Hope Is A Verb - Boyan Slat - The Impossible Cleanup

Episode Date: July 31, 2025

Meet Boyan Slat, founder of The Ocean Cleanup - the world’s largest cleanup in history. After starting as a high school project in the Netherlands in 2011, Boyan’s mission has gone global, removing tens of millions of kilograms of plastic from oceans and rivers. It’s an epic job and with plastic pollution on the rise, the cleanup is doubling down on its goal to remove 90% of ocean plastic by 2040. From the recent launch of the cleanup’s 30 Cities program to dealing with critics on social media, Boyan’s 'engineering energy' might just change the way you think about the world. Topics discussed: mother nature vs human nature; why The Ocean Cleanup is not a lifelong project; behind-the-scenes of the cleaning up the world’s most polluted river; what motivates Boyan to keep going in the face of impossible odds and why addressing the root cause is not the best way to tackle our problems. For more information check out: theoceancleanup.comThis podcast is hosted by Angus Hervey and Amy Davoren-Rose from ⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠Fix The News⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠. Audio sweeting by Anthony Badolato at Ai3 – audio and voice.

Gus, it is so good to be back at the microphone, back in our chairs and doing hope as a verb. It's so nice, Amy. It's been a long time. I think our last episode was more than six months ago. Yeah, it was back in December of 2024, and it feels like the world's changed quite a bit since then. I think that might be a dramatic understatement. We are so excited for this season. There is a lot of noise out there. There's a lot of stuff clamming for our attention. But we're going to meet some really extraordinary people

that are getting on with the work. And most importantly, midway through the season, we are finally dropping our long-awaited audio documentary about the malaria vaccine. Cannot wait for that. That has been an epic project, probably the most epic I've ever worked on, but I'm really, really excited to share it. Yeah. All right. Let us get into the first episode of this season. It's a really good one. We're going to be talking about plastic. Plastic is everywhere and it doesn't feel like it's going away. Remember the Great Pacific Garbage Patch? Well, it's still there. And if anything, the problem of plastic, especially in our oceans, has gotten exponentially worse.

Microplastics have now infiltrated the deepest ocean trenches, the most remote corners of Antarctica, and we're even finding them in our bodies. What is really sad is that despite all of our individual efforts, the paper straws, the reusable bags, the guilt-ridden trips to the grocery store where you agonise over whether you can carry everything without a bag, we're still producing more plastic now

than at any other point in human history. I mean, the whole situation feels impossible. to solve. But there's always a but. There's always a but. The thing about impossible problems is that quite often the breakthrough solutions come from the most unexpected places. And I really feel that today's guest, Boy and Slat, is proof of that. He's the founder of the ocean cleanup, a non-profit that's developing technologies to get the rubbish out of our oceans and rivers. And he believes that not only can we solve this problem, we can do it within the next five years. Boyan's origin story is pretty well known by this point. At the age of 16, he was scuba diving

in Greece and he was so shocked to see all of the plastic. He thought to himself, well, why can't we just clean it up? And when he discovered that no large-scale solutions existed, he used a high school science project to draft a technology that could work with the ocean currents, Essentially, letting the ocean do the work of collecting the plastic. Twelve years on, the ocean cleanup has focused its efforts closer to shore, cleaning up some of the world's most polluted rivers. Their goal is to reach a 90% reduction of floating ocean plastic by 2040. Yeah, wow.

Which is not a huge amount of time. I feel like there's been a lot of interviews with Boyin, the inventor, about how he got started and why he got started. But because we're 12 years on, we really wanted to have a different conversation with him. It's a great conversation. Without further ado, here's Boyan Slat. This one is very general, Boyan. You decided to take on one of the world's naughtiest problems.

How are we doing? Not sure, to be honest. I remember about a year ago, I was having a chat. Max Rosa is the founder of our world and data. And he asked me a simple question, is it going up or down? We don't know. Roughly, the latest estimates is that 100 to maybe 250,000 tons of plastic is entering the oceans every year.

