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PODCAST

Clearer Thinking with Spencer Greenberg

Spencer Greenberg

Clearer Thinking is a podcast about ideas that truly matter. If you enjoy learning about powerful, practical concepts and frameworks, wish you had more deep, intellectual conversations in your life, or are looking for non-BS self-improvement, then we think you"ll love this podcast! Each week we invite a brilliant guest to bring four important ideas to discuss for an in-depth conversation. Topics include psychology, society, behavior change, philosophy, science, artificial intelligence, math,

science social sciences

All Episodes

01:20:31

What causes mass shootings? (with Ragy Girgis)

Clearer Thinking with Spencer Greenberg ·

2025/11/05

Read the full transcript here. What do we miss when we treat public shootings as the whole story of mass murder? If public events are a small slice, how should prevention and attention shift? Does saturation coverage turn tragedy into aspiration for the fame-seeking few? Do school “active-shooter” drills protect kids—or seed fear and imitation? Should reporting drop names and faces to starve the infamy motive? How should we talk about risk without distorting it? Can culture stop romanticizing

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01:11:06

Contempt-free public discourse (with Robert Rosenkranz)

Clearer Thinking with Spencer Greenberg ·

2025/10/29

Read the full transcript here. What makes a forum truly open-minded rather than performative? When does listening change minds instead of just hardening identities? Are we teaching citizens to separate facts from frames? Do the best debates surface values as well as evidence? How can we reward calm argument over outrage economics? What reforms reduce polarization without dulling real disagreement? Should any topic be off-limits in a free society? Is philanthropy giving back—or building what’s

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01:21:44

Beyond the assumption that humans are rational (with...

Clearer Thinking with Spencer Greenberg ·

2025/10/22

Read the full transcript here. What does rationality mean when life won’t fit a spreadsheet? If models demand one common scale, what happens to values that can’t be compared? Are we optimizing choices, or narrowing them to what’s easy to count? When do toy problems stop teaching us about real ones? Can preferences be “mapped” if the act of asking reshapes them? When is precision a disguise for guesswork? What standard should judge error when the world is fuzzy by design? If we want better

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01:24:17

Will AI superintelligence kill us all? (with Nate...

Clearer Thinking with Spencer Greenberg ·

2025/10/15

Read the full transcript here. Are the existential risks posed by superhuman AI fundamentally different from prior technological threats such as nuclear weapons or pandemics? How do the inherent “alien drives” that emerge from AI training processes complicate our ability to control or align these systems? Can we truly predict the behavior of entities that are “grown” rather than “crafted,” and what does this mean for accountability? To what extent does the analogy between human evolutionary

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01:15:37

Do facts have an expiration date? (with Samuel Arbesman)

Clearer Thinking with Spencer Greenberg ·

2025/10/08

Read the full transcript here. What does it mean to treat facts as drafts rather than monuments? If truth is something we approach, how do we act while it’s still provisional? When definitions shift, what really changes? How do better instruments quietly rewrite the world we think we know? Are we mostly refining truths or replacing them? When do scientific metaphors clarify and when do they mislead? What public stories make self-correction legible and trusted? What features make science

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01:16:44

From prisoner to escaping inner prisons (with Shaka...

Clearer Thinking with Spencer Greenberg ·

2025/10/01

Read the full transcript here. What changes when we treat violence as a human problem rather than a demographic story? Are fear, anger, and shame the real levers behind sudden harm? How much agency can we ask of people shaped by chaos without ignoring that chaos? Where is the line between explanation and excuse? What would an honest narrative about community safety sound like? Do neighborhoods want fewer police, or different policing grounded in respect? How do we build cultures where accountability

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01:27:01

A new paradigm for psychology research (with Slime...

Clearer Thinking with Spencer Greenberg ·

2025/09/24

Read the full transcript here. What changes when psychology stops naming traits and starts naming parts - can “entities and rules” turn fuzzy labels into testable mechanisms? If the mind is a web of governors with set points, what exactly is being controlled - and how do error signals become feelings? Are hunger, fear, and status-seeking all negative-feedback problems, and where do outliers like anger or awe fit? What would count as disconfirming evidence for a cybernetic view - useful constraint or

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01:12:05

Beyond saving lives: happiness and doing good (with...

Clearer Thinking with Spencer Greenberg ·

2025/09/17

Read the full transcript here. Are we trying to maximize moment-to-moment happiness or life satisfaction? Can self-reportsreally guide policy and giving? What happens to quality of life metrics when we judge impact bywellbeing instead of health or income? How should we compare treating depression to providingclean water when their benefits feel incomparable? Do cultural norms and scale-use quirksimpact the accuracy of global happiness scores? How much do biases warp both our forecastsand our data

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01:17:40

Darwinian Demons: Climate Change and the AI Arms Race...

