{"podcast":{"title":"The Origins Podcast with Lawrence Krauss","slug":"the-origins-podcast-with-lawrence-krauss-505968","podcast_index_feed_id":505968,"rss_url":"https://api.substack.com/feed/podcast/745084.rss","website_url":"https://lawrencekrauss.substack.com/podcast","image_url":"https://substackcdn.com/feed/podcast/745084/6858bb9512e275b84f93b7865a5d7f57.jpg","author":"Lawrence M. Krauss","episode_count":153,"summary":"Science, Culture, Reason, Public Policy, & Fascinating Ideas","last_synced_at":"2026-07-08T06:18:24.930787+00:00","page_url":"https://stenobird.com/podcast/the-origins-podcast-with-lawrence-krauss-505968"},"episode":{"title":"The Like Button, and the Strange Power of Tiny Ideas | Martin Reeves","slug":"the-like-button-and-the-strange-power-of-tiny-ideas-martin-reeves","published_at":"2025-12-22T20:03:27+00:00","page_url":"https://stenobird.com/podcast/the-origins-podcast-with-lawrence-krauss-505968/the-like-button-and-the-strange-power-of-tiny-ideas-martin-reeves","show_page_url":"https://stenobird.com/podcast/the-origins-podcast-with-lawrence-krauss-505968","url":"https://lawrencekrauss.substack.com/p/the-like-button-and-the-strange-power","audio_url":"https://api.substack.com/feed/podcast/182198361/e413ae3040b2d1877b0509f246695f44.mp3","summary":"On this week’s episode of The Origins Podcast, I ended up in a place I genuinely never expected to go: the humble “like” button. When the idea first landed in my inbox, my reaction was basically, why on Earth would anyone write a whole book about that? Then I spoke with Martin Reeves, and I discovered that the history of this tiny icon is a surprisingly rich window into innovation, entrepreneurship, human psychology, and the modern attention economy. Martin is a senior figure at BCG’s Henderson Institute, but what made the conversation especially fun for me is that he is not a consultant who wandered into science. He has a background in science, and then wandered into the world of strategy, technology, and ideas, and he approaches the “like” button the way I wish more people approached our digital world: with curiosity, skepticism, and a willingness to follow evidence across disciplines. The central irony, of course, is that the “like” button began as an almost laughably small, practical solution. In the story Martin and his coauthor reconstructs, it is often less about a single inventor than about a messy ecosystem of micro innovations, technical constraints, and cultural accidents. Yet those small choices compound. The result is that something as simple as a handful of code became a universal signal that helped shape social media, transformed advertising, and created feedback loops that are now baked into the infrastructure of daily life. We also dig into why it works so well on us. The mechanisms are not mysterious in the abstract, they are biological and social, but the scale is unprecedented. Approval and recognition are ancient. Industrialized approval is new. And once you start thinking that way, you notice how these same feedback dynamics are spreading into new…","meta_description":"On this week’s episode of The Origins Podcast, I ended up in a place I genuinely never expected to go: the humble “like” button. When the idea first lande…","key_points":[],"chapters":[],"topics":[],"duration_seconds":8723,"processing_state":"not_requested","actions":[{"name":"request_transcript","method":"POST","url":"https://stenobird.com/v1/public/podcasts/the-origins-podcast-with-lawrence-krauss-505968/episodes/the-like-button-and-the-strange-power-of-tiny-ideas-martin-reeves/transcription-requests","description":"Idempotently request low-priority transcript generation for this episode."},{"name":"read_markdown","method":"GET","url":"https://stenobird.com/podcast/the-origins-podcast-with-lawrence-krauss-505968/the-like-button-and-the-strange-power-of-tiny-ideas-martin-reeves.md","description":"Read the agent-friendly Markdown representation of this episode resource."}]}}