How to heal trauma with meaning: A case study in emotional evolution

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Impossible-sounding things are possible in hospitals — however, there are times when we hit dead ends. In these moments, it's important to not run away, but to confront what's happening head-on.

For a lot of us, one of the ways to give meaning to terrible moments is to see what you can learn from them.

Sometimes certain information can "flood" us in ways that aren't helpful, and it's important to figure out what types of data you are able to take in — process — at certain times.

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BJ MILLER

BJ Miller, MD, is an assistant clinical professor of medicine at the University of California, San Francisco where he practices and teaches palliative medicine. He has been profiled in The New York Times Magazine, and interviewed on Super Soul Sunday, The Tim Ferriss Show, and On Being with Krista Tippett, and has spoken at the Aspen Ideas Festival and around the world.

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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.

Other Frequent contributors include Michio Kaku & Neil DeGrasse Tyson.

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3 ways to find a meaningful job, or find purpose in the job you already have

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Broaching the question "What is my purpose?" is daunting – it's a grandiose idea, but research can make it a little more approachable if work is where you find your meaning. It turns out you can redesign your job to have maximum purpose.

There are 3 ways people find meaning at work, what Aaron Hurst calls the three elevations of impact. About a third of the population finds meaning at an individual level, from seeing the direct impact of their work on other people. Another third of people find their purpose at an organizational level. And the last third of people find meaning at a social level."

What's interesting about these three elevations of impact is they enable us to find meaning in any job if we approach it the right way. And it shows how accessible purpose can be when we take responsibility for it in our work," says Hurst.

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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: There's a lot of talk about purpose: What is your purpose as an individual? And, really, it puts a lot of pressure on us to figure out what is our purpose, a sort of grandiose idea. And it's scary to enter that.

What we've found, actually, in studying individual purpose is that it's much simpler than that, especially as you get started on that journey. And I just want to share with you one question for you to really reflect on to help you think about how to make purpose more accessible to you. What we've seen in our research is that we're wired to find meaning in different ways at work. We don't all get a sense of purpose from the same things. And that doesn't mean different causes. It actually has to do with the elevation of meaning in your work. So let me explain what that means.

For about a third of the population, they get the most meaning at work when they can directly see their work impacting other people. They need to have that visceral sense that their work actually made an impact in someone's life. No matter what the impact is, if they don't see that visceral connection, they don't feel a sense of purpose. Think of a doctor, right? A doctor sees patient after patient. If they didn't get a sense of meaning from each patient, that job wouldn't be fulfilling. It wouldn't be one that they would find purpose in most likely. I think of myself. I actually asked my doctor once, you know, "How the hell do you listen to person after person come in with the same issue after the same issue? Don't you just want to be like, look, I've already seen this one before. Go see another doctor. I've already treated this issue." And he said, "No, actually, I see each person as like a unique opportunity to make an impact." So for about a third of people, that is the primary lens for thinking about impact. And you don't have to be a doctor to do that. There's a lot of ways for that to show up. It could be your co-workers. It could be customers. It could be clients. There's a lot of ways to think about how to make that direct impact.

We then have about a third of the workforce who gain much more meaning from working at an organizational level. They say, it's great to help people, but, ultimately, I want to build a more sustainable impact by helping build teams, to build organizations, to build institutions that can make a longer, sustained impact on the world. And when I see, you know, helping a given patient, you know, that's meaningful, but I'd rather help 1,000 doctors serve a million patients and be part of that equation, and that's what's really going to get me fired up. Whereas a person at that individual side might be like, "That that sounds like bureaucracy. Why would you want to be in medicine and be a hospital administrator? That sounds like torture." But to the person who's driven by that organizational change, that is exactly where they need to get that meaning. For people who really get a lot of meaning from that organizational team level, there's so many ways to do that. But at the core, it's about building teams, building organizations...

