Podcast Transcript June 12th, 2026— From a 340-year slavery law finally repealed to pancakes for cigarette butts: 10 solutions this week

Episode Description:

A high-risk breast cancer diagnosis used to mean one thing: chemotherapy. A large UK trial just found that 68 percent of those patients could skip it safely, based on a genomic test that already exists and is already in use.

Arielle and Karissa also get into the pigeon liver finding that stumped scientists for over a century, a California city that voted to permanently ban data centers, and France formally repealing a law that had been sitting on the books since 1685.

Stay tuned until the end for this week’s Emissary Shout Out!

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Theme and all original music by Marvin Lanes

Transcript:

Karissa:

Hello everyone , I’m Karissa.

Arielle:

And I’m Arielle.

Karissa:

And welcome back to The Optimist Daily’s weekly roundup

Arielle:

Yes, we are so happy to be here, feeling really positive today personally. How are you, Karissa?

Karissa:

Yeah, I’m feeling pretty positive myself. The sun is shining, lots of good news to share.

Arielle:

And we also have two Emissary shout-outs that came in.

Karissa:

Yeah, keep the shout-outs coming, Emissaries. We wanna recognize what makes you optimistic, of course. And if you want a shout-out on the podcast and support The Optimist Daily financially, you can become an Emissary, and the link is in the show notes.

Arielle:

Yes, we cannot do this work without you, so thank you so much to all the Emissaries out there. But also thanks to all the Optimists who are just part of our community who read our articles or listen to the podcast or both, follow us on socials. All of that support, rates, reviews, subscriptions, all of that really does keep us going, and yeah, we definitely need it. Uh, some days are not as positive as others, and knowing that we have such a great community around us helps us continue on.

Karissa:

If you want These solutions in a different format, we have our daily and weekly edition of the newsletter that you can sign up for.

And again, link is in the show notes.

Arielle:

And if you have any comments, questions, or feedback, you can reach us at podcast@optimistdaily.com.

Karissa:

Yeah, or on any social media channels. We’re @optimistdaily on just about everything except on X, where we are @OdeToOptimism.

Arielle:

Oh, I should mention that next week there is a very, very special guest interview, coming out.

Karissa:

That’s right. I am looking forward to hearing this special guest episode.

Arielle:

Yes. But for now, let’s focus on the solutions that were published this week on The Optimist Daily. Karissa, do you wanna jump in?

Karissa:

Yeah!

The first solution we shared this week is called “Breast cancer genomic test could spare millions from chemotherapy.” A massive UK trial just found that 68% of high-risk breast cancer patients could safely skip chemotherapy based on a single genomic test. But the key word here is high risk. These are patients who, by every traditional measure, were supposed to need chemotherapy. Chemotherapy is just a very intensive and emotional process to go through,

Arielle:

Mm-hmm.

Karissa:

of course, physically tolling as well.

So the fact that this test could possibly change clinical treatment of breast cancer is very optimistic in my opinion.

Arielle:

Yeah, it’s great to see the growing awareness around, long-term quality of life costs of cancer treatment and not just survival outcomes. This genomic test, uh, Prosig- Prosigna I think it’s called, already exists and is available. So this isn’t a future technology story.

It’s a clinical practice story that’s happening right now.

Karissa:

In this trial, 68% of patients who were clinically flagged high risk scored low on the genomic test, and it meant that their outcomes were nearly identical to those who went through full chemotherapy. So that’s a pretty big number, and yeah, I mean, again, can just change the treatment of cancer if it’s just widely implemented more.

Arielle:

I wonder if maybe this test can be applied to other cancers as well, maybe in the future.

Karissa:

I’m sure it’s definitely in the works.

All right, I’m gonna move on to solution number two, which is “The parenting habit that builds lifelong closeness with adult children.”

The research is fairly consistent. Some parents stay genuinely close to their adult children, and some don’t, of course. But the gap isn’t really about love, because most parents love their children deeply.

In this solution, we get some insight from a Harvard-affiliated psychologist who has been studying what actually separates the two groups, and it comes down to one pattern that plays out in small moments across years. And the core finding was that unconditional parental regard: love, and acceptance that doesn’t depend on the child meeting expectations, is the defining factor in whether adult children stay genuinely close to their parents.

Arielle:

Yeah, parent-child relationships are often very complex and, this article goes into what, um, conditional parental regard looks like. So basically, if a child calls their parent and says something like, “Oh, I lost my job,” or, you know, “I’m, I’m having a low moment right now,” and then the parent can’t really react to that in, um…

Yeah, they’re, they’re just disappointed, and there’s this overwhelming feeling of negativity, when their child comes to them with this type of news instead of, I guess a more supportive way of reacting to, um, news that is not necessarily the most positive.

Karissa:

Yeah, and Everyone’s gonna make mistakes; nobody is perfect. But I think the baseline here is just to be supportive and be there for your kids.

Arielle:

Yeah.

Karissa:

I also thought this solution made a good point that a lot of parenting advice is aimed at parents with younger children or teenage children, but, you know, you’re always gonna be a parent through your entire life,

parenting is a life journey.

Arielle:

Yeah, yeah. This might be personal, Karissa, but how’s your relationship with your, with your parents?

Karissa:

I have a pretty great relationship with my parents, but it’s been complex and it gets even more complex being an adult and dealing with boundaries and stuff. of, you know, I am no longer a kid, I am an adult now who can make my own decisions. But for the most part, it’s, it’s good, but complex.

Arielle:

Yeah. Um, similar. My relationship with my parents was definitely more fraught with disagreements and, um, maybe not the best communication styles on both, on both sides. But what I love is that they have actually apologized to me about things that they now know they could have done better, and that is really healing.

Um, and I think it definitely helps me stay close to them ’cause, yeah, it’s so remarkable when a parent, a person of authority, can admit when they’re wrong and, um, yeah, for it not to be, like, something that they’ll never do or something that you can never hope for as a child. Um, so yeah, I would say it’s good.

Karissa:

Yeah, exactly. I think I’m still waiting For a couple apologies. But one day. We’re all evolving.

I’m gonna move on to another solution that we shared this week, and it is called “France finally votes to strike the Code Noir from books, its last slavery law.” Believe it or not, there was still an untouched, unrepealed slavery law for the past 170 years still existing, even though slavery was abolished in France. So France’s National Assembly just voted 254 to zero to formally repeal the Code Noir, and it was the 1685 royal decree from Louis XIV that governed enslaved people in French colonies. I would like to say that it’s opening up this conversation of, I mean, for one, why was it still there?