Bounce! Conversations with Larry Weeks

"Acceptance is the full embrace of our personal experience…it's choosing to feel with openness and curiosity, so that you can live the kind of life you want to live while inviting your feelings to come along for the ride" - Stephen Hayes  This podcast is about the power of dealing with negative thoughts and emotions more obliquely. It's about a central shift from focusing on what you think and fee...

On this episode we cover a bit of the biography of vaccines, dovetailing into the current state of vaccination around the globe. My guest on this podcast is Dr. Paul Offit, a world renowned expert and medical pioneer in the field of immunology and virology. He is a professor in the division of Infectious Diseases at the Children's Hospital of Philadelphia and a professor of Vaccinology at the Univ...

"A person can make himself happy or miserable regardless of what is actually happening outside just by changing the contents of consciousness" -Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi How you feel about life and living, and your happiness in general - ultimately depends on interpreting everyday experience. Your mind shapes every experience you have and there is a minimal return on happiness effort, trying to exer...

Nicholas Christakis on the impact of Coronavirus, what went wrong, what's going right, and our possible future. More below. Nicholas is a physician and social scientist at Yale University who conducts research in network science, biosocial science, and behavior genetics. Named by Time magazine to their annual list of the 100 most influential people in the world, Nicholas's current work focuses on...

Chatter refers to this negative cycle of thinking and feeling that leads us to get stuck in ways that can be really toxic for our health, for our relationships, and for our ability to think and perform  - Ethan Kross "Hecaton asks, "Do you ask what progress I have made? I have begun to be a friend to myself." Valuable progress indeed: he will never be alone." —Seneca On this podcast, I delve into...

Tommy Chong is a grammy award-winning comedian and is legendary for his invaluable contribution to American counter-culture as part of the iconic comedy duo Cheech & Chong. During their reign, the twosome recorded six gold comedy albums, including the 1973 Grammy winner "Los Cochinos," and starred in eight films, most of which Chong co-wrote and directed. The first, "Up In Smoke," was the highest-...

What can we learn from survival science about recovering from trauma? What can survivors of extreme events teach us about creating a new normal?   My guest on this episode is Laurence Gonzales. Laurence Gonzales is the author of numerous books and has won many awards, including two National Magazine Awards and the Distinguished Service Award from the Society of Professional Journalists. Laurence a...

In this episode, my focus is on how to find peace of mind amidst turmoil and persistent uncertainty. So many things that are directly affecting our lives are also out of our direct control - and it can be maddening.  Serenity now.  The Ancient Greeks used the term ataraxia, which means a state of serene calmness. Steven Gambardella writes in the Sophist, "Ataraxia is not a positively-defined state...

What do you do when you're faced with a big decision? If you're like most people, you might make a pro and con list, although many don't even do that - if you're like me, you might over-analyze and spend too much time searching for that extra data point that might make you sure. There is a better way to make quality decisions and minimize second-guessing.  My guest is Annie Duke.  Annie is an expe...

"It's like an aha moment when you suddenly see it, the moment you say, oh, all these negative feelings are awesome and wonderful, this is a positive deal. The moment you see that you suddenly won't want or need them anymore."   - Dr. David burns  "What you resist not only persists but will grow in size" - Carl Jung  This was recorded in late August and throughout much of the world, we are still de...

"The greater the mistake, the more foolish the belief, the more consequences of that belief...Then, the greater your need to reduce that dissonance in your favor because the gap is greater between yourself and feelings of self worth" - Carol Tavris  On this podcast, we talk about what happens after we make a terrible mistake. What is our response to our mistakes? Do we try to brush it off? Do we s...

Rory Sutherland is a best selling author, ad man being the Vice Chairman of Ogilvy and Mather and co-founder of Ogilvy Change, a behavioral science practice where they believe the greatest gains to be made in business and society are psychological , not technological .   Rory is regarded as one of marketing and advertising's most original thinkers and inspirational speakers; a cumulative 7M viewer...

I'm never sure how to introduce James Altucher to anyone who might not have heard of him. He's a best selling author with a hugely successful podcast, investor, serial entrepreneur, former VC & hedge fund manager, computer programmer, and chess master. I'm sure I've left some out but just Google him, he's everywhere.  Returning for his second appearance on the podcast (see more of his story here),...

