Why employees have the upper hand now more than ever before

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Employee satisfaction, as a concept, didn't emerge until the rise of the industrial economy and unionization. If employees were unhappy, management could predict a strike and stoppage of work.

Since then, the standard for management has been to consider employee engagement an accurate measure of satisfaction. Instead, research suggests the focus should be employee fulfillment: Do employees have the ability to reflect on and create meaning around their work?

Now, in the information economy, employees are often the means of value creation. This provides a unique advantage in which management must consider employee fulfillment in order to remain profitable.

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AARON HURST

Aaron Hurst is a globally recognized entrepreneur who works to create communities that are empowered to realize their potential. He is the CEO of Imperative, a B Corp advocating for Purpose-Oriented Workers and supporting the organizations that embrace them. Hurst is the author of The Purpose Economy (2014) and a regular advisor and thought partner for many global brands.

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TRANSCRIPT:

Aaron Hurst: Thirty years ago or so, we started having this movement to talk about employee engagement, that the goal of organizations is to have engaged employees. And there's been a lot invested in this. Companies are measuring it. There's consulting firms that make all their money off of it. I mean, this has become sort of mainstream, sort of corporate employee measurement. We suspected that not only was engagement probably not the right way to measure this, but actually might be part of the problem when it comes to fulfillment at work.

So in this most recent study we looked at, sort of this question between what is the difference between engagement and fulfillment? And we saw some pretty marked differences. But we also saw that people truly understand the difference. So, when we asked people, would you rather have an engaging job or a fulfilling job? People overwhelmingly said, I'd rather have a fulfilling job, right? We also asked them, you know, how would you describe engaging work versus fulfilling work? And you saw it as completely different words that were used to describe them. One was about doing, and being busy, and active, which is employee engagement. The other one was much more about the state of being. It was about relationships. It was about the emotional relationship to work, which we know from psychology, is actually really what matters. And I think this matters in a lot of different ways.

I think one is, what creates an actual sense of fulfillment at work is the ability to reflect, and to actually process your work, and to think about it, and to create meaning around it. And in a culture in which we're talking about like being engaged, we're looking for people just to be busy. And the idea of spending time reflecting doesn't look like engagement. So, we're actually sort of creating this culture with engagement that actually gets in the way of employees being fulfilled.

One of the things that really distinguishes employee fulfillment from employee engagement is that when we ask people who's responsible for your fulfillment, so at the end of the day, if you're fulfilled or not, whose responsibility is that? And, overwhelmingly, again, people said they were responsible for their own fulfillment. That's a pretty big difference from how we thought about employee engagement, where the discussion has all been about the assumption it's your manager. It's the company. It's what the organization is doing for you that makes it engaging. That's a totally different approach to HR and leadership when you make that assumption. When you start off with this idea of fulfillment being your own responsibility, leadership is very different. Leadership is about enabling people to get out of their own way because people also said they were their number one barrier to fulfillment, not their manager, not leadership, they were their own greatest barrier. So leadership's increasingly about getting out of the way of people being able to actually realize that difference.

I think understanding the different between employee engagement and employee fulfillment requires understanding the history of how we even got to employee engagement in the first place. So if you go back thousands and thousands of years before any economy existed, and we were just sort of working in the Serengeti in ou...

For the full transcript, check out: https://bigthink.com/videos/employee-fulfillment

The top 4 crises facing the world today

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According to historian Jared Diamond, we currently have four global crises to address: the ongoing threat of nuclear attacks, climate change, running out of resources, and socioeconomic inequality.

Diamond believes there's hope for the future, though, because these problems are human caused, and must have human solutions — they are not looming doomsdays like an asteroid poised to strike Earth (of which we are currently largely helpless to address).

If we don't aim to solve these issues within the next 30 years, then we — and our children — may end up living in a "miserable world not worth living [in]."

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JARED DIAMOND

Jared Diamond, a noted polymath, is Professor of Geography at the University of California, Los Angeles. Among his many awards are the U.S. National Medal of Science, Japan's Cosmos Prize, a MacArthur Foundation Fellowship, a Pulitzer Prize for General Nonfiction, and election to the U.S. National Academy of Sciences. He is the author of the international best-selling books Guns, Germs, and Steel; Collapse; Why Is Sex Fun?; The World Until Yesterday; and The Third Chimpanzee, and is the presenter of TV documentary series based on three of those books.

