Episode Description:

Karissa hosts solo this week while Arielle recovers, covering ten solutions including the world’s first wild bird flu vaccination program for Phillip Island’s little penguins, France making unsolicited telemarketing calls flat-out illegal, and what Baltimore is doing with $400 million in opioid settlement money.

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Transcript:

Karissa: 

Hey everyone, it’s Karissa, and welcome back to The Optimist Daily’s Weekly Roundup. I’m here alone today since co-host Arielle is out without a voice, so obviously it’d be a little difficult for her to get on here and share all the great solutions from The Optimist Daily But it’s been a while since when we’ve been able to share our weekly digest of solutions.

As Arielle popped on here the other week to let you all know, we were still in the midst of so many travel plans and catching up with family and weddings and big life events over the past month. Summer is that time. And of course, with all those travels and activities, sickness sometimes feels inevitable.

So Arielle did come down with something, and she’s trying to recover and get back home to Amsterdam, so I’ll just be solo podcasting today. There are a lot of positive things to share this week with you guys. I won’t go into too much of each solution, so for a more thorough rundown, check them out on our website, optimistdaily.com.

And we wanna remind you that you can get all these solutions straight to your inbox in our free daily or weekly newsletter. The weekly newsletter goes out on Fridays, and just like this podcast, it’s a digest of the 10 new solutions from The Optimist Daily each week. And in the daily newsletter, you get two new solutions, solutions from the archive, and a great positive quote to start off your day.

You can also follow us on all social media channels, @optimistdaily. We’re on everything, on Facebook, on Instagram, even on Pinterest. Our handle is the same everywhere, except on X, where we are @OdeToOptimism. If you have any comments, questions, or feedback, you can definitely engage with us on those social media channels, and you can also just email us at podcast@optimistdaily.com.

We always love to hear from you and welcome any kind of discussion. Before I go into the solutions, I also wanna thank our Emissaries who are the financial supporters of The Optimist Daily. Through your help, we are able to do this work and share it with as many people as possible, and we’re so grateful for all of you.

And of course, we just wanna thank all of our listeners and all of our Optimists out there for believing in optimism and believing in solutions. Well, I’m gonna go into the 10 new solutions from The Optimist Daily this week. I won’t go too deeply into these solutions today since I don’t have Arielle here to discuss a little further with.

So here’s just a little bit of a tasting menu. The first solution is “How Niger restored 5 million hectares without planting a single tree”. In 1983, an Australian agriculture advisor working in Niger noticed something strange. The land that looked completely dead wasn’t. There were living root systems under the soil waiting for someone to stop overgrazing long enough to let them come up.

40 years later, that observation has turned into a restoration movement covering 5 million hectares, and not a single tree was planted Tony Rinaudo, who is an Australian agriculture advisor, in 1983 discovered intact root systems beneath what appeared to be barren Sahel soil, and he developed a technique called Farmer-Managed Natural Regeneration, and abbreviated, that’s FMNR.

Farmers protect and selectively prune shoots emerging from existing underground roots, so there’s no seedlings and no planting required. It holds here because trees that farmers protect give direct returns: shade, erosion control, firewood, fruit, animal fodder. So the protection is kind of self-interest here and not a program obligation.

This method is really helping Niger, and it was formally recognized as a national restoration method in 2020. And by 2020, about five million hectares are restored, over 200 million trees are included in that, and roughly 2.5 million people benefited. The next solution we had to share this week is “Student Makers”.

Teen volunteers are teaching STEM across three continents. In 2022, a group of high school students in California designed 150 Lego-inspired airplane kits, 3D-printed each one by hand, assembled them, and shipped them to a school in Kenya. It was the project that defined what Student Makers would become, a nonprofit now run almost entirely by teenagers, offering free STEM education across the US while keeping active programs running in Kenya and India.

