Purpose
My son Micah is 12 years old. His older brother, Shai, is, let’s say, an “advanced” student who spends most of his time improving his skills at Blender, a 3D modeling application. Shai is well into the top 1 percent of teenagers doing computer graphics. Other kids seek him out to make 3D models for their projects. Occasionally, Shai plays a video game, which I’m thankful to see, otherwise he’d spend all his time building 3D models and programming up new designs. He usually stops work and goes to bed around 11:30pm. He’s 14.
Micah worked with me last spring to create a trip to Africa that we ultimately didn’t find enough people for, so we had to cancel it. But he was fascinated learning about the animals. He cares so much about animals that he stopped eating them and was interviewed by a vegan researcher on YouTube about going vegan. Micah is a bit of a holdout. I’ve been vegan for 35 years and Shai has been “mostly vegan” for about 8 years now."
Micah and I talked about what he could do to help animals. I suggested he start his own podcast on YouTube. Micah watches a lot of YouTube videos; he watches pretty much everything by Jordan Peterson and Lex Fridman, so he agreed a podcast to raise awareness of animal issues was a good idea. We worked with GPT4 to come up with a good name - Nature’s Guardians. We decided to focus initially on illegal wildlife trade, but it soon expanded to include farm animal welfare, lab-grown meat, critical thinking, coral reefs, lions, wild dogs, Chinese medicine, and many others. His online school, the Socratic Experience, gave him permission to make it his elective, so he dedicates all day every Wednesday to the show. This morning, we spoke with a guy in NE India who said that each year elephants kill 70 humans in his part of the country, and humans kill 70 elephants — who knew there was a human-elephant war going on in India? In general, we’re learning that most animal species are doing really well, and that the “crisis” language is mostly for fundraising.
Micah doesn’t want to be a naturalist. He wants to help animals in the most effective way possible. So we decided that the purpose of the channel is to tell the stories of and promote the people working to save and help animals around the world.
See his channel. Subscribe. Tell your friends. Suggest people we should talk with!
Putting in the hours
It’s a lot of work. We have a Notion database tracking everyone we’ve reached out to, schedule our interviews, make sure people have good internet connections, do the interviews on Zoom, then we spend hours editing, making thumbnails, promoting, and planning our next moves. Micah is really into it. He’s a different kid since we started. This morning, he told me he woke up at 7:30am and spent 45 minutes commenting on other animal videos and leaving links to his. We’ve now done 20 interviews.
Yesterday, we recorded our first in-person video. We took the metro to Tyson’s Corner, Virginia, to meet Dr Lixing Lao, an expert on traditional Chinese medicine. He’s working to get animal ingredients out of TCM. Remarkably, we learned that animal parts have been phased out of TCM for more than 20 years already. Of course, they never worked at all. But patients still ask their doctors for tiger bone and pangolin powder, so the illegal trade continues. He’s working to educate doctors to dissuade their patients from going to the traditional pharmacies and getting these products. He mentioned, for example, that bear bile has been a common ingredient in Chinese medicine for centuries, though of course it doesn’t do anything. For decades, people have been raising bears in capitivity just to kill them and get their bile to sell. But then the Chinese consumers got wind of this and started demanding wild bear bile, which of course in their minds is a far more effective medicine than bear bile from a bear farm.
We are learning more and more that the way to reduce animal trafficking is to reduce demand. We understand it’s hard, but that’s where the real action is. So we went to his office, set up our gear, interviewed him, and now I’m editing the video, which will be out in a few weeks. Here’s an example page from our Notion database of people we are reaching out to:
I just keep telling Micah: “Make your first 100 videos, then decide what to do with it.” So we just keep plugging away. We know that the day we interview Yao Ming or someone big, thousands of people will discover our video library and we’ll be in the next league. Until then, we keep trying to make better and better videos.
Emergent Ventures
I’ve known Tyler Cowen for years. Among many many other things, he has a fund called Emergent Ventures, to support young people in their various worthwhile endeavors. It’s not a lot of money, just enough to give a promising young person a boost and hope it helps. It’s called Emergent Ventures. He’s funded probably well over 100 young people. So I applied for support, to help us create a trip to document people helping animals, and … we got it! Micah, age 12, got $10,000 to pursue his passion of helping animals. We’re planning to take a trip to Africa next March, and you’re invited to come along with us. Bring your kids! This will be a budget-friendly trip that gives you and your kids the insider track to Kruger National Park in South Africa.
Our goal is to make a few high-quality videos of people working to save animals in the field and show them to studios. Our goal is to get funding to make a series starring Micah as the kid telling the stories of people working hard to reduce the demand for and the supply of animals around the world.
Bonding
It’s really about bonding with your child on a project he/she cares about and enjoys doing. It’s Ikegai. And it’s fun to work together. We’re a team. Sure, it takes me 10-15 hours a week, but it’s already made Micah into a mini-celebrity at his school. This week, he’ll give a presentation to kids on how to make a podcast, because everyone has been asking him.
We don’t have many viewers, but we do have respect from the animal conservation community. We’re having all kinds of interesting conversations with groups about sponsorship, collaboration, promotion, etc. Also, at this point, we can apply for more documentary filmmaker grants, which I’m doing.
Micah used to play a lot of video games. Now he still plays, but his first priority is his podcast, and that has changed everything. He even decided to get a new haircut and look to be more professional on camera, and it's changed his overall level of self-esteem. It took a while to find his Ikegai sweet spot, but now that he's found it, he's on a mission. Watch his four-minute intro to see how much he cares about animals. And please subscribe to his channel and share it with all the professional grantmakers you know. :)
You may not have video production skills, but you have other skills, and you have a network of people who could help your child achieve his/her dreams. You want to be on the same side as your kids, not the parent saying “no” all the time. By following and enabling your child’s intrinsic sense of purpose, you have a chance to build something special together that will last for both your lifetimes.