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How minds work: decisions, habits, emotions, and the science of a good life.
Roblox CEO David Baszucki says his son's bipolar disorder eased within weeks of starting a ketogenic diet, after five medications and repeated hospitalizations failed. He ties his own metabolic state, tracked with a continuous glucose monitor, to decision quality, and describes destroying bureaucracy, shipping unfinished products for real feedback, and holding Robux near one cent for twenty years.
Author Luke Burgis says AI may weaken social contagion by letting people pursue personalized interests instead of copying each other. He also critiques effective altruism's materialism, names confession frequency as his test for a thriving Catholic parish, and describes building the Cluny Institute as a modern echo of medieval Cluny's networked monasteries.
Michael Moritz, the Sequoia investor turned memoirist, says close observation, not technical skill, built his career and his book on family exile. He traces his family's escape from Nazi Germany, argues great entrepreneurs are obsessives, and says the lesson of researching his memoir Ausländer is that a person can never have enough passports.
Psychologist Steven Pinker explains why people hedge instead of stating things plainly: naming a transaction out loud turns a warm relationship into a cold one. He shows how common knowledge, once spoken aloud, cannot be denied, and how innuendo lets bribery, threats and courtship happen with plausible deniability intact.
Scott Barry Kaufman closes 11 years and 478 episodes of The Psychology Podcast with seven lessons on human potential, personality change, and creativity. He argues neuroticism is the easiest Big Five trait to shift and openness the hardest, and that lasting change comes from habits, not willpower (09:06, 15:22).
Steve Jobs spent twelve years outside Apple, from 1985 to 1997, nearly going bankrupt at NeXT before learning to delegate and compromise. NeXT's software, built on object-oriented programming, became the base for the iPhone, while Pixar taught him to step back, and Bill Gates' $150 million rescued Apple when Jobs finally returned.
Stanford psychologist Alia Crum finds that beliefs about food, stress, illness, and genes can alter body chemistry itself. Labeling an identical milkshake indulgent rather than sensible triples the drop in the hunger hormone ghrelin (12:37), and believing one carries a low-efficiency exercise gene lowers real oxygen conversion regardless of actual genotype (47:10).
Regular arts engagement cuts depression risk in half over ten years and leaves brains measuring five to seven years younger than actual age, UCL research shows. Psychobiologist Daisy Fancourt's cohort studies tie the effect to dopamine, emotional distance from difficult art, and cognitive reserve, holding even with 10 to 20 minutes of daily practice.
How minds work — judgement, habits, emotion, relationships — from psychologists, neuroscientists, and the writers who translate them.
The articles keep the mechanisms and the caveats, not just the headline, so the takeaway survives the next study.
