Blue Sky

Former Vox Media pioneer Joe Posner spent years watching bad news win the battle for eyeballs and clicks. Now he's pushing back with Dream On , a YouTube docuseries about people "fighting entrenched poverty and winning." Joe shares how his parents, an affordable housing developer and a product lead on Lotus 1-2-3, shaped his optimism, younger generations today are less likely to out-earn their par...

Stephen Minix calls himself "Optimus Prime," but he's quick to say optimism doesn't mean life will always get better. It means believing that showing up today still matters. He learned that from his father, an Air Force master sergeant who died when Stephen was a boy and who taught him to give whatever he has to others. Stephen shares what teaching and coaching at Locke High School in Watts taught...

Dr. Deepika Chopra, known as the Optimism Doctor, makes a surprising admission: she isn't a natural optimist. In this conversation, she explains why optimism is a learned skill and not a fixed trait, how it differs from happiness, and why real optimists see setbacks clearly rather than wishing them away. She also shares how she put her own tools to the test while writing The Power of Real Optimism...

Margaret Hathaway and  K arl Schatz traded New York City for a goat farm in Maine. Then a pandemic-era cookbook project led them to create Community Plate , a series of story-sharing potluck suppers that bring strangers together over food.  They've  now hosted 51 suppers across Maine. In this conversation, they share what makes the gatherings work, from rectangular tables and real  c hina  to phon...

News can feel relentlessly negative, but as this week's guest points out,  that's  a choice about what gets covered, not a reflection of  what's   actually happening  in our communities. Mebane Rash is the founder and CEO of  EdNC , a nonprofit, paywall-free online newsroom that covers every public school and all 58 community colleges in North Carolina. She joins Bill to talk about building a news...

Joe Fiv e ash, a longtime digital media executive with stops at the Weather Channel, IBM Watson, and Raycom Media, joins Bill Burke to talk about Intro s hips , the nonprofit he now leads that helps college students figure out what career path is right for them before they chase a traditional internship. What started over a decade ago as a handful of Atlanta parents pooling their kids together for...

Educators John Holdridge and Lowell Libby join Bill Burke to talk about the Can We ? Project,  a Maine-based initiative launched in 2018 that teaches high school students the mindset and skills needed for constructive dialogue across political, social, and cultural divides. Through full-day retreats held in schools across Maine (and now New Hampshire), students learn to move past their first insti...

Sam Demma had his sights set on a professional soccer career from age five — training in Italy at 13, playing for one of Canada's top club teams by 17 — until three major knee injuries and a torn labrum ended that dream in his final year of high school. What came next is the subject of this conversation: how Demma rebuilt his sense of purpose, first through small volunteer garbage cleanups with a...

Comedian, speaker, and humor coach Mike Goodwin joins Bill Burke for this  special summer encore   presentation  of  a classic  Blue Sky  episode . Mike shares how a difficult, sometimes volatile childhood in Camden, South Carolina sparked his lifelong instinct to use humor to ease tension  -  a skill that carried him through four years in the U.S. Army, a career in higher education and college co...

In this  Blue Sky  conversation, host Bill Burke sits down with Melissa Conn e lly, CEO of OneGoal , a national organization working to ensure every young person can  pursue education beyond high school. Melissa's path to this work started long before her career in education. Raised by a single mother on the south and southwest sides of Chicago, she missed more than  60 days  of school in eighth g...

Ted Johnson's life reads like several careers stitched into one: raised in a mostly white Raleigh suburb while attending a Black church several times a week, a Hampton University graduate, a 20-year Navy officer who became a White House Fellow under President Obama and later a speechwriter for two chairmen of the Joint Chiefs of Staff. Somewhere along the way, he became a writer — now a Washington...

Lee Woodruff's life reads like fiction — a college meet-not-quite-cute with her future husband Bob, a front-row seat to the Tiananmen Square crackdown that redirected Bob's entire career, his meteoric rise to co-anchor of ABC's  World News Tonight , and then, just weeks into that dream job, a roadside bomb in Iraq that nearly killed him.   In this conversation, Lee shares how she got the call whil...

