Episode Description:

Arielle and Karissa are reunited after a few weeks apart, covering a wide range of solutions this episode: a new telescope that survived two White House cancellation attempts, the decade-long trial that settles the statin-and-dementia debate once and for all, and a biodegradable balloon that took three years and hundreds of failed experiments to get right.

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Theme and all original music by Marvin Lanes

Transcript:

Arielle: 

Hi, everyone. It’s Arielle. 

Karissa: 

And I’m Karissa, and welcome back to The Optimist Daily’s weekly roundup. 

Arielle: 

Yes, we are both back. Um, Karissa, thank you so much for taking over last week. Yeah. I just had completely no voice. I even, uh, s- tried to send a voice note to Karissa- … explaining that I can’t talk, and it just sounds so scary.

Karissa: 

Yes. Well, I’m happy that you are recovered now, or on the way to recovery, almost there. Mm-hmm. And I’m so happy to be back with you, Arielle, ’cause it’s been a long time since we’ve both been able to, just us two, be on the pod and- 

Arielle: 

Mm-hmm … 

Karissa: 

share all the great news from The Optimist Daily. 

Arielle: 

I know. It has been a few weeks, I guess.

So it’s nice to have the chance to get back into the rhythm of things, which I feel is going to be the theme for the coming weeks since kids are gearing up to get back into school, and I guess- Mm … parents will have their usual [00:01:00] routines again. And there’s just something grounding about that little hint of fall that I know we’re feeling here in Amsterdam.

I don’t know about you, Karissa, how it is over on your side. 

Karissa: 

Yeah, absolutely. After the summer rush and before the holidays kick in, in a couple months, we have a kinda set period of focusing and locking in. I’ve seen a lot of discourse online, um, talking about the September to December lock-in period. 

Arielle: 

Yeah.

While we’ve both been kind of all over the place with traveling and making the most of the summer and reconnecting with friends and family, which has been amazing, but yeah, if my last, uh, sickness taught me anything, I think it’s time to slow down. 

Karissa: 

Mm-hmm. Time to slow down, get healthy. I just wanna focus in on work, focus on getting out those great positive solutions.

Arielle: 

Which we are about to jump into, but before we begin, we just wanna remind everyone that we do have a free daily newsletter or a weekly newsletter. The link to sign up for that is in the show notes. 

Karissa: 

Mm-hmm. That’s correct, and sometimes there’ll be some other fun stuff in that daily newsletter as well. All that positive news is also available on our social media channels, and you can follow us @optimistdaily on basically everything except on X, where we’re @odetooptimism.

Arielle: 

And as usual, we love to hear from all of you Optimists and Emissaries out there, so please feel free to leave comments, questions, any kind of feedback. Rate, review, subscribe, um, hit that follow button on whatever podcast app you’re listening to us on. That would be great. You can also reach us at podcast@optimistdaily.com.

And speaking of Emissaries, a huge thank you to you guys. You guys keep the lights on here through your financial support and help us do the work that we do. To thank you for that, we have an Emissary shout-out, which is a perk that allows you to send us a little message that we read on the podcast that features, uh, a positive change-maker in your life.

It could be, uh, a local charity that is inspiring you in your neighborhood or just a, a really kind person that you just wanna thank publicly. Um, so yeah, if you haven’t taken advantage of that little perk and you are an Emissary, then go ahead and do that. The link should be somewhere in your inbox. 

Karissa: 

Yeah.

And if you wanna become an Emissary, the link to do that is also in the show notes. We appreciate any and all forms of help. But if financially that’s not possible for you right now, there are so many free ways to support us. You can like and share this podcast, forward a solution to a friend, someone who needs a dose of positivity in their life.

Arielle: 

All right. Well, with all of that said, let’s jump into the solutions. The first headline that we have is “Your guide to September’s best night sky events in 2026.” So not really a solution in the traditional sense, but definitely a helpful guide to appreciating this world and all of the amazing things that happen in it, or outside of it, since this is celestial.

September is a surprisingly stacked month for the sky. Venus is at its absolute brightest, and then the Harvest Moon is rising with Saturn right behind it, and the autumn equinox opens aurora season. So there’s a narrow window to see the Milky Way core before it disappears for the winter, and this coming weekend might be it.

