Think Again - a Big Think Podcast

I like to think. If I didn’t, this would be the wrong job for me. But I realize that as open-minded as I like to consider myself, I’ve taken a thick, black sharpie to certain areas of the philosophical map, scrawling “here there be monsters” and leaving them be. We’re all like this to some extent—it’s the flip side of interest—even if you’re super-curious, the things that interest you most become safe spaces. Comfort zones. And there’s nothing wrong with that.

But if you want to keep learning, it’s necessary to spend time in regions of reality that scare the crap out of you. The things you don’t want to look at. And if, like me, your unsafe spaces include the many catastrophes that could befall the human race—you couldn’t ask for a more affable, well-informed, tour guide than Josh Clark. Trained in history and anthropology, Josh is a writer and podcaster—host of Stuff You Should Know and now, The End of the World—a 10 part series that looks at the many ways humanity might go extinct. And what we can do about them. And why it’s all worth taking very, very seriously.

Surprise conversation starters in this episode:

Michelle Thaller on how astronauts poop in space

Shane Parrish on emotions and decision making 

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What gets a wolf or a pigeon up in the morning? No offense to wolves or to pigeons, but it’s probably not the desire to make the world a better place. As far as we know, humans are unique in the freedom to decide what’s worth doing with our finite time on Earth.

But as my guest today argues, we often steal that freedom from one another or sell it off without even realizing it—our finite  lifetime, the one thing we have of real value, is devalued by capitalism and for those who have it, by religious faith in eternal life, or eternal everythingness, or eternal nothingness. . . .

It’s a long story. These ideas are better expressed in a 400 page book than in a 60 second intro. Happily, philosopher Martin Hägglund has given us that much-needed book in This Life: Secular Faith and Spiritual Freedom. Martin is a professor of Comparative Literature and Humanities at Yale and a Guggenheim Fellowship recipient. And I’m delighted to have him here with me today. 

Surprise conversation starters in this episode:

Rob Bell on whether Jesus would have wanted Christianity

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We’re all living inside concentric circles of private and public, inner and outer. From the time we’re small we start to understand that these circles aren’t always friendly to one another. There’s friction at their borders. The stuffed bunny that keeps your heart whole gets you tormented at school. The people you love most don’t look or sound like the cool people on TV. And neither do you. This is true to some extent for all of us, but if you’re growing up black in the other America—the one where everyday life is full of the kinds of experiences that keep cable news commentators shaking their heads 24/7—the friction is something else entirely. Can you own your own life—the places and the people you love—while striving to be part of a world that created the conditions it judges them for? Can you live in both places at once?

These are some of the questions at the heart of the project that is SURVIVAL MATH: NOTES ON AN ALL-AMERICAN FAMILY. In these lyrical and meticulous essays, Mitchell S. Jackson tries to wrap his mind around his own coming of age in Portland, looking with relentless honesty—and above all, love—at the frictions at the heart of his America, his family, and himself.

Surprise conversation starters in this episode:

Kevin Zollman on game theory and scientific truth

Sean McFate on the billionaire-led future 

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The first time I attempted to play Minecraft with my then-seven-year-old son, we immediately dug ourselves into a pit deep in the Earth and could not get out. In spite of the crappy 8-bit graphics, all of our primal, H.P. Lovecraftian terrors of the underground were activated. We were trapped! We were lost! We might die down here!

Will Hunt, on the other hand, has been climbing eagerly since childhood into dank and disorienting tunnels, caves, sewers, and other underground spaces, from abandoned New York City subway platforms to ancient Mayan temples of human sacrifice in the caverns of Belize.

In his brilliant new book UNDERGROUND: a Human History of the Worlds Beneath Our Feet, he takes us physically and spiritually along on some of these adventures. Part global, subterranean travelogue, part meditation on human curiosity, UNDERGROUND plumbs the philosophical depths of our primal awe of what lies beneath. . . . and it almost makes me want to go play Minecraft, where at least there are no rats.

Surprise conversation starters in this episode:

Martin Amis on good writing

Michael Shermer on living forever

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Let’s start with a very old poem :

On the bank of Caishi River is Li Bai’s grave

Surrounded by wild grass that stretches to clouds.

How sad that the bones buried deep in here

Used to have writings that startled heaven and moved earth.

Of course poets are born unlucky souls

But no one has been as desolate as you.

When you think of an an ancient poet, what do you picture? Wandering? Drinking? A lot of ups and downs? That certainly describes the life of Li Bai, one of the most brilliant and beloved poets in Chinese history—a man of whom it is said that he drowned jumping into a river, drunkenly chasing the reflection of the moon.

In his beautiful new biography THE BANISHED IMMORTAL: a Life of Li Bai, the poet and author Ha Jin paints a vivid picture of this extra-vivid man—who suffered the double misfortune of living in interesting times and being interesting himself. Ha Jin is interesting too—a young soldier in China’s Cultural Revolution, he came to America as a grad student. Watching the Tiananmen Square Massacre on TV, he decided to stay in America for good.

Surprise conversation-starters in this episode:

Michael Hobbes on student debt

Ben Goertzel on panpsychism 

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At this point, it’s very rare to read something and find myself thinking: This is something new. This is unlike anything I’ve ever read before. It doesn’t have to be written in hieroglyphs or be some kind of three-dimensional interactive reading experience with pull-out tabs and half the pages upside down. That kind of formal experimentation, in my experience as a reader, more often ends up being gimmicky and annoying than exhilarating. In fact, paradoxically, the “wow this is something new” experience often comes along with a sense that this new thing has somehow always existed, in your dreams if nowhere else.

