing. And I don’t have any bad memories from the first time around. It feels like a fear of loss. And that isn’t true of the before times, before I existed. I didn’t have anything to lose then.

Spencer Greenberg: Yeah. I think different arguments work differently for different people. But another classic argument is that if you think about who does death harm? — and we’re not talking about the friends and family of the people dying, but the person themselves — it doesn’t harm the person when they’re alive, because they’re not dead yet, and it doesn’t harm the person when they’re dead, because they can’t be harmed. And then the argument is that therefore it doesn’t harm them at all, because it can’t harm them when they’re alive or when they’re dead.

Luisa Rodriguez: Right.

Spencer Greenberg: And when we think about these thought experiments, some people will still be afraid of death itself, but I think a lot of that is actually fear of dying, or missing out, or something like that — which is a somewhat different fear. It’s not exactly of death.

Luisa Rodriguez: Yeah. I guess maybe the fear of missing out, maybe that feels closer to what I suspect people grieve when they think about humanity as a whole and existential risk: it’s a bunch of people who are alive right now who will miss out on the joys that they could have experienced, and all the people who could exist who will miss out on potential experience. Is there something that helps people cope with that in their own individual life?

Spencer Greenberg: Every once in a while I’ll meet someone who says, “Maybe it’d be better if humanity died out.” And I’m always shocked. I tend to think that when they say things like that, they haven’t really thought it through. Because I think almost everyone actually values a lot of different things, and almost all of those things end when humanity ends. Not all of them. You might value spirituality; maybe you think that continues even if there’s no humanity. You might value nature, and that continues, et cetera. But a lot of what people value actually does go away.

So that’s why I think almost no matter what your values are, you probably really care about the world not ending. With some exceptions, like if you think the world’s going to end because of your religion — you know, Jesus returns — that’s a different matter. But humanity ending because of human stupidity, I think for almost all value systems, that’s a horrendous thing, and should be a top priority if we think it’s at all likely.

Luisa Rodriguez: Yeah, yeah. I’m trying to figure out how different does it feel: I am going to die and my loved ones are going to die; versus humanity, and really all sentient life on Earth, in theory, with some of these existential risks could stop existing. I guess it just does clearly seem like an enormous loss of value.

What should people do with that? Do the coping strategies that help with individual death help with the extinction of humanity?

Spencer Greenberg: Yeah, I think we really have to grapple with the enormity of the value loss that would actually be tremendously bad. And I think the way to cope with it is not to pretend it’s less bad than it is. But an interesting thing is that even things that are really, really bad, you can become more psychologically strong in the face of them.

You think about people going into battle for some just cause, right? Let’s say their people are being attacked and they have to defend their people. And you think of, for example, a courageous warrior going into battle: they might die, their whole family might be wiped out, their entire community and their whole civilisation might be wiped out — but it doesn’t mean that they have to go in in terror. And in fact, going into that battle in terror is dysfunctional: it actually makes it more likely that they’re going to get wiped out, right?

So I think we need to understand that the enormity of something being difficult does not imply you have to just be in terror all the time.

Luisa Rodriguez: OK. So people struggle with this, and I think for some of them, it harms them in a way that it’s not helping them to regularly be afraid that everyone and everything is going to end. But also, the goal isn’t to pretend that’s not a possibility. What exactly should we be aiming for for people for whom this is a salient thought?

Spencer Greenberg: I think that there will be somewhat different psychological strategies that are helpful for different people. One of them is going to be around courage, and this idea of being strong in the face of adversity and standing up to difficult things. I think for some people, that can actually be inspiring in a way.

Luisa Rodriguez: Yeah, I actually feel some of that.

Spencer Greenberg: But I think for others — and I want to say this very carefully, because it’s easy to get confused about this — the best strategy will be acceptance. But acceptance does not mean that you’re not resisting it and trying to stop it. Acceptance is a psychological attitude of, “I accept that this thing is a possibility. My mind is not rebelling against reality, but that doesn’t mean I’m not going to work my hardest to fight it. In fact, I might be more effective fighting it if I accept it.”

The idea here is that sometimes our brains do this thing where we try to deny reality because reality is difficult, and in that fighting against reality, we actually can make it really hard to get to a psychologically stable state and keep ourselves in this perpetual fear state or dysregulated state.

Luisa Rodriguez: Yeah, that actually does feel like it is kind of the way my brain copes with my own mortality. It’s something like, I do feel sad that I won’t get to live longer than I will, on current life expectancy, get to live. But that is the human condition. That’s how things are right now. So it doesn’t come attack me as a thought because it is what it is. It is sad, but it also is what it is.

Spencer Greenberg: Well, I think a useful metaphor here is: imagine a patient that is likely to be terminally ill. Like, they have a high probability of being terminally ill, but there’s still some stuff they can do to increase the probability of survival. Let’s say they have a year to live, but it’s a chance to survive if they can do everything right, but they probably won’t no matter what they do.

What is the best attitude for the patient to have? There will be some individual variation, but I think one healthy attitude would be to try to fully accept the possibility that they’re going to die — so they’re no longer mentally rebelling against that while still taking effective action to reduce that probability. And those things don’t have to contradict each other.

It might actually be helpful to contrast this with other strategies that are not helpful. One of the other strategies not helpful is to be in denial, and be like, “No, I’m definitely not going to die. Everything’s just going to magically work itself out.” That actually might be really detrimental in multiple ways. One is it might actually interfere with them taking effective action, because they’re in denial about the danger. Another is that because their brain hasn’t sort of accepted it, it might just keep coming back and coming back, and they have to kind of fight off those thoughts.

This state of acceptance is one that’s a little bit tricky to wrap your head around, but it’s something like moving your baseline of expectations to fit reality. Often, when a bad thing happens, it will take us some time to move our expectations.

