Explore every episode of the podcast 3 Takeaways™

As Arctic ice melts, the struggle for the frozen north is beginning to resemble a new Cold War.

Russian submarine activity is rising. China is mapping the seabed and expanding its icebreaker fleet. And Greenland sits at the center of a growing contest over shipping routes, critical minerals, energy, and missiles.

Heather Conley, a senior fellow at the American Enterprise Institute and one of America’s leading experts on the Arctic, Europe, and transatlantic security, spent years warning that this region would become critical to America’s defense.

What did she see that America and its allies were missing and how much time is left to prepare?

She discusses:

• How much of what Trump wanted in the recent Greenland deal was already possible 
• Why Russia sees the Arctic as central to its military and economic future
• Why the United States secretly offered Denmark $100 million for Greenland after WWII
• Why Greenland’s location makes it critical to America’s missile defenses
• How the Arctic shortens distances for missiles, submarines, ships, and undersea cables
• Why China’s Arctic science will also have military applications
• What Greenland’s mineral wealth means for U.S. interests
• Why America cannot adequately defend the Arctic without its allies

The next decade in the Arctic could determine whether America and its allies are ready for when the Cold War in the Arctic gets hot.

The world map we grew up with makes Greenland and Africa look the same size. The problem?  Africa is actually an astonishing 14 times larger.

The even larger problem? There's no such thing as an accurate map. They all distort how we see the world. 

Jay Foreman and Mark Cooper-Jones are comedians, writers, and YouTubers with millions of followers where they are better known as Map Men. Their new book, This Way Up, explores how maps shape our understanding of the world and what happens when they inevitably get it wrong. 

They discuss:

• Why a 500-year-old deeply-flawed map became our standard picture of the world
• Why Greenland and other northern regions appear much larger than they really are
• Why creating a completely accurate flat map is impossible
• Why north being “up” is simply a convention
• How a country’s apparent size and position may shape how important we believe it is
• Why Google Maps can display different borders depending on where it is viewed
• What London taxi drivers reveal about navigation, memory, and the brain
• How relying on GPS is weakening abilities we once took for granted
• What GPS and AI have in common

Maps look objective, but they're actually very subjective and flawed. Where and how are they misleading us? 

And if you're looking for a more topical take on Greenland, Trump, and the recent security deal -- be sure to tune in next week for my conversation with security expert Heather Conley. 

What if one of the things Americans believe most deeply about America simply isn’t true?

Americans have a powerful story about who they are and why America acts when it does.

Historian Robert Kagan, a senior fellow at the Brookings Institution, says America's own history tells a very different story.

He discusses:

● The biggest myth Americans believe about their own country
● What American history looks like when you strip that myth away
● Why America keeps doing something it insists it doesn’t want to do
● Whether America’s wars were really forced upon it
● The unexpected connection between American power and the threats America faces
● What China and Russia may understand about America that Americans don’t
● What happens if America turns inward again

What if the biggest thing Americans misunderstand about their role in the world isn’t the world?

It’s America.

What if AI becomes easier to talk to than another person?

And what happens to us when it does?

MIT professor Sherry Turkle has spent decades studying what technology does to the way we think, work, and love. Now she says there are two parts of our lives we should never let AI into.

She discusses:

• Why ordinary conversation has started to feel like work
• The surprising reason people may prefer talking to chatbots
• How AI will change what we expect from other people
• Why “pretend empathy” may be more dangerous than it seems
• What happens when relationships become frictionless
• What it could mean for a child to have an AI friend
• Whether AI could make us worse at being with each other

The question isn’t just what AI can do. It’s what AI may do to us.

Mark Cuban told people that television would eventually be delivered over the internet. 

Everybody thought he was an idiot.

Now, Cuban is making another prediction that runs counter to what we all believe, but this time it's about A.I.

Few people have made as many big bets across as many industries as Mark Cuban. The billionaire entrepreneur and investor has built businesses in technology and media, transformed the NBA's Dallas Mavericks, and is now taking on prescription drug companies with Cost Plus Drugs.

