3 Takeaways - Top Takeaways of 2024 (#232)

Episode Date: January 14, 2025

The episode you’ve been waiting for is here: our Top Takeaways of 2024. Listen to some of the world’s smartest, most influential thinkers, business leaders, innovators, technologists, and other newsmakers — including Eric Schmidt, Mellody Hobson, Atul Gawande, Fareed Zakaria, Jill Abramson, Stephen Breyer, and others. You don’t want to miss this episode.

Hi, everyone. I'm Lynn Toman, and this is Three Takeaways. Today, I'm thrilled to bring you our top highlights of 2024, featuring an incredible lineup of guests who've shared their wisdom and experiences with us this year. In this 2024 highlights episode, we'll revisit some of the most compelling moments from the following guests. World renowned historian, Neil Ferguson. Melody Hobson, president and co-CEO of Ariel Investments

and former chair of Starbucks. Former New York Times executive editor, Jill Abramson. Former defense and foreign minister of Norway, Ina Eriksson-Sarajda, former Supreme Court Justice Stephen Breyer, taste expert and food innovator Barb Stuckey, physicist and award-winning entrepreneur Safi Bakal, former Google CEO Eric Schmidt, negotiation guru William Urie, renowned global health expert, Atul

Gawande, Princeton professor and philosopher, Peter Singer, former U.S. Deputy Secretary of State, Wendy Sherman, Fareed Zakaria, political commentator and journalist and host of CNN's Fareed Zakaria GPS, and finally, executive leadership coach extraordinaire, Marshall Goldsmith. Here we go, enjoy the show. My guest today is Neil Ferguson. He is one of the world's most renowned historians. He has extensively studied the rise and fall of civilizations.

There were, as you point out, a series of 20th century experiments with the same people and the same cultures. There were two sets of Germanys, East and West, two Koreas, North and South, two Chinas, mainland China and Taiwan. What happened and why? Will Barron Well, the great thing about my theory is that it's quite testable. We ran a series of experiments. They weren't really thought of experiments, but they turned out that way in which we would give the same people different institutions. And you mentioned the classic examples. There are two Germanies, one of which is essentially integrated into the Western world of democracy and rule of law, limited government and market economics. And then there's East Germany,

which is part of the Soviet bloc. Two Koreas, one of which is fully Marxist-Leninist, the other one part of the American alliance system and becomes democratic. And in each case, with amazing speed, the outcomes diverge. And you could equally make this argument about mainland China and Taiwan. So we see in a great many different places, these experiments in which one people is given a couple of different systems. And what proves that ideas and institutions really matter is how quickly the different incentives produce different outcomes. It doesn't matter how long a cultural tradition you may have, as soon as the institutions are different, then behaviour completely changes. We kind of assume that there's a life cycle

of empire or civilisation, that they have a sort of vigorous youth and they're in the prime of their lives and then they age and then finally die. But that's what we do as individuals. It is not actually what policies do. Because civilizations or empires, which are sort of structured civilizations can vary enormously in their lifespan. I would offer the insight that there is a kind of interplay between those forces that allow a frontier to expand and those forces that cause the core to rot, to corrode. And understanding those dynamics helps us. And one of my favorites is that once a society is spending more on paying the interest on its public debt than it's spending on defense or national security, it's probably in trouble. The situation

of the United States is precisely that this year for the first time, the United States is now going to spend more on interest payments than on defense in 2024. History suggests that that's not a good idea. I'm excited to be with Melody Hobson. Melody grew up in a household having electricity turned off, phones turned off, and being evicted. She grew up the child of a single mother, and her father was not present in her life.

But despite growing up in such challenging circumstances, Melody's become enormously successful and a star and beloved. She is president and co-CEO of Ariel Investments, a highly respected investment company with over $15 billion in investments. She's also the chair of the board of directors of Starbucks and a member of the board of JP Morgan. One

of the things that you've said your mother told you was to make yourself indispensable. Can you talk about that? And that was a great piece of advice. Whatever it was, I would volunteer. And that did allow me to stand out. It really, really did. And I would volunteer for all sorts of things, you know, the things no one wanted to do. It's like, we need to write a recommendation for this person for, you know, some master's degree or something. They were an intern at Ariel.

You know, it's a lot of pages. You got to go talk to someone who they work for, et cetera. And I would say like, oh, I'll do it. And so I just did it because I wanted to be someone that was perceived as being user friendly. And then I thought, what kind of person would you want working with you? You want the person who volunteers,

not that you're trying to twist arms to get someone to volunteer for something. We've all been in that room where you're sitting around the table. It's like, who's going to do this? I'm going to do it, and I just want to continue to do that to make myself, hopefully, more valuable to do that. I'm going to do it and I just want to continue to do that to make myself hopefully more valuable to the organization.

