Hope Is A Verb - Lead Poisoning Is Solvable. So What’s Been the Hold Up?

Episode Date: September 29, 2026

How do you get the world to pay attention to a problem it thinks it's already solved?Around a billion children are exposed to dangerous levels of lead. It can be hiding in cookware, spices and cosmetics, or released through industries like battery recycling. For a child, exposure can mean losing up to six IQ points - irreversible damage that, multiplied across hundreds of millions of children, becomes an enormous drain on human potential. And yet, unlike so many global challenges, we already know how to prevent it.Meet Drew McCartor, President of Pure Earth. For the past 17 years, Drew and his colleagues have been sounding the alarm about lead poisoning: gathering evidence, understanding the scale of the problem and building the playbook for how to solve it. Now, after decades of “yelling into the void”, the world is finally paying attention - and Drew believes we have an opportunity to eliminate lead poisoning altogether.In this episode:Why around a billion children are exposed to dangerous levels of leadThe surprising places lead is still hiding - from cookware to spicesWhat losing four to six IQ points means for a child - and an entire countryHow a Craigslist ad led Drew from unpaid intern to President of Pure EarthWhy Pure Earth spent years wondering if they were crazyThe young boy in Bangladesh who brought the human cost of lead poisoning home for DrewWhat changed when the world finally started paying attentionWhy Drew believes we can eliminate lead poisoning altogetherAbout the title: A Useful Truth comes from a 1786 letter by Benjamin Franklin about lead poisoning: “You will observe with concern how long a useful truth may be known and exist before it's generally received and practiced upon.” Almost 250 years later, it feels remarkably apt.Timestamps:00:00 A Useful Truth00:55 Do you ever feel like something is wrong but no one will listen?03:20 Haven’t we already solved lead poisoning?05:00 What does lead poisoning actually mean?07:43 The curse of the Industrial Fairy10:20 What’s harder: solving lead poisoning or convincing people it matters?12:31 From Craigslist ad to President of Pure Earth14:50 How do a group of hippies change the world?17:36 Midpoint reflections20:09 When the world finally started paying attention22:57 What happens when you get the thing you’ve spent 17 years working towards?25:07 Lead and the global funding crisis29:06 The story that makes lead poisoning real33:58 The solutions are already here34:46 What happens if we raise the IQ of a billion children?39:01 What’s possible if we solve lead poisoning?44.59 Final ThoughtsCurious to find out more?👉Check out the Pure Earth website👉Support their work👉 Listen to Drew's TED Talk👉 The Pure Earth SCALE Initiative to protect 500 million children from lead exposureAbout Fix The News:Fix The News is a solutions-focused media platform sharing stories from the frontlines of progress - exploring what’s working in the world and the people making it happen.Subscribe & follow:If you enjoyed this episode, follow the podcast and leave a review - it helps more people find these stories.Production credits:Hosted by Angus Hervey and Amy Davoren-RoseProduced by Fix The NewsAudio production: Anthony Badolato, Hear That! This episode was produced in Australia on the lands of the Gadigal, Wurundjeri and Woi Wurrung peoples.

Your real question was, is it scary to now have more resources available, to have more partners, to have a bigger spotlight on us? And the answer is yes, but it's the best kind of problem. You know, how fortunate to be given the thing that you've been asking for, for in my case, 17 years, in Pure Earth's case, 26 years. This is the day that we have always been working toward and dreaming of. Welcome to Fix the News. I'm Amy. I'm Gus. And these are stories from the front lines of progress.

You know that feeling that you get when you just know that something is wrong, but nobody else around you is really concerned about the thing or nobody is really paying attention? Yeah, that's how I feel about my coffee machine. right now, it's making weird noises, and I don't know how I'm going to fix it. Exactly. I think for me as a mum, it's when I know that something is up with Darcy, but he keeps telling me is fine.

