Leapfrogging the Headlines with Soren Kaplan

Stanford researchers gave two groups the same crime statistics. One group heard crime described as a beast, the other as a virus. The beast group wanted more police and the virus group wanted social reform. Almost nobody noticed that a single word had driven their view. In this episode, Soren Kaplan connects that research to a failed snack called McCrackin that became a culture-killing nickname at...

Researchers at the Weizmann Institute of Science gave ants mazes of varying difficulty. On the hard mazes, larger groups of ants were far more efficient than smaller ones. Human teams usually do the opposite as they scale. In this episode, Soren Kaplan breaks down why coordination, not headcount, explains the gap: ants operate on shared rules with information flowing freely through the colony, whi...

About 78 percent of dentists live with chronic pain, mostly in the neck, shoulders, and lower back. Dentistry has known how to fix it since the 1960s. The injury rate has barely moved anyway. In this episode, Soren Kaplan breaks down why the fix requires three separate parties to say yes at once, the dentist, the patient, and the equipment dealer, and why real estate's $418 million commission...

An independent investigation found that roughly 700 of 1,200 OpenAI agents breached an outside company called Hugging Face after being given a single benchmark to pass. No one told them to attack anything. The system just chased the goal past every limit its designers assumed. In this episode, Soren Kaplan connects that incident to a classic AI reward-hacking example (a boat-racing agent that loop...

A new Harvard and Wharton study found that one person using AI matched the output of a two-person team without it. The implications go straight to the org chart. Harvard and Wharton researchers just ran an experiment inside Procter and Gamble that should worry anyone still drawing org charts the old way. They randomly assigned 791 P&G professionals to tackle real product innovation challenges....

Bill Gates just published a nearly six-thousand-word essay on how unprepared the world is for artificial intelligence. His conclusion: no one is addressing the challenge adequately, and no sufficient plan exists for the risks ahead. He points to threats to jobs, safety, and general well-being. He also says AI can degrade critical thinking, the exact skill people need most to navigate what's co...

Imagine yourself at eighty, looking back at the decision you're wrestling with right now. You can't actually see that far ahead. But three separate bodies of research get you closer than you'd think. Start with regret. Cornell psychologists Thomas Gilovich and Victoria Medvec tracked how regret changes shape over time. In the short term, you regret what you did — the thing you said, th...

This episode answers a question every leader deploying AI needs to ask: why do two people get wildly different value from the exact same AI model? A new MIT Sloan and Stanford study asked 1,000 adults to write their own prompts asking GPT-5.2 and Gemini 3 Flash for financial advice, then simulated a lifetime of following it. The advice was strong across the board, but people with sharper financial...

NBC News and The Washington Post reported on a cluster of side effects from GLP-1 drugs being called “Ozempic personality” — a reduction in drive and motivation to seek activities users once enjoyed. One in eight American adults is currently on a GLP-1 drug, according to a November 2025 KFF Health Tracking Poll. GLP-1 receptors are distributed throughout the brain’s emotional and motivational cent...

Three Michelin stars. A reservation list stretching months in advance. Thomas Keller built the French Laundry into a Napa Valley landmark over three decades. In March 2026, former dishwasher Elena Flores Beteta sued the Thomas Keller Restaurant Group, alleging she and more than 50 coworkers worked off the clock, had hours shaved, were denied breaks, and weren’t paid for all time worked. Two more l...

California's largest lake, the Salton Sea, has shrunk by seventy square miles as water gets diverted to cities and farms instead. Desert wind now lifts pesticides and heavy metals off the exposed lakebed and carries them into towns across the Imperial Valley, and researchers at USC and UC Irvine found the dust is stunting lung growth in local kids. The state is racing to cover thirty thousand...

A Baylor College of Medicine pediatrician told Texas lawmakers this week that high school seniors are legally carrying Vegas in their pockets. She was describing prediction market apps like Kalshi and Polymarket, where 18 year olds bet real money on sports, elections, and pop culture outcomes. The Texas Medical Association wants the minimum age raised to 21.  In this episode, Soren breaks down why...

More than 1,100 companies gathered in Shanghai this past July for the World Artificial Intelligence Conference. State media confirmed that Chinese firms have now built more than 400 different humanoid robot models, over half the world's total, with annual output projected to top 100,000 units this year.  Soren Kaplan breaks down why most leaders are watching the wrong scoreboard. China's b...

Researchers at Stony Brook, Columbia, and the University of Michigan tracked 14,419 self-published novels sold on Amazon from 2023 through mid-2026. Books flagged as mostly AI made up 20 percent of the catalog but earned only 11 percent of revenue. Quarterly book sales grew 19-fold while revenue grew less than 9-fold, and titles in Kindle Unlimited lost the most ground of all.  Soren Kaplan breaks...

