Hope Is A Verb - Bryan Walsh - Solving the Narrative Deficit

Episode Date: November 19, 2025

Meet Bryan Walsh, editorial director at Vox, where he leadsFuture Perfect – one of the most ambitious experiments in solutions-journalism that focuses on the policies and technologies that will make the future a better place. As a former foreign correspondent and climate writer for Time Magazine and the author of End Times: A Brief Guide to the End of the World, Bryan has spent more than two decades tracking humanity’s gravest threats. Today Byran is focused on highlighting the under-reported progress that show we stillhave room to bend the story in a better direction. Other topics: the good news hiding behind every dayconveniences; George Washington's candles as perspective; why Bryan’s report card for humanity is "incomplete"; negativity bias, doomscrolling, and the allure of bad headlines; local crime statistics versus national fear of rising violence; how American political psychodrama dominates the global news feed; what AI overviews and chatbots are doing to online media traffic; theeconomics of journalism after print advertising and social media; Future Perfect's origin story and focusing on what matters most; philanthropy, foreign aid cuts, and momentum in development gains; why solutions journalism can feel like eating your vegetables; the narrative deficit and hero deficit in progressreporting; pandemic vaccines as an under-appreciated scientific and moral triumph; hope as a life preserver rather than a prediction and creating a media ecosystem that rewards depth, nuance, and solutions. Find Out More: Future Perfect – Vox MediaAre you interested in how ⁠80,000 Hours⁠ can help you use your career to make a difference? Check out their podcast on Apple,Spotify or where ever you listen to your podcasts.This podcast is hosted by Angus Hervey and Amy Davoren-Rosefrom ⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠Fix The News⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠. Audio Producer/Director Anthony Badolato, Hear That? If you love this episode, please share, leave a review. You can get in touch with the team via email [e-mail]

Welcome back to Hope is a Verve and our second last episode for this season. I have to admit, I have lost all sense of timelines. We've banked so many conversations over the past few months with people from all across the globe, and we really appreciate that you've stayed on for the ride with us. But if this is your first time joining us, hi, I'm Amy. And I'm Gus, and we're from Fix the News, a solutions-based media organization that reports on hidden stories of progress from around the world. And today, we're chatting with Brian Walsh, the former foreign correspondent and climate writer

for Time, who is now the editor of Vox's Future Perfect, one of the most ambitious experiments in solutions-driven journalism. Each week, Brian explores the big ideas and policies and innovations that could make the world better. He covers everything from global health and poverty reduction to AI safety, animal welfare and existential risk. And his work is to not just report on these issues, but to frame them in a way that helps us understand the bigger picture. From the stories that aren't getting enough attention to the future that we're building right now, Brian is a journalist after our own heart, one who brings a long lens clarity and a well-grounded optimism to whatever it is that he is reporting.

This is a big conversation and we dive into everything from the media landscape in 2025 Brian's take on this moment in American history, how to make solutions journalism work and why he believes that even in this noisy, messy world, there's always a path forward. Brian, welcome to the podcast. Great to have you here. There is a lot going on in the world right now. Is anything good happening out there? Well, yes, I think a lot of good things are happening out there,

which is good for me because I write a weekly newsletter about those good things. When we think about what's happening in the world today, We have a very present-day bias, right? We quickly forget what happened in the past. So certainly, you don't have to go very far back to know that whether it was due with health, life expectancy, or social rights, very few of us would want to be teleported back

50, 60, 70, 80 years, let alone further than that. So we're sort of enjoying aspects of progress in our daily lives. We kind of take it for granted, but occasionally I'll try to shine a light on that fact. You know, if you go back 249 years ago, 1776, we had our Declaration Independence,

signed. Wow, things were bad. Daily life was really, really hard. You look at things like infant mortality, huge. People didn't have light. I read something recently about how George Washington had to spend the equivalent of hundreds of dollars a month just getting candles. So there's all those kind of small things that are just part of the background of our lives that are good things. And then I think there's stuff that is happening actively right now. I'm really excited about improvements that are happening around medicine, some of these new drugs, the DLP 1 inhibitors, that are having a huge impact on all kinds of diseases that go with metabolic syndrome. or cardiovascular disease.

