Think Again A Big Think Podcast

While you live, shine. Have no mourning at all. Life exists a short while And time demands its fee. – From a 2000 year old tombstone in (then) Greek-speaking Asia Minor I’d like to do a little free-association exercise with you. I’m going to say three words and I’d like you to speak or write down all the words that come to mind as a result. No filtering. No judgment. Ready? American Pop Culture. Go!  . . . Ok. Here’s what I got: Kanye Trump Gun Meme YouTube That’s pretty sad, I suppose. And maybe it anecdotally, non-scientifically supports a claim made by my guest today that culture and music, once mutually dependent, have become totally unmoored and lost in the age of globalism. And that the sounds we make and market today just don’t have anything like the healing power that was music’s purpose for thousands of years. Christopher C. King is a writer, Grammy—winning music producer, and something of an ethnomusicologist. His obsessive collecting of rare ‘78s led him to discover the music of Epirus, a re

The places we live in shape us. I don’t care who you are how indomitable your will…your spirit is in dialogue with the place you live. For example, I live in New York City, a place I wrapped around me like a second skin when I was 18 years old. Back then New York made me feel strong, cool, infinitely removed from the suburbs I grew up in. I’ve been here for 25 years and at this point what I mostly notice is the claustrophobic public spaces, the smallness of the sky. What do you feel when you hear the word ‘Florida’? Do the pleasure centers of your brain light up, imagining palm trees and pristine beaches? Or does your amygdala kick in as you imagine the ancillary costs of a week at Disney World? My guest today is the writer Lauren Groff. In her vivid, dreamlike new book of short stories, Florida is a humid, seething organism that wants to eat you. Snake-infested. Full of sinkholes. A thing to resist, get lost in, surrender to, and sometimes, temporarily escape. Surprise conversation-starter clips in this e

What is food? It’s nourishment. It’s comfort. It’s culture. It’s art. For millions of people, it’s not something you waste much time thinking about. You eat what you’ve always eaten. What everyone around you eats. What you can afford. For others, every bite is a careful, conscious choice motivated by the drive to be thin, to impress your friends, or to do the right thing. In 2018, whatever our motivations, most of us live at a vast remove from the places and the ways our food is produced. We meet it gleaming and uniform on the shelves of our supermarkets. It’s cheap and it’s plentiful. Why look a gift horse...or cow...or pig...or chicken...in the mouth? Here’s why: While we slept, the farms that produce our food have grown and morphed and metastasized into something worse than sinister. Something that if you look too closely at it might just put you off your dinner. With every meal we eat, we’re making ethical choices that define us and shape the future of the planet. How long and on what grounds can we jus

When you think of the industrial revolution what comes to mind? Steam engines probably. Lone genius inventors. Factories and coal mines, perhaps. And depending on your professional interests and political leanings, either suffering laborers in sweat shops or the Great Onward March of Civilization.  Did anybody think of guns? According to my guest today Stanford historian Priya Satia, guns are inextricably bound up with industrialization and it is our long and ever-changing relationship with these  tools, toys, trade goods, status symbols, and instruments of war that makes them such a persistent fact of life to this day. Priya Satia’s latest book is EMPIRE OF GUNS: the Violent Making of the Industrial Revolution. Surprise conversation-starter clips in this episode: Max Tegmark on artificial intelligence Alice Dreger on the history of knowledge Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Imagine you’re a father or a mother of three kids. Your city is in the middle of a civil war. At any time a rocket might burst through your wall. Soldiers might round your family up, or kill them in crossfire. What do you do? You leave, of course. You do whatever you have to do to get your kids to safety. There will be many deadly risks along the way. But you know what’s the worst? The not knowing. The constant thoughts inside your head of everything that might go wrong, everything you hope will go right. The trusting looks on your kids’ faces, when, in fact, they have no idea where they’re going or why. Since 2011, an estimated 11 million Syrians have fled their homes. They and refugees from other troubled nations like Eritrea and Somalia have been trying to migrate Westward and northward, to Turkey, then to Europe. Many have died along the way. Many thousands of others have been detained in refugee camps while nations decide what to do with them. I’m here today with  filmmakers Lorena Luciano and Filippo

