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John: Welcome to another edition of The Impact Podcast. I’m John Shegerian, and I’m so excited to have not only my friend, but also my doctor back with us again. Dr. Peter Kozlowski, welcome back to the Impact Podcast Doc Koz.

Dr. Peter Kozlowski: John, thank you for having me. It’s such an honor to be back.

John: Well, I’m honored to have you back because you’re not only my good friend, but you’re also my great doctor and you’ve helped me tremendously improve my health and wellness, which I’m forever grateful for, and it’s an ongoing journey. But today we’re going to be talking not about only my recovery and everything you’ve helped me with and of course, for our listeners and viewers who remember you, you came on last year and discussed your first book, Unfunc Your Gut, and now you have a wonderful and very important something that I’m working on right now. Get the Func Out and I’m midway through my process working with you on this on. And so we’re going to talk about this, your new book today. And for our listeners and viewers would like to find Doc Koz and work with them like I have, you could go to www.doc-koz.com. Doc, what made you write this great new book? And talk a little bit about the impetus behind that and why this book is so important to our listeners and viewers.

Peter: I would say, put it simply unfinished business.

John: I like that.

Peter: Yeah. So for any of your listeners that haven’t heard of functional medicine, maybe they missed our first podcast together or haven’t heard of functional medicine, that’s what I do. And so I was trained as a family practice doctor. I have an MD, I went through residency and I just got lucky really to be introduced to functional medicine. So for those of our listeners that haven’t heard of it…

John: Tell us what it is.

Peter: The whole point of it is to figure out why, instead of someone coming to me and me making them… giving them something to feel better, I help them figure out why, just like with working with you, we’ve helped you figure out why certain things are happening. It’s not pharmaceutical-based. It is investigation, it’s testing, and it’s using natural ways to heal. So it’s lumped under alternative medicine, but it is all about figuring out why someone’s sick. And so I always describe it for someone that’s new to functional medicine. It does not matter to me if you brought your child with autism to me, or if you brought your parent with dementia to me, or you got diagnosed with lupus or Hashimotos or elevated liver enzymes or blood sugar issues, I want to know why. And the reason someone comes to see me is to figure out why. They go to their regular doctor, they get a diagnosis, they get some pills that will help the symptoms. And then for some people, they want to know why, and so that’s the point of functional medicine. And I always describe those five areas we look regardless of the diagnosis. That’s my opinion of this. It is food, it is gut health, it is hormones, it is toxins, and it is mental, emotional, spiritual health. And for anybody that read my first book or listened to our first pod, they know that out of those five, to me, the most important is mental, emotional, and spiritual health.

So in Unfunc Your Gut, I covered food, gut health and mental, emotional, spiritual health. So when I sat down and had some free time, I was like, well, wait a minute. There’s unfinished business here. I work with so many people that have hormonal imbalances, and for most of my patients that we find a hormonal imbalance, they want to know why. And so what I try to uncover or teach in this new book is the connection to our toxic environment because it’s a major victory for a lot of people who have not felt well to find out, hey, my thyroid’s not working right, or I have adrenal fatigue, or I have low testosterone, like was my own story. Or for a woman, hey, I have estrogen dominance. But most of my patients want to take it even further. That’s fine, I have a hormonal imbalance, but why? And my argument is the toxic environment. And when I say toxins, I mean the most common things that I find in people are heavy metals and the most common heavy metals being lead in mercury. Mold for anybody with exposure to a water-damaged building, I find mold. Glyphosate, which is the main component of Roundup, which many people have heard of. And then there’s all the other stuff, which is what I talk about in the book. So I think a very interesting just chapter for someone to read is the introduction, where I use my wife’s morning routine. Sorry. So it actually starts with her bedtime routine of going to bed, waking up, having breakfast, showering, getting ready for the day using makeup and hair products, and all of that and then playing with our dogs. And just the amount of toxins that she is exposed to before even leaving the house or before even starting her day. And it’s a lot of stuff that people don’t think about. It’s what the almond milk is made of and her smoothie, it’s the pesticides and herbicides that are sprayed on the fruit and vegetables that are in her smoothie. It’s the plastic that our dog toys are made of.

Or if you have kids, the baby bottle or the flame retardants that they sprayed on the couch, so it doesn’t burn. It’s the 80 different chemicals that they’ve put into memory foam mattresses. It’s the mold that she might be breathing in. It’s the stress that’s not helping her detoxify. It’s the chlorine in the water, which is even worse when you heat up the water in the shower. It’s the makeup. And so all these different things are going back to an analogy that I really like that I’m sure we talked about the first time is the bucket. That we’re all born with this bucket and we fell this bucket with sugar and genetically modified food and processed foods and bad oils, and then you throw antibiotics and you get dysbiosis and SIBO. And then you deal with chronic stress, and that damages your adrenal glands. And if you’re under chronic stress and your adrenal glands are damaged, if you’re a man, you’re probably going to be having low testosterone. If you’re a woman, you’re probably going to be having low progesterone or low testosterone, or both. And then you’ve got all these toxins you’re exposed to and your thyroid stops working. And then these things happen, and then you can’t detox as well, and then you’re being exposed to more toxins and it’s just this neverending loop that people get on it.

And that’s what I’m trying to help people do is get out of that loop. And that’s why I didn’t… I wasn’t even really sure if I’d write one book and I definitely didn’t expect to write two and especially not even just one year after the first one. But I felt more confident writing this book. I like it better. I think it’s a better book. I think people are more interested in gut health, but I think that’s because they’re not aware of all these hormonal imbalances or their doctors are doing the proper testing. So they think they don’t have a hormonal issue. And I know that their regular doctors definitely not doing that toxin testing. So in the book, in this new book, Get the Func Out, I really get into lab testing. What’s the proper lab testing for your thyroid? What’s the proper lab testing for testosterone or reproductive hormones for women in estrogen, progesterone? How do you test for heavy metals? How do you test for mold? What do you do about these things? What foods will help? So my guess, my goal with this one is just really to create awareness around a subject that a lot of people aren’t aware of. And with our environment becoming increasingly toxic year after year, it’s just a matter of time before this becomes mainstream because there’s more and more people getting sick and not knowing why and wanting to know why.

John: Well, doc, just from my old personal experience working with you, I’m 60 years old and don’t smoke, don’t drink, been a vegetarian since I’m 17, and lived what is pretty much a clean and healthy lifestyle, but I was having both stomach issues and other issues, and you unraveled the mysteries by doing all the type of testing you said you did. Pee testing and poop testing and blood testing helped me straighten out both my stomach issues and you’re still working with me on the toxic issues, exactly what you cover in this new great book with regards to heavy metals and mercury poisoning. And the burdens that are contained there in are mold and the burdens of mold and your strategies are not that invasive, and nor is the testing.

So I want to share with our listeners and viewers that A, the testing is done mostly in your home and sent to the labs via mail, which is actually very easy. Even the poop and the pee testing and some of the blood testing and the strategy to get well is done through your natural ways of fixing and adjusting both your eating, architecture, vitamin strategies, and supplement strategies, and even something like the red light sauna, which you highly suggested that I use and it’s been very valuable for myself and for my wife, helping us both feel much better and clearer and get better sleep. So your methodology works. What’s the biggest challenge to get people to understand that even if they’ve lived a no smoking, no drinking, not a lot of red meat in every other type of historical, burdensome way of diet and actually exercise, that they could still have, as you said, the environmental burdens that just regular life brings to us that can cause toxicity in their body, in their gut, thyroid, hormonal structures, adrenal structures, et cetera.

Peter: I would say the hardest burden is just lack of awareness. That people don’t know. And that’s an even… it is a burden. What you’re mentioning is that I do work with a lot of people that are like, listen, I’ve been eating organic for seven years or 10 years, and I’ve been exercising and doing all this stuff, so I can’t have a toxic issue. And I have learned through my career that almost the more convinced someone is they have something, the less likely they have it. And the more convinced they don’t have something, the more likely they have it.

John: That’s interesting.

Peter: Yeah, but it’s sad. Because if you are investing the time that it takes to educate yourself, the money that it takes to spend on eating clean, that you could still have huge levels of glyphosate in your body, for example. Or when I start talking about heavy metals like lead and mercury, most people are like, well, I have no reason to have lead and mercury. Usually, the first response is, well, I never had mercury fillings, because that’s what most people have heard of is like mercury fillings. I’ve never had those. So I don’t have a mercury problem. And one example that I give is, I had a couple in their ’60s, and the woman had grown up here in Chicago, and her husband had grown up in Nigeria, and they wanted to do some preventative testing.

So I said let’s do heavy metal testing. And the three of us all thought that she would come back normal and he would come back with a toxic burden of metals because there’s not like an EPA as far as I know in Nigeria and I guess semi uneducated assumption, but the patient also who grew up there was like, they don’t protect the environment that we do in the United States. That we’re conscious of pollution in these things. And so we said, let’s do the testing and find out. And she tested completely negative. She had no metals in her body. Or excuse me. He tested completely negative. He had no metals in his body from growing up in Nigeria. She tested through the roof from growing up in Chicago. [crosstalk] First world versus, maybe some emerging economy world and you would think the opposite would be the truth. And no, right here in our own country, lots of environmental burdens that we are invisible.

And then another one is, I had a seven year old boy who came to me with the family brought him for OCD and he was developing OCD behaviors. So they said they wanted to figure out why. And so I said, whenever I work with neurologic conditions, I’m always testing for toxins. So I said, let’s test for toxins. We tested this little boy for heavy metals. Now, this family had had their son on an AIP diet since he was born, which is a diet that basically, it’s called the autoimmune protocol. It is an elimination diet, but even more intense. It is totally grain-free. There’s no nightshades, there’s no soy, corn, dairy. It is the cleanest diet you could imagine. And this boy, when he was in my office, I was like, well, what happens if you go to a birthday party and they have burgers or they have cake? And he’s like, “No way. I would ask for broccoli.” And I was like, whoa. I was blown away. so I was like, this boy has very little risk for a toxicity, but let’s test because there’s a neurologic issue going on. Got his test results back and his cesium and thallium were through the roof. And I was like, you are through the roof, the highest levels I’ve ever seen. And so I called the lab that we do testing with and I was like, can you guys help me figure this out? And they said, well, we’re seeing this more and more.

They used cesium and thallium in the oil industry and the oil industry, when they’re getting water… when they’re getting oil out of the ground, they use water and there’s water leftover from that process. And guess who’s buying that water? Farms experiencing droughts. Mostly farms in California, because that’s where a lot of the droughts were in America. And so they’re watering their crops with oil water and that’s full of cesium and thallium. So this little boy, through eating what I would argue is the healthiest diet, a seven-year-old I could have in the history poison himself. And so that’s where it’s like, the worst part about that is a farm can be called organic, even if they’re using oil water to water their crops.

John: That makes sense.

Peter: And so the deeper you dig into this stuff, and it makes me mad, that for my patients, because it’s like, man, some of these people are putting in so much work to be clean, healthy, and yet you don’t even have a chance really. You’re getting screwed over by just our environment. So that’s what taught me when it comes… I don’t run all of my functional medicine tests for every patient. And that’s primarily because of cost and the costs can add up. And so I’m typically trying to focus where I think somebody would have the highest yield, so that’s frequently we’re starting with their gut. But the toxin testing, I have learned that I don’t really need to hear anything in your history. I think everybody should be tested for heavy metals.

I think everybody should be tested for glyphosate. I think anybody who has any question of living in or working in a water-damaged building should test for mold, whether that was 30 years ago or last night. Because the worst part about toxins, I don’t feel it. Let’s say I’m eating a bunch of sushi. I’m eating a bunch of tuna full of mercury. I don’t feel it, I don’t get a stomach ache. I don’t get a headache. I’m drinking water out of the tap that’s full of lead. I don’t feel sick. I’m not showering and getting a rash from the chemicals that are in the water that I’m using to shower. When it comes to mold, someone can be allergic to mold and that’s what traditional medicine believes in, is mold allergies. Traditional medicine does not believe in mold toxicity. When I was writing this book, we have this famous book in medical school called The Pathologic Basis of Disease. It’s a 1700-page textbook with the smallest print you’ve ever seen. And it has everything that could ever go wrong with the body. If you know this book, then you know everything that could go wrong with the body. So I went back to this book and I was like, I didn’t remember, because it was a long time ago, I had to learn that book.

Did they talk about mold toxicity? In the 1700 pages, there’s two pages about mold, and the two pages are about allergies to mold and that is not what I deal with. I deal with mold toxicity, which is the buildup of mycotoxins in your body. When mold is present in a building or anywhere, it releases spores and that’s how it replicates. That’s what someone becomes allergic to. But mold also releases mycotoxins, which is how it defends itself. It’s how it kills things around it so it can survive. And that is what gets into our body and causes mitochondrial damage, which leads to cell death, which leads to disease. But somebody who’s allergic to mold, if they walk into a moldy building, they’re going to note, their nose is going to start running, they’re going to start getting allergic symptoms. Somebody who’s developing a toxicity to mold won’t know it. They’re just going to be living and breathing it, and then one day they’re going to get diagnosed with Hashimotos or lupus or another autoimmune disease. And that fact of toxins makes it… there’s so many things that makes it difficult.

One, another one being that the traditional medical world just doesn’t really accept this, but they’re silent. You don’t feel symptoms from it. And we would all be better off if every time we ate a vegetable that was loaded with glyphosate or another herbicide, we felt it. We’re like our bodies were telling us, hey, don’t eat this. But no, we don’t feel this stuff until it’s too late. And that’s where my argument and my hope for our society one day is that toxin testing is routine testing that starts in pediatrics, that that starts when we’re kids, because I do toxin testing on adults like you. And it’s like, well, when did this get here? I don’t know. I can tell you whether it’s coming in now and I can tell you that it’s there, but I can’t tell you if you got this from the dorm you lived in college or if it was your parents’ house that had water in the basement or if it’s… most people want to know.

And I agree, I would want to know where I got the lead in my body, but I didn’t test myself till I already had low testosterone. And then it’s like, well, I don’t know when it got there because nobody’s doing this testing. So the time to get toxin testing done is right now if you’re feeling good. Because this should be preventative medicine. Unfortunately, what I do is, their disease has started and my patients have been to university clinics around the country and their neighborhoods. They’ve been to Mayo Clinic and Cleveland Clinic, and it’s like, screw it, I’m out of options. Let’s try this alternative functional medicine. Maybe they’ll help me figure it out. Well, if we started this testing for our kids, then maybe you wouldn’t be getting diagnosed with these crazy conditions that are on the rise. So it’s something that I’m very passionate about as you can tell that this stuff should be tested for everybody because there… I work with very few people that have an exposure history. Most people that I’m diagnosing are like, they’re basically out of options. So they’re like, I’ll try it, but I have no reason to have a ton of mercury in my body. And they’ll do it and we find it and then they start healing.

John: Like you said, it should become part of regular practice and protocol instead of the Hail Mary [inaudible] For our listeners and viewers who just joined us today, we’ve got back with us today, Dr. Peter Kozlowski. He’s known as Doc Koz. You can find him at www.doc-koz.com. Here’s his new book, Get the Func Out. It’s a really important and great read. I’m living through this right now myself, Dr. Peter is my doctor as well, and helping me with these exact issues and helping me. I’m feeling better than I’ve ever felt. You can find this book not only on his website, but of course at amazon.com and other great bookstores. Doc, what is the key takeaways that you want people to have from your new and great book?

Peter: I think the biggest key takeaway is detox doesn’t have to be that complicated. And one of the things that I really hate in the whole functional medicine world is there’s a lot of people out there selling products. And specifically when it comes to detox, and they have great social media sites that will convince you that you’re toxic and buy their detox plan for three months and then buy it for another three months, and then you’ll be able to detox. Toxins are fat-soluble. So what that means is when we breathe them, eat them, drink them, absorb them through our skin, they will get stored in our fat tissue. Every cell in your body is surrounded by a cell membrane that has fat in. So these toxins can get stored in any part of your body, from your brain to your toes. What detox is, is a two, some people say three, to keep it simple, I’d say a two-phase process in the liver.

And I get through this in the book with all the pictures to help make it make sense. But when we absorb this stuff through our lungs, through our gut, through our skin, our blood sends them to the liver. And most people know the liver as your detox organ. And what your liver does is go through phase one and phase two of detox. When it does that, it makes the toxins water-soluble. Once they are water soluble, you can then pee, poop and sweat them up. That’s what detox is. So for some people, they don’t have access to this testing, and it can get nervous like, what am I going to do? Do the basics. And so if peeing, pooping, and sweating the toxins out is how we get rid of them. Drink enough water, drink half your body weight in water. And so I use pounds to ounces. If you’re 180 pounds, 90 ounces of water a day. Make sure you’re pooping every day. If you’re not moving your bowels every day, you’re not ready to detox.

Because imagine your liver goes through this whole detox process. You’ve got all this lead and mold and glyphosate that’s been detoxified on its way out through your stool, but you haven’t pooped in three days. Then those toxins are just sitting there and they get reabsorbed right back into your body. So that’s where unfuncing your gut comes into play. And that’s the first book is, if you’re not moving your bowels every day, you’re not ready for the next steps and you got to get your gut right. And then sweaty, so you mentioned one of my favorite tools, infrared sauna, but then there’s also exercise, and making sure that you’re exercising every day and sweat it. So there’s water, pooping, sweating, those are things that everybody can do. And then I would say the last one is sleep.

If you picture all day long, we’re under this barrage. From the moment we wake up and the wifi router’s too close to our bed or we start putting our laptop on our stomach and the toxic onslaught starts. And all day long you know, driving to the office or playing with your kids or your dogs or making breakfast, lunch, and dinner, there’s this constant bombardment of toxins. We’re filtering them. But sleep is when your body restores. That’s when you restore your immune system. That’s when your immune system makes its memory against the things it’s encountered. And that is when our ability to detox is restored. And so peeing, pooping, sweating, sleeping. And then the last thing is nutrition. And I could talk about in Unfunc Your Gut, it’s the nine to 12 servings of vegetables and fruited it. And in the new book I get into all the different foods that support detox. So that two-phase process that functions in your liver, phase one and phase two of detox is totally dependent on vitamins and minerals. How do you get vitamins and minerals through your diet? And then the most vitamins and minerals we’re getting is from fruits and vegetables. So that’s where I go with the nine to 12 servings a day.

So these are steps that will take you a lot farther than getting suckered into some kind of social media marketing of buying the new and trendiest detox protocol. And I have never… there’s a lot of people making money off this stuff and their intentions are good, but at the end of the day it’s also about their profits. And so that’s never been my attitude and you can detox… you can support your body through basic steps that are going to keep you healthy regardless in order for you to detox. Now a lot of these things like heavy metals, lead, and mercury can get really stuck in your body and you do need assistance to get them out, but don’t assume that. And so if you do want to go down the detox road, invest the money in the proper testing, which I go through in each chapter of the book of how to get the right testing and make sure. Because like I said, the more convinced someone comes to me that they have a mold problem, they’ll end up testing positive for lead or something else. And so don’t assume just because you’ve watched some promo video on YouTube that you have mold or lead, get the testing done. And if you do have it, as you know, there’s a way to get this stuff out and so…

John: You’re going to feel so much better. My life is improved, my digestion’s improved, my sleep is improved, my clarity is improved. Just my overall well-being since I’ve started working with you and nothing, both the testing and the protocol for me specifically in terms of mold and some of the metals, it’s not invasive. Either way, it’s not invasive. And also I don’t live in the Chicago land area. So for our listeners and viewers who live in Chicago land area, who want to see Doc Koz in person, up front, have one-on-one, which is wonderful, they could come see you in person, but you and I have done it all over Zoom. So wherever you are in the world, you could be doing this stuff with you just over Zoom. [inaudible]. Since you and I are talking in January, 2023 and people are living with their new year’s resolutions, which some of the people’s new year’s resolutions include not only more exercise, but also losing weight. Since as you say, toxins are stored in fat cells in many ways, or part of the fat molecule, are people that are losing weight more at risk because now they’re releasing more toxins than ever before. And is there a strategy for them to help their body rid themselves? Is it along the same lines as you said, when if you’re going to start a new protocol as a new year’s resolution? Make sure you’re drinking the right water and enough water, make sure you’re getting enough good nutrition and your sleep architecture’s good because you’re going to need it because now you’re going to have an extra burden while you lose the weight to rid yourself of extra toxins than ever before.