He discusses:

● What everyone may be getting wrong about AI
● What he sees happening to jobs and where the real opportunity may be
● The one thing he believes AI will never replace
● How he decides whether a seemingly crazy idea is actually an opportunity
● The quality he looks for after seeing thousands of entrepreneurs
● The mistake incredibly smart people make again and again
● Why one of his biggest decisions required him to become “the younger Mark Cuban” again
● Why being wrong repeatedly may not matter nearly as much as we think
● What success means to him now that money is no longer the measure
● What he thinks most Americans still don’t understand about healthcare

Mark Cuban saw streaming coming and almost nobody believed him. What does he see now that the rest of us may be missing? 

What if the president can act before Congress has time to stop him?

As former U.S. Secretary of Homeland Security, former General Counsel of the Department of Defense, and a member of the National Security Council, Jeh Johnson has advised presidents on war, terrorism, cyber threats, and some of the country’s most consequential national security decisions.

He has seen what happens when the pressure to “do something” collides with incomplete intelligence, rapidly changing facts, political pressure, and enormous presidential power.

He discusses:

● Why “Mr. President, do something” can be dangerous advice
● Why Congress has formally declared war in only five conflicts in U.S. history
● How much military force a president can order without first going to Congress
● What happens to constitutional checks and balances when weapons can strike in minutes
● Why presidential power looks different from inside the Oval Office
● What actually happens inside the Situation Room when the intelligence is incomplete and the stakes are enormous
● The threat that worries him the most

The Constitution gives Congress the power to declare war. But modern military strikes and warfare can move extraordinarily fast. 

So who can stop a president from starting a war? Where are the limits on presidential power when a decision has to be made in minutes? And when the law leaves enormous discretion in the hands of one person, how much ultimately depends on that person’s judgment and restraint?

What if trying harder is sometimes exactly the wrong thing to do?

Angela Duckworth, University of Pennsylvania psychologist, MacArthur Fellow, and author of the #1 New York Times bestseller Grit, has spent years studying achievement. In her new book, Situated, she explores why perseverance alone isn't enough.

She discusses:

• How Angela and her husband nearly “gritted” their way out of their marriage
• How much your environment shapes who you become
• The small change that can make good habits easier
• Why parents may be asking the wrong question about their children
• How peer pressure can become a force for good
• Whether AI could make us worse at thinking
• When changing your situation matters more than changing yourself

We spend enormous energy trying to improve ourselves. Angela Duckworth asks a different question: what if the more important thing is to change what’s around us?

What can we do when doing the morally “right” thing produces worse outcomes?

And what if some of society’s strongest moral instincts are preventing us from solving problems we all agree are terrible?

Alvin Roth is a Stanford professor and Nobel Prize-winning economist whose work has helped redesign real-world systems, including kidney exchanges and the way doctors are matched with hospitals. His new book, Moral Economics, tackles a harder category of problems: markets and behaviors we find morally objectionable, even when banning them may create consequences we don’t want.

He discusses:

• Why nearly 100,000 Americans can be waiting for a kidney 
• What prohibitions of alcohol and heroin can teach us 
• What happened when Rhode Island accidentally legalized indoor prostitution
• Whether paying kidney donors could save lives without creating an ethically unacceptable market
• Why evidence becomes especially important when reasonable people disagree about morality
• Whether performance-enhancing drugs could eventually become as ordinary as coffee

Some policies sound obviously right when judged by their intentions. But what happens when you judge them by their actual consequences?

Roth pushes into the uncomfortable territory between those two questions: when banning something creates a black market, when changing a rule may save more lives than inventing a new technology, and what we should do when the outcome we believe is morally necessary turns out to be something we cannot actually achieve.

Could America build the world’s best AI and still lose the AI race?

What if the biggest threat to America’s lead isn’t China’s technology, but our own fear of using it?

Katrina Mulligan is Head of National Security Partnerships at OpenAI and previously served in senior roles at the Department of Defense, National Security Council, and Department of Justice. Few people have seen both Washington and frontier AI development from the inside.

She argues that AI is no longer a technology question for the future. It is becoming core infrastructure for economic strength, national security, and the way we work.

She discusses:

●  Why America could win the race to AGI but lose on adoption
●  Why trust in AI is dramatically higher in China and the developing world
●  How China and the U.S. are taking fundamentally different approaches to AI
●  Why AI may ultimately transform society as profoundly as electricity
●  The biggest mistake leaders make when trying to adopt AI
●  Why AI transformation cannot simply be delegated to the IT department
●  How she has used AI to become at least 30% more effective at her own job
●  Why using AI like a search engine means dramatically underestimating what it can do

America may currently have the advantage in building the most advanced AI.