On an  earlier episode of this show the Turkish novelist Orhan Pamuk said something that I’ve never forgotten. He said that writing programs shouldn’t teach about plots or characters or how to structure a story. Instead, they should  teach writers to manage their own psyches. To be the captains of their own creative ships across the rough daily waters of fluctuating emotions and energies. This kind of self-management, he suggested, is what makes the difference between people who keep producing art and those who don’t.  My guest today is Jessica Abel. She’s an accomplished artist herself—a graphic novelist who did a kind of graphic docu-novel called OUT ON THE WIRE about how some of the greatest radio shows and podcasts are made, including Snap Judgment, Radiolab, and This American Life. In the course of figuring out how to steer her own creative ship she’s learned invaluable lessons about how to help others do the same. Her most recent book GROWING GILLS and her Creative Focus Workshops offer creatives a pers

Life is full of horrible things. I dare you to deny it. Things like death, sickness, and alcoholism. And did I mention death, which lies in wait for us all? But if you talk about these things at dinner parties, or at work, or to someone you have just met in line at the grocery store, you risk being branded a negative person. In some circles, such as the state of California,  negativity is like leprosy. It can really mess up your social life. This does not seem to trouble my guest today, who has spent much of his life turning horrible, true stories into festive comedy. like many people, I first heard David Sedaris’ unmistakable voice on public radio in the late 90s. My sister and I took a couple of his audio books on a road trip across America in her red Saturn with a bumper sticker on the back that read “Humanity is Trying”. Having Sedaris along as company somehow made the endless miles of Stuckeys’ and strip malls, and the weeping people at Elvis‘s grave side in Graceland a little less alien and terrifying.

As the Wu-Tang Clan once put it: “Cash moves everything around me... Get the money. Dollar dollar bill, y’all.” I grew up not wanting to believe this. All the stuff that seemed worth having was hard to put a price tag on. but in a global capitalist world, there’s a lot of hard, sad truth to it. As an American child of the 1980s, I absorbed the message “find yourself!” “Follow your passions!” But there are powerful economic forces at work, shaping our lives and opportunities. My guest today experienced this in the most intense way imaginable, wrangling with the European Union over the economy of his country, Greece, in the aftermath of the 2008 financial meltdown. He saw firsthand what a house of cards global capitalism can be, and what can happen to the ones on the bottom. Yanis Varoufakis is Greece’s former finance minister and the author of two recent books: Adults in the Room and Talking to My Daughter About the Economy. Surprise conversation-starter clips in this episode: Slavoj Zizek on the problem wi

There’s a famous line from a Bob Dylan song that goes “she’s got everything she needs...she’s an artist...she don’t look back.”  As a person who loves art—music and literature especially—I’ve always been haunted by that line. Does an artist really not look back? Is looking back somehow a threat to creativity? What about Proust? Did he ever look anywhere but back?  My guest today is Jonathan Lethem, one of my very favorite writers since I read his early novel Fortress of Solitude. He’s also the author of Motherless Brooklyn, Dissident Gardens and much more. Lethem is an artist who experiments and explores, playing with forms and genres and trying on new masks, but he also spends a lot of time rummaging through the stacks, unearthing things that are lost or forgotten. His latest book is More Alive and Less Lonely, a collection of essays about books and reading.  Surprise conversation-starter clips in this episode:  Henry Rollins: what is punk?  Michelle Thaller on human cyber-evolution Learn more about your a

In Hollywood movies diplomats always get a bad rap. I’m picturing Claude Rains as “Mr. Dryden” in Lawrence of Arabia looking, as Clyde Rains always does, somewhat reptilian as he hunches over a map of the Middle East with General Allenby, smirking secretively. Hollywood diplomats are slippery. Untrustworthy. More often than not, they turn out to be double agents. On screen, definitive action plays better than careful talk or compromise. This is true of America in general and of our politics in particular—we’re just not comfortable with ambiguity. Leave that to the French. Americans are about gettin’ things done. But the geopolitical world is complex, and allegedly getting more so every day. Meanwhile, over the last several presidencies, America has quietly been shifting its foreign policy approach from diplomacy to military muscle. With the current president, the gutting of the State Department in favor of the Pentagon is starting to look like Friday the 13th part whatever. My guest today is investigative jo

