Jason Gots
Editor/Creative Producer, Big Think
Jason Gots is a New York-based writer, editor, and podcast producer. For Big Think, he writes (and sometimes illustrates) the blog "Overthinking Everything with Jason Gots" and is the creator and host of the "Think Again" podcast. In previous lives, Jason worked at Random House Children's Books, taught reading and writing to middle schoolers and community college students, co-founded a theatre company (Rorschach, in Washington, D.C.), and wrote roughly two dozen picture books for kids learning English in Seoul, South Korea. He is also the proud father of an incredibly talkative and crafty little kid.
With MIND IN MOTION, psychologist Barbara Tversky offers a stunning account of movement in the world as the foundation of abstract thought, from logical problem-solving to taking other people’s perspectives. We discuss gesture, abstract art, animal intelligence and much more.
For all the women in the world who never got the apology they needed, and all the men who haven’t found the words, and above all for herself, Eve Ensler (THE VAGINA MONOLOGUES) wrote THE APOLOGY. In this searing, unflinching, often surprisingly funny conversation we talk about trauma, compassion, and what it means to apologize for real.
Convergence 2.0: Engineers are using the “natural genius” of biological systems to produce extraordinary machines—self-assembling batteries, cancer-detecting nanoparticles, super-efficient water filters made from proteins found in blood cells. Neuroscientist and MIT President Emerita Susan Hockfield and host Jason Gots discuss what all this could mean for our future.
Torn between absolutism on the left and the right, classical liberalism—with its core values of compassion and incremental progress whereby the once-radical becomes the mainstream—is in need of a good defense. And Adam Gopnik is its lawyer.
Personal crises and national crises have more than a few things in common. From Brexit to the partisan divide in America to Germany after World War II, Jared Diamond talks with host Jason Gots about how we get through them (or don’t).
With 14 Tony nominations, HADESTOWN is redefining what a Broadway musical can be. Its creator, songwriter/singer Anaïs Mitchell sits down with Jason Gots to talk about the myth of Orpheus and Eurydice, making old things new, and leaving her songwriting cave (temporarily) for the theater.
Secret Spice Girls dance parties of the wives of anti-western morality police. Book deals for political prisoners still in jail. Iran is a land of contradictions where oppression and freedom uneasily coexist. Born in France, Delphine Minoui lived in Tehran for 10 years to understand her grandparents’ country from the inside.
Tragedy in art, from Ancient Greece to Breaking Bad, resists all our efforts to tie reality up in a neat bow, to draw some edifying lesson from it. Instead it confronts us with our own limitations, leaving us scrabbling in the rubble of certainty to figure out what’s next.
The film becomes the story of the making of the film. From his Monty Python days to now, Don Quixote is a metaphor for Terry Gilliam’s whole career, and for his 30 year project of making a film about a film about the knight of the woeful countenance. We talk about Muppets, time, and basically everything else two humans can talk about.
Love + fear = awe. And awe can inspire the best and the worst in us. From 100,000 wild tigers a century ago, we’re down to around 5,000. Oscar winner Ross Kauffman’s TIGERLAND tells the story of the lengths some will go to to protect them.
Love, grief, and moral disgust aren’t unique to humans. Like chimps, humans sometimes struggle for dominance, but our first impulse is trust and connection. Frans de Waal has spent decades showing that most of what we believe about animals, humans, and the differences between us is wrong.
For Idris Elba’s directorial debut YARDIE, actor Aml Ameen (Sense8, Kidulthood) went back to his family’s Jamaican roots, learning patois and sound clash chat—using method acting to become “D” – a lost soul on a quest for revenge. The process changed him forever.
Killer robots. Alien invasions. Climate change. Josh Clark of Stuff You Should Know and the new podcast The End of the World thinks a lot these days about existential threats. Believe it or not, he’s optimistic.
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 […]
In the 1980’s, Northeast Portland was a black neighborhood hustling to survive. Today, it’s full of pilates studios and handlebar moustaches. As a writer, professor, and former inmate, Mitchell S. Jackson has lived in and learned from both worlds. In SURVIVAL MATH, he puts the pieces together.
The catacombs of Paris. Secret graffiti beneath NYC. The hidden cities of Cappadocia. Writer and explorer Will Hunt is your philosophical tour guide to what lies beneath.
The 8th century AD was a tough time to be a genius from a poor family in China. Poet and novelist Ha Jin on the tortured life of the legendary drunken poet Li Bai. Also: panpsychism, the value of idleness, and humanities education in America today.
Man-Booker prizewinning author Marlon James in a freewheeling game of verbal ping-pong on African mythology, ’80’s hip hop, heavy metal, tattoos, and billionaire philanthropy.
Why does Faulkner use “inchoate” so much? Maybe because Benjamin Dreyer wasn’t his copy editor. The author of DREYER’S ENGLISH is here to remind us that there’s no absolute authority on the English language. Still, please avoid “onboarding”.
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.
It’s up to us humans to re-humanize our world. An economy that prioritizes growth and profits over humanity has led to digital platforms that “strip the topsoil” of human behavior, whole industries, and the planet, giving less and less back. And only we can save us.
One of the most influential Buddhist teachers and writers of the past half-century, Joseph Goldstein helped bring Vipassana (insight) practice to the West. We talk about love, pop-mindfulness, and how even a philosopher can learn to quiet the mind.
30 years later, a new investigative documentary on Bob Lazar’s claims about Area 51 raises some ghosts, some hell, and some unsettling questions.
Empathy makes us human. Humans make structures that rob us of empathy when we need it most. Helen Riess is trying to reverse that trend.
With the help of positive psychology and the happiness industry, many of us seem to be running in the exact opposite direction of happiness.
What do the “seduction movement,” the Virginia Tech shooter, and the Asian-American experience have in common? Wesley Yang thinks and writes with devastating clarity about loneliness, invisibility, and the incoherence of American life.
Amit Tzuk and Ofir Trainin, the subject and director of an FAMILY IN TRANSITION, an Israeli documentary about a small town father of four who becomes a woman.
Science and the squishiness of the human mind. The joys of wearing whatever the hell you want, and so much more.
For two decades she’s traveled the world, photographing humans in crisis. Pulitzer and MacArthur winning photojournalist Lynsey Addario on what it’s all taught her.
Notes from the Fog author Ben Marcus on Elon Musk, the weird existential joys of the reality TV show Castaways, and whether we will eat in the future.