Clearer Thinking with Spencer Greenberg ·

2025/09/10

Read the full transcript here. Are existential risks from AI fundamentally different from those posed by previous technologies such as nuclear weapons? How can global cooperation overcome the challenges posed by national interests? What mechanisms might enable effective governance of technologies that transcend borders? How do competitive pressures drive harmful behaviors even when they threaten long-term stability? How might we balance innovation with precaution in rapidly advancing fields? Is slow

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01:31:43

Seeing through cognitive traps (with Alex Edmans)

Clearer Thinking with Spencer Greenberg ·

2025/09/03

Read the full transcript here. How do we distinguish correlation from causation in organizational success? How common is it to mistake luck or data mining for genuine effects in research findings? What are the challenges in interpreting ESG (Environmental, Social, Governance) criteria? Why is governance considered distinct from environmental and social impact? How should uncertainty in climate science affect our policy choices? Are regulation and free markets really at odds, or can they be mutually

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01:48:10

The most important century (with Holden Karnofsky)

Clearer Thinking with Spencer Greenberg ·

2025/08/27

Has society reached ‘peak progress’? Can we sustain the level of economic growth that technology has enabled over the last century? Have researchers plucked the last of science's "low-hanging fruit?" Why did early science innovators have outsized impact per capita? As fields mature, why does per-researcher output fall? Can a swarm of AI systems materially accelerate research? What does exponential growth hide about the risk of collapse? Will specialized AI outcompete human polymaths? Is quality of

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01:14:01

Should we try to live forever? (with Ariel...

Clearer Thinking with Spencer Greenberg ·

2025/08/22

Why do humans live as long as they do? Since whales have literally tons more cells than humans, why don't they develop cancers at much higher rates than humans? What can the genetic trade-offs we observe in other organisms teach us about increasing human longevity? Will we eventually be able to put people into some kind of stasis? What is the state of such technology? What counts as being dead? How much brain damage can a person sustain before they're no longer the same person? Is lowering

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01:29:06

Trying to convince Spencer to be a utilitarian (with...

Clearer Thinking with Spencer Greenberg ·

2025/08/13

Read the full transcript here. How has utilitarianism evolved from early Chinese Mohism to the formulations of Jeremy Bentham and John Stuart Mill? On what points did Bentham and Mill agree and disagree? How has utilitarianism shaped Effective Altruism? Does utilitarianism only ever evaluate actions, or does it also evaluate people? Does the "veil of ignorance" actually help to build the case for utilitarianism? What's wrong with just trying to maximize expected value? Does acceptance of

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01:35:19

A conversation with an autistic person (with Megan Neff)

Clearer Thinking with Spencer Greenberg ·

2025/08/06

Read the full transcript here. What does autism feel like from the inside? Do autistic people lack empathy? What is context insensitivity? What are some ways special interests can manifest in autistic people? What are some less common ways stimming can manifest? What are the main components of autism? Can you be diagnosed with autism if you meet all the diagnostic criteria but didn't have any symptoms in childhood? Is autism only a problem in relation to neurotypical people? Is there a link between

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01:31:28

AI: Autonomous or controllable? Pick one (with...

Clearer Thinking with Spencer Greenberg ·

2025/07/30

Read the full transcript here. Is AI that's both superintelligent and aligned even possible? Does increased intelligence necessarily entail decreased controllability? What's the difference between "safe" and "under control"? There seems to be a fundamental tension between autonomy and control, so is it conceivable that we could create superintelligent AIs that are both autonomous enough to do things that matter and also controllable enough for us to manage them? Is general intelligence needed for

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01:07:33

How much does global population decline matter? (with...

Clearer Thinking with Spencer Greenberg ·

2025/07/23

Read the full transcript here. What is the current global birth rate? What factors have contributed, or are currently contributing, to this rate? What outcomes will we experience as a result, and when? How accurate are demographers' projections on this topic? How much of a problem is local over-population? Could a low global birth rate eventually be overcome by high birth rates within a few specific groups? Why does any of this matter? How is average age in the US changing? What should the American

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01:19:00

Is AI going to ruin everything? (with Gabriel Alfour)

Clearer Thinking with Spencer Greenberg ·

2025/07/16

Read the full transcript here. Is AI going to ruin everything? What kind of AI-related dangers should we be most worried about? What do good institutions look like? Should designing better institutions be a major priority for modern civilizations? What are the various ways institutions decay? How much should we blame social media for the current state of our institutions? Under what conditions, if any, should the flow of information be regulated? What are some of the lesser-known kinds of AI

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01:25:49

What listeners think Spencer's wrong about:...

Clearer Thinking with Spencer Greenberg ·

2025/07/10

What defines a cult? Is there such a thing as a good cult? Do Clearer Thinking's tools actually help people? Why does Clearer Thinking share its tools for free for everyone to use? How legitimate is the research Clearer Thinking does to create its tools? Is that research too reliant on self-report? Do Clearer Thinking's tools focus too much on the average person and fail to account for significant variance among people? Should AI companies be required to create and release text watermarking tools

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01:21:09

What do we know about psychology that matters? (with...

Clearer Thinking with Spencer Greenberg ·

2025/07/03

Read the full transcript here. In light of the replication crisis, should social scientists try to replicate every major finding in the field's history? Why is human memory so faulty? And since human memory is so faulty, why do we take eyewitness testimony in legal contexts so seriously? How different are people's experiences of the world? What are the various failure modes in social science research? How much progress have the social sciences made implementing reforms and applying more rigorous

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01:19:58

Bringing your "A-game" to your relationships (with...

Clearer Thinking with Spencer Greenberg ·

2025/06/25

Read the full transcript here. What does it mean to bring your "A-game" to relationships? What is emotional "fitness"? What forces do relationships need to balance to remain stable and healthy? Are we attracted to a particular brand of heartbreak? What are "original attachment wounds"? Can Dark Triad traits be tamed? What emergent properties do relationships exhibit? What nourishes a relationship? When should relationships end? Why might people choose to maintain abusive relationships? How can

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287 results

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