Like, everybody around keeps saying that he's fine. I always get to this point where I start second-guessing myself, and I think that maybe I'm going crazy. Well, that's pretty much where our guest today found himself once upon time. Obviously, he wasn't worrying about coffee or his kid. He was worrying about something much, much bigger. Drew McCarter, he's the president of Pure Earth, an organization with one of the best origin stories,

I think that we have ever covered here on the podcast. Essentially a bunch of hippies, a whiteboard, and a question. A really big, really important question. what problem is out there that everyone else is missing. And for the past 25 years, they have been worrying about the problem of toxic pollution around the world. Since Drew joined the organisation 17 years ago, he and his colleagues have become convinced

that they were looking at a problem that was far, far, like far bigger than anyone realized, and still that anyone kind of realizes today, but nobody was listening to them. What I love about this conversation, Gus, is it's kind of two things. I mean, first of all, it is a conversation about a huge global health problem that most people don't even have on their radar, which has lead poisoning. But I also feel like there is, it's about something that's much more human.

It's that feeling, almost like that loneliness of when you can see something that's wrong. and you just keep yelling into the void. And what happens when, after 17 years of yelling into the void and banging the drum, the world finally starts listening? I want you to imagine that you're at a dinner party and you are sitting next to someone you haven't met before and you tell them that you've spent the last 17 years or so working on lead poisoning.

what will their response be? It isn't really even a hypothetical. It happens fairly frequently to me, and the response is usually quite similar, and it's lead, huh. Is that still a big problem these days? Something along those lines, where everyone's familiar with the challenge,

but usually some skepticism about, didn't we solve that already? So what is your follow-up to that? Well, that really opens the door for me to start with some kind of high-level, rather dramatic facts about the toll that lead's really taking today. One of the easiest of those is just that lead is affecting a third of all kids in the world, which is so large that it almost is unbelievable, and that hooks them a little bit in terms of their attention, because it almost doesn't pass the smell test of being real. The fact of the matter is that our best

Estimates are that not only that a third of the kids in the world have a concentration of lead above a threshold that the World Health Organization says requires intervention, but if you just look at the low and middle income countries in the world, it's actually half of all kids. So even though we've made huge progress in rich countries like my country of the U.S., it's still just taking an almost unbelievable toll in most of the world. I think the number is around a billion children are exposed to dangerous levels of lead. What does that actually mean? What are we talking about here?

Sure. One of the things about lead that makes it a little tricky to communicate about is that it's really a sliding scale. There really isn't one number or concentration. On one side, you have lead poisoning on the other, you don't. Because there's just no safe level of lead in the human body at all. So when we're talking about a billion kids, and you're ranked on the numbers, I think it's around 1.1 billion kids, we're talking about that number of kids exceeding what the WHO says just really requires intervention.

But the truth is there's another billion kids below that threshold that are still impacted negatively by this chemical. So even though it doesn't sound like it makes any sense, really almost every one, we're on earth is poisoned by lead just to different degrees. What is the threshold and what happens beyond there? What is the actual impact on the human body? Sure. So the threshold is five micrograms of lead per deciliter of blood. And this is not necessarily a health-based threshold where something dramatically changes. That represents approximately the average concentration of lead and kids in lower-income countries. And at that concentration, we can expect that a kid would lose between four and six IQ

points. We can expect that their risk of heart disease would go up dramatically, that they would be of increased risk of things like attention deficit disorders, behavioral problems, reduced mood control in a way that when those kids grow up and become adults can lead to increased commission of violent crimes and incarceration, all types of societal ills that we're working hard to avoid led exacerbates. And then because it's impacting the brain and IQ, also taking a really big toll on things like learning outcomes and economic development, your lifetime earnings are related to or are correlated with your IQ. And so if we're, you know, robbing IQ from a billion kids, we're also dragging down economies in countries that are doing everything they can to build

up their economies and their standard of livings. So I often refer to lead as like an invisible anchor that is just dragging us down across all sorts of issues that we would never relate to lead. To me, it feels like the sort of industrial fairy cast a curse on us, you know, like 200 years ago and then disappeared and everyone forgot about the curse, but this curse still lingers. I thought we'd eliminated lead. I remember in 2021, we reported a story here at Fix the News about how lead had finally been eliminated from gasoline everywhere in the world. Why does everyone still have lead poisoning? So that brings two thoughts to mind immediately. And one is just how long we've known that this thing is a terrible toxin and yet have waited to work on it. Some years ago,

