Educational Videos

Penn Jillette: The Year That Broke Our Illusions

Moderated by Victoria Montgomery-Brown, co-founder and CEO of Big Think
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The year 2020 will go down in history as one that shook our inner and outer worlds.

In this Big Think Live session, magician, author, and cultural critic Penn Jillette will discuss the giant upheavals of 2020 through the lens of what he knows best: illusions. Which social, personal, and governmental illusions have been shattered this year, and how (and what) should we rebuild? Jillette, one half the world’s most famous magic duo with Teller, will also give tips on how to foster long-term business partnerships and sustain creativity, and how he maintains a clear, rational mind in the noisiest era to date.

In the mid ’80s, magician Penn Jillette and his touring partner, Teller, went from playing the tiki lounges at various Ramada Inns to being one of the most popular, big budget, death defying, nightclub acts in the country. After killing it in movies and SNL appearances, the duo went on to have their own Showtime series where they attempted to debunk everything from male enhancement pills to UFO sightings. Penn has independently produced the stand up comedy tribute film, The Aristocrats, and hosted a successful podcast with Ace Broadcasting, Penn’s Sunday School. Penn & Teller: Fool Us, a current CW series, began its first season in London and now it has just begun its seventh, under the dazzling lights of Las Vegas.
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PENN JILLETTE:

Penn Jillette is a cultural phenomenon as a solo personality and as half of the world-famous Emmy Award­-winning magic duo Penn & Teller. His solo exposure is enormous: from Howard Stern to Glenn Beck to the Op-Ed pages of The New York Times, The Wall Street Journal, and the Los Angeles Times. He has appeared on Dancing with the Stars, MTV Cribs, and Chelsea Lately and hosted the NBC game show Identity. As part of Penn & Teller, he has appeared more than twenty times on David Letterman, as well as on several other TV shows, from The Simpsons and Friends to Top Chef and The View. He co-hosts the controversial series Penn & Teller: Bullshit!, which has been nominated for sixteen Emmy Awards. He is currently co host of the Discovery Channel’s Penn & Teller Tell a Lie and the author of God, No! and Presto!
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ABOUT BIG THINK:

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Navy SEALs: How to build a warrior mindset | Big Think
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The fact that U.S. Navy SEALs endure very rigorous training before entering the field is common knowledge, but just what happens at those facilities is less often discussed. In this video, former SEALs Brent Gleeson, David Goggins, and Eric Greitens (as well as authors Jesse Itzler and Jamie Wheal) talk about how the 18-month program is designed to build elite, disciplined operatives with immense mental toughness and resilience.

Wheal dives into the cutting-edge technology and science that the navy uses to prepare these individuals. Itzler shares his experience meeting and briefly living with Goggins (who was also an Army Ranger) and the things he learned about pushing past perceived limits.

Goggins dives into why you should leave your comfort zone, introduces the 40 percent rule, and explains why the biggest battle we all face is the one in our own minds. “Usually whatever’s in front of you isn’t as big as you make it out to be,” says the SEAL turned motivational speaker. “We start to make these very small things enormous because we allow our minds to take control and go away from us. We have to regain control of our mind.”
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TRANSCRIPT:

BRENT GLEESON: SEAL training is 18 months long. We talk about discipline, we talk about trust, accountability, mental fortitude. Very, very high attrition rate. For my class only about 10 percent ultimately graduated of the original class. But the first six months of that 18 month training pipeline is called BUDS, which stands for Basic Underwater Demolition SEAL. And the first three weeks of BUDS are leading up the Hell Week. And those three weeks are no joke either. They’re just as bad as Hell Week, but you get to sleep a couple of hours a night. But then Hell Week is where you’re going to weed out the rest of your class. By the end of Hell Week 80 percent of your class is gone. Hell Week starts on a Sunday, ends on a Friday afternoon, and the great thing about that Sunday is the class will report to one of the main classrooms with only a couple required items in their possession and we don’t allow them to know when Hell Week will commence, when breakout starts. And it’s pure chaos. Guys will quit minutes into breakout. And so the anguish, the anxiety is just killing you. It’s a fascinating thing to watch. Not a fascinating thing to be a part of. So that afternoon our class leader, who’s the highest ranking officer in the class, he read us – one of the things he did to motivate us was to read us the speech, the St. Crispin’s Day speech from William Shakespeare’s Henry V. And a great excerpt that many people know from that speech is, “”We few, we happy few, we band of brothers. For he today that sheds his blood with me shall be my brother.””

ERIC GREITENS: If there was a single question that you can ask someone to measure how resilient they’re going to be, you ask them what are you responsible for. And what you find is that even in the most difficult situations when you look at stories of people who have been prisoners of war, for example. People who survive said I’m going to take control of my thoughts, or I’m going to take control of the way that I breathe. There are certain things even though my freedom has been taken away from me that my ability to eat where I live. All of these things have been taken away from me. I’m still going to control something. And when you focus on actually taking control of something and what happens is your circle of control begins to widen and people begin to see that even in the face of hardship and difficulty, there’s a way for them to build power and live a purposeful life.

