Episode description

How can I be a better ancestor?

This question has haunted and inspired me since way back in 2019 when I first read the Optimist's Telescope. A beautiful, helpful, inspiring book by Bina Venkataraman. Then I had Bina on the show.

I think it's fair to say it reframed and focused my work and now all of our work here.

You simply cannot be a better ancestor by hoping shit gets better in posting black boxes on your Instagram stories. You have to do the work for today and tomorrow. If you want your descendants to consider you the cool, great-great uncle, you need to drive change today.

Bina is a journalist. She's an author and a science policy expert. She's the editor at large at the Boston Globe and a fellow at the Belfer Center for Science and International Affairs at Harvard. She's been an advisor to President Obama on everything from climate innovation to Ebola to public school science education.

I hope you enjoy this wonderful throwback conversation.

It is mid-Trump presidency. It is before COVID, before Biden, with old co-host Brian Colbert Kennedy, sharing the mic with me, where we dig into the influence Bina's family had on her perspective and her ideas for how you can value the future, how you can use the tools we have available to us now to both prevent further calamities and a build better future.

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INI Book Club:

• “The Lorax” by Dr. Seuss
• Find all of our guest recommendations at the INI Book Club: https://bookshop.org/lists/important-not-important-book-club

Links:

• Watch Bina’s TEDTalk: "The power to think ahead in a reckless age"
• Read: "The Optimist's Telescope"
• Twitter: @binajv

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• Subscribe to our newsletter at importantnotimportant.com
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• Follow Quinn: twitter.com/quinnemmett
• Edited by Anthony Luciani
• Produced by Willow Beck
• Intro/outro by Tim Blane: