The Most Important Question

Everyone needs insurance. But what kind? And what does it mean to have it, or not?

Well, there’s actual insurance, which is a policy where you and an insurer contract with one another in case things go south with (usually) your home, your car, or your body.

That’s the layman’s technical explanation, but more colloquially, and for our purposes today, “insurance” can mean just having a buffer or a back up plan, or a “thing you might do to make sure a big decision (like buying a home, having a child, or just generally being a person) doesn’t go to hell in a hand basket.”

All of these decisions are usually the result of understanding that just by being alive you’re really putting yourself out there. While you believe in your choices, and the odds of actual calamity are (usually) reasonable, the costs of calamity can be devastating.

My friends: We are in a time of calamity. It’s time to get some insurance.

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How do we reimagine capitalism in a world on fire?

That's today's big question, and my guest is Rebecca Henderson, Harvard professor behind the wildly popular class "Reimagining Capitalism".

I had Rebecca on the show in 2020 to discuss her book of the same name and her research, which explores the degree to which the private sector can play a major role in building a more sustainable economy, focusing on the relationships between organizational purpose, innovation, productivity, and high-performance organizations.

What Rebecca discovered over the last decade or so of research is that focusing exclusively on shareholder profits is a pretty terrible way to run a company in the long run. And it could burn this whole thing down in the short, in the long term.

The silver lining is, as we try to present here all the time, of the four to five catastrophes happening in this country at any given moment, many also present unprecedented opportunities to build a better today and tomorrow for everyone.

Here's my 2020 conversation with Rebecca Henderson.

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What does it mean when people say “revolution”?

For these purposes, which are pretty narrow and entirely of my own invention, I don’t mean some single moment in time, unless it was a bellwether for something bigger.

And I don’t mean the revolutions that have necessarily most directly impacted me. When I think “revolution” I imagine a building up of…something…that affected most people directly or indirectly, so that’s the threshold I’ll use here.

This list is in no way comprehensive, I’m a generalist bonehead who definitely missed some significant items. I am 40, though I feel like I’m 99, so anyways I’m going to use 1982 as my starting point. YMMV.

INI is about looking forward, to understanding where we are and where we might be going, so we can build a better today and tomorrow for everyone. But to do so, it’s helpful to look back a little bit to understand how we got here, what’s underway, and what might be brewing, for better or worse.

Because the more we have our eyes on these currents, the more we can strike at the root to influence them.

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How can I be a better ancestor?

This question has haunted and inspired me since way back in 2019 when I first read the Optimist's Telescope. A beautiful, helpful, inspiring book by Bina Venkataraman. Then I had Bina on the show.

I think it's fair to say it reframed and focused my work and now all of our work here.

You simply cannot be a better ancestor by hoping shit gets better in posting black boxes on your Instagram stories. You have to do the work for today and tomorrow. If you want your descendants to consider you the cool, great-great uncle, you need to drive change today.

Bina is a journalist. She's an author and a science policy expert. She's the editor at large at the Boston Globe and a fellow at the Belfer Center for Science and International Affairs at Harvard. She's been an advisor to President Obama on everything from climate innovation to Ebola to public school science education.

I hope you enjoy this wonderful throwback conversation.

It is mid-Trump presidency. It is before COVID, before Biden, with old co-host Brian Colbert Kennedy, sharing the mic with me, where we dig into the influence Bina's family had on her perspective and her ideas for how you can value the future, how you can use the tools we have available to us now to both prevent further calamities and a build better future.

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Across the front of our website, in big bold letters, is our calling card: “Science for people who give a shit.”

You may have seen it and immediately thought “That’s me!” or “You sir, are a child.”

Either reaction is well and great. We’re not for everybody.

You’re here, though, so let's assume you’re on board with the whole idea.

However you identified with that tagline, you may have also asked yourself what it means, in practice. And that’s a good question because while the mantra isn’t changing, I’m more focused than ever on putting it into practice for me, and you.

To Do Better Better requires trust in one another.

That we care, that we'll step up when it counts, that we won't pull the ladder up after us.

It requires a radical reorientation of our assumptions and expectations, to put into practice our values, to show up for one another -- together whenever we can, and when we're most alone -- to understand 1% better every day doesn't feel very different today -- if anything, it can feel like nowhere near enough -- but in three hundred and sixty-five days, much less by 2035 or 2050, at the rate of 1% a day, together, we can build something entirely new and fucking awesome.

That's compound action. That's what we're about. That's science for people who give a shit.

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We’re taking giving a shit quite literally this week! 

Our guest is Newsha Ghaeli, the president and co-founder at Biobot Analytics. If you read our newsletter, you’ll have heard me go on and on about Biobot, whose mission is to transform wastewater infrastructure into public health observatories.

As an architect turned urban studies researcher, Newsha met her co-founder, Dr. Mariana Matus, at MIT almost a decade ago. Their work on the MIT Underworlds Project led to a dissertation, scientific publications, and coverage by dozens of local and national media outlets, and places in the DeltaV, DesignX, and Y Combinator accelerators.

Obviously, Biobot’s work couldn’t have come along at a better time.

