The Beleaguered Club of Eternal Optimists

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Bill Burke: I had Charles Kenny on, British guy and a think tech, brilliant guy. I was talking to him about young people losing faiths, being cynical. And he said, It really frustrates me because this will be the greatest generation in the history of the world. It’s the largest in number. They’re going to have the longest lifespans. They’re the most technologically savvy. They’re the most socially accepting.

And he’s like, Our job is to keep them motivated and optimistic.

Zachary Karabell: What could go right? I’m Zachary Karabell, the founder of The Progress Network, joined by my cohost, Emma Varvaloucas, the executive director of The Progress Network.

And What Could Go Right is our weekly podcast where we look at, yes, what could go right in a world where so many people are looking at what could go wrong. Usually we look at a whole variety of issues, from science to technology to politics to culture. And today we’re going to do something, I suppose, a little more self serving and a little bit different, which is to speak with someone who is doing something very similar to what we’re doing.

You know, my hope when we created The Progress Network almost four years ago was that it would be part of a group of voices and a group of movements and a group of people that would coalesce into something more potent than any one of its individual parts, that the collective would be more powerful than the individual.

And that it would create some sort of network, hence The Progress Network. That has proven, I think, elusive. The aspect of The Progress Network, we are a megaphone where we help amplify stories of others that we find throughout the world. That part has proven, I think, extremely successful between the podcast, the newsletter, and the various social media channels we’re on.

Creating a network of individuals and groups whereby the collective is greater than the sum of its parts has been more challenging. That being said, there are a number of organizations over the past years that have been aligned with what we’re doing, trying to draw people’s attention to what’s going on in the world that is more constructive and trying to make sure that the world that we are building is more constructive.

And there are several dozen organizations that we know of, I’m sure there are several dozen that we do not, that are both like minded and doing similar things. And I think that is both wonderful and imperative and would like to see more and more, rather than less and less and less. So in that note, we’re going to speak to someone today who has, more recently, created something that we find akin and that we want to support and that we are trying to do ourselves.

So Emma, who are we going to talk to today?

Emma Varvaloucas: Yeah, today we’re going to talk to Bill Burke. He founded the Optimism Institute in 2022. They have a newsletter you can sign up for and he also hosts the Blue Sky podcast there. Before he became the King of Optimists, just joking, there’s been no coronation ceremony and there might be a fight for that title, but he’s definitely among the contenders, he was CEO of the Weather Channel Companies and for that he was also at Time Warner and Turner Broadcasting System. So he’s coming to us with lots of experience as a business leader and also, as I said, the new maybe King of Optimism. So let’s talk to Bill.

Zachary Karabell: Let’s.

Bill Burke, it is a pleasure to speak with you, particularly given that this is one of those synchronicity conversations, serendipitous synchronicity, of like minded individuals and like minded organizations. And while I am usually a, I hope, legit critic of preaching to the choir, sometimes the choir is so thin and so selective that it’s occasionally nice to preach to it. And I think in the case of groups and individuals who are focused on and dedicated to shining a light on what’s going well in the world, is not a, you know, unbelievably selective club, but it’s, it’s hardly like there’s a waiting list. So.

Bill Burke: Exactly.

Zachary Karabell: Why don’t you tell us a little why you started the Optimism Institute when you started it, what you hoped to achieve, what you think you’ve achieved, what you hope to still achieve, and what you believe you have yet to achieve and have not been able to.

Bill Burke: I might hit about 30 percent of that question with my answer, but I’ll give it my best shot. So the idea came, I was fortunate enough, my wife and I, in 2022, we participated in what’s called the Advanced Leadership Initiative, ALI, at Harvard University. And it’s this incredible opportunity where 45 fellows come together, actually from all over the world.

We had a woman who’d been vice president of Panama and a woman who was in the government in Bulgaria and Gus Johnson, the Fox Sports announcer, and just this crazy mashup of people looking at what they wanted to do with the next phase of their career with an emphasis on social impact ventures.

And so you have a curriculum where you study together. You can audit classes all over Harvard, undergrad, law school, business school. So we have people working on the issues you’d expect, like climate change and homelessness and inequality, polarization. I, about halfway through, got this notion that we face a pretty serious issue with pessimism, cynicism. I have two kids, they’re 28 and 30. They have a lot of friends who, because of eco anxiety, have decided not to have children because the world’s going to end in 30 years. And yeah, there’s no problem with not having children. That’s a very valid choice. But when it’s because you’re positive the world’s going to end in 30 years, I think we have an issue.

So I latched onto this notion. I’ve always liked storytelling. I’ve written a book. I produced a documentary film. And as you all know, podcasts are very accessible. It’s a thing that we all can do. And so I got in my head, I was going to start it in March of 2023, only to find that March is National Optimism Month. Who knew?

So I started in March of 23. I just put out my 70th something episode and my hope would be to start telling stories. What I try to do is feature people working on the very things that make us pessimistic. So I have people on about climate change, homelessness, polarization, but there are people who approach it with a sense of hope and optimism and a solutions orientation.

It’s been incredible for me. I’m a better person to be around. I get more optimistic by the day. And, and it’s not to say that there aren’t things that concern me. It’s not to say that everything’s always coming up roses, but there are better stories out there that need to be told, and the more we listen to them, I think the better off we’re all going to be.

So, so far so good. And I’ve enjoyed following your work there. Like you said, it’s not a huge chorus, but I feel like it’s growing. I feel like there’s some momentum and I’m just happy to be part of the movement.

Emma Varvaloucas: Yeah, I mean, this is something that Zachary and I have definitely commented on. The feelings of anxiety about any particular issue seem so much more extreme when you’re not actually having your hands, you know, deep into the issue.

I’m sure you have many wonderful examples of people coming to very intractable issues with a lot of hope and optimism. I’m kind of like, normally with our guests, we like steer them in a bit of a constructive direction. And I think because we are running the risk of being a holiday chorus, I’m like, I kind of want to push you in the other direction.

