Highlights of 2025 (#281)

3 Takeaways Podcast Transcript

Lynn Thoman

(https://www.3takeaways.com/)

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Lynn Thoman: It's been an extraordinary year. One filled with thoughtful conversations, bold ideas, and guests who challenged us to see the world a little differently. 

Hi everyone, I'm Lynn Thoman, and this is 3 Takeaways. On 3 Takeaways, I talk with some of the world's best thinkers, business leaders, writers, politicians, newsmakers, and scientists. Each episode ends with three key takeaways to help us understand the world, and maybe even ourselves, a little better. 

Lynn Thoman: As we look back on the year, I wanted to share some of the moments that stayed with me, the perspectives that expanded my thinking, surprised me, or reminded me of what truly matters.

Today, you'll hear highlights from some of the remarkable leaders, thinkers, creators, and visionaries who helped shape this incredible year of conversations. 

When we talk about the biggest strategic challenges facing the United States in this century, China comes up again and again. Its influence touches everything from economics to technology to global security.

I asked Admiral James Stavridis, former Supreme Allied Commander of NATO and a longtime military and national security leader, how he sees China's role in the world. I also asked him what kind of strategy the U.S. needs going forward. His answer is nuanced, realistic, and very clear-eyed about both the risks and the opportunities.

James Stavridis: The challenge with China, Lynn, is the strategic challenge of the 21st century. Only China can mount a significant challenge to the U.S. in everything from technology and artificial intelligence to competition for alliance systems to economic power and throw weight through the application of tariffs by both sides to actual military confrontation. Only China can pose that level of risk for the United States.

So I look at China. I'm hopeful we can construct a strategy that says, confront where we must, but cooperate where we can with China. We've got to confront China on their claim of ownership of the South China Sea.

It's preposterous. We've got to confront them on the possibility they may invade Taiwan, which would crack the global economy. We've got to confront them on their highly aggressive cyber activity, for example.

There's a basket of things where we cannot bend, but we ought to look for the zones of cooperation with China in everything from the environment and climate to preparing for the next pandemic to disaster relief around the world to shared economic potential agreements that could be positive both ways. There's a lot of scope for cooperation with China. We need a strategy that's not an either or, carrot or stick.

It's got to be both. China is the strategic risk for the United States this century. 

Lynn Thoman: So many people ask some version of the same question. How can I have it all? It's a question that comes up across careers, families, and every stage of life. I asked Bonnie Hammer, former vice chair of NBCUniversal, what advice she gives most often, and she offered a powerful reframing: why defining success for yourself matters more than chasing anyone else's version of it. 

Bonnie Hammer: I don't know if there's one piece. There are just so many pieces of advice that I give people based on who they are.

For me, advice is individualized. It's people coming to me with what they need at that stage of their life or their career that I then help them navigate through their situation. 

For example, I get constantly the question from so many people, particularly women, but everybody, it's how can I have it all?

And my answer to them, there's no such thing as having it all. 

What we have in life is choices and it's having the agency of those choices. So don't let somebody else's all define who you are because my all and Lynn, your all, are going to be totally different.

So you have to figure out what you need and want out of life. And then even once you isolate that, you have to choose. It can change over different decades or different times of your life, but you do have to figure out what your all is, for you, at that moment in time, and then move forward. And know that everybody feels out of balance, at some point, and so will you, and that's okay.

Lynn Thoman: Catastrophes feel random, but what if they aren't? What if catastrophes from stock market crashes to wildfires to earthquakes all have the same hidden underlying patterns? Physicist and author Mark Buchanan explains the hidden patterns behind disasters.

By understanding the patterns, we can reduce the worst damage. 

Mark Buchanan: So the hidden patterns are, first of all, a mathematical propensity for many small events and only a few large events. The second pattern is that those few large events really dominate the system in terms of the consequences.

So if you look at the total number of acres that get burned in forest fires, then you can sum up all the many, many small forest fires, sum up all the total of all the acres that have been burned and you'll find it's a small fraction [of the total acres burned]. Whereas you may look to the two or three largest forest fires, put them together and they will account for maybe 90% of all of the acres that gets burned. So the second pattern, in this particular critical state organization, is that the few largest events actually dominate in terms of their consequences for the system as a whole.

Even though there's so many more small ones, they are so much smaller than the large ones, that the large ones end up dominating the consequences for the system. 