Similar quantities currently floating in the ocean. At the ocean clip, we're intercepting about 1, 2, 3% of global plastic emissions. So even though that's still small, we are making a measurable density. there. On the other hand, though, the amount of plastic that the world is consuming is still growing exponentially. We see a lot of growth in plastic consumption in middle-income countries, which are, of course, the places where most plastic leakage takes place, because that's where waste management is really lacking. So I do think there's probably more plastic entering the ocean today compared to, say, 10 years ago. This is a related question, which is you've got a unique

vantage point in that not only have you been working on this problem for 10 or 15 years now, but you've also traveled all over the world. You stood on the riverbanks of various different places that many people will never go to. You've been out into the deepest parts of the ocean. Is there something about the nature of the work that you do that gives you an overview effect that most people on the street just wouldn't have access to? In the same way that an astronaut gets to look at Earth from a spaceship? I don't think I've literally experienced the overview of fact. But everyone is always obsessed about discerning differences between groups of people. When you travel, you actually realize how similar we are and that human nature is a very

powerful thing. In the world of environmentalism, and maybe people who care about problems in general, they sometimes tend to ignore human nature, maybe because there are some parts of human nature that we'd rather wish didn't exist. But I think it's very important. And when you design solutions, you design them to be highly compatible with human nature. For example, as many people always say, like, if only we all did X, Y, and Z, then we wouldn't have this problem. But knowing human nature, what are really the odds that everyone would do X, Y, Z? Probably not very big, right? Certain priorities and a degree of laziness and greediness, because that gives us some survival advantages.

So you kind of want to design your solutions to work with human nature rather than trying to fight against it. I realize I'm not really answering your question. I like it as not really what I expected, but I like what you're going there. What is really interesting listening to you answer that question was most people would look at something like the ocean clean up and there's a huge amount of that problem solving mindset in there. But actually what you're dealing with is huge.

human nature. It's all the messy human stuff. How do you tackle that side of your work? And is it something that you've been surprised has become such a big part of it? First of all, I think we try and create solutions that work no matter what humans do. Ultimately, we need to better handle plastics upstream, but we're not here to be judgmental or moralistic. We're just here to solve a problem. Therefore, no matter what's going on in the minds of people, we need to be able to stop plastic from going into the ocean and return the oceans to their original pristine state. So what we're doing in the deep sea, cleaning up the legacy pollution that's already in the ocean, is really just us versus the laws of nature. But with our river work to intercept plastic in rivers before it goes into the ocean, it's all about the system around the system. Everyone sees the interceptors in these rivers and the satisfying videos of these waves of plastic being intercepted before they go into the ocean.

But actually, to make that work, you need a local operating partner that's properly incentivized. And you need waste handlers. We need governments to supplies with permits and ultimately take over the operating costs. And of course, you have the local communities as well. Because buy-in we need to be able to deploy and, yeah, the love. parts of that ecosystem that have to come together to make these river projects a success. It makes me wonder whether actual mother nature or human nature, which one is less of a challenge? I'd say nature is probably easy because it's more predictable. I forget who's quote this is,

but there's something like hardware keeps you honest, which is if you are into some kind of marketing business or something, you can kind of fool people to buy it. buying your stuff. But the laws of nature will not be fooled. You can't just bullshit your way into making something work. So that's the hard part of hardware, but it's also the beauty in that those things are very predictable. All right. I want to drill down a little bit more because you've spoken here in quite broad terms, saying you've got to partner with local communities and get local governments on board. Can you help us really understand what that looks like from an actual project.

So many war stories, man. Give us your best war story. Yeah, come on. All right. I don't think it's ever happened that the local authorities do not want a project like this to happen. The complexity, the slowness usually comes from the place of general bureaucracy. Also, it's not like we ask for some living room extension permit.

This is not something they have dealt with before. So last year we deployed an interceptor in Guatemala and what we believe to be formerly known as the heaviest polluting river on earth, the Rio Matagua. I said formally because we're now stopping almost everything that's flowing out of it. But getting that deployed was a lot of work. So the anchors of that interceptor, they are on land. And at first, it wasn't clear who owned the land. And there were no public records of anyone owning it.

and then we learned actually there's this farmer that uses the land to do need his permission to dig a big hole and put an anchor into his ground and then we couldn't find this guy anywhere and then we learned he's in the hospital but we needed his signature of this document so we went to the hospital and then we got his signature

and then the next day we learned that he actually was in hospital because he was fleeing for the local police because he had evaded some taxes he didn't pay some fines and he couldn't be arrested while being in hospital Also, to get the permit for that, we had to trace down the new environment minister that we didn't have any relationship with.