DAVID GOGGINS: People always ask me how do you build mental toughness. Mental toughness also has these classes out here. A class on mental toughness. Positive thinking, visualization, all these different techniques—mental toughness is a lifestyle. It’s something that you live every single day of your life. When I was growing up I was a lazy kid. I was a lazy kid and everyone goes how did you get to where you’re at today? How did you get to where you’re running 200 miles at one time in 39 hours being so disciplined. It started off honestly with recognizing that my bedroom was dirty. My bed wasn’t made. I lived a sloppy life. So I took very small increments in my life. I started making my bed. I started cleaning my room. I started doing things, coming outside of my lazy ways to become better. And through a period of time your brain doesn’t like it, but it starts to realize this is a new way of thinking…

Read the full transcript at https://bigthink.com/videos/navy-seals-build-a-tough-mind

Yumiko through her experience in life explains how
change is the most constant thing in the world and how fast things evolve. She gives an empowering message to the future generations joining the business world. Change is the constant thing in the world and how fast things are chaning and what messege or support we are giving to our future generations This talk was given at a TEDx event using the TED conference format but independently organized by a local community. Learn more at https://www.ted.com/tedx

Talk:
Where do you find courage? From within. Life coach Shanita Liu shows you how to activate courage in an interactive way so that you can access your courage, keep it alive, and utilize it whenever you need to.

About:
Shanita Liu, MPA, CPC is a first-generation Indo-Caribbean American born and raised in Queens, New York. As a certified professional coach, workshop facilitator, reiki practitioner, and CEO of Coach Shanita Inc., Shanita teaches people how to say bye to burnout. Her approach includes showing people how to tune into their hearts and reconnect to their courage, power, and strength so that they can stop sacrificing themselves and start leading healthier and happier lives. Shanita Liu, MPA, CPC is a first-generation Indo-Caribbean American born and raised in Queens, New York. As a certified professional coach, workshop facilitator, reiki practitioner, and CEO of Coach Shanita Inc., Shanita teaches people how to say bye to burnout. Her approach includes showing people how to tune into their hearts and reconnect to their courage, power, and strength so that they can stop sacrificing themselves and start leading healthier and happier lives. This talk was given at a TEDx event using the TED conference format but independently organized by a local community. Learn more at https://www.ted.com/tedx

Visit http://TED.com/shapeyourfuture to watch more groundbreaking talks from the TED Fellows.

We need an inside-out approach to how we diagnose disease, says immuno-engineer and TED Fellow Aaron Morris. Introducing cutting-edge medical research, he unveils implantable technology that gives real-time, continuous analysis of a patient’s health at the molecular level. “We’re creating a diagnostic lab inside your body,” Morris says — and it may pave the way to diagnosing and treating disease better and faster than ever before.

The TED Talks channel features the best talks and performances from the TED Conference, where the world’s leading thinkers and doers give the talk of their lives in 18 minutes (or less). Look for talks on Technology, Entertainment and Design — plus science, business, global issues, the arts and more. You’re welcome to link to or embed these videos, forward them to others and share these ideas with people you know.

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3 wonders of the universe, explained
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Most people have seen atoms illustrated in textbooks and know about the Big Bang and the speed of light, but there is a good chance what you think you know is not scientifically accurate.

Michelle Thaller, an astronomer and Assistant Director for Science Communication at NASA, is here to clear up the misconceptions and explain why atoms don’t actually look that way, why the Big Bang is a misnomer, and why the speed of light is more than just really fast.

Is there an edge of space? Does light experience time? Watch this video for answers to those and other interesting questions.
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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 https://solarsystem.nasa.gov/people/1040/michelle-thaller/
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TRANSCRIPT:

TEXT: This is NOT what an atom really looks like.

MICHELLE THALLER: Calling what an electron is and where it is around an atom an “”orbit”” is actually very misleading. In truth electrons don’t move around a nucleus the same way that planets move around a star at all. It’s very, very different and part of that has to do with what an electron really is. Elementary particles are not tiny, tiny little balls that are actually moving through space. They’re more properly described as waves and an electron does not exist in only one location around an atom. It actually exists as a wave. And what that means is that there are volumes around the nucleus of an atom that an electron will fill in. A single electron can actually be an entire sphere around the nucleus of an atom, or these orbitals as we call them, but again I caution you nothing is actually moving around like a planet around a star. Some of these orbitals are shaped like dumbbells and a single electron actually fills out a volume that looks like a dumbbell, or sometimes they look like a disc. So these actually are mathematical solutions which show you where the probability of finding this electron is around an atom. We call these electron shells and it’s not that a single electron is moving around inside the shell. It’s in the whole shell all at once. The electron actually fills in that volume and all you’re looking at is a probability area of where that electron may be. So despite our depictions of atoms with the nucleus in the middle and electrons going around the outside, reality is nothing like that. Electrons form these volumes and some of those volumes even go through the nucleus. Some of these dumbbells actually have electrons existing inside the nucleus as well. What an atom really is, is far more complicated than our artistic depictions of it, far more mysterious and I think really wonderful. One of the best things to study in quantum mechanics is how electrons form these volumes.

