The Next Big Idea

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 developed extraordinarily sophisticated social technologies — what June calls “wisdom systems” — designed to meet our deepest human needs. To help us grieve, build t...

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 ago, the ex-Obama staffer decided to do something about it. Cut to the present. He’s a published novelist, dawn-patrol surfer, solid tennis player, and budding...

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 than any of them thinks is wise. Kevin would know. Until recently, he was a tech columnist at the New York Times and co-host of the massively popular Hard Fork po...

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 conversation too. It’s live. It’s loose. And it covers a lot of ground we didn’t get to last time — like what Michael Phelps's childhood ZIP code had to do with his 28 Olym...

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. “I'm after the rigorous possibility that we can use the tools of psychology to go back in history to ask the questions: What produces innovation? What produces...

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 with a new book called Situated that complicates that argument in a fascinating way. 🎥 The Next Big Idea is on YouTube! You can find our episodes here. 📱 Follow R...

"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 is a sobering account of the rogue-AI incidents that have everyone from Anthropic CEO Dario Amodei to King Charles warning of existential peril unless we slow do...

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 in his sixties. He has degrees from Harvard and Rockefeller University; he won a MacArthur “genius” award; and he’s a professor at Stanford, where he holds joint...

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 sign of a broken relationship. She argues that avoiding difficult conversations can quietly erode the very connections we’re trying to protect. The answer isn’t to f...

America was founded on a radical promise: all people are created equal. But for 250 years, some of the country’s most powerful thinkers have been arguing the opposite. In Country of Lords, historian Kim Phillips-Fein traces the largely forgotten intellectual tradition that has defended hierarchy, from the Founding Fathers and Gilded Age industrialists to today’s tech elite. She reveals how inequal...

Will Storr is the author of the dazzling books The Science of Storytelling and A Story Is a Deal, and in this episode, he tells us everything he knows about humanity’s greatest invention: story. More than just entertainment, Will argues, story is what we do and who we are. It’s how we make sense of the world, captivate, and persuade. And yet for all its power, storytelling isn’t some elusive magic...

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. "Thoreau's attempt to 'get back to nature,'" he and co-author Jonathan Van Belle wrote in their book, Henry at Work: Thoreau on Making a Living,...

How did a group of notoriously difficult French philosophers become intellectual rock stars on American college campuses — and how much do their ideas matter today?  In The Frenchmen, writer and editor Emily Eakin traces the unlikely rise of French theory and the thinkers who transformed how a generation understood language, truth, power, and identity. In this conversation with guest host Mic...

Democracy is in the dumps. OK, that's a bit dramatic. But it's definitely not working as well as it used to. Good thing Daron Acemoglu — Nobel laureate, MIT Institute Professor, and one of the world's most-cited economists — has a plan to fix it. Today on the show, he explains why liberal democracy has faltered in the post-industrial age and makes the case for upgrading it to a new "working-class...

What if creativity isn’t a talent you’re born with, but a muscle you’ve simply stopped using? In Daily Creative, Blythe Harris and Mallory May make the case that everyone is creative — even the people convinced they can’t draw, paint, write, or make anything “good.” The real problem is that perfectionism, routine, and our obsession with getting things right have trained many of us to stop experime...

Want to be a better leader? Start by doing less. In her new book, Leadership Intelligence, Caroline Webb shows how smart delegation, ruthless prioritization, and the right time management techniques can help you make better decisions. In this episode, Caroline and Rufus discuss how to be a better leader by using your time more intentionally, delegating work you should no longer own, and helping yo...

Today, we're revisiting Rufus's conversation with Yuval Noah Harari about his book Nexus. It's Harari at his best — a soaring overview of human history that turns, almost imperceptibly, into a gripping argument about the world we are building right now. The questions he raises about how AI affects our politics are even more relevant now than they were back then. At the time, Harari warned that AI...

Your brain is a master storyteller. The problem? It’s also an unreliable narrator. We like to think our beliefs are built on facts, logic, and careful reasoning. But psychologist and author Owen Fitzpatrick argues that the process often works in reverse: we decide what feels true, then search for evidence that proves us right. This can reinforce limiting beliefs, fuel political polarization, and m...

We’ve had many bracing thinkers on this show, but Sara Walker might take the cake. A physicist and astrobiologist at Arizona State University, her book Life as No One Knows It: The Physics of Life's Emergence is a thrilling exploration of life's origins and the search for it across the cosmos. This episode first aired in December 2024. 🎥 The Next Big Idea is now on YouTube! You can find our episo...

We’ve optimized nearly every part of modern life. So why does it feel like we’re missing the experience of actually living it? In The Small Stuff, Ian Bogost argues that our obsession with happiness, productivity, and efficiency has stripped everyday life of something essential: gratification, the immediate pleasure of physically engaging with the world around us. Today, he makes the case for redi...

We live in a world that worships talent, a world that cheers natural athletes, exalts child prodigies, and venerates virtuosos. But admiring people who are blessed with innate abilities can lead us to underestimate the range of skills that we can learn and how good we can become. As Adam Grant explains in his new book, “Hidden Potential,” growth is not about the genius you possess — it’s about the...

We've spent the last few years watching AI transform the digital world. Now it's coming for the physical one. Humanoid robots are leaving the lab and entering homes, factories, and workplaces. But are we witnessing another ChatGPT moment, or are these machines still years away from becoming truly useful? Journalist Stephen Witt has spent months inside the world's leading robotics companies to find...

Why do some people seem to create opportunities wherever they go while others spend years waiting for the right break? According to Cate Hall — lawyer turned poker player turned drug addict turned CEO of a $3B foundation — the difference isn't luck. It's the ability to question assumptions, reject the default path, and realize the world is far more malleable than it seems. In this episode, Rufus a...

In the age of AI, endless information, and instant certainty, philosopher Lani Watson argues that questions — not answers — are humanity's greatest intellectual advantage.  Today, she explains why curiosity is a biological superpower, why schools unintentionally teach us to stop questioning, and how learning to embrace a question-oriented mindset can make us better thinkers, leaders, and huma...

First, a few numbers. This year Amazon, Microsoft, Alphabet, and Meta will spend more than $700 billion building AI infrastructure. There are 1,500 data centers in development across the country. AI-linked stocks make up at least 40% of the S&P 500. These are the kinds of numbers that make some economists jumpy. If this whole AI thing doesn't pan out, they warn, we're headed for the mother of all...