Something that former program participants emphasized is students who completed workshops a semester or two earlier would come back as instructors, and so it really creates a self-reinforcing pipeline of being in this program, being taught, and then coming back to teach. And partnering with other schools in other continents is a really awesome way to go about teaching STEM.

If you wanna learn more about this great organization that is helping kids and offering classes on 3D printing, Python, data science, physics, financial literacy, then check this one out. The next solution we had to share is “Back to school shopping without the meltdown, how to keep trends and budgets in check”.

This is actually a reprint article from last year, but I mean, every August the same conversation will happen in a lot of households. A kid has a list of things they absolutely need, and a parent has a budget that doesn’t reach that far, and both of them are not quite sure why this conversation on what a kid needs for back to school gets so heated.

But there’s a reason why it feels bigger than just the school supplies. Psychologist Caitlin Slavin says back to school shopping isn’t just about function, it’s about identity. This article goes into some methods to help calm down these conversations and, you know, we can’t always give our kids everything they want that’s on trend and, um, you know, shouldn’t obviously stretch your budget to do that.

So making your children a part of this conversation and really making it a moment of resilience. One psychologist in this article, Janine Jenna, says, “Children need to experience challenges, setbacks, and disappointments to build their resiliency and independence.” There’s a lot of great strategies here. I think the most important one to me that I saw in this was compromising strategically.

You can agree to buy a couple of splurge items and round out the rest with practical buys. The next solution is “The world hit three terawatts of solar power faster than anyone predicted”. This is a huge renewable energy win. It took 68 years to reach the first terawatt of global solar capacity, but the second arrived in two years, and the third only took 19 months.

Solar is accelerating faster than the forecasters expected and faster than some grids can currently absorb. And as of April 2026, solar and wind together are producing more electricity worldwide than natural gas. China actually has more than half of global solar deployments, and we were talking about this in our interview with Christie last week, again, if you haven’t checked it out, about how even though maybe the United States is kind of slowing on renewable energy, the rest of the world is moving on forward.

Chinese manufacturers drove down panel costs, and this enabled adoption in Pakistan, Nigeria, and the Philippines, and Cuba, countries that previously couldn’t justify the investment. This solution I was very excited to see because “In France, peace and quiet is now a legal right by banning unsolicited cold calls”.

France just made unsolicited telemarketing calls illegal. Not restricted, not regulated, straight out illegal. A 2025 parliamentary report found 97% of French people are annoyed by cold calls, which the authors described as one of those rare issues that unites people in France. Um, this might be a global uniting thing because I’m also very annoyed by cold calling.

But starting this week, businesses need written consent before they can call someone for marketing. No consent, no call. And businesses must obtain written consent and keep proof of that consent on file. Very important. So yeah, the ban took effect this week, and it covers all sectors, exceptions, of course, only for existing contracts or prior written consent.

I think this is great news, and the United States needs to do something similar because I’ve complained on this podcast before about how annoying spam calls are, and I actually noticed recently that I’ve been getting less because I added my name to the National Do Not Call Registry. I was getting a call, like, at least, like, two times a day, and I would block the number, and it would always come from a different number, and it would just be like blah, blah, blah.

It’s a broader shift in European consumer law from opt-out to opt-in models, GDPR, cookie consent, do not call registries, and now this. So the European Union in general is, uh, getting on board with this and trying to protect people’s peace. More good news out of the European continent is “London’s clean air zone is linked to faster lung growth in children”.

For the first time, researchers have direct evidence that cleaning up air pollution can actually improve children’s lungs, not just slow the damage. A Lancet Public Health study followed more than 3,400 children in London as the city’s ultra-low emission zone cut traffic pollution. These children were ages six to nine, and they were followed over several, several years in central London in the ULEZ zone and Luton, which is the control no clean air zone.

