The most desired people in the job market? “Glue people.“

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In researching his new book How to Win in a Winner-Take-All World, economics journalist Neil Irwin discovered that what makes people succeed in a highly competitive job market is what he calls being a "glue person."

Glue people are people who pull teams together to make them greater than the sum of their parts. They are typically specialists in one area but can also understand other specializations and communicate across boundaries.

The most natural thing to do is to find one thing you're good at and stick with it. Glue people do the opposite – they stretch themselves.

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NEIL IRWIN

Neil Irwin is a senior economic correspondent at The New York Times, where he was a founding member of The Upshot, the Times’s site for analytical journalism. He was previously the author of The Alchemists: Three Central Bankers and a World on Fire, a New York Times bestselling account of the global financial crisis and its aftermath that was short-listed for the McKinsey-Financial Times Business Book of the Year award.

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TRANSCRIPT:

NEIL IRWIN: My job is to be an economics writer. So what I do everyday is write about these big-picture issues in the economy, what's changing in the corporate world, GDP, what's going on with the Federal Reserve. And then, at night, often, over the last several years, I'll go out and I'll see a friend, or see a colleague, or a source, and we'll talk about how hard it can be to navigate a career in the modern world, how you have to make a lot of decisions, there's not a nice linear path you can follow like our parents' generation did. And eventually I realized these conversations I was having at night over drinks and these things I was writing about during the day as a writer at The New York Times were actually two sides of the same coin, and that figuring out how to have a successful career is really about understanding how the economy is shifting, how you can be in position to take advantage of those shifts rather than being steamrolled by them.

For this book, I went to a lot of big companies -- to Goldman Sachs, to Microsoft, to GE, to Walmart, and asked, OK, what does it take to succeed in this environment we're in, this highly-technological, highly-competitive environment? And the thing I heard over and over is the importance of being able to work in teams and pull together teams; I call it being a glue person, a person who can make a team stick together and produce something more than the sum of its parts. And so that's not just about technical ability. You have to have technical ability, obviously. You have to be good at whatever the thing is your core job is. But you also need to understand how what you do fits together with what your other members of that team are. And if you can't communicate with others effectively who have very different kinds of skills and background than your own, you're really not going to be that glue person.

Economists talk of this concept of Pareto optimality, and they usually mean it in regards to an entire economy. So an economy is Pareto optimal if you can't make one person better off without making somebody else worse off, meaning it's the best of all possible worlds -- even if there's inequality; it doesn't mean necessarily that everybody's equally well off. It just means if you're going to make somebody else better off, somebody else is worse off. Now, that's not what I'm talking about with careers, but I think drawing that line is a really useful concept that can help us understand who becomes a good glue person, who actually helps modern organizations propel toward success. And that's being Pareto optimal, meaning you can't get better at one thing without getting worse at the other.

So if you think about a team that has people who are engineers on it and people who do kind of marketing and product work on it, a Pareto optimal engineer is somebody who is a really good engineer who is at least as good at marketing as they can be without being worse as an engineer. This exists in all types of organizations, and there are different spots on that curve to be at. There are people who are really good at one thing, and only a little bit good at that other thing. Then there's others who are kind of in the middle, and they know some engineering, they know some marketing, some product development. Those tend to be team leaders, people who pull together a product in a lot of different types of organizations...

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America has outgrown its ‘Judeo-Christian’ label. What’s next?

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America wasn't always known as Judeo-Christian nation. Rather, it used to be considered a Protestant nation.

As Jews and Catholics began to represent a larger share of the nation, activists realized that America needed to reinvent itself if the voices of these growing groups were to be heard. In this way, the "Judeo-Christian" label was conceived. Today, that label doesn't quite fit anymore. What does?

The opinions expressed in this video do not necessarily reflect the views of the Charles Koch Foundation, which encourages the expression of diverse viewpoints within a culture of civil discourse and mutual respect.

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EBOO PATEL

Eboo Patel is the founder and president of Interfaith Youth Core (IFYC), a national nonprofit working to make interfaith

cooperation a social norm. He is the author of the books Acts of Faith, Sacred Ground, Interfaith Leadership and Out of Many Faiths. Eboo holds a doctorate in the sociology of religion from Oxford University, where he studied on a Rhodes scholarship.

