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Big Think
By bigthinkEducation
Big Think episodes
- Why men and boys are struggling | Richard Reeves
“People warned me against writing a book about boys and men.” Richard Reeves explains the big problems facing men today – and why no one is talking about them.
"Are men and boys in crisis? In his book “Of Boys and Men: Why the Modern Male Is Struggling, Why It Matters, and What to Do About It”, Richard Reeves, a senior fellow at the Brookings Institution, explores several of the key challenges facing boys and men, including the friendship recession, the evolving nature of marriage, and the gender pay gap. To Reeves, these problems are generally structural, not individual, and the interventions tried so far haven't been very effective.The friendship recession is particularly affecting men, with the percentage of men who report having no close friends showing a fivefold increase compared to the 1990s. This social isolation can lead to numerous mental health issues and negatively impact their overall well-being. Meanwhile, marriage patterns have also shifted, creating a growing class divide, with educated couples more likely to marry and stay together than their less-educated counterparts. This divide exacerbates economic and social inequalities.Reeves argues that we ought to confront the crises facing boys and men in a deliberate and thoughtful manner. By addressing these challenges head-on, society can work toward a more equitable and inclusive future where both men and women can thrive."0:00 Meet Richard Reeves0:20 Part 1: The challenges facing boys and men3:44 What is the education landscape like today for men and women?8:37 How does brain development impact education?12:46 Are boys more likely to be diagnosed with developmental disabilities?16:59 What changes could we make to help boys in education?18:52 Why do most men today earn less than men did 40 years ago?22:58 Which occupations are the most gender segregated?27:16 Which skills impact male employability?28:50 How has fatherhood changed?33:45 How is all of this affecting the well-being of men?37:06 Part 2: The friendship recession39:17 What was the traditional view of friendship?40:47 What factors are getting in the way of people having more friends?45:29 Why is it so hard to make friends as one gets older?48:15 What are the negative impacts of not having friends?50:15 Why is it beneficial to have diversity amongst your friends?53:08 Part 3: The death of marriage57:00 How has the concept of marriage in America changed?1:03:12 Is marriage now more about love than necessity?1:05:18 What is the future of marriage?1:08:40 Part 4: The gender pay gap1:13:24 Why is there still a pay gap for women?1:18:36 Who else is affected by a pay gap?1:21:14 Would you change anything about "Of Boys and Men"?1:23:41 What do you hope to achieve with your book?-------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------06:30-17
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1 hr 33 min - Inside a real genius club: the Santa Fe Institute
Complexity arises in any system in which multiple agents interact and adapt to one another and their environments. Examples of these complex systems include the nervous system, the Internet, ecosystems, economies, cities, and civilizations.
Complexity science explores all of those systems, and more. And at the Santa Fe Institute in New Mexico, the globe’s smartest minds are researching across disciplines, cultures, and schools of thought to answer the biggest questions in science and philosophy.Our host Kmele Foster stepped into the Santa Fe Institute — renowned for its collaborative environment of vast disciplines and schools of thought — to speak with some of the most eccentric and genius minds in our world today.--------------------
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50 min - How to see clearly through deceptive emotions | Kristen Lindquist
**🌍 Emotions Are Not Universal — They’re Cultural Lenses Shaping Reality**
We often think emotions are hardwired facts — but in truth, they’re deeply shaped by the culture we live in. Emotions *feel* like objective reality, but they’re more like tinted glasses that color our perception.
🧠 **Kristen Lindquist**, professor of psychology and neuroscience, explains how emotion is both *biological* and *cultural*. While our brains come with the machinery to feel, *what* we feel — and *how* we interpret those feelings — is learned through culture, like language or art.
For example:
- In the U.S., anger = drawing a boundary. In Japan, anger = disrupting harmony.
- Westerners under stress may see threats (like misidentifying objects as guns) — a bias driven by intense emotion.
- Emotions aren’t even linguistically universal: only 22% of languages have a word for “fear” like English does. "Surprise" appears in just 13%.
👀 Even facial expressions — long thought to be universal emotional signals — are perceived differently depending on your cultural lens. What looks like anger in the UK may be read as something else in China. “Resting bitch face”? A cultural misinterpretation layered on gender norms.
💬 Gender norms, too, shape how emotions are interpreted. Women’s distress may be dismissed as anxiety. Men are expected to show anger, not sadness. This misalignment leads to real-world consequences — from misdiagnosed heart attacks to internalized shame.
🌏 *Emotions, then, are predictions*, filtered through past experiences, learned behaviors, and societal values. Recognizing that others may see, feel, and react differently — not wrongly — is key to reducing bias and creating connection.
