Important, Not Important

Important, Not Important

The 6-time Webby & Shorty nominee for Best Host, Best Science show, and best Podcast Episode returns to bend the motherf’ing arc of the universe towards a radically more livable planet for you, me, and everybody else.

  • 44 minutes 17 seconds
    Life Under A Microscope

    Since the dawn of recorded history, our living earth has been changed by everyone who spends time on it or in it from the smallest bacteria to the largest animals.

    But like the brain-gut axis inside of us that we still barely understand, we've really never had the ability to see and document and even begin to ask questions about the smallest among us out in the world. In the soil, in the air, in the mud, and, of course, all the different kinds of water on this very, very watery planet. Until recently.

    Thankfully, there are scientists and documentarians among us who can see and share and spark joy in a simple tablespoon of water. Who can help so many more of us who don't have access to those things, see and understand what's around us every day.

    And as the world has changed so much faster than ever before, it is vital we support as much of this work as possible. Just when it is most possible. 

    My returning guest today is the great Ariel Waldman.

    Ariel is a National Geographic Explorer, a documentary filmmaker, an Antarctic researcher, a TED main stage speaker, NASA advisor, YouTube host, producer, and an author. Her solo expeditions in science exploration work have earned her global recognition for bridging adventure, storytelling and cutting edge science.

    I'm so thankful for making all this for coming back on the show today to share news about her wonderful new six part series, Life Unearthed with Ariel Waldman, premiering in April on PBS.

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    Have feedback? Tweet us, or send a message to [email protected]

    New here? Get started with our fan favorite episodes at podcast.importantnotimportant.com.

    Find every action recommended in The Most Important Question here: www.whatcanido.earth

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    13 April 2026, 10:22 am
  • 42 minutes 56 seconds
    Public Health Just Got Personal

    The CDC issued six health alerts in all of 2025, down from dozens in a normal year (whatever that means anymore). 

    Measles, a disease we basically eliminated 26 years ago, is closing in on 1000 cases, with children hospitalized for brain swelling. And the people now running our top health agencies are the same people who spent years questioning the science those agencies existed to defend.

    But the good news is people are building new things. States are forming their own health alliances. Scientists are organizing to fight misinformation where it lives. And one epidemiologist in Texas turned a six-week email experiment in March, 2020 into one of the most trusted public health resources on the planet.

    So what can I do about the collapse of trusted public health communication? 

    Today's guest is Dr. Katelyn Jetelina. 

    Katelyn is an epidemiologist, a mom, a wife, a data scientist, and the founder of the incredibly popular and free Your Local Epidemiologist newsletter. 

    She started it from her kitchen table, and it now reaches something like 310,000 subscribers in 130 plus countries. She's one of the Time 100 most influential people in health, former advisor to the White House and the CDC, and she now leads Project Stethoscope as well.

    We talk about how Katelyn built YLE, why the old model of top down public health communication was always broken and is now definitely broken, and what Project Stethoscope and Phoenix are actually doing about it.

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    Have feedback? Tweet us, or send a message to [email protected]

    New here? Get started with our fan favorite episodes at podcast.importantnotimportant.com.

    Find every action recommended in The Most Important Question here: www.whatcanido.earth

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    30 March 2026, 5:00 am
  • 1 hour 12 minutes
    Not Right Now: Coloring Pages of Karl Marx

    This week, we're dropping an episode from our other show, Not Right Now, in the feed, where Quinn and Claire have community organizer and dad, Garrett Bucks, on the show to chat about parenting, of course, but also how he answered the most important question by building community locally and across the nation, and how you can make it easier for parents (and kids, why not) to engage civically as well.

    Garrett runs The Barnraisers Project, writes The White Pages newsletter, and is the author of the memoir The Right Kind of White. He also has a son who is very mad that his sister thinks they live in a suburb.

