A Video Podcast Exploring the Meaning of Life

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Trailer for Dispatches from The Well

What is our purpose? How do we find meaning in the universe? There are no easy answers to these questions.

But that's what we set out to explore on our new video podcast Dispatches from The Well. Throughout the first season, the team will journey from observatories at the top of the world to atom-smashing laboratories exploring the tiniest building blocks of life and everywhere in between. And because this isn’t a conventional show about science — we are sitting down with a fascinating mix of scientists, philosophers, artists, musicians, and more.

The first season is packed to the brim with insights from luminaries ranging from conservationist Jane Goodall, physicist and philosopher Sean Carroll, neuroscientist Christoph Koch, Fermilab's Deputy Director for Science and Technology Bonnie Fleming, ALMA Observatory Director Sean Dougherty, Nobel Laureate Sir Roger Penrose, and comedian Fred Armisen — just to name a few.

Throughout the season we'll talk about humanity's eternal search for meaning and purpose in our vast, miraculously complicated, rapidly expanding and incomparably mysterious cosmos.

The show is part of Big Think's ongoing partnership with The John Templeton Foundation on a joint publication called The Well which sets out to explore some of the world's biggest questions through interviews and essays with the world's most foremost experts.

Creatively, this was a fun experiment to intentionally blur the lines between a video series and a podcast. As more and more podcasters adopt video to draft on the better discovery algorithms that video platforms provide and as more podcast platforms begin to support video, we're going to see more and more podcasts blur this line. But it's much harder to do that with narrative podcasts that aren't simply a handful of people sitting in one room for an hour. So we set out to try and build something that could be visually interesting if you're watching on your phone or on the TV but would also work in your car or at the gym.