Going Quietly Is Not An Option

Quinn: [00:00:00] 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 action on the human level. And the second is people already fighting for a healthier, more equitable society, but who are curious about the evolving science behind our complex systems, our bodies, whatever level.

They all want to know a version of the most important question, what can I do? It's a big question right now. And today, after almost 200 conversations and on this, our newly rebranded show, we're going to confront that question as some of our most vital human and humane systems are being put in the shredder.

They're imperfect. [00:01:00] These wildly complex systems we designed over the past few decades to protect ourselves and each other from weather and illness. Systems that, frankly, look and operate like hyperobjects. They're nearly impossible to consider all the parts or even just the sum of. They're being torn to shreds, intentionally by corrupt Nazi billionaires in an administrative coup that will cost no fewer lives around the world than any other version. So again, it's a hell of a time to ask, what can I do? And yet every week, thousands of people ask us the most important question in the world. And so every week I turn around and ask someone who actually knows what the hell they're talking about the very same question.

Someone who's already answered it for themselves. Who's been working on the front lines of the future in global health, climate change, AI, food and water, medicine, whatever, electric school buses. I find out why they're doing the work they're doing and what we, you and [00:02:00] I, can do to support it, to join their work, to fund their work, to find our own way to the front lines of the future.

I'm your host, Quinn Emmett, and my guest today is perfectly suited for this immense task, Dr. Ticora Jones. Dr. Jones has spent the last two years leading the efforts to expand the vision for science in the science office at the NRDC, to support the scientific and evidence based nucleus for organizational strategy and advocacy.

Before joining the NRDC, Dr. Jones served nearly 15 years at USAID, a little agency you may have heard about recently, in a number of roles, including most recently as Agency Chief Scientist, Executive Director for innovation, technology, and research, and Managing Director for research. As the Agency Chief Scientist, which is really a hell of a title, Jones chaired the Research and Development Council, which was responsible for revising and instituting science policy.

She advocated for process changes [00:03:00] to better support scientific integrity and research generation and use. And she led efforts to expand USAID's interagency role with international science and technology cooperation for deeper strategic partnerships with the U.S. government. As of this month, that is all in serious trouble.

For questions or feedback, you can always email us at questions at important, not important. com.

Dr. Ticora Jones, welcome to the show.

I usually start this whole thing with a two part question, because this one is both evergreen and timely. So I want to do the timely part first, if that's okay.

Which is to say, to acknowledge the state of the world of which you were very much part of what has been happening here, which is to say [00:04:00] USAID the absolutely enormous agency where you spent quite a long time, 10, 10 years, 13 years, long time?

Ticora Jones: Thirteen and a half. We round all the way up to 15 just cause.

Quinn: Yeah we do. Sure. My kids are like, how old are you? Do your kids ever, does your daughter?

Ticora Jones: She was sweet enough to tell me that I was 29.

Quinn: Oh. See, my kids go what was it like in the 1900s? And I'm like, you can go to bed. Thank you.

Ticora Jones: She’s not there yet. She will start making those jokes soon.

Quinn: They’re not jokes. They think it's horrifying. Like, how could someone be that old?

Anyways so you spent rounding up 15 years at USAID, which has been cut off at the knees.

Ticora Jones: Knees, head, arms.

Disemboweled.

Quinn: We don't have enough time to describe what USAID did, does, malaria, TB, Ebola, so many things, maternal health. How are you doing?

Ticora Jones: It's hard. Each moment, each time [00:05:00] you read about what is happening and has happened, each time you reach out to former colleagues, each time they reach out to you it is incredibly hard. The destruction has been both efficient and inefficient at the same time. Because you know, I can say with certainty that it started about a month and a half ago.

So a week into the new administration is when the stop work orders started. And what that meant was a very slow but rapid descent. It meant that people who had been working in the agency for years as technical experts, just because they weren't civil servants, were fired.

They had years of work in HIV and AIDS, years of work running programs on global health, on agriculture, you know, keeping alive a famine early warning system, all of these things.

First it was the technical experts that weren't officially civil servants, but essentially worked [00:06:00] closely with so many people in the agency that I had worked with.

After that, it was, hey, we're going to lock you out of your systems. And then it was don't come to the building.

And then you were hearing about the confrontations between DOGE and the Office of Security, who knows our oath is to protect against all enemies, foreign and domestic. And the fires inside the house.

Trying to put out the fire, but they're ready to call people on you.

So, actually last Thursday what day was that, the 27th, I went to support my former colleagues as they were given 15 minutes to clean out their offices. This was after they had taken down the signage and removed all of the things and then lied and said they were going to, oh, we'll kind of keep some of these programs, these life saving programs around HIV flowing. But people are going in and systematically unchecking boxes so folks don't get paid.

Quinn: They're quite literally just unchecking.

Ticora Jones: Quite literally. And so when I used to talk about the federal government and working within it, as I was talking to [00:07:00] people about the life that I made transitioning from a polymer science PhD into science policy, I would talk about why there are apparatuses and bureaucracy and systems, and that it's not like you can just whip out a credit card and buy a whole set of things. You have to design programs. You have to build relationships. You have to build trust within those relationships. And everything that was just done within these last five, six weeks, even if people are able to come back and things are able to be restored. You cannot get that trust back. You cannot get those relationships back. There's research that, you know, programs that I built were working on agricultural crops that had been crop varietals that they had been working on for multiple months, like 18 months. And they're going to be left in the field because all those people overseas got fired too. It's not just all the people in the U.S.

All of our [00:08:00] partners. It's everywhere. And I still call them our partners because they were people that I worked so closely with for so much time. And so it's been incredibly hard to navigate this space, knowing that the congressional Republicans aren't actually interested in doing their jobs because they have the power of the purse. They're just choosing not to use it. And they're choosing to let, you know, chainsaw wielding people take the hit for them so they can go in the back and do things that may or may not be working because I think they're taking heat in different ways. It is heartbreaking in the worst of ways.

Quinn: Is there a part of you that wishes you were still there when this went down?

Ticora Jones: Yes, and no. The part of me that would still have been there would be really in it with my colleagues, but the part of me that is outside of there can actually use my voice in a different way. I can speak up for them. I can try to find opportunities for them. I can talk [00:09:00] about them with people like you.