William B. Irvine is a professor of philosophy at Wright State University. The author of seven books, including The Stoic Challenge and A Guide to the Good Life, he has also written for the Wall Street Journal, Huffington Post, Salon, Time, and the BBC. He lives in Dayton, Ohio For the context of the show I refer you to his latest,   The Stoic Challenge : A Philosopher's Guide to Becoming Tougher,...

This episode is about trying to understand our true capacity to cope with stress and how to arouse the dormant resilience in all of us.  My guest on this show seems to be proof there are benefits from extreme physical challenges. In his case, actually seeking out stressors and using them to hack the nervous system - reprogramming it's response to those stressors. Scott Carney is an investigative j...

At the moment as I publish this, there are 340,000 cases of the Coronavirus and over 9,700 deaths from it in the U.S. Over 70,000 deaths world wide.  The amount and velocity of information on the pandemic is overwhelming and much of it conflicts. Do this - don't do that. I need help parsing all of it.  Enter Dr. Alex Lickerman, M.D.  Alex is a direct primary care physician at ImagineMD, spending t...

As I publish this (April 2020) the current Coronavirus pandemic has been a setback for all of us in various degrees, some worse than others. Hence, I would encourage you to listen to this episode and share with someone who could use it. My guest is Dr. Steven M. Southwick, who along with Dennis Charney are the co-authors of Resilience: The Science of Mastering Life's Greatest Challenges .   The bo...

Depending on the research, there are anywhere from 40% - 60% percent of us admitting we make New Year's resolutions, A  study from the University of Scranton found that 23% of people quit their resolution after one week. And only 19% of individuals actually stick to the goals longer term. We put off starting a project we planned, or once started, we never finish.  We swear to eat healthily, lose w...

M.I.T. Technology Review dubbed Nir Eyal, "The Prophet of Habit-Forming Technology" as he is the author of the bestselling book on building habit forming products (Hooked). So who better to help us understand the neuroscience of distraction. Nir's new book, " Indistractable: How to Control Your Attention and Choose Your Life " is the topic of this podcast.  "In the future, there will be two kinds...

This is a podcast about results, getting things done. How to move past uncertainty and define the future.  In this episode I talk with J.J. Sutherland. He is the CEO of Scrum Inc and is also the co-author of Scrum: The Art of Doing Twice the Work in Half the Time , written with his father, Jeff Sutherland, the co-creator of Scrum. His newest book The Scrum Fieldbook, A Master Class on Accelerating...

"…What it takes to keep up isn't as much about coding, AI, algorithms… it's about being change oriented, it's about being forward thinking, and it's about being willing to develop skills in this new world." --Gerald Kane What allows some organizations and individuals to thrive in new world of rapid technology innovation and disruption while others fall behind or get stuck in obsolescence? Explorin...

"I'm focusing on making decisions through A.I. They're making so many choices for us, mostly in ways that allow us to be productive but the flip side is the extent to which we are fully in control of our decisions. It's not quite what it used to be. The algorithms are nudging us in different ways" - Kartik Hosanagar My guest on this episode is Kartik Hosanagar. Kartik is a professor of marketing a...

The abbreviation A.I. along with its phrase "artificial intelligence" for many invokes fantasies of sentient overlord robots everywhere or benevolent machine assistants or sexy operating systems. It can be difficult to separate hype from reality. Newsfeed cycles don't help either. S tories circulate with titillating headlines as to what A.I. has just done without context as to where it's failed. R...

It seems like a waste of time to introduce Seth Godin. Just search his name, "Seth" to Google is Seth Godin. He's founded several companies including Yoyodyne and Squidoo. He is the author of 18 best-selling books that have been translated into more than 35 languages. They include perennial classics like Permission Marketing, written in 1999 that elucidated the [then] new idea of delivering releva...

What do you do when you go from being the founder and CEO of your own line of successful hotels to the oldest guy at the tech startup surrounded by some of the brightest millennials in the country? Well, if you're Chip Conley, Strategic Advisor for Hospitality and Leadership at Airbnb, you set aside your ego, reinvent yourself and make the situation work for you. It's that kind of adaptation that...