The Next Big Idea
The Next Big Idea is a weekly series of in-depth interviews with the world’s leading thinkers. Join hosts Rufus Griscom and Caleb Bissinger — along with our curators, Malcolm Gladwell, Adam Grant, Susan Cain, and Daniel Pink — for conversations that might just change the way you see the world. New episodes every Monday and Thursday. For ad inquiries, please reach out to: Network+NBI@yapmedia.com
Episodes
July 20, 2026 • 49 mins
Most people think success comes from having an original idea. Mark Pincus thinks that's one of the most expensive mistakes you can make.
After building one of the most successful gaming companies in history, he believes the best products rarely begin as completely new ideas. Instead, they start with a deep understanding of what already works, a relentless focus on making it better, and just enough novelty to make people care.
In ...
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July 16, 2026 • 62 mins
Podcasting is lousy with guests who peddle advice about starting businesses, building careers, and living full lives. Few of these gurus have actually accomplished anything. Fewer still have advice that comes anywhere close to revelatory.
Mark Pincus is the rare exception.
The founder of 10 companies, Mark is best known for Zynga, the gaming juggernaut behind FarmVille and Words With Friends. At its peak, Zynga was valued at more...
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July 13, 2026 • 104 mins
For years, cardiologist Eric Topol hunted for the rarest people in America: those over 80 who had never been sick. When he finally found 1,400 of them, he made a shocking discovery. It wasn't their genes. These "super agers" were often the last ones standing in families where everyone else died decades earlier. So what separates people who live into their 80s or 90s feeling great from those who battle chronic disease? In his new bo...
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July 9, 2026 • 58 mins
Despite decades of urgency and alarm, progress on climate change has felt frustratingly slow. What if we've been going about it all wrong? Elizabeth Dunn and Jiaying "JZ" Zhao think there's a missing ingredient in the conversation: joy.
In their new book, Leave the Lights On, Liz and JZ draw on psychology, behavioral science, and sustainability research to argue that the most effective climate solutions aren't rooted in guilt, fea...
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July 6, 2026 • 57 mins
Publisher, scientist, humorist, diplomat — Benjamin Franklin was America's first polymath. Today, with help from Eric Weiner, we revisit Franklin's life, searching for tips about how to be healthy, wealthy, and wise.
This episode first aired in July 2024.
🎥 The Next Big Idea is now on YouTube! You can find our episodes here.
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July 2, 2026 • 68 mins
"We’re entering our 250th birthday, and we’re not quite in the mood for a birthday party. We’ve been tearing ourselves apart." That's what Walter Isaacson told Rufus when they sat down last year. But, he says, it doesn't have to be that way. "Let's use this birthday party as a chance to try to heal some of the divides."
Walter's latest book is The Greatest Sentence Ever Written. That sentence? “We hold thes...
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June 29, 2026 • 34 mins
On Thursday, Rufus and Robert Wright (The God Test) talked about AI as a new stage in the evolution of intelligence — and about the very human traits already showing up in our machines: empathy, deception, power-seeking, seduction. Today, they ask the harder question: what happens when these machines become the object of a geopolitical arms race?
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June 25, 2026 • 59 mins
Does the logic of human destiny now lead to artificial intelligence? Are we creating a higher form of intelligence in our own image? And, if so, what kind of image is that?
These are the questions celebrated author Robert Wright asks in his new book, The God Test, which was published this week.
Bob argues that we should not be surprised to see signs of deception, power-seeking, flattery, and autonomy in AI systems. These are not ...
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June 22, 2026 • 56 mins
Most of us swear we have no free time. But the week is 168 hours long. Subtract a 40-hour job and eight hours of sleep a night, and you're left with 72 hours. So where do they go? Today, Laura Vanderkam, author of the new book Big Time, shares her system for reclaiming her free time, including her method for knocking out "someday" projects in small daily bites.
🎬 The Next Big Idea is now on YouTube! You can find our episodes...
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June 18, 2026 • 74 mins
GPAs. Citations. Step counts. Likes. We love a good metric, don't we? It tells you exactly where you stand, no arguing. Mention a 4.0 to a high schooler and they'll know exactly what you mean. Tell a fellow Fitbit-wearer you just hit 10,000 and they'll nod approvingly. But that clarity has a price. To make a metric that clean, that portable, you have to sand off all the nuance, all the context, everything that made the thing worth ...