And we just couldn't get a meeting. And then at some point in time, there was this person giving a speech in a zoo in Guatemala City. And then our legal person who was trying to meet this person said, okay, I'm just going to try and meet the minister during this speech, during this event. And then she wasn't allowed to enter the zoo

because of security. So then she sneaked into the zoo through some emergency exit. and that is to get the meeting with the minister. So sometimes you have to be a bit tenacious to get what you need. And that's just one deployment, right? We've got many stories like this. Oh, that's great.

Thank you. And, you know, repeat at infinitum in every single location. All right, let's zoom back out again. So at the recent UN Ocean Conference, you guys announced your 30 Cities program, and that's going to move your work from these single river deployments to citywide solutions. Tell us a little bit more about this

and maybe explain why have you made, made this shift. What's changed? Why now? We're of course doing this because we want to solve the problem. As said, we're currently stopping about 1, 2, 3% of global missions. We've intercepted more than 30 million kilos of trash. So it's definitely already having an impact, but of course, we are far from satisfied. So we need to scale up. Ideally, we keep on this trajectory of doubling our impact every year. And to be able to continue to do that, we need to branch out to more rivers. Ultimately, we think we need to tackle about 1,000 rivers to really close the tap globally. We're currently in 20.

These 20 are exceptionally polluted, hence the outside impact there. And half of them are in Kingston, Jamaica. And so what we learned from that was that the amount of effort required to execute the Kingston project wasn't 10 times more than any of our other single river project. So there's this big economies of scale involved there because you deal with one operator across all these rivers, you deal with one authority to get the permission for all these rivers. So when you go there to do research, to attach the cameras,

to get the data, you only need one visit to get everything deployed rather than 10 separate visits to 10 different rivers. So it's just way more efficient to scale on a city-by-city basis. Coastal cities and middle-income countries, that's where the pollution really comes from. So every project going forward will not just tackle a single river, but do all of them. Are you going to try to tackle them all simultaneously, or you're going to do one city by one city? So you get Mumbai done, and then you get Kingston done and move on. What does this role actually look like? You said you're hoping to scale up to the

point where you're getting 30% of ocean plastic waste by 2030. I think that is that right, or 2045? Yeah, a third of emissions actually within the next few years publicly. Give us a bit of an idea of what does that timeline look like. Five years, not a hell of a lot of time. How are you going to do this? Yeah, it's definitely going to be scaling hell. It will be intense, right? So last quarter, we did two deployments,

and we need to get to roughly two rivers a week. I'm under no illusions that this is going to be easy. It's going to be pretty hard. But still, the question is, how do we make our lives as simple as possible? And I think one part of that is this scaling, city by city. I think the other aspect of it is that we have to standardize everything. We need to work essentially with a Lego kit of interceptors, a discrete number of barriers,

a discrete number of anchors. And then even all these other aspects in terms of collecting the data, the contracts with the government, all of that has to be standardized because we just cannot reinvent the wheel every time. I think the dream that we're chasing is that we collect the data in terms of the flow speed, the shape of the river, other information like vessel traffic and all that, and then we can plug that into our model, and our model within one or two minutes fits out the best design rather than us spending months behind the drawing table. So that's really about economies of scale, standardization, and then deploy in many cities

simultaneously. We can't just do it one after the other. that would take way too long if we do it sequentially. So Mumbai, Jakarta expansion, Panama City, all of that will see their first river staccout in the next few months. What I love about the ocean cleanup is that they are going straight out the problem. They're using engineering, ingenuity, but they're also taking on board the humanness of the problem. of these places where plastic is coming out has a different set of social and political and economic

forces that they have to deal with and they're doing it. His whole persona was really different to what I was expecting. That's interesting. Yeah, when you think about someone that's taking on such a big problem, he's so grounded. There's no big performance about it. He is just getting on with the job. I met Boyin for the first time at TED this year and I was immediately struck by his humility and it's the kind of humility that you can't fake and I think it does come from

trying to take on one of the world's biggest problems the scale of the challenge is just so daunting that you can't help but be humbled by us what I found really interesting in this next part of the conversation was that we'd consider cleaning the ocean as a lifetime project

but for Boyan this This is just the beginning of the story. You have so many pins dropped in different parts of the world right now. What have you learned about people's relationship with water across the world? Yeah. You realize how important clean water, clean oceans are for people. Also in ways you never imagined, right? And so in Indonesia, after recently deploying our latest interceptor there in the Chisadana River,

west of Jakarta, there's many fishing communities at the mouth of that river. And they used to be heavily impacted by all this stuff that came floating down this river. And now the squid that they're fishing for, they're coming back to the area. So they don't have to go that far out to the ocean to find anything to eat. and secondarily they use these little outboard engines on their boats and these used to get fouled by the plastic every few minutes so they have to bring it up, take the plastic bag out of the propeller and keep going and that also doesn't happen anymore.