More than t wenty-five years ago, John Wood was a rising Microsoft executive with a demanding job and a packed passport. A trek through Nepal changed everything. After encountering a rural school with empty library shelves, Wood made a promise to a headmaster that would eventually lead him to leave his corporate career behind and found Room to Read — an organization that has since built tens of th...

Alan Murray has spent four decades studying American business — as editor-in-chief and CEO of Fortune, Washington bureau chief at the Wall Street Journal, president of Pew Research Center, and now founding president of the WSJ Leadership Institute. In this episode, he makes the case that despite the headlines, business has undergone a genuine, structural shift toward human-centered leadership — an...

Kathy Eldon's  son, Dan Eldon, was a young photojournalist working for Reuters in Somalia when he was killed at just 22 years old while documenting a famine and its aftermath. Rather than let that loss define her, Kathy and her daughter Amy founded Creative Visions Foundation in 1998 to support artists, journalists, and storytellers using media to inspire positive change. The foundation has since...

What if optimism about climate change  isn't  naive — but necessary? In this episode of  Blue Sky , Anne   Therese Gennari, TEDx speaker and author of  The Climate Optimist Handbook , shares the breakdown that led to her breakthrough: how years as an "angry activist" left her burned out and disconnected, until a single emotional collapse revealed her real mission — teaching climate optimism as a d...

If even the letters "A-I" are enough to spike your anxiety, this episode is for you. In this conversation, host Bill Burke sits down with Dr. Mar k  Bloomfield — a Cambridge Judge Business School fellow who has spent over 15 years applying artificial intelligence to  real business  challenges, long before ChatGPT made it a household name.   Mar c 's career is a story of reinvention: a colorblind t...

Margo Walsh is an entrepreneur on a mission to prove that second chances are good for business. As founder of  MaineWorks  — a certified B-Corp — she has built a model that connects people with substance use disorder and/or criminal records to meaningful employment in the construction sector, tackling two of society's most persistent challenges at once.   MaineWorks   doesn't  just find jobs for p...

What if one of the most powerful tools for restoring your mental health, sharpening your focus, and cultivating optimism has been outside your door all along? In this episode of  Blue Sky , neuroscientist Marc Berman — pioneer of the field of environmental neuroscience and author of  Nature and the Mind  — shares groundbreaking research on how nature  literally rewires  the brain.   From his path...

What if the relentlessly negative news cycle is giving us a distorted picture of reality? In this episode of Blue Sky , Charles Kenny from the Center for Global Development makes a compelling, data-driven case that the world is  truly  getting better — in ways most of us rarely hear about.   From dramatic reductions in global poverty and child mortality to rising living standards across the develo...

Kathryn Anne Edwards, a labor economist and co-host of  Optimist Economy , discusses economic optimism, career paths, and the impact of policy on the American economy. She shares her insights on the job market and  AI, and  explains how her work is motivated by a belief in the importance of investing in children and families to build a stronger economic future. She argues for strategic public spen...

Adam Mastroianni says he likes to " study how people perceive and misperceive their social worlds, from the person sitting across the table to the whole country buzzing around them."  In this  Blue Sky  conversation, Dr. Mastroianni describes research he and a colleague conducted that  demonstrates  that human beings falsely assume that the world used to be better, and that we continue to decline...

Once an ironman athlete and perfectionist,  Risa  August faced a devastating diagnosis that stripped away her former life. This is the story of how she found new purpose and adventure, transforming her approach to life, from rigid achievement to joyful discovery, even with her unexpected companion,  " Bubba, "  her brain tumor.     Chapters: 00:00 From Extreme Achiever to Illness   Host Bill Burke...

Dr. Robert  Soiffer  took an interest in medicine at an early age when he played a physician in his first-grade play .   Today, he is a leading physician, researcher, and teacher at Dana-Farber Cancer Institute, a world leader in oncology .   In this episode, Dr.  Soiffer  describes the incredible pace of change in the field of cancer research and treatment and the detection tools and cures that a...

While many of us wish we had more resources, more options, and more time, David Epstein suggests that  it's  scarcity and constraints that lead us to better outcomes . This notion might feel  counterintuitive,  but David explain s the research and reasoning behind his terrific new book,  Inside the Box: How Constraints Make Us Better ,  including examples from Apple, Southwest Airlines, NASA, and...