The Most Important Question

By Important, Not ImportantSociety & Culture Science Technology

The Most Important Question episodes

March 09, 2023⚡️Your Home Electrification Questions, Answered
This week:
In response to our ongoing and delightful home electrification series with our friends at Rewiring America, we have received a hell of a lot of questions that are beyond our ability to answer.

So we brought in the experts: previous pod guest John Semmelhack, home electrification wiz and co-owner of The Comfort Squad, and Joel Rosenberg, member of the Special Projects team at Rewiring America.

Your regularly scheduled newsletter will return next week!
Here's What You Can Do:
Find a reputable contractor in Colorado with Renu, Xcel Energy, Elephant Energy, or Helio
Find a reputable contractor in California with The Switch Is On from TECH Clean California
Find a reputable contractor in Maine with Efficiency Maine
Not from any of those states? Check with your State Energy Office
Check out Redwood Energy's retrofit guide
Learn more about smart heat pump water heaters
Buy a low-level carbon monoxide sensor/alarm
Get more:
Get more news, analysis, and Action Steps at importantnotimportant.com/newsletter
Got feedback? Email us at [email protected]
Follow us on Twitter at @importantnotimp
Subscribe to our YouTube channel and watch this episode
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Take a nap you deserve it

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Mentioned in this episode:

Become An Important Member
56 min
March 08, 2023Essay: A living act of resistance
This week:
Can little-old-you really make a difference? Hell yes you can.

Plus: cheaper insulin, cleaner camping gear, a new (lidless) coffee cup, good news on BetterHelp, and maybe even some paid leave.
Here's What You Can Do:
⚡️ Help your local farmers sell online — not just at farmer’s markets — with GrownBy.
⚡️ Help people worldwide get clean, safe, accessible drinking water with charity: water.
⚡️ Support Dr. Ayana Elizabeth Johnson’s Urban Ocean Lab as they write the future of ocean policy.
⚡️ Stay ahead of water news with the award-winning Circle of Blue non-profit newsroom
⚡️ Queer student journalists: Apply to be a member of the 2023 Nat’l LGBTQ Journalists’ Conference Student PROGRAM, a week-long all-expenses-paid reporting intensive
News Roundup
Health & Medicine
REI has committed to stop selling products with forever chemicals
Eli Lilly will cut insulin prices to $35, should still be regulated
There’s a new bipartisan push for paid family and medical leave
Endovascular thrombectomy will (eventually) save millions of lives
Climate
The Interior Department released guidance on how states can claim $500 million to clean up oil wells
The world swore they’d eliminate fossil fuel subsidies. Funny story! They doubled them (it’s complicated)
Food & Water
This new coffee cup is entirely compostable (and cool as hell)
The Mediterranean diet is, one, delicious, and two, may improve a person’s response to immunotherapy
Beep Boop
The FTC will ban BetterHelp from sharing mental health data for ad targeting, which, I don’t know, sounds pretty damn obvious
Instead of legislative bodies, judges are making consequential tech policy, and, look, nobody’s prepared for this stuff
COVID
This is the first at-home COVID and flu test
Why forest clearing doesn’t just release emissions — it helps viruses jump to humans
Get more:
Get more news, analysis, and Action Steps at importantnotimportant.com/newsletter
Got feedback? Email us at [email protected]
Follow us on Twitter at @importantnotimp
Subscribe to our YouTube channel
Get fun merch at importantnotimportant.com/store
Take a nap you deserve it

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Mentioned in this episode:

Become An Important Member
14 min
March 06, 2023Best of: Lessons From Plants
What can we learn from trees?

That's today's big question, and my guest is Dr. Beronda Montgomery.

Beronda's a transformative writer, researcher and scholar who pursues a common theme of understanding how individuals perceive, respond to and are impacted by the environments in which they exist.

She recently moved from Michigan State University to Grinnell College where she's a professor of biology and Vice President for Academic Affairs and Dean of the College, which is perfect because I can't think of anyone who is more intentional about mentorship than Beronda.

She is the author of one of my favorite books, Lessons From Plants.

She's also one of my all-time favorite podcast guests, so I'm excited to share one of our most popular conversations from all the way back in 2021 as we more urgently and comprehensively try to understand how to adapt ourselves, our society and our economy and our ecosystems to mitigate further harm from climate change.