The thing about being inside the federal government, I read it recently, it's you don't know what all the cooks in the kitchen are doing when you go to a fine dining establishment. You just know that you get good food on the outside, if you get what you've paid for. And right now, they're eliminating all of the cooks and all of the food that is being brought to the kitchen. It's not even toddlers doing stuff back there.

And so people are now finding out that like this fine dining establishment that we called American democracy actually required people who were willing to be the cooks in the kitchen, who didn't need to be the out loud chef, who didn't need to be the person in the front, but were willing to be committed public servants. And now they are being eliminated. And now they're finding out that, oh, wait, that food didn't just make itself. Those systems didn't just function. It's not just magic. That whole conversation around how chatGPT creates this interface that makes you [00:10:00] feel as if it's magic and that there's not a whole lot underneath it. It's the same kind of thing. There was a whole lot underneath that apparently people who forgot their ninth grade civics lessons are learning again.

Quinn: I want to get into, how you went from chemistry to designing research and policy and things like that, because it's such a fascinating route and it's so effective. If half the people disappeared, we would lose people who know how to make specific parts of bridges or tunnels. And those are almost exceptional, right? We really would not be able to build them without that very specific knowledge all these different people bring that we take for granted about how these work.

Ticora Jones: And people being willing to mentor and train the next generation of people coming in.

Quinn: 100 percent and all of a sudden it makes you go. We kind of need tunnels. We kind of need [00:11:00] food systems.

Ticora Jones: We kind of need people who are tracking bird flu and communicating with us about it. Some of those people got fired and rehired because there was enough kerfuffle about that. But, the people doing clinical trials, the people able to help us understand that unfortunately much of our medical system was based on people that look like you, all the clinical trials, people that look like you, but that does not mean that you and I are the same in terms of how our bodies and systems would respond to any of the medical interventions that are out there.

And so you need so much more, you know, there was this, I don't know if it was a Post piece or something else, but somebody that was at the National Science Foundation, who was down in the Arctic, doing collaborative, country collaborative research down there and got fired down there. It's not supposed to make sense.

Yes, we are supposed to be shocked and awed. And what I am hoping people will do is continue to both document who they were, what they did and why it was [00:12:00] important if they were federal employees, share some of those things with the House Democratic Science Committee because they're looking for federal scientists that have been fired and getting their stories. But also that they don't go quietly. I think there are a lot of people because they are grieving and so shocked, they do want to just go quietly and hide, but we can't.

Quinn: Sure.

Ticora Jones: We cannot afford to do that. And finding ways to be in community with others. Share the gifts that they had, share the work that they did. Yes, some of the foundations are trying to step into the void around international development and fill some of that. But my heart breaks not just for the people that I used to work with, it's been exactly two years. But for all the things that we did in the, that we built, that we partnered around. The way that it really was true partnership and not just, Hey, we're the American people and we're here to save you with these things. There were so many things to be learned around [00:13:00] the world. And all of that is broken now.

Quinn: Yeah. This will have come out after, but real time in the next 48 hours. We are actually launching a guest series called Unfinished and we are putting out calls for those fired folks to send us posts and we're going to publish all of that.

Ticora Jones: I love that.

Quinn: We've got a tremendous guest editor, a good friend who's been on the show a bunch, who's gonna shepherd the whole thing.

Ticora Jones: And I will happily put out calls to have people come and talk to you.

Quinn: It's, you can't go quietly.

Ticora Jones: No. As much as they want us to be deeply terrified because of how we are forced to use all of the systems available to us now, going quietly is not an option.

Quinn: Well, we're all now in the find out stage and people are going to understand how infrastructure works. How early warning famine systems work. Why Ebola didn't turn into a thing here [00:14:00] 10 years ago. It turns out it doesn't just happen.

Ticora Jones: And why COVID did because diseases don't care about borders.

Quinn: Yeah, it's so weird.

Ticora Jones: You may or may not recall there was a, it was essentially like not exactly bioweapons, but there was a set of folks in the White House as Obama left office in 2016 that were focused on, essentially disease transmission, all of those things. They got eliminated in 2017 when the 45th administration took over. It took a little while, but there was COVID and all of the people who had the plans for how to deal with combating a pandemic were already gone. History will repeat itself at some point. I'm not trying to be dark, but like.

Quinn: No, but it's so negligent and marginalizes again, forget forward looking projects like how do we increase yields from these crops and things [00:15:00] like that, to minimize at best the work that goes on every day to you know, overcome religious hesitancy for vaccines abroad, for this and that, who is the communicator, like all these different things?

It just makes you go okay, well, I guess we're gonna find out what happens when we don't do that.

Ticora Jones: Except we know exactly what happens. It's just a matter of how long it will take.

Quinn: Awesome. Great. This is, this has been great. No listen, we're, here's the deal. We're going to pause on all that shit for just a second. Cause I want to understand, did you grow up in Colorado? Is that right?

Okay. One of the things I really care about a lot. And part of the reason we moved our kids from Los Angeles back here to Virginia, was having more independence, but also greater access to a variety of natural ecosystems or I guess people call it nature. I imagine you had quite a bit of that out there. How did, if so, [00:16:00] how did that access influence your curiosity and later all these different fields of study?

Ticora Jones: So you know, from zero to 12 I grew up in Louisville, Colorado, which is just outside of Boulder. Before it became as deeply, ridiculously expensive as it is right now. My dad worked for IBM. My mom for a little while was a music teacher, then went back to school and ended up working more kind of financial related things.

And the mountains were just there. And I did not, until I was older, appreciate just how that beauty, like all of the pictures, because you know, your kids draw pictures all the time. At least mine is seven. She draws people. All of my pictures have mountains in them. They were always purple. It is my favorite color.

The aspen trees were there. We had blue spruces in the yard. and I just had the space to explore. Sadly, I was allergic to a lot of it, but it was still just, being able to [00:17:00] explore your neighborhood, go out bike riding, all of that other stuff. It was a great way to grow up and yes, we only had snow days if there were two feet of snow and even then that was pushing it. And I'm just grateful that I had the time and space to be within nature. You know, I feel it even more now. Yes, I live in D. C. I live in a city. But there are green spaces that we're able to access and go through that I go for runs in. I'm much better medicated now, so the allergies aren't as bad. It was a beautiful place. It's a beautiful place.

