The Big Think Interview

In 1936, a shipyard worker in Hamburg kept his arms folded while hundreds of men around him raised theirs for Hitler. Luke Burgis, author of Wanting and The One in the 99, wants to know what it takes to become that person, and he traces the answer back to the family. Drawing on psychiatrist Murray Bowen’s distinction between the solid self and the pseudo self, Burgis shows how anxiety and opinion pass through groups by contagion, and how our screens have multiplied the crowds we have to stand within.

For decades, atheists have used one move to dismantle the case for God: swap in an evil one and show that the arguments work just as well. Philosopher Jack Symes was convinced by it, and was 50,000 words into a book defending atheism when he noticed that the exercise kept tipping toward goodness. He threw out the manuscript and started over.

From von Neumann's blueprint, which predated the discovery of DNA, to viral genes that now help form our memories and placentas, Blaise Agüera y Arcas argues that function defines life more than material does, and that AI belongs in the same story. He explains why he thinks AGI is already here, and gives a blueprint for using AI without sacrificing your own mind.

Jonathan Rauch, author and senior fellow at the Brookings Institution, dives into the philosophy of liberalism, how it has created and transformed our institutions, and the state of truth in a world rife with misinformation.

Most of us can recite the benefits of exercise, gratitude, and patience while doing none of it. Tal Ben-Shahar calls this the Knowing-Doing gap, and our typical interventions, like retreats and month-long overhauls keep it open.

Two-time debate champion Bo Seo breaks down why arguments fail: the 4 bad-faith personas that hijack conversations, a four-question framework for picking fights worth having, and the surprising Cold War standoff between Nixon and Khrushchev that shows what staying composed under pressure actually looks like.

OBGYN Jen Gunter unpacks the science, history, and mythology of menstruation and menopause, and offers a guidebook to navigate the modern healthcare landscape.

Talent isn’t a gift we're born with – it’s a signal we’ve been reading completely wrong. Author Daniel Coyle breaks down the common traits shared by successful people, and why environment, not innate ability, is the variable that ties them all together.

Terence Tao has spent decades solving problems most people can't even state, and he says he's never had a single eureka moment. In this conversation, the UCLA mathematician and Fields Medalist breaks math down to six essential ideas: numbers, algebra, geometry, probability, analysis, and dynamics.

Every marriage’s disintegration is marked by the same four warning signs that researchers John and Julie Gottman can spot before a couple even finishes their first sentence. The founders of the Gottman Institute break down decades of lab research on why relationships collapse, and what to look for in a partner so they can make it 50 years by your side.

Stress has a branding problem. Clinical psychologist Dr. Lisa Damour argues that most of us have the wrong relationship with discomfort entirely, treating stress like a malfunction instead of what it actually is: a signal that we're growing.

Arthur Brooks studies happiness for a living, and he says the epidemic of depression and anxiety among young adults comes down to one culprit: a meaning crisis. Brooks walks through the biology of falling in love, the real formula behind human suffering, and why a Harvard study spanning 85 years found deep relationships to be the single strongest predictor of a happy old age.

Physician Giulia Enders spent years studying the gut before realizing no organ works alone. Here, she walks through 5 body parts — the lung, the immune system, the skin, the muscles, and the brain — and what each one reveals about how we work, heal, and recover.

Philosopher Jonny Thomson walks through Dietrich Bonhoeffer's 3 conditions for the kind of stupidity that destroys societies: outsourcing your thinking to an authority, willful ignorance, and conformity. He shows how each one shows up today, from AI answering our moral questions to political parties enforcing loyalty over conviction.

Psychologist Paul Bloom has spent his career studying the parts of human nature we often feel uncomfortable examining: why loneliness feels like starvation, why people are drawn to behaving poorly, why revenge feels righteous until it destroys everything. Bloom argues that the US doesn't actually have a loneliness epidemic, it has a solitude epidemic, one being accelerated by AI companionship.

A philosopher who walked away from an elite academic career to spend 3 years washing dishes in a monastery says that intellectual life has nothing to do with degrees. Zena Hitz argues that the real philosophers are taxi drivers, office clerks, prisoners: Everyday people who exist outside the cult of academia.

Steve Brusatte, the paleontologist behind Jurassic World's science and author of The Rise and Fall of the Dinosaurs and The Story of Birds, walks through what fossils actually prove versus what Hollywood invented. Brusatte traces dinosaurs back to footprints smaller than a house cat, found in Poland just after the worst mass extinction in Earth's history, and explains why those early survivors spent millions of years as background characters next to car-sized salamanders and armored crocodiles.

A retired Japanese engineer once memorized pi to over 111,000 digits using nothing but storytelling and visualization. He also forgot his wife's birthday that same year. Neuroscientist Lisa Genova uses this contradiction to dispel a persistent collective fear: that ordinary forgetting is an early warning sign of Alzheimer's.

Could depression, dementia, and poor oral health all have one uniting link? The gut microbiome contains 200 more genes than human cells, and research shows its strong impact on mental illness, brain health, and chronic inflammation. Professor of epidemiology at King's College London Tim Spector breaks down the science of how gut microbes produce the chemicals that shape your mood, your immune system, and your cognitive health, and why the standard Western diet has been systematically destroying them for 50 years.

