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 Thursday.
Episodes
December 23, 2025 • 42 mins
Back in January 2020, Rufus sat down with Priya Parker — a conflict resolution specialist who’s worked on peace processes around the world — to talk about her book The Art of Gathering. What she told him changed how we think about every dinner party, every work meeting, every family get-together we host. Priya’s argument is simple but radical. She says most of our gatherings fail because we focus on the wrong things. We obsess over...
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December 16, 2025 • 77 mins
What does it mean to flourish? According to author Daniel Coyle, flourishing is “joyful, meaningful growth — shared.” But how do you achieve that enviable state? The answer lies in Dan’s forthcoming book, “Flourish,” which you can pre-order now on Amazon, Audible, or Bookshop.org.
Highlights:
(5:11) Life isn't a treasure hunt; it’s more like treasure creation
(14:15) The $90 million deli that said no to Disney
(20:40) Your brai...
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December 11, 2025 • 59 mins
In our divided nation, there's one thing many of us seem to agree on: winter sucks. A recent study found that nearly half of Americans would skip winter if they could. Yet not everyone dreads the cold months. Psychologist Kari Leibowitz has spent years studying these winter-lovers, and she's arrived at a surprising truth: people who thrive this time of year aren't just born that way — they've learned to see the season differently. ...
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December 4, 2025 • 70 mins
Daniel Coyle will soon join us on the show to talk about his forthcoming book, Flourish. Today, we're revisiting our 2022 conversation with Dan about his last book, The Culture Playbook. Here's how we described the episode back then:
The filmmakers at Pixar. The servers at Union Square Cafe. The badasses on SEAL Team Six. What do these super successful groups all have in common? Strong team culture. But what exactly is culture, an...
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December 2, 2025 • 44 mins
A few weeks ago, Rufus moderated a panel discussion at Vanderbilt’s New York City campus on artificial intelligence and the future of American higher education. Today, we’re bringing you that conversation. It features Nabiha Syed, executive director of Mozilla Foundation; Nicholas Dirks, president and CEO of the New York Academy of Sciences; Julie Samuels, president and CEO of Tech:NYC; and Matthew Johnson-Roberson, inaugural dean ...
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November 27, 2025 • 65 mins
New York Times columnist and acclaimed author David Brooks has been trying to learn the skills that go into seeing others, understanding others, making other people feel respected, valued, and safe. Such social skills may sound trifling, but mastering them, David believes, could help us all make better decisions, enhance our creativity, and maybe even repair our nation’s fraying social fabric.
This episode first aired in November ...
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November 25, 2025 • 55 mins
In this conversation, recorded live on Zoom with members of the Next Big Idea Club community, Brené and Rufus talk about what drives her, how Texas has shaped her, the leadership skills that matter most, and work-life balance. Plus, our curator Adam Grant makes a surprise cameo. Brené’s new book is Strong Ground.
🎁 Join the Next Big Idea Club today and we'll send you a signed copy of Walter Isaacson's new book, The Greatest Sente...
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November 20, 2025 • 46 mins
Brené Brown is a researcher, storyteller, and author who hosts the podcast Dare to Lead and has given some of the most popular TED Talks of all time.
In this episode, recorded live at an Authors@Wharton event, Brené and our curator Adam Grant talk about her new book, Strong Ground. They discuss how to identify your core values, what courageous leadership looks like, and whether vulnerability has become more popular. They also addr...
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November 18, 2025 • 71 mins
What is the greatest sentence ever written? According to Walter Isaacson — former editor of Time, ex-CEO of CNN, and the acclaimed biographer of Elon Musk, Steve Jobs, Benjamin Franklin, and Jennifer Doudna — it’s this: “We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal, that they are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable Rights, that among these are Life, Liberty and the pursuit of Happiness.” Yes...
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November 13, 2025 • 66 mins
When Walter Isaacson, the legendary biographer of Steve Jobs, Albert Einstein, Benjamin Franklin, and Leonardo da Vinci, started shadowing Elon Musk, he found himself following "a guy who was one of the most popular people on the planet, and ended up with a guy who's the most controversial." Today on the show, Isaacson unpacks the transformation.
(This episode first aired in September 2023.)
Learn more about your ad choices. V...