I ran into a quote from a letter that Benjamin Franklin wrote in 1786. And I always keep this quote up on my computer because I love it so much. He was writing a letter and he was talking about lead and he said, you will observe with concern how long a useful truth may be known and exist before it's generally received and practiced upon. And he's talking about humanity knowing that lead is toxic and just, just not doing much about that fact. To your point, you're right. We've made dramatic progress on a couple of big issues that I think have kind of lulled us all into this sense of completeness.

We've removed lead from gasoline in the last country, Algeria in 2021. And about half the countries on earth have regulated lead in paint, which are two of the big sources that most people are familiar with, but despite that, lead is getting into all sorts of other consumer goods and being released through industrial practices that just keep these global levels really high. And the source of exposure are things you might never imagine. You know, like in the U.S., for example, we talk about old pipes and old paint. Those are the source of exposure that most people are familiar with. If you go to Mexico, for example, the number one source of

exposure there is ceramic glazes on traditional artisinally produced ceramics. Or if you go to India, you will find that car battery recycling that is done unsafely is a huge emitter of lead. Or Bangladesh had a problem with people adding lead-based pigments and spices. And so you just go around the world and you're finding it in all sorts of places where, one, it just doesn't belong and doesn't have a useful purpose. And two, that you just wouldn't expect and you can't see. You know, the thing, Drew, that I find really hard to wrap my head around is that you are describing a problem that most of us think has solved. It's not solved. It's actually robbing different countries of their future in many ways. And yet, we also know how to solve it.

So which has been harder, working out how to solve lead poisoning or convincing people that we need to solve it and that it matters? So I don't want to pretend either is easy, but the awareness challenge has been decades long and really hard. And I think that stems to kind of a triple invisibility problem. So on the one hand, lead in stuff in the environment. and in products, just is materially invisible. You can't see it in cosmetics. If it's in your food, you're not going to know. If it's in your backyard garden, you won't know.

But then it's also kind of clinically invisible. If you bring a lead exposed child into the doctor's office, the chance that that doctor will assume that lead might be a problem or test them is really almost zero, even in high-income countries. just because lead does not have these really dramatic symptoms that a doctor could spot. And then finally, it's kind of invisible in national data. So, for example, most countries don't test kids in mass, which means that they aren't aware that they have a big challenge.

And if they aren't aware that they have a big challenge, they're not going to budget for testing. There's no justification for a response. And so that's kind of the third leg of this invisibility stool is when we approach a government, their first response is typically, oh, no, we don't have that problem. And then we ask, did you test to check? And they say, no, we didn't,

but we don't have a reason to check because we don't have that problem. And so this has been, I think awareness has been the main thing that we've been working on for many, many years. I do have to ask, when you signed up for the job at Pure Earth, which I think was back, then the Blacksmith Institute. As a young lawyer, did you know what you were signing up for?

I had no idea. And like many people, my whole career in involvement was very accidental. I moved to New York right after graduating from law school where I studied environmental law to go be a fancy lawyer. And I arrived there basically the day that Lehman Brothers collapsed and the great recession of 2008, 2009 began. So rather than handing out jobs, you know, most people were losing their job. So I arrived and I spun my wheels for about a year before I realized I was going to need to work for free somewhere to show them that I could add value and be productive. And the idea of doing that at a law firm was just a soul-crushing proposition.