A good example of this is: imagine that you have $10,000 in the bank account, and then you get scammed or something, and you lose $3,000. And then every time you check your bank account, you feel like, “This sucks. I have $7,000. I hate that.” But imagine instead you had $4,000 in the bank account, and you got a windfall and you got $3,000. Now you check and you have $7,000. You’re like, “Yes! I have $7,000 in the bank account!” You might be literally the same person, and you have the same money in the bank account, $7,000 — but the psychological experience is completely different. And it’s because the baseline is different: in one case, your baseline is $10,000, so $7,000 feels terrible. In the other case, your baseline is $4,000, so $7,000 feels great.

So there’s this idea that the way we react to things depends on our baseline. And we can resist moving our baseline when things happen, which ends up actually extending our suffering — but if we can move our baseline to match reality faster, it can actually smooth it out and make it easier to deal with difficult things.

Luisa Rodriguez: Yeah, nice. And in case anyone is like, “No, it needs to stay really salient that the stakes are incredibly high right now, and that’s important for motivation,” I guess it feels like things we’ve already said apply quite a lot still. Do you take the most effective actions you can when your fear dial is 100 out of 100? Probably not. Probably you run around screaming like you’re on fire. That’s probably not the right way to approach work.

Spencer Greenberg: Yeah, and I think this goes to the really common perception that somehow accepting it means you have to stop fighting against it. I think that’s why the word “acceptance” is a little funny there, because we don’t mean “accept” as in, “OK, I’m fine with it; I’m not going to resist it.” We mean “accept” in that you’re no longer mentally rebelling against it. You’re no longer saying, “This can’t be happening. I won’t accept this. Fuck this.” You’re saying, “Here’s reality. And now I’m going to operate under the assumption of reality rather than my mind saying, ‘No, reality can’t be happening.'”

Luisa Rodriguez: Yep. Nice. That’s really helpful.

When loved ones think you’re weird [01:17:21]

Luisa Rodriguez: Let’s turn to another cluster of issues. Loneliness and interpersonal difficulties came up a bit in the survey, and the therapists I spoke with told me that patients working on existential risks struggle in particular with kind of feeling isolated and disconnected — because both strangers, but also friends and family, end up thinking that they’re alarmist, that they’re weird, that they’re in a cult, that they’re doomers. How common was something like this in the survey?

Spencer Greenberg: Thirty-two percent said they experienced loneliness or isolation, and 28% said they experienced relationship difficulties connected to their work. So fairly common. Not most people, but fairly common. In the open-ended responses, where people could write anything they want about what are the psychological challenges you’re facing in your work, only about 13% brought these issues up, so it’s a little bit lower. So it’s usually not the number-one problem people face, but it’s definitely something people face for sure.

Luisa Rodriguez: Yeah. I’m curious what your personal reaction is to people — strangers or friends or family — thinking that you have really weird views about existential risk?

Spencer Greenberg: So there have been a few times in my life where I’ve been talking to people about my views on AI and they have kind of dismissed them, and that felt bad. And I think that’s a real thing that can happen when you have views that are sort of out of sync with broader society.

However, I do think that there are techniques we can use to help us feel connected to people, and even get empathy if that’s what we need from our friends and family, even if they disagree with us on the claims about what we’re grappling with. For example, even if they think AI is not a big deal, it’s not something to take seriously, and we think it’s really important to take seriously. Or even if they think, “I don’t know why you’re focused on animal suffering. That’s silly.”

You might think that’s going to be automatically isolating and you can’t connect with that person. But I don’t think that’s the case. I think we can actually still have really good relationships, even if we have these differences in important beliefs.

Luisa Rodriguez: Yeah, I’d love to talk about them. What do you think helps most?

Spencer Greenberg: One thing is that trying to convince someone of the belief is often a mistake. Like, if they’re interested, you could tell them about why it matters. But if you’re getting to the point where you’re arguing about it, that will tend to create a sense of disconnection.

However, people who care about us, most of them are going to be willing and interested in connecting over things we find difficult. You don’t have to make it about the exact details of the thing. For example, let’s say you work on animal suffering, you could talk to a friend. Even if they don’t really buy it and they don’t think it’s that important, you could say, “I find my work really challenging. Sometimes I’m thinking about animals being tortured, and it really bothers me viscerally, and it’s hard for me.” And I think most of them would be able to really relate to that, and give you empathy and give you support, even if they don’t think animal [welfare] should be an important cause area, or they don’t buy it as something significant.

So I think there’s ways to talk about it where you talk about it more in terms of your experience, rather than in the conversation requiring they buy into a set of assumptions.

Luisa Rodriguez: Yeah. I’m just thinking of some of my friends and family. Animals is a good example. I don’t know it’s that they disagree about the facts, but it doesn’t seem like a priority to them. And if I said, “I feel really strongly and sad about the harm that factory farming causes, and it really bothers me,” I think some of them wouldn’t really be able to access empathy and sympathy. And maybe I think that’s true of existential risk too.

My guess, and I could be misjudging, but my guess is that they’d be like, “Man, it’s really hard to relate to Luisa right now. She’s talking about some really crazy stuff that I just think is totally weird. And I don’t know where she’s getting her information, but I think she’s kind of insane.”

Spencer Greenberg: Yeah. And that might be true. What I would say is that there’s very likely something they could connect with you around this. And it’s probably not around the factual questions, but something around your emotional experience. The idea is not to mislead about what’s going on, but to find some aspect that’s more about the way you feel and more about the effect it has on you that they can connect to and they can relate to and empathise with.

So with animals, it might be that you saw something that disturbed you. And you can say, “I saw this thing and I felt really disturbed by it.” That’s not making a factual claim about the objective nature of this problem, but it’s like, I was really bothered by this, and then they can relate to the fact that you are bothered and connect over that.

Or let’s say with AI, maybe your friends and family have other concerns about AI, and they’re not the same as yours. You could talk about it in a broader way. Say, “I’m really concerned about AI. In my job, I have to think about it all the time, and actually I find it disturbing to think about.” You don’t have to get into the exact facts and then negotiate what’s actually true. A lot of our friends and family, they want to connect with us and they want us to feel better and they want to empathise with us. But we can accidentally derail it by making it about the facts.