TEXT: The Big Bang wasn’t an explosion. Visualize it like this instead.

Now when you hear the term Big Bang that implies an explosion, and we all know how explosions work from our experience. Things actually fly out from a common center. And one of the things is that scientists really don’t like describing the Big Bang as an explosion at all. That sort of sets you up in the wrong direction right away because you could imagine that there are galaxies all flying apart away from each other, away from a common center, and flying out into empty space. And the universe we observe is absolutely nothing like that. For example, the whole volume of the universe that we can see with the Hubble space telescope. We can see to a distance of nearly 13 billion lightyears. All of that volume is filled with galaxies. There is no empty center to the universe. And the other thing that we don’t observe and we’re pretty sure that nobody else ever could either is being on the edge of that. Being on a galaxy right on the edge of expansion and seeing all of the galaxies in one direction because you’re looking inside and nothing but…

Read the full transcript at https://bigthink.com/videos/wonders-of-the-universe

Learn the Netflix model of high-performing teams | Erin Meyer | Big Think
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There are numerous strategies for building and maintaining a high-performing team, but unfortunately, they are not plug-and-play. What works for some companies will not necessarily work for others. Erin Meyer, co-author of No Rules Rules: Netflix and the Culture of Reinvention, shares one alternative employed by one of the largest tech and media services companies in the world.

Instead of the ‘Rank and Yank’ method once used by GE, Meyer explains how Netflix managers use the ‘keeper test’ to determine if employees are crucial pieces of the larger team and are worth fighting to keep.

“An individual performance problem is a systemic problem that impacts the entire team,” she says. This is a valuable lesson that could determine whether the team fails or whether an organization advances to the next level.
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ERIN MEYER:

Erin Meyer is the author of The Culture Map: Breaking Through the Invisible Boundaries of Global Business, and co-author of No Rules Rules: Netflix and the Culture of Reinvention. She is also a professor at INSEAD, one of the world’s leading international business schools. Her work has appeared in Harvard Business Review, The New York Times, and Forbes.com. In 2019, Meyer was selected by the Thinkers50 as one of the fifty most influential business thinkers in the world. She received an MBA from INSEAD in 2004, and she currently lives in Paris, France. In 1994 and 1995 Meyer also served in the Peace Corps as a volunteer teacher in southern Africa. Visit erinmeyer.com for more information.

His latest book No Rules Rules: Netflix and the Culture of Reinvention https://amzn.to/3mt3QQG
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TRANSCRIPT:

ERIN MEYER: When Reed started Netflix, he had this question, this experiment in his mind, which was: Would it be possible, if he created an organization that was made up entirely of top performers? Would it be possible to give them an incredible level of freedom without having to worry about the organization descending into chaos? Because, of course, in most companies, most of the rules and process are put in place in order to deal with employees who are underperforming, or who are maybe not the best employees of the batch, right? So that led him to this idea, this idea of talent density, of creating a high performing team that had very little rules and process tying it down. And the idea is specifically not just that we’re any other team, but we’re a high performing Olympic team. And I think that’s actually an interesting image, because we can all think about top athletic performers, that they recognize that if they want a spot on that top Olympic team, that they’re going to have to fight hard to get that spot. Meaning they’re going to have to really be performing at their highest level. And when they get there, they know every year they kind of have to try out again. It’s not like they’re going to be in that spot for life. So, I think that that’s an atmosphere that is very attractive to some of the younger generations today that aren’t thinking about employment for life, but instead are thinking about opportunities that can allow each of us to shine to our full potential. And then, when that opportunity is done, we can move on to another opportunity. Of course, that also means that Netflix, I would say, is a rather high adrenaline place to work. Just like being on an Olympic team may be high adrenaline. And what I found is that people are both excited and delighted and a little bit exhausted. So, you have to be a person who really is looking for that level of freedom and opportunity, knowing that it may be a position that is also going to use every inch of your neurons while you’re working there.