Peter: Totally. I’ve heard that from many patients, the people that go through rap… it’s more when you go through the rapid weight loss than the more gradual weight loss. But absolutely, if you talk to people that have lost weight quickly, they feel sick a lot of times. And I do think that that’s a lot of the toxins coming out and that is a thing. The keto flu, that keto flu. Is really that part of that ridding yourself of toxins. And so that, that’s a very real thing. And the hard part is, I don’t like to just throw a general detox protocol out there, but my favorite… So for somebody like that, my favorite detox supplement is glutathione, and it’s a light Bazalmo glutathione. And so what that means is, is a fat soluble glutathione because if you do a little research on glutathione, it’s very hard to absorb.

And then, unfortunately, there’s a lot of these supplement companies that make Apsol forms in powder forms of glutathione and it’s just a waste of money. The liposomal forms are typically a liquid and you drink it and it’s absorbed. And so if somebody goes in and looks at Get the Func Out and looks at the liver diagram when you look at phase one and phase two of detox, there are very different nutrients that are involved in phase one and phase two except for glutathione. Glutathione is the only thing that works on phase one and phase two of detox. Now a lot of people, and if you buy some of these products that are designed properly, they really target phase one of detox. Well, if you only target phase one of detox, you create a lot of what are called reactive oxygen species that are intermediary metabolites that are actually more toxic. And so if you don’t ramp up phase two equally enough, you can actually make yourself worse. And so that’s where people just really have to be careful with this stuff and work with someone who has some experience with it.

But if I could just give one nutrient that I would give someone for detox, it’s liposomal glutathione. Now, there’s a lot of detox products out there that are targeted at phase one and phase two. So what somebody can do is sit down with my new book and open up that chapter on detox and I get into all the nutrients. And if you are deciding on a detox supplement, look at it and does it contain things that are needed for phase one? Does it contain things that are needed for phase two? And if it looks like a nice balance, then you probably have yourself a good supplement. And that’s all right there in the book in a beautiful picture of the liver with what you need.

John: And you’ve had me on that glutathione and it’s helped me tremendously as my blood tests have proven out and as my health and energy have massively improved because of that. So again, I know what you’re saying to be true because I’m living it and I’ve been living it with your help for over the course of the last year. For our listeners and viewers out there, I highly recommend Doc Koz’s first book Unfunc Your Gut, his new book, Get The Func Out. You could find Dr. Koz and you could find his books at www.doc-koz.com. You could also find them of course, on amazon.com and other fine bookstores. Doc Koz, you’re always welcome back on the Impact podcast. You not only a wonderful friend, but a great guest because as we know there’s no finish line to having good health and wellness. It’s just a journey and having you to help people on that journey, which you’ve been helping me, has just been a wonderful joy and has made my life so much more improved and better. Thank you again for helping others as well, get their life better and making them more feel, feel well. You’re always welcome back here, Doc. Can’t wait to see you again. And thanks for all the great work that you’ve done.

Peter: And it’s such an honor. Thank you for trusting me with your health and having me on your podcast and getting to share a little bit more about functional medicine.

John: This edition of The Impact Podcast is brought to you by ERI. ERI has a mission to protect people, the planet, and your privacy, and is the largest fully integrated IT and electronics asset disposition provider and cybersecurity-focused hardware destruction company in the United States and maybe even the world. For more information on how ERI can help your business properly dispose of outdated electronic hardware devices, please visit eridirect.com. This edition of the Impact Podcast is brought to you by Engage. Engage is a digital booking platform, revolutionizing the talent booking industry with thousands of athletes, celebrities, entrepreneurs, and business leaders, Engage is the go-to spot for booking talent, for speeches, custom experiences, live streams, and much more. For more information on Engage or to book talent today, visit letsengage.com.

John Shegerian: Listen to the Impact podcast on all your favorite podcast platforms including Apple podcast Google podcasts, Amazon Music, iHeart Radio, audible Spotify Stitcher, and of course, at impactpodcast.com. This edition of the Impact podcast is brought to you by ERI. ERI has a mission to protect people, the planet, and your privacy and is the largest fully integrated IT and electronics asset disposition provider and cybersecurity-focused hardware destruction company in the United States and maybe even the world. For more information on how ERI can help your business properly dispose of outdated electronic hardware devices. Please visit eridirect.com. This episode of the impact podcast is brought to you by closed-loop partners. Closed-loop Partners is a leading circular economy, investor in the United States with an extensive network of Fortune 500 corporate Investors, family offices, institutional investors, industry experts, and Impact Partners. Closed Loops platform spans the Arc of capital from Venture Capital to private equity, bridging gaps, and fostering synergies to scale the circular economy. The find closed-loop Partners, please go to www.closedlooppartners.com.

John: Welcome to another edition of the Impact podcast. I’m John Shegerian. And I’m so honored to have with us today Debbie Lizt. She’s the head of global sustainability for Intuit. Welcome to the Impact podcast, Debbie.

Debbie Lizt: Thank you, John, so much for having me. It’s great to be here with you today.

John: Debbie, we’re going to talk a lot about the sustainability journey at Intuit. But before we go into that, I want to hear a little bit about your journey where you grow up, how do you even got to this great position that you’re in Intuit and how you made that whole journey along the way?

Debbie: Yeah, I’d be happy to share that. So I’m from the Midwest originally and actually I am the granddaughter of a farmer so I would spend summers in Wisconsin on my grandparents’ farm and I think that that was really for me at a very beginning of my sustainability journey just seeing the human impact on nature and the land and vice versa, I have always felt a strong connection to our natural environment. And that really continued, I would say throughout my educational pathway. So in college, I was a civil engineering major, I focused on building structures that built environment. I was always fascinated with that and I was privileged enough to have a adjunct professor when I was an undergrad, who was an architect by day professor by night, I don’t know when he found time to sleep, but he was really phenomenal. In terms of introducing me to this very nascent world of green building and green architecture. And I learned so much from him that upon matriculation, I wanted to do something in that space and I wanted to be a part of the built environment in a positive way. And so after graduating, I went into the construction industry focused on Green Building and this was a time when lead… so that entire Green Building concept was still very nascent. It was new. And I was on a project where this large pension center in Chicago. For those who are familiar with the Chicago Convention Center, McCormick Place. They were expanding it and it was going to be lead certified, which at the time it was going to be, I think the largest building in the country by square footage to be lead certified. I raised my hand to essentially guide that process.

So I became a lead API guided that process and I became a… for the company I was working for at the time I guess, their first internal Green Building expert and so there I would go into these client meeting and introduce this concept of Green Building, the cost, the benefits, and I was always fascinated by the folks who I was sitting across from the decision-makers in terms of what went into their decision-making process to invest in these types of buildings, from more of a vanilla on strategic perspective, and I realized that I didn’t know how to necessarily speak that language. I didn’t know necessarily how to speak the business language and at the time, didn’t have a really strong environmental science grounding. So, after a few years of working I actually went back to school to fill those gaps. And I ended up getting an MBA and then a master’s in Environmental Management from Duke University, who at the time was one of the few schools who created programs like that. And now I’m just so incredibly impressed by all… It seems like every academic institution has some type of sustainability degree, certification pathway.

And so for me that’s just been extraordinary to see and just really inspiring. And after grad school, I worked in corporate sustainability for Abercrombie Fitch leading there really their first-person focus on sustainability leading their sustainability initiative. I then became fascinated in renewable energy. So I went to work for a solar developer for a few years but I always really loved the challenges presented in more of the corporate sustainability space. All of the problems that a large company was solving in terms of how to reduce its environmental footprint to have more of a positive impact on the planet. And so that’s really what led me to this role here at Intuit, as it had a global sustainability. And I’m I feel incredibly privileged to be in this role and to be really guiding and setting the direction for a company of Intuit, size, reputation, and with really all the work that we do, which I’m sure will plunge on.

John: But your journey’s fascinating because truly Debbie, you’re what I call with all affection and kindness, you’re one of the real sustainability. OGs, because you were back in the original. Like you said, the nascent stage of Green building, Lead certified, platinum-certified. That whole beginning back when you were working on the McCormick Place project and then went on to go get other formal, education in environmental sciences and stuff. And people think this concept in America, on a corporate basis, has been around a long time, but the truth is when I even started this show. There were very, very few chief sustainability officers or head of global sustainability or impact officers. And very few Universities had any programs in this that even as recent as 2007. So you have been doing this a long time, so it’s no wonder and it’s a lucky break for them to have you at Intuit running their Global sustainability program makes total sense now. Makes total sense.

Debbie: Thank you. Yeah. No, it’s been an amazing personal journey, and professional Journey for myself, and to your point, I’ve been in this space for over 15 years now and it’s just amazing to see the change that has happened and really just yeah, the groundswell of people that have joined our ranks and are really having an affecting change.

John: Well, you were there for the evolution and I feel like this evolution is now becoming somewhat of a revolution in a good way. A positive revolution, we’ll get into that later. Let’s go back and talk about Intuit for a second and for our listeners and viewers who are not familiar with Intuit. First of all, to find Debbie and all her great colleagues of all the important work they’re doing in corporate responsibility and sustainability, you could go to www.intuit.com, but understand that Intuit under Debbie, and her colleagues, have all these amazing brands that are so familiar to us household Brands like Turbo Tax. Credit Karma, Minute, QuickBooks, and MailChimp. So you are really sitting on top of a brand empire that most of Americans and people around the world are very very familiar with it. That have been using for many many years.

Debbie: Yeah. No, as a company we’re privileged to serve over 100 million customers globally through those products that you just mentioned and really in our mission to power prosperity or those that we serve our customers, our community. So, the impacts and the amount of individuals that we affect on a daily basis, and it is pretty extraordinary.

John: So what year specifically did you join Intuit in your role as head of global sustainability?

Debbie: Yeah. I am going to be celebrating my one-year anniversary with Intuit in this role and so Intuit has had a storied history of leadership in the climate space before I join this role. So I feel like just carrying the mantle and pushing the company forward into the future. So yes, still relatively new at Intuit but obviously bringing my expertise to bear at the company.

John: So now you join a year or so ago. Talk about how do you assess where Intuit was and where you wanted to take it, especially with regards to Intuit’s carbon footprint as it existed and operational footprint. Because there’s so many ways of doing this and doing it, right there’s so anyways to show progress and as I was taught many years ago by then, who was the person and who is the head of sustainability for Molson Coors at the time on the show he said to me, I was asking him about how weird is this end and he goes, “John, in sustainability there’s never finish line and it really was a very early education to how these journeys go. So now you start, you have a great storied history behind you at Intuit but now you are sitting in the seat yourself. How do you assess that carbon footprint and operational for print and create go forward plan for Intuit?

Debbie: Yeah, great question. Before I arrived Intuit had been focused on reducing, its operational carbon footprint for the last decade and had been making really great strides in terms of setting sustainability targets. So when I arrived, it was really an opportune moment where we as a company acknowledged that the science tells us we the planet of humanity need to cut our emissions in half by 2030 and reach net zero emissions no later than 2050. So therefore Intuit has committed and we’ve actually submitted are near a long-term science-based NetZero target, to science-based target initiative that’s BTI for validation and either fully recognizing that meeting these targets won’t be easy. And in fact, were exploring Innovative Technologies for our offices, were looking at new ways to engage our suppliers in hitting those targets because we know this is going to be a journey. And so right now we’re… and I’ll give you a couple of examples of what we’re doing. Since I’ve really taken over this role.

And then setting these targets is that particularly what it comes to our offices we’re exploring procuring, 24/7, renewable energy essentially for every electron that our office uses matching that with a renewable energy source and Google other companies have really pioneered this. They have a larger energy demand than we do. So we’re really looking at this from, how can a company of Intuit size really lead in this area that perhaps we can Inspire other companies to engage with. And there are certainly challenges to procuring 24/7 renewable energy. It is not easy, and so we’re really working through that with legal through various partners to explore how we can do that. Because we really see this as one, away that we can have incredible impact and two ways that we can as I said Inspire our peers to also look at these new Innovative Partnerships and and procurement methods to really drive down emission quickly.

And and then even on the supply chain level our company is scope three emissions make up 97% of our total emissions footprint. So we know that we have to engage our supply chain in this journey. And so we’re looking at really innovative ways to engage with them and particularly be a company that serves small businesses through Quick books, were paying particularly close attention to those small business suppliers in our supply chain and in fact, what resources they would need because unlike an Intuit, these small businesses, small business suppliers may not have in-house climate experts like myself. They may lack capital to really move towards this climate transfer… jump on this climate transformation that we’re all need to essentially engage in and so we’ve introduced to at least our small business suppliers and our small business customers a platform that we created in November of 2021 and you can actually find it on our website.

It’s Intu Climate action Marketplace and it’s essentially an online destination for any small or medium-sized business to get connected to solutions that eventually will help them replace high-emission business activity is wick more sustainable solution Your category is like energy, travel, office supplies, food waste often an exclusive discount that’s why we created this market place to begin with was to really enable small businesses [inaudible] journey and particularly they lack some of that capital to provide them with an incentive to take those steps. So I’m really excited about all the work that we’re doing operationally right now and thinking about that long-term future excited about again creating these innovative solutions to really push the needle to hit our target.

John: And what I read about your targets, talk a little bit about what it means your 50… Why is it called 50 by 30 climate call again? Explain that to me. So I understand it our listeners and viewers can understand that.

Debbie: Yeah, so actually for a little bit of historical context so they said we as a company have been on the Journey of reducing our operational footprint for the last decade, and by 2019, we had actually met… our goal was to procure, 100% renewable energy for operations to reduce at that time, our carbon footprint by 50%. We met those goals 10 and five years. Yeah, and by meeting those goals early, it gave us the band way to ask ourselves. How can we do more and knowing that climate change severely impacts the ability of our employees, our customers, and the communities that we serve to prosper, we knew that we needed to look at that point beyond our operational boundary, which is why we created this climate positive commitment, which essentially states that were going to reduce carbon emissions outside of our operational boundary by 2 million metric tons by 2030. And that 2 million metric tons is 50 times what our 2018 carbon footprint was, by 2030. So that’s where you get this 50 by 30 strategic name. And that was really our goal and to do that by helping these key stakeholders that I mentioned our employees, our customers, and the communities that we serve to one, reduce their own climate emissions, but two to become more resilient in the face of the climate crisis.

John: So 50 by 30 was started in 2019, you said?

Debbie: Correct. 2000… Yeah.

John: This is about four years old. So what were some of the… I know you just joined about a year ago, but what are some of the best lessons learned since launching 50 by 30 that you’re taking forward, and using that as informing you as you make further decisions in the sustainability journey for Intuit?

Debbie: Yeah, so great question. So really, this climate-positive commitment has allowed us to explore Innovative Partnerships and accelerate solutions and products that we otherwise necessarily wouldn’t have explored or tested and so I’ll give a couple of examples. So one, particularly in the communities that we serve we’ve been able to pilot so pretty Innovative Partnerships. One partnership that we have is with a company called Clear Loop, and their work is really focused on cleaning up the grid here in the United States and providing clean energy access through the development of solar project in community that are otherwise being left behind in this renewable energy transition by we as a country are in the middle of right now and that, we as corporates have been able to take advantage of. And in partnership with this company, we’ve been able to go into communities where we have had presents and find these solar projects that not only help these communities one, gain access to clean energy that they would have never had access to before, and therefore helping to reduce emissions.

But two, we’re creating jobs in these communities, through these projects new jobs in these communities and we’re also through these projects, creating a platform for students in these communities to get exposure to this clean energy future and jobs of the future in this space and learn more about these technologies through stem educational programs. And that really has been, I think one of the amazing lessons for all of this in terms of these projects is we’re really, not just accelerating solutions and projects that would reduce carbon emissions but we’re really creating a myriad of benefits for these communities which is been extraordinary and it is not to say that this is easy. One of the biggest lessons that we’ve learned over these past few years is particularly working with these types of projects, is that they take time and there can be a number of roadblocks in getting these types of projects and programs established. But the end of the day, the work is really more than just about reducing emissions. It’s about creating these opportunities in this communities.

John:: Got it. How many… just so our listeners and viewers and for those of you just joining us, we’ve got Debbie Lizt today with us. She’s the head of global sustainability for Intuit to find Debbie and her colleagues and all the important and great work, they’re doing in sustainability and corporate responsibility. Please go to www.intuit.com. Intuit remember controls and owns, Turbo Tax, Credit Karma, mint, QuickBooks and MailChimp. So you’re definitely going to be positively affected by Debbie and her important work at Intuit. How many employees does Intuit have? And how dispersed is your employee base?

Debbie: Yes, we have over 17,000, employees globally. Dispersed all over the world, yeah, and they certainly are as I mentioned one of our key stakeholders. So we’re really looking at ways that we can not only engage our employees in our climate positive commitment and in our efforts and what we’re doing operationally but really trying to provide them with more access to solutions themselves that they can take into their personal lives, that will help them lead more sustainable lives. Help them reduce their carbon emissions and essentially even help them stay and save money too a couple of benefits that we offer our employees is, we have a wellness for life benefit. That is a certain number of dollars that employees been certain categories. And we open that up, that employees can essentially offset the purchase of solar panels for their homes with this type of benefit, which I think a number of our employees. I don’t have the exact stats on this one, but I think a number of employees have taken advantage of that wellness for life benefit, to engage, and to procure sustainable solutions for their homes.

John: What was fascinating to me is that you get to have the benefit also of having employees that are so dispersed and creating solutions and opportunities for them where they are sitting geographically and culturally speaking. But also, I guess I would bet that they also get the share back, what’s going on because as we know we’re somewhat as a country somewhat behind some of the countries in Europe for instance that were into sustainability probably 40, 50 years ago. But based on their size they knew they could have live in a literary economy that had to be more circular based even though that was a terms that were being used regularly back then but it must be a fascinating experience to have dialogue an ongoing dialogue with all these employees around the world. And sharing best practices.

Debbie: It is. We have sustainability champion teams. That’s what we call. essentially are green teams across the world and it’s amazing. I’m always inspired by the ideas and the programs that these teams are creating locally. Because to your point, so much of what’s happening in the world is hyperlocal as well and a solution that might work here in the United States, may not work in India. May not work in the UK, or maybe there is some type of solution or product, et cetera, that can work globally. And so it’s really neat to work with teams across the world to see what’s happening both in their geographic locations. And also, just what we can do to accelerate, what they’re doing in those location [crosstalk].

John: With regards to your operational footprint the rethinking and how you’re going about on the energy procurement, how hard is that to create the energy goals? How hard is it to achieve the energy goals that you set out about 10 or 15 minutes ago with regards to other sources of renewable energy that Intuit and your client base in the folks that you touch which is massive like you said at the top of the show 100 million plus? So there’s more opportunities, is energy, diversity, and choice, a difficult thing in the times that we live in?

Debbie: I think it certainly can be. There are certainly challenges like I mentioned moving towards like a 24/7 renewable energy procurement policy for a company of our size while we have incredible amount of influence, it still is challenging. There are still these roadblocks that I’ve mentioned whether they’re legal, whether they’re financial whether they’re even just structural challenges to procuring energy which is why we’re exploring them or trying to find partners that will think creatively with us on how to remove some of those barriers that will allow us to connect to those energy sources and not something that we’re trying to do for our employees, for our customers, for the communities that we serve like I mentioned with that partnership with Clear Loop, trying to unlock access to renewable energy and communities that otherwise wouldn’t have had access to renewable energy before. And as I mentioned on our climate action Marketplace, we actually have one of our solution providers, is a company called EnergySage and they’re a solar energy Marketplace here in the United States. That essentially helps individuals and small businesses connect with different solar providers. Because that can also be a challenge, a lot of our small business customers, a lot of our employees don’t know where to begin, and taking that next step, either, whether energy procurement, whether it’s even just how to divert waste, food waste, how to procure more sustainable, office, supplies et cetera. And so that’s where we’re really trying to look at those barriers and think creatively about how we can partner develop solutions that start reducing those barriers so people can connect to the solutions.

John: It seems like you guys were so far ahead. Like you said, you beat your goals by ten years or so. And then you made a real double-down commitment, to really power and facilitate sustainable practices and opportunities for your SMBs, in your client base around the world, which is so it’s really wonderful because like you said, so many people don’t know where to even start the sustainability journey, small and medium businesses are lost and they don’t have a Debbie Lizt sitting in their office that they could go turn to and ask for help. So, this is just unbelievably wonderful. That’s great.