This article lists a bunch of windows for optimal dark sky viewing. Do you have a favorite memory or, like, an experience that you had while stargazing over the years, Karissa? 

Karissa: 

Uh, oh my gosh. I don’t know if I have a favorite. There was one night camping where there were a lot of, uh, shooting stars out, so not, like, necessarily a marked event in any sense.

Arielle: 

Mm-hmm. 

Karissa: 

I just love viewing the sky. Whether it’s day or nighttime, there’s always something good to see. Arielle, have you… Is there anything that stands out to you? I know you took a trip semi-recently to see some great sky events. 

Arielle: 

Yeah. Well, I was in Finland during the solstice. 

Karissa: 

Mm-hmm. 

Arielle: 

Um, so that was really cool.

I think I mentioned that before. Uh, it just so happens that as soon as I left for my trip back home to Toronto, um, central Europe was experiencing either a full eclipse or an almost full eclipse, so I, I missed out on that, but a lot of friends went out to view it, and their pictures look amazing. But yeah, we…

I also missed the aurora lights that were apparently visible over my friend’s cottage. We were there for a couple nights over the past few weeks, and yeah, if we had just gone outside, then we would’ve seen the northern lights, but- Hey … we just saw it on the news instead the next day. So this is not a list of the favorite ones that I’ve seen, but more the ones that I’ve missed.

Karissa: 

Yeah. Well, there’s a lot in September that you can look forward to. 

Arielle: 

Yeah, exactly, so definitely check out this article if you wanna avoid my mistakes and actually go out and see something. The second article is titled “”What counts as real music? Australia’s charts just drew a line.”” An AI-generated cover of Madonna’s “Like a Prayer” spent 16 weeks in Australia’s top 20 and peaked at number two.

Listeners did not reject it. It just charted because it sounded like something people wanted to hear. Australia’s music industry decided that cannot keep happening on the official charts. So the ARIA, A-R-I-A, Australian Record Industry Association, is banning wholly AI-generated tracks from its charts and award eligibility, effective this past Monday.

Um, I think this is such an important topic to, to surface just because AI and its effect on the creative scene is everywhere, and it’s, it’s quite uncanny. It feels like art-making should be something that remains human. Uh, do you have any thoughts on this, Karissa? 

Karissa: 

Yeah, I 100% agree, and I think this is, of course, um, gonna be a continuing issue and something that different, not just like the music industry, but other industries will have to continue to figure out.

And I think an important point that this article made is that, you know, this affects people. Like, musicians do this for a living. It’s a economic threat to working musicians as well. 

Arielle: 

This policy is in step with International Federation of the Phonographic Industry guidelines from July. Um, and it says that chart-eligible tracks must be substantially human-made.

So there is still a way to use AI, um, to some degree, but the, the human basically has to be in charge, making the main creative choices, and steering that ship. It’s also a delicate balance of, like, how to use AI ethically as a tool within the music industry- 

Karissa: 

Mm-hmm … 

Arielle: 

uh, without completely exploiting it and, um, taking humanity out of the finished product.

So yeah, good on Australia for being proactive about this.

The next solution is called the “The Reddit-popular five-minute productivity rule that truly works for procrastinators”. There’s this productivity trick that’s been circulating on Reddit and productivity forums for years, and it’s, it’s actually really, really simple.

Basically, the rule is if a task takes five minutes or less, just do it right now. You don’t need to actually add it to your list. You don’t need to schedule it. You just do it. This article was really interesting to me because I, I can get into a bit of a procrastination slump. Um, I don’t know, Karissa, if you relate to that.

Karissa: 

I can definitely get into those slumps as well, so I thought this article was a great, uh, tip. 

Arielle: 

Mm-hmm. Uh, the time management coach in the article is Alexis Haselberger, and she calls the thing that happens when small tasks pile up task list bloat, which is nice imagery for this concept. Um, and basically, it just means that you spend more time pushing tiny tasks to tomorrow or the next day or the next day, uh, and then you end up doing that for more time than it would take to just do them.

It’s a very simple tip, but it’s worth looking at again just in case any of you out there are also struggling with some procrastination. The next solution is called “Meet the Bioloon: the biodegradable balloon aiming for shelves by 2028”. So I really love balloons. They just bring me so much joy, but there’s always that nagging feeling in the back of my mind saying, “This is just gonna turn into pollution and a health and safety hazard for wildlife everywhere.”