Katrina explains in today's 3 Takeaways™ conversation why that lead is far from guaranteed, how fear could become a strategic disadvantage, and why the countries and organizations that learn to redesign themselves around AI may ultimately have the most to gain.

What if your brain isn’t showing you the world as it truly is?

Journalist, professor, and author of "A World Appears: A Journey into Consciousness" Michael Pollan explores one of the deepest questions of all: why do we experience anything in the first place? 

He discusses:

• What consciousness actually is
• Why the brain predicts reality instead of simply taking it in
• How perception may be a kind of “controlled hallucination”
• Why we may see the world in the most useful way, not the most accurate way
• What animals, plants, and AI reveal about consciousness
• Why feelings may be central to being conscious
• Why attention may be one of our most precious resources
• How social media and AI are putting consciousness under siege
• Why consciousness is something we may need to protect and cultivate

The world you see may feel solid, obvious, and real.

But Michael Pollan explains why the experience of being conscious is far stranger, more fragile, and more mysterious than most of us realize.

Why would the world’s largest country risk everything to destroy a smaller neighbor?

What is it about Ukraine that poses a greater threat to Vladimir Putin than any army?

Pulitzer Prize-winning historian and The Atlantic writer Anne Applebaum has spent decades studying Russia, Ukraine, and authoritarian regimes. She argues that the war is being fought over far more than territory and that the outcome will reshape democracy, military power, and global politics.

She discusses:

● What Putin was really trying to prevent when he invaded Ukraine
● Why nearly everyone underestimated the Ukrainian people
● How architects, engineers, and entrepreneurs began reinventing modern warfare
● What drones have revealed about the future of war
● The first warning sign that a democracy is beginning to fail
● How modern propaganda works without persuading anyone
● Why leaders often become dramatically richer as democracy weakens

The maps don’t tell the whole story of this war.

Anne Applebaum explains what’s actually at stake, why Putin hasn’t achieved what he expected, and what Ukraine may reveal about the hidden strengths of democracy.

How does someone steal the Mona Lisa from the Louvre and simply walk away? 

And how did an even more brazen crew rob the same museum in broad daylight last year with just a cherry picker and some power tools?

The real stories are stranger than Hollywood and best-selling author Noah Charney knows them all. One of the world’s leading experts on art crime, he has advised museums, governments, and law enforcement agencies around the world.  

It turns out that stealing priceless art is often surprisingly easy. It’s turning the art into money that’s nearly impossible.

He explains:

◼ How a thief had unwitting Louvre workers help him walk out of the Louvre with the Mona Lisa
◼ How a brazen team used a cherry picker, power tools, and high-visibility vests to rob the Louvre in broad daylight
◼ Why most real art thieves are nothing like the elegant masterminds portrayed in movies
◼ How Napoleon turned art looting into an organized instrument of empire
◼ Why criminals steal art and how they get themselves apprehended
◼ How movies, fiction, and even the media can unintentionally help art criminals

Artificial intelligence could change almost everything.

John Hennessy thinks we're still asking the wrong questions.

As Chairman of Alphabet and one of the pioneers of modern computing, Hennessy has helped shape some of the biggest technology revolutions of the past half century. 

He explains what today's AI can - and can’t - actually do, what would qualify as artificial general intelligence, and why the greatest impact of AI may come from amplifying human capability rather than replacing it.

He discusses:

• The one capability that still separates humans from machines.
• What would have to happen before we can truly say we've reached artificial general intelligence (AGI).
• How AI could transform scientific discovery.
• The real risks that concern him most.
• Why leadership and human judgment may become even more valuable in the age of AI.
• How to prepare for a future where AI becomes part of almost every profession.

Few people have witnessed as many computing revolutions as John Hennessy. This episode explores what the AI conversation is getting right - and what almost everyone is getting wrong.

Why do some people instantly draw us in?

Olivia Fox Cabane reveals that charisma is not a gift. It is a skill - and most of us misunderstand what creates it.