Luisa Rodriguez: Yeah. I also wonder if there’s something about these topics in particular and how much people in this community have them as part of their identity. Because I have plenty of things that my family and I probably disagree about the facts in particular about various things. We probably disagree on whether climate change is as existentially risky as it is. I think it’s really bad, but I think some of my family might think it’s even more extreme than I do.

But I wonder if for some people — including me, a little bit — it feels like these topics are different. They’re really important to me. They’re like a thing that really shapes a lot of my worldview, like all of my work. It actually is part of my identity.

Spencer Greenberg: I think it’s really important to note that there’s incredible amounts of disagreement around these topics, so if you’re super duper confident you’ve got the correct answer, it’s worth being a little bit epistemically humble. Even among really smart people who are really deep in this, there’s a lot of different topics. So at least for that reason, we should hold these topics a little bit lightly.

I’m not saying don’t be opinionated — I think it’s actually really important to have an opinion — but to recognise simultaneously that you should be willing to quickly update on new evidence. Especially because lots of really smart people think you’re wrong, even ones who have studied this as much as you have.

Luisa Rodriguez: Yeah. Then there’s another version of this thing, which is that even among people who do share your worries about existential risk or factory farming or something, there could be differences in beliefs that feel really big and important. For example, whether superintelligent AI is coming in two years or 20 years; or whether it’s OK to work on AI safety at a frontier AI company like OpenAI, or whether that’s actually making the problem way worse.

I guess it seems like when the stakes feel existential, disagreements like this can actually be more morally loaded. So it’s not just, “We see this differently”; it’s, “You might be contributing to catastrophe, to the end of the world.”

My sense from speaking to the therapists is that this can be a really difficult issue for people. Some of their closest friends they’ve stopped being able to relate to well because they’ve got some important difference in belief about one of these issues. Do you have a take on how people stay in good relationships with colleagues or friends that they think are getting something dangerously wrong?

Spencer Greenberg: I think it’s important to go to the motivation. Often when people disagree with us with a topic that’s so important to us, where we might think that they’re even causing harm, it’s easy to impute a sort of a bad motivation — like, “You must not take this seriously, and you’re just being reckless,” or, “You’re just doing this because it benefits yourself” or whatever.

And I think jumping to that is often inaccurate and can really damage your relationship. So if you can go to the motivation, you could try to understand their motivation without making it about, again, the answers to these questions, but, “Why are you doing this? What’s motivating you?” And recognising that if they have positive motivations — there’s a good chance they do, if they work in these topics — that really what’s happening is they just disagree about the facts. They’re trying to help, probably, and they disagree about the facts.

And also, making it hostile is not the way to win them over to your side, right? If you want to win someone over to your side, the way you do that is by getting them to see your point of view, which also involves being genuinely open to hearing their point of view. Very rarely are people willing to be convinced unless they could see the possibility that they could convince you too, right? If I come in, like, “Here’s why you’re wrong,” you’re not going to listen to me. But if I’m like, “Let me hear you out. I want to hear your perspective. Can I also tell you my perspective?” now we can actually have a real dialogue.

Luisa Rodriguez: Yeah. Any other advice on that?

Spencer Greenberg: Julia Galef, in her book The Scout Mindset, has some really helpful viewpoints here. Basically, the idea is that when we’re going into studying a topic or having a conversation about a topic, we could be in a “scout” mindset — where we’re just trying to understand reality as it is; what is really true — or we can be in a “soldier” mindset — where we’re trying to win, we’re trying to prove our side right, trying to win the debate or find the facts that support our viewpoint.

And what I find really helpful to think about, when you’re dialoguing with someone who disagrees, is:

• First ask, “Am I in a scout mindset?” If you’re not, well, you may not be doing what you think you’re doing. And also, they’re probably not going to be open to listening to you if you’re coming in with a soldier mindset.
• And second, if I’m in a scout mindset, is the other person? Because if they’re not, then the priority, in order to have this be a helpful dialogue, is to help them get into a scout mindset. To get them in the place where they’re not just trying to defend their beliefs, but they’re trying to really have a dialogue and listen.

So step one: am I in a scout mindset? If yes, step two: are they in a scout mindset? And then, once you’re both in the scout mindset, now you can proceed and have a much more productive dialogue.

Luisa Rodriguez: Yeah. Nice.

How to balance impact and personal wellbeing [01:28:20]

Luisa Rodriguez: OK, so pushing on. The therapists I spoke to said that lots of patients struggle with kind of ordinary life decisions because of how certain lifestyle choices interfere with being able to work really effectively on these problems.

We’ve already touched a little bit on how different values come into conflict when making decisions about how much to rest versus how much to work. But there are other examples: whether to have kids, work/life balance, personal spending versus donating, saving for retirement, doing a job you find difficult or unenjoyable, where to live, risk tolerance in career choices. There are lots of these. It’s kind of a minefield.

And a lot of these decisions are being made under huge uncertainty: the size of the risks, but also the timelines, which makes these choices harder. And these kinds of questions about kids and work/life balance, I think they are different. But the underlying difficulty of these decisions, I think it’s kind of just one question over and over again: how much of your life are you allowed to keep for yourself versus do you want to spend on solving global problems?

There seem to be a couple of approaches to this. One says impact is the thing that matters most, so the default is to organise your life around it, and you kind of need justification to claim anything for yourself. The other says you have multiple real values — impact and also a life, and maybe other things too — and none get automatic priority. What is your approach?

Spencer Greenberg: I have a particular approach to this, which is my life philosophy, which I call valuism. And valuism is very simple, but there’s a lot of complexity hidden underneath.

So the first question is: how do you even figure out what you value? And this is actually a trickier question than it seems, because we’re quite good at figuring out what we value — and by that I mean things that we assign value to, like states of the world. Like you can imagine a state of the world where babies are being kicked in the face, and you’re like, “That’s a bad state of the world.” You can imagine the state of the world where babies are giggling, and you’re like, “That’s a better state of the world.” So we’re pretty good at thinking about states of the world and thinking about how much we value them.