I'm excited to be with Jill Abramson, former executive editor of the New York Times. What's changed in the media over the last 10 or so years? Everything. Everything has changed. Digital journalism has changed everything. It's no longer just professional journalists who cover the news and analyze it and write about it. It's any citizen who wants to go online and express what they know or their viewpoint. So that in many ways has been a healthy thing. The unhealthy aspect of the digital revolution has been the complete destruction and upending of what was the old revenue model,

which was advertising. And so the news gathering muscle of journalism has withered horribly during the course of my career. City councils, county councils, state houses, they're all going uncovered. That's a big danger to democracy. That's why I care about it, not because my colleagues have lost their jobs. I'm excited to be with Ina Eriksen Sarraida. She was Minister of Defense and then Minister of Foreign Affairs of Norway. She is a member of Norway's parliament and chair of the Standing Committee of Foreign Affairs and Defense. She is the perfect person to ask about the social, political, and defense disruptions

roiling our world today. How do you see the United States? Well, I think for a country like Norway, the U.S. is our closest ally. And we work so closely together on so many topics spanning from security policy, defense intelligence, to trade. The relationship with the U.S. is strong also because we have neutral benefits from having this relationship. I mean, we are a country with Russia as our neighbor, with the high north as a theater

where things have been relatively calm and low tension until now. Now we are seeing that things are changing. It's changing because of Russia's behavior. It's changing because different actors's behavior. It's changing because different actors now have interests they want to pursue in the Arctic. And it's changing because of climate change. And the ice is retracting, new sailing routes are opening, new activity is coming. And that is why I think it is important to continue to deepen our relationship with the US. And of course, it also means

that sometimes we disagree. And we are quite open and frank about that both ways. You will see when you come to visit Norway, that we have a very keen interest in US politics, in American society. I mean, when you look at the US, you consist of more people with Norwegian heritage than there are Norwegians in Norway right now. So this also has historical roots and historic bonds. So you will see that this corporation is very strong and we're such a small country in the big pond that we need to work like that and investing in our alliance, investing in our allies, in our relationship with our allies is maybe the best investment that we can do. I'm excited to be with former Supreme Court Justice Stephen Breyer. How do you decide which cases to hear?

Is there a division, a real division of opinion, about what these words mean among lower court judges? And there are far fewer of those than you think. That's why we get down to 70 or 80 out of 8,000. And sometimes, like Guantanamo Bay and the prisoners kept there, we'll hear a case even though there wasn't a split in the lower courts. Sometimes it's just important for the nation to have an answer. And so we'll take some of those sometimes.

But that's the criteria. You're going to love this conversation with Barb Stuckey. Barb and her wonderful book Taste helped me become more attuned to a world of tastes, aromas, textures, sights, and sounds that I didn't even know I was missing. Barb, where does taste happen? Is it solely in the mouth? It happens on your tongue where your taste buds are, but it's much more complicated than just what is happening on your tongue.

There are only five things that you can taste using your taste equipment. Sweet, sour, bitter, salt, and umami, otherwise known as savory or meaty. And so there's a lot more going on than just what is happening in your mouth. I'll tell a story about a favorite restaurant of mine in San Francisco, here where I live. It's called, it's a wonderful Italian restaurant run by Craig and Annie Stoll, a married couple. I interviewed Craig when I was writing Taste, and he's a trained chef. And I asked him about his restaurant and what type of food he cooks. And he said,

I have to turn the volume of my flavors up to compete with the noise level in my restaurant. I thought that was just so elegant and beautifully put from someone who doesn't really know the research. He doesn't know that that research had been done and then that had been proven to be the case. I'm excited to be with Safi Bacall. Safi is a former public company CEO, physicist, award-winning entrepreneur, and author of the wonderful international bestseller, Loonshots. When you look at some of the biggest ideas that have created some of the biggest businesses

and industry in the last two decades. It's cloud services. 15 years ago, 20 years ago, if you would have said, here's my idea, I'm gonna go to every company in the world and you know your IT budget that you're buying these metal boxes and these software things that you buy, forget it. Just give it to one company or maybe two companies,

throw away all your computers and they'll do everything in the cloud for you. People would have said, you're nuts. That's a crazy idea. It took a tiny little player, someone that was nothing in the business to business world, a company that was known for selling diapers online, which was called Amazon at the time. It was basically a mail order catalog that was splashed onto the internet.