So of course, saying that you want to have a team of all high performers is easy enough, but figuring out how to do that is not so easy. Historically, companies like GE and Microsoft have dealt with this idea of trying to get all top performers by using these processes, which are sometimes called things like “”Rank and Yank,”” where you rank your employees from top to bottom. And for example, with GE, for a period of time, managers were then asked to fire the bottom 10 percent. But since been shown to not be a great management tool, because it creates a lot of internal competition and even backstabbing. Plus, because Netflix is so anti-process, that wouldn’t work there anyhow. But instead, what they do at Netflix, which I think is actually a very interesting…

Read the full transcript at https://bigthink.com/videos/high-performing-teams

Visit http://TED.com/shapeyourfuture to watch more groundbreaking talks from the TED Fellows.

Introducing a new type of public space, custom-fit for communities in need of a shot of hope and wonder. Artist and TED Fellow Matthew Mazzotta takes us across the US, sharing delightful projects that refresh space and place, spark collective conversation and reignite a sense of possibility and purpose in their surroundings.

The TED Talks channel features the best talks and performances from the TED Conference, where the world’s leading thinkers and doers give the talk of their lives in 18 minutes (or less). Look for talks on Technology, Entertainment and Design — plus science, business, global issues, the arts and more. You’re welcome to link to or embed these videos, forward them to others and share these ideas with people you know.

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Psychedelics: The scientific renaissance of mind-altering drugs
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Having been repressed in the 1960s for their ties to the counterculture, psychedelics are currently experiencing a scientific resurgence. In this video, Michael Pollan, Sam Harris, Jason Silva and Ben Goertzel discuss the history of psychedelics like LSD and psilocybin, acknowledge key figures including Timothy Leary and Albert Hoffman, share what the experience of therapeutic tripping can entail, and explain why these substances are important to the future of mental health.

There is a stigma surrounding psychedelic drugs that some scientists and researchers argue is undeserved. Several experiments over the past decades have shown that, when used correctly, drugs like psilocybin and LSD can have positive effects on the lives of those take them. How they work is not completely understood, but the empirical evidence shows promise in the fields of curbing depression, anxiety, obsession, and even addiction to other substances.

“There’s a tremendous amount of insight that can be plumbed using these various substances. There’s also a lot of risks there, as with most valuable things,” says artificial intelligence researcher Ben Goertzel. He and others believe that by making psychedelics illegal, modern governments are getting in the way of meaningful research and the development of “cultural institutions to guide people in really productive use of these substances.”

Read Michael Pollen’s book “How to Change Your Mind: What the New Science of Psychedelics Teaches Us About Consciousness, Dying, Addiction, Depression, and Transcendence” at https://amzn.to/2IBvjS6
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TRANSCRIPT:

MICHAEL POLLAN: 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 5-HT2A 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, you know the neuroscientists say lead 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. The expectation I think was that people would see an excitation of many different networks in the brain. You know, that’s what the kind of mental fireworks sort of 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 the 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 happened to us and folding them into that narrative. And that appears to take place in the posterior cingulate cortex. So, you know, 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 kind of, you know, 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…

To read the full transcript, please go to https://bigthink.com/videos/how-do-psychedelics-work

Immortality: Can we upload human consciousness?
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Technology has evolved to a point where humans have overridden natural selection. So what will our species become? Immortal interstellar travelers, perhaps.

Scientists are currently mapping the human brain in an effort to understand the connections that produce consciousness. If we can re-create consciousness, your mind can live on forever. You could even laser-port your consciousness to different planets at the speed of light, download your mind into a local avatar and explore those worlds.

But is this transhumanist vision of the future real or is it a pipedream? And if it is real, is it wise? Join theoretical physicist Michio Kaku, neuroscientist David Eagleman, human performance researcher Steven Kotler, skeptic Michael Shermer, cultural theorist Douglas Rushkoff and futurist Jason Silva.

Read Michio Kaku’s book “The Future of the Mind: The Scientific Quest to Understand, Enhance, and Empower the Mind” at https://amzn.to/3mjVGtA
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TRANSCRIPT:

JASON SILVA: Transhumanism is essentially the philosophical school of thought that says that human beings should use technology to transcend their limitations. That it’s perfectly natural for us to use our tools to overcome our boundaries, to extend our minds, to extend our mindware using these technological scaffoldings. The craziness here is that we’re finding more and more that our technological systems are mirroring some of the most advanced natural systems in nature. You know, the internet is wired like the neurons in our brain, which is wired like computer models of dark matter in the universe. They all share the same intertwingled filamental structure. What does this tell us? That there is no distinction between the born and the made. All of it is nature, all of it is us. So to be human is to be transhuman.

But the reason we’re at a pivotal point in history is because now we’ve decommissioned natural selection. You know, this notion that we are now the chief agents of evolution, right? We now get to decide who we become. We’re talking about software that writes its own hardware, life itself, the new canvas for the artist. Nanotechnology patterning matter, programmable matter. The whole world becomes computable, life itself, programmable, upgradable. What does this say about what it means to be human? It means that what it is to be human is to transform and transcend; we’ve always done it. We’re not the same species we were 100,000 years ago. We’re not going to be the same species tomorrow. Craig Venter recently said we’ve got to understand that we are a software-driven species. Change the software, changed the species. And why shouldn’t we?