Bill Burke: Go, go. Yeah.

Emma Varvaloucas: You know, I’m curious if you’ve had people on your podcast that were like, okay, I started this work and I just don’t see this going anywhere. And, you know, I just don’t think this is working out. Or is, you know, everyone you’re speaking to, like, once you’re actually trying to make a difference they actually see the differences being made?

Bill Burke: Yeah, that’s a great question. I’d say, you know, probably by selection, there aren’t many people who have, you know, given up or not seeing progress. However, I just thought of someone who popped in my head because I watched him give a talk yesterday, a gentleman named Kevin Adler, who has spent the bulk of his career working on the homelessness challenge.

And he’s written a terrific book called When We Walk By, the idea being that so many of us just don’t even make eye contact. We don’t try to, the social disconnection is what he says is one of the most significant issues that cause and contribute to homelessness.

He’s frustrated because this has been a very intractable problem. The campaigns are not focused on it. So he’s very frustrated, but he’s got a solution he thinks will work. And he started something called Miracle Messages. And what he does is he actually gets down at ground level with homeless people, tells their story on video and reconnects them with family that they’ve been disconnected with from church communities, synagogue communities, that sort of thing.

His success rate is through the roof in terms of getting people off the streets once they can make this connection. So, he’s frustrated because it hasn’t scaled the way he’d like, but he’s selling a lot of books and he’s giving a lot of talks. I saw him give a fantastic one yesterday. So that’s someone, and again, I think, I think a true optimist is realistic too, and you’re a pragmatist and you know that things aren’t going to be fixed overnight, but he’s the guy who’s committed to this cause.

And if you listen to him speak for a half hour, you would come away feeling much better about the possibility. So that’s the first example that comes to my mind.

Zachary Karabell: So when you talk to your grown progeny now in light of the past year and a half, has there been any traction in, hey, wait a minute, you know, there’s another way to look at these things or, or is this just one of these back and forth family debates where, you know, you say boo and they say boo?

Bill Burke: There’s certainly some debate. I will say though, I think there’s been some traction, which leads me to one of the things I really believe and one of the reasons I’m doing this work is I love history. I’m history buff. I was a history major. I’ve forgotten most of what I learned in college, but I, I fear that we have trouble putting today’s challenges in historical context.

So for example, and you’ve heard this many times, this country has never been more divided than we are today. Really? You know, the Civil War comes to mind, I’m reading Doris Kearns Goodwin’s latest book, and we’re talking about the summer of 1968. If we think that the protests on college campuses today are, are concerning or, or extreme, you know, I would challenge people to think back in our lifetime, at least my lifetime, to a summer like 1968.

I think that’s been helpful for my kids when the latest conflicts in the Middle East started, it’s very obviously a huge concern and it’s a scary situation. But when you’ve lived through others in the past and you realize this is not something new under the sun, I think that helps our kids put things in perspective.

So that’s part of it. I had Kevin Kelly on the show and he has a line that I use every chance I get, which is, if you only read the news, you’ll think things have never been worse. But if you read history, you’ll realize things have never been better. And so I, I.

Zachary Karabell: It’s a good line.

Bill Burke: It’s one of my favorites and I’m wearing it out, but it’s something that I think has helped my kids cause I always refer back to history when it, when it makes sense. And it really does help put things into context.

Zachary Karabell: My corollary to that line has been to say that never before have more human beings had more caloric affluence, physical security, legal rights, longevity, and better health, and never have more people been more pissed off.

And, you know, it’s, it’s one of the weird dichotomies or ironies. I don’t know. Maybe it’s not ironic, but it, it is certainly a phenomenon of our day. And I think part of it, you know, I’ve tried to figure this out, Emma’s tried to figure this out. I don’t think we have a good answer to it, is that none of us live in history.

So while it is absolutely true to point this out to people, and I, I continually write this way. I mean, I did a piece in the summer of 2020 when, of course, this was like the, both the heart of COVID and the depths of the George Floyd protests. And at that particular time, the comparisons with the summer of 68 were particularly high on people’s minds.

And I was trying to say, look, even as bad as that period of time was in 2020, it still, in my view, wasn’t nearly as chaotic and divisive as the summer of 68. I do respect the degree that that it requires effort to live historically. It’s not intuitive. It’s not natural. I mean, maybe it is in certain traditional cultures where they’re constantly invoking the ancestors in the past.

And there’s a greater degree of nurtured connection to the past, but we don’t, we’re not like that. And I grapple, and I wonder whether you’re finding this at all as you, as you do the hey, wait a minute, right? Like, hey, wait a minute, look at the past, that, that it is often not as effective as you think it would be because it forces people into a zone that they’re just, you know, we haven’t culturally made ourselves in, which is to think of ourselves in a continuum rather than ever present present.

Bill Burke: Yeah, I think that puts it well. Not everyone enjoys history the way I do, reads it, reflects on it. And also, you know, these are challenging times. There are tough things going on. I interviewed Adam Mastroianni, who’s a brilliant guy who writes on the subject of sort of mental games that we play with ourselves.

And he says, you know, people say these are unprecedented times. And he said, guess what? Every human being has lived in unprecedented times. Every generation is experiencing things that are unprecedented by definition. And so, yeah, there’s things we’re going through that we’ve never gone through before, but there are definitely echoes and corollaries in history.

But yeah, it’s absolutely a challenge. And it’s also a challenge, I’m sure you face this when people say, Okay, fine. That was 1968. But this is a real problem. Like, yeah, it is. But let’s, let’s start with some context. Let’s take a deep breath.

I was honored to give a high school graduation speech two Junes ago. So the challenge was, you know, addressing a bunch of 18 year olds who just want to get to the party and, you And this old guy up there telling them about optimism. And one of the things I talked about, uh, I’ll date myself, but I graduated from high school in 1984. And so I, I, I did my research to make sure I had it right.

