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Did You Hear The One About The Starfish?
Why I missed dinner last night
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Welcome back, Shit Givers.
Because I am a sap, I have been thinking about my kids a lot lately. And kids in general. Theyâre going to grow up and live in a world thatâs very different from ours, and itâs important to me that theyâre all as ready for that as they can be.
So this week: Did you hear about the starfish?
â Quinn
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Iâm Quinn Emmett, and this is science for people who give a shit.
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Did You Hear The One About The Starfish?
I was listening to a conversation between Chris Sacca and Ted Seides the other day, on Tedâs excellent podcast Capital Allocators.
Chris Sacca is famous for having the best VC batting average since Ted Williams and then suddenly retiring, only to unretire a few years later to found Lowercarbon Capital with his equally-impressive wife, Crystal English Sacca.
Their goal: Invest in climate tech companies and buy us time to unfuck the planet.
You can see the appeal.
I have always appreciated Chrisâs candor and enthusiasm. But when Ted asked how Chris and Crystal manage to balance work (unfucking the planet) and being around for their young kids, there was one line that stuck out to me, and it was when Chris replied (and Iâm paraphrasing here):
âYou know, the answer to why you tell your kids you canât hang out right now better be really fucking good.â
That one stuck with me. And hereâs why.
It stuck with me because Iâm thankful, proud, and privileged to be a dad who is home for dinner and bedtime virtually every night, and it kills me when I canât be, whatever the reason. My kids didnât notice my occasional absences when they were toddlers â toddlers barely have object permanence. And when theyâre teenagers, theyâll probably give even less of a shit when Iâm MIA â if not celebrate my absence.
But right now, when theyâre most aware and most desire my full attention â my time â to justify a late-night at the office means I better be on the cusp of curing some goddamn disease.
Thatâs how important my time with them is â to me, and to them.
And yet â Iâm definitely not curing a disease. Not directly, at least. Thatâs not how my brain works, or how my biology grades went.
Thatâs also not my job. My job is to help all of you understand and unfuck our rapidly changing world, together, through context and Action Steps. I call it Compound Action, which is just a catchy way of saying we stand on the shoulders have the millions whoâve done it before us, for everyone to come after us.
So when I have to miss dinner or canât play catch or Barbies or catch with Barbies, itâs usually because I have to finish up an essay like this one, or tag-in to some policy call.
The kids are bummed â I can see it â but they finally kind of understand what I do, so theyâll (gently) roll their eyes and go back to their sweet potatoes. They will, in all of their grace, forgive me. It doesnât happen often.
But hereâs the thing âeven though theyâre increasingly cognizant and proud of what I do and why I do it, and understanding more of the world around them, some part of me still believes theyâre always going to remember me missing dinner, not why I missed it.
Each time I have to pass on some crucial moment with them, it feels like Iâm failing a test, that theyâre more aware of our limited time together than I am (which is probably impossible, not only because theyâre brains arenât fully formed yet, but because Iâm obsessed with how little time I have with them).
But at the same time, as they grow, theyâre also getting a better idea of how goddamn lucky they are to have parents who can often both be home for dinner and bedtime (and breakfast, and games and recitals and just building forts in the woods).
Theyâre increasingly aware of what they have, and importantly, what other kids around them donât â parents, food, water, books, toys, time.
That recognition, in this moment, is serendipitous for my work here, because for all of the enormous progress weâve made here in the US and across the world to improve childhood outcomes â literally even just making it out of childhood alive â we keep choosing to not do more, if not to punish kids and families altogether.
And itâs really pissing me off.
So last night I told my kids I couldnât hang out because Iâm actually helping other kids.
In The Expanding Circle, Peter Singer wrote:
âThe proposal that we might risk lessening the happiness or prospects of our own children, to however slight a degree, in order to save strangers from starvation strikes many people as not merely idealistic but positively wrong.â
One, great news, I donât give a shit what other people think about me, or my parenting, about my work, or how much profanity we use here (itâs the turn of the tide, shitâs real, get on board or unsubscribe).
Two, yeah, my kids need me, just like they need their mom (ok, maybe less than they need their once-in-a-universe mom). But while theyâve each got their own strengths and struggles, overall, theyâre gonna be ok. More than ok.