    The gang gets into why your son talks differently to his sister than to his friends, kids not knowing what the Epstein files are, growing up in rural Montana, how to get work done in between school drop off and soccer practice, and why protests are important AND performative AND boring and worth doing anyway, and how to actually get your kids to come.

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    Have feedback? Tweet us, or send a message to [email protected]

    New here? Get started with our fan favorite episodes at podcast.importantnotimportant.com.

    Find every action recommended in The Most Important Question here: www.whatcanido.earth

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    INI Book Club:

    1. Find all of our guest recommendations at the INI Book Club: https://bookshop.org/lists/important-not-important-book-club

    Links:

    1. Get all of our Not Right Now episodes at notrightnow.show

    2. Find Garrett's work at garretbucks.com

    3. Subscribe to The White Pages at thewhitepages.net

    4. Check out The Barnraisers Project at barnraisersproject.org

    5. Read Garrett's memoir, The Right Kind of White https://bookshop.org/a/8952/9781982197209

    6. Join The Interdependence Relay at jointherelay.org

    Follow us:

    1. Subscribe to our newsletters at importantnotimportant.com

    2. Join us at importantnotimportant.com/upgrade

    3. Get our merch!

    4. Follow us on Threads: www.threads.net/@importantnotimportant

    5. Subscribe to our YouTube channel

    6. Follow Quinn: on Twitter - twitter.com/quinnemmett; Bluesky - bsky.app/profile/quinnemmett.bsky.social; Threads - www.threads.net/@quinnemmett

    7. Produced by Willow Beck

    8. Intro/outro by Tim Blane: timblane.com

    Advertise with us: importantnotimportant.com/c/sponsors

    23 March 2026, 7:00 am
  • 52 minutes
    Public Health In A Post-Evidence World

    Just because we're done caring about an outbreak doesn't mean the outbreak is done with us.

    Over the last year, we have watched something unsettling happen in plain sight. The quiet, active dismantling of the systems built to catch outbreaks early, coordinate a response, and keep hospitals and communities from getting overwhelmed.

    Websites have been scrubbed, teams have been hollowed out. Early warning signals have gone silent, and at the exact same time, diseases that many of us haven't thought about since childhood, like measles, are being let back into the present, which really leaves a lot of people with the same question, said a little differently than usual.

    If the safety net is being shredded, what do we do now?

    My returning guest today is Dr. Nahid Bhadelia.

    Dr. Bhadelia is the Founding Director of the BU Center on Emerging Infectious Diseases, a board-certified infectious diseases physician, and an associate professor at the Boston University School of Medicine.

    She served as the senior policy advisor for Global COVID-19 Response on the White House COVID-19 response team in 2022-2023, where she coordinated the US global vaccine donation programs and helped lead Project Next Gen, a $5 billion effort to develop next-generation vaccines and treatments for a pandemic prone coronaviruses.

    Dr. Bhadelia also served as interim testing coordinator for the White House Impacts Response Team, and she's the founding director and co-founder of BEACON, an open-source outbreak surveillance program.

    Today, we're gonna try to make sense of what's being dismantled, what threats don't wait for politics to catch up, what's starting to fill the gaps and most importantly, what you can do right now to protect yourself, your family, and to help rebuild the public health infrastructure we all rely on whether we have to think about it or not.

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    Have feedback? Tweet us, or send a message to [email protected]

    New here? Get started with our fan favorite episodes at podcast.importantnotimportant.com.