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TRANSCRIPT:

EBOO PATEL: When I go to college campuses, one of the ways I like to open my talk is I say, when the Mayflower Pilgrims landed on the eastern seaboard and they approached Plymouth Rock, they dusted it off, they saw etched on the stone the words, "Judeo-Christian nation." And there'll be a long pause, and all these 19-year-olds who did really well on their standardized tests will like look up at me, like, "Wow." And then I'll slowly start shaking my head. And you can hear the ripple of, like, kind of a chuckle in the room. It raises the question, if that's not how we started to think of ourselves as a Judeo-Christian nation, how did it happen? Did Thomas Jefferson write it in the Declaration of Independence? Did God give it to Moses on Sinai? How did this notion emerge? Well, the story of that is actually an even better story than the little Plymouth Rock fable that I told.

In the 1920s, at a time that feels a lot like our era now, massive economic and social shifts, agrarian society to an industrial society, the country to the city, profound social and economic polarization, technological leaps, et cetera, et cetera, you had the rise of really ugly racist movements and xenophobic movements, mostly in the form of the KKK. And not only was the KKK anti-black, it was anti-Semitic and anti-Catholic. And in 1928, the first Catholic to run on a major party presidential ticket appears, a man named Al Smith who was the Governor of New York at the time, and the KKK torpedoes his candidacy, largely with anti-Catholic weapons. And a group of great Americans emerged out of that and say "We can't have this.

With the growing Catholic and Jewish populations in the United States we can't be a nation that excludes their contributions; that's crazy." They build an organization called the NCCJ, and they start doing a set of civic projects across the country, tri-faith dialogues, minister, priest, rabbi, going to different campuses and different cities and to different military bases around the world, the era of World War II, to talk about the importance of what they called The Brotherhood of Man Under the Fatherhood of God. And as a part of this, they decide a new narrative is important for a country that long thought of itself as a Protestant nation and so they invent a word. And the word is Judeo-Christian. It's an invention. It's not theologically accurate. Jesus is a central player in Christianity, he's maybe a good rabbi in Judaism: discuss, right? It's not historically accurate, it's not like Jews faired especially well in Christian majority societies for much of history. What it is is a genius civic invention. It is a term that helped us welcome the contributions of Jews and Catholics.

It did really good work for 70/80 years. We now live in a nation with several million Muslims and Buddhists and Hindus, growing groups of secular humanists, atheist, agnostics; we're a long way away from Jews and Catholics being the new minorities. What comes next? What's the next chapter in the great story of American interfaith cooperation? I think its called "Interfaith Nation." I think it centers the idea of America not as a melting pot, but as a potluck that welcomes the contributions of all communities, our Muslims, our Bahais, our Jains, our Sikhs, our Jews, our Atheists, our Zoroastrians our Evangelicals. The only way the nation feasts is if every community contributes.

Why a great education means engaging with controversy

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During times of war or national crisis in the U.S., school boards and officials are much more wary about allowing teachers and kids to say what they think.

If our teachers avoid controversial questions in the classroom, kids won't get the experience they need to know how to engage with difficult questions and with criticism.

Jonathan Zimmerman argues that controversial issues should be taught in schools as they naturally arise. Otherwise kids will learn from TV news what politics looks like – which is more often a rant than a healthy debate.

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JONATHAN ZIMMERMAN

Jonathan Zimmerman is Professor of History of Education at the Graduate School of Education at the University of Pennsylvania. A former Peace Corps volunteer and high school social studies teacher, Zimmerman is the author of "Campus Politics: What Everyone Needs to Know" (Oxford) and six other books. He is also a frequent contributor to The New York Times, The Washington Post, The New York Review of Books, and other popular periodicals.

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TRANSCRIPT:

JONATHAN ZIMMERMAN: At different times in American history there's been a little more room for for controversial discussion, and then it's been constricted, like in a staccato rhythm, like an accordion. So in the progressive era that preceded the First World War, there was a little bit more discussion and controversy in schools. This was the era of the current events lesson, when the newspaper industry actually promoted it, the lesson -- you'd cut out an article from a newspaper and come in and discuss it. But then the United States entered World War I, and there was a rapid and massive constricting of discussion. Because during wartime, historically in this country, speech has been limited, and it was extremely limited in schools. And then, in the interwar period, that is, in the '20s and '30s, there was a little bit more wiggle room. During the Second World War and Cold War, much more constriction. In the '60s and '70s, during the Vietnam and civil rights era, opening up a little bit, but then starting in the '80s, constricting as well. And there are different reasons for this across time. But one of the through lines that we find is that during war especially, or times of national crisis, the school boards and school officials are much more wary about allowing teachers and kids to say what they think.

