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Transcript

*Actually* Pro Life: Our Positions · The Most Important Question

• 0:00
  [upbeat music] For two years, something has been missing from Actually Pro-Life.
• 0:09
  Obviously, you guys didn't even know about it until recently, but the point is we had these 2,000 actions we've been recommending and reviewing and refreshing for years.
• 0:19
  Now, on the other hand, we had these eight principles we really talked about and we polled people about. All very old to humanity, but we were trying to newly define them for ourselves and to arrange this whole thing.
• 0:32
  But even after we decided on what those were gonna be, between the two groups, the principles and all these actions, sat this gap. And like dark matter,
• 0:44
  which I definitely don't understand, the point is, like, I knew it was there, but I couldn't put my finger on it.
• 0:48
  'Cause it's one thing to walk around never questioning that, yes, obviously, I am a human, not a fucking monster, who holds the principle, let's do every person should have a home, right?
• 1:00
  It's another to take the leap and to fight for it, to donate to Habitat for Humanity, or even to step up in real life with a hammer.
• 1:09
  Unless, of course, you're one of the many millions of people who never got to choose, get to choose, who've had to fight for one or all these principles from day one, right? Either way, between the belief and the hammer,
• 1:23
  there are questions that need answers, such as, one, why the hell doesn't everyone have a home, much less a guarantee of one? Two, exactly how many people don't have a home, and how has that changed over time?
• 1:35
  Three, who the hell decided they shouldn't be able to have one? Four, how much can we reduce that number, and are there proven ways to get there at any level, local, state, country, whatever?
• 1:48
  Positions are how we answer those. So you guys actually asked for this. Here's something to know.
• 1:56
  It has always been true that whatever we make, you are very quick to, one, thank us, thank you, and two, tell us what's missing. Great.
• 2:04
  What Can I Do exists at all because the strongest feedback we ever got was you saying, often literally, "Okay, but what can I do?" So we built it, and then you asked for three more things. Here they are.
• 2:18
  One, to find and to be able to follow more people, real people, who give a shit actively in real life like you do. Two, to see more real, in real life progress, including the results of your own actions.
• 2:34
  And three, and focus on this one for a moment, to understand what progress really means, right, as a measurable standard. Now, those three asks of yours have driven the past year of our work on improving What Can I Do?
• 2:48
  And very soon, they will become, honestly, what we're calling What Can I Do 2.0. Positions, and there are pages, are our answer to question number three there. So let's talk about what a position is.
• 3:01
  A position is a measurable standard for a principle we hold.
• 3:06
  Each one is built on the work of so many people and orgs and governments over so many years and decades to measure a disadvantage, to figure out why the fuck it exists, and to measurably improve upon it, or to demolish it altogether.
• 3:22
  And we talked about this when we first introduced Actually Pro-Life, but just to come back to it, every position has to answer four questions. One, is it measurable? Obviously. Two, is there evidence that it works?
• 3:36
  Three, does it actually flow from our eight principles? And four, can we track it? Here's what answering those can get you. For example, one, a minimum tax on billionaires.
• 3:48
  Two, automatic voter registration in every US state. Three, hot meals in SNAP, finally. Four, MERV thirteen air filters at minimum in public buildings. Next, replace all lead pipes. It's black or white.
• 4:03
  And believe me when I tell you how complicated this is. Some states haven't even checked to see how many lead pipes they've got yet. Anyways, moving on. Eliminate tuberculosis everywhere. WIC, fully funded.
• 4:15
  DC statehood, now. It's black or white. End child marriage, like yesterday. Full Title One funding for every single low-income school. And there's about a hundred and fifty more examples like that.
• 4:28
  Now, again, the positions began, started to coalesce in my insane, mostly illegible notes as we took the principles and, and the actions and all this shit and, and it all started to make its way into spreadsheets a little more.
• 4:41
  It all got defined a little better. And along the way, we worked out which of our almost 2,000 actions fit which positions. Or better yet, often more than one.
• 4:52
  Now, the original set of positions numbered about a hundred and thirty, which felt like a lot. But as we kept gathering and reconciling all the data and reviewing things, we found some new patterns, we found some gaps,
• 5:04
  and pretty quickly, about twenty more positions immediately presented themselves.
• 5:09
  And each of those was like a great little mini research project, born from often, like, a list of orphan actions that didn't have a home yet.
• 5:18
  Now, there's still a long list of orphan actions, and there are also plenty of gaps and opportunities left to address. What we're sharing today is really just the beginning of that.
• 5:29
  But let me answer this, because it's important. Why the hell are we only finally launching these now, a couple months after we put out our pretty logo and the philosophies and all that stuff?
• 5:39
  Well, we had every intention of launching positions back when we first introduced you to Actually Pro-Life. And really, besides the fact that we're a bunch of part-timers, two things held us up.
• 5:51
  One was political, and one was technical. So let's talk about the political hold up first. Founding merit of Actually Pro-Life is bringing some goddamn receipts to the party. The priorities include Who needs help?
• 6:07
  The most measurable ways to help them. Who is preventing progress? And who shows up to help? Now, we'll never get it all right, at least as long as I'm in charge. But we will sure as hell try.
• 6:20
  We gotta walk the walk here.
• 6:21
  And so for the first two priorities, I built many of our educated assumptions on first party, relatively non-partisan government data, which includes, in the US, the Congressional Budget Office, censuses. Sensei?
• 6:37
  I don't know. Anyways, it took a really long time to get all that straight and logged and matched up to actions that would then measurably move that data.
• 6:46
  You know, what has worked in the past, where and, and when and, and how has it not worked in some places, how has it not been evenly distributed at all?