So those are good things that are happening beyond just the fact that as bad as the headlines can look, people are doing good things, whether that's in charity, whether that's trying to find innovations, whether that's just being good people, frankly. Those things are as real

as all the negative headlines you hear. Yeah, the obvious counter-argument to everything that you're saying is that, well, okay, maybe life is better for us than it was for our grandparents, but now we've suddenly got policy changes and a change in governance, especially in the United States,

you've got these huge funding cuts to science. So we're not going to see those advances happen as much. Everything perhaps is about to get much, much worse. Do you buy into that argument? I understand that argument, and I think that prediction has been made many times in the past. There are many people who have prophesied that things are about to really fall off a cliff. The world is about to end.

Now, of course, this only has to happen once before we're all in real trouble. And I do worry a lot about the current moment. The things you've identified in terms of the policies here in the United States, it's devastating. There's no getting around it. There's no sort of way to put a happy face on it. And I do worry specifically about policies that keep out scientists from the U.S. from coming in here, whether it's the study, whether it's to work. There's a huge, huge blow to the United States, in some ways, even bigger than the money thing.

Like, money can be replaced, but people can't. And what's made the United States an engine of innovation has been its ability to attract people. If we stop that, it's like committing a form of national suicide. At the same time, we can't adjust, people adapt, and that doesn't mean things will be okay. Rather, it makes it all the more important that we come up with ideas that people have the energy to push back against this, both directly and politically,

but also, I think, to figure out ways around it possibly. One thing I cover a lot is foreign aid and global development. And that's been one of the best stories in the world for the last 25 years. plus. Amazing reductions in childhood mortality in deaths from neglected diseases that should have been solved a long time ago. That stuff is at real risk of both plateauing and maybe actually starting to turn back and that worries me a lot. And then here comes the Trump administration to slash USAID funding. That's going to be devastating or to say we're going to

take billions away from global efforts around vaccines. The way I look for sort of optimism there is to identify the people or groups that are trying to find a way to keep things going and try to find a way to do things better in the future. There are people who are stepping up in terms of philanthropy around that. People who have dedicated their life to this are not going to just stop. So I hope there's a certain kind of momentum to this form of progress that will carry on however long this lasts. And I guess the other thing I'll say is that I do have hope that the United States

and other countries certainly have gone through really terrible times in the past, politically terrible times economically, we've managed to bounce back. And I think sometimes this is what happens in history. Do we have a dark period? And this is, I think, in many ways, dark period. But that's not an excuse to stop fighting. And it's not an excuse to miss out and things are working well in the world. Brian, you've got a really long lens on a lot of these issues. You've reported on everything from pandemics to the climate collapse. And now you do deep dive future-facing journalism. If you were to give us as a species

a bit of a report card right now, what would it say? That's really interesting. Incomplete, for one thing, because there's never a complete story. I've been a journalist since 2001. And depending on when you stop the clock, you would come to different conclusions.

We've made amazing strides in the most basic areas of reducing the people who die of a disease they shouldn't die of, which is something that was just always in the background of humanity. And even as we made amazing strides in rich countries on those things, with you mentioned things like vaccines, antibiotics and so forth, it was just kind of a given that for much of the world that was marred in extreme poverty, well, not much can be done about that.

And I think one of the most impressive and most important things that's happened over the last quarter century is a large number of people who said it doesn't have to be this way. Whether it's a mix of money, a mix of innovation, a mix of will, we can change that. So we were making really good progress. We've had a back turn. I don't know. I mean, B minus, I guess, if I pull, does that translate?

I mean, is it a zero out 100? I don't know. I mean, like it depends, I suppose. A B minus, I guess. But I think the incomplete part is the important part. Like, there will never be a final kind of grading of the human species because hopefully we'll keep going. And hopefully learn from the past and then try to do better in the future.