DAVID EAGLEMAN: All the pieces and parts of your brain, this vastly complicated network of neurons—almost 100 billion neurons, each of which has 10,000 connections to its neighbors. So we’re talking a thousand trillion neurons. It’s a system of such complexity that it bankrupts our language but, fundamentally, it’s only three pounds and we’ve got it cornered and it’s right there and it’s a physical system. The computational hypothesis of brain function suggests that the physical wetware isn’t the stuff that matters. It’s what are the algorithms that are running on top of the wetware? In other words, what is the brain actually doing? What’s it implementing, software-wise? Hypothetically, we should be able to take the physical stuff of the brain and reproduce what it’s doing. In other words, reproduce its software on other substrates. So we could take your brain and reproduce it out of beer cans and tennis balls and it would still run just fine. And if we said, “Hey, how are you feeling in there?” This beer-can-tennis-ball machine would say, “Oh, I’m feeling fine, it’s a little cold,” or whatever.

It’s also hypothetically a possibility that we could copy your brain and reproduce it in silica, which means on a computer, in zeros and ones, actually run the simulation of your brain.

MICHIO KAKU: The initial steps are once again being made. At Caltech, for example, they’ve been able to take a mouse brain and look at a certain part of the brain where memories are processed. Memories are processed at the very center of our brain and they’ve been able to duplicate the functions of that with a chip. So, again, this does not mean that we can encode memories with a chip, but it does mean that we’ve been able to take the information storage of a mouse brain and have a silicon chip duplicate those functions. And so was mouse consciousness created in the process? I don’t know. I don’t know…

Read the full transcript at https://bigthink.com/videos/can-humans-be-immortal

Skepticism: Why critical thinking makes you smarter
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It’s not always easy to tell the difference between objective truth and what we believe to be true. Separating facts from opinions, according to skeptic Michael Shermer, theoretical physicist Lawrence Krauss, and others, requires research, self-reflection, and time.

Recognizing your own biases and those of others, avoiding echo chambers, actively seeking out opposing voices, and asking smart, testable questions are a few of the ways that skepticism can be a useful tool for learning and growth.

As Derren Brown points out, being “skeptical of skepticism” can also lead to interesting revelations and teach us new things about ourselves and our psychology.

Read Michael Shermer’s latest book “Skeptic: Viewing the World with a Rational Eye” at https://amzn.to/3c7vP58
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TRANSCRIPT:

LAWRENCE KRAUSS: I like to keep an open mind but not so open that my brains fall out. And that’s the key point. We have to skeptically assess the information we receive. We can’t be gullible because when we get a lot of information, it’s absolutely certain that some of that information is wrong. And so we have to always filter what we get. And we have to ask ourselves the following question: “How open does my brain have to be to accept that information? Does it have to fall out?” And by that, I mean when someone tells you something you have to ask “Is this consistent with my experience? Is it consistent with the experience of other people around me?” And if it isn’t, then probably there’s a good reason to be skeptical about it; it’s probably wrong. If it makes predictions that also appear to be in disagreement with things that you observe around you, you should question it.

And so we should never take anything on faith. That’s really the mantra of science, if you want, that faith is the enemy of science. We often talk about a loss of faith in the world today. You don’t lose anything by losing faith. What you gain is reality. And so skepticism plays a key role in science simply because we also are hard-wired to want to believe. We’re hard-wired to want to find reasons for things. In the savanna in Africa, the trees could be rustling and you could choose to say, “Well, there’s no reason for that.” Or, “Maybe it’s due to a lion.” And those individuals who thought there might be no reason, never lived long enough to survive to procreate. And so it’s not too surprising, we want to find explanations for everything. And we create them if we need to, to satisfy ourselves, because we need to make sense of the world around us. And what we have to understand is that what makes sense to the universe, is not the same as what makes sense to us. And we can’t impose our beliefs on the universe. And the way we get around that inherent bias is by constantly questioning both ourselves and all the information we receive from others. That’s what we do in science and it works beautifully in the real world as well.