We can learn a lot from plants which are living things that are literally planted in place and so they are forced to adapt to whatever comes their way.

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Have feedback or questions? Tweet us, or send a message to [email protected]

New here? Get started with our fan favorite episodes at importantnotimportant.com/podcast.

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INI Book Club:
"Breathe: A Letter to My Sons" by Imani Perry
Find all of our guest recommendations at the INI Book Club: https://bookshop.org/lists/important-not-important-book-club
Links:
berondamontgomery.com
Instagram: @beronda_m
Twitter: @BerondaM
Read: “Lessons from Plants”
Follow us:
Subscribe to our newsletter at importantnotimportant.com
Follow us on Twitter: twitter.com/ImportantNotImp
Subscribe to our YouTube channel
Follow Quinn: twitter.com/quinnemmett
Edited by Anthony Luciani
Produced by Willow Beck
Intro/outro by Tim Blane: timblane.com

Find our more about our guests here: https://www.importantnotimportant.com/guest-stats

Advertise with us: https://www.importantnotimportant.com/sponsors

Mentioned in this episode:

Become An Important Member
1 hr 14 min
February 27, 2023Best Of: Did A.I. Just Make My Life’s Work Obsolete?
How many nights have you spent up recently worried that AI is just gonna take your job?

That's today's big question, and my guest is Dr. Mohammed AlQuraishi.

Almost three years before chatGPT and New Bing really hit the scene, Mohammed showed up to a conference excited to share his life's work on protein folding, one of the biggest problems in biology.

But Mohammad quickly discovered that Deep Mind or to be more specifically AlphaFold had solved the whole damn thing.

Mohammad is an assistant professor in the Department of Systems Biology and a member of Columbia's program for mathematical genomics, where he works at the intersection of machine learning, biophysics and systems biology.

Obviously, all this is more important and more relevant than ever before.

Literally, it changes every week, so I'm excited to share this conversation from 2019 or a million years ago.

The world and AI is moving so quickly, but it's messy and in many places it's moving faster than our societal and ethical guardrails can keep up.

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Have feedback or questions? Tweet us, or send a message to [email protected]

New here? Get started with our fan favorite episodes at importantnotimportant.com/podcast.

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INI Book Club:
The Better Angels of Our Nature: Why Violence Has Declined by Steven Pinker
Find all of our guest recommendations at the INI Book Club: https://bookshop.org/lists/important-not-important-book-club
Links:
Learn more at https://moalquraishi.wordpress.com
Twitter: https://twitter.com/moalquraishi
“The Future of Protein Science will not be Supervised”
Chan Zuckerberg Initiative: chanzuckerberg.com
Follow us:
Subscribe to our newsletter at importantnotimportant.com
Follow us on Twitter: twitter.com/ImportantNotImp
Subscribe to our YouTube channel
Follow Quinn: twitter.com/quinnemmett
Edited by Anthony Luciani
Produced by Willow Beck
Intro/outro by Tim Blane: timblane.com

Find our more about our guests here: https://www.importantnotimportant.com/guest-stats

Advertise with us: https://www.importantnotimportant.com/sponsors

Mentioned in this episode:

Become An Important Member
1 hr 8 min
February 24, 2023Essay: How to get sh*t done
This week:
Pulled in a million directions? Wondering what the hell you do with your days?

Find your north stars (and become devastatingly effective) with one simple question.
What We Can Do:
⚡️ Please don’t use public wifi without a VPN. Please? If you can’t just hotspot, use the lightning-fast Mullvad VPN to secure your data.
⚡️ On the hunt for new furniture? Save some trees and check out Kaiyo’s marketplace to buy and sell fancy used furniture!
⚡️ Cancel out your transportation emissions and find your next (or first!) e-bike at Ride Review
⚡️ Want to go to climate farm school, or be a climate VC? Get the education you need and build an incredible network with our friends at Terra.do.
News Roundup
Health & Medicine
Are we getting closer to curing Alzheimer’s?
5th person confirmed cured of HIV
After a brutal winter, an RSV vaccine might finally be around the corner
Social media has been a major cause of mental illness in girls for a long time. Here’s the evidence.
Climate
How disinformation is slowing the clean energy rollout
Global corps climate pledges are ‘misleading’, not the word I would have used
Biden wants all of the floating offshore wind
Why the hell has climate change made tampons more expensive?
Governments spent a record $1 trillion on fossil fuel subsidies last year
Food & Water
One year later, the infant formula crisis is still a thing, and could happen again
Cereal companies are NOT pumped about the FDA’s new “healthy” label
Congress killed a bill to give farmworkers a path to citizenship
Healthier school lunches may reduce obesity
Beep Boop
Why haven’t digital therapeutics got payer coverage yet?
How Google’s ad business funds misinformation (I wrote a deep dive into disinformation last week)
COVID
That meta-study on masks is decidedly not as decisive (or honest) as expected
What happens with COVID-era food benefits end?
Get more:
Get more news, analysis, and Action Steps at importantnotimportant.com/newsletter
Got feedback? Email us at [email protected]
Follow us on Twitter at @importantnotimp
Subscribe to our YouTube channel
Get fun merch at importantnotimportant.com/store
Take a nap you deserve it

