Discern Earth
Discern Earth
Grant Mulligan on Absurdism, Wildlife Biology, and Positive-Sum Environmentalism
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Grant Mulligan on Absurdism, Wildlife Biology, and Positive-Sum Environmentalism

"Zero-sum thinking says if we let anything get built, we've lost nature for good. Positive-sum thinking lets human ingenuity and nature's resilience work together in innovative ways."

In this episode I speak with Grant Mulligan, a wildlife biologist by training who has worked across conservation finance, impact investing, and environmental progress. He currently writes the newsletter Progress Accumulation and is fellow at The Roots of Progress Institute. Grant brings a unique perspective as an atheist deeply committed to environmental stewardship, drawing on Camus's absurdism to find meaning in conservation work. We discuss:

  • How his atheist worldview, grounded in Camus's absurdism, shapes his joyful approach to environmental work and finding meaning through action rather than belief.

  • His journey from counting endangered species in the Arizona desert to working on conservation finance at The Nature Conservancy.

  • Why the shift from zero-sum to positive-sum thinking is essential for effective environmentalism that includes human flourishing.

  • How spending summers watching birds with his grandparents in Wisconsin led to discovering Aldo Leopold and a career in wildlife biology.

  • The critical role of economic thinking in conservation, from groundwater banking to renewable energy siting.

  • Why courage and incremental action, not grand ideas, are the limiting factors in environmental progress.


David Valerio: How would you describe your spirituality and the way it shapes your work?

Grant Mulligan: In a religious context, I'd be considered as an atheist bu most. I don't believe in God. When I think about spirituality, I often start with religion. But if we zoom out a little bit, if spirituality is the answer to the question of how do I live, I think The Myth of Sisyphus by Camus is probably the closest depiction of reality for me. "One must imagine Sisyphus happy."

Visakan has a great meme on Twitter of a sailor sailing between two extremes: on the left side, "life is devastatingly meaningless," and on the right side, "life is excruciatingly meaningful." We're sailing through the absurdity of life, where we're so trivial but everything matters so much. We only get this one life. Finding things and people to be passionate about and work on—sailing through it joyfully.

When I think about spirituality, that's a huge part of it: living and creating joyfully is at its core. My personal philosophy is grounded in an article by Max Roser, who founded Our World in Data, called "The world is awful. The world is much better. The world can be much better." It had a massive influence on me. We've made the world so much better than it used to be. Our lives have so much more joy and so much less suffering in really substantial ways, but there's still so much we can do.

I wear this necklace of Sisyphus pushing a little pearl that my brother gave me as a reminder. We live great lives and should really be happy, but we still need to enjoy pushing the boulder up the hill every day.

David Valerio: It seems that you think there is no inherent meaning in the world, and that you lean toward an absurdist worldview. But instead of taking the nihilist approach to the situation, you take the optimistic one. If there's no meaning, I need to make my own meaning. Is that how you would describe it?

Grant Mulligan: That's exactly right. I think you do have to create your own meaning, and it can happen in really small interactions day by day. I have a two-year-old and a four-year-old. I find meaning in them everyday. I find tremendous meaning in my work.

A lot of my spirituality, and how it connects to my work, comes from time I spent in nature and lessons I learned moving through nature. The closest I've ever gotten to peace, transcendence, or equanimity came from when I'm in nature. I find meaning in those landscapes and places. I don't ascribe to them religious meaning or divinity, but I think a lot of the feelings are very similar. We can create value and meaning in our day-to-day lives through our actions and relationships.

David Valerio: Where do you think those feelings of beauty and transcendence in nature come? Is it evolutionary?

Grant Mulligan: Richard Prum, an ornithologist at Yale, has some great research on beauty and how it came to be in nature. I've always thought of it as evolutionary. When I go to a beautiful landscape, I get this sense of "we can make a life here, we can survive here."

But there's also awe and grandeur. I grew up in Arizona, and even in the desert, which is a harsh environment where you wouldn't necessarily say we're going to have an easy life, there's something awe-inspiring about it.

People are drawn to beauty. Look back through history at the level of intricacy in lace-making, painting, architecture. People are drawn to making beautiful things, seeing what they can create. There's something in nature, this conversation you have with the world around you, that is really uplifting. A lot of the language in nature writing mirrors writing in the Bible, the Quran, or the Dhammapada. There's overlap because these feelings of us being small in this grand world, and the beauty that elevates us, are very much interrelated.