So I thought, okay, if I'm going to work for free, I have to find the absolute coolest, most interesting organization I can. And I found what I think was a Craigslist ad for an unpaid internship at Blacksmith Institute. And that was 17 years ago. Since then, I have held every single job title that the organization uses between intern and president. Wow. And most of that time working in our programs department, which is where we design and implement solutions, which was just wonderfully interesting to see what worked, what didn't work, and to

constantly be learning along the way what the true scale of this issue was. Because when we started 17 years ago, there just wasn't any good data on this. So we mostly kept chugging along based on anecdotes from our experience, not because we had these mind-bendingly large figures that we talked about earlier, it was just a process of kind of micro discoveries of, oh, this is bigger than we thought yesterday. And tomorrow we'll realize that it's bigger than we thought today. And only in the last maybe eight years have we had the kind of data firepower

to really get the world to notice. It almost sort of feels like a strange story, a movie where you have a bunch of basically concerned hippies to say like, hey, we don't want some bad stuff in our food. Let's do something about it. Now this group happens to catch the problem that affects a billion children. How does a group of concerned citizens end up becoming, you know, something like pure earth today?

Yeah. I don't think your characteristic is that far off. You know, this was a little bit high in the sky thinking early on. There were a lot of points where I and I'm sure our founder, Rich Fuller, second-guessed. Like, are we crazy? We keep kind of yelling into the void that we think this is really, really big and no one's listening. Well, I guess we'll just, you know, try to generate more evidence. But there were some key moments along the way that showed us, actually, no, we're not crazy. We're really on to something. When the organization was founded, it was kind of like an

Engineers Without Borders. We were reacting to problems we had heard about in the world. Maybe this village in Russia is contaminated or this community in India, and we would respond with an engineering solution, dig up some dirt or adjust water somehow. But it was really reactive. We just hear about a problem when we respond, but how do we know we're working on the right problems? What if there's a hundred ones that are worse than the one that we've selected to work on? So then we did a little digging around to see, oh, who in the world has a global database of toxic hotspots because we could use that to figure out, you know, the top 10 places to work on or something. And we sniffed around and, you know, the UN Environment Agency didn't have such a database and the

World Bank didn't. And so we realized, oh, we're going to just have to build that from scratch because otherwise us and anyone else working on this issue is just going to be throwing darts with a blindfold on in terms of prioritization here. The one that we created is called the toxic sites identification program. It's still the largest global database of polluted sites in the world. And the process of creating it of going to all these places and assessing thousands upon thousands of toxic hotspots really started to build that evidence case where we were like, okay, we're not crazy. We have found, in a matter of a few years, 1500 communities that are being poisoned by lead. And that was just with a couple million dollars in a couple of years

worth of poking around. But it made us realize we're onto something. We have a story to tell. And if we keep digging, we're likely to learn that it's worse than we understand not better. Okay. This is where I have to admit something. I don't think I really understood the full impact of lead poisoning, especially what it does to kids, until I watched Drew's TED Talk and until we were having this conversation. Well, if it's any consolation, I don't think any of us did, Amy. I mean, I think that we all knew that lead was a problem, but I didn't understand just how visceral that problem actually is and how widespread it is, I think. Yeah, and it's weird, right? It highlights the problem with some of these problems. I mean, we've, we've been following this. I remember helping

write some of those summaries in the newsletter. But for some reason, I just, I never quite joined the dots between lead poisoning and what Drew was talking about here, which is kids losing IQ points. And when you start multiplying that across, you know, hundreds of millions of children, and the global impact is just huge. Yeah, and we've kind of learned to live with it. It just sort of, it feels like normal because we've never known anything else. But four or five IQ points in a child, it's a lot.