Debbie: Thanks. Yeah and I’ll just throw up some statistics on it. [inaudible] a small business community. 90% of our global business population is made up of small business employees and here in the United States, there are over 30 million small businesses. And so it’s extraordinary when you think about the scale and I think particularly those small businesses haven’t been engaged when we talk about solving the climate crisis, how do we empower a very large portion of our global business population to take those first steps to really move along that journey like large corporations are and we at Intuit as I said, we focused on small businesses. They’re one of our [inaudible] and there was a stop that I read recently from Bheema here in the United States, Federal Emergency Management Agency that said something like 40… estimated that something like 40% of small businesses never reopen after a natural disaster and that really struck me like 40% of these small businesses can’t recover. And we recognize that these small businesses in the fate of these climate crisis particularly they lack the type of safety net. That like a large corporation has an access to capital that a large corporation like Intuit has. They may never recover in the wake of a disaster. And so that’s why we really are focused on trying to create tools and products and services that can help them take that step to become more climate resilient and to be able to thrive.

John: On a personal note Debbie it seems you have such a great history in sustainability, going back to the McComirk Place story. When I started on the journey too back then, somewhere in that same area, there was no such thing as part of our vernacular, Aleksic [?] on such as the acronym ESG, or the shift from the linear to Circular economy was certainly not happening then it seems to be happening now and there wasn’t the financial institutions like Larry Fink over Black Rock Stella saying, “Hey, my portfolio companies have to not only be talking about ESG but they better be doing it and proving to me that they’re doing it otherwise, they won’t be a portfolio company. Where are we in this fascinating sustainability journey? Where do you feel that we are and are you more hopeful than ever before given where you sit right now and where the world is evolving on these different acronyms and practices and media messaging is that we’re hearing more than ever before?

Debbie: So I am hopeful. I really I’m hopeful I know that particularly when you read the headlines and you just look outside your window and you see what’s happening. It can be incredibly depressing and disheartening but I guess I’m forever an optimist. I look actually at particularly the work that we’ve done as a company, and the projects that we’ve been able to create and the communities where we’ve been able to impact, and I remain incredibly hopeful that there is a future that is possible. Where we do mitigate the worst impacts of climate change and when reading the headlines about ESG, I think we’re moving towards the direction where there’s going to be greater accountability for companies to not only show ambitious target but to really show progress against those targets to really disclose the impacts that climate change is happening, and the risk that climate change has on their businesses. But also the opportunities that this opens up to and I think it’s going to lead to… this is me speaking personally, but I think it’s going to lead to greater transformation. You mentioned things like circular economy et cetera. And I think that there’s like an extraordinary opportunity to grow new businesses in this type of environment to think and develop new Innovative technologies that will really help us draw down emissions. And so I am incredibly hopeful and particularly now at a company that has a climate positive commitment that looks not just in our operations but outside of our operations and the positive impact that we can have for the planet, but also for those that we serve, keeps me energized every day.

John: Obviously, and what’s wonderful about what you’re doing at Intuit is that you’re empowering all of your customer base. And that’s a domino effect, that’s massive in terms of not only just doing linearly what Intuit is about but you’re affecting the whole world by the all your client base, which is like you said 100 million plus, which is just fascinating. For our listeners and viewers Debbie’s corporate responsibility report is published every year somewhere in the August area, you could find their corporate responsibility reports on intuit.com.

Debbie, where are you going next with Intuit you’re a year into this. You’ve got a big future in front of you and some big goals talk a little bit about what’s next? Because I find it always facsinating that is such an interesting array of issues that you could decide to be focused on. What do you look at as what’s the next thing in the years to come for you and your team at Intuit?

Debbie: Well certainly as I stated we’ve committed to these NetZero science-based NetZero targets and so like where my next few years will take me as really being and working cross-functionally. When we talk about business transformation, it really is about working cross-functionally across the business to ensure that we have the carbonization roadmaps and place that we have supplier engagement pathways, bringing our suppliers along with us on this journey. It’s about exploring these Innovative technologies that will really help us put us on that path to achieving those targets. And then continuing to look beyond our operational boundary, beyond the value chain. We have this climate-positive commitment to reduce 2 million metric tons by 2030. That is no small feat and three years in, well, we’ve been able to help reduce 400,000 metric tons of carbon emissions. So, that’s a little over 10X on our 50X journey, we still have a ways to go. So for me and it’s working with my team, working with partners that we have outside of the company, to continue to innovate and to continue to think creatively about what types of programs and products that we can create both in the communities that we serve for our customers for our employees. And I know that it’s not a specific targeted answer, but there’s a lot of work still ahead to be done and I’m just really excited about the possibility.

John: Well, we are very excited that you’re in this very important role, at Intuit. And again, for our listeners and viewers to find Debbie and her colleagues and their corporate responsibility report, you could go to www.intuit.com. Remember Intuit owns Turbo Tax, Credit Karma, mint QuickBooks and MailChimp, so were all affected and we all get to use some of your wonderful brands on a regular basis. Debbie, thank you and all the great people at Intuit for making the important impacts that you make in making the world a better place. We look forward to having you back on and continuing your story and your journey with Intuit in the near future.

Debbie: Thank you.

John: It was such a pleasure to be with you today and I look forward to our next conversations and thank you all for listening today, I’m really excited to share Intuit’s story with you.

John: This edition of the Impact podcast is brought to you by Engage. Engage is a digital booking platform revolutionizing, the talent booking industry. With thousands of athletes celebrities entrepreneurs and Business Leaders, Engage is the go-to spot for booking talent for speeches custom experiences live streams, and much more. For more information on Engage or to book talent today visit letsengage.com.

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John Shegerian: Do you have a suggestion for a Rockstar Impact podcast guest? Go to impactpodcast.com and just click, “Be a Guest,” to recommend someone today. This edition of The Impact Podcast is brought to you by ERI. ERI has a mission to protect people, the planet, and your privacy, and is the largest fully integrated IT and electronics asset disposition provider and cybersecurity-focused hardware destruction company in the United States and maybe even the world. For more information on how ERI can help your business properly dispose of outdated electronic hardware devices, please visit eridirect.com.

John: This edition of The Impact Podcast is brought to you by Engage. Engage is a digital booking platform revolutionizing the talent booking industry. With thousands of athletes, celebrities, entrepreneurs, and business leaders Engage is the go-to spot for booking talent, for speeches, custom experiences, live streams, and much more. For more information on Engage or to book talent today, visit, letsengage.com.

John: Welcome to another edition of The Impact Podcast. I’m John Shegerian, and this is a very, very special edition. We’ve got with us today, Joe Theismann, the legendary Super Bowl champion quarterback. He’s also a broadcaster, entrepreneur, restaurateur, philanthropist, and he’s also the chairman of the upcoming V Foundation, Big Virginia Vine Dinner. Welcome today to the Impact Podcast show.

Joe Theismann: John. Thanks for having me. I’m looking forward to our conversation. We’ve got a lot of great things happening at Virginia Vine, and this is our 30th year of the V Foundation started 1993 when Jimmy walked to the podium. ESPN and Jimmy Valvano put together, an unbelievable experience going forward to fight cancer.

John: How well did you know Jimmy Valvano before that event? And he, and he gave his great Never Give Up speech.

Joe: I knew of Jimmy because I grew up in South River, New Jersey, which is about 20 minutes from New Brunswick where Rutgers University is located. Bobby, Lloyd, and Jim Valvano were the guards when I was in high school. They were the guards in college at Rutgers. So, I was aware of Jimmy at that time. And, as time went on and I got into professional sports and got into speaking a little bit more, I know Jimmy was doing it. Followed his career, interestingly enough, because I signed originally at North Carolina State University, of which he was coaching. We had a little bit of synergy there. Didn’t see him that much. Then my dear, dear friend Harry Rhodes, who ran the Washington Speakers Bureau, owned the Washington Speakers Bureau. Jimmy and I would wind up at different events together. I would see him, I would see videos of what he’s done. And like I said, I just got to know and admire him. I mean, he was one giant ball of energy. That’s, if anybody says to me, what do you remember most about Jimmy Valvano? Was his energy and his passion for life?

John: I’ll tell you that speech has been watched so many times by so many people I know, including myself, and has made a huge impact on all of us. What now? This is the 30th anniversary of the V Foundation. For those who aren’t familiar with the V Foundation, you go to v, it’s that simple, v.org, v.org. And for the Virginia Vine event that you’re going to be hosting, it’s v.org/virginiavine. Talk a little bit about the importance of this Virginia Vine event that’s coming up. April 14th to 16th in Middleburg, Virginia. Why are you involved there specifically, and why do you love doing that event? And you’ve now done this repetitive time show.

Joe: Before I talk about Virginia Vine, you bring up Jimmy’s speech. I carry a copy of Jimmy’s speech with me all the time. It’s in my briefcase, it’s in my notes when I do presentations. I reference it quite often where he talks about, you have to think, you have to laugh, you have to cry. You have to bring your emotions to a level where you feel them. You have to remember where your, you’ve been, where your car is, and where you’re going. I take parts of that speech and I incorporate into my presentation because Jimmy talked about life. He talked about sharing life. He talked about experiencing life. The entire evening I sat there with him 30-plus years ago, I remember it wasn’t about Jimmy Valvano fighting cancer. It wasn’t about anything but life. That’s really what the v Foundation has become an opportunity to be able to try, give people life. Sitting there at the ESPY that night, the first night when he received the Arthur Ashe Award, I remember the doctors were saying, “Hey, you can’t go. You’re not strong enough.” You’re not going to tell Jimmy, “no”. Of course, his dear friend Mike Krzyzewski and Dick Vitale and all of us had a chance to be there. He helped him on stage. I remember helping him off the stage. As he stood behind that podium, and he gave that speech with the passion that only Jimmy Valvano could give, in the way he could only give, the emotions just run wild inside of you. You understand what this man is fighting. You understand what his life potentially is going to be or could be. And yet he stood there in front of millions and millions of people and had such incredible strength, John, and said, “Don’t give up. Don’t ever give up.” That’s our mantra as well as Jimmy’s. But, I’m just honored that I was asked about five or six years ago, this is our eighth year with Virginia Vine. I was given an opportunity to be the host then, and I’m again hosting it this year. It runs from April 14th to April 16th. April 14th, we have a wine and country music event. April 15th, we have the voices for Victory where we’ll have sports people talk, as well as our medical staff and people that are researching cancer. And on the 15th, we have a breakfast. The 15th is the evening of the dinner and the 16th is the breakfast the next morning.

John: What’s the goal? How much money want to raise?

Joe: We like to raise at least a million dollars. We have to last a couple of years. We got within a whisker of it last year and the year before we managed to do it. Even during COVID, we had an incredible experience, which means people care. When you think about one in three women, one in two men will experience cancer possibly sometime in their lifetime. It’s here but, it can be beat. We have to be able to have the resources to be able to fight, to be able to do it. Like I said, this is the 30th year we’ve been added. We’ve raised over 310 million for research grants. Thank you. First of all, a big thank you to everyone who gives or donates, who cares. John, life is a funny thing. When I was, when I was playing ball, MVP of the National Football League, world Champion Quarterback Man of the Year, award after award, after award. I started feeling pretty special. I felt like I’m something. But, the truth of the matter is we’re not put on this earth to be served. We’re put here by the good Lord and graces of the good Lord to be able to serve others. That’s really what the V Foundation does. We’re here to try and serve others. It isn’t just the patients that are being treated for cancer, it’s their entire family. I think sometimes we tend to focus just on that particular individual, God knows that fight is incredible, but it’s their family members, the support system around them. For us, it’s not just, it’s not just raising money to treat cancer, but it’s to be able to provide the opportunity to be able to take care of the family as well as the person that’s fighting the fight. And, and, and that’s, that’s what I think people have to realize. I say this to everybody, John, if you haven’t had cancer touch your life, and I don’t imagine there are many people that have in one way, shape, or form. Then you’re very blessed and lucky. But if you have had it happen in your life, you want to be able to know that there’s someplace that there’s continuing research going on. And the only way we can do that is to fund it. That’s really why I’m so honored to be able to host the Virginia Vine Evening. On that whole weekend, to be able to, give back and look at other people and say, I want to help you, I want to help you any way I can.

John: Let’s talk about the funding aspect of it. This is important for our listeners and viewers to understand all the money that comes to the V Foundation. It goes to cancer research and programs. It’s not what we’ve read over the years now. Because of the transparency that exists because of the internet and other social media, we get to look into all these nonprofits around the world and see how much money is going towards administration, how much money is going towards the cause that you donated to. At the V Foundation, it looks like a hundred percent of the money that is donated is going to the money that people are donating it for, for cancer research and funding program. Is that the truth?

Joe: Yes. I believe it’s the truth. That’s the way it’s been and that’s the way it’s going to be going forward. Some of administrative costs, but the money that comes in, the money that is donated goes to research for Cancer. So it’s cure for Cancer

John: So, it’s a volunteer Board of Directors giving their time to make this organization work and people like you, great people like you and your colleagues that are, are top business sports and scientific leaders tend that make this happen and allow all the money to directly flow through actually battling and beating cancer?

Joe: It’s an incredible board made up of scientists, sports individuals, business people. It’s with one goal in mind, we want to beat cancer. That’s the bottom line. That’s why we’re doing what we’re doing. That’s why we’re raising the money, that we’re raising the money. And there’s a, particularly, there’s a resistance that you deal with also. A lot of what we do with our research grants and the therapeutic resistance research that we’re involved in is basically if someone is being treated for cancer and it appears that it might be gone, but yet comes back, that’s the resistance of cancer-fighting against the treatment. We have to continue to try evolve, just as cancer has evolved. We need, as researchers and people fighting it need to be able to continue to evolve and put the resistance out there against it. It’s just an incredible opportunity to be able to help other people. And like I said, it’s not just that person that has cancer, but it’s the entire unit, the family unit around them that is touched by it.

John: Joe, it’s also important to mention, given that you’re such a massive and successful competitor, that if cancer was a football game, we’re winning the game. The game is now the tightest turn because of great organizations like the V Foundation and all the funding that you’re doing, cancer rates are de are, are continuing to decline in men and women of all racial groups right now. Isn’t that make you feel good and make you want to drive even further and further what you’re doing with the V Foundation?

Joe: It’s one thing to be able to talk about it, John, it’s another thing to be able to have statistics that say, here are the facts, 1991 to 2019, the death rate in men and women combined has fallen 33%. That represents approximately 3.5 million people, million people that have died that have not died from cancer. So, that number alone tells you that we’re making progress, we’re continuing to fight, we’re not going to stop, we’re not going to quit. Through the good graces of people that watch your podcast and will tune in and get a chance to see us on the 15th at our dinner to be able to raise money, we appreciate it so much from the bottom of our hearts, we want to thank everybody out there for their donations. Too often you say to yourself, you’re asking for money. Yes. Yes because our research can’t continue if we don’t have the funding to be able to do it. And, we’ve gone through some really tough times. You can’t ignore what people have gone through with the pandemic and the way people’s lives have been changed. It doesn’t matter the amount. It doesn’t matter what you give it. The size of the amount doesn’t matter. It’s the fact that you care and you do give something that’s most appreciated.

John: For listeners and viewers who’ve just shown us, we’ve got legendary NFL quarterback Joe Theismann with us. We’re talking about the V Foundation and their upcoming event, Virginia Vine, you could find the V foundation at v.org. You could find the upcoming event from April 14th to 16th at v.org/virginiavine. Talk a little bit about the run program that’s gonna be going on there, and what kind of fun activities people could have to enjoy if they come out to this wonderful Virginia Vine event and donate.

Joe: We have wine and country music on the 14th. We have the dinner on the 15th, a chance to do that. We have also during the day, Terry Gannon, who’s great broadcaster, he’s gonna be hosting the voices of Victory panel that’s carried on by sports individuals as well as scientists, doctors, people involved in the foundation. And then we have a breakfast that following morning on the 16th where everybody sort of, you know, sort of unwinds a little bit, I guess you could say. Again, we have presentations that just help people understand where the money’s going, who it’s going to, and thanking them for their contribution. That’s sort of the run of the show. One of the thing that’s also interesting, John, people ask me quite often, what would Jimmy think of where we are today 30 years later? Getting to know him like I did, like I said, just a ball of energy, he would probably say, “This is wonderful. It’s wonderful that people are out there contributing. It’s wonderful that people care, but we’re not done, we’re not finished.” My, singular image of Jimmy is after NC State wins the n NCAA basketball tournament, right? He is running around looking for someone to hug. If you get a chance, to look it up online, just look at the end of that ballgame and look at Jimmy running around. He was just looking for anybody to hug. What I tell people now, is he probably would still be running around 30 years later looking for someone to hug, to say, thank you for caring, thank you for donating. But it’s just, like I said, that to me, that’s Jim Valvano. He’d be saying, “Hey, it’s wonderful, but, but the battle’s not over. The fight isn’t won. We have to continue to get better and better and bigger and bigger and raise more and more money.” He would be proud of what his name represented. He would be extremely proud of what ESPN and The V Foundation have done over these 30 years. But we want to keep on fighting. We want to keep on going. That would be Jimmy. He’s with me every day in my briefcase. I have a speech. He’s with me every day.

John: Joe, are there other athletes and entertainers that join you at this Virginia Vine event that are part of your panelists or part of yours, the auction dinner that you host on the vine?

Joe: Terry Gannon, Jay Billis has been there before. We have different individuals that have come. Difficult through the course of a year. Just different people have shown up.

John: Got it. Talk a little bit about people who can’t make the event. What would you be, what’s your call to action for our listeners and viewers? They love what you’re doing. They love what the V Foundation stands for. They can’t make it out physically to the Virginia vine event on April 14th through the 16th. What would then be their second-best option that you would be thrilled about?

Joe: You talked about it, John, you can log on. You’ll be able to make donations through that. I’m not sure whether we’re going to stream it this year. I haven’t gotten the final itinerary yet. We’re now in the process of going through the final aspects of the show, the run of the show, I guess you could say. But we’re still positive that we will have an opportunity for people that can’t be there physically to have an opportunity to donate.

John: So you could go online, make a donation, and to the V Foundation. That’s the second best choice if you can’t make it out in person to see you and all the other great folks that are hosting this important event, April 14th, through 16th in Middleburg, Virginia. It would be remiss of me to not ask you because you’re a living legend in the NFL. Talk a little bit about the importance of what you’re doing, Joe, as serving as a servant leader for the next generation of NFL legends that are playing still today, that can give back once they get out of the NFL like you’ve committed to doing for your entire life. I’ve been a fan of yours since I’m a little kid, and I’ve watched how you’ve continued this throughout. Is this part of your servant leadership and do you coach NFL players today on life after the NFL?

Joe: I try to, John. It’s really funny I appreciate the kind words, and like you said when you were a kid. I get people come up to me quite often and say, “Boy, I loved you when you were playing and my dad loved you.” Then they say, “My grandfather…” and I say, “Let’s not go quite the grandfather shit, Okay. I’ve been around quite that long, but I appreciate it.” There are so many incredible athletes in every aspect; men and women’s sports, professional sports, collegiate sports that give back so much to the community. It’s one of the things that the league emphasizes you see in the National Football League, are different programs where different players are honored with the Man of the Year award. When you receive the Man of the Year award, which I was very, very honored and blessed in 1982 to receive, it has to do with your community service. It has nothing to do with what you do on the football field. It has everything to do with what you do in the community. That’s even become a greater reach now. It’s what players do around the world to try and help those less fortunate. We have so many young men in the world of professional football, and I know in the WNBA and the women that are a part of that and what they do. How they go out and they talk to kids in schools and you visit hospitals. What makes it so gratifying is the smile that you see on someone’s face. When an athlete that is playing in a town and everybody’s excited, all of a sudden you show up into someone’s hospital room and you get a chance to sit and visit with her, or they’ve beaten cancer and they come to a game or throw a pitch out or play catch with them, whatever it might be. You changed someone’s life because now you influenced that individual. Or if you’re, if you’re an athlete and you go to a school and you talk to the kids at the school. There’s 50 kids in the classroom, maybe 10, maybe even a greater percentage will take to heart what you’re doing and say, “I want to do something for my community.” What you’re doing is you’re creating a foundation of young givers. People that want to give back. We’re blessed beyond belief to be able to play a game of our dreams. I dreamt about doing what I wound up doing, and then I lived the dream, then I’ve had a chance since then to be able to say thank you. I do it through hosting the Virginia Vine. Other guys do it. I know some have donated to hospitals, some have built hospitals. Some of these numbers are absolutely incredible for these young people today, but they don’t take it all. They make sure, their agents make sure, the clubs make sure that they do provide some of it to go to the community that they serve. We have guys living everywhere today. It used to when I played, we didn’t have free agency. I stayed in the Washington metropolitan area, that the Cowboys were in Dallas, the Giants were in New York, the 49ers were in San Francisco, Falcon Guys were down in Atlanta. Today, everybody’s all over and they have their reach everywhere. They have an impact on different communities that they live in. It’s just absolutely wonderful to see players, professionals giving back.

