The Next Big Idea

By Next Big Idea Club

Society & Culture Education

What's The Next Big Idea about?

The Next Big Idea is a weekly series of in-depth interviews with the world’s leading thinkers. Join our host, Rufus Griscom — 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.

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UNREASONABLE HOSPITALITY: T...

09.21.2023

When he was 26, Will Guidara took the helm of a middling brasserie in New York City called Eleven Madison Park. A decade later, it was named the best restaurant in the world. How did he pull off this unprecedented ...

The Next Big Idea episodes:

09.21.2023 UNREASONABLE HOSPITALITY: The Power of Giving People More Than They Expect When he was 26, Will Guidara took the helm of a middling brasserie in New York City called Eleven Madison Park. A decade later, it was named the best restaurant in the world. How did he pull off this unprecedented ...
09.14.2023 ELON MUSK: Walter Isaacson on the World’s Most Polarizing Person Two years ago, Walter Isaacson, the legendary biographer who has written books about Steve Jobs, Albert Einstein, Benjamin Franklin, and Leonardo da Vinci, began shadowing Elon Musk. "I started off with a guy who was one of the most popular ...
09.12.2023 Special Preview: Walter Isaacson on Elon Musk Last week, Rufus sat down with legendary biographer Walter Isaacson to discuss his new book, "Elon Musk." We'll have that conversation for you on Thursday. Until then, here's a sneak peek.
09.07.2023 CHANGE: How to Excel When Everything Is in Flux We go through at least thirty-six major changes in the course of our adulthoods. And yet adapting to those changes is really, really hard. Why is that? Health and science writer Brad Stulberg says it's because our model for change ...
08.31.2023 DREAM TOWN: Shaker Heights and the Quest for Racial Equity In the 1950s, Shaker Heights, Ohio, became a national model for housing integration. In the 1970s, it was known as a crown jewel in the national move to racially integrate schools. So why is its school system now struggling to ...
08.24.2023 PERENNIALS: How to Thrive in a Post-Generational Society Increasing longevity and the explosion of technology are reshaping the world. What will it mean for your education, your career, and your life? • Mauro Guillén’s new book is “The Perennials: The Megatrends Creating a Postgenerational Society” • Download The ...
08.17.2023 ULTRA-PROCESSED: What Fake Food Is Doing to Our Health Ultra-processed food makes up 60 percent of the American diet. Though to call it food is a stretch. Because it is not, strictly speaking, food at all. It is an industrially produced edible substance. And it’s killing us. That is ...
08.10.2023 How to Succeed by Quitting (2022) In “Quit: The Power of Knowing When to Walk Away,” cognitive scientist turned professional poker player turned bestselling author Annie Duke says mastering the art of quitting is the key to making smart decisions. (This episode originally aired in October ...
08.03.2023 Why the Modern World Puts Us All at Risk for Addiction (2021) In “Dopamine Nation: Finding Balance in the Age of Indulgence,” Dr. Anna Lembke says today’s superabundance of pleasurable stimuli makes us all vulnerable to overindulgence. But don’t lose hope. Anna, the medical director of addiction medicine at Stanford, says that ...
07.27.2023 WORK: Henry David Thoreau on Making a Meaningful Living Henry David Thoreau was a philosopher, poet, and pencil-maker. He was a great resigner and, above all, a superb writer whose masterpiece, "Walden," is considered by many to be America's first environmentalist manifesto. But John Kaag has a different view. ...
07.20.2023 RISE AND SHINE: How to Have the Perfect Morning Research has shown that how you spend your morning can have a significant impact on the rest of your day. If you start off feeling anxious and frazzled, chances are you'll end the day feeling the same way. But if ...
07.13.2023 Artificial Intelligence Meets Virtual Worlds: The Future of Sentience The two hottest topics in tech right now are the rise of generative AI and, with Apple’s recent push into spatial computing, the mainstreaming of augmented reality. Will silicon-based machines develop sentience? Will human experience extend into virtual worlds? These ...
07.06.2023 You Should Have More Fun This Summer. Here’s Why. Are we all so busy doom-scrolling and binge-watching that we’ve forgotten how to have fun? Real fun. Tingly-all-over, natural-high, I-hope-this-never-ends fun. Catherine Price thinks so. But don’t despair. Her latest book, “The Power of Fun,” is jam-packed with research-backed hacks ...
06.29.2023 PARKING: How It Explains the World For decades, urban planners have blanketed our cities with the cheap and convenient car storage known as parking. They've swapped sidewalks for strip malls and bulldozed bright, inviting storefronts to make room for dark, urine-scented parking garages. In some downtowns, ...
06.22.2023 OUTLIVE (Part 2): How to Optimize Your Diet, Sleep, and Emotional Health Dr. Peter Attia, author of the #1 New York Times bestseller "Outlive," is back to share cutting-edge tips for improving your sleep, nutrition, and emotional health. (If you missed the first part of our interview with Peter, you can listen ...