Because when you shift all of that to the intellectual potential of the entire world population, you are talking about a change that is civilization defining. What struck me is that, this is much less a story about pollution and a story about human potential. Yeah. And pure earth, like they knew this, like they have been sitting on that for so long, but they also didn't just sit on it. They just kept on trying to do something about it. You know, they kept on looking, they gathered evidence and crucially they were coming up

with solutions at the same time as they were finding out how big the problem is and as the problem kept on getting bigger. And that after almost two years, decades of sounding the alarm, suddenly the world starts paying attention. And, you know, where Drew is right now, it feels like the beginning of a whole new story. A couple of tipping points really mattered here. The first was there is a global public health kind of data analysis shop called the Institute for Health metrics and evaluations. And I forget the exact year, but around 2015, they included lead poisoning in an analysis product of theirs called the Global Burden of Disease Analysis. The global burden of disease basically looks at

what killed everyone who died and what was the risk factor that led to that cause of death? And for the first time, they included lead exposure and started vacuuming up all of the available lead data and the numbers were shocking. immediately. Lead was taking more lives than really well-known diseases like malaria, like HIV, and that it was impacting hundreds of millions of kids. Now, since 2015, those estimates have gone dramatically, but even when they were smaller, they were a shock to, I think, to the world. And so what we started to do was put out two influential reports. Now, I will be the first to admit that I'm I'm skeptical of the value of any report.

I haven't seen many reports move the needle. But in particular, we wrote one with UNICEF. And we said, we want to write a report on lead, and we think that there's an incredible story of neglect here that impacts children mostly. And luckily, they agreed, and were wonderful partners in creating a report called The Toxic Truth.

And the headline of that report was what we opened with that a third of the world's kids are being really dramatically affected by this invisible toxin, and it's totally neglected and nobody really is aware of the fact that it's taking these huge tolls on the world in terms of economics and health. That headline, a third of the world's kids, was so unbelievable that what happened was that report landed on the desks of places like USAID and the World Bank and all of these kind of global movers and shakers. And, I think people were tasked with this doesn't look right. Young analyst, will you prove it wrong so that we can ignore it?

And slowly but surely, people failed to prove that that wasn't what the best evidence suggested. And so the report kind of trickled up through all of these policymaking institutions, through donors, and all of these levers of power until, you know, in the last administration in the U.S., the head of USA to made this a personal mission of hers and put a lot of political firepower behind it. So true, it was around 2024 where there was kind of this tipping point, where the world really started paying attention to this alarm that you had been sounding. And then at the beginning of this year, you stood on the TED stage, audacious has given you some funding to scale.

is there something terrifying about finally getting the thing that you've been working toward for so long? You know, the former head of global health at USAID, a doctor named Atulka Wanda, I was chatting with him after the TED talk and after winning this audacious project. And he said, oh, you're kind of like the dog that caught the mail truck now. Yeah. But your real question was, is it scary to now have more resources available, to have more partners, to have a bigger spotlight on us? And the answer is yes, but it's the best kind of problem. You know, how fortunate to be given the thing that you've been asking for, for, in my case, 17 years, in Pure Earth's case, 26 years.

This is the day that we have always been working toward and dreaming of where heads of state are aware and asking for our help, where major development organizations are calling us and saying, how can we get involved? When donors approach us instead of us coming to them begging for little scraps here and there. So it's a little intimidating, but there's this great ecosystem of kind of thought partners that are all super collaborative. we all know each other and we talk constantly about best practices. There are great playbooks that exist. So we're not walking in to an issue that is new to us at all or that we have to invent solutions for a whole cloth. We've got 26 years of experience.

And the thing that we were really lacking was an opportunity to get out there and do the things that we know work. And the timing of this is so extraordinary, right? because global funding is in the headlines for all the opposite reasons, and it's in this environment that you guys are really able to scale. What has this funding unlocked for you? Two things come to mind immediately, and one is kind of the why of why lead is receiving funding in a time where funding is shrinking for a lot of groups and a lot of issue areas. This is not a comment about any other group or issue area, but I think the thing that has helped led in particular

