The Two Things summarizes essential professional wisdom in two sentences, such as

The two things about economics

One: Incentives matter.
Two: There’s no such thing as a free lunch.”

I have five examples.

The two things about hexayurts:

One: take twelve 4×8 panels, as close to Thermax HD as you can find, and then cut six in half diagonally, tape the halves into a cone to make the roof, use whole for the walls.
Two: tape soaks up errors so use wide, good stuff and don’t ever skimp on the tape anchors.

The two things about global poverty eradication:

One: cheap solar panels will drive the second industrial revolution in only a few years
Two: lowering infant mortality is the number one goal, with food security a close second

The two things about the internet:

One: every generation (now two years apart!) redefines cool, and older trendspotters think it’s about technology
Two: every message has two ends and a format, the question is who are the intermediaries and what do they add/subtract along the way (from the wires, through the OS, to you.)

The two things about cryptography:

One: public key cryptography enabled secure communications when all channels are insecure, enabling people who have never had a secret conversation to communicate in secret any time they want to. At the time it was invented, this looked a lot like perpetual motion or levitation to cryptographers.
Two: quantum computers may well undo this revolution, returning us to an age where only those who’ve communicated secretly in the past can communicate securely in the future.

The two things about me:

One: If you have a pair of pistols on the mantle piece in the first act, they should be fired in the third. (Checkov’s gun applied to nuclear bombs, pandemic flu, biometric fascism, the collapse of civilian self-defense and so on)
Two: No human being can write my biography, not even Chuck Norris.

I think of The Two Things as the twitterish version of Wikipedia, really. And I’m not putting all this work into managing apocalyptic scenarios because I enjoy it, but because very few agencies really seem to be thinking about this stuff with a clear eye and the will to fix it. I just wish I had more consistent financial support to continue working on blocking out the general frameworks for dealing with the worst things in the world.