They found that these London children had slower lung growth than Luton children before the ULEZ, but after ULEZ, London children lungs function grew 233 milliliters per year versus 223 milliliters per year in Luton. This is really interesting because it’s the first study to link a clean air zone specifically to faster lung growth in children, and these kind of zones are expanding across Europe, but of course remain politically contentious because excluding cars is always going to be a huge debate.

But I think this study gives the debate something very concrete. And it’s also important to note that this finding shows that damage is reversible, and it’s taking a shorter than expected amount of time to reverse the harmful damages. The next solution we have to share is “Baltimore reimagines what 911 can do with $400 million to back it up”.

Every year, Baltimore takes nearly 1.7 million calls to 911. Many of them, tens of thousands, have nothing to do with crime or fire or medical emergencies. Someone fell asleep in a store, someone seems confused in a park, someone is having a mental health crisis in a McDonald’s parking lot and doesn’t know where else to turn.

Baltimore is rethinking what the city sends to those calls or who they send to those calls, and it now has roughly $400 million from illegal settlements to build something different. Mobile crisis teams are already operating. A clinician and a peer counselor go out together to respond to mental health calls in place of police.

But this new expanded program funded by this $400 million in opioid legal settlement money will go towards drug-related harms or harm prevention services. So this includes housing, healthcare, and education. Sending out teams that aren’t just police can lead to fewer arrests, and as one study found, there were fewer arrests when non-law enforcement teams responded to 911 calls, especially for Black callers, men, and people ages 25 to 39.

Often, we don’t know who to call in these kind of crises that don’t necessarily require police intervention. 911 was built for emergencies, of course, but over time it’s become the default call for anything overwhelming. So this program is an attempt to build a system that actually routes people to what they need and not just, uh, having cops show up when it’s not needed.

Cycling people through jail for poverty-related and mental health crises is expensive, often traumatic, and solves nothing, of course. So this is a city putting money towards the alternative. Moving on to the next solution, “The case for eating blueberries every day according to a nutritionist”. Blueberries are one of those foods that keep showing up in the research for reasons that go well beyond they’re good for you.

A cup a day, fresh or frozen, delivers fiber, vitamin C, and anthocyanins. I don’t know if I pronounced that right, but it’s a specific compound that protects blood vessels, supports gut health, and may lower the risk of high blood pressure, heart attacks, and cognitive decline. The frozen bag at the back of the freezer might actually even be the better buy according to this article.

A cup of blueberries is very impressive. It contains vitamin C, vitamin K, manganese, and about 3.5 grams of fiber, which is 14% of daily recommended fiber intake for adult women. One point that stood out to me is blueberries are great for exercise recovery. And as mentioned, frozen blueberries are cheaper, have a longer shelf life, work well cooked or blended, and yeah, can just be really easy to add to your, your daily meals, whether that’s in your yogurt, oatmeal, smoothies, salad, hummus, sauces.

I personally love blueberries, so great solution to see. The next solution is absolutely adorable. “Phillip Island’s little penguins are getting bird flu vaccines in a world-first program”. Every night on Phillip Island in Victoria, tens of thousands of little penguins come in from the sea and return to the exact same burrows they left that morning.

That routine is what makes them lovable, but it’s also what makes them vaccinatable. Researchers are using that predictable schedule to run the world’s largest wild bird vaccination program, catching, weighing, microchipping, and vaccinating more than 1,000 penguins so far against H5N1 bird flu, with thousands more to go.

So little penguins, they’re actually so cute if you haven’t seen a picture of them, and they are little. They’re the world’s smallest penguin species, about a ruler height, and they’re found only in Southern Australia and New Zealand. But this program is trying to target about 5,000 little penguins across Phillip Island and St.

Kilda Colony, and 1,000 plus are already vaccinated. This vaccination schedule is a two-dosed, two-dose H5N1 vaccine. The first dose is now, the second dose is in three weeks, and it’s only possible because penguins return to the same burrows each night. The penguins come ashore, they’re guided into small pens, weighed, measured, microchipped, vaccinated, and released.

