The World Is Falling Apart. Here's Why You Should Still Be Optimistic

Be honest — when did you last feel genuinely optimistic about the future?
With Trump, Putin, climate chaos, wars, inflation and a media machine built
on doom — it's never been harder to stay hopeful. But what if optimism
isn't just a feeling? What if it's a science-backed survival skill — and
the single most important force keeping democracy alive?

In this live episode, recorded at the beautiful Hotel Klostermaier in Icking,
Bavaria, we sit down with two of Germany's most respected science journalists
and documentary filmmakers — Dirk and Sabine Steffens — to talk about
optimism, the negativity bias, doomscrolling, climate solutions, and why the
facts about our world are far better than the headlines suggest.

Dirk has just published his new book "Hoffnungslos Optimistisch"
(Hopelessly Optimistic) — a must-read for anyone who wants to stop
feeling paralysed and starting to feel empowered again.

🌍 In this episode, you'll discover:
✅ Why pessimism is actually the lazy option — and optimism takes real work
✅ The evolutionary reason your brain is wired for doom (and how to override it)
✅ Why a toddler falls 4,000 times before walking — and what that tells us about resilience
✅ How pooping blue whales could solve up to 40% of our climate problem (yes, really)
✅ Why bees ARE coming back — and you haven't heard about it because of the negativity bias
✅ The shocking truth: over 60% of Germany's electricity now comes from renewables
✅ Why democracy literally cannot function without optimism
✅ How to hack the algorithm to feed you good news instead of doom
✅ What JFK's moon speech teaches us about courage and goal-setting
✅ Why the future is still an open book — and that is great news

💬 "You cannot solve any problem by not being optimistic." — Dirk Steffens
💬 "We have more solutions than problems." — Sabine Steffens
💬 "Democracy is the promise of a better future." — Dirk Steffens

─────────────────────────────────────────
👉 ABOUT DIRK & SABINE STEFFENS
─────────────────────────────────────────
Dirk Steffens and Sabine Steffens are award-winning German science journalists,
documentary filmmakers, and TV presenters. They have traveled to over 120 countries, covering nature, climate, science, and the future of our planet for ZDF, Terra X, and international media. Dirk is the author of the new book
"Hoffnungslos Optimistisch" — a science-based case for hope in troubled times.

📺 Watch their documentaries and reports: https://www.zdf.de/serien/terra-x
🎙️ Their Podcast: https://www.geo.de/wissen/kettenreakt...
📘 Dirk's Book "Hoffnungslos Optimistisch": https://www.penguin.de/buecher/dirk-s...
📸 Dirk on Instagram:&amp

Transcript

00:00:00 Claudia Koestler: Be honest. When was the last time you felt really optimistic about the world? That's exactly why we are having this conversation. Welcome to Over Here, Over there, your podcast, Across Borders The Transatlantic News and Views. Today we'll talk a topic everyone needs and need more of optimism and how to find it. So please listen to the end. There are excellent pointers coming. We recorded this discussion live at the beautiful Hotel Klostermaier in Icking, Germany. Many thanks for that and please visit when you get a chance. And now let's go. I know we've all been there. I've been there, you know, sitting there at four or five in the morning. Doomscrolling. And it's all doom and gloom. But I've been wondering where does it lead me? Where does it all go? And actually, you know, looking on a more positive side, on the bright side of things, That's not just, you know, nice and fluffy stuff and all that. It's a survival skill. So it is absolutely important, isn't it?

00:01:09 Dan Harris: Yeah. I get caught in the doom scroll. And I'm, I'm hoping that these experts across the way for me can get me out of that doom scroll. But and that, and that is, , another tie, another session with Dirk and Sabina Stevens who have important message for us all. And Dirk has just written a book on optimism. And so we want to highlight that and talk to him about that. Dirk. Sabina, welcome again.

00:01:34 Speaker 3: Thank you. Great to have you. Great to have you here. Thanks for having us. Yeah.

00:01:37 Dan Harris: You've traveled to one hundred and twenty, one hundred and thirty countries. You've seen a lot of good things and bad things. What are the brightest possibilities that you see in hanity? I know this is a huge question, but in the darker moments, I mean, just just something that an example say.

00:01:52 Dirk Steffens: Let's start with a small thing. I don't know whether we can hear it.

00:01:56 Dan Harris: Yes.