In this episode, you’ll learn:

• The three qualities that make someone charismatic
• Why introverts can be highly magnetic
• How people judge you before you speak
• Why presence matters more than performance
• The surprising link between confidence and self-compassion
• Simple ways to become more charismatic immediately

Charisma is not just how people feel about you.

It is how you make them feel about themselves.

Olivia Fox Cabane is the author of The Charisma Myth. 

Everyone knows where the last generation of great technology companies came from.

The more interesting question is where the next generation will.

Mehran Gul spent years studying the world's most successful innovation hubs to understand why some places repeatedly create breakthrough companies while others never quite do.

He shares surprising insights about China's rise, Silicon Valley's future, and why artificial intelligence could reshape the global map of innovation in ways that few people expect.

Dr. Robert Cialdini, author of Influence - 5 million copies sold, and one of the most important books Warren Buffett says he's ever read - has spent decades studying why people say yes. 

He reveals the psychological forces shaping our decisions, why tiny changes can dramatically influence outcomes, and how the most effective communicators get people to yes without anyone feeling pushed. 

Once you understand these principles and hidden triggers, you'll start seeing them everywhere.

Most people think healthcare is broken by accident.

Mark Cuban says it isn't.

In part two of our conversation, he explains the hidden companies who really control healthcare, where AI is headed, and the biggest opportunities most people are missing.

He also shares the advice he gives young people, the three “superpowers” he believes matter more than talent, network, or money, and the one question he thinks everyone should ask themselves.

The NBA thought it was selling basketball.

Mark Cuban thought it was selling something else.

That insight shaped how he has built companies, evaluated opportunities, and challenged entire industries.

The lesson starts with basketball. It ends somewhere much bigger. 

He also shares the skill he values most in entrepreneurs, and how AI is changing the way ambitious people learn.

What if those brief conversations - with a barista, a neighbor, or someone sitting next to us - matter far more than we realize?

Gillian Sandstrom, a University of Sussex psychologist and author of Once Upon a Stranger, explores why we're so reluctant to talk to people we don't know, what happens when we do, and how seemingly small interactions can add up to a richer, happier, and more connected life.

The wind stops blowing. The sun goes down.
What happens next?

Former U.S. Secretary of Energy Ernest Moniz explains why the transition to clean energy may be far more complicated than most people realize.

In one of the most clear-eyed conversations about our energy future, Moniz pulls back the curtain on what it will actually take to build energy that is clean, reliable, and affordable - and why some of the hardest challenges have little to do with solar panels or wind turbines.

He reveals which emerging technologies - from hydrogen to nuclear fusion - could reshape the future of energy, why storage remains a major hurdle, and what many people misunderstand about renewable power.

What will it really take to keep the lights on in a low-carbon world?

We think of North Korea as a communist dictatorship. But Jonathan Cheng, the Wall Street Journal’s China Bureau Chief and former Korea Bureau Chief, says that misses the real story.

He argues North Korea functions more like a religion -  complete with rituals, worship, and a ruling family treated like immortals. Once you hear it, you can’t unsee it.

His new book is Korean Messiah. 

When people think about war, they picture missiles and mushroom clouds.

But what if the greatest threats today are the ones most people never see coming?

Christine Wormuth, former U.S. Secretary of the Army and current leader of the Nuclear Threat Initiative, explains why some of today’s biggest dangers are quieter, harder to detect, and easier to unleash than most people realize.

Most people see the world as the U.S. vs. China.But the real power shift is happening elsewhere.

Richard Fontaine, CEO of the Center for a New American Security and a former senior advisor at the National Security Council and the U.S. State Department, shows which countries are quietly shaping the next world order - and why the biggest power shifts are happening far from the spotlight.

Inflation, interest rates, AI, tariffs, the dollar…

Most people treat them as separate stories but actually, they’re not.

Former Council of Economic Advisers Chair Jason Furman explains how these forces are all connected - and why most people are missing the bigger picture.

What’s really driving inflation, why the dollar’s power may be slipping, and why the biggest risk isn’t what most people are watching.

A conversation about the hidden forces shaping the economy - and what comes next.

“We trained a whole country.”

It sounds like an exaggeration.

It’s not - according to Patrick McGee, author of Apple in China.