David Valerio: Tell me about your personal background with spirituality. You classify yourself as an atheist now, but what was your journey like?

Grant Mulligan: I grew up around religion. My mother was raised Catholic. I grew up going to church and was confirmed in a Methodist church. I had really great experiences with religion, honestly. But like a lot of college students, I became a bit of a hardcore atheist when I got to college. It's easy to point at religion and all the bad things and say, "Religion makes people do silly things." The classic black-and-white thinking of a teenager.

I was studying biology at the time and thought, "How both the Bible and evolution be true?" I thought there was much more evidence on the side of evolution, so I adopted a strongly atheistic viewpoint a la Richard Dawkins.

But that changed because while I was studying biology and becoming a wildlife biologist, I was also reading a lot of religious texts. I was having trouble figuring out how to live. I felt lost and lonely and didn't feel good at things yet. Religion seemed like this playbook for living.

My best friend since kindergarten was Mormon. He was my roommate during my first semester of college, and then he went on a Mormon mission. I thought, "This guy has conviction. He has this book and ways of living that are guiding him." So I went deep on religion. I read the Bible, the Quran, the Analects, the Tao Te Ching. I was trying to understand what they knew that I didn't, whether there was a belief system that could help me function.

Ultimately, it came back to truth for me. I thought there was a lot of truth in these texts about the human condition and how we live. But I couldn't get on board with there being a God. I would pray and couldn't feel anything.

At the same time, I was going out more into nature. Nature had been a huge part of my childhood, spending summers in Wisconsin with my grandparents. These two things fused together. As I was picking up ideas from these texts I started thinking, "That's how I feel when I'm in nature."

Nature became this thing I got deeper into. I was studying it, getting good at it, liked the rewards of knowing more about the world I was moving in. They fused together into this philosophy of how I want to live my life, what I want to study, what I want to work on forever. It was transformative in my late teens and early 20s, and has continued to now being almost 40.

David Valerio: How did you originally fall in love with nature and decide to study wildlife biology?

Grant Mulligan: This is one where my grandmother would tell you it's divine intervention. It certainly feels that way in the story.

I grew up spending summers with my grandparents in Wisconsin countryside. My favorite activity was filling up their bird feeders. They had feeders all around the house. There was a thistle feeder where goldfinches would show up in this amazing color I'd never seen before. A seed feeder out in the yard where cardinals and blue jays would come. I could sit for hours watching these birds, the robins running around in big green fields.

I really came to love spending time outdoors. It was always where I felt most at peace: outside listening to birds, walking through the forest, running around. That was something I was naturally attracted to.

In college, I was studying biochemistry. I was struggling and not having fun. I went to buy books for my second semester and A Sand County Almanac was on the shelf as required reading. My grandfather had given me it during my last summer in Wisconsin with an inscription inside: "To remind you of your summers in Wisconsin and how nature is a part of us."

I'd read the book when he gave it to me. It was beautifully written and I felt so connected to it. But I thought it was just some book about where my grandpa lived. I had no idea it was this seminal work in conservation.

I immediately signed up for the class. It was a renewable natural resources class about how you could get a career in wildlife management and conservation, work for the Forest Service… Things I'd never been aware of. I was so awestruck that you could do this for a career. I immediately marched to my counselor's office and changed my major. It was pure luck finding that book on the shelf that day. It set the course for the rest of my career and life.

David Valerio: It's amazing how much serendipity plays a role in every human life. What would your life have looked like if your grandfather hadn't given you that book?

Grant Mulligan: That serendipity has extended to so many places for me. In that major, I met a professor who saw something in me even though I was a struggling student. He encouraged me, gave me confidence, and ultimately he is the reason I went to graduate school. I met my wife during my first week of graduate school.

It's all these random little moments that you open yourself up to. If it wasn't for finding that book and that professor, there's a good chance I'd have become a high school science teacher or an accountant like my parents. Nothing wrong with that, but all the opportunities I've had since then came from finding something I could love and be passionate about and share with others. When you have that type of passion, the serendipity finds you.

David Valerio: Tell me about your early career in wildlife biology.

Grant Mulligan: I graduated from Arizona State in 2011. It was an incredibly difficult job market right after the financial recession. There were state hiring freezes and not a lot going on economically.