About 40% of everything you do today is a habit your brain automated, and the neural loop driving it doesn't distinguish between good and bad habits. Charles Duhigg, author of The Power of Habit and Supercommunicators, explains why trying to eliminate a bad habit is neurologically futile and why the habit that scares you most irrationally is probably the one change that rewires everything else.

You only have a few seconds to make a first impression, and the non-verbal cues you’re sending may be silently working against any kindness your words communicate. Charisma is learned, not innate, and even if you consider yourself an “awkward” person, you can still hack positive reception. Body language expert Vanessa van Edwards shares a genius formula to create a lasting first impression while debunking body-language myths and these mistakes you’re probably making in social situations.

David Epstein, author of Range and Inside the Box, walks through decades of research exploring why constraints, not freedom, are the engine behind creativity, focus, and breakthrough.

Astrophysicist Hakeem Oluseyi takes us from the quantum realm to the cosmological and out to the multiverse, answering physics’ underexplored questions. He digs through the actual nature of electrons, why your speed through space is always borrowed from your speed through time,and why the Andromeda Galaxy is visible to the naked eye, yet almost no one has looked for it.

Trauma doesn’t vanish when danger does. According to psychiatrist Bessel van der Kolk, the body acts as an archive, holding fear, pain, and survival instincts long after the moment passes. Van der Kolk explains why conventional treatments for trauma fall short, and the promising new pathways to healing that science is revealing.

Music is at least a million years older than language, yet we still see it solely through the lens of entertainment. Professor Michael Spitzer argues it's something closer to a biological system, one that was shaping the human body long before we had words for what we were feeling. Why does a chord you've never heard before make you want to cry? Why do babies respond to rhythm before they've heard a single song? Why does the same part of your brain that processes mortal danger also process musical beauty? The answers reach back 4 million years, and forward into a future where music may be prescribed like medicine.

Dr. Nicole LePera, the holistic psychologist and NYT bestselling author behind Reparenting the Inner Child, breaks down the 6 archetypes of childhood trauma. LePera explains why insight alone never produces lasting change and walks through the science of reparenting: The practice of stepping in as the adult presence you may never have had.

Most people are trying to solve the wrong problem, optimizing for happiness when happiness isn't actually a goal, it's a byproduct. Mark Manson, author of The Subtle Art of Not Giving a F*ck, argues that the entire self-help industry has been selling ephemeral highs: affirmations, visualizations, the relentless pursuit of feeling good. The research doesn't support it, and more importantly, neither does lived experience.

Most people chasing excellence are chasing the wrong thing entirely. Brad Stulberg argues that the 4am routines, optimization stacks, and recovery scores are just elaborate performance passed off as “excellence.” Stulberg breaks down the biology, philosophy, and psychology behind genuine excellence and how to reach it.

Trauma doesn't end when the danger does, and for decades, science couldn’t explain why. Rachel Yehuda, a leading PTSD researcher, has spent her career inside that question, uncovering how trauma leaves impressions on our genes, sometimes passing biological echoes on to the next generation. Now, she’s focused on a therapy that could actually break the chain.

Neuroscientist David Linden sheds light on the biology behind phenomena that medicine has long struggled to explain, from voodoo death and broken heart syndrome to the placebo effect, and why grief shows up in autopsy results. Linden also explores the rising GLP-1 drugs, their effects on addiction, and why they don’t work forever.

What if space and time aren't the backdrop of the universe, but a byproduct of it? NASA astronomer Michelle Thaller makes the case that quantum entanglement may be the underlying fabric from which spacetime itself emerges. This idea would mean that distance, gravity, and the passage of time are consequences of the deep interconnectedness created from the Big Bang.

Time feels obvious, but physics tells a stranger story about its existence: Theoretical physicist Jim Al-Khalili explores why our sense of time may be incredibly misleading, including the idea that past, present, and future might all exist at once.

We tend to imagine ancient life in broad strokes. But daily existence was built out of small, sensory details. The taste of staple foods, the smell of living spaces, the feel of handmade tools in your hands -- those experiences shaped the people of the past. Sam Kean examines how recreating those details brings history into sharper focus, rebuilding the foods and practices of the past and what that reveals about human adaptability. Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

We want to believe that love is guided by instinct, and that following our heart will lead us to our ideal soulmate. Alain de Botton argues that our romantic lives are shaped more by the emotional patterns we learned in childhood than by destiny. Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

Jill Tarter has spent a lifetime working on a question that resists answers: not whether we believe there is life beyond Earth, but the quest for undeniable proof. Tarter explains why SETI is really about technology, patience, and learning how to tell alien signals from our own. Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

The story of the chip is a story about geopolitics and scarcity. From $20 billion fabrication plants to machines built by a single Dutch firm, the supply chain behind your devices is both miraculous and astonishingly fragile. Chris Miller explains why the AI race, U.S.–China tensions, and the future of economic dominance, all rest on this tiny square of silicon. Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

