Speaker 1: Oh g is, folks, it's showtime.
Speaker 2: People say good money to see this movie.
Speaker 3: When they go out to a theater.
Speaker 4: They want closed soda, pop, popcorn, and no monsters in
Speaker 4: the projection booths.
Speaker 2: Everyone pretend podcasting isn't boring.
Speaker 5: Cut it off, Hey, folks, Welcome to a special episode
Speaker 5: of the Projection Booth.
Speaker 2: I'm your host Mike White. On this episode, I am
Speaker 2: talking with Bill Burke. He is the founder of the
Speaker 2: Optimism Institute.
Speaker 1: Talk to him a little.
Speaker 2: Bit about optimism and his podcast, talk a lot about
Speaker 2: his early days over at AMC N TCM aka Turner
Speaker 2: Classic Movies. Had a great time talking with me. Burke,
Speaker 2: and I hope we have a great time listening to it.
Speaker 2: Thank you so much and enjoy this interview. As somebody
Speaker 2: named Mike White, there's a lot of Bill Burke's out there,
Speaker 2: so yes, who are you Bill Burke? Tell me the
Speaker 2: Bill Burke story.
Speaker 1: Please. The most famous and growing up was Billy Burke,
Speaker 1: who played the good Witch of the Doors and apparently
Speaker 1: she had that funny movie Apparently that was her voice
Speaker 1: and she was just singing in the rain character. She
Speaker 1: was a big star in silent movies. And then I
Speaker 1: went they went to talkies that voice sidetractor. But anyway,
Speaker 1: I was sharing with you off the interview. I was
Speaker 1: born in Detroit and moved when I was only three
Speaker 1: years old, but it was a rabbit Detroit fan. Grew
Speaker 1: up around the media business, so my late father, we
Speaker 1: were in Detroit, sy ran radio station there WJR. Moved
Speaker 1: to New York where he built his career, and I
Speaker 1: grew up around media. Watched way too much television when
Speaker 1: I was a kid, loved movies, read the TV and
Speaker 1: variety of trades when I was like en and so
Speaker 1: just always. My dad didn't steer any of us into
Speaker 1: that world, but just naturally gravitated towards it, and so
Speaker 1: had summer jobs in the field. Took full advantage of
Speaker 1: the lucky connections I had, And then when I was
Speaker 1: getting out of business school, I wound up getting a
Speaker 1: job at Turner Broadcasting in Atlanta, and I was in
Speaker 1: charge of new business development. And probably a big part
Speaker 1: of the reason you ever found me was that business
Speaker 1: plan I developed. It was not my idea, but I
Speaker 1: developed a business plan the sort of numbers behind turd
Speaker 1: classic movies, and in the early nineties, cable was the
Speaker 1: wild West and Ted was the cowboy ready fire aim.
Speaker 1: We were just doing stuff and this got approved, this
Speaker 1: business plan, and I wanted to stay with the network,
Speaker 1: and my boss was like, he reported to Ted, they
Speaker 1: would just keep going and what do you mean, we'll
Speaker 1: start hiring people. So basically I was the de facto
Speaker 1: general manager when we started Turner Classic Movies and reporting
Speaker 1: to Gunny brad Siegel who was running T and T
Speaker 1: and so from there that was just the creatiest ride
Speaker 1: launching that channel, and then was promoted to run TVs Superstation.
Speaker 1: IF actually was in the new media part of Time War,
Speaker 1: but frankly got disillusion with big corporate life. Left are
Speaker 1: just started off for a while, then came back to Atlanta,
Speaker 1: ran the Weather channel companies for a couple of years,
Speaker 1: and then left there and moved back to Maine. Wanted
Speaker 1: to be a writer, maybe teacher. This a very long answered,
Speaker 1: a very quick question. Good.
Speaker 2: I asked for the life story. You've given it to me, though,
Speaker 2: this is pretty quick for that.
Speaker 1: Yeah, I gets self continent so then, But anyway, I
Speaker 1: wrote an article about leadership lessons I learned from Ted
Speaker 1: Turner sent it to him via his secretary twenty five pages.
Speaker 1: She called back in about five minutes and said, Ted
Speaker 1: wants to talk to you. And he gets on the phone.
Speaker 1: He said, I love what you wrote bound this says great.
Speaker 1: I want you to write my biography. It's the longest
Speaker 1: thing I've ever written, but you'd be great, So long
Speaker 1: story shorter. I wrote Ted's autobiography. I was just like
Speaker 1: ghost writer. Put my name on the coverage, generously called me.
