Fix The News

What if we could catch the next pandemic before it starts?

For most of human history, we’ve discovered outbreaks after people start getting sick. But what if we could spot a dangerous virus as it emerges, track it as it spreads and give health workers the information they need to stop it - in real time?
Meet Dr Pardis Sabeti, geneticist, disease hunter and professor at Harvard University. Pardis has spent more than two decades on the frontlines of some of the world’s deadliest outbreaks, from Lassa fever and Ebola in West Africa to COVID-19. Now, through Sentinel, she and her team are trying to build something even more ambitious: an early-warning system for infectious disease that can work anywhere - including communities across Africa where laboratory resources are limited and outbreaks can easily go undetected.
From why many “emerging” diseases may actually be diseases we simply haven’t detected to the devastating consequences of global health funding cuts - this is a conversation about how close we are to changing our relationship with infectious disease, and what it will take to stop the next outbreak before it becomes a pandemic.

In this episode:
How Pardis and her team tracked Ebola as it spread through West Africa
Why many “emerging” diseases may already be circulating
How Sentinel is building an early-warning system for outbreaks
What Rwanda got right with Marburg
What global health funding cuts look like on the ground and in the lab
Why stopping the next pandemic will take more than technology
Why Pardis still believes we can build a world where outbreaks are stopped before they become pandemics
Timestamps:
00:00 The Disease Hunter
00:42 If Pandemics Keep You Up at Night
02:51 Inside the 2014 Ebola Outbreak
03:38 The More You Test, the More You Find
04:39 Building an Early-Warning System for Disease
07:05 Are Diseases Emerging - or Are We Finally Detecting Them?
08:48 How Did Pardis Know COVID Was Coming?
10:36 Is Another Pandemic Inevitable?
11:43 What Well-Timed Funding Makes Possible
13:52 Why Every Person Matters in a Pandemic
15:26 How Rwanda Stopped Marburg
16:35 Why Ebola Is So Hard to Stop in the DRC
18:26 Midpoint Reflections
19:29 What Global Health Funding Cuts Look Like on the Ground
21:39 Laying Off a Third of Her Team
23:52 “Philanthropic Survivor’s Guilt”
26:59 How Do You Take On a Trillion-Dollar Problem?
29:08 Why Technology Alone Won’t Stop the Next Pandemic
31:57 “I’m a Student of Humanity”
34:03 The Work You Don’t Get to Finish
Find Out More:
👉 Explore Sentinel
👉 Learn more about Pardis Sabeti and the Sabeti Lab
👉 Discover The Audacious Project at TED
👉 Read about Sentinel’s $100 million MacArthur 100&Change award

About 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-Rose
Produced by Fix The News
Audio production: Anthony Badolato, Hear That!

 This episode was produced in Australia on the lands of the Gadigal, Wurundjeri and Woi Wurrung peoples.

What if the knowledge we need most for the future is something we’ve spent centuries forgetting?

Meet Victor Steffensen, Tagalaka man, author, filmmaker, musician and co-founder of the Living Knowledge Network. For decades, Victor has worked with Indigenous communities in Australia and around the world to revive traditional ways of reading and caring for Country. His new book, The Knowledge, asks a much bigger question: what have we lost by separating ourselves from the natural world - and what might happen if we learned how to listen again?

From why the climate crisis may actually be an identity crisis to how Western science and Indigenous Knowledge Systems can work together and the deceptively simple idea that everything we create should help nature flourish - this is a conversation about Indigenous knowledge as you might never have heard it before. Not as something that belongs to a select few, but as the wisdom that underpins us all.

In this episode:
Why Victor believes we’re all Indigenous to the planet
Why he thinks the climate crisis is, at its heart, an identity crisis
What happens when a landscape loses its identity and how you bring it back
How ancient knowledge and modern science can strengthen each other
The possibilities of reviving cultural memory and practice
And why, instead of arguing about who created the mess we're in, it’s time to get on with cleaning it up
Timestamps:
00:50 Introduction to Victor Steffensen
05:21 Why Indigenous Knowledge is for everyone
09:17 The moment that sparked 'The Knowledge' for Victor
13:00 Indigenous Knowledge v Western Science
17:32 What Victor has learned from apply the Knowledge in different countries
20:06 Midpoint Reflections
22:40 The Knowledge Triangle
24:41 The Identity Crisis
31:21 What does this actually look like?
34:47 The job of cleaning up the mess
41:32 Final Reflections

Want to know more about The Knowledge?
👉 Read Victor's new book, The Knowledge(Available online & at all good bookstores)
👉 Explore the Living Knowledge Network
👉 Follow the team's work: Instagram. LinkedIn. Facebook. Video. 

Image Credit:
Harry Vincent - Living Knowledge Network
About 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-Rose
Produced by Fix The News
Audio production: Anthony Badolato, Hear That!

 This episode was produced in Australia on the lands of the Gadigal, Wurundjeri and Woi Wurrung peoples.

Five years ago, the Taliban banned girls from the classroom. One school refused to stop teaching.
 
In August 2021, as the Taliban returned to power in Afghanistan, the staff and students of SOLA, the country’s first and only boarding school for Afghan girls, managed to escape to Rwanda, where they established a temporary campus to continue classes.  
 
