Brené Brown and Adam Grant have been watching the same YouTube videos as the rest of us. They get the same barrage of supposedly educational clips from men and women pitching simple hacks to fix your life — to seem more appealing to prospective partners, or to wield more influence at work, or to set firmer boundaries with a family member.
“It’s a lot of agenda pushing and grift,” said Brown, with palpable disdain, in a joint video interview with Grant last week. “People over-promising that they can solve complex problems, or leaving you hanging for insights until they can sell you something.”
Brown and Grant aren’t in the life-hack business. They’re academics and public intellectuals, known for best-selling books (hers, “The Gifts of Imperfection” and “Daring Greatly”; his, “Originals” and “Think Again”) and viral TED Talks that ground insights in reams of research.
But with a new weekly video podcast, “The Curiosity Shop,” debuting March 19, they’re diving into the algorithmic swamp, aiming to inject regular doses of rationality and humility into popular discourse.
“We have been fighting this battle for a long time, trying to figure out how to share deep, evidence-based content on platforms that are really not designed for that,” said Grant, pointing to X — where he has nearly 900,000 followers — as an example. “There are lots of people who are just making things up on YouTube who have audiences sticking around for three hours at a time,” he said. “I think we can put together a solid hour of quality insights that will keep people engaged.”
“The Curiosity Shop,” a reference to the Charles Dickens novel “The Old Curiosity Shop” and the type of oddities purveyor it describes, will feature Brown and Grant delving into topical subjects from a research-based but compassionate perspective. Some episode ideas from early brainstorms have included the psychology behind the different paths to Olympic gold taken by the figure skater Alyssa Liu and the freestyle skier Eileen Gu, how visual advertisements hijack the brain and how a person’s ideology can shade their perception of reality itself.
More than their previous podcasts — Grant’s “WorkLife” and “ReThinking,” Brown’s “Unlocking Us” and “Dare to Lead” — which featured interviews with experts about big ideas, the content of “The Curiosity Shop” will be shaped by the news. The aim for the show, both hosts said, is to be both “timely and timeless.”
“We’ll take something that one of us is curious about in that moment and come at it from different angles and pull it apart,” Brown said. “I don’t think it will be a show where we’re recording on Monday about something that happened on Sunday. But you’re going to feel like we’re talking about something that you’re in the middle of dealing with right now.”
The podcast is being produced and distributed by Vox Media — maker of shows like “Pivot,” “Where Should We Begin? With Esther Perel” and “Today, Explained” — and will be published on YouTube and traditional podcast platforms, where an audio-only version will be available. Ray Chao, a senior vice president for audio and video at Vox who previously worked with Brown on “Unlocking Us,” said the hosts had “immediate natural chemistry.”
“They’re friends and they obviously deeply respect each other, but they’re not afraid to express their opinions and call each other out when they disagree,” Chao said. “You can hear one learning from the other in real time, which is the same thing that we’re doing as listeners.”
Although they followed similar tracks from academia to the mainstream, Brown and Grant are something of an odd couple. She likes to dig deep into the emotional core of a subject, while he prefers to discuss theory. She likes to FaceTime, he’s more of an email guy.
“He just can’t get enough of all the touchy-feely, emotional, heart work from me,” Brown joked on the video call.
Even the suggestion made Grant’s eyes go wide.
“I think I might have just emoted,” he said.
Initially, the two were closer to enemies.
Their first meaningful interaction was in 2016, when Grant published an essay in The New York Times (pushing back against “authenticity” as a personal and professional ideal) that quoted a line from Brown’s work and implied that it was “terrible advice.” Brown posted a thorough rebuttal on LinkedIn a day later, calling Grant’s essay “gimmicky and opportunistic.” Although Grant wrote a response clarifying his position and attempted to make amends, the Brown refused to speak with him for four years.
“I was Grade-A pissed off and not having it,” said Brown, adding that she had read Grant’s original essay as covertly chauvinistic. “It felt very binary to me — male versus female, psychology versus social work, rational versus emotional.”
Mutual friends intervened, urging Brown to meet with Grant and insisting that they would get along if they got to know each other. During the coronavirus pandemic, he reached out to see if she would give a remote talk to a women’s sports team he was working with (the team’s request), and Brown agreed.
“There were just so many people who were so much more deserving of being angry at,” she said. “And even when we were having our stalemate, his books were always the ones that I underlined and dog-eared the most.”
On their new show, they hope to model how people who aren’t always naturally aligned can still have a productive dialogue.
“I don’t think I’ve ever enjoyed finding out I was wrong more than when I’m in conversation with Brené,” Grant said. “And we definitely need more of that in the world.”