Quinn: When did you realize how much of an impact? That access had on your decision making?

Ticora Jones: It’s only really been recently, I think, because, you know, you go through these cycles of, for me, it was getting a chemistry set when I was 10 and like my parents encouraged my love of science and technology. It wasn't STEM then but [00:18:00] navigating that weirdness between being allergic to outside and loving outside meant that I got to nerd out inside. And it's really only been recently, like during COVID, that I re-engaged this love of the outdoors because we were stuck inside and there was just not access in the same kinds of ways because we were doing this zoomy whatever thing all of the time and that was just the life that we lived. So during COVID, I would go for walks in North Carolina in July at two o'clock in the afternoon, long sleeves, long pants. Like I just needed to be outside. It did not matter that I could have had a heat stroke. But that was for me when I really just came to appreciate and love the outdoors even more. It was when it felt so inaccessible, it became essential.

Quinn: I love that. Recognizing how few kids really, [00:19:00] especially kids that don't look like me, have access, reliable access to nature, much less of a variety of versions of it is really pretty important for those folks.

Forget like activating themselves and their friends to take care of that nature and to nourish it. For them to even recognize and understand it and how they're an inextricable part of it requires us going, we had to get these kids into nature somehow.

Ticora Jones: Right. We have to stop essentially restricting our lives to the screens that we live on and all of these other things. And we're all guilty because we're trying to cope in a world that according to the last surgeon general, parenting is just like hard. It's dude, we know.

Quinn: Yeah, I'm aware. I did. I thank you for the op-ed, but I didn't have time to read it cuz my kids wouldn't stop asking for snacks, so.

Ticora Jones: Right. But making the decision to make sure that we go do those things. So, you know, did my kid learn how to ride a [00:20:00] bike in camp last year? Yes. Did we go to Costa Rica a second time and she learned how to surf? Yes. This is exactly what I want for her, that level of curiosity and fearlessness and stick to itiveness. Yes, she fell down on that surfboard a whole bunch of times, but she eventually got it.

That's what I want for all of our kids. I want them to have the space to try and fail and try and fail and ultimately overcome and then try something different. Doesn't mean that you have to leave the country to do it. It's just, what does it mean for you to be intentional about how you get your kids in the spaces and places to try new things? That's it.

Quinn: And other people's kids

Ticora Jones: Also other people's kids because if they go with their friends, sometimes they're a little less ornery about it. So you want me to do the how'd I get here?

Quinn: Not, well, not as much. We focus less on tell me your entire life story. I'm sure it's fucking amazing. I want to get to, I saw an interview somewhere where you said your role at USAID [00:21:00] was more about complex environments and systems than physical molecules. But you, I mean you're a chemistry nerd. Like you said, polymer nerd. And it reminds me a little bit. So I have this wonderful sister. She has gone back and forth over her career from teaching at a school in Tanzania to teaching special needs kids in Boston.

And knowing and seeing I am affecting these 20 lives today, no question, versus she's also worked in policy and data science, where your day to day impact is less tangible, right, and direct. But there's the potential to affect many more lives. And it seems like you have found this place using your background to really do the latter but it requires that background.

How did you carve this out? Why do you feel like you fit so well in this niche, and especially now at the NRDC?

Ticora Jones: You know, it's something that I have been really trying to like, dig [00:22:00] down into for a lot of reasons and I feel like some of it was always tied to a duality of a both/and. So, you know, how could I nerd out, explore, enjoy that I liked math and whatever else, and be part of a community? I think for so many people who are trained as scientists, there's a level of isolation that they accept or that is placed upon them because it's like, Oh you're a little different. So I'm not sure what we do with you.

And some people accept that. And I didn't. And I'm not sure if my parents would have let me accept that. And so, I expected to be a participant in my communities, whatever those communities looked like. Whether it was, you know, the church community that I grew up in, the family community, the school community.

There were just so many different pockets of people that I spent time with and found [00:23:00] homes with. That I didn't accept that me liking something that was a little unique from what other people like meant that I had to isolate myself. So, you know, I had great examples in my parents and their friends around how they showed up in their communities and how they led, you know, my dad would take me to, the town that I grew up in had kind of a housing board and he was the chair of the housing board and he would take me to his meetings with him and I'm like three or four. Have my little purse with my little toys in it and I'd go and I'd sit there and I'd chill. But you know, you think about that now and I'm like, huh, my dad took me to his meetings. My mom took me to hers too, as she was, you know, leading things at the church that we went to, but both of them took me. And so I had those examples of this is how you show up in community with other people. This is how you support that community. Because leading wasn't necessarily about [00:24:00] being at the front of the room and being the loudest voice or any of those other things. But this is a way you could do this.

Quinn: This is really interesting to me. Because again, you, obviously, you can't, you know, work with the university consortium that you worked with at USAID without your grounding in the lab and the things you did, right? So you have a leg to stand on in conversations with all of these folks, because you’ve done it.

Ticora Jones: Right. Like we nerd out.

Quinn: Right, your dad was on the housing authority board. Great. So what do you think he felt like he brought to the housing authority?

Ticora Jones: It was probably, you know, this kind of systems approach, a deep appreciation for history. He's a civil war buff, like by all of the books in the house. My parents grew up in Richmond, Virginia, which he will always say is the capital of Confederacy.

Quinn: Not great. We're working on it.

Ticora Jones: All of the life and times that we are going through now, like. Not shocking. So, I would say that it was probably a sense of history and appreciation of systems, [00:25:00] and the ability to operate in places where he wasn't necessarily accepted, expected, or any of those other things. Because both of my parents, they didn't integrate their colleges, but they were part of the movement that essentially transformed their colleges, because they graduated from high school in 1965. King was assassinated in 68, while they were both still in college at predominantly white institutions. And they expected more from their institutions and were part of efforts around that, it wasn't necessarily being in the front, but strategic efforts and other things like that.

So both of them brought that ability to exist in multiple places. And I feel like because they brought me with them, I saw them exist as different kinds of people in different circumstances. And so that doesn't feel inauthentic to me. It feels normal.