Meet Shabana Basij-Rasikh, co-founder of SOLA, and our very first guest on this podcast when we launched in 2023. Five years since the Taliban takeover, Shabana returns to reflect on what has happened since: from Afghan women running secret schools and girls rationing internet data to keep learning to what has become of SOLA’s first cohort and what it means to create a place where Afghan girls have the freedom to simply be  “girls who go to school.”
 
In this episode:
Why Afghan women are continuing a generations-long tradition of secret schools
How the internet has become a lifeline for girls and women inside Afghanistan
What happened to the first cohort of SOLA girls 
How SOLA built a permanent new home for Afghan girls in Rwanda
The importance of giving girls the safety to be normal teenagers
What five years of exile, education and resistance can teach us 
Why Shabana’s message to the world is simple: “Don’t look away.”

Help keep the doors open for Afghan girls:
👉 Learn more about SOLA
👉 Donate to SOLA
👉 Explore SOLAx

Timestamps:
00:54 Introducing the School of Leadership Afghanistan (SOLA)
03:10 What hope means to Shabana Basij-Rasikh
05:07 The legacy of Afghan women and eduction
08:43 Why the internet is a lifeline for Afghan women and girls
13:10 SOLAx - the online school
18:04 An update on the students of SOLA
21:45 Midpoint Reflections
23:17 SOLA has finished construction on a permanent campus in Rwanda
27:43 The power of partnerships
29:50 The relationship between SOLA and Rwanda
32:18 What the students of SOLA have taught Shabana
35:40 How the story of SOLA expands what's possible
38:31 Final Thoughts

About 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-Rose
Produced by Fix The News
Audio production: Anthony Badolato, Hear That!

 This episode was produced in Australia on the lands of the Gadigal, Wurundjeri and Woi Wurrung peoples.

The story of farming has always been one of adaptation. The next chapter may be its most one important yet.
In this special episode of Fix The News, we bring together two conversations exploring one of the defining questions of our time: how do we feed a growing world without destroying the planet that we depend on?
Meet Professor Rattan Lal, one of the world's leading soil scientists and a World Food Prize laureate, whose life's work has transformed our understanding of the living world beneath our feet. Then meet Alesha Miller, Chief Strategy Officer at Digital Green, who's helping smallholder farmers across Africa and Asia combine generations of local knowledge with artificial intelligence to build more resilient food systems.

Together, they help us unpack that that the future of agriculture isn't about choosing between nature and technology, tradition and innovation, or human and artificial intelligence. It's about strengthening both. 
 
In this episode:
Why healthy soil is the foundation of healthy food systems
How our lifestyle choices today will help shape the future
The importance of the world's 500 million smallholder farmers
How AI can amplify rather than replace human knowledge
Why trust matters as much as technology
Why the future of farming may depend on combining old wisdom with new ideas

Timestamps:
00:13 The most common occupation on earth
03:45 Meet Professor Rattan Lal
04:54 Why soil is a living entity
08:37 What does Regenerative Agriculture actually mean?
12:05 The Law of Return
20:53 Midpoint Reflections
22:47 Meet Alesha Miller
25:47 What is Digital Green?
30:14 Can weather predictions save AI?
37:21 Technology and Trust
43:04 Closing Reflections: Choose Both

Dig Deeper:
👉Professor Rattan Lal
👉 Digital Green

About 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-Rose
Produced by Fix The News
Audio production: Anthony Badolato, Hear That!

 This episode was produced in Australia on the lands of the Gadigal, Wurundjeri and Woi Wurrung peoples.

Since October 2023, much of the world's attention has been focused on the destruction in Gaza. This conversation is about something we hear much less about: rebuilding.

Meet Tala and Farah Mousa, two teenage sisters from Gaza and winners of The Earth Prize Middle East, one of the world's leading environmental competitions for teenagers. Their project, Build Hope is recycling the enormous volumes of rubble left behind by destroyed buildings and transforming it into reusable bricks to help rebuild their communities. The idea began with a Year 9 textbook in Tala's school bag. Today, it has the potential to give communities beyond Gaza, the tools to rebuild using what's already around them. It's an idea that has the potential to reduce waste, lower rebuilding costs and support reconstruction in disaster and war zones around the world.
Podcast Image credit: Ali Awad

In this episode:
Displacement and disruption - life as a teenager in Gaza
The inspiration behind their award-winning project
Their vision for helping communities beyond Gaza
Why rebuilding deserves as much attention as destruction
Timestamps:
00:35 What we know about Gaza and the Middle East Region
04:18 Introducing Tala and Farah Mousa
05:14 What they want us to know about their community
05:58 The inspiration behind Build Hope
08:12 A family and community project
09:21 The problem with rubble
09:54 Why its important for people in Gaza to have the tools to rebuild themselves
10:53 Midpoint Reflections
12:36 The next step for Build Hope
13:17 What Tala and Farah have learned about themselves
13:53 What hope means to these sisters
15:49 Gaza 10 years from now
16:37 Tala and Farah's message for young people around the world
18:54 Final reflections

Support Build Hope:
Contact amy@fixthenews.com for more information
About The Earth Prize
The Earth Prize is one of the world's largest environmental competitions for teenagers, supporting young innovators developing practical solutions to the planet's biggest challenges.

About 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-Rose
Produced by Fix The News
Audio production: Anthony Badolato, Hear That!

 This episode was produced in Australia on the lands of the Gadigal, Wurundjeri and Woi Wurrung peoples.