Speaker 1: Ted came out two thousand and eight. That got me
Speaker 1: in a different path, which really was good for me
Speaker 1: storytelling writing. I actually co wrote and directed a back
Speaker 1: to Detroit doc to me about the auto bail out
Speaker 1: called Look Another Day. I came out twenty sixteen, I
Speaker 1: want to say. And it also my late father founded
Speaker 1: a minorleague baseball team in Maine that I oversaw for
Speaker 1: about fifteen years, Portland Sea Dogs Redstox Doba affiliate. As
Speaker 1: we were contemplating that, I did an academic fellowship with
Speaker 1: my wife called the Advanced Leadership in this Ship at
Speaker 1: Harvard University. It was an amazing program, and in that
Speaker 1: I started something called the Optimism Institute. I had this
Speaker 1: feeling that the world is getting more pessimistic than it
Speaker 1: should be. That it's not good for our health and
Speaker 1: frankly not good for our society. I'm having a terrific time.
Speaker 1: I host a podcast every week called Blue Sky Right,
Speaker 1: a few people working on the tough challenges made which
Speaker 1: make us pessimistic, but approaching them of the sense of
Speaker 1: optimism and solutions, and I'd been a great experience for me.
Speaker 1: I've loved that. I enjoy this whole podcast ecosystem through that,
Speaker 1: I think that's how I found you, Mike. I still
Speaker 1: love movies, and I don't run a movie channel anymore,
Speaker 1: but I have fond memories and I'm just really pleased
Speaker 1: to have this chance to talk to you in your audience.
Speaker 2: A lot of people do a little bit of a
Speaker 2: lot of things. It sounds like you do a lot
Speaker 2: of bit of a lot of things that'd be fair
Speaker 2: there you ask, it'd still be a little But yeah,
Speaker 2: I've been really lucky, and I do have a My
Speaker 2: podcast has a really wide range of.
Speaker 1: People, and I love that. I love to learn, I
Speaker 1: love to read actually think, and I've seen that in
Speaker 1: my optimistic people. They're interesting thread that I didn't expect,
Speaker 1: but one is a sense of lifetime learning. And Kelly Corrigan,
Speaker 1: who's a great writer. She was on my show and
Speaker 1: she said, well, yeah, it's a fundamentally optimistic position to take,
Speaker 1: to believe there's always more to learn. It is applied
Speaker 1: to movies. There's always another movie you haven't seen. It's
Speaker 1: always a great one you forgot about that you can
Speaker 1: see again. What a great way to go through life.
Speaker 1: So yeah, it's been a great experience for.
Speaker 2: Me being a movie fan. I used to be a
Speaker 2: huge fan of AMC and that used to be the
Speaker 2: channel and I would watched my first buster, Keaton on
Speaker 2: AMC when there was a marathon. How does AMC relate
Speaker 2: to TCM and how do those early days come about
Speaker 2: for you? For TCM, it.
Speaker 1: Was American Movie Classics. They were the incumbent, They owned
Speaker 1: the category. George Clooney's father was the host.
Speaker 2: Yeah, they were big.
Speaker 1: And what happened was Ted Turner bought the MGM. He
Speaker 1: bought all of MGM in the late eighties and then
Speaker 1: quickly realized he couldn't afford all of the MGMs. That
Speaker 1: sold off the working studio in a deal where everyone
Speaker 1: thought he was nuts because they didn't see the value.
Speaker 1: He kept the movie Library and that was not just MGM,
Speaker 1: but also pre nineteen forty eight Warner Brothers, so Casablanca's
Speaker 1: in there, and then I think it wasn't part of
Speaker 1: the same jaie. He also owned the RKO Library, so
Speaker 1: King Kong, Citizen Kane, and that was used to launch
Speaker 1: people forget That's TNT started as basically a kind of
Speaker 1: classic movie channel and some sports, and then it kept
Speaker 1: evolving to get more modern, more sports, had Sunday Night
Speaker 1: NFL briefly which we will forget NBA, And so these
Speaker 1: movies were collecting dust. Ted was also famously colorizing many
Speaker 1: of them, which is so polarized. We could talk about that,
Speaker 1: but a virtue of that was the first step in
Speaker 1: colorization is a pristine restoration of the black and white print.
Speaker 1: And so we had these classic movies that were collecting dust.
Speaker 1: And Ted was never a seller. He could have AMC
Speaker 1: would have paid a lot of money to run Gone
Speaker 1: with the Wind, but Ted didn't like that idea. And
Speaker 1: so the idea was like, what could we do with
Speaker 1: this stuff? And Brad Siegel came down to Atlanta. He
Speaker 1: actually had worked in programming at AMC. He understood that business,
Speaker 1: understood how valuable it was and we said, you know what,
Speaker 1: there's room for two of these channels, and most people
Speaker 1: don't know that AMC can't run Gone with the Wind
Speaker 1: or Citizen Kane or actually we had a license deal.