Advertise with us: https://www.importantnotimportant.com/sponsors

Mentioned in this episode:

Become An Important Member
17 min
February 22, 2023Essay: What Do You Need?
This week:
The future of search and chatbots looks a lot like our ancient past. Why do we keep making the same tools over and over again?
What We Can Do:
⚡️ Addiction is brutal. Help yourself or a loved one or someone you’ve never met with Shatterproof.
⚡️ I’m so excited to share that my favorite event on Earth, “LA Loves Alex’s Lemonade Stand” is finally back. Support pediatric cancer research and buy yourself some tickets to eat food from some of the greatest chefs on the planet.
⚡️ It’s a pretty pretty pretty good moment to read Atlas of AI: Power, Politics, and the Planetary Costs of Artificial Intelligence and The Alignment Problem: Machine Learning and Human Values.
⚡️ Want to switch your retirement fund to one without fossil fuels? Check out Fossil Free Funds to find mutual funds and ETFs that qualify.
News Roundup
Health & Medicine
It’s probably helpful to understand that half of all American hospitals are projected to be in the red this year
American teenage girls are suffering in a very real way. There are a million things we can do, here are a few ways to start to help
E-bikes incentives are SO POPULAR
Sure, we need to get toxic gas out of our homes, but also — why is asthma the way that it is?
Climate
This amazing new solar farm is also a prairie restoration project and a carbon sink, you’re welcome (also, let’s hear it for hedgerows!)
Harvard voted to build climate change into its medical school curriculum
Food & Water
Sorghum is one of our oldest and most reliable grains and could be a stalwart in the age of climate change
Can food be medicine, after all?
Beep Boop
Tesla’s recalling 300,000+ cars because self-driving was bullshit all along
Supermarkets, like everyone else, are selling your data
COVID
China’s recent COVID death toll could top a million
Is Long COVID a neurological disease?
Get more:
Get more news, analysis, and Action Steps at importantnotimportant.com/newsletter
Got feedback? Email us at [email protected]
Follow us on Twitter at @importantnotimp
Subscribe to our YouTube channel
Get fun merch at importantnotimportant.com/store
Take a nap you deserve it

Advertise with us: https://www.importantnotimportant.com/sponsors

Mentioned in this episode:

Become An Important Member
46 min
February 20, 2023Clean Air Is An Inside Job
Imagine you’re in a sci-fi movie. The one where everything’s on the line.

And while dinosaurs or aliens or a virus takes over down on the ground, you’re the scientist unexpectedly riding in the helicopter with the actual president, the scientist who’s run the calculations and asked the questions nobody else thought to ask, who’s uncovered the virus’s single weakness.

But nobody’s listening to you. Because it’s complicated when everything is on the line. But you know that what you know could save millions of lives.

What do you do next?

That’s today’s big question, and my guest is Dr. Linsey Marr.

A renowned scientist and multidisciplinary engineer who pioneered research into a better understanding of the flu’s airborne status, and how humidity plays a role in the flu’s seasonality. She is among a very small group of scientists who truly understand the aerosol transmission of bacteria and viruses.

Three years later, we’re still wrestling with the implications of this virus and how we level the playing field by cleaning up our indoor air.

And nobody understands the challenges we face – and the opportunities in front of our faces, literally under and inside of our noses – like she does.

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Have feedback or questions? Tweet us, or send a message to [email protected]

New here? Get started with our fan favorite episodes at importantnotimportant.com/podcast.