I was fortunate to land an internship at the Phoenix Zoo working on breeding and releasing endangered species back to the wild. Not the part where people come to see giraffes, but the back part of the show where we bred black-footed ferrets, Chiricahua leopard frogs, and narrow-headed garter snakes for reintroduction. Species native to Arizona that were threatened or endangered. We'd go out in the field, collect animals or their eggs, raise them at the zoo through periods where mortality is really high, and release them back to the wild in high numbers to reestablish populations.

That was seminal for me getting started, but I quickly realized I didn't want to just keep the last of something alive. I wanted to know why they were going extinct in the first place. I didn't feel like there was enough agency in solving these problems. It felt like Band-Aids everywhere.

I moved on to a wildlife technician role with the Arizona Game and Fish Department doing surveys for endangered species. To comply with the Endangered Species Act, you have to survey. We surveyed a lot at military establishments. I was basically a glorified counter of things, hiking 15-plus miles a day in summer in the Arizona desert. In those harsh conditions, you get a lot of time to think. I started mapping my course: what would it look like to try to solve these problems at a bigger scale?

It was a great job. I got paid to hike around in nature and play with critters, which was exactly what I wanted. But ultimately I wanted to move upstream and focus more on problem-solving.

David Valerio: Often the roles most available in environmental science are about minimizing losses. Mitigation after the fact. How did you shift from that line of work to trying to positively impact the natural world?

Grant Mulligan: I came to believe that ecology and economics are deeply intertwined. The consequences we were seeing for nature were downstream of human economic decisions. You had to put people more firmly into the picture.

For all the talk about sustainability and solving climate change in my initial education, it was very focused on what was happening to the natural system and negative stories. Not a positive vision, not talking about ways that we had solved problems, not talking about how countries getting richer means they have more to invest in conservation.

I went back to grad school and focused on business and the environment. How could you create businesses or opportunities where the more good you do, the more money you make? The best example is renewable energy. The more clean energy you create, the more money you make. The more money you make, the more clean energy you can deploy. A virtuous circle.

I was fortunate to have professor named Eli Fenichel, who saw how I was with people and my ability to create positive visions of the future. He helped me get into the Yale School of Forestry, which now the Yale School of the Environment. There I met people who were deeply passionate, incredibly ambitious, and really smart.

That journey led me to The Nature Conservancy, where I worked on cutting-edge projects blending finance and conservation. I've kept moving upstream piece by piece to sell and build this more positive vision for environmentalism.

David Valerio: Why do you think environmentalists often don't think about how humans are integrated into the natural world? We like to focus on "nature" as being different from humanity, but the two are obviously interconnected.

Grant Mulligan: I think it's hard. It's like the Fitzgerald quote about genius being able to keep two competing ideas in your mind at the same time and still function. It's hard to believe we're part of nature when you leave the city to spend Saturday on a hike and get solitude. It's hard not to feel like they're two separate things, the human environment and the natural environment. You get very different feelings in each one.

Also, when you walk through nature repeatedly as a biologist, you start to be more observant. You're trained to observe what's happening around you. Most people are born into the world as it is. They don't question where things come from. Where the food on their table comes from, and the full supply chain involved in making that happen.

There's a John Collison quote that goes “Everything you see around you is someone's passion project." Someone got into asphalt and figured out how to make materials for roads. Some engineer laid out where roads would go. Most people don't see those things.

Nature has had the biggest impact on my life by making me observe more. Everywhere I go, I notice birds. This morning taking out the trash, I heard a flicker, chickadee, and nuthatch. There are great horned owls nesting down the street that I hear calling. They're marking territory and looking for each other, as spring is almost here.

Nature is real to me. I have names for things, sounds call me into it. My neighbors taking out the trash probably had no idea birds were chirping. The patience to observe and understand connections, like where materials come from, just isn't in most people's day-to-day purview.

David Valerio: Tell me about your work at The Nature Conservancy on conservation finance. What were your key learnings?

Grant Mulligan: I started at The Nature Conservancy as executive assistant to the executive director in California, which was probably the best job I've ever had for learning how to be a professional and conservation. I got to spend time with the leadership team and see how they approached problems.

One project was creating a first-of-its-kind partnership with private equity firms. The Nature Conservancy would be embedded in their funds as an impact advisor, helping set conservation targets and rules before investments to ensure that at least no harm was done.

I raised my hand when the idea was being brought to the board and said, "This is what I'd really like to do." I got that opportunity and spent close to four years in absolutely insane learning.