Speaker 1: They did get some RKO films, and so we decided
Speaker 1: to go right after them, not necessarily to knock them
Speaker 1: off the block, but to coexist. And so that's how
Speaker 1: it came about. And I was just so many stories
Speaker 1: we didn't know what to call it. One of our
Speaker 1: points of differentiation was going to be we had a
Speaker 1: line it doesn't have to be old to be classic,
Speaker 1: the we, for example, had because of MGM, we owned,
Speaker 1: Rocky we owned I can't remember some of the examples
Speaker 1: we used, but that's a good one. And so that
Speaker 1: was gonna be a point of differentiation. TNT had a
Speaker 1: franchise called Our Favorite Movies. At one point we thought
Speaker 1: about calling it our Favorite Movies. We actually had about
Speaker 1: five names we were going to put in a focus groups,
Speaker 1: one of them being Turner Classic Movies. And I was
Speaker 1: in charge of this, like twenty thousand dollars focus group
Speaker 1: in Ohio or something, and Ted got wind of the
Speaker 1: fact that we were spending money on a focus group
Speaker 1: and back when you still used to get typed memos.
Speaker 1: I wasn't even on the memo. You send it to
Speaker 1: my boss and my boss's boss. It's that Turner Classic
Speaker 1: Movies is the name of the new channel, and that
Speaker 1: was it. That was the entire memo. I called my boss,
Speaker 1: so I guess for calling off the fuckers scroops. So
Speaker 1: that's how we got the name. And then funny fast
Speaker 1: forward to the day of the launch. He's walking up
Speaker 1: to the podium in Times Square and he whispers in
Speaker 1: the ear of our pr person, is it Turner Movie
Speaker 1: Classics or Turner Classic Movies and he's in Turner Classic.
Speaker 1: We thanks, and he got it right in the announcement,
Speaker 1: so we pitched. Cable operators would say, why do we
Speaker 1: need this? And we tried to explain, not only do
Speaker 1: we now have the same movies, been way more movies.
Speaker 1: So AMC was repeating movies like crazy. They'd show them
Speaker 1: at eight o'clock, eleven o'clock, two o'clock, same movie. The
Speaker 1: old expression was they ran the sprockets off those movies.
Speaker 1: We are thing was we're going to show up to
Speaker 1: four hundred movies a month, different movies. You could do
Speaker 1: that because those older movies are shorter, but we had
Speaker 1: such a huge library, so the pitch was these could
Speaker 1: live side by side. And then eventually what happened was
Speaker 1: when we were head to head with them, we became
Speaker 1: the more popular channel. AMC saw the writing on the
Speaker 1: wall and that's when they morphed into something different. So
Speaker 1: I'd argue that too. It's one of those sometimes capitalism
Speaker 1: works in a good way. They're the best for everybody.
Speaker 1: TCM had this huge library and this incredible service, and
Speaker 1: AMC morphed into something else that was very valuable and
Speaker 1: everything went along well. So another long.
Speaker 2: Answer to a simple question, that's how it came about.
Speaker 2: Did you guys ever have any sort of problems with censorship,
Speaker 2: because that was one of the things I do remember
Speaker 2: from AMC was watching straight time the Dustin Hoffmann film
Speaker 2: and there being a lot of like forced zooms in
Speaker 2: order to avoid showing like MM at Walsh's butt.
Speaker 1: Yeah, that's a good question now, because that was the
Speaker 1: other thing. We said, we're going to be uncut, and
Speaker 1: we made a deal with Ted we are not going
Speaker 1: to show colorized movies. But no, and because we were
Speaker 1: not over the year and we weren't usually in basic
Speaker 1: cable packages an AMC and theory. So a lot of
Speaker 1: people aren't understand this subtle difference. But cable channels are
Speaker 1: not governed by the FCC only if you have a
Speaker 1: public license over the airwaves. When people say, for example,
Speaker 1: I heard recently something said Fox News, the FCC should
Speaker 1: crack down on them. They don't have jurisdiction. It's a
Speaker 1: cable channel, so we could do whatever we want. I know,
Speaker 1: we didn't censor. And one interesting thing that's been done
Speaker 1: since I left that I give TCM a lot of
Speaker 1: credit for. As you go back to these old movies,
Speaker 1: there are a lot of racially insensitive material. Stuff you
Speaker 1: look at now, Oh my god, it's in the old cartoons.
Speaker 1: And so rather they made a tough decision, but they said,
Speaker 1: rather than park these movies, we're going to run them
Speaker 1: with discussion. And they even did they do what I
Speaker 1: saw recently, the beautiful set up to Gone with the Win.