So first thing I said was that 1984 was not as bad as the hopelessly pessimistic George Orwell thought it would be, but also, you know, when we were sitting there graduating, we had apartheid, we had the Cold War we had the Soviet Union and the United States boycotting each other’s Olympics. We had, when it comes to the environment, we had acid rain and the ozone layer.

So I said to them, look, we’ve whiffed on climate change to a large degree, but everything I just listed was checked off in the years since I graduated. Oh, AIDS. AIDS was rampaging in 1984. I don’t even think we’d given it that name at that point.

And my point to them was, these didn’t just get fixed because we’re all optimists and just, you know, look to the skies and things got better. People researched, they marched, they voted. When I got to college, the protests were about divesting in South Africa. So that sort of historical context is helpful. I also told them, you know, on my dad’s side of the family, my grandfather left high school, left college and went to World War I, his son left high school and went to World War II, his brother, my dad left college and went to Korea.

Come to my generation, my brother missed the Vietnam draft by three years. And, you know, conscription is not something even on the minds of these people I give speeches to. So I, I wear it out, but I think it’s important to do it and remind people that just how well we have it on so many regards.

Emma Varvaloucas: My favorite historical example, and this gets brought up, is I was in The Hague a few months back and there was a statue commemorating Johan de Witt, who most people don’t know about.

Johan de Witt died because he was involved in the politics at the time over there in the Netherlands and he was carried off by an angry crowd and eaten alive.

Bill Burke: Oh dear.

Emma Varvaloucas: And I always think to myself, like, You know, there are a lot of messy political things happening these days, but like, that is not something that.

Bill Burke: Not on our radar. Yeah. No, it, the caning of Sumner is always my favorite example, you know, before the civil war and this guy gets bludgeoned in the House of Representatives.

Zachary Karabell: Brooks, Representative Brooks.

Bill Burke: Right. He, he was unscathed. It was just, you know, that guy deserved it.

Zachary Karabell: They were separated. That, that was the punishment.

Bill Burke: Exactly. Go to your corners. Exactly. No, it, yeah, there’s, there are so many historic, one of my favorites, it’s more on the healthcare side of things, which by the way, is another series of advancements that we just wildly take for granted in my view, when Calvin Coolidge is the sitting president of the United States and his son dies, I think it was 17, 18, from an infected blister playing tennis.

It was like five years before penicillin. People don’t die from infected blisters the way they did in, you know, a hundred years ago. It’s not that long ago. And I think we take these things for granted in our peril. And that’s, that’s one of the things I like to talk about.

Zachary Karabell: Part of it is, back to what I was saying earlier, there is a kind of, it’s not just that people don’t live in history. It’s that we have liminal responses to fear and, and anger and hot emotions. We have liminal responses to cool ones as well. And in our chemistry, to put it bluntly, there is very little biochemical difference between the surge of hormones, fear, adrenaline, about someone trying to deal in Gaza with Israeli bombs or in the Syrian civil war, or Israelis trying to deal with Hezbollah missiles, and a, like, socialite in Beverly Hills breaking their nail before a big event.

Bill Burke: Okay.

Zachary Karabell: The anxiety and fear hormones that rush through the body are remarkably similar. And people have actually done this work, right? And so we laugh at that, right? Because it is an absurdity to make those things in any stretch equivalent. And yet our brains and our bodies. can equivalize them. I don’t even know if equivalize is a word, but I’m going to use it because it’s my podcast.

So I think that’s something we have to respect. Respect meaning we have to recognize. We certainly don’t have to respect it like, oh yeah, I totally get that breaking your nail before the red carpet is like in the seventh circle of hell. No, it’s not. But it can feel that way. And I think we just, you know, whatever, whatever it means to deal with that reality, like, I am constantly trying to respect the degree that, that those kind of emotions, irrational, can be powerful and then they can be collective, like they can feed on each other collectively.

Bill Burke: You mentioned Gaza and it made me think of, and you talked before about what a great time this is to be alive and how pissed off everybody is.

I like the, uh, I’ve, I’ve coined the Paradox of Modern Optimism, which I like cause it forms POMO. You could argue that there’s never been a better time to be alive than today, and yet there’s never been a harder time to be optimistic. And so how do you square that? And, and I think one of the things you, when you say Gaza, I think about footage, I think about social media feeds, I think about how directly we’re interacting with these things now because of the explosion of digital media. It makes a huge change.

When, when Vietnam was first put on Walter Cronkite, it changed people’s views of the war. And we’d never had that real time coverage of war ever. We had, we had newsreels that were doctored or, you know, softened or made more propagandized in, in World War II, but we never had anything like, like Vietnam. And now it is so in our face.

And I think we have to realize that that’s, that’s a significant issue. And we have to make smart choices about what we put in our feeds, what we consume on a daily basis. An example I like to use, I used to work at the Weather Channel and, uh, you know, it’s funny business because the worse the weather is, the better the ratings and you just have weird incentives to root for bad weather.

Hurricanes get the biggest ratings because there’s all this buildup. They get a name. It’s, you know, everyone knows somebody lives in Florida, that sort of thing. Tornadoes would come and go and you’d get footage of the damage unless some intrepid tornado chaser went and found them.

Now we all have cameras in our pockets. So what happens? We get images of funnel clouds all the time. Okay. You combine that with justifiable anxiety about climate change. And I guarantee you, I haven’t done this research. If you asked a hundred Americans, are there more tornadoes today than there were 20 years ago? 90 would say yes. Fact is there aren’t.

There are more videos of tornadoes, and climate change seems to maybe be moving where the tornadoes are happening, but there are not more tornadoes in the United States today than there were 20 years ago. Climate change will have impacts on other types of weather, but we think there are more because there’s video.

I’ve talked to people in law enforcement who say we’ve always had a problem, obviously, with police brutality. It feels worse today because we have video. And, but for the, the courageous woman who videotaped George Floyd with a camera in her pocket, we wouldn’t have, that case never would have seen the light of day.