And so, in the context of things like stock market crashes, you'll find that the number of people who get their portfolios wiped out is dominated by the few big crashes that occur rather than the small movements that are happening all the time.

And if economists can avoid the worst crashes and avoid the worst problems, then you're way ahead in terms of protecting people and protecting the system. So that's the second pattern. 

Those are the two, I think, particular patterns, the power law, distribution, and then this thing about how the biggest events carry almost all the weight.

Lynn Thoman: Technology has made life easier in countless ways, but it's also quietly changing how we relate to one another. Many of us now have a choice between being together in person or interacting through a screen. I asked Christine Rosen, a senior fellow at the American Enterprise Institute and a leading writer on technology and culture, whether we're actually spending less time together face-to-face and what we may be losing as screens increasingly stand between us.

Christine Rosen: We are, and this is a fairly new thing in that we have a choice about whether we can be with each other in physical presence, face-to-face, having those sorts of conversations or doing the same thing, but with a screen between us and another person. Given the convenience, the ease, the efficiency, our ability to maybe mute or turn off a conversation that we're not enjoying, we're more and more often gravitating towards the mediated interaction with other people rather than the face-to-face. And I think over time, we develop habits and expectations of each other that are mediated through the technology.

And that means when we are face-to-face and together in person again, we're not as good at what we used to do. We've lost some of our skills in just interacting as human beings. 

Lynn Thoman: We often think of our surroundings as background, but what if our environments are actively shaping our brains?

What we see, hear, and experience every day may matter more than we realize. 

Susan Magsamen, Executive Director of the International Arts and Mind Lab at Johns Hopkins, shares the surprising impact on us of enriched and impoverished environments. 

Susan Magsamen: In the [19]60s, there was a researcher named Marian Diamond who did the first experiments around enriched environments.

What she did was create three conditions. The first was an enriched environment that had novelty and surprise and things changed. They were places for curiosity.

The middle was kind of a status quo environment. The third was an impoverished environment where there was very little to rest on or to gain attention. And these three environments were created for rats.

So she put the rats in these different conditions for just two weeks. And after that period of time, the rats were sacrificed. 

And what she saw was that in the enriched environments, the brains of the rats grew.

They actually got larger, which is extraordinary. The synapses were stronger, but the mass, the physical mass of the brain got bigger. 

In the status quo environments, nothing really changed in the rats.

But sadly, in the impoverished environments, the brains got smaller and there were less connections. 

And so this work in those days was shared. And initially it was shared with other scientists with disbelief.

No one believed that the brain could change. This was the first experiment on neuroplasticity. People thought that you're kind of born with a certain amount of connections and they maybe grow when you're young, but then they stop.

And what we saw was that environments change the brain. They change it in profound ways. And now those experiments are being done non-invasively and in human subjects.

And we're seeing in fact, that that's true, that enriched environments matter. 

And so how those environments are created and how you have agency over your environments are really important, whether it's light or smell or temperature, novelty. As I mentioned, really thinking about what are those spaces for you and what do you need those spaces to do? 

I think sound is one that's also incredibly important.

And how does that sound really change your neurophysiology and how can you moderate that and begin to create those environments that really support what you need regardless of where you are. 

Lynn Thoman: Very few people get to sit across the table from the world's most powerful leaders. Even fewer get to observe them closely over time and in moments of real consequence. 

I asked National Security Advisor Jake Sullivan what surprised him most about China's leader Xi Jinping and Russia's Vladimir Putin. And his observations offer a rare glimpse into these leaders. 

Jake Sullivan: Well, I've met many times with Xi, with Putin, only once in the Biden administration was I in a face-to-face meeting and participated in that meeting.

That was the summit in Geneva. Before then, I had seen President Putin when I worked at the State Department many years ago and saw him on multiple occasions. 

He's always been the same guy, President Putin, but his historic, almost destiny-based obsession with Ukraine is palpable today in a way that I feel it was not to the same extent a decade ago.

It was there, but not revved up to the point where he has bet his entire country's future on trying to prevail in this conflict.  

He is a person of passionate intensity about his views of history and of his own place in it. And you can see that emanating from him when you're in the same room.

With President Xi, I think what's surprising about him is that he has the vibe of a natural politician, which is interesting for someone who leads in a very hierarchical Communist Party structure in China. He has a natural way of interacting. He will put his notes aside, have a back and forth, he'll tell stories, he'll tell jokes.