is that there is just a tremendous justification in terms of return on investment and cost effectiveness to working on this. So if you think about other global challenges that we're well familiar with, you know, I suffer some time from problem fatigue. Like, are we making progress on climate change? I'm not sure. And I don't know. know what we should be doing differently exactly or how to get it done. I don't know what levers of change I can pull personally exactly. That's not a knock on climate or any other issue, but this one is just very solvable. And the reason that we haven't made progress isn't because we need a fancy new technology or something like that. It's just because it was totally neglected for decades and

decades and even centuries. So that's why I think in a period of contracting resources, the donors that are left are out there kind of shopping for what is a really solvable problem where we're not working on the most expensive last mile of the problem, but where we can work and get huge gains from working on the first mile of a totally neglected problem and lead kind of slops into that. And now I've totally forgotten the second part of your question, if you could help me. The scale, what does this unlock for you? Yeah. So there are three big initiatives. We're part of all of them that are adding to scale. A donor group called Coefficient Giving has a lead fund, and they are funding us and many other groups. Bloomberg Philanthropies

announced a big push on lead poisoning. And we were a finalist in a funding aggregation platform run by the TED organization called the Audacious Project. All three of those are bringing a scale of resources to bear that were unavailable just two or three years ago. And what it allows for is a three-step model to be rolled out in dozens of countries around the world. So to talk about how to prevent lead poisoning, the first step that we advocate for that these resources allow for is a national survey where you test kids' blood to understand how much lead is in their blood. Step two, each of these countries has its own unique exposure sources, and you can't walk into a country and just assume that country A's problems are

going to be the same as country B's problems. So this increased resource availability allows us to go in and test country by country, what's making people sick here? Is it the leafy greens? Is it the cheap aluminum cookware? Is it the industrial practices? so that you don't waste your time and money working on things that just aren't that country's particular issue. And then three targeted mitigation efforts. So if that is food contamination, then that means, okay, let's spend concerted time with this government talking about industrial emissions. Or if it's spices, let's go into marketplaces and conduct educational campaigns with sellers and all of this stuff. So three different steps. All of them require time,

and awareness and resources. And those three steps you're going to see increased dramatically over the coming years. Drew, can you kind of boil this down to just one example of like a village or even a person or a family that has changed as a result of one of these solutions being applied?

In my TED Talk, I described a family we met in Bangladesh. This family lived in a small village where some men leased a plot of land to recycle the lead out of old car batteries. Now, a car battery, the kind of heavy plastic box that's in the front of most cars, it's basically 60% lead and 40% acid, and that's why it's so heavy. And the lead in there is valuable. So no one on earth really throws away car batteries.

They're all recycled because they have maybe 40 or 60 bucks worth of lead in them. So in this one village in Bangladesh, some men leased a plot of land. They started pulling the lead out of these batteries and just melting them down in an open fire, particularly at night. And this threw up tremendous amounts of lead dust all across the community, where kids are playing and going to school and messing around outside. These two young brothers of this family, we tested their blood and found that they had really acute lead poisoning. They had the highest levels in this village of several hundred people. But even aside from the levels in their blood, their parents came to us with no knowledge of concentrations.

and they said, our boys need help. They used to be doing really well in school, and they were just normal, lovely boys who excelled. And today, they just are different. They are almost falling out of school. They're so far behind. They're struggling to learn anything new. They're struggling to remember common sense things

that any child should know. And when we interviewed one of them on camera, our interviewer was just asking some regular questions. He was asking this boy named Saim, who at the time, I think, was nine. And he said, Saim, you know, what grade are you in? And Saim said, I'm in second grade. And he said, oh, what school do you go to? He said, oh, I go to Hazabari school.

He's like, oh, who are your friends in school? And he said, oh, my friend is Meem. And Meem is in third grade with me. And the interviewer says, wait, third grade with you. Didn't you just say that you're a second grader? and you see Saim on film pause for a minute and then look confused, and then he just replies as honestly as I've ever seen anyone say anything. I don't know.

