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.

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We have a pretty good idea what ancient civilizations looked like. But what did they taste, smell, and feel like?

📕 Dinner with King Tut by Sam Kean

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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.

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All day long, your brain makes subconscious value calculations. It looks at every decision and asks, "What is going to be most rewarding for me right this very minute?" That creates a gap, doesn't it? A gap between the person you want to be and the choices you actually make. Today on the show, neuroscientist Emily Falk explains the science behind that gap. She shows us how understanding our brain's hidden valuation system can give us more compassion for ourselves, and help us gently nudge our daily actions to align with our deepest values. Her new book is What We Value.

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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.

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In part two of our interview with Eric Topol, author of the New York Times bestseller Super Agers, we cover how to get a good night's sleep, why one day everyone may take GLP-1s, and how AI is poised to transform medicine.

1️⃣ Missed Part 1? Listen now on Apple Podcasts or Spotify

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

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For years, cardiologist Eric Topol hunted for the rarest people in America: those over 80 who had never been sick. When he finally found 1,400 of them, he made a shocking discovery. It wasn't their genes. These "super agers" were often the last ones standing in families where everyone else died decades earlier. So what separates people who live into their 80s or 90s feeling great from those who battle chronic disease? In his new book, Super Agers, Eric reveals what the science actually shows, shares practical advice you can use at any age, and takes on the bro scientists selling false promises along the way.

This is part one of our interview with Eric. Part two will be available right here next week. If you can't until then, you can listen now on the Next Big Idea app: https://nextbigideaclub.com/app/

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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.

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Arthur Schopenhauer said, “Talent hits a target no one else can hit. Genius hits a target no one else can see.” Thomas Edison famously claimed, “Genius is 1% inspiration and 99% perspiration.” Helen Lewis has a different take entirely. To her, the term genius licenses noxious eccentricities, exasperating ego trips, and downright bad behavior. Sure, plenty of things qualify as acts of genius — Shakespeare’s sonnets, penicillin — but when we pin the genius badge on a person instead of an achievement, we grant them membership in a supposedly superior class. That, Helen says, is the genius myth. She wants to demolish it and, in its place, tell the real story of how breakthroughs happen and who deserves credit.