So what actually happened in China?

Dr. Tom Mihaljevic, CEO of Cleveland Clinic and a leading heart surgeon, explains how medicine is already changing in ways most people don’t see.

He has spent his career performing complex heart surgeries and now leads one of the world’s top hospitals.

A conversation about what’s changing in care and what it means for patients right now.

Iran briefly showed it could choke off a waterway carrying nearly a fifth of the world’s oil.

That’s the visible threat.

The real risk may be something else entirely.

Former Deputy National Security Advisor and U.S. Special Representative to Iran Elliott Abrams breaks down where Iran's strategy backfired, whether those in power in Tehran can hold on, and why the most dangerous consequence could outlast the war itself.

He is senior fellow at the Council on Foreign Relations.

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Exciting news!

We’ve been nominated for a Webby Award — one of the top honors for podcasts.  

If you enjoy the show, you can vote for 3 Takeaways here: (Just takes a minute - sign in with Apple or Google, no need to provide your email)   https://wbby.co/57427N

(Voting ends tomorrow)

Thank you! 😊 👏

We’re entering a world where life itself could become programmable.

What if creating new forms of life becomes as simple as writing code? 

Geneticist Adrian Woolfson explains how close we are — and why the consequences could be extraordinary.

--------------------------

Exciting news!

We’ve been nominated for a Webby Award—one of the top honors in podcasts.  

If you enjoy the show, you can vote for 3 Takeaways here: (Just takes a minute - sign in with Apple, no need to provide your email)  https://wbby.co/57427N

(Voting ends April 16)

Thank you!

Is the war with Iran actually a turning point for the Middle East?

Dan Kurtzer - former U.S. Ambassador to Israel and Egypt, advisor to presidents, peace negotiator and Princeton professor - has seen these moments up close, when expectations surge - and the outcome looks nothing like the promise.

His unfiltered take on Iran - and what actually changes after a war like this.

--------------------------

Exciting news!

We’ve been nominated for a Webby Award—one of the top honors in podcasts.  

If you enjoy the show, you can vote for 3 Takeaways here: (Just takes a minute - sign in with Apple, no need to provide your email)   https://wbby.co/57427N

(Voting ends April 16)

Thank you!

Love him or hate him, Elon Musk has upended entire industries - from cars to rockets - by doing things differently.

Jon McNeill, former president of Tesla, reveals the thinking behind Tesla and SpaceX that drives radical innovation - and shows how anyone can apply it.

He also offers a rare glimpse into how Elon Musk operates close up. 

--------------------------

Exciting news!

We’ve been nominated for a Webby Award—one of the top honors in podcasts.  

If you enjoy the show, you can vote for 3 Takeaways: (Just takes a minute - sign in with Apple, no need to provide your email) 👉 https://wbby.co/57427N

(Voting ends April 16)

Thank you!

A few paragraphs from Washington once stopped oil tankers in their tracks halfway around the world - no navy, no missiles. 

Eddie Fishman, who helped design and implement U.S. sanctions and economic warfare policies, explains how these quiet battles shape global power. 

If countries can inflict real damage without firing a shot, what does power look like in this new kind of war - and how vulnerable are we?

Scientists are finding tiny fragments of plastic inside the human body - including the brain.

Dr. Matthew Campen of the University of New Mexico explains how they get there - and why the biggest source may surprise you.

The government feels louder and faster than ever: executive actions, constant disruption, everything happening at once. 

But Yuval Levin of the American Enterprise Institute argues that all this motion may be masking something deeper. He explains why durable change comes from laws passed by Congress - not one-off deals- and why the shift from rule-making to deal-making could shape the future in unexpected ways.

The rules of quantum physics aren’t just strange - they’re usable. Particles can exist in multiple states at once. Observation can reshape reality. 

Now, scientists are turning those quirks into machines that could solve problems today’s computers simply can’t touch.

Princeton Engineering Dean Andrew Houck breaks down what quantum computing really is, what it can (and can’t yet) do, and why it could transform fields from drug discovery to energy.

A clear-eyed look at the weirdest laws of the universe and the revolutionary technology they may soon power.

The Constitution isn’t just a statement of ideals. It’s a framework for power - built to divide authority so that no single institution can fully control the law.