I don't remember. And he's talking about his grade level, and he just doesn't know. I've been working on lead for 17 years, and I've never really found as poignant a moment that shows what this is. does to a human child. I have a daughter, Syam's age, I have a 10-year-old, and if I were to mistake her grade level in front of her, it would be a half second before she started hollering the correct grade level. You know, this matters to kids. It's part of their identity, and they don't get it wrong. And Syam didn't know. And true, just to clarify, once that is,

impact has landed, there is no cure. There's no regaining those IQ points. This is true, unfortunately, for the intellectual damage that lead causes. So lead has two impacts on the body that we worry most about. It has many, many impacts, but the two that we worry most about are brain damage, which is irreversible once it occurs in a child. And the second is heart disease that happens later in life. And available evidence suggests that the heart disease risk can go down if you prevent exposure earlier in life. So there's great value in reducing exposure to someone that's already been exposed to lead, but they will not repair the brain damage.

And that is why an organization like ours focuses almost entirely on prevention and prevention in the earliest stages of life, even before birth, because, in fact, the most vulnerable moments of life are in the womb, where the brain is at that moment creating billions of synapses and is growing kind of out of nothing. And if lead is up in the brain, the brain will use lead to do things that it just can't do in the building of these synaptic connections and just wire in a way that can't be unwired. That just brings home the urgency of what you have been trying to. trying to do and why you have been sounding the alarm as an organization 25 years.

Yeah. But, you know, I want to make sure that we kind of keep an eye on the fact that prevention isn't a Sisyphian task where we're trying to, you know, move this unmovable boulder up a hill. We just haven't tried very hard. And once you have a little bit of government buy-in and a little bit of resources, the fixes are not rocket science. So fortunately, even though the stories of personal impact are devastating, we cleaned up Syam's community. That local magistrate is not ever going to allow someone to recycle

lead in that district again. That community is clean and that lesson is learned there. And we just keep on marching, community, state, and country by country until this is solved. Drew, what happens if you raise the average IQ of a billion children by six points globally? Yeah, so this is super interesting because, you know, we can talk about a case like Saim and describe how it affected his life and brain personally. But when you do this on a macro scale, if you do it in a country like India with, I think, around 1.4 billion kids, even if those kids are, only losing four to six IQ points, the societal impact is absolutely staggering. And in my talk,

I have a nice visual that shows a curve, a regular distribution bell curve. And in the middle of that is an IQ of 100, which is the human average. Most of us sit somewhere near that. And then on the tails, of course, you have a population that has extraordinarily high IQ. These are often referred to as gifted kids, and a population at the other, which classified. as intellectually disabled. If you shift that average from 100 down to 95 or up to 105, you move these extremes by 50%, meaning if we move from 100 down to 95,

which is likely the case for many, many countries in the world. That is already what has happened. you cut in half the gifted population by over 50%. And you add to the intellectually disabled population by over 50%. So this is just a tremendous intellectual capital loss. These gifted kids, hopefully, are going to be the future leaders, the innovators, you know, the thought leaders for these countries that are not only going to, you know, be working on issues like lead,

we have all sorts of challenges approaching us in the future. You know, there's no shortage of challenges that we're going to need incredibly smart people to be working on the future. And lead is just emptying that pool of talent and intellectual capital. I mean, on the whole, this feels like a solution whose time has come. Is there part of you and maybe other people in the organization that are just a bit annoyed that it took this long? You know, like, where were you guys?

Like we've been banging this drum for so long. Where were you 10 years ago? Where were you 15 years ago? It would make sense for that to be a strong emotion. And for whatever reason, it isn't one that really permeates our organization or I think others. Mostly it was just relief that we weren't positive this day would ever come. And here it is. And now we just have an enormous responsibility to make sure that the opportunity that we've been given

isn't squandered because what a tragedy would it be to work for 26 years to arrive at today and then waste it on some ineffective solutions or having retreats in the Bahamas instead of just getting down to the business of solving things. But I also want to point out that while awareness and resources have grown a lot in the last couple of years, it is still nowhere near commensurate to the size of this challenge. we're talking about a problem that annually is estimated to drain the global economy to the tune of $6 trillion. So that's just the economic harm side. And even though we've moved up from spending $15 million annually addressing it,

I don't have a firm figure of what we're spending today, but it's not more than, I don't know, 50 maybe. So the uptick has been dramatic. Hopefully, that is just the first increment up from many more to the point where our response to this is somewhere at the scale of the challenge. Because today we're doing well, but we still have a mighty hill to climb. All right. My laptop is about to die. So I'm going to try to see if I can get this question in.