MICHAEL SHERMER: The problem is this. None of us has the truth. The only way to find out if you’re deceiving yourself or not, if you’ve gone off the rails, if you’re wrong in some way, is to listen to other people who disagree with you. I started encountering other people that disagreed with me. You know, we-never-went-to-the-moon people, conspiracy people, whatever. And I thought, “Okay, so how do we know, if I don’t know what’s coming down the pike say in 10 years from now, if I was gonna teach my students how to think critically, what are the key points, like just basic questions they could ask?” So, it begins with one: How reliable is the source of the claim? Here’s the claim, how reliable is it? What’s the evidence for it? What’s the quality of the evidence? Where does it come from? Who said that? Is this some fake news, alternative site thing, or is it The Wall Street Journal or The New York Times? The source really matters. Has anyone tried to disprove the claim? This is super important because everybody thinks they’re right and every website has testimonials about this product or that idea. The question is not “What do your supporters think?” but “What do the people who don’t agree with you think?” Because that’s what I wanna know. Has anyone run an experiment to try to disprove your theory? And so in science, this is as basic as it gets. Karl Popper called this the Principle of Falsification. That is, we can’t ever prove a theory correct, but we can disprove it by having an experiment that shows it’s wrong.

So, if you can’t falsify it, what are you really doing? And my favorite story on…

Read the full transcript at https://bigthink.com/videos/critical-thinking-skills

Terry Harpold, Ph.D, describes works of art, myth, and fiction that open us to the vital connectivity between our observations of the natural world and the products of our creative imagination. Our responses to climate crisis in the coming century, he proposes, must go beyond practical solutions, however essential they will be. We must also embrace vital connectivity and its recreation of new and lasting meaning in a world in crisis.” Dr. Terry Harpold completed his undergraduate studies at the State University of New York at Stony Brook – English BA – followed by a year abroad, studying philosophy and literary theory in Paris. Graduate school (PhD) in Comparative Literature at the University of Pennsylvania. He began teaching at the University of Florida in late 2000, where his teaching and research have been primarily in new media theory, digital humanities, science fiction, climate studies, and environmental humanities. He’s been nominated five times for College of Liberal Arts and Sciences Mentoring and Teaching Awards, and was a winner of the CLAS Teacher of the Year Award in 2008 and 2020. This talk was given at a TEDx event using the TED conference format but independently organized by a local community. Learn more at https://www.ted.com/tedx

Уже несколько десятилетий Татьяна привозит в столицу Урала самые крутые театральные постановки. В выступлении она расскажет как развить в себе любовь к этому виду искусства. Начать ходить в театр никогда не поздно. Директор Арт-холдинга «Ангажемент» This talk was given at a TEDx event using the TED conference format but independently organized by a local community. Learn more at https://www.ted.com/tedx

Sylvester “Sly” James, Jr. served as Mayor of Kansas City, Missouri from 2011-2019. During his tenure, Kansas City enjoyed a renaissance boasting nationally recognized successes in modern transportation development – from a new streetcar to a new, single terminal airport – third grade reading initiatives, SMART city technology deployment and adoption of a 20-year infrastructure repair program. He served on the advisory board of the U.S. Conference of Mayors, and is a past president of the National Conference of Democratic Mayors, and the African- American Mayors Association. Before holding office, James practiced as a trial attorney with trial, litigation and meditation experience as both a defense and plaintiff’s attorney with over 70 cases tried to juries and over 200 mediations. He was the first African American Associate and Partner in the Blackwell, Sanders, Matheny, Weary & Lombardi Law Firm. And prior to that, he served in the United States Marine Corps. Sylvester “Sly” James, Jr. served as Mayor of Kansas City, Missouri from 2011-2019. During his tenure, Kansas City enjoyed a renaissance boasting nationally recognized successes in modern transportation development – from a new streetcar to a new, single terminal airport – third grade reading initiatives, SMART city technology deployment and adoption of a 20-year infrastructure repair program. He served on the advisory board of the U.S. Conference of Mayors, and is a past president of the National Conference of Democratic Mayors, and the African- American Mayors Association.

Before holding office, James practiced as a trial attorney with trial, litigation and meditation experience as both a defense and plaintiff’s attorney with over 70 cases tried to juries and over 200 mediations. He was the first African American Associate and Partner in the Blackwell, Sanders, Matheny, Weary & Lombardi Law Firm. And prior to that, he served in the United States Marine Corps. This talk was given at a TEDx event using the TED conference format but independently organized by a local community. Learn more at https://www.ted.com/tedx

Why are our brains shrinking? In answering that question, Jeff Stibel shares the story of how an offhand question from his friend and mentor Kobe Bryant turned into one of his most formative research experiences. In his talk, Jeff shares the lessons he learned along his journey about approaching tough challenges, finding resilience, and about what it means to truly be a mentor. Jeff Stibel is a founding partner of Bryant Stibel and serves on the boards of the Consortium for Brain and Cognitive Sciences at Tufts University and the Natural History Museum. He has served on the boards of a number of non-profit, private, and public companies. Stibel was previously President & CEO of Web.com, Inc. (NASDAQ: WWWW) and The Dun & Bradstreet Credibility Corporation, and later served as D&B’s (NYSE: DNB) Vice Chairman. Stibel is a USA Today columnist and author of The New York Times bestseller “Breakpoint” and “Wired for Thought.” Stibel received his undergraduate degree in psychology, philosophy, and cognitive science from Tufts University, and his graduate degree from Brown University, where he was the recipient of a Brain and Behavior Fellowship while studying for a PhD. Stibel also spent time as a visiting fellow at MIT and received an honorary doctorate from Pepperdine University. This talk was given at a TEDx event using the TED conference format but independently organized by a local community. Learn more at https://www.ted.com/tedx

Visit http://TED.com/shapeyourfuture to watch more groundbreaking talks from the TED Fellows.