Quinn: I love that [00:26:00] because so much of how we direct people when they say, What can I do? There's actually a few different ways to phrase that question that people come to us with, which is like, what can I do? And they're looking for what is the thing?

Like what needs help? But then there's also this sort of, especially right now, this feeling of impotence and smallness of what can I do among all of this?

The answer so much of the time is, besides what are you good at and what are you into, is something on the local level. Where you might not have thought, and it could be an HOA, and those should all be burned to the ground, obviously.

It could be your library board. It could be, I mean, sweet Jesus, please join your housing authority. Right? It could be showing up at public utility commission meetings. But you can bring whatever your skill set is, your personality, your background. Like you said, your dad, systems thinking, right? Housing, I mean, the second you're introduced to it, you're like, Oh, got it.

No, I can do this all day. Right? [00:27:00] And that is so important for people to hear.

Ticora Jones: Yes. Like your skills are transferable.

Your identity and how you embody it and your authenticity within that is important. But so many of the skills that you have acquired over your life, even if they're not official professional skills, are transferable. I make jokes about starting my party planning enterprise as a first grader. Because I planned a surprise party for my first grade teacher. I rallied all of my friends. I figured out what we needed to do. And I was just like, okay, adults, I need you to help me do this.

Quinn: My wife talks about starting her spy agency, and it turns out she was only really into the marketing, like handing out pamphlets about it. Not so good at the spying part. But she was like, yeah, clearly I get shit done.

Ticora Jones: And so, like, being able to be comfortable identifying, like, where you should show up. I listened to your episode with Dr. Ayana Elizabeth Johnson. Hey y'all we need more communicators. We need party [00:28:00] planners. I will say the same kinds of things around like the world that we occupy. Everyone needs to be able to show up. Everyone is not going to be a scientist. That's fine.

Quinn: That's great even, you know?

Ticora Jones: Great. But we need everyone to be able to show up with the aptitude and ability and passion and commitment to community and care. Those are the things that you need. If you're only committed to I just need to get mine and stay over here no, then stay over there.

Stop bothering everybody else. Stay over there! But, you know, how we join together in community. It's something that I feel like I have been doing my entire life, even if it's been me accessing and engaging with different kinds of communities while still being at the core myself.

Quinn: So it sounds like you've actually thought about this before, which is interesting. In the sense that you've got all this work you did at USAID forever. Now you're at NRDC, which is this, you know, huge [00:29:00] organization doing incredible things again, especially right now.

There's a certain amount of, even if you're not directly doing it, donors and fundraising and keeping the apparatus running in different ways again, especially right now. Having facilitated and coordinated all this different research and outreach, again, from like crops to the NASA program you guys did, how do you now bring all this data and development work and like you said, all the soft power and things like that back down to the ground level and less in the application and more in the like, again, people who want to help, but live in the US or elsewhere in the West, who don't necessarily need this early warning famine system, who might not be affected by some of the development work.

Ticora Jones: Yes, but they care about what's happening with NOAA.

Quinn: Yeah. You're fucking right they do. Yeah. They're all like, my weather app's great. And you're like, are you serious? Are we having this conversation?

Ticora Jones: Would you like to maintain these things? Because they come from a place that your tax dollars have already paid for.

Quinn: But the [00:30:00] communication part. How do you now come back to those people and go, it's really important for you to spend your time and your money or join this organization.

Ticora Jones: So, it is really about stepping back and helping people see the changes they've already experienced in their lifetimes. So, you know, when I think about, because I am not trained as an environmental scientist. I was like, y'all, you know, when you're hiring me, like this is not my ministry. They're like, we know, we want you to manage, we want you to lead, we want you to publicly engage. I was like, okay, I can do all of those things.

So, you know, part of what I think about is how you get people to come back into themselves, to not be so far afield of like, well, out there and out, it's like, but what is your experience? How is winter different for you now than it was when you were a kid? What are the things that your kids see and experience now [00:31:00] that are different from what you saw and experienced? People will think about oh wait, my kid has heat days now. I didn't have heat days. Or we have snow days and heat days. And so that gets people back to being able to think about their lived experience and putting that in the context of what is changing. And then take that lived experience and have that be part of the stories that they can tell as they are going to talk to different lawmakers at different levels. The federal landscape is a hot mess.

That doesn’t mean that you stop engaging with the federal landscape. I will consistently say it is not just the federal landscape. As I'm sure many of our listeners have heard about, there is a federal, there is a state, there is the local, there are all of these different points of decision making and points of power that we have the opportunity to engage with if we tune in. And so both tuning into your lived experience and then tuning into the [00:32:00] level that you feel comfortable engaging with, because some people are just like, yes, I am mad that we are not in the WHO and that we're not going to contribute to the IPCC and they are ready to do alphabet soup. And I love that for them. Other people are just like, tune out, can't deal, but they do care about what is happening within the school that their kid goes to.

And it shouldn't be that the people with the loudest voices are the ones who are like, I don't like X, Y, Z, A, B, or C. Why can't the people who do like things use their voices as well? Like we have to combat the level of negativity that is constantly being forced at us. Because we know we want our lived experiences to be different.

To do that is, I think, one thing that's important. Now, I have two specific things around like, NRDC and what we are actually doing. [00:33:00] You know, in terms of where our organization is, I like to say that we're the bears that'll fight you, not the cute, cuddly bears.

And so what that means is that there are ways that we're starting to take legal action against this version of the Trump administration, you know, in the first Trump administration NRDC sued 163 times and won nearly 90 percent of those cases, that have been resolved. Whether that was blocking their attempts to resurrect the Keystone XL pipeline or defending energy efficiency standards or stopping polluters, those were things that we were able to do the first time. But because they are shredding the administrative state, the breadth of what is happening right now is very different from what they tried doing the first time. There was a lot of sloppiness the first time. Now there's just chaos. Still sloppiness, but more chaos. And so what that means is we are collaborating in [00:34:00] different ways with folks to try to be strategic about the targets that we're going after because the shock and awe and flood the zone and all of the things are still happening and you have to pick and choose. Does that feel good to have to say that you have to pick and choose?

No, but aren't there like 330 million people in the U. S.? So if half of them are like, we don't like this.