There is controversy in a democracy, if you haven't noticed, especially now. And if our teachers aren't leading kids in discussions of controversies, the kids aren't going to be educated in how to have a discussion. I think especially at this moment, you turn on the TV, and you're told that after the commercial break, there's going to be a debate about some subject -- immigration, health care, whatever -- and then you watch what ensues, and you see four people shouting at each other or past each other, really a set of sequential rants. That's what our kids are going to think politics is unless our schools teach them how to engage controversial issues in a fair-minded, tolerant, and reasonable way. That's very difficult, and people won't learn to do it unless they're taught to do it. If our teachers avoid controversial questions, our kids won't get the needed experience of how to engage those questions.

If you interview American school teachers about their pre-service training, and you ask them, 'As part of your preparation to become a teacher, did your teachers or your university engage you in the question of controversial issues? That is, were you taught how to teach about them?' Most say no. And I think that anybody who's going to be a teacher should have thought about, discussed, and addressed precisely what we're talking about right now. So I'm not saying there should necessarily be, quote, "a class" on how to talk about controversial issues. But I think all disciplines are defined by controversy. English class is defined by, you know, what's love really? History class is defined by: What is a democracy when you get right down to it? These disciplines are defined by controversies, and I would say, rather than having a special class on controversy that our teachers should be prepared to engage it as it arises in the disciplines that are defined by it...

Read the full transcript at https://bigthink.com/sponsored-institute-for-humane-studies/education-censorship

Lateral thinking: How to workshop innovative ideas

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As we get older, the work we consistently do builds "rivers of thinking." These give us a rich knowledge of a certain kind of area. The problem with this, however, is that as those patterns get deeper, we get locked into them.

When this happens it becomes a challenge to think differently — to break from the past and generate new ideas. How do we get out of this rut? One way is to bring play and game mechanics into workshops.

When we approach problem-solving from a perspective of fun, we lose our fear of failure, allowing us to think boldly and overcome built patterns.

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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: As we get older, it becomes a real benefit to have a long history and tradition, the work that you do. It builds what you might call patterns or rivers of thinking. And the more experience we glean, the more education we acquire. We build deeper and deeper rivers. And those rivers are really valuable. Those patterns are important.

But the challenge is that as those patterns get deeper, we get locked into them. And it becomes hard to change our minds. It becomes hard to do things differently. That's why children are absolutely amazing at their lateral thinking, or the ability to think across different domains within an instant. It's because they haven't built those patterns or gone deep into those rivers yet.

And while a river can be really valuable for you as an expert in an area of neuroscience, let's say, or it can be really useful if you're building a product forecast or doing market research, when you need new ideas, when you need to break with the past, it could be really challenging. Because we know what we know, and it's hard for us to diverge or jump out of those rivers.

But there's good news for it. We can actually practice. We can cultivate this. We can take time to be able to build new patterns of thinking, but only if we're willing and if we have the desire to go and do things different. And that is a really important intrinsic factor — the motivation, the desire, to be able to get out of our normal patterns of thinking.

Think about it this way for a moment. How many times have you gone to work the same exact way, walking across the same city blocks or driving across the same roads? When have you said to yourself, I'm going to go a longer route, I'm going to try something different? Maybe I'll even bike to work. Maybe I could skateboard-- maybe not skateboard. But you know what I mean, doing things differently. Because when you do things differently, it actually starts to rewire our brain, and it pushes us in a very deliberate way to think what we've never thought before.

And there's a lot of different lessons and little secret ingredients that I think that could help prime or set people up to be able to think different. So one, the battle is usually one or lost before you ever step foot on the battlefield. I think it was George Patton who said that. And it really is true, not just in war or in sports, but in innovation.