For the full transcript, check out: https://bigthink.com/videos/3-ways-to-find-a-meaningful-job-or-find-purpose-in-the-job-you-already-have

Michio Kaku: 99.99% of species go extinct. What is humanity’s future?

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The great science fiction writer Isaac Asimov put a terrifying question on humanity's radar: Where will we be 50,000 years from now?

Humanity is close to exhausting the known laws of physics; it's the unknown – the unified theory of everything – that could dominate our destiny in the coming millennia. And that destiny is almost certainly tied to space travel. Why?

"Extinction is the norm," says Michio Kaku, 99.99% of all species on Earth eventually go extinct. "Mother Nature and the laws of physics have a death warrant for humanity," says Kaku. "[U]ltimately our destiny will be in outer space."

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MICHIO KAKU

Dr. Michio Kaku is the co-founder of string field theory, and is one of the most widely recognized scientists in the world today. He has written 4 New York Times Best Sellers, is the science correspondent for CBS This Morning and has hosted numerous science specials for BBC-TV, the Discovery/Science Channel. His radio show broadcasts to 100 radio stations every week. Dr. Kaku holds the Henry Semat Chair and Professorship in theoretical physics at the City College of New York (CUNY), where he has taught for over 25 years. He has also been a visiting professor at the Institute for Advanced Study at Princeton, as well as New York University (NYU).

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TRANSCRIPT:

MICHIO KAKU: When I was a child, I, too, read Isaac Asimov's Foundation series, and it forced you to confront the question: Where will we be 50,000 years from now?

Now, remember, science fiction, when I was a kid, was just shoot 'em up cowboy movies in outer space. That's all it was. However, Isaac Asimov forced you to come to grips with the fact that we're going to be exhausting the known laws of physics pretty soon. We have a very good grasp of the electromagnetic, the strong, the weak forces, gravity, but beyond that lies the unified field theory; the theory that eluded Einstein for the last 30 years of his life, the theory that I work on professionally -- that's my day job; I work on something called string theory, which we think is the theory of everything, and this theory could dominate our destiny in the coming millennia. Now, this means, of course, starships. Already, NASA has something called the 100 Year Starship program, very ambitious, however, a lot of it's still theoretical. We don't know for sure what it would take to go to the stars. Stephen Hawking, my colleague, the late Stephen Hawking, talked about shooting computer chips, tiny computer chips boosted by laser beams to 20% the speed of light, capable of reaching Alpha Centauri in 20 years time. But then, of course, we want to go beyond that. One day, we're going to have fusion rockets, anti-matter rockets, rockets that can take us to the nearby stars, not just computer chips, but people. And then beyond that, who knows? Maybe our destiny really does lie in outer space.

Remember that on the earth, 99.9% of all species eventually go extinct. Extinction is the norm. We think of Mother Nature as being warm and cuddly, and for the most part, she is. But sometimes, the savagery of Mother Nature is revealed. And if you don't believe me, dig underneath your feet. Right under your feet, right now, are the bones, the bones of all the different organisms, of fossils, the 99.9% that were doomed by the laws of nature. And the laws of physics also doom the entire planet Earth. And that's why I say, given the fact that Mother Nature and the laws of physics have a death warrant for humanity, that ultimately our destiny will be in outer space.

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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.

How to fix America’s broken higher education system

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Half of all students who begin their higher education journey drop out, 68 percent of Americans never attain a higher education degree, and 73 percent of Americans go into fields unrelated to their higher education degree.

Clearly, something is wrong with how we approach higher education. In turn, this approach contributes to societal ills, like unrealized contributions to humanity, unrealized potential, debt, despair, and pessimism.

Professor and founder of Greater Commons Todd McLeod has a 12-step plan designed to revolutionize higher education in the U.S. to ensure that the higher education system can keep pace with our rapidly changing world.

