Last month I had the honor and pleasure of giving a TEDx talk in London. When I first got the word that I will be giving the talk, I was ultra-excited, but in the weeks leading to the event, my excitement quickly turned into anxiety: According to the TED/x format, talks cannot exceed 18 minutes, […]

Three years ago my life was supposed to be perfect.

I recently gave a talk at the Leading to Well-Being conference at George Mason University. The event included a great mixture of speakers, including Dr. Barbara Fredrickson who spoke about the emerging science of love (!). The topic of my talk was “Positive Computing” – new technologies that use research in psychology to drive and […]

Here is a little known fact: When he was teenager in Turkey, Byram Karasu received a package in the mail from Harley Davidson in the United States. His father had mail-ordered a bike for him. It was only when they opened up the boxes that they both realized they are dealing with a full size […]

Riding from Las Vegas to Lone Pine was possibly the best day of the cross-country trip. The sharp contrast between the the decadence of Vegas and the quiet hills of Lone Pine, where Roy Rogers and John Wayne shot some of their best films, is buffered by Death Valley National Park. Death Valley is a […]

The day before boarding the plane and heading back home I had the privilege of meeting with Dr. Deepak Chopra at the Chopra Center in Carlsbad, California. We talked about going on the road, about ego and the value of humility, about the fascinating concept of collective consciousness, the importance of the present, and about subjectivity and […]

Last Thursday, a day before taking off and going back home, I went to UC Riverside to meet with Dr. Sonja Lyubomirsky. The somewhat festive feeling of the last Ride interview was a little disturbed by pouring rain all the way from Carlsbad to Riverside and back. So, I arrived to the psychology building pretty […]

When I was in LA I was fortunate to have the opportunity to meet with Byron Katie, while she was giving the School For The Work to some 300 students. Katie’s story is an amazing one both from a personal perspective and in terms of the impact it had on so many lives over the […]

When I was envisioning the end of this trip, I thought of basking in the So Cal sun. Ironically, after 4 weeks of mostly reasonable weather crossing the entire country, I hit an entire week of thunderstorms and rain when I was riding down the Pacific Coast Highway. I arrived to LA pretty soaked. The […]

On Wednesday I had the great honor of meeting with Dr. Phil Zimbardo. Phil is best known for the seminal Stanford Prison Experiment and is one of the most prominent people in shaping the face of modern psychology as we know it today. He spent decades studying evil behavior and the situations that encourage it. Most […]