Now, you've been a journalist since 2001. A lot of big shifts are happening in the media industry, especially over the last few years. What's your take on where media's at right now? It's a tough world. I mean, it's funny to say that because I have seen a lot of changes in the media world. When I started in 2001, I was working for Time magazine, the biggest weekly news magazine in the United States.

And I could talk to people who'd worked there for 2025 years, which people did back then. And while obviously things had changed in the 25 years before in their career, it wasn't too different. Like you did the job more or less the same. You had some new stuff like, oh, cell phones, there's useful computers. But it wasn't hugely different. And then when I get in there, the Internet is beginning to come of force faster and faster. That is incredibly disruptive.

I see a lot of layoffs. You see a lot of shifts in employment away from stalwart things like newspapers, which had, I think, reached about at least in the United States. A peak in employment sometime in the late 90s. and then it's just been down, down, down, down since. And then, of course, at the same time you see these new things rise. The site I work at now, Vox, is only 10 years old. So it gets founded in 2014 as part of a whole raft of new media startups that wanted to do journalism in a different way

that were enabled by the Internet to do that. You could not have done Vox in 1994. So suddenly the Internet that was on one hand destroying the foundation for the media as we'd known it, at least in print, also was giving birth to all these new startups, all these new ways of doing it, new writers, new voices, really exciting. And we think we're into a new era. And then, of course, it's always been tough to make a business out of this.

It's hard to translate a method around advertising that's really based around the fact that you were able to get that money because there was nowhere else for it to go. If you're a big magazine, nighttime magazine, you can reach audiences no one else can. Suddenly the internet comes along, and that's no longer the case. So that's a problem. And it doesn't quite translate to digital. And now you have AI. And AI is creating more rapid change than

And I feel like almost everything else combined in the years leading up to this. The site I work at was based on the idea that you put stuff out there and it will be found by people searching for it on Google or maybe a little spread on social media like Facebook. And what we discovered is as users migrated to tools like ChatGPT or Google itself starts giving you those AI overviews, suddenly traffic to stories falls off a cliff. And suddenly we need to figure out a new way to make money. But also suddenly we're dealing with a crisis and truth that goes well. beyond all the concerns about misinformation and disinformation that rose with social media.

At the same time, it does open up new windows, new ability for any individuals to do things. Like, we've seen new platforms rise out of that. We've seen a real focus around things, obviously, like audio and podcasts or newsletters. So on one hand, you can do more as a journalist now, never before. The challenge is, how do you get it read or watched or listen to? Even as the audience itself is changing what they want, increasingly they want videos, increasing they're less interested in reading words. I mean, I can't believe it's only been 25 years

because it feels like this is more changed than someone before me would have experienced in 50 plus years. I want to talk specifically about this idea of reporting on progress and the overwhelming bias in the media towards bad news. I mean, this is not new, right? The phrase, if it bleeds, it leads, came from William Randall first in the 1890s,

and he coined it after seeing that stories involving horrific incidents were the ones that caught the public's attention. So could you just say that this is the way the news has always worked, or is there something different about what we're seeing now? I think definitely there's an element where this has always been the case. And this is why it goes beyond the economics of media to the psychology of human beings.

We are predisposed to a kind of negativity bias. If something's going well, you can notice it or not notice it. It's not a threat to you. If something's going badly, you're going to pay more attention to it. the media learned as became more competitive that, yes, highlighting the negative, highlighting the danger, playing up the violent news, was a way to get audience. And that's remained the case. One form of media that has barely changed at all is our local news that we have on our broadcast networks always leads with murder. Like, it's amazing. Like I grew up outside

city, Philadelphia, where a lot of crime, even here in New York, where crime is far, far, far less. I mean, something I've written about recently, it's fallen off a real cliff. You still see when a murder happens, it gets coverage. And so I think that's built into a certain extent. Like, is it worse now? I think it can be. I mean, for one thing, we are far more wired into what's happening all around the world than we used to be. Sometimes I think what would World War II have been like if we had Twitter and TikTok? What would we like to be wired into something that was far more horrific than anything we've experienced, but experienced by us in that kind of way that we experience things on social media, the emotional sort of activation