What’s much more challenging is figuring out our intrinsic values — because almost everything that we value, we value because it gets us other things, not because it’s an intrinsic value. You know, you might value having a car, but you value having a car because it gives you freedom to go places you want, or maybe it gives you status if it’s a really cool car, or whatever it is. But you don’t value the car for its own sake.

We deep dive on this in our book, The 12 Levers, about how to explore your values and use them. But also on our website, clearerthinking.org, we have a free intrinsic values test that helps you discover what your intrinsic values are, and we built that because people struggle with exactly this. So that’s the first part: how do you figure out what they are?

But then to your bigger question: what do you do if they come into conflict? And there, I think the first step is realising what are the intrinsic values that are at stake? And often when you do that, it’s really clarifying.

Luisa Rodriguez: Yeah. I expect that a very common one is just like valuing making the world better for sentient beings, and then valuing your own wellbeing. And maybe it’s a bit tricky to figure out whether you value beauty intrinsically or whether you value it because it makes you a happier person. But let’s say that your wellbeing and something like altruism are values that come up a lot; I think that’ll be true for a lot of the choices that people working on these issues find really hard. Can you talk through a decision-making framework or a template for putting those values next to each other and working out what to do?

Spencer Greenberg: Yeah. I think the first question here is: do you believe there’s an objective truth to what’s good? Like you’re utilitarian or you believe in virtue ethics or rights theory or rule utilitarianism, whatever it is. Because I think the answer here is actually going to differ somewhat based on that.

When I talk about intrinsic values, I’m not talking about what is objectively good; I’m talking about what you actually value. Imagine we have this incredible device that completely analyses your psychology. What would that device say about what you actually intrinsically value as an empirical fact?

One thing that I find helpful about valuism is it changes some of these questions from these incredibly difficult philosophical questions to empirical questions about your own psychology. From that lens, there’s a question of, yes, you probably really care about sentient beings not suffering and the world not ending. Those are probably deep, important things that connect to your intrinsic values. And you also care about connection to your loved ones and maintaining your relationship with them, and having pleasure in your life, and not suffering yourself too much.

So then we can now ask the empirical question: how much do you care about each of those? And the answer to that is not going to be a stable number. In my experience, just as a claim about human psychology, that is going to depend on to what extent you’re neglecting each of them. If you are investing all your focus on reducing suffering in the world, there’s a good chance that the other values will pull a lot harder. And if you really inspect, you’re going to say, “These are mattering more now to me because I neglected them. I’ve not been satisfying these values.”

Then the way I approach it is I try to strike a balance between these things. I try to not neglect my intrinsic values, but let them sort of come in communication with each other and find a balance between them that feels right. And that’s a psychological quest. It’s not a quest about the nature of philosophy or the universe.

Luisa Rodriguez: OK, so I want to both get even more concrete about how one does this, explore empirically how much of each value you want to invest in at different times. But for people who are like, “I’m not convinced this is how I want to live my life yet,” I think at least some people listening will have the intuition that, you know, we can describe how much different things matter to us in a given moment, but that that description is different from telling us how much we should try to achieve certain things.

More concretely, maybe it is true that I would get a lot of value from let’s say having a kid, which I have chosen to do, but I think that is in direct tension with this other value I have of trying to use my career to do a lot of good for other people, for other beings. So I could live my life trying to figure out empirically, “How do I want to create value for myself, given that I value these different things and that sometimes they trade off against each other?” Or I could think that I need to live my life doing the thing that normatively I should do, which might be to forgo having a kid so that I can do more of the thing that’s objectively good for the world.

What is your argument for why we shouldn’t be trying to do the thing that is objectively best, if there is such a thing, and should do this thing instead?

Spencer Greenberg: Now we’re squarely in the realm of philosophy, which I’m happy to talk about, because I love philosophy, but I would just say we’re leaving the realm of psychology.

Philosophically, are there actual truths about what is good? When you say, “Why don’t you do what you should do?” — like, morally — I say, let’s define that word “should” a little more carefully here. If you say, “You should use a [hammer] if you want to hit a [nail] into the wall,” I know what that means: it’s essentially implying that there’s some goal you’re trying to achieve. You should do it because you want the nail to be on the wall, so you should use a hammer. Right?

And people use moral language in the same way, but it’s not clear what the thing being implied is. Like “You should work to reduce suffering for all sentient beings”: well, what is the “should”? Where is it coming from?

This is something I’ve thought about a lot for many years. There was a time when I was younger where I accepted that there are universal moral truths, but now I reject that. I don’t think the “should” means anything. I actually believe that it is a nonsense statement. Like, if you want to say, “You should, if you want to live by your values,” that’s not a nonsense statement. If you want to say, “You should, if you want to be accepted by your community” or “live by your community’s standards” or whatever, that’s not a nonsense statement. But the “should” without anything after, I actually just believe is gibberish.

Now, a lot of people disagree with me, tonnes of philosophers disagree with me. I want to try to be a little epistemically humble here. I’m happy to try to defend my position, but it’s controversial.

Luisa Rodriguez: Yeah. I guess I at least am drawn to something like, “You should, given that there are beings in the world who have values and preferences and could get those met.” Do you think that’s a coherent position?

Spencer Greenberg: Well, I think that’s a coherent position if you already assume you value other beings having their values and preferences met.

Luisa Rodriguez: Right.

Spencer Greenberg: Then it’s like, yeah, you should do that because you’re trying to nail the nail into the wall; you’re trying to get other beings’ values and preferences met. But then, why? It goes deeper and deeper. Valuism doesn’t require rejecting moral truth to be a valuist, but it comes out of my attempt to say how should I live, now that I don’t believe shoulds mean anything without conditioning — and then say, well, there are, as an empirical fact, things that I deeply value, things I value for their own sake. That gives me structure, things to aim for. And why? Well, those are the things I fundamentally value. I’m not making a claim that you should do it, in the same sense that people make moral claims, because I don’t think the “should” means anything.