In 2019, Lumina Foundation and Big Think teamed up to create the Lumina Prize, a search to find the most innovative and scalable ideas in post-secondary education. Congratulations to Greater Commons, founded by Todd McLeod, the audience choice winner of the Lumina Prize!

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TODD MCLEOD

Todd McLeod is the founder of Greater Commons, an online learning platform where individuals can learn and teach new skills. He has also worked as a tenured professor in California, teaching multiple disciplines such as business, information systems, computer science, and online education.

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TRANSCRIPT:

TODD MCLEOD: I have a plan for building a better education system, but I need your help. For 20 years, I've served as a tenured professor in California.

I've watched generations of students come to campus with hope in their eyes. They want better jobs. They want a brighter future. Yet half of them will not graduate. That's right. Half of those who begin higher education drop out.

There is even more bad news, unfortunately, about the state of higher education. If you want to understand how bad higher education is in America, you need to know three numbers -- 50, 68, 73.

We already talked about how 50% of those who begin higher education -- half of students who begin higher education -- drop out. This is a massive fail. But it gets worse.

68% of Americans never achieve a higher ed degree. The current system fails more than 2/3rds of Americans. This is another massive fail. Yet it still gets worse.

Of those that do earn a degree, 73% go into a career different than their field of study. Students come to higher ed for better jobs. Yet 73% of the time they do not directly use what they learned. This is another massive fail.

Higher education is failing Americans, and this leads to all kinds of breakdowns in our society and in the lives of young adults -- loneliness, pessimism, despair, debt, depression, opioids, suicide, lack of innovation, unrealized human potential, unrealized GDP, unrealized contributions to humanity. These are the true costs of our broken education system. This is a deeply concerning issue and a very important issue for us to solve.

This is such an important issue, the United States government has identified the breakdown in education as a national security issue. To put it plainly, ladies and gentlemen, education has not kept pace with our rapidly changing world. And this is why we are creating Greater Commons.

The first thing we've accomplished is that we've created classes that have been delivered to 312,223 students in 192 different countries. In these classes, we've tested and refined our theories on how education should be delivered in our digitally connected and rapidly changing world. We call our approach agile learning. Our courses have met with significant success, both in reviews from students and in the deliverable of getting students jobs.

The second thing we've accomplished is that we've built our own learning platform to deliver classes. We knew we wanted to create more than what's in the marketplace right now, so we went through our code debt learning curve on this step. Through this process, we focused on optimizing for cost. For instance, the market currently charges $0.04 for each minute of video encoded. But because we built our own video encoder, we can do it for one-third of a cent. That's a 12x reduction in cost.

To continue reading, please visit: https://bigthink.com/Lumina-Foundation/higher-education-crisis

How Silicon Valley went from Republican to Democrat

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From its inception right up until the 1980s, Silicon Valley, and particularly its leaders, were Republican leaning. Dave Packard, cofounder of Hewlett-Packard, was Richard Nixon's deputy secretary of defense.

This trend changes in the 1990s, when the techie generation who came of age during the Vietnam War and Watergate represent a more cynical and liberal class of leaders. In 1984, Steve Jobs admitted he'd never voted.

In the late '80s and '90s, politicians like Bill Clinton, Al Gore, and Newt Gingrich start sitting down and talking with futurists, supercomputing specialists, and Turing Prize winners to understand how this world is evolving and how the innovative energy Silicon Valley could be harnessed to bring America into the 21st century.

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TRANSCRIPT:

MARGARET O'MARA: For a long time, the Valley was Republican leaning; it was the few people who were Democrats who felt few and far between. And I'm thinking, you know, in the '60s and the '70s, and into the '80s, into the Reagan era. The business leaders were, you know, there were like other business leaders. They tended to vote Republican. The great eminence of Silicon Valley Dave Packard, who was the co-founder of Hewlett-Packard, such an incredible influence on Valley's business culture, but also its political culture. He was a really important Republican supporter and donor. He was President Nixon's deputy secretary of defense. He was a political entrepreneur. He had this political career that he continued throughout his life.

