Good evening,

Willow is off and I’m traveling so I wrote a brief update/addendum to a reader favorite from actually-not too long ago. Thanks for reading.

— Quinn

The title kind of says it all.

The post below is mostly a reflection on how and (more importantly) why we expanded from a single newsletter to a newsletter and podcast, and then to more than one of each of those, and finally, to our app, What Can I Do?

In the post I recount my own personal journey to WCID and the revelations that led to me finally writing it all down (for myself, our team, and for all of you).

None of those factors have changed, nor the underlying reasons why we believe the app (and all of the rest of our work) need to exist, right-the-fuck-now.

But more recently, a year into a long, long research project, I stumbled onto this simple, blunt idea — Together or Nothing.

And suddenly all of the moves we’ve made over the past year or two, and all of the quantifiable injustices and opportunities to make the world even better coalesced into a worldview, and even more so, strategy, if you will, that had been hiding in plain sight.

To note: we couldn’t be more proud of everything we make, and thankful for everyone who helps make them, and all of you, who not only seem to enjoy (?) them, but who find them useful — but looking around, we’ve both 1) got a long way to go and 2) got them right where we want them.

The the threats are measurable and real, and so are the opportunities. So the app is evolving in a very real and very aggressive way over the next few months, to match those, to become everything it can and needs to be in this moment.

Btw - I’m talking less here about the specific code or technologies or platforms we’re using to evolve it; those are changing faster than ever, and we’re putting them to use in a transparent way for one reason only: to bring you all together to solve as many of the most measurable problems we can.

I’m talking more about what the app can fundamentally do for all of us, together — as humans, as people who often feel enraged but impotent, or hopeful but hesitant, as activated but still alone, because the forces allied against us have consolidated more power, resources, and wealth than any of us can possible imagine, no matter how much we outnumber them.

That’s asking a lot of a very small, international, unprofitable, 100% bootstrapped team, much less a single app, but we’re fucking doing it anyways.

I’ll leave you with two bits of additional context:

Here’s the speech:

Together or nothing,

— Quinn

Originally published 2024

You’d think that -- considering we just spent two years building our new What Can I Do? app -- that I’d have a really good answer for why we were doing it in the first place.

But I didn’t. Not until about a week ago.

I knew, of course, the practical reasons why it needed to exist, and I had a good idea of what I wanted it to look and feel like.

I knew it was the natural evolution and a significant missing piece of our work.

But I had never really interrogated myself to understand why I was so hell-bent on building an app -- a tool -- that gathered all the action steps we’d researched over the years, and made them accessible to anyone across the world, anytime they wanted or needed them.

At Important, Not Important, we cover climate change, hunger, ecosystem decline, education, biotech, and other fun stuff from a human perspective because humans are, for the most part, for better or worse, in the driver’s seat.

It’s why the subtitle of these essays is “250,000 years of fucking around and finding out.”

The decisions we make are mostly predictable, because we never really change, but they’re more connected and impactful than ever.

Good news: that also means the good you choose to put into the world can put a much bigger dent in the universe than ever before.

Which is why one -- or, really, two -- of my favorite questions to ask are:

1. Why do YOU have to this work?

2. Why do you have to do THIS work?

Gently expanded:

1. Why do you think it’s essential that -- of anyone -- you’re the person to do this particular work? Why are you special?

2. What internal reason do you have where you absolutely have to do this specific work? Why are you obsessed with this?

Re: our new app, I’d really never asked myself either of these.

And I never did. This, despite the focus of these essays being, “The decisions we make are mostly predictable, because we never really change, but they’re more connected and impactful than ever.”

But about a week ago, my kid asked me, and as I answered him, it suddenly — predictably — made sense.

My kids are patient and kind. His question was innocent enough.

I’d missed dinner and was late to bedtime, a common occurrence these past weeks as we’ve prepared for launch, but one that is otherwise pretty rare.

I have been incredibly privileged, mostly by my wife, to have structured my career around being around and showing up for my kids much more than most dads are able.

So when I miss dinner and bedtime, my kids notice. When I miss it a few times in a row, they ask about it.

It was a simple question: “What were you working on?”

