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Develop leaders in your organization with Big Think+ classes
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Create premium thought leadership and storytelling with Big Think Creative
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Live Events
Bring your people and ideas to life with Big Think Events
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1hr 24mins
“There are at least three very much interrelated misconceptions about trauma right now.”
In this excerpt from "The First Eight," Congressman Jim Clyburn shares the story of Robert Smalls, the man whose audience with Lincoln may have saved the Union army.
Welcome to The Nightcrawler — a weekly newsletter from Eric Markowitz covering tech, innovation, and long-term thinking.
In 2017, a kilonova sent light and gravitational waves across the Universe. Here on Earth, there was a 1.7 second signal arrival delay. Why?
Ryan Holiday on why wisdom depends on failure, experimentation, and the courage to admit when we’re wrong.
NASA’s Caleb Scharf talks with Big Think about life’s long experiment in expansion.
The greatest companies navigate change at speed and make it stick at scale. Here’s how IBM started that journey in 2012.
Governance scholar and University of Pittsburgh professor Jennifer Brick Murtazashvili, Ph.D. on the forces that decide whether conflicted nations unify or unravel.
John Templeton Foundation
8mins
“The purpose of a coach is to not be the one to set the goals, but instead to say, "Here are the kinds of goals we can work our way through.””
3mins
The brain is an “illusion factory.” Here’s what that means for our perception of time.
Unlikely Collaborators
Dark matter, dark energy, and the Big Bang are all part of a solid scientific foundation. Here's why popular media often claims otherwise.
13mins
“Chance invents and natural selection propagates that chance invention.”
Members
In the operating room, success isn’t about one person but the teamwork behind them. Surgeon Atul Gawande says those lessons under pressure apply far beyond medicine.
What if the first search for life beyond Earth actually succeeded?
Former tech founder Scott Britton wants to shatter the binary myth that separates driving ambition from inner development.
12mins
The hospital where Rainn Wilson’s wife and son nearly died became his own personal holy site. There, he discovered that the sacred can exist in places we least expect it.
During his talk at A Night of Awe and Wonder, he explained how the awe we feel in moments of courage and love is moral beauty — and following it might be the start of our spiritual revolution.
Planets grow from protostellar material in disks, leading to full-grown planetary systems in time. At last, the final gap has been filled.
We chat with Mark Klarzynski, founder of PEAK:AIO, on how his company became an international player in data storage for the age of AI.
Until the late 20th century, there wasn't a truly universal standard. Under our current definition, everyone agrees on what "one meter" is.
Do aliens speak the same physics that we do, with similar laws, observables, and underlying mathematics. Maybe not, argues Daniel Whiteson.