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June 15, 2026 • 43 mins
The World Cup kicked off over the weekend, and so far the mood is meh. Fans are fuming over sell-your-kidney ticket prices, frightened by reports that ICE may target matches, tailgates, and sports bars, and generally feeling down on this quadrennial celebration.
We wanted to know: Is there any joy left in this thing?
So we called up Simon Kuper. He's a columnist at the Financial Times, "one of the best sportswriters in the Englis...
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June 11, 2026 • 66 mins
Nearly half of all Americans believe AI is bad for humanity. Peter Diamandis is not one of them. On his podcast, Moonshots, and in his new book, We Are as Gods, co-written with the inimitable Steven Kotler, he makes the case that artificial intelligence is already ushering in a world of abundance — think radical life extension, 10 billion humanoid robots, and agents that do your job while you're sipping a latte.
He knows it ...
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June 8, 2026 • 72 mins
Modern life has not been easy on our brains. Average IQ scores rose steadily throughout the last century. Now they appear to be leveling off. The problem, according to neuroscientists, may be that we have reached our neurobiological limits. Our brains simply can’t work any harder. Luckily, science writer Annie Murphy Paul has a solution. In her book The Extended Mind: The Power of Thinking Outside the Brain, she draws on a we...
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June 4, 2026 • 76 mins
Nicholas Epley is a mind reader. But he doesn’t have ESP or practice hypnosis. He's not telepathic or clairvoyant. Sure, you could ask him to read your fortune, but you'd be better off with a Magic 8 Ball.
When we say Nick is a mind reader, what we mean is he studies mind reading at the University of Chicago — studies, as he puts it, "how we make inferences about each other's thoughts and beliefs and attitudes, and mo...
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June 1, 2026 • 54 mins
What do your five senses — sight, sound, smell, taste, and touch — have to do with happiness? According to Gretchen Rubin, a great deal. The world around us, she says, has the potential to dazzle, to entertain, to trigger a state of rapture. If only we pay attention. Today on the show, she shares the tools she's developed to delight in the physical world. She spoke to Rufus in April 2023 about her book Life in Five Sens...
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May 28, 2026 • 66 mins
America's a funny place. It's not a country with a fixed geographic or religious identity. We don't have a common story of divine creation. "What we have," writes Ben Rhodes in his new book, All We Say, "are words." The words of the founding documents, yes — but also "the words of speeches spoken by Americans who call us to be that better version of ourselves."
Ben has spent more time with great American speeches than just...
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May 25, 2026 • 79 mins
In his mega-bestseller Four Thousand Weeks, Oliver Burkeman showed that the finitude of life “isn’t a reason for unremitting despair, or for living in an anxiety-fueled panic about making the most of your limited time. It’s a cause for relief.” In his follow-up book, Meditations for Mortals, he invites us to embrace what he calls “imperfectionism.” Accept your limitations, your finitude, your lac...
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May 21, 2026 • 54 mins
Nicholas Thompson, CEO of The Atlantic and host of "The Most Interesting Thing in AI," joins Rufus and Caleb to explain why the machines may master our minds long before they master our muscles — and what that gap tells us about where AI is headed. Along the way: why human podcasters still beat AI ones, how Nick learned to stop worrying and love open source, and where he'd point an infinite AI budget.
🎧 Check out Nick&...
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May 18, 2026 • 71 mins
The Greek philosopher Epicurus made a rather bold claim over two thousand years ago. The key to life, he said, is simple: pursue pleasure and avoid pain. Around this maxim he developed a school of philosophy, Epicureanism, which promised its adherents that if they took care of their basic needs, surrounded themselves with trustworthy friends, and developed a basic understanding of science, they would be happy. But is it really that...
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May 14, 2026 • 55 mins
You can run from uncertainty, but you can’t hide. The thing to do, says Simone Stolzoff, to develop comfort with ambiguity and build tolerance for the unknown. His new book is How to Not Know: The Value of Uncertainty in a World that Demands Answers.
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