Hey, folks. Before we start today, I'd love to briefly mention my favorite new podcast.

It happens to be, coincidentally, our new weekday show called, appropriately,

the next big idea daily, hosted by my dear friend, Michael Kavnot,

he of the Milofluis Baratone. It really is phenomenal. Check it out wherever you get your podcasts.

LinkedIn presents.

I'm Rufus Griskin and this is the next big idea. Today, the delightful,

disturbing and downright fascinating story of the human mind.

Paul Bloom is no fan of textbooks. I would never write a textbook. I wouldn't want to read a

textbook, which is kind of funny because Paul is a professor. He's taught psychology for decades,

first at Yale, and now at the University of Toronto. And despite his professed

loathing of textbooks, he recently found himself wanting to write a book that would capture

basically everything I know about the mind. Sounds an awful lot like a textbook, right?

Except what Paul ended up writing is unlike any textbook I was ever forced to slog through

back in school. For one thing, it's actually fun to read. It's brisk, accessible, occasionally

body, and thoroughly unputdownable. It's a joyride of a book and it's called Psych,

the story of the human mind. I'm honest about the limitations of psychology, our failures,

our embarrassments, what we struggle to explain. But I also get to talk about our discoveries.

Everything involving memory and language and mental illness and consciousness and reasoning,

emotions, the whole shaman. This is exactly the kind of book we love here at the Next Big

Idea Club. Smart, but approachable, profound, yet whimsical, and Paul is exactly the kind of

author we adore. Warm, clever, curious, contrarian, and above all else deeply knowledgeable.

There's a reason why his last book, The Sweet Spot, the pleasures of suffering and the search

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