Hey Freethinkers,

I’ve been reading a lot about death lately, not out of morbid curiosity, but because we’re putting together something special here at Freethink: an entire collection focused on efforts to delay it.

The Longevity Issue drops this fall, and in it, you’ll find:

• A conversation with one of the world’s leading gerontologists,

• A first-person dispatch from a weekend inside a longevity-themed pop-up village,

• And an exploration of how pet dogs might be the key to humans living longer, healthier lives.

The Freethink Interview team is also preparing to release a new video with internet entrepreneur and Twitch co-founder Emmett Shear — in it, he discusses the role of AI agents in the world. Our paid followers will get early access to the video on Substack, so if you were thinking about upgrading from a free subscription, now’s a great time.

That’s what you have to look forward to from Freethink. Here’s a selection of some of my favorite stories that we’ve recently released.

Read on,
Kristin

FREETHINK VOICES

Silicon Valley has entered its superstar engineer era

The race to build artificial general intelligence has ignited an unprecedented talent war in tech — top companies like Meta and Google are now offering engineers the kinds of salaries previously reserved for pro-athletes and Hollywood elites. These nine-figure deals might actually be sound investments, though — small, elite teams have proven capable of building hugely profitable AI models, and securing a single superstar engineer could mean dominating the future of intelligence.

In his latest piece for Freethink, Rohit Krishnan explores the lengths Silicon Valley’s top firms will go to get a Noam Shazeer or Ilya Sutskever on their payroll.

READ MORE

ARTIFICIAL INTELLIGENCE

The real danger in “I, Robot” isn’t AI. It’s humans.

On the surface, 2004’s “I, Robot” appears to be a cautionary tale about the dangers of AI. Look closer, though, and Louis Anslow, author of the Pessimists Archive newsletter, thinks you’ll find a more nuanced warning: The danger isn’t AI itself, but its centralization and overregulation. With just a decade to go until the film’s imagined future, Anslow urges readers to be less worried about rogue machines and more concerned about the humans and institutions that seek to control them.

READ MORE

FREETHINK FEATURES

The Golden Dome should be built — just not the way Trump imagines

Gal Winter knows missile defense. Before moving to New York to attend Columbia University, he served as an Iron Dome officer in the Israeli Air Force, leading research initiatives exploring critical gaps in Israel’s air defense systems. In a new Opinion piece for Freethink, he breaks down why President Trump’s proposed Golden Dome is unlikely to succeed: It’s trying to do too much, too fast. Still, Winter argues that even a scaled-down version of the Golden Dome could deter attacks and buy time in a crisis — making it a smart, strategic investment as Russia, China, and North Korea continue to ramp up their missile capabilities.

READ MORE

TECHNO-HUMANIST MANIFESTO

AI can dramatically expand human agency

In all of human history, there have been just three basic eras of production: the Stone Age, the agricultural age, and the industrial age. We now appear to be on the cusp of a fourth: the intelligence age, characterized by fast, cheap cognitive labor powered by AI. In his latest “Techno-Humanist Manifesto” essay, Jason Crawford challenges the idea that we’re inevitably headed toward a dystopia in which humans surrender all agency to AI. If we get AI right, he argues, the intelligence age will be one of accelerating empowerment — a time when humans can do anything we want.

READ MORE

In case you missed it

• In humanity’s dance with technology, people lead. Always.

• Gen Z: We must resist the temptation to cheat on everything

• A personal assistant for everyone: The promise of ambient AI

• 2025: We're not in a crisis. We're in a transformation.

Kristin Houser is the managing editor at Freethink.

Have a tip on an exciting innovation? Or just have feedback on how to make this newsletter better? Send me an email: freethinkweekly-replies@freethink.com

YOUTUBE | INSTAGRAM | X

Share Freethink Media

Hey Freethinkers,

People love to romanticize innovation. Some genius has a “light bulb moment,” and from that flash of brilliance we get an invention that changes the world.

In reality, innovation is rarely instantaneous — the light bulb itself was the result of incremental advances made by dozens of inventors over most of a century — but people are willing to put in that work because humanity has a problem that can only be solved by something new.

This week, Jason Crawford explored the idea of ideas in his Techno-Humanist Manifesto, arguing that, because we’re always going to have some kind of unmet need or desire, we’re always going to have innovation. The question is whether we can keep up the pace of innovation set in the 20th century.

Also, we’re very excited to announce that we’ll be updating Freethink Weekly to give you more insight into what’s happening behind the scenes at Freethink and why we do what we do. Expect a new look (and a new name) when it next hits your inbox.

Read on,
Kristin

FREETHINK VOICES

It’s far too early to call “peak ideas”

By Jason Crawford

New ideas drive economic growth — we innovate, and those innovations open up new economic opportunities. Between 1870 and 1970, the world innovated at an unprecedented rate — we got everything from the automobile to the electric grid — but over the past 50 years, the pace has slowed to a crawl. In the latest edition of the Techno-Humanist Manifesto, Jason Crawford explores why we aren’t innovating like we used to — and what it might take to stave off stagnation.

READ NOW

FREETHINK FEATURES

The war on artificial ice

by

The way we produce meat today — by raising and slaughtering livestock — is both environmentally harmful and ethically fraught. Lab-grown meat could allow us to keep the meat we know and love without the downsides of traditional production, but instead of embracing this innovation, some states are banning it. In a new installment of , Louis Anslow explores how the fight over lab-grown meat mirrors an earlier battle against a different disruptive food technology: factory-made ice.

READ NOW

Get more from Freethink in the Substack app

Available for iOS and Android

Get the app

ARTIFICIAL INTELLIGENCE

What if you could start civilization over with AI?

by Peter Leyden

Leaders in every major field are currently asking themselves the same question: How can we incorporate AI into what we do? But that’s the wrong question, argues author . In the latest essay in his “The Great Progression: 2025 to 2050” series, Leyden lays out what everyone should be asking instead.

READ MORE

WORTH SHARING

When to quit: A simple framework for life’s toughest decisions

by

In poker, knowing when to fold is just as important as knowing when to hold, but laying down a hand — even a lousy one — can be hard, especially if you’ve already put money in the pot. The same dilemma plays out in careers, relationships, and other facets of life: Quitting something you’ve invested time, money, or emotion into can feel like admitting defeat. In an interview with Big Think, former professional poker player turned decision-making guru explains why it’s important to know when to walk away — and shares how to get better at identifying that moment.

READ NOW

Kristin Houser is the managing editor at Freethink.

Have a tip on an exciting innovation? Or just have feedback on how to make this newsletter better? Send me an email: freethinkweekly-replies@freethink.com

YOUTUBE | INSTAGRAM | X

Subscribe now

Hey Freethinkers,

This weekend, I traveled two hours north of Pittsburgh for the Forest County Bigfoot Festival, an annual celebration of all things Sasquatch.

While walking the festival grounds, I caught several mentions of the “Patterson-Gimlin film” (PGF). According to Bigfoot believers, this minute-long video, recorded in 1967, depicts a chance encounter with the cryptid in the wild — the first video evidence of its existence.

In reality, though, the PGF was likely created by a team of hoaxers over a long weekend, with the role of Sasquatch played by a man in a gorilla costume, making it a notable example of disinformation — false information deliberately spread to mislead people.

Thanks to today’s AI, it’s never been easier to make this kind of content quickly and cheaply — I whipped up my own Bigfoot video in just a few minutes using Runway AI. But unlike the relatively harmless PGF, some of this AI-generated content can have profound consequences.

This week, Freethink contributor Yasmin Khorram explored how Sam Altman’s Tools for Humanity is trying to combat disinformation online — ranging from fake videos to chatbots posing as humans — by having people prove their personhood to an eye-scanning Orb.

Also on deck: everything we know about OpenAI’s plan to dominate the future of social media.

Read on,
Kristin

THE DIGITAL FRONTIER

How proof-of-human tech could save the internet

If I want to visit another nation, I need to show my passport to prove that I’m actually an American citizen. According to Tools for Humanity, we need a similar form of identification that lets internet users know that the person they’re talking to online is actually a person and not an AI. The company’s solution is a World ID, and five years after launch, these digital passports are finally available to people in the US — but will enough Americans put aside their privacy concerns for the tech to take off?