Marlon James—the Jamaican writer who won the Man Booker Prize for A Brief History of Seven Killings— has done something in his new fantasy novel Black Leopard, Red Wolf that’s unlike anything I’ve ever read before. The first book of a trilogy, it’s been described as an “African Game of Thrones” and likened in scope to Tolkien’s Lord of The Rings. But the stories within stories it tells and the shifts in voice and perspective thrust you into a seething, hallucinatory, morally ambiguous world that’s part Ayahuasca dream and part blacklight nightmare, anchored in a rich African mythology that’s worlds away from all those elves, wizards, dragons, and goblins—all those well-worn tales of light versus darkness.

Surprise conversation-starters in this episode:

Jeffrey Sachs on whether Jeff Bezos should distribute his Amazon wealth

Damian Echols on tattoos as a lifeline 

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There are two kinds of people in this world: Those who don’t give a damn about grammar, style, or  syntax, and those who write aggrieved letters to publishing houses about split infinitives.

My guest today, Benjamin Dreyer, is neither. As the Copy Chief of Random House, it is his unenviable task to steer the middle way between linguistic pedantry and letting these writers get away with bloody murder. Scratch “bloody”—redundancy.

Before reading his hilarious and practical new book DREYER’S ENGLISH,  I think I would have imagined the Copy Chief of Random House as something like the Arbiter Eligantiae of Ancient Rome—a terrifying, absolute authority on questions of grammatical law and taste. The kind of person who walks around waving a scepter at things to be preserved or destroyed. As the book makes plain, however, there’s no absolute authority when it comes to either taste or correctness in the English language. Still, please avoid “impactful”, “utilize”, and 'very unique.”  And use the Oxford comma. And you can do away with just, really, and actually while you’re at it. 

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We’ve been talking a lot lately on this show about happiness. What it is, where we can get more of it, why it does not yet seem to be available on the Internet. Author Ruth Whippman presented some compelling evidence that the way most Americans are pursuing happiness is making us unhappier. Buddhist master teacher Joseph Goldstein talked about a way of training yourself to be more generous, and the happiness this has brought to his life.

In her new book ARISTOTLE’S WAY, classicist Edith Hall reminds us that Aristotle’s “virtue ethics” was a sophisticated, subtle approach to the pursuit of lifelong happiness a couple millennia before Oprah thought of inviting us to live our best life. Offering no listicles of the top ten happiness hacks, Aristotle tried to live and taught the virtues of an ethically guided, purpose driven life with plenty of room for good friends, sensual pleasures, and long walks on the beaches of Ancient Greece, Macedonia, and what is now Turkey. 

Edith Hall—my guest today—enjoys putting the pleasure as well as the rigor into all aspects of Ancient Greek and Roman History, society, and thought. She’s a professor of Classics at King’s College, London, the author of more than 20 books, and a world leader in the study of ancient theatre and culture.

Surprise conversation starter clips in this episode:

Nick Offerman on what happiness is

Stephen Greenblatt on the Adam and Eve story

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For me, the very best Onion article of 2018 was this one about Jeff Bezos revealing Amazon’s new headquarters to be the entire Earth, as an Amazon-branded glass sphere clicked into place, encasing forever the horrified inhabitants of our planet.

More than a grain of truth in that one, eh? At this point, with all that’s happened over the past few years, I think you either have to be delusionally optimistic by nature or have strong vested interests in the tech industry to think that all is well in our digital world.

Douglas Rushkoff has been looking at these problems with unflinching clarity and humor since long before the rest of us heard the click of the big glass sphere. on his podcast Team Human and in his new book of the same name, he invites the rest of us humans to team up and stand up for weird, messy humanity against this anti-human agenda.

Surprise conversation starter clips in this episode:

Johann Hari on depression and anxiety in the workplace

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Love, money, health, great sex, peace of mind—however you define it, happiness in this world is impermanent and unreliable. But we’re all invested in the illusion that we’re just one career move or one Amazon purchase away from permanent bliss.

To quote Darth Vader: Search your feelings—you know it to be true. Life is sometimes exhilarating and sometimes devastating, but it’s always, always in flux.

This is the first noble truth of Buddhism. That everything in this life is unreliable and unsatisfactory. Maybe it doesn’t sound to you like the beginning of a message of hope, but that’s exactly what it is. A couple millennia ago the Indian prince Siddhartha Gautama, better known as Buddha, offered anyone who would listen a system of training the mind to free it from the suffering that comes from clinging to impermanent things, like how many followers you have on Instagram.

My guest today is Joseph Goldstein. He’s one of the most influential Buddhist teachers and writers of the past half-century. In 1975, Along with Sharon Salzberg and Jack Kornfield, he co-founded the Insight Meditation Society in Barre Massachusetts. Since then, he has done immeasurable good worldwide with his books, dharma talks, and meditation retreats.  Four decades ago he started a journey he’s still on today, helping westerners—very much including myself—benefit from the Buddha’s ancient insights and techniques.

Joseph’s latest book, MINDFULNESS: a practical guide to awakening, is his magnum opus: the distilled wisdom of four decades of teaching and practice. 

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