Luisa Rodriguez: Right.

Spencer Greenberg: One other thing I want to note is that I think there are many people that reject there being moral truths that are objective, and yet they sort of act as though they believe it. And to that group, I would especially recommend at least thinking about valuism — because if you reject objective moral truth, yet you’re still trying to maximise the good or do the best moral thing, what is grounding that? I would say I don’t know what is grounding that, other than your own values. I don’t know what you can ground that in other than your values. So at least I would consider whether you’re sort of accidentally pretending that you believe in objective moral truth because you don’t know what else to do, and I’d say that there is something to ground that in.

Luisa Rodriguez: Yeah, I think you’re probably actually describing me, so I’m really tempted to dig into it more, but we just don’t have time.

Let’s say that lots of people listening do either think it is objectively true that we should value other people’s wellbeing, other beings’ wellbeing; or that it isn’t objectively true, but that we value it, as individuals with values for complicated psychological reasons. My impression is that you think valuism is kind of good either way. It leads to good outcomes. It leads to you being a pretty flourishing person that can also do really good work to help others, help solve global problems. Can you make that case?

Spencer Greenberg: Absolutely. First of all, things like existential risk are incredibly bad according to almost everyone’s values. So even if everyone were valuists, in the hypothetical thought experiment, I think they would be taken incredibly seriously, far more seriously than society takes them today, and there’d be a significant amount of effort to reduce existential risk.

And I think many if not all of the effective altruism cause areas would also be extremely high priority to people with a valuist philosophy. Not everyone, because people’s values differ, but almost everyone has values around reducing suffering. They don’t want even strangers, people they’ve never met, to suffer. They don’t want animals to suffer. It’s not the biggest value for most people, but it’s a significant value for almost everyone.

So I do think valuism kind of gets you to similar places as effective altruist thinking. However, I also think that it is less likely to grind you to a pulp than philosophies like utilitarianism. And this is not a claim about being true or not, I’m just talking about the psychological effects of it. If you really deeply buy into it, I think it can have very strongly negative psychological effects, and it can be very prone to causing you to burn out — which is kind of ironic, because if it were the true theory, it would suck if believing the true theory causes you to not be good at acting on the true theory because you burn out. But that might actually be the case.

Luisa Rodriguez: Right. Can we talk through an example that illustrates how one might make decisions when values conflict?

Spencer Greenberg: Yes. I think it’s good to focus on a simple example to illustrate the principles. Imagine that your friend writes a play and invites you to see it. And afterwards, they come up to you and say, “What did you think?” And you can tell they just want you to say nice things about it, they want you to say that you really loved it. But the fact is you absolutely hate it. You can’t even think of a single good thing to say about it. It’s so bad from your perspective.

What do you do? I think most people are going to feel conflicted in this situation. On the one hand, they want to be truthful. Most people have a value of being truthful, not spreading lies. And let’s assume that it’s not better for your friend to hear their play sucked. Let’s assume that they’re just going to feel bad. There’s no benefit that’s going to accrue. But on the other side of the ledger, you don’t want to cause your friend emotional pain. That sucks. Almost everyone has the value of not causing people emotional pain as well, right?

So what do you do? The answer will differ for different people, depending on the relative strengths of those two values. So there’s not going to be a single answer to this question. So how do you even think about this? How do you kind of get traction on this?

What I like to do is little mini thought experiments here.

• You could be like, suppose you knew your friend was going to be so depressed by what you said that they were going to go into a tailspin and not be able to function for a month. To me, then it’s an easy choice. Yes, I really care about truth, but that’s just not worth it. That’s too much emotional suffering to cause that to preserve the truth.
• Well, what if you had to give like a five-minute lie where you’re just going to make up all kinds of details that are not true about your thought process, blah, blah? Well, that would just be beyond the pale on a truth level, right?

So you can begin, through these thought experiments, to kind of converge to where you sit. Because some of these will be obvious which one wins here, and then as you get closer and closer to the real situation, you’re going to be like, “OK, yeah, I think on this one I’m leaning here.” That’s the best way I know of in these practical situations to try to get to it: you start tweaking the parameters to see how your values react to that.

We’re constantly facing values tradeoffs, because even at the very basic level, spending time on one thing to get one value means we spend less time on other values. When we really neglect values that are extremely important to us, I think that they start to pull harder, and we start paying a higher and higher psychological price to not having them met. And I think this is what happens when someone is all-in on the mission, and only thinks about the mission and doesn’t take into account their other values: they start to pull harder on them psychologically, and I think that leads to things like burnout. I think one of the causes of burnout is neglecting your other important values.

One thing I think is really interesting about the effective altruism community — and this is how I frame it as a valuist, which is different than how other people frame it — is I think it’s a community more than anything that’s bonded together by having really strong values around reducing suffering and increasing happiness broadly for all conscious beings, and really strong values around truth. So it’s kind of fascinating to me how often effective altruists think in utilitarian terms.

Utilitarianism doesn’t care about truth. You know, in theory someone could be like, “I’m going to lie for utilitarian ends.” But actually, this is a community that cares deeply about the truth also. And I think that’s not at all captured in sort of the utilitarian ethos, but it is captured in almost everything the effective altruism community does. It’s very truth oriented. So I would say it’s a community with these two really strong values, and that’s kind of what unites it.

Luisa Rodriguez: It feels like part of what happens for people who end up really struggling with not meeting, not putting some weight on these alternative values, alternative to making the world better for others, is something like not a commitment to being honest with themselves about what’s going to happen if they don’t put some weight on those other values.

It feels like it’s kind of a failing to be realistic about the fact that we in fact are humans. And whether it’s the ideal thing philosophically, whether it’s ideal for the world or not, clearly, descriptively, we value things — we value our loved ones, we value spending time with others, we value leisure.