A phone call to a US prison or jail can cost up to a dollar per minute — a rate that forces one in three families with incarcerated loved ones into debt. In this searing talk about mass incarceration, criminal justice advocate and TED Fellow Bianca Tylek exposes the predatory nature of the billion-dollar prison telecom industry and presents straightforward strategies to dismantle the network of corporations that has a financial interest in seeing more people behind bars for longer periods of time.

The TED Talks channel features the best talks and performances from the TED Conference, where the world’s leading thinkers and doers give the talk of their lives in 18 minutes (or less). Look for talks on Technology, Entertainment and Design — plus science, business, global issues, the arts and more. You’re welcome to link to or embed these videos, forward them to others and share these ideas with people you know.

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In Italia sempre di più l’agenda politica viene dettata dai Creators con milioni di followers. I Creators non danno una visione totalizzante del mondo come quella che davano i partiti, sinistra, destra e così via, ma si esprimono su temi precisi, chirurgici: immigrazione, unioni civili, antirazzismo, ambientalismo, gender gap e così via. Ora, è un bene che parlino sempre più d’attualità e politica? Giornalista, vive e lavora a Milano dove è docente di giornalismo digitale presso l’ Università IULM.
Dopo la scuola di giornalismo e 9 anni a Vanity Fair, nel 2019 ha deciso di intraprendere la carriera da freelance.
Scrive di attualità, politica e trend digitali tra gli altri per Vanity Fair, Il Foglio, Wired e Donna Moderna e per il canale digitale Will. This talk was given at a TEDx event using the TED conference format but independently organized by a local community. Learn more at https://www.ted.com/tedx

He is a founder and CEO of a company which is a branding and marketing which help startups in giving end to end solution to them in branding and marketing so that their life becomes easy and they can focus more on increasing the quality of their product and services. He is a founder and CEO of a company which is a branding and marketing which help startups in giving end to end solution to them in branding and marketing so that their life becomes easy and they can focus more on increasing the quality of their product and services. This talk was given at a TEDx event using the TED conference format but independently organized by a local community. Learn more at https://www.ted.com/tedx

Visit http://TED.com to get our entire library of TED Talks, transcripts, translations, personalized talk recommendations and more.

The pandemic forced the world to work together like never before and, with unprecedented speed, bore a new age of health and medical innovation. Physician-scientist Daniel Kraft explains how breakthroughs and advancements like AI-infused antiviral discoveries and laboratory-level diagnostic tools accessible via smartphones are paving the way for a more democratized, connected and data-driven future of medicine and personalized care.

The TED Talks channel features the best talks and performances from the TED Conference, where the world’s leading thinkers and doers give the talk of their lives in 18 minutes (or less). Look for talks on Technology, Entertainment and Design — plus science, business, global issues, the arts and more. You’re welcome to link to or embed these videos, forward them to others and share these ideas with people you know.

Become a TED Member: http://ted.com/membership
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Like TED on Facebook: http://facebook.com/TED
Subscribe to our channel: http://youtube.com/TED

TED’s videos may be used for non-commercial purposes under a Creative Commons License, Attribution–Non Commercial–No Derivatives (or the CC BY – NC – ND 4.0 International) and in accordance with our TED Talks Usage Policy (https://www.ted.com/about/our-organization/our-policies-terms/ted-talks-usage-policy). For more information on using TED for commercial purposes (e.g. employee learning, in a film or online course), please submit a Media Request at https://media-requests.ted.com

How does one achieve social justice? In his talk, Kip Curtis explains how land grants can lead the way to justice and empowerment in the 21st century.
Kip Curtis is an Associate Professor of Environmental History in the Ohio State University’s Department of History and a 2020/2021 Faculty Fellow in the University Office of Outreach and Engagement. He has written and published on the history of mining, on the history of environmental ideas, and he is co-authoring a forthcoming history of humans on earth (2022). His current project focuses on what he calls “histories of the future,” where he has imagined an urban food production system and then developed a grant to launch it. Working at the intersection of racial justice and ecologically-minded economic development, Curtis has partnered with the North End Community Improvement Collaborative and their Executive Director, Deanna West-Torrence, to launch a microfarming cooperative in Mansfield that captures food dollars that once left the state and redirects them into households and neighborhoods in their community that need them. This talk was given at a TEDx event using the TED conference format but independently organized by a local community. Learn more at https://www.ted.com/tedx

Psychology instructor and researcher Christina Costa was working on her PhD when she was referred to get an MRI and discovered a large brain tumor in her right temporal lobe that was later diagnosed as grade 3 Anaplastic Astrocytoma.