John: I had the chance to meet you years ago and I’m a lifelong Cowboy fan, but boy, you make a lifelong Cowboy fan love a Redskin. I’ll tell you what, or a commander now you’re a special human being, Joe. I just want to say thank you from the bottom of my heart, my listener’s heart for sharing some time with us today on this very, very important topic of beating cancer. This event you’re having at Virginia Vine on April 14th to 16th. For those who want to donate or attend this event, please go to v.org/virginiavine. Joe Theismann, you’re a living legend, not because of what you’ve done in football, but because of how God has blessed you to do all the servant leadership that you’ve done post-football, raising money for the V Foundation. I’m sure Jimmy Valvano is smiling down upon you and all the other great colleagues that you have at the V Foundation. Thank you for your time today, in the Impact Podcast. I know I can’t make the event, but I know I’m donating today, and I hope our listeners and viewers do the same. God bless you and stay healthy. Joe Theismann.

Joe: Thank you, John. I appreciate the opportunity to share Jimmy’s story with you and hopefully look forward to seeing a lot of people there. And if not, thank you for your donations.

John: This episode of the Impact Podcast is brought to you by Closed Loop Partners. Closed Loop Partners is a leading circular economy investor in the United States with an extensive network of Fortune 500 corporate investors, family offices, institutional investors, industry experts, and impact partners. Closed loops platform spans the arc of capital, from venture capital to private equity, bridging gaps and fostering synergies. To scale the circular economy. To find closed-loop partners, please go to www.closelooppartners.com.

John: This edition of The Impact Podcast is brought to you by ERI. ERI has a mission to protect people, the planet, and your privacy, and is the largest fully integrated IT and electronics asset disposition provider and cybersecurity-focused hardware destruction company in the United States and maybe even the world. For more information on how ERI can help your business properly dispose of outdated electronic hardware devices, please visit eridirect.com.

John Shegerian: Get the latest Impact Podcast right into your inbox each week. Subscribe by entering your email address at impactpodcast.com to make sure you never miss an interview. This edition of the Impact Podcast is brought to you by ERI. ERI has a mission to protect people, the planet, and your privacy, and is the largest fully integrated IT and electronics asset disposition provider and cybersecurity-focused hardware destruction company in the United States and maybe even the world. For more information on how ERI can help your business properly dispose of outdated electronic hardware devices, please visit eridirect.com. This edition of the Impact Podcast is brought to you by Engage. Engage is a digital booking platform revolutionizing the talent booking industry. With thousands of athletes, celebrities, entrepreneurs and business leaders, Engage is the go-to spot for booking talent, for speeches, custom experiences, live streams, and much more. For more information on Engage or to book talent today, visit letsengage.com.

John: Welcome to another edition of the Impact podcast. I’m John Shegerian, and I’m so honored to have with you today, Paul Augustine. He’s the head of sustainability for Lyft. That’s right, Lyft, L-Y-F-T. Welcome, Paul, to the Impact Podcast.

Paul Augustine: Thanks so much for having me, John. It’s an honor to be here.

John: Hey, Paul, you’re doing some very important work, obviously, at Lyft, and we want to get into that in a little bit. But before we get into that, I’d love for you to share with our listeners and our viewers the Paul Augustine backstory. How you even got here, and what your journey growing up leading to this point in your career really look like?

Paul: Sounds great. I’m going to take you way back, I’ll take you back a previous generation, actually.

John: Okay.

Paul: So, my dad grew up as one of 13 kids in rural India on a farm. When he came to the US, he settled in Buffalo, New York, and brought a little bit of that farming to Buffalo. We grew up with fruit trees and vegetable gardens. I spent a lot of time outdoors. In the beautiful buffalo summers, as well as the famous snowy winters, I was outside. And so, I just developed this love for nature and appreciation for all that we get from nature. So, fast-forward to college, when I entered college, I knew that I wanted to set myself up for a career in which I can help the world and improve people’s lives. Initially, I thought that was going to be medicine. And then two courses actually changed my career trajectory. So, first was an intro to environmental engineering, and I kind of fell into this course by accident. But as I learned more about the environmental challenges that we were facing, and the technology solutions that were already out there, I got really excited. And then I took another course in environmental policy and law, and learned about the large-scale impact that policy can make in our environmental issues. So, I studied environmental engineering and economics, and then went on to grad school to focus more on climate and energy issues. And then coming out of school, I went to the federal government and worked as a presidential management fellow for the US Environmental Protection Agency, and the Senate Energy Committee on climate policies and air pollution programs. I was there for about 3 years. And then I saw that the investment community was actually putting money to work in solutions on the ground to reduce emissions and joined RNK capital, which, at the time, was one of the largest investment firms focused on green commodities. So, I started there as a trader, and traded a large portfolio of carbon credits, renewable energy certificates, emission credits. I’m also invested in carbon offset projects. I was there through the recession, which wasn’t the best time to be working in Wall Street, to be honest. But there was one bright spot in the environmental markets, and that was California. California was starting its greenhouse gas cap and trade program. And so, a recruiter reached out to me from Southern California Edison, the large electric utility. They need someone to help build out their carbon trading strategy, their carbon trading desk, and work on the policy side as the rules were being developed. And it was just the perfect opportunity for me. So, I moved over to California, sunny California, and I helped build out the carbon strategy for Southern California Edison. I also got to work on renewable energy and electric vehicles to some extent. From there, I went to Chicago, and worked for a consulting company, consulting to utilities throughout the country on different topics, including community solar, utility of the future policy, and smart grid deployment. I did that out of Chicago for 2 years, and then moved to San Francisco for 2 years. And as a consultant working in San Francisco, I was travelling every week down to Arizona. I would come back every week and talk to my wife about the week. And the highlights for my week were usually the conversations with my Lyft driver. I took between 4 and 10 Lyfts every single week for about a year and a half. And it was really this deep connection to the Lyft drivers and learning about their stories and the different walks of life that they were coming from. Talking to the veterans, talking to folks that needed flexibility to take care of a loved one, college students looking to earn money to pay for school, and a lot of retirees whose spouses told them that they needed to get out of the house and talk to other people. I had already been following Lyft as a company because of its values. And the connection with the drivers was really what brought me to Lyft, as well as the opportunity to make a large-scale impact in terms of transportation emissions.

John: First of all, I want to unpack a little bit of your past and then we’re going to go into Lyft. So, a couple things, back in rural India, what were your grandparents and relatives farming back there?

Paul: Yeah. This is fresh in my mind because I was just there at the farm that my dad grew up on. They had a variety of crops. The cash crop there was rubber. They also had coconuts, pepper, and host of other things as well.

John: Does some of your relatives, brother, sisters, or cousins take over the family business that are still in it?

Paul: Yeah, my uncle is still there running the farm.

John: And what had dad become? When he moved you guys to Buffalo, what was dad’s profession?

Paul: Dad became a doctor.

John: Okay. That’s why you were sort of headed towards medical school[?].

Paul: Yeah. There was a little bit of pressure from him. My older sister did help. She also went into medicine. So, I had to have a lot of long conversations with my dad about other profession.

John: And that’s sort of normal, right?

Paul: Yes.

John: That’s normal. That’s a normal thing. And you’re very humble, obviously. But when you talked about your formal education, which got you on this wonderful trajectory… I just want for our listeners and viewers to understand, you went undergrad to Yale, then masters at Columbia.

Paul: That’s right.

John: One of the greatest institutions in the United States. But what it set you up for, really, the education is you’ve had a very versatile career and really got to touch so many areas in the sustainability field that made you so qualified for this wonderful position that you now have.

Paul: Yeah, I was really fortunate to have a lot of really great professors and mentors over the past couple of decades, including, while I was at school that helped shape the trajectory of my professional life.

John: Yeah, good for you. Good for you. What a wonderful connection to connect with the drivers, and that leads to this. That’s such a great storyline. But it’s so true, though, because really, we connect with brands in different ways. And to have such a great experience on a week-by-week basis, not just one unique anomaly of a driver, so many wonderful experiences leading you to really fall in love with the brand, and making you want to be a part of that brand. That’s a real great storyline. I like that a lot. I don’t hear that a lot, actually. I don’t hear that a lot. So, talk about now, what year did you get this wonderful position of head of sustainability at Lyft? And were you the first head of sustainability there?

Paul: I was not the first head of sustainability. So, my predecessor, Sam, joined Lyft in March 2018, and then I joined Lyft about 6 months later to build out the sustainability program. And I have stuck around long enough to take the reins over and build this into a broader and more comprehensive sustainability program.

John: [inaudible] interested, it was relatively speaking compared to GM, or compared to Pepsi, or Gillette, Lyft is a relatively new brand. It’s part of our new generation of brands. So, creating a sustainability program, laying the groundwork for sustainability from your perspective, and all the great things that have informed you, which your experience was vast. How do you go about doing it? What do you use as benchmarks, to really create a program that matches the company’s values and DNA, but also takes what you were informed by historically, and you get to lay that into that and leave your stamp on it as well?

Paul: Yeah, I think there are a couple pieces of context with regard to the company that helped refine what our strategy was. So, first, I just want to mention that Lyft is a founder-led company. Our co-founders are still here leading the company forward.

John: Wonderful.

Paul: And they cared deeply about sustainability, both of them. Logan, our CEO, comes from an environmental and transportation planning background. And John, our president, comes from a hospitality background and was deeply inspired by green cities course that he took. And so, when they founded Lyft, sustainability was part of their reason for founding Lyft. They believe that reducing single occupancy vehicles on the road was an integral part of creating this sustainable transportation future and transforming cities, to be built around people and not cars. And it’s actually embodied in Lyft’s mission, which is to improve people’s lives with the world’s best transportation. And so, it’s been embedded within who the company is. It’s just part of our fabric.

John: Right. Well, axiomatically speaking, as you just said, that’s a great point, Paul, being part of the shared economy, itself, is a sustainable business model.

Paul: That’s right. That’s right.

John: Right, that makes sense. That makes total sense.

Paul: I have the great platform where the company was founded in part[?], based on this ideal of developing more sustainable transportation futures. Basically, I came in to help develop something more tangible and concrete in terms of the strategy for sustainability.

John: Understood. How much latitude are you given? Is it pretty much a piece of blank canvas, and you and Sam just start to paint, and make it come to life, and build it from the ground up?

Paul: So, the thing that I love about Lyft also is that we do have to prioritize ruthlessly. And so, when we think about the impact that we can have, we’re focused on transportation.

John: Right. Understood.

Paul: There are a lot of other pieces to how we approach sustainability, including external reporting, some of the traditional corporate sustainability work. We have a hardware footprint because of our micro mobility program, so developing sustainable end of life[?], as well as product design approaches. But the biggest impact in terms of carbon and other emissions is from vehicles driving our platform for rideshare. And so, we’ve been very focused on getting to a fully electrified platform.

John: If I’m not mistaken, when I read through your materials and other information about all the great work you’re doing at Lyft, your goal, if I’m not mistaken, is to have everything fully electrical by 2030?

Paul: That is correct.

John: Wow. It’s already 2023, as you and I know, years go by kind of fast.

Paul: They do.

John: It really does that. So, 7 years sounds long in one respect, but actually, isn’t that long. So, how are you working towards that very bold and virtuous goal?

Paul: There are a number of ways that we’re approaching this. First, we know we can’t do this alone. We know there is a broader systemic change that needs to happen. One area that we’ve been focused on has been on policy. So, advocating for the policies that are going to help the entire economy, switch to electric vehicles. And we’ve seen a lot of progress at the federal and state level just in the last couple of years. So, we’re really excited about that. Another area that we’ve been focused on has been the rental program. Currently, most EV models are 40 plus $1,000, which puts them out of reach for many Americans generally, and many Lyft drivers. So, one thing that we have focused on, in terms of an easier access point for drivers, has been a flexible weekly rental program that we have called Express Drive, and onboarding EVs into that program. And then, another area that we’ve been focused on, and I’m really excited about the fact that we were able to launch some new EV offerings in December of last year to help get our drivers into EVs, including an incentive for drivers in certain markets to drive EVs. A charging discount for public fast charging, and then a discount for home charging infrastructure.

John: Wow. So, let’s unpack that a little bit. These are bold goals, and these are great landmarks that you’ve created to make this goal a reality. When you go to bed at night, and you lay in bed, and you’re thinking about the path ahead, what keeps you up? What’s the biggest sticking point in these issues to actually making this reality by 2030?

Paul: There are a lot of challenges that we need to overcome. Seven years is a very short timeline, and it does keep me keep me up at night sometimes. We we’re essentially trying to overcome some of the biggest challenges in transportation. This includes 100 years plus of marketing that equates car ownership to freedom. And also, 100 plus years of folks getting comfortable with using gasoline to power their vehicle. It’s going to take a lot of effort in order to change personal behaviors and comfort with this new technology. The thing that excites me, though, is we’re working on the ground to solve for wide scale adoption of EVs. In order to be successful in meeting our goal, we need to bring EVs to everybody. This is an equity challenge that we’re facing. When I look at the demographics of our drivers, over 70% of them identify as minorities, and nearly half of our trip starter end in low-income communities. So, these are the people and the places that have been left out of the EV transition in the broader clean tech transition. I’m excited about the fact that we have to work on democratization of this technology. We need to find ways to provide access to these expensive vehicles. This includes the rental program that I mentioned. We need to provide access to EV charging in areas that haven’t received charging to date.

John: It’s interesting. And going back to what you just said, given that we’re [inaudible], we both come from immigrant roots. Not only [inaudible] was only a car equate to freedom, it also was one of the trademarks of success of actually making it here, whenever the American dream used to be that was one of those checkmarks that okay, home, car, et cetera, colored TV, whatever that list was or used to be, it was. But you bring up a great point about equity, is America as a whole, both federally and on a state-by-state basis, moving fast enough on a policy basis to help you, as a private enterprise, achieved your goals?

Paul: It’s never fast enough. But I think the progress that we’ve started to make, especially at the federal level with the Inflation Reduction Act, moving forward last year, and the Infrastructure Investment and Jobs Act moving forward is going to be huge in terms of supporting EV adoption, and access to charging. There’s a lot more that needs to be done. What we’re trying to do as Lyft, we have a lot of data, and we’re trying to support smart decision-making from the government in terms of where is their demand? Where are drivers going to be? Where do they live in a way that protects the driver data, but also helps inform decisions in terms of where billions of dollars of public money is going to be invested? We’re trying to partner with governments in order to help accelerate this transition to electrified future and make sure that public money is getting the most bang for the buck.

John: That’s a fascinating issue. Since you have such a great reputation of having worked on both sides of the aisle, actually all three sides of the aisle. What I would call three sides, finance, as a public servant for the government, and now for a company, a for profit company. Are you being called upon by government officials to inform them like DOE and DOT to give them feedback before they come out with their final decisions on how things could be better if they approach their legislation or alter their legislation that they’re contemplating? Are you one of those key people that they talk to on a regular basis?

Paul: There’s a lot of public stakeholder engagement going on right now, as the implementation rules are being said. And so, we are trying to engage directly to help inform and provide insight, because we have been working on this electrification journey for years now. We have a lot of on the ground experience and lessons learned, which we do try to share with policymakers.

John: As a competitive advantage, sustainability can be a powerful tool. Paul, is it a competitive advantage over your competitors to announce this kind of bold vision and begin executing on it, as compared to any of your other competitors who might not be that forward thinking?

Paul: So, I’ll say that when we made this commitment to 100% EVs back in 2020, we made this commitment because we wanted to drive our competitors forward. We also wanted to be a catalyst for change for other private sector entities. So, including industries that we aren’t participating in, auto manufacturers, rental car companies, and others. We wanted to create this path for others to follow. So, what I’m really excited about is that our largest competitor followed our lead a couple months later and made a similar commitment. And now, it’s basically a race to the top, not a race to the bottom. And so, we’re excited. We’re not scared or disappointed that this is not a competitive advantage for us within our industry. We’re excited about racing to the top, and doing what’s best for our drivers for the communities that we serve and for the planet.

John: I love that because Paul, and for those listeners and viewers who just joined us, we got Paul Augustine with us today. He’s the head of sustainability for Lyft. To find Lyft and to find Paul and his great colleagues and the important work they’re doing with electrifying, whatever, making their whole fleet electric by 2030, you can find them at www.Lyft.com. You’re a new breed of leader though, Paul. The leaders in business used to be Game of Thrones. It used to be zero-sum game. But you’re that new breed of leader that leads by being inspirational and aspirational in hopes that others, both direct competitors and others in adjacent or not adjacent industries, follow because you realize, and obviously, you’re brilliant enough to realize that it’s not a zero-sum game. We all live on one planet. Nobody wakes up hoping that they drink waste[?] water or breathe waste[?] air than they did the day before. Everyone wants their children and grandchildren to have a better planet than they had. And that’s wonderful that your inspirational leadership paid off by having both a direct competitor and others start making similar commitments. And that’s part of a new generational type of business leader, and I really applaud you for that. That’s a wonderful way to be because so many other people see business still as zero-sum game of thrones. If they’re doing better, that means we’re doing worse. And that’s not the reality when it comes to sustainability or circular economy, or really, making the world a better place.

Paul: Yeah, John, I think that is one of the biggest lessons that I’ve learned from my career, between working in government nonprofits and different private sector industries, is that we can’t look at each other from a competitive standpoint, or from a cynical view of each sector, we really do need to work together in order to solve these issues. Transportation is the biggest contributor of greenhouse gas emissions in the US. If we’re serious about addressing climate change, we have to decarbonize transportation. And we have to do it quickly. I, frankly, having been in the space for a while and you as well, am concern. I’m deeply concerned about where we’re headed in terms of the climate. I studied climate science, almost 20 years ago, and some of those climate models are coming into fruition, where we’re seeing tens of billions of dollars of damage, extreme weather events. If we don’t move with a sense of urgency, and work in partnership and collaboration, we’re just not going to meet the goals of stabilizing the climate.

John: Yeah, I agree with you. I mean, just an order of magnitude for our listeners and viewers and my sake, how many cars does Lyft have on the road? I want to understand how big and monumental getting everybody into EVs by 2030 really is.

Paul: Yeah. So, we’ve got, again, over a million vehicles active on platform. We’re also not just a rideshare company, we operate the largest micro-mobility platform in the country. We operate bike share in major cities, as well as scooter share. And so, the transition that we’re trying to catalyze here is not just shifting people into rideshare. What we’re trying to catalyze is getting people out of personal car ownership into other low carbon modes of transportation, which includes shared bikes, shared scooters, transit, as well as clean rideshare.

John: That’s wonderful. That’s tremendous. What does the future of transportation look like, Paul? Like you said, not only with regards to just scooters, bikes, and cars, give us a little glimpse on what you foresee things are going to look like by 2030 and beyond.

Paul: Yeah. It’s interesting to see just talk to young people these days. And I think the mindset, getting back to our earlier discussion around car ownership, the mindset has changed. Younger people, some of them, don’t feel a need to get a driver’s license. Owning a car is sometimes seen as more of a burden than a benefit. And I think we’re going to continue to see these trends. And where it leads is basically a transportation future, that is shared, electric, and multimodal. I believe Lyft is leading the way in this transformation by offering a convenient alternative to car ownership, by investing and in expansion of electric vehicles, by operating and expanding shared bikes and scooters, and linking everything together in one app.

John: In one app. Wow, that’s exciting. That’s exciting. Are apps a big part of the future of Lyft in terms of technology? Interrelating technology, both the technology in our hand with transportation, is that going to get to continue to be a connective tissue between the future of transportation and getting us more motivated to get out of ownership and into the shared autonomy?

Paul: Yeah, I mean this is another challenge that we face. Right now, if you own a car, it is very easy for you to just get the keys, hop in your car, and drive and [inaudible] if you need to fuel it. So, we need to compete with that. We need to have something that is equally reliable and convenient to that, and I think that is basically what we are developing here in expanding at Lyft.

John: With regards to sustainability, the macro vision of sustainability, Silicon Valley is a hotbed of wonderful and super smart folks like you. Paul, do you get together with other sustainability leaders in Silicon Valley, and share best practices as a whole outside of just the EV ecosystem, and just share best practices on sustainability and inspire each other with regards to share best practices?