Speaker 1: You watch Gone with a Win today, it's, oh my god,
Speaker 1: it almost it doesn't quite glamorize slavery, but it comes
Speaker 1: pretty close. And so it was very thoughtful. Here are
Speaker 1: some of the objections people have to this film. Here's
Speaker 1: what the time was like, here's why we still think
Speaker 1: it's a classic. Here why we think it's worth watching
Speaker 1: and discussing. The handle it beautifully and I believe in that.
Speaker 1: I think rather than pretend these things didn't happen, show them,
Speaker 1: put them in context. So no, we were very keen
Speaker 1: on nowha interruptions. Another thing people did on television, we
Speaker 1: did it on TVs that people didn't realize. To make
Speaker 1: a movie fit a two hour time slot, there was
Speaker 1: a thing called rotoscoping. I think it's called rotoscope. You
Speaker 1: could speed it up and slow it down, so you
Speaker 1: do it in Westerns. If there's a panorama that took forever,
Speaker 1: you'd crank it up so it only took out ten
Speaker 1: seconds instead of thirty. We literally would do that to
Speaker 1: fit a timeslot. We didn't do any of that on TCM.
Speaker 1: We kept saying we're gonna we didn't. We use letterboxing
Speaker 1: and if people don't understand that, but especially before flight HCTVS,
Speaker 1: you have a square of TV. But these films were
Speaker 1: shot in a more horizontal sort of landscape mode and
Speaker 1: you have to put these boxes. And we have people
Speaker 1: calling and say, what have you done? That you wrote,
Speaker 1: you broke my TV. No, we're trying to show you
Speaker 1: the full sea. There were these old movies bing Ron
Speaker 1: where you couldn't see the two characters talking to each
Speaker 1: other because they were cut off. So we were really
Speaker 1: proud of that, and I think it's one of the
Speaker 1: reasons it's so esteem now in Hollywood circles. And we
Speaker 1: could talk about what happened when they threatened to cut
Speaker 1: the staff and the types of people who came out
Speaker 1: in defense, and turning Classic Movies knocked me out of
Speaker 1: my chair is pretty cool.
Speaker 2: The other thing that TCM has and AMC had this
Speaker 2: I can't remember. Wasn't Robert Osbourne on there?
Speaker 1: It was on turn Classic Movies. He was like right,
Speaker 1: so like Cloney was George Clooney's dad.
Speaker 2: Yeah, I'm trying to remember his name as well. But
Speaker 2: it was to have those guides and to have those
Speaker 2: little intros, sometimes up to fifteen minutes or even more.
Speaker 2: And then you have specialized shows where it's those folks
Speaker 2: are talking and going back and forth, and to hear
Speaker 2: those discussions it's always wonderful. But to get those little
Speaker 2: intros and to get that historical perspective, like you're talking about,
Speaker 2: like the kind of the warnings in front of things,
Speaker 2: but to get that little bit of historical perspective, to
Speaker 2: get a little bit of trivia or whatever it is. Yeah,
Speaker 2: those just make the movie sometimes.
Speaker 1: Yes, by the way, it is Nick Colooney. I couldn't
Speaker 1: remember his name as the dead handsome guy, just I
Speaker 1: guess Son and Brat. I get Brad Siegel credit for
Speaker 1: that because he understood the AMC model, and right away
Speaker 1: he said, we got to get Robert Osborne. He was
Speaker 1: one of our very first hires. Not only did he
Speaker 1: know the movies, he knew the movie stars. He was
Speaker 1: one of these guys who he stayed at Betty Davis's
Speaker 1: vacation house. He was a Paul Barrett somebody famous's funeral
Speaker 1: I can't remember which one. And having to be a
Speaker 1: lovely human being. He literally wrote the book on the
Speaker 1: history of the Oscars, just all that stuff. Other early
Speaker 1: hires we made were researchers who really understood the library.
Speaker 1: And there's this, you're one of them. There's people out
Speaker 1: there who know these movies inside out in spreadable passion. Yeah,
Speaker 1: and so you take and we had, frankly, you run
Speaker 1: that many movies really obscure movies and some that were
Speaker 1: old but not really classic. Think we're very good. They
Speaker 1: made bad movies back then too, but with an introduction
Speaker 1: the other thing we did, and frankly it was hardly
Speaker 1: to save money, but it was also really cool. When
Speaker 1: Ted bought the library, he got all kinds of assets,
Speaker 1: including the trailers, so we would instead of spending money
Speaker 1: on a team of people to cut original promos, we
Speaker 1: came up to these cool little framing divide literally frames
Speaker 1: around them, and we ran the trailers. Had some of
Speaker 1: these original trailers are hysterical on you you look at
Speaker 1: the old techniques they use.