But that design has a consequence: it slows decisions and complicates action. Is that inefficiency a weakness - or the very mechanism that protects liberty?

Drawing on his experience at the center of federal rule-making, Harvard Law School’s Cass Sunstein explores how these constitutional guardrails actually work, why they were designed to restrain concentrated authority, and what we risk losing when they begin to erode.

This isn’t abstract theory. It’s about the quiet architecture that shapes who can act, and how a system of divided power ultimately protects self-government.

We all love the thrill of winning - the house, the promotion, the deal. But as Nobel laureate Richard Thaler explains, some of our biggest “wins” are actually the moments we set ourselves up to lose. Thaler breaks down why we overbid, overpay, and talk ourselves into choices we regret. And he shares simple tricks to help you catch yourself before you make a mistake you can’t undo.

The American Dream promises that hard work leads to a better life. But for many children today, that promise depends less on effort and more on where they grow up.

Raj Chetty, a Harvard professor and the founder of Opportunity Insights, has spent years following millions of lives to understand what truly drives economic mobility. His findings challenge long-held assumptions about opportunity in America.

If the American Dream has started to feel like a coin flip, what’s quietly shaping the odds? And what would it take to give more children a real chance to get ahead?

In this conversation, we explore why neighborhoods matter more than we think and how expanding opportunity could strengthen not just individual lives, but the country as a whole.

See his new paper Creating High Opportunity Neighborhoods. 

Federal Judge Jed Rakoff has spent decades inside the justice system - as a prosecutor, a defense attorney, and now a judge. In this conversation, he challenges how we think justice works and explains why outcomes often have little to do with guilt or innocence.

We think laughter is a response to something funny.
A joke. A punchline. A light moment.

But listen closely to real conversations, and laughter shows up in places that are far more important than we realize - and often when nothing is funny at all.

Neuroscientist Sophie Scott CBE reveals what laughter really signals, how it works, and why it quietly shapes our relationships, our hierarchies, and our sense of belonging.

Sophie Scott is a professor at University College London and one of the world’s leading researchers on the science of laughter.

Elon Musk and Geoffrey Hinton warn of an AI-driven job apocalypse.

MIT’s David Autor, one of the world’s leading thinkers on how technology reshapes work, says the real danger lies somewhere else.

The biggest risk of AI isn’t mass unemployment - it’s whether human skills and expertise will still matter.

David explains how AI could expand middle-class opportunity by lowering barriers to high-value work, why past technologies created more new jobs than they destroyed, and what we need to get right to make this moment a hopeful one.

Jack Goldsmith, who once ran the Justice Department office that advises presidents on what they can and can’t legally do, takes on some of the hardest questions about the limits of the president’s power — from changing the government to the use of military force abroad, including the invasion of Venezuela.

Drawing on his experience inside the executive branch, he looks at why the limits on presidential power are more fragile than they appear, how precedent quietly expands executive authority, and what that means for the future of the presidency. 

Most people quit their New Year's resolutions by March. The reason why might surprise you.

University of Chicago professor Ayelet Fishbach has spent decades studying why we fail at goals. Her finding: willpower is overrated. What matters is something entirely different.

In this episode, Fishbach reveals what actually separates those who succeed from those who quit and the strategies that make goals stick.

Some insights change how you see the world.

From the White House to the frontiers of AI drug discovery, we’ve gathered the most powerful moments from a year of extraordinary conversations. 

This 2025 highlights episode brings you the thinkers and leaders who challenged assumptions, revealed hidden patterns, and reframed the biggest questions of our time. 

- Mark Buchanan (Physicist): The hidden patterns behind catastrophes from wildfires to stock market crashes

- Cass Sunstein (Harvard Law Professor): What Facebook’s emotional manipulation experiment really revealed

- Susan Magsamen (Johns Hopkins): How your everyday environment is quietly reshaping your brain

- Jake Sullivan (U.S. National Security Advisor): What surprised him most about Xi and Putin

- Admiral James Stavridis (Former NATO Supreme Allied Commander): Navigating the China challenge

- Jon Gray (President, Blackstone): The real key to career success (it’s not what you think)

- Bonnie Hammer (Former Vice Chair, NBCUniversal): Redefining what “having it all” really means

