We’ve had many bracing thinkers on this show, but Sara Walker might take the cake. A physicist and astrobiologist at Arizona State University, she's just written "Life as No One Knows It: The Physics of Life's Emergence," a thrilling exploration of life's origins and the search for it across the cosmos. 🕐 The second part of this conversation will be available on Thursday. If you can’t wait until then, you can hear it right now on The Next Big Idea app 🎁 Take 20% off a Next Big Idea Club subscr...
Dec 17, 2024•1 hr 2 min
You may think you know what strategy is, but Seth Godin is willing to bet you haven’t got a clue. It’s not just setting goals. It’s not just making plans. It’s— Well, you’ll have to tune in to find out. 📕 This Is Strategy by Seth Godin ✉️ Want big idea delivered to your inbox every day? Sign up for our newsletter Book of the Day here 🎙️ If you enjoyed this episode, you may also enjoy our conversation with Tony Fadell, the legendary creator of the iPod and iPhone, about how to build a game-chan...
Dec 12, 2024•1 hr 2 min
Today, master woodworker Callum Robinson on craft, history, family, and our relationship with the natural world. 📕 Ingrained: The Making of a Craftsman 🎙️ For more bite-sized big ideas, follow The Next Big Idea Daily on Apple Podcasts or Spotify 🎁 Take 20% off a Next Big Idea Club subscription or gift when you use code PODCAST20 at nextbigideaclub.com
Dec 09, 2024•14 min
Greg Epstein, the humanist chaplain at Harvard and MIT, wants you to think twice before putting your faith in Silicon Valley's promises. 🎙️ Follow The Next Big Idea Daily on Apple or Spotify 🎁 Take 20% off a Next Big Idea Club membership or gift when you use PODCAST20 at nextbigideaclub.com
Dec 05, 2024•54 min
You’re probably used to looking for so-called good jobs and avoiding bad ones, but we might be better off looking for jobs that fit, that are a good match for our talents and personality. This approach would be better for employers and employees alike, according to Andre Martin, author of “Wrong Fit, Right Fit: Why How We Work Matters More Than Ever.” 🎙️ Follow The Next Big Idea Daily on Apple Podcasts, Spotify, or wherever you listen 🎁 Get 75% off a Next Big Idea express membership when you u...
Dec 02, 2024•10 min
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 transformation? By practicing unreasonable hospitality. (This episode first aired in Sept. 2023.) 📕 Unreasonable Hospitality 📬 Take 50% off a subscription to our Book of the Day newsletter here 🎁 Looking for the perfect gift for the readers in your life? How about a subscription to ...
Nov 28, 2024•1 hr 7 min
For two decades, Ann Wroe has written weekly obituaries for The Economist. Some of her subjects are luminaries (Queen Elizabeth II, Paul Newman). Others are little-knowns (cheesemakers, storm chasers, typewriter repairmen). But all of them, in Ann’s words, “have enhanced the world by their existence.” Her obituaries are celebrations of life, and Ann is a soul-catcher — souls, for her, being the best word for the “unique and essential part of ourselves, our self-conscious and transcendent core.” ...
Nov 21, 2024•54 min
Philosophers have long maintained that the Good Life is braided from two strands: pleasure and purpose. But Middlebury’s Lorraine Besser says there’s a third: psychological richness — or, as she calls it, The Interesting. Interesting experiences, she contends, captivate our minds, engage our thoughts and emotions, and often change our perspective. Today, she’ll teach you how to find them. 📕 The Art of the Interesting 📬 Take 50% off a subscription to our Book of the Day newsletter here 🎁 Looki...
Nov 18, 2024•1 hr 5 min
Do fewer things. Work at a natural pace. Obsess over quality. These are Cal Newport's three principles for achieving your goals without burning out. Today, in a special preview of our first-ever podclass, Cal explains how to harness the power of slow productivity to bring meaning, purpose, and a genuine sense of accomplishment into your life and work. ✉️ To hear the rest of Cal’s podclass, sign up for our Book of the Day newsletter. Get your special discount here 🎁 Looking for the perfect gift ...
Nov 14, 2024•42 min
What if everything we think we know about the history of our species is wrong? That’s the provocative question at the heart of a new book by today’s guest, David Wengrow. Hailed as fascinating, brilliant, and potentially revolutionary, “The Dawn of Everything: A New History of Humanity” debuted at no. 2 on the New York Times bestseller list. Drawing on the latest research in archeology and anthropology, it suggests that the lives of our ancient ancestors were not nasty, brutish, and short. On th...