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INI Book Club:
Our Missing Hearts by Celeste Ng
Find all of our guest recommendations at the INI Book Club: https://bookshop.org/lists/important-not-important-book-club
Links:
Follow Dr. Marr on Twitter
Read and implement the EPA Clean Air In Buildings Challenge
Learn more about air pollution
Read the CDC recommendations for ventilation in buildings
Install a PurpleAir air quality monitor in your home
Monitor CO2 in your home with an Aranet4
Purchase an Air Purifier for your home
Follow us:
Subscribe to our newsletter at importantnotimportant.com
Follow us on Twitter: twitter.com/ImportantNotImp
Subscribe to our YouTube channel
Follow Quinn: twitter.com/quinnemmett
Edited by Anthony Luciani
Produced by Willow Beck
Intro/outro by Tim Blane: timblane.com

Find our more about our guests here: https://www.importantnotimportant.com/guest-stats

Advertise with us: https://www.importantnotimportant.com/sponsors

Mentioned in this episode:

Become An Important Member
52 min
February 15, 2023Essay: How to Survive
This week:
There are a default group of problems that exist in our society because of the basic needs required to be a human.

They are:
Air
Water
Food
Sleep
These, our most primal needs, are more or less biologically inarguable, and the good news is, we understand them very well and have made enormous progress to ensure they are accessible to a greater percentage of humans than ever before.

There have been trade-offs along the way, of course, including plundering most of the solar system’s single habitable planet’s resources.

Without fulfilling our most basic requirements, we can’t truly move into the future, no matter how much one small but powerful group wants to skip ahead to electric planes or flying cars or extended life spans.

I want to get to the future as fast as anyone, but without equal access and enjoyment of these make-or-break requirements, there are simply no bootstraps to pull yourself up by, no ground to stand upon, much less to collectively reach higher.
Here's What You Can Do:
⚡ Understand the health impacts of what’s actually in your food, cosmetics, and cleaning products with the free Yuka app
⚡ Reduce food waste and take care of your grocery shopping with the Misfits Market
⚡ Interested in community solar? Plug your zip into Arcadia’s tool to find out how you can go clean and reduce your power bill
⚡ Want to invest in clean tech but don’t know where to start? Check out ImpactAssets and their donor-advised fund and put your cash to work saving the world
News Roundup
Health & Medicine
Is this why lung cancer doesn’t respond to immunotherapy?
The first federal gun crime report in 20 years dropped
New blood donation rules will loosen restrictions on gay and bisexual men
Prenatal exposure to air pollution is associated with neurodevelopmental outcomes at just 2 years of age
Climate
The US Treasury made more cars eligible for tax credits, and still, there’s nothing for e-bikes and other micro-mobility options
The Colorado River crisis is not going swimmingly as seven states just can’t agree on cuts
Europe’s fossil fuel use should plummet this year
Food & Water
CRISPR could help feed the world but boy genome editing in crops is a tad bit controversial
The FDA rolled out a plan to re-org the food side and not everyone is pleased
How road salt is poisoning Michigan’s water
Beep Boop
A new group called Health3PT is trying to address ransomware attacks along hospital supply chains
GPT is coming to…everything
The ACLU is suing the US intelligence community to try and further expose abuses of a warrantless surveillance program
COVID
Vaccine makers kept $1.4 billion in prepayments for canceled COVID shots for the world’s poor and I am losing my mind
VA Senator Tim Kaine, suffering from Long COVID, pushes for more research and treatments
A good piece on we need an air-quality revolution
Get more:
Get more news, analysis, and Action Steps at importantnotimportant.com/newsletter
Got feedback? Email us at [email protected]
Follow us on Twitter at @importantnotimp
Subscribe to our YouTube channel
Get fun merch at importantnotimportant.com/store
Take a nap you deserve it

Advertise with us: https://www.importantnotimportant.com/sponsors
27 min
February 13, 2023Essay: "Why Do We Exist?"
This week:
For the next few weeks, I’m rewriting and sharing a selection of essays I wrote in 2020 and 2021, so about two hundred years ago. I think they’re more relevant than ever — I can’t wait to hear what you think.

This week: What would you say you do here? (Originally published July 2020, updated February 2023)

Why do we exist?

After a hundred years of progress, humanity faces stress tests unlike any we’ve faced before, and all at once.

