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Our impulse to seek out agreement is stifling us, says world debate champion Bo Seo.
The ability to reach agreement with other people is a crucial skill, not only in your career and everyday life, but also in your close relationships. However, that doesn’t mean there’s no place for disagreement.
Many people tend to shy away from disagreements. After all, we often see media images of disagreements going out of control, whether it’s clashes between rival political parties or people feuding on social media. But there is a way to have enlightening and productive disagreements.
That’s one of the main takeaways from this Big Think interview with Bo Seo, an author, journalist, and two-time world champion debater. To Seo, a world where everyone agrees all the time would not only be worse off intellectually, it’d be boring.
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About Bo Seo:
Bo Seo is a two-time world champion debater and a former coach of the Australian national debating team and the Harvard College Debating Union. One of the most recognized figures in the global debate community, he has won both the World Schools Debating Championship and the World Universities Debating Championship. Bo has written for The New York Times, The Atlantic, CNN, and many other publications. He has worked as a national reporter for the Australian Financial Review and has been a regular panelist on the prime time Australian debate program, The Drum. Bo graduated summa cum laude from Harvard University and received a master’s degree in public policy from Tsinghua University. He is currently a student at Harvard Law School...
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Enlightenment: After the ecstasy, the laundry. Why enlightenment is never an end in itself.
Ask people what it means to be enlightened and you’ll get a wide variety of answers. But according to Zen master Robert Waldinger, permanent enlightenment rarely — if ever — exists. In fact, we should be suspicious of those who claim to be “fully enlightened” beings.
Although some people claim to have acquired total enlightenment after experiencing some fantastic spiritual event, Waldinger believes this perspective of “acquisition” can be dangerous. Instead of viewing enlightenment as something you acquire, he believes it should be something you practice in each moment, like an activity or a habit.
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About Robert Waldinger:
Robert Waldinger, MD is a Clinical Professor of Psychiatry at Harvard Medical School, a practicing psychiatrist, psychoanalyst, and a Zen teacher and practitioner.
For the last two decades, Waldinger has been the director of the Harvard Study of Adult Development. This study, conducted over more than 85 years, has analyzed the entire lives of 724 families to determine the activities, behaviors, and dynamics that enhance a person’s life-long well-being. Waldinger has dedicated his career to examining these elements and discovering what brings true fulfillment to human existence.
He is the author of several books, including his most recent, The Good Life: Lessons from the World’s Longest Scientific Study of Happiness.
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You know Steve-O. Now meet Steve Glover, as the professional stuntman talks to us about pain, insecurity, and never finding contentment.
In this deeply personal and revealing interview, Steve Glover, better known as Steve-O, the daredevil entertainer known for his jaw-dropping stunts and unflinching willingness to face pain, shares the untold story of his journey from a childhood craving for attention to becoming an icon of wild antics and extreme performances.
Opening up about his struggles with alcoholism, the relentless pursuit of fame, and his battles with feeling 'not good enough', Glover offers an introspective look into the complexities behind the laughter and the screams.
With raw honesty, he discusses the pivotal moments that shaped him, the drive to document his existence through stunts, and the liberating power of sharing the secrets he once vowed to take to his grave.
This interview is not just a glimpse into the life of a professional idiot; it's a candid exploration of human vulnerability, the cost of fame, and the ongoing quest for self-acceptance.
We created this video in partnership with Unlikely Collaborators.
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About Steve-O:
Steve-O (a.k.a. Stephen Glover) was willing to do whatever it took to become famous, even if it meant stapling his ball sack to his leg. After failing miserably at the University of Miami and couch-surfing with friends, he decided that in order to further his goal of becoming a stuntman he would enroll in Ringling Brothers and Barnum & Bailey Clown College. But it was his relentless attention whoring that ultimately led to working with Johnny Knoxville on a new stunt-based reality show called Jackass.
In 2000, MTV aired the first season and the rest, as they say, is history. Since then, he's had continued success, as a New York Times best-selling author with the release of his memoir, 'Professional Idiot', as well as establishing himself in the world of stand-up comedy. With fourteen years of sobriety under his belt, Steve-O shows no signs of slowing down...
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Modern males are struggling. Author Richard Reeves outlines the three major issues boys and men face and shares possible solutions. Boys and men are falling behind. This might seem surprising to some people, and maybe ridiculous to others, considering that discussions on gender disparities tend to focus on the structural challenges faced by girls and women, not boys and men. But long-term data reveal a clear and alarming trend: In recent decades, American men have been faring increasingly worse in many areas of life, including education, workforce participation, skill acquisition, wages, and fatherhood. Gender politics is often framed as a zero-sum game: Any effort to help men takes away from women. But in his 2022 book Of Boys and Men, journalist and Brookings Institution scholar Richard V. Reeves argues that the structural problems contributing to male malaise affect everybody, and that shying away from these tough conversations is not a productive path forward.
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0:00 intro
1:35 Men in education
7:26 *Class matters
7:53 Men in the workforce
10:54 Men in the family
13:00 Deaths of despair
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About Richard Reeves: Richard V. Reeves is a senior fellow at the Brookings Institution, where he directs the Future of the Middle Class Initiative and co-directs the Center on Children and Families. His Brookings research focuses on the middle class, inequality and social mobility. Richard writes for a wide range of publications, including the New York Times, Guardian, National Affairs, The Atlantic, Democracy Journal, and Wall Street Journal. He is the author of Dream Hoarders (Brookings Institution Press, 2017), and John Stuart Mill – Victorian Firebrand (Atlantic Books, 2007), an intellectual biography of the British liberal philosopher and politician.
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Discover Big Think | Smarter Faster™