So there are positives to it, like the George Floyd example, but I think it makes it harder for us to be optimistic because we’re just deluged with all this data, imagery, audio, video. It’s, it’s a hard thing for our brains to handle.

Emma Varvaloucas: Also to that point around police brutality, I mean, a lot of these things, and again, we’ve talked about this on the podcast, like, we were not collecting data on that in the 60s. There’s no way that it was better in the 60s or previous to that.

Bill, I also wanted to ask you about climate change and climate anxiety because we have brought it up a few times in the conversation, but we haven’t talked directly toward it. How do you talk about that with your kids and to other people because it is something per the conversation up until now that does not have great historical precedent.

People do tend to bring up, you know, the ozone layer or, you know, you mentioned acid rain, but climate change is different in that it’s like so embedded in how we produce energy as a world, right? And as you say, there are a lot of people that are very convinced that the world is going to end in however many decades from now.

So how do you personally approach that conversation?

Bill Burke: First thing I think is to make sure we separate weather and climate, basic thing. But one of the things that concerns me is you step outside on a usually warm day and instead of enjoying it, it’s like, well, climate change. And it, yeah, there’s a very loose potential link in that, but it’s not that direct.

These things are small percentage, small degree changes over a long period of time. That’s one. Another is that I think it’s important in anything like that we’re talking about is to take some action. So that can be the smaller things in your own life. But more increasingly, I think people are figuring out, yeah, it’s great to recycle, it’s great to use fewer plastics, but there’s a handful of large entities and countries that need to get their act together for this to really change.

And so being active about it, voting according to it, signing petitions, do it, my son is starting a sustainable fashion company, God willing, you know, if that works, and, and I’ve learned a ton from him. By the way, let’s listen to young people too, I’ve learned a ton from him about the clothing industry and what a disaster it is in terms of In terms of carbon emission and waste and selfishness, frankly. So, you know, you got to play a role.

And the other thing, Kevin Kelly turned me on to this and I, I interviewed just recently Jamie Metzl, who’s written a book called Superconvergence that you all be interested in if you’re not familiar with it. He said it in a way that was a little aggressive, but he said, you know, in the old days, we’d be grateful for climate change.

And I thought, but what he meant was yesterday’s technologies caused today’s problems, right? So the industrial revolution did remarkable things, pulled people out of poverty, grew economies, and guess what? An after effect was, was climate change. Now we need to come up with today’s technologies to fix yesterday’s solutions, and that’s just how history rolls. So let’s, let’s really try to lean in and figure this out and not just put up our arms and say, oh, we’re doomed, you know, and let’s keep driving the SUV and into the abyss.

So it’s not, it’s not a perfect answer to your question. This is a very concerning issue. But if you sit around and fret about it, my, my belief is that optimists make things happen, that Kevin Kelly, back to him, says the future will be decided by optimists. I interviewed Bert Jacobs from Life is Good. He said, I challenge people to bring to me the list of history’s great pessimists. Like they don’t exist. And when you get to the point. of extreme pessimism and cynicism, you don’t take action.

Why would you? It’s a lost cause. So the key is for us to never lose hope and in a cause and take action, get involved.

Zachary Karabell: Yeah, we’ve talked about this a lot, the kind of the enervating nature of pessimism, the societal death spiral that that can create. And it’s interesting, I spent a lot of years at times being a Wall Street commentator and also being involved in managing money.

And, you know, there’s a constant, particularly on financial news and financial media, attempt to create the kind of dichotomy between bulls and bears, right? This ancient, ancient story on, in financial markets. What’s really interesting about financial markets, when you step out of this debate that’s amplified by media, because that’s the only drama there is, right? Prices go up, prices go down. Are there bulls? Are there bears? Are we bearish? Are we bullish? Is that, for the most part, anyone who invests anything in markets is bullish because nobody puts a dollar in any financial instrument with a desire or expectation for that to be worth less tomorrow than it is today.

And that’s inherently an act of optimism. It is the belief that the system will generate enough long term growth or change that you’ll have more money tomorrow than you do today. Otherwise, you should keep it in a mattress. So what’s bizarre about the debates is inherently everybody’s an optimist, whether they articulate them being so. I mean, there may be a very few people who in financial land are, in fact. short everything, although even then the money’s got to come from somewhere.

And I want to talk to you a little bit, you know, so you were a CEO. I like the fact that CEOs of operating companies tend to be much more humble than CEOs of financial or hedge funds, because you said you worked with the Weather Channel. You didn’t say, I ran the Weather Channel.

Bill Burke: The Weather Channel worked for me, Zach. Let’s put it that way. Just kidding.

Zachary Karabell: I was the Weather Channel, channel, channel, channel.

Bill Burke: I was weather’s most powerful mortal. Go ahead. Sorry.

Zachary Karabell: And CEOs tend to be optimistic, right? Because you don’t, you don’t tend to lead an organization if you think it’s going to fail.

I mean, occasionally somebody comes in at the very end and tries to save it or salvage it, but for the most part, right? You’re running it because you think you can make it better. You’re not running it because you know that you’re going to make it worse. So there’s a temperament there, right? And you, you probably had that temperament anyway.

Bill Burke: I did. Yeah. So it’s, I, another phrase I’ve, I’ve sort of coined is that not, not every optimist is an entrepreneur, but every entrepreneur has to be an optimist by definition. And I think the same with business leaders.

And when you’re a leader of an organization, it takes on different views, right? You have to be realistic. You have to paint an inspiring, but realistic picture. And there’s an added pressure, I think, or it’s very important to convey a sense of hope and optimism. One of my favorite people to read about in that context is, is Eisenhower, you know, before D Day. And he’s looking these young men in the face, knowing that, you know, best case, a huge number of them aren’t going to make it.

