Search
Latest Videos
A library of interviews with the world’s biggest thinkers.
3mins
“We love, as a culture, to attack messengers when the message is something that makes us feel uncomfortable,” says journalist Wesley Lowery.
5mins
Harvard bioethics specialist Glenn Cohen considers the complex question of whether humans should mix their genetic material with other animals to create chimeras.
4mins
Amy Herman teaches visual intelligence to doctors, intelligence analysts and the NYPD. Here she runs through how to make decisions you can defend under questioning: ones that are perceptive and informed.
2mins
The impulse to create art and music comes from deep evolutionary drives, explains Bill Nye the Science Guy. In the animal kingdom, song and visual displays are great tools for, um, flirting.
9mins
The first time you think of something in a totally new way, says Alan Eustace, people will think you're crazy.
2mins
Do big sales and shopping mania keep workers from their families the day after Thanksgiving? That's a common moral high ground, but it ignores the real needs of those on hourly wages.
3mins
Checking email and being on social media gives us a reward similar to playing slot machines, or fishing. We never know what's going to happen next, and that's what makes it so compelling.
15mins
"Behind every rise of fascism is a failed revolution," said the Frankfurt School thinker Walter Benjamin. Here, Slavoj Žižek revives that statement in the context of the failed left.
1mins
Bill Nye the Science Guy says we all go through a phase of disliking school. But that's because adolescence is a tough time in life for everyone. Thankfully, that phase is only temporary.
2mins
Washington Post reporter Wesley Lowery says the social media giant isn't excused from making responsible editorial choices just because it wishes to see itself as a technology company first.
5mins
The shooting of Philando Castile, captured on Facebook Live, was a watershed moment because it brought technology to bear on our emotions, complicating the good guy vs. bad guy narrative.
6mins
Fad diets are with us now, and will always be with us, says health and wellness expert Jillian Michaels. This despite the fact that weight loss is a simple science: eat less, exercise more.
7mins
The maxim "One Man, One Vote" is so enshrined in our understanding of democracy that its weaknesses are difficult to see. Yet weaknesses it has.
4mins
There are two people inside everyone: an artist and a bureaucrat. You'll need both to succeed in life, so how can you get beyond your apparent limitations? Take a lesson from Pixar Animation Studios.
5mins
Journalist Jelani Cobb considers the impact of Obama’s presidency on race in America. Did he make good on the promise of change that got him elected?
4mins
The happiest moments of our lives are when we lose ourselves – in art, in exercise, in love. According to Harvard's Diane Paulus, being able to 'play' and engage in something outside of ourselves is a valuable respite from our egos.
4mins
Columbia professor Tim Wu came to the Big Think studio to talk about clickbait. What happened next will shock you.
1mins
Farewell Moon, we barely knew you. Bill Nye knows the Moon is moving away from Earth 1.48 inches per year. Will it keep drifting further away, and what happens to Earth when it does?
8mins
Slovenian philosopher Slavoj Žižek thinks the U.S. political machinery is truly broken. He guides a verbal tour through the failure of manufactured consent, the appeal of human baseness, and politics as a real struggle of life and death.
4mins
Physicists' ideas about the nature and existence of time may seem incongruent with our experience of it, but author James Gleick makes a case for why we need to keep an open mind.