Paul: You’re part of this sustainability community, and I think that’s one of the great things about sustainability professionals. We do try to share knowledge, lessons learned. It is a highly collaborative environment. There are a number of forums and groups that are pulled together by nonprofits. For example, we pull together a tech companies and others as well, where we have the opportunity to share lessons learned. And there are areas where we may not have the expertise because it’s not our focus area. And there are other areas, like transportation, where we are the experts. And the great thing about sustainability professionals is that we do try to share what we know in order to help meet this global challenge that we’re facing.

John: And every year, do you guys put out an impact, an issue report?

Paul: We do. So, that was something that we developed back in 2020, was our first report. We’ve been releasing our annual environmental social governance report since then.

John: What month do you typically put it out?

Paul: The last year we released it, I believe, in August. We will probably release it again in August this year.

John: In August, got it. Besides getting everybody electric on your platform by 2030, what else could you tease, share, or excite our listeners and viewers about what’s next for Lyft, Paul?

Paul: There are a couple other areas that we are focused on. One is providing data with business customers. Lyft has a number of business partners where they sign up for a Lyft business account, and let their employees use our services to get around. One key aspect of making better decisions on sustainable practices is better quality data. So, the Lyft rides are part of Scope 3 emissions. So, providing an easy way for our Lyft business partners to access that data will hopefully allow them to make better decisions in terms of their Scope 3 emissions. They will also be able to track how we’re doing in terms of decarbonizing our platform. It’s also part of our efforts to keep ourselves accountable and make the data transparent.

John: That’s really important. I find that one of the main tenants now of good responsible sustainability practices is radical transparency. So, you’re saying that if I was the Director of Sustainability or Chief Sustainability Officer Goldman Sachs, and Lyft was our chosen vehicle company to transport our employees, you’ll create a dashboard for us? So, I can have a daily dashboard to see what kind of usage we’re doing with Lyft, and time of the day, length, carbon emissions, and everything. All the algorithm points that we were interested in, in tracking Goldman Sachs or whatever company would be?

Paul: That’s right. That’s kind of where we’re headed in terms of providing that type of transparency. And I think that speaks to the broader conversation in sustainability reporting that[?] we need more consistency and transparency, especially with regards to the Scope 3 emissions.

John: And also, then, I have to report to my analysts, my c-suite, and my board of directors. So, you, giving me that dashboard makes it much easier. I don’t have to go chase that information down, and it’s not fragmented anymore in my company.

Paul: That’s right.

John: So, you’ll literally create a portal for that and make it really easy to track and then also report on. That’s brilliant. That’s brilliant. I love it. Well, that’s great, Paul. Are you finding that this position, you get to draw upon all your past experiences, like you said, and everything you’ve done in policy as a financier, as a public servant, as a non-profit, and now, as a for-profit business that’s really mission-based in many ways besides profit-based? And also, part of the greater mission is making the world a better place? Do you get the drawn all your experience on a daily basis?

Paul: 100%. Every iota of my experience and background somehow comes to use in my day-to-day.

John: That’s so wonderful. Well, I think they’ve picked the right guy because you definitely have all the right background to make this a reality. And we’re so grateful for your time today, and we’re so grateful that you and your colleagues at Lyft are committed to going electric by 2030. I think that is a bold and very virtuous challenge, but also goal. And I know you’re going to get there with someone like you leading the charge at Lyft. You’re going to get there. Paul, thank you. You’re always welcome back on the Impact Podcast to share the continued journey in EV and sustainability at Lyft, with our listeners and our viewers. And thank you for not only making the impacts that you would Lyft make, but thank you, also, for making the world a better place.

Paul: John, thanks so much for having me. I really enjoyed it.

John: This episode of the Impact Podcast is brought to you by Closed Loop Partners. Closed Loop Partners is a leading circular economy investor in the United States with an extensive network of Fortune 500 corporate investors, family offices, institutional investors, industry experts, and Impact partners. Closed Loop’s platform spans the arc of capital from venture capital to private equity, bridging gaps and fostering synergies to scale the circular economy. To find Closed Loop Partners, please go to www.closedlooppartners.com.

John: This edition of the Impact Podcast is brought to you by ERI. ERI has a mission to protect people, the planet, and your privacy, and is the largest fully integrated IT and electronics asset disposition provider and cybersecurity-focused hardware destruction company in the United States and maybe even the world. For more information on how ERI can help your business properly disposed of outdated electronic hardware devices, please visit eridirect.com.

John Shegerian: Listen to the Impact podcasts on all your favorite podcast platforms including Apple Podcast, Google Podcast, Amazon Music, I Heart Radio, Audible, Spotify, Stitcher, and of course, at impactpodcast.com. This edition of the Impact podcast is brought to you by ERI. ERI has a mission to protect people, the planet, and your privacy, and is the largest fully integrated IT and electronics asset disposition provider and cybersecurity-focused hardware destruction company in the United States and maybe even the world. For more information on how ERI can help your business properly dispose of outdated electronic hardware devices, please visit eridirect.com. This edition of the Impact podcast is brought to you by Engage. Engage as a digital booking platform revolutionizing the talent booking industry. With thousands of athletes, celebrities, entrepreneurs, and business leaders, Engage is the go-to spot for booking talent for speeches, custom experiences, live streams, and much more. For more information on Engage or to book talent today, visit letsengage.com.

John Shegerian: Welcome to another edition of the Impact podcast. I’m John Shegerian. I’m so excited to have with us today Pamela Rucker. Pamela is a CIO advisor and an instructor from the Harvard Professional Development. She also recently partnered with Oracle on their No Planet B study. Welcome to the Impact podcast, Pamela.

Pamela Rucker: Thank you for having me.

John Shegerian: Hey listen, Pamela, there’s a lot to unpack here. Your biography is so fascinating. Before we get going into what you’re doing as a CIO advisor, what you’re doing in Harvard, and what you recently did with Oracle on their No Planet B study, I would love you first to share your background.

Pamela: Yeah. Let me unpack this a little bit in a way that might be interesting. I’m going to go all the way back to elementary school. I grew up in Virginia. Virginia, I don’t know if you know, had a massive wall of resistance to integration, which occurred some years ago. The net result of that was that when I went to the first grade, I was the only person of color in my classroom, the only one. The kids wouldn’t play with me. This continued all the way through school until I got into the third or fourth grade. At that point, even though the kids wouldn’t play with me, they call my family names, they did all sorts of mean things so that we would be separate. When I was going to school with the kids I live in within my neighborhood, we were all placed in different classrooms. We couldn’t necessarily sit with those kids either. That had the effect of being very isolating for me. One of the things that my mother really believed about the school that I was going to was that it was willing to give me a much better education. She was a big proponent of that. She encouraged me to go out for what they had at the time, called the Talented and Gifted Program, I was tested for this Gifted Program. When I made it into the Gifted Program, she was so excited because this is all of her dreams coming true. Now, you have to understand, my mother was a woman of the 50s. I mean, she grew up in the 50s and married in the 60s. The options for her were either go to school or get married. She chose to get married, even though she had a scholarship to go to school and didn’t actually pursue that. She always said to me, “You’re going to be the one that goes off to college and does these things that I couldn’t do.” She was super excited about that. When I got in the Talented and Gifted, I was waiting for the opportunity to do some of the other things that kids were doing. It just seemed like they had these games going on where I was always excluded. I couldn’t participate in the way that I wanted to. One day, in an effort to keep myself busy, I saw this huge, quirky device over in the corner with lots of blinking lights and there was this phone on the hook over there. I went over to check that out to see what it was. I found out that, wait, I could actually play on this device. I could get on this machine. If I type certain things, then I could talk to somebody across town somewhere else. It turns out that that computer became my friend in Talented and Gifted. That person on the other end of the hook became my friend in Talented and Gifted. That’s when my love of technology began. My mother saw that I was loving all of the things I was doing in Talented and Gifted. She said, “Instead of you playing around on Saturday mornings, you’re going to go to the Math and Science Center, right?” All of us are watching cartoons and the things that we would watch back in the day with Jughead and so forth. Not me, I’m up and going to the Math and Science Center and I’m taking things like pharmacology and biology and one of those classes is meteorology. That’s how you start to see these tie come together with me and technology and interest in weather patterns and people and how we might be able to use technology to help save our planet and save people. Fast forward, I actually ended up going on some college and I’m studying one of my mentors. My mentor was an accountant at the time. I loved everything that they did and I said, “I’m going to be like this person.” I took the classes, I was under one of the best, most renowned instructors on the East Coast. I remember it being a beautiful bright day. This is how I’ll blame the environment for me changing my career, right? It was a beautiful bright day, the windows are up in the classroom. The instructor was talking about double declining balances and I thought I was going to kill myself. I’m not sitting here another minute. I left the class because I just said I wanted to do something different. I talked to one of my favorite instructors about organizational behavior, who said to me, “Hey, there’s this emerging technology coming out, where there’s this place where people are sitting in the middle, where you understand technology, and you understand people and you help them talk to each other called management systems.” That’s what he invited me to join. I joined that, it’s been something I’ve worked on ever since then, how to get people on both sides to talk to each other and understand what it is they’re doing. That’s how I started my career off and started an interest in the things that I talk about today.

John Shegerian: That’s so cool. Then what brought you to Harvard? What was the impetus to get you over to Harvard to teach there?

Pamela: Yeah. That’s another great story. I was teaching and working in organizations. I found out that each time I got promoted, because I was a person that got promoted early and I was given larger levels of instruction early. But one thing I found out was each time I had to get promoted, I had to train the people that were working with me, right? I had to bring them along with me. In that process, I started talking about the things that I was doing. I was talking to people about the things that I was learning. I had a person invite me to speak at the forester leadership conference two years ago and I said, “This is a moment, right? Either I can accept this and say that I’m going to take this challenge on, or I’m going to not accept it and it might not come back around forever.” I went to the conference. That day, I remember being on the stage with all of these people from such huge organizations. The story that I was telling was, I know you have a billion-dollar budget and I know you have these great things that you’re doing, but the work I do every day is around limited budgets and trying to get people to conform to these changes and getting them to want to struggle for a future that I’m trying to create with a limited budget and having to train them to do that as I go along the way. My role was not just how do I serve as a CIO or how do I serve as a top technology person, but how do I also train them in the way they should think and act as they’re moving along in their career. It just turns out on that day, a lot of people had that resonate with them. I started talking more with CIO Magazine and with others about how we could then turn that into a program that we would deliver to other organizations. We partnered on not only that, but also concepts around helping women understand how they could be leaders in organization. That exploded into classes that we did for people across the country. After doing that for about seven years, I started to do it with Harvard. That’s how I got there.

John Shegerian: That’s awesome. That led to, at some point, you partnering with Oracle on the No Planet B study. Can you explain how that relationship came together and what the No Planet B study is?

Pamela: Yeah. I have always felt like ESG is the future. I really have felt like it’s important for me to figure out how we can best support businesses that are really trying to spend more time on sustainability and social issues. When we had a chance to actually just serendipitously with meet with the Oracle team, it turned out that we cared about the same types of things. One of the things I wanted was some rigor around the things I cared about talking about. They wanted someone that could actually speak to this from an academic perspective to say, “What are some of the things that would bring businesses in to be interested in the topics that we are covering?” Because I talk a lot about digital and because I do honestly believe sustainability gives you a competitive advantage, which I hope we’ll have a chance to talk about a little bit more in the session, that just seemed like a marriage made in heaven for us.

John Shegerian: Got it. Let’s go back to that. What year did you undertake the No Planet B study and what was the mission of it when you started out?

Pamela: It was last year, 2022. The goal was to really talk to consumers and businesses about how they felt about the topics of sustainability and whether we saw the emergence of what I called at the time shadow players, people whose minds were changing about things, even if they hadn’t done anything about that yet. Then people who were actively changing the way that they were behaving around sustainability. We did that and we surveyed more than 11,000 consumers and business leaders across 15 countries. From that survey, we saw three big things. The first thing we saw is that people are fed up with society’s lack towards sustainability and social initiatives. I’m sure you’re not surprised by that. Second, that they really want businesses to turn their talk into action. They really feel like we have an opportunity to do something about this that maybe they aren’t capitalizing on. Then third, that people feel like technology can help companies to succeed where they might have failed in the past.

John Shegerian: Got it. Out of that come those three major facts. You and I have been around long enough and we’ve been around this topic. Let’s talk a little bit about the evolution of sustainability as it goes in America. Because, Pamela, correct me if I’m wrong. But in my travels on business travels, it seemed to me that sustainability was a DNA cultural thing in Europe long before it ever came to the US and in parts of Asia, such as South Korea and Japan. When I started connecting the dots, I started thinking about size, size matters. UK, France, Spain, Italy, are all small countries. They didn’t really have the luxury of us in America where to us, if it’s in America, it’s bigger, and bigger means better than everyone else. That means same thing with our trash in our linear economy that we could just dig another landfill and plus out our waste in a landfill. Well, they didn’t have that luxury, so they were forced to become more sustainability-thinking, more circular economy-thinking, I don’t know, back in the 30s, 40s, and 50s. We were playing from behind for a long time. Do you believe that to be true?

Pamela: Yeah, and it’s interesting that you bring it up that way. Because I say this to anyone, once you start to travel, you start to see that the entire world thinks differently than you do. All of the things that you would have traditionally have thought were true about the entire world, you find aren’t case. One of the things that you touched on is this idea of size, right? That there are some things that they are forced to do because they don’t have the capability of other options, right? I put those into two buckets of capability and collaboration, right? The first one is, I don’t have the ability to just say, “I’ll put it in a landfill and send it out of the city and put it somewhere else.” I don’t have the capacity to do that. I’m forced to think about something different. The second is, I’m in a place and because I don’t have that capacity where I have to collaborate with the people around me, we have to come to some way to solve this problem. It can’t just be my way, it can’t just be your way, we have to think about this because we have a common interest in our own shared future. That means we’re going to have to work differently than we’ve done today. When you look at the size of the US compared to some of the individual countries in Europe and so forth, you do see that we have the capacity to actually kick the can down the road a little bit. One of the things we’re starting to see now is that we’re seeing a little bit of the end of the road, so we can’t kick the can much farther.

John Shegerian: Right. Good point. End of the road. I mean, it’s undeniable. I grew up in New York City, I now live in Fresno. The climate change that we’ve seen in our lifetime, Pamela, is undeniable. We don’t have to watch television or listen to a scientist. Just wherever we live, we could see the shifts in the weather patterns and stuff like that. Obviously, you did this study with Oracle with all the best intentions and you got those great backs out of them and trends that you see. Well, how do you now put these into action in terms of getting folks, leaders, business leaders, political leaders, policymakers, and just the listeners of this podcast that are wonderful men and women and young people around the world to be more involved and more engaged with the process of change? How do you go about it from here now that you have the results of your great study?

Pamela: One of the things that I always tell people is, first, you have to listen. Listen to what it is that people are saying to you, right? We’re going to dig into this a minute and I’m sure in the content. But hopefully, as you hear the results that come out of this survey, and these are not isolated results, right? These are results that we see that are similar to other surveys that have been taken. As you see this, listen to the people that are talking to you. We have people talk a lot about the consumer side, the employee side, and the business side. Listen to the people that are talking to you and then take action on those steps. I’ll talk about this probably multiple times, but also take action that you can prove. It’s one thing to say that you are changing. But I often run into companies, and I’m sure you might as well, who have this huge marketing campaign around the things that they’re doing when in effect, the shadow that they’re casting is much larger than the actuality of what they’re doing. It’s important for you to actually do something about the things that we’re going to be talking about today.

John Shegerian: Got it. Let’s go back to the consumer part because that’s a great place to start. Are consumers now, with regards to sustainability, voting with their pocketbook more than before?

Pamela: Yeah. This is interesting, right? There was this overwhelming consumer response that said they want companies to prioritize the things that they’re doing around ESG. Let me go into some of the numbers. 93% of people in this survey said, “Look, sustainability and social issues are more important now than ever.” And 78% of people said that they’re frustrated and fed up with the lack of progress by businesses to date. It’s the things that they’ve been seeing, John, over the past few years, like the pandemic and racial injustice and political unrest and all the extreme weather patterns that we’re seeing, all of that put things into perspective for them. It’s caused at least one out of four of them to change what they’re doing about those problems or commit their lives to sustainability and social causes. From our research, it’s really clear that people will not only seek out companies that are focused on ESG to patronize them, but they will also seek out companies focused on ESG when they’re looking for job opportunities, too. In order to talk about why things might be playing out that way, we need to think about what’s been happening with businesses and people. If you let me double-click on one of these for a minute, I want to talk about why that’s happening. On the business side, leadership imperatives have shifted. The imperatives used to be speed and agility, and growth and profit, right? But now, speed and agility are just table stakes. One author that I talked to said, “We’ve been talking about it for the past 50 years and it’s just time to stop, right?” The leadership imperatives are now moving toward growth and profit and trust in value. That’s happening because research tells us we’re in the age of the consumer. The trust in value point is, do I trust you to earn money in a sustainable way? Do I trust you to use the profits that you get in ways that I support in the communities that needs them? When you think about that age of the consumer, meaning that the consumer has more power, it means that businesses have these increasingly powerful consumers and companies are trying to solve these what we call functional and emotional jobs that their customers might have. Let me explain what I mean. Most companies tend to focus on competing on functional jobs or how well their product performs or what the product actually does for you. But research on the new science of customer emotions tells us that customers can be satisfied with you as an organization or satisfied with your product, but they don’t really feel connected to you. That means your product can solve the problem for them well, but they can still lead you. But it also then shows that having an emotional connection with customers makes you more valuable to them. Some of the highest emotional connection motivators are having competence in the future. Or feeling like the future was better than the past. Or enjoying a sense of well-being or feeling like my life is measuring up to expectations and it’s really stress free. Or feeling a sense of belonging, I feel like I’m part of a group, like I said, I wanted to feel like when I was so young. Or protecting the environment is a big one. People see that environment is sacred, and they want to take action to improve that. Or it can be that you want to feel secure or you want to be the person that you want to be. Research says there’s this direct link between emotional connection and what people buy from you or who they buy it from. It gives people a reason to stick with you in the long term if you’re selling something to them. Let’s take that back to the survey and say why this matters for ESG. Well, it matters because we saw in the data that 70% of people in the survey said that they would be willing to cancel their relationship with a brand that does not prioritize sustainability and does not prioritize social initiatives. Almost the same number, 69% said that they would leave their current company to work for a brand and they decided that they do want to take ESG more seriously. We really see that adopting this robust ESG programming can support your financial role, that can help you attract talent, and it can help you keep talent around, too.

John Shegerian: From a business leader perspective, employee engagement, attraction, retention, and also more revenue, more profit. There’s lots of reasons for business leaders to be shifting their thinking and their actions.

Pamela: Yeah. When you think about that, this is coming on the consumer side, right? The fact that I can actually attract people to want to work for me, I can engage you when you’re there. I can retain you so that you don’t want to leave me. Those are big. But here’s some other statistics we saw to that might make companies want to be more sustainable when you think about your consumers. 37% said that they believe organizations are lazy when it comes to sustainability and social impact. To me, that says that they believe that people have the capability to do something about this as a company, but you’re not willing to spend your energy on that. We saw 45% say that they believe that businesses have more power for change than individuals and governments do alone. They really are looking for these businesses to step up and help here and not just wait for the individuals to do something about it. Then they also said, “Look, you as an organization have all this access to technology, so use that.” 84% of them said they believe artificial intelligence or AI that support businesses so that they can change faster. They said, “Stop doing all of this stuff yourself, let the machines do it.” And 61% of those said that they think that bots can help us pick up the slack. Think about the way we all use Alexa and Siri every day or the way many of us use these AI technologies every time we search online, or when we use social media, or when we unlock our phones with our faces, or we get recommendations on what to buy or what to look for. All of that’s already integrated into our lives. I think this idea of consumers believing that bots can help us is a really big observation on their part because they’re exactly right. A lot of us that work with systems know how hard it is to get data from a lot of different places. Having bots take over important tasks that you care about and you want to get right, quite frankly, saves a lot of time. All of that is exciting for me, right? Because that is data that we got from the consumer side. It’s not only the information that ESG is important, but it’s the integration of all of that with digital, which I love, right? I tell people this all the time, given that the people that you are now selling to and hiring and partnering come pre-wired for ESG, right? The people that you’re dealing with right now, they’re already wired for this. Not understanding what that implies for you and not understanding what implies for your business right now means that you could be out of business when you’re middle aged, right? If you think about all of those millennials that are so engaged, all those people who have so much of a voice, if you don’t do something about it right now, 10, 20 years from now, you might be out of business. That’s going to be when they have more income than they had before, when they’ll buy more products than they ever have before, when they’ll run more parts of the business than they had before, and when they have more control over who they work for than they ever had before.