00:01:58 Dirk Steffens: Do you hear the chicken? Yeah. We're sitting in our Bavarian, , hometown. It's a village, actually. You see the Alps behind us, and what we hear there is a hen. Probably it just lay an egg and hen celebrate it. So. And and listening to it, you know, cheers us up. So maybe his start is try to find the the grains of hope and optimism and every single day, because there is always it's a question of perspective. And then you can widen the picture. And there's a very simple thought, , that lays the fundament to all these, this optimism. Because if you have a problem, how can you solve it? Whatever problem it is, do you solve it by giving up? MM. The question is clear. The answer is obvious. You cannot solve any problem by not being optimistic, because being optimistic is not that. You just believe that things turn better by themselves. Being optimistic means you analyze what is the problem? You you question yourself. Is there a solution? And in best case you ask yourself, can I be a part of the solution? That is optimism. Just try it. It doesn't mean that you always win, but to try it again and again and again. That's optimism. .

00:03:19 Dan Harris: So not giving up.

00:03:20 Dirk Steffens: Not giving up. And you know, just imagine when you were born, you fell four thousand times before you learned to walk. Every thousand times. Four thousand times three toddler. Every toddler has two fall and stands up four thousand times. So standing up again, trying it again and again and again. It's just deep down in your nature and actually is trying it again. Being optimistic. It's the idea of life. Just imagine a lion that would not even try to catch the antelope, or imagine an antelope not even trying to escape. You're trying. It is optimism and trying. It is the engine of life, and it's in you. It's in you. It's in every one of us. But we, we have to use this power that is the engine of life. And that's not so difficult if you think about it, because giving up and being a pessimistic person does not solve any problems.

00:04:23 Dan Harris: Can I, can I ask one follow-up on that? Is it then so from the toddler you get that statistic, which I found I've never heard of, four thousand? So, is it then the environmental factors that make you a pessimist, or what happens that changes you then from that getting up four thousand times?

00:04:41 Sabine Steffens: It's a complicated one because it's both in us. So, the not giving up part is in us. We are not quitters, but by birth. , but there's also a thing that's also ingrained in our genes is that we tend to perceive negative news more than positive news. And that does make sense from an evolutionary kind of view. You know, imagine you as an early human, maybe Homo erectus, maybe already sapiens, walking through the African savanna. You see a bug, an antelope, a tree, grass, the sun, some clouds, and a poisonous snake. What do you have to remember to survive that day? The poisonous snake. So that made a lot of sense to me. To perceive negative things more strongly and to remember them more thoroughly than the positive things. And that psychology causes a negativity bias. And we all know that we are more in tuned to negative news than we are to positive news, which is why we like to doomscroll. I did two, actually, but it also works the other way around. If you want to get the algorithm to feed you positive news. So, it's both on us. We are, actually, optimists by nature, but we tend to overperceive, maybe, negative news. 

00:06:16 Claudia Koestler: So, it is both a choice and a disposition to be an optimist. Is it.

00:06:22 Sabine Steffens: Is it a laziness to be a pessimist? Because I may say yeah.

00:06:26 Dirk Steffens: Pessimism is good and analysing the problem. But at that very point, you stop just thinking because you're not trying to find a solution. So being optimistic is a little bit more complicated and more complex because you not only have to see the problem, but you have to think about the solution as well. So, it's an additional step.

00:06:45 Sabine Steffens: It's an attitude.

00:06:47 Claudia Koestler: If it's an attitude. Can a pessimist actually learn to become more optimistic? Is that something you can actually train?

00:06:55 Dirk Steffens: To a certain degree? Yes. But it is very, very important to highlight what Sabine just explained. So this negativity bias is an evolutionary effect. It helped our forefathers and foremothers to survive in the far, and the very old times in the far past; it was very important, but it doesn't help you with your texts or filing your text forms, and then the modern world or to deal with an AI or something like that. So it's an, it's an ability that was very useful.

00:07:35 Sabine Steffens: .

00:07:36 Dirk Steffens: Two hundred zero years ago. But it's a problem now. And the solution is, , think harder. It sounds, you know, like a Nobel Prize winner. Kahneman wrote a book about it, and he calls it Slow Thinking and Fast Thinking. So fast thinking is what we do all the time. So you see something, and you have an idea of what you do, and it's very useful if you live in the Stone age and, and a wild animal is coming into your cave. So, there's no time for discussion, thinking, and reflecting. So, you have to act immediately to survive. That's fast thinking. Slow thinking is, you think about climate change. There is no easy answer. You really have to analyze it. You have to think about it. You have to consider different ways and different solutions all the time. It's, it's a painful and slow process, but that is what we call thinking.

