Highlights of 2025 (#281)

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.