The Like Button, and the Strange Power of Tiny Ideas | Martin Reeves

The Like Button, and the Strange Power of Tiny Ideas | Martin Reeves

From The Origins Podcast with Lawrence Krauss by Lawrence M. Krauss

December 22, 2025 · 2h 25m

About this episode

Lawrence Krauss discusses the unexpected significance of the 'like' button with Martin Reeves, exploring its impact on innovation and society.

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…

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