The reason I say that is that it primes you. It gets you ready. You've already premeditated on the subject. And while that might put you in a pattern of thinking, it also readies you to come in and to start thinking deeply on a subject. Often, we'll throw out things in the moment, in the instant, to people and hope that miraculously, they'll have a great idea. It requires incubation time, which is a term that's used in neuroscience, where we allow for ideas to percolate before we actually start to try to do something with it. So preparation is absolutely essential when you want to achieve a big success in any type of workshop or design sprint or ideation session.

The second thing that I believe wholeheartedly in is this idea of play. So play is not something new, but it's often frowned upon in most of adult working states. Now, some companies have done an awesome job of trying to change the story, Google, and Apple, and other companies that are a bit more tilted towards the millennials....

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The looming superbug crisis: Politics, profit, and Big Pharma

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Alexander Fleming discovered a fungus that produced a chemical that could stop nearly every bacteria in its path. The 1950s are known as the Golden Era of Antibiotic Development.

However, today, there is a looming superbug crisis because bacteria has mutated whilst we've focused on treating other diseases, such as cancer and heart disease. Many companies in the pharmaceutical industry don't want to take on the expensive risk of finding another antibiotic drug.

However, a potential superbug crisis may compel us to use tax-break and patent policies to incentivize them to do so.

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MATT MCCARTHY

Matt McCarthy, MD, graduated from Harvard Medical School and went on to complete his internal medicine residency at Columbia University Medical Center. He is the author of two national bestsellers, "The Real Doctor Will See You Shortly" and "Odd Man Out." His newest book, "Superbugs," is on-sale now.

He is also an assistant professor of medicine at Weill Cornell and a staff physician at NewYork-Presbyterian Hospital.

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TRANSCRIPT:

MATT MCCARTHY: Yeah, the discovery of antibiotics is one of the most remarkable stories in medicine. There was this young military physician named Alexander Fleming who was taking care of injured soldiers in 1914 at a makeshift military hospital in France. And he noticed that many of the soldiers had infections that were not getting better with the tools that he had to treat them, which was largely his surgical scalpel and also antiseptic fluid. And he was just 34 years old at the time, but Fleming recognized that there had to be a better way. And after the war was over, he went back to his laboratory at St. Mary's Hospital and started tinkering around. And it wasn't until nearly 15 years later that he stumbled upon this fungus that was producing a chemical that was so extraordinary that it could kill almost every bacteria in its path. And the chemical that that fungus was producing is what we now know is penicillin.

What's interesting about that story is that the discovery did not lead to a commercially available drug right away. In fact, Alexander Fleming didn't realize that he was on the cusp of some incredible discovery. It took another World War, and teaming up with the burgeoning pharmaceutical industry and a number of other researchers at Oxford University, before everyone fully recognized what he had stumbled upon in his laboratory in the late 1920s. And that discovery of penicillin ushered in what we now know of as the golden era of antibiotic development. The 1950s was a period when there was a new drug being discovered seemingly every few months. And the life expectancy of humans shot up because of all of these fantastic discoveries. But then there was a problem, which is that we were so successful finding new antibiotics, that a number of prominent physicians and scientists came out and said, we got this infectious disease issue kicked. It's time to look for more pressing issues like heart disease and cancer.

And so we started focusing our attention on treating those diseases just as the bacteria were being exposed to our precious arsenal of antibiotics. And that set up a very difficult situation, which is that the bacteria were mutating when we took our eye off the ball. And we didn't recognize the scope of the problem until the 1990s. And that's when we first recognized that there were all of these drug resistant bacteria around us, which we now think of as superbugs. Yeah, so when we talk about bacteria evolving into superbugs, what we mean is that they are mutating to develop machinery and enzymes that can evade even our most powerful antibiotics. My favorite one is something called an efflux pump. And it's a microscopic vacuum cleaner that bacteria have developed that can suck up an antibiotic and spit it out. One of the other things I really like are these enzymes that they have created that chew up antibiotics. And they scavenge for metals, like zinc. And they can chop up even the most complex or nuanced medication that we throw at them.

And so bacteria are constantly doing this whether we recognize it or not. And so what's been fascinating to see is how quickly they can evolve. This is a remarkable insight that we can now discover this. But it also sets up a very perilous situation for the companies that want to create new antibiotics. They know that, if they make a new drug, the bacter...

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Cosmic death beams: Understanding gamma ray bursts

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In a single night, astronomers are able to detect about 20 supernova explosions.