This episode is really something different. It’s a live show we did on April 21st in Green Bay Wisconsin, as part of Untitled Town Book and Author Festival, now in its second year. I’d never been to Green Bay before. Nice town! You may know about the cheese and the football, but did you know that the Red Hot Chili Peppers once fled from the police due to an unfortunate wardrobe malfunction at a concert and spent the night hanging out at a local fan’s house? I learned this and much, much more from the wonderful people I met there. What’s great about live shows is that anything can happen, and so to preserve that feeling in all its glory, we’re not editing this one too much. So grab your popcorn, sit back, and imagine yourself in sunny, snow-covered (yes, snow in late April) Green Bay, WI. Our guest is graphic novelist and Believer Magazine Art Director Kristen Radtke, author of IMAGINE WANTING ONLY THIS. Surprise conversation-starter clips in this episode: Gene Luen Yang on art and empathy Chris Hadfield o

Je pense donc je suis. (I think, therefore I am.) Huh? Who is this I? How do I know that it is thinking? What does it even mean to say that I am—that I exist, if it's this mysterious,  untrustworthy Ithat says  so? To be fair, René Descartes didn't invent these problems. but In the centuries after his death, his thought experiments sent philosophers, psychologists and later on, neuroscientists reeling and spiraling down a seemingly bottomless chasm In search of Consciousness. What is it? Where is it? How did it get there? Surely that icky grey-green stuff can't fully account for the sublime perfection of Beethoven's Ninth! If you've ever heard that there are differences between the left and the right brain, you can blame my guest today, Michael Gazzaniga, who did many of the pioneering studies in this area. Now he's after even bigger game. In his new book The Consciousness Instinct he lays a conceptual framework for closing the gap between the meat of the brain and the magic of Consciousness, and maybe sa

Why can’t we all just get along?  And conversely, why do we sometimes get along so well, building cathedrals, inventing Democracy, symphonies, and stuff that that?  According to my guest today, the answer is as old as life itself. In the behaviors of the most ancient forms of bacteria, single-celled organisms without a nucleus, we can see the seeds of civilization as we know it, for better and for worse. They form collectives. They go to war. The key is homeostasis—the imperative of all life to avoid harm and seek to flourish. I’m delighted to be speaking today with neuroscientist and philosopher Antonio Damasio. He heads the Brain and Creativity Institute at the University of Southern California and is the author of DESCARTES’ ERROR and the new book THE STRANGE ORDER OF THINGS: Life, Feeling, and the Making of Cultures. Surprise conversation-starter clips in this episode:  Max Tegmark on consciousness  Maya Szalavitz on addiction Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

In New York City, where we all live in little boxes on top of one another, “Ignore thy neighbor” is a reasonable coping strategy. Live and let live, right? To each her own. But what’s the tipping point at which thy neighbor becomes simply too numerous, too loud, too different to ignore? I’d submit that whoever you are. Wherever you locate yourself on that spectrum of tolerance. You too, have your limits. In the mid 1980s, a group of people in Oregon discovered their tipping point when a massive commune moved in next door. The Baghwan Shree Rajneesh and thousands of his followers decided to build a city in the middle of nowhere—a utopia on Earth. Only it was the middle of somewhere for the mostly white, mostly Christian residents of a tiny nearby town. It was home, and like most humans, they weren’t too excited about the idea of radical, unexpected change in their own backyard. I, on the other hand, am very excited to be here today with the Way Brothers — Chaplain and MacLain… They’re the directors of the f