It's a much more relaxed manner than you typically see from Chinese leaders or leaders in systems that are in the same vein as the Chinese system. 

Lynn Thoman: People often wonder what really separates those who build fulfilling careers from those who struggle to find momentum. Is it talent, timing, or something else entirely?

I asked Blackstone President Jon Gray for his career advice. 

Jon Gray: My career advice would be to work harder and care more than other people. People often say, how did so-and-so get so successful?

They show up earlier, they double-check their work, they really care about what they're doing, they enjoy it. I would say related to that, being passionate about what you do, because it's really hard to work harder and care more if you don't love it. You probably get the sense, I love the intellectual challenge of investing, I love traveling, I love people, and that makes me able to give 110% of what I do.

Finding something you're passionate. Then I would say, think of yourself as an entrepreneur. Whatever your role is, and it certainly applies to Blackstone, not just to investors, but to fundraising, to finance, to technology, to legal.

What I mean by being an entrepreneur is, hey, I can be an agent for change. We've been producing this report this way for 15 years, but half the people don't read this stuff, it's way too long. Here are the things people need.

There's a way to do this using technology as opposed to just having a bunch of human beings do it. If you think of yourself as an entrepreneur, as an agent of change, then your job becomes, I think, more fun. You work really hard, you care a ton, you're passionate about what you do. 

It doesn't mean you don't have bad days. Then you're an entrepreneur and an agent of change. If you can put that together, then I think you'll have a fulfilling career.

It doesn't mean every day's good, but when you look at it and step back and say, collectively, wow, I'm learning a ton, and I really enjoy this, and I'm pouring my heart into it, then I just keep going. 

Lynn Thoman: Political polarization feels especially intense right here and now in the United States. But from the outside, it can look both familiar and uniquely American at the same time. 

I asked Zanny Minton-Beddoes, Editor-in-Chief of The Economist, how polarization looks from abroad and how the U.S. compares to other democracies facing similar pressures. 

Zanny Minton-Beddoes: I think the dissatisfaction with existing political parties, with existing political positions is widespread. You see it in Europe, too, where you see a backlash against traditional mainstream parties.

The difference with the United States, I think, is partly the narrowness of the divisions. Broadly, it is a 50-50 country. The extreme nature of the polarization, which I think is fueled by the different media ecosystems that the two sides live in.

When I go to the United States, I force myself to watch 15 minutes of cable news in the morning and 15 in the evening. If I watch MSNBC in the morning, I'll watch Fox in the evening or vice versa, not because it's necessarily fun or good for me, but because it is a very powerful window into the polarization you're talking about. It's not just that people have different views.

They live in different ecosystems with different facts. It's just extraordinary. That, I think, is more extreme, certainly, than in England. 

In Britain, we still have the BBC, which, although widely criticized, does provide a sort of anchoring in terms of facts and the news agenda. The other difference is that in many European countries, you have different political systems that mean the way that the polarization or the way that dissatisfaction has manifested itself has been the decline of traditional parties and the sprouting of lots more extreme and fringe parties. The consequence of probably what is a similar dissatisfaction has been a very different political setup, so less polarized and more fragmented.

People are concerned about uncontrolled immigration. People are concerned about the pace of change. People in lots of countries are worried that their children will have a less good future than they did.

It's very corrosive in a democracy if a plurality of people think that their children will be worse off than they were. People are scared, worried about the pace of change. These are ingredients for dissatisfaction.

They manifest themselves in different ways in different countries. 

Lynn Thoman: Many people sense that something deeper than policy disagreements is broken in our society. There's a growing feeling of disconnection, anger, and loss of meaning.

I asked David Brooks, columnist for the New York Times and author of multiple books on character and morality, what he sees as the most urgent questions facing us today and how a society rebuilds trust, purpose, and a shared moral foundation.

David Brooks: How do you repair a society that's broken? And how do you find a morality that we can believe in? There was a book in the 1980s by a guy in Chicago named Alan Bloom called The Closing of the American Mind.

He talked about moral relativism. And I look back on when he was writing in the 1980s, and that seems like a stroll through the garden compared to what we're living through today. Because we don't have moral relativism, a soft, bland moral relativism.

We have, first, nihilism, a loss of belief in anything. 

And second, people using politics to fill a hole in their soul. So they want to feel righteous, so they go to politics.