Richard Reeves argues that this quiet male crisis has been decades in the making, and it’s not the simplistic story most people assume. From collapsing educational outcomes to shrinking roles in the labor market, men are struggling in ways that challenge our cultural narratives about progress. Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

We've inherited the history of Ancient Rome through movies, ruins, and shallow stories. The truth is far messier, says classicist Mary Beard. The hidden side of Roman life that screens rarely capture is chaotic; crowded streets teeming with Romans whose everyday lives were shaped by social hierarchies and familial obligations. Mary Beard unpacks what archaeology, literature, and even shoes tell us about the Romans’ daily lives. From the role of slaves in dressing elites to the rowdy crowds at chariot races, she shows how we’ve underestimated their complexity. Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

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6 ways to heal trauma without medication, from the author of “The Body Keeps the Score,” Bessel van der Kolk. Conventional psychiatric practices tell us that if we feel bad, take this drug and it will go away. But after years of research with some of the top psychiatric practitioners in the world, we’ve found that drugs simply don’t work that well for many, and our conventional ways of healing trauma need to change. In recent years, experts in the study of trauma have been experimenting with ‘new age’ healing mechanisms that are making massive waves for trauma patients. Some of these new healing methods include EDMR, yoga, theater and movement, neural feedback, and even psychedelics. Many of these methods have proven to be more effective than conventional pharmaceuticals. But just like any other health regimen, what works for you might not work for your friend or neighbor. New age trauma therapy is all an experiment, and after enough experimenting, something can eventually work, healing your trauma in a…

What is trauma? The author of “The Body Keeps the Score” explains, with Bessel van der Kolk. Contrary to popular belief, trauma is extremely common. We all have jobs, life events, and unpleasant situations causing us daily stress. But when your body continues to re-live that stress for days, weeks, months, or even years, that stress changes your brain, creating trauma inside your mind, and that trauma can eventually manifest in your physical body. As you can see, trauma isn’t what happens to you, but how you respond to the traumatic situation. Something that is traumatic to one person may be no big deal to the next. Whether something becomes traumatic or not has a great deal to do with who’s around you while you experience this event. Were you alone and scared, were you comforted by friends and family? The problem with trauma is that it starts when something happens to us, but that’s not where it stops - it changes your brain. Once your brain changes and you’re in constant fight or flight mode, it can be…

Train for any argument with Harvard’s former debate coach, Bo Seo. Bo Seo, an author and two-time world debate champion, believes our public conversations are in crisis. To Seo, our arguing skills have collectively atrophied over recent decades, resulting in bad arguments that have caused many people to lose faith in the idea that productive disagreements are even possible. That's why Seo suggests a framework called RISA — which stands for "Real, Important, Specific, and Aligned" — to help people pick their fights more wisely and to give conversations the best possible chance of success. RISA helps individuals find a better way to disagree. Seo believes that by making a contract with the other party and reminding them of the rules, conversations can be productive, and disagreements can lead to progress. Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

How a ‘heroic dose’ of psychedelics can be therapeutic, explained by a Johns Hopkins professor. Psychedelic research is enjoying a renaissance. Recent studies have shown that psychedelic drugs like LSD and psilocybin seem to be a safe and effective method for treating conditions like depression, anxiety, and post-traumatic stress disorder. And unlike common antidepressants, some people report long-lasting improvements in their mental health conditions after taking just one dose of psychedelics. What makes these substances so unique and powerful? That’s one of the driving questions behind the research of Matthew W. Johnson, who has conducted numerous studies on the nature of addiction, psychedelics, and other psychoactive substances. Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

Modern males are struggling. Author Richard Reeves outlines the three major issues boys and men face and shares possible solutions. Boys and men are falling behind. This might seem surprising to some people, and maybe ridiculous to others, considering that discussions on gender disparities tend to focus on the structural challenges faced by girls and women, not boys and men. But long-term data reveal a clear and alarming trend: In recent decades, American men have been faring increasingly worse in many areas of life, including education, workforce participation, skill acquisition, wages, and fatherhood. Gender politics is often framed as a zero-sum game: Any effort to help men takes away from women. But in his 2022 book Of Boys and Men, journalist and Brookings Institution scholar Richard V. Reeves argues that the structural problems contributing to male malaise affect everybody, and that shying away from these tough conversations is not a productive path forward. Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for…

The speed at which civilization is progressing has become overwhelming for modern humans and has caused what Jamie Wheal (author of Recapture the Rapture, founder of the Flow Genome Project, and host of the Collective Insights Podcast) calls a “collapse of meaning.” For many, Meaning 1.0 (organized religion) and Meaning 2.0 (modern liberalism) no longer provide the structure and guidance that they used to. "It does feel like the handrails, the things we used to look to for stability and security, have evaporated," says Wheal. "If we've experienced a collapse of meaning, how do we go about restoring it?"In order to reach Meaning 3.0—which Wheal says is a blend of traditional religion and modern liberalism without the promise of an escape—we need to focus on mending trauma, reconnecting with inspiration, and connecting better with one another. Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.