And they said, what if we try this crazy thing? Everybody wrote the idea off as crazy. I'm excited to be with Eric Schmidt, the former CEO of Google and the co-founder of Schmidt Sciences. To quote from the introduction of Eric's new book, Genesis, the latest capabilities of artificial intelligence, impressive as they are, will appear weak in hindsight as its powers increase at an accelerating rate. Powers we have not yet imagined are said to

infuse our daily lives." Eric, where do you think AI and machines will be present in our lives and running our lives in five or 10 years? Let's start with where we are right now. Folks are very familiar now with Chatchie BT and its competitors, which includes Quad and my favorite of course, Gemini from Google, and a number of others. And people are amazed that this stuff can write better than certainly I can. They can do songs, they can even write code.

So what happens next? The next big change is in the development of what are called agents. And an agent is something which is in a little loop that learns something. So you build an agent that can do the equivalent of a travel agent. Well it learns how to do travel agents. The key thing about agents is that you can concatenate them. You get an English command and it gives you an English result. And so then you can take that result and put it into the next agent.

With that you can design a building, design a ship, design a bomb, whatever. Do you think there will come a point where machines will assume judgments and actions? And if so, what do you think the impact will be on both humanity and machines, of machines assuming and humans surrendering independent judgment and action? So are we the dogs to their humanity? Will ultimately AI be our overlords? I certainly hope not. The theoretical argument is the computers are running the world and we're the dogs.

That's unlikely. A much more likely scenario, which I do worry about, is that the concentration of power that a dictator type person, sort of an autocrat type person, can accumulate under the guise of efficiency can also restrict liberty. At the key point is what we call technically recursive self-improvement, when it can begin to improve itself. We better have a really good way of watching what this thing is doing.

And if you think about it for a while, the only way to watch what it's doing is to have another AI system watching it, because people won't be able to follow it fast enough. I'm excited to be with William Urey, one of the world's leading experts on negotiation and mediation.

One of your insights that I found fascinating, which I had never quite realized, is that negotiations sound differently, the ones that are going badly from the ones that are going well. Can you talk about how they sound differently? The thought experiment I conducted when I was a graduate student was, what if I was an anthropological fly on the wall of a Middle East peace negotiation? How would I know it was going well or poorly? You know, it was things like, well, if it's going poorly, people are focused

just on the past, they're engaged in a blame game, the question is who's right, who's wrong, and if it's going well, people are focused on the future, they're engaged in a blame game. The question is who's right, who's wrong. And if it's going well, people are focused on the future, like what are we going to do tomorrow morning to ameliorate the situation? How are we going to create an opening in this seemingly difficult conflict? So those kinds of things would be immediate indicators of whether a negotiation was closing down possibilities or opening up possibilities, even in the most difficult situation. I'm excited to be with Atul Gawande, the renowned surgeon and a professor at Harvard Medical

School and the Harvard Chan School of Public Health. He's also an author who's written four bestselling books, which have revolutionized health care. Just one of his ideas, his checklist for operating rooms, has reduced surgical deaths in hospitals around the world by from 30 to 50%. Can you talk about how you think about life expectancy? Death before 50 is now largely preventable. The focus has been on individual diseases that we now have the know-how and want to

make sure that we deploy solutions for HIV, TB, malaria, death and childbirth, and so on. What we now are demonstrating in countries, whether it's higher income countries like the US and countries in parts of Europe, or even low middle income countries like Thailand, or some of the countries you named in Latin America where it's been incredible progress, that they are getting the percentage of deaths that occur before age 50 down to 10% or less. That we can at this point make it so less than 10% of deaths need to occur before you're existing.

And that's an extraordinary accomplishment. We have had the goal that death in children should be rare, and we're making that the reality around the world. But now essentially death before middle age, we can make that uncommon. I'm excited to be joined by Peter Singer, who was born in Australia, educated at the University of Melbourne and the University of Oxford, and became a professor of bioethics at Princeton University Center for Human Values. His work specializes in practical ethics, and he is known for his work on animals and

on global poverty He's the author of numerous books including animal liberation Practical ethics and the life you can save his most recent book is consider the turkey About how many animals cows lambs pigs, and fish are produced for food each year. We're talking about an estimated 200 billion animals raised for food each year. Animal raising industry clearly contributes to climate change. It's greater than the emissions of all the cars that are being driven around the world. It's very substantial.

What you describe as how these animals live is horrifying. What do you see as the main ethical problem with eating animals? Animals are sentient beings that they have interests in living a decent life, not suffering pain. And we violate their interests all the time. Chickens and pigs and dairy cows and laying hens, and maybe to a somewhat lesser extent the beef cows, their lives are really bad. We are inflicting suffering on them.