But this starts turning in the early 1990s. And the person who really personally helps turn it is Bill Clinton, who is, you know, the Democrats had been talking admiringly about techies for a while. In the early '80s, there was a group of Democrats in Congress that talked so much about tech that Washington journalists started calling them the Atari Democrats. Because they were like, "This is the future. We need to support technological industries." It's really funny, because politicians talked a lot about tech, but tech didn't really love them back. It was interesting -- I found, again and again, these efforts during the '80s, people like Gary Hart coming out and trying to get to know Steve Jobs, and get him to sort of publicly endorse Hart's presidential run in 1984, for example. And Jobs was uninterested, you know, he never voted. In 1984, he admitted he'd never voted in his life. I hope, later, he did vote, but Silicon Valley, the younger, personal computer generation, first of all, they kind of grew up in opposition to big government and to bureaucracies, and saw Washington politics as ossified, a sign of things that were wrong, things that were corrupt. Look, this is the generation that came of age during the Vietnam War and Watergate. They were very cynical about the capacity of government and policy makers to change things for the better. They felt that what they were doing was much more important. And they didn't pay much attention to politics.

In the 1990s, this changes. Bill Clinton starts coming out to Silicon Valley even before he announces his run for president. Clinton was fascinated by technologists. He wasn't and isn't a techie himself, but he likes powerful, interesting people, and they were also people with money, who might give him campaign donations. And like other Democrats of his generation, he saw the Valley as a symbol of the new economy to come. And how could this, the innovative energy of this economy and this industry, be harnessed to bring America into the 21st century? And when Clinton picks Al Gore as his vice-presidential running mate in 1992, that really seals the deal. Gore was one of the few people in Congress in the '80s who was really deeply interested in tech. Yes, he got made fun of later for appearing to seem to say that he invented the internet, which he didn't. And he didn't really say that, either. But there was a small number of people, Gore being one of them, Newt Gingrich being another -- two people who are really consequential to 1990s politics. In the '80s, they're in Congress, and they're sitting down and talking with futurists like Alvin Toffler. They're bringing in supercomputing specialists. They're bringing in Turing Prize winners, and trying to understand how this world is evolving. And no one else was doing that. And these policymakers -- you have Gore, you have Gingrich, you also have Ed Markey, who's now senator from Massachusetts...

To read the full transcript, go to:

https://bigthink.com/videos/how-silicon-valley-went-from-conservative-to-anti-establishment-to-liberal

Do aliens exist? If they did, would we know?

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One of the biggest questions is whether we are alone in the universe — could there be other intelligent life, besides us, out there? Currently, we don't have any evidence aliens exist.

There may have been a chance for a civilization to start billions of years before life began on Earth — one that is far more advanced, technologically speaking, than us. However, they're not making it very obvious. We have no proof of this.

If such an advanced civilization exists, though, it probably relies on solar energy to fuels its everyday activities.

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MICHELLE THALLER

Dr. Michelle Thaller is an astronomer who studies binary stars and the life cycles of stars. She is Assistant Director of Science Communication at NASA. She went to college at Harvard University, completed a post-doctoral research fellowship at the California Institute of Technology (Caltech) in Pasadena, Calif. then started working for the Jet Propulsion Laboratory's (JPL) Spitzer Space Telescope. After a hugely successful mission, she moved on to NASA's Goddard Space Flight Center (GSFC), in the Washington D.C. area. In her off-hours often puts on about 30lbs of Elizabethan garb and performs intricate Renaissance dances. For more information, visit

NASA.

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TRANSCRIPT:

Michelle Thaller: One of the biggest questions is, could there be other life besides us out there in the universe? And I think pretty much every scientist I know feels that there must be. I mean, just simply the numbers-- in our galaxy alone, there are half a trillion stars. And we're now beginning to realize that nearly every star has its own solar system. So at the very least, our single galaxy has hundreds of billions of planets. And some of the stars out there are even older than our sun.

