How to stop playing somebody else’s game. My chat with philosopher C. Thi Nguyen. Thi is an associate professor of philosophy at the University of Utah and specializes in the philosophy of games, technology and value. A few highlights from the episode: - How metrics can replace values they meant to serve - Work OKRs and the problem of measuring at scale - How accountability changes what we measure - When the numbers start taking over - Can you gamify your work? - Goals vs purpose - Retirement and new games to play - Process beauty: why the doing can matter more - Being playful in diffucult circmstance - AI and the danger of getting the outcome larryweeks.com/the-score-tra…

“One must say Yes to life and embrace it wherever it is found. ... The moment we cease to hold each other, the moment we break faith with one another, the sea engulfs us and the light goes out.” — James Baldwin via the 5-Bullet Friday newsletter (tim.blog/fbf) from @tferriss

How to future-proof your brain. Your brain is not necessarily doomed to significant cognitive decline with age. But it does need a reason to keep adapting. My conversation with neuroscientist Dr. Tommy Wood may change how you think about aging, retirement, frustration, and the things you normally avoid because they feel difficult. Dr. Wood is Associate Professor of Pediatrics and Neuroscience at the University of Washington. He’s the head scientist for motorsport at Hintsa Sports Performance, and the chief science officer at the brain-health company BetterBrain. Some highlights from the episode: 06:00 The counterclockwise study 08:00 Beliefs about aging 11:00 Age limits and cognitive ability 14:00 Cognitive baseline testing 16:00 Challenge and brain adaptation 19:00 Why frustration can be beneficial 21:00 Reading versus listening 26:00 Alzheimer’s versus dementia 30:00 The best exercises for the brain 37:00 Retirement and cognitive decline 39:00 Food and brain health 41:00 Dementia biomarker testing 44:00 Improving cognition after decline 46:00 Advice for caregivers 48:00 Do crossword puzzles and brain games work? larryweeks.com/a-younger-bra…

This about covers it

How to coexist with your negative moods. Gregg Krech says we have it backwards. You don’t need the right feeling before you act. You can let the feeling be there and still do the thing. That’s Morita therapy’s “third option”: not express, not suppress. Accept, and act anyway. Feelings aren’t the problem. Our relationship to them is. Behavior doesn’t have to be downstream from a feeling, like motivation. You can move it upstream where more control lives. larryweeks.com/the-third-opt…

AI doesn’t have feelings. But maybe we should treat it like it does. Anthropic looked inside Claude and found that the model has internal patterns that map to emotion concepts like calm, fear, love, anger, and desperation. They are not saying Claude feels emotions. They are saying the model has functional emotion-like representations that can influence how it behaves. It seems that the patterns are not just decorative. When Claude faced impossible coding tasks, its “desperation” pattern rose; when amplifying that pattern, Claude cheated more. When they amplified “calm,” Claude cheated less. So the internal “state” of the assistant-character can affect honesty, judgment, and task performance. The paper suggests that AI models are partly trained to play a role: the helpful assistant. Like a method actor, the model may draw on human emotional patterns it learned from text to decide how that assistant should respond. That means the “persona” of the AI is not just cosmetic; it may shape behavior. My takeaways : AI may not have feelings, but it can behave differently depending on the emotional frame it is operating inside. This gives more weight to the use of personas, and we should prompt it less like a machine we are yelling at and more like a high-integrity teammate: “Be calm. Be honest. Don’t guess. Don’t force a solution. Tell me if the task is impossible. Accuracy matters more than pleasing me.” And the obvious human lesson: Pressure without safety creates shortcuts. Calm clarity creates better judgment. That applies to AI, employees, teams, and, annoyingly, ourselves. transformer-circuits.pub/202…

What is AI doing to higher ed, and how are companies actually adopting it? That’s what I asked Professor Gerald Kane @profkane , author of The Technology Fallacy. Jerry is the Professor of Management Information Systems at the University of Georgia’s Terry College of Business. He sits in both worlds: a professor watching AI hit his classroom in real time, and a researcher who studies how companies adapt, or fail to adapt, to digital disruption. AI is not just a technology. It’s a social event. It functions as a moment in history, one that is already altering what people believe, how people learn, work, hire, manage, and make decisions. • How fast AI hit campus • The university policy divide • Workplace tools and incentives • Young minds and the outsourcing of thinking • Teach the basics first, then add AI • Curation as the new core skill • AI pushback from artists and creators • Ethical use over refusal • What’s actually happening inside companies • Building a coalition of the willing • Shadow AI and the risks of unsanctioned use • Layoffs and AI washing • Adoption steps and safety • Minimal viable governance • Jobs anxiety vs. reality • Bullish long-term, uncertain short-term • Chatbots and attention traps larryweeks.com/the-ai-fallac…

