Education

The Big Think Interview

Big Think is the leading source of expert-driven, actionable, educational content — with thousands of videos helping you get smarter, faster. Get actionable lessons from the world’s greatest thinkers & doers. Our experts are either disrupting or leading their respective fields. We aim to help you explore the big ideas and core skills that define knowledge in the 21st century, so you can apply them to the questions and challenges in your own life.

Latest Episodes:

Young people say their lives feel fake. Here’s why | Arthur Brooks Aug 07, 2026

Show notes

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.

Giulia Enders: The old-fashioned mindset that gets in the way of our healing Jul 31, 2026

Show notes

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.

A philosopher's guide to escaping your own echo chamber Jul 24, 2026

Show notes

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.

Paul Bloom: The psychology of morality, perversion, and revenge Jul 17, 2026

Show notes

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.

The myth of the cult of genius, in 48 minutes Jul 10, 2026

Show notes

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.

250 million years of dinosaur history, in 104 minutes Jul 03, 2026

Show notes

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 neuroscientist’s guide to protecting your brain, in 58 minutes Jun 26, 2026

Show notes

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.

Tim Spector: The science of the gut microbiome and chronic inflammation Jun 19, 2026

Show notes

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.

The 3-part habit loop your brain is running 40% of the time | Charles Duhigg Jun 12, 2026

Show notes

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.

Vanessa Van Edwards: 7 cues that make you instantly more likable Jun 05, 2026

Show notes

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.

Our TOPPODCAST Picks

Follow Us

Stay Connected

The Big Think Interview

Related Podcasts

Links

Stay Connected