And actually they were so grateful for that that they started bringing free food to the people who are operating the interceptor just as a token of appreciation. Even though it's a global problem And actually a few years ago Some other research group They deployed GPS trackers in that very river And some of them ended up on the coastline of Madagascar

So we know some of this plastic can actually Go very far There's really this global impact But still the greatest impact is within 20 miles From the river mass So you can really see a massive impact On these coastal communities That are really dependent on a healthy ocean

That must be so rewarding when you are doing such big picture work and then you have these stories of a fisherman whose life has just become a little bit easier because of that. That must really bring it home for you. Yeah, I think it's super satisfying

and also having seen the before and after situations in some of those places we deployed. Mind you, the first eight years of the ocean clean, we didn't catch any plastic. So that was very hard for myself as well as everyone else that came here with the idea that they were going to clean the ocean

and then it was just research and development for eight years and many failures. But now stuff is really working and we're really having an impact. It feels like the fun is just getting started. All right, before we get into the fun, I want to stay there for a little bit longer. Was there a moment when you wanted to give up? And would you be willing to share that with us?

I never came to that point. Of course, there were very dark periods. I think the most notable one was when our first ocean system failed, didn't catch plastic, broke into two. And the months that followed were just super hard. We're running out of money. The team was just super demotivated. We just spent all that time and money on something that didn't work.

But then I think it's always important to approach these situations freshly and realizing this for myself. Has this event in any way changed? the urgency of solving this problem. And the obvious answer is no, the problem was as large, if not larger, than the day before we had this failure. Also, every failure has been this learning opportunity and taught us what not to do and pointed us in a more productive direction.

But considering the scalably problem, I as felt a deep sense of responsibility, especially because the thing that went through my head was, if we fail, the chance that this ever happens is probably going to be way smaller, right? Because people will point at the ocean cleanup as, look, these guys, raise funding, they had all this support and all these smart people working there and they didn't succeed.

So this is a dead avenue. I think that was my biggest fear that through us failing, the probability that the cleanup would ever happen would actually have been reduced compared to if we never had started. Wow, that is literally carrying the weight of the world's oceans on your shoulders.

How do you carry that through your day? Or is it something that you just have awareness of at different points? I mean, it always felt like a big responsibility. Also, people entrusting us with their money. Yeah, I mean, what else can I say? It's been a big responsibility. At the same time, it's also a huge privilege to get to work something like this.

Boyn, I've seen you foray up into the, wild west of social media every night and again. I've seen you engage with a lot of the reply guys, especially when people are having a crack at, oh, this is a bad idea or here are all the things that could go wrong. And every time you do it, I'm always reminded of one of my favorite

quotes, which is from this guy called Francois Guizot, who is one of the key figures from the French Revolution. And he says, the world belongs to optimists, pessimists are only spectators. That quote makes me think of you whenever you wade into the fray on social media. And I know you've spoken about this

kind of thing. I wonder if you could just unpack that for us a little bit more. Yeah. She reminds me of the Teddy Roosevelt quote as well with the men in arena. I think pessimism is what preserves the status quo and optimism is what drives you forward. While doing all this, going through all these failures, I always maintained this belief that we would eventually find a way to make it happen. And I think that's been the wind in ourselves throughout this journey. I think I'm a fairly rational person. I'd like to think in probabilities and I always demand numbers. But fundamentally, it's a deeply emotional thing, what we're engaged in. It's not rational, but you need to have that belief because otherwise you're not going to feel this fire inside of you to always

keep going. I think generally in the world, there are too many people on the sidelines criticizing those who do, because it's much easier to point fingers and criticize than to actually do. You've heard people say, like, when somebody is critical or pessimistic, they come across as smart or authoritative, but when they're optimistic, you feel like they're telling you something. Or they're naive. Yeah, that too, yeah. But who critiques the critics, right? I think if you don't defend yourself against people saying things that are not true or debatable. Who else will, right? I think we'd be really cool, but I've never seen a journalist dig into critics and asking them tough questions. It's like they always get away for free

somehow. I don't think it's fair because doing these things is very hard and I feel fortunate that we managed to get to where we are today despite all of that headwind. But maybe there are a hundred other entrepreneurs who just got discouraged by it or weren't able to attract funding because of it. And that's super sad because ultimately we need to do new things. And I think the future is created by those who do, not those who criticize. Boy, in the ocean cleanup must be a pretty all-consuming day job. And night job. And a weekend job. In a world where everybody speaks about trying to find work-life balance, how do you find time to live your life while pursuing a lifelong project.

