Bounce! Conversations with Larry Weeks

Your brain isn't simply recording reality. It's constantly predicting it.

Why can someone know they are loved and still feel unlovable? Why can we intellectually know something is safe and still be terrified of it? Why can resisting pain sometimes make it worse? And why are some beliefs so difficult to change, even when the evidence seems overwhelming?

Jakob Hohwy, one of the leading thinkers on predictive processing, explains how the brain builds a model of the world, and what happens when that model gets stuck.

Professor Hohwy is a philosopher and cognitive scientist at Monash University in Melbourne, Australia, and the Director of the interdisciplinary Monash Centre for Consciousness and Contemplative Studies. Jakob's The Predictive Mind helped establish the predictive processing paradigm. His 2026 book, The Self-Evidencing Agent: Mind, Existence, and Predictive Processing, tells a fundamental story about how everyday experience arises as people seek out evidence for their internal model of the world and themselves.

In this conversation, we explore how the brain constructs our experience of reality, why old beliefs can survive contradictory evidence, and what predictive processing might tell us about suffering, anxiety, phobias, meditation, pain, therapy, AI, gratitude, and how to live in a world that keeps changing.

One idea kept resurfacing: maybe the goal isn't to eliminate uncertainty. Maybe it's to get better at updating our models when reality surprises us.

Some highlights from the episode:

03:00 Introduction into predictive processing 05:30 The brain as a prediction machine vs recorder 10:00 What an expected text message can teach us about prediction error 13:00 Priors, evidence, and why some beliefs carry more weight than others 20:00 How unexpected failure can become a powerful learning signal 26:00 Why someone can be loved and still feel unlovable 32:00 Meditation, attention, and learning not to immediately react 35:00 Self-evidencing and how we test our models of the world 49:00 How the predictive brain compares with LLMs and AI 52:00 How we can change our experience of physical pain 1:02:00 Prediction errors and emotional suffering 1:10:00 Why holding beliefs too tightly can make us suffer 1:16:00 Why phobias can be rational 1:20:00 How avoidance keeps fear alive 1:27:00 The surprising predictive-processing case for gratitude 1:31:00 Attention is an amplifier of beliefs 1:35:00 Why getting new information itself feels like a reward

Enjoy!

For show notes and more, visit larryweeks.com

Scores can be useful, but they can also quietly take over—until we start serving the metric instead of the reason we played the game in the first place. Sometimes we don't choose the game. At work, for example, the scoring system just comes with the role.

So how do we keep a score useful without letting it hijack our behavior? And for the games we do choose to play, how do we make sure we don't lose the sense of play that made them worth doing?

C. Thi Nguyen is an associate professor of philosophy at the University of Utah specializing in the philosophy of games, technology, and value. He was named to Vox's 2024 Future Perfect 50 list of thinkers working to make the world better. His first book, Games: Agency as Art, won the American Philosophical Association's Book Prize, and his newest book is The Score: How to Stop Playing Somebody Else's Game.

Some highlights from the episode:

01:00 How metrics can replace the values they were meant to serve

04:00 Work OKRs and the problem of measuring at scale

06:00 Why organizations rely on numbers, even when the numbers are imperfect

11:00 How accountability changes what we measure

16:00 Goals, scoring systems, and when the numbers start taking over

17:00 Can you gamify your work without becoming trapped by a score

18:00 Goals and a purpose

20:00 Striving play

22:00 Games and "unnecessary obstacles"

25:00 When scoring and competition kill the joy of an activity

34:00 Why "just enjoy the process" can actually be bad advice

38:00 What to do if a goal that once motivated you stops working

42:00 Retirement and new games to play

44:00 Process beauty: why the doing can matter more

52:00 Gamifying life

56:00 AI and getting an outcome while skipping the normal effort in getting that outcome

Enjoy!

For show notes and more, visit larryweeks.com

Your brain is not necessarily doomed to significant cognitive decline with age.

But it does need a reason to keep adapting.

That is the premise behind The Stimulated Mind, and it is why this 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.

Tommy is an associate professor of pediatrics and neuroscience at the University of Washington. He studied biochemistry at Cambridge, earned his medical degree from Oxford and his PhD from Oslo. He also works with Formula 1 drivers as head scientist for motorsport at Hintsa Performance and is the author of The Stimulated Mind: Future-Proof Your Brain from Dementia and Stay Sharp at Any Age.

Your brain needs meaningful challenge.