But if he’s there biting his nails and nervous and scared, you know, it’s, you have to convey, you have to come to work, and when you’re at the top of an organization, you’re under a microscope. People are watching what you do. They’re noticing how often your door is closed or open. It’s a very important thing to put on and to live by an optimistic countenance.

I, it’s funny people ask if I was always of this mindset and I, so I, I thought back and I remember being sort of a brooding teenager like everybody else, and had some tough things happen when I was younger. But then literally, this was about a year ago, my sister was cleaning out my mom’s basement. We’re moving her to assisted living and she found my high school yearbook. I’d never had a copy of my senior yearbook.

So she hands it to me. Of course, I go to the back and there’s the votes for most likely to this most. They had class optimists and it was me and Maura Quinlan. Maura, if you’re out there, I have no recollection of this. It was 40 years ago and I’m standing there with my thumbs up. I’m like, who even votes for class optimist? And I was it.

So I guess I have been tagged with this for a while, but I, yeah, I think it’s very important to be a leader. As someone said to me too, no one, no one follows a leader says, Come follow me. I’m going to take you someplace worse. It’s just not, it doesn’t work.

And I, and I would extend that beyond business. If you, if you look at any great social movement, you know, think about apartheid ending without Mandela. Thinking about, think about civil rights without. MLK, think about anything important that’s happened in history. There are optimistic leaders central to that effort, in my view.

Emma Varvaloucas: Yeah, for me, this brings up a point about the intersection of let’s say optimism and privilege. This is a pushback that I hear a lot, which is, sure, it’s easy to be optimistic if you’ve had a really successful career and you know, you’re relatively affluent and you have a nice life. And of course we never really know, you know, what’s going on in someone’s interior life.

But that aside from the outside, if somebody’s saying like, be optimistic, be positive, whatever, you know, that can come across as very toxic to people when they feel that doesn’t ring true in their day to day. So yeah, thoughts on that. I mean, how do you handle that critique?

Bill Burke: I’m really glad you brought that up because I exemplify privilege.

I was born on third base. That is something I’m very conscious of and, and try to attempt, you know, when people say, you know, I’m living in New York, how do you like New York? I was like, well, I live in New York in a really comfortable way. I’m very fortunate to be able to do that. So I’m not going to label New York as this great place to live because I happen to be in a, in a setting that, that works for us.

So I think that’s really important. And that’s one of the things I try to do on the podcast is have people who have come from more challenging backgrounds, faced adversity in ways that I never, I just edited one with a guy named Lee Ellis, who was a five and a half year POW in Vietnam in the Hanoi Hilton with John McCain, still alive and amazing guy. And that puts things in perspective when you talk to somebody like that.

You have to be careful, I think, when you’re dealing with individuals going through really tough stuff. You know, you can’t just say, oh, buck up, be optimistic, everything’s going to be all right. There’s a chance it’s not going to be all right.

You, so I think it’s, It’s not, it’s not totally different from weather and climate. You know, there’s sort of individual instances that are worth being pessimistic and sad and frankly hopeless about in some cases when you’ve, when you’ve been told you’ve got a week to live. That’s a terribly hopeless place to be.

I try to broaden it more to, you know, the, the general trend of history and the general trend of society and, and be very sensitive about people going through really tough stuff. I don’t expect someone on their deathbed to listen to my podcast and jump out and feel better about things. I have to be realistic about that.

And I, I have privilege coming out my ears. So I’m, I’m very conscious of that as I do this work.

Zachary Karabell: You know, there is also a temperament aspect of it. I’m kind of a messy mix of some intersection of privilege and poverty. I mean, I grew up with a single mother who didn’t go to college in a one bedroom apartment on an Upper West Side in Manhattan that was not the Upper West Side of Manhattan today, meaning it was demographically completely different, much more working class, much less affluent, and, but I also was, you know, went to one of the best private schools in the city.

And my dad went from being an actor or stage manager to being a corporate lawyer. And while I didn’t, you know, benefit from that because they were separated, I did in my education. So I had like this melange and yet there’s just a temperament aspect of how one views the world that I think we have to respect.

You know, there’s, we all know people who are more likely to be attentive to things that are going wrong. Sometimes that serves them quite well. I mean, we, we all need to have a spidey sense for danger and problems and risks in our own lives and in the society around us. And you certainly don’t want to be so starry eyed about everything is great that you you’re looking at the clouds and you fall into the manhole.

Right? That’s the classic. You’re not attentive enough. So it’s not an either or in that respect. And probably society is better off from some mix of people who have different temperaments. You know, it’s I always used to think when I was, you know, my, my liability when I was primarily an investor for a period of time was I was much more likely to be swayed by the great story of the dynamic company that was going to change the world and buy into the bullshit if it was, or buy into the dream if it was, and much less able to be as critical as one probably should be.

And so it’s good to surround yourself with people who are much more Eeyore like. You know, if you’re going to be Tigger like, there should be an Eeyore. When you were leading companies, did you solicit negative views because you knew that you yourself be less inclined to, you know, go there?

Bill Burke: Absolutely. And I got better at that as my career went along, when I hit bumps in the road in a business to think, okay, what, because I would tend to say, okay, what’s, what’s the best thing that could happen if we did this strategy, how, you know, but then let’s, let’s look at the worst.

And I, I was lucky enough to, my first sort of real job out of business school was at Turner Broadcasting. And I got to know Ted Turner, wound up ghostwriting his autobiography. So I really got to study him too, after working with him, and there’s a story that’s, I’ve had other people say it’s true.

When he got the idea to start CNN, it was absolutely insane. He had no news division. They had this goofy thing at WTBS where this guy would put a bag over his head and read the news every night because the FCC said they had to have a news show. And if 24 hour news made sense, ABC, NBC, or CBS could do it in their sleep and this guy in Atlanta couldn’t do it.