What became clear was my strong conviction that conservation and environmental good can be very compatible with economic returns. But historically, people were framing them as absolute opposites in a way that was holding the field back.

Two examples of what the Nature Conservancy did brilliantly:

First, their team’s work on permitting and siting for renewable energy in California used science and data to say, "Here are places with endangered species where we don't want to plow up land for solar or wind. But here are marginal agricultural lands that aren't as important." Certainly there would be impacts, but by prioritizing land they identified those that weren’t as critical to biodiversity. "If you site renewables in those places, you can speed up permitting, get them built faster, avoid getting bogged down in courts."

That's exactly what conservation should do. Speed up economic development, get more clean energy on the grid, but do so in a green way. You stop saying no to everything and start looking for ways to grow and say yes.

Second, on my project specifically, we worked on groundwater banking. You take marginal ag land out of commission, take the water rights being used to grow something uneconomic like alfalfa and capture that water in ponds that sink through sandy soils into an aquifer. Then you can sell that water to other farmers who can use it elsewhere.

You've created a market and rationalized water use. But for conservation, you could build those groundwater banks to the right depth for migratory birds to use while migrating from Alaska to Chile on the Pacific Flyway. The San Joaquin Valley had 90-plus percent of its wetlands converted to agriculture. All the lakes and ponds birds would stop at were destroyed.

Instead of conservation having to buy lands and operate them as wetlands 100% of the year, which incredibly expensive and entails high opportunity costs, you can create groundwater banks with high economic use that also create pop-up habitats when flooded in spring and fall.

I started seeing more of these solutions from really smart people with great understandings of science, economics, and food systems. It gave me hope that if we could get more money to these types of things and deploy more ideas like this, we could accelerate human and environmental progress side by side.

David Valerio: The renewable energy example is particularly interesting. The traditional conservationist view to just say "no,” those projects will kill birds and desert tortoises. But that's not pragmatic. We need energy. How did that shift your mindset?

Grant Mulligan: You hit on something really overlooked in environmentalism: the need for positive-sum environmentalism as opposed to zero-sum thinking.

Zero-sum thinking says if we let anything get built, we've lost nature for good. If you take a positive-sum approach, you see different solutions. Zero-sum shrinks your solution set to be very small. Positive-sum thinking lets human ingenuity and nature's resilience work together in innovative ways.

There's a bit of cutting off your nose to spite your face in zero-sum thinking. You can stop renewable energy projects, make it hell to connect to the grid or build transmission lines across sensitive areas, but all you're doing is perpetuating climate change and fossil fuel use. People only have the existing infrastructure available, so they continue relying on current methods, which is ostensibly the problem you're trying to solve.

With positive-sum thinking, you think in net terms. Yes, you may have some negatives, but the positives outweigh it. You can think about local and global trade-offs. Your level and quality of thinking and solutions grow exponentially.

This is the core challenge for environmentalism. Not to overstretch the analogy, but it's like what we discussed about religion. What turns people off is the "you're a sinner, everything is bad, wrathful God" rhetoric. I see the same in classic environmentalism about humanity's role.

What Jesus, the New Testament, and positive-sum environmentalism can do is say, "Actually, there's a greater vision for the world. If we think differently, we can create a positive vision people can be excited about." There's a sort of salvation available to us. You have to give people not just apocalyptic doom and gloom, but something to aspire to. Otherwise you're paralyzed, not thinking through possible solutions. It's not actually a guide to how you live or behave.

I see more signs we're getting to a place with a much more positive vision, but there's still work to make that real and sell it to people.

David Valerio: If you view these problems dogmatically, it's more about rule-following than actual outcomes. Nothing actually happens. Whereas if we accept the world as it is and are pragmatic about how humans can facilitate the economy while growing natural ecologies, it completely shifts the conversation.

Grant Mulligan: Part of that is telling people how much better it's gotten. Malcolm Cochran wrote this brilliant piece about New England forests. The move from horses to cars allowed millions of acres to go back into forest in New England.

If you've hiked there, you walk through what feels like old, dense forest and find stone walls. They're from farmers who plowed up land for pasture because you needed hay and grain to feed horses, which were your transportation, workforce, and how you moved things. Once you switched to cars with more concentrated energy in gasoline, all that land could go back to nature.

Europe has seen major comebacks in mammal populations for similar reasons, there's actually reforestation happening. When you see more countries growing GDP while reducing carbon emissions per capita, you see a world where we can provision for people and give them options.