Nov 07, 2024•1 hr 10 min
In his mega-bestseller “Four Thousand Weeks,” Oliver Burkeman showed that the shortness 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.” Now, in “Meditations for Mortals,” he invites us to embrace what he calls “imperfectionism.” Accept your limitations, your finitude, your lack of control — because “the more we try to render the world controllable,” he warns, “the more it eludes us; an...
Oct 31, 2024•1 hr 21 min
Making art is hard work, as Adam Moss, the revered former editor of New York magazine, reveals in his illuminating new book, "The Work of Art." The book is a collection of interviews with painters, poets, filmmakers, and even sandcastle builders about the demanding, mystical, peculiar process of creating something out of nothing. Adam spoke with our curator Daniel Pink in front of a live audience in New York City earlier this month. 📕 The Work of Art: How Something Comes From Nothing 🗞️ Check ...
Oct 24, 2024•57 min
Earlier this week, Jonathan Haidt joined us to discuss the crisis in youth mental health caused by smartphones and social media. Now he’s back to talk solutions. ✉️ We launched a Substack! Check it out now at bookoftheday.nextbigideaclub.com 🎙️ Enjoy this episode? Check out Rufus's related conversations with Will Storr and Anna Lembke
Oct 17, 2024•37 min
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 seventh month on the New York Times bestseller list, the book shows how the mass adoption of smartphones and social media has led to record rates of depression, anxiety, self-harm, and suicide among teens. 2️⃣ The second part of Rufus’s interview with Jonathan will be out on Thursday...
Oct 14, 2024•55 min
“Life is a game. There’s no way to understand the human world without first understanding this. Everyone alive is playing a game whose hidden rules are built into us and that silently directs our thoughts, beliefs and actions. This game is inside us. It is us. We can’t help but play.” So begins The Status Game by acclaimed science writer Will Storr. He continues: “We play for status, if only subtly, with every social interaction, every contribution we make to work, love or family life and every ...
Oct 10, 2024•2 hr 31 min
Twenty-five years ago, Malcolm Gladwell was not Malcolm Gladwell. Well, sure, ontologically speaking he was, but he would not have registered on the Celeb-O-Meter the way he does today. So what happened? What changed? What did he do to become a household name? He wrote “The Tipping Point: How Little Things Can Make a Big Difference.” A quarter century later, Malcolm sat down to update the book that made his name — only he realized that he had a lot of new things to say about social contagion. Cu...
Oct 03, 2024•1 hr 20 min
Next week, Malcolm Gladwell will be on the show to discuss his new book "Revenge of the Tipping Point: Overstories, Superspreaders, and the Rise of Social Engineering." In anticipation of that conversation, we're revisiting our 2021 interview with Malcolm about "The Bomber Mafia" — the story of a group of pilots who met on a muggy airbase in central Alabama and hatched a plan to revolutionize warfare. 🎟️ We're hosting a live taping on Oct. 10. Daniel Pink will chat with Adam Moss, former editor...
Sep 26, 2024•59 min
Is AI all bad, or could it be so good that we might one day want to merge with it? This is just one of the questions Rufus poses in part two of his conversation with historian and mega-bestselling author Yuval Noah Harari. 1️⃣ If you missed part one of this conversation, listen now on Apple Podcasts or Spotify 📕 Yuval’s new book, Nexus: A Brief History of Information Networks from the Stone Age to AI, is out now 📩 Want the latest insights from the world’s top thinkers delivered to your inbox e...
Sep 19, 2024•36 min
Yuval Noah Harari published an essay in the New York Times the other day. “Large-scale democracies,” he wrote, “became feasible only after the rise of modern information technologies like the newspaper, the telegraph and the radio. The fact that modern democracy has been built on top of modern information technologies means that any major change in the underlying technology is likely to result in a political upheaval.” Well, we’re witnessing a major change in the underlying technology right now....
Sep 16, 2024•1 hr
Extreme poverty, defined as living on less than $2.15 a day, has long been seen as an intractable problem. But what if the solution is simple? What if you could eradicate extreme poverty by just giving people cash? That’s what Rory Stewart believes. He’s the former UK Secretary of State for International Development and now a senior advisor to GiveDirectly, a non-profit that has distributed $800 million — in cash — to 1.6 million people around the world, including right here in the US. Today on ...
