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You can find us at http://bigthink.com or follow us on Twitter at https://twitter.com/bigthink

Big Think is a multimedia knowledge company with a mission to help people get smarter, faster. To achieve this we create content on three different platforms, focused on three different outcomes:

1. Our free public website, BigThink.com, and our public YouTube channel help our global audience identify

and understand the big ideas that they need to know today. Through idea-driven video interviews with thousands of global thought leaders, including Eric Schmidt, Larry Summers, Oliver Sacks, Peter Thiel, Dr. Michio Kaku, and many, many more.

2. Our Mentor Subscription Content connects our world-class mentors with a global community of smart, driven users to teach the habits of mind and people skills they need to live happier, healthier, more productive lives.

3. Our Big Think+ professional development training content helps results-driven companies provide the knowledge and skills that will make their employees at every level more productive, engaged, motivated and happy.

10/29/2025

Checking power at work | Kim Scott

Kim Scott, author of Radical Candor, talks about the importance of checks and balances to check corruption of power in the workplace.

For more on fostering a collaborative and respectful work environment, become a member and watch the full Big Think Class: Radical Respect at Work: https://bigthink.com/my-classes/radical-respect-at-work/radical-respect-at-work/

If you want to be miserable, then spend your money like this | Morgan Housel———An important fact of life is that it’s of...
10/29/2025

If you want to be miserable, then spend your money like this | Morgan Housel

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An important fact of life is that it’s often difficult to know what will make you happy, but quite easy to identify what will make you miserable.

When faced with a difficult problem — and how to spend money in a way that will improve your life certainly is — it can help to work backward, reducing and excluding what doesn’t work until what’s left over is a decent approximation of favorable traits. Evolution works in similar ways, so thoroughly destroying what doesn’t work that what’s left over tends to work quite well. Or think about health: What foods are good for you is an endless debate, and no one who’s honest with the evidence can say they know the perfect diet. But what’s bad for you is much more settled. I have no idea if a glass of red wine is good for me. I am 100% sure that ci******es are not.

A young boy once asked Charlie Munger, “What advice do you have for someone like me to succeed in life?” Munger replied: “Don’t do co***ne. Don’t race trains to the track. And avoid all AIDS situations.” Succeed by first knowing what to avoid.

In the same way, I can’t tell you how to spend money, because I’m not you. And I can’t tell you what will make you happy, because I’m still trying to figure that out for myself. Everyone’s different and life is complex. But what leads to a miserable life tends to be universal and straightforward.

So let me offer you a brief guide on how to be miserable with your money.

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Read the full article: https://bigthink.com/books/how-to-spend-your-money-to-be-miserable/

Art:

10/27/2025

Why investing should be boring | Barry Ritholtz

During the late 19th and early 20th century, coal miners in Europe and North America used canaries as living carbon mono...
10/27/2025

During the late 19th and early 20th century, coal miners in Europe and North America used canaries as living carbon monoxide alarms. Due to their high metabolism and sensitive respiratory system, these small, yellow songbirds succumbed to the invisible, odorless gas much faster than humans. As soon as the small cages strapped to their tool belts stopped chirping and chattering, the miners knew it was time to head back up.

Several lifetimes and technological revolutions later, this unconventional safety measure has resurfaced in the title of a monumental study — one concerned with a different potential hazard: artificial intelligence. Published in late August by the Digital Economy Lab at Stanford University, Canaries in the Coal Mine? Six Facts about the Recent Employment Effects of Artificial Intelligence constitutes one of the first attempts to trace, by means of actual, hard data, how AI is reshaping the American labor market.

The results are rather alarming. So far, the widespread adoption of generative AI appears to be hitting entry-level workers harder than older, more experienced people in senior positions. The study also suggests that AI has a greater effect on employment opportunities for professions where the technology is capable of automating human labor, such as software development and customer service. In professions where AI augments and enhances human labor, on the other hand, employment opportunities have remained stable, or even increased.

To get a clearer picture of how AI is expected to change the future of work, Big Think spoke with two of the study’s three co-authors: Erik Brynjolfsson — Jerry Yang and Akiko Yamazaki Professor and Senior Fellow at the Stanford Institute for Human-Centered AI — and Bharat Chandar, postdoctoral researcher at the Stanford Digital Economy Lab and Institute for Human-Centered Artificial Intelligence.

Here’s what the canaries are telling us.

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Read the full article: https://bigthink.com/business/are-young-workers-canaries-in-the-ai-coal-mine/

Art: Sarah Soryal

10/24/2025

The fish that break biology | Sean B. Carroll

What can we learn from fish that have evolved to create their own antifreeze?

What can we learn from two of the greatest investors of all time?Eric Markowitz speaks with Alex Morris to distill inves...
10/24/2025

What can we learn from two of the greatest investors of all time?

Eric Markowitz speaks with Alex Morris to distill investment lessons from Warren Buffet and Charlie Munger.

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I’ve known Alex Morris for about five years. From the beginning, I’ve admired his work — his writing, his investment research, and perhaps most of all, his ability to stay relentlessly focused in a field that too often rewards distraction. Alex has always struck me as someone who plays the long game: careful in his thinking, measured in his conclusions, and deeply committed to extracting durable lessons from markets.

That’s why I was thrilled when he set out to write a book, Buffett & Munger Unscripted, about Warren Buffett and Charlie Munger, arguably the two greatest investors of our time.