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November 6, 2025 • 69 mins
Andrew Ross Sorkin’s new book, 1929: Inside the Greatest Crash in Wall Street History—and How It Shattered a Nation, is an eye-opening account of the forces that led to the worst financial crisis in history and the lessons that disaster can teach us about today’s economy.
(7:09) Life before the crash
(8:58) How Americans developed a taste for leverage
(17:10) What happened on Black Thursday
(20:05) Why so few people saw the cra...
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October 30, 2025 • 63 mins
Nick Thompson is the CEO of The Atlantic. But he moonlights as a damn good runner.
At 44, he ran a marathon in 2 hours and 29 minutes, making him one of the fastest marathoners his age on the planet. He later set an American age group record in the 50K. He has run in blazing heat with ice tucked into his hat and in frigid cold with Vaseline dabbed on his nose. He's run up sunny mountain trails and down dark city streets. He has ru...
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October 23, 2025 • 61 mins
As promised, today we’re bringing you a full-length interview with Steven Pinker about his new book, When Everyone Knows That Everyone Knows . . .: Common Knowledge and the Mysteries of Money, Power, and Everyday Life.
What is common knowledge? For Steve, it is not conventional wisdom. Instead, it’s when everyone knows something and everyone knows that and everyone knows it. That may sound loopy, but the implications of common kno...
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October 16, 2025 • 46 mins
Caleb is joined by Sam Kass, former senior food policy advisor to President Obama and the chef who cooked dinner for the first family most nights. Now a partner at a venture capital firm investing in food and agriculture tech, Sam has a new book out, The Last Supper: How to Overcome the Coming Food Crisis.
The situation, he says, is bleak. Almonds, artichokes, chocolate, coffee, oysters, rice, wine — all at risk due to climate ch...
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October 9, 2025 • 93 mins
Dave Blundin has co-founded 23 companies, co-hosts the Moonshots podcast, runs the VC firm Link Ventures, teaches at MIT, and has been building neural networks since the 1980s. His take: “[AI is] under-hyped. It's absolutely going to change the world in the next couple of years more than any change in human history. There's nothing even vaguely comparable to it.”
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(7:37) “Stop sleeping. Rush to everything you do.”
(15:16) Why h...
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October 2, 2025 • 65 mins
Angus Fletcher has a PhD in literature from Yale and teaches English at Ohio State. He’s passionate about Shakespeare. He probably owns a tweed jacket. In other words, he’s the last person you’d expect to receive the Army’s fourth-highest civilian honor.
But when he’s not parsing King Lear or dissecting Hamlet, Angus is pioneering research into narrative cognition — our ability to think in stories — and how it can make us smarter....
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September 25, 2025 • 71 mins
Harvard psychologist Steven Pinker shares five key insights from his brand new book, When Everyone Knows That Everyone Knows. He reveals how “common knowledge” — the hidden force of knowing what others know — shapes everything from financial bubbles and political revolutions to why we say “Netflix and chill.” Then we revisit our 2021 conversation with Steve about rationality, where he explains why smart people believe dumb things, ...
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September 18, 2025 • 82 mins
Today's AI runs on neural networks, a design originally inspired by the human brain. As these systems grow more sophisticated, they're raising a profound question: Even if they don't work exactly like our brains, could something resembling a "mind" eventually emerge from the machines we're building?
Guests: Gaurav Suri and Jay McClelland
Book: The Emergent Mind: How Intelligence Arises in People and Machines
———
Want to connect...
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September 11, 2025 • 84 mins
It’s rare these days for a book to go viral, but that’s exactly what happened with The Anxious Generation: How the Great Rewiring of Childhood Is Causing an Epidemic of Mental Illness by Jonathan Haidt.
Now in its 75th week on the New York Times’ bestseller list, the book reveals a startling truth: Starting in 2012, teen depression rates suddenly spiked 150% worldwide, perfectly coinciding with the moment smartphones and social m...
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September 4, 2025 • 80 mins
Arthur C. Brooks is an unlikely happiness guru.
He’s not a psychologist, philosopher, or mystic. He’s an economist and public policy analyst who, for years, ran a prominent think tank.
But rubbing shoulders with heads of state and titans of industry made him miserable. Confronted with the sobering realization that for too long he’d privileged work over connection and status over happiness, he left the c-suite and set about renova...
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