Public health data in the US is fractured and difficult to aggregate, much less on the fly.

Three years into the pandemic, most COVID testing is done at home and unreported, and most states have stopped reporting the data they do get.

Building a baseline understanding of what’s quite literally floating around in our towns and cities will help us be better prepared when new threats like COVID, or old threats like polio come to town.

Like a weather report, wastewater data can make our day-to-day lives safer and less surprising when things go to shit.

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What’s one big change we can make that can make our food healthier, make farming more lucrative, draw down carbon in the atmosphere, and reduce climate emigration?

That’s today’s big question, and my guest is Sasankh Munukutla, another fellow in our series with the 776 Foundation. 

Sasankh is the Co-Founder of Terradot, a satellite and AI-based gigaton-scale, soil-carbon sequestration verification system.

Sasankh originally hails from Singapore and grew up across countries as a third-culture kid and a future global citizen attending international schools. Before college, Sasankh took two gap years and served as a Commander in the Singapore Armed Forces. Once at Stanford, he completed his undergraduate degree in Computer Science with distinction as a Terman Scholar, Phi Beta Kappa, Tau Beta Pi, and with the Stanford Award of Excellence.

So, you know.

As you’ll hear, Sasankh is deeply passionate and thoughtful about the intersection of technology and social impact. He’s worked in the refugee space, on accessibility, and is a major force for organizing in the tech for good space. Something we can all get behind.

Here’s the deal:

Globally, soil has the potential to sequester up to 1.85 gigatons of carbon per year but soil degradation threatens our ability to feed a growing population, and soil desertification will result in 135 million soil refugees by 2050. Fun!

That’s where Sasankh and Terradot come in.

For farmers, Terradot will incentivize adopting sustainable agricultural practices that sequester carbon, improve soil health, and enable participation in soil carbon credit markets.

On the other side, for carbon buyers, Terradot can eventually provide high-integrity carbon removal credits while allowing them to verify and monitor the permanence of carbon removal – an essential piece of the puzzle.

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Aluminum. It’s everywhere!

And we’re going to need a hell of a lot more of it in the future.

Aluminum is a primary ingredient in solar, wind, hydro, concentrated solar, bioenergy, the grid, batteries, hydrogen, and more. And that’s just electricity generation and distribution, to say nothing of consumer goods, from EVs to baseball bats.  

Great news: we already collect and recycle a hell of a lot of it. Compared to, say, plastic, this is a huge win!

But…the bit we haven’t been able to recycle is 1) at scale, a lot, and 2) FAIRLY hazardous.

Luckily, some very smart young folks may have figured out how to recycle more of it, and maybe even power their whole operation from the inside out.

We have to rebuild our entire economy to get to zero new emissions, and then go even further. Some sectors are far easier than others, and deep tech, heavy industry, is the latter.

It’s not sexy, but heavy industry is – often literally – the foundation for everything we do. Think metals and minerals and concrete and steel and more.

Rostam and Julian are childhood friends, and the founders of Hydrova, a new company that focuses on developing technology to repurpose waste byproducts of aluminum recycling that are typically landfilled into valuable commodities. 

Rostam is another 776 Fellow that I’ve had the pleasure of meeting and sharing with you.

What they’re trying to do is so important. If you’ve ever watched a video about aluminum production or recycling on YouTube, well, it’s like looking at a collection of rings being forged in the fires of Mordor.

Finding a way of making that process more efficient, more circular, less dangerous for people and the climate, and just in time for us to need much more of the product?

Well, that’s a story I’ve just got to share.

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There’s nothing quite like breaking bread with family and friends, old or new. By mid-2020, we’d have all taken the opportunity to break bread with just about anyone.

Why are recipes, and the stories behind them, some of the most enduring parts of each of our cultures?

How can we be more intentional about cooking food more often, food that makes us feel good, that tastes good, that’s good for the planet, food that nourishes others, and that allows us to let our guards down for a moment, and share our joys and struggles?

One thing I never make enough time for is hosting others, and feeding others. I mean, besides my kids, who I love to feed, but they never stop feeding, and so it’s relentless, but that’s another story altogether.

Some of my favorite food to make is from my guest today Joanne Lee Molinaro, the Korean Vegan.

Joanne is a runner, an attorney, a blogger, a podcast host, and the author of the James Beard-award-winning Korean Vegan Cookbook named one of the best cookbooks of 2021.

But you may know her best as the chef and storyteller behind her wildly popular Instagram and TikTok accounts, where in just sixty seconds or so, she makes a delicious plant-based Korean dish, and at the end, when she’s done, you and millions of others are laughing, or crying or both.

Joanne infuses her food with stories about her life, and her family’s journey from what is now North Korea. Her stories are heartbreaking and compassionate, at the same time vulnerable and empowering as hell.

Because we’ve all come so far. We’ve all suffered, we’ve all felt alone, and I can tell you, sharing some spicy garlic tofu over a round table packed with friends…that’s the antidote to just about everything.

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*CORRECTION* The Indigenous author referenced at approximately 31:50 is Dr. Robin Wall Kimmerer. I am a moron. You can and should buy Dr. Kimmerer's books here.

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