Adults tend to hate feeling like beginners. We avoid unfamiliar technology, difficult skills, and situations where we might look incompetent. But Tommy explains why that frustration may be evidence that the brain is doing exactly what it needs to do.

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

23:00 Hearing and vision loss

26:00 Alzheimer's versus dementia

30:00 The best exercise for the brain

34:00 Overstimulation versus real stimulation

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?

Enjoy!

For show notes and more, visit larryweeks.com

Something happens. The tire goes flat, the layoff comes, test results come back. And then a sentence starts running in the back of your head. That shouldn't have happened. I should weigh less. They shouldn't have fired me. You barely register it. It plays like a radio in another room, and it produces a feeling, and the feeling produces a behavior, and the behavior produces the day you are having.

The stress paradox is that the thought causing you the most pain is also the one that feels most obviously true.

Of course they shouldn't have fired me. The belief feels like clear sight rather than distortion, and it feels useful, like it is the thing that will finally motivate change. It almost never is.

Treating stress as a condition to be managed rather than a belief or thought to be examined leaves it running.

My guest is Andy Bernstein.

Andy is the creator of Active Insight and the founder of the Resilience Academy. He is the author of Breaking the Stress Cycle, and he has taught at Wharton Executive Education since 2007, where his sessions have been audience favorites for thousands of leaders. His corporate clients include Merrill Lynch, Morgan Stanley, Johnson & Johnson, Google, Coca-Cola, and Genentech.

Andy built a process for dealing with stress that is seven steps, done on paper. You do not lie on a couch. You do not say a word. In this conversation, he walks through all seven steps live, twice.

Challenging the way other people think is something we all do constantly. Challenging your own thinking is something we rarely do.

Some highlights from the episode:

03:32 Losing his father at 14 and his sister at 16

06:00 Byron Katie, The Work, and a job he never meant to leave

08:26 Active Insight

11:07 Field-testing

14:51 Where our idea of stress came from

19:25 Bears, war zones, and the adaptive exception

24:41 "Should" as the argument with reality

29:33 The seven steps, walked through live

30:43 What is negation?

36:50 Running the process on "they shouldn't have fired me"

39:19 The showdown with yourself

43:37 Time doesn't heal wounds. Insight does.

44:34 The Grant Study and not pushing love away

47:00 Doing it in your head, and when that isn't enough

50:47 Won't I become a doormat?

51:09 Flow, not stress

53:49 The psychology of subtraction

Enjoy!

For show notes and more, visit larryweeks.com/podcasts

You know what you should do. You're just not doing it.

The gym bag is by the door. The draft is open on your screen. The email's been sitting there for three days. And somewhere underneath all of it is the same quiet assumption running the show: that you have to feel like it first. That motivation comes before action.

What if that's backwards?

That's the premise behind Morita therapy, and it's the reason this conversation with Gregg Krech might rearrange how you think about getting things done.

Gregg is the Executive Director of the ToDo Institute, a Naikan education and retreat center in Vermont.. He is also the author of several books, including: "Naikan: Gratitude, Grace, and the Japanese Art of Self-Reflection," "A Natural Approach to Mental Wellness," "The Art of Taking Action," and "Question Your Life."

For nearly thirty years Gregg has been teaching an approach called Morita therapy developed a century ago by a Japanese psychiatrist to treat severe anxiety, and it offers a genuinely different way of dealing with the feelings that stop us.

Here's the core of it. When we have a difficult feeling, like anxiety, depression, anger, or the urge to quit, we think we have two options: express it or suppress it. Morita therapy offers a third. Acceptance.

You coexist with the feeling, and you take action anyway.

In this conversation we get into how you actually build that skill, not as a concept, but as something you train like free throws or piano. We cover why motivation is optional, what the maxim "lead with the body" means, why the smartest people often get the most stuck, and how to use your attention to relieve suffering in real time. We talk about recovering from real setbacks like job loss and divorce, and end on a surprisingly freeing idea about indecision: why what you do after you decide matters far more than the decision itself.

Some highlights from the episode:

02:36 Origins of Morita Therapy

06:39 The third options

10:48 Thoughts vs actions

13:31 Purpose and feelings

17:24 Practice restraint and action

21:37 Directors vs actors

24:20 Willpower

27:27 Motivation and optionality

29:09 Lead with your body

30:38 Setbacks

33:29 Attention

35:37 Meditation

41:00 Breath practice

45:31 Resistance

48:24 Exercises over maxims

55:22 Indecision and commitment

Enjoy!

