Big Questions with Cal Fussman

When Cal first heard PTTOW! described as the Dalai Lama + Coca-Cola + will.i.am + General Electric + Elon Musk, he didn't quite know what it meant but he thought: That certainly says a lot. It also says a great deal about this week's guest on Big Questions. The co-founder of Plan To Take On The World!: Roman Tsunder. Cal found out firsthand how Roman brings executives, influencers and artists together to activate a room and ripple out messaging across the globe. Roman's book, Plan To Take On The World, is out now. It's filled with human success stories that can lift us all in the age of AI. Cal has talked for months now about the dance between humans and AI. This week, he sends a thank you to OpenArt.ai for smoothing out his authentic video and audio footage in the introduction. You might find the AI movie maker beneficial in your own way.

In all of Cal's years of interviewing, no guest has come in prepared quite like Sébastien Page, Chief Investment Officer of T. Rowe Price. With the help of AI, Sébastien came to share wisdom, and Cal walked away learning something about himself. They talk about leading through change, what it was like introducing an AI agent into an important recurring meeting usually reserved for humans, and lessons from Sébastien's book, The Psychology of Leadership. It all circles back to the words T. Rowe Price lived by: Change is the investor's only certainty.

Larry Cheng on AI's Unlimited Upside Last week, the call was for regulation to keep AI from going too far. This week, the other side of the tug of war. Larry Cheng, co-founder of Volition Capital, sees a company go from zero to $100 million in a week and can't help but say: Let's go! Larry has been powering up since he became Apple's youngest certified technician at 13. He survived 200 rejections launching Volition, then backed Chewy with $15 million when its founder was facing rejection of his own. That led to a $3 billion exit. Larry talks about the unlimited possibilities he's seeing in AI, the data center power needed to unleash them, why so many people don't want that power in their backyard as well as the societal implications of watching this all unfold. And more than that. Larry offers simple steps YOU can take to build out your own ideas with AI.

When a CEO who most of America wouldn't recognize on the street gets impersonated by Saturday Night Live, he stops being an expert on the news. He becomes a character in the great drama of our time. Cal starts there and then runs through the week the AI conversation changed, all curated into short clips so you can get caught up without scrolling YouTube at 2 a.m.

Cal becomes curious when he hears about a book that proves just that. He learns from The New Social Code that the most successful people aren't the ones who get the most social media likes – but the ones who have three or four powerful human connections. Authors Greg Pryor and Michael Arena show how those types of connections came together to enable Robert Prevost to become Pope Leo. And they also prove how success in our time can be attained by getting the most out of AI while doubling down on human connections that are based on deep trust.

Cal's ongoing look at how humans can get the best out of AI while avoiding the worst goes to an unanticipated place: Mentorship. In the time of a loneliness crisis, will young people rely on AI too much for guidance? Will those who refuse all interaction with AI miss out on its benefits and pay a price? It turns out there's never been a more important time for humans to find the people who can put them on the right path. A conversation with Georgetown professor Eric Koester, author of Super Mentors, shows us where ambition meets guidance in our time. And we're in luck! Eric reveals the best ways humans can connect with the right mentors and use AI as an accelerant, whether you're 18 or 52.

Three young girls leave the United States for the first time and head to Paris on a trip that has been awarded to their mother for extraordinary work. It lands them in a restaurant where they encounter escargot for the first time. Do they devour the snails? Drown them in lemon juice to avoid the taste? Or scramble for the nearest detour?!!! The story is a portal into how the workplace has changed through a report called the Recognition Disconnect. Now, with more than 50 percent of employees surveyed feeling burned out and many fearful of being replaced by artificial intelligence, people desire workplace rewards that are about time with family that actually replenishes. The human connection in this trip shifts the narrative away from the dystopian nightmare of AI taking everybody's jobs. It's told through Xceleration CEO Ben Levenbaum – who commissioned the survey. And seasoned by Frank Congiu, a global thought leader at Randstad – which helped 1.7 million people find jobs last year. In the end, it defines how this podcast has evolved into ways of getting the best out of AI and avoiding the worst. For these reward trips are an innovative way of enabling humans to feel confident and thrive in the age of artificial intelligence.

Cal goes to the heartland to talk with a man who's spent decades teaching kids how to build strength the right way for a conversation on how his training approach overlaps with AI. Turns out, Michael Ockrim uses the same disciplined tactics to build digital muscles that can wrestle down insurance payments. This episode is a real-world look at how anyone (not just tech people) can start putting AI to work in their own life. Michael is a husband, father of four and founder of Mighty Oak Athletic in Westmont, Illinois. Consider this episode solid advice from the heartland.

As the 25th anniversary of 9/11 approaches, Cal replays one of the most powerful conversations in Big Questions' archive: his interview with Michael Wright, a survivor who was buried alive when Tower 2 of the World Trade Center collapsed on him.

Michael was a 30-year-old account executive on an ordinary Tuesday morning when the hijacked planes hit. Cal interviewed him for Esquire Magazine just days after the attack and has replayed his taped recollections every year since Big Questions started.

This year, Cal introduces curated archival images from that day, synced to Michael's narrative. The visuals can be found on youtube.com/@bigquestionspodcast. This is the story of how Michael survived after being buried alive near a fireman. He crawled to the fireman and stuck to him "like a sticky burr on a bear's ass." The fireman hacked them both out with an axe.

When the story was first published, Esquire called it "the fastest 3,863 words you will ever read." It's a story about adaptation under the worst possible pressure, and about the connection between two strangers that made survival possible. Twenty-five years later, all of those involved still have everything to teach us.