The Progress Report: Clean Up on Aisle Everest

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Zachary: What Could Go Right? I’m Zachary Karabell, the founder of The Progress Network, joined by Emma Varvaloucas, the Executive Director of The Progress Network, and this is our shorter form weekly podcast, our Progress Report where we look at some of the news of the week, some of the news of the day, and examine stories that you almost inevitably will have missed buried as they are under the tsunami of bad news that washes over all of us on a regular basis. In fact, it’s news that we would’ve missed, that Emma would’ve missed, that I would’ve missed, that the team at The Progress Network would’ve missed unless they and us were making an effort to find it. And that is one of the great challenges of our age. Good news is hard to find and bad news is everywhere.

You actually have to make an effort to look for stories about things that are going right, whereas you have to make an effort not to be overwhelmed by stories of all that is going wrong. And it is simply our. Proposition that in a world where much is in fact going right but isn’t talked about, it creates a false optic of everything going wrong and nothing going right.

When the reality is at any given time, there is a lot going wrong and there’s a lot going right, and it is what is going right that could shape our future in a much more constructive way than all the things that are going wrong, which we know can shape our future in a destructive way. So there you have it.

And this is why we do what we do and why Emma spends all of her time sitting on a beach in Greece with her computer because she’s at work 24/7. There’s an AI bot that scans the world in her sleep. It’s incredible the amount of conscious and unconscious effort that Emma spends trying to find tidbits of good news in every one of the 198 dentist associated territories around the world.

So Emma, what have you found for us this week?

Emma: I actually wanna write a book called I Dream of Progress–

Zachary: That’s good.

Emma: I’ve just been waiting to use the wake up honey meme on this podcast. Wake Up Honey. The World Bank has released its income classifications for fiscal year 2026

Zachary: Thank you for that.

Emma: That landed just about as well as I thought it was going to. It actually excites me.

Zachary: I mean, I’m smiling both internally and externally. If you can, if you’re watching this, I’m smiling. If you’re not watching this, I’m also smiling, but the smile doesn’t say as much.

Emma: Well, the World Bank has released this due income classifications for fiscal year 2026,

Zachary: hasn’t wake up honey.

Emma: about it? Yes, the world is every year is richer than it used to be. It’s fun looking at the progress from 1987 in 19 87, 20 5% of countries for high income, so a quarter of the world, and now we’re at 40% and lots of movement upward in between as well.

I can look up the percent for low income, but it has gotten much lower. I think it’s only 12% of the world is classified as low income now. Yep. 12% low income, not too shabby.=

Zachary: Do you wanna do a wake up honey? The World Bank, ASMR. If we’re gonna continue the meme theme –

Emma: What would that look like? I mean, I’ve got some nails. I can click clack. I don’t know what else that would have.

Zachary: Sure there’s a way you could come up with a wake up honey as SMR somehow. In the back of your mind as you contemplate a wake up honey, A SMR that involves the World Bank and diminishing poverty levels and increasing affluence around the world year by year, in a way that does not adequately heralded or fully understood.

We will now move on to the second item on your — 

Emma: No, we won’t move on quite yet ’cause I have to wish. Congratulations to the countries that have moved up. Categories this year or, okay. So we got one, one country that entered high income status. It’s a fun one.

Zachary: Pick a continent. I’ll try to guess.

Emma: Lot of wait. Hold on. South America. Now, wait, hold on. I’m about to embarrass myself deeply. Central America. Central America.

Zachary: Okay. Costa Rica.

Emma: Yes. How did you get that?

Zachary: There aren’t that many countries in central America

Emma: Fair enough. And not many are that rich? Yeah.

Zachary: I mean, I suppose Panama is somewhat functional.

Emma: Still-

Zachary: With no disrespect to Honduras, Guatemala, and El Salvador as well as Belize and everyone always forgets Belize. I feel Belize is like the seventh child.

Emma: It is Costa Rica. Congratulations to them. And we’ve got two that have moved up into upper middle income, which there’s no way you’re gonna guess these.

Zachary: Oh don’t, that’s a challenge. I feel I need to rise to give me a continent and I’ll try

Emma: one’s in Africa

Zachary: Uhhuh.

Emma: and the other is Oceana

Zachary: I’m probably not gonna get that one. Kenya,

Emma: Nope.

Zachary: No. Okay. Tell me.

Emma: We got Cape Verde, a bond

Zachary: Yeah, no. Wasn’t gonna get Cape Verde. Apparently it’s beautiful. And although it’s kind of semi Africa, semi Europe, right, with the Portuguese heritage and the slave tradition, it’s a whole, it’s a mishmash

Emma: Kate Verde is also like, when you look at all of the indicators for development, like Cape Verde is always just on the top of the list of the African countries. They’re kind of a, an outlier, but still we’re excited

Zachary: I have no idea Fiji. No, can’t be

Emma: Samoa.

Zachary: Samoa!

Emma: I didn’t, I mean. There’s no way you would’ve gotten that,

Zachary: Round of applause for Samoa and Cape Verde.

Emma: That’s right.