And some small percentage of those are like, okay, we're going to do something about this. Doesn't that give us slightly more than a fighting chance than if everybody tunes out and assumes the fait accompli that they're trying to convince us is happening?

Quinn: It should, I'm just saying, it’s a lot numbers.

Ticora Jones: It should! Whether or not it does is up to individuals to be motivated and inspired, but it's also up to those within organizations to create the spaces for them to get engaged and involved. Yes, there are people that create dreams. And then there are people that make those dreams real. On the other side they have created a nightmare that they are [00:35:00] perfectly happy to create the apparatus to make that real.

We need all kinds of people who are willing to do the work to make the kinds of dreams that inspire us real.

Quinn: First of all, we need better opposition, obviously, which is a huge breadth of things and depth of things, but we also have to paint something that is better to help people with.

You talked about, okay. If half the people are not comfortable with this, and then a percentage of them are like pointing me in the right direction, let me use my lived experience or my resources, there's on the other side of the barbell, a segment of people who are like, fuck you, I burned it down because of X, Y, Z. I don't want to say in the middle, but there is an understandable group of people that are like, Hey, the US has a lot of its own problems right now. It's very difficult to be poor here, even if poor in the US relative to folks in extreme poverty around the world is a whole different ballgame.

Ticora Jones: [00:36:00] Very rich. Yes.

Quinn: But they would look in isolation at the quote unquote end of USAID and PEPFAR in a naive way, but in a world where disinformation is what it is, as sort of this one to one exchange for hopefully better support and policy at home around food prices and health care and housing, right?

Obviously, this country is capable of walking and chewing gum at the same time. But how would you frame and argue for something like, again, USAIDs scope and budget and for NRDC protecting these ecosystems, for folks who are like, I understand, but I still can't pay for housing.

Ticora Jones: I would ask them to look at the military budget.

If you're looking for waste, fraud and abuse, there are plenty of places to go. It's kind of this zero sum thinking that okay, well, I mean, that's nice for you, but I need to take care of me. What says that we can't collectively take care of one another? Because we all live on the same [00:37:00] planet.

Your borders are artificial. But, you know, a place like USAID has a budget that's 1 percent of the entire federal budget.

Apparently they did do a survey when they asked people like, you know, how much do you think we should be spending on this? And they were like 10. I was like, wow, that would have been amazing.

Quinn: By the way, at 10, everything's fixed. We're done. We're out.

Ticora Jones: But, you know, for the folks who are concerned about their own things, looking at other people who have needs, but who are also doing all of the things that they can for their own communities while sitting on your hands going but I need things. Part of me is just like, don't be whiny. What are you doing? Who are you advocating to aside from on the socials?

Quinn: I just look at it as, I'm a big fan of telling people that bad guys are real and here's who they are. I do believe there's people who can't afford housing who are like, no, I would love to help those people.

And I would love to find a way to help first. [00:38:00] But I also like, I'm really struggling with this, in the sense that I don't think those are necessarily bad guys. Those are people who are struggling because we do make it very difficult to be poor.

There's so much nuance to the whole thing as much as there's again, very clearly like fucking bad guys.

Ticora Jones: There's black, white, and a whole lot of gray, but the levels of black and white continue to resolve. And that gray is…

Quinn: I know I'm with you, and, you know, we're focused for so long on this idea of like, all right, we are here for people. We call it science for people who give a shit. And when you join our newsletter, you get this automated email from me that says.

Why are you here? And we'll get totally random shit, but we get I'm a third grade teacher and I don't know how to talk about heat days. Or advocate for them. We get I'm a grandmother and I'm worried about this and what do I do? And we point him towards Third Act.

I run a university endowment and kids are yelling at us about fossil fuels.

Ticora Jones: About our endowment investments.

Quinn: So we get this whole wide range and it's amazing. And some of these things are aligned. Some of them are paragraphs. They're beautiful. You [00:39:00] know, people, turns out now, late COVID as we put it, people fortunately and unfortunately now give a shit for a lot of different reasons.

They don't have home insurance anymore. They lost someone to COVID. They were on the front lines of COVID, whatever it might've been. They've worked for USAID or the Peace Corps or whatever it may be. And they're like, or Partners in Health. And it's amazing because you see this huge breadth of people who are like, I didn't want to give a shit, and now I have to.

And it reminds me always of sitting on a plane in two thousand and nine or ten, and this gentleman was telling me why Obamacare didn't need to include pre-existing conditions. And I remember thinking to myself, Oh, You don't think you have anyone in your life with a pre existing condition.

Because if you did you couldn't argue that way or you're a fucking monster and now we put you that into the barbell. But the point is so many people give a shit for so many different reasons and again with the parenting thing It's so hard to like practically give a shit about other [00:40:00] people's kids when you're dealing with your own. But I do believe so many parents would if we can give them the most efficient and economical way to do it.

While at the same time, again, the point of the show is going yeah, it's fucking hard. We get it.

We're not trying to tell you, like you should be doing more, no, it's fucking hard.

I'm trying to say like, how do we operate with both empathy but also intention about all of this?

Ticora Jones: Yes, because the empathy and intention is how I feel like I've been trying to live my entire life. You know, thinking about managing a team of people during deep COVID and having to keep us motivated enough to continue doing our work so that we could support researchers around the world who were trying to figure out how to put together better PPE to treat other people around the world too. Just because we weren't actively the people who were sewing together the tents that help people have better flow. Like, in Uganda, they repurposed things that they had created for helping folks [00:41:00] treat people with Ebola to helping folks treat people with COVID. And so, no, I am not in the midst of this particular storm, but the system I'm in, I am able to create the space for other people to do this work. And I at least alleviate some of that burden by creating that space.

And so I have empathy both for myself, the team that I work with, the teams that they work with. And my intention is to help make the world a better place. Did we always do that? Who knows? I hope so. But it requires being able to think more than two steps ahead. And thinking that I am an important part of this system. I am not the only piece of this system. And the people that I work with, that I support, that I make space for, that I hold in high regard, that I see their dignity and their humanity, I hope that they [00:42:00] see the same of me and will continue to pay that out in dividends to other people that they interact with. And that feels very basic to me and I keep finding out it's not basic, which makes me mad. You know, we've got communities of advocates and lawmakers. I don't know if corporations think they're in community with people, but they are folks who should be held accountable along with all those decision makers.