READ NOW

MISINFORMATION

America tried to ban fake photos in 1912

While Tools for Humanity has been working on ways to identify AI-generated disinformation online, legislators have been wrestling with what to do about the people who create it — how should we punish those who make deepfake revenge porn or use chatbots to try to influence elections? These issues seem wholly modern, but as Louis Anslow notes in an essay for Pessimists Archive, Congress dealt with a similar issue more than 100 years ago when it tried to criminalize the creation of fake photos — and the lessons legislators learned back then could help us address disinformation today.

READ NOW

Get more from Freethink in the Substack app

Available for iOS and Android

Get the app

ARTIFICIAL INTELLIGENCE

Why AI today is more toddler than Terminator

The AIs depicted in pop culture are often logical, rule-based machines (think: The Terminator or Data from “Star Trek”), but according to author De Kai, the reality is far more nuanced. This week, Freethink shared an excerpt from Kai’s new book, “Raising AI: An Essential Guide to Parenting Our Future,” in which he argues that modern AIs can have a range of personalities, and as with children, the kinds of AI we end up with depends on how we raise them.

READ NOW

FREETHINK FEATURES

The AI social network war has begun

In February, Sam Altman responded to a report that Meta, Facebook’s parent company, was making a ChatGPT competitor with what seemed like a joke: “ok fine maybe we'll do a social app,” noting how funny it would be to “uno reverse” the social media giant. As Kiara Nirghin reports in a new Freethink feature, all signs now point to OpenAI being serious about making a play for your social feed — and she has all the details on what its AI-native platform is likely to look like.

READ NOW

WORTH SHARING

Anomaly no more! “Muon g-2” puzzle resolved at last

In science, a theory is only as good as its ability to withstand testing. If, for example, a bowling ball hovered in the air when dropped, rather than falling to the ground like the theory of gravity predicts it should, we’d know there was something wrong with our theory. One of the most important theories in physics, the Standard Model, has passed all experimental tests except one, maddeningly suggesting there must be something wrong with it that we just couldn’t see. This week on our sister site, Big Think, astrophysicist Ethan Siegel details how scientists have finally resolved the anomaly and saved the Standard Model.

READ NOW

Kristin Houser is the managing editor at Freethink.

Have a tip on an exciting innovation? Or just have feedback on how to make this newsletter better? Send me an email: freethinkweekly-replies@freethink.com

YOUTUBE | INSTAGRAM | X

Subscribe now

Hey Freethinkers,

Sir Jonathan “Jony” Ive and I don’t have much in common. He’s Gen X; I’m a millennial. He’s bald; I’m blonde. He’s a knight — I’m not even a night owl.

We do share this, though: we’ve both chosen to work in highly volatile industries. Tech and media are fast-moving, high-stakes fields, and opting for a career in either means accepting that your company can be booming one minute and laying off your colleagues — or you — the next.

Ive was the head of industrial design at Apple in 1997 when it went through one of these low periods. Microsoft was eating into its market share, and the company was bleeding money. To stay alive, it had just laid off more than 4,000 employees — nearly a third of its workforce.

A demoralized Ive was thinking about leaving voluntarily when Steve Jobs — newly reinstated as Apple’s CEO — stopped by for a tour of the design studio. The two felt an instant connection and would go on to co-develop the industry-changing products that not only saved Apple from bankruptcy but made it into the tech giant that it is today.

Ive now has a new creative partner: Sam Altman. This week on Freethink, Leander Kahney — author of best-selling biographies on Ive and Jobs — explores whether the new pairing could do for OpenAI what the Ive/Jobs collaboration did for Apple. Also on deck: Jason Crawford explains why worrying that we’re going to run out of natural resources is a waste of time.

Read on,
Kristin

FREETHINK FEATURES

Jony Ive has found his new Steve Jobs

When Steve Jobs rejoined Apple in 1997, it was floundering. In an attempt to turn things around, he did a top-to-bottom audit of the company — and that’s how he met designer Jony Ive. Together, the two went on to develop a string of successful products that brought Apple from the brink of bankruptcy to the top of the tech mountain. Ive seemed to lose his spark following Jobs’ death in 2011, but he now has a new partner in Sam Altman — and the device the two are developing for OpenAI could be as revolutionary as the iPhone.

READ NOW

THE FREETHINK INTERVIEW

We stopped believing in progress. Now, we’re stagnating.

Life in the Western world changed dramatically between 1870 and 1920 thanks to major advances in energy, communication, transportation, and healthcare. The last 50 years? We got the internet and some advances in biology, but nothing that compares to those previous breakthroughs. This week, Jason Crawford, founder of the Roots of Progress Institute, sat down for a Freethink Interview to discuss this stagnation and what the future could look like if we start believing in progress again.

WATCH NOW

ARTIFICIAL INTELLIGENCE

AI thinks “vegetative electron microscopy” is real — it’s not

“Vegetative electron microscopy” isn’t a new imaging technique — the phrase doesn’t actually mean anything, but a few years ago, it started appearing in scientific papers. It turned out that a scanning error had injected the phrase into a dataset used to train AIs. When some corner-cutting scientists then prompted the models to write their papers, they included “vegetative electron microscopy” in the responses. This week, journalist B. David Zarley talked to the researchers who unraveled this mystery and found out what needs to happen to prevent more output oddities from polluting our AI results.

READ NOW

Get more from Freethink in the Substack app

Available for iOS and Android

Get the app

FREETHINK VOICES

Predictions of resource scarcity have a fundamental flaw

By Jason Crawford

We got a double dose of Jason Crawford on Freethink this week. In addition to sharing his aforementioned Freethink Interview, we also published the next essay in his Techno-Humanist Manifesto series. In this installment, Crawford explores how past predictions of catastrophic resource shortages have rarely come true because we usually invent some better resource or technology before we have time to exhaust the old one. The takeaway? We can probably stop worrying that we’re going to run out of lithium, or sand, or quartz…

READ NOW

WORTH SHARING

Are large language models dyslexic?

Louis Rosenberg is a Stanford-trained engineer, a virtual reality pioneer, and a successful entrepreneur. He also has trouble reading analog clocks and telling his left from his right. Strangely, some of today’s most powerful AIs have the same problems that Rosenberg does, and in an essay published on Big Think, he explains why he thinks the root cause might be the same: dyslexia.

READ NOW

Kristin Houser is the managing editor at Freethink.

Have a tip on an exciting innovation? Or just have feedback on how to make this newsletter better? Send me an email: freethinkweekly-replies@freethink.com

YOUTUBE | INSTAGRAM | X

Subscribe now

Hey Freethinkers,

May 2025 was a momentous month for me.

Exactly six years ago, I took advantage of a Memorial Day sale to purchase a brand new car. I know it was exactly six years ago because this month marked my 72nd — and final — payment on the vehicle: I’m now the proud owner of a 2019 Hyundai Tucson (hold for applause).

If you’ve been keeping up on your Freethink Weeklys, you know that my car regularly sits dormant for weeks at a time, but I live in the US, where car culture dominates — the idea of not owning one simply didn’t cross my mind back in 2019.

That’s why I appreciate Freethink’s Hard Reset series: It makes me think about alternatives to the status quo. This week, they did it again by taking us inside a new kind of neighborhood that bucks the car-first mentality and shows what people can get when they’re willing to give up their parking spots.

Also on deck: Freethink contributor Christopher Ferguson explores how the delayed release of Grand Theft Auto 6 could impact real-life violence — but not in the way you might think.

Read on,
Kristin

HARD RESET

24 hours in an illegal, car-free community

I learned a new word this week: charette. It’s an intense planning session during which all the stakeholders in a new project hash out its design. For most urban planning projects, it starts with figuring out parking, but that wasn’t the case at the charette for Culdesac Tempe — its developers designed the neighborhood around alternative modes of transportation. In a new episode of Hard Reset, host Nick Tucker visits Culdesac to see what you get when you’re willing to give up your car (spoiler: it starts with cat stickers and just gets better from there).

WATCH NOW

VIDEO GAMES

Pac-Man turned 45 today. The surgeon general once warned that playing it could make kids violent.

Cigarettes, alcohol…social media? Last June, then-Surgeon General Vivek Murthy called for a warning label on social media platforms, arguing that they were “associated with significant mental health harms for adolescents.” The science on that is actually far from settled, but this wasn’t the first time America’s top health official had jumped to conclusions about the connection between tech and kids. In the 1980s, one warned parents that video games were going to make their kids violent. At the center of the controversy? The most brutal game of all: Pac-Man.

