199. This Idea Must Die

Former S.E.C. chair Gary Gensler has had a front-row seat to numerous financial booms and busts. How does he feel about America’s massive bet on A.I.? “Something has to give.” SOURCES: Gary Gensler, professor of the practice of global economics, management, and finance at M.I.T. ...  Show more

Harlan Coben doesn’t think so. The mega-best-selling author talks suburbia, impostor syndrome, and what he learned from his college friend David Foster Wallace. If you'd like to see the video version of Better in Person, you can watch it on YouTube or Apple Podcasts. Hosted by Si ...  Show more

Our space and physics editors go head-to-head over a classic mind-bending question. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices 

Ideas are currency. This couldn't be more true in academia, where it's the job of researchers to think of questions and, hopefully, find answers. Bapu talks with economists Steve Levitt and Emily Oster about how they come up with ideas for studies, why most never make it off the ...  Show more

Sure, we worked way too hard for that pun in the title, but it's a serious question: CERN, or the European Organization for Nuclear Research is one of the world's largest, most prominent centres for scientific research. The experts at CERN use the world's largest and most complex ...  Show more

Progress versus preservation: It's one of the eternal dilemmas found throughout every instance of human civilization. Should we embrace disruptive thoughts and science that challenges our beliefs, or should we cling to the comfort of the status quo? Join Ben and Noel in this week ...  Show more