In “Did You Hear The One About The Starfish?”, I quoted investor and dad Chris Sacca, who said, “You know, the answer to why you tell your kids you can’t hang out right now better be really fucking good.”

I identify with that practice, and so I wrote:

I’ve worked a lot of places. I’ve done a lot of jobs. I’ve been paid well for some of them, and for some others, not so much. Some carried much more risk than others.

I’ve worked at illustrious newspapers and magazines all over the world, I’ve built websites and apps and paywalls, I’ve invested in and advised non-profits, startups, political campaigns of all sizes, and institutions, like Sesame Street. I’ve written TV pilots and screenplays about World War I-era soldier soccer players, World War II immigrant submariners, horrifically behaved Jamestown colonizers, and teleporters gone awry, forcing us to ask questions like “What makes you you?”

I am a long-ago liberal arts major with no defined career path.

On the one hand, with perspective, it’s easy to look at what I do now as the natural evolution, again, of everything I’ve done before. The media, the tech, the activism, the fundraising, the storytelling.

On the other, I clearly have never had my shit figured out.

But even though my son knows what I do, that’s not how he took it when I said, “We’re trying to finish getting all the data in for this app, and making sure it won’t break when we share it with people, so it can help people be more helpful.”

He sighed, distraught.

I thought -- fuck. Maybe that’s just not good enough for him. Not good enough to miss dinner and bedtime.

I take everything personally. I’m working on it. It’s not going well. In Starfish, I continued:

That’s what I was feeling again.

So I asked him what was the matter.

I don’t want to betray his trust so I won’t get into the details, but BASICALLY this new middle schooler is dealing with everything middle school, as you do, but ALSO is convinced that everyone but him has their life figured out — including me.

I laughed. Not at him of course, but because any adult with any self-awareness and perspective would do the same.

Because exactly none of us have our shit figured out.

I recounted to him my career path, above, emphasizing how little of it was anticipated, much less planned or having anything “figured out.”

When he asked how this current work fit in to…all of that…I thought for a moment and doubled-back to the activism and giving.

I went back to 2008 to tell him a story he’d heard before, one I’ve told before, but one I’ve never connected to the app — until right now.

In 2023’s “Why I Don’t Eat Animals”, I wrote:

But it wasn’t as easy as that.

I struggled a lot, in both cases, during the day, at my job, and awake at night, to figure out what the fuck can I do about this?

As I described that feeling to him, and thought about the app, I realized what had been driving me to make it, all this time.

Our work has always delivered something special: vigorously researched action steps you can take to act on the biggest issues of our time. We help you, along with us, throw the kitchen sink at them.

But we have always given the action steps to you in what is called a “one to many” model.

In short, we pick them, put them in an email, and send it you. Same shit for the podcast. We talk about it, upload it, publish it, you listen to it.

It works, and it matters, and we’re proud of it, but...it’s pretty limiting.

If you already know the answer to why it’s limiting, than we know each other better than you think.

It’s limiting because what if what I put in the email that day wasn’t what you are worried about, or excited to help with?

Sure, you can look back through the emails to see if it’s out there, or Google it, but I mean…good luck with that.

It’s limiting because I know exactly what it’s like to completely spin out at work or around your kids or when you’re alone or in bed at night when you just don’t know what the fuck you can do about something, but you’re desperate to do anything, and it’d sure be great if that anything fucking did something.

In “How Does The Brain Work?” I wrote:

Even at work, even with your kids, even at night, in the middle of the night.

That’s what the app does. It’s self-serve. All of our really, really impactful actions are just three clicks away, no matter your resources or what time it is, whenever and however much you need it.

This is what I told him. This is why I missed dinner.

Because for fifteen years I’ve been trying to recapture that feeling of finding Team in Training, of running a marathon through my tears, for a reason, and for the last two years I’ve been working alongside a very small but passionate team to build the app I needed then and now.

When people sign up for our newsletters, they get an automatic email that asks, “Why are you here?”

The volume and variety of responses we get from endowment chairs and third grade teachers, from grandparents and law partners and sculptors and students and even senators...