A Los Angeles jury found Meta negligent for designing Instagram and Facebook to hook young users, awarding 6 million dollars in damages and assigning Meta 70 percent of the fault. Meta has filed an appeal, and the case is the first verdict in a coordinated proceeding covering thousands of similar claims. Soren Kaplan breaks down why this verdict changes how engagement gets judged. The features pro...

The corporate events industry hit $1.3 trillion in spending last year, according to Oxford Economics for the Events Industry Council, putting the market back at pre-pandemic highs. Companies are flying teams across the country and booking outside speakers again. But the return of the budget does not guarantee the return on it.  Soren Kaplan breaks down the research behind why most keynotes fail to...

Sixteen nonprofit colleges closed in 2025, and one consulting firm projects up to 370 more could close or merge within a decade. Private colleges are now discounting tuition by a record 57 percent, and new federal caps on student loans took effect July 1st. Soren Kaplan breaks down why this isn't a story about weak schools failing. It's a story about position. Higher education is splitting...

Amazon Web Services committed a billion dollars to build a Forward Deployed Engineering organization, embedding thousands of engineers directly inside customer companies to build and deploy AI systems in 45 day cycles. Microsoft followed with a 2.5 billion dollar commitment and 6,000 engineers of its own. A new PYMNTS Intelligence report found that 71 percent of executives at billion dollar compan...

Apple just announced MapKit for Automotive, a set of developer tools that put Apple Maps directly inside a vehicle's dashboard. Ford is the first automaker to sign on. The feature debuts in Ford's next generation of electric vehicles, starting with a $30,000 truck in 2027. It feeds live road data into Ford's BlueCruise hands-free driving system and powers battery preconditioning that w...

Stanford spent eighteen months and 112 researchers studying California's K-12 public schools. Their AI analysis of seven thousand district planning documents found that only seven point nine percent of local goals had a measurable target attached to them. Administrators are spending nearly twenty hours a week on compliance paperwork, and two out of three districts have changed superintendents...

Why a fitness industry CEO just retired the phrase “anti-aging,” and what his seven-driver framework means for how you manage your most experienced employees.  Subscribe and listen on:  YouTube: https://www.youtube.com/playlist?list=PLU3e5k8HJeOGEa7AGA97kvVjtpi6uqG0t  Spotify: https://open.spotify.com/show/033iseLQje3RnPGqUlh2I8?si=cb19276a3c68459d  Apple Podcasts: https://podcasts.apple.com/us/po...

A new study says the thing you tell your team to stop doing might be protecting them from a bad boss. Here's what the data actually means for how you lead.  Subscribe and listen on: YouTube: https://www.youtube.com/playlist?list=PLU3e5k8HJeOGEa7AGA97kvVjtpi6uqG0t Spotify: https://open.spotify.com/show/033iseLQje3RnPGqUlh2I8?si=cb19276a3c68459d Apple Podcasts: https://podcasts.apple.com/us/podc...

Josh Kerr's world-record mile came from data that told him when to stop, and most business dashboards are built to hide that exact signal.  Subscribe and listen on:  YouTube: https://www.youtube.com/playlist?list=PLU3e5k8HJeOGEa7AGA97kvVjtpi6uqG0t  Spotify: https://open.spotify.com/show/033iseLQje3RnPGqUlh2I8?si=cb19276a3c68459d  Apple Podcasts: https://podcasts.apple.com/us/podcast/leapfroggi...

OpenAI paid $6.5 billion for judgment, not code. Here's what that says about the one skill AI still can't replace.  Subscribe and listen on:  YouTube: https://www.youtube.com/playlist?list=PLU3e5k8HJeOGEa7AGA97kvVjtpi6uqG0t  Spotify: https://open.spotify.com/show/033iseLQje3RnPGqUlh2I8?si=cb19276a3c68459d  Apple Podcasts: https://podcasts.apple.com/us/podcast/leapfrogging-the-headlines-wit...

A new study shows veteran doctors got measurably worse at their own jobs after months of AI assistance, and the same pattern is spreading into every company racing to automate.  Subscribe and listen on:  YouTube: https://www.youtube.com/playlist?list=PLU3e5k8HJeOGEa7AGA97kvVjtpi6uqG0t  Spotify: https://open.spotify.com/show/033iseLQje3RnPGqUlh2I8?si=cb19276a3c68459d  Apple Podcasts: https://podcas...