The Next Big Idea

Kevin Roose, ex New York Times tech columnist and Hard Fork co-host, interviewed more than 150 people racing to build artificial general intelligence for his new book The AGI Chronicles, and his headline finding is that the race runs on spite: 'these guys hate each other, it's grudges all the way down,' and those rivalries have pushed AI forward faster than any of them thinks is wise. The conversation covers the secret Slack channels, philosophical feuds, and billion-dollar bets behind the labs, and asks whether a small group with outsized influence over humanity's future can cooperate on safety. For consultants: a sober look at the governance culture (or lack of it) behind the tools clients are being told to bet their organizations on.

A live follow-up conversation on Duckworth's new book Situated, recorded with Daniel Pink at Politics and Prose in Washington, D.C. Loose and anecdote-driven: what Michael Phelps's childhood ZIP code had to do with his 28 Olympic medals, why solo striving is a problem, how to become a 'mentor magnet,' and Pink's admission that he built his career without a single mentor. For consultants: more evidence for the Situated thesis that environment shapes what effort can achieve, design the context, not just the person.

Martin Seligman, founder of positive psychology, returns at 84 with a new book, Agency, and an attempt to found a field he calls psychohistory: using the tools of psychology on history itself to ask what produces innovation, progress and stagnation. His one-word answer to what explains progress is agency, the belief in one's capacity to influence outcomes. For consultants: the research lineage behind the autonomy argument, from the man who built the field; agency as the measurable ingredient participative structures are designed to produce.

Ten years after making grit one of the most influential ideas in psychology, Angela Duckworth returns with a new book, Situated, that complicates her own argument: passion and perseverance turn potential into achievement, but the situation around a person shapes what perseverance can actually do. For consultants: useful ammunition against purely individual explanations of performance, design the situation, not just the person.

Stephen Witt, author of the viral New York Times essay on AI escaping full human control, lays out four concrete ways to rein the technology in, including investigating AI breakouts the way we investigate plane crashes. Also covered: how AI risk went from niche worry to political flashpoint, and why the smartest people in tech still disagree on whether AI is buggy software or an untamed tiger. For consultants: a governance frame for clients delegating real decisions to agents.

Stanford professor Robert Sapolsky, author of Determined, assembles his case that free will simply does not exist, a conclusion he first reached at age 14. He also makes the intriguing argument that abandoning the illusion of volition could help us build a more humane world. A vault episode that first aired in January 2024.

Conflict resolution expert Priya Parker challenges the idea that disagreement signals a broken relationship, arguing that avoiding difficult conversations quietly erodes the very connections we are trying to protect. She and Rufus talk about 'healthy heat' (holding tension with care long enough to get somewhere new), which fights are worth having, how to make apologies that lead to real repair, and when to let a relationship end. For consultants: transferable to teams where harmony norms suppress the productive conflict self-managing groups depend on.

Historian Kim Phillips-Fein traces 250 years of American arguments in defense of hierarchy, from the Founding Fathers and Gilded Age industrialists to today's tech elite. With guest host Michael Kovnat she covers the dark side of meritocracy, why some of America's richest men believed wealth proved superiority, and how once fringe ideas are finding new life in Silicon Valley as AI threatens to concentrate wealth further. For consultants: background on why hierarchy keeps getting reframed as natural and necessary, the exact assumption self-management work runs up against.