3 Takeaways™

What if joy isn’t a reward for when life goes well, but the thing that helps us survive when it doesn’t?
Psychologist and Stanford lecturer Kelly McGonigal reveals that joy is not the same as happiness, and that many of us quietly push it away without realizing it.
In this episode, you’ll learn:
Why happiness needs everything to be good, while joy needs just one thing
Why so many of us protect ourselves from joy, and why anxiety can feel safer
How power and success can make connection, and joy, harder to reach
Why people in war zones, hospitals and hospice understand joy best
How to follow the news without being consumed by outrage and fear
The simple practice of “meeting joy with joy”
Joy is not something you wait for.
It is something you can create for yourself and for others.
Kelly McGonigal is the author of Joy Is a Risk Worth Taking.

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.