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:

The difference between creative people and you: Tolerance for useful restriction | David Epstein May 29, 2026

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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.

The quantum realm, the cosmological realm, and the multiverse, in 69 minutes May 22, 2026

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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.

Bessel van der Kolk: The body’s silent record of trauma May 19, 2026

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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.

Michael Spitzer: How music rewires the brain May 08, 2026

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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.

Nicole LePera: The child who learned to disappear is still running your adult relationships May 01, 2026

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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.

Mark Manson: How to pull yourself out of a cheap dopamine spiral Apr 24, 2026

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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.

Brad Stulberg: Getting 1% better every day is mathematically impossible. Do this instead Apr 17, 2026

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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.

Rachel Yehuda: Your brain changes after trauma. Science can reverse it Apr 14, 2026

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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.

David Linden: The bizarre phenomena that medicine struggles to explain Apr 03, 2026

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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.

Michelle Thaller: Modern physics is forcing us to rethink existence Mar 27, 2026

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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.