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TRANSCRIPT:

JARED DIAMOND: Is the world facing any crisis? Yes, you will not be surprised to learn from me something that you already know, that the world is facing various crises, of which I would pick out four as being the most serious crises. The crisis with the most explosive potential for damage is of course, nuclear weapons. The risk of the U.S. and Russia getting into a nuclear war has now decreased. But the risk of India and Pakistan has increased. The risks of North Korea and the United States has increased.

And then the risk that terrorists either will steal a nuclear weapon, as they tried to do at the time of the World Trade attack, or that they will take a perfectly normal dynamite bomb, which they've been very good at blowing off in the central of Paris and Lisbon and other places, and just add to the dynamite bomb a radioactive isotope like cesium 137, which you can get from any hospital medical facility. You put your isotope in your dynamite bomb and blow off your dynamite bomb in the center of Washington, D.C. And then you sterilize for the next 132 years that area of Washington, which become radioactive.

Big consequences, so risk for the world is nuclear risk. Another risk of the world is obviously climate change, which has the potential for cooking all of us, cooking and drying out and raising sea level for all of us. The third risk for the world is running out of resources. The world is operating unsustainably now. At the rate we are going, we will run out of essential resources, fisheries, forestry, water, topsoil within about the next 30 years or so. Either we solve it in the next 30 years or we'll never get to solve it. And then there's finally the world risk of inequality. There's inequality not only between Downtown LA and Beverly Hills, there's inequality between countries of the world.

But poorer countries nowadays have-- in this globalized world-- have ways of visiting their dissatisfaction on rich countries by supporting terrorists or by forming unstoppable waves of immigration or unintentionally by poor public health systems, underfunded public health systems, which means that they can't cure their own diseases of malaria and dengue. But nowadays, in these days of international travel, American tourists go into other countries and visitors from other countries come to the United States, meaning that malaria and chikungunya fever and dengue are showing up in developed countries.

So those are what I see as the four biggest problems facing the world. I'm cautiously optimistic. By cautiously optimistic I mean that we have problems and we're capable of solving the problems because the problems that we face are problems that we humans are causing, such as climate change. They're not an asteroid racing towards us and there's nothing we can do about it. And how optimistic am I? It depends upon the choices that we make. I can't predict what choices we'll make. But I would say that I see the chances as at least 51% that my sons will end up in a happy world 30 years from now.

And the chances are no worse than 49% that they'll end up in a miserable world not worth living it. But it depends upon our choices. And I cannot predict our choices. If we make the right choices, we are guaranteed to end up in a happy world.

Upward mobility requires education. Here’s how America falls short.

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One credible way to help children born into poverty get out of it is by providing them with a great education. Indeed, the best, high-paying jobs are going to go to the nations with the best-education people.

On top of helping solve socio-economic inequality, a quality education also promotes a civically-minded, knowledgable citizenry.

Education has become a partisan issue — it should be the opposite. It's also become frayed by lackluster civic engagement.

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ARNE DUNCAN

Arne Duncan was one of the longest serving members of President Barack Obama’s cabinet and among the most influential Secretaries of Education in history. He is now a managing partner with the Emerson Collective.

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TRANSCRIPT:

ARNE DUNCAN: The only way I know how to end cycles of poverty is by giving children, who happened to be born in poverty, which is never their fault, a chance to get a great education. If we want to have upper mobility, if we want to have a growing middle-class the only way I know how to do that is through education. And quite honestly these days Im starting to worry about our democracy and our democracy fraying at the edges. And if were going to have a civically-engaged citizenry, if were going to have an active participatory democracy, the only way I know how to do that is through education. a the And we live now in a flat world, in a globally competitive economy.

And good jobs, high wage, high-skilled jobs are going to go to the nation that does the best job of educating their citizens. And I desperately want those jobs to be here in America and Id rather them of the year than in China or India or Singapore or wherever else, South Korea wherever else you might talk about. For us to do that we as a nation have to embrace the opportunity I would say the imperative of having a great, great education system.