Ambition and loyalty. What we want versus what we already have and should be grateful for. When there’s conflict here, in some ways it's a tension between loyalty to others and loyalty to ourselves…or maybe loyalty to who we are now versus another possible future self. Have I overcomplicated my life out of impatience and ingratitude? Have I broken something precious beyond repair? Or on the other hand, am I missing out on the life I’m supposed to have? Sometimes I think a lot of the trouble comes from the misunderstanding that these have to be opposing forces at all. These kinds of questions and choices are at the heart of Meg Wolitzer’s novels, of which there are many. She’s the author of THE INTERESTINGS and her latest, THE FEMALE PERSUASION. Surprise conversation-starter clips in this episode: Tali Sharot on confirmation bias and why facts don’t win fights, Michelle Thaler on how success and failure coexist in everyone Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

What does your education mean to you? What would you be willing to sacrifice for it? For me and my sister, growing up, it was a given that you’d get “well-educated.” You’d get good grades, go to a good college, and most likely graduate, medical, law, or business school.  School was just what you did…ritualized and rote the way religion is in other families. For my guest today, Tara Westover, the framework was completely different. In her mountain home in Idaho, school was seen as a threat. It was a government tool for brainwashing people out of faith in God’s teachings and into worldly decadence. She went on to become very well-educated by anybody’s standards–—studying history at Cambridge University in England and at Harvard. But it came at very high price. Her first book, EDUCATED, is a powerful and beautifully written memoir about family, loyalty to oneself, and the difficult, even impossible choices we sometimes have to make. Surprise conversation-starter clips in this episode: Chris Hadfield on an as

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Adult life, with all its schedules and responsibilities, can turn into a kind of library of locked boxes. The ones we open every day sit on a shelf at eye level, their keys clipped to a carabiner at our waist: Set the alarm. Pack a gym bag. Pick up milk for the kids. But on the lower shelves and in the dusty back rooms there’s an ominous jumble of odd-shaped containers. They hold the stories that don’t fit so neatly into the skin we’ve decided to live in. Maybe we’ve misplaced the keys, or maybe we’ve deliberately lost them. My guest today keeps all the keys close at hand. In his stories and graphic novels worlds collide and, as the fairy Ariel puts it in Shakespeare’s Tempest, they “suffer a sea change, into something rich and strange”. The walls of reality are permeable, and dangerous magic is always seeping through. Neil Gaiman is the author of the Sandman graphic novels, The Graveyard Book, Coraline, American Gods, and many other wonderful things. His latest is a marvelous retelling of Norse Mythology,

I admit it. I confess. I’ve got a touch of what my guest today calls “progressophobia”. Ever since Charles Dickens got hold of me back in middle school, and William Blake after that, I’ve been a little suspicious of the Great Onward March of science and technology. Gene therapy, healthier crops, safer, more efficient forms of nuclear energy? Very nice, very nice. But what about eugenics, climate change, and Fukushima?  For every problem human ingenuity solves, doesn’t human nature create a new one, on a bigger scale? Dammit, Spock, can your cold, calculating reason fathom the mysteries of the human heart? But you know what? After devouring all 453 pages and 75 graphs of psychologist Steven Pinker’s new book ENLIGHTENMENT NOW, I admit defeat. The defeat of defeatism. This man has done the math. Since the 18th century things have been getting better in pretty much every dimension of human well-being. Health, safety, education, happiness, you name it… And we’ve done it with the most reliable tools we have: reas

I don’t know about you, but for me, middle school was horrible. I arrived at an all-male school in a still very homophobic era as a small, nervous, Michael Jackson fanatic. Don’t worry - I’m going somewhere with this. For three years, life was hell. Then I found my tribe—the drama nerds. Maybe we couldn’t beat you up, but you had to respect the artistry. In high school, Tribalism was power. My guest today is Yale Law professor Amy Chua, who shook the Internet up a few years back with her book BATTLE HYMN OF THE TIGER MOTHER. What upset some progressive American parents most, it seems, was the suggestion that they were members of a parenting tribe. A cultural bubble with its own fallible set of assumptions.  In her powerful new book POLITICAL TRIBES: GROUP INSTINCT AND THE FATE OF NATIONS, Amy points out that long past high school, group instinct is much stronger than Americans generally like to admit. And that this cognitive blind spot has led to our repeatedly shooting ourselves in the foot, at home and ab