How do you make decisions? What helps and what doesn’t? What stops you from making said decisions and what aids you in making them faster? How do you get your creative work done? Is art never finished, only abandoned or Is it just a matter of removing the pieces of the stone that are not a part of the sculpture. This week we discuss things that we look for when we are making decisions, what mental models we use for that, some small asides on inductive and deductive reasoning, and then get into questions of platonic ideals for ourselves, and our work, and our decisions. We close up with discussion around building right systems for right decisions.

Can taking blood on your hands be a kindness? Is it a niceness? What does it mean to be nice vs. kind? Can kind things be done in a polite way, or is politeness and niceness tied at the hip? This week, we briefly talk about kindness (vs niceness) in ending relationships before getting deeply caught up in kindness in death before turning our attention to unpacking the interplay between niceness and kindness, and have some very interesting insights about how niceness shapes our constructs about motivation and what people “like us” do.

What will happen as we have more and more AI systems as our co-pilots? How will we value things when AI has been involved in the creation? And is this the same trend towards commoditization of higher and higher skilled labor? This week, we talk different AI systems we have met in our lives — DALL-E, the image creation AI, Github’s Copilot, the AI peer programer, and GPT3, the AI text generation tool. We get very excited about the potential for new kinds of art and artists because of these tools, and also spend a few minutes talking about the value and business implications. We also talk about how these systems learn, and spend a few minutes getting really nerdy about the similarities with human brain and how social media has made our neural networks learn faster.

What leads to you feeling successful ? Are they the things the same things that lead to you feeling confident ? This week, we continue the discussion from Episode 3, “Cognitive and Emotional Experiences & Models for Failure,” and discuss what events in our lives have led to feelings of confidence, how other people’s perceptions of us and those events influenced the feelings of confidence, and whether those events were a success or a failure. We illustrate this with some personal anecdotes, and briefly gossip about Adam Neumann and Mark Zuckerberg.

Is the way you do one thing, the way you do everything? It’s a common Buddhist saying but this week, we examine if it is actually true, and we talk about how we learn things: from the people around us, from practice, from exposure and from adapting models from culture. We also explore how persistence and learning are connected to our expectations of outcomes. This was a super fun conversation because we end up diving into things that are core to what joyus is about, and we discuss how we have arrived at some of those learnings in our own lives. And there is some stuff about competing with duolingo, which definitely we have never done ourselves. Nope. Never.

Why is pain helpful? How do we distinguish between different kinds of pain? How can we be cognizant of when we’re acting to protect ourselves, and when those protective instincts becomes routines that guide our thinking? And why does the world have so many golf courses?

What are the expectations of your audience? Can you support those expectations? Are those expectations uniform across the audience? In this episode, Divya and Kahran begin by talking about the presumed expectations of their audience, but quickly realize they themselves have different ways of listening to podcasts. Divya is nearly as taken aback to hear that Kahran binges podcasts, as Kahran is shocked to hear that Divya has a rotating pattern by which she listens to podcasts of different cognitive and emotional intensity. We  discuss Matt Walker's podcast, The Matt Walker Podcast, about sleep, available at https://themattwalkerpodcast.buzzsprout.com, as well as touch on The Knowledge Project, hosted by Shane Parish, https://fs.blog/knowledge-project-podcast/ as well as Esther Perel's podcasts, available here: https://www.estherperel.com/podcast. Divya did not reveal the comedic podcasts in her rotation, but we shall push her to tell those secrets as well in a future episode!

What does it mean to accept the data but not the feeling? How does our ability to accept failure influence our ability to do new things? What are better ways to fail? This week we explore different kinds of experiences, and how they shape behavior. We think about why it feels bad when we have failure, and the difference between accepting failure cognitively versus emotionally. We also think together about how it feels to access painful memories, how to reduce trauma when you relive and share it, and finding where to grow. We both also share some deeply personal anecdotes about how we have fought with our siblings, and forced biscuits on past employees, and otherwise behaved foolishly.

How do we signal -- to the right people, with the right message, at the right time? How do we choose our in-group? We talk this week about signaling, what it means, how we do it, what feels weird when people seem part of the "us" group but also part of the "them" group, realizing your family in-group is not actually an in-group, aspirational signaling, signaling versus living your truth, and the way we bias based on signals when being approached for business. We also briefly discuss Pride signaling, and chuckle about rainbow washed shampoo bottles.

How do you think about success? What are the components of your success?

This week, we explore how to construct a model for success, defining success, success ecosystems, how Divya would learn something new -- and be successful at it, how success-focused models can deliver in terms of achieving goals (but also warping intentions), and why achieving things sometimes comes with a sense of loss.