Gamma-ray bursts are even more energetic — in a single flash of radiation they can outshine the rest of the known universe. If a gamma burst went off anywhere in our galaxy, it could be disastrous. The radiation would be beamed far and wide.

However, as long as you're not in the way of one of those beams — or very far the site of the initial explosion — then you're probably safe.

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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: Walter, you've asked a question about how explosions propagate through space. And of course, the amazing thing is that there are incredibly violent explosions going on all around us. I remember I spent one night at Mount Palomar. And there is a specific telescope up there it was called the Palomar Transient Factory that scans the sky for supernova explosions. And the amazing thing was that in a single night-- just one night being up on top of this mountain in Southern California they detected about 20 supernova explosions. And that's an entire solar system ripping itself apart. In a single night, you see 20 of them. And there are actually more violent explosions still, more energetic explosions called gamma ray bursts. And gamma ray bursts are almost sort of unbelievably violent. In a single flash of radiation, one little object can outshine literally the rest of the known universe, billions of galaxies. It becomes so bright that, quite honestly, we had a lot of trouble explaining where all that energy could possibly come from.

Now, a gamma ray burst, you think, wow, something outshines the entire universe, that must not happen very often. Well, incredibly, with our satellites, we detect about one a day. So all around us, there are these mind-blowingly violent events. By and large, they don't affect us much. And that's because of the distance. You see, the main amount of radiation that comes out of these is in the form of light. And I don't mean just visible light. Gamma ray bursts, as the name suggests, have a lot of gamma rays. Now, gamma rays are very high-energy form of light. And gamma rays are produced when conditions the gas around the object reach the many, many billions of degrees. When you're a billion degrees hot, you actually shine, naturally, in gamma rays. Things like supernova explosions, you get a lot of x-rays, things that are millions of degrees hot. But it's still light gamma rays, X-rays, ultraviolet light, the light that we see, visible light, and then there's lower-energy light, too, like microwaves and radio.

The amazing thing is that there's so many different kinds of light, and we are really blind almost all of them. We see a tiny little bit of light that's available. But life is made of photons, and light travels through space. But there's a wonderful thing called the inverse square law, and that describes how the intensity of light drops as you move farther and farther away. And really what it has to do with is the area of a sphere. If you have a light source, and light is coming away, say, from the sun. The sun is shining in all directions. There's a sphere of photons coming away from the light. As those photons move out into space, they're covering a larger and larger area as they move away. And the area of a sphere is related to the square of the distance away that you are from the object. So the square of the radius, the inverse square law. So if you move twice as far away from the sun as we are now, the light from the sun would drop by a factor of four. We've gone twice as far away, it's four times as faint. These objects are so far away from us that that light is spread over an incredibly large area, and it's really lost any sort of i...

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Greenland’s ice: A trip back in time to see the future of climate change

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The Greenland ice sheet covers 80% of the island of Greenland. The sheet is 1,500 miles long, 700 miles across, and two miles thick. Scientists call it the largest laboratory in the world.

By studying the minerals and gasses trapped in layers of ice, glaciologists can unravel mysteries of the past, such as what the temperature was 1,000 years ago, or search for clues as to why the Greenland Norse people vanished.

Ice cores are a key to the past that also unlocks the future. Studying Greenland's ice sheet is yielding valuable information about the future of climate change.

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JON GERTNER

Jon Gertner is a journalist and historian whose stories on science, technology, and nature have appeared in a host of national magazines. Since 2003 he has worked mainly as a feature writer for the New York Times Magazine. His first book, The Idea Factory: Bell Labs and the Great Age of American Innovation, was a New York Times bestseller.

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TRANSCRIPT:

JON GERTNER: It's hard for us here to imagine what the Greenland ice sheet is like. This is thousands of miles from the United States, as well as from Europe. It's a country that few people ever visit; it's a flyover -- maybe when you're going to Northern Europe you see this vast ice sheet. And Greenland's ice sheet, you might just imagine kind of a cupcake where the icing doesn't quite go to the edges. I mean, not only is Greenland the world's largest island, but this ice sheet, which is about 1,500 miles long and 700 miles across, covers well over 80% of the island. So there's really only this narrow strip of land around the edges that have been hospitable to settlements. Because nothing really lives on the ice sheet. This is a place where frozen temperatures get down as low as minus 80 degrees fahrenheit. It's a place that was considered forsaken by the native Inuit, a place that was somewhere you would stay away from, where evil spirits dwelled.

