Callum Parks
Rice University
Houston (29.7° N, 95.3° W)
featuring Thomas Burnett, Assistant Director of Public Engagement, John Templeton Foundation, Philadelphia (39.9° N, 75.1° W)
Thomas Burnett is the assistant director of public engagement at the John Templeton Foundation. Mr. Burnett graduated from Rice University in 2000 with a BA in philosophy. Upon graduation he attended UC-Berkeley and did doctoral studies in the history of science. Mr. Burnett has worked in a variety of roles. He has been a high school teacher, a science writer, editor, and a communications associate. These experiences led him to his current position at the John Templeton Foundation. In his job, he helps translate the complicated “science-speak” into publicly understandable information. He describes his job as “identifying thought-provoking, underappreciated, and potentially beneficial findings from recent research in order to enhance public engagement with science and the Big Questions.”
During my interview with Mr. Burnett, we discussed his current position, including how his education and skills fit with it, how the media we consume is created, and the impact technology has on our lives. Mr. Burnett has a tendency to turn basic interview questions into something more, building on his ideas and at times surprising himself. His philosophy background stands out; his thought process is unique.
Mr. Burnett’s views on technology’s current impact resonate with me the most. He believes we currently possess the most powerful tools for investigation in history, but with this there are consequences. He mentions how we constantly bombard ourselves with distractions, and that this endless cycle of “being busy” could be preventing us from necessary introspection and asking the questions that need to be asked. Mr. Burnett believes true boredom could be the catalyst of philosophical revolution. This fascinates me. When I told Mr. Burnett that I had never seen things that way, he responded, “Neither have I actually. I just made that up right now.” I laughed.
The second point that resonates with me is the function of the science journalism industry. Growing up with interests in STEM, I read article after article but never considered the origination of the article. I always assumed a journalist read a scientific paper and then wrote about it. I know now that this is typically not the case. Individuals like Mr. Burnett read published papers, pick out what is important, and pass this information to news outlets who cover the story. Understanding the creation process behind the media I consume helps me better appreciate the effort put into it and I can better understand the information presented.
Highlights from the Interview
When did you envision yourself as the assistant director of public engagement at the John Templeton Foundation?
Honestly not until I saw the job posting, because I didn’t think a job like that actually existed. Essentially, my position draws from basically all areas of my interest that I had cultivated over the last twenty years, which is what made the position so surprising. I have a degree in philosophy from Rice; it drew on that. I did graduate studies in history of science; it drew on that. I’ve done a lot of studies in natural sciences; it drew from that. There’s theology—I drew on that. And then also communications, more generally speaking. So all those different threads tied together was this job description. It’s pretty interesting that there’s a job in which I didn’t have to make up anything about how I could see myself fit into the job because pretty much everything I had done for the past two decades fit. It was a very unusual opportunity and that’s the reason why I was willing to move from Washington, D.C. to Philly to take the job. Otherwise it would have taken a lot to get me out of that city. Pretty much only this job could have done that.
What does your position entail?
The Templeton Foundation funds a lot of research in different academic areas—the natural sciences, social sciences, philosophy, and theology. So you can imagine how much research you can do with around eighty or ninety million dollars a year. A lot of research gets done. It’s a lot of publications, a lot of books, a lot of articles—a huge volume of scholarly material. Some of it’s good, some of it’s so-so, some of it’s spectacular. But if you don’t have someone who looks at it all to assess whether it’s interesting or not, then it just kind of sits there in scholarly communities kicking around in journals and various things that are behind a paywall that nobody else knows about. So something the Templeton Foundation wants is not just to invest in scholarship, but for these new discoveries to be shared more broadly so normal humans can appreciate the kinds of things that we learn about. My role is to investigate what’s going on in the research world and then to help unearth the kinds of stories that would be of interest to people that read the Washington Post or the Atlantic or many other different media outlets in which they’re looking for good stories, for good information, or for insights. To be able to bring those kinds of stories to where they are, serving as that bridge between the academic world and the media world—that’s a very tenuous and long, long bridge, and so you need intermediaries, and I play an intermediary role.