So yeah, I mean, this is a great program, and of course, only possible because of their predictable schedule of returning to their little burrows, little homes. But little penguins are rated very high risk from H5N1 in Australia’s national risk assessment, despite not being federally listed as threatened.

So this is a great conservation intervention technique, and we wanna protect these little penguins, of course. And they’re actually, um, kind of celebrities over here because the Phillip Island population is about 40,000 birds, and the penguin parade draws 700,000 visitors each year and contributes about $500 million to Victoria’s economy.

So they are definitely a tourist attraction, but more importantly, of course, they are a species that needs protection as all our species do. Um, in the worst case in this vaccination story, or I guess the H5N1 threat, is that up to 16,000 little penguins could die, and that would not be great. H5N1 bird flu is…

has been a hot topic considering how it could be affecting poultry, farm-based poultry, and that could affect the food chain. It’s moving through wild seabird populations in a rapid pace, but it’s kind of a less covered dimension of the outbreak. This is the first program at this scale for wild birds anywhere in the world, believe it or not, but the logistics alone are quite remarkable.

Our final solution of the week is also on the back to school beat, and it is “Six useful things to donate before back to school season this year”. Back to school season generates a lot of still useful stuff. Lunch boxes the kids have outgrown, backpacks that survive the year but aren’t wanted, notebooks that never got opened, uh, last year’s water bottle trend, whether that’s S’well, Hydro Flask, Hydro Jug.

But most of it ends up in the trash, and Goodwill says that this is the window where they need donations the most, and there are a few specific categories that fly off thrift shelves the moment that school starts up again. Clothes and shoes, of course, are a huge one. Uniforms, sneakers, gym shorts, jeans, graphic tees, jackets, sweaters, sweatshirts, anything gently worn is fair game and could definitely be needed at your local Goodwill, at your local, uh, donation spot.

Bags are really easy ones here because backpacks, lunch boxes, messenger bags, laptop bags are very important, but make sure to check zippers and straps. If it’s functional, it will do. It can really serve someone and have a second life. Something interesting in this article too is donating dorm items. Mini refrigerators, blenders, toasters, coffee makers.

These are in big demand from college students. They must be clean and working of course with all cords. But these could also be very useful to college students who are having to buy everything for moving out and, um, you know, all of this adds up really quickly at retail prices. And this category to me is very underrated ’cause when we think back to school we’re, we usually just think of children in the K through 12, um, well, in the United States.

But going to school for college, university is real, and you need stuff when you’re entering this next part of life. If you know someone who might need these things it could be good to reach out. I know when I was in, um, just all parts of life, in elementary, like older friends, family friends who had like, you know, cute clothes and backpacks and stuff would always offer just, you know, in the spirit of community.

And going to college and stuff a lot of people would rally with, “I have old, um, you know, plates and bowls and stuff that you could use for your dorm if you’d like.” So such a big help. Well, that’s all the solutions we had to share from The Optimist Daily this week, and there’s a lot more on optimistdaily.com to go further into these solutions.

I missed so much having the discussions with Arielle because it’s always fun to kind of put in our own personal touch to all these solutions. So I miss Arielle, and she will be back hopefully next week. But before I go, I have a positive quote to leave you with, and it is, “Life is a learning process, and you have to try to learn what’s best for you.”

And that’s from John McEnroe, who is a very famous tennis player. And every time I see him and hear his voice, um, he was the narrator of this great Netflix show, Never Have I Ever. It’s a very funny kinda like teen drama that came out a couple years ago. And, um, I thought it was hilarious and kind of heartwarming too.

And John McEnroe is the narrator for a teenager, Devi, who, um, is going through a lot in life, so it’s just kinda funny that he’s just narrating her life. But he has a lot of great wisdom and of course, yes, life is a learning process. Well everyone, we will both be back next week on The Optimist Daily to share some more positive news.

But until then, I hope you have a great weekend. Bye.