> **The takeaway?** Emotions are not truths — they are interpretations. And when we treat them as such, we become more open, less reactive, and better able to connect across divides.
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22 min - Physicist Brian Cox explains quantum physics in 22 minutes
"Quantum mechanics and quantum entanglement are becoming very real. We're beginning to be able to access this tremendously complicated configuration space to do useful things."
With a topic as seemingly complicated as quantum physics, where can you start if you want to build your understanding?
In just 22 minutes, physicist and professor Brian Cox unpacks the subatomic world, beginning with the theories as we understand them today.
Chapters:
0:00 The subatomic world
1:23 A shift in teaching quantum mechanics
2:48 Quantum mechanics vs. Classic theory
6:07 The double slit experiment
11:31 Complex numbers
13:53 Sub-atomic vs. Perceivable world
16:40 Quantum entanglement
About Brian Cox:
Brian Cox obtained a first class honors degree in physics from the University of Manchester in 1995 and in 1998 a Ph.D. In High Energy Particle Physics at the DESY laboratory in Hamburg. He is now Professor of Particle Physics at the University of Manchester, The Royal Society Professor for Public Engagement in Science and a Fellow of the Royal Society.
Brian is widely recognized as the foremost communicator for all things scientific, having presented a number of highly acclaimed science programs for the BBC watched by billions internationally including ‘Adventures in Space and Time’ (2021), ‘Universe’ (2021), ‘The Planets’ (2018), ‘Forces of Nature’ (2016), ‘Human Universe’ (2014), ‘Wonders of Life’ (2012), ‘Wonders of the Universe’ (2011) and ‘Wonders of the Solar System’ (2010).
As an author, Brian has also sold over a million books worldwide including ‘Black Holes’, ‘Universal: A Guide to the Cosmos’, ‘Quantum Universe’ and ‘Why Does E=mc2?’ with co-author Professor Jeffrey Forshaw. He has set several world records for his sell-out live tours, including his most recent tour Horizons which has taken in venues across the globe.
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30 min - You can slow down aging with zero weird tricks | Dr Morgan Levine
Former Yale professor Morgan Levine explains how to calculate your ‘bio age’ to live longer.
How old are you? Odds are your answer is a number of years — a metric known as your "chronological age." Although this number isn’t meaningless, it fails to capture the full picture of aging. Your "biological age" may be a far more useful metric. This is the degree to which your biology has changed over a given period of time.“Aging is starting at a molecular level, and over time this is going to give rise to all the functional changes and manifestations that we tend to see with aging,” says Dr. Morgan Levine, author of the book True Age. Unlike chronological age, your biological age is malleable: Scientists know that it’s possible to slow biological aging by maintaining a healthy lifestyle.But is it possible to actually reverse the aging process? See what Dr. Levine has to say about the potential of anti-aging research in this Big Think interview.0:00 The aging illusion1:42 Chronological age vs biological age3:17 Your biological age is malleable4:32 Measuring biological age6:26 How to find out your biological age6:54 Get informed, change your age7:25 Can we reverse aging?----------------------------------------------------------------------------------About Morgan Levine:Morgan Levine was previously a tenure-track Assistant Professor in the department of Pathology at Yale University where she ran the Laboratory for Aging in Living Systems. In 2022, she was recruited to join Altos Labs as a Founding Principal Investigator at the San Diego Institute of Science. She currently leads a research group at Altos Labs working at the intersection of bioinformatics, cellular biology, complex systems, and biostatistics with the overall goal of understanding the molecular trajectories aging cells, tissues, and organisms take through time.------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------06:30-17
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14 min - We can cure almost all human diseases. Here’s how. | Albert-László Barabási
The Human Genome Project was a major breakthrough in medicine, but according to network scientist Albert-László Barabási, simply having a list of genes is not enough to fully understand how they interact, and crucially, how our bodies work. Barabási believes network science — which studies complex patterns and interactions between our cells — can fill in this gap by creating a biological map from which we could develop new cures, and even predict diseases.
He explains that disease genes often have mutations that result in a missing interaction within the sub-cellular network, which then causes problems in the functioning of a cell. Traditional medicinal interventions can lead to unwanted side effects, as they also affect other cellular processes in the network; network medicine has revealed that these complex systems, though robust, are also fragile to attacks, and removing a few major hubs can break the network into tiny pieces.Understanding the structure of the network within our cells can allow for precise interventions that cure the problem without causing other issues. For Barabási, the ideal future of medicine would involve individualized network diagrams being adopted as a standard tool for doctors to show patients where mutations are, how they impact the rest of the cell, and how interventions can stop their effects.0:00 The map of life: Human Genome Project1:01 What is network medicine?2:09 The Achilles’ heel4:20 A new kind of doctor will emerge------------------------------------------06:30-17
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9 min - This popular emotional advice might backfire
What if everything you’ve heard about managing emotions is wrong? Psychologist and author Ethan Kross challenges popular emotional advice, like the idea that venting is always helpful or that we should avoid emotions at all costs. He explains that regulation isn’t about quick fixes or staying in the moment constantly. Instead, it’s about building a flexible toolkit.