Which leaves some room for altruism. Especially for kids.
Weâre actually going to drastically expand our efforts to research, define, cooperate, and activate behind a kids-specific platform here, so I wonât go into everything today â consider this a (3000 word) primer.
Altruism â doing the right thing, even and especially if you donât get anything out of it â probably started in our genes as a way to protect our kids, family, and community, in that order.
This genetic mandate and sequence is still a fundamental tenet, if not a practice, for most of us. Care, from the inside out.
But it doesnât extend as far as we need it to. To understand the chasm between what we say and what we do, just watch any NFL game, funded in part by alcohol and the Defense Department, and then stroll your local TJ Maxx for a broad assortment of âFamily, Faith, Friends, Flag, Firearms - 5 Things You Donât Mess withâ t-shirts (and donât think for a second that list is in the correct order).
Caveating of course that there are so many incredible selfless people who care for kids for very little pay, if any, in reality, old white people are terrified of an influx of brown kids flooding public schools and their parents taking meaningful jobs, when those white people send their kids to private school and refuse to do those jobs, anyways. They LOVE some farmerâs market peaches, though.
People go to church quite a bit less than they use to, something as a basically-pagan-atheist-religious-studies-major I have complicated feelings about, but either way â thereâs less structured community than their used to be. Kids are hanging out less. Adults are hanging out less. Parents are talking to their kids less.
Thereâs so many opportunities to mindlessly scroll Facebook on the toilet at home or while literally driving your truck, and not see the real life kids who need help or that you might run over while they walk to public school not because they want to, but because we donât pay bus drivers enough and immigration doesnât exist anymore so there arenât enough bus drivers to even pay.
Anyways â
Our lizard brains evolved into primate brains, later evolved into NPR brains, and then into these scatter-shot social media brains, and here we are:
Patriotism means very little in practice; we both under and over-think everything; we argue over how beneficial AND tone-deaf Effective Altruism can be at the exact same time; travel nurses hold up our healthcare system and GoFundMe pays for our funerals; the worst billionaires in history build yachts and spaceships and college dorms instead of museums and national parks.
But, again, not everyone has given up on other peopleâs kids.
In 2023, Against Malaria is probably the most effective organization on the planet, protecting children youâll never meet with treated bed-nets youâll never need for a disease youâll never encounter.
George W. Bush â the war criminal, yes, I know â probably saved (after years of pleading from advisers and other unlikely allies, including Bono, who recounts the whole thing in a delightful Irish accent in his audiobook) more lives through PEPFAR than anyone ever will.
The UN Millennium and more recently,Sustainable Development Goals have â however very unevenly â put magnificent dents in childhood poverty, hunger, and disease.
These are people and organizations and massive efforts all saying, âOther peopleâs kids deserve better.â
Sure, the world is filled with tragic but heartfelt stories of parents of kids with cancer fighting to make sure more kids donât get cancer, or that we find cures, or treatments, or at the very least, alleviate the costs of traveling for treatment or a clinical trial.
Or the reverse â a small child watching their parent suffer from some form of progressive muscle dystrophy, and quietly willing herself or himself into just the scientist who would find a cure.
But this is still the basic, hard-wired altruism weâve all got buried inside. We have to do much, much more.
We have to not only look outside our own homes, but around our neighborhoods to pay teachers more, to expand education, to provide books, to provide community health clinics, to plant tree-cover, to build and operate more pools and free swim lessons, to expand SNAP and Medicaid and reduce the administrative burdens of both, to banish ultra processed food and forever chemicals and lead pipes, but also fight for mandatory parental leave and paid leave for salaried and hourly jobs, to not just let 70,000 childcare facilities close, leaving at least three million more kids without reputable care, or any care.
And again, we can and have to go further: beyond our state borders, beyond our national borders, to Africa and India, to the continents and billions of young people poised to reshape everything about our economies and societies in coming decades, but whose children will, yes, grow up with GPS and wifi, but often still without refrigeration, and with sea-level rise.
Great news: History is littered with examples of people doing exactly these things:
Someone making or selling a vaccine for malaria probably isnât doing it for their own kids. Infant mortality didnât get cut in HALF because one parent kept their toddler away from the fusebox or actually got them to actually wash their hands.