that goes into it. I think it would be far worse. That's a measurement where our ability to know what's happening, or at least think we know what's happening, has intensified in a way that often will make us think things might be worse than they really are. And then when you play video on a mass scale, that intensifies it as well, because that sort of tends to go towards hot emotions to really engage feeling. We're quicker to click into something that things threatening or dangerous or bad than we are to something that feels good. It plays better on video. The same things that William Randolph Hearst was saying over a cent ago remain the case now. I just think that we just have so many more outlets. And I don't really know what your feed looks like. You

don't really know what my feed likes like. So we're not getting the same news. But I do know that generally speaking, whether it's a headline, whether it's a tweet, whether it's a video, if it tries to engage those sort of negative threatened emotions, it generally will get better engagement. It doesn't will spread more, even though you don't feel good doing that. And so you have something like doom scrolling, which on the face of it is like an insane term, why would you want to scroll endlessly about Doom? And yet there's a reason why we all find ourselves doing it. There's a compulsion that is easy to feed and profitable to feed too, unfortunately.

Amy, whenever I hear someone talk about this ubiquitous phrase, doom scrolling, it always feels like they're speaking to me personally because I have been doom scrolling longer than almost anyone that I know. I came into the work that we do here at Fix the News as a news junkie. I'm still a news junkie. And Vox was created around 10 years ago the same kind of time that I started leaning

into Solutions Journalism. So for me, this conversation feels personal in a way that's difficult to describe. It really kind of bookmarks a decade of work both for myself and for Brian, but I think also a decade in the wider media ecosystem. And as you know, a decade is a long time. Yeah.

You know what was interesting for me is talking to someone who's working in the same part of the media ecosystem that we are, but spotting different things. Yeah. I really loved his framing around the world's report card and that the story is always incomplete. There's never that final grade.

And that's where the possibility for future progress lies, right? Not necessarily in the boxes that we've already ticked, but in that process of making mistakes, learning the lessons and doing better next time. That really resonated for me. The other big issue, as we see it, is the overwhelming dominance of US politics in new. American media companies control 90% of English language news distribution globally, and American

news topics receive somewhere between 10 and 15 times more coverage than any other country. I recently read that news in Canada covers 20 times more American news than news about Canada. The psychodrama of US politics soaks up so much more of our attention globally as a species than any other country. Where does this play into the split screen between good news and bad news? Well, first off, I'd like to apologize for that. But I'd mentioned there's been an element

that's always been the case. If you were to look at over a longer time frame, it's gotten worse over those years. And that's in part of a recognition of the fact that all these new technologies in terms of the media, it's an internationalized thing. So where it used to be at a lot of news was inherently more local

because we didn't have the technology to have messages going from around the world instantly. We end up focusing on what's happening at this bigger level, and in doing that miss what's happening more locally, and it's funny because if you ask people, take something like crime, for instance, you ask them like, how is crime in America? They'll be like, oh, it's getting worse, it's getting worse. It's amazing. We keep saying it's getting worse every year, which is not usually the case. But then if you ask, how is your city or how is your neighborhood, they'll be like, oh, it's actually pretty safe. So there's a disconnect where we can't be the case where all the localities are safe, and yet the whole country is dangerous. So you're dealing with much less knowledge, which means it's much easier to activate those negative emotions. And I suspect this is also a factor of declining budgets.

