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The Most Important Question

The Most Important Question

Important, Not Important

Science for people who give a sh*t. Want to feel better AND unf*ck the world? The 6-time Webby nominee delivers deep conversations with the world's smartest people (scientists, doctors, CEO's, farmers, and more!), and digestible news updates every single week, to help you answer the world's most important question: What can I do? We're talkin' clean energy and coral reefs, COVID vaccines and pediatric cancer research, clean water and carbon capture tech, asteroid deflection and artificial intelligence ethics. "A vital service in an era where important truths, outright fiction and mere trivia all compete for your attention.” - Craig Mazin, creator, writer, and executive producer of HBO's Chernobyl Hosted by Quinn Emmett

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Top 10 The Most Important Question Episodes

Goodpods has curated a list of the 10 best The Most Important Question episodes, ranked by the number of listens and likes each episode have garnered from our listeners. If you are listening to The Most Important Question for the first time, there's no better place to start than with one of these standout episodes. If you are a fan of the show, vote for your favorite The Most Important Question episode by adding your comments to the episode page.

The Most Important Question - Fighting Food Waste With The iPhone of Trash Cans

Fighting Food Waste With The iPhone of Trash Cans

The Most Important Question

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05/08/23 • 54 min

How much food do you throw away every week? And do you have to?

That's today's big question, and my guest is Matt Rogers.

Matt is a former Apple iPod and iPhone engineer. The Co-Founder of Nest thermostats, Founder of incite.org, and former Chairman of Carbon180. He is now the Co-Founder and CEO of Mill.

What's Mill? It's a membership to a food-shrinking, de-stinking kitchen bin, and it just may be one of the most important levers you and I can take to fight food waste and climate change.

I'm a huge fan of Matt's multidisciplinary work to drive systems change across tech, non-profits, and politics.

Mill may be his most direct take on it yet.

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The Most Important Question - #42: What Happens When You’re Almost an Astronaut... And What Comes Next?

#42: What Happens When You’re Almost an Astronaut... And What Comes Next?

The Most Important Question

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11/06/18 • 69 min

Dr. Sian Proctor tells us how we can all help get more women and more people of color into space, one way or another.

Want to send us feedback? Tweet us, email us, or leave us a voice message!

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The Most Important Question - Internal Activism

Internal Activism

The Most Important Question

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05/03/22 • 77 min

If you give a shit, well, you’ve probably had at least a few moments where the enormity of what’s in front of us has challenged your mental health in some way.

I can’t imagine there are many folks listening to this show who’ve never felt the heaviness of our climate future, of our climate present.

There’s a lot of guilt, a lot of shame, a lot of shame about that shame, a lot of furious action – we’re here, aren’t we.

And running parallel alongside all of those emotions is the dread of what’s being done out there, about the lack of action, and for the people who are taking action on the frontlines of the future, giving it their all.

But, as Dr. Katharine Hayhoe says, we have to talk about it.

Not just what’s happening, but how we’re dealing with it.

How we can recognize it and move forward, for ourselves, together, for the planet, for the people who will come after us.

My guest today is Dr. Britt Wray.

Britt is the author of the fantastic new book “Generation Dread: Finding Purpose in an Age of Climate Crisis”, an impassioned generational perspective on how to stay sane amid climate disruption.

Britt has a Ph.D. in Science Communication from the University of Copenhagen and is the author of "Rise of the Necrofauna: The Science, Ethics and Risks of De-Extinction."

She is currently a postdoctoral fellow at Stanford University and the London School of Hygiene & Tropical Medicine (sure, why not both?), where she researches the mental health impacts of climate change on young people.

Britt is also the author of Gen Dread, the first newsletter that shares wide-ranging ideas for supporting emotional health and psychological resilience in the climate and wider ecological crisis.

I have learned so much from Britt of late, and her book is a tremendous source of empathy and courage.

I think you will find us both baring a bit of our souls and our beliefs in this conversation, and hopefully, some ways we can all cope and build a radically more supportive world – for everyone.

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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.

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The Most Important Question - How to Electrify Your Home

How to Electrify Your Home

The Most Important Question

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09/26/22 • 90 min

For decades Americans have relied on wood, oil, and gas to power, heat, and cool our homes, and the water we use to drink, cool, and bathe in. But these things have helped fuel our climate crisis – by some estimates, residential energy use accounts for about 20% of US greenhouse gas emissions.

That’s a lot.

Not to mention, burning wood inside and using gas stoves and fireplaces, and water heaters are just straight-up terrible for our health.

Great news though.

An electric future awaits us, and now, having passed the IRA, there are a huge variety of rebates to help you electrify your home, to become less dependent on the grid, to save money over time, and breathe cleaner air inside AND outside.

But where do you start? It’s a great question, and one I’ve been wrestling with recently.

I want to make my home reliable, resilient, and healthier. And together, with you and millions of other Shit Givers, I want to take a huge chunk out of US emissions, to slow the climate crisis.

But in order to do so, I needed some help.

So I called John Semmelhack.