00:08:35 Speaker 3: And yeah.

00:08:36 Dirk Steffens: And you can.

00:08:37 Speaker 3: Even, you can, you can.

00:08:38 Dirk Steffens: Even measure it. Thinking, thinking uses up a lot of calories. It's hard work, you know, look, look at our bodies, at our physics. We use twenty percent of all energy just up here in our brains, twenty percent for an organ that is, I don't know how heavy a human brain is. I don't know, it's not twenty percent of your body weight. No, it's not. So, it shows. Thinking is hard work. And we have to force ourselves to think harder. And that is one way out. And there's another easy way, if you use algorithms and social media, like the good news, you will get more and more and more. We did that, and it's overwhelming.

00:09:21 Dan Harris: Yeah. Saved me there. You may have saved me. In fact, we spoke.

00:09:28 Dan Harris: With Arnold, he says to lose weight, he does mental exercises.

00:09:34 Dan Harris: Yeah. No. He's German. He was joking in a way, but then he wasn't.

00:09:39 Dirk Steffens: I guess, weighing chess players, you can really measure if in a tournament, for example, a chess tournament, you can measure that they lose more weight, compared to people who are just sitting around and thinking about nothing.

00:09:53 Claudia Koestler: Oh, wow. Wow. Okay.

00:09:54 Dan Harris: Yeah. I always said that you travelled so much around one hundred and twenty-one hundred thirty countries. Are there more optimistic countries?

00:10:03 Dirk Steffens: Germany, of course.

00:10:04 Dan Harris: Of course. 

00:10:05 Claudia Koestler: Country.

00:10:06 Dan Harris: Didn't want to say. I didn't want to say.

00:10:10 Dirk Steffens: It's culture thing as well.

00:10:12 Dan Harris: Have you been on a comedy tour as well? Is that a book tour?

00:10:16 Dirk Steffens: Yeah. German humour. Probably the best channel. It's a serious matter. The Germans laugh like the Germans. One of the shortest programs. Why are you laughing now?

00:10:31 Dirk Steffens: Yes, it's a cultural. There's a cultural aspect to it, too. So, we can learn a little bit to be more optimistic. We always use your example, Brazil, right?

00:10:44 Claudia Koestler: Yeah.

00:10:45 Sabine Steffens: Yeah. People in Brazil are very, very optimistic and in good humour. But also what you always say, it's not so much about, well, Germany and the United States or Great Britain are wealthy countries and people like us. We. I mean, what's there to complain about? We have a lot. And the prospects of becoming even better or richer are small. But if you are somebody living in a village somewhere in Brazil or Uganda, you know, you can have hope that you, or your children, might have an easier day or might become a little wealthier. So it's much more about what the future holds that takes your attitude. And that's why I think many people here are in a bad mood because it's difficult to get even wealthier.

00:11:43 Dirk Steffens: Want to make clear the dimension of that thought? Because if you talk about democracy. Democracy is the promise of a better future. It's at the core of democracy. If you do not believe that you can change things for the better. You do not vote. You do not demonstrate. You do not take part in public life. So democracy needs optimism. People who give up will never be good Democrats. It's not possible. So, you think how deep it goes into our behaviour, and optimism is not just, ah, I want to be because it's more fun in life. No, it's very important for our future. Without optimism, you cannot solve problems like climate change, and you will lose the ability to live in a free society and be in a democratic society. Because if you do not believe that, you can change the future. So come on, that's the end of everything.

00:12:39 Dan Harris: You should be a political consultant in the United States. You've got to come over, spend some time. We need you over there. That was a great message. I thought, " Oh, just gold plate that.”

00:12:51 Dirk Steffens: But it's so simple. If you think about it.

00:12:53 Dan Harris: You know, people.

00:12:54 Dirk Steffens: Get my vote.

00:12:55 Dirk Steffens: If you do not think things can become better. You know, democracy doesn't make any sense if you're pessimistic.

00:13:01 Dan Harris: Yeah, I guess they just get so downtrodden from the media telling them the opposite. Yeah, they need voices like that.

00:13:07 Dirk Steffens: But the media works. Like Sabine explained earlier, due to the negativity bias. Every time our journalist colleagues and the news field try to bring good news to the people. People are not interested. It's our brain, you know, the evolution, evolution formed our brain in a way that we are more interested in bad news. And these are very old sayings.