Where we are now today quite candidly isn't good enough. If you look at early childhood we ranked 30th in terms of access to pre-K; its a dismal record. If you look at math and reading science scores at the high school level we re somewhere usually between 15th and 30th internationally; you look at college completion rate were about 16th. To sum all that up were top 10 in nothing. And while there are amazing bright spots, theres stuff thats so inspiring that I traveled the country and was lucky enough to see every day we have to get better faster and we have to do it with a real sense of urgency.

Its a tough comment for me to make or tough belief to have that too much of education involves lies. Well, let me just walk through a couple of them: I tell the story early in the book of a young man I worked with named Calvin Williams who was a rising senior who was a very good basketball player was on the B-honor roll at his high school and wanted me to help prep him for the ACT so he could go to a division one school to receive a basketball scholarship. And very quickly after we started working I found out that he was functionally illiterate, he was really struggling with the basics. And that was just devastating to me because this was a young man coming from a very tough environment never smoked, never drink, stayed away from the gangs, wasn't caught in violence, he played by all of our societal rules and yet we collectively had let him down. He was not nearly prepared to take that next step in his educational journey. That story is unfortunately all too often true.

A second lie is that we say we value education but we never vote around education, we never hold politicians at any level, local, state, federal accountable for increasing access to high-quality pre-K or raising high school graduation rates or making college more accessible and affordable. And for me education should be the ultimate bipartisan or non-partisan issue. I do care less left, right, Republican, Democrat, I just want us as voters to vote on these issues. Third, we say we value teachers, but we don't pay them as professionals, we don't train them as professionals, we don't have career ladders that make sense and teaching is some of the most important most challenging most complex work imaginable. We trust literally our babies' futures to our nations teachers, but we don't respect them and treat them and compensate them as such.

Then the final one and maybe the toughest is the lie that we say we value our children. And Ive struggled with the issue of gun vio...

For the full transcript, check out https://bigthink.com/videos/arne-duncan-social-mobility

How to vastly improve your problem-solving workshops

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Companies often jump right into workshopping solutions to a problem before they truly understand the underlying source and "pain points" of the issue.

Deliberate Innovation CEO, Dan Seewald, advises companies to visualize and map out those unmet needs in order to discover a new path to a fresh solution. Only then should you move onto brainstorming and ideation techniques.

These important steps allow for more meaningful experimentation, as well as greater opportunity for learning and breakthroughs.

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DAN SEEWALD

Dan Seewald is the Founder and CEO at Deliberate Innovation and designer of the Deliberate Innovation System™, which combines rigorous innovation techniques with the inspirational practices used in coaching high-performance athletes.

He did his graduate studies at New York University in political economy and entrepreneurship and has a B.S. in Accounting from the College of New Jersey.

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TRANSCRIPT:

DAN SEEWALD: I'd love to tell you about a recent experience I had with a large company that was really struggling to crack a big problem. So, where did it start? It started with getting clarity around what was the problem they needed to solve? Now initially, this organization was trying to solve a big brand or business challenge. They're trying to grow their business. And that's where they started. They said, we want to make our sales go way up. But that wasn't a problem. That was a wish, an aspiration. So we had to use a mapping technique where we begin to visualize what are all of the challenges or the underlying pain points and unmet needs that are underneath that problem? And by visualizing just from one starting point, which they thought was the right challenge, we were able to identify not one or two, but 30 or 40 different areas that we could explore.

And what was important is that before we ever stepped foot into a workshop, we were able to visualize and see the different elements that you could attack and try to solve for. And very curiously, they realized that it wasn't just one problem that they need to solve, it was three or four that they wanted to prioritize right now. It also gave them opportunities to explore in the future. But by visualizing and understanding your problem well ahead of time, that's what allows you to have the most effective problem-solving or design-thinking session later on. So that's first and foremost. But in addition to that, what I found to be really powerful was asking people to think about where else this problem's been solved. And what do I mean by that? They took the challenge, the problem that they defined, and they thought, where else has that problem been seen before?

I'll give you an example. A long time ago, Ban, maker of deodorants, was trying to figure out how they could better apply deodorant that was a spray deodorant. Now, the spray was very uneven, they had a lot of customer complaints. They're trying to think, how can we pivot or do things differently? So they asked, where else in the world has this problem been solved? Or, to put it another way, where else are things applied unevenly? Sure enough, as they started to characterize it and come up with many different possibilities, what they came up with was roller ball pens. So the pen technology, if you think about the BIC ballpoint pen, that pen uses what originally was a messy fountain pen, and they used a roller ball technology. So by looking at that, they said, well, how might we apply that technology to our problem? And sure enough, what they came up with was the idea of the Ban roll-on deodorant. You may have seen it before, the roller ball. Before that, it had not existed.

