Welcome back, Shit Givers.

And if you’re new here, welcome for the first time. I’m Quinn Emmett, and every week I write a free essay breaking down how to think about our rapidly changing today and tomorrow, and supply specific Action Steps you can take to help us build one that’s better — for everyone.

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What We Can Do

⚡️ Last week’s most popular Action Step was protecting your online privacy with the Mullvad VPN.

⚡️ If apocalyptic skies and hazardous air quality reports are making your climate anxiety a little more intense this week (I feel you), look into the Climate Psychiatry Alliance’s database to find a climate-aware psychiatrist near you.

⚡️ Help spread fire adaptation practices and give communities the tools they need to reduce their wildfire risk and increase their resilience by donating to Fire Adapted Communities.

⚡️ Campaign to speed up the transition away from coal in your community by joining a local team to retire coal plants.

⚡️ While you’re staying indoors to avoid the unhealthy air outside, purchase an air purifier to keep your indoor air quality up to par (got Scrooge McDuck cash? Donate a few to local schools).

⚡️ Learn more about the impacts of air pollution, and read these recommendations for proper building ventilation.

Start Over

Originally published April 2021, updated June 2023

Sometimes, in life, you get fired. Or you fall off your bike, or your startup fails.

And sometimes, in a video game, you die.

When you die in a video game, you get sent back to some checkpoint that’s either just a few moments before, if you’re lucky, or (usually, infuriatingly) way the hell back at the beginning of the alien’s lair.

And now you’ve gotta get over all those goddamn bottomless pit again, kill all the levitating alien shrimp things again, outrun the deluge of poisonous gels, again, until finally — finally — you get to face that huge beating heart again.

And I have to break it to you now, friend — if you don’t have the spread gun the entire time, you can just forget it.

You might as well go all the way back to the hangar.

Starting over can be frustrating as hell. In real life, or in Contra. Out of shape? Flunk out? Fired? Divorced?

At least in Contra you can just tap out up-up-down-down-left-right-left-right-B -A-start, and starting over suddenly becomes a whole hell of a lot easier.

There’s no Konami Code in real life. Well, that’s not totally true. I’m well-aware that being born a white man in America in 1982 is a massive and historic level-up. It’s the only real universal cheat code that brings unlimited power ups.

We could all use some do-overs. COVID, for example, exposed long-held cracks in our society and economy with devastating consequences. It exhausted us and our systems, and continues to punish and take away so many, with predictably inequitable results.

We’ll all feel the after-effects of COVID for a very long time, but for many of our most marginalized neighbors, and for the hundreds of thousands of children (in the United States alone) who lost caregivers, the loss will be held much more acutely.

Other things have changed, too: offices aren’t dead, but they’ll never be what they were, so downtowns will never be what they were. That’s already having second-order effects in commercial leases and balance sheets.

We have to start over, and re-imagine what living in cities means, and what it means to run a large company where employees can benefit from being around one another, but don’t have to, and not if it means unaffordable rent and/or brutal commutes and lost time with loved ones.

Consider the climate crisis. For the privileged among us (myself included), the experience of the climate crisis is just beginning, while low-income and marginalized countries and communities have been suffering for years.

Sure, I left California in part because my home insurance policy became astronomically expensive, but millions of folks have lost their actual homes or jobs, been forced to relocate, to start over. Shit, Indonesia is already building an entirely new capital city. We can’t put sea-level rise back in the box, so Jakarta is the past.

The same goes for something like clean water. Millions of kids can’t just un-drink lead-flavored water and get their precious IQ points back.

Sometimes, though, we do get the opportunity to start over, and with some key lessons learned.

One of the tenets of our Do Better Better philosophy is asking better questions -- of yourself, your family, your company, your investments, your philanthropy, and your time.

Today I’m asking you: What if you chose to start over?

Hear me out:

Knowing everything we know about ourselves, about how susceptible we are to a novel virus, to disinformation, and to grid failures, how unevenly the seas are rising and cities are heating, how sacred (and few) our votes are, how short our time on this rock is...as we become more and more aware of all of these externalities and how they intersect, it’s a great moment to ask:

Is this what I want to be doing?

Is this the best use of my skills?

To be clear: Not everyone can start over. And not everyone should.

But in this moment, when a shitload of tech workers have been fired, and on the threshold of great change, you, friend, have an opportunity to identify your core values and your unique skill set, and to use them to participate in that great change.

I wrote about this conundrum recently in “What Would You Say You Do Here?”

To rehash and provide a little more context:

Right about the same time I was sweating through the end of Contra, having chained my seven-year-old self to the NES in my basement, Richard Hamming, a titan of American mathematics and pillar of Bell Labs, gave a speech called “You and Your Research”.

In it, Hamming described a series of brutally honest lunch conversations with some poor bastards in the chemistry department:

This fucking guy.