Do you think there are any misconceptions about this job?
Most people are surprised that this job exists because what tends to happen is that you can find a job in academia or you can find a job in media space, but there aren’t as many opportunities for someone to be tasked to engage in content as much. I guess there are people in communications departments or communications offices, but what’s interesting about them is that for folks that just work in straight communications, they don’t engage with the content so much. What it winds up being is when you describe press releases or things that are formulaic, you don’t really tell the story if you don’t know the content well enough. So I guess part of my job is to engage with the content on a deeper level so that I can identify the more human, some of the more dramatic gripping elements of it that go beyond what you would be able to say in a press release. There’s something so different from a story compared to information. That storytelling role that has to get out of the technical jargon and into plain English, that’s the space in which I work.
What skills do you find yourself utilizing the most when you’re doing these interpretations or going about your job?
It is very reading intensive. There’s a lot of analysis, a lot of writing. I write a lot of emails, and that sounds boring…but if you think of it more as a nineteenth century style and the Republic of Letters and the European Enlightenment, I identify people who are either really talented scientists or really talented journalists or editors—like big names, people you’d recognize. Usually when you email people, you never get a reply. Like if you were in PR and you email a bunch of people with your press release, your response rate approaches to zero. But if you really know your subject that you are contacting, and you communicate with them about something that they’re interested in, and you can clearly demonstrate that you have something of value, then you’re more likely to get a response. The boring way is to say that I sit around, and I write a lot of emails to people that I don’t know; the more exciting way is that I reach out to people who are themselves outstanding storytellers through this sort of professional networking to create these channels of communication where we’re swapping story ideas. It’s kind of like going fishing. You’re throwing out bait all the time, and you can’t control how consistently you catch your fish. So my job is sort of inherently risky in the sense that on any given week, I have no idea whether my effort will amount for anything. Over the course of a year, I have noticed that things do work out, but all that can be said is that I’ve probably written to two hundred people this year, and there’s maybe fifteen or sixteen really interesting articles or podcast episodes or stories that come out. I’d call my job media relations. That’s a big part of it. I’m actively commissioning literature reviews and digging into academic research. What’s unusual about this job is that I can do both.
How did your college years prepare you for what you’re doing now?
It prepared me in the sense that I gave myself a liberal arts education. I actually went to Rice University to be a physics major, and I wound up with a degree in philosophy. The way that that happened was that when I was there, I recognized that a lot of the questions I had—well a lot of questions I have—were not technical questions. Technical questions are interesting, but there are other fundamental human questions or existential questions that are really bothering me. So I flipped my major from physics to philosophy. If you get a degree in philosophy, they spend all of your time trying to teach you how to think more clearly, to analyze arguments, to read and dissect what other people are thinking and saying. So philosophy taught me how to think. I also took courses in history and English that taught me how to write. I took a fair number of biology classes. My physics…I regret to this day that I didn’t take quantum mechanics. It’s a handicap, honestly, for me in my job that I haven’t taken quantum mechanics. So that, I guess, is my biggest regret in college, which regrets being what they are is not so bad. I got an all-around education so that I learned broadly enough that I could ask questions about things I was ignorant about. And that I think is key to my job—no one that I work with knows all the stuff, but if you have enough of a foundation and you can ask good question to people who are experts, then they can teach you lots of stuff really quickly.
Learning how to learn is the most important thing. The knowledge itself can build but you need a foundation. Graduate school is where you figure out how to teach yourself, and teaching yourself is really hard. That’s the difference between undergrad and grad school. In undergrad, you’re the student, and then in grad school you have to figure out how to go your own way.
What kind of projects do you work on? What’s a brief example of one of the projects you’re working on right now?
