You already know things are broken. You read the news, you listen to the analysis, you've got the outrage. What you don't have is a plan. The Most Important Question — 6x Webby-nominated, 2x Signal Award-nominated — is a weekly conversation with one person who stopped asking "what can I do?" and went and found out. Not pundits. Not commentators. The scientists, doctors, nurses, journalists, farmers, activists, and policymakers who are doing the actual work on the frontlines of climate, public…
Subscribe:.rss.atom.json.md.m3u.pls
Live Last read · last published · next check
Saves to your Listen queue, to pick up on another day or another device.
Today, another in our series of conversations with friends who are part of the pipeline at Run For Something. I'm excited to introduce you to Sophia Gibb. She is a public servant and elite athlete who knows what it means to perform under pressure, whic...
Today we're gonna talk about Florida and representation, and how Florida has very little of it, in even the loosest definition of the word. We're gonna do that by introducing you to my new friend, May Thach. May is a candidate for state representative ...
There are a lot of folks in rural America that can say, "No candidate's ever come and knocked on my door." So today, I'm going to introduce you to the one who knocks, my new best friend, Brittany Newton. You folks around the world have said very clearl...
A huge catalyst for our 2025 pivot towards courting a much wider audience was AOC’s post-mortem of the 2024 election: “We can’t just be right. We have to be effective.”But at the same time, we have to also agree on the fundamentals — human rights — and...
Today we're gonna talk about Texas. For a decade, maybe 100 years, we've heard over and over, this is the year we flip Texas. Sometimes we get closer, sometimes we get much further away. But as much as I'm excited about a candidate like James Talarico,...
Today, we're gonna talk about data centers. Now, I know these things are a hot topic amid everything else: the heat, water, prices, lack of homes, lack of childcare, you name it. But we do need to speak out about them. So, who is the most qualified her...
Something new from the team behind The Most Important Question! It's Called Reality is a podcast about reality TV, and the systems hiding inside it. Every episode, hosts Willow Beck and Briana Brown take a show you're already watching and pull the thre...
You may feel like you're giving it all you have, but obviously things are tough out there. We're working on all of it, but in particular, you, our listeners have asked for over and over more examples of a fight and actual progress that you can see and ...
We've spent the last two essays building the case for *Actually* Pro Life: wht it means, where it comes from, and why the logo was designed to be worn, carried, and declared in public. Now we're asking you to do exactly that. We just launched our first...
If the name Actually Pro Life is deliberate, then so is the logo. Because like I said in our intro post, we’re reclaiming "pro-life" from the same people who blame kindergartners for getting shot at school, and we’re grounding it in evidence. Evidence ...
250 years after a group of slaveowners wrote that "all men are created equal", we're done letting hypocrites own the language of life.Introducing Actually Pro Life: a reframe, a research platform, and a direct challenge to anyone willing to be held acc...
Last Christmas we teamed up with about 40 other big podcasts to support our dear friends at Give Directly with a very special campaign called Pods Fight Poverty. The goal was to raise $1 million to send to families in extreme poverty in Bwakira, Rwanda...
Your kids are hearing about the news whether you are ready or they're ready or not. One study said two-thirds of kids aged 8 to 14 are absorbing current events at least every few days, and almost none of it was made for them. They're getting the fear w...
Whoever said this country can't come together about anything anymore in the year of our Lord twenty twenty-six was wrong because PFAS, or forever chemicals, are in the blood of ninety-seven percent of Americans right now. They're in our water, our cook...
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 n...
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 t...
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 qu...
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, coo...
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 bod...
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 philant...
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 ...
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 Gi...
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 t...
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 righ...
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 b...
Chronically parched is not something anyone in this country or anywhere should ever have to feel, but here we are. So how are towns and states making clean water more affordable, reliable, and less controversial? 'cause remember, it's fucking water. Lo...
I think we can all agree that kids shouldn't go hungry ever really, but especially at school. You might feel right now like you are giving it everything you got, but when you look around, things feel kind of dark out there. So you, our listeners and re...
Maybe you feel like you're already giving it all you've got. You look around, and things are tough out there. You, our listeners and readers and viewers and users across the country and across the world, you're demanding more examples of fight and prog...
Things are a little tough out there. So you, want, no need, more examples of fight and progress you can actually see and touch and feel. And in these series of conversations, in partnership with our best friends at Run for Something, we are giving you ...