They want to feel belonging, and they go to politics. But asking politics to fill a hole in your soul is asking more of politics than it can do. You think you're trying to find some sense of purpose in your life by being really active and really partisan, but you're just entering an endless culture war.

And if you don't have a shared morality, you can't ever solve your debates because you have no criteria upon which to solve them. 

And so the debates just get louder and louder and louder. And so I think a core challenge is we're not a Christian country. We're a pluralistic country. With people from all religions and no religion, how do we create a shared sense of values? How do we do that in such a diverse country? 

And I think it's very doable. If we can have basic morality, everyday morality, on how to treat each other with consideration and respect in the normal circumstances of life, that would go a long way to helping the problem of trust, helping the problem of loneliness and all the various angers that are floating around society.

Lynn Thoman: About a decade ago, Facebook ran an experiment that sparked widespread alarm and concern. It raised uncomfortable questions about power, influence and emotional manipulation. I asked Cass Sunstein, Harvard law professor and former White House regulatory czar, what the company did, what it learned, and why the fact that technology can manipulate us and shape our emotional lives is so deeply troubling. 

Cass Sunstein: It found that emotions are not only contagious, which we know. So if you're surrounded by grumpy people, the chance that you will grow grumpy increases. If you're surrounded by happy, fun people, you're probably going to be happier and have more fun.

Facebook can induce positive or negative emotions through posts. And it would be regrettable if some people's, although it's unfortunately true, some people's principal social relationships are online. Even if your principal social relations aren't online, you can be rendered, Facebook found, happier or sadder just by virtue of what Facebook is showing you.

And since Facebook has a capacity to put happier or sadder posts on your newsfeed, it can induce emotional states. And Facebook got a lot of pushback for that. That was desirable, that there was that pushback.

Facebook, I think, wasn't doing anything malevolent there. It was just trying to learn. 

But the idea that a company can have some authority over people's emotional states, that is troubling with a capital T.

Lynn Thoman: Artificial intelligence is advancing rapidly, and its impact is only going to grow. The question isn't whether it will change our world, but how prepared we are for that change. I asked Craig Mundie, former Chief Research and Strategy Officer at Microsoft and a longtime technology advisor, what he believes are the most important things people need to understand about AI, especially when it comes to trust and long term consequences.

Craig Mundie: The most important points are to recognize that the progress of these things, I think, is now inevitable. I believe they will come to exceed human capabilities, even beyond what they have so far. 

And they'll probably become able to operate directly in the physical world, which today they're largely not doing yet.

And that because of these things, they will diffuse into just about everything. 

The next most important thing to understand is, we don't currently have a solution for the trust question. You hear people talk a lot about safety.

You hear people talk about alignment. But if you distill it all down, it's really about trust. What I'm trying to do is to get people to realize, if you don't build a trust architecture, none of this stuff is going to work out very well.

And that the narrow, one piece at a time articulation of the threats, or pursuit of individual solutions, I think, is not going to be adequate. And therefore, more energy needs to go into finding some coalition of people and countries who recognize that it's in their long-term interest, no matter how they compete today, to find alignment on how to trust AIs and each other's construction and use of AI-based systems. 

Many of the things that people fear about it, other than its existential risk stuff, is the side effects.

For example, oh, isn't it going to destroy the climate even faster? 

I categorically think that technological changes, independent of the AI, are going to arrive in time. Things like fusion energy and potentially more improvements in how we actually build the chips that AI runs on are going to make dramatic changes in what those requirements are or how we fulfill them in a way that ultimately reverses many of our existing problems.

Lynn Thoman: For decades, developing a new drug was a long, slow, and uncertain process. I asked Dr. David Agus, physician, professor of medicine and engineering at the University of Southern California and CEO of the Ellison Institute, how artificial intelligence and genetic data are transforming drug development. 

He shared why this moment in medicine is so exciting.

Dr. David Agus: Making a drug, literally took a 10-year period just to make the drug and then 7 years to test it. Now I can say, hey, with AI, here's a protein. I want something that binds right here.

Here's every other protein in the body. I don't want it to bind to those. Here are the genes for metabolism. I want it to last this long in the blood. Here are the genes for the immune system - I don't want it to be recognized as foreign by the immune system.

With those constraints, I can make a drug literally in weeks. In the last six months, we've made five drugs. The probability of working is actually greater because I know it won't bind to any other protein in the body than a classic drug.