If you know people must be provisioned, you can be realistic. What's the best way? How do we invest in those technologies? As opposed to just saying "no."

We're on the cusp of potentially rewilding much of the world and bringing nature back to where it hasn't been in millennia, because we can lower human impact even with growing population. That's what gets me out of bed every morning.

David Valerio: Tell me about your journey from The Nature Conservancy to writing Progress Accumulation and becoming a Roots of Progress fellow.

Grant Mulligan: From The Nature Conservancy, I moved to AlTi Tiedemann Global, which is a wealth management firm. It was an unusual jump from nonprofit conservation to for-profit wealth management, but I had the opportunity to contribute to research and conduct due diligence for clients wanting to invest in climate technologies and nature through impact investing.

I'd seen these things working at The Nature Conservancy, but I didn't feel fully fluent in why capital did or didn't go to those strategies. I didn't understand the financial side of things, which was a real gap in my knowledge. So I went to capital allocation to understand: How would we allocate capital to this? What are the barriers?

One big lesson was that people's overly pessimistic approach wasn't just impacting what happened on the ground, it was affecting where dollars went. For instance, people wanting to invest in agriculture and food systems might see "organic" in a pitch and think, "That's impact, that must be good for the world." They were against GMOs or intensification on certain lands.

I thought this was a real miss. Some of the best philanthropic interventions and impact investments came from groups like the Rockefeller Foundation funding Norman Borlaug's research on dwarf wheat that enabled the Green Revolution. I was seeing pessimism creep into where money was going, and knew that pessimism impacts what reaches the ground level. You had to tell the story better.

I became obsessed with progress. Where it comes from, and why we've had environmental progress. I applied to be a Roots of Progress fellow for their blog-building intensive, which was one of the most amazing experiences of my entire life and inspired me to launch my blog.

The idea is to tell positive stories and present data. Not overly optimistic philosophy, but grounded in data, like how Hannah Ritchie does brilliantly in Not the End of the World. She's a hero of mine for showing people the progress we've made, getting them focused on the right problems, and inspiring more people to build.

It's been a way to learn from people, meet you, have these conversations, and explore what my next big work project will be, either in a startup or something else pushing the envelope of these ideas to make them real.

David Valerio: How did environmental pessimism get into the impact investment space? You'd think investment types would be hard on numbers.

Grant Mulligan: There are some key definitions to understand. The impact investor might be the person raising capital and actively making investments in renewable energy or nature-based solutions. But someone has to give them that capital: pension funds, wealth management clients, foundations, endowments, ultra-high-net-worth individuals etc.

Those people don't necessarily have investment backgrounds. Some started companies and became wealthy, and are now figuring out what to do with their money to have a positive impact. Or they inherited money and are trying to figure out what to do. There's a certain level of education that's really important.

Part of it is we've demonized wealth to an incredible extent. We love to tear down people who built amazing technologies and companies that supplied goods and wellbeing worldwide, vilifying them for having money. I think a big part of impact investing is almost investing as recompense. "I'm sorry I have this money, I need to give it away." That's the negative version.

The positive version is: "I see things that are bad in the world, I have this resource, I want to use it positively and align with my values." Almost every single person I came across in impact investing is coming from a positive place. They're good people really trying. We make it very hard on them in some ways.

But then things like “organic” become difficult. There's a price premium, so we think it must be better. Someone talks about using fewer inputs and it's all great. In many cases, organic really is great. But the challenge is if you lower crop yields, you need more land to grow the same crop. For a farmer to make their living, instead of 100 acres, maybe they need 150. They don't realize the driver of emissions from land is land conversion. Actually, we might want to intensify production in certain areas.

That starts to clash with moral judgments, values, things they've been taught and care about. It's a really complicated space. There are layers and layers of complexity when it comes to where that marginal dollar flows next.

David Valerio: We're talking about the power of ideas influencing capital allocations and real-world issues. How do you think about getting into the world of ideas and shifting the conversation?

Grant Mulligan: It took me years to get to this question. Part of why I went into capital allocation was thinking money was the problem: if we just had more money for these things, we'd be better off. Environmental philanthropy gets something like 5-6% of all philanthropic dollars in the US. It's a really small portion of impact investing.