How do we make sure folks know that seeing the dignity in others isn't optional.

Quinn: But that is the question. Is how do we take that chunk of people that like you said, is getting smaller in some ways, but it's still the raw number is enough to do so much, you know, when people come to me, I have a few answers in my pocket for the what can I do thing for people?

Because again, I'll have offline conversations with people who have nothing again, teachers, which nothing makes me angrier. I'm just like, the first answer is you should make a million dollars a year. So I'll point people, they're like, I want to help [00:43:00] teachers. I'm like, great Donors Choose, all these things, flood it. Go get them.

Ticora Jones: Show up at your school board, advocate for the things that they need.

Quinn: And then there's other ones where people go great. I just want to help outside the US. I'm like, Give Directly. Just, you know what, you’re literally giving people cash.

Ticora Jones: Wonderful, but at a certain point, you might actually have to put your body somewhere and not your money.

Because we have that privilege here of feeling like we can just fling money around.

Quinn: And that's why, with this app one of the things we designed is we'll say, Hey, did you take this action? And you click yes or no. If it clicks yes, we're like, that's great. Would you like to do something else about it? Like showing up at this meeting or calling your Congress person, whatever it might be, because that really matters.

So if it's like, Hey, I want to buy an induction stove. Awesome. That's great. I hope you don't poison your kids anymore. Once you say yes, I think the thing that comes up says I want you to take this script to your city council and argue that they should be subsidized for low income households across the city and that means you got to fucking leave your house and you got to go and you got to [00:44:00] do it. And I know it's scary.

Ticora Jones: Even if it's a zoom meeting, that means you have to log on and raise your hand.

Quinn:And you gotta tell your kids like please just fucking eat the dinner while I do this thing.

Ticora Jones: Or like they can be on the screen with you as you advocate for this thing. And then you are showing them civic engagement, but you have to figure out where you're going to show up.

All right. So does this mean that we can send you like NRDC specific things that help people see actions they take?

Quinn: So I'm really excited about this. So part of what we're building with this app is what we call the Partner Panel and we're really focusing on the city and state level obviously right now for a lot of reasons.

So basically, you know what five calls.org is? Yeah, great. So we have, turns out there's a reason nobody else really does state and local versions of that and it's because it's just a stupid amount of work. So we're doing that.

But what we're doing is we've built this partner panel. Well, we're building, it's like the Death Star. It's almost done. Where we invite specific partners, NRDC, or policymakers in Virginia or Rhode Island, whatever it is to input the [00:45:00] specific policies and things that are active that they're fighting for, et cetera, et cetera that then go in.

So you can say, I'm a constituent. I want to be heard about this, in this state or city.

Ticora Jones: Zooming in from the global level to the local level that people need to understand that each of these layers is important. Each of them matter. You cannot just stop at the federal. That's what I was talking about last year when we were doing this whole kind of cute campaign around giving the IRA, which is horribly named, we know, a fighting chance as the Inflation Reduction Act, as like the biggest climate bill that got passed.

When I moved to DC in 2008, to move here to work on the Hill, I was like, I'm going to go work on clean energy because I have a material science and engineering background. That's where I thought I both have a certain level of expertise, but learn things about how the policy process worked. Turns out I worked for a Senator who, while he [00:46:00] had a great environmental record, clean energy was not going to happen because of the constituency he had. But these are all things that when you talk about that idealism and dreaming and whatever else, not understanding how the levers of the system are connected. That's what I learned when I worked on the Hill, how the levers of the system were connected, why constituency matters, why the money in the system matters, like all of these other different things. But it freaked me out that I was writing memos about a 787 billion dollar bill. What is that? I wanted to understand how that then trickled down into actual programs that got to actual people. Which is why I ended up staying in the federal government, but like that notion of how things trickle down, people are still having issues connecting all the dots. And so I love that that's what you're doing.

Quinn: Well, again, I try to really come at it, and being a parent with, again, so many resources and such a [00:47:00] support system, and still having a hard time, I try to come at it from this place of empathy, of, I can't just tell you to go to your city council meeting and yell at them, I understand, I need to hand you a script to read and tell you when to go.

Ticora Jones: The transaction needs to be smooth enough for this to be an action you feel like you can try one time and if I made it easy enough, you'll be willing to try something else that might be a little bit harder. So it's just like the little kid learning how to get up the stairs.

Quinn: Because here's the thing and the little kid is a great example, because my oldest son took his first steps and immediately, ran into a fucking coffee table and split his head open. But he was also like, whatever. This is amazing. It's the other side of it, because the IRA, the whole thing, right?

Car credits, whatever it might be. When you make something happen, so one of the first things coming from L.A. that we did here, a friend and I, was help this wonderful Black woman, she'd been a kindergarten teacher for forever. She decided she wanted to run the school [00:48:00] board, and of course it was during the Liberty shit.

And we were like, fuck those people. And we helped get her on the school board. Cause no one deserved to be on that board. Nor did our students need more, someone like her.

Ticora Jones: Then somebody who had been a kindergarten teacher.

Quinn: The day she got put on the school board. We were like, holy shit. We've got power, it's that feeling of what you can do and it's not always going to work out. But if you go to city council long enough and you understand again pragmatically like you were saying how the levers work, where the money is and you get some fucking bike lanes put it or some flashing lights around the crosswalks, you get to drive by that every day or use them and go I fucking did that and maybe somebody doesn't get hit by a car because of it and maybe pollution comes down a little bit because of it. But when people come to me and they're like I'm worried about the jet stream.

I'm like, that's great. But there is so much you can do but again acknowledging that friction and trying to reduce it but also make it as specific [00:49:00] as we can.

Ticora Jones: Because otherwise people, they are sufficiently exhausted. They are easily distracted. Because we can just scroll our whatever away. And reducing the friction and making it easier. I thought about that constantly in the work that we did. I thought, I think about it in the emails that I write. Okay, what do I actually want to happen? How do I make this easier?