There may have been a chance for a civilization to start billions of years before life began on earth. And if that's true, could there be alien civilizations out there that are far more advanced, technologically, than we are? The unfortunate thing, of course, is we have no evidence of this. They're not making it very obvious. So is there a way that we might be able to see some of, at least, the artifacts of one of these super-civilizations around a distant star? And one of the people who thought about this in a really wonderfully scientific way was a man named Freeman Dyson.

And his name got lent to something called a Dyson sphere. And what a Dyson sphere is-- the idea is that a very advanced civilization would probably need a lot of energy. And one of the best sources of energy is solar energy, the energy of their star that they orbit around. But instead of waiting for that starlight to come all the way to a planet, and to get put into little detectors and solar cells, what if civilization was a little bit more assertive about that, and actually went to the star and built giant collectors around that star? The idea of a Dyson sphere is probably a bit extreme, because some people wondered if a civilization could build an entire shell around a star.

And that shell would collect all of the radiation available from that star that they could use for whatever alien purposes in their super-advanced civilization. A lot of people have suggested that maybe a shell wouldn't be stable. It would be very hard to keep that actually working and orbiting around a star. So maybe you could make a giant grid of huge collectors that would orbit around the star and pick up as much radiation as possible. So a Dyson sphere, or sort of the equivalent of that, there being many, many orbiting detectors around a star, is a wonderful idea in science fiction.

The question is, is there a way you could detect one of these? And for some time, actually, people have wondered, what if you saw a lot of infrared radiation, heat radiation, coming from a star-like object, but you didn't see any visible light? Is it possible that there was a shell of material around that star used to collect all of its energy, and that shell was getting warm because it's around the star, but it wasn't letting any light through? There are very serious scientists who proposed looking for star-like objects that just have heat, but no light associated with them. Unfortunately, we never found any of those either. A couple years ago, however, something very dramatic happened. And it happened as part of the Kepler mission.

This was a mission that was looking for planets aro...

For the full transcript, check out: https://bigthink.com/videos/michelle-thaller-aliens

Immigration: Why the well-meaning ‘successful immigrant’ narrative is faulty

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There's a tendency to fight dehumanizing narratives about immigrants and refugees with stories about how much value they have to the United States, in terms of economic and academic achievements and abilities.

Though these counternarratives might come from a good place, Adam Waytz doesn't believe they "really consider people in terms of human dignity." They fail to call out immigrants and refugees inherent dignity.

The image of the deceased Aylan Kurdi washed ashore evoked immense sympathy for refugees. Besides showcasing their economic values, it highlighted their shared humanity.

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ADAM WAYTZ

Adam Waytz is an award-winning social psychologist and associate professor at Northwestern University’s Kellogg School of Management. His writing has appeared in the New York Times, the Harvard Business Review, the Wall Street Journal, and elsewhere. He is the first person to receive twice the Theoretical Innovation Prize from the Society for Personality and Social Psychology. He is also the winner of the SAGE Young Scholar Award and the International Social Cognition Network’s Early Career Award.

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TRANSCRIPT:

ADAM WAYTZ: So there are often these dehumanizing narratives around immigrants and refugees, that they are barbaric or animal-like or disease-ridden and that we should be eradicating them, or at least keeping them out of the country. And I think there's a tendency to fight that narrative sometimes by talking about how much value immigrants have, or refugees have, to the United States. And what concerns me about some of these counternarratives, even though they might come from a good place, is that I don't think they really consider people in terms of human dignity.

They tend to be narratives around things like, well, "Immigrants have value because look at this person who became a great entrepreneur. Or look at this person who fled genocide in Eastern Europe and came to the U.S. and won the Nobel Prize for developing magnetic resonance imaging technology. Or look at this person who comes from an immigrant family who actually served the U.S. in the military." And so, you're not placing any intrinsic worth on immigrants or refugees as human beings, but rather as instrumentally valuable.