For show notes and more, visit larryweeks.com/podcasts/

The AI fallacy is thinking the transformation is only in the tool.

AI is already transforming education and work; not just because of what it can do, but because of what people believe it can do. Students, workers, managers, universities, and companies are all changing their behavior around AI, sometimes rationally, sometimes badly, and often before they even fully understand it.

The AI paradox is that it is both a technology and a social event.

It is a technology because it is something we install, manage, govern, and use. But it is also a social event because it functions as a moment in history, one that is already altering how people learn, work, teach, hire, manage, and make decisions.

Treating AI only as technology leads to the fallacy: the mistaken belief that because a challenge is technical, the solution must also be purely technical.

My guest is Professor Gerald C. "Jerry" Kane.

Prof. Kane is the C. Herman and Mary Virginia Terry Chair in Business Administration and Professor of Management Information Systems at the University of Georgia's Terry College of Business, he has also served as a Visiting Scholar at Harvard Business School, a Guest Editor at MIT Sloan Management Review, and a Senior Editor at MIS Quarterly.

Jerry's research explores the role of digital technologies in business strategy, organizational culture, and talent development, with a particular focus on how people and organizations respond to digital disruption. He is also the author of two books on that topic: The Technology Fallacy and The Transformation Myth: Leading Your Organization Through Uncertain Times.

I had Jerry on the podcast before. This time, I wanted to talk to him because he sits in both worlds: he studies how companies adapt to digital transformation, and he is also a professor watching AI hit higher education in real time, not as a theory, but in his classroom, with his students, right now.

Treating AI as a software update rather than a cultural shift results in 'bolted-on' systems that people neither trust nor understand.

Some highlights from the episode.

02:13 Meet Professor Jerry Kane 07:12 How fast AI hit campus 13:22 The university policy divide 14:19 Workplace tools and incentives 17:36 Young minds and the outsourcing of thinking 20:20 Teach the basics first, then add AI 24:22 Degrees vs. lifelong upskilling 29:34 Curation as the new core skill 31:50 AI pushback from artists and creators 32:47 Ethical use over refusal 33:18 What's actually happening inside companies 34:13 Building a coalition of the willing 36:13 Shadow AI and the risks of unsanctioned use 38:25 Efficiency vs. transformation 40:44 Layoffs and AI washing 42:12 Middle managers and org structure 43:27 Adoption steps and safety 47:29 Minimal viable governance 55:35 Jobs anxiety vs. reality 58:30 Bullish long-term, uncertain short-term 1:00:49 Chatbots and attention traps

Enjoy!

For show notes and more, visit larryweeks.com/podcasts

Dr. Sonja Lyubomirsky is one of the world's leading researchers on happiness, human flourishing, and what actually helps people feel connected. A Professor of Psychology at UC Riverside, she is the bestselling author of The How of Happiness and The Myths of Happiness, published in 39 countries. Her latest book, written with Harry Reis, is How to Feel Loved.

Sonja's work has shaped the modern science of happiness and earned major honors, including recognition as a Fellow of the American Association for the Advancement of Science, an Honorary Doctorate from the University of Basel, and several leading awards in personality and positive psychology. She also writes a popular newsletter on the science of happiness, and her research has been featured widely in media, documentaries, podcasts, and public conversations around the world.

On the show, we cover:

• Self-help culture and happiness
• The happiness trap: doing what we think will make us happy that can backfire
• The counterfactual gratitude practice
• The "masking effect": seeking admiration and its impact on connection
• The vulnerability paradox
• Being loved vs. feeling loved
• Curiosity as a way of making other people feel seen
• Challenging the Five Love Languages
• Why small daily moments of connection matter so much
• On AI: the rise of AI companions and simulated connection
• The multiplicity mindset: why people are more than one trait or action

For show notes and more, visit larryweeks.com

You make hundreds of decisions a day. Most of them invisibly. A few of them under real pressure, with incomplete information and no clear right answer.

So how do the people who do this for a living like firefighters, surgeons, military commanders, and get it right when the stakes are highest?

That's the question Dr. Gary Klein has spent his entire career answering. Not in a lab. In the field. With people whose next call might be life or death.

Gary is a cognitive psychologist, a Senior Scientist at MacroCognition LLC, and the Chief Scientist at ShadowBox LLC. He's one of the founding figures of naturalistic decision making, the study of how people actually decide in the real world, under time pressure and uncertainty. He 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.