If your unhappy maybe a large part of that is because you are hidden, people dont really know you, or the real you. My latest conversation is with Dr. Sonja Lyubomirsky, one of the world’s leading researchers on happiness, connection, and human flourishing. We talk about self-help culture, the happiness trap, vulnerability, curiosity, AI companions, why small moments of connection matter, and the difference between being admired and being truly seen. larryweeks.com/the-happiness…

A wait-and-see approach is getting more expensive by the day. What fear gets wrong, and what it gets right … larryweeks.medium.com/ai-wil…

How to decide in the age of AI. My conversation with a pioneer in decision science, Gary Klein who built the Recognition-Primed Decision model, which has been incorporated into Army and Marine Corps doctrine. He created the PreMortem method of risk assessment, endorsed by Nobel Prize winners Daniel Kahneman and Richard Thaler. Malcolm Gladwell put it simply: “No one has taught me more about the complexities and mysteries of human decision-making than Gary Klein.” In this conversation, we get into everything from when you should, and shouldn’t, trust your gut, the value of first-person expertise, the difference between knowledge and knowing, and why more information doesn’t necessarily mean better decisions. Then we spend time on AI: what happens when people start outsourcing their thinking, and what might get lost in the shuffle. larryweeks.com/how-to-decide…

What if purpose exists at the deepest level of reality, even if not every event is designed? Not just human life. I mean the whole damn thing. This can slide into vague spirituality fast. That’s not what this is. I’m talking about whether reality itself might be structured around value. Prof @Philip_Goff (Durham University) is the author of Why? The Purpose of the Universe and argues the universe may have an intrinsic goal, underpinned by something like mind This conversation shifts from metaphysics to the deeply personal: how one carries themselves when the big questions remain unresolved. Are you closed, or do you stay open in the best Bayesian sense, constantly updating as new evidence warrants? I want to be open, even if not convinced. Some highlights: 06:16 Framing the big questions 10:00 Fine-tuning theory and the “casino” intuition 12:54 Meaning, Frankl, and suffering 16:52 Agency and teleology 24:18 Mystics and mystical experience across traditions 28:04 Consciousness and panpsychism 28:52 The ‘Why’ tension of cosmic purpose 30:14 Becoming a ‘heretical Christian’ 31:32 Meaning as beauty, gratitude, and ‘pronoia’ 34:06 Scientism and other ways of knowing 37:47 Religion as social technology 41:19 Prayer as orientation 45:08 Meditation as creative energy without certainty 51:04 Reflections on affordances larryweeks.com/more-than-mat…

Beliefs behind your stress. My guest on this show proposes that happiness may be more a process of subtraction, suggesting much of our psychological stress is rooted in the dogmatic demands we layer on reality rather than reality itself Therapist Dr. Walter Matweychuk teaches me about Rational Emotive Behavior Therapy (REBT), which focuses on identifying and disputing irrational, self-defeating beliefs to reduce emotional distress and change negative behaviors. Walter makes the case that REBT is not just a therapeutic modality but a philosophy for living based on emotional responsibility, resilience, and a way to stop rating yourself as “good” or “bad.” In this conversation: - Emotional responsibility vs “positive thinking” - Training with CBT legends Albert Ellis and Aaron Beck - Shame vs. healthy concern - The two big engines of disturbance - How dogmatic “musts” turn bad moments into emotional spirals - How to catch a belief that’s driving a feeling - Long-term hedonism: how REBT thinks about pleasure, meaning, and tradeoffs And much more. Check it out. larryweeks.com/beliefs-behin…

What if "time management" is a pin-hole narrow way to look at our lives? If time is just a linear flow, why does a car crash feel like slow motion while a decade vanishes in a blink? In my latest episode, how time is no longer just a resource to manage, but a perception to be mastered. I sat down with Prof. Steve Taylor, a senior lecturer at Leeds Beckett University. Steve specializes in Time Expansion Experiences, those rare moments where time stretches, slows, or seemingly halts. We’re diving into the neuroscience of aging, and that weird intersection where mysticism and physics start making uncomfortable eye contact. 👁️⚡️ Is time a resource to be managed, or a perception to be mastered? Listen to the full conversation on the latest episode of Bounce here: 🎙️✨ larryweeks.com/stopping-the-…