The Most Important Question

For decades Americans have relied on wood, oil, and gas to power, heat, and cool our homes, and the water we use to drink, cool, and bathe in. But these things have helped fuel our climate crisis – by some estimates, residential energy use accounts for about 20% of US greenhouse gas emissions.

That’s a lot.

Not to mention, burning wood inside and using gas stoves and fireplaces, and water heaters are just straight-up terrible for our health. 

Great news though.

An electric future awaits us, and now, having passed the IRA, there are a huge variety of rebates to help you electrify your home, to become less dependent on the grid, to save money over time, and breathe cleaner air inside AND outside.

But where do you start? It’s a great question, and one I’ve been wrestling with recently.

I want to make my home reliable, resilient, and healthier. And together, with you and millions of other Shit Givers, I want to take a huge chunk out of US emissions, to slow the climate crisis. 

But in order to do so, I needed some help. 

So I called John Semmelhack.

John is co-owner, with Neil Comparetto, of The Comfort Squad LLC, a home performance contracting + consulting firm serving Charlottesville, VA, and Richmond, VA. John is a pioneering practitioner of the "electrify everything” movement and is the self-declared “Minister of Heat Pumps” for the Southeast U.S.

And his company, The Comfort Squad, helps clients create healthy, comfortable homes that run on clean electricity. 

Today we’re going to take you on one of his standard home performance assessments and paint a picture for you of the healthier, all-electric home.

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Let’s say you get sick. 

Diabetes. Cancer. Heart disease. Long COVID. PTSD. MS. Depression. Alzheimer’s

Despite the best efforts of your physician, nothing’s working. They’re out of answers, and you’re out of questions. You might both be increasingly out of time.

Where do you turn?

There must be someone, somewhere, working on your problem. Working to better understand it, at least, maybe to treat it, maybe cure it, or prevent it for the next person who might be susceptible to getting it.

How do you find out if they exist? And if they do, how do you find them?

How could you volunteer for their work, knowing they might not have the answers – but knowing you won’t know and they won’t know – until you try?

For almost twenty-five years the best answer has been to visit a government-run website called clinical trials dot gov. I know because I’ve sent tens of thousands of people to it, for help.

But even if you are able to sort through a Windows 95-era database and find the trial that’s right for you – what if it’s hundreds of miles away?

So many of us could benefit from better awareness and better access to cutting-edge research that could save the lives of people we love. 

And so many researchers are frustrated by the inability to sign people like you, your daughter, or your dad up for their trial.

It’s 2022. We can Do Better Better.

My guest today is Brandon Li.

Brandon is the co-founder of Power, the new and arguably most patient-friendly platform for clinical trials ever made. Brandon and his team are making it easy for all patients to use Power to discover promising clinical trials and get in touch with the researchers – directly.

My mission is outcome-based – to connect you with the most measurable ways to take action, feel better, and drive systemic change. There’s so much we can do to rebuild public health, to do the basic shit we need to do to take care of one another.

But simultaneously, by increasing the success of vastly more inclusive clinical trials, we can accomplish all of those goals at the same time.

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• The following stat from the episode: "self-directed research into clinical trials has grown 22X in the last seven years" was determined using the web analytics tool, ahrefs.

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Curious about the climate? Then there’s a show I want to tell you about—A Matter of Degrees, where Dr. Leah Stokes and Dr. Katharine Wilkinson tell stories about the powerful forces behind climate change — and the tools we have to fix it.

You know climate change is a problem. So what can we do about it? 

The new season of A Matter of Degrees kicks off with a mini-series to answer that question. What can we do personally, professionally, and politically?

Episode four is a favorite…it’s about coping with our emotions about the climate crisis. And there’ll be more expert interviews and compelling narratives that touch on everything from crypto to Indigenous stewardship. 

Find A Matter of Degrees wherever you listen to podcasts.

The new season launches on September 15!

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• Listen to A Matter of Degrees

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“What can I do?” This is the question I get most often. 

It’s the question that early on pivoted our newsletter and then this podcast towards measurable action steps that help you feel better and drive systemic change.

I don’t have anywhere near all the answers to basically anything, so I usually answer people with “What CAN you do?”…to stall for time, but also to open up the conversation.

Because the answer to what CAN you do is usually best found at the intersection of your interests or passions or skills, and the eleventy billion problems and opportunities we have before us.

And so, almost a hundred and fifty published conversations later and ten times as many offline, some of my favorites remain talking to young people about their lived experiences and how they’re directing it towards a problem and solution, towards a radically better world, however ambitious and however much I am a moron and don’t understand the basic science behind it.

But on the other hand, somebody’s gotta support these folks. And so those of us with privilege, with a mic or a checkbook or both have to – at the very least – step up and ask a slightly different version of that question, which is:

“How can I help?”

My guests today are Lissie Garvin and Laura Stieghorst.

Lissie is the Foundation and Fellowship Director at the new 776 Foundation, the philanthropic arm of the venture capital firm with the same name, both founded by Alexis Ohanian.

Lissie helped run Reddit, was chief of staff at Initialized Capital, working alongside Alexis.

Laura Stieghorst is one of the first 776 Fellows. She is the co-founder and CEO at BASICO2, where they are working to understand how we can safely rebalance ocean chemistry using natural mechanisms to remove CO2 from the ocean and restore coral reefs. No biggie, right?

Combined, these two humans are a shining example of humanity’s young people, our most affected, our most ambitious, doing hard things. Because we have to, because they want to, because, in the end, some of these things might be possible, and might change the world.

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