If you're dealing and you're serving a smaller audience in an age where you can no longer count on a geographic monopoly when it comes to cost or advertising, it's going to be much harder to work. And so you end up with a handful of much larger brands. Like here in the United States, things like CNN or The New York Times, which is metastasized in the year since I've been a journalist. like it was always America's biggest newspaper. But now it's a global news brand that is very specifically looking to grow its audience in other parts of the English-speaking world. What's interesting is they now do much less coverage

of New York City, where I live, where they're based, because you're not getting a lot of returns for that. And then lastly, we politics working here and say, the president is basically someone who thinks in the terms of TV or digital media because it's a bit of a sort of Twitter native. And so it's almost like the way we cover politics is in a game show kind of way that sadly does keep eyeballs

that's built in some ways to attract attention. And then, of course, it's the fact that whether there's trade policy or foreign policy, the U.S. still has this enormous influence over countries that have no voice in our government. And even as we're probably entering a bit of a period of national decline, that hasn't changed really, I think it's unhealthy for the U.S. I think it's unhealthy for news consumers around the world because you can obsess over what's happening here in the U.S.

and you have no ability to control it. It just creates like a passive audience factor and then on top of it, you're probably paying less attention to what's actually happening in your own country or your own backyard. Okay, so you've got declining budgets, it's harder to get eyeballs,

and at the moment it feels like the loudest voices in the world are the ones that are getting the headlines. In this ecosystem of today's news, how do you make solutions, journalism work? It's difficult. I think a lot of it will come down to framing. I think there's an inherent attraction to innovation still. I find when I compare a real severe problem to something where science is making a practical difference, that seems to help. The bottom line, people

count on the work of scientists and researchers to actually make the world a better place, whether that's through a new drug, a new technology, things like that. So I find those work. On a different level, this is not something we do as much, but I think when you can personalize it or when you can write about people that are being impacted by this, that can make a difference. We deal often with big numbers. Something like malaria, hundreds of thousands of people a year,

it's hard to really put your head around that. That's a medium-sized city gone every year. But if you personalize it in terms of actual families, in terms of people, that was something when I used to work at time we were really focused on. Tell the story through a person, that's more likely to stick, I think. Brian, I want to talk some more about, Solutions journalism, because I think that this is really an area that you know more about than

almost anyone else that we can think of. And I thought what might be interesting here is to read a bunch of stories that have happened since the beginning of 2025. So six countries around the world have already eliminated a disease. We've got a new TB vaccine in trials, malaria awards emptying out across Africa. About six to seven million kids have been vaccinated already. Nepal just eliminated extreme poverty. Canada's made a mass. of new investment into making child care affordable. Finland and Ireland just shut down their last coal plants. Thailand just banned corporal punishment for children.

The United States is on track to reach its lowest filing crime and lowest murder rate ever in 2025. And last but not least, the biggest story in the world, China's emissions are coming down now because it's deploying so much solar. Yeah. Why did these stories not get any cut through? And why do solutions journalism feel like eating your vegetables? Oh, God. It's harder to turn to a story, possibly. I mean that, like, in a narrative sense. I could definitely tell you from the media. When we mean the news, we generally mean, and this thing went wrong. I think in part because, especially in the world today, you just ran off a whole list of really amazing things. And there's more than that happening, too. So I think it feels like it's in the background. The China thing is so interesting. I worked in Hong Kong for five years to start my career. Some of the first stories I did were about just how terrible the air pollution was coming across the border in China. And the

idea that it's gotten fixed in many ways is astounding. I think part of it is a kind of baseline shift that happens. We get accustomed to something improving and we stop recognizing that actually matters. I think as well, there's an element where for audience, it feels weirdly not smart to consume this kind of coverage. You are a sophisticated person if you think things are bad because you're smart enough to see it, which actually is not hard to see. I think with solutions, there's no one to blame, which I think is a big part of news coverage and news consumption, especially again in a more social media era. Like we're usually trying to identify very quickly what went wrong. And in some ways, that's a great step forward.

Like we've experienced these terrible floods in West Texas, the worst than the deadliest floods we've had in decades in the U.S. And these things used to happen more often. And I believe when they did, the reaction was less, well, what went wrong? Because we didn't presuppose we had the power to control things like that. Now, almost instantly you're going to who failed, right? Like this shouldn't happen, who failed. And that is true to a certain extent. Like things like that, incident in particular, should not have happened to this degree.

