When you're young and you first learn about the great unsolved problems in the world,

we need a cure for cancer, clean energy, ending global conflict,

there can be this flicker of childlike hope that maybe you will be the one to solve one of these.

As we get older, reality sets in. Solving big problems is hard. Even if you do

become a scientist or a doctor or a diplomat, there are endless bureaucratic hurdles, funding gaps,

gatekeepers, just complex problems that don't have one simple solution. Most of us start chasing smaller things,

or biting off more manageable tasks, like how to deliver a compelling podcast intro.

Tim Fridi is not most people. From the time he was a teenager in Wisconsin,

Tim became fixated on a problem most Americans have never thought about.

Roughly 120,000 people die a year from venomous snake bites,

mostly poor people, mostly in places far from hospitals.

The anti-venom available today is made essentially the same way. It was made in the 1890s.

You inject a horse with snake venom, harvest the antibodies it produces, and hope it works on the

specific snake that bit you. It's expensive.

It's species-specific, and it can trigger serious allergic reactions

because the antibodies are coming from an animal, not a human.

Tim thought there had to be a better way.

You may have first heard about Tim the way I did, about a year ago,

when the New York Times published a story in the science section hooked to a recently published research paper.

The headline of the Times article, Universal Anti-Venum may grow out of man who let snakes bite him 200 times.

That man is Tim. Over nearly two decades, he turned his own body into a

biological experiment, working alone in a converted basement lab in Wisconsin, while he was raising

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