 When people hear the word environment, they think of the stuff out there. But in reality, we are part of the environment and the environment is part of us. So whatever you do to the environment, you do to yourself. You take better care of it if you know that it's part of you. You cannot draw a distinguishing line between us, me, I, you and the environment. We are one. We are masters of self-deception. If I would tell you that a foreign nation would come to the United States every year and wipe out a place the size of Miami, 450,000 people, we would go to war with that nation immediately. It's just the amount of people we kill off with cigarettes. If we look at the recent outbreak of the coronavirus, the death count from this outbreak will be in the noise of just smoking alone. And we advertise for that. We are not advertising for coronavirus just yet. So we are constantly harming ourselves. We are living on a planet that's on fire. We are so many that the damage we do happens at a scale so vast. We might still have the ability to change the course of humanity. And every day going by where we pretend as if nothing has happened is a lost day. Once we go beyond the tipping point, making a correction will not bring the system back to its state. The research that we conduct really morphs into very unexpected outcomes. Plastics are absolutely fascinating. It has been an accident from the beginning. When we designed these materials, we weren't thinking about that we're going to mass produce them. If you look at plastic recycling, we all feel good that, oh yeah, there's a blue bin in this room, so great. But it won't be recycled, right? It's a scam. It is difficult to find a person right now who doesn't have detectable levels of various plastics in their bloodstream, in breast milk, in their fat tissue, in their gut. Who wants to listen to a professor? So academics are boring, right? They seem like people who are not real. We are real people. We had real childhoods, we had real challenges, we worked real jobs. Starting age 15, I worked in construction. We were working on a canal lock. It was empty and we had to descend down into the canal to supply very toxic plastic paint to surfaces all day long inhaling the toxic air that made our skin peel off. Unless you experience it, it's hard to understand what it really means for the people who get exposed on a daily basis. And that's ultimately why a lot of us work in public health and in environmental engineering. We have certainly changed the composition of over 2,000 personal care products. But I don't see the required breakthrough that needs to happen very, very quickly in a drastic way in order to create a livable planet. I think there's no point in being a pessimist in life. Life is precious, every day should be celebrated, and so we got to slow down. We got to think about what is really important to us, whether it's counting the lives that are lost due to environmental pollution or the impact of our consumption that exceeds the boundaries of our planet. We kind of live like kids where we expect others to make the right decisions for us. We could change the market. We don't have to wait for the government to make big decisions to protect us. The things we buy, the things we eat, how we create our environment. I think nobody wants to leave this planet thinking that they were the last one and they just switched off the light. I hope that more and more of us can say that we conducted ourselves along the lines of what we value most, giving the future generation a chance to also have a great life.