But what that means is that there's a constant feeling that there's failure everywhere. Government's failing or people are failing or business or institutions definitely are failing. And I think trying to consume solutions, journalism means you have to go back against that to a certain extent. If your attitude is that things are wrong, this is challenging that. There might be a bit of a cognitive disconnect, I think, that sort of pushes people away. And maybe it's just inherently less traumatic. We'd love to consume stories about the people who were saved in a terrible event like that, but not really about the people who put it in the work, say, to create the flood walls,

to prevent this from happening somewhere else. It's often you're writing clues in journalism about, especially if you're getting ahead of a problem, you eliminate the narrative right there. If you build the better bridge, the build the better blood walls, we won't have the story where they go wrong. And there's no way to fixate on that. There's a narrative deficit. And as long as news, and human beings really, and this is just part of who we are, make sense of the world through stories. It is harder to make them stories.

You need to identify that something's going wrong. Maybe then you can fix it. That's a story. But that more gradual improvement in things doesn't get as much attention. Like if there's a real huge leap forward, like the polio vaccine comes around, that's a big story. story, but most of what we think of as solutions is slowly improving things, and that is inherently just less newsworthy feeling than when things go wrong. Or I guess even better, is Solutions Journalism the elimination of narrative?

That's a problem, right? Does it have to be this way? It's a problem in terms of audience, for sure. And it's funny. I think that's one reason why a lot of what we see in Solutions journalism tends to go two different ways. One is, honestly, a little bit like Cat rescued from Tree. It tends to have. that end of the news on the lighter side, the feeling, that's one thing. And then it tends to be very data-driven, very wonky, right? And we do that for sure. We like our charts and data visualizations as much as everyone else, because in some ways, numbers are the better way to tell that story, but still, it's not that narrative. And I think maybe there's a cultural element

here, too. If we had a world where we recognize heroes more, maybe that is where that narrative could come from. But I don't think we really do. Certainly not people we can agree on in any meaningful way. I look back to the pandemic, which the more time passes, the more I think we will be grappling with the psychological and political effects of it for decades. But the creation of those vaccines was astonishing. And I had covered SARS in Hong Kong and bird flu and then H1N1 flu and all these things. And I was told this about the experts, this is going to take four or five years to develop. We don't develop them faster than that. And suddenly, and weirdly enough, thanks very much to the first Trump administration because they really were the ones doing this.

We had this in a year, like an incredibly effective vaccine with a new technology. I feel like in a world where we had greater trust institutions, the people who did that would be heroes. They'd be like Jonas Salk, these titanic figures from the 20th century that everyone recognizes are great humanitarian. And, of course, what actually happened. A lot of people took the vaccine. Many people didn't, at least in the United States. There was tremendous loss of trust. Suddenly it becomes subject to conspiracy theories.

And this very moment that, like, in some ways to my mind, is the most fantastic. humanitarian development in recent memory becomes the point at which paranoia and doubt and anger revolves. Fast forward four years and the person currently in charge of the department that actually created that vaccine is led by an inadvertent anti-vaxxer. I mean, that's depressing. But also we didn't recognize that. And I think that says something at least in the United States, like really deep and a little dark

about who we are as a people, how our media function. And if you can't have a narrative like that, I don't know when you'll have it. And in some ways, it's better if this stuff happens under the radar. Like, it gets worse that people pay attention to it, you know, because then it becomes a subject of controversy, it becomes another point of polarization. The best progress we're making now is kind of happening under the radar.

Brian, we've spent a lot of time in the big picture. But I'm really interested for you personally, how has your approach to your work changed? I think what's changed is a longer time frame, longer sense of time. And I started out as a journalist. I was 22. I didn't have a long history of time, period. I knew about history, but I didn't really think about it.

