The Future Is Inherently Uncertain, But What Could Go Right?
TechStuff
iHeartPodcasts
4.3 • 1.9K Ratings
🗓️ 24 April 2026
⏱️ 58 minutes
🧾️ Download transcript
Summary
Many contemporary talking heads take a pessimistic view of the future, but our guest today hopes to change this. Oz interviews Zachary Karabell, host of the podcast What Could Go Right? and founder of the Progress Network, about being an ‘edgy optimist’ and what that means for the future of humanity.
After that, TechStuff presents an episode of What Could Go Right? featuring Ian Bremmer, the founder of Eurasia Group and GZERO Media. Together, Bremmer and Karabell discuss how the post-WW2 world order has changed over the years, whether social media is a tool for freedom or a mechanism for control, and why the current moment of global chaos may simply be part of a longer geopolitical cycle — one that, like all cycles, eventually turns.
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Transcript
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| 0:00.0 | This is an I-Heart podcast. |
| 0:02.5 | Guaranteed human. |
| 0:19.7 | Welcome to Tech Stuff. I'm Osvaloshin, and today we're joined by Zachary Carabelle. |
| 0:24.1 | He's an author, an investor, who has written widely on history, economics and international relations. |
| 0:30.2 | He writes a substack called The Egy Optimist and he's the host of a podcast called What Could Go Right, |
| 0:35.6 | which I'm delighted to say kaleidoscope is now producing. |
| 0:39.1 | Today we're going to hear from Zachary about the podcast and why you should listen |
| 0:42.1 | before playing this week's episode. |
| 0:44.7 | But without further ado, Zachary, welcome to text. |
| 0:48.1 | Why, thank you, Oz. |
| 0:49.1 | What makes you an edgy optimist? |
| 0:50.4 | What makes me an edgy optimist? |
| 0:51.7 | Well, I'm not an optimist, full stop. So I wrote this column in 2011, |
| 0:59.3 | 12, and 13 for Slate and the Atlantic and Reuters. And I called it the edgy optimist. And part of the |
| 1:04.5 | point was that was, I thought, when we were beginning to descend into what I thought would be |
| 1:10.0 | a more temporary |
| 1:10.9 | nadir of pessimism and has remained a trough that we have only deepened and have yet to get |
| 1:16.0 | out of it. |
| 1:17.0 | But the end of the first Obama presidency in beginning of the second where all of a sudden |
| 1:20.1 | the kind of the gold, well, there was 2008 financial crisis, but I feel like from the 90s |
| 1:25.0 | to the kind of 2008 era, like things are pretty good. |
| 1:28.9 | Yeah, 9-11 being a, we had a kind of a collective response to 9-11 that felt like we were coming together. |
... |
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