So by going outside of that world, it gave them a new and fresh solution that otherwise they wouldn't have discovered. So we will take that problem and we'll ask people to think about it before they ever step foot into the workshop. And then when they're in the workshop, we do multiple things. Number one, we align on what is the goal or the vision that we're trying to achieve, because it's often the case that people are solving for different things and for different reasons. So getting that clarity, sitting down together, and being able to facilitate a conversation in a meaningful way with provocative questions builds that alignment that may otherwise go unspoken.

We collect insights because insights are really the pearls that make every...

For the full transcript, check out: https://bigthink.com/videos/how-to-solve-problems

Space is dead: A challenge to the standard model of quantum mechanics

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Realists believe that there is an exactly understandable way the world is — one that describes processes independent of our intervention. Anti-realists, however, believe realism is too ambitious — too hard. They believe we pragmatically describe our interactions with nature — not truths that are independent of us.

In nature, properties of Particle B maybe depend on what we choose to measure or manipulate with Particle A, even at great distances.

In quantum mechanics, there is no explanation for this. "It just comes out that way," says Smolin. Realists struggle with this because it would imply certain things can travel faster than light, which still seems improbable.

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LEE SMOLIN

Lee attended Harvard University for graduate school receiving a Ph.D. in theoretical physics in 1979.  He held postdoctoral positions at the Institute for Advanced Study in Princeton, The Institute for Theoretical Physics (now KITP) in Santa Barbara and the Enrico Fermi Institute at the University of Chicago. This was followed by faculty positions at Yale, Syracuse and Penn State Universities, where he helped to found the Center for Gravitational Physics and Geometry.   In September of 2001 he moved to Canada to be a founding member of the Perimeter Institute for Theoretical Physics, where he has been ever since.  

Lee's main contributions to research are so far to the field of quantum gravity. He was, with Abhay Ashtekar and Carlo Rovelli,  a founder of the approach known as loop quantum gravity, but he has contributed to other approaches including string theory and causal dynamical triangulations.  He is also known for proposing the notion of the landscape of theories, based on his application of Darwinian methods to Cosmology.  He has contributed also to the  foundations of quantum mechanics, elementary particle physics and theoretical biology.  He also has a strong interest in philosophy and his three books, Life of the Cosmos, Three Roads to Quantum Gravity and The Trouble with Physics are in part philosophical explorations of issues raised by contemporary physics.

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TRANSCRIPT:

LEE SMOLIN: So let's first define what we mean by being a realist. What I mean when I say I'm a realist is that I believe that there is an exactly understandable way the world is, which is independent of our intervention, independent of our existence, our knowledge. It's possible for everything that happens in nature, to give a complete individual description to that process or those events.

And thence, to understand what -- the causal processes behind those events, to understand exactly what's behind, what goes on in a physical process. Now, for reasons which have a lot to do with World War I, and a lot to do with philosophy and things that I'm not a scholar of, the predominant view among educated people in Europe in the 1920s and 1930s was not-- was not realism. They didn't believe that realism was possible.

They thought that science was a way of speaking about our interactions within our interventions in nature. That the concepts that we use, like wave or particle or law or causality or energy, represent our own intuitions, and are useful to describe what happens when an atomic system interacts with a measurement device. But are not -- do not extend to concepts that stand alone, have meaning when applied just to the atomic system without the context of the experiment.

And I'm trying to talk here the way that Niels Bohr talked because he was the most radical of these anti-realist thinkers. Let's talk about what it means to be not a realist. What it means to be not a realist is that realism is too ambitious and too hard. We don't have it -- they would say something like, "Our concepts come from our experience." Our experiences of the world are the big things we throw them. They bounce back and forth. We play with balls. We sail, we have some intuition about water and wind and so forth.