06.15.2023 OUTLIVE (Part 1): Peter Attia’s Guide to the Science of Longevity Peter Attia had a problem. It was 2006. He'd recently graduated from Stanford's medical school and was completing a prestigious surgical residency at Johns Hopkins, but instead of celebrating his success, he was tormented by frustrations. The medical establishment, it ...
06.08.2023 THE WAGER: David Grann Tells a Tale of Shipwreck and Mutiny David Grann is a staff writer at The New Yorker and the acclaimed author of "The Lost City of Z" and "Killers of the Flower Moon." In his new book, the #1 New York Times bestseller "The Wager: A Tale ...
06.01.2023 THE REAL WORK: Adam Gopnik on the Mystery of Mastery A few years ago, Adam Gopnik, a longtime writer for The New Yorker and three-time winner of the National Magazine Award, started thinking about all the things he wasn't good at. He couldn't dance the foxtrot or bake a brioche. ...
05.25.2023 JOY OF MOVEMENT: How Exercise Can Help You Find Happiness and Connection Pay a visit to your local gym, observe the grimacing patrons as they pound the treadmill or march in place on the StairMaster, and you might conclude that exercise is no fun. But it doesn’t have to be that way, ...
05.18.2023 BREAKTHROUGH: How to Get Unstuck and Achieve Anything "To be alive is to battle stuckness." So declares NYU professor Adam Alter in his new book, "Anatomy of a Breakthrough: How to Get Unstuck When It Matters Most." Adam has spent years studying why we get stuck — in ...
05.11.2023 EXCELLENT ADVICE: Life Lessons From Wired Co-Founder Kevin Kelly Kevin Kelly has made a career out of looking to the future. He helped pioneer online social networking all the way back in the 1980s, and he co-founded Wired, the magazine devoted to digital technology, when the internet was still ...
05.04.2023 SELFLESS: Why “You” Are a Social Creation You are not autonomous. You are not an island unto yourself. You, my friend, are a social construct. The “self” you haul around — that yammering voice in your head — was entirely shaped by your relationships and social interactions. ...
05.02.2023 The Next Big Idea Club Presents — "Immortality: A User's Guide" What if you could live forever? Okay, maybe not forever, but for a long, long time — like to 150. First of all, is that even possible? And second, what would that mean for your family, your career, the planet? ...
04.27.2023 Steven Johnson & Michael Specter on the Future of Life Last month, longtime New Yorker staff writer Michael Specter released a brand new audiobook with our friends at Pushkin. It’s called “Higher Animals: Vaccines, Synthetic Biology, and the Future of Life,” and it’s an inspiring account of the emerging field ...
04.25.2023 You Need a Bedtime (from The Next Big Idea Daily) What if we told you that every day, in just a few minutes, you could get a master class in better, smarter living from the world's best writers? Sounds too good to be true, right? Well, if you think that, ...
04.20.2023 SENSES: Gretchen Rubin’s Guide to Getting Out of Your Head and Into the World What do your five senses — sight, hearing, 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 ...
04.13.2023 PSYCH: The Story of the Human Mind In his expansive new book, "Psych: The Story of the Human Mind," Paul Bloom, a professor of psychology at the University of Toronto, lays out, in his words, "basically everything I know about the mind." And when he says everything, ...
04.06.2023 PREPPY: The Surprising Origins of American Style How did Oxford shirts, cashmere sweaters, and chinos become staples of American fashion? How did a style born on Ivy League campuses make its way into the mainstream? What does the way we dress say about who we are? To ...
03.30.2023 SUCCESSION: The True Story Behind the Hit Show So "Succession" is back. The Emmy Award-winning series returned to HBO for its fourth and final season last Sunday. The show, if you haven't seen it, centers on Logan Roy, the aging CEO of a media conglomerate called Waystar Royco, ...
03.23.2023 ABOLISH POVERTY: Matthew Desmond on How We Can Do It RUFUS GRISCOM: Could you share with us your broader mission and how your new book, “Poverty, by America,” supports that mission? MATTHEW DESMOND: I want to end poverty. I want to be part of the movement that’s growing around the ...
03.16.2023 READING: Are We Forgetting How To Do It? Maryanne Wolf is a professor at UCLA and the renowned author of "Proust and the Squid: The Story and Science of the Reading Brain" and "Reader, Come Home: The Reading Brain in a Digital World." She says deep reading makes ...
03.09.2023 David Chalmers Thinks We May Be Living in a Simulation (and He’s OK With It) Last year, Rufus sat down with philosopher David Chalmers to talk about the allure of virtual reality, whether robots will ever achieve consciousness, and the likelihood that we’re living in a simulation (David thinks it’s about 25 percent). It was ...
03.02.2023 Is AI Moving Too Fast? A Conversation With Kevin Roose When Kevin Roose, a tech columnist at the New York Times, demoed an AI-powered version of Microsoft's search engine last month, he was blown away. "I'm switching my desktop computer's default search engine to Bing," he declared. A few days ...