And it was also a place that in its center -- if you consider this kind of icing on the cupcake, in the center it's 10,000 feet high. So it's this kind of giant dome of ice, and it's two miles thick. One scientist I spent a lot of time with in Greenland called it the world's largest laboratory. Which is a kind of strange phrase when you think of it as the world's largest island, and it's covered in ice. Well, why is that? But if you look back in the history it sort of offered this opportunity for the study of the one remaining ice sheet in the northern hemisphere; the other is down south in Antarctica. But it also offered some of those early scientists a way to look back in time. Because ice, in the words of a lot of scientists, is depositional. It creates a kind of record of all the deposits that fell on it through snow. And we think, OK, well it has old snow. But it's more than that. It actually holds ancient gases. It contains records from ancient volcanic eruptions. And the way we began to access that information, because it really is information, was to drill into the ice.

And the first people to do this in a significant way, they weren't actually drilling into the ice. There was this guy Ernst Sorge, who was stationed with Alfred Wegener's team in the center of the ice sheet in 1930. And he began, literally, he was camped out under the ice with another guy -- two other guys, actually -- and he began to literally dig down with a shovel. He dug a staircase into the ice. He dug about 50 meters -- 50 feet, excuse me, down into the ice. And he began to carve out blocks and bring them back up to where they were sleeping, and he would measure them on a scale. And he wanted to measure their density. And what he discerned was that there was a very kind of discernible variation between wintertime-density snow and summertime. And he could, by doing this, sort figure out exactly how many years back in time he was going. So that was the big first step. OK, you can actually measure these sort of stripes in the ice, if you think of it that way, by kind of going down deep. And after that it became much more ambitious.

In the 1950s and 1960s scientists really brought drilling rigs up there. They tried to figure out how you could kind of drill down and pull up a core, which might sound easier than you think, but it's actually quite hard because you want to retain the pristine nature of the ice...

For the full transcript, check out https://bigthink.com/videos/greenlands-ice-a-trip-back-in-time-to-see-the-future-of-climate-change

How psychedelics work: Fire the conductor, let the orchestra play

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If your ego had a "location" in the brain, it would be the default mode network, where much of your self-critical mind chatter happens. Taking psychedelics down-regulates this brain network.

Researchers describe the effect of psychedelics as "letting the brain off its leash", or firing the conductor to let the orchestra play. Without the default mode network acting as a dictator, areas of the brain that don't normally interact meet, producing phenomena like hallucinations and synesthesia.

An overactive ego may be what punishes those of us plagued with anxiety, addiction and mental health disorders. Psychedelics can have a beneficial effect by temporarily killing the ego, jogging the brain out of negative thinking patterns.

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MICHAEL POLLAN

Michael Pollan is the author of How to Change Your Mind and seven previous books including Cooked, Food Rules, In Defense of Food, The Omnivore's Dilemmaand The Botany of Desire, which received the Borders Original Voices Award for the best non-fiction work of 2001, and was recognized as a best book of the year by the American Booksellers Association and Amazon.com. PBS premiered a two-hour special documentary based on The Botany of Desire in fall 2009.

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TRANSCRIPT:

MICHAEL POLLAN: So how do these psychedelics work? Well, the honest answer is: We don't entirely know. But we know a few things. One is, they fit a certain receptor site -- the serotonin 52A receptor -- and they look a lot like serotonin, if you look at the molecular models of them. And in fact, LSD fits that receptor site even better than serotonin does, and it stays there longer, and that's why the LSD trip can last 12 hours.

What happens after that, we don't really know. It's an agonist to that receptor, so it increases its activity. And this, the neuroscientists say, "leads to a cascade of effects," which is shorthand for "don't really know what happens next." But one thing we do know, or we think we know, is that it appears that one particular brain network is deactivated or quieted, and that is the default mode network. This was discovered not very long ago by a researcher in England named Robin Carhart-Harris, who was dosing people with psilocybin and LSD and then sliding them into an MRI machine to take an FMRI, a Functional Magnetic Resonance Image. And the expectation, I think, was that people would see an excitation of many, many different networks in the brain. That's what the kind of mental firework foretold. But he was very surprised to discover that one particular network was down-regulated, and that was this default mode network.