In this talk, Christina connects her experience of living with brain cancer to her field of study and explains why tools of gratitude can increase our well-being and what is happening in our brains when we experience and express gratitude.

You can find Christina on Instagram @ms.christinacosta and her book ‘Kiss Your Brain’: Diagnosis Diaries can be found on Amazon and Barnes and Noble. Christina Costa is a PhD Psychology Candidate at the University of Michigan. She researches the psychology of well-being in addition to teaching undergraduate psychology and is specifically interested in well-being for teachers and the science of gratitude. Last year, Christina was diagnosed with anaplastic astrocytoma, a rare and severe brain tumor. Christina has used gratitude as a tool to help maintain her personal well-being throughout her treatment. In her talk, Christina shares some of the lessons she has learned through her research and experience about the power of gratitude in her life, and how it can be used to change yours. She holds a B.A. and M.S. from the University of Michigan. This talk was given at a TEDx event using the TED conference format but independently organized by a local community. Learn more at https://www.ted.com/tedx

In the Philippines, many people will go to great lengths to lighten their skin because the sad truth of it all is that in Filipino culture dark skin equates to being dirty, ugly, and poor. In this talk, speaker Bianca Punzalan will explore the origins of the colonial ideals of colorism and how we end anti-brownness once and for all. Bianca Punzalan is a senior at Moreau Catholic High School. She has been a member of student government, the Writers Club, and the National Honors Society at her school. She will be attending the University of California Berkeley in the fall to study environmental sciences at the Rausser College of Natural Resources. Bianca is a champion of sustainability and environmental justice in her community. Her other interests include Southeast Asian studies, volleyball, and visual arts. She hopes to further her advocacy and raise awareness of the effects of colorism, particularly how it affects women in the Philippines, into her college years. This talk was given at a TEDx event using the TED conference format but independently organized by a local community. Learn more at https://www.ted.com/tedx

Pankaj Kalita (Ph.D.) is an Assistant Professor at the School of Energy Science and Engineering at the Indian Institute of Technology, Guwahati.
He has more than 4 years of teaching and 10 years of research experience in the field of renewable energy (solar energy, thermochemical and biochemical conversion of biomass and energy storage), Thermal management of PVT, and Li-ion battery pack, and Energy Management. He has published more than 50 peer reviewed research papers in various reputed journals, 12 book chapters and more than 20 conference papers. He has implemented many research and consultancy projects. At present two research projects are in progress in the areas of energy storage, and renewable energy integration for remote electrification. He was a recipient of India’s Distinguished Visiting Fellow awarded by the University of Nottingham, the United Kingdom in 2010. He was also selected for attending the prestigious India-UK young scientist networking conference on low carbon technologies held during 2-3 December 2009 in Kolkata organized by British Council Kolkata. He has also represented IIT Guwahati in the 2nd Winter School held at Gifu University, Japan in 2016. He has been awarded an early career research award by Science Engineering Research Board (SERB), DST, Govt. of India. He has organized five short-term courses, one national conference, and one International conference sponsored by TEQIP in the areas of clean energy, waste to energy, thermo fluids, and renewable energy successfully. He has also organized a GIAN course on Advances in Combustion and Gasification Technology successfully in 2018.
In this talk, Dr. Pankaj Kalita simplifies the technical aspects of climate change and explains with statistics that how mechanization driven by fossil fuels energy became a major reason for global warming. He elaborates how his lab is developing renewable and carbon-neutral energy generating systems mainly from waste to mitigate climate change Dr. Pankaj Kalita has more than 4 years of teaching and 10 years of research experience in the field of renewable energy (solar energy, thermochemical and biochemical conversion of biomass and energy storage), Thermal management of PVT and Li-ion battery pack and Energy Management. He has published more than 50 peer reviewed research papers,12 book chapters and more than 20 conference papers. He has implemented many research and consultancy projects. He was recipient of India Distinguished Visiting Fellow awarded by the University of Nottingham, United Kingdom in 2010. He was also selected for attending prestigious India-UK young scientist networking conference on low carbon technologies held during 2-3 December, 2009 Kolkata organized by British Council Kolkata. He has also represented IIT Guwahati in the 2nd Winter School held at Gifu University, Japan in 2016. He has been awarded early career research award by Science Engineering Research Board (SERB), DST, Govt. of India. This talk was given at a TEDx event using the TED conference format but independently organized by a local community. Learn more at https://www.ted.com/tedx