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5 min - Meet the scientist that made a machine to measure life itself | Lee Cronin
**🧬 What *Is* Life, Really? And Could We Build It From Scratch?**
What if the key to understanding life… is not *what it’s made of* — but *how it assembles*?
Ask ten scientists “What is life?” and you’ll get a thousand different answers. But **Lee Cronin**, the chemist behind **Assembly Theory**, offers a radical simplification:
> **Life is any system that can produce complexity at scale.**
Not DNA, not metabolism — just *non-random complexity*, multiplied.
### 🔧 Enter “Assembly Theory” — Life by the Numbers
Instead of asking “Does it have genes?” Cronin asks:
**How much *selection* went into producing these objects?**
- **Assembly Index**: How complex is an object — how many steps to make it?
- **Multiply that by how many copies of it exist**, and you get a system’s *Assembly*.
- The more **non-random complexity** at scale? The more likely you’re looking at life.
In essence:
> **Life is what happens when the universe gets choosy — and does it over and over again.**
### 🌌 Why This Changes Everything
1. **We can *measure* life**, not just define it vaguely.
2. **We can trace its evolution** anywhere — even on other planets.
3. **We might even build it.**
Yep — **we might be close to creating life in a lab.**
### 🧪 The “Origin of Life” Machine
Cronin and his team are building a **selection engine** — a machine designed to sift through random chemistry and spot the emergence of life-like behavior.
They're targeting three critical time factors:
1. **Time to create** the object.
2. **Time until it decays** if left alone.
3. **Time it can persist** through generations in a living system.
If a molecule scores high on all three? It might just be alive — or close.
### 🚀 How soon will we create synthetic life?
No one knows.
But Cronin believes it's not decades away.
> “We now know what we’re looking for — and we’re building the tools to find it.”
**✨ Big Idea:**
What if “life” isn’t some magical property… but an **inevitable result** of chemistry and selection?
If so, life may not be rare. It may be **written into the fabric of the universe**.
About Lee Cronin:
Leroy Cronin has one of the largest multidisciplinary, chemistry-based research teams in the world. He has given over 300 international talks and has authored over 350 peer-reviewed papers with recent work published in Nature, Science, and PNAS. He and his team are trying to make artificial life forms, find alien life, explore the digitization of chemistry, understand how information can be encoded into chemicals, and construct chemical computers.
He went to the University of York where he completed both a degree and PhD in chemistry and then went on to do postdocs in Edinburgh and Germany before becoming a lecturer at the Universities of Birmingham, and then Glasgow where he has been since 2002, working up the ranks to become the Regius Professor of Chemistry in 2013 at age 39.
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6 min - How our expectations shape what we see, hear, and feel
A neuroscientist, a psychologist, and a psychotherapist discuss how emotions are stories built from old experiences. By introducing new ones, you can shift the way your past shapes you.
Neuroscientist Lisa Feldman Barrett, PhD, psychologist Paul Eckman, PhD, and psychotherapist Esther Perel, PhD, explain how the brain constantly rebuilds emotions from memory and prediction. According to their research, by choosing new experiences today, we can reshape how our past influences us, gain more control over our feelings, and create new possibilities for connection and growth.----------------------------------------------------------------------------------
About Lisa Feldman Barrett, PhD:Lisa Feldman Barrett is University Distinguished Professor of Psychology at Northeastern University, with appointments at Massachusetts General Hospital and Harvard Medical School. She directs the Interdisciplinary Affective Science Laboratory, where she researches the nature of emotion and the brain’s predictive processes.About Esther Perel, PhD:Esther Perel is a psychotherapist and author recognized worldwide for her work on modern relationships. Perel is also a sought-after public speaker, with TED Talks reaching millions, and consults globally with organizations on relational intelligence.About Paul Ekman, PhD:Paul Ekman is professor emeritus of psychology at the University of California, San Francisco, and a leading authority on emotion and nonverbal communication. He pioneered research on microexpressions and developed the Facial Action Coding System (FACS), used widely in psychology, law enforcement, and security.------------------------------------------------------06:30-17
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11 min - Brian Cox: Why black holes could hold the secret to time and space | Full InterviewFolllow this Podcast for daily Episodes
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1 hr 26 min
About Big Think
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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.…
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.
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