02.23.2023 LIFE IS SHORT: The Upside of Death Life without death, says philosopher Dean Rickles, is like playing tennis without a net. In his new book, “Life Is Short: An Appropriately Brief Guide to Making It More Meaningful,” Dean challenges us to rethink what it means to get ...
02.16.2023 MUSIC: What the Songs You Love Say About You In this special episode, Susan Rogers, a record producer turned cognitive neuroscientist, and Daniel Levitin, author of “This Is Your Brain on Music,” get together to discuss what music has meant in their lives, debate what separates a great artist ...
02.09.2023 AI: The Origin Story Imagine a world where AI is everywhere — where self-driving cars roam the streets and chatbots can do your homework. Oh, wait. That world already exists. This is exciting news for some. For others, it's slightly terrifying. Whichever camp you ...
02.06.2023 Not Finished Is Not Failure (from The Next Big Idea Daily) Doing is more important than being done. That’s the provocative argument at the heart of a new book by artist and entrepreneur Becky Blades, “Start More Than You Can Finish: A Creative Permission Slip to Unleash Your Best Ideas.” Becky ...
02.02.2023 CELLS: Siddhartha Mukherjee on the Breakthroughs That Are Revolutionizing Medicine Siddhartha Mukherjee is an oncologist, professor, researcher, and biotech entrepreneur. He’s also a writer, and a fine one at that. His first book, “The Emperor of All Maladies: A Biography of Cancer,” won a Pulitzer Prize. His second, “The Gene: ...
01.30.2023 Introducing: The Next Big Idea Daily Great news, folks. We just launched a new podcast! It's called The Next Big Idea Daily. Tune in Monday through Friday for quick master classes in better, smarter living with help from thinkers like Adam Grant, Susan Cain, Greg McKeown, ...
01.26.2023 PLEASURE: An Epicurean Guide to the Good Life The Greek philosopher Epicurus made a rather bold claim over two thousand years ago. The key to life, he said, was simple: pursue pleasure and avoid pain. Around this maxim he developed a school of philosophy, Epicureanism, which promised its ...
01.19.2023 POWER FAILURE: What Happened to GE? (with Malcolm Gladwell & William Cohan) General Electric used to be the most valuable company in the world; now it's practically irrelevant. What happened? Today on the show, we're going to find answers. And to help, we're turning to two writers who have followed the saga ...
01.12.2023 DIET: The New Science of Healthy Eating “Our food decisions,” writes Dr. Tim Spector in his new book, Food for Life, “are the single most important modifiable factor in preventing common diseases and staying healthy.” But how do we know we’re making the right choices? In this ...
01.05.2023 How to Develop Your Passions and Avoid Burnout (with Atul Gawande and Adam Grant) Renowned surgeon Atul Gawande spends his days in the operating theater and his nights writing articles for The New Yorker and bestselling books like Being Mortal. Today on the show, he tells our curator Adam Grant how he balances his ...
12.29.2022 FEELINGS: The Secret Power of Embracing Emotions at Work Today, in a special bonus episode, we bring you a live conversation between Liz Fosslien and Mollie West Duffy, authors of “No Hard Feelings: The Secret Power of Embracing Emotions at Work,” and our curator Susan Cain. They discuss over-sharing, ...
12.22.2022 SAPIENS: Yuval Noah Harari on Our Past, Present, and Future Yuval Noah Harari is a historian and philosopher whose books — "Sapiens," "Homo Deus," "21 Lessons for the 21st Century," and most recently "Unstoppable Us: How Humans Took Over the World" — have sold more than 40 million copies. He ...
12.15.2022 ANALOG: Let’s Build a More Human World “The future is digital,” they said. Then the pandemic came along and forced that digital future on us. We traded offices for Zooms, gyms for Pelotons, schools for YouTube videos, restaurants for takeout apps. And guess what? It sucked. Many ...
12.08.2022 SLEEP: How Understanding Your Body’s Clock Can Revolutionize Your Health Sleep can enhance your creativity, lift your spirits, improve your sense of humor, and amplify your sociability. So why do so many of us struggle to get a good night's rest? Russell Foster, a professor of circadian neuroscience at the ...
12.01.2022 ANIMALS: They’re Smarter Than You Think Alexandra Horowitz takes us inside the mind of a puppy. James Bridle introduces us to slime mold that can outwit the best human engineers. Justin Gregg makes the case that thinking like an animal is the key to living a ...
11.24.2022 HUMOR: The Case for Navigating Life on the Precipice of a Smile Humor is no laughing matter. It inspires innovation, strengthens relationships, disarms tension, and makes you look smart. Seriously. Stanford professors Jennifer Aaker and Naomi Bagdonas say the recipe for professional success and personal fulfillment is to lighten up, pack a ...
11.17.2022 GOOD ARGUMENTS: Adam Grant and Champion Debater Bo Seo on the Craft of Persuasion When Bo Seo was 8 years old, his family moved from Korea to Australia. He did not speak a world of English. At school, to deflect attention from his inarticulacy, he became an agreeable wallflower. But that all changed when ...