It feels like a way in for me on this has been that I just was trying way too hard to reject reality and reject my own humanity. I was like, “No, I can just sacrifice all of my other values for this one particular value of making the world better.” And maybe that’ll land for some other people, because we are so interested in truth. The reality is that we have things that pull us, and that really start messing with our wellbeing when we ignore them. And just from a truth-tracking perspective, we should be honest about what those are, and be willing to incorporate that into our worldview and how we act.

Spencer Greenberg: Right. To reinforce what you said, even if you think there’s an objective moral truth, and you think you know what it is and you plan to pursue that, there’s still psychological facts about who you are as a being. And if you think that your actual value system places equal value on the suffering of a mouse as it does the suffering of your mother, then unless you have a really bad relationship with your mother, then you’re very likely deluding yourself.

So it’s important to understand what kind of being you are, what you actually value. Even if you don’t fundamentally care about those values, I think you’ll pay a very significant price to not understand your values.

Luisa Rodriguez: Yeah. So the thing that’s been really helpful for me is Internal Family Systems, which I think some people call “parts work.” You’re kind of introspecting to figure out what different parts of you want, which feels really symmetric with the thing that you’re describing: you’ve got different values, and you’re trying to figure out how to weight them. Like if you picture a boardroom or a group of children who all have different singular personalities — one might be ambitious, one might be very fearful — and these different parts can kind of represent a value that you have.

I’m curious if you’ve used anything like parts work to try to make life decisions where values are in tension?

Spencer Greenberg: Yeah. In our book, The 12 Levers, we have a whole section on this. I will just say that “parts work” is kind of a broader umbrella term; there are actually multiple different therapies that use this concept, including schema therapy, self-compassion-focused therapy, and then also Internal Family Systems, which you mentioned. So I just want to be clear that it’s kind of a broader concept.

The way I like to think about it is that we have these kind of bundles of wants, thoughts, values, urges, et cetera that come together. When you have that, you could start kind of dialoguing with that part of you. You can think of that as a part of you. I would not take this literally, and I think sometimes people do take this too literally. It’s not like you literally have these different parts, but I think it can be a useful way to explore yourself.

And different versions of parts work do it differently, but the classic general technique is you want to notice that there’s some part of you that wants something or has urges or needs not met. You can give it a name. It can be helpful to give it a name, because then you can talk about it or refer to it later. So maybe you’ll say, like, “I’m going to call it the Critic. It’s the part of me that tells me I’m never doing enough, I’m never good enough.”

And then you want to put yourself into a state where you can talk to it very compassionately, without being reactive. And they give different names to this, like the Self or the Compassionate Self or the Adult or whatever it is. But you’re kind of going to be dialoguing with this part from a very compassionate, healthy state, and you’re going to try to just explore what that part needs and wants and cares about, and try to help it have its needs met.

Luisa Rodriguez: Yeah. The way that I found it useful that’s relevant is, using your play example, I might have two parts: one part that really values honesty and one part that really values not hurting people’s feelings. And probably the honesty part would be like, “Ugh, I really don’t want to say something untrue. I feel really strongly that we don’t say untrue things.” And the part that values not hurting people’s feelings is like, “But it’s going to hurt them so much if I say that I thought the play was trash!”

And by putting them directly in dialogue, often what happens is I end up being like, to that part of me that values honesty, “I appreciate you. I’m glad that you are here asking me to be an honest person. I agree that’s really important. But do you understand? Can you get on board with doing this thing that in this case we think is more important, which is not hurting people’s feelings? It just seems like in this case that’s the win.” And that part is like, “Oh fine, like I appreciate you hearing me out, but yes, we can do that.”

It feels like there’s something like that part needed to be heard, otherwise it’s going to keep screaming at me, like, “But you weren’t honest! But you weren’t honest!” And I feel like this gives it space to, one, say its piece so that it doesn’t keep screaming at me, and two, for me to grieve that I didn’t give that part what it wanted. And it feels like this ends up being a useful tool for me.

You know, I think I had to kind of grieve the part of me that wanted to work 80-hour weeks because it thought that was the most morally good thing to do in order to fulfil the wishes of the part of me that really wanted to be a mom. And I think that part of me that wanted to work harder would have just kept being like, “You’re a bad person! You’re a bad person!” unless I’d really heard it out and been like, “I hear you. Thank you. You want me to be a good person, I appreciate that. But I’ve decided, full-eyed looking honestly at things, that I want to be a mom anyways.” Does that make sense?

Spencer Greenberg: Absolutely. And I think when we have something tugging at us, whether it’s an unmet value or an emotion that we’re kind of ignoring and suppressing, I think it can keep pulling harder and harder. And sort of staring at it face-on, and really accepting that this is something that matters or this is an emotion that you’re feeling, may actually help reduce the pull of it once it’s really acknowledged.

Luisa Rodriguez: Yeah.

What people report actually helps [01:53:49]

Luisa Rodriguez: OK, let’s talk about some things from the survey that people said helped. I think you asked a couple different questions that hit on this. One was just what helped the most. Another question was, “Imagine someone similar to you is about to start working in the same cause area as you. Knowing what you know now, if they wanted your advice related to psychological and mental health aspects of this kind of work, what would you tell them?”

What were some of the things that came up that you think might be most helpful to people listening?

Spencer Greenberg: First, there were a lot of the usual suspects of what people said helped. If we look at people who said they tried a thing, and then what percentage of those wrote about it when we asked what was the most helpful, we find that at the top of the list are: therapy, medication, talking to friends and family about the issues. Those really stood out: among those that tried them, they were more likely to say that they were really helpful.

But I actually think a lot of the most instructive stuff was around when we asked the question, “What would you advise someone who’s very similar to you who’s getting into this field, in terms of dealing with these psychological challenges?” And there I think it surfaced some interesting recommendations.

Luisa Rodriguez: Yeah, I’d love to talk through those. What’s one of them?