And that's work that I have to do to think about what it requires to make something easier for someone else to engage with me on. And so that's the work that I do. I remember going to Girl Scout camp with the kid for the first time last summer. And I'm like managing the children and the children are like, but you're not doing anything. And I'm like, I'm making sure the kitchen actually gets clean. I am assigning you jobs. I'm checking to make sure that you are accountable to me. And so you're telling me that I'm not doing anything?

Okay. Would you like to do that part? And then [00:50:00] when the troop leader comes back, you're the one that's going to say, yes, everything is clean.

Or do you just want to sweep this one thing? I'm making this easy for you. Here is your one job. Which would you like?

Quinn: But that space that you carved out because your mom did the church stuff and your dad went to the housing authority and all these different pieces you acknowledged this is a crucial piece of the puzzle and I have a leg to stand on because I know what I'm talking about but I can be this conductor.

I can organize this. And is it annoying sometimes to be like, why do I have to help you? Why do I have to write this email so that you feel like it's the easiest thing to respond to? But at the same time, and this is where a lot of our stuff is coming from right now. And it's so true is, you know, AOC had that great quote last year where she was like, we can't just be right. We have to be effective. And at some point that means you gotta be like, okay, I gotta be honest about how this, I want this outcome. What do I need to do to get [00:51:00] there? What does effective mean? So there's this great economist who wrote a book, Mariana Mazzucato, I think, Mission Based Whatever, the point is, she says, you’ve got to start with a very clear measurable outcome and design everything else from there. And the world's easiest example is we want to fly people to the moon and bring them home in one piece.

Great. Every team member you hire, every process, every decision has to answer to that very clear thing. It's not fly him to the moon. No. It's bring him home safely. Everything has to work from that. And that's how, like you said, writing those emails are. Or when people come to me and go, what can I do? We made this app. After a while, recognizing it was something we needed, but I never really knew, like, why I always had this bug that I needed to do this specific piece of the puzzle, besides the overwhelming information of people coming to us over and over and doing it again. And very quickly, you're like, oh, there's a market for this. But I was like, why do I need to do this for me? And I realized it's because it [00:52:00] was something I needed. My best friend died of cancer about 13 years ago, very quickly.

I remember in that time, feeling very impotent because I was like, here's the list of things I cannot do to contribute. I'm not a doctor, I'm not a researcher. I did very bad at science. I love it, but like to the extent that I enjoyed Wired and Star Trek. But that's as far as I can go. Well, talk about not knowing what I didn't know. What I didn’t know is how can I affect this situation and help him?

And the answer to me in a limited capacity in 2008 was you can't do anything. And that felt horrible. And it's one thing when you have a kid who's sick or someone else this and this it the feeling is horrendous knowing like I feel desperate I can't do anything, in the middle of the night, when you're spinning out whatever it is. I found this group and they're called Team in Training and they’re the fundraising arm at the Leukemia and Lymphoma Society, been around forever and they were like, here's what you can do. You, [00:53:00] you sweat and you run and you do all this stuff and we take the money you fundraise and we give it to the scientist who might help your friend.

And I go, that I can fucking do. I can do that shit all day long because that's, I'm a big dumb animal. That's what I can do.

Ticora Jones: As you told me that story and I'm sorry, cause that still hurts as it should, someone who is so critical to you. I think about the ways that, you know, folks show up when people are sick or when a kid is born and how things like meal train where it was like, okay here. And like when I had my own kid. I had an entire email, like this tells you like how on brand I am. So like I had an entire email that was very clearly laid out. Hi, this kid is here. It's January. We will see you after a certain point because it's flu season. If you would like to bring food, here are the kinds of things that I would like.

[00:54:00] Here are the days that will work. Here are the restaurants that will work. I am allergic to these things. If you want to see her, here's her social media accounts. Done. Do you know how many times I have forwarded that email to other new moms?

Quinn: I'm sure.

Ticora Jones: Or other new parents to just be like, people want to help you. And before this person or persons, because I had a colleague who just had triplets, before this person or persons shows up, here is a way that you can help other people help you because they want to show up for you. And that same notion of us wanting to show up as our collective country is in deeper crisis than a whole lot of people understood. There are a number of people who are just like, yes, this is who we are. And there are people like, I'm one of those people. And there are a number of people like, but why? Like, that's not the question. The but why? No. My father is a Civil War buff. That's why.

But what do you do here? Stop staying in the but [00:55:00] why. Here's some things that are concrete enough. And yes, it does require that amount of management and hand holding and easing of transaction and smoothing of process to give people enough of a sense of victory that they will want to do it again.

Quinn: Or tell a friend. Hey, I want you to come with me to this thing. And one of the things I learned from this Team in Training experience, and he didn't make it, I mean it was too far gone, but I get very indignant about things. And I try to use that in a positive way. A lesson I took, was they were like, Oh, we don't just say, Hey, thanks for the money. We'll do this. Along the way, you're going to train with people who have someone that's affected as well. You're going to train with survivors. We're going to have meetings where the doctors come up and go, I use the $10, 000 you raised for that to do this trial. And you're going to have people who are currently surviving with it [00:56:00] come tell you, Hey, thank you for doing this.

And you're like, well, how can I run more? Because, holy shit, this is so empowering.

Ticora Jones: It's called community. And care.

Quinn: It's called community and I try to use, again, born with, so much privilege, but one thing about me is I had terrible asthma as a kid and I know what it's like to not be able to breathe and I blew my parents health insurance out of the water and ambulance rides and I'm sure it was terrifying for them. But I remember what it was like to not be able to breathe. And so when we were in Los Angeles and they were like, oh, I mean maybe at some point, you know, we'll make it easier for kids to breathe near the ports. I was like, I'm gonna become fucking Batman. Kids have to be able to breathe.

We have to start there. And whatever your lived experiences, like you're saying, take it and weaponize it.

Ticora Jones: For good! Not just of you, but of other people, damn it!

Quinn: We have to be able to start there. Kids have to be able to have lunch. They have to be able to breathe. You know, they have [00:57:00] to be able to have a bed net for malaria because they didn't ask to be born.

Ticora Jones: Things that aren't really that small at all, there's still human dignity, there's still a human experience, there's still people having value. And people having more value than money.