Even the late great Anthony Bourdain talked about how if Trump's very restrictive immigration plan for Mexican immigrants went through, where Mexican immigrants would be kicked out of the country, the restaurant industry would totally collapse. The idea being that there are so many Mexican immigrants, some undocumented immigrants, working behind the scenes of restaurants that this represents a very important labor force. And even if the sentiment was well-intentioned, we're not getting the argument that in addition to these people as valuable members of the economy, these people are also human beings.

It's always easier to dehumanize others who are socially distant from us, people who speak different languages from us, who live in different places from us, who have different circumstances from us, who look differently from us. So, simply by the virtue of being foreign, we tend to dehumanize at a baseline level anyone who comes from outside of the United States. So there are a lot of dehumanizing forces working against our capacity to develop sympathy for these outsiders. But I think a remarkable example of a countervailing force comes not from the U.S. case necessarily, but comes from the case of people fleeing Syria. And so we can perhaps recall the image of Aylan Kurdi, the young Syrian boy who sadly washed ashore, fleeing civil war.

And when that image of this deceased boy washed ashore circulated on social media and the front pages of newspapers, donations to refugee-oriented charities absolutely spiked. So I think that represents the power of a single human individual, or a single human narrative to generate more sympathy for the plight of immigrants and refugees.

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The incredible history of the 2nd Amendment and America’s gun violence problem

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In 1765, the Britain Parliament passed a Stamp Act, but people in New England rebelled against it. In response to this, the king sent two regimens of the British army to Boston to occupy the city. They were much despised by Bostonians, and this occuptation led to the Boston Massacre in 1770. Since then, many have interpreted the Second Amendment to mean the right of the people to bear arms to aid them in a possible insurrection against the government.

The Supreme Court in 1939 in U.S. v Miller, decided unanimously that gun safety laws are perfectly constitutional — the justices declared that the Second Amendment does not protect the rights of an individual to carry firearms. They said the Second Amendment protects the right of people to form militias, or to participate in the common defense.

According to many historians, bearing arms evokes a military use for the common defense — not for shooting rabbits or for the insurrection against one's government. It seems the purpose of the law is to allow citizens to participate in defense of the country against a common enemy.

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JILL LEPORE

Jill Lepore is the David Woods Kemper '41 Professor of American History at Harvard University. She is also a staff writer at The New Yorker. A prize-winning professor, she teaches classes in evidence, historical methods, humanistic inquiry, and American history. Much of her scholarship explores absences and asymmetries in the historical record, with a particular emphasis on the histories and technologies of evidence and of privacy. As a wide-ranging and prolific essayist, Lepore writes about American history, law, literature, and politics. She is the author of many award-winning books. Her latest book is These Truths: A History of the United States (2018)

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TRANSCRIPT:

JILL LEPORE: One of the more interesting theories about the nature of gun violence in the United States and the quite high homicide rate in the United States, both of which distinguish the United States from other similar nations, has to do with at what moment in time the United States became independent and why the Second Amendment ends up in the Bill of Rights, which is written by Madison. In the theory it is that most states, that is nation states, pursued a historical course that led to the state having a monopoly on violence before the state became fully democratized, that is to say the government essentially seizes the weapons and declares that people can't be kind of holding their own weapons for the sake of wielding kind of satellite forms of armed power against the state and then societies become democratized. So if you think about the United Kingdom like you could think about it in those terms. That doesn't happen in that sequence in the United States, the United States becomes democratized much earlier.

From early in the 17th century British mainland colonies and island colonies as well elect their own local representatives to their colonial legislatures, they pass their own laws. There is a spirit of independence in colonial governments that you don't see in county governments in England say at the same time historically. And among the important elements of that spirit for many people by the 1760s is the idea that in so distant set of colonies from a ruling imperial government, what is dangerous is when people's ability to express themselves politically is interfered with by a standing

army. So the great bugbear of 18th century mainland colonists is the standing army, especially in the north. The south doesn't have as much of a problem with a standing army and Britain's Island colonies in the Caribbean don't have a problem with the standing armies.

