Transcript 0:00 [on-hold music] Welcome back to The Most Important Question Today, where in just a couple minutes or less, we apply the Actually Pro-Life principles to a news headline and then help you answer the most important question: What can I do? 0:17 [on-hold music] Advice time. Two situations where you never actually want to be right all the time. One is marriage, and two is climate change. 0:33 Many of you two have been batting a thousand for a while on these. About the air, about the heat, the water, about who gets hurt first when something inevitably breaks in our systems. 0:43 You could win these arguments in your sleep, and that is a trap, believe me. But if you don't, listen to Florence Nightingale. In eighteen sixty, she published a book. This thing is seventy-nine pages plus a forward. 0:55 It's called Notes on Nursing, and it is absolute fire. 0:59 Because despite what you've heard about Florence Nightingale, which is never enough, the, the first chapter of this thing is not about devotion or kindness or being a good person. 1:08 It is literally called Ventilation and Warming. "Keep the air the patient breathes as pure as the air outside without chilling him." That's it. That is the very first rule. 1:18 Windows, Florence points out, exist to be opened. Doors exist to be closed. But she doesn't stop there. She talks about the rest of the house itself and the noise. She talks about insurance. 1:29 She talks about food, where she says thousands of patients a year, in eighteen sixty, are starved with plenty of food in the house because their food is still shit. 1:38 She talks about light, which she says the sick need second only to fresh air. She didn't open with caring. She showed it, and then she did it. She opened with windows, right? Basic, measurable shit that shows you care. 1:50 Now, all... a long time later, Ryan Holiday, in his book about justice, Right Thing Right Now, has this line that I keep coming back to. I love it out of spite. 1:59 He says, "The triumph of the good cannot be left to the ineffectual, the unrealistic, or the naive." 2:05 And then a few lines later, he calls out the reader, who's feeling pretty good about themselves because they're actually reading a book called Right Thing Right Now about stoicism, so they can't possibly be naive or ineffectual. 2:16 And Holiday says, "It's very easy to think that you're just acting on principle when what you're really holding onto is something flimsier, something that mostly makes you feel good, especially when it's other people who pay for your principle, or the lack of fucking backbone you show when you don't show up for it." 2:32 So nobody cares. But I wrote something similar way back in twenty twenty-four, borrowing from AOC, that we can't just be right. We have to be in power, right? 2:42 We have to be effective, and we have to be in power over and over again. It is true. It's also an easy sentence to write. Being right is noticing the air, that the room is bad. 2:51 But opening the window, doing the next thing, is the fucking job. Noticing, important, where it starts. It is not where it counts. Holiday calls it, I think he calls it a craft, right? Like anything else, playing piano. 3:01 It's something you do and maybe get a little better at because you're actually fucking doing it. 3:06 So this weekend, after a glorious week for democracy that took so much work from so many people, please pick the one thing you feel like you've been right about the longest, not in your marriage, in the world. 3:15 And instead of just making the case for it again or posting about it, find a fucking window and open it. Do the dull thing that will actually move the needle, that we know will move the needle. 3:25 If you don't know what to do but you want to, we collect all those things on whatcanido.earth. It is built on a framework we call Actually Pro-Life. It is the literal kind. 3:34 It is backing up the nine things every person is owed: clean air, clean water, healthy food, home, quality healthcare, quality education, safety, a living world, and of course, equal standing, which means you get to take part in all of that, and nobody gets to shut you the fuck out. 3:47 Not anymore. Not in Actually Pro-Life. Under each of those, we've organized it into specific things you can do. Fifteen hundred measurable windows you can open today. Go open one. [on-hold music] Thanks for listening. 4:04 Subscribe for more of these and for my longer conversations with incredible humans who've already asked and answered the most important question for themselves. 4:12 You can get more answers for free twenty-four seven at whatcanido.earth, or you can join hundreds of other important members to support the mission and make your actions go much, much further. [on-hold music]