Okay, let’s move on. Let’s talk about Paris. We haven’t talked about theran in some time. So I’m sure people know about the 1.4 billion euro cleanup project that the Parisians undertook when they hosted the Olympics, particularly for the river Seine. People might remember the videos of swimmers in the Olympics trying to prepare to swim in the river by ingesting little tiny bits of e coli for days or vomiting after.

It was all a big thing, right? Like how clean is the river? Well. It has reached European cleanliness standards for regions are now legally allowed to swim in the river. This is the first time they’ve been able to do so in a hundred years. So good for them.

Zachary: I saw the pictures all over this week of people frolicking in the sun and happily doing so, and then a few of my friends responded by saying, let them go first and they can tell us how it goes.

Emma: I mean, they seemed, there was quite a few people in the photos, you know, newspaper reporters interviewed people like they were willing, the locals were willing, is what I’m trying to say.

Zachary: Absolutely.

Emma: Let’s talk quickly about the Supreme Court. What was the flurry of decisions that have come out? You might have missed this one, which I think is an uny Good as a decision.

They have decided in a six three vote to uphold a program that has been active since 1996 that provides subsidized telephone internet services to. Mostly rural Americans, lots of low income Americans, rural healthcare providers, schools and libraries. Conservative groups had decided to question whether the FCC, basically, Congress gave the FCC the ability to disperse these funds, and conservative groups challenged Congress’s ability to do that.

But the Supreme Court decided no Congress is allowed. Keep the funds, keep the program, continue on with the subsidized telephone and internet services.

Zachary: Look, and that’s important too because all people tend to focus on is all this controversial Supreme Court decisions that they hate. Left and right and that tends to dominate the, oh my God, Supreme Court decisions as opposed to the other ones that are much more anodyne. And as you just said, in this case, what I think many people would consider more constructive, obviously not the three who voted against it, but the point is, we don’t tend to lawed decisions nearly to the degree that we decry them.

That’s part of the same matrix of problem about how we integrate, as it were, good news versus bad news, and then applying it to Supreme Court where the lion’s share of attention goes to the, oh my God, responds to the decisions and not the, oh my God, response to the decisions.

Emma: Yeah. I mean, to be fair, as you said, there’s so much going on with the Supreme Court that it’s. These ones that our people are happy with are, by nature gonna receive less attention. But they are there. The ghost gun one was another good one that I think people missed. Yeah. So moving on beyond the Supreme Court, let’s take a quick visit to Nepal, specifically Mount Everest private companies.

There. Are working with authorities to test pilot some new drones that are helping clear Mount Everest and some of the surrounding peaks of literally hundreds of tons of trash that has been accumulating there since I think the eighties or nineties. It’s been a

Zachary: Right, but it’s gotten so much worse over the past decade as commercial. Climbing and permits have increased. And so you know, you have these pictures and I know people have done this, that there really is just swaths of, it’s like walking past a mini dump. I mean, no, it’s not like climbing the entire mountain.

You’re walking past garbage. But there are distinct areas where people just left stuff and it has just sat there.

Emma: Left up

and also because the ice is melting in places, so it’s revealing the trash that’s been sitting there right under the snow and the ice. They actually changed regulations relatively recently that if you, I think if you summit and definitely I think it. Actually, I’m not sure if it’s just if you summit or if you get to a certain level of camp, but you have to bring down at least eight kilograms of trash when you come back down from the mountain.

The people who are mostly responsible for picking up the trash are the authorities like police, military, or Sherpas. So Sherpas. You know, already working in extremely dangerous conditions, have to carry down a bunch of trash every time they go up. So these drones are not working perfectly.

Obviously in the high altitudes, it’s a very challenging technological problem. The high winds are sometimes taking these drones down. They have little parachutes, by the way. They have automated parachutes, which is kind of cute.

Zachary: Aw. Little drone parachutes.

Emma: The drones are Sherpa approved. This is from a Bloomberg article, and they interviewed some of those guys and they were very happy about them.

So not perfect yet. As I said they’re just testing them out, trying different drones from different companies. But could one day see a future where the drones have picked Mount Everest clean of trash.

Zachary: And that is yet another example of sometimes the odd dialectic of progress, which is that human beings create solutions to problems that human beings have created, but nonetheless do create solutions that are in. Innovative, effective, and may have other uses. Who knows? That is it for us this week. Thank you all for listening.

Please, if you have a great idea or a great story you think we should highlight either in this podcast or in the weekly newsletter also called What Could Go Right? send those suggestions to Emma and her team at hello at The Progress Network dot org. Send us anything you wanna send us via email and we will do our best to respond.

Emma: I should say that we just received a really wonderful message from one of our podcast listeners that was inspired by our podcast to implement a rule with his friends and family because they. Apparently spent all of their conversations freaking out about the state of affairs and the news. They have decided to end all their conversations with one positive piece of news.

So we love that. Thank you so much for telling us that. You know, give it a try yourselves if you think that might be helpful, and please send us messages if we have somehow helped you in some way.

Zachary: And maybe that’s an even better reason to listen to this particular podcast. It gives you fodder for those ending conversations. We’ll be back with you next week. Thanks for listening.