    Find every action recommended in The Most Important Question here: www.whatcanido.earth

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    INI Book Club:

    1. Everything Is Tuberculosis by John Green

    2. Find all of our guest recommendations at the INI Book Club: https://bookshop.org/lists/important-not-important-book-club

    Links:

    1. Get global health alerts from BEACON https://beaconbio.org/

    2. Check out the impacts of new public and global health policies at Impact Counter https://www.impactcounter.com/

    3. Track health trends in your community with PopHIVE https://www.pophive.org/

    4. Check out the Vaccine Integrity Project https://vaxintegrity.cidrap.umn.edu/

    5. Check out the Governors Public Health Alliance https://govsforhealth.org/

    Follow us:

    1. Subscribe to our newsletters at importantnotimportant.com

    2. Join us at importantnotimportant.com/upgrade

    3. Get our merch!

    4. Follow us on Threads: www.threads.net/@importantnotimportant

    5. Subscribe to our YouTube channel

    6. Follow Quinn: on Twitter - twitter.com/quinnemmett; Bluesky - bsky.app/profile/quinnemmett.bsky.social; Threads - www.threads.net/@quinnemmett

    7. Produced by Willow Beck

    8. Intro/outro by Tim Blane: timblane.com

    Advertise with us: importantnotimportant.com/c/sponsors

    Mentioned in this episode:

    Get Readwise

    Get Reader

    What Can I Do?

    16 March 2026, 7:00 am
  • 1 hour 3 minutes
    The Plastic Crisis Isn't On You, Actually

    Plastic. It is the miracle material that has quietly become the infrastructure of modern life over the past 63 years and the almost undefeated business model that's continuing climate change and keeping fossil fuel companies alive and reshaping our bodies, our oceans, and our politics.

    Yeah, plastic keeps food fresh and hospitals running, and cars and planes lighter, and it's also in the air we breathe, the water we drink, and the supply chains that keep churning out more of it while they tell us recycling will handle it.

    Meanwhile, cities and states are actually trying to rein it in, companies are pledging circularity, and regular people are left staring at their blue bin thinking, does this matter? Does any of this work?

    So what can I do about plastic?

    My returning guest is Beth Gardiner, a journalist and author of the new book Plastic Inc. Beth pulls back the curtain on how plastic became so pervasive, why the personal responsibility story has been so convenient for yet another industry, and what the real solutions actually look like, because that's why we're here.

    So stick with us because at the end of this conversation, what can I do? Won't feel like a shrug. It'll feel like a plan.

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    Have feedback? Tweet us, or send a message to [email protected]

    New here? Get started with our fan favorite episodes at podcast.importantnotimportant.com.

    Find every action recommended in The Most Important Question here: www.whatcanido.earth

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    INI Book Club:

    1. North Woods by Daniel Mason

    2. Mark Twain by Ron Chernow

    3. Find all of our guest recommendations at the INI Book Club: https://bookshop.org/lists/important-not-important-book-club

    Links:

    1. Read Beth's book Plastic Inc https://bookshop.org/a/8952/9780593717103

    2. Keep up with more of Beth's work here https://www.bethgardiner.com/

    Follow us:

    1. Subscribe to our newsletters at importantnotimportant.com

    2. Join us at importantnotimportant.com/upgrade

    3. Get our merch!

    4. Follow us on Threads: www.threads.net/@importantnotimportant

    5. Subscribe to our YouTube channel

    6. Follow Quinn: on Twitter - twitter.com/quinnemmett; Bluesky - bsky.app/profile/quinnemmett.bsky.social; Threads - www.threads.net/@quinnemmett

    7. Produced by Willow Beck

    8. Intro/outro by Tim Blane: timblane.com

    Advertise with us: importantnotimportant.com/c/sponsors

    Mentioned in this episode:

    Get beehiiv

    Get Readwise

    9 March 2026, 7:00 am
  • 1 hour 19 minutes
    What's The Purpose of Your Wealth?

    If our mission is to help people, everyone, answer the most important question, what can I do? Then at some point we need to talk to the people who help really wealthy people, help people.

    So today's question, what can I do about high net worth philanthropy?

    And look, hey, maybe you're among the vast majority who just heard that and you're like, well, this one doesn't apply to me, but hear me out. We have some of the worst billionaires of all time, but if billionaires are gonna continue to exist, we all need to have a good idea of how we can push them to distribute their resources more effectively and ASAP.