But before reading this article, I didn’t realize that the actual material that balloons are made of, which is natural latex, is not… It’s not really the problem. Natural latex is biodegradable on its own, but it’s the manufacturing process that makes the latex toxic. There’s a PhD student at Imperial College London who just spent three years removing this problem, and the result is a balloon that fully breaks down in nine months, no matter where it ends up.

The student in question is 29-year-old Juliana Cumming, and she’s the co-creator of the Bioloon, along with Charlotte Melia, an events entrepreneur and former party planner, who put up 30,000 pounds, which is approximately $38,000, to partly fund the research. Oh, there goes my voice again. Excuse me, everyone.

So traditional balloons are made of natural latex plus sulfur vulcanization, which sounds, like, so sci-fi. Sulfur accelerators, antioxidants, and activators, and those additives prevent biodegradation and leak toxic chemicals into the environment. The Bioloon is natural latex plus a second biodegradable polymer without any vulcanization additives, and it retains the latex’s natural biodegradability.

It was tested in soil, seawater, and deionized water, and it all broke down in every condition. 

Karissa: 

One of my fondest childhood memories is, like, letting balloons go. I don’t know why. And my- 

Arielle: 

Oh. … 

Karissa: 

my, my parents, like, my family would always be like, “Oh yeah, your balloon is going to, like, heaven or something.” I’m like, “Oh, that’s so sweet.”

And so finding out that it’s actually really bad for the environment was very heartbreaking. Mm-hmm. And I was surprised to find out in this article that about 20 to 25 billion balloons are purchased worldwide each year. That’s a lot, so. Yeah. But yeah, a lot of buyers are unaware of the un- environmental impact.

Arielle: 

The last solution that I’m going to be sharing before I hand over the reins to Karissa is titled “8 clever ways to reuse spice jars around the house”. Most empty spice jars get rinsed and then recycled if they don’t just sit on the counter until someone throws them away, or, like- … I’m guilty of just kind of leaving them in the drawer until my partner tidies them up.

But professional organizers say this is a missed opportunity, and they’ve got eight pretty specific reasons why. The one that caught my eye the most for you, Karissa, is craft supplies. ‘Cause you can put, like, little beads and glitter and, like, embroidery needles or whatever, and the clear glass jar is perfectly practical ’cause you know exactly what’s in each jar before you open it.

Karissa: 

Um, I’ve recently taken up sewing, and so I have a whole bunch of stuff everywhere that I’m just opening, and, you know, little pins falling out everywhere and a whole bunch of small stuff. So that one definitely stood out to me. Also thought, um, that another great suggestion here was to use it for travel toiletries so things don’t get, you know, smashed in your luggage.

You can put cotton swabs, hair pins, bandages, nail clippers, and they’ll stay safe and, you know, not get destroyed at the bottom of the bag. Lots of great tips in this solution.

The next solution we shared this week is “Climate attribution science just changed the rules for fossil fuel lawsuits”. For decades, oil companies have had one reliable legal defense: You can’t prove our emissions caused that specific storm or climate crisis.

But a new study just cracked that argument open, and for the first time, researchers can trace a specific company’s emissions to a specific disaster with a specific percentage attached. So that’s huge news. There’s been this investigation into this new climate attribution science, and Christopher Callahan, who is an earth systems scientist at Indiana University, published this in Earth’s Future.

It’s a peer-reviewed journal, and ran 150-plus simulations across eight climate models to map how CO2 concentrations increase the probability of extreme heat and rainfall. He then plugged it into real historical emissions data from individual companies and countries event by event, and the results of this found that fossil fuel firms increased the odds of the 2021 Pacific Northwest heat wave by 31%, raised the probability of Pakistan’s catastrophic 2022 extreme rainfall by 7% And this is called source attribution.

It’s narrower than general climate attribution science, and asks which specific actors caused which specific outcomes. The old approach was linking multiple climate models, and that could take months. But Callahan’s new method runs on historical data alone, and it’s much faster, and it can result in much faster climate justice.

Arielle: 

Yeah, I, um, I really wonder how these fossil fuel actors are going to be able to weasel their way out of this one, because, I mean, there’s, there’s hard science behind it, so they must be kind of shaking in their boots at this point. 

