Welcome back, Shit Givers.

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.

⚡️ Last week’s most popular Action Step was downloading the Yuka app — decipher product labels to find out what the hell that moisturizer’s got in it, anyways.

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TOGETHER WITH THE INVESTING JOURNAL

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What We 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.

Why Do We Exist?

Originally published July 2020, updated February 2023

OK, sure, for many of us, it’s because our parents simply wanted to feel something, and then…wow, you arrived, and ok, I guess we’re adults now.

But instead of going down that very dark path, let’s instead talk about climate change!

I’m kidding. Not really.

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.



Let’s set the table, first:



COVID. A volatile market. War. A changing climate. mRNA. Ravaged ecosystems. Cheap solar. The Colorado River. Civil rights struggles. India. China. Soil. Satellites. Early AI. Offshore wind. H5N1. Immunotherapy. Drought. Batteries. East Africa. West Africa. Antibiotics. CRISPR. Floods.



Underlying each of these examples are massive fissures in our economy and society. Systems thinking, like butter coffee or mashed potatoes, is overhyped, but is also essential to understanding what we’re dealing with, and what we’ve wrought, the good and the bad.

To expand:



We’ve made enormous strides in vaccines, treatments, and environmental engineering, but continue to wrestle with a novel virus — one that was exponentially more likely to jump from animals to humans because of where we live and how we eat — because we haven’t filled the societal cracks in the sidewalk. H5N1 will be an pretty pretty pretty urgent test of what we’ve learned over these past few years.

We can take people’s cells out of their bodies and spin them around in a tube really fast and then put them back in those same bodies to fight disease, which is FUCKING NUTS, but many of our pipes are still filled with lead and one part of our country is nicknamed “Cancer Alley”?



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