Spencer Greenberg: Many people talked about sustainability, and how focusing on sustainability is really important. Even if you don’t think it matters for its own sake, it’s really important just to be effective. And people that are very focused on sacrifice rather than sustainability often aren’t even able to achieve the thing they want. In other words, sacrifice doesn’t work over the long term, leads to boom-and-bust cycles, or they burn out and they end up having to leave or change their work.

Luisa Rodriguez: Yeah, this one’s interesting, because I think some people in the community kind of react suspiciously to sustainability as a concept — I think because maybe they worry people are using motivated reasoning to convince themselves they can have things that are kind of self-indulgent.

And I feel like there’s a concept we’ve talked about in another episode that’s useful, which is that sometimes there are multiple reasons for doing something, and meeting certain values that seem kind of selfish might be selfishly good and it also might be instrumentally good. And the fact that it is selfishly good doesn’t mean that it is incorrect that it is instrumentally good for achieving goals like helping others thrive.

And I feel like the sustainability thing just seems really empirically true for a lot of people, and even though it also is nice because it means you get to prioritise your wellbeing more, I think too many people make that a reason that probably we should be suspicious of people saying that sustainability is important.

Spencer Greenberg: In my experience, being totally adherent to a philosophy can actually increase people’s self-deception around this. If you think that everything has to be justified in terms of maximising utility, then now, given your nature as a human being, you have tremendous psychological pressure to justify everything that is for something else you care about in terms of maximising utility. And I think that’s actually a very unhealthy and self-deluded state to be in.

But if you accept, “Wait, I’m a human. I have multiple values, and here’s what I actually value,” then you can talk about, like, “Actually, the reason I have my friends is because I value human connection, it’s really important to me, and they bring me joy, not because it makes me more effective.” Just being more both understanding yourself psychologically better empirically and being more honest with yourself.

Luisa Rodriguez: Nice. Yeah, I think that’s really insightful. What was another thing people said?

Spencer Greenberg: People really encourage others to have life outside of the work. In other words, to build relationships that are not just all people in the community.

You know, I live in New York where people talk about AI a lot less. But when I’ve visited the Bay Area, there have been times I’ve been shocked about how you can’t have a single conversation not about AI, even at social events. I’m like, do people ever talk about other things? That can feel oppressive, like you just need a break right from that.

So yeah, I do think that this is wise: maintaining relationships outside of people in the community, that can give you a break, that can give you like a playful experience that’s not just about work. Because maybe when you’re socialising with people who also prioritise these topics, there’s a natural tendency for them to come up all the time, even when you’re supposed to be doing restful things.

Luisa Rodriguez: Nice. Yeah. Were there others that seemed good?

Spencer Greenberg: Another really key one that I think is really insightful that people pointed to is: don’t wait until things have fallen apart. Be preventative about taking care of yourself. Notice the earliest signs of pre-burnout. Don’t wait until it’s burnout.

Like, “I’m noticing I have a bit less motivation here. I’m noticing that I’m waking up stressed every day, or I’m having trouble sleeping.” And then take preventative action — whether that’s seeing a therapist, seeing a coach, just doing self-improvement techniques to try to improve that situation — and not saying, “Well, I can live with this bad sleep, I can live with this feeling of stress all the time, I can live with this lower motivation.” Maybe, but is it going to get worse, and how long can you actually live with it? And also, you don’t necessarily have to live with it. You can have a more pleasant lifestyle. You don’t have to necessarily suffer so much, and you still might be able to be equally or more effective.

Luisa Rodriguez: Nice. Yeah, I think those are really good.

Spencer read 100 self-help books: here’s what works [01:59:40]

Luisa Rodriguez: OK, let’s talk a bit about your book. A bunch of the tools we’ve been talking about here, maybe all of them really, are touched on in your book, The 12 Levers. Very high level, what motivated you to write it?

Spencer Greenberg: So throughout my life I’ve found a lot of value in specific self-improvement methods that have really been transformative for me. At the same time, I’ve read so much self-improvement where I felt like I just didn’t really get much out of that — like it didn’t really have any useful techniques, or it could be that it sort of repeats other things. So the space felt like a bit of a mess. Like, I know there’s really valuable stuff there, but it’s sort of hard to find it.

And my coauthor, Jeremy Stevenson — who’s a clinical psychologist, he treats patients, and he also has a PhD in psychology — had really similar experiences, where he’d found some stuff transformative, but it’s hard to find the good stuff. So we both had this desire of like, “What is all the good stuff?”

So we decided to join forces on this quest to find all the good stuff that we can, package it, try to understand what’s there, try to synthesise it, try to get the meta patterns out of it, and also look at the evidence. So we actually reviewed the evidence on each lever, and we have a sort of appendix at the back of the book that talks about the evidence for each lever.

What I think I like best about the book is that I think every one of the 12 levers can be really useful, so it’s kind of a toolkit that you can come back to in different life situations and say, “Right now in life, I think I really need Lever 5.” And you can go read that and get really concrete instructions of ways to apply that. But another time in life you might need Lever 11 or Lever 2. So it’s trying to give you these tools that you can come back to again and again for many different things.

That’s why, even though this is not a book about dealing with psychological challenges of high-impact work, I think it’s relevant — because I think it’s relevant to all psychological challenges. That is kind of the point of the book.

Luisa Rodriguez: Yeah. Nice. Is there a lever that you’ve personally found most useful in your life?

Spencer Greenberg: Yeah. For me, we have a lever we call “approach the monster,” which is about the natural human tendency to run away from negative emotions, especially fear. The nature of fear is that we want to avoid it. If you think about it, that’s sort of how it operates. You know, you see a lion at the watering hole, and you don’t go back to the watering hole for a while, because you’re afraid of it. That’s a protective measure. But for many people, this process goes a bit haywire, and they start avoiding things due to negative emotions or anxiety or fear, and that actually causes all kinds of negative consequences in their life.