A standing army is an army kept by the king in times of peace and quartered among the people or near the people. And Britain's Caribbean colonies what they really, really want is a standing army because that's a bunch of English colonists who are vastly outnumbered by their enslaved African workforce and they want to be defended by the British army so they're forever indeed asking for a standing army to be in the islands to defend slave plantation owners against their own slaves who were constantly rebelling. And that is to some degree the same case in the southern colonies in the mainland. In the north in particular, particularly in New England, the idea of a standing army is the worst form of political tyranny and this assume...

For the full transcript, check out https://bigthink.com/videos/jill-lepore-guns

Smart drugs: All-natural brain enhancers made by mother nature

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Nootropics are colloquially known as 'smart drugs' – substances that increase cognitive function in healthy people. The word nootropic is a combination of two Greek words, noos meaning 'mind' and tropein meaning 'towards'.

Dave Asprey discusses two naturally occurring smart drugs: Caffeine and nicotine. The latter might be a surprise, but while smoking, chewing tobacco and vaping have negative health consequences, there's evidence to suggest microdosing one milligram of nicotine, about 5% to 10% of a cigarette's worth, may protect against Alzheimer's.

Beyond naturally occurring smart drugs, Asprey discusses aniracetam, a pharmaceutical cognitive enhancer pioneered in Russia that may improve memory input and recall.

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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: Since this is Big Think, let's talk about the things that help you think big. And you might think, oh, great, this is going to be a Tony Robbins discussion. No. This is a discussion around nootropics, or what's known as smart drugs. I have been using smart drugs for more than 20 years, both the pharmaceutical side and the natural side, where you have lots of plant compounds. I've even formulated some for my company, where it puts together things -- oh, look, there's studies on rosemary. There's studies for this extract of seaweed -- good studies that show that these are increasing your ability to get things in and out of your memory, or making your brain work better.

And it turns out Mother Nature apparently wants us to be higher performance, because she makes a couple of really potent smart drugs, and you might even have used one or both of them. The most commonly consumed cognitive enhancing substance on the planet is coffee. Now, yeah, Bulletproof coffee -- I probably have a bias for saying that -- nut no, seriously, 90% of people drink coffee, and caffeine is a very well-studied performance enhancer, at least over the short period. You can't drink coffee for three days straight and expect to perform well at the end. But could we go deeper than that? And by the way, coffee itself, at this point, I feel comfortable saying it's an anti-aging substance, given the preponderance of studies. All of the big four killers and things like that, they seem to get better. So you have a cognitive enhancer that looks like it's beneficial in many different aspects. I'm all-in on that one.

But what about nicotine? Well, is that a cognitive enhancer? It turns out that nicotine actually, since 1988, has been studied and shown to be an anti-Alzheimer's agent. What? I actually interviewed a guy -- I call him Dr. Nicotine -- his name's Andrew Newhouse -- on Bulletproof Radio. And he's the guy who wrote the first paper in 1988 at Vanderbilt University, and has been studying nicotine ever since. Smoking is bad for you. Chewing tobacco is bad for you. Vaping is bad for you. However, a little bit -- we're talking micro-dosing -- of oral nicotine is a potent cognitive enhancer. You feel one milligram, which is about 5% to 10% of a cigarette's worth; you feel it a lot. And so I will tell you, Super Human was written with the aid of both coffee and nicotine. However, the recommendations in Super Human for nicotine are, you don't want to be using a lot of nicotine, because a lot of nicotine isn't good for you. And smoking is never good for you. To say tobacco and nicotine are the same thing is not a good idea. So I tell people, look, if you're over 40, one milligram a day might be a good idea, because it enhances mitochondrial function, and because we don't want to get Alzheimer's as we age. And maybe over 50, you want two milligrams a day, so just a little bit. But trust me. You'll like that one milligram a day, because it feels good. In fact, nicotine can improve typing speed by up to 15% in healthy people. That's a lot, especially if you're writing a book like Super Human. I typed faster. Not really. I dictated a lot of it.