    And I truly do believe that among high net worth individuals, there are some, especially younger folks that are dying to do exactly that. So whether that is you or definitely not you, or maybe you are adjacent to someone like that, I think there's something for everyone here.

    My guest today is Sharon Schneider. Sharon is the Founder of Integrated Capital Strategies LLC, a consulting firm that helps founders and family offices create positive social change using an expanded toolbox of resources and strategies that spans the return spectrum from grants to market rate investments.

    She's also the author of Handbook for An Integrated Life: A Practical Guide for Aligning Your Everyday Choices with Your Internal Compass, a number one new release on Amazon that helps individuals live into their values the same way her consulting helps business owners and family offices. Sharon previously served as the Executive Director of the Telluray Foundation, the Founding Director of the Walton Personal Philanthropy Group, and the co-founder and CEO of Moxi Jean, a for-profit social enterprise that was acquired by Schoola in 2015.

    Sharon was named a Colorado Governor's Fellow in 2022 and in 2024 was named an Aspen Institute Finance Leader Fellow, and a member of the Aspen Global Leadership Network.

    Again, I really do think there's something for everyone here. This is a really important conversation in a time of growing inequality. We gotta help more people.

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    Have feedback? Tweet us, or send a message to [email protected]

    New here? Get started with our fan favorite episodes at podcast.importantnotimportant.com.

    Find every action recommended in The Most Important Question here: www.whatcanido.earth

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    INI Book Club:

    1. Handbook For An Integrated Life by Sharon Schneider

    2. The Purpose of Capital by Jed Emerson

    3. Find all of our guest recommendations at the INI Book Club: https://bookshop.org/lists/important-not-important-book-club

    Links:

    1. Get in touch with Sharon at incapstrategies.com

    2. Follow Sharon on LinkedIn

    3. Modeling tool to plan your financial future https://projectionlab.com/

    4. Read about how DAFs are actually being used here and here

    Follow us:

    1. Subscribe to our newsletters at importantnotimportant.com

    2. Join us at importantnotimportant.com/upgrade

    3. Get our merch!

    4. Follow us on Threads: www.threads.net/@importantnotimportant

    5. Subscribe to our YouTube channel

    6. Follow Quinn: on Twitter - twitter.com/quinnemmett; Bluesky - bsky.app/profile/quinnemmett.bsky.social; Threads - www.threads.net/@quinnemmett

    7. Produced by Willow Beck

    8. Intro/outro by Tim Blane: timblane.com

    Advertise with us: importantnotimportant.com/c/sponsors

    Mentioned in this episode:

    What Can I Do?

    Get Readwise

    Get Reader

    19 January 2026, 7:00 am
  • 2 minutes 36 seconds
    We need your help

    Hi! It's Quinn. We have huge plans for 2026, and we need your help.

    So we're running the biggest discount on an Important Membership that we've ever run, and will ever run, probably.

    Right now it's $30/year. On January 1st, it'll be $50/year, and it's never going back.

    So right now you can go to ImportantMembership.com and lock in $30/year forever, and we'll all be in a better place. You even get a free 30 day trial. Huzzah.

    Here's a fun fact: 95% of people who joined are still Members. That's crazy. You will not regret it, and you even get stickers.

    Members pay -- directly -- for our people, our software, our data, and when we can afford it -- which we really need to be able to afford more often -- marketing and advertising to get our work and the app in front of like 100 times more people.

    You get bonus episodes from both of our podcasts, everything we make, like Life Finds A Way and The Science of Fiction, and all of it ad-free, and a place to track and share your actions with thousands of other people in What Can I Do? It's so great.

    So that's it -- the price is going to basically double on January 1st, but you can lock in a Membership right now at $30/year, with a 30 day free trial.

    Go to ImportantMembership.com right now, we take Apple Pay, it takes 10 seconds. Thank you.

