Beyond AI Doom: Zack Korman on the Case for Cautious Acceleration

Is AI doom a prophecy or a set of choices we can make right now? What happens if the people building AI start believing it has a soul? And if AI is risky, why might the doomers be wrong about how to respond? In this episode, Zack Korman explains why AI doom isn't inevitable and why the real risks have less to do with machines plotting against us and more to do with what access we give them and whether anyone is watching. Zack is the co-founder of Embroidery.io, a cybersecurity company that uses AI to monitor AI agents. He was previously CTO of the cybersecurity company Pistachio. Based in Norway, Zack has become an outspoken voice in the AI safety debate, including media appearances in The Atlantic, Time magazine, and The Wall Street Journal. In this conversation, we explore how AI agents actually work, what really happened in the Hugging Face incident, the divide between doomers and accelerationists, why believing AI is alive could make it harder to shut down, why Zack treats AI models as extraordinarily valuable malware, how to regulate the way AI is deployed rather than just the labs that build it, how to protect yourself in the age of agents, and how becoming a father changed the way he thinks about the future. One idea kept resurfacing: whether AI goes well or badly may depend less on what the machines want and more on what we build, what we connect them to, and whether anyone is watching Some highlights from the episode: Between extraordinary promise and existential fear Doomers, accelerationists, and centrists: The competing philosophies of AI Can we move fast without breaking things? The asymmetry of AI risks and rewards How language models become agents that can take real-world actions Why even a well-aligned AI model can't be perfectly safe The problem of persistence  Kill switches, sandbox escapes, and human oversight AI consciousness, and the effects of anthropomorphism What effective AI regulation might actually look like Interpretability: Understanding a model's choices What AI doomers get right Practical advice for agentic AI risks Potential upsides of AI A new father's perspective on AI risk Enjoy! For show notes and more, visit larryweeks.com  

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!