Speaker 2: But it brought a lot to the service.
Speaker 1: Again largely just at first it was like this would
Speaker 1: be an efficient way to do it, and it's like,
Speaker 1: this is way more fun than if we did tonight
Speaker 1: it all on tournal closet movies. We we actually did some
Speaker 1: of that stuff, but the trailers are gold so that
Speaker 1: was fun too. But yeah, the studio intro, so one
Speaker 1: of our biggest expenditures we were very lead was spending
Speaker 1: money on the set that Robert was in. It really
Speaker 1: set a tone for the show for the network, and yeah,
Speaker 1: we're really proud of all that, but there's a lot
Speaker 1: of thought went into it.
Speaker 2: And then for you, obviously you've been in the media
Speaker 2: world for your entire life, but this must have been
Speaker 2: an educational thing for you. Even just seeing a lot
Speaker 2: of these movies.
Speaker 1: Moins, I had some sense, but I really dove in.
Speaker 1: And also it was wild to see the community that
Speaker 1: was out there. So when we first launched, we barely
Speaker 1: had any cable subscribers. It was a tough time. People
Speaker 1: are so used to streaming now, it's a totally different
Speaker 1: world than nineteen ninety four. When we launched, it was
Speaker 1: like getting on a grocery store shelf. There was only
Speaker 1: so much space, and if you wanted to get on
Speaker 1: the great nuts, we're going to have to come off
Speaker 1: for you to find a slot. At the beginning, we
Speaker 1: had very few subscribers, but if you had a satellite dish,
Speaker 1: you could pull down the signal. So a lot of
Speaker 1: our sands were that, and out of the blue, we
Speaker 1: started getting letters some Genie Jean Schalette had a home
Speaker 1: in western Massachusetts. I think at that point he was
Speaker 1: actually doing these Today Show segments for the young people
Speaker 1: out there. He was very well known movie critic on
Speaker 1: the Today Show and a celebrity Mike running down the
Speaker 1: little hallway. Gee, Charlo just wrote us a letter and
Speaker 1: he was amazing. He really levedy to do. We ought
Speaker 1: to show that movie because she was in that too.
Speaker 1: Really thoughtful, and then we realized there were this community
Speaker 1: out there. It was really cool and that was one
Speaker 1: of the ways we got distribution because we kept saying, hey,
Speaker 1: call your cable operator if you're missing this, call cable. Ever,
Speaker 1: we're showing movies you're not seeing on a MC cannabis
Speaker 1: ground swell that grew into a fan base eight years later,
Speaker 1: rushed to the network's defense whenever it's dropped from a system,
Speaker 1: or are they reading the paper that they're doing a downsize.
Speaker 1: I think this is incredible, and everything from hardcore old
Speaker 1: movie fans to celebrities to Ryan Reynolds came out of
Speaker 1: the woodwork and defended TCM from cutbacks. And Martin Scorsesey
Speaker 1: was an early fan because he's a huge film preservationist
Speaker 1: and he was an early advocate. Steven Spielberg. It was
Speaker 1: just amazing the range of people, and I think another
Speaker 1: service we provided was that curation, not just the introduction
Speaker 1: of films, but the programming the film noir showcase or
Speaker 1: a Star of the month, because frankly, even if you
Speaker 1: are a classic movie fan, even today with streaming, it's intimidating.
Speaker 1: Where am I going to find these? Which one should
Speaker 1: I watch? Wind up watching the same one over and
Speaker 1: over again, versus we would serve this up and here's
Speaker 1: a movie. Humphrey Boger was in the probably I haven't seen,
Speaker 1: so the discovery and a curation and so people can
Speaker 1: just say, let's turn on TCM and see what's on tonight,
Speaker 1: as opposed to us spend a half hour in the
Speaker 1: Blockbuster store on Netflix trying to find this movie. Yeah.
Speaker 1: I was really proud of what it became. I was
Speaker 1: there from the time it was approved, probably early ninety three.
Speaker 1: We went on the air in April ninety four, and
Speaker 1: I was done by the fall of ninety five moving
Speaker 1: over to TVs, So a lot of what I'm talking
Speaker 1: about was done by my successors but hadn't been there
Speaker 1: at the beginning. Just really proud of what it became.
Speaker 1: It's a really amazing thing to watch.
Speaker 2: So tell me more about the OPPOSM project and I
Speaker 2: know more about this and how that even came to you.
