At The Optimist, we’ve always kept a close watch on Muhammad Yunus. We interviewed him in his office in Dhaka, Bangladesh, before the Nobel Peace Prize in 2006 for his groundbreaking work with microcredit pioneer Grameen Bank made him famous. So when Yunus speaks out about the new goals he’s working on—zero poverty, zero unemployment, and zero net carbon emissions—we listen. Here’s an interview full of ideas that make you think, and re-think. “If an illiterate woman living in a remote village in Bangladesh can turn herself into an entrepreneur, why is a literate person with a university degree sitting around because no one will give him a job?”