In this Blue Sky conversation, host Bill Burke sits down with Melissa Connelly, CEO of One Goal, 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 grade and landed in her high school's truancy program, a labeling experience that nearly derailed her future.

That changed when a school social worker, Ms. Jeter, taught her how to advocate for herself and get back on track. Melissa shares the highs and lows that followed, including a heartbreaking moment arriving in New York for her freshman year at NYU without enough cash for a cab, and the winding five year, five school path she eventually took to earn her degree.

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 speech writer for two chairmen of the Joint Chiefs of Staff. Somewhere along the way, he became a writer — now a Washington Post columnist and author of two books, most recently If We Are Brave: Essays from Black Americana.

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 while at Disney World with their four kids, the surreal days that followed, and the 36-day coma that ended with Bob speaking Mandarina nd French before he could speak English again. She opens up about "ambiguous loss" — the complicated grief of loving someone who survived but changed — and the "four F's" (family, friends, funny, faith) that got her through. Lee also talks candidly about the Bob WoodruffFoundation, which has now raised more than $80 million for veterans and military families, and about her own definition of optimism: not the absence of hard days, but the belief that tomorrow can be better.

More than twenty-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 thousands of libraries and reached over 26 million children across 20 countries.

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 — and he explains the "physics" behind why.

Alan walks Bill through the data point that changed how he thinks about corporate value: a study found that more than 80% of Fortune 500 companies' value came from physical assets in the mid-1970s, but today more than 85% of value comes from intangibles — talent, brand loyalty, employee engagement. That shift, he argues, is what's really driving the "human-centered" turn in business, not politics or PR.

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 incubated hundreds of projects — including the Oscar-winning documentary Navalny — and its work has reached more than 100 million people across five continents.

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 daily practice, not a personality trait.

Anne Therese makes the case that fear-based climate messaging doesn't change behavior — it triggers the same fight-or-flight response as encountering a bear in the woods. Instead, she offers a different approach: trading shame and guilt for curiosity and invitation, and shifting from "minimizing our negative impact" to "maximizing our positive one." She and host Bill Burke also dig into the psychology of optimism, the surprising data on optimists' success and longevity, and what it's been like for her to raise two young children — including a daughter who hugs trees on sight — while holding onto hope for their future.

This conversation is a reminder that the future isn't fixed. It's being written today, one mindset shift at a time.

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. Mark 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.

Marc's career is a story of reinvention: a colorblind teenager whose dream of flying gave way to a PhD with Airbus, and eventually to advising boards at companies like Vodafone, Unilever, and Pfizer on their AI transformation. Along the way, he's developed a refreshingly grounded, optimistic philosophy about how everyday people can engage with AI—starting small, staying curious, and using these tools to amplify what makes us human rather than replace it.

From treating AI anxiety like a fear of flying, to his weekly "AI amnesty" walks, to raising AI-savvy kids ("water always finds a way—so train them to become a plumber"), Mark offers a practical, hopeful roadmap for a technology that isn't going anywhere.

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 people—it sets them up to succeed. Through the non-profit she co-founded with her sister, Margo ensures that returning workers have what they need to show up and thrive: like proper clothing, boots, transportation, and the basic building blocks of a fresh start.

What began in Maine has grown into a regional movement, expanding across New England and serving as a replicable blueprint for companies and communities across the country. Margo's work has earned widespread recognition and multiple awards—and in this episode, she shares what it was like to attend a State of the Union address as a senator's guest, a testament to the national impact of her vision.

This is a story about optimism in action—and what becomes possible when we invest in people others have written off.

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 to coining "environmental neuroscience" to surprising findings about what even a simple walk in the park can do for your attention and mood, Marc reveals the science behind something we've always intuitively felt—that time in nature just makes us feel better. And now we know why. In a world of constant digital stimulation and screen fatigue, this episode offers both a scientific framework and a simple, hopeful prescription.

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. More…

Kathryn Anne Edwards, a labor economist and co-host ofOptimist 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 spending and challenges common economic narratives.

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 in terms of moral standards and civil behavior. This cognitive "bug" he has detected can lead us to develop a more pessimistic view of the world and also leaves us more susceptible to believe in the message of autocrats who promise to take us back to a time when the world – and people – were somehow better than they are today. Adam's insights are fascinating, as are the techniques he uses in his research, and he explains his findings and observations with great wit and wisdom.