READ NOW

THE UPCOMING EVENT

We are excited to announce an exciting new event series called The Great Progression. As systems from the 20th century falter, world-changing technologies like AI, clean energy, and synthetic biology are opening a rare window for reinvention. This series — curated by futurist Peter Leyden in partnership with Freethink — will kick off this Thursday, May 29th in San Francisco.

At this event, we’ll hear from:

– , Editorial Director at Google Labs and bestselling author
– , co-founder of Siri and VP of AI Experience at Airbnb

Join us for a night of great conversation ​about the future we all want to see.

Attend the Event

FREETHINK FEATURES

Grand Theft Auto 6’s delay could lead to a spike in real-life crime

In terms of on-screen violence, Grand Theft Auto has Pac-Man beat by mile (driven in a stolen police car), so if any game was going to send kids into an offline rage, GTA would be an obvious candidate. However, when researchers looked at crime statistics in the days and weeks after a new GTA dropped, they found that juvenile violence rates actually fell. In a new piece for Freethink, psychologist Christopher Ferguson looks at why this might be and how the delayed release of GTA 6 could have a particularly strong impact on real-life violence.

READ NOW

Get more from Freethink in the Substack app

Available for iOS and Android

Get the app

FREETHINK VOICES

If progress has stalled, we need to know why

By Jason Crawford

Progress accelerated more between 1870 and 1970 than in perhaps any other century in human history. In those 100 years, most Americans gained cars, electricity, refrigerators, indoor plumbing, and so many more inventions that made their lives easier and safer. Over the last 50 years, though, progress has slowed if not outright stalled. Sure, we got the internet, but that’s about it for major innovations. In the latest installment of the Techno-Humanist Manifesto, Jason Crawford takes a closer look at the “Great Stagnation” and explores what might be holding us back — and what it will take to reignite the engines of progress.

READ NOW

WORTH SHARING

The red color of Mars is mere inches deep

Mars is called the Red Planet, but its scarlet hue is actually only skin deep — dig just an inch or two below the surface, and you’ll find a mix of colors. So what is causing all the red dust that gives the planet its characteristic reddish appearance? That’s the question astrophysicist Ethan Siegel answers in this week’s installment of Starts with a Bang.

READ NOW

Kristin Houser is the managing editor at Freethink.

Have a tip on an exciting innovation? Or just have feedback on how to make this newsletter better? Send me an email: freethinkweekly-replies@freethink.com

YOUTUBE | INSTAGRAM | X

Subscribe now

Hey Freethinkers,

I solved a murder Saturday night.

Nearly 40 years ago, journalist Andrew “Andy” Bailey was found shot to death in a park. The case had run cold, but I helped a team piece together that he’d been murdered by his brother-in-law, David. The motive? The deceased was preventing David’s wife from selling a plot of land their father had left the siblings in his will.

OK, so maybe I didn’t solve a real murder this weekend, but I did spend my Saturday evening poring over statements and crime scene photos with a group of friends, shuffling files between us and jotting down relevant information in our notebooks between bites of pizza.

It was a decidedly analog experience — real people with real files sitting around a real table — yet when we were ready to point the finger at the brother-in-law, the game we were playing directed us to scan a QR code. There’s simply no escaping technology in the modern world.

This week, we’re sharing an article in which Big Think’s resident philosopher Jonny Thomson digs into our relationship with technology: Is it still a luxury that we can take or leave? Or is it something we need, a cage made of screens and passwords that we’ve built around ourselves?

Also on deck: how “vibe coding” is making it easy for anyone to develop apps — not just computer programmers.

Read on,
Kristin

WORTH SHARING

Lessons from the Roman Empire about the danger of luxury

How long could you survive without your smartphone? The answer is probably just as long as you’d survive with it, but if the idea of having to give up the device immediately spiked your anxiety, what does that say about its control over your life? Sure, technically you own your smartphone, but in some ways, does it also own you? Big Think columnist Jonny Thomson recently explored how present luxuries can become future chains — and he goes all the way back to the Roman Empire to prove it.

READ NOW

FREETHINK FEATURES

Vibe coding is rewriting the rules of technology

Historically, if you wanted to be a computer programmer, you needed to seek out some kind of education, be it a four-year college degree or a lengthy playlist of YouTube tutorials. You then had to be ready to commit to the painstaking process of writing precise code — one misplaced semicolon, and the whole program could fall apart. This week, Freethink contributor Kiara Nirghin shared her experience with a new kind of AI-empowered coding that’s accessible to anyone — as long as they’re willing to follow the “vibes.”

READ NOW

THE UPCOMING EVENT

We are excited to announce an exciting new event series called The Great Progression. As systems from the 20th century falter, world-changing technologies like AI, clean energy, and synthetic biology are opening a rare window for reinvention. This series — curated by futurist Peter Leyden in partnership with Freethink — will kick off Thursday, May 29th in San Francisco.

At this event, we’ll hear from:

– , Editorial Director at Google Labs and bestselling author
– , co-founder of Siri and VP of AI Experience at Airbnb

Join us for a night of great conversation ​about the future we all want to see.

Attend the Event

ARTIFICIAL INTELLIGENCE

Media has a blind spot when covering the AI panic

Since the 2022 release of ChatGPT, the media has been flooded with predictions of an AI-triggered apocalypse. To find out why the discourse on the new technology has been so extreme — and so extremely negative — communication researcher Nirit Weiss-Blatt spoke to the journalists covering the AI landscape. In the process, she discovered that two billionaire-backed movements are driving the AI doom discourse — and that the media is largely turning a blind eye to their involvement.

READ NOW

Get more from Freethink in the Substack app

Available for iOS and Android

Get the app

FREETHINK VOICES

How AI could usher in The New Enlightenment

By Peter Leyden

During The Enlightenment, innovators came up with six breakthrough “mega-inventions” — starting with mechanical engines and ending with nation states — that would lead to the creation of an entirely new civilization. In this week’s Great Progression: 2025 to 2050, author Peter Leyden makes the case that we’re now seeing (or will soon see) a comparable set of six mega-inventions emerge — and that these will trigger yet another civilization-scale reinvention.

READ NOW

THE FREETHINK INTERVIEW

Can we have infinite energy without ruining the planet?

With Bret Kugelmass

Nuclear power is cleaner than fossil fuels and more reliable than renewables, but it also has an image problem: high-profile meltdowns have distorted its safety profile, leading to public opposition to the creation of more plants in the US. Add in the tremendous cost and time required to build plants comparable to the ones we already have, and you get a declining nuclear industry. Sentiment is starting to shift, though, and startups like Bret Kugelmass’ Last Energy are now attempting to revive the industry — one small reactor at a time.

WATCH NOW

Kristin Houser is the managing editor at Freethink.

Have a tip on an exciting innovation? Or just have feedback on how to make this newsletter better? Send me an email: freethinkweekly-replies@freethink.com

YOUTUBE | INSTAGRAM | X

Hey Freethinkers,

It’s so easy to not leave my house.

I have a fully remote job, Amazon Prime, and GrubHub+. With FaceTime, I can see my friends and family from my couch, and the ridiculous number of streaming platforms I subscribe to means I’m never short on entertainment. Throw in some social anxiety and an introverted personality, and you get whole weeks where my car doesn’t move from its parking spot.

Still, even I, the ultimate indoor cat, can’t deny craving real human interaction from time to time — there’s a kind of connection you have with people in physical spaces that just can’t be replicated through a screen.

In 2024, Freethink started tapping into this human desire for IRL connection by hosting intimate live events where scientists, filmmakers, artists, and other attendees explore big, important ideas and immerse themselves in art designed to expand their minds.

The latest Freethink salon focused on the future of space exploration, and this week, Freethink published a recording of one of the evening’s highlights: a live conversation between Varda Space Industries' CEO Will Bruey and Freethink’s own Kmele Foster.

Also on deck: columnist Kevin Dickinson talks to the indie developers who could save the video game industry from itself.

