TED Audio Collective.

You're listening to How to Be a Better Human.

I am your host, Chris Duffy, and today we're talking about problems.

So how do you fix a problem?

One time I lived in a place where whenever we told the landlord about a problem,

he would send over this

handyman to try and fix the issue. But the handyman fixed it always in the absolute cheapest and

fastest way possible. Like one time there was a leaky pipe and the solution that this man came up with

was to just wrap the pipe in like 20 feet of duct tape. It was truly incredible. Or another time,

we had a hole in a cabinet door, and he came over and his solution was he just filled the

entire cabinet with that inflatable spray foam stuff so that there just wasn't a cabinet anymore

at all. And I'm pretty sure that that is not how you're supposed to fix either of those problems.

But here's the thing, that guy actually was not

the worst. There are a lot of people who don't even try and fix problems. They completely ignore the

issues or they make problems worse. And many, many, many problems that people are dealing with these days

are a lot more significant than a weird cabinet or a leaky pipe. I'm talking about broken down systems. I'm talking about

malfunctioning international organizations. Things like that can feel unfixable. But today's guests,

Ann Morris and Francis Frey, they are all about finding solutions to problems, whether they're big or

small. And those two, they refuse to accept the idea that nothing can be done. They never resort

to duct tape or spray foam unless those are appropriate for the solution. And they so rarely are.

To give you a sense of how Anne and Francis work, here's a clip from Anne's TED Talk.

Move fast and break things is still a widely held belief that we can either make progress or take care of each

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