The good news: Your company can help rewrite the future.
Here's What You Can Do:
⚡️ The death toll in Turkey and Syria continues to rise. Relief agencies are having a hell of a time, but you can donate to the Syrian American Medical Society, Doctors Without Borders, and World Central Kitchen.
⚡️ There’s never been a better time for educators to bring climate crisis solutions into the classroom, and no better tool than the All We Can Save Project.
⚡️ Renter? Landlord? Either way you can find out how to green your building with BlocPower.
⚡️ Clean up the air in your town with Mom’s Clean Air Force.
⚡️ Every boob is different, so help recruit more women to breast cancer studies with WISDOM.
News Roundup
Health & Medicine
Please read this David Brooks piece on friendship and depression
Sure, yes, electric cars can clean up the air, but please also way fewer cars
A quarter million US students haven’t returned to school since the early pandemic. Where the hell are they?
Workers fighting America’s overdose crisis need much more help
Yelp is coming for “crisis pregnancy centers” and the GOP is not pleased (this is exactly what I mean in the essay above)
Climate
Shell’s board of directors were sued for mismanaging climate risk
EU leaders are still unsure how to deal with the United States’ climate industrialization moves (which we’ve gotta get right)
NPR’s stunning multimedia piece on Senegal’s climate fight is worth a read
Paris is growing new mini-forests
Food & Water
Hot damn — bacteria really does eat plastic.
How to save food from the landfill with WhatsApp (?)
Yeah there’s lead in most dark chocolate, so what should you eat?
Beep Boop
AI is a lot right now. The invaluable Ted Chiang puts it all in perspective, and Charlie Warzel on the gold rush
Federal agencies only followed 40% of cybersecurity recommendations, the same percentage as my children’s chores
Legacy IT systems at London hospitals are not ready for global heating or even like a gentle breeze
What happens when you Google “grief”
COVID
Biden will end the COVID emergency declaration soon. Issac Saul on what it means.
The FDA’s recommendation for annual COVID shots — like the flu — got mixed reviews
Get more:
Get more news, analysis, and Action Steps at importantnotimportant.com/newsletter
Got feedback? Email us at [email protected]
Follow us on Twitter at @importantnotimp
Subscribe to our YouTube channel
Get fun merch at importantnotimportant.com/store
Take a nap you deserve it

Advertise with us: https://www.importantnotimportant.com/sponsors

Mentioned in this episode:

Become An Important Member
18 min
January 30, 2023Best of: How To Innovate
How does innovation actually work?

That's today's big question, and my guest is Christopher Mims. Chris is a journalist for the Wall Street Journal, and I had him on the show in 2021 to understand how he asks big questions.

Chris is constantly asking questions about the most pressing technological and societal issues we face from robot trains to the future of batteries, brain implants, and whatever happens to land in between. And his thesis is this: every little bit counts. And innovation is more predictable than you think - or is it?

In this conversation, Chris and I explore the team dynamics of innovation, the "great man" question, the invisible force behind Moore's Law, and more.

The bad news: Nobody gets to save the world.

The good news: Everyone gets to save the world a little bit.

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Have feedback or questions? Tweet us, or send a message to [email protected]

New here? Get started with our fan favorite episodes at importantnotimportant.com/podcast.

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INI Book Club:
Life as We Made It by Beth Shapiro
Arriving Today by Christopher Mims
Find all of our guest recommendations at the INI Book Club: https://bookshop.org/lists/important-not-important-book-club
Links:
mims.club
Twitter: @mims
Follow us:
Subscribe to our newsletter at importantnotimportant.com
Follow us on Twitter: twitter.com/ImportantNotImp
Subscribe to our YouTube channel
Follow Quinn: twitter.com/quinnemmett
Edited by Anthony Luciani
Produced by Willow Beck
Intro/outro by Tim Blane: timblane.com

Find our more about our guests here: https://www.importantnotimportant.com/guest-stats

Advertise with us: https://www.importantnotimportant.com/sponsors

Mentioned in this episode:

Become An Important Member
1 hr 9 min

About The Most Important Question

From the publisher's feed

The most important question in today's world of climate chaos, AI psychosis, and crumbling democracy is: what can I do? Your host, Quinn Emmett is completely unqualified to answer it, so he's calling the people that already are.