John Shegerian: Right. For our listeners and viewers who’ve just joined us, we got Pamela Rucker with us today. She’s a CIO advisor. She’s also an instructor for Harvard Professional Development and she recently partnered with Oracle on the No Planet B study, which we’re discussing today with regards to ESG and sustainability trends now and in the future. Pamela, ESG is relatively from where I see it, a relatively new terminology, new part of our lexicon or vernacular. How far back does ESG go? When you say ESG, or with regards to the No Planet B study, what did you mean it to mean? Because I’ve heard so many other definitions, the definitions are very wide sometimes and very narrow. What’s your definition of it?

Pamela: If we think about ESG, we’re thinking about how we’re going to be more sustainable, right? How are we going to do business without negatively impacting the planet? How are we going to make a shift to more renewable resources? How are we going to reduce the pollution that we put into the air? But also think about societal issues, right? How are we going to work in ways that have less negative social impact? How are we going to be good community partners in the communities that we operate in and with the people that we’re selling to? Then on the governance side, how are we going to be accountable for the things that we say that we’re going to do? How is it that we’re going to actually keep our promises? I say this to people all the time, it’s really important for you to build the backbone that you need to build as an organization in order to keep the promises that you make. Because every day in all of our marketing and all of the things that we do, we always talk about the things we’re going to do. I talked the moment ago about the functional and emotional jobs. What are the problems you’re going to solve for me? I’m always making these promises to you about what I’m going to do. Well, I have to build the backbone for myself as an organization to do that. More and more, we’re seeing that ESG is becoming a part of that operational backbone, that it’s not just, do I have the people? Do I have the technology? Do I have the capability? But do I have the understanding of the impact of ESG for my organization as well? To go back to your earlier part of your question, though, I mean, we see us talking about this early in the 70s, where we talked about people, profit, and planet. We had the first Earth Day years and years ago. We’ve seen the emergence of this over time, where we’re talking about the triple bottom line and the things that matter. One of the things that I think has caused ESG to come so much into focus is exactly what I said earlier, that so much has been happening. If you think back to what was happening to you and I during the pandemic, we were forced to be in front of our television and we could not look away. We could not look away from reports about what was happening with the pandemic and how it was affecting people. We could not look away from reports about racial injustice. We could not look away from reports about what’s happening in the environment. We see what’s happening again now across the country and across the world and it’s just hard to look away. Once I think we saw that, we started to see a lot of people coalescing around that term and we see it more now on earnings calls and more people thinking about the importance of it.

John Shegerian: It’s a brilliant point. The pandemic definitely accelerated things. Before, there wasn’t a ton of talk about ESG prior to the pandemic, nor was there a lot of talk about the shift from the linear to circular economy. Post-pandemic and during the pandemic, as you said, we all coalesced around the television sets. We were sitting in our homes, we were all mostly on lockdown. What comes first? The patterns from the pandemic, of course, accelerated things. But in terms of a tipping point, was it the Larry Finks of the world who came out of BlackRock and said, “You’re going to be a portfolio company here at BlackRock.” As you said earlier, Pamela, not only you’re going to do the ESG stuff, that we need you to do an ESG, but then you’re going to have to prove up and report on it. Actually, I’m not going to just listen to your words, I need to see your actions. I need to see which direction your feet are going. It was a combination of both recent social circumstances that we were thrust into vis-à-vis pandemic and the racial injustices that we all got to watch in real time on television, with the financial institutions moving at the same time and seeing all these massive shifts happening and say, “This is the way we’re going.” Once Larry Fink says something like that, BlackRock’s the largest investor on the planet, the other financial institutions follow. Is that combination of one-two punch create that tipping point that pushed us here to this other side?

Pamela: Yeah, I love the way you phrase it with the one-two punch, right? Because I actually think it’s not an either or, it’s an end, right? Because if you think about what happened in the 60s, when there could be companies leading the way, saying that we think that integration is right or we think that having the correct type of approach toward having people of color in your organization is right, you can have leaders always say that. But people can always negate what you’re saying by ignoring that or not tuning in or not paying attention to what you’re doing. That was when we saw the dogs and the hoses on TV at night and you couldn’t look away, right? I really do think that there’s a convergence of leadership and what has happened in the media in terms of us being locked down. Because it’s not just that it was on TV, but we had nothing else to look at. It was everywhere on social media, it was everywhere on television, everywhere you went you saw it. That’s why you saw so much of an uprising, where people just said, “You know what? I have to do something about this because I don’t have options to look away.” I do think that’s the one-two punch that we need, where we need businesses to stand up and say, “I know this is right and we are not going to operate in a way that we know is unjust, that’s not going to take care of social justice or it’s going to take advantage of other people or that’s going to destroy the planet so that our children don’t have anything left.” You do need that leadership on that side. You need accountability from organizations who say that they care about it and it’s not just the care of the day. They’re just doing something because it’s the hot topic that everyone’s talking about, but they have real substantive change that they’re working on. But then you also need a something to happen that I think creates that wellspring, that opportunity for people to look and to translate that from a societal issue to a personal issue, right? It’s not just something that’s happening out there to other people or that’s happening 10, 15 years down the road. But I now have brought that in. It’s something that it’s really an issue that’s personal to me.

John Shegerian: Speaking of personal, now you are CIO advisor. Now that you have this great information that’s come out of this very important study, No Planet B study that you did with Oracle and it’s very clear and compelling, unstoppable and undeniable trends. Has your demand by business leaders gone up? Because one of the trends that I’ve seen, and I would love to you to weigh in on this, is I’ve done this show now 15 years. When I talk to people leadership online, during the show, and offline, I get to meet a lot of cool people because of this platform, a lot of business leaders are scared. They’re scared to take the first step because the opportunity and the challenge looks so daunting. Are you getting pulled out to them and called by them to come coach them through this to begin this journey that they need to be on? Because the facts, as you said, 15 minutes ago are undeniable in terms of employee attraction, employee retention, client attraction, keeping the clients in their ecosystem, and creating more revenue and creating more profits for their company, which so many have been trained that’s the thing that you’re supposed to be focused on. Now they have to deal with this new thing called ESG, relatively new compared to the Peter Drucker School of Business. Are you now being called on more to be a professional coach and mentor and instructor to business leaders to get them on the journey and coach them through this process?

Pamela: Yeah, I am. One of the things people come in the most for is helping explain the why, right? It is not enough what, right? Because one of the things that I see is people may know it’s important. But if I can give them a more compelling why, other than it’s just the right thing to do, but I can actually tie that to their bottom line, I can tie that to competitive advantage. I talk to people a lot when I teach my class about the things that we used to think give us competitive advantage don’t give us competitive advantage anymore. Now you have companies that are able to compete in your spaces without having to do all of the things that you had to do. What I’m being called in to do is to talk about what those things are and why it is that you as an organization might see sustainability as a compelling competitive advantage for you for an entirely new set of people that are sitting in a space to make decisions about whether they buy from you if you’re a B2C company or they buy from you if you’re a B2B company. What are those things that they’re looking for that go beyond just whether or not you can solve this initial problem for them? Because in the same way that every individual customer or individual person has functional and emotional jobs, every business does as well. Being able to partner with organizations that are taking giant leaps around sustainability solves other problems for companies who feel like they’re struggling with that as well. Yes, I’m called in a lot to talk to people about that. Because sometimes, we find that business leaders are on the same page as the general consumers are. We saw this in our survey, right? That they want to dedicate more time and more resources to ESG within their company. But knowing how to do that is still a big barrier for a lot of people. If I jumped back into the numbers, we saw that 95% of business leaders said, “Look, I am having a tough time trying to implement sustainability and ESG initiatives. I can’t get metrics from my partners, I can’t get it from our third parties, I can’t get the data that I need. I have these time-consuming manual processes. I’ve got to integrate all of this complex data. I’ve got to get data from multiple parts of the business.” One of the things that helps me sit in that sweet spot is that I know how to talk about business, I know how to talk about digital, I know how to talk about sustainability. But I also am very passionate about all of those, right? Leadership, digital, and sustainability, all of those matter to me. No matter how we tend to pivot that conversation, I can talk to people about why that matters. Here’s an example of something that happened in one of my programs recently. I used one of my favorite definitions of leadership, which is that leadership is the art of mobilizing other people to want to struggle for a shared aspiration, right? There’s a lot in that. The question then becomes, how am I influencing you to struggle? What am I influencing you to struggle for? If I feel like I need to be more emotionally connected to my customers and I need to demonstrate that it’s not that I can build a better widget, it’s not that I can build a better mousetrap. But I care about the world that you live in, I care about you as I do that, I care about the communities I sell in, and that you will drive past my competitor in order to buy from me. But when I serve as a leader then, when I try to mobilize you around these topics, it’s going to have sustainability in it. Because I realize we have a shared ambition, we have a shared aspiration of making the world a better place, of solving these issues both functionally and emotionally for these customers. Being able to pivot back and forth and say, yeah, digital is important because everybody talks about technology. Yeah, sustainability is important. Yeah, leadership is important. But it’s the integration of all of that, that’s going to allow you to be successful. Then be able to prove that you have done the things that you need to do. That’s important for you as a leader. Now, we also saw in the survey that 96% of people said that, “Look, we would love to do this, but we know we have human bias.” That’s a topic that a lot of people struggle talking about, that a lot of times bias distracts us from the end goal. There are things we know we should be doing but our bias gets in the way. I believe and I think the research supports that the fact that bias, just like our values, is something that everybody has, right? It’s not true to say that I don’t have it and that you don’t have it, that we were either born with it or it was put into us when we’re so young. The research says that it feels like it was hardwired into our very being. Everybody has bias just like everybody has values. The problem comes in, John, when people who are in power are allowed to use their bias to determine who to hire and promote and treat fairly, are allowed to have practices that destroy our planet, are allowed to decide policies that other people are forced to conform to. You might actually have conscious bias and you need laws and rules to force you to behave properly. But we actually see that more people have unconscious bias. They need training to help them be aware of how they might be treating other people unfairly or how they may be making decisions unfairly or doing something unfair toward the planet. The research tells us that our minds are really stubborn. We believe what we believe. But I don’t think that means we should be allowed to make decisions that impact people and profit off the planet based on our own personal beliefs. In our study, we saw that 93% of people would trust that bot that I talked about over a human to make sustainability and social decisions. It’s because they think those bots are better at making decisions without making mistakes or making rational, unbiased decisions if it’s programmed to properly or predicting future outcomes, identifying new ways to tackle issues. This is why I think this integration between leadership and sustainability and systems is useful because it helps us level this playing field with this day-to-day corporate work that we have, so that it’s not really based on individual beliefs. But I also think that leadership and systems and sustainability altogether can help companies keep promises, so that they don’t intentionally or unintentionally break them. I really think that it’s keeping your promises that builds value in the eyes of your customers and in the eyes of your employees.

John Shegerian: Potentially why people trust the bots more is because they’re unemotional. Really what you’re doing is you’re coming in and helping leaders get over themselves. As you said, we all have biases from our upbringing in the environments that we’re raised in and things of that such. But we’ve got to get over ourselves and listen to the real facts that exist. We as [inaudible] and moral and ethical people make better decisions for not only our corporation, our shareholders, but our employees, our clients or potential clients, and actually the world at large. When we were growing up, Pamela, big business was seen as a Game of Thrones zero sum game. As you said, all shareholders and stakeholders in this and we all can work together, wherever we are, to improve the world and make it a better place.

Pamela: I agree with you, I think it used to be quite Machiavellian. In some places, it can still be that way. But I think that things are changing quite a bit. Then I’ll go back to my history, right? When I told you the story about me going to Talented and Gifted and playing with that machine in the corner, I still think technology has the ability to do that, right? I still think technology has the ability to connect people around common goals if we program it and walk away, right? Clearly, if you program bias in, you’re going to get bias out, so we have to address that first. But if you address that properly, you can actually have decisions that are made without hopefully bias in it. At least some of the lower-level decisions that are obvious ones, about whether we should take on a certain project or whether we should think about the impact on the environment or whether we should think about the impact we’re having in social communities, those are things that are obvious that we should feed into the way that we make decisions. To your point, we won’t be able to survive in this Game of Thrones type environment any longer in the future. I think our customers and our employees expect more of us, even our partners expect more of us now.

John Shegerian: Think about technology and Oracle was your partner on this. To find more on the study, all of our listeners and viewers could go to www.oracle.com. Where does technology have the quickest wins for the business leaders out there that are looking to deploy technology to get them on the journey to help create some data points and algorithms that could show some early wins so that you get some traction in their ESG and sustainability journey?

Pamela: I love the fact that some of the results coming out of the survey focus on something I think we all know intuitively, right? That technology can help us with this. The thing that we saw was that AI might be better at making decisions. The idea that I can teach the computer to think in the way that I do, to process things in the way that I do, 90% of business leaders said that they thought that would be helpful. They saw a lot of benefit in machines doing heavy lifting and then getting the data out so that the humans could give context around what the data was that they saw. Or maybe even say, “Well, I think we need to pivot based on the data that I see.” They said that, “Look, you’ll make a lot more progress towards sustainability and social goals if you use the help of AI, not really in his way where this machine takes over but in a way where the humans and machines work together.” We really want to think about this as humans plus machines or not humans versus machines, right? It’s the human with machine that’s going to lead us to having success around ESG. This is important, I think, because yes, machines do work faster at these repetitive tasks than we do. But machines can also leverage data and analytics to help us increase our level of insight. That gives us insight on what’s important or insight on what work to do or insight on how to explain what we see happening, all of that. When we apply that insight toward sustainability initiatives, that’s really huge. The way that I see it, technology plays a huge role in the integration of ESG initiatives. But it also helps us to gather information and organize that information and implement all of that data that we need to really make important decisions. If you can focus on how do I get all the guesswork out that I deal with every day, how do I automate more tedious work that nobody really wants to have to do anyway, then can you focus on allowing technology to allow different departments to collaborate and communicate more easily. As we talked about the countries overseas not having the opportunity to look away from, can we allow technology to do those things and get everybody on the same page? Because if so, yes, then business leaders can really focus on making a real and lasting change. If you don’t do that, I think business leaders will always push back because they don’t really have the time and something else is always going to get prioritized over the type of work.

John Shegerian: Understood. You and I know that if tomorrow there was a presidential election and we elected a new president in this country, the day after that election, 50-plus percent of the American public would love that president and 49 point something percent would really be against that president. That’s the way America works, we’re a individualistic society. There is already now a little bit of pushback happening on ESG. Some states, you were born in Texas, so we’re not holding you to the great leaders of Texas. I wasn’t born in California, so I don’t want to be held to Governor Newsom’s rules and standards either. We’re from different places, but we happen to live in our adopted home states. There are some states that are pushing back on ESG investing and things of that such. Is that a healthy part of the evolution of the undeniable and unstoppable trends of ESG and sustainability? How do you foresee that way out in the months and years ahead, Pamela?

Pamela: I might think about this a little differently than other people do, right? I think it’s important to have healthy dialogue and give people a space to see why they don’t agree. But then also use the data and the facts to address those issues, right? Because it’s not until I stress that and I stress that system that I realized here’s an issue where you have incorrect facts. Here’s an issue where maybe I’m wrong and you’re right. Here’s a place and opportunity for us to collaborate, maybe you bend a little and I bend a little. It’s almost like a person who is going in for a stress test on their heart, right? In order for me to see what your capability is, I push you to the limit a little bit. Then I back off and say, “Okay, here’s the space where I think you can operate at peak capability, peak capacity.” I think every organization, every state, every government should do that, so that it’s not just one part of me actually operating. I think that what we’re looking at for our future, John, is a collective thing. You talked earlier about us being individualistic or collective. The goals of the individualist is also always think about the things that they want individually. A collectivist recognizes that sometimes, you have to subordinate the needs of the individual to the group. As we think about ESG, that’s going to be where we need to be, that we need to somehow subordinate some of my individual wants and desires so that collectively, we’re going to have a planet that you can live in and we’ll have something to give to our children. I think just like organizations want to succeed, states are now competing for talent. They’re competing for companies. When you see people dispersing across the country, because so many people can work from home right now, now you’re having to promote your state is one of the great places to live. Just like organizations, you need to understand the emotions that are driving the people that are coming to your state. The emotions of people of the organizations that are thinking about moving to your state, right? Because your competitive advantage, just like that company is going to depend on who you can attract, just like that company depends on who they can hire and their profit depends on who they can sell to. You want to be emotionally connected to the people that are coming to your state so that they have a reason to stick with you. I have to have things I love about Texas in order to stay here. You have to have things you love about California in order to stay there, right?

John Shegerian: 100%.

Pamela: All of us, even if you’re a government entity, have to get better at keeping our promises, right? We have to get better at progressing toward a sustainable future that we can all live in and prove our value to people that really care about it. Because a lot of times, people can’t see the things that we say that we’re doing, or they can’t see any proof that we’re actually getting that done. We have to get much better at doing that.

John Shegerian: Got it. Pamela, you’re just fascinating and what you’re doing is so timely and important. I’m so thankful for your time today. For our listeners and viewers, to find more about the No Planet B study, please go to www.oracle.com. To find Pamela Rucker, please, you can find her on LinkedIn, on Twitter, or at pamelarucker.com. Pamela, it is just an honor and a pleasure to have you on the Impact podcast. You’re always welcome on this podcast. We do this show specifically for great people like you and Oracle who are together making the world a better place. Thank you for joining us today. I hope to see you back here another time.

Pamela: Thank you for having me.

John Shegerian: This episode of the Impact podcast is brought to you by Closed Loop Partners. Closed Loop Partners is a leading circular economy investor in the United States, with an extensive network of Fortune 500 corporate investors, family offices, institutional investors, industry experts, and impact partners. Closed Loop’s platform spans the arc of capital from venture capital to private equity, bridging gaps, and fostering synergies to scale the circular economy. To find Closed Loop Partners, please go to www.closedlooppartners.com. This edition of the Impact podcast is brought to you by ERI. ERI has a mission to protect people, the planet, and your privacy. It’s the largest fully integrated IT and electronics asset disposition provider and cybersecurity-focused hardware destruction company in the United States and maybe even the world. For more information on how ERI can help your business properly dispose of outdated electronic hardware devices, please visit eridirect.com.

John Shegerian: Do you have a suggestion for a rock star Impact Podcast guest? Go to impactpodcast.com and just click Be a Guest to recommend someone today. This edition of the Impact Podcast is brought to you by ERI. ERI has a mission to protect people, the planet, and your privacy and is the largest fully integrated IT and electronics asset disposition provider and cybersecurity-focused hardware destruction company in the United States and maybe even the world. For more information on how ERI can help your business properly dispose of outdated electronic hardware devices, please visit ERIDirect.com. This episode of the Impact Podcast is brought to you by Closed Loop Partners. Closed Loop Partners is a leading circular economy investor in the United States with an extensive network of Fortune 500 corporate investors, family offices, institutional investors, industry experts and Impact partners. Closed Loop’s platform spans the arc of capital from venture capital to private equity, bridging gaps and fostering synergies to scale the circular economy. To find Closed Loop Partners, please go to www.ClosedLoopPartners.com.

John: Welcome to another edition of the Impact Podcast. I’m John Shegerian and I’m so excited to have with us today, Ethan Carter. He’s the Director of Sustainability of Darling Ingredients. Welcome to the Impact Podcast, Ethan.

Ethan Carter: Thanks, John. It’s a real pleasure to be here. I’m really excited about it.

John: You know, before we get talking about all the important and great work that you and your colleagues are doing in Darling Ingredients, I’d love for you to share first the Ethan Carter story. Where did you grow up and how did you even got here?