The annoying thing is: he was right. The world is awash in important problems. How are you gonna help?

And can you do it from your current position? What if the answer is no? What are you gonna do about it?

We can have subjective arguments all day about how to define an important problem. That’s part of the reason Richard wandered over the chemistry table, tuna sandwich and jello on his tray, and started with that very angle: “What are the important problems in your field?”

He wanted to know, but it’s clear he also wanted to know if they knew, and then he wanted to know what the hell they were gonna do about it.

For our purposes, let’s assume important problems are like pornography: you’ll know one when you see one.

Like, for example, how the east coast is currently orange and unbreathable. Or how the monsoon is late (again), or southeast Asia is melting, how we are less prepared for the next pandemic than we were for the last one, how we’re both overusing and running out of antibiotics, how methane leaks are everywhere, or rapid AI development with few ethical guardrails.

In 1989, I identified Contra’s enormous beating alien heart as one of the world’s important problems, made peace with starting over as many times as necessary, and then dedicated myself to blowing it up, day in and day out.

The only way out was through. I had to start over. And over. And over. I lived with the problem. I dreamt about it.

To quote Hamming, again:

Many incredible humans (including many of you) have already dedicated their/your lives to working on (actual) important problems.

On the other hand, in this time of great struggle and consequence, I have a blog and a podcast.

Setting my own failures aside, let’s revisit some questions from What Would You Say You Do Here (these are also the basis for many of my 1:1 conversations). Ask yourself:

• What do I make?

• What does my company make?

• Why do we make them?

• Do you have to make them? Says who?

• Do they address any of the world’s great problems?

• If not, do I want to keep making them?

These apply if you’re a solo operator (by choice or not), too. You can use them to reimagine how you market yourself to companies, or to start an entirely new one (though I’ll tell you, the world is already packed with stellar organizations looking for people like you).

Are you a young person with a world-changing climate idea?

Want to be an electrician?

Want to use AI to solve old problems?

Reinvent the trash can to fight food waste?

Become a community health worker?

Use behavioral data and peer pressure to encourage voters to turn out?

Start an olive oil (and climate-friendly) company?

Invest in Black climate VC’s?

Build a better, healthier birth control?

With important problems -- systemic, society-wide, life or death problems -- come enormous, plentiful opportunities. Opportunities to join together, to contribute, to profit, to make change, to make Compound Action.

To take a step back and think about how we want to spend our time and use our skills, and whether doing so means starting over (whether you’ve been recently canned or not).

To take everything we’ve learned, and start fresh.

To make something new. To invent a way to recycle something old. To design a more accessible way of using it. To paint a picture of how to try it. To market it to people who’ve never had the chance to experience it. To invest your money and time to make the next version even better, cleaner, faster, more powerful, and less energy intensive.

You can start over right now in your own investment portfolio, in your neighborhood, on your school board, inside your company, on your TV show, by re-routing your industry, by embracing moments to listen, to have the beginner’s mind, to donate to and volunteer with charitable efforts that need your -- yes your -- very specific set of skills.

It just means you might have to start over. And that could change the world.

— Quinn

News From My Notebook

Health & medicine

• A new pill for lung cancer was found to cut the risk of death in half during clinical trials, yay!

• Unfortunately, cancer is on the rise for people under 50 worldwide, and we don’t really know why, god I really fucking hate cancer

• The chatbot “working” for an eating disorder helpline, instead of real humans capable of human empathy, was found to be encouraging unhealthy eating habits. Cool cool cool

• This week was one of the worst wildfire pollution events in U.S. history

Climate

• Biofuels might not actually be the best climate solution

• Reforesting the Amazon could drastically help slow global warming, but there are a lot of roadblocks

• Would you bike to work if the feds paid you to?

• The clean energy transition is reliant on mines — but young people don’t want to work in them

• Solar is growing fast enough to meet global decarbonization goals — here’s a graph as a treat. You deserve it.

Food & water

• Lack of water is limiting construction in Arizona, which I don’t know, feels like a big deal

• As global food costs soar, a food delivery company is launching a fund for food-insecure Americans

• Droughts in France are leading to water shortages, and the current solution isn’t sustainable

• A pretty pretty vital Ukrainian dam was destroyed this week, leading to major flooding

Beep Boop

• Could online age verification rules designed to protect children come at the price of everyone’s privacy?

• The A.I. boom could be hindered by the cost of operating systems to run them

• YouTube has changed its misinformation policy to allow 2020 election denial videos to remain on the site GREAT WORK EVERYBODY

COVID

• Anti-vaxxers and medical misinformation spreaders are getting their social media platforms back

• Wildfire smoke can increase the risk of contracting Covid. Let’s do neither?

Got YouTube?

Dr. Sheila Davis started as a nurse and now uses everything she learned to lead Partners in Health and tens of thousands of essential community health workers across the planet. A must watch.