...”well”, I told him, “fortunately and unfortunately there are many, many more people who give a shit than ever before, for a million more reasons, and I know how that feels, so the least I can do is help them answer the question “What can I do?” for themselves, whenever they need it the most.”

There have been people fighting for every cause under the sun for decades and centuries, and we have many allies who’ve been doing the work to connect new people to existing frontline heroes for years.

But -- and this is 100% my fault -- I couldn’t see through my own darkness to find them. Team in Training had been doing their thing for years. But finding Team in Training when I needed them felt like a fucking miracle, to me.

In the same breath, years later, when my friend Andy was on his way home to hospice, the only thing I could think to do was drink and call my mom, who knew exactly what I needed to do: come home, because the only thing left to do was be together.

And sometimes that’s it. Sometimes when everything else has been said and done that’s the most important thing we can do, whether we’re doctors or researchers or lab techs or grant writers or event planners or artists or carpenters or marathoners.

Be together. Stand together. Cry together. Remember together. Make sure it doesn’t hurt anyone else ever again, together.

Sarah Jaquette Ray wrote in 2023 that, “We can feel buoyed that we are not alone in our efforts, when we recognize that we are part of what Martin Luther King, Jr. called a “network of mutuality”, what Vietnamese monk Thich Nhat Hanh called “interbeing”, and Indigenous epistemology recognizes as “all our relations.”

Not all of us can do everything or fight every fight, some of us are much more skilled in one thing or another, have more resources than others, have lived experiences so different from one another, or are not locked in as many intersecting, predatory systems as others.

Our job, in fact, is to unlock those prisons.

It has been glaringly clear to me over the course of this work that I — and many of you, but not all of you — have what Viktor E. Frankl described as a “freedom to take a stand toward the conditions.”

But neither you or I can do it alone. Nor can the scientists working on kids leukemia, on depression and Alzheimer’s, on making rice and coffee safe from the heat, from drought, from floods; nor the candidates running for school board, for judge, for lieutenant governor; the journalists, the artists, the investors.

That’s not what Compound Action is.

At one point when we were building the app, our (one and only) developer Conor said, “Wait, you want to build a...social network...in this? Am I reading this right?”

Sort of!

The social networks we’ve come to know and loathe are coming apart the way the Empire comes apart in Foundation -- very, very slowly, and inevitably, terrifying everyone who built fortunes on the backs of a world connected for the first time, for better or worse.

I don’t want any of that bullshit.

The entire world can search our app for free, as many times as they want. If you want to keep track of the actions you’ve taken and want to take later, and if you want to connect with other Shit Givers, you can make a profile, and you can leave it private, or share it with the world.

And the world will know it’s you, because we verify every public profile — so you can trust you’re following a real person, whether they’re a family member, philanthropist, athlete, or celebrity.

So that person can trust that there are real people following them. And this time, in this network -- for a reason.

The candidates that will flip houses and the doctors and nurses and teachers and organizers and organizations that are working on the frontlines of the future today need much, much more help.

It’s my entire job to connect you to them. 

So in the dark of night we can each see and be inspired by all of the many ways so many of us around the world are taking action, right now, in this minute, and now in this minute, and the next one, over and over again.

Because somewhere, at their job or newly out of one, in their darkest moment, someone can and will find you, and see the actions you’ve taken, and the ones you’ve favorited for later, knowing, then, that you have done so much but you are not at rest.

There is always more to be done.

At various points throughout our lives we can each feel like we’re fighting our own long defeat, and throughout history, a collective one, against real bad guys, and for a better, cleaner, future.

One so close because we’ve come so far on the backs of so many, but that will require many more; to be a better ancestor for those to come, and who immediately follow up “What can I do?” with Dr. Ayana Elizabeth Johnson’s favorite question, “What if we get it right?”

There’s nothing new here, there’s nothing ground-breaking about a white guy with a bootstrapped app, a newsletter, a podcast.

But the reason why I need to do this work is more clear to me than ever before, and it’s been right here the entire time.

This is what I told him.

This is what I was working on that night.

I don’t have my life anywhere near figured out, but I do know, now, why I needed to make this app.

Why are you here?