Read on,
Kristin

THE FREETHINK INTERVIEW

Why the future of pharma is off-planet

Gravity is, on the whole, pretty useful for manufacturing — just imagine how hard it would be to build cars if parts kept floating off the assembly line — but some products, including certain pharmaceuticals, would be easier to produce if we could remove gravity from the equation. Varda Space Industries is developing “space factories” to manufacture these goods in Earth’s orbit, and on April 8, Will Bruey, the startup’s CEO and co-founder, spoke at a Freethink Media Salon in Los Angeles, CA, about its first attempts to cook drugs in space — and what comes next. For details about future Freethink Events, be sure to sign up for email notifications.

WATCH NOW

THE DIGITAL FRONTIER

Skype is dead. Here’s why it almost wasn’t born.

Skype once dominated internet calling, but by the time the pandemic made “Zoom” a verb, the platform’s popularity had plummeted. On May 5, 2025, it was officially retired. In a recent installment of Pessimists Archive, a newsletter highlighting historic examples of technophobia, writer recounts how traditional telephone companies once waged a war on internet calling — and had they won, Skype, Zoom, and all the other services that lets us talk to people across the globe without worrying about the per-minute cost might never have existed.

READ NOW

THE UPCOMING EVENT

We are excited to announce an exciting new event series called The Great Progression. As systems from the 20th century falter, world-changing technologies like AI, clean energy, and synthetic biology are opening a rare window for reinvention. This series — curated by futurist Peter Leyden in partnership with Freethink — will kick off Thursday, May 29th in San Francisco.

At this event, we’ll hear from:

– , Editorial Director at Google Labs and bestselling author
– , co-founder of Siri and VP of AI Experience at Airbnb

Join us for a night of great conversation ​about the future we all want to see.

Attend the Event

CONSUMER TECH

Indie developers may save the video game industry from itself

The majority of Americans play video games, but despite the popularity of its product, the video game industry is currently in a tough spot. Sales are slumping, and the astronomical production costs of prestige titles are making it harder for major studios to turn a profit, which has led to an increase in subscriptions, microtransactions, and other gaming elements designed to separate players from their money. In a new feature for Freethink, columnist Kevin Dickinson talks to the indie developers eschewing these trends and finding success making the games they’d want to play.

READ NOW

Get more from Freethink in the Substack app

Available for iOS and Android

Get the app

WORTH SHARING

The 6 strongest materials on Earth are harder than diamonds

When I was a kid growing up in the ‘80s, Pluto was a planet, climate change was debatable, and diamonds were the hardest things on Earth. Today, we know that none of those things are true — but if diamonds losing their spot atop the hardness rankings slipped by you unnoticed, astrophysicist Ethan Siegel has you covered. In a recent article for Big Think, he counts down the six materials now known to be harder than diamond — and shares how they could make the impossible possible.

READ NOW

Kristin Houser is the managing editor at Freethink.

Have a tip on an exciting innovation? Or just have feedback on how to make this newsletter better? Send me an email: freethinkweekly-replies@freethink.com

YOUTUBE | INSTAGRAM | X

Hey Freethinkers,

What would you do with a billion dollars? Buy a private jet and travel? Buy an island and settle down?

Entrepreneur Baiju Bhatt was just 33 years old when the stock-trading platform he co-founded, Robinhood, made him a billionaire (on paper, anyways). He then kept working at the startup for another six years, growing it into a publicly traded company worth $20 billion, before stepping down as chief creative officer in 2024, finally ready to enjoy the fruits of his labor.

Just kidding. Instead of retiring on a warm beach somewhere, Bhatt did one of the most stressful things a person can do: he founded an aerospace startup. This week, Freethink digs into Bhatt’s new company, Aetherflux, and its mission to beam solar power from space to Earth — something that could make clean energy available to anyone on the planet at any time.

Also on deck: Freethink Voice Peter Leyden explores the abundance movement and the major opportunity it’s currently missing.

Read on,
Kristin

FREETHINK FEATURES

The billionaire building space lasers to power Earth

Entrepreneur Baiju Bhatt earned his way into the three-comma club off the back of Robinhood, the stock-trading platform he co-founded in 2013. With his new company, Aetherflux, the billionaire is determined to disrupt something even bigger than Wall Street: space. The startup’s goal is to use lasers to send solar energy from satellites to Earth-based receivers. If successful, it’ll open the door to a kind of clean energy previously found only in sci-fi — and maybe even save American lives.

READ NOW

IN THE KNOW

OpenAI’s structure evolves

By @OpenAI on X

OpenAI was founded in 2015 with the mission to ensure that artificial general intelligence, if/when it is achieved, would benefit all of humanity, not just a few powerful companies. At the time, it made sense to OpenAI’s co-founders to set the organization up as a non-profit — this would help ensure its AI researchers would prioritize safety and public benefits over potential monetization. Ten years and one wildly expensive app later, the company has announced plans to change its structure — though not exactly in the way CEO Sam Altman was hoping.

JOIN THE CONVERSATION

MORE ON THIS STORY

• Why ChatGPT feels more “intelligent” than Google Search

• Will LLMs lead to an artificial general intelligence?

• Sam Altman on the future of AI

Get more from Freethink in the Substack app

Available for iOS and Android

Get the app

FREETHINK VOICES

The missing tech case for how we create an era of abundance

by Peter Leyden

In March, journalists Ezra Klein and Derek Thompson published their new nonfiction book, “Abundance.” In it, they argue that America’s current political and economic frameworks have created a nation of scarcity and that we’ll need to revamp these systems to become a nation of abundance, one with plenty of houses, jobs, and everything else our citizens need. In this week’s Great Progression: 2025 to 2050, Peter Leyden digs into the role AI could play in creating this new America — and why he thinks abundance proponents should be talking about tech more.

READ NOW

WORTH SHARING

Why we need social innovation now more than ever

Creating a world of abundance, where everyone has everything they need, is possible, but we aren’t there yet. Right now, many people in many places are living with scarcity — they don’t have enough healthcare, enough food, enough support. Freethink recently partnered with the Skoll Foundation to show how local innovators are solving these crises through social innovation, which seeks to create long-term solutions by empowering the people closest to the problem.

WATCH NOW

Kristin Houser is the managing editor at Freethink.

Have a tip on an exciting innovation? Or just have feedback on how to make this newsletter better? Send me an email: freethinkweekly-replies@freethink.com

YOUTUBE | INSTAGRAM | X

Hey Freethinkers,

I spent many hours this past week livestreaming the 2025 NFL Draft, hoping my beloved Steelers would select players who could help us dominate the league for years to come (and pass on the rookie QB sure to bring a media circus with him to Pittsburgh).

For NFL teams, draft day is all about calculating risk. Most picks are multimillion-dollar investments, and while college performance, combine metrics, and pro days can indicate a rookie will be worth the draft capital, some first-round picks become legends, while others are out of the league in four seasons.

The same is true for aerospace companies. Ground testing, computer simulations, and dress rehearsal can all point toward a mission being a success, but there’s always a chance something could go wrong after launch, and a failed space mission can mean losing millions or even billions of dollars.

That’s why most aerospace companies are famously risk-averse. But for this month’s Future Explored, I talked to the founder of a startup that’s taking a high-risk, high-reward approach to aerospace, the equivalent of trading up to take a boom-or-bust quarterback in the first round.

Also on deck: Freethink Voice Peter Leyden presents three explanations for America’s every-80-year reinvention cycle.

Read on,
Kristin

FUTURE EXPLORED

This startup is racing to mine the final frontier

In 2015, astrophysicist Neil DeGrasse Tyson made a bold prediction: The world’s first trillionaire was going to be the first person to figure out how to exploit the natural resources of asteroids. Despite this potential for riches, though, the asteroid mining industry is still in its infancy a decade later — no aerospace company has even reached an asteroid, let alone mined it. In the latest edition of Future Explored, AstroForge CEO Matt Gialich tells Freethink his startup has everything it needs to be the first to make asteroid mining a reality — including guts.

READ NOW

THE GREAT PROGRESSION

Why America reinvents itself every 80 years — and is doing so again

by Peter Leyden

When people talk about the idea of history repeating itself, it is usually in general terms: all empires rise and then fall, for example, and revolutions eventually lead to dictatorships. But something stranger has been happening in America since the nation’s birth: every 80 years, it experiences a period of reinvention, with its old systems giving way to new ones. Freethink Voice Peter Leyden shared this example of history repeating itself with uncanny precision in a previous edition of his The Great Progression: 2025 to 2050 series, and in this week’s article, he answers the question on many Freethink readers’ minds: Why 80 years?