Speaker 1: Yeah, thank you. So I've always been, by nature a
Speaker 1: more optimistic person. That was funny. I remember being a
Speaker 1: brooding teenager like everybody else. And then out of the blue,
Speaker 1: my sister found my high school senior yearbook and my
Speaker 1: mom's basement. I didn't have a copy. It's your senior,
Speaker 1: I think, so go right to the back, and I'm
Speaker 1: looking at the class elections most likely to this best whatever,
Speaker 1: And they had a vote for class optimists, and it
Speaker 1: was me in another even forty years ago, with a
Speaker 1: stupid thumbs up. I guess I've always been this way,
Speaker 1: and I have been genuinely concerned. My kids are now
Speaker 1: twenty eight and thirty, and they have friends who think
Speaker 1: the world's going to end in thirty years because of
Speaker 1: climate change, and frustrated by political division, and all understandable,
Speaker 1: but I think all also a little bit extreme. And
Speaker 1: also I'm a history buff. I think also abs a
Speaker 1: good understanding of history and the things we've been through
Speaker 1: before four and how the world innecturably keeps getting better,
Speaker 1: and that when someone says this country's never been more
Speaker 1: divided than we are today, I quickly turned to the
Speaker 1: Civil War and those of us. I don't remember the
Speaker 1: summer of sixty eight because I was two years old,
Speaker 1: But if you study history and realize how divided this
Speaker 1: country was through Vietnam, through the assassinations of Bobby and MLK,
Speaker 1: Bobby Kennedy and MLK, come on, We've been through a
Speaker 1: heck of a lot in our history. And my concern
Speaker 1: is if you go all the way to pessimism, that
Speaker 1: leads to apathy, which leads to an action which could
Speaker 1: halt the sense of progress and the actual progress we've
Speaker 1: always made. So that's how it came about. I love storytelling,
Speaker 1: as you could probably tell already, and I love the
Speaker 1: idea of interviewing people. So I learned a lot of
Speaker 1: interview techniques from writing the Ted Turmer book because I
Speaker 1: did a ton of banterviewing not just Ted for that,
Speaker 1: and then making the Auto Bailout documentary because that was
Speaker 1: one hundred percent interviews. Began a narrator, So I love that.
Speaker 1: I love to learn a lot of my guests are authors.
Speaker 1: I love to read their books and it's been great,
Speaker 1: and I get anecdotes from people. You know what this
Speaker 1: is really helping? Wow, I hadn't looked at it that way.
Speaker 1: I was asked to do a high school graduation speech,
Speaker 1: which was who you know, small little high school up
Speaker 1: in me, and I was able to distill my feelings
Speaker 1: on this and one of the things I told then
Speaker 1: picture eighteen year olds just wanting me to get off
Speaker 1: the stage. And I said, look, I know what you're thinking.
Speaker 1: Your generation lefters are a mess. First of all, welcome
Speaker 1: to the club. Every generation inherits a mess from their parents.
Speaker 1: And I said, my definition of optimism is you get
Speaker 1: out and do something. You have a role in making
Speaker 1: tomorrow better, So not just going to happen. And when
Speaker 1: I was in high school, I'll date myself. I graduated
Speaker 1: nineteen eighty four, which first of all, wasn't as bad
Speaker 1: as the hopelessly pessimistic George Orwell said it was going
Speaker 1: to be. But we had a part time.
Speaker 2: We had Cold War.
Speaker 1: That's the worst we had aids. We didn't have a
Speaker 1: name for it when I graduated, but it was killing people.
Speaker 1: I grew up in Greater New York. It was killing
Speaker 1: people by the scores of terrifying. We were boycotting each
Speaker 1: other the Olympics because of the Cold War. We didn't
Speaker 1: go to Moscow. They didn't the russianston the Soviet Union
Speaker 1: didn't come to La And yeah, we whipped on climate change.
Speaker 1: But when I was graduate in high school had acid
Speaker 1: rain and the ozone layer. If you go through the list,
Speaker 1: I just listened. We basically kicked them all off. And
Speaker 1: how did that happen? It didn't just happen. We got
Speaker 1: them voted. We protested. When I got to college, the
Speaker 1: campus protests were divestments from South Africa. We banned four
Speaker 1: or Flora carbons. My mom used to spray her hair
Speaker 1: with this stuff that was killing the ozone layer. We
Speaker 1: listened to the scientist and we fixed it, you know.
Speaker 1: So my advice to this young group was like, you
Speaker 1: guys are next in line to take off. Go sit
Speaker 1: there and do them gloom, get out and fix this
Speaker 1: stuff we've left for you, just like my parents' generation
Speaker 1: left stuff for me. So that's my message. The podcast
Speaker 1: is called Blue Sky, available wherever you get your podcast,
Speaker 1: and it comes out every week and I just released
Speaker 1: my seventy second episode, so it's rolling. And I was
Speaker 1: featured last March on the Today Show with Hoda and Jenna.
