Seventy-two billion dollars. That, according to the Grifter Counter™, is the amount of money that's been swallowed up by crypto and blockchain scams and crashes. It's an enormous sum — but one that may not surprise you if you've kept up with the news. Bitcoin lost more than 60% of its value in 2022. FTX, once the world's third-largest crypto exchange, collapsed, and its founder, Sam Bankman-Fried, was later found guilty on seven counts of fraud and conspiracy. And it's not just crypto that has seen dark days. Remember NFTs? They were once touted as a revolutionary new form of digital ownership made possible by the blockchain. Today, however, 95% of them have lost all of their value. That's right. All of it.

So it would seem like a suboptimal time to publish a book arguing that "blockchains and the software movement around them — typically called crypto or web3 — provide the only plausible path to sustaining the original vision of the internet as an open platform that incentivizes creativity and entrepreneurship." But that's precisely what Chris Dixon, founder of a16z crypto, has done with "Read Write Own: Building the Next Era of the Internet." Chris, who spoke with Rufus in a live taping of this show last week, says that while blockchains have been "maligned and associated with grift, casino culture, and fraud," they are tools that can be used for good. Today on the show, he makes that case.

When Rajiv Shah was in his late 20s and didn’t know what to do with his life, he got a job at a fledgling nonprofit, the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation. Before he knew it, he was a driving force behind a global vaccination program that immunized 900 million children and saved 16 million lives.

At 36, he became the administrator of the United States Agency for International Development (USAID), managing a $20 billion budget, overseeing a staff of 10,000, and leading the U.S. response to global humanitarian crises.

Today, as president of the Rockefeller Foundation, he’s finding innovative solutions to mitigate climate change and end energy poverty.

What connects these experiences? At every step, Raj maintained a big bet mentality. What is a big bet? “A concerted effort to fundamentally solve a single, pressing problem in your community or our world. Big bets require setting profound, seemingly unachievable goals and believing they are achievable.” In this episode, he shares his methodology for creating large-scale change and making the world a better place.

Host: Rufus Griscom

Guest: Rajiv Shah

Book: Big Bets: How Large-Scale Change Really Happens

A few weeks ago, USA Today ran a story with the headline "It's over: 2023 was Earth's hottest year, experts say." But is it really over? Hannah Ritchie, a data scientist at the University of Oxford, doesn't think so. In her new book, "Not the End of the World," she says that if we zoom out and look at the data, "we can see something truly radical, game-changing and life-giving: humanity is in a truly unique position to build a sustainable world." She's on the show today to tell us why she's urgently optimistic about our planet's future, what smart people get wrong about climate change, and the most effective ways to lower your carbon footprint.

Host: Caleb Bissinger

Guest: Hannah Ritchie

You can learn more about Our World in Data here, and check out Hannah's newsletter, Sustainability by Numbers.

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Do we have free will? Do we have a choice in what we do? Philosophers and theologians have debated these questions for centuries; Robert Sapolsky answered them when he was 14. Free will, he concluded, simply does not exist.

Robert is now in his mid-sixties. He has degrees from Harvard and Rockefeller University; he won a MacArthur “genius” award; and he’s a professor at Stanford, where he holds joint appointments in biology, neurology, and neurosurgery. But despite how much time has passed and how long his CV has grown, he never lost his youthful fascination with free will — or our lack thereof — so he decided to write a book about it. It’s called “Determined,” and in addition to assembling a formidable case against free will, Robert makes the intriguing argument that if we can abandon our illusion of volition, we can build a more humane world.

Support the show by becoming a Next Big Idea Club member. (Use code PODCAST for 20% off.)

We’re hosting a live taping in New York City on January 31st. Come on by! We’d love to meet you. You can learn more here.

Forming a new habit is tough. Sticking with it is even tougher. That’s probably why someone buys a copy of James Clear’s 2018 book “Atomic Habits” every 11 seconds. James breaks down the science of habit formation into simple, actionable steps anyone can take — even you. Today on the show, he talks Rufus through the four laws of behavior change, explains how small improvements compound over time to produce remarkable results, and offers easy tips you can use now to kick bad habits and adopt good ones.

What makes us happy? Researchers at Harvard have been trying to solve that riddle for 85 years. Now, they think they’ve found the answer. Marc Schulz, associate director of the Harvard Study of Adult Development, joins to tell us more.

Do we have alcohol to thank for civilization? The answer, according to Edward Slingerland’s new book, “Drunk: How We Sipped, Danced, and Stumbled Our Way to Civilization,” is a resounding yes. Edward, who’s a professor at the University of British Columbia and self-proclaimed “philosophical hedonist,” says that far from being an evolutionary fluke, our taste for alcohol is an evolutionary advantage — one that we’ve relied on for millennia to help us lead more social, creative, and pleasurable lives.

(This episode first aired in July 2021.)

Rory Stewart may be the most interesting person you’ve never heard of. He’s an adventurer, writer, politician, and nonprofit leader. He walked across Afghanistan — alone — in the months after 9/11 and wrote a book about the experience that the New York Times called a “flat-out masterpiece”; he then served as a deputy governor in Iraq, held a chair at Harvard, and was elected to British Parliament. Now he’s out with a new memoir called “How Not to Be a Politician.” It’s a funny, candid, and somewhat shocking chronicle of the decade he spent in office. It’s also a book about why our political system feels so broken and what we can do to repair it.

Host: Caleb Bissinger

Guest: Rory Stewart

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We may live in an ever-evolving world, but some things never change. The power of a good story. The miracle of compound interest. The cold, hard fact that money can’t buy happiness. This is the deceptively simple premise of “Same as Ever” by Morgan Housel. If we can master the behaviors that never change, we’ll be ready to handle whatever the future throws at us. On today’s show, Morgan sits down with Rufus to share some of the timeless lessons from his new book as well as enduring wisdom from his last, “The Psychology of Money.”

Host: Rufus Griscom

Guest: Morgan Housel

• Support our show by joining the Next Big Idea Club. Visit nextbigideaclub.com to learn more, and use the code PODCAST for a 20% discount