Your top destination for expert-driven, educational content. Featuring thousands of episodes and insights from renowned figures like Bill Clinton to Bill Nye, Big Think accelerates your learning by delving into the pivotal concepts and essential skills shaping knowledge in the 21st century...

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Ed Yong explores the hidden features that make dog noses so incredible.

Many animals, from sharks to elephants, are champions of olfaction (smelling).

Dogs are the most famous. Through their sense of smell, dogs can tell which direction a person traveled and even can distinguish between identical twins.

Dogs can be trained to detect just about anything, including electronic devices.
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About Ed Yong:
Ed Yong is a Pulitzer Prize–winning science writer on the staff of The Atlantic, where he also won the George Polk Award for science reporting, among other honors. His first book, I Contain Multitudes, was a New York Times bestseller and won numerous awards. His work has appeared in The New Yorker, National Geographic, Wired, The New York Times, Scientific American, and more. He lives in Washington, D.C., with his wife, Liz Neeley, and their corgi, Typo.

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Expert Michael Spitzer explains how culture can “tune” your musical taste. Do humans have something like an instinct for music? The musicologist Michael Spitzer thinks so. As he points out, every person is born with an innate ability to recognize rhythm, beat in time to it, and to recognize and recall melody. Music-related abilities may be universal, but musical preferences and styles can differ greatly from culture to culture. In this Big Think video, Spitzer explores why cultures interpret music differently, and also whether the internet will have a homogenizing effect on music.
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Chapters
0:00 The musical instinct
1:13 How music is colonized and counter-colonized
3:58 Why music will never homogenize
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About Michael Spitzer: Michael Spitzer is the author of The Musical Human and professor of music at the University of Liverpool, where he leads the department’s work on classical music. A music theorist and musicologist, he is an authority on Beethoven, with interests in aesthetics and critical theory, cognitive metaphor, and music and affect. He organized the International Conferences on Music and Emotion and the International Conference on Analyzing Popular Music and currently chairs the editorial board of Music Analysis Journal. About Big Think | Smarter Faster™ ► Big Think The leading source of expert-driven, educational content. With thousands of videos, featuring experts ranging from Bill Clinton to Bill Nye, Big Think helps you get smarter, faster by exploring the big ideas and core skills that define knowledge in the 21st century. ► Big Think+ Make your business smarter, faster
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Discover Big Think | Smarter Faster™

Your top destination for expert-driven, educational content. Featuring thousands of episodes and insights from renowned figures like Bill Clinton to Bill Nye, Big Think accelerates your learning by delving into the pivotal concepts and essential skills shaping knowledge in the 21st century...

Unlock Knowledge, Faster

With Insights from the World's Leading Minds

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