So they wouldn’t launch a channel, wouldn’t launch, wouldn’t launch, Ted said, screw it, I’m doing it. And when it was time to pull the trigger, he asked about 5 or 10 executives that by the end of today, come to me with 5 reasons why we shouldn’t launch CNN. And their, their challenge was keeping it to 5, right?

And they, they delivered them to Ted and he’s like, okay, I’ve read all your reasons. We’re still doing it. And he was really good about that, about looking at what’s the worst case. He’s the ultimate optimistic entrepreneur in my view, but also he lost a lot. He learned from loss.

You know, he owned the Braves back when they were losing a hundred games a year. And he’d say, we’re not losing. We’re just learning how to win. And so my favorite, just a quick story. There’s a guy named Rankin Smith. He used to own the Atlanta Falcons back then. They weren’t very good either. And they didn’t like each other. Ted’s team, the Braves lost 102 games one year or something.

And Rankin Smith calls and Ted picks up the phone. He said, Ted, Southern guy, I just got to know, what’s it feel like to lose a hundred games a year? And Ted said, well, the way I look at it is we won 60, and that’s more than you’ve won in 10 years with the Falcons, and he hung up.

So I think it’s important to balance and, and no one’s going to take a leader seriously. If, you know, if I had a startup and I said in 10 years, we’re going to be worth more than Nvidia, I mean, no one’s going to follow somebody who says that. You’ve got to be realistic. You got to look around the corners for the, for the potholes. That’s a really long answer to a simple question, but I think it is important to balance.

One more thing too, I just want to say about privilege. I think it’s really important too. I said I was born on third base. I know a lot of others who were in that situation and they were left in scoring position, to extend the baseball analogy. There are people who were born with advantages who also tried to do their best to do good things with those.

And I think just as we shouldn’t put down people in poverty or on the streets, I think we should be careful when, when people had these advantages to not lump them in a big basket of, you know, lazy, rich, privileged people. I think that’s important. There are baskets to, there are baskets to be had with people who have abused their privilege or wasted it or.

But I just think that’s important. I think we tend to categorize people so readily in this country in so many different ways, and it’s not always healthy.

Emma Varvaloucas: I think maybe though sometimes it’s a skepticism whether those kinds of people like really understand what other people are dealing with. You know, to go back to the conversation about privilege that it’s like. You can get really divorced from, you know, and I’ve had this just from, let’s say my first job in New York, I was making $30, 000 a year, right?

Which in New York is, ha ha.

Bill Burke: Doesn’t get you far.

Emma Varvaloucas: Right? 15 years later, it’s not the same situation, especially because I’ve moved to a city which must, with a much lower cost of living. But you do tend to forget like what that was like, you know, back in the day when you had to choose between the ramen tonight or like going out on Saturday and other people are in much more, you know, in extreme situations of that. So.

Bill Burke: I will never be able to relate to people and the types of poverty that I see between my office and my apartment. And I think we all have to be really careful about that and acknowledge that. And I try to do that.

Emma Varvaloucas: There’s another favorite. I don’t know about pushback. It’s like a favorite reputation that optimistic people have.

I feel like optimism gets like a decent rap in the business world. There’s a case to be made for it. I feel like optimism, as we’ve been talking about in your personal relationships, is kind of a given, meaning that like no one wants to hang out with the Eeyore. Like the Eeyore might be useful in a business context sometimes, but no one wants to like be married to them, you know, like that is just not fun.

But when it comes to like, okay, let’s have like serious analysis about the world or let’s talk about complex issues, like all of a sudden, being an optimist is almost the equivalent of being dumb or naive or, you know, Pollyanna ish. Why do you think that is? I mean, what, what, what gets us there in particular when it comes to optimism around these kind of more complex, worldly issues?

Bill Burke: A lot of it, I think, is in the delivery. If, again, if you’re just, oh, it’s going to get better. Oh, this too shall pass. Well, it won’t, it shall not pass unless we do something about it for the most part, or this has passed before. Again, back to the historical analogies that we can make on, on so many of the challenges we have today.

So I think that’s, that’s a lot of it. I think it’s, it’s in the presentation more than in the mindset, if that makes sense. I think that, again, and nothing gets fixed without that. You don’t have some optimism in you. Whatever problem you are talking about right now is not going to get fixed unless you’re solutions oriented, progress oriented person, nothing’s going to change.

And so I think a lot of it’s in the delivery and, but you’re right. I mean, if, if when you lead with optimism, This guy named David Von Drell wrote a beautiful piece in the Washington Post a few years ago. And he said something about, we’re often seen as, he’s an optimist and we’re seen as naive, foolish, you must not read the news or you’d be depressed like me.

So I think it’s, it’s a challenge, but it’s one worth taking on. And again, a lot of it’s in the delivery and the messaging.

Zachary Karabell: So I want to pivot for a moment to the weather, given you were at the helm of the Weather Channel.

Bill Burke: Yes.

Zachary Karabell: I think at a time when it saw a lot of cultural growth, you know, it was, we kind of went from the weather as being the last two or three minutes of a local newscast to this sort of national news phenomenon where you had celebrity people showing up in storms, bracing themselves against the winds.

But it also came, and you alluded to this before, with a certain amount of weather apocalyptism and hysteria, right? So, you know, and the problem with the Weather Channel and the weather as news is it followed the same problematic dynamics of the rest of the news, which is, oh my God, we’re going to die. You know, the weather is coming. Category 1, 2, 3, 4 graphs.

And look, we’re recording this on the heels of Hurricane Helene, which was one of the most destructive storms the United States has seen, uh, maybe ever, but certainly in recent memory. So, in no way am I trying to say that the weather isn’t and cannot be apocalyptic, it absolutely can be.

But there’s a bit of a Chicken Little phenomenon in that it’s, it’s hard to know given that, you know, once you’ve, once you’ve reached a certain pitch of, Oh my God, the weather is coming. At some point you tune out because occasionally it’s, it’s Hurricane Helene, but often it’s a bust, right? So what did you do about that?