He's the author of several influential books, including Sources of Power, The Power of Intuition, Streetlights and Shadows, Snapshots of the Mind, and Seeing What Others Don't, a fascinating deep dive into how insight actually works.

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 how Gary personally works through a tough decision to when you should, and shouldn't, trust your gut. We cover the value of first-person expertise, the difference between knowledge and knowing, how to use a pre-mortem, 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.

I also ask him to audit my use of his framework for managing uncertainty because there's a lot of that going around right now.

Some highlights from the episode:

• 02:35 The White House Situation Room (and why he can't talk about it)

• 05:17 Writer's block, pen and paper, and how Gary structures his thinking

• 07:37 Walking through a real decision: the medical scenario

• 10:53 Intuition: when to trust it, when to question it

• 13:00 Pattern matching, mental simulation, and the Recognition-Primed Decision model

• 18:00 The AI concern: outsourcing decisions and eroding expertise

• 18:42 The pre-mortem: how it works and why Nobel Prize winners endorsed it

• 22:35 The 80/20 of decision making: build experience and frame the problem

• 27:12 AI and the younger generation: old fogey worry or real risk?

• 31:49 Why curiosity about failure is the thing AI can't replicate

• 33:06 Tacit knowledge: the invisible layer AI can't scrape

• 39:07 Five sources of uncertainty — and tools for managing them

• 42:36 Wrapping up: the cognitive dimension and what makes humans indispensable

We go from the mechanics of expert decision making to a surprisingly urgent question: in an age of AI, what happens to the skills you never knew you were building?

Enjoy!

Prof. Philip Goff is a British philosopher, author, and professor at Durham University whose research focuses on philosophy of mind and consciousness. He was an Associate Professor of Philosophy at Central European University and the Department of Philosophy, University of Birmingham.

Philip is also the author of Galileo's Error: A New Science of Consciousness, Consciousness and Fundamental Reality, and his most recent, Why? The Purpose of the Universe, is the touchstone for this episode.

We're covering some lofty territory today: from the hard science of physics and cosmology to the deep waters of philosophy, religion, and the question of God.

Some highlights from the episode:

• 06:16 Framing the big questions: purpose, consciousness, and the value hypothesis

• 10:00 Fine-tuning theory: dark energy and the "casino" intuition

• 12:54 Meaning: Frankl, suffering, and why questions matter

• 16:52 Agency and teleology

• 24:18 Mystics and mystical experience across traditions

• 28:04 Consciousness and panpsychism

• 28:52 The 'Why' book tension: cosmic purpose, hope, and meaning

• 30:14 Returning to religion: 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: community over doctrine

• 39:23 Orthodox mysticism + Anglican flexibility

• 41:19 Prayer: orientation vs. supplication

• 45:08 Meditation: creative energy without certainty

• 51:04 Reflections on affordances and enacted meaning

Quick note: at the very end of this episode I tacked on a short addendum. I share how this conversation actually landed for me.

Enjoy!

My guest on this podcast asserts that a huge chunk of our psychological stress isn't caused by what's happening but by the demands one quietly places on reality.

In this episode, 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."

Walter is a psychologist with the University of Pennsylvania Health System and an adjunct professor at NYU who specializes in REBT. Formally trained by pioneers Dr. Albert Ellis and Dr. Aaron Beck, he integrates their foundational insights into a private practice serving clients worldwide. He is the author/co-author of multiple books and writes the Intermittent Reinforcement newsletter. Beyond his clinical work, Dr. Matweychuk is widely recognized for hosting the weekly REBT Conversation Hour, a long-running public demonstration of practical cognitive-behavioral strategies available at REBTDoctor.com.

In this conversation:

• What Walter learned training with CBT legends Albert Ellis and Aaron Beck
• Shame vs. healthy concern, and Walter's "shame-attack" experiments
• The two big engines of disturbance: "ego disturbance" vs. "discomfort disturbance"
• The way dogmatic "musts" turn a bad moment into an emotional spiral
• "Philosophical acceptance": how to stop personal scorekeeping
• How to catch the belief that's driving a feeling in real time
• The little "8 ideas" card Walter sends people
• Long-term hedonism: how REBT thinks about pleasure, meaning, and tradeoffs
• Secondary disturbance: the second layer of suffering that keeps people stuck
• Emotional responsibility and why it's closer to freedom than "positive thinking"

If stress is often a "demand in disguise," this episode might help you spot the demand and loosen its grip.

Enjoy!

Show notes and more at larryweeks.com