00:13:33 Sabine Steffens: Bad news is good news, and good news is no news.

00:13:37 Dirk Steffens: Exactly true.

00:13:38 Dan Harris: Well, I mean, I know the red top newspapers, tabloids, and probably in both Germany and the United Kingdom, probably somewhere in the United States. They just live off of it. Yes. It's just bad news. Bad news, bad news. There's hardly any good news, really. And then the empathy cell.

00:13:53 Speaker 6: Just imagine a headline like in Germany yesterday, All trains arrived on time.

 (laughter)

00:14:01 Dirk Steffens: Okay, that would be big nowadays.

00:14:07 Dan Harris: I know, I know. Wait. Yeah, that's your job.

00:14:11 Claudia Koestler: Right? Right.

00:14:11 Dirk Steffens: She laughed like a German. She cannot stop anymore.

00:14:18 Dan Harris: Well, we know we. We got to stay on that. And I got to say this. When she was five years old. Have you heard the story from Claudia? 

00:14:26 Dirk Steffens: No, but I'm. I'm really keen to hear.

00:14:27 Sabine Steffens: No, it's going to be very embarrassing.

00:14:29 Dirk Steffens: He's flashing already. He must be.

00:14:32 Dan Harris: Opening a new school or whatever. Yeah. They're opening this school, and they brought in these dignitaries and politicians to celebrate the good news. And, in walks these young youngsters from the kindergarten. And one of them was Claudia at five years old.

00:14:49 Claudia Koestler: Happy as like (smiling).

00:14:50 Dan Harris: Happy and smiling as she does. She said she was happy. And, I guess it caught the attention of one of the politicians around here, whom we won't name at this moment. But everyone could see this happy, happy young girl at this event. And he turns around and says, so everybody can hear it. Life. What is it? Life will teach.

00:15:12 Claudia Koestler: Life will teach you not to smile.

00:15:14 Dirk Steffens: Oh, yeah. Very German attitude.

00:15:18 Dan Harris: A life will teach you not to smile. When I heard that, my heart sank. And it was just stunning. It's just like. Well, there's a scar that won't heal for a good twenty years.

00:15:28 Dirk Steffens: That's exactly what type of politician we need for a bright future.

00:15:35 Claudia Koestler: Well, I mean, he probably tried to toughen me up, you know, for what's about to come. , but it's in my family. It was like, okay, that was a very, very German thing. Just check in regularly that he was wrong, you know? Are you still smiling? Can you catch a smile here and there? So yeah.

00:15:55 Speaker 6: But, come on, you are still smiling, and he's probably dead.

00:16:01 Claudia Koestler: Who's smiling now? He's the politician.

00:16:04 Speaker 6: Yeah, yeah.

00:16:06 Claudia Koestler: But yeah, but talking about media consumption, I mean, the traditional media is being outsmarted by social media a lot these days. They are quicker. But also, there is the algorithm, and it leads so often into a rabbit hole. And so often it is about doomscrolling. So, you told us before that one can outsmart it. Do you think that this is just for us to change the perception of social media and lifestyle, or is it something that we need to to be more aware of that maybe it is a tool to be used to keep us in a bad mood, because when you are in a bad mood, if you're grumpy, if you don't like what's going on, you're much more inclined to vote differently. More to the extremes. Maybe, you know, just to go back and change everything and go back to square one, and democracy doesn't work. And is that something we have to watch out for? That we are being manipulated by social media. Maybe.

00:17:09 Dirk Steffens: Difficult to say whether they do it on purpose. I think they just use the mechanism of the negativity bias because it makes things so easy. You know, extremist parties, for example. It's so easy to say they ruined our country. Everything is going wrong. It's so easy to do that. But finding out, solutions step by step, changing the world to become a better place. It's a very complex, not only complicated, but even complex thing to do. And it's less attractive. And here you come to the point where it's about narratives. So, the story is more important than the facts. That's for a science journalist like us. It seems to be a very, it seems to be bad news, but in the end, it's good news because, people never in the history of humankind, people never followed facts. They followed stories since the day when we started to sit down and gather around a campfire a hundred thousand years ago. It's stories. Just imagine we're in Bavaria, and every single little village has these beautiful churches. Did people build churches all around the world, the Christian world? And when they did so, and they were standing in these marvellous buildings, and they were wondering, oh, the only thing missing now is religion. No, of course it was the other way around. You first have the story, and if the story is convincing a lot of people, the story starts to change everything. Democracy, equal rights for women, you know, and all these kinds of crazy stories in the very beginning. But they were convincing. So, like slavery, you always like to talk about the end of slavery, for example. That was a big story as well, a fantastic story.