Yeah, like, how do you fall in love or fall out of love? I met your mum at TED, and it was great. I think she mentioned something about a grandchild, maybe. I don't know. I'm sure she didn't. But she didn't. It was actually my mother who was asking her that, so I apologize. I do love that both of you were Ted with your mums, by the way.

I've just got to throw that in. Yeah, it's important moments to share with family. But first I hope this is not. not a lifelong project. There's many more problems I hope to be able to spend my time on and I hope we can get this done next 10 years or so and then move on to the next one and apply what we learned from this one to the next bigger problem. And then I think this whole concept of work life balance is flawed in my view. If you work as something you're passionate about, it usually doesn't feel like work. That's also what we try to stress when people

join the ocean cleanup. It's not just a job, right? You're joining a mission and this will be all consuming but it comes from a place of intrinsic motivation rather than we are forcing you like some legal office or hedge fund there's nothing else I'd rather spend my time on than doing this of course it's seven days a week usually at 12 to 14 hours a day so it's very intense and I will not pretend that it's always fun I mean it's it's very hard work and it's training I do prioritize my sleep and I exercise and I exercise and I think that's what allows me to work those kind of hours. But it does mean there's not much time left for anything else.

But I'd rather lay on a beach once there's no more plastic on that beach and I can think back on all the war stories of getting permits in difficult countries. That's a great answer. So well said. And you know what I've just clocked? You are actually a professional problem solver. And the ocean cleanup is the first big public problem that you're solving. Have you always been like that? Were you a problem solver as a kid?

Oh, yeah, yeah. Problemer solving, building things, making things that's been stored of my life. You know, when I was two, I decided I wanted to make my own chair. And when I was eight, I almost burnt down the house because I was distilling nitrate on the furnace in the kitchen. And I lost track of time. And suddenly my mom was screaming at me because the entire house was in smoke. Dynamite on the stove. not a single moment I've been bored pretty much I always had my own projects and then when I was 12 I had this obsession with water rockets

so you know the small rockets you compressed there and decided I wanted to set a Guinness World Record with it I got some sponsors involved some corporate sponsors to pay for the equipment you know there's media and I had to recruit more than 200 people to launch one of those things at the same time That was, I think, my first project that was bigger than just me messing about. Yeah, so it's not like real problems, right?

But to me, there were kind of intellectual problems of, you know, I have some weird goal for myself and then sort of figuring out the path to get there. I think that's the thing I like. I just want to dive into this problem solving thing a little bit more. There's a lot of advice out there about problem solving, right? You've been involved in solving a massive, massive problem. Do you think there is a principle that you've been, able to distill from this that might be useful for our listeners as a starting point or as a

kind of a guiding principle when it comes to either choosing to solve a problem or to solve a problem that they're currently engaged in. I do think it helps to be analytical, but mostly to be obsessive by nature. I think if you're very motivated, passionate about something, you will learn how to do it just because you will want to, right? I think that's at the root of everyone who's done anything interesting. It comes from a place of deep motivation. I think in terms of principles, I've been keeping notes throughout the past 12 years and thoughts on that topic. As already said, I think it's important to work with human nature, to try and find the path of least resistance. Don't try and change the system, but work with the system and figure out

how can we solve this problem despite the world being the way it is and humans being the way they are. I think this idea of only considering tackling the root cause as the way we should solve problems. I think that's a flawed idea. I think we should really figure out at what level is the problem most tractable and address it there because I think the idea of a root cause is very intellectually flawed because there's never one root cause is always a combination of different things. And then of course the real root cause is the big bang. Like how far back do you go? With the plastic problem, what's the real problem? The real problem is economic and environmental loss due to plastic.

Why is that? Because there is plastic in the ocean. Why is that? Because plastic is entering the oceans from rivers and fisheries. Why is that? You go upstream up. Plastic enters up in the river. And then why is that?

Because of improper waste management. And why is that? Because there's not enough money. Okay, actually, you can go further. You can go a different route. You can say, actually, it's the creation of plastic. And very soon you end up concluding that we shouldn't invent any new technology or something because that would cause to our environmental problems.

