The Next Big Idea Daily

What if setting goals is a waste of time? ———

We've known about climate change for decades, even if most of the so-called solutions have felt too slow, too expensive, or too politically fraught. But pioneering environmentalist Bill McKibben says we've been overlooking the answer right in front of us, or rather right above us. The sun. In his new book, Here Comes the Sun: A Last Chance for the Climate and a Fresh Chance for Civilization, Bill argues that solar power — once dismissed as niche and impractical — is now growing faster than any energy source in history. It's cheap, it's everywhere, and it's the only solution that can scale quickly enough to meet the climate emergency.

Why are we so much chattier than other species? Madeleine Beekman has a surprising answer: blame the babies. Madeleine is professor emerita of evolutionary biology at the University of Sydney, and in her new book, The Origin of Language: How We Learned to Speak and Why, she explains that due to a series of evolutionary accidents, human infants were born so helpless that survival depended on coordinating care. Language, she argues, evolved as a kind of project-management system for baby-rearing. In other words, we didn't start talking because we were geniuses; we started talking because we were exhausted parents.

You're busy. Your team is busy. Everyone's working hard. But for all that effort, does it ever feel like not much actually gets done? According to today's guests, the culprit usually isn't laziness — it's lousy workflow design. Emails that should've been meetings, meetings that should've been emails, and half-finished projects clogging the system. In their new book, There's Got to Be a Better Way: How to Deliver Results and Get Rid of the Stuff That Gets in the Way of Real Work, MIT Sloan professors Nelson Repenning and Donald Kieffer show how smarter work design can cut through the clutter.

Most of us like to think we could spot a con artist. But according to Emmy-winning television producer and investigative podcaster Johnathan Walton, the truth is much scarier: Scammers don't look like strangers. They look like friends, neighbors, even soulmates. In his new book ⁠Anatomy of a Con Artist: The 14 Red Flags to Spot Scammers, Grifters, and Thieves⁠, Walton draws from his own jaw-dropping experience of being conned out of nearly $100,000 by someone he considered family. The good news? He turned that pain into purpose, and he's here to help the rest of us avoid the same fate.

Even in good office environments, there are inevitably colleagues who are challenging to deal with. But not dealing with them isn't really a choice. Luckily, Amy Gallo is here to help. Her book is Getting Along.

Conventional wisdom says that great leaders roll up their sleeves, get in the trenches, and sweat the small stuff. But what if that's only half the story? According to former nuclear submarine captain L. David Marquet and organizational psychologist Michael A. Gillespie, the real superpower of great leaders isn't proximity — it's distance. In their new book, Distancing: How Great Leaders Reframe to Make Better Decisions, they show that stepping back — psychologically, emotionally, imaginatively — helps leaders strip away bias, see what truly matters, and make smarter choices.

Most of us worry about what others think of us. While this is probably a useful survival instinct, it can also turn into a kind of neurotic rumination, leading us to prioritize people-pleasing over our own needs. Why we do this, and how we can move past it, is the topic of the new book Are You Mad at Me?: How to Stop Focusing on What Others Think and Start Living for You by psychotherapist Meg Josephson.

We live in a complex world that's only getting harder to navigate. The pace is faster, the problems are messier, and the future is tougher to predict. So how can your brain possibly keep up? Should we outsource everything to AI? Or is there a deeper, older intelligence we're overlooking? That's the question Angus Fletcher asks in his new book out today, Primal Intelligence: You Are Smarter Than You Know. Angus is a professor of story science at Ohio State's Project Narrative, a consultant to U.S. Army Special Operations, and a leading thinker on how the human mind really works — and why our creative minds are a lot more powerful than we realize, even in the age of smart machines.

Happiness might not sound like a business strategy, but Arthur C. Brooks—Harvard professor, Atlantic columnist, and all-around happiness guru—says it's the most important metric of all. In his new book The Happiness Files: Insights on Work and Life, Arthur argues that your life is a startup, and you're the founder, CEO, and maybe even the unpaid intern. Which means you've got to manage your most important asset: yourself.

How can you break out of the endless cycle of blah and create the kind of interesting, meaningful life you seek?

When we talk about aging, we often hear about lifespan (how long you live) or healthspan (how well you live). But what about joyspan? That's the question gerontologist Dr. Kerry Burnight is asking in her new book by that name, Joyspan: The Art and Science of Thriving in Life's Second Half.

Journalist Paul Vigna has spent years covering crypto and asking hard questions about finance. He's written a new book called The Almightier: How Money Became God, Greed Became Virtue, and Debt Became Sin and in it he argues that money is less of a tool and more of a kind of religious object — a myth fueled by faith, weaponized by greed, and now so central to our lives that we barely question it. But maybe we should.