What's possible? What's possible is eliminating lead poisoning, full stop. And here's why I think that. In the U.S. between around the late 70s and today, we reduced the concentration of lead in U.S. children by around 94%. It's not zero, but that's close to a total solution. There is no reason why that can't be done in every country on this planet. Lead is not required for almost anything.

It's needed in certain types of car batteries. In that vest you wear when you're getting an x-ray, we still use it in fishing weights and in bullets. But almost nothing else needs lead. Those things don't need lead for that much longer. So this is a chemical whose time has come in terms of industrial usefulness, and it was never valuable to the human body. Unlike many other metals and nutrients, this one has no place in the human body. It has no place in our economy. It has no place in our environment.

And we can get to a day where it's not, where it's not in any of those things. I'm just interested in if you could go back and talk to that young lawyer that walked into that unpaid internship. What would you tell him? You know, this is a message that I would love to share. From that experience, I learned that if I had had too much ego or too much self-importance to take as a 30-year-old law school graduate an unpaid internship, I would have missed out on a career that I could not imagine being more interesting and rewarding. If I had had too much self-importance to say,

no, I'm a lawyer now, or no, I'm in my 30s, and this is beneath me, I would have missed the world. And I'm just so glad that 30-year-old Drew saw that as a viable path and an opportunity and not something beneath him, because it wasn't. And it was the most important choice aside from my wife that I've made. Thanks, Leibon, brothers. I just can't shake that point that we started with, when you know that something is wrong, but nobody else really seems concerned about it. Yeah, and you're like, am I crazy? Am I losing my mind here?

Like, should I be worried about this? No, I know I need to be worried about this, but like, why is no one else worried about this? I know. And what I love about this story in particular is it wasn't like there was one eureka moment where everything kind of sorted itself out. they kept looking, they kept finding evidence, and they just kept sounding the alarm. Yeah, and I think what's even crazier is that this is not just 17 years old. I mean, we have known about this problem for a lot, lot longer.

It's been centuries in the making. You know, it goes right back to the dawn of industrialisation. You know when he spoke about that letter that Benjamin Franklin wrote? Yeah. It reminded me a lot of the conversations that you and Ada have been having on the history of Saving the World podcast about these ideas are here sometimes for hundreds and thousands of years, but it's just when the right time comes. And also that we have been trying to save the world for a very, very, very long time.

Like, I think that's what the crazy thing is, is we know how to stop this. You know, we know how to clean up contaminated communities. We know how to regulate the sources and everyone is on board. No one says, oh, we want more lead poisoning. Everyone is like, nope, that's great, let's get it out here. So everything was in place, but what was really missing was attention on the actual problem itself. And doesn't it just make you question? How many other problems are currently in the we've already solved this box,

or no one's really paying attention box, and that there is someone somewhere right now kind of yelling into the void? Yeah. I'm sure they're out there. We will try to find them and I hope that they have not been yelling into the void for 17 years as well. We know there are a lot of podcasts out there.

It means a lot to us that you chose this one. It's made possible by our paying subscribers. So if you're one of them, a big thank you. And if you want to support what we do, you can find us at fixthenews.com. This show was produced by Amy Rose with audio by Anthony Badalore. from Hear That. It was made in Australia on the lands of the Gotagal, Morundry and

Weywerung peoples. If you liked it, hit subscribe, leave a review or send it to someone you love who needs to hear it. Thanks for listening.