And simply by working for the next 20 years, I had this sort of period of context to draw from that I didn't before. So what that has helped me understand is I think having more confidence in prioritizing what I write about, what I cover, and really trying to identify what are the most important things out there this section that I edit is called Future Perfect and it began in 2018

because a writer in Dillon Matthews is still with us was working as a reporter in Congress and he was just bored frankly because he just kept feeling like he was writing about stuff that didn't matter oh the senator is going to hold this bill or whatever seems like a big deal at the time there's tremendous competition but he's like what does this matter

and he talks to the editor Vox the time Ezra Klein and he says I just feel like I'm not writing about things that mattered and Ezra goes well, if you wrote about the things that mattered, we just wrote about malaria all the time. And then that's literally what we ended up doing. And they create this section focusing on what are the most important problems out there

that tend to be neglected by the media and write about them in ways that focused on raising awareness, but also what can be done about them. We often, as journalists, don't stop and think about how important is what we're covering actually when you get down to it. I have the luxury now to do that. That is our job.

And I'm incredibly grateful that's an opportunity I get. and then that's continued to shape me in terms of figuring out what those things are. And that continually evolves, like you'll have new problems that pop up, new opportunities. Sometimes I'll come to realize problems that didn't even know existed. I was not aware of the extent of something like factory farming

and the damage that does until I came to work here. Now I understand that as a major problem that it deserves amelioration. So that ability to focus on what matters and that be the guiding principle more than anything else, more than what's happening on a day-to-day basis, that's probably the thing that shaped me the most in recent years. What's giving you hope about the future of media?

Are there any emerging models or trends that you think are pointing us in a better direction? I think that the growth of tools and platforms that do allow small groups or individuals to get their voice out there to pioneer new forms of medium. Even things like short form video that can be kind of awful in some ways. They don't have to be. They can be used for good. They can use for better purposes. Substack, I think that's a real bright spot.

I think it shows that people will follow smart writers and will pay for it even, which is nice. The existence of new tools to produce content faster. Having done this long time, I can remember how long certain things used to take. And we can move faster than we used to. That leaves us more time to think, which is actually good as well. I don't know what the future lies in terms of the business of it. that will be challenging. And AI plays a concerning role there for sure. But even beyond that, we've never really figured out a really effective way to make money, which at the end of the day,

is something we have to do as a business. But then you look at the New York Times as a bigger and stronger and more important brand than it ever was before. It is better and bigger and more influential and all the rest than it was in 2001 when I started. So we might get a situation where there are a few brands that really can succeed and thrive. And if they're led well, If they do good work, that's really beneficial. That's important. At the same time, as a journalist per se, it's a tricky future. Even some of the sort of newer platforms that could be hopeful, like a substack, do come with

their own challenges because certain subjects, certain writers are more likely to get subscriptions and followers than others. I worry about the gender skew on that site, a political skew as well. I worry that as we are forced to put up paywalls, which we all do at this point, or almost all of us, you are locking yourself into a smaller audience that might be necessary for survival, but I worry then that leaves the people who aren't paying for it getting really substandard information in media,

of which there's no shortage of right now. A lot of things are going to come down to the audience, really, as much as us. Like, we're trying really hard to find new solutions, like constantly in meetings and so forth. If people could recognize that value, that's where the greatest hope will be. Maybe there'll be a turn around that.

Or we'll just be able to reduce costs enough that we can continue to do our work at a scale that's meaningful, that makes a difference to the world. Okay, Brian, let's say in five or ten years there's an upsurge in solutions journalism. People finally say, you know what, enough of this doom scrolling, we need something else. So audience tastes shift, there's good leadership, there's good writing, there's good coverage. What does the journalism ecosystem look like in that world compared to the one that we have now? Yeah, in a world like that, I think there'll be more solutions right about because a lot of other things will have had to go pretty well as well.

I do keep wondering, like, at some point, and to be it's the next generation. I mean, it's Generation Z or the people will come after them, where they'll just see the psychological wreckage that a doom-scrolling life has led so many people to and just be like, no, no, thank you. In the same way that we all stopped smoking, in large numbers at least, a while back,

like social change like that can happen. AI is an interesting tool because on one hand, there are ways in which it might actually help the pursuit of truth depending on how the program and how they're aligned all the rest

they can be more reliable than perhaps like the free-for-all that we have now and if that happens then you have a more healthy ecosystem to a certain extent that potentially opens the door

for people to be more into solutions I think there's a cart and a horse situation here where unless we can start to see yes things are progressing there are improvements happening all the time

