Stay ConnectedThe 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.
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When Walter Isaacson, the legendary biographer of Steve Jobs, Albert Einstein, Benjamin Franklin, and Leonardo da Vinci, started shadowing Elon Musk, he found himself following "a guy who was one of the most popular people on the planet, and ended up with a guy who's the most controversial." Today on the show, Isaacson unpacks the transformation.
(This episode first aired in September 2023.)
Andrew Ross Sorkin’s new book, 1929: Inside the Greatest Crash in Wall Street History—and How It Shattered a Nation, is an eye-opening account of the forces that led to the worst financial crisis in history and the lessons that disaster can teach us about today’s economy.
(7:09) Life before the crash
(8:58) How Americans developed a taste for leverage
(17:10) What happened on Black Thursday
(20:05) Why so few people saw the crash coming
(26:23) Could the crash have been averted?
(37:13) Andrew’s fascination with money
(39:22) What if financial bubbles are a feature, not a bug?
(41:35) Could we be headed for another 1929?
(45:00) The dangers of leverage
(53:16) How the blockchain will revolutionzie finance
Nick Thompson is the CEO of The Atlantic. But he moonlights as a damn good runner.
At 44, he ran a marathon in 2 hours and 29 minutes, making him one of the fastest marathoners his age on the planet. He later set an American age group record in the 50K. He has run in blazing heat with ice tucked into his hat and in frigid cold with Vaseline dabbed on his nose. He's run up sunny mountain trails and down dark city streets. He has run, and run, and run some more.
His relationship with the sport is the subject of his new memoir, The Running Ground. It's a book about the fragile boundary between love and obsession, between progress and suffering. And it's about the way we all run in loops: away from the past and then back toward it.
(4:35) Nick reads from The Running Ground
(8:00) On his father: "Not a simple guy"
(16:34) How the sport finds you
(30:00) A personal best, then a cancer diagnosis
(40:56) The four states of running bliss (and how to reach them)
(46:29) How Nick got faster in his forties
(49:14) The big takeaway
(50:33) Want to start running? Do this.
(53:14) Is running actually good for you?
As promised, today we’re bringing you a full-length interview with Steven Pinker about his new book, When Everyone Knows That Everyone Knows . . .: Common Knowledge and the Mysteries of Money, Power, and Everyday Life.
What is common knowledge? For Steve, it is not conventional wisdom. Instead, it’s when everyone knows something and everyone knows that and everyone knows it. That may sound loopy, but the implications of common knowledge — how it’s produced, sustained, and manipulated — are profound.
“It's common knowledge,” Steve tells Rufus, “that makes humans human. Humans are not solitary. What makes humans humans is that we coordinate in groups — from couples to nations to, in some cases, the entire world — and I think common knowledge is the underpinning, the cement, the foundation of that ability to coordinate.”
(8:00) Why “coffee” doesn’t just mean coffee
(14:40) What blushes and laughter unintentionally reveal
(30:39) The real reason brands spend millions on Super Bowl ads
(35:00) How common knowledge explains cancel culture
(48:43) What happens to society when norms collapse?
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Caleb is joined by Sam Kass, former senior food policy advisor to President Obama and the chef who cooked dinner for the first family most nights. Now a partner at a venture capital firm investing in food and agriculture tech, Sam has a new book out, The Last Supper: How to Overcome the Coming Food Crisis.
The situation, he says, is bleak. Almonds, artichokes, chocolate, coffee, oysters, rice, wine — all at risk due to climate change. And that’s not even close to the full list. Our food system is both driving the climate crisis and being devastated by it. But Sam argues we can still avert the worst if we start with culture, fix our policies, and deploy the right technology.
(4:00) Cooking for the Obamas
(7:49) How vulnerable is our food supply?
(12:45) Can fixing the food system bring us together?
(24:29) The food policies we need
(27:38) Are we making America healthy again?
(35:42) The technologies that can make a difference
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Thoughts? Email us at podcast@nextbigideaclub.com
Dave Blundin has co-founded 23 companies, co-hosts the Moonshots podcast, runs the VC firm Link Ventures, teaches at MIT, and has been building neural networks since the 1980s. His take: “[AI is] under-hyped. It's absolutely going to change the world in the next couple of years more than any change in human history. There's nothing even vaguely comparable to it.”
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(7:37) “Stop sleeping. Rush to everything you do.”
(15:16) Why he started building neural nets at MIT in the 1980s
(16:19) Should you finish college or start a business?
(20:38) Why best friends are the best co-founders
(25:00) San Francisco is still king, but Boston is AI startup central
(28:06) “The chip shortage is going to be incredibly bad.”
(34:26) The AI energy shortage
(36:32) Are we in an AI bubble?
(55:44) The case for human immortality before 2050
(1:02:00) Advice for first-time founders (and second-time, and 23rd-time)
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💿 Catch up on our other AI episodes with this Spotify playlist
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Angus Fletcher has a PhD in literature from Yale and teaches English at Ohio State. He’s passionate about Shakespeare. He probably owns a tweed jacket. In other words, he’s the last person you’d expect to receive the Army’s fourth-highest civilian honor.
But when he’s not parsing King Lear or dissecting Hamlet, Angus is pioneering research into narrative cognition — our ability to think in stories — and how it can make us smarter. When the Army put his theories to the test, his methods reshaped how soldiers learn to think clearly under pressure and act decisively in volatile environments.
Now, he has distilled this work into a new book called Primal Intelligence. Malcolm Gladwell says it's confirmation that Angus "has never had an uninteresting thought." We think you’ll agree.
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(05:43) What is Primal Intelligence?
(8:24) Computers Think in Probabilities. Humans Think in Possibilities.
(11:08) The Art of Intuition: Spotting Exceptions to Rules
(29:59) Why Storytelling is the Essence of Human Intelligence
(34:13) How to Plan
(35:38) The Role of Emotion in Decision Making
(45:27) How to Use Common Sense to ‘Tune Your Anxiety’
(49:34) What Great Innovators Have in Common
(51:25) The Best Way to Become a Better Communicator
(54:22) Don’t Freak Out About A.I. Do Freak Out the State of Your Intelligence.
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Harvard psychologist Steven Pinker shares five key insights from his brand new book, When Everyone Knows That Everyone Knows. He reveals how “common knowledge” — the hidden force of knowing what others know — shapes everything from financial bubbles and political revolutions to why we say “Netflix and chill.” Then we revisit our 2021 conversation with Steve about rationality, where he explains why smart people believe dumb things, why we're terrible at assessing risk, and how our species can be both brilliantly rational and spectacularly irrational at the same time.
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Today's AI runs on neural networks, a design originally inspired by the human brain. As these systems grow more sophisticated, they're raising a profound question: Even if they don't work exactly like our brains, could something resembling a "mind" eventually emerge from the machines we're building?
Guests: Gaurav Suri and Jay McClelland
Book: The Emergent Mind: How Intelligence Arises in People and Machines
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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 75th week on the New York Times’ bestseller list, the book reveals a startling truth: Starting in 2012, teen depression rates suddenly spiked 150% worldwide, perfectly coinciding with the moment smartphones and social media conquered childhood.
But Haidt doesn't just diagnose the crisis. He offers a roadmap out with norms, guidelines, and policy suggestions that parents, schools, and communities are already implementing with remarkable success.
Further Listening:
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