READ NOW

Get more from Freethink in the Substack app

Available for iOS and Android

Get the app

FREETHINK VOICES

Why progress was so slow, for so long

by Jason Crawford

Humanity has made tremendous progress over the past 250 years — life expectancy and literacy rates have skyrocketed, poverty and hunger rates have plummeted, and the world is generally just a better place for people to live than it was in the 1700s. The Industrial Revolution also kicked off about 250 years ago, suggesting that it deserves the credit for igniting this period of advancement, but in a new installment of his Techno-Humanist Manifesto series, Jason Crawford explains how progress really began millions of years earlier — and how it could soon accelerate to a rate never before seen in human history.

READ NOW

WORTH SHARING

How the search for dinosaurs on Venus exposed a warning for Earth

In 1900, the general consensus was that the planets in our solar system had formed one after another, starting with the one farthest from the sun and moving inward, and that each evolved in basically the same way. Because Venus was “younger” than Earth, people believed its surface likely looked like Earth’s did millions of years ago: covered in dinosaurs. However, when scientists sent spacecraft to study Venus up close in the 1960s, they discovered a hellish landscape unsuitable for any kind of life — and a warning about Earth’s future.

READ NOW

Kristin Houser is the managing editor at Freethink.

Have a tip on an exciting innovation? Or just have feedback on how to make this newsletter better? Send me an email: freethinkweekly-replies@freethink.com

YOUTUBE | INSTAGRAM | X

Hey Freethinkers,

The seventh season of “Black Mirror” just hit Netflix, and for the past couple of weeks, my social media feeds have been riddled with posts from people certain that today’s technologies are pushing us straight toward the dystopian futures depicted in the show.

Indeed, in the ~200 years since Mary Shelley gave birth to the science-fiction genre with “Frankenstein,” countless creatives have done what “Black Mirror” is doing, wrapping warnings about a scary future in an entertaining package. But sci-fi doesn’t have to inspire fear — it can also inspire solutions to the world’s biggest problems.

This week, Hard Reset released a new episode featuring a startup that’s using a controversial technique its co-founder discovered in a sci-fi novel to combat climate change — but whether the outcome for us will be better than the one experienced by those in the world of the book is still TBD.

Also on deck: In the latest edition of The Great Progression: 2025 to 2050, Peter Leyden explains how President Donald Trump may actually make America great again — just not in the way he intended.

Read on,
Kristin

HARD RESET

Meet the guys whose ‘absurd idea’ might save our planet

In 1991, Mount Pinatubo erupted in the Philippines, sending at least 18 million tons of sulfur dioxide (SO₂) into Earth’s atmosphere. The gas then acted like a sunscreen for the planet, reflecting sunlight away from the surface, and as a result, global temperatures fell by about .5 degrees Celsius the year after the eruption. In a new episode of Hard Reset, Freethink talks to Make Sunsets, a startup that’s releasing SO₂-filled balloons into the stratosphere in an attempt to mimic these cooling effects and combat global warming.

WATCH NOW

IN THE KNOW

The cost of politeness

By @sama on X

This week, Sam Altman revealed on X that OpenAI likely spends “tens of millions of dollars” processing phrases like “please” and “thank you” in ChatGPT users’ prompts. It seemed to be something of a throwaway tweet for the CEO, but it inspired seemingly countless conversations about prompt engineering, AI consciousness, the sustainability of LLMs, and more.

JOIN THE CONVERSATION

MORE ON THIS STORY:

• The future of data centers — on land, at sea, and in space

• OpenAI and Microsoft are reportedly planning a $100B supercomputer

• GPT-4 is surprisingly good at explaining jokes

Get more from Freethink in the Substack app

Available for iOS and Android

Get the app

FREETHINK VOICES

What a historian in 2100 might say about Trump’s America

by Peter Leyden

In the latest installment of his Great Progression: 2025 to 2050 series, author Peter Leyden attempts to get into the mind of a future historian looking back on American life in 2025 to help readers better understand the present, and this thought experiment leads him to conclude that President Donald Trump’s actions might have a dramatically different impact on the US than he intends.

READ NOW

WORTH SHARING

Science’s best answer to “where did the Universe come from?”

Humans have likely been pondering the origin of the universe for about as long as our species has existed, but it wasn’t until the 1960s that we finally started to get some scientifically based answers to the question. In an in-depth interview with Big Think, Dr. Ethan Siegel, a Ph.D. astrophysicist and author of "Starts with a Bang!," unpacks those answers.

READ NOW

Kristin Houser is the managing editor at Freethink.

Have a tip on an exciting innovation? Or just have feedback on how to make this newsletter better? Send me an email: freethinkweekly-replies@freethink.com

YOUTUBE | INSTAGRAM | X

Hey Freethinkers,

The weather in Pittsburgh is incredibly erratic this time of year.

In just the past two weeks, we’ve experienced snow flurries, hail the size of ping-pong balls, and a thunderstorm loud enough to keep my pomsky up all night. We’ve also had temperatures high enough to inspire me to pull my e-bike out of storage, and on Sunday afternoon, the sound of lawnmowers drifted through my open windows.

Thankfully, I’m blessed with an HVAC system that allows me to control the temperature in my home with the push of a button, so whether it’s snowing or sunny outside, I’m always able to maintain a comfy temperature in my home (just don’t ask to see my electric or gas bills).

In the latest edition of his Techno-Humanist Manifesto, Jason Crawford argues that humanity needs to develop a way to monitor and control the global climate the same way I can already control the temperature in my house — and he has a few ideas about the buttons we could try pushing.

Also on deck: Rohit Krishnan, Freethink’s newest Voices contributor, breaks down what Chinese startup DeepSeek means for the race to AGI.

Read on,
Kristin

FREETHINK VOICES

“Stopping climate change” is the wrong goal

by Jason Crawford

The past century of industrial activity is changing the climate in ways that could potentially cost us trillions of dollars every year. In response, some think we should be doing whatever it takes to stop climate change, including cutting back on our energy usage. To Jason Crawford, that’s unacceptable. In the latest installment of his Techno-Humanist Manifesto, he argues that what we should be doing instead is focusing on how we can control the climate — and he’s already identified ways we could start to do that.

READ NOW

ARTIFICIAL INTELLIGENCE

How DeepSeek rewrote the rules of the AI race

By Rohit Krishnan

DeepSeek has rocked the foundation of the AI industry. On January 20, 2025, the Chinese startup unveiled its remarkable R1 language model, proving that you don’t need a huge team, a ton of money, and cutting-edge chips to create world-class AI. In the first installment of his new Freethink Voices series, author and investor Rohit Krishnan breaks down what makes DeepSeek so special and what the startup means for the future of AI.

READ NOW

Get more from Freethink in the Substack app

Available for iOS and Android

Get the app

THE GREAT PROGRESSION

Kevin Kelly points a new way forward into the Age of AI

by Peter Leyden

Peter Leyden and Kevin Kelly go way back. As the founding executive editor of WIRED magazine, Kelly offered Leyden a writing job, and more than three decades later, Leyden still goes to his old mentor for insights into the future of technology. The latest meeting of their minds is detailed in the newest article in Leyden’s Freethink Voices series, The Great Progression: 2025 to 2050. In it, Kelly talks about the pace of AI adoption, the “cognification” of things, and what he thinks will be the “scariest” thing about AI for many people.

READ NOW

WORTH SHARING

America underestimates the difficulty of bringing manufacturing back

On April 2, 2025, US President Donald Trump announced major new tariffs on goods imported from foreign nations. The goal? Bringing manufacturing back stateside. This week, Freethink syndicated a blog post in which Molson Hart, founder and president of educational toy company Viahart, details 14 reasons tariffs won’t be able to accomplish this goal and shares what might actually get more products made in America.

READ NOW

Kristin Houser is the managing editor at Freethink.

Have a tip on an exciting innovation? Or just have feedback on how to make this newsletter better? Send me an email: freethinkweekly-replies@freethink.com

YOUTUBE | INSTAGRAM | X

Hey Freethinkers,

My first job when I moved to Los Angeles in my mid-20s was working reception at an animation studio. It specialized in fairly simple 2D animation — the kind you see used for a lot of Saturday morning kids’ shows — and a seasoned animator could generally produce about a minute’s worth of animation per week.