What I came to believe is it's actually about ideas. It's about good businesses and what you can actually do. Not pie in the sky, but people concretely thinking about day-to-day challenges, how to build a market, execute well, and think about financial sustainability alongside ecological sustainability.

I started to view ideas as much more meaningful in a David Deutsch Beginning of Infinity way: good ideas replace bad ideas. If you can show something works in these memetic environments of how capital flows, people get interested.

Everyone has a different way to contribute. The Institute for Progress thinks about permitting reform and how NEPA limits clean energy. People at The Nature Conservancy do critical work in local communities identifying important areas for conversation. These ideas start linking up. One person solves one part, hits a constraint, solves it there. Someone else hits another constraint.

The limiting factor is courage. It's ideas, willingness to start a new business, find a compelling idea even if not perfect, build it out, and let this ecosystem spread the idea.

Writing makes these ideas more legible to myself first. Twenty-plus years of experience… I'm trying to figure out how to say it succinctly, understand it, tease out true lessons. But I'm also writing for actual people working in these fields to subtly change their perception, add nuance, get them thinking more positively, maybe think about a new idea in their sphere. The hope is that snowballs over time.

People get caught up in the one big idea. “If I spread this one big idea or start this one company, I'll be successful.” But there are so many smaller ways. You just have to start. Action changes everything. Any little piece you do to spread an idea, help one client allocate capital differently, get one person who reads your blog to think about managing a forest differently—all those things compound over time.

I'm trying to play the compounding game. That's what Progress Accumulation comes from. Hhow do you slowly accumulate all these to the point where over 200 years, you see massive change?

David Valerio: The end state is only reached by doing small, individual day-to-day things. Becoming a better person, seeing a better world, these abstract questions can only be addressed by becoming better yourself, interacting better with others. It's the holistic interconnections between individual actions that leads to that large graph of progress.

People like going after the big idea because they don't actually have to do anything in their day-to-day life. But real change requires changing your way of being and how you interact with people.

Grant Mulligan: I know you're a parent too. Parenting is hard. My four-year-old daughter had a massive tantrum this morning. I realized, "I'm probably escalating the situation. How do I handle this differently?" Parenting is where you look at the world, see yourself, and realize, "I have a lot to change myself." I have a lot of ways I need to change how I show up.

Your inadequacies and failings as a person are immediately reflected in the thing you care most about. That's very eye-opening in terms of how you live.

Visakan has this line: "Focus on what you want to see more of." If day-to-day you focus on being a better person, doing those things, stop worrying about the shitposts—I never respond to people trying to tear down positive visions of environmentalism. I don't want to focus on that. I want to focus on telling the positive story. If I do that well, I'll get more people in that direction.

It's a powerful way to live. What am I doing today to show up, educate myself? I've been reading more fiction to round myself out and become more compassionate. This is really hard work that most people frankly don't want to do. I don't blame them, it's easy to be comfortable. It's not for the faint of heart. But focus on more of what you want to see in the world, be that incrementally day-by-day, and trust the compounding. Trust that will lead somewhere.

David Valerio: What does a good life look like for you, and how will you attempt to live that good life going forward?

Grant Mulligan: Two influential things beyond what we discussed: Sisyphus and Stewart Brand's line "We are as gods." When I think about that, I think about concrete environmental behavior we could do, but also agency—trying to have more agency and realize we can create this world, we can shape it.

Frankly, I'm terrified of not reaching my potential, of being too comfortable and settling in. I'm trying to marry "we are as gods" with the myth of Sisyphus. There is real change in rolling that boulder up the mountain.

There's Charles C. Mann's book The Wizard and the Prophet about two competing environmental worldviews. The wizard idea is that we are as gods. We can change things, we have agency. The way I'm trying to live is to act every day as though I have more agency than I feel. Force myself to raise my ambition and try something bigger and grander than I can envision. How do I take it one step further?

That's how I got into the Roots of Progress fellowship. I didn't think I was a good candidate, but I wanted to be the type of person who applies to these things. Look what happened, I got in and it changed my life.

I'm trying to embody pushing the boulder up, doing it joyfully, believing that pushing the boulder isn't just limited to the boulder itself but creates change in the world every time I move it an inch. Really importantly: recruiting other people to push with me. It's so much more fun when you're doing it together, struggling together in the joy.

I'm out to find my passion projects, things that make me feel like I'm contributing to human progress overall, increasing joy or reducing suffering. Carrying that motivating philosophy through every day and finding more people who want to do it with me.

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