Speaker 1: Because March, many of you probably are on your calendar,
Speaker 1: but March is National Optimism Month. It's actually a thing.
Speaker 1: I looked it up and so I had good number
Speaker 1: before that, and that really helped me take off. And
Speaker 1: I've got a good loyal following and hope to keep
Speaker 1: growing it and I just I feel really strongly about it.
Speaker 1: I'm working on a book on the subject, paradox of
Speaker 1: Modern Optimism OMO for the youngsters, And the paradox I
Speaker 1: see it is that you can argue that there's never
Speaker 1: been a better time to be live than today, but
Speaker 1: there's also never been a harder time to be optimistic.
Speaker 1: How do we square those things? And the second part
Speaker 1: for me, a lot of its social media and media
Speaker 1: we get in our ecod chambers and we pull each
Speaker 1: other down. Wherever you are on political strata, you go
Speaker 1: deeper that way when you spend all day wallowing in
Speaker 1: social media that agrees with you and outrages you. So
Speaker 1: that's what I'm doing and I'm having a great time,
Speaker 1: and yeah, I hope some of your listeners might enjoy
Speaker 1: it as well, in addition to your podcast.
Speaker 2: Of course, I'm sure there are times where you still
Speaker 2: get discouraged, still get down in the dumps. How do
Speaker 2: you pick yourself up from that, you maintain that optimism
Speaker 2: or get back.
Speaker 1: And glad you said that, because that is absolutely true.
Speaker 1: And out of objections you get for people's oh, come on,
Speaker 1: you can't always be happy. I said, this isn't happiness optimism.
Speaker 1: This is thinking that tomorrow could be better than today
Speaker 1: and that you have a role in making it. So
Speaker 1: that's key part. But yeah, so when I get down,
Speaker 1: you have to get through the tough stuffs that the
Speaker 1: best way is not around, it's through. And I think
Speaker 1: also if you can look back on some of the
Speaker 1: worst setbacks that you're like, first of all, look back
Speaker 1: on how many things you worried about that never happened
Speaker 1: at the key so you spend a lot of our
Speaker 1: time making up worst case scenarios in the future that
Speaker 1: don't happen, or when you're in the very worst or
Speaker 1: you've been through the very worst, when you look back
Speaker 1: on it, think about the silver linings, the consolation prizes
Speaker 1: that came out of that. So I'd gotten better about
Speaker 1: talking about I lost a dear niece to cancer. She
Speaker 1: was twenty nine years old. It was brutal, and the
Speaker 1: sister's oldest daughter awful. I wish you were still here.
Speaker 1: I wish it had never happened, obviously. However, the silver
Speaker 1: linings are an empathy that you get from that a
Speaker 1: club that you're in. You wish you weren't a member,
Speaker 1: but you're in that cancer club. When something similar happens
Speaker 1: to a friend or a loved one or a child
Speaker 1: of a friend, you have a totally different response. You
Speaker 1: understand it, You understand people's griefs, what to say, what
Speaker 1: not to say, in a way you wish hadn't happened.
Speaker 1: It makes you a better person on the other side.
Speaker 1: So the toughest times to get through it do have
Speaker 1: silver linings. Usually on the other side, you also have
Speaker 1: to understand. I'm sure that people have seen this today
Speaker 1: who are rolling their eyes at me and going through
Speaker 1: something absolutely terrible, and they get that. And I've been
Speaker 1: an incredibly privileged person in so many ways. But I
Speaker 1: think it does help you get through if you can
Speaker 1: try to keep looking for housing. That's gonna what I'm
Speaker 1: gonna learn from this. How am I going to be
Speaker 1: better on the other side of this. I think that's
Speaker 1: really important. And then again, just knowing that these things
Speaker 1: are going to happen sometimes I think I actually have
Speaker 1: an issue with a lot of the happiness literature. I
Speaker 1: think a lot of it, in my view, creates a
Speaker 1: false expectation, and especially with young people. And I think
Speaker 1: that the combination of preaching happiness to young people and
Speaker 1: social media. You hear about all these kids they get
Speaker 1: to college and they have a bad day and I
Speaker 1: have a bad week, and then they go on social
Speaker 1: media and all their friends are having a great day
Speaker 1: and a great week. And of course, as the old
Speaker 1: expression goes, you're comparing your insights to their outsides, first
Speaker 1: of all, and it's not helpful. You are going to
Speaker 1: be unhappy. Awful things are going to happen to you. Sorry,
Speaker 1: but that's the truth. It's how you deal with and
Speaker 1: how you can stay optimistic. So that's how I try
Speaker 1: to do. With my wife were here, she'd say, listen,
Speaker 1: this guy's not always walk in the park. I have
Speaker 1: my moments like everybody else. But I think having that
Speaker 1: default setting towards the hopeful and positive is a good
Speaker 1: thing to have.