Karissa: 

I hope this will help accelerate some, you know, of course, well-deserved climate jus- justice.

But yeah, like you said, these fossil fuel industries are pretty weasely, so we’ll see what this can do. But I think this is a great step forward in the right direction with being able to actually hold them accountable that you caused, like, you know, 10% of this natural disaster. The next solution is “How to choose a fertility clinic: what reproductive endocrinologists look for”.

This one is really just for anyone who’s thinking about egg freezing or even just has it on their radar, or maybe knows someone who is thinking about it. There’s a lot of advice out there about where to go, but almost none of it covers what you should be asking when you get there. So a couple of reproductive endocrinologists broke it down, and some of what they said actually surprised me.

The first tip, and I think that’s really important, too, is that the location of a clinic is more important than people realize because you’ll have to have about four to seven early morning monitoring visits during a cycle, and sometimes more. And all of that includes blood work and ultrasounds before your day even starts.

So having one, you know, that isn’t a long commute is very important. 

Arielle: 

Yeah. I have not really seriously thought about freezing my eggs, um, although I am at the age where I think a lot of women do start considering it at least. Um, so this article was a really interesting read for me. There’s so much that goes into, um, into this project, I guess you could call it.

Uh, and it is good to, um, make this decision with your eyes wide open. So if any of you Optimists out there are even just casually considering it for now, um, give this one a quick read because I think there will be a lot of surprising, uh, aspects of, of the process, um, including the price. I was- Yeah

I was pretty surprised that it can cost so much, and then you also need to think about storage. 

Karissa: 

Yeah, exactly. Egg freezing has really become a more mainstream, you know, procedure. But the information landscape hasn’t caught up to it, and most people don’t know what to ask for, what the benchmarks are in going about this process.

And the coverage is pretty patchy for egg freezing. Only 20% of large employers offer it to be covered, but the cost is a real barrier for most people. So this story is about access as much as choices as well. The next solution is also dealing with space. We talked about, uh, September’s celestial events to look out for, but there’s also gonna be a new telescope out there from NASA.

“NASA’s Roman space telescope heads to deep space after surviving budget cuts”. This telescope is now in the sky, but it almost wasn’t because of those budget cuts. The Nancy Grace Roman Space Telescope launched Sunday from Florida after surviving two separate attempts by the White House to kill the whole program, of course.

But it’s good that it’s actually out there, and now it’s a million miles from Earth and heading to the same neighborhood as the James Webb Telescope, which we’ve shared on The Optimist Daily before. And what this new Roman telescope can do is kind of mind-blowing. This telescope isn’t out there to replace Hubble or Webb.

Again, Optimist Daily favorites here, and we love all the great images it’s captured. It works with them, but at a totally different scale. Its field of view is 100 times larger than Hubble’s, so it can survey huge swaths of sky in one shot. It also has a special instrument called a coronagraph that blocks star glare.

Didn’t really know that was an issue, but I can see that being a problem. And now scientists can actually photograph the planets orbiting those stars. These three telescopes will work as a layered system. Roman sweeps wide, Hubble zooms in for follow-up, and Webb goes deepest for the sharpest look.

All of Roman’s images will also be released to the public immediately, not just to scientists, so amateur astronomers can dig in too. So that’s a really awesome feature of this new telescope. And the big question Roman was built to answer out in the sky is why is the universe’s expansion speeding up?

Scientists have known about this since the late ’90s, but they still don’t have a good explanation, so this is gonna explore a major new frontier. 

Arielle: 

Yes. Um, I think we all know that we’re in a moment where the US science budget is, um, definitely under threat. So this launch feels like a win, but of course the fight is ongoing.

Karissa: 

Yeah, exactly. The next solution is “Statins reduce heart attack risk in healthy adults over 70, decade-long trial confirms”. So this is a big headline for anyone with aging parents or grandparents or honestly for anyone thinking about their future health. A world-first clinical trial just found that statins are safe and effective for healthy adults over 70, and it also puts to rest one of the biggest fears people have had about taking them.

Statins are prescription medication used to lower blood cholesterol levels and reduce the risk of heart attacks and strokes, if you didn’t know. Australian researchers at Monash University ran the first randomized control trial specifically testing statins as a preventative measure in healthy adults over 70.