And then we go into the laboratory and we try to take apart an atom and understand what its components are well, there are things called electrons and nuclei and protons and neutrons and quarks. But what are these things? What-- and we get very confused when we try to understand what they are. And it is indeed confusing. They're not balls like a baseball or a soccer ball. They're not waves like a breeze kicking up some ripples on a lake. But there's something that, to d...

For the full transcript, check out: https://bigthink.com/videos/lee-smolin-space

How Pete Holmes creates comedic flow: Try micro-visualization

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Setting an intention doesn't have to be complicated, and it can make a great difference when you're hoping for a specific outcome.

When comedian Pete Holmes is preparing to record an episode of his podcast, "You Made it Weird with Pete Holmes," he takes 15 seconds to check in with himself. This way, he's primed with his own material and can help guests feel safe and comfortable to share theirs, as well.

Taking time to visualize your goal for whatever you've set out to do can help you, your colleagues, and your projects succeed.

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PETE HOLMES

Pete Holmes is a comedian, writer, cartoonist, "Christ-leaning spiritual seeker", and podcast host. His wildly popular podcast, You Made It Weird, is a comedic exploration of the meaning of life with guests ranging from Deepak Chopra and Elizabeth Gilbert to Seth Rogen and Garry Shandling.

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TRANSCRIPT:

PETE HOLMES: It's unfortunate that the idea of having an intention is so often repeated that it's sort of lost meaning. But in my experience, it's not as complicated or labored as it sounds, and it's also really, really, really, really helpful.

For me, if I'm going to do a podcast -- or really do anything, it makes a huge difference if I just take a moment to actively imagine-- people might say visualize, but it doesn't feel that fancy. It's literally just maybe in the shower. You're going to a podcast. What face do I want them to make? Just that specific visual goal of, how do I want them to feel when we're done? And what my intention when I do any podcast is I want them to be my friend. I want them to think, and be my friend. Not just think that we're friends. That's phony showbiz nonsense. Some of my greatest friends, people that I consider family-- I mean emergency contacts on my medical forms-- were podcast guests. And it happens all the time. And that is a good intention to have, is I want this person to feel safe, I want them to feel seen. Just like Marc Maron, at the end of my podcast, I like to say, do you feel satisfied? Do you feel satisfied? Sometimes they say no, and they go, when we talked about that, I didn't feel like I said it. Do it. Go ahead. But specifically, what kind of laugh do I want them to laugh? What kind of smile do I want them to smile? That's what visualization is to me.

It's not as heavy as sitting and really, I'm going to play by play. It's 15 seconds, if that. It's not doing it that does it, it's remembering to do it that does it. You know what I'm saying? People don't forget people's names, they forgot to remember the name. You know what I mean? So it's actually just this micro adjustment of intention that goes, I took the time-- if I'm driving to a podcast, I'll listen to instrumental music and I'll just think about the person. And you'd be shocked-- I'm also listening to myself. What's going on in my world today? How anxious am I today? What are my needs? What are my confessions? What are my joys? And then I'm going in loaded.

So if they're not going to-- this is another great thing. You go in with enough to say about yourself that if they don't say anything, you go, it's fine, you can sleep in the back. I'll drive us to Disney. It's OK. This is my podcast, too. It's fine. I'm glad you're here. You're going to listen to me talk about my mom. And, boy, I hope you talk about your mom. But if you just wanted to plug your book, that's fine. It'll get a hefty plug at the beginning. But the episode is going to be Pete heavy. And hopefully that's comforting. It shouldn't be threatening. It's like, oh, he's got it, it's good. I'll respond, as well. It's sort of like you're not going in with scared money. You're like, we'll get this coming or going.

I have a vision in my head that you score. That's a term we use in comedy writing. If the actor gets a laugh on a line you wrote, you go, oh, he scored with that. I want them to score. I interviewed Stephen Colbert for a fest in LA, and at one point, he was just crushing. And it was because of a certain series of questions and areas that we were going with. Nothing was planned. It was just, we flowed. And we got there and it was 3,000 people were there, and he's crushing. And I'm like-- it was like watching your children take a step or something. Something that you built together paid out for him. Nobody remembers that I did that interview, but everybody that was there was like, remember that thing Steven said abo...

For the full transcript, check out: https://bigthink.com/videos/goal-visualization

Hashtag politics: 4 key ways digital activism is inegalitarian

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Protesting in person is costly in terms of money and resources; some people have children to take care of, jobs that can't be away from, or may not have time to attend a planning event.