Ethan: Yeah, and so, I grew up in the great state of Arkansas. So, I grew up in the Little Rock area, went to school there and then ended up at the University of Arkansas where I majored in chemical engineering. I had some really great opportunities there to really- That’s kind of where I really got first exposed to sustainability and the sustainability world, and it was really a big interest. It’s kind of the early days from a corporate sustainability perspective but a lots of things moving, [inaudible] sustainability but I found a way to get involved through the engineering department and some life cycle analysis work, in things like that as well as minoring in environmental science. So, really, it’s an interest in mind that I really pursued. Out of college, I got a job with an oil and gas company which was a little bit different than the journey that most sustainability professionals out there. It was a company called Southwestern Energy. So I was in Arkansas with them, working on environmental and safety and lots of different issues, air quality issues and then kind of started to move into sustainability role as they were really kind of leading on the leading edge of oil and gas companies and that was really exciting to be a part of. In their first sustainability report, building some of those programs, we had an initiative we’d be freshwater neutral. Well, before, that was going on in a lot of [inaudible] that was exciting to work on. Then, after a while, transitions to Houston and we’ve been living there for the past 8 years. I worked some more at that company, as well as Exxon Mobil where I worked on decarbonization and lots of the exciting work that’s going on in the energy industry. A lot of fascinating work going on in oil and gas to try and decarbonize and provide solutions for customers and so that it was a really, really exciting and really interesting way to shape a career. About five months ago now, I came to the Darling Ingredients in the Dallas area and so, I’m really excited to be here now. It’s been an interesting pathway coming through from an engineering education into this sustainability world, especially as more and more companies have had an increased focus on sustainability which I think is hugely important and that’s why I’m really glad to be a part of it and I’m really glad to come to a company like Darling.

John: You know, Ethan, how does your background in energy inform you and applicable to the role now that you have is director of sustainability at Darling Ingredients?

Ethan: Yeah. So, Darling Ingredients is a really fascinating company and not a lot of people know us or know what we do. I didn’t really know the company much prior to finding out about this role. Our primary business is we take the rest of the animal that’s left over after the food ends up on your plate and we render that. So, you separate out the proteins and the fats and then we use the protein in animal feed and pet food and lots of different applications. A lot of the waste fats, actually, we make into renewable diesel. So we have a joint venture with Valero in the Houston area where we make renewable diesel fuel. We just started up our third unit. We’re really proud that that’s up and going now. So, there’s a lot of parallels between the things that Darling does in the energy space and what I was working on in my previous life at oil and gas companies because we are partnered in the space, we work in some of the same markets. That’s really an exciting parallel and I’m excited to bring that here. The other big piece of it for me is that we use a lot of energy in our process and, you know, the lessons from that technical background and the trying to solve those really hard, deep industrial decarbonization questions that are out there. You know, electricity switching feels like the easy thing when you’re trying to decarbonize chemical production or steel production or cement production, or steam generation like we do a lot of here and so that’s where I’m really open to bringing some of that technical background into this role with Darling Ingredients, and really help that long-term journey that we’re on toward getting to net zero emissions.

John: Let’s go back to what Darling does, explain that to me because, again, like you I never have heard of Darling Ingredients until the deal. Until recently when I was prepping for this interview, but it sounds fascinating and it sounds also very important as what you do. So, explain it again. This is the post-consumer proteins and fats, or is this pre-consumer, or is it a mix there of all?

Ethan: It’s a mixture of that. We operate in kind of three main sections, we think of it as food, as feed, and as fuel.

John: Okay.

Ethan: So, our food segment is things like collagen, peptides. We take leftover animal skins after the animals are slaughtered and we reform that into collagen, and that’s actually a product that you can buy in the store. It’s great for lots of health benefits that I’m not the expert in so I won’t try to enumerate them and, you know, but there’s that piece of it. The feed part of our business is that coming from that rendering process. The main material that we take is when an animal comes from the farm and then there’s the meat production part of the value chain where the companies, they take and they sell. It’s what you buy on the store, the chicken or the beef. There’s a lot of the animal, about 50% of the animal, that’s left over at the end of that process and so, rather than that going to landfill or just to incineration, we take that animal and we run it through a process where you essentially cook it. So, you can render fat in your kitchen, right? I’ve heard people say that if you, you know, if you’ve cooked bacon in your kitchen, you’ve done rendering, right? You separated fat from protein.

John: Right?

Ethan: Essentially, that’s what the process is and then we take those proteins and apply it back. A lot of it goes into animal feed. Some goes into pet food. It really is kind of that pre-consumer waste that we’re taking for the majority. We also have some facilities that take food waste as well from grocery stores if it goes past its expiration date. We can run that through our process as well to repurpose that. So, it’s really fundamentally repurposing that material, and then the fats from that really leads into our fuel segment. Our fuel kind of has two separate entities. One is our facility in the Gulf Coast that really processes those fats from the rendering process as well as used cooking oil that will be gathered from stores like Chick-fil-A where they fry the chicken and then when the cooking oil is used, it has to go somewhere. It can’t just go in down the drain and so we collect that and we take it to our facility and make renewable diesel out of it.

John: So you’re recycling a lot of these materials. That’s fascinating. Chick-fil-A I understand, the supermarkets I understand, long expired food. Where do you get your feed stock for the other fats and proteins? Is it from composting companies or other types of relationships that you have?

Ethan: Yeah, it comes from slaughterhouses. When they’re making the meat, what’s leftover comes to us. So, that’s a big part of it.

John: Oh, great.

Ethan: We get animals directly from farm sometimes as well. There are certain parts of the market or certain parts of the world where if an animal just dies at the farm, we take that animal as well. The primary supply comes from what’s left over after the meat production process.

John: Historically, where was that? Before Darling existed, where was that material going before?

Ethan: Rendering is a really old process. I mean, Darling Ingredients has been around for more than 100 years.

John: Wow.

Ethan: Yeah, it dates back a long time. People have been doing this, but the alternative is really either landfill or incineration and so, really, we think that there’s a really good story to tell in terms of the avoided carbon from all of the what’s left over. If you just sent the rest of this animal to the landfill, it’s going to decompose, you’re going to have methane emissions related to that. Instead, we’re able to take it and make it into really useful products that we’re going to be able to sell back into our marketplace.

John: For our audience out there, if you’ve just joined us, we’ve got Ethan Carter with us today. He’s the Director of Sustainability of Darling Ingredients. To find Ethan and his colleagues, you can go to www.darlingii.com. and I’m on your website now and it’s a beautiful website, honestly. It’s very green by the way and [inaudible] but it’s impressive. All the information and all the transparency that you have with regards to what you’re doing and how you’re doing it. I mean, this is a big role here that you’ve taken. I mean, because director of sustainability is one thing, but you have over 270 facilities in 5 continents. That’s a lot of sustainability coverage to look over, huh?

Ethan: It is, absolutely. We have over 14,000 employees around the world. We’re growing even now. We’ve recently announced two more acquisitions. One in Poland and one in Brazil that we plan to close on next year. So, we’ve been expanding a lot which brings its own challenges from a sustainability management perspective, and that’s part of why I was brought in, to help kind of manage the growth of Darling Ingredients as we look to these new areas. We also think it’s really important because, you know, when you think about population growth, there’s going to be a need for more protein. There’s a need for more food in the world. Part of the reason that we’ve expanded so much into Brazil is that we see Brazil as a big part of that. Brazil raise its own sustainability challenges. Especially, when you talk about meat production, deforestation comes out a lot and we think we can be a big part of ensuring that as Brazil grows, and Brazil really looks to be kind of the area that can be the next area to feed the world, we need to make sure that happens sustainably and so we’re looking forward to that.

John: You know, Darling has a rich history and a long history as you pointed out, 100 plus years, we’re you the first director of sustainability or are you filling somebody’s shoes that had moved to a different position or left the company?

Ethan: Yeah, that’s a great question. So, I’m the first full-time sustainability director. The title has been passed around a little bit, but from an organizational standpoint, you know, we’ve kind of viewed here that what we do, our CEO loves to say that we were green before green was cool.

John: Right.

Ethan: He quoted a few times, saying that because of what we do is inherently, really taking waste products and making it into something beneficial.

John: Sure. Yeah.

Ethan: And I think, you know, the realization has been organizationally, we need a more robust focus on sustainability and as we look at meeting some of the longer term commitments that we put out there in terms of reducing our own emissions footprint, trying to help our customers and our suppliers, understand how our process fits in their sustainability stories as well, there was a need for more focus. So, yeah, this is a new position at Darling Ingredients and I’m really excited to kind of take that on as a challenge and really build up more of a sustainability organization here.

John: You know, that’s really fascinating because like your CEO said, you were green before green was cool and you were doing already the sustainability [inaudible] thing before those words became part of our vernacular lexicon, but now, bringing on someone like you, young and ambitious and a great speaker and a great organizer with already history in sustainability, now you get to actually not only codify that within your company but you also get to message that to the rest of the world because what use is it really besides the subset of used to the business model if people don’t understand that you’re really leading the way as we shift from a linear to a circular economy.

Ethan: Yeah, absolutely, and I think that’s a very important part and part of why my boss here runs sustainability as well as investor relations and communications is because there’s so much of that that is interrelated. Our investors and stakeholders are really interested in what we’re doing. We’re trying to tell the story in a better way and get the information out there in terms of what we do and why it is so beneficial and why it’s so important in the animal agriculture value chain and what value we bring and in terms of kind of how we’re approaching that. I kind of view my challenges as being three things. One, you have that challenge of telling the Darling Ingredients story and how we add value. The second part is really getting the focus away from how we’ve thought about things like decarbonization historically where it’s been a focus on energy efficiency. Lots of companies are going through this journey now where you think of it as energy efficiency and cost reduction and things like that to really, “Okay, we have to fundamentally think differently about how we run our process.” and that’s a bit of a paradigm shift and that’s hard for any organization to do.

John: True.

Ethan: So that’s kind of the second piece, and then the third piece is just how do we enable the new business pathways? I think that’s one really interesting or that’s one lens I really try to bring, is always trying to think about sustainability from that business opportunity standpoint and where do you find new markets? Where do you create? You know, like we’ve done with renewable diesel where there wasn’t much of a market but we’ve grown that business and created a new use for these waste cooking oils and waste fats and really created that business and really be able to kind of shape those markets as they get going.

John: Well, as you pointed out and our listeners have got to know over the years, at the end of the day, you’re a commercial enterprise, your business is to make money, but at the same time, you’re doing a lot of good along the way. So we’re merging those two, you know, interest and continue to evolve them both. So you continue to maintain or grow your profits while you also grow the positive impacts that you’re having, planet-positive impacts, carbon-neutral impacts that you’re having. It’s a fascinating balancing act but journey as well. You are doing this yourself, you’re still very young, and as your CEO said, you were green before it was cool to be green at Darling. Well, you were doing sustainability for the energy companies before it was cool to be green as well or sustainable as well. Now though, it seems as though the times have caught up with everybody in a positive way, and sustainability and circular economy and ESG are now terms that are all becoming very socializing, ubiquitous to us vis-à-vis the media and leaders, business leaders, institutional leaders like Larry Fink, etc. So how does that play? ESG into your role of director of sustainability as Darling Ingredients evolves, your sustainability and ESG and impacts that you’re making.

Ethan: Yeah, you know, ESG as kind of the talking point and what we’re all looking at. I mean, you look at Europe and the recent passage of the corporate sustainability reporting directive. I think what we’re seeing now, from my lens, is a little more structure in that space, right? Whereas it’s kind of been, you know, we all are trying to get on the same frameworks and I’m sure that many of your guests have joked about the alphabet soup of ESG where you have all the different standards and kind of competing interests out there. So, you know, I’m hopeful that we’re getting to a place where we can all get a little more standardized in how we talk about these things which will really help people that are looking in from the outside to help understand what we do and what our impacts are. That’s a huge part of my job, it’s understanding the regulatory landscape and how that is going to impact us and our going forward. I view ESG, personally, in my view, I like the term sustainability much more because we’re all trying to get to a place where we’re sustainable, we’re looking at things like circular economy. ESG, I think, is the way that we, as a corporate entity, report on that to the outside world. It’s incredibly important because we need that transparency, we need that disclosure, we need that engagement with stakeholders and it’s going to be a huge part of our sustainability journey but we also can’t report our way to decarbonizing, right?

John: That’s right.

Ethan: So we have to be able to apply those things. The other interesting thing I think that I got from what you just mentioned there, in addition to the ESG [inaudible], I am a little bit young for folks in these kind of roles. It’s been interesting to me over the years, especially in the oil and gas industry. It’s really easy to commit to something that’s going to happen 30 years after you retire, right? And, you know, I started looking at my retirement timeline and I still plan to be around when some of these longer term goals hit, and so we started thinking about 2050 as maybe, you know, my index fund retirement date [inaudible] 2055. I may still be here, right? And so how do we make sure we’re actually getting on a credible path way?

John: Yeah.

Ethan: Something we worked really hard on in the oil and gas industry was let’s not just throw out numbers that we can’t hit or don’t know how to hit, let’s really find that credible pathway and that’s what now at Darling Ingredients we’re really getting laser focused on. How are we going to execute these plans, going forward? We recently committed to the science-based targets initiative which I’m sure most of your listeners are well aware is a very intensive process. We’re looking forward to going through that and kind of guiding our strategy setting on that. I’m just really excited to get on that journey here.

John: Hey, you know what, [inaudible] and please take this the right way, I said you’re really young. It’s a term of endearment because I think it’s wonderful that chief sustainability officers, whether it’s the first chiefs of sustainability officer in a company or your the third one, it’s wonderful to bring in youth because it gives me [inaudible] 60 years old now, Ethan, and I’ve been doing this for years and my dad was one of the first guys to bring- He was the first guy to bring windmills to America, into windmill farms back in the late 70s. So to me, that we’re passing the torch to the next generation of talent like you with youth and energy and already great experience behind you and an engineering background, that makes me feel really hopeful that the future is in good hands. The future is in good hands, but I get what you mean. You’re going to have to live with the decisions you make now and you’re going to have to hear about it, like you said, from your colleagues, 20 years from now. So, that is also a part. I didn’t think of that part of the equation. On your website, which I love, it’s so great, you’re what I call radical transparency. Your website is radically transparent in so many ways, and one of the ways is you had your ESG Report September 2022 Audit which could be downloaded and I highly recommend to listeners or viewers who are more interested in learning more about what they Darling Ingredients is doing, you can download this report. How does your experience, and I know you’re only five months into your new position, how is that report going to evolve do you believe in the months and years [inaudible] got to do 2023’s, 2024’s, and beyond?

Ethan: The sustainability report is really exciting, right? Yeah, sustainability issue report. You know, I think we’ve done a lot and Darling Ingredients has done a great job prior to meeting here because I think I was here two months before we published [crosstalk]. We’ve done it and I think what we’ve tried to do is a lot of that transparency that you talked about. I think getting more and more information out there and that’s something we’re trying to do even more of going forward, bringing as much transparency as we can to how we’re approaching things, to what outcomes we’re seeing, what kind of trends we’re seeing in the business, how that fits into our strategy, how that looks from a climate risk perspective. We started to align with TCFD this year, a task force of climate-related financial disclosures, we’ll continue to evolve going forward. For me, I think one of the things I want to see, I want to shrink the number of pages so that when you download it, it’s not 85 pages or however many it is. If it’s hard for me to sit down and read, it’s definitely hard for someone to sit down and read that [crosstalk]. I think we’ll see a couple of trends with that. One is I think we’ll see us try to get on more of a digitally friendly, kind of maybe even more closer to real time in like the quarterly that you see with financials report in terms of what our progress is. I’d love to get that more frequent and not getting it out in September when the data is from last year. It would be a great step.

John: Right.

Ethan: I think the trend, generally, is going to be one, we’re going to have to align a regulation as that comes out. In a European regulation [inaudible], we have a massive footprint in Europe. We have over 50 facilities in Europe and so we’re going to need to align with sort of the global reporting standards in addition to what we’re trying to do here, but also I think that increased transparency. You know, we want to talk more about how we’re thinking about these sustainability issues that impact our business, that have the potential to impact our business, how we’re addressing those from a business standpoint and both from a risk perspective but also an opportunity perspective because I think that sometimes, we think about sustainability risk a lot of times and climate risk and that’s what you hear a lot of but not opportunities, and what opportunities are out there to build markets, to create partnerships that are going to really drive sustainability poured in value chains rather than just in what we report.

John: You know, you’re at an interesting role. When I talk to friends of the leaders of huge companies like yours, one of the greatest challenges that they have is it’s one thing to be in your role and to really hone your skills at communicating outward but since you’re doing such important work and you guys were cool before it was cool to be green, how do you then communicate and figure out how to best communicate inwardly to your 14,000 employees and get your colleagues all excited to become great ambassadors and evangelists of all the importance of sustainability and circular economy work that you’re doing? Do you leverage social media, traditional media? Do you leverage email? What’s your thoughts on that and and how do you want to improve that at Darling Ingredients?

Ethan: Well, that’s why we’re talking today, John. Right?

John: Okay, touche.

Ethan: And I’m sure you’ll see this appear on our LinkedIn page [crosstalk]. I think that is a huge challenge. The one thing I found in working in large organizations over the years is that people want to be involved when it comes to sustainability. They want to do good things for the planet. They want to help with all these big issues, but it doesn’t always clearly translate into, “How am I supposed to do this and also do the other 55,000 things I’m asked to do everyday in my day job?”

John: Right.

Ethan: And so I think what we can do from a messaging standpoint is to really provide that guidance in terms of here’s how we can be thinking about our jobs differently. Engineering department, here’s how you can think about what you’re doing. Environmental Department, here’s how you can be thinking about doing. Operators, here’s what you can be thinking about doing in your day-to-day job and how we’re operating things differently. As well as getting feedback from them because sometimes there’s great ideas out there that just haven’t bubbled their way up. I love getting out into the facilities and talking to folks about how they run their business, and, you know, one of our core values is entrepreneurship within the company and so we love to let the businesses do their thing, but we need to give them guidance in terms of how they can move that sustainability aboard. In terms of how we communicate that, I mean, that’s the big challenge, right? We do have a few hundred, a couple hundred facilities and 14,000 people, so that’s one of the things we’re working on now. How do we build that communication strategy internally in addition to how we talk about what we do externally, ensure we’re able to to leverage all the ideas out there and I think the best ways I’ve found in the past is you can leverage your budgeting process because everyone feeds into that one way or the other. You can leverage social media, we have an internal social media tool. A little bit here is most companies do nowadays and we’re looking forward to working with the communications experts, [inaudible] in my department as well to leverage that.

John: It’s just that you’re obviously a great communicator and that’s obvious to all of our audience that’s been listening today. Go back to something you just said, you said something just really important about you love to go into facilities and get out and see facilities and that’s a common theme I’ve heard over the last 16 years as I’ve interviewed and gotten to know many chief sustainability officers or impact officers across the whole planet. Now that we’re living in this post COVID world, and of course you’re doing the balancing act of managing the carbon footprint, helping to manage the carbon footprint of Darling Ingredients, but also knowing the need and also knowing the passion you have for what you’re doing, wanting to get out and see some of your 270 facilities and meet some of your 14,000 colleagues. How do you want that balance beam there to do enough of it but not too much of it and how does that scale weigh out for you and what’s your thoughts around travel and going out and getting on the road and seeing so many of the confidence and the facilities and the people that you get the pleasure of working with?

Ethan: Yeah. Well, the biggest challenge is that maybe having three kids at home as well. [crosstalk] My wife is a saint that she lets me go and travel when I can.

John: True.

Ethan: But, no, I mean it’s usually important. The way I try to think about it is, you know, we do have to think about how much we’re out of the office, right? And getting out and so, yeah, I do think though that you can almost get more value sometimes by visiting a facility, seeing things in person, really talking with the people that operate things during the day, and I’m still early in that here but a lot of times, there may be something that looks really good on paper back at the headquarters that you then bring it out and they’re like, “No, that won’t work. We’ve tried it because of xyz,” or you take it out and they say, “Oh, yeah, that would be really easy. We could do that tomorrow.” and you’ve put it in the budget for 10 years from now because you’re like, “Oh, this is too hard.” So really bringing that kind of understanding in is important. I’m always working to strike that, what that balance looks like. The big challenge for us with this big of a global operation, we’re going to have to build our team out some around the world. Right now is myself and one other person in our sustainability team, full-time, which for a company as large as Darling Ingredients we’re going to need more support on that front. I think positioning those folks in different parts of the world will be really helpful for us as we look at it, to strategize there.

John: Ethan, before I let you go today, do you have any upcoming or big announcements that you want to make here? Or anything you want to tease us about that’s coming in 2023 or beyond for Darling Ingredients?

Ethan: Sure. I think the big thing we’ve done very recently, I think the press release will come out a couple hours after we tape this, is that we’ve committed officially to the Science Based Targets Initiative.

John: That’s good.