Quinn: That's it. What is the money for? We could go on clearly all day. I want to ask you, so the last sort of specific pieces, you're at the NRDC now, here's the state of the world, what you guys are working on, but also any other groups. What can I do? What do you want people to, again, measurable, tangible things with their voice, their dollar, their body. What are we doing?

Ticora Jones: So, in terms of what NRDC officially does.

There are lots of ways that we harness the grassroots. We have over 3.2 million members, supporters, activists, and subscribers who take things online and offline to act to confront our most pressing environmental challenges. But when we think about those environmental challenges, who are we saving the Earth for except for us and future generations of us to [00:58:00] live here? In terms of those communities of activists, they are working to hold lawmakers, corporations, and other decision makers accountable through signing petitions, sending letters, making phone calls, writing letters to the editor, testifying in public hearings, or volunteering with us one on one for on the ground advocacy opportunities. We'll see that show up in state legislatures, in more local, like smaller localities. But all of these actions, you know, to our conversation before are about being able to take that lived experience and harness it for local action, not just federal action. We want to make sure that we are mobilizing public support, whether that's alongside the experts and the scientists that my part of the organization supports. As the Chief Science Officer, I'm trying to make sure that we are maintaining a level of scientific integrity around the efficacy that we do and the policies that we promote. Because it's real easy to get very [00:59:00] hyperbolic in either direction, and we want to be able to stand on as much scientific integrity as we can when other people will not.

So we want to make sure that we're doing that. Our policy folks are supported. Our litigation folks are supported, as the tools within our toolbox that helps us counter misinformation, helps us change the conversation, and helps us actually get ahead in the court of public opinion, which given the many trials of the court at this moment, it's just going to be a lot.

So, there are lots of ways that you can join NRDC more specifically. There's a text that you can send to 61636 to sign up to get our urgent text alerts and send messages to your members of Congress, urging them to stop the administration's attacks on our environment. Or you can go to NRDC.org to make your voice heard on the issues that you care about and sign up to get the latest news on the campaigns that we have and ways to take action. So that's the [01:00:00] many ways that NRDC is working. And as we progress within this new administration and all of the attacks that it's making on the environment, we'll also be engaging the lawsuits.

Two weeks ago, along with Earthjustice, we sued the Trump administration, challenging the first executive orders that would open up 625 million acres of U.S. waters to offshore oil and gas drilling. And then last week, we also, along with partners, sued the U.S. Department of Agriculture for illegally purging climate change information from their website. You know, when we think about what our tax dollars have paid for, it is to pay for the data that we access. So why are we smashing all of that down? Oh, wait, we shouldn't be.

We'll sue to protect it. Those are some of the fun things that are happening at NRDC. I mean, they're not fun. They're necessary. But we want people to know that there are a wide variety of environmental organizations [01:01:00] who are fighting what’s happening to them.

Quinn: If you get off on being an antagonist in your life this is actually a great moment for you.

Ticora Jones: I do and I don't.

Quinn: I just mean broadly, I mean literally to the listeners, it's if you like pushing people's buttons, it's time to push them back, and there's some really great ways to slow this shock and awe a bit, by being like, no, fuck you.

Ticora Jones: Precisely.

Quinn: Okay. Last question. What is something you've read you've loved in the past year? We have a whole list up on Bookshop. It can be work related. It could be something with your kid. It could be dragons. Hit me.

Ticora Jones: Can I give you three different things?

So, work related, I read The Atlas of AI, Kate Crawford, fantastic book. We had her come, to talk to us at NRDC, fantastic author. I love the very subtle way that she cites nothing but female researchers in all of the things that she does. It's great. But it's a fantastic, systems way [01:02:00] of breaking down where we are as it relates to AI and how it is becoming even more transformational in its generative form. When we last heard from AI, we were deep in big data and machine learning so that we could actually analyze pictures better. Get more insights, do a little more modeling.

What we're talking about as a potential future is not something that a number of us ask for because I really didn't need to make AI art. I didn't need that, so I digress. So, that's the work related book within the last year that's been fantastic. Kid book? Me and the kid are reading The Wild Robot. We watched the movie, NRDC actually was part of making that movie. We have an entire entertainment partnerships team that works with folks in the kind of entertainment and media landscape, to support them as they're telling stories and narratives that are more inclusive of just kind of the changing world that we live in. And [01:03:00] so I got to see it at Climate Week last year. And for Christmas, I was like, Alright, so we're going to get this whole series of books and that is our chapter book that we read each night.

So we're almost done with book one, but we're at the part where the robots have come to retrieve Roz and the animals are just like, fighting back and I love it.

Quinn: A lot of tears, a lot of tears.

Ticora Jones: Let's see there have been so many books that I've consumed because it's been audiobooks versus podcasts in the last couple of years. Oh, there are so many that I've loved. Give me a topic. I'll have to pick a book. I will bet you I have read a book about it.

Quinn: Fantasy. Have you done? Here's the thing about this series. It's so incredible. It is like climate change adjacent. Have you done the Broken Earth series?

So good.

Ticora Jones:And I just finished the first in the Hundred Thousand Kingdom series. So deep appreciation for N. K. Jemisin and all of her science fiction work as a next generation Octavia Butler. [01:04:00] I am enjoying the expanse of Black women writing science fiction. It's doing things for me. It's doing a lot of things for me.

Quinn: I love it. That series is, it's one of those ones you start reading and you're just like, how does someone do this?

Ticora Jones: I mean, but I also have been having a good time reading authors that basically are officially my contemporaries when they write kind of historical, it's not deeply historical because it's the 90s, but like our children would say, but you lived in the 1900s. But they're writing fiction about like collegiate experiences that feel so very familiar. So Xochitl Gonzalez, Anita de Monte's, Last Laugh, that might be it?

Quinn: Okay.

Ticora Jones: Fantastic. Based on this story of this Cuban artist who was killed by her sculptor husband. Like that really happened. She essentially creates an entire fiction around that, makes them new characters and creates an entire fiction around it, but bounces back and forth in [01:05:00] time between when they were alive and when this college student who is going to college at Brown in the 90s. So she's at a predominantly white institution in New England in the 90s. And I'm just like, Ugh, this is hurting my head in a good way.

Quinn: That's awesome. I love it. This has been so great.