But what are some of the other things you can do? One of my favorite drugs that I write about is called aniracetam. And it is a pharmaceutical substance. I...

For the full transcript, check out https://bigthink.com/videos/smart-drugs-all-natural-brain-enhancers-made-by-mother-nature

Automated trucks: Blue-collar disaster or economic win?

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There are 3.5 million truck drivers in the U.S.; it's the most common job in 29 states. Yet there is a $168 billion financial incentive for Silicon Valley to automate truck drivers.

The pros? Automation will lower the 4,000-person annual death toll caused by truck collisions, and it will save companies and consumers money. The cons? Truck drivers with families to support and loans to pay will soon have to compete with a robot truck that doesn't need to sleep.

That kind of economic hardship doesn't exist in a vacuum; it will ripple outward in unexpected ways.

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ANDREW YANG

Andrew Yang is an entrepreneur and author who is running for President as a Democrat in 2020. In his book The War on Normal People, he explains the mounting crisis of the automation of labor and makes the case for the Freedom Dividend, a Universal Basic Income of $1,000 a month for every American as well as other policies to progress to the next stage of capitalism.

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TRANSCRIPT:

ANDREW YANG: The big misconception about the impact of technology in the workforce is thinking that it's around the corner. Instead it's been with us for years. If you look at the last 20 years or so, we've automated away 4 million manufacturing jobs in Michigan, Ohio, Pennsylvania, Wisconsin, Missouri, Iowa, all the swing states that Donald Trump needed to win in 2016 and did win.

Then my friends in Silicon Valley and my friends who work in technology know that what we did to the manufacturing workers we are now going to do to the retail workers, the call center workers, the fast food workers, the truck drivers, and then even bookkeepers, accountants, insurance agents, lawyers, and on and on through the economy. So what happened to the manufacturing worker is a very clear sign of what's going to happen to these other workers moving forward.

And I talked a little bit about retail workers, the most common occupation in the economy. Thirty percent of Main Street stores and malls are going to close in the next five years because Amazon is soaking up $20 billion of commerce every year. And many of these workers are making $11 to $12 an hour and don't have a huge savings cushion to be able to make meaningful adjustments. Being a truck driver is the most common job in 29 states. There are 3 and 1/2 million truck drivers in this country, average age 49, 94% male, average education high school or one year of college. They're making about $46,000 a year right now. It's one of the higher paying blue collar jobs in this country.

And on the west coast, you have my friends in Silicon Valley who are trying to automate truck driving. And the reason they're doing that is because of the money -- $168 billion in financial incentives for automating away truck drivers. And that's not just labor savings. That's also equipment utilization because a truck never needs to stop whereas human-driven trucks have to stop every 14 hours; fuel efficiency because trucks can convoy together in lower wind resistance and so robot trucks would be able get places with less fuel, fewer accidents because truck drivers right now kill about 4,000 other motorists a year in accidents and that number would come down if you had automated freight. So there's a very, very powerful set of incentives to try and automate truck driving as an occupation.

Again, though, you have these 3 and 1/2 million truckers, and only 13% of them are unionized. So there's not going to be a grand negotiation. So imagine being a trucker who's taken out $50,000, $60,000 loan to lease your truck and it's your livelihood and your means of support, and then all of a sudden, you have to compete with a robot truck that doesn't need to sleep. And that is what is around the corner for hundreds of thousands of truckers in this country in the next five to 10 years when robot trucks start to hit our highways. And Amazon is testing out robot trucks as we speak, right now in the Midwest.

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