Very soon you end up at the Big Bang. Yeah, yeah. It's just not, I think you should really figure out what's the point of highest leverage. Yeah, love that. Work there. What else? I think it's very important to just get started and approach problems iteratively rather than have a definite view. I think you should be very inflexible when it comes to the end goal, but very flexible in terms of how you get there.

And when we started the urgent cleanup, I really didn't know what I was doing. I had never run an organization. I never developed any maritime technology. I basically did everything wrong except for getting started, keeping going, even in periods of hardship, and having a willingness to change my mind when new information appeared. So I think that combination is way more important than being an expert in any field. If you're passionate and you're willing to change your mind, You will keep going and you will adjust course, you'll ultimately find something that will work.

Boyan, to wrap this up, can you paint us a picture of what the future would look like once our oceans are cleaned up? What are the potential ripple effects? Look, I think the plastic pollution problem is a major world problem. The value the ocean provides to humanity is in the order of $30 trillion per year. And of course, most of that is not in the economy, right? The economy is only, I think, $115 trillion a year. But of course, a lot of things like food security, coastal protection, aesthetic value, climate regulation.

A lot of that we get for free. But there are things that are creating tons and tons of value to humans. And plastic pollution is estimated to reduce the value of the ocean by about 1 to 5%. So you're talking about hundreds of billions. per year or even trillions per year in terms of lost value. I think some of this problem will be tremendous value to humanity. But I hope that the impact of what we do with the ocean cleanup will expand beyond just clean oceans.

Of course, helping the billions of people that live near the ocean, I think there's a lot of value to that. But I think also this is just one out of many problems that we have right now. I think what humanity needs is a narrative that problems are there to be solved, that we actually can solve them as long as we put our minds to them, if we embrace the miracles of modernity, technology, business approaches rather than to reject them. I hope it can be the example of how to solve problems in the 21st century. This is just one problem, but hopefully we can inspire many other people to do similar things at a similar scale. but for other problems. I think that's what motivates me to keep working on this. For anybody who's listening and would love to get involved,

how can people help you with this mission? How can they join up? Yeah, we're always looking for talented people to join the team. We're also welcome people just generally make impact. What we now have on our website is we call an impact calculator. So if you go to the donate page, it will actually tell you based on the impact we've had in 2024, how many football fields worth of ocean your donation will clean and also how many plastic bottles you will be intercepting from a river so yeah you can basically just buy impact through the website so theoceancleanup.com is where you can find more information on all of that

i've got a final question point we've spoken about the word optimism we've spoken about problem solving but one word i'm really curious to know what you think of is the word hope what does that would mean to you? I think especially amongst people of my generation, I think there's a lot of fatalism. There's many people who don't have hope because all these problems seem insurmountable. And many people feel like, what can I do as one person to change any of that? But if you do not have hope, why bother working on anything? So I think hope is the essential ingredient to be motivated to work on solving problems, right? So that's also why I think the work you guys are doing is so important, right? Because there's a big negativity bias in media. There's

all good evolutionary reasons for that. But one of the bad ideas I see a lot in the realm of activism is people believe that you can scare people into being motivated to do something. And actually, I don't think that works. I think people get tired of the doom and gloom story. They're just sewn out. But I think once people see that problems can be solved, I think that gives people hope. And I think hope is what drives people to work on these things. Like if I didn't have any hope that we would ever be able to clean the ocean,

I wouldn't have spent 12 years working seven days a week. I think hope it's a finite resource and we need a lot more of it because that's what will motivate humanity to get us act together. This was one of those conversations. This was one of those conversations you don't walk out of it the same as how you walked in. And my biggest takeaway is that we are all problem solvers. And even though we talk about the problem and the solution, we don't talk about that intersection of problem solving enough,

what it is, what it takes, and how we make sure we're always fostering more of it. I'm trying to tone it down here, but this is one of the best stories in the world right now. is one of the most hopeful stories in the world right now. I don't know why more people aren't speaking about it. It just makes me think, well, what else is possible if we apply that mindset? What else could we solve? We're so happy to kick off this new chapter of conversations

and turn up the volume on these extraordinary people. And make sure you stay tuned because later this season, we're releasing a shot at history, our three-part documentary series about the malaria vaccine. 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.

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 gutter gal and the Wurundry and way wrong people. If you enjoyed this conversation and would like to support Hope as a verb, make sure you subscribe and leave a review.

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