• 6:55
  But by the time we got to actually publishing these things, the current US administration had made significant strides in hollowing out imperfect, obviously, but invaluable institutions at home and abroad, including the ones that collect and analyze and report our most impactful data.
• 7:15
  So they started with crimes of omission and obviously worked their way up to outright dangerous fascist disinformation. So trust in those institutions and their data sank with them, my trust and yours.
• 7:29
  The vast majority of our launch positions are US-focused or concerning US foreign policy, foreign aid in particular, or what there used to be.
• 7:39
  So if I wanted a leg to stand on with all this, my only real recourse was to find almost entirely new evidence sources for nearly every one of the original positions.
• 7:49
  That is all obviously made a lot harder when your government is a bunch of lying fuckwits who, at best, don't care whether you live or die. Now, let's talk about the technical holdup. Here's the good news.
• 8:02
  The delay handed our small team of ambitious humans a real opportunity. We were already in the middle of a massive technical rebuild to answer
• 8:12
  questions one and two from above, and it had become clear that the tech that got us here, tech we will remain forever so fucking proud of, wasn't gonna be able to power what we really wanted to build for you and what you asked for, what you needed.
• 8:25
  Our merry little band of part-time shit-givers had thrown a lot of ziti against the wall, and the verdict was in. We needed what I call, 'cause I'm an idiot, a brain transplant. Why now? Well,
• 8:39
  we don't just walk into mortar. Sorry. We don't have the time or the resources internally or out there in the world to make a lot of mistakes. Fun- foundational ones.
• 8:50
  We can't lean on duct tape more than we absolutely have to for, like, a minute.
• 8:54
  So we have always put ourselves under enormous pressure to stop and make big foundational moves before not making them becomes the problem sooner or later.
• 9:05
  So while I went back to the drawing board on all this evidence stuff, Lauren took over the day-to-day Actually Pro-Life data management, this whole new thing. Ally made our social lively and fun.
• 9:18
  Christina roped in some influencers, which is really exciting. Casey built out a bunch of our partnerships that are still growing, and Willow published so much incredible editorial work.
• 9:28
  And Tom and Connor got down to business, figuring out how and when and where to do this brain transplant without taking the whole thing down.
• 9:38
  Now, no pressure, but if they didn't get it right, we'd have ended up with a couple hundred well-founded positions tied to a couple thousand rigorously researched actions and thousands of thousands of you acting on them still, but still mostly in isolation,
• 9:54
  wondering whether anyone else was acting on them like you were or on anything else. Despairing still that progress could never be made, and certainly not at this rate. Here's the good news. I think we got it right.
• 10:07
  We're still building, but I'm pretty sure we got it right. So let's talk about what's on these position pages that you can access starting today.
• 10:15
  On each one, you're gonna find a measurable position to aim for and its related Actually Pro-Life principle,
• 10:21
  a description of the what and the why, a collection of evidence and metrics to help you trust that this thing is real and meaningful, all of the current organizations and actions that, that we have put together so far associated with that position, probably not exhaustive, and of course, the members like you who have taken action on it.
• 10:40
  And fun fact, because we have this new brain, and these pages are brand new, and our ability to tie all the data together are literally brand new, you might actually be the first member to register action on a given position and show up on one of these pages.
• 10:55
  And for that, we say thank you. But for now, you can search, and you can get to position pages from whatcanido.earth/actually-pro-life. Right?
• 11:06
  In the very near future, good news, they will be built into What Can I Do search and actions and more everywhere as the Actually Pro-Life system becomes more and more cohesive and connected, one ideally. Now,
• 11:20
  if you're not a member yet, right, which is five bucks a month or 50 bucks a year with a free 30-day trial that you can cancel at any time,
• 11:30
  you can still and will forever be able to search and see all the position pages and all the associated actions and vice versa and take all the action you can handle. I mean, please and thank you, right? But
• 11:44
  if you want to be counted in public, if you want people to see what you did and be inspired to act because you did, and again, vice versa,
• 11:56
  if you want, for example, from our new brain, updates when there's a new action for positions you follow or have acted on, or actions in a location you live in or where you used to live or whatever,
• 12:10
  you can upgrade right now with a free 30-day trial. It's going to be fucking awesome. Here is the line in the sand for us. Well, that's what these pages are, right? They're a really, really, really great reminder that
• 12:26
  bad guys are real and that we should always say their names and we should always put them on record. And that includes people who do nothing at all.
• 12:36
  Most of the progress we've already made, but haven't distributed evenly, and most of the progress we can still make requires inventing very little. What it does require is some fucking backbone.
• 12:46
  Despite the enormous efforts of so many millions of people before us, a select few asshats have spent decades and centuries making choices to disadvantage people and to rape ecosystems, while a lot of other people have stood by and watched.
• 13:01
  It is enough. We all have to actually carry the fire. No more hobbies.
• 13:06
  The positions throughout What Can I Do require all of us, or at least more of us than there are of them, more every day, to continue this tradition of compound action.
• 13:14
  To simply make different choices, but in the aggregate. And that includes, but isn't limited to, who we recruit and train and campaign for and vote into every single level of office, from school board on up.
• 13:27
  Positions, and this is why I'm so excited, are the things that put the actually in Actually Pro-Life. They put the works into faith and works. They are our fighting words. They are that line in the sand, the target.
• 13:39
  They're what we are working towards with every action that we all take inside and outside of What Can I Do. So please check them out now. We'll put the link in your show notes. Let us know how it's going. Send feedback.
• 13:52
  Sign up to put a dent into history. And remember, it is together or it is nothing.