Studio Ghibli is an entirely different beast.

While my coworkers were doing all of their animating on computers, the Tokyo-based studio specializes in hand-drawn animation, and bringing its lush art to life is a time-consuming, painstaking process — a four-second-long scene in one of its films took an animator 15 months to complete.

Over the past couple of weeks, social media has been flooded with images that look like the work of Studio Ghibli’s artists, but that were actually generated in mere seconds by AI. This week, a new Freethink op-ed explores what this development means for the future of creativity and the role of humans in it.

Also on deck: Freethink Voice Peter Leyden revisits three periods in American history that bear striking similarities to what we’re seeing in the nation today — and that could help us know what to expect in the coming years.

Read on,
Kristin

FREETHINK FEATURES

The artifact isn’t the art: Rethinking creativity in the age of AI

by Ashish Bhatia

Mere hours after OpenAI unveiled its latest image generator, engineer Grant Slatton took to X to show how he’d prompted the AI to recreate an image of his family in the style of Studio Ghibli. Soon, so many people were Ghibli-fying their own images that it was “melting” OpenAI’s GPUs, according to CEO Sam Altman. The trend brings to the forefront questions about creativity that have been lurking in the shadows ever since the start of the generative AI era, and in his new op-ed for Freethink, NYU Stern professor Ashish Bhatia shares his answers to them.

READ NOW

IN THE KNOW

Dire wolves are back. Sort of.

By @colossal on X

Dire wolves roamed North America for more than 100,000 years before succumbing to extinction around the end of the last Ice Age. This week, Colossal Biosciences announced that it has “resurrected” the species — or something like it, at least. Using cutting-edge CRISPR technology and ancient dire wolf DNA, the startup modified the genomes of grey wolves to produce three pups that look — and sound — a lot like they belong to the species that went extinct 10,000 years ago. The startup’s hope is that it’ll be able to use techniques developed for the dire wolf project to protect species on the brink of extinction, like the endangered red wolf.

JOIN THE CONVERSATION

MORE ON THIS STORY

• They made dire wolves in the lab [short video]

• CRISPR is helping “de-extinct” the Tasmanian tiger

• Can the woolly mammoth save Siberia from climate change?

• World’s first cloned arctic wolf is now 100 days old

FREETHINK VOICES

America is going through its every-80-year reinvention

by Peter Leyden

America is at a crossroads. Advanced AIs, cheap renewables, efficient bioengineering tools, and other transformative technologies are ready to scale up and reinvent the nation in the process. As unprecedented as this moment feels, though, it’s not the first time the US has faced such radical change. In the latest edition of his Freethink Voices series, The Great Progression: 2025 to 2050, Peter Leyden details three other times in America’s history when it was at a similar crossroads — and strangely, they always happen 80 years apart.

READ NOW

WORTH SHARING

The next era of psychedelics may be precision-designed states of consciousness

Psychedelic drugs — LSD, DMT, psilocybin, etc. — temporarily alter a person’s perception of reality, causing them to see, hear, or feel things that don’t exist. Evidence suggests the drugs may also have a positive lasting impact on mood and mental health, but translating them into medical treatments is tricky given that we still know so little about how they work. In a new feature for our sister site, Big Think, journalist Saga Briggs talks to a startup using AI to clear up some of the mystery.

READ NOW

Get smarter, faster by checking out Big Think on Substack.

Kristin Houser is the managing editor at Freethink.

Have a tip on an exciting innovation? Or just have feedback on how to make this newsletter better? Send me an email: freethinkweekly-replies@freethink.com

YOUTUBE | INSTAGRAM | X

Hey Freethinkers,

As a kid, I rarely left the house without a book. I’d read at the grocery store, posted up by the gumball machines while my baba shopped. The Sweet Valley twins went with me on hikes, and I’d visit Fear Street from the safety of the fort in the town playground.

Anywhere I could read, I read.

Thanks to my job at Freethink, I still spend most of my waking hours reading — mostly, it’s articles that will eventually end up on the site or Substack, but I also consume a number of essays, books, and other texts that I think will help me ensure that we continue to publish the stories that our audience needs to hear right now.

Many people only have time to read a fraction of the content they wish they could. This week, author Peter Leyden shares a dozen reasons why his new essay series, The Great Progression: 2025 to 2050, should make it into everyone’s reading queue.

Also on deck: We dig into the evolution of espionage and how technology is allowing private companies to surpass the capabilities of government agencies.

Read on,
Kristin

FREETHINK VOICES

Who can you trust about AI? Peter Leyden makes his case.

by

Visions of AI-induced dystopias are everywhere today, but what if AI and other transformative technologies, like CRISPR, actually lead us to a better world? Peter Leyden thinks they could, and convincing you of the same is a goal of his new essay series, The Great Progression: 2025 to 2050, which is being published through Leyden’s Substack and Freethink Voices. In this week’s essay, he digs into his own background and comes up with 12 compelling reasons you should listen to what he has to say.

READ NOW

IN THE KNOW

China enters the supersonic race

by @bscholl on X

In January 2025, Boom Supersonic’s XB-1 demonstrator aircraft broke the sound barrier for the first time, putting the American startup a huge step closer to getting a commercial supersonic jet off the ground. Just two months later, CEO Blake Scholl retweeted the news that China is working on its own supersonic jet — making the race to resurrect commercial supersonic flight an international affair.

JOIN THE CONVERSATION

MORE ON THIS STORY

• How Boom is resurrecting supersonic flight

• 3x faster air travel at a fraction of the price: this jet engine could change everything

• The chimera engine: The heart of hypersonic flight

FREETHINK FEATURES

How technology has transformed private espionage

As recently as the Cold War, government agencies were the leaders in intelligence gathering — they had the networks and the technology needed to collect and analyze information that others were trying to keep under wraps. Thanks to AI and the huge amount of open-source data available online, private companies are now surpassing their public counterparts. In a new feature for Freethink, journalist Ben Upton unpacks this shift and what it means for the future of spying.

READ NOW

WORTH SHARING

The case for expanding the definition of intelligence

What if intelligence isn’t just something humans and other animals possess but something found in bacteria, plants, and even entire ecosystems? A new think tank of scientists and philosophers recently gathered in a 16th-century Tuscan church to rethink intelligence as a distributed, relational capacity: the ability of any system to sense, adapt, and thrive within its environment. Their conclusion challenges centuries of assumptions, suggesting we may need a new definition of what it means to be “smart.”

READ NOW

Get smarter, faster by checking out Big Think on Substack.

Kristin Houser is the managing editor at Freethink.

Have a tip on an exciting innovation? Or just have feedback on how to make this newsletter better? Send me an email: freethinkweekly-replies@freethink.com

YOUTUBE | INSTAGRAM | X

Hey Freethinkers,

It’s officially spring, the season of rebirth, and here in Pittsburgh, that means I’m finally starting to see bits of green cutting through the gray that has dominated the landscape for the past five months.

Just like nature, the world itself is cyclical, with periods of growth, maturity, death, and rebirth. Our last “spring” kicked off about 80 years ago, around the end of World War II, and we’re now in the murky gray period between the death of that old world and the birth of a new one.

To help our readers navigate this chaotic yet exciting time in human history, Freethink has launched The Great Progression: 2025 to 2050, a new op-ed series written by Peter Leyden, a longtime tech expert and thought leader on the future.

Also on deck: an exclusive excerpt from a popular AI podcaster’s first book.

Read on,
Kristin

FREETHINK VOICES

What is The Great Progression: 2025 to 2050?

by

The past 15 years have seen the development of three world-historic general-purpose technologies: advanced artificial intelligence, affordable clean energy tech, and breakthrough gene-editing systems, including CRISPR. In The Great Progression: 2025 to 2050, his newly launched article series for Freethink Voices, thought leader Peter Leyden plans to explore how these transformative technologies have us well-positioned to solve the world’s biggest challenges. Be sure to read the first installment in the series now on Freethink.