Speaker 2: Yeah, I completely agree, mister Burke. Thank you so much
Speaker 2: for your time. I'd love to have you back on sometime.
Speaker 2: I hear You've got a great take on the Twelve
Speaker 2: Angry Men, which we haven't covered yet.
Speaker 1: Oh, if you listened to that episodes, I was a
Speaker 1: guest on a fabulous podcast, and yeah, I'd come on anytime,
Speaker 1: only if you call me Bill and not mister Burke.
Speaker 1: But yes. One of the great pleasures of movies is
Speaker 1: rewatching something you'd forgotten about. And I was on a
Speaker 1: show that encouraged me to think about that movie and
Speaker 1: rewatch it. By the way, I recently just rewatched Moonstruck
Speaker 1: with my daughter. Oh my god, just this side of
Speaker 1: perfect that movie. There's so many movies like that. Look
Speaker 1: you gotta smile on your face. You think back to
Speaker 1: that movie. Nicholas cage Is performs, he has his hand,
Speaker 1: he has bride. Oh my god, what's better than sitting
Speaker 1: back a movie like that. I'm watching in a New
Speaker 1: York City with my daughter who lives in New York,
Speaker 1: and it's just it's a love letter to New York. Anyway,
Speaker 1: I will come on anytime you'd like, if you call
Speaker 1: me Bill, and I really appreciate it an honor to
Speaker 1: do on your show. I appreciate you reaching out.
Speaker 2: You gotta Bill, thank you so much. This was wonderful
Speaker 2: take care of my.
Speaker 1: Time.
Speaker 3: Things in life I bade, they can't really mte you made.
Speaker 1: I'm a things. Just might you swear and curse.
Speaker 3: When you're chewing on laughs, Whistle back, rumble, give a whistle,
Speaker 3: and this will help things turn out for the beast.
Speaker 4: I always look on the b side.
Speaker 1: Lie, Always look on the lie.
Speaker 3: Sigh the lie.
Speaker 4: If LA seems johnny rotten, there's something you've forgotten. And
Speaker 4: that's the last one of the dancing.
Speaker 3: When you're feeling in the dubs, dabby silly chumps, just
Speaker 3: purse your lips and whistle.
Speaker 1: That's the thing.
Speaker 3: I always look on the bright side of life.
Speaker 1: Come on, always look up the right side of life
Speaker 1: before life is quite so.
Speaker 3: And that's the final word. You must always face the
Speaker 3: curtain with a bear.
Speaker 4: Forget about your seat, give the audience a gooin, enjoy it.
Speaker 3: It's a la chart and.
Speaker 2: So always look on the.
Speaker 3: Bright side of them.
Speaker 4: I just beliefore you draw your terminal breath. Love's a
Speaker 4: piece of sweet.
Speaker 3: When you look at it, lives a laugh and that's
Speaker 3: a junk.
Speaker 2: It's true.
Speaker 3: You'll see it's all a show. Keep them laughing as
Speaker 3: you go. Just remember that the last laugh is on you.
Speaker 1: And the players. Look on the right side.
Speaker 3: Always look on the right side of love.
Speaker 1: I'm a mark.
Speaker 3: You act.
Speaker 1: Right side.
Speaker 4: Always look on the right side of life. Where as
Speaker 4: things happen to see.
Speaker 2: You know, gona lose.
Speaker 3: You know you come from laughing. You go back to
Speaker 3: nothing where you lost office. Nothing will come from napping.
Speaker 3: You know, a nice time cheer the old bugger.
Speaker 4: I'll do said quiz.
Speaker 1: It's needed in a record.
Speaker 3: You'll be in a minute.
Speaker 4: The bras s your girl bridge just run off with
Speaker 4: the Argentinian polo bat. Okay, your using just eat camping,
Speaker 4: a baby sitting and he's from the life, all right.
Speaker 4: So your team's losing fifteen mile home to Varney.
Speaker 1: Alone, is it?
Speaker 4: So come on, tier up, moan, moan, moan. That's what
Speaker 4: people do these days, especially your peoples. But we're going
Speaker 4: to do is sit around and moan as you take
Speaker 4: your teeth away and come on, girls, put a kit on.
Speaker 4: I have a nice cup of tea.
Speaker 1: He says, Oh.
Speaker 4: Come on, you grew with this joggy. Better get your
Speaker 4: scrubby shopping. Oh, but you better come to so many
Speaker 4: pretty than news.