Think Again – a Big Think Podcast

In this first episode of 2020, beloved dharma teacher Joseph Goldstein is back for a conversation about struggle, doubt, and growth on the spiritual path.

To create the podcast series “Dolly Parton’s America”, Jad Abumrad and his producer Shima Oliaee took nine trips into the “Dollyverse”—that complex American multiverse of music and culture that surrounds country singer Dolly Parton. In this episode Jad and host Jason Gots talk about some of the astonishing discoveries he made along the way.

“Body, breath, awareness…that’s your life. Every problem you ever have, every joy you ever have, depends on that.” In this week’s episode of Think Again, host Jason Gots talks with acclaimed poet and zen teacher Norman Fischer about the imagination as a tool for living a good life.

Confucianism, Islam, Christianity, Hinduism—the world's scriptural belief systems take many different forms but all tend toward 'kenosis'—self-transcendence for the benefit of others. And all have been used and abused for less spiritual ends. Former nun and renowned theologian Karen Armstrong on the lost art of scripture.

Playwright and novelist Deborah Levy on chaos and order in creative work. Also: marvelous digressions on the caterpillar and the octopus.

Having helped transform how creative work is financed, Yancey Strickler has moved on from Kickstarter, the company he co-founded toward a kind of values reset that moves us away from a narrow, unsustainable, inhumane obsession with profit at all costs. This week, he and host Jason Gots consider Milton Friedman, inequality, corporate social responsibility, and how bad common sense can change for the better.

Following the Booker shortlisting of her novel 10 Minutes, 38 Seconds in This Strange World, Elif Shafak returns to Think Again to talk about forgotten lives, the nature of evil, and what we mean by progress.

“I think when you come to grips with what happened, it gives you a chance of doing something different. What’s really dark is when you’re going through something and you have no perspective.” By revisiting—through poetry—his 9 years in prison for a teenage carjacking, Reginald Dwayne Betts finds freedoms most of us have never known.

Journeys of discovery and wonder in the inner and outer world, with beloved author Bill Bryson.

For too long, we’ve treated racism as a personality trait or a vague systemic menace rather than the result of policies and ideas created deliberately to benefit some groups at the expense of others. As a result, too many anti-racist efforts have collapsed into name-calling sessions, failing to achieve their goals. Ibram X. Kendi, author of How to be an Antiracist, sees a better way.