In a moment when the news out of Washington can seem untenably rough, when the gerontocracy that got us here won't give up their hold on power, when billionaires own every single media channel, when everything from housing to childcare to elderly care ...
This week we're rerunning our 2024 episode with Maddie Stone, writer of The Science of Fiction blog, to celebrate the fact that Maddie has joined our team and The Science of Fiction now lives at Important, Not Important. The Science of Fiction explores...
Turns out it's our 200th episode. It has been a journey. The show is now called The Most Important Question, and I can't think of a better answer than just fucking run for something. What can I do about anything? Run for something. And so obviously the...
Congress just jammed the brakes on America's clean energy boom, however short-lived it may have been. The One Big Beautiful Bill Act was signed into law after a lot of debate in the House and the Senate and in public. It will wipe out most of the wind,...
Imagine waking up to discover that the United States has just pulled $35 billion out of foreign aid overnight, and that hundreds of HIV clinics, and child malnutrition programs, and poverty graduation trials will shut their doors within days and weeks....
Toilet paper. You use it. I use it. Sometimes, even my children use it. The point is, toilet paper is everywhere. Almost everyone needs it, and so much of it still comes from actual forests, and yet 2 billion people don't have access to even basic sani...
You've heard people say it. It shouldn't have been called Earth. It should have been called Ocean, but it is simultaneously a planet of trees. As Richard Powers put it in The Overstory: We live in a world of trees. Once something like 6 trillion trees,...
Picture a city that beats brutal heat waves with cool tree-lined streets, slashes household energy bills, and cuts carbon pollution by as much as 80%, without waiting for these miracle technologies. That future-positive vision is already taking shape i...
In every flood scarred bend of an Appalachian river sits a chance to rebuild something stronger, cleaner water for people, and room for a 160 million-year salamander to thrive again. Hurricane-shaped chaos is unveiling a surprising truth when we restor...
This week: There are a million legitimate reasons why standing up to bullies may require a pseudonym (and a cowl), or even anonymity. As has been clear for centuries, and even more so in this moment of inescapable mass surveillance, some of us — by nat...
63% of Americans say abortion should be legal in all or most cases, and yet here we are. So what can we do to make the language around abortion more positive? My guest today is Sophie Nir. Sophie is the CEO of the Abortion Positivity Project. The Abort...
Sometimes you buy organic, sometimes you hit a restaurant that's plant-based, or at least you choose the veggie option. Maybe the fish option at the market or the restaurant is marketed as being sustainable. Maybe you compost. It's all useful. But we'v...
We've spent the last few years learning up close how a crisis like a global pandemic reveals and deepens all of our faults, inequalities, biases, and outright failures of empathy. But here's the kicker: it's not the first time. Plagues and epidemics ha...
The United States has long been the largest aid donor in the world, accounting for about 40 percent of humanitarian assistance globally last year, according to the United Nations. But that is quickly changing. Most U.S. foreign aid is currently on hold...
This week: You’ve never had a better opportunity to improve one person’s life than you do right now. I would argue, in fact, that there’s never been a better time to improve one person’s life than there is today. Sounds crazy, right, considering all th...
One of the ways this Trump administration is different from the last is, relatively at least, how much more unconstitutional, how much more organized and comprehensive the attacks on our institutions, particularly the scaffolding we built for ourselves...
We didn't always call our work science for people who give a shit. But ever since we did, we've welcomed at least two types of people to our flock. The first is people who are deeply invested in science, but are unsure how to tie it into measurable act...
What can we do about land power? It's the most important question and my guest today is Mike Albertus. Mike is a professor of political science at the University of Chicago. He's the author of the new book, Land Power. Who has it? Who doesn't? And how ...
This week: Not. Right. Now. I hope you enjoy our new show. It’s super, super informal, and fun, and full of profanity, and personal, and — I hope — something you or a parent in your life can identify with, and maybe get some relief from. It’s intention...
Please enjoy the debut episode from our new show, Not Right Now. Every week, Claire (Evil Witches) and Quinn (Important, Not Important) dive into the chaotic reality of raising tiny humans in these wild times. From behavioral reflection forms and schoo...
Not Right Now is a podcast for parents navigating the impossible task of raising kids while *gestures wildly at everything*. Join Quinn Emmett (Important, Not Important) and Claire Zulkey (Evil Witches) for honest conversations about parenting in an er...