Do you ever just know something? You get a gut feeling about a person or a situation — a feeling you can't quite explain, but more often than not happens to be right? It can feel like magic, but it's actually neuroscience. Today, we're hearing from behavioral scientist Laura Huang, author of You Already Know: The Science of Mastering Your Intuition. In the book, she explains that gut feelings are actually fast, subconscious calculations — your brain drawing on data, memory, and lived experience to make split-second judgments. And the best part? You can train it to be even better.

In Robin Hood Math, mathematics professor Noah Giansiracusa shows how understanding a little math can help you push back against a world that keeps reducing you to a number.

Author and zoologist Bill Schutt joins us to make the case that chompers have made vertebrates dominant on the planet, and how, in the future, dentists might be a dying breed.

In her new book Don't Talk About Politics, Sarah Stein Lubrano explores a radical idea: that people don't think their way into new beliefs — they live their way into them. If you want to shift hearts and minds, you've got to start with experiences, relationships, and community.

Despite affecting more people than diabetes or depression, headaches are still under-researched, underfunded, and often dismissed. But science is finally starting to catch up, and what it's revealing might change the way you think about pain, the brain, and how we treat illness.

Leadership expert and serial entrepreneur Meghan French Dunbar says the way we work isn't just outdated — it's dangerous. In her powerful new book, This Isn't Working, she offers a new blueprint for building lives and workplaces that prioritize well-being over burnout, and meaning over metrics.

If you've raised an adolescent (or been one), you already know it's a life stage that can feel like an emotional rollercoaster—full of drama, defiance, and slammed doors. But what if all that chaos wasn't a bug but a feature? Today we're hearing from Pulitzer Prize–winning New York Times journalist Matt Richtel, who says adolescence is a brilliant, necessary phase of human development. In his new book How We Grow Up, Matt explains how teenage brains are wired to question, rebel, and innovate—and how that friction might just be the thing that helps our species survive.

We all know what it looks like to use power badly. But how much do we really know about how to use power well?

Nicholas Maggiulli is here to flip your concept of wealth on its head. In his new book The Wealth Ladder, he argues that building financial freedom isn't about budgeting harder or dreaming bigger — it's about recognizing where you are on the wealth spectrum, and then following the right strategy for that level. Whether you've got ten bucks in the bank or ten million, Nick has a plan to help you enjoy what you've got without risking your future.

Today, we hear from Julian Treasure, a sound expert whose TED talks have racked up more than 160 million views. In his new book, Sound Affects: How Sound Shapes Our Lives, Our Wellbeing, and Our Planet, he delivers a kind of public service announcement for your ears. Because sound isn't just background noise — it's shaping your health, your focus, your mood, even your spending habits. The good news? By becoming better listeners, we can improve almost every area of our lives.

Organizational psychologist and University of New Hampshire professor Vanessa Urch Druskat has spent decades studying what separates the best teams from the rest. Spoiler: It's not hiring superstars. It's about creating emotionally intelligent norms.

Neuroscientist Joseph Jebelli explains how doing nothing might be the best thing you do all day. His new book is The Brain at Rest: How the Art and Science of Doing Nothing Can Improve Your Life.

In When You Wonder, You're Learning, Gregg Behr and Ryan Rydzewski bring the lessons of Mister Rogers' Neighborhood into the digital age, helping parents raise more creative, curious, and caring kids.

You know that feeling when someone's really listening to you, not just nodding while waiting to talk, but actually tuning in? It's rare. In our noisy, fast-talking world, real listening has become a lost art. Emily Kasriel, a former BBC journalist and executive coach, wants to change that. In her new book Deep Listening: Transform Your Relationships with Family, Friends, and Foes, she explores how we can tune out the noise and truly tune into each other at work, at home, and across divides.

In Invisible Rivals, Jonathan Goodman argues that the real story of human nature isn't about picking sides: it's about understanding how our ancient instincts for cooperation and competition are still playing out today.

Bree Groff argues that fun isn't frivolous. It's the secret to better teams, better lives, and better business.

According to Wendy Johnson, real wellness starts with community, nature, and rethinking everything we've been told.

Fred Dust, former senior partner and global managing director at the legendary design firm IDEO, is here to teach you how to design conversations and meetings that are creative and impactful.

In his new book, Shamanism: The Timeless Religion, anthropologist Manvir Singh travels from Indonesian rainforests to Burning Man in search of what makes shamanic traditions so enduring — and so human. It turns out that when life feels uncertain, people everywhere still seek out ritual, healing, and a little magic.

Anne Marie Chaker went from journalist to competitive bodybuilder at 50. Now, with her book Lift, she wants to change how we think about aging, power, and what our bodies are capable of.

The most hated word in English might just be a storytelling superpower—and a tool for empathy, nuance, and emotional truth.

When we talk about the forces that shape history, we usually hear about wars, revolutions, inventions… maybe the occasional love affair. But there's one powerful force that's rarely acknowledged—because, well, it makes people uncomfortable. That force is drugs. In his new book ⁠Human History on Drugs⁠, writer and historian Sam Kelly uncovers the surprising, often scandalous ways that everything from opium to cocaine has shaped leaders, inspired art, fueled some bad decisions—and some good ones. It's a provocative and oddly humanizing look at the past, and it just might change the way you think about both history and substance use.

Celebrated psychologist Paul Bloom shares five key insights from his book The Sweet Spot.

Once just a word, now a worldview — how a 20th-century invention came to shape everything from your phone to your future. Support the show!

Ambition. We celebrate it, chase it, and reward it. But for many of us, ambition has become a double-edged sword—fueling overwork, perfectionism, and self-neglect. What if the problem isn't having ambition, but where it's coming from? Executive coach Amina AlTai has worked with everyone from Olympians to entrepreneurs, and in her new book The Ambition Trap: How to Stop Chasing and Start Living, she argues that we don't need to give up ambition; we just need to reclaim it on our own terms.

How code became the most powerful spell humans have ever cast.

Life changes can sneak up on all of us, and sometimes they hit pretty hard. Cassidy Krug spent 20 years training to be one of the best divers in the world. She made it to the Olympics. And then, in a single moment, her lifelong dream ended—with no medal, no encore, just the quiet shock of “What now?” Cassidy's new book, Resurface, is a guide for anyone navigating life's big transitions—grief, identity shifts, career changes, reinventions. In the book, she gathers wisdom from Olympians, veterans, new parents, and more. Below, she shares what she's learned about letting go, asking for help, and redefining success.

Listening can be improved. Ximena Vengoechea is here to tell you how.

We live in a golden age of learning. Want to learn Mandarin? There's an app for that. Want to write some code? There's an AI chatbot that can help. Want to start a business, write a novel, fix your posture, or master the didgeridoo? Go to YouTube and you could start today. And that's the problem. When you can learn anything, the temptation is to try learning everything. Entrepreneur and podcaster Pat Flynn says that's the fast track to burnout and stagnation. In his new book, Lean Learning: How to Achieve More by Learning Less, he lays out a better way.

Antidepressants we don't understand. Cures that never arrive. One neuroscientist blows the whistle on a mental health system that's stuck—and she's got a radical new plan to fix your brain.

Let's face it: ideas are a dime a dozen. Just about anyone can come up with a clever app, a market opportunity, or a product pitch over coffee. But building a real company? That's the hard part. In her new book After the Idea: What It Really Takes to Create and Scale a Startup, Harvard Business School faculty member Julia Austin offers a rare, behind-the-scenes look at what it really takes to turn inspiration into a functioning business—and stay sane along the way.

Let's talk about revenge. Not the juicy, action-movie kind with flaming cars and dramatic showdowns, but the kind that quietly simmers in your brain long after someone cuts you off in traffic or sends a snarky email. According to Yale psychiatry lecturer and lawyer James Kimmel, Jr., revenge isn't just an emotion. It's an addiction. A hit of dopamine here, a rumination there, and suddenly we're hooked on the fantasy of payback. But what if we could quit cold turkey? In his new book, The Science of Revenge, James explains how to rewire our minds, embrace forgiveness, and break free from the cycles of grievance that keep us stuck.

Robert Reffkin, co-founder and CEO of the real estate company Compass, says his success story is really the story of his great relationships.

A formula for reigniting your purpose at any age, from the founder of Moms Demand Action.

Pria Anand reveals how our minds create elaborate stories to fill the gaps we don't understand.

In a world where fitting in can seem critical to your survival, it's worth asking: What if your power lies in not belonging? Psychiatrist Rami Kaminski thinks that sense of being an outsider isn't a bug — it's a feature.

Science journalist Melinda Wenner Moyer, shares research-backed strategies for parenting with compassion, curiosity, and resilience from her new book, Hello, Cruel World!: Science-Based Strategies for Raising Terrific Kids in Terrifying Times.

To close out the week, here are five key insights from Roy Richard Grinker's book Nobody's Normal: How Culture Created the Stigma of Mental Illness.