And obviously you had to follow some of the commercial dynamics, which is you notice that every time. You ratcheted up the headlines or you made a more extreme statement about some system that was forming, more people tuned in. And if you were a little more opaque or subtle about it, people didn’t. So, like, how did you balance the need to be, I don’t know, honest about probabilities?

This was a huge thing with Trump, where he changed the pathway to the Hurricane, too.

Bill Burke: Oh, that was a classic. The sharpie, the sharpie extending the cone into an area that he cared more about. Yes, that was a classic.

I, I think I was lucky. I mean, first, I was there just as people like CNN were realizing, hey, we’re missing the boat on this weather stuff. We should send somebody out in the slicker to do the same thing. So it was a little bit less, I’d say directly competitive.

The big, one of the biggest things for us, any survey you did on news and call Weather Channel a news outlet, we’re given news and information, we were by far the most trusted source by far.

Now, part of that was because Fox and MSNBC were coming on. And so if you were conservative, you might trust Fox. And if you were less, you’re more liberal, you might trust CNN. So some of it was that political polarization, but trust was our currency. And so if we got too hypey, we were the ones people would turn to, okay, they’re going to tell me what’s going to happen.

I think it’s gotten a little bit less that way since I left, not because I left, but again, because of the competition. But that was really key. Interestingly, while I was there, we had, you know, a hurricane expert and a tornado expert. We made the decision to hire a climate expert, and we hired a woman named Heidi Cullen.

And she wound up being, all of a sudden, once we started reporting on climate, and again, this is about 20 years ago, climate was a lot more political then and people were still in denial, way more people were in denial about climate then, than they are today. Once we started reporting on climate, our trust numbers went down, and they thought we were getting quote unquote political.

And she had a terrible time. After I left, she said at one point that any meteorologist who doesn’t believe in climate change should lose their license, their AMS license. And she caught hell, you know, so a lot of what we were doing was about trust. And I think that’s an important thing to remember because, again, if we, if we’re Chicken Little, people didn’t trust Chicken Little after a while.

Trust is a really valuable currency in life, in business. And so being too hyperbolic and you, we all on this call have to worry about it. If we just, again, are unrealistic about our views of the future, no one’s going to trust us. We have to be realistic. So that was probably the biggest thing at the Weather Channel.

Emma Varvaloucas: Yeah. I mean, that’s one of the issues that people are most, I don’t know about most cynical, but definitely cynical about these days that you can have a network reporting on scientifically backed research, a scientifically backed phenomenon, and people will view that as politics.

Bill Burke: Yeah. And who do you trust? Yeah. What is your trusted news source today? If you ask a hundred people, you’ll get a wide range of answers.

Emma Varvaloucas: Yeah, well not to end on on that negative note, I wanted to ask the reverse of the question I asked in the beginning, which is like an issue, you know, what, whether it be someone that came on your podcast or not, some issue that you were like really jazzed about, really feel like we’re on the cusp of solving it, dramatic progress forward, something that’s like the opposite of your Dark Night of the Soul.

Bill Burke: I’ll cheat and give you a sort of one and a half, one comment that like knocked me out of my chair. I had Charles Kenny on who’s a British guy and a think tech, brilliant guy. And he has a British accent. So he sounds even smarter. He’s a fantastic person. And I was, I was talking to him about what we addressed before about young people losing faiths, being cynical.

And he said, it really frustrates me. He said, because this will be the greatest generation in the history of the world. So I’m sitting there like, oh, come on, greatest generation. That’s World War II. And what he said was, It’s the largest in number. They’re going to have the longest lifespans. They’re the most technical, technologically savvy. They’re the most socially accepting.

He said, he said with the exception, I have some concerns about free speech, but you know, in terms of, you know, I tell this high school class, if you told me when in 1984 that same sex marriage would be the law of the land in the United States. I never would have believed you.

So that’s sort of, that gave me a lot of hope. And he’s like, our job is to keep them motivated and optimistic because we’re going to blow this opportunity for them to be the greatest generation. So that’s one. And then I mentioned this Jamie Metzl, he talking about the super convergences of AI, computing power, healthcare innovation, the next 15 years of healthcare innovation, I think are going to blow people away. We have no concept for the things we’re on the cusp of, in terms of targeted medicines, we’re already seeing it. Even in mental health, behavioral health, targeted depression, anxiety, medications.

We’re going to take cost out of the system because of it. It’s really inspiring and I think, again, we take these things for granted at our peril. He gave about three or four pages on the COVID vaccine and what a miracle it was that we produced a vaccine in the time that we did and it was as effective as it was.

But what do we remember about the vaccine? Fights, debates, mandates, and we never stop. We don’t know the Jonas Salk of the, there’s not a household name associated with this incredible development. And it’s just the tip of the iceberg. So at the end of that call, and I read his book, it’s like, we, we got to stay hopeful because there are amazing things at our doorstep.

Emma Varvaloucas: Although, you do wonder if 50 or 75 or 100 years from now, like, after the COVID vaccines are not a debate of the time, whether there are going to be household names and it is going to be like, well, that was great. You know, the way that we look at things now.

Bill Burke: That’s why I keep telling the story because I think it’s a shame that we don’t appreciate these things more and we’d feel better about our daily lives if we did.

Zachary Karabell: Absolutely. So I want to thank you for joining us today. There is no immediate risk of optimism breaking out in the popular culture, no matter what work we are currently doing. I think we are in for a period, particularly in the United States, of, you know, continual kind of roiling and chaos.

One thing, and I want to maybe leave you with this thought, but also leave us with this before Emma and I turn to our, our post hoc digest is, it is often true that the present is really messy and we of course don’t know where it’s going to go until we’re looking back at it as the past.

So if you lived through the summer of 68, you could be forgiven for wondering if everything was going to unravel because you didn’t know that it wasn’t. And if you’re living in our present, you don’t know that things aren’t going to get worse because we don’t know that things aren’t going to get worse.