We didnât regulate clean water and clean air because our own kids werenât suffering from dirty versions â we know this, because the people who voted for them were overwhelmingly not people who were exposed to them.
Unfortunately, this progress is being challenged at every front. The days of Congresses coming together to do the right thing for kids and families are very, very few and far between. The COVID money â the trillions that changed lives, however briefly, and the hundreds of billions we lost track of or were pilfered by bad actors â may have been the last straw.
Across the world, 4.3% of children die before theyâre 15 years old. Thatâs 5.9 million kids a year, 16,000 kids on any given day, 11 kids a minute. Again â this is both horrific, and incredible.
It used to be SO MUCH WORSE. And now â through the choices we make, through Compound Action, we can make it so much better in so many more places. Children born in Somalia, where 14% die, could be like children in the EU, where 99.55% survive childhood.
You might think the US is a great place to give birth and/or be born, and comparatively to say, sub-Saharan Africa or southern Asia, youâd be right. But compared to any other wealthy country, itâs a nightmare. It simply doesnât have to be this way.
Millions of people across the world have been working for decades to improve access and quality of nutrition, vaccines, sanitation, healthcare, midwives, housing, and education. The work is impossibly difficult and never-ending, but it isnât rocket science.
But despite the heroic efforts of those who came before us, and who continue this work today â having blown way past their own programmed altruism â weâve got a very long way to go to reach Sustainable Development Goal 3.2 â to reduce the child mortality rate to at least as low as 2.5% in all countries by 2030.
Right now, 3.9% of kids worldwide die before they reach age five, and to me, thatâs fucking unacceptable.
âThe fact that even the best-off countries struggled for millennia to keep children alive and improved the health of their children only in recent decades suggests that there is nothing that would prevent the same progress in those countries where children have the poorest health today.â
During and after COVID, vitally important childhood vaccination programs across the world faltered. Russiaâs fucking war in Ukraine, continued energy poverty, and fossil fuelâŚfueledâŚglobal heating and floods threaten crops and farmland. Reversing or mitigating these is going to be wildly difficult.
And yeah, look, again, I get it. Iâm tired, too. My work and kids are exhausting and expensive. Iâm donating a lot, too. There are some hugely wasteful non-profits and policy pork (we donât point you towards those, donât worry). I think the way some folks in Effective Altruism ignore problems close to home sucks.
Kids matter everywhere, full stop.
On the one hand, kids continuing to suffer and die in Africa and Asia when other counties have leveled up with a pretty reliable playbook is fucking bullshit.
On the other, any kids continuing to suffer and die in the richest countries is fucking inexcusable. We are simply choosing not to help them. Actively choosing. It makes me furious. Furious.
But thereâs one little thing youâll notice, if youâre around kids a lot.
Kids generally choose to help other kids. They generally choose to help, period.
Sometimes you have to train them a little bit, or even incentivize/bribe them, but itâs amazing how at the very least they hear about other kids suffering, look down at their stainless steel bento lunchbox packed with hand-cut real food and think, âThatâs fucked up.â
But somewhere along the way, at some point when I guess the incentives become big enough, some adults stop caring about other peopleâs kids.
Have you heard the story about Susie? With the starfish? Iâll tell it now.
Little Susie, she was six. Letâs call her six.
Anyways, sheâs strolling down the beach, and sheâs got some distance from her parents â a nice little dose of childhood independence â and itâs low-tide, so sheâs just casually picking up starfish that were left on the beach, and tossing them back into the waves.
Along comes some middle-aged dickhead walking in the opposite direction. This guy sees Susie toss yet another starfish into the waves and â keep in mind, this is a choice heâs making, to use his time and energy for this, without even introducing himself â he says to Susie, âYou know, you canât save all of them.â
Susie looks down and regards the starfish in her soft little six year old hand, looks back up at the guy and says, âYeah, but I can save this one.â
She tosses it into the sea as he stomps off to listen to the ALL IN podcast on his AirPods because â despite his completely unprovoked lecture â starfish and Susie are below his line of shit he could possibly care about.
Understand this: Susie has no genetic relation to that starfish, at least not recently. She canât. She is a person. It is an echinoderm.