The internet was supposed to be a way to sidestep this barrier to political activism. But this doesn't consider the other barriers preventing poor and working-class folks from participating in digital activism.

In particular, these people lack ASETs: access to computers, the skills to use them, the empowerment necessary to feel that using Twitter or other social media is for them, and the time to make use of digital platforms in an effective way.

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JEN SCHRADIE

Jen Schradie is a sociologist and Assistant Professor at the Observatoire sociologique du changement at Sciences Po in Paris. Her work has been featured on CNN and the BBC and in the New Yorker, the Washington Post, Time, the Daily Beast, and Buzzfeed, among other media. She was awarded the Public Sociology Alumni Prize at University of California, Berkeley, and has directed six documentary films. She is the author of The Revolution That Wasn't: How Digital Activism Favors Conservatives (2019).

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TRANSCRIPT:

JEN SCHRADIE: A key claim that's made around digital activism is that it is this more egalitarian space and also enables a wider variety of people to participate because of the lowered costs of participation. And this argument is made because of how expensive it is in terms of time and energy, for example, to print out flyers or go to a meeting to plan an event. Someone may need to pay bus fare or gas or pay for child care. And so many have argued that digital activism really lowers the costs for political participation. However, I found that this argument really doesn't consider the costs that people who may not already have a computer or a smartphone or high-speed internet access or a data plan that allows you to be on social media constantly, which uses up a lot of data, that these are very high costs for people who are struggling at the margins. And yes, certainly we hear reports of viral videos of working-class folks posting something, some injustice, and that's very real, but those are outliers compared to people who do have more resources who are able to engage on a regular basis. And what I found is that the middle- to upper-class groups were much more likely to have higher levels of online engagement than poor and working-class groups. And the reason is, first of all, organizationally.

So groups who have more middle- to upper-class members tended to just simply have more computers and skills and general resources, but I also found individual reasons. The individual members, they really lacked what I call ASETs. So they tended to lack access -- A for access. Some people had to drive, for example, 10 or 20 miles to their aunt's house who happened to have a computer, or they had to go to the library, or maybe they had a computer but it's not working so well. So basic access was important. So the next part of ASETs is S, skills. So really understanding the nuance of how Twitter works was really intimidating for people -- how the Facebook algorithm works. People talked about learning how -- maybe even going to a training to learn about how to build a website but not really being able to sustain those skills. But most people didn't even have those basic skills at all. The other issue that I think is really key and part of this ASETs -- so A-S-E -- is empowerment. So many people I talked to said, well, I'm not a computer person or I don't get up there in talking about Twitter, this very hierarchical sense of that's up there, I'm down here. That's not for me. One woman told me Twitter is too fast. I just can't keep up. And this idea of feeling entitled and empowered to engage in these tools that for middle- to upper-class folks just feel normalized or part of their everyday routines, but for a lot of people, it's much more challenging. But the other key point of ASETs is the last letter, T for time.

One worker I spoke with, young guy who's 25 years old. He was a nursing assistant at a mental hospital. And he had to drive into work. It took him a while. Lived in a very rural area. When he got to work, he had to hand over his cell phone, and he wasn't able to use it for his entire shift, sometimes up for 12 hours. And so if you think about then the time that it took for him to drive ...

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America’s education system is centuries old. Can we build something better?

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The current education system wasn't designed to accommodate the dynamism required today.

Derrell Bradford of 50CAN points out that, while education reform in the past has done some great things for many students in America, there is a definite need to evolve. That evolution involves maintaining the positive aspects of the education system and overcoming the negative.

This video is supported by yes. every kid., an initiative that aims to rethink education from the ground up by connecting innovators in a shared mission to conquer "one size fits all" education reform.

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ELIZABETH GARLOW

Elizabeth Garlow is Lumina's impact investment officer. She most recently served as a community solutions fellow and domestic policy advisor at The White House during the Obama Administration, where she managed the President's Promise Zones initiative, working closely with local leaders to create jobs, improve educational outcomes, reduce crime and support overall economic growth.