So what is that? Well, it's a tightly linked set of structures connecting the prefrontal cortex to the posterior cingulate cortex to deeper, older centers of emotion and memory. It appears to be involved in things like self reflection, theory of mind (the ability to impute mental states to others), mental time travel (the ability to project forward in time and back) which is central to creating an identity, right? You don't have an identity without a memory. And the so-called autobiographical memory, the function by which we construct the story of who we are by taking the things that happen to us and folding them into that narrative, and that appears to take place in the posterior cingulate cortex.

So to the extent the ego can be said to have a location in the brain, it appears to be this, the default mode network. It's active when you're doing nothing, when your mind is wandering. It can be very self critical. It's where self talk takes place. And that goes quiet. And when that goes quiet, the brain is sort of, as one of the neuroscientists put it, let off the leash because those ego functions, that self idea, is a regulator of all mental activity. And the brain is a hierarchical system and the default mode network appears to be at the top; it's kind of the orchestra conductor or corporate executive. And you take that out of the picture, and suddenly you have this uprising from other parts of the brain, and you have networks that don't ordinarily communicate with one another suddenly striking up conversations. So you might have the visual cortex talking to the auditory system and suddenly you're seeing music. Or it becomes palpable. You can feel it or smell it -- synesthesia. So you have this temporary rewiring of the brain in the absence of the control of the regulator...

To read the full transcript, go to: https://bigthink.com/videos/psychedelics-in-the-brain-fire-the-conductor-let-the-orchestra-play

Should you defend the free speech rights of neo-Nazis?

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Former ACLU president Nadine Strossen understands that protecting free speech rights isn't always a straightforward proposition.

In this video, Strossen describes the reasoning behind why the ACLU defended the free speech rights of neo-Nazis in Skokie, Illinois, 1977.

The opinions expressed in this video do not necessarily reflect the views of the Charles Koch Foundation, which encourages the expression of diverse viewpoints within a culture of civil discourse and mutual respect.

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NADINE STROSSEN

Nadine Strossen is the John Marshall Harlan II Professor of Law at New York Law School. From 1991 through 2008, she served as President of the American Civil Liberties Union, the first woman to head the nation’s largest and oldest civil liberties organization. Her most recent book is HATE: Why We Should Resist It With Free Speech, Not Censorship.

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TRANSCRIPT:

NADINE STROSSEN: The American Civil Liberties Union, the ACLU, has always staunchly defended all fundamental freedoms for all people no matter who you are, no matter what you believe, we consider that you are entitled to fundamental and equal rights, including freedom of speech. And thats true even for people who reject and crusade against our own civil liberties principles. So this become very controversial, especially among people who are otherwise disposed to support the ACLU. How can you -- on the forefront of equal rights and anti-discrimination -- possibly support freedom of speech even for hate mongers? Probably the most famous or infamous situation in which that happened, depending on your perspective, was in a case called the Skokie case. For many people that immediately reminds them of what happen because it received so much attention. In 1977, the ACLU came to the defense of the free speech rights of a group of neo-Nazis who wanted to demonstrate in Skokie, Illinois, a town near Chicago that had a large Jewish population, many of whom were actually Holocaust survivors way back in 1977. And many ACLU members, stalwart champions of free speech, even ACLU members were so upset that we would really stick to those principles of defending freedom even for the thought that we hate, and thats a paraphrase for of a famous line from Supreme Court Justice Oliver Wendell Holmes, that we lost 15 percent of our card carrying members as a result of that case. I should add that we easily won the case in the courts of law because it happens that that neutral principle of freedom, even for the idea that we hate, is what the U.S. Supreme Court has called the bedrock principle underlying our free speech jurisprudence -- that government may never suppress speech solely because we the people, even the vast majority of us, dislike its views, its ideas, its message. Even if we loathe and despise and fear that message, the answer the court says is to raise our own voices in counter speech.