READ NOW

IN THE KNOW

DeepSeek’s “small” update isn’t so small

by @kimmonismus on X

In January 2025, China-based startup DeepSeek made waves in the AI world (and the stock market) with the unveiling of R1, a new large language model (LLM) as capable as the ones built by the US’s leading AI firms, but open source and far cheaper: while OpenAI spent more than $100 million training GPT-4, DeepSeek reportedly spent just $6 million training R1 (worth noting that some say that figure is misleading). The startup has now unveiled DeepSeek-V3, a new model that some think gives China the lead in the AI race.

JOIN THE CONVERSATION

MORE ON THIS STORY

• How AI is reshaping the legal profession

• Sal Khan wants to give every student on Earth a personal AI tutor

• Open-source “Davids” are taking on GPT-4 and other Goliaths

FREETHINK FEATURES

Will LLMs lead to an artificial general intelligence?

At just 24 years old, Dwarkesh Patel has already established himself as one of the most respected voices in technology. He’s interviewed seemingly every important figure in the industry — from Mark Zuckerberg to Sam Altman — on his popular Dwarkesh Podcast, and in 2024, TIME named him one of its 100 Most Influential People in AI. With the March 25 publication of The Scaling Era: An Oral History of AI 2019-2025, Patel can now add “book author” to his list of accomplishments. To find out what you can expect from the highly anticipated work, check out this exclusive excerpt shared on Freethink.

READ NOW

WORTH SHARING

Three discoveries that change the way we think of the universe

Where did this all come from? We finally have the answer.

Theoretical astrophysicist and author of the Starts With A Bang column, Ethan Siegel, takes us on a mind-bending journey through the science behind our cosmic origins. Through groundbreaking discoveries and bold new theories, Siegel uncovers how the cosmos evolved into the vast, intricate universe we see today.

WATCH NOW

Kristin Houser is the managing editor at Freethink.

Subscribe now

Hey Freethinkers,

I’m Kristin Houser, the new Managing Editor of Freethink. If my name looks familiar, that’s because I’ve been a staff writer for the site for the past five years, and you’ve likely seen my pieces highlighted in this very newsletter.

I’m looking forward to taking on this new role and making sure you’re caught up on Freethink’s latest and greatest content. This week, that means a new video from the team at Hard Reset, who recently got a behind-the-scenes look at what goes into a moon mission.

Also on deck: my interview with Bernt Øyvind Børnich, CEO of 1X Technologies, a startup sending humanoid housekeepers into people’s homes.

Read on,
Kristin

HARD RESET

Moon landings are back, baby!

Most things get way easier after you figure out how to do them the first time, but that hasn’t been the case for landing on the moon—nearly 60 years after the first “soft” moon landing, lunar missions still regularly fail. No surprise, then, that the team at space startup Firefly Aerospace was a little on edge when Hard Reset stopped by just prior to the launch of their first lunar lander. Watch the video to find out what went into giving Blue Ghost the highest possible chance of success—and whether the effort paid off when the lander reached the moon.

WATCH NOW

Hard Reset

A show about how the future gets built.

IN THE KNOW

America’s teens are feeling (a little) better

by @StefanFSchubert on X

About 15 years ago, anxiety, depression, and suicide rates began increasing in America’s teens and young adults. Researchers have yet to figure out why this started happening, but a new analysis by The Economist suggests the trend could be reversing itself.

JOIN THE CONVERSATION

MORE ON THIS STORY

• Why is anxiety spiking in young people but not older adults?

• Potato chips or heroin? The debate on social media and mental health

• My anxious generation: The unforeseen toll of a digital childhood

FUTURE EXPLORED

Humanoid helpers are now entering our homes

Dishwashers and Roombas have freed us from the tedium of two chores, but what if you could own a single robot that did them all and was always down for a game or conversation? Robotics startup 1X Technologies is developing such a bot, and in this week’s Future Explored, Freethink talked to its CEO Bernt Øyvind Børnich about his company’s mission to get the humanoid into thousands of homes before the end of the year.

READ NOW

WORTH SHARING

Everything about humanity is changing—except our bodies

Life today looks nothing like the past. Deadly diseases have vanished, food is much easier to produce, and we have more control over our world than ever before. But while everything around us moves fast, our bodies are struggling to keep up. Biologist and author Sean B. Carroll reveals how these changes are challenging our evolution.

WATCH NOW

Big Think

Learn from the world's biggest thinkers.

Kristin Houser is the managing editor at Freethink.

Subscribe now

Hey Freethinkers,

The devastating wildfires that recently struck Los Angeles have left everyone asking what can be done to prevent or mitigate future wildfire tragedies. In the latest installment of Future Explored, we take a look at the beneficial role that prefabricated homes are likely to play.

Also on deck: In the latest chapter from his book The Techno-Humanist Manifesto, Jason Crawford explains why solving the biggest problems facing humanity not only means fully accepting the reality of the problems, but also enthusiastically stepping up to meet the challenges.

Onwards,
Damon

FREETHINK VOICES

Progress happens because solutions create new problems to solve

by

“Progress is messy,” writes Jason Crawford. “Its benefits come with inextricable costs and risks.” But it is only by accepting such costs and risks, he argues, and working tirelessly to prevent, mitigate, or cure them, that progress can actually occur.

READ NOW

The Roots of Progress

The history of technology and the philosophy of progress—a digest of posts from rootsofprogress.org

By Jason Crawford

IN THE KNOW

When science fiction becomes science fact

by @TIME on X

Do you ever get the feeling that you’re living in the middle of a sci-fi story? The recent news that a team of scientists have bred “woolly mice” via gene editing as part of their efforts to bring back the long-extinct woolly mammoth certainly sounds like something straight out of the realm of speculative fiction. Except for one thing: It’s really happening.

JOIN THE CONVERSATION

MORE ON THIS STORY

• We’re able to create new creatures through gene editing. What’s stopping us?

• How turning off one gene causes mice to grow 6 legs

• DIY biohacking: Do(n’t) try this at home

FUTURE EXPLORED

Fire-resilient prefabs are helping LA build back better

This week’s Future Explored takes a look back at the history of prefabricated homes, explaining what they can offer that standard constructions can’t, and how one maker of these residences is working to ensure its clients won’t have to go through the fire rebuild process again in the future.

READ NOW

WORTH SHARING

We were promised “Star Trek,” so why did we settle for these lousy chatbots?

Earlier this year, I spoke with Gary Marcus, the popular and outspoken AI skeptic, about my AI fatigue. And as we were talking, he pointed out something I needed to hear: Most of this isn’t the AI I was promised. These new models and tools are not AI in the sense that I used to imagine it. Amazon has rebranded a search feature. Google Sheets is doing what Excel was doing in the 2000s. Spam filters are not AI; they’re just glorified if-else coding.

This is not the AI I was promised. And, according to Marcus, if we accept all of this as AI, then we risk missing the bigger thing.

READ NOW

Mini Philosophy

A space to explore ideas from the greatest minds in the world with Big Think's Jonny Thomson.

By Jonny Thomson

Damon Root is the managing editor at Freethink.

Subscribe now

Hey Freethinkers,

“The inherent efficiency of the process is almost a thousand times better than plants.” Those are the words of Casey Handmer, the founder of Terraform Industries, whose team has built a machine called the Terraformer, which uses air, water, and sunlight to make cheap, synthetic natural gas. In the latest episode of Hard Reset, we take you inside the facility where a new age of artificial photosynthesis is taking root.

Also on deck: In the latest installment of Future Explored, we cover the researchers and scientists who are training an AI on DNA.

Onwards,
Damon

HARD RESET

Is this the last fuel we'll ever need?

The Terraformer is a machine that makes synthetic natural gas by recycling CO2 from the air. “We have to take what plants have done forever and improve upon that process so that there’s enough energy for humans to do what they need to do,” explains Terraform Industries founder Casey Handmer. In the latest episode of Hard Reset, we give you an up-close look at the Terraformer in action.

Don’t forget to subscribe to the new Hard Reset YouTube channel!

WATCH NOW

IN THE KNOW

A turning point in the fight against pancreatic cancer?

by @KepecsLab on X

Three years ago, Freethink reported on “a new pancreatic cancer vaccine based on mRNA tech [that] was shown to be safe and capable of triggering an immune response in a small trial.” That cancer vaccine was back in the news again last week, and its results continue to be impressive. Are we about to reach a turning point in the fight against this deadly form of cancer? Let’s hope so.