Susie is throwing it back into the water, where it has another chance to live because - simply - it does not have to die. Not if she has anything to say about it. Her world is simple, her priorities are clear, her power is enormous.
âWell, actuallyâ, you say, not enormous. The resources available to Susie are limited: Susie doesnât have a donor advised fund, she doesnât have an employer to match her new monthly donation to the Ocean Conservancy, she isnât even using her hard-earned allowance to save this starfish because it is in cash in a drawer at home.
But I will tell you this: Susie is spending something far more valuable â her time.
Singer would be a fan:
âMy contribution cannot end a famine, but it can save the lives of several people who might otherwise starve.â
Look. Again. I get it. Itâs a lot to ask. Youâve got a LOT going on.
Thereâs another election coming. In Virginia, thereâs another election in like weeks. And weâll talk about those races as we get closer and Iâll indicate very clearly where I feel like we can make a measurable difference.
But kids need help now. Itâs probably the most important ask, every day.
Among all the meaningful opportunities to bend the needle, across all of the interwoven systems of air and water, food and healthcare, education and poverty, helping children everywhere, now (and often that means indirectly, by helping their parents or guardians), simply provides the best bang for our buck, long-term.
Still not convinced? Ok, so, letâs be honest here.
If youâre reading this, whether youâre a new or long-time subscriber, thereâs very little chance youâre thinking âOk, butâŚIâm kind of selfish.â
But maybe thereâs some tiny part of you that canât possibly look beyond your own kids, grandkids, nephews, nieces, or students, for whatever reason.
Truth bomb: I can relate. I want to tell you one more personal story here. But first, another anecdote from Singer, this time about intimate relationships:
Whether weâre talking about relationships within, or even among different communities, he said, âPeople who are altruistically motivated will make more reliable partners than those motivated by self-interest. After all, one day the calculations of self-interest may turn out differently.â
Weâve all suffered and lost so much these past few years, but permit me this bit:
Throughout a lifetime of enormous privilege, Iâve seen my fair share of shit. I had crippling childhood asthma. I lost one of my best friends to cancer at age 30, and another to drugs and suicide a few years later, a precious uncle to ALS, a cousin to ALS. I watched four grandparents suffer through Alzheimerâs, I have spent time with children with cancer who werenât there the next week.
Every one of these stuck with me, because Iâm not a monster, but not just in the way youâd think.
Hereâs my secret (well, one of them): I have absolutely donated to organizations that support people who suffer from these exact issues, all the while quietly calculating that someday, maybe, my meager contributions might make those organizations more capable should my loved ones ever need them.
There. I said it.
On the one hand, I rationalize these donations as some version of future-proofing. Like building a doomsday bunker but the bunker has co-benefits like providing funding for pediatric cancer research.
On the other, it is definitely not selfless. Itâs selfish. Iâll own it.
But hereâs the thing, if you really need it: Arenât the organizations benefiting either way? Arenât other kids and people benefiting either way?
Weâre going to talk a lot more around here about how to improve the lives of kids.
So before I finish, take a moment and stop thinking about other peopleâs kids in this country and other countries and come back to the ones closest to you in your life.
The ones who fit so neatly into âkin altruism.â The ones youâd do anything for.
Youâd go without food to feed these kids, give them the only water when theyâre thirsty, work a second job or third, volunteer in their classroom, lock and stand guard at the door of that classroom when thereâs someone in the hallway who wants to hurt them.
Your kids or charges may or may not know what resources you have. Sometimes itâs clear: You may flaunt them if you have them. Or they may only be aware because sometimes they have less food to eat than they want or need. Sometimes the power is cut off, even for just a day.
But I truly believe that once you do everything you can for them, intentionally toeing the line of what they need versus what they want, encouraging them to learn to read, to learn history and ethics and math and science and civics, as you cultivate a household ethos of empathy and care â
â once you do all that, as you do all that, Iâd be willing to bet that if you asked them whether itâs fair that other kids donât have books or food or power or water or a roof, or whether other kids should find it difficult to breathe â theyâd reply that no, itâs not fucking fair.
But know this: Once you ask them, theyâre gonna know what you know it, too.
And then â because theyâre kids and they will hold you to every little thing youâve ever said out loud â youâre going to have to do something about it.
And it might mean missing dinner once in a while.
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