I'm asking for your money

I’ve got four pieces of great news for you today:

1. Our team is growing

2. We’re building some really cool shit I can’t tell you about yet

3. We’re having a Membership drive to pay for it all

4. Membership is 50% off until New Year’s 🎉

In 2023, I wrote 168,661 words, which is the equivalent of 562 pages of a book.

(For context, that’s more words than are in The Splendid and The Vile, which you should read)

It looks like I’ll tack on another 3000-4000 words for my 2023 Year in Review, which comes out Friday, so let’s call it an even 171,000. Lord.

Willow joined the team (or, really, made it a team), got our backend ducks in a row (sorry), and wrote 20 editions of the new Monday newsletter, combing the entire internet every week to provide you with the most vital news, and accompanying Action Steps for those.

I recorded 20 podcast conversations with amazing humans and we provided a transcript for each of these for free, because some people prefer to read, and some people are hearing impaired.

I also recorded 47 audio editions of my essays, also for free, in case you prefer listening or are a person with any sort of vision impairment.

Willow produced all of these audio units, which, if you’re counting, is almost 70 hours — nearly 3 days of her life — spent listening to my voice, over and over again. All in cooperation with our wonderful part-time editor, all in an effort to make me not sound like a moron. No one should have to bear this burden.

But hold on — we also produce video versions of each of these for our fledging YouTube channel, because video is fun, but also because young people spend every waking minute on YouTube, and it’s so important to us to meet people where they are, even if I do not understand what “riz” means.

(We are proud but very tired)

We are also human, imperfect, and a very, very small team, but we give a shit, and we believe in accessibility.

Every version of the vast majority of what we make is available to the world, for free. As it should be. Most companies and shows put them behind a paywall (which, btw, is smart business) or don’t make alternative versions at all, which sucks.

Which is why we’re here today: to ask you for money.

A few times a year we come right out and ask you to support our work directly by becoming a paid Member. Members provide the vast bulk of our revenue, with sponsorships providing the rest. We do not take VC money because I would rather answer to you than those jokers.

As Tim Carmody put it, “The most economically powerful thing you can do is to buy something for your own enjoyment that also improves the world.”

Friends, if you missed it, that’s what we do:

We help countries, companies, and people answer the question, “What can I do?”

What can you do?

About climate, public health, food, water, AI, and more?

My 1:1 convos, our newsletter, essays, and podcast help you understand what’s happening in the world, and our hand-picked action steps help you unfuck it.

So I’m here to ask you to become a Member.

Again, very exciting, until New Year’s Day, the first year of annual Memberships are 50% off.

When you become a Member (which I do not take lightly), you not only subsidize our work for everyone else, you get:

• Access to “Quinn’s Notebook”, your very own curated news homepage (and RSS feed for the OG’s!)

• Weekly Member editions

• Access to our Slack community

• Invites to live events

• Early access to betas 👀

The future is coming, and we’re so excited to share what we’ve been working on. But we can’t do it without your patronage.

Thanks for reading, and as always, thanks for giving a shit.

— Quinn