- Christine Rosen (American Enterprise Institute): The hidden costs of a screen-mediated life

- Zanny Minton-Beddoes (Editor-in-Chief, The Economist): American polarization through foreign eyes

- David Brooks (New York Times columnist): The mistake people make when they turn to politics

- Craig Mundie (Former Microsoft Chief Strategist): AI’s biggest unsolved problem

- Dr. David Agus (Founding CEO Ellison Medical Institute): How AI is changing drug discovery

- Laura Carstensen (Stanford Center on Longevity): What she wishes people understood about aging

- Thomas Chatterton Williams (Author): Moving beyond racial identity

These are the conversations that expanded minds in 2025.

Dr. David Agus, Professor of Medicine and Engineering at the University of Southern California and Founding CEO of the Ellison Medical Institute, treats presidents, CEOs and cultural icons and has spent decades studying one question: What determines how long and well we live?

His answer is hopeful: Only 4% is genetic. The other 96% is under your control.

In this episode, he reveals why elephants rarely get cancer, why giraffes never get heart disease, and what inflammation does to nearly every organ in your body. He also shares the simple, proven habits that matter more than DNA, and destroys the myths quietly harming millions.

Science-backed. Actionable. Hopeful.

He is the author of multiple New York Times bestsellers, including The Book of Animal Secrets, The Lucky Years and The End of Illness.

Nicholas Burns spent 2021 to 2025 in Beijing as US Ambassador to China, witnessing up close the forces shaping the world's most dangerous rivalry.

Sitting across from Xi Jinping and living in China, he saw firsthand how dangerously close the world is to a crisis. Some of it genuinely terrified him.

Our conventional wisdom about China? Outdated. And dangerously wrong.

In this episode, he reveals the alarming "nightmare scenario" almost no one is talking about, why a single unanswered phone call could spark disaster, and what we're getting wrong about China and what China is getting wrong about us.

All from someone who lived it.

Sleep shapes your mood, memory, immune system, and long-term health, yet most of us aren’t getting enough. 

Harvard Medical School and Mass General Brigham sleep scientist Dr. Elizabeth Klerman shares the three easiest science-backed changes proven to improve your sleep tonight, plus the myths that make things worse.  

If you’re struggling to fall asleep, waking at 3 a.m., or dragging through the day, this episode is for you. 

In a Paris hospital delivery room, Thomas Chatterton Williams, writer for The Atlantic and author of Self-Portrait in Black and White, held his newborn daughter for the first time. Blonde hair. Blue eyes. And in that instant, everything he thought he knew about race shattered.

Thomas lives the questions about race and identity that most of us only debate. The son of a Black father who grew up under Jim Crow and a white mother, he had accepted America's racial categories without question. Until he couldn't.

What he decided is radical. Controversial. And will challenge how you think about identity, George Floyd, and the categories we use to define ourselves.

What if fatigue, fear, and even failure aren’t real limits, but signals from the brain trying to protect us?

Nick Thompson, CEO of The Atlantic and former Editor-in-Chief of Wired reveals the surprising psychology behind fatigue, focus, and fear and how our biggest limits often come from within.

Nick isn’t just one of the most thoughtful leaders in media, he’s also a record-breaking ultramarathoner who’s learned that endurance begins in the mind.

This conversation will change how you think about performance, aging, and the power of effort itself.

Nick's wonderful new book is The Running Ground. 

We’re told youth is life’s peak — but what if that story is wrong?

Stanford psychologist Laura Carstensen reveals how time itself reshapes what we value and how we find meaning. Her research offers profound lessons for living well at every age — and for finding more meaning in the moments we have. 

It’s a conversation that will change how you think about time, happiness, and life itself.

We’ve entered a new age. Where nature once took a million years to make a few genetic changes, scientists can now make billions in an afternoon — and even imagine adapting humans for life beyond Earth.

George Church, a Harvard geneticist, pioneer of the Human Genome Project, and founder of more than 50 biotech companies, helped lay the foundation for CRISPR, personal genomics, and even de-extinction.

In this episode, he explains how biotechnology, AI, and materials science are converging to transform life itself -  from reversing aging and curing disease to resurrecting lost species like the woolly mammoth, and one day, helping humanity thrive among the stars.