The Making of Ideas That Matter (with Nicolas Berggruen and Nathan Gardels)

The Berggruen Institute began with a simple conviction: ideas shape the world. Out of the wreckage of the 2008 financial crisis,the Institute's co-founders – Nicolas Berggruen and Nathan Gardels – set out to build an independent think tank that would imagine bold, new futures, bridge cultures, and redesign institutions to match the pace of the 21st century. Beyond just thinking about these ideas, today the Institute works to make them real. In this episode, Berggruen and Gardels reflect on their unlikely partnership and the projects that shaped their vision. From bipartisan reform efforts in California to high-level dialogues in Beijing, they chart the emergence of some of the Institute’s most innovative frameworks: participation without populism, pre-distribution of wealth, and planetary realism. Along the way, they discuss why philosophy still matters and how nothing is more powerful than an idea whose time has come.

Om Podcasten

The future never arrives all at once. It ripples through society long before we know what to call it. At the Berggruen Institute, we know that we need more than prediction to name what’s next; we need invention. Each week, Institute President Dawn Nakagawa introduces us to scientists and philosophers recalibrating our cosmologies, technologists coming to terms with alien intelligence, and policymakers scrambling to design systems for a world in flux.  Join thinkers and doers from the Berggruen-verse as we imagine a future that we can accomplish together, instead of one that we’re all working to prevent.