There were nearly 10,000 participants, and it was a decade-long study. The result is that there was a 30% reduction in the risk of a first major cardiovascular event, including heart attack, stroke, or cardiac surgery. In practical terms for these results, one major cardiac event prevented for every 37 older adults treated with daily statins over nearly six years.

So that’s a great improvement. Statins have also come with this, uh, fear that dementia could be a side effect. People have reported side effects of losing their memory taking statins a long time ago, so that’s always been a concern. But this study puts that to rest. There was no statistically significant difference in dementia rates between the statin and placebo groups.

And one cardiologist said it really closes the book on that, that that actually is not a fear from this medication. Important to note in this trial is that more than 15% of participants stopped taking their medication during the trial, which is a real-world challenge, of course, of making sure people continue to take their medications.

Arielle: 

And another thing to note would be that the sample size for this study was not super diverse. Mm-hmm. Um, I think they were mostly white with a mean age of around 75. So the results may not apply to all types of communities. 

Karissa: 

Yeah, exactly. And now that we’re in, I believe September is World Heart Month and World Heart Day is September something.

I don’t know. My yoga studio just sent out something about it. But, um, this is great news for heart health. The last solution we had is “Why managers struggle with coaching and what the research says to do instead”. Almost every company says they invest in coaching their managers, and then you look at the research and coaching is consistently the thing managers get scored lowest on.

It’s kinda like dead last out of everything leaders get rated on. Gallup assessed managers on 20 leadership responsibilities, and coaching came in as the area most in need of improvement. It was rated that way both by managers and their own direct reports. But a 12-year analysis of 360-degree assessments from more than 1,700 leaders found the same thing.

Coaching was the lowest rated skill across the board. And the problem here might not be just coaching, it might be the definition, because most managers think of coaching as a scheduled event with an annual review, a weekly one-on-one check-in, and it makes it feel high stakes and easy to avoid. Researchers call the alternative to this in-the-moment coaching, a brief informal feedback woven into the workday as something that can be more effective here in improving coaching.

It could be a comment after a meeting, a question over coffee, or catching someone right after something goes really well or really badly. The principle behind this is to spot it and say it. It’ll treat any moment when something unexpected happens or someone asks for help as a coaching opportunity.

Arielle: 

Yeah, this kind of surprised me because I feel like coaching in general is so prevalent in this day and age with, like, social media and the online coaches and the life coaches and the love coaches and whatever coach. But I guess- Yeah … in practice, in real life, it does end up being that, that one-on-one review that happens once in a while at work instead of- Mm-hmm … um, kind of taking a, a more holistic approach or just, uh, as you mentioned, Karissa, saying something when you see it.

Karissa: 

Yeah, exactly. In this era of the always on workplace, since we’re always online, and sometimes it can be hard to separate work from life, it, you know, makes these scheduled check-ins feel like a source of friction. All right. Well, that’s all the good news from us this week. But before we head off, we have a positive quote to share with you.

Arielle: 

It’s by Dolly Parton, who has sadly left this realm. Um, but I’m sure she’s out there somewhere still belting her heart out. 

Karissa: 

Mm-hmm. Yeah, and… Well, actually, when I solo podcasted last week, as soon as I hung up the mic, I logged on to see Dolly Parton had left us, and I was quite sad. And so I got a lot of good quotes, um, over the week of mourning her.

And she just was such an Optimist, and, um, I liked to quote her on The Optimist Daily a lot over the years. So I thought this one was, just fit The Optimist Daily perfect. And she said, “Try to make someone else feel good, and that’ll make you feel better. If you can’t change the whole wide world, change your own little world, and maybe that’ll kinda reach out and do some good.”

Arielle: 

Aw, bless her heart. The passing of this cultural icon has, I think, hit so many diverse friend groups of mine. Um, Dolly Parton was such a unifier. 

Karissa: 

She’ll definitely be missed, but her wisdom will live on. 

Arielle: 

And on that note, we wish all of you Optimists out there a very, very happy, restful weekend. And Karissa and I will be back next week with more solutions.

Karissa: 

Yeah. And I guess, um, for the United States, it’ll be a three-day weekend, so enjoy that. We won’t have any solutions on Monday because of that holiday. But we’ll still be back with the podcast next Friday. 

Arielle: 

All right. Until then…

Karissa: 

bye, everyone!

Arielle: 

Bye!