The Most Important Question

A very basic way to use a mental model, you’re welcome.

PLUS: Mosquitoes, overseas abortion pills, healthy ice cream, German nuclear power, electric school buses, and more.

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Why is it so dangerous to have Black babies in America?

April 11-17th is Black Maternal Health Week, and so we are replaying one of our favourite episodes from 2021 with guest Representative Lauren Underwood of Illinois, a nurse and former senior advisor to President Obama.

We discuss how this country is failing Black mothers, and her incredible Momnibus Act, a suite of 12 bills designed to improve Black maternal health outcomes in America, where Black women are dying in or after childbirth at 3x-4x rates of white women.

In this incredible conversation, Rep. Underwood goes deep to help us understand the complexities of the problem, the crushing personal inspiration for her work, and what we can all do to help.

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If you had all of the data in the world at your hands, what question would you ask first?

That's today's big question, and my guest is Dr. Emma Pierson.

Emma is an assistant professor of computer science at the Jacobs Technion-Cornell Institute at Cornell Tech, and a computer science field member at Cornell University with a secondary joint appointment as an assistant professor of population health sciences at Weill Cornell Medical College. Sure. Why not?

Emma has published a number of game-changing papers, and we talk about those today and how they all tie together. She's written for the New York Times, 538, The Atlantic, Washington Post, Wired, all my favorites, and has been named to the MIT Technology Review 35 Innovators under 35 list, and the Forbes 30 under 30 in Science list.

Her team's work has helped unlock answers and solutions to some of our biggest, most lingering and also sometimes most urgent questions.

Emma and her team work diligently to develop data science and machine learning methods to study two vital, huge interlocking areas: inequality and healthcare.

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What if we just gave people money?

That's today's big question and my guests are Caroline Teti and Michael Faye from GiveDirectly. This conversation from 2021, one of my all-time favorites is one of those conversations that can help you truly think outside the box and reconsider how to most effectively take a simple action that can have cascading effects.

Caroline Teti or just Teti as she likes to be called, I swear, works on the ground in Kenya, Nairobi, where she is the Director of Recipients Advocacy for GiveDirectly's global operations, and the Director of Governmental and External Relations.

Michael Faye is the Co-Founder and Executive Chairman of GiveDirectly.

I think we can all understand that different people need different things on different days. We're talking about life essentials: clean air, clean and accessible water, healthy food, shelter, medicine. The needs can vary enormously among people and on a day-to-day basis.

But one thing that unites us all in need is a need for agency over our own life. 

From everything I've understood in this conversation and talking to so many folks over the past few years, nothing takes away agency like poverty.

And it turns out that giving people cash can create that power.

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We're going to keeping re-running this 2020 episode until America stops sacrificing children.

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Here we are, yet again.

We first ran this episode with Fred Guttenberg, father of Parkland victim, Jaime Guttenberg in 2020 - and what has changed? More gun violence and more senseless deaths.

It doesn't have to be this way.

In Episode 98, Quinn & Brian discuss: common sense solutions to prevent gun deaths and destroy the gun lobby.

Our guest is: Fred Guttenberg, a gun safety activist and political troublemaker.

14-year-old Jaime Guttenberg was killed in her high school on February 14, 2018 in Parkland, FL. We usually like to make some jokes at this point, but not today. This is a loss that no person should have to experience — and it’s all the more painful for how utterly avoidable it is. Which side you choose to be on this issue should be as simple as answering this question: do you want to wake up and discover that one of your friends or loved ones has been shot? If the answer is no, then pay attention.

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Where the hell did all of the electricians go?

That's today's big question, and my guest is leading journalist Emily Pontecorvo.

Until recently, Emily was an energy, environment, and climate reporter at Grist, one of our favorite publications. She's now moved on to the new climate newsroom Heatmap.

Emily has covered the whole enchilada from green hydrogen subsidies to coal ash, scope three emissions, Fashion Week, airports, locusts, frequent flyers, college divestment movements, carbon removal, you name it.

And so when Emily did a deep dive on the worker's subsidies and training schools behind America's electricians or lack thereof, I knew she was the perfect person to help me, and therefore you, understand where we go from here because we need a lot of electricians to electrify everything.

It's complicated, it's systemic, and it's holding us back.

We need to understand what the bottlenecks are when you can't find an electrician, how we can market to future electricians, then educate them, train them, and support them as a new generation of truly essential workers.

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Fighting over ESG is stupid, risky, and bad business. Let’s move on.

Plus: RSV vaccines, the E-BIKE Act, Skittles (?), deepfakes, allergies, and a new season of DRILLED

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What if you got the chance to dive to the bottom of the ocean? Would you go? And what would you find there?

That's today's big question and my returning guest, one of my all-time favorites, is Dr. Dawn Wright, better known the world over as Deep Sea Dawn.

Dawn recently became the 27th person ever in history and the first Black person ever to dive into the Challenger Deep, the deepest part of Earth's ocean.

Dawn is an elected member of both the National Academy of Sciences and the National Academy of Engineering and the Chief Scientist at Esri, where she works with other scientists to map the ocean floor in 3D.

As our oceans heat up and rise, as we try to reduce overfishing, and as our governments and companies race to mine minerals for our all-electric future, there has never been a more monumental and historic, and vitally important project than trying to understand our oceans.

A lot has happened, since Dawn and I last spoke.

It shouldn't be surprising then, that this conversation not only talked about the wonder of the deep seas and the Earth's crust but also went to some wonderful and unexpectedly emotional places.

I'm so thankful to have shared another conversation with Deep Sea Dawn.

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What we know — and more importantly, what we don’t — about what AI is capable of, and how much change we’re capable of absorbing.

Plus: the Willow Project, H-1B visas, blueberries, honeybee vaccines, climate disclosure rules, next-gen bed nets, and health insurance in North Carolina

Health & Medicine

Climate

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What if I told you there was less oxygen in the ocean than there used to be?

That's today's big question, and my guest is Dr. Dawn Wright, or as many in the ocean community know her "Deep Sea Dawn." 

Dawn Wright is an elected member of both the National Academy of Sciences and the National Academy of Engineering. She's the Chief Scientist at ESRI, where she works with other scientists to map the ocean floor in 3D.

In 2018, when I was just a baby podcaster, when Brian was my co-host, I saw a headline about the ocean that made me question a lot. I knew the oceans were heating up. I was beginning to understand, I think we were all beginning to understand, just how much global heating the oceans had absorbed over the years.

But I didn't know what that meant for the billions of creatures that call the ocean home. I didn't know what it meant for us. So I called Dawn.

In celebration of Dawn's return to the show next week, I wanted to replay this incredible conversation we had with her to better understand how far we've come.

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