Plenty of books have been written about them — volumes on their deals, their financial acumen, even their quirks of personality. But Alex’s approach is different. Rather than layering on his own theories or interpretations, he went back to the primary sources: decades of transcripts from the Berkshire Hathaway annual meetings, paired with the timeless lessons embedded in their shareholder letters.

What makes his book special is not just the synthesis of this material, but the clarity with which it reveals Buffett and Munger as more than investors. They were, above all, teachers — using plain language and sharp wit to help anyone, novice or professional, think more clearly about business, incentives, human behavior, and life itself.

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Read the full article by Eric Markowitz: https://bigthink.com/the-long-game/a-fresh-take-on-the-buffett-munger-axis-of-genius/

Art: Gregory Reid / Gallery Stock

10/23/2025

6 learning tips in under 60 seconds

Most people do all the wrong things when learning.

Rereading, highlighting, and cramming are all techniques that give us the illusion of learning and are easier than actual learning. But they don't work.

Here's what does:

1. Struggle

Being faced with a problem and making mistakes primes your brain for new learning by teaching it how relevant that information really is to your life.

2. Make connections

My favorite way to do this is by making a map with the big ideas as categories and organizing new information under each big idea. You can also redraw this map from memory to test yourself.

3. Take breaks to test yourself

Rereading and highlighting don't work. But what does is the Doer Effect. Taking breaks to apply what you learn has been shown to increase comprehension up to 6x.

4. Find your blindspots

The other benefit of stopping to test yourself is that it lets you take inventory of what you know and what you don't know. This might seem obvious but there's a lot that you don't know you don't know. Find out where you're actually at in your learning and compare it to where you want to be. Then fill in the gap with practice.

5. Space out your learning

One way to think about learning is that in order to remember you actually just have to stop yourself from forgetting. Research shows that the best way to do this is just by making an effort to recall and use that information before you forget it.

6. Learn from experts

I've taught myself things in the past by cobbling together learning road maps from youtube videos, reddit tips, and advice from friends. The problem with this method is that most of the information you find will be worse than useless — it will actively teach you the wrong things or distract you from what you should be learning to get better, faster. The best shortcut I’ve found is to find someone who is really good at what I want to be good at and learn from them.

Go to BigThink.com/membership to become a Big Think Member and access 100+ expert classes from names like Adam Grant and Yuval Noah Harari.

What does it take to lead? Here are 4 ingredients for a successful CEO, excerpted from "A CEO For All Seasons" by Caroly...
10/23/2025

What does it take to lead?

Here are 4 ingredients for a successful CEO, excerpted from "A CEO For All Seasons" by Carolyn Dewar, Scott Keller, Vikram Malhotra, and Kurt Strovink.

The best horror stories are those that don’t rely on jump scares or bloodied campground killers to frighten. The scaries...
10/22/2025

The best horror stories are those that don’t rely on jump scares or bloodied campground killers to frighten. The scariest part of The Wicker Man isn’t its eponymous effigy; it’s realizing what the natives of Summerisle will do to placate their gods. And while the ghosts haunting the Overlook Hotel may unnerve readers of The Shining, it is Jack Torrance’s maniacal relapse that truly grips the spine.

Tales that rely on cheap tricks can be fun, but the ones that exhume their horrors from within powerful ideas endure.

For that reason, we’re taking a look at five horror stories that double as philosophy lessons. Each one rests on a foundation of great ideas that can wrap around your mind like a te****le and force you to really think about what has frightened you.

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Read the full article by Scotty Hendricks: https://bigthink.com/books/5-horrifying-stories-that-double-as-philosophy-lessons/

10/21/2025

How to heighten your sensitivity to joy | Marie Kondo

Big Think's Jonny Thomson sat down with Marie Kondo to talk about her new book, Letter from Japan. In this clip, Kondo explains one of the best ways to heighten your sensitivity to joy — and it's something you can do every day.

“The classic example of a hijack is ma********on,” Edward Slingerland tells me. We’re talking about all the evolutionary...
10/21/2025

“The classic example of a hijack is ma********on,” Edward Slingerland tells me. We’re talking about all the evolutionary quirks that humans tend to exploit — the cases where we’re “built” for one purpose, but decide to put that structure to other uses. And ma********on is a classic example.

In this week’s Mini Philosophy interview, I spoke with Slingerland about his book Drunk, in which he outlines his “intoxication thesis.” Slingerland argues it’s quite common to think that getting drunk is an evolutionary mistake. Some early Homo sapiens drank too much fermented fruit juice and discovered it was pretty fun. So they told their mates and, altogether, they clinked their frothy ciders and sang b***y songs about hunting and gathering. But the human brain and body were not built to get drunk. Alcohol is effectively a poison. Our bodies don’t like it — or so the argument goes.

The intoxication thesis says this is all wrong. For Slingerland, drinking alcohol and getting drunk are important to human well-being and complex societies. It might not be what evolution “intended,” but it’s certainly given us a reproductive and interspecies advantage.

So, how is getting drunk different from other “evolutionary mistakes”? And what possible benefits might getting drunk give us? Today, we find out.

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Read the full article: https://bigthink.com/mini-philosophy/the-intoxication-thesis-the-evolutionary-benefits-of-getting-drunk/

Art: Augustín Farías / Death To Stock

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