The Templeton Foundation made a series of grants related to a biology topic on the evolution of cooperation. There are probably about five different grants with total funding of, I don’t know, twelve million dollars. And those different project leaders conducted their research, and they published things, and then there you have it. Their grants were done, they move on, and they do other things. So my project was to then look at what got published and discern, is there interesting material in here? If the answer is yes, I’ll go out and hire someone to read all the publications. This is somebody who has expertise, so that all those publications at least make more or less sense to them. It’s their kind of language and subculture. So someone will write a review of that literature. That might be eight books and a hundred and twenty articles. They’ll write me, I guess, a fifty or sixty page report of the synthesis—what is this all about, what’s interesting here—and they’ll organize it. The structure of the report is super-duper important, and then there’s the details. So I will then read that and look at that and from that think, is there anything interesting that a journalist or an editor would like here? So I read it through the lens of media space, and I might find three or four different story ideas that they might like. And then I pitch those story ideas. Imagine several levels of distillation—from a large number of academic scholarly publications distilled into a technical report, and from that turned into story pitches, and the story pitches then might turn into articles at some point. I identify the best three or four people to email first, but then I might email another twenty or twenty-five people just to get as much as I can out of the material that I have. And then I find another topic and I do the same thing. So it’s a cycle starting with a big base of literature on a given topic and then you turn the wheel that turns into a report, report turns into story ideas, and the story ideas might turn into a story. If I do that about eight times per year, then that’s considered to be successful.
That’s awesome. That’s so cool actually.
Yeah, it’s neat. Each time it’s completely starting over because it’s a topic that is utterly different than the one before so it’s very mentally exhausting because I don’t build any momentum. I mean, I do over the course of one thing, but one thing ends, and I have to just scrub my brain empty and gear up a bunch of energy and then launch the next one.
What would be your favorite topic?
I like the evolution of cooperation. I also really like the psychology of intellectual humility. It is a fascinating topic.
Can you describe it?
The idea behind intellectual humility is this: as humans we have a skill for learning and understanding the world around us, whether it’s through language or sensory perception or logic. Humans are like learning machines. At least we have the potential to learn. But at the same time we have to recognize that we’re limited as well. Each person has one brain. That brain has many abilities, but it can only do so much.
If you run into conflict with somebody that disagrees with you, if you are more aware of your own limitations, you have the potential for self-correction better than if you think, wow, anyone who disagrees with me is stupid. That would be the opposite of humility. It’s a neat topic. I think it applies to many spheres of life. It for sure applies to academia, it applies to politics, it applies to religion, it applies to relationships—like in marriages and friendships—it applies in office environments. It has wide applicability, but it’s a topic that is not highly valued.
In today’s space, self-promotion is the thing. And humility is the opposite of that. So there’s a tension between what might be best for us in a sense of character or wisdom and what might be best for us in terms of short-term financial gains or winning arguments and that sort of thing. I think it’s an undervalued and underappreciated concept, so that’s a reason that I’ve worked hard on it on my job.
What do you think makes the John Templeton Foundation a great place to work?
Its mission. Ultimately, the Templeton Foundation is interested in advancing human knowledge in every direction, to the degree that it can. What that involves is funding across a wide variety of areas that don’t look like they necessarily have much in common.
We do a really broad spectrum of things, with the recognition that the really big questions of life, the things that are really, really special, just cannot be answered by a single discipline. While single disciplines are extremely important, and you need a type of expertise, you’ve got to be able to work across disciplines to get a sort of vantage point, and almost a…like a community skill set to really go after the big fish.
The Templeton Foundation is committed to bringing together people from different traditions, whether it’s science or humanities or theology, and getting people talk to each other. Really interesting insights happen in those cases, and the hardest questions that humans can ask require that kind of community.
How do you think science and technology are reshaping this work? Do you think it’s making it easier or harder?