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TRANSCRIPT:

ELIZABETH GARLOW: At Lumina, we are especially interested in trying to increase the number of individuals with a quality post-secondary credential. So, we want clear and flexible pathways to help individuals get the education that they need to lead a better life. And for us, that means a few things. It means trying to help individuals have their learning recognized wherever it may take place, whether it's in the military, or in the workplace, or in libraries. So how do we find ways to capture, recognize, and validate that learning toward a credential?

Second, we really want to ensure that those pathways for individuals are affordable. It's really hard to understand the true cost of education today. And so we're interested in helping people understand what a credential really costs and what that ROI on a credential might be. Third, we want to move toward a national competency-based education system, where what you know is more important than the time you're spending in a seat in a classroom.

And fourth, we want a national quality assurance system where we can really understand what a quality credential looks like, what are the outcomes that someone is achieving with that credential. We need to make quality learning opportunities available for millions of Americans who look different from those students that our systems were really built to serve. So, our post-high school education landscape today was really built to serve students that might be full-time, campus-based. And the reality is today that we have a very different student demographic. Over 40% of students enrolled in some sort of post-secondary education today are over the age of 25. They might be taking care of families. They might be commuting to campus. And so we need to create educational systems and pathways that are really friendly to their needs and what they're capable of achieving.

Another thing that's really unique about Lumina is we are looking to better understand the systemic historic factors that have created an unequal education system and how we can close gaps in education and educational attainment by race and ethnicity. We will not be able to get to the place that we want to be as a nation to be globally competitive in a talent marketplace unless we close those gaps in attainment. So we really are interested at Lumina in what we call our equity imperative, which is, how do we ensure that we create a more equitable post-secondary education system that works for all?

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Biohacking: Why I’ll live to be 180 years old

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As a teenager, founder of Bulletproof, Dave Asprey, began experiencing health issues that typically plague older adults.

After surrounding himself with anti-aging researchers and scientists, he discovered the tools of biohacking could dramatically change his life and improve his health.

He's now confident he'll live to at least 180 years old. "It turns out that those tools that make older people young make younger people kick ass," he says.

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DAVE ASPREY

Dave Asprey is a Silicon Valley tech entrepreneur, professional biohacker, the New York Times bestselling author of Game Changers, Head Strong and The Bulletproof Diet, the creator of Bulletproof Coffee, and the host of Bulletproof Radio, the Webby Award–winning, number one–ranked podcast. His new book is Super Human (2019).

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TRANSCRIPT:

DAVE ASPREY: When I was 14 I was diagnosed with arthritis in my knees. And I remember, going home, I was shaken. Because in my mind, as a 14-year-old, I said, look, this is a disease that old people get. And now that I'm 46-- when I say "old people," I'm talking about people that I respect and admire, the sources of wisdom. And I cultivate friends, when I can find them, at least twice as old as I am, because they know all the stuff that I haven't learned yet.

But at the time, I said, I'm young. I'm a teenager. I'm not supposed to be experiencing this. And I was dealing with metabolic issues. I already had stretch marks that still cover me. I hit 300 pounds in my very early 20's. And I started having brain fog in my mid-20's. I was diagnosed with high risk of stroke and heart attack-- very high risk-- as circled by the doctor when I was 29 years old. It turns out I was dealing with all the stuff that normally hits you when you're 60-plus. And I was doing it as a young man. And it scared the heck out of me. And it did that because no one likes to look in the mirror at a time you're supposed to be growing your career and say, I can't remember what happened in that meeting. It's just gone. And I'm so tired. I just can't put one foot in front of the other. But I'm going to do it someway anyway.

It turned out that the people who knew how to fix this weren't my doctor. My doctor told me vitamin C would actually kill me, believe it or not. So I fired him. And for four years, I became my own scientist. Fortunately, I'm a computer hacker, and I know how to do that kind of thing. But then I hooked up with an anti-aging nonprofit group. And I started hanging out with these people full of wisdom who are making themselves younger. And the stuff that they knew, the things I was learning from them and from the top researchers in the world, they made me better.

They gave me the tools of what became biohacking, a movement of people that's now even a word in the dictionary. It didn't exist eight years ago. Well, it turns out that those tools that make older people young make younger people kick ass. And that's been a foundational thing for what I've done with Bulletproof and for what's changed my life in a very dramatic way. I'm about 10%, maybe 10.2% body fat right now. I don't experience hunger on a regular basis. I love what I eat. I have more energy at 46 than I did at 26. I feel amazing. My brain works. I can remember all the things I want to remember. I don't drop words. And it's been absolutely liberating. It also cost a million dollars along the way. And that is completely unfair.