I think our efforts are more in the direction and your efforts are more in the direction of the self fulfilling prophecy part of that equation, rather than some assertion that we have a better crystal ball than you do, or that we know better, because I certainly don’t think I do, and I’m sure Emma doesn’t, and it doesn’t sound like you do.

So it’s more of the, What do we do to make sure that that optimism is warranted rather than a conviction that it is? And I think that’s the kind of the important rub here is, it’s more of an effort to ensure a better future rather than a conviction that it will necessarily be so.

So I want to thank you for the work you’ve done. You clearly could have done a lot of other things given the career that you have had. So it’s clearly a passion project, a labor of love, you name it, but an important one. I think there is a, you know, a social import. And the more the merrier. You know, one thing I’ve, I’ve hoped for in doing this for the past four years is that it would engender more or that those of like minds would coalesce and create some sort of critical mass. That too is complicated in an atomized world.

So again, thank you for what you’re doing. Keep doing it. And everyone else, check out the Optimism Institute podcast.

Bill Burke: Blue Sky. Wherever you get your podcasts.

Zachary Karabell: Check out the Optimism Institute podcast, Blue Sky, after you’ve listened to What Could Go Right, of course.

Bill Burke: Exactly.

Zachary Karabell: Everything is zero sum.

Bill Burke: I am so in your rearview mirror, I am nowhere, don’t worry about, don’t worry, I don’t worry about you guys. By the way, I have to say this before we sign off, you asked me how I got this inspiration and I mentioned the program at Harvard, the second semester there I met with Steven Pinker on this subject.

And he started listing people I needed to reach out to and follow on online and The Progress Network was right at the top of his list. And so he turned me on to you all. That was two years ago, and I’ve been following you ever since, and I’m really inspired by what you do. So it’s a real privilege to be on here.

Emma Varvaloucas: Oh, thanks, Bill. And yeah.

Zachary Karabell: It might’ve worked.

Bill Burke: Exactly. There you go. Thank you very much.

Emma Varvaloucas: So hopefully we prevented too much of a hallelujah chorus there with Bill, although it’s certainly nice to talk to people that are in our general realm of being, because I feel like most the time when you try to talk to people about, or try to, as we’ve talked about, kind of push against some of their negative impressions of what’s going on, it is very difficult to do that without invalidating personal experience and without seeming like the know it all guy.

So I like hearing from people that can kind of share a strategy of storytelling and attitude, just kind of like a general vibe that we can copy and hopefully put to good use. Cause yeah, a lot of people don’t necessarily want to, want to hear from us or, you know.

Zachary Karabell: I was, I have to say, I mean, it is affirming to know that some of what we’re putting in motion is in fact in motion.

I mean, the idea of this was always, you know, ideas, culture changes, but it changes slowly. And it’s hard to know exactly when a tipping point is reached till after the point has been tipped. And so the idea that we’ve been trying to germinate, and then other people pick that up is, I think, affirming for me.

I don’t particularly care whether that tipping point is a product of what we do, or a product of what Bill does, or a product of what X organization does. And in fact, at the end of the day, it’s usually because a lot of people are doing things sort of simultaneously, and then they wake up and they realize there are other people doing it simultaneously.

It’s good to talk to somebody who’s trying to do the same thing, who’s come to it from a very different pathway. And hopefully there’s more and more people in that general universe, although the economic model is not favorable to it as we’ve talked about. It will be interesting to see, I mean, first of all it will be interesting to see if TikTok gets banned, if Instagram Reels becomes the new TikTok, or if a different model of kind of social media that’s not quite so keyed to, you know, cortisol and charge and a little more key to something else, or whether we’re just, these tools of social media are, are going to feed off of Insta reactions, which are always going to be more heated emotions.

I don’t know. I don’t know.

Emma Varvaloucas: Well, TikTok might get banned for you guys, I’ll say. Over here in the European Union, we’ll be getting our dopamine fix as per usual.

I think that the first step is the holding one in each hand. The second step is, for me anyway, and this is kind of clear by the trajectory of Buddhism in the West, actually, because they started this whole thing called Engaged Buddhism, which is basically like, Yes, okay, we’re holding the things, and that can turn into navel gazing, and then how do we actually engage?

How do we enter these problems? And for me, if you enter a problem with a mind that is very disturbed, that’s very full of emotions, outrage, fear, hatred, the direction that you take is going to be a very different and less fruitful direction than the one in which you enter with a completely different mindset. So there’s that too.

You know, as you were saying, it’s really nice to hear that what we’re putting out is not just going into the ether, that actually other people are picking up what we’re putting down, as the kids would say. And I’d love to hear more stories from people that have been like, we haven’t talked a lot about like direct steps of action, but I do kind of hope that, that, that people listen and they kind of are introduced to an issue they might not be aware of or find an entryway into an issue.

And I would love to hear some stories of that too. So any of our podcast listeners out there, please feel free.

Zachary Karabell: Please send to theprogressnetwork.org. There’s an email address there. So, once again, we’ll be back with you next week. We do welcome your comments, we appreciate your time. Even though the possibilities of the future are infinite, and the abilities of human beings are expansive, we still live in a 24/7 reality, so we deeply appreciate you taking a portion of your precious time to tune in to us and what we’re saying.

We’re honored to be the recipients of the gift of your time, and I hope that we have made it worth your while. So please join us next week. Thank you, Emma. Thank you, Podglomerate, for producing. Thank you to the team at The Progress Network for being the team at The Progress Network. And thank you all for listening once again.

Emma Varvaloucas: Thanks, Zachary. And thanks, everyone.

Zachary Karabell: What Could Go Right is produced by the Podglomerate, executive produced by Jeff Umbro, marketing by the Podglomerate. To find out more about What Could Go Right, the Progress Network, or to subscribe to the What Could Go Right newsletter, visit theprogressnetwork.org. Thanks for listening.