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Society & Culture

The Next Big Idea

by Next Big Idea Club

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Latest episodes

  • Danny Meyer on "What Could Possibly Go Right"

    October 29, 2026 · 1 hr 10 min

    What does it take to turn a money-losing hot dog cart into a global empire? Surprisingly, it starts with how you treat your employees. Danny Meyer, the legendary restaurateur behind Shake Shack, Union Square Cafe, and Gramercy Tavern, has…

  • Best Of: Stop Wasting Your Talent and Start Making a Difference

    October 26, 2026 · 1 hr 21 min

    What if everything we've been told about having a successful career is wrong? ⁠Rutger Bregman⁠ thinks most of us are wasting our working lives and argues we should stop trying to get rich and start trying to solve the world's problems…

  • Musk, Bezos, and the Battle to Control Space

    October 22, 2026 · 54 min

    For the last few years, the global space race has been dominated by two billionaires: Elon Musk and Jeff Bezos. They’ve launched thousands of satellites, designed lunar landing modules, and drawn up ambitious plans to build AI data centers…

  • The Modern Science of Ancient Wisdom

    October 19, 2026 · 1 hr 21 min

    June Cohen has spent her career shaping the future, from bringing TED Talks online to launching Masters of Scale. But she has come to believe that some of the best solutions to what ails us today lie in our distant past. Our ancestors…

  • How to Become the Most Interesting Person You Know

    October 15, 2026 · 1 hr 3 min

    We all carry around invisible lists, private ledgers of disappointment — the talents we wish we had, the hobbies we’d like to take up, the passion projects we keep meaning to kickstart. Ravi Gupta has one of those lists, and nine years…

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  • Feel the AGI: Kevin Roose on the Strange, Intoxicating Race to Superintelligence

    October 8, 2026 · 1 hr 18 min

    What’s really fueling the race to build superintelligence? Science? Idealism? Money? Try spite. “These guys hate each other,” says Kevin Roose. “It’s grudges all the way down.” Those rivalries, it turns out, have pushed AI forward faster…

  • Daniel Pink and Angela Duckworth on Friction-Maxxing, Becoming a Mentor Magnet and the Problem with Solo Striving

    October 5, 2026 · 56 min

    Our curator Daniel Pink recently sat down with Angela Duckworth to chat about her new book, Situated: Find the People and Places That Bring Out Your Best. Although we just had Angela on the show, we couldn’t resist sharing this…

  • The One Word That Explains Progress

    October 1, 2026 · 1 hr 9 min

    Martin Seligman founded the positive psychology movement. Now, at 84, he’s shaking up the field all over again. He’s got a new book out. It’s called Agency. And in it, he says, he’s trying to “found a new field.” It’s called psychohistory…

  • Angela Duckworth Now Thinks "Grit" Wasn't the Whole Story

    September 28, 2026 · 1 hr 10 min

    Ten years ago, Angela Duckworth became one of the world’s most influential psychologists by making the case for grit. Though talent matters, she argued, it’s passion and perseverance that turn potential into achievement. Now she’s back…

  • AI Has Gone Rogue. Here’s What We Should Do About It.

    September 24, 2026 · 58 min

    "This Is Really Bad." That's the not-so-comforting headline of Stephen Witt's mega-viral New York Times essay about a dawning realization among Silicon Valley researchers that "AI may no longer be entirely within human control." The piece…

  • You Don't Have Free Will. That's Good News.

    September 21, 2026 · 1 hr 7 min

    Do we have free will? Do we have a choice in what we do? Philosophers and theologians have debated these questions for centuries; Robert Sapolsky answered them when he was 14. Free will, he concluded, simply does not exist. Robert is now…

  • The Art of Fighting

    September 17, 2026 · 1 hr 7 min

    We’ve gotten very good at cutting people off. But have we forgotten how to work through our differences? In The Art of Fighting, bestselling author and conflict resolution expert Priya Parker challenges the idea that disagreement is a…

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About the show

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