Show Notes
The World Cup kicked off over the weekend, and so far the mood is meh. Fans are fuming over sell-your-kidney ticket prices, frightened by reports that ICE may target matches, tailgates, and sports bars, and generally feeling down on this quadrennial celebration.
We wanted to know: Is there any joy left in this thing?
So we called up Simon Kuper. He's a columnist at the Financial Times, "one of the best sportswriters in the English language today" (The New Yorker), and author of the Next Big Idea Club must-read World Cup Fever. He's also attended every World Cup since 1990.
Simon tells us how the tournament bridges political divides, why suicides decline during the World Cup, whether “sportswashing” really works, and which storylines to follow, no matter if you're a die-hard footy fan or a first-time viewer.
🔗 SPONSORED BY:
Fora — Build and scale your own travel business by becoming a Fora Advisor today at foratravel.com/idea
Northwest Registered Agent — Helping small business owners and entrepreneurs launch and grow businesses for nearly 30 years. Learn more at northwestregisteredagent.com/nbifree
Shopify — Launch your business for just $1/month. Start selling today at shopify.com/nbi
More from The Next Big Idea
For the last few years, the global space race has been dominated by two billionaires: Elon Musk and Jeff Bezos. They’ve launched thousands of satellites, designed lunar landing modules, and drawn up ambitious plans to build AI data centers in space. We wanted to understand why these two are so obsessed with galaxies far, far away. And, more importantly, what their efforts to conquer the cosmos mean for the rest of us down here on Earth. So we called up Josh Tyrangiel. He wrote the cover story for the latest issue of The Atlantic. It’s called “Choose Your Overlord: Musk vs. Bezos.”
June Cohen has spent her career shaping the future, from bringing TED Talks online to launching Masters of Scale. But she has come to believe that some of the best solutions to what ails us today lie in our distant past. Our ancestors developed extraordinarily sophisticated social technologies — what June calls “wisdom systems” — designed to meet our deepest human needs. To help us grieve, build trust, find meaning, experience rapturous joy. In her new book, The Great Remembering, she looks at six of those ancient traditions and unpacks the cutting-edge science of why they work.
We all carry around invisible lists, private ledgers of disappointment — the talents we wish we had, the hobbies we’d like to take up, the passion projects we keep meaning to kickstart. Ravi Gupta has one of those lists, and nine years ago, the ex-Obama staffer decided to do something about it. Cut to the present. He’s a published novelist, dawn-patrol surfer, solid tennis player, and budding Italian chef. How did one man accomplish all that? Today on the show: the method he swears anyone can use. Even Caleb.
What’s really fueling the race to build superintelligence? Science? Idealism? Money? Try spite. “These guys hate each other,” says Kevin Roose. “It’s grudges all the way down.” Those rivalries, it turns out, have pushed AI forward faster than any of them thinks is wise.
Our curator Daniel Pink recently sat down with Angela Duckworth to chat about her new book, Situated: Find the People and Places That Bring Out Your Best. Although we just had Angela on the show, we couldn’t resist sharing this conversation too. It’s live. It’s loose. And it covers a lot of ground we didn’t get to last time — like what Michael Phelps's childhood ZIP code had to do with his 28 Olympic medals (8:15), why Angela's house is full of avocados and physical therapy equipment (26:55), how a late-night cold call changed millions of lives (32:27), and how Daniel has made it in his career without a single mentor (41:52).