    22 December 2025, 7:00 am
  • 1 hour 23 minutes
    Pods Fight Poverty: What Really Happens When You Just Give People Money?

     Hey friends, I want to talk about something big. Change the actual world big, because the world won't unfuck itself, as we all know.

    We are joining podcasts across the planet for Pods Fight Poverty, a campaign directly supporting our good friends at Give Directly. Now, if you've been with us since episode 116, which feels like a thousand years ago, you'll remember when we asked one of the most deceptively simple, world altering questions ever.

    Why is just giving people money the most effective way to help them change their lives and maybe even end global poverty altogether?

    To crack that open I had Caroline Teti and Michael Faye on the show, two people who've spent years with Give Directly, knee deep in data and logistics and lived experience, my favorite combination of things, and guess what the answer turned out to be?

    People are the experts on their own lives. You are. So why aren't they? Different people need different things on different days. So if you want them to get exactly what they need, you give them the resources to choose cash directly, and that's what Give Directly does.

    No middlemen, no guessing, just trusting other humans with the dignity and agency we would expect and that they deserve. Yeah, wild idea. It works. It works better than almost anything else we've tried.

    So here's the part where you come in. None of us can erase global poverty by ourselves. Again, that's our whole tagline. But literally, any one of us can lift one person out of poverty, today, right now. So for Pods Fight Poverty, if you can head to givedirectly.org/important and chip in.

    That's givedirectly.org/important. And look to take it even further, my wife and I already personally contribute to Give Directly every year, every month actually, which is the best way to support a group like this, by the way.

    And thousands of you all do too. I'm gonna step it up and will personally match the next $5,000 in donations when you use our link, which again is givedirectly.org/important. So let's do it.

    And to get you in the spirit, we're gonna revisit our conversation right now with Teti and Michael. It's funny, it's hopeful, it's deeply nerdy, and it'll remind you why this work matters every single day. Thanks as always for giving a shit.

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    Have feedback or questions? Tweet us, or send a message to [email protected]

    New here? Get started with our fan favorite episodes at podcast.importantnotimportant.com.

    Take Action at www.whatcanido.earth

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    15 December 2025, 7:00 am
  • 1 hour 2 minutes
    Let's Talk About Menopause

    What if talking about menopause out loud was as normal as talking about sports scores or school pickup?

    Imagine it in movie plots, in your group chat, at the clinic, and on the campaign trail because when we name what's happening in our bodies, three things can follow: better care, better research, and better policy.

    Normalizing the conversation around something that's gonna happen to half the population isn't oversharing. It's infrastructure. This is how we're gonna get appointments that move the needle for people. This is how we're gonna get workplace benefits that actually matter and research dollars that finally match the need, especially for those most impacted and least studied.

    So what can I do to make menopause a public everyday conversation?

    My guest today is Jennifer Gerson. 

    She's a journalist at the 19th, one of my favorite publications, and the author of their new menopause newsletter. Jennifer blends sharp reporting with practical scripts, and memes, how to talk to your doctor or your partner or your teen or someone in HR, and maybe your elected representatives too, because you know we love that.

    So that this thing that's been so intensely private and understudied, on purpose, becomes public. And so progress compounds. This one can definitely change the conversation in your home and far, far beyond it.

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    Have feedback or questions? Tweet us, or send a message to [email protected]

    New here? Get started with our fan favorite episodes at podcast.importantnotimportant.com.

    Take Action at www.whatcanido.earth

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    INI Book Club:

    Links:

    Follow us:

    Advertise with us: importantnotimportant.com/c/sponsors

    Mentioned in this episode:

    What Can I Do?

    What Can I Do?

    Get Mill

    Get beehiiv

    1 December 2025, 7:00 am
  • 59 minutes 36 seconds
    The American Revolution's Unfinished Promise

    If the American Revolution was, as Ken Burns put it, the biggest event since the birth of Christ, then there's probably never been a better time to explore and drastically expand on why it happened, who was involved, and what it set us up for than right now.