And for me, that was huge, because I grew up with a lot of social anxiety — to the point where if I had to go start a conversation with a stranger at, let’s say, a party, I would feel like my heart was going to explode. It would be pounding so hard in my chest that I could barely function. And then when I would host events, because I enjoyed hosting events, I would get so nervous that I’d be stressed out the entire day beforehand, not able to enjoy the day before the event.

Then when I was in my early 20s, I was like, “I’ve got to do something about this. I can make this better.” And I went to a therapist and he taught me about exposure therapy, which is a really effective method.

He would give me these funny homework assignments like, “OK, 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 that 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. If I had to go in and just immediately start a conversation, maybe that would be too much, but it started easy. And then it would build up. It would be like, “What drink are you drinking? That looks good.” You know, it could build up to there, which is a little more stressful for me.

Then eventually it culminated in really wacky exercises where I would go up to men I didn’t know and say, “Hey, would you mind giving me a hug?” And my brain predicted that I was going to get punched in the face, that they were going to get really angry at me. And the funny thing is, nobody had a bad reaction. Now, I’m not recommending you do this. Maybe in your area they would have a bad reaction. But in New York at the time, nobody had a bad reaction. I just thought that was so funny, because the difference between what my brain predicted and what happened was so huge.

Luisa Rodriguez: Right. Yeah. Nice. A thing that you said, that feels like I’ve had to learn and relearn it, is: exposure therapy seems incredibly helpful, but I always make the mistake of not starting small enough, and then I almost learn the wrong lesson. I’m like, “Oh, the thing was as scary as I thought.”

But I think it’s kind of surprising how small you have to start. Especially the scarier the thing, I think the more true that is. Proper exposure therapy I think really requires you to do a thing that is not going to crush you. And I think lots of people try to just be like, “OK, I’m just going to expose myself to the hard thing that I’m afraid of,” instead of like, “What is a small version that’s going to feel tolerable?”

Spencer Greenberg: Yeah, intriguingly, there’s 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 here the challenge is that a lot of people do things during flooding that’s kind of screwing up the lesson and make it not work. So that’s why I don’t recommend it. 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 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 usually not recommended.

Luisa Rodriguez: Right. Because then you only learn that the thing is OK because you did the weird coping thing that you actually don’t want to do every time.

Spencer Greenberg: Exactly.

Luisa Rodriguez: Yeah, makes sense. Is there a lever that you’ve seen be most transformative for other people? Or is it hard to kind of narrow down to one?

Spencer Greenberg: It’s so specific to what someone’s dealing with. But if I had to point people to one… Let’s say you have a problem in life. You’re struggling with it, you haven’t been able to solve it. The lever that I would point many people to in that case is the first lever, which is about unravelling the deeper hidden causes of an issue.

It’s just really fascinating how often we understand the problems in our life at a fairly surface level of causality. Where we think, “My problem is that I get in fights with my spouse. That’s my problem.” And then you’re like, “OK, why do you get in fights with your spouse?” “Well, we’ll get in fights because they want X and I want Y.” “But a lot of other spouses have that situation where one of them wants one thing, one of them wants the other, and they don’t fight about it. So why are you fighting?”

And there’s these deeper and deeper levels of causation. And we give a number of different techniques in that lever of how exactly do you get to the causality? But as you get deeper and deeper into causality, it often really helps you be much more effective at solving the problems of your life, and it’s very easy to notice that you’re not at the deepest level of causality.

Luisa Rodriguez: Right. So for the husband and wife, it’s something like, actually they’re seeing these disagreements in some way that feels very hurtful or personal attack-y or something. And as you keep going deeper, you realise it’s not quite about the disagreement, it’s about feeling attacked? Is that…?

Spencer Greenberg: Yeah. Oftentimes interpersonal disagreements like that that are recurring are not about the thing that they seem to be about. There’s a deeper thing that they’re about, like maybe it’s, “I just don’t feel like you really love me. I just am unconvinced that you love me or something like that.” You might be fighting about the dishes, but it’s really… And then it’s like, “Well, maybe I need to show my love for you in more ways that help it sink in more. What would do that for you?” You know what I mean?

I like to think about, imagine your car won’t start, right? And you just start trying things at random. You’re like “Maybe if I refill the gas. Oh, that didn’t work. Maybe if I fix the battery. That didn’t work.” It’s like you have to understand what’s wrong with the car to fix it effectively. Picking things at random is usually not very effective. A mechanic is going to diagnose it. It’s like that, but for the problems in your own life.

Luisa Rodriguez: Nice. OK, last question: which lever do you find that you’ve had to kind of keep relearning? So you find it really helpful, but it’s just really hard to make it stick, maybe because the kinds of problems it helps with are the kinds that you struggle with most.

Spencer Greenberg: Lever 8 is about how to be more productive. And we call that “tuning the productivity equation.” There’s actually a mathematical equation we came up with; it’s actually literal. It’s about how much value you produce, and it splits into three factors:

• The time you put in: the more time you put into something, all else equal, you’re going to produce more of what you value
• The efficiency: how much [output] do you produce per hour
• The importance of the thing you’re working on: if it’s not important to you at all, according to what you value, you get no output in terms of what you value.

And I think that very often people who want to be productive throw hours at the problems — because in a way, it’s the simplest and most obvious. And it does improve your productivity, as long as you can keep the other things equal. But in many cases — unless you’re underworking, that’s one thing — but for many productive people, it’s actually the worst way to get more productivity.

And I think I’m prone to throwing more hours at things, so that’s one that I have to keep coming back to and be like, that is not the best way to be more productive, and remind myself of it. So it’s an ongoing piece of work for me.

Luisa Rodriguez: Yeah, I feel like we could have spent a bunch of time talking about that one, and it’ll be interesting to a lot of people listening. So yeah, I encourage people to pick up the book. It is available today. My guest today has been Spencer Greenberg. Thank you so much for coming on, Spencer.

Spencer Greenberg: Thanks so much for having me. Really fun conversation.