JOIN THE CONVERSATION

MORE ON THIS STORY

• Personalized mRNA vaccine preps the body to battle deadly cancer

• How Google’s new AI could revolutionize medicine

• The exciting research that may cure Parkinson’s

FUTURE EXPLORED

Arc Institute’s new AI can read and write the code of life

The Arc Institute joined forces with researchers at Stanford University and the University of California, Berkeley, to create an AI model that could interpret and generate DNA sequences the same way that other AI models do text or images. The result? We might just be entering a new era in biology, one in which scientists aren’t just trying to decipher the code of life, but are also rewriting it from the ground up.

READ NOW

WORTH SHARING

The truth about banning “dangerous gain-of-function” research

Since the emergence of SARS-CoV-2, a dangerous and unsupported conspiracy theory has gotten popular: that the virus didn’t infect humans due to natural spillover, but was created in a lab by dangerous, unethical virology research. Although this conspiracy theory has no evidence supporting it, it’s very politically popular, and is at the core of a new bill being introduced into the US Senate. Here’s what that means.

READ NOW

Starts With a Bang

Explore the cosmos with astrophysicist and author Dr. Ethan Siegel! From the origin of everything to the fate of the universe, Ethan and Big Think are here to answer your biggest questions.

Damon Root is the managing editor at Freethink.

Subscribe now

Hey Freethinkers,

In a must-read new article for Freethink, self-described “biohacker” Dr. Josie Zayner writes: “There is no scientific reason why a unicorn or a dragon cannot exist. The only barrier is the work it takes to make them real. And we are doing the work.” Read on for Zayner’s explanation of exactly what sort of barrier-breaking work is now being done.

Also on deck: In the latest installment of Future Explored, we tell you what you need to know about “AI PCs,” the new category of computer that will soon be everywhere.

Onwards,
Damon

FREETHINK FEATURES

We’re able to create new creatures through gene editing. What’s stopping us?

The real question isn’t whether we can sculpt new life, says Dr. Josie Zayner. The real question is what comes next. In the lab of Zayner’s new company, the Los Angeles Project (LAP), scientists are learning to harvest large amounts of embryos and eggs from different animal species in order to understand the development of life on a scale no one has tried before.

READ NOW

IN THE KNOW

How AI is reshaping the future of health and medicine

by @adcock_brett on X

“90% accuracy in predicting cancer-related gene mutations.” That startling figure from Evo 2 is only the latest in a long list of examples that demonstrate how advances in artificial intelligence have the potential to radically transform human health and medicine. Here at Freethink, we believe that transformation to be one of the most significant stories of our time, and we’re proud to highlight some of our best coverage of it.

JOIN THE CONVERSATION

MORE ON THIS STORY

• Inside the “Virtual Lab” where AIs and humans collaborate

• How Google’s new AI could revolutionize medicine

• New AI generates CRISPR proteins unlike any seen in nature

FUTURE EXPLORED

All PCs will be AI PCs “pretty soon,” says Intel exec

Are “AI PCs” really a significant advance in computing? Or just another example of the AI label being slapped onto a product to encourage sales? In the latest installment of Future Explored, we dig into the evolution of PCs and explain what sets AI models apart from the rest.

READ NOW

WORTH SHARING

The quest for a “communication device” that tells cells to regenerate the body

What if the body could regenerate itself in ways we’ve never imagined? A bizarre experiment involving flatworms led to a groundbreaking discovery for Michael Levin, a biologist at Tufts University, and his team. From bioelectric signals to harnessing the body’s innate intelligence, Levin’s research is pointing to a future where we can unlock the full regenerative potential of our cells, potentially curing diseases and even regrowing organs.

READ NOW

Big Think

Learn from the world's biggest thinkers.

Damon Root is the managing editor at Freethink.

Subscribe now

Hey Freethinkers,

Let’s talk about energy.

It’s no exaggeration to say that many of the greatest challenges now facing humanity—from climate change to the changing world order—involve energy. So, in this edition of Freethink Weekly, we’re zeroing in on the subject by taking a close look at some of our most popular stories about this urgent topic. From the quest to build better batteries to the campaign to build more nuclear reactors, we’ve covered the people and innovations working to bring about cleaner, more abundant energy for all.

Onwards,
Damon

FUTURE EXPLORED

America’s plan to resurrect nuclear power

Nuclear power produces zero carbon emissions. It’s also a much more dependable form of clean energy than either solar or wind power. So why aren’t we building more nuclear reactors in the United States? Why is the total number of reactors going down instead of up? In this edition of Future Explored, we examine what’s standing in the way of nuclear power and explain what can be done to clear the path.

READ NOW

HARD RESET

The future of high energy density batteries

“In the 21st century, probably the most important technological revolution we need is a better battery.” Those are the words of Dr. Venkat Srinivasan of Argonne National Laboratory, where he is part of the team working to bring that revolution to life. In this episode of Hard Reset, we get an inside look at the new battery design that might help to unlock a new era of energy.

For more stories like these, don’t forget to subscribe to the Hard Reset channel on YouTube.

WATCH NOW

FREETHINK FEATURES

US hits 180 GW of solar power. Here’s how we get to 1,000 by 2035.

“We’re building more solar than most people realize, but not fast enough to catch up with the physics of climate change.” That’s what author and climate activist Bill McKibben told Freethink. In this article, we explore the major efforts underway to speed things up, from the innovations aimed at overcoming technical obstacles to the policy proposals designed to smooth the process.

READ NOW

FROM THE ARCHIVES

The master plan to end EV “range anxiety” forever

Electric vehicles today can largely compete with their gas-powered cousins in terms of cost and performance. But they still don’t match up in terms of range and convenience. In other words, if the battery in your EV starts to die while you’re out driving, there’s still no guarantee of a nearby charging station. But the times may be changing. In this article, we survey the trends in tech that might finally deliver more EV charging stations to more places around the U.S.

READ NOW

WORTH SHARING

Embrace your dark side: A new perspective on negative emotions

A life without pain would be full of suffering. Take it from people with the rare condition called congenital insensitivity to pain: Because they lack an internal alarm system, they fail to recognize when they’re in serious physical danger — letting cuts go untreated, not sensing infections, walking around with broken bones. A lack of negative emotions would be similarly dangerous. As Kross explains, negative emotions might be unpleasant, but they deliver us useful information about our inner and outer world.

READ NOW

Big Think

Learn from the world's biggest thinkers.

Damon Root is the managing editor at Freethink.

Subscribe now

Hey Freethinkers,

The World Economic Forum’s latest Future of Jobs Report came out last month, and one of its most notable findings was the fact that “climate-change mitigation” and “climate-change adaption” are both impacting the overall economy and “driving demand” for a variety of green jobs. In the latest Future Explored, we explain what it all means for young workers (and old) who are looking to pursue a career that tackles the problem of climate change head on.

Also on deck: Now that AI is transforming the legal profession, are “robot lawyers” going to be handling our legal affairs in the near future?

Onwards,

Damon

These red-hot “green jobs” could help Gen Z cope with its eco-anxiety

According to a recent survey, 61% of Gen Zers said they hoped to have a “green job” within the next five years. In the latest installment of Future Explored, we break down the labor market “macrotrends” that could help this younger generation find the sort of purpose-driven work that will help to build a more sustainable future.

READ NOW

IN THE KNOW

The rise of the robot professor?

by @alecstapp on X

Economist Tyler Cowen knows a thing or two about judging the quality of academic research. So when he recently reported that the AI tool Deep Research had, at his prompting, created “outstanding” 10-page papers whose quality was comparable to the work of “a good PhD-level research assistant,” people sat up and took notice. Is this the next frontier in artificial intelligence?

JOIN THE CONVERSATION

MORE ON THIS STORY

• No, LLMs still can’t reason like humans. This simple test reveals why.

• Can we automate science? Sam Rodriques is already doing it.

• AI skeptic Gary Marcus on AI’s moral and technical shortcomings

How AI is reshaping the legal profession

Artificial intelligence is transforming many fields of work and the legal profession is no exception. Aided by large language models such as ChatGPT and Deepseek, lawyers are able to draft contracts and analyze vast amounts of information in rapid time. And now those same AI tools may even be giving some lawyers the upper hand in the courtroom.

READ NOW

Freethink Media

Exploring the collision of technology, business and society.

Damon Root is the managing editor at Freethink.