John is co-owner, with Neil Comparetto, of The Comfort Squad LLC, a home performance contracting + consulting firm serving Charlottesville, VA, and Richmond, VA. John is a pioneering practitioner of the "electrify everything” movement and is the self-declared “Minister of Heat Pumps” for the Southeast U.S.

And his company, The Comfort Squad, helps clients create healthy, comfortable homes that run on clean electricity.

Today we’re going to take you on one of his standard home performance assessments and paint a picture for you of the healthier, all-electric home.

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

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  • Follow John on Twitter
  • Follow The Comfort Squad on Twitter and check out their website
  • Check out the federal and state financial incentives to electrify your home
  • Read Rewiring America's guide to electrify your home
  • Get an Ecobee smart thermostat
  • Find an induction cooktop
  • Find an electric or heat pump water heater
  • Electrify your apartment building with Bloc Power
  • Save energy and money with Ohm Connect
  • Buy a solar powered battery with Humless
  • Pre-order your smart home battery
  • Find your local solar farm
  • Get...
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The Most Important Question - Newsletter #288: What $200,000 buys you

Newsletter #288: What $200,000 buys you

The Most Important Question

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08/19/22 • 13 min

This week:

  • What IRA means for cars
  • Centralizing data for the next pandemic
  • A parched Earth
  • Big Pharma is Big Mad about IRA
  • Fingers crossed that Big Tech will protect democracy

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The Most Important Question - Life Finds A Way

Life Finds A Way

The Most Important Question

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07/04/22 • 61 min

I think about time a lot. Some days I feel ancient, some days I can’t believe how old I am.

I’ve got kids, too. I can’t believe how fast they’ve grown up already. They love so many things. Swimming. Cooking. Plain pasta. The beach. Vegetables, somehow. Their friends. Their family. Dinosaurs.

Man, oh man, do they love dinosaurs.

I love to challenge them, to help them think about how long ago it all was, and how long it lasted. How different the world was. How the land under their feet was an ocean, once.

And of course, knowing what we know now, how fast it can all change. How an asteroid - or a virus, or a fire, or a flood - can change your life forever.

I try to help them understand that, unlike the dinosaurs, we have the tools to prevent many of these things, and we have the foresight to understand when and how, and why they might happen.

As much progress as we’ve made in these 300,000 years of Homo sapiens, from fire to wheels to meat to agriculture to handwashing – we are in a moment when we are challenged yet again on a global scale, and unlike the dinos, our future is of our own making.

Things can change quickly, and we need to understand how that’s happened before.

My guest today is Riley Black.

Riley is a science writer and amateur paleontologist based in Salt Lake City, Utah, right in the center of dinosaur country, where she chases tales of vanished lives from museum collections to remote badlands.

Riley’s published books include Written in Stone, my favorite and critically-acclaimed My Beloved Brontosaurus, When Dinosaurs Ruled, Prehistoric Predators, and her newest: The Last Days of the Dinosaurs, a fascinating, emotional page-turner that explores the minutes, hours, days, weeks, years, and centuries after the dinosaurs were wiped out by the Chicxulub asteroid 66 million years ago.

Riley’s journey and storytelling are powerful and so important in this moment when we’re so ready to move on to the next thing that we haven’t taken the time to cherish the people, the places, the world around us, and how lucky we are to have them.

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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.

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The Most Important Question - Turning The Tide On Microplastics

Turning The Tide On Microplastics

The Most Important Question

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09/25/23 • 61 min

What are microplastics doing to us? And how do we stop putting them into our water, and our bloodstreams, and our food?

That's today's big question, and my guest is Julia Yan. Julia is the co-founder and CEO at Baleena, a closed-loop, consumer-facing laundry startup working to tackle ocean microplastic pollution.

Julia is a recent graduate at UPenn, and with her two co-founders, some funding, including from our friends at 776 and a bunch of big name partners, they're trying to tackle one of the biggest microplastic inputs. Your washing machine.

Microplastics are not great. They're so prevalent that we have found them on the bottom of the ocean and on the top of mountains. We have found them in deserts, in our crops, in our soil. We have found them in adult bloodstreams and in unborn babies and placentas.

It is an enormous, wildly complicated problem and the implications are becoming more clear. The good news, like carbon emissions, we can choose to stop it.

It's just going to take an intentional systemic approach and people like Julia.

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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.

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The Most Important Question - 128. The Best Olive Oil You’ve Never Had

128. The Best Olive Oil You’ve Never Had

The Most Important Question

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11/29/21 • 63 min

In Episode 128, Quinn unpacks the most delicious olive oil in the world, how it came to be, and what it means to start a food business in the age of climate change.

Our guest is Aishwarya Iyer, dreamer, doer, and eternal optimist. Ash is the founder and CEO of Brightland, the new gold standard in pantry essentials. They are proponents and advocates for authenticity and transparency in the food industry, starting with olive oil.

There are something like six bajillion bottles of olive oil at your local supermarket, and that’s just the extra virgin stuff. And yet, despite the options (organic, cold-pressed, etc) you’d be hard-pressed (sorry) to find pure, quality oils – ones that aren’t blended, rancid, or worse.

Thankfully, you don’t have to cross the Atlantic (and the Mediterranean) in order to find the good stuff. It’s available right here in California.