I'm excited to be with Wendy Sherman. She's an American diplomat who served as the United States Deputy Secretary of State from 2021 to 2023. How do you see this increase in cooperation and alliance among China, Russia, Iran, and North Korea? Well, I think we all have to be careful about not overselling this. Some people call it the axis of chaos. Some people call it an alliance of adversaries. I'm not sure how deep it really goes, how intertwined it is. China probably is pretty irritated with North Korea's relationship with Russia and may create

a place for disruption of that relationship and perhaps a way for the United States to talk with China about deterring North Korea from taking adverse actions. So this is a little bit more complicated. Each of these countries has its own interests. Where those interests align, they will undoubtedly already are working together, but their interests don't always align. And so we have to be careful about over expecting that all four of these countries will work

in harmony with each other. So we need to take it case by case, understand each instance, look for where these countries have powerful stakes in other parts of the world and make sure that we're doing really tough analysis before we come to too many conclusions. I'm excited to be with Fareed Zakaria. Fareed is the host of Fareed Zakaria, GPS on CNN, a columnist for the Washington Post, and a bestselling author. How do you see the Democratic and Republican parties in the U.S.? Are they weakened shells?

Fundamentally, we have done something very strange to our political parties. We took away their primary function. The primary function of every political party is to choose a candidate. The primary system means that the 10% that is most extreme, most engaged in each party chooses the candidate. That, by the way, is a unique system. No other advanced democracy in the world does it this way. And every other democracy, the party, through some internal means, chooses the candidate and then presents it to you for the election. And what does that mean? That means that the party elders, party officials, senior party members lose power and party activists, extremists, the people on Twitter, the people who go to primaries, they gain

power. The people I mentioned, the party elders tend to be mainstream. They're politicians. They've been elected by broad constituencies. They represent in a sense, the center of the political spectrum. The people who vote in primaries tend to represent the extreme. So it's been a very bad trade that we've made. And it means that the party is really now a shell, as you say, within which political

entrepreneurs act. And if you can raise the money and you can gain attention, you become important. I'm excited to be with Marshall Goldsmith. He's an executive coach and founder of the 100 Coaches, as well as a New York Times bestselling author. I was fascinated by your insight that the higher you go, the more likely your mistakes are to be behavioral. Can you talk about that? Yes, because what happens is when you're a young engineer, young finance person, you do really need to be technically competent. That's what you get paid for. But every time you get promoted, that technical competence

becomes less and less important. You can't rely on technical expertise. More and more, you have to be a leader. You have to focus on behavior. You have to focus on people. It's not about you being the expert. It's about them being the expert. It's not about you being the winner. It's about them being the winner. This is a very difficult transition to make. It's hard to make that transition between I'm smart, I'm wonderful, I'm special. And you're smart, you're wonderful, I'm special. And you're smart, you're wonderful, you're special. It's so interesting to me that when we think about very successful people, we rarely associate their success with technical skills or brain power.

I love your example of who people would rather have as a chief financial officer. The moderately good accountant who is great with people outside the firm and skilled at managing very smart people or the brilliant accountant who's inept with outsiders and alienates all these smart people under him. Excellent example. The brilliant accountant is not a bad person. They should just be an accountant. Yes. As long as they're an accountant, they're great. But they shouldn't be in a leadership role. That's not what they're early talent, they're great. But they shouldn't be in a leadership role.

That's not what they're getting paid for. I hope you've enjoyed these highlights. If you'd like to listen to any of the full episodes, historian Neil Ferguson is episode 199, Melody Hobson is episode 184, former New York Times executive editor, Jill Abramson is episode 206, Norway's Ina Eriksson-Sarajda is episode 213, former Supreme Court Justice Stephen Breyer is episode 220, extraordinary food expert, Barb Stuckey is episode 183. Former Google CEO, Eric Schmidt is episode 225. Negotiation expert, William Urie is episode 193.

Global health surgeon, Dr. Atul Gawande is episode 182. Bioethicist Peter Singer is episode 224. Former Deputy Secretary of State Wendy Sherman is episode 227. Journalist Fareed Zakaria is episode 209 and executive coach Marshall Goldsmith is episode 221. If you're enjoying the podcast and I really hope you are, please review us on Apple podcasts or Spotify or wherever you get your podcasts. It really helps get the word out. If you're interested, you can also sign up for the Three Takeaways newsletter at threetakeaways.com where you can also listen to previous episodes.

You can also follow us on LinkedIn, X, Instagram, and Facebook. I'm Lynn Toman, and this is Three Takeaways. Thanks for listening.