There’s greater specialization than ever, there’s more powerful tools than ever. And so when you bring good questions to the table—I think we live in an age in which when you have well-formulated questions, you have more tools than ever at your disposal to try to answer them. But I don’t know if the age that we live in helps us in terms of formulating questions or in terms of deciding which questions to explore or to privilege over other kinds of questions. I’m not so sure if we have an advantage…perhaps we’re at a disadvantage if we’re so busy and consumed with all our activities. What if boredom is essential to coming up with the most creative questions or perplexing topics to study? In that case, we’re in trouble because no one’s ever bored because we have many different ways to distract ourselves. I think we have better tools than ever, so in that sense, science and technology really help us, but perhaps we’re not in the context where we’re bringing new questions or a sense of urgency of exploring certain kinds of questions because we don’t give ourselves the time or the stimulation that we need in order to ask questions.
I never thought about it that way.
Neither have I actually. I just made that up right now.
That was actually really insightful.
That kind of thinking—where going to graduate school for eight years or whatever, gives you these technical skills, but you’re going to have to draw from somewhere else. Where do your questions come from? Why do you get bothered? Why do some questions interest you and other ones just leave you kind of flat? I don’t entirely know, but in my study of the long intellectual tradition of humanity, there’s always been people who are good question askers. That has not changed. What has changed is that the tools that we have to investigate them, but the tools themselves don’t ask questions. You have to supply those yourself, that’s kind of where creativity comes in.
What do you think the biggest issue facing your industry is?
That’s a very good question. I guess there is an industry called private philanthropy, and I am not a good person to address that, because I have not worked in philanthropy at all until this job. So there are people who kind of know these larger trends…Well, let me just give you some hearsay. So there’s a whole lot of money going into philanthropy now from a small number of people in the tech world. Who the philanthropists are changes and is reflective of the days in which you live. Back in the days of Andrew Carnegie and Andrew Mallon, there’s railroad and oil titans that built their empires and subsequent foundations. And there’s people that work in totally different fields—they are software developers, and they have billions of dollars. I think who has the money is really going to affect where this money gets spent. So I think that’s going to make a difference. Our founder, John Templeton, was more like Warren Buffett. He broadly knew business across many, many sectors, but somebody who developed a company in San Jose and then sold it for three billion dollars is going to have a very different vantage point than Sir John who is looking across dozens of different industries for where good investments were. The people who found the foundations are going to have their imprint on what philanthropy looks like. So that’s certainly going to change as the way that our economy works, and the way that money gets made, it makes philanthropy look different. That’s about as specific as I can be, because I’m way new to the area and quite ignorant.
What advice would you give a student interested in your field?
Here’s how I’m going to answer it. I’m going to say that my field is the liberal arts, because that it is the liberal arts that got me to where I am. And I would tell liberal arts students that liberal arts is not about trying to get a particular job after college. It’s about building a foundation and a skill set that would be valuable to jobs you’ve never considered before, probably even jobs that don’t exist right now.
Many people who go to college are generally curious people that want to learn. They are fascinated by humans, they’re fascinated by nature, they’re fascinated by space. For those people, it really does not matter what job you get right out of college. What matters is during the four years you’re there that you learn how to read well, to write well, to think well, to network, to be comfortable in strange places. It’s a combination of building your intellect and building your social skills and building your character. You are developing assets that would be valuable in a number of different venues that you can’t envision at all while you’re doing it or in the world we live in. The world changes too fast. There are notable exceptions. There are professions like medicine, law, engineering, architecture, music that require a training regimen. But anything in the business world, anything in the nonprofit world, those things require—if you’ve developed your intellect, your social skills, and your character, that’s the way to prepare for those jobs.
So that’s my advice. I was a liberal arts person in undergrad, and I have a lot of liberal arts friends who just were beside themselves with not knowing what to do. There are not clear paths for liberal arts students, but if you’re okay with not clear paths, there are very interesting paths that you can explore if you develop your intellect, social skills, and character during your college years.
(Interview excerpts have been lightly edited for clarity and readability and approved by the interviewee.)