Now, I am very fortunate that I was able to do that, because I worked at the company that held Google's first servers when Google was two servers and two guys. So I had a leg up early on, and I was able to spend myself to wellness, to make a lot of mistakes, to waste a lot of money getting younger, and then to say, all right, how do I go beyond getting younger? And it is that deep knowledge of 20 years of working with the world's best anti-aging researchers and scientists, and reading the papers, and doing the work, and trying it myself that led me to say, with reasonable confidence, look, I'm going to make it to at least 180 if I want to. And that's not the cap, that's the floor.

All right, let me see. Now, if we wanted to be ridiculous and you wanted to be like, here's an anti-aging thing, I can do something like this on camera. I'll just be like, how many people do you know with flexibility like they're teenagers? Do you want to do that? BIG THINK: We just got it. DAVE ASPREY: [LAUGHS] BIG THINK: Yeah.

Ethnic chauvinism: Why the whole world shouldn’t look like America

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When the Berlin Wall fell in 1989, many Americans jumped for joy. At the time, some believed there weren't going to be any more political disagreements anywhere in the world. They thought American democracy had won the "war of ideas."

American exceptionalism has sought to create a world order that's really a mirror image of ourselves — a liberal world order founded on the DNA of American thinking.

To many abroad this looks like ethnic chauvinism. We need to move on from this way of thinking, and consider that sometimes "problem-solving," in global affairs, means the world makes us look like how it wants to be.

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SEAN MCFATE

Dr. Sean McFate is an adviser to Oxford University's Centre for Technology and Global Affairs, as well as a professor of strategy at the National Defense University and Georgetown University’s School of Foreign Service in Washington, DC. Additionally, he is the author of several books, including Shadow War, The New Rules of War, and The Modern Mercenary.

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TRANSCRIPT:

SEAN MCFATE: 1989, the Berlin Wall crashes, and a lot of America jumped with joy. We won the Cold War, et cetera. Whether that's true, it's a different debate. But there were a couple scholars out there who thought -- you know, like Frank Fukuyama wrote a book called "The End of History." He said, "The future is Utopia. It's going to be all great. There's not going to be any more political disagreement anywhere in the world because American democracy has won the war of ideas that's ancient and old."

Which is absurd, but this absurdity became a New York Times bestseller and launched his career and et cetera. And ever since then, this idea of American exceptionalism has sought to create a world order that's really a mirror image of ourself. And many -- and I lived abroad, and to many people, this looks like ethnic chauvinism. But we go around, our foreign policy tries to shore up a world order, a liberal world order founded on the DNA of American thinking. And when it can't do that, it contains the problem, whether it's the Middle East or in Africa. And the way this looks -- how this comes out in American policy is this.

You hear this phrase for Africa, African solutions for African problems. That's really code for containment. But that doesn't solve any problems. It doesn't create American order in Africa or the Middle East, as if that's even feasible or desirable. It's not. What we need to do is move away from containing problems and solve them. And problem-solving does not mean that you're going to make the world look like the place you want it to be. Problem-solving can also be the world makes you look like it wants to be. And we need to move on, whether it's -- and not just in foreign policy, but again, like in warfare.

We are fighting according to our rules of war, yet those rules no longer apply. And then we wonder why Afghanistan is the longest war in history. That's the world we're up against.

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ABOUT BIG THINK:

Smarter Faster™

Big Think is the leading source of expert-driven, actionable, educational content -- with thousands of videos, featuring experts ranging from Bill Clinton to Bill Nye, we help you get smarter, faster. Subscribe to learn from top minds like these daily. 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.

Read more at Bigthink.com for a multitude of articles just as informative and satisfying as our videos. New articles posted daily on a range of intellectual topics.

Join Big Think Edge, to gain access to an immense library of content. It features insight from many of the most celebrated and intelligent individuals in the world today. Topics on the platform are focused on: emotional intelligence, digital fluency, health and wellness, critical thinking, creativity, communication, career development, lifelong learning, management, problem solving & self-motivation.

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