What if the biggest threat to your company isn’t competition, a down round, or a bad hire but the slow erosion of your ability to think clearly?
Maria Konnikova is a psychologist, three-time New York Times bestselling author, and a World Series of Poker bracelet winner who turned a zero-knowledge experiment at the poker table into over a million dollars in tournament winnings. She returns to Artificial Happiness to deliver a stark warning: we are raising a generation that may not know how to think, connect, or decide — and the implications for founders building in the AI age are profound.
What You’ll Discover:
🧠 The Attention Apocalypse
- Why every major human breakthrough has depended on the ability to pay deep attention
- How the reversal of the Flynn effect (falling IQ scores) coincided with technology entering schools
- What Silicon Valley parents know about screen time that the rest of the world ignores
🃏 Pick Your Spots — Poker Wisdom for Founders
- Why the best players (and founders) pass on most opportunities to dominate a few
- How the OODA loop from the Air Force can sharpen your decision-making under pressure
- The principle that changed Maria’s career: you can’t pick good spots if you’re oblivious to the dynamics at play
✍️ Why Writing by Hand Changes How You Think
- The neuroscience behind why pen and paper outperform typing for processing risk and retaining insight
- Why outsourcing your writing to AI means outsourcing your thinking
- How Maria uses the act of writing to discover what she actually believes
⚖️ Emotion as a Decision-Making Tool
- Why stripping emotion from decisions can be more dangerous than including it
- The Iowa gambling task: what happens when people literally cannot feel risk
- How to distinguish between incidental emotion (skip lunch, feel irritable) and integral emotion (a signal worth heeding)
🤖 Where AI Still Can’t Beat Humans
- Why computers dominate heads-up poker but still lose to the best humans in live, multiplayer games
- Maria’s next book on cheating — and what real-time AI assistance means for trust in competitive environments
Key Insights:
“People who start outsourcing their writing to AI are outsourcing their thinking.”
“You cannot make good decisions if you haven’t paid attention.”
“The best predictor of future behavior is past behavior. When you forget that is when you make huge errors.”
About Maria Konnikova:
Maria Konnikova is a psychologist and three-time New York Times bestselling author of The Biggest Bluff, The Confidence Game, and Mastermind. A former contributing writer for The New Yorker and a World Series of Poker bracelet winner, she writes the Substack newsletter The Leap. Her work sits at the intersection of psychology, decision science, and human behavior.
🎯 Perfect for: AI founders questioning whether their team’s decision quality has declined, leaders who sense they’re losing depth of thought to constant context-switching, builders wrestling with when to trust gut instinct versus data, and anyone concerned about how AI tools are reshaping cognitive capacity.
⏰ Timestamps:
00:00 – Introduction: Why decision quality is the real bottleneck
01:28 – What Maria has changed her mind about since 2020
03:35 – The attention crisis: what’s really at stake
07:44 – Banning technology in schools — a necessary intervention
13:49 – Why writing by hand changes how you process risk
15:55 – Emotion in decision-making: feature, not bug
18:32 – Cognitive biases: when evolutionary shortcuts fail
22:39 – AI vs humans in poker — and what it means for the rest of us
26:18 – Skin in the game: why stakes accelerate learning
31:17 – Pick your spots: Eric Seidel’s career-defining advice
33:17 – The OODA loop: a military framework for founder decisions
37:55 – The best predictor of future behavior is past behavior
Subscribe for more conversations that matter, and let us know in the comments: When was the last time you made a major decision without consulting a screen — and how did it feel?
#Konnikova #DecisionMaking #Attention #PokerStrategy #AIvsHumans #FounderMindset #CriticalThinking #ArtificialHappiness