At the same time, I know this is going to sound a little weird, is we're taking human organs that were ineligible for transplant, things like a liver, and we can keep them alive for a while with a new thing that pumps blood and plasma through them and test drugs against human organs instead of mice. 

All of these things with AI are enabling us to develop drugs quicker and better. 

In clinical trials, instead of saying, hey, half of you are going to get the drug, this exciting drug because you have a deadly disease, and half are going to get a placebo because we have to see if the drug makes you live longer.

Questionable ethics right there, but that's what we do. We can say, hey, listen, we're going to give you 100 people this drug, and we're going to find 100 people from the database who are exactly the same in terms of their health parameters, see their outcomes, who compare to a virtual. Basically, you have a digital twin we're comparing you to, instead of giving somebody a placebo.

It means the trials are half as expensive, half the size. You don't have to give people a placebo. And they [the trials] take half the time to get done. This is a game-changing time we're dealing with now.

We're going to have new drugs, and I get to see what's in the pipeline - the amount of new drugs to treat diseases is really staggering and so exciting. 

Lynn Thoman: We tend to look back on earlier stages of life with nostalgia or we look ahead with anxiety, but each stage has its own strengths if we're able to recognize them.

I asked Laura Carstensen, Stanford psychologist and founding director of the Stanford Center on Longevity, what insight she would leave people of any age about living well across time. Her answer is both wise and deeply reassuring. 

Laura Carstensen: I wish that we humans could come to appreciate what is good and special about every stage of life while we're in it. 

I would love it if children really knew that this was the most spectacular time in life to climb trees and jump up and down, and that teenagers could appreciate the exquisite physical capabilities that they have and how to value physical health for most of them when they're very young. 

I would love it if middle-aged people could come to experience life as not being burdened by all the responsibilities they have at that stage in life, but about being able to help other people, more than ever, at that stage in their life. 

And that if when we got to be old, we could recognize that in many ways, the most advanced stages in our lives are the most precious of all, because they are more limited and value goes up when the amount of anything goes down.

And so, we come to experience our later years with an ability to see what's beautiful in the world, unlike any other stage in life. 

My point is there are good things and there are challenges with every stage of life, and I wish for people to be able to see what's good and special about each one of them while they're living it.

Lynn Thoman: Thomas Chatterton Williams perspective on race was shattered when his daughter was born with blond hair and blue eyes. He is a writer and author of Self Portrait in Black and White. 

I asked Thomas what he’s come to understand differently about love, identity, and our shared humanity.

Thomas Chatterton Williams: I think that we're not going to ever be able to transcend racism and xenophobia and many of the ills that afflict our societies, so long as we continue to accept these ways of dividing ourselves and organizing ourselves into hierarchies based on ancestry and things like this, so long as we believe that we share in the achievements of people who had somehow looked like us in the past or we share in the kind of diminishments of people who had looked like us in the past as opposed to believing that we are here in the present now, and what we have is each other.

 And so I really think of myself as an individual. I really believe that.

And I think of the people that I interact with as individuals. 

And I don't mean to say that community isn't important or that some people just don't have as high a threshold as I do for giving up on tribes, but I do think that we should really strive to live in ways in which we interact with people with as little of the kind of inherited prejudices and biases of conflicts past as possible.

That veil of abstract identity that slips between you and the other that you're meeting, I think is really the enemy. 

I want skin color to convey as much information to me about who you are as hair color does, as eye color does. 

It's no more physically meaningful as the pigment in your, in your hair or your iris, but we put so much emphasis on the epidermis.

Lynn Thoman: As we wrap up this year of 3 Takeaways, what stands out most to me is how connected these conversations really are from global leadership and technology to careers, community, and how we live our lives.

As we look ahead to 2026, I’m excited for the conversations to come. We’ll keep asking big questions with people who are shaping what comes next - thinkers and leaders who challenge assumptions and offer fresh perspectives.

If you’d like to listen to any of the full episodes, click on the links below. 

- 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

Thanks for listening and for your curiosity!

OUTRO: If you’re enjoying the podcast, and I really hope you are, please review us on Apple Podcasts orSpotify or wherever you listen. It really helps get the word out. If you’re interested, you can also sign up for the 3 Takeaways newsletter at 3takeaways.com where you can also listen to previous episodes. 

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I’m Lynn Thoman and this is 3 Takeaways. Thanks for listening.

This transcript was auto-generated. Please forgive any errors.