if there's a way to make that more visible I mentioned the narrative deficit or the hero deficit it. Is there a way to fix that? It's tough. But I think, again, if we get to a situation where people feel good about the world or that things can get better, because there's so many challenges, not just beyond sort of what's happening in the moment, but something like climate change is a particular challenge to this narrative because even if we improve climate change, it will continue to get worse

for years and years because of carbon up in the atmosphere and long-term things. So there's a sense where young people really feel like everything will continue to get. worse. Maybe we actually need to show that it is getting better in more obvious ways, more visible ways, that could make a difference. And that makes people more open to coverage or ideas around making the world a better place. And that then leads to more engagement, more attention. The title of this podcast is hope is a verb. What does the word hope mean to you? Yeah. I think the word hope to me means an attitude where I believe things could get better.

I think it's something I hold on to. There's a reason why we use the term giving up hope, right? If you surrender it, it means you've signed off in the possibility of anything getting better. To give it up is to give up, period, in some ways. And once you've lost it, that's the end of the story. And in some ways, holding on to that is all the more important when it seems like that doesn't make sense.

I could give you all kinds of rational reasons for why you should hope that. things will get better. You should feel that things will get better. But I'm as human as anyone else. Like, I have a negativity bias. I really have to fight against that. And so, let me some article like a life preserve it, that I need to stay afloat. Amy, what I really love about this conversation that Brian has named here something that I've long thought, but haven't I really had the language for, which is the idea of a narrative deficit in solutions journalism. And I think it's such an important point that solution journalism isn't going to work if we just try

and force it down people's throats and say this is an important thing to be listening to or to be reading or to be watching it can't feel like eating your vegetables we know that doesn't work we've seen that in the world of climate change what we need to do is create stories that are compelling, that are interesting, where we make it unput-downable. And I feel like this concept of narrative deficit is something that we can take on board in our own work. But I think is something crucial for the wider solutions journalism ecosystem to really think about and take on. Yeah. And it's funny because even though we didn't use these words, when Brian spoke about the hero deficit, I mean, that's exactly what made us start this.

podcast because we see from the newsletter that there were all of these extraordinary people out there but no one was paying attention to them because no one could see them coming from a background in legacy media I'm still astounded that when I reach out to these people it's usually through a personal Gmail address there's no agent there's no layers of comms and I just keep waiting for everyone else to catch on to not only how incredible these people are, but how interesting and compelling their stories are. I remember I said to you a long time ago

when you first started writing the humankind section for Fix the News, and when we started discovering these people, we said these are the true celebrities. Every single time we speak to one of these people, we come away feeling starstruck. Now, if this conversation has made you feel more ambitious about making your own difference in the world, it's really worth checking out the 80,000 hours podcast. We love what these guys are doing.

And they tackle some really interesting issues that can help people figure out which problems they want to work on, and also some of the best approaches for solving them. Recently, they've interviewed Alan Defoe on How to Shape AI Development, Sam Bowman on why housing still isn't fixed and what would actually work and they've even explored the complicated relationship between guilt, imposter syndrome and doing good. So if that sounds like you,

they are a great podcast to check out. They chat with a wide range of guests from academics and activists to entrepreneurs and policymakers. So if you're looking for something to hook into, tune in through their website, YouTube or wherever you listen to your podcasts. As always, we will pop all the links in our episode notes and make sure that you join us next week for our final episode of Season 4 and it's a good one. We're catching up with some of the team from Future Council, that inspiring feature doco that follows eight young

people on an epic road trip across Europe to find solutions to some of our greatest challenges. There are a lot of podcasts out there. It means a lot to us that you chose this one. This podcast is recorded in Australia on the lands of the Gardagal and the Wurundry and Wayorong people. We'd like to thank our paying subscribers for making projects like this podcast possible. If you're interested in finding out more about our work,

check out fixthenews.com. If you enjoyed this conversation and would like to support Hope as a verb, make sure you subscribe and leave a review. Thanks for listening. Thank you.