00:18:59 Sabine Steffens: Even lots of stories that when people thought this would not be possible, change is not possible because it needs to stay like this. Our economy works like this. And then if you think about it, lots have changed. Like women's rights, like slavery, things that have not seemed possible before are possible if the story is good enough.

00:19:25 Dirk Steffens: Right.

00:19:26 Dan Harris: In your book, what would you say? What's the message? What are you trying to accomplish with the book? And, and I'll just say also to our English-speaking audiences, we're hoping I hope Penguin's listening. we hope to see it in English very soon.

00:19:39 Dirk Steffens: Yeah. So do we. We come from the field of natural science. And so, checked out the facts. Is it really doomsday nowadays? It feels like that, because if you look at climate change, extinction of species, and all these subjects, it really seems to be possible that we are at the brink of extinction of our own species. It is a possibility, yes, but it's not necessarily happening because if you, for example, look at climate change and Germany, you always have the feeling that nothing is going forward. You know, we do not achieve anything. But if you look at the real numbers, the opposite is true. In Germany nowadays, more than sixty percent of all the electricity comes from renewables in the entire world. When I when we researched that number, we were really stunned by that number in the last year of all new energy plants around the world, more than ninety percent were renewables. Why? Because the tipping point has been reached. It's just cheaper. From an economic point of view. It makes more sense to build new power plants on the basis of renewable energies than to burn more coal and more oil. And the public discussion, if you listen to what Donald Trp does or Putin does, or what happens in other countries, or China, or something like that. You get the impression we are. We are stepping backwards. But it's not true. It's really not true. You know, so many things like crime, , lifespan, warfare, you know, every, all the numbers in the history of mankind. Right now, we have the best numbers ever in the history of mankind. But it feels as if it's doomsday. And that's what we are talking about. The facts speak a completely different language than our emotions.

00:21:28 Sabine Steffens: And what we are always trying to tell in our documentaries, in our podcast, that there is, that there is hope there, that we have more solutions than problems. That's actually the main message. And, the way we think about optimism isn't naive or just wishful thinking. It's based on meeting so many people all around the world, talking to experts. There are solutions out there. We just need to implement them. And if we look into nature, there are so many positive stories. There's so much resilience still in this world, in this, on this planet, that if we just leave nature alone in some parts and try to protect it a little better, many things will get better by themselves. Our favourite story is the defecating blue whale.

00:22:23 Dirk Steffens: Yes, defecating whales, as I mentioned. Sorry if I heard about a whale.

00:22:30 Sabine Steffens: Poo can save your day.

00:22:31 Dirk Steffens: The whale peepee? No.

00:22:33 Dirk Steffens: You know, the big whales like blue whales? Yeah, or some animals like that. They feed down there. They feed on plankton in the depths. Yeah. And then they come up, and there they defecate. Probably it's too difficult to do that with five. With a.

00:22:47 Dan Harris: Pressure.

00:22:47 Dirk Steffens: Pressure of five hundred meters, water against you. So we fall wherever they defecate on the surface. This is good news because this is a fertilizer for the phytoplankton. Yeah. And it really is the population, the numbers of phytoplankton explode when they are fertilized like that. And we're talking about billions, trillions, and even more than that. And when they do that, they are in the water, they do the same thing that trees do on land. So they, they take carbon dioxide from the atmosphere, and they release oxygen. And when these little phytoplankton die down, they go down to the ground, and the greenhouse grass is gone for a long, long time. And we are talking about big numbers up to thirty-seven billion tons a year. That is four times the amount that the entire Amazon rainforest can store. So make it in a simple line. Pooping whales can solve the climate problem. At least a big part of it. Up to forty percent of the anthropogenic emissions per year. That's a big number. So, stop killing whales, and nature will help us solve our problems. And there are many, many processes like that.

00:24:03 Dan Harris: I bet it's in your book as well?

00:24:05 Dirk Steffens: Oh yeah.

00:24:06 Sabine Steffens: It's also on YouTube.

00:24:07 Dan Harris: Actually, it's on YouTube.