Older episodes

The Next Big Idea

What's The Next Big Idea about?

Download our free app to listen on your phone

The Next Big Idea episodes:

UNREASONABLE HOSPITALITY: The Power of Giving People More Than They Expect

ELON MUSK: Walter Isaacson on the World’s Most Polarizing Person

Special Preview: Walter Isaacson on Elon Musk

CHANGE: How to Excel When Everything Is in Flux

DREAM TOWN: Shaker Heights and the Quest for Racial Equity

PERENNIALS: How to Thrive in a Post-Generational Society

ULTRA-PROCESSED: What Fake Food Is Doing to Our Health

How to Succeed by Quitting (2022)

Why the Modern World Puts Us All at Risk for Addiction (2021)

WORK: Henry David Thoreau on Making a Meaningful Living

RISE AND SHINE: How to Have the Perfect Morning

Artificial Intelligence Meets Virtual Worlds: The Future of Sentience

You Should Have More Fun This Summer. Here’s Why.

PARKING: How It Explains the World

OUTLIVE (Part 2): How to Optimize Your Diet, Sleep, and Emotional Health

OUTLIVE (Part 1): Peter Attia’s Guide to the Science of Longevity

THE WAGER: David Grann Tells a Tale of Shipwreck and Mutiny

THE REAL WORK: Adam Gopnik on the Mystery of Mastery

JOY OF MOVEMENT: How Exercise Can Help You Find Happiness and Connection

BREAKTHROUGH: How to Get Unstuck and Achieve Anything

EXCELLENT ADVICE: Life Lessons From Wired Co-Founder Kevin Kelly

SELFLESS: Why “You” Are a Social Creation

The Next Big Idea Club Presents — "Immortality: A User's Guide"

Steven Johnson & Michael Specter on the Future of Life

You Need a Bedtime (from The Next Big Idea Daily)

SENSES: Gretchen Rubin’s Guide to Getting Out of Your Head and Into the World

PSYCH: The Story of the Human Mind

PREPPY: The Surprising Origins of American Style

SUCCESSION: The True Story Behind the Hit Show

ABOLISH POVERTY: Matthew Desmond on How We Can Do It

READING: Are We Forgetting How To Do It?

David Chalmers Thinks We May Be Living in a Simulation (and He’s OK With It)

Is AI Moving Too Fast? A Conversation With Kevin Roose

LIFE IS SHORT: The Upside of Death

MUSIC: What the Songs You Love Say About You

AI: The Origin Story

Not Finished Is Not Failure (from The Next Big Idea Daily)

CELLS: Siddhartha Mukherjee on the Breakthroughs That Are Revolutionizing Medicine

Introducing: The Next Big Idea Daily

PLEASURE: An Epicurean Guide to the Good Life

POWER FAILURE: What Happened to GE? (with Malcolm Gladwell & William Cohan)

DIET: The New Science of Healthy Eating

How to Develop Your Passions and Avoid Burnout (with Atul Gawande and Adam Grant)

FEELINGS: The Secret Power of Embracing Emotions at Work

SAPIENS: Yuval Noah Harari on Our Past, Present, and Future

ANALOG: Let’s Build a More Human World

SLEEP: How Understanding Your Body’s Clock Can Revolutionize Your Health

ANIMALS: They’re Smarter Than You Think

HUMOR: The Case for Navigating Life on the Precipice of a Smile

GOOD ARGUMENTS: Adam Grant and Champion Debater Bo Seo on the Craft of Persuasion

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