This generation's wisdom is being spun in concert with technology.

The internet is our version of splitting the atom.

It holds immense powers, both perilous and promising,

as it upends the meaning of ancient, elemental things like making and leading and belonging and learning.

We know ourselves not only to be connecting to others

beyond kin and tribe, we have the means and the freedom to create our own tribes bound by

passion and service quite apart from bloodline or geography. So is the story of Maria Popovas'

internet phenomenon brain pickings.

Right now, I rarely read the internet at all, and I spend most of my days sort of buried in bookpiles and letters and diaries and old philosophy books and whatnot.

But, you know, there's this term that we hear in kind of new agey

circles, spiritual reparenting, which is a bit too new age, even for my taste, and I can be quite

the hippie sometimes. But there's an aspect of it that I like, and it led me to think about what I do as a kind of two-way generational reparenting, sort of on the one hand, caring for these bygone thinkers, while at the same time imbueing the present generation with their hand-me-down wisdom and their most enduring ideas.

This is becoming wise, an inquiry into the mystery and the art of living.

I'm Krista Tippett.

I think Maria's central European background gives her an audacious, somewhat un-American faith in the power of ideas.

And somehow she manages to use technological tools in service of old-fashioned wisdom.

When I speak with Maria at the age of 30, she's already been at this for a decade. Brain Pickings is a

labor of love with a vast following now, and it points at technology's redemptive potentials.

She, like Brune Brown, has stumbled on a robust vocabulary of hope while pursuing seemingly

unrelated questions. I think the magnetism of your work,

the appeal of it for people, that it's aspirational, right? I mean, and which is another contrast

to disruptive. We have all these assumptions we kind of walk around with and lay them, especially

...