Ash has been hard at work extending olive branches (you’re welcome) to local family farms, getting them to buy into the mission and the message. Brightland is also branching out into sweet and sour territory with truly addictive honey and vinegar offerings.

Making a difference often means shopping responsibly. It’s wonderful having one more option when it comes to it.

Today’s episode is brought to you by Avocado Green Brands, where sustainability comes first. They craft their GOTS certified organic mattresses, pillows, and bedding with natural materials sourced from their organic farms in India, in their own clean-energy powered facility in Los Angeles, where their team shares a singular purpose: To raise the bar for what it means to be a sustainable business.

Avocado is Climate Neutral Certified for net zero emissions and donates one percent of all revenue to environmental nonprofits through its membership with 1% For the Planet.

Find out what it means to sleep organic at AvocadoMattress.com.

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.

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Important, Not Important is produced by Crate Media...

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The Most Important Question - 127. How To Innovate

127. How To Innovate

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11/22/21 • 68 min

In Episode 127, Quinn wants to know just how the hell “innovation” actually works.

His guest is Christopher Mims, a journalist for the Wall Street Journal, who’s spent a career asking big questions about the most pressing technological and societal issues we face, from robot trains to the future of batteries, brain implants, and whatever happens to land in-between.

The thesis: every little bit counts, and it’s more predictable than you think. Or is it?

Together, Quinn and Chris explore the team dynamics of innovation, the “great man” question, the invisible force behind Moore’s Law, and more.

The bad news: Nobody gets to save the world. The good news: Everyone gets to save the world, a little bit.

Today’s episode is brought to you by Avocado Green Brands, where sustainability comes first. They craft their GOTS certified organic mattresses, pillows, and bedding with natural materials sourced from their organic farms in India, in their own clean-energy powered facility in Los Angeles, where their team shares a singular purpose: To raise the bar for what it means to be a sustainable business.

Avocado is Climate Neutral Certified for net zero emissions and donates one percent of all revenue to environmental nonprofits through its membership with 1% For the Planet.

Find out what it means to sleep organic at AvocadoMattress.com.

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

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Important, Not Important is produced by Crate Media

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The Most Important Question - Introducing: Catalyst with Shayle Kann - The Carbon Market's Quality Problem

Introducing: Catalyst with Shayle Kann - The Carbon Market's Quality Problem

The Most Important Question

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09/11/23 • 47 min

Voluntary carbon credits are a lot like used cars: You really have no idea what their quality might be. Or maybe they’re more like expensive bottles of wine. Many people (or at least Shayle) can’t tell whether they’re actually buying good-quality wine. If it’s expensive, it must be good, right?

That’s the kind of logic that has plagued voluntary carbon markets for years.

A carbon credit can work in one of two ways. First, it can avert 1 metric ton of emissions that would have otherwise happened by, for example, preventing deforestation. Alternatively, a credit can directly remove a ton of carbon from the atmosphere through methods such as direct air capture or biochar.

But widespread reporting reveals that most credits don’t do what they say they do. Just this month, the CEO of the world’s leading certifier stepped down after an investigation by The Guardian revealed that over 90% of rainforest carbon credits were worthless. In May, a $1 billion lawsuit filed in California alleges that the credits that Delta Air Lines relies on for its claim of reaching carbon-neutrality are bogus.

Carbon credits have reached a crisis point at the same moment we need to massively scale them up to meet net-zero goals. So what do we do about these quality problems?

In this episode, Shayle talks to Allister Furey, co-founder and CEO of Sylvera, a company that rates the quality of credits in a manner akin to what agencies like Moody’s and Standard & Poor’s do for bonds.

Shayle and Allister cover topics including:

  • The history of the first voluntary carbon markets and their early problems, such as producing fluorocarbons just to destroy them.
  • The current state of the market, including its size, segments and prices.
  • The wide gulf in price between the cheapest avoidance credits and the most ambitious engineered removal credits
  • Why Allistair thinks we need to be on a “war footing” to reach the highly ambitious carbon-removal targets needed to meet net zero, such as growing the market from $2 billion to $1 trillion by 2050.
  • Why high prices do not necessarily mean high quality.

Recommended resources:

  • The Guardian: Revealed: more than 90% of rainforest carbon offsets by biggest certifier are worthless, analysis shows
  • The Guardian: Delta Air Lines faces lawsuit over $1B carbon neutrality claim

Catalyst is a co-production of Post Script Media and Canary Media.

More episodes of Catalyst can be found here.

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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.

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FAQ

How many episodes does The Most Important Question have?

The Most Important Question currently has 420 episodes available.

What topics does The Most Important Question cover?

The podcast is about Podcasts, Technology and Science.

What is the most popular episode on The Most Important Question?

The episode title 'Fighting Food Waste With The iPhone of Trash Cans' is the most popular.

What is the average episode length on The Most Important Question?

The average episode length on The Most Important Question is 46 minutes.

How often are episodes of The Most Important Question released?

Episodes of The Most Important Question are typically released every 6 days, 5 hours.

When was the first episode of The Most Important Question?

The first episode of The Most Important Question was released on Jan 17, 2018.

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