So that was an extremely painful moment for the organization; losing that many members was not only putting us in the spotlight of controversy and criticism, including for individual leaders of the organization were subject to threats and protests and harassment and ostracizing, especially leaders of the organization who were themselves Jewish. Our lead lawyer at the time was ashamed and rejected and repudiated by the rabbi in the synagogue that he and his family had belonged to, and ultimately things were so uncomfortable, you know, threatening phone calls in the middle of the night, ultimately he and his family moved out of state all together.

And I should say in our brief in the Skokie case, we pointed out that the very same principles that were relied on to defend free speech for the Nazis had been used just a few years earlier to defend free speech in another town in Illinois where it was Martin Luther King's organization whose message was very controversial in the southern part of Illinois, a town named Cicero, that was very segregated and very opposed to the pro-civil rights message.

We have to look beyond the particular factual situation and understand that we are fighting for something larger, which encompasses the idea that are antithetical to the ones that happened to be at issue in a particular case. So people will often say to me as somebody who is Jewish and the daughter of a Holocaust survivor who barely survived the Buchenwald Concentration Camp, how can I of all people defend the N...

For the full transcript, check out https://bigthink.com/Charles-Koch-Foundation/free-speech-nazis

Whole Foods Co-founder John Mackey on Conscious Captialism (Archival)

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Stakeholder-based "conscious capitalism" realigns the short-term profit model of capitalism that has undervalued employees, customers, and suppliers.

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JOHN MACKEY

John Mackey opened a small health food store in Austin in 1978, which in 1980 merged with another local natural foods store to form the foundation on which Whole Foods Market was born. Mackey has led Whole Foods Market since the beginning through mergers and internal development to create a FORTUNE 500 company. Whole Foods is now one of the top 12 supermarket companies in America and the world's largest natural foods retail chain.

Mackey says his business philosophy is to act with care and responsibility toward all of the various stakeholder groups of the company and to operate Whole Foods Market with social and environmental responsibility. He was named 2003 Entrepreneur of the Year by Ernst & Young.

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TRANSCRIPT:

Question: What is "Conscious Capitalism?"

John Mackey: From a macro perspective conscious capitalism is becoming conscious of the framework that capitalism has to exist in, in order to be successful, in order to flourish. There are certain key principles that have to be in place and we have to nurture those principles or we won’t have a capitalistic order. It’s not something that automatically exists. It has to have principles. It has to be grounded in those principles. And some of those principles include property rights: that we have to have the right for people to be able own property. At the same time there needs to be the freedom to exchange property. We need to be able to trade it. We need to be able to create something and then trade it or sell it to someone else. We need a rule of law. There needs to be laws that are just and laws that are predictable and laws that apply to everyone in the society, including the government. A rule of law is essential. You cannot have a capitalistic order without the rule of law. And whenever that comes into doubt or if there are not stable property rights you don’t really have the basis for the capitalistic order.

And finally you need a freedom to trade. Usually the greater the... the fewer restrictions on the freedom to trade across the… between people, but also between people in different states, people in different countries, the greater value creation that occurs. So anytime you see a society that is beginning to restrict the ability to trade, you see a society that is going to lessen its prosperity. It tends to happen when people get preoccupied with the loss of jobs, not understanding that you may lose some jobs to a foreign country if you allow freedom to trade, but you’re gaining jobs at the same time. You gain more net jobs because the people won’t give you their goods for free. They want to trade with you as well and so those jobs and the goods that they want to trade for are the goods and services they want. That will create greater employment at home. But that is very hard for the average person to understand.

But anyway, conscious capitalism is understanding these basic core economic values and becoming more conscious of them. Conscious business, there are certain principles behind that and one principle is that business has the potential for higher purpose, that maximizing profits... If you ask people what the purpose of business is they usually say... if you go to a cocktail party and ask that question they’ll generally say "Well, everybody knows that, the purpose of business is to maximize profits, it’s to maximize shareholder value." But that is a very odd answer because that is not the answer we would give is you ask what the purpose of a doctor is—it would be to heal the sick. Or what the purpose of a teacher is, to educate people. Or what the purpose of a lawyer is or what the purpose of an architect is or what the purpose of an engineer is, so why is that we would come to this odd answer that the purpose of business is to maximize profits when I have known literally hundreds of entrepreneurs in my life and with very few exceptions very few of them actually created their businesses to try to maximize profits...

To read the full transcript, please go to https://bigthink.com/videos/four-principles-for-successful-conscious-capitalism