    My guest today again is David Schmidt.

    David is the producer and co-director, along with Ken Burns and Sarah Botstein, of American Revolution, a six-part, 12-hour series premiering on PBS this November.

    David is a childhood friend, but two decades after he and I played Nintendo in his basement, he began working with Florentine Films as a researcher and apprentice editor, beginning with The Roosevelts in 2014, where he also supervised the documentary's seven-episode script.

    David's research on the Vietnam War in 2017 won him the Jane Mercer Footage Researcher of the Year Award, and he also worked closely on that project with writer Geoffrey C. Ward and helped coordinate post-production. With Burns, Schmidt also produced the two-part biography Benjamin Franklin in 2022 for PBS.

    I can't wait for you to hear this discussion. I think it pairs really nicely with our conversation with Clint Smith and can't wait for you to see this piece.

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    Have feedback or questions? Tweet us, or send a message to [email protected]

    New here? Get started with our fan favorite episodes at podcast.importantnotimportant.com.

    Take Action at www.whatcanido.earth

    -----------

    INI Book Club:

    Links:

    Follow us:

    Advertise with us: importantnotimportant.com/c/sponsors

    Mentioned in this episode:

    What Can I Do?

    What Can I Do?

    Get Mill

    24 November 2025, 7:00 am
  • 1 hour 3 minutes
    History vs Nostalgia

    I've recorded hundreds of conversations with incredible people working on the front lines of the future. People who've asked the most important question: what can I do? Who found their answer and followed it.

    But for today's conversation, we're going back to the front lines of the past because the past can tell us a whole hell of a lot about today and how tomorrow might go.

    But only if we tell the full story of how we got here, about who got us here, about how my great-great-grandparents got here. And how my grandma got here fleeing the Nazis, and how millions of Africans were forcibly brought here, over 35,000 trips across the middle passage over almost 300 years.

    The full story of the choices we made then, which was not so long ago, and continue to make now about wars and heritage and bondage and family and land and more.

    And how, if we can break from the stories we've been told and continue to tell ourselves to choose history over nostalgia, to choose facts over memory and infinite disinformation on demand, we can make different choices.

    My guest today is Clint Smith. Clint is the number one New York Times bestselling author of How the Word Is Passed: A Reckoning With the History of Slavery Across America, he's the winner of the National Book Critic Circle Award for nonfiction, the Hillman Prize for book journalism, the Stowe Prize, the Dayton Literary Peace Prize, and was selected by the New York Times as one of the 10 best books of 2021.

    And now in 2025, the Young Reader's Edition has just come out and it is wonderful. Clint is also the author two books of poetry, the New York Times bestselling collection Above Ground, as well as Counting Dissent. Both poetry collections were winners of the Literary Award for Best Poetry Book from the Black Caucus of the American Library Association, and both were finalists for NAACP Image Awards.

    Clint is a staff writer at The Atlantic and he has received fellowships for the Andrew W. Mellon Foundation, New America, the Emerson Collective, the Art for Justice Fund, Cave Canum, and the National Science Foundation. His essays, poems, and scholarly writing have been published in The New Yorker, New York Times Magazine, the New Republic, Poetry Magazine, the Paris Review, the Harvard Educational Review, and elsewhere. Clint is a former National Poetry Slam Champion, and the recipient of the Jerome Jay Shestack Prize from the American Poetry Review.

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    Have feedback or questions? Tweet us, or send a message to [email protected]

    New here? Get started with our fan favorite episodes at podcast.importantnotimportant.com.

    Take Action at www.whatcanido.earth

    -----------

    INI Book Club:

    Links:

    Follow us:

    Advertise with us: importantnotimportant.com/c/sponsors

    Mentioned in this episode:

    Get beehiiv

    What Can I Do?

    What Can I Do?

    17 November 2025, 7:00 am
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