00:24:09 Sabine Steffens: Yes. Oh, in German, though. But there are subtitles.

00:24:15 Sabine Steffens: It's a cool story. One of our favourite stories. But there are many of these stories that give us hope and reason for optimism.

00:24:23 Claudia Koestler: What about the bees? I mean, that's a famous saying. Once the bees disappear, humankind will die out as well.

00:24:31 Sabine Steffens: All of us have heard about the bees dying. Yes. Have you heard about the bees coming back?

00:24:37 Claudia Koestler: No.

00:24:38 Sabine Steffens: See? But it's happening.

00:24:40 Dirk Steffens: Negativity bias.

00:24:42 Sabine Steffens: Good news. The EU just prohibited the new neonicotinoids.

00:24:50 Dirk Steffens: Yes. That's a chemical, a chemical that really makes you nuts. The brain of the bees does not work anymore. They do not find help. Okay.

00:25:00 Sabine Steffens: So, I.

00:25:02 Dirk Steffens: They missed the hive.

00:25:04 Sabine Steffens: Because the expert. But I think these are doing better and coming back. So yeah, but you are generally right. If the bees die, the humans will die too. Yeah, it's just, I mean, it's simplifying in terms of, without biodiversity, we are doomed. That's for sure.

00:25:23 Dan Harris: Well, that layer of pollination across the world, if that were to go, we're in big trouble.

00:25:28 Dirk Steffens: Yeah. Big trouble. This chemical is forbidden in the European Union. And since then, the bees have been thriving a little bit better than they did before. Good news. But bad news makes it to the headlines. And good news.

00:25:42 Claudia Koestler: As we all know. Yeah. Being a journalist myself.

00:25:45 Dirk Steffens: There are facts from natural science that prove what Sabine said. We have more solutions and problems. It feels different, we know that. But that's a question of what stories do we tell each other? If we talk about everything is doomed, everything is going down. We will not make it. And if we if this is the mood, it will happen. The future will be as if we talk about it today.

00:26:14 Claudia Koestler: So, we have to break the cycle of doomscrolling, thinking negatively, of the possibilities of the future. And then by being more optimistic, we find solutions, and then we can save it, save the world.

00:26:30 Dan Harris: Basically, I've got this answer. You've got to read Dirk's book. Yes. You've got to.

00:26:38 Dirk Steffens: The future is not a written book. It's open-ended. And, we have to be a little bit braver, not knowing what will happen in the future. Yeah. Is an opportunity because if you knew there was no opportunity. And imagine I just remember when John F Kennedy, you know, this moon speech, the moon speech, when he said, " We will bring a man to the moon. And before the end of this decade, the sentence from that speech I like most is, we are not doing it because it is easy. 

Dan Harris: We are doing it because it's hard. 

Dirk Steffens: Because it is hard. That's the main sentence because that sentence turned into an engineering challenge. International adventure. Yeah. It changed everything.

00:27:21 Dan Harris: Yeah. No, I have that on my phone. I listen to it every so often. No, really, that's one of those optimistic speeches, and I need a lift. That's one of the things I like, like Martin Luther King.  I listen to speeches like that.

00:27:41 Dirk Steffens: Yeah, it wasn't sugarcoating anything.

00:27:43 Dan Harris: I said, it's going to be hard. But he set a goal.

00:27:46 Dirk Steffens: Actually, it was hard coating because it will be hard like Churchill did you know, with his. Yeah.

00:27:53 Dan Harris: Yeah, exactly, exactly. Well, thank you very much. We really appreciated that. And we like to encourage people to go to Dirk and Sabina's work. They are just super science TV journalists who do great work around the world in many countries.

00:28:09 Claudia Koestler: Try and catch them live if you have a chance.

00:28:12 Dan Harris: And just the name of your book is Hopelessly Optimistic.

00:28:16 Dirk Steffens: Optimistic and in German Hoffnungslos Optimistisch. Yes.

00:28:19 Dan Harris: So look out for it.

00:28:20 Claudia Koestler: Definitely.

00:28:21 Dan Harris: You won't be disappointed.

00:28:22 Dirk Steffens: Thank you so much.

00:28:23 Dan Harris: Thank you. And so, we would just like to thank our guests again, Sabina and Dirk Steffens. Don't forget to like, subscribe, share, and comment, and don't miss our next episode. So, thank you very much for tuning in.

00:28:35 Speaker 9: Bye-bye. Thank you. Thank you for having us.