april
in which some things are wrapped up and others are started
Hello, says the April newsletter. Written as the clock strikes midnight! My brain loves a good deadline.
Agriculture & water
In the past month, I spoke with over a dozen farmers and ranchers about regulatory burden — thank you so much to everyone who reached out and connected me with folk!
I validated that farmers and ranchers across the U.S. spend a ton of time and money on regulatory compliance. Moreover, their experiences were extremely similar, regardless of operation type.
Key learnings:
Primary farm owners and their family members are usually the ones managing regulatory overhead, unless they can afford to outsource it
They spend ¼-½ of their weeks on it on average, or outsource it for $6,000+/mo
Farm owners often get help from their neighbors or lean on local Farm Bureaus or similar organizations for understanding how to accurately complete paperwork and learning about upcoming regulation
Regulatory burden across the board is only increasing
Water regulations like quality and usage were a top concern, especially in CA
I think it would be valuable to build some sort of TurboTax for agricultural regulation.
I’m excited about this idea because it is mission-driven. Regulation is an important vehicle for environmental and social reform — including for fighting climate change.
However, these rules are burdensome ($, time) on farmers and ranchers who already operate on thinning margins, incentivizing them to fight against regulation even if they deeply care about conservation.
My theory is that by (1) reducing regulatory burden, (2) collecting better data across a wide variety of inputs, and (3) building trust with farmers and ranchers that certain regulatory compliance is “worth it” when related conservation efforts help their bottom line, I can align financial and environmental incentives to better enable farmers and ranchers to comply with environmental / social regulations and practices.
With all that data, it’s also easier to launch marketplaces and other features. Think about what Carta just did for secondary stock sales (thanks Dani for that analogy!).
My next step is to build a quick prototype for specific regulatory forms, and get a few farmers to use it and give me feedback.
Climate security research
I submitted my manuscript that I had been working on for the past two years for publication. It was on how the U.S. military understands climate risks.
It’s now under peer review (!), so fingers crossed for a smooth revision process.
It was a tremendous relief to submit — this year-long cloud of ambient guilt and anxiety, for doing anything except for working on this paper, has dissipated.
But it was also a bit of an anti-climax — there’s still several months ahead of revisions before the manuscript can make it to publication.
It was an important milestone, though, something that my friends made me realize when they insisted we celebrate with things like sparkling wine over Zoom. I’m not great, but am getting better, at celebrating milestones like that.
My masochistic brain apparently now feels guilt-free about coming up with new climate security ideas for me to chew on.
Interact
This month, we accepted nearly 100 new Interact fellows — wonderfully diverse mission-driven technologists, all of them — from 17 countries.
The median age of the cohort is 22, and the group is >50% female and non-binary!
This, too, was a huge milestone; the culmination of six months — hundreds of hours — of work. I miss going out to dinner with friends.
The Next 50
We began hosting Zoom conversations with elected officials from across the country, which have been pretty rad.
We started with a conversation on the stimulus package with U.S. Senator Mark Warner (D-VA), then discussed rural politics with State Rep. Tom Winter (MT-96), and just tonight finished chatting about public health in a pandemic with U.S. Congresswoman Lauren Underwood (IL-14).
The vast majority of participants on the calls have been under 40, and feedback has been tremendously positive from both the campaigns and our peers.
Senator Warner apparently keeps on bringing us up and wants to “do more stuff with young people.”
Participants have repeatedly told us they felt way more civically engaged in the U.S. political process on these calls than they normally do otherwise.
The whole point of The Next 50 is to make politics more accessible to young people, so I feel genuinely hopeful that we are fulfilling that mission through these events.
Other musings
About a week after the last newsletter, I hopped on a plane to self-isolate with family in Maryland. I should be back in SF next week; I think it’s time to come home. Maybe more mentally than epidemiologically.
Since then, I’ve taken 10 cello lessons! All but the first have been over video call.
I’ve developed quite the callus on my right index finger, as I’m only allowed to pluck — because my teacher is an old school Ukrainian lady who refuses to let me pick up a bow without her physically weighing it, lest I develop bad habits.
I kind of agree with her. I’m having trouble enough keeping my left hand in line; I honestly cannot imagine having to worry about both hands at the same time.
She keeps on adding more and more positions — I only learned first position in middle school, which is where my cello experience had ended, but it turns out there are actually seven positions on the cello. That I’m supposed to know by now.
I was able to skate by the first few lessons without much practice, because I could sight read the music easily enough. But, in the past few lessons, the pieces have become complicated enough with like five different positions per piece that my lack of practice and sheer overconfidence in being able to sight read is sorely showing.
I tried to push off a lesson one time, because I had procrastinated on practicing and was feeling stressed about it, and she just straight up wouldn’t let me. For maybe this reason alone, she’s a great fit as my teacher.
Thanks for reading, and I hope you are staying safe and healthy.
Best, Mackenzie