Sep 12, 2024•1 hr 2 min
In March, when Sam Bankman-Fried, the disgraced founder of FTX, was sentenced to 25 years behind bars for stealing $8 billion from customers, many people saw it as just punishment for a two-faced poser who had spouted a lot of rot about altruism just to mask the rank odor of his relentless greed. Michael Lewis, the famed author of Moneyball and The Big Short, was not one of those people. Through his eyes, Sam didn’t look like a con man. He looked like an awkward but well-meaning kid who meant wh...
Sep 05, 2024•1 hr 12 min
Sturgeon caviar harvested in a lab. Skyscrapers made out of living materials that grow from the ground up. Computers that run on DNA. These might sound like science fiction fantasies, but our guest today, Jamie Metzl, says they are real — they’re in development right now. How these and other biotechnologies will transform our lives, work, and the world is the subject of Jamie’s new book “Superconvergence.” 🎟️ We’re hosting a live taping of this show in New York City on Sept. 11, featuring Yuval...
Aug 29, 2024•57 min
What are some words you would use to describe a leader? Bold, driven, steadfast. How about … anxious? You may not equate leadership with anxiety, but Morra Aarons-Mele — a writer, podcaster, and self-proclaimed anxious achiever — says that’s a mistake. Because anxiety is not a professional defect or character flaw. It’s not something to be ashamed of or something you have to hide. Instead, in Morra’s view, it’s an asset, a resource, a motivator that can bring out your best work. The hard part is...
Aug 22, 2024•1 hr 1 min
Today, Nate Silver explains why most people should take bigger risks, reveals the big thing everyone misunderstands about Sam Bankman-Fried, and makes the case that there’s anywhere from a 2 to 20 percent chance that AI will take over the world. 🎙️ This is the second episode in our two-part series with Nate Silver. To hear Part 1, click here
Aug 15, 2024•44 min
You probably know Nate Silver, the founder of FiveThirtyEight, as the statistician with an uncanny knack for predicting election results. What you may not know is that Nate has never been comfortable inside the Beltway. Before his election models made him famous, he made his living playing poker, and it's in that world that he feels most at home. Recently, Nate has been reflecting on his poker-playing pals, and he realized many of them are part of a broader community of analytically-minded, ultr...
Aug 12, 2024•43 min
Effective altruism — the brand of philanthropy where you try to do the most good for the greatest number of people with the resources you have — has gotten a bad rap lately due to its association with Sam Bankman-Fried, the disgraced crypto wunderkind who was once hailed as the movement's poster child. But is the bad press fair? Today, we explore that question by revisiting our conversation with Will MacAskill, Oxford professor of philosophy, leading figure in the movement, and author of "What W...
Aug 08, 2024•1 hr 13 min
Today, social psychologist Devon Price makes the intriguing and ultimately hopeful case that laziness is a myth, a lie, a pernicious trap with no other purpose than to make us feel lousy for not doing more. Host: Rufus Griscom Guest: Devon Price (This episode first aired in October 2021.) 🎁 Get 20% off a Next Big Idea Club subscription when you use code PODCAST at https://nextbigideaclub.com/ 📩 We recently launched a daily Substack! Sign up today at https://bookoftheday.nextbigideaclub.com/
Aug 01, 2024•1 hr 6 min
Humans have been imbibing for thousands of years. What has drinking contributed to society? What is it doing to our health? Guests: Edward Slingerland (”Drunk: How We Sipped, Danced, and Stumbled Our Way to Civilization”) and Susan Dominus (”Is That Drink Worth It to You?”) 🎙️ Check out Edward’s previous appearance on the show here 📱 Download the Next Big Idea Club app and use code PODCAST to get 20% off: https://nextbigideaclub.com/app/
Jul 25, 2024•1 hr
Over 2,000 years ago, Epicurus, a Greek philosopher, made a simple yet bold claim. The key to the good life, he said, is to pursue pleasure and avoid pain. Is it really that easy? To answer that question, we turn to Emily Austin, a professor of philosophy at Wake Forest and author of “Living for Pleasure: An Epicurean Guide to Life.” (This episode first aired in January 2023.)
Jul 22, 2024•1 hr 14 min
Back in the 1700s, in a spa town outside of London, Thomas Bayes, a Presbyterian minister and amateur mathematician, invented a formula that lets you figure out how likely something is to happen based on what you already know. It changed the world. Today, pollsters use it to forecast election results and bookies to predict Super Bowl scores. For neuroscientists, it explains how our brains work; for computer scientists, it's the principle behind artificial intelligence. In this episode, we explor...
Jul 18, 2024•53 min
