Spencer Greenberg on staying sane while trying to save the world

If you genuinely believe that humanity could be wiped out by AI or a pandemic, what is the appropriate amount of fear to feel?

“As much as possible” can seem like the only reasonable answer. If the world is on fire, surely feeling calm just means you haven’t internalised the situation. When you’re trying to prevent human extinction or end factory farming, taking a weekend off can feel morally indefensible.

But fear is an alarm designed to provoke short bursts of drastic action, not a state humans can productively inhabit for months or years. Guilt turns out not to be such a great engine for productivity, either. So what is the best way to sustain motivation to work on the world’s most pressing problems in the long term?

Host Luisa Rodriguez and guest Spencer Greenburg tackle this question from many angles — talking to therapists, running a survey of people working on existential risks, and pulling relevant lessons from Spencer’s new book, The 12 Levers: The Complete Psychological Toolkit for Improving Your Life. Drawing on all these sources, they put together a plan for how to make an impact without grinding yourself to a pulp.

Check out Spencer's new book: https://80k.info/12-levers

Links to learn more, video, and full transcript: https://80k.info/sg26

This episode was recorded on June 12 and 15, 2026.

Chapters:

Cold open (00:00:00)
Spencer is back — for a 5th time! (00:00:40)
Managing the psychological toll of working on existential risks (00:01:00)
Luisa and Spencer surveyed people working on existential risk (00:04:23)
How to sustain your motivation (00:11:13)
Why you shouldn’t read the news (00:23:54)
Why guilt isn’t an optimal source of motivation (00:36:28)
Breaking the boom-and-bust cycle of burnout (00:44:41)
Specialness and saviour complex (00:51:46)
If you're certain we're doomed, you're overconfident (00:57:36)
We're all (probably) going to die (01:03:50)
When loved ones think you're weird (01:17:21)
How to balance impact and personal wellbeing (01:28:20)
What people report actually helps (01:53:49)
Spencer read 100 self-help books: here's what works (01:59:40)

Our production team includes:

Video editors: Josh Alward, Dominic Armstrong, Ollie Bignell, Andrés Escobar, Jasper Luithlen, Milo McGuire, Luke Monsour, and Simon Monsour
Producers: Elizabeth Cox and Nick Stockton
Coordination and support: Katy Moore and Lou Moran

Music: CORBIT

Tämä jakso on lisätty Podme-palveluun avoimen RSS-syötteen kautta eikä se ole Podmen omaa tuotantoa. Siksi jakso saattaa sisältää mainontaa.

Jaksot(344)

Jasmine Sun on what the people building AI really believe

Many AI researchers believe mass job displacement is coming — and some even think there’s a chance their technology will kill everyone. But they’re building it anyway. Writer and journalist Jasmine Su...

21 Heinä 1h 6min

#247 – Anton Leicht on how middle powers avoid losing everything in a post-AI world

In a post-AGI world, can a country without access to frontier AI even be considered sovereign anymore?Anton Leicht says once frontier AI becomes a core economic input, the countries that own it will p...

14 Heinä 1h 33min

#246 – Sneha Revanur on how a small team of activists helped pass America's landmark AI safety laws

Six years ago, aged just 15, Sneha Revanur founded the AI advocacy nonprofit Encode AI — back when AI felt like a niche issue. Now the world’s caught up with her, and she’s ready to share everything s...

8 Heinä 52min

We can guess what intergalactic war would look like. And strangely, it matters.

Intergalactic war is probably billions of years away — yet physics can already tell us how it ends. And strangely that conclusion is relevant to decisions people have to make today.In this video, Rob ...

18 Kesä 15min

How AI could create the world’s biggest problems (article by Zershaaneh Qureshi)

Imagine you’re living 15,000 years ago. Your people are hunter-gatherers and you sleep under the stars. If someone told you humans would one day build cities with millions of people, fly through the a...

11 Kesä 1h 29min

#245 – Rohin Shah on what it's really like to run AGI safety at Google DeepMind (and where I disagree with 'doomers')

Most people working on AI safety think without a massive effort AI systems will probably end up with goals catastrophically different from humanity’s. Today’s guest, Rohin Shah — head of AGI Safety an...

2 Kesä 2h 48min

What makes for a dream job? | Benjamin Todd

What actually makes a job fulfilling? It's not what most career advice tells you. "Follow your passion" sounds inspiring, but it's misleading — and the research backs that up.Drawing on hundreds of st...

28 Touko 28min