Ethan: We’re using that to set our strategy going forward and in really those challenges around emissions in particular, which, as we have talked about, is a huge part of sustainability although not the only thing. Coming from oil and gas, sometimes it feels like the ESG issues are climate, climate, climate and climate and there’s everything else is kind of [crosstalk]. I think that’s one thing that we’re looking forward to. Looking at our new businesses that we brought in to the Darling Ingredients family and how we integrate, there may be some areas that these businesses were bringing in have better sustainability processes than we have in other parts of Darling currently and so can we leverage some of those learnings as we look to integrate those companies and to how we operate in other places to improve sustainability? I think working with suppliers and customers is going to be huge. These are dealt with big, complex energy value chain challenges in previous roles and the agricultural value chain is maybe even more complex. You have everyone from individual small farmers to large farms and companies and how that integrates into the animal feed side of the business into the meat side of the business and then we operate in the fuel segment as well. So, how that all relates together and how we really approach is going to be something we’re really focused on in 2023.

John: Wonderful. Well, thank you for joining us today. For our listeners and viewers who want to learn more about what Ethan Carter and all of his colleagues are doing in sustainability or to download their 2022 ESG report, please go to www.darlingii.com. Ethan Carter, you’re the Director of Sustainability at Darling Ingredients, you’re making the world a better place, you’re making huge impacts, and you’re always welcome back on the Impact Podcast. Thank you for all that you do.

Ethan: Thank you, John. It’s been a real pleasure today and I really look forward to hearing from you again and hearing from all the other great folks that you have on this.

John: This edition of the Impact Podcast is brought to you by Engage. Engage is a digital booking platform revolutionising the talent booking industry. With thousands of athletes, celebrities, entrepreneurs, and business leaders, Engage is the go-to spot for booking talent for speeches, custom experiences, livestreams, and much more. For more information on Engage or to book talent today, visit LetsEngage.com.

John: This edition of the Impact Podcast is brought to you by ERI. ERI has a mission to protect people, the planet, and your privacy and is the largest fully integrated IT and electronics asset disposition provider and cybersecurity focused hardware destruction company in the United States and maybe even the world. For more information on how ERI can help your business properly dispose of outdated electronic hardware devices, please visit ERIDirect.com.

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John: For more information on how ERI can help your business properly dispose of outdated electronic hardware devices, please visit eridirect.com. This episode of the Impact Podcast is brought to you by Closed Loop Partners. Closed Loop Partners is a leading circular economy investor in the United States with an extensive network of Fortune 500 corporate investors, family offices, institutional investors, industry experts and impact partners. Closed Loop’s platform spans the arc of capital, from venture capital to private equity bridging gaps and fostering synergies to scale the circular economy. To find Close Loop Partners, please go to www.closedlooppartners.com.

John: Welcome to another edition of The Impact Podcast. This is a super special edition. We’ve got with us today, the tree hugger himself, Graham Hill, founder and CEO of the Carbonauts, but of course, so many of you know him for many other reasons which we’ll get into today. Welcome Graham.

Graham Hill: Thank you for having me. A real pleasure to be here.

John: It’s such an honor to have you today, Graham, because even for me who got into the industry about 20 years ago, you’ve been a living legend, a shining light even when there was a lot of darkness and so many of us, like me, have followed your career, follow your trajectory, and just follow all the great and important work you’ve accomplished and inspired all of us. Thank you for all that you’ve done, including for myself.

Graham: Thank you, John. That great. Yeah, it’s nice to have been able to create some things that help get people excited about the incredible green future. I really appreciate hearing that.

John: It’s the truth and for the listeners and viewers who haven’t heard of you yet, and I wanted to ask you about this, you have a TED Talk that has over 11 million views. Of course, you created the iconic and legendary, which still exists today, and I read it today, treehugger.com, which had, at one point, billions of views, probably now, tens of billions of views. You’ve been on the cover of numerous magazines and, truly, before sustainability became a thing, you were beating the drum and doing it way before it was cool and you actually made it cool. Can you talk a little bit, before we get talking, of course, about the Carbonauts, can you talk a little bit about your history leading up to the Carbonauts?

Graham: Absolutely. yeah, so I’m an undercover Canadian, although I’ve been in the US for a long time. I studied architecture and product design. I grew up in the country in a log cabin with hippie parents, a lot of health food and hippie stuff. I definitely came by this honestly. In the mid, the early 90s 93, 94 I fell in love with the internet at Emily Carr in Vancouver. They just were advanced, advanced, meaning that we had one computer that had the graphical web, as it was called then. Then we used email, the War Games green characters on the screen thing. Anyway, I just saw that as the future and so was lucky to start a company in 1995 in Seattle, just over the border from Vancouver with my cousin Tish Hill building websites because we just thought that was… We were very lucky and did some good work and pushed hard, right place right time and built it to 60 people and sold it and did a ton of work for Microsoft. I’d been in the service industry before and so that was really formative because it really allowed me… Yeah, I really became an entrepreneur at that point. I made some money at an early age. I basically moved to Boston temporarily to run one of the other companies that got bought by our parent company with the deal that I would be able to get to New York City. When I had traveled to New York City, I was like, people walk my speed here. I really like it. I was very drawn to New York and so I finagled my way there, worked for the parent company for a little bit and then that’s when everything blew up in 2000, I guess 2001. I made some money and I no longer was working for the parent company and I stumbled across the Natural Step, which is still going today. I was able to be choosy about what I wanted to do and so Natural Step and Natural Capitalism, the book by the Lovins and Paul Hawken, etcetera was very inspiring, reading science about evolution and that sort of stuff. Yeah, I was able to be choosy about what I wanted to do and I was very clear to me that I wanted to do environmental matters. That was 23 years ago and I’ve been focused on it ever since. I started off, I was looking at green roofs in 2000, 2001, but I ended up focusing on building a plant-based air filter. It turns out that if you run air through soil, the living plant the bacteria around the root structure will break down pollutants. I wanted to build a beautiful air filter that would go in your bedroom kind of thing. I got some bad advice from some of my partners and wanted something small and inexpensive and it ended up being large and expensive. But it really got me going. Yeah, people have built these things. I honestly don’t know how well they work because I sort of know about it. In my opinion, they have to be pretty big to do much. But in any case, that got me going. I had an idea for Treehugger in 2000 and basically environmental media at that point, as you remember, and certainly some among us, some of the listeners will remember, was terrible. It was negative. It was, “Stop this, stop that.” It was political. It was partisan. It was often anti-business. It was not designed forward. Loved the hippies, tiny market. I just saw an opportunity because I saw I could piece together in my mind, I could see this incredible green future that was highlighted by books like Natural Capitalism. I could see it. In my searching around the internet, I could see all these incredible things, but it was hard for most people to put it together. The environmental media, we need the alarmist stuff. We need the negative stuff. We probably even need the partisan stuff, not that that’s terrible. But I really felt we needed something for someone who wore a collared shirt, lived in a city. But we needed something that was bipartisan, that was pro-business, that was designed forward that showed this exciting green future that I could see. That was the basis for Treehugger. Obviously it’s a tongue-in-cheek name. We were just having some fun with it, but it made it very memorable. I had thought about it in 2000 and basically in 2004, the technology came. Then the blogging platform, which made it inexpensive and easy to build media, which has changed our world in such a big way. My friend, Nick Denton, did Gawker Media and was very helpful in pushing me to do it. We pushed really hard and we had such a new unique approach and we were one of the early blogs, which was very incestuous, which helped you get page views so we were very quickly the biggest green site on the web. Tree Hugger grew and ended up selling it to Discovery in 2007. Worked for them for a number of years and it’s still going strong. Lloyd Alter, who I hired probably in 2005, maybe even 2004, still there crushing it. They’re now, yeah, they were part of Discovery, then they did a joint venture with M&N and then they eventually sold to IAC and so my old friend, Neil Vogel now runs the whole division there. Yeah, they’re ending up in a good place and it’s still going strong. I highly recommend to readers. They have a fantastic newsletter and it’s just a solid site. Of course, it’s hard to see it in the context of what it is now because there’s so many other sites doing similar. But, yeah, Treehugger is a wonderful thing and it got billions of web page views over the years.

John: It was in my…

Graham: Yeah. Okay, go ahead.

John: It was in my inbox this morning and it was still, like you said, Lloyd’s doing a great job and it’s still very relevant.

Graham: Yeah, it’s great.

John: Which is awesome.

Graham: Yeah, and he’s still as funny and funnier and more now… Listen, the guy’s been doing it forever. It’s amazing. Highly recommend that. Yeah, and we’re probably going to do some work with them, which is fantastic. That was the Treehugger story. Discovery, loved them, they were great to work with and still we’re probably going to do some work with them at the Carbonauts. Then I focused on small living for about a decade. I built this company called LifeEdited with Ross Porter and a handful of others, David Freelander and a number of other people. Basically, the idea that if you apply smart design technology and a little behavior change that you can create a smaller life. It’s going to save you money, that it’s going to be better for the planet and that ultimately a smaller, simpler life is actually a happier life. We’ve just gotten confused with somehow this idea that more space and more stuff is really going to make a difference to our happiness. Happiness levels have flatlined since the 50s and it’s just crystal clear. We did some really cool…

John: The 50s, do you know why it’s flatlined since the 50s? I actually learned this recently, but the… Do you know why?

Graham: I don’t know. Tell me?

John: Pretty much, it was the lack of connectivity that was created by the television.

Graham: Yeah, that’s good.

John: Yeah. That actually came out of the Harvard Happiness Study.

Graham: Oh, right. I’m just about to listen to the Sam Harris interview with that guy about that. He’s very cool. Yeah, that sounds about right.

John: He literally talks about just what you said, since the fifties, it’s been flatlined or in decline.

Graham: Yeah, and probably, with social media, even worse, further decline. Yeah.

John: It’s funny you talk about space, though. I remember, and of course I don’t remember the actual publication, but I remember a wonderful article on you being done about the space that you had been living in, that you had set up, during this period. It’s such a visual, the visuals articulated your message better than even the message itself, the written word. Because I remember, just marveled at how small you were living in and were…

Graham: Yeah.

John: …just very happy.

Graham: Yeah. It was great. I did a couple. I did three main personal projects. Then we did some projects for other people, including one of the founders of Summit Series. But I built, in New York, I built a 420 square foot apartment.

John: Right.

Graham: Then after that, I did 350, and I lived in both of them for quite awhile. I really pushed it, or we pushed it really the team. It was down to the forks and knives kind of thing, every last detail. But it was, yeah, if you search LifeEdited you can see a bunch of examples. We were on the cover of Dwell, for the small space issue. It was moving walls was part of it. Definitely lots of Murphy beds and the one’s main space would transform. It would go from your open office space for during the daytime to living room. We had a table that hid away and stretched from about a foot wide to, I don’t know, eight feet so we could have a bunch of parts that you would add to it so we could have dinner for 10 people in my space.

John: Wow.

Graham: Then there was a moving wall that came out and revealed some fold down bunk beds on one side and then a big queen sized bed folded over the couch. Then a curtain closed the two off so you could have couple of guests over. Yeah, it was terrific. It did everything. It was really fun. Then I did an even smaller one upstairs. That was great.

Then I built in Maui, everyone was like, “Yeah, it’s micro units, what about families, and so I built one for a family. I built 1000 square foot, four bedroom, two and a half bath, which is a lot in a bath. Now part of it, it’s Maui, so part of it was 400 was outside…

John: Right.

Graham: …covered lanai kind of thing. There definitely was a little cheating. But by the book it’s 1000 and fully off-grid so full solar set up with the Blue Planet batteries. My friend David Sellers helped us put that all together. Water catchment, composting toilets and electric cars so we did the whole thing. I still own that and rent it. Have a lovely couple there now. It’s been, yeah, fun to expose it to other people…

John: That’s wonderful

Graham: …over the years. It was part media, part projects. It was really fun. We were good at it. Maybe not good at doing inexpensive stuff. But I got to the point where I realized that I didn’t want to be a real estate developer. That was a problem because I didn’t want to be an architect and I didn’t want to be a real estate developer.

John: Right.

Graham: It’s still a passion of mine. I’m trying to avoid it because it’s such a time suck. But it is really fun for me. That brought us to the Carbonauts. That’s what I’m up to now. The Carbonauts is about three years old. Basically, I realized that awareness is very high. Compared to when I started Treehugger in 2004, that was about mainstreaming green. How do we make this more popular and mainstream? The reality is now, everyone gets it. The numbers are incredibly high and climate does not care about our feelings

John: Or our politics.

Graham: Yeah. It doesn’t care about our awareness. That’s not what matters. What matters is action and so…

John: Well, we live in California, we’re living through one of the biggest rain…

Graham: Right. Exactly.

John: …systems ever what, in California’s last 50 years.

Graham: Yeah.

John: It’s no matter what people’s opinion is anymore, which used to matter back in 2005 and 2006, when there was…

Graham: Yeah.

John: …like you said, when things were bipartisan, it’s undeniable now.

Graham: Yeah.

John: It’s unstoppable, the…

Graham: Yeah.

John: …climate change issue.

Graham: Yeah, it’s clear.

John: Yeah, it’s clear. Talk a little bit about what Carbonauts is and for our listeners and viewers…

Graham: Yeah.

John: …it says it right on your hand, but it’s just so people know, it’s not carbonnauts.com, but carbonauts.com to find Graham and his colleagues and all the great work they’re doing. Tell us now what was the mission and the vision with carbonaut?

Graham: Basically what I saw is incredibly high awareness, very little action. I think I’ve always, and I used to do it back in Treehugger days. I’d look around because I was in this group of green leaders and I was like, feel like a lot of people are not actually living like…

John: Yeah.

Graham: …living super, even though these are the leaders, not living in super green ways. Not to point fingers, it’s just like we’re busy and this is sometimes complicated to know what to do. You sit down and try to figure it out. There’s so much information these days and misinformation, disinformation that it’s hard to feel confident. Then you just go back to your normal life. It’s hard to know what to do. The Carbonauts is really about helping move our society from awareness to action and building the identity. We believe that this is largely about social norms. Where we are now is we have high awareness, very little action. We need to find that 5% of the population that are game to do stuff and help support, incent, inspire them to help create the social norms that will have everyone else come along. That’s the big idea. Over the years, I’ve seen so many websites and apps and all sorts of guides and a hundred tips for this, and just felt like nothing ever got much traction. We decided to go back to basics and realized that a lot of this is, pursuant to what we were talking about earlier, is about relationships and about connection and about hip things being alive. We’re on a video chat, we’re human we like to look at each other and see how each other is reacting. A long way of saying we ended up doing workshops, and that’s our focus. We do live, cameras on, highly interactive workshops around sustainability for mostly big companies. We’re going to do more B to C, direct to citizen, as I like to say. We’ll definitely do some of that. In fact, we may be doing some great work with the National Wildlife Federation as a partner. Excited about that.

John: That’s great.

Graham: But largely we have a fantastic set of clients including Amazon and Chanel and AT&T and Toyota so a big amazing…

John: Big brands.

Graham: …set of clients. We do cohorts of usually 30 people and we teach them these live workshops. Could be anywhere from 30 minutes, 45, 60, 75, something like that. Some of them are one-off, some of them are an hour a week for a month or six weeks. Largely we are just meeting people where they are and helping them, teach them how this stuff works. Most importantly, helping that to educate and inspire them to take action, to actually start to build. Part of when you do something you become the kind of person that does that kind of thing. Action can really help you create identity. We need to build the social norms that we all know that these things are important, but not a lot of us are doing them. Once you build the social norms, then people just start. We care very much about what other people think. That’s what we’re trying to do. We do a whole bunch of workshops around stuff like, what we call the big six, which are the six most impactful things you can do to reduce your footprint. Those are, I haven’t talked about this for awhile, it’s funny to do it, I guess the holidays. Switching to renewable energy. That could be via your utility, via community solar, via solar panels, depending on your capabilities. We advocate reducing driving by as much as possible and electrifying as much of the miles as you can so moving to a, at least a plugin, if not full electric. We advocate for a plant rich diet. We help people become more plant rich. Reducing food waste, which turns out to actually be a big component of climate change. Composting, so you can do it whether you got an apartment or a house. We help people with that. This one’s a little trickier, but we work with people on reducing and optimizing flying. Because it turns out that flying is actually, for many people, the biggest component of their footprint. There’s a bunch of useful stuff that you can do there. Then offsets, high quality, third-party certified if you can afford them, as much as possible. Ideally, bring yourself into carbon neutral territory. Then social norms, helping people understand that you want to be public about this not in a preachy, shaming way, but in a positive, helpful, tactful manner. You want to let other people know that you’re doing this stuff so that they can be more comfortable doing it or talking about what they’re already doing. We help people understand the importance of social norms. We do stuff like that. We’ll do a workshop on climate optimism, so how to move through the depression that some people… We’ll do some on sustainable fashion. Then we’re starting to do more stuff on the businesses themselves so focused on but typically our slight of hand is in a way to get employees engaged in sustainability. We have them start with focusing on their homes.

John: Got it.

Graham: It appeals to people’s self-interest. For most people, home is number one, it’s not work. In that process, so the companies pay for them to take these cohort-based workshops, and we help them do all the things I just mentioned at home or whatever works for them. Now. We’re very non-judgmental. We call it the judgment free zone. Meet people where they are and we’re just very inspiring and helpful and give them the resources and the support to get this done. In that process, they learn all about sustainability, which of course applies directly to the company. We help staff become climate literate, climate enthusiastic. That helps with eco-innovation at work. Also it’s all employee engagement and staff really care, particularly the millenniums, etcetera. They really care about working for a company with values. This is great team building and great attract and retain. There’s some awesome HR benefits on top of the sort of standard ESG that you would expect from these. Yeah, so that’s the basic carbonauts idea, three years going. Yeah, it’s a simple service company. We’re all over the US. We work all over the planet. We’re working with over 30 countries, Asia, Australia, all over Europe. We’re even looking at doing some other languages. Yeah, so it’s not an easy… We’re stuck in slow corporate sales cycles, which is maddening to say the least. But we’re getting there. We run net promotion surveys, NPSs after every single hour and so we know, we get anecdotal and statistical feedback and so we know that our workshops are very well received. We’re very focused on being a learning organization and doing a great job. Yeah, we’re high touch and, yeah, we’ve got a great group of people. Meg O’Neil is one of them, and she was my editor in chief, at Treehugger. Getting the team back, the band back together a little bit. Also Matt Daniels is a guy I worked with for my first company in Seattle in 95.

John: Wow.

Graham: It’s fun to work with some of the people I worked with in the past.

John: Let’s go back a little bit. Your mom and dad, are they still alive?

Graham: My mom and dad? Yeah.

John: Yeah, so you have to be the dream child for hippie parents. In terms of your success and everything you’ve touched has been really part of you really are a product of your and all the environment, but you’ve overachieved, just say in a wonderful way, in a very positive way. It’s in an inspirational way both with your success in Web 1.0, in using it for the greater good. Now with your leveraging technology, but also all of your knowledge base now, 30 years of knowledge of what you’re doing with the Carbonauts. They have to be just the two proudest parents on the planet.

Graham: Yeah, I guess so. Yeah, I think that, yeah, they’re very principled based parents. They’re very cool on that…

John: It’s great.

Graham: …and adorable. My mom and stepdad did a, a few years ago now, but did the 100 Mile Challenge. I think they lived for a month or something with only using things that came within 100 miles.

John: Oh, my gosh.

Graham: My mom’s been a vegetarian for, I don’t know, 40 years or something. Yeah, my dad’s fully into it. They actually did the Carbonauts. Then, full electric car, he’s got solar, he is got heat pump, he just went for it. Yeah, I think my parents are awesome.

John: Number two, both you and I are lucky enough to have lived through and actually been part of Web 1.0.

Graham: Yeah.

John: Then also environment 1.0. If we’re going to draw parallels to where we are with regards to technology now and all of the coolest stuff that’s happening with regards to these apps and Zoom that we’re on today, where are we in the sustainability journey? Things shifted a little bit. Obviously you were one of the big, just like Al Gore and I’ll put you in Al Gore’s level. You were one of the change makers in society when it came to sustainability. I got to live it and see it so I can say that. But we’ve evolved since 2000 tremendously…

Graham: Yeah.

John: …for better and worse. There’s a couple of trends going on. I just want the understanding from your perspective, what’s your thoughts on them. One is the trend of linear to circular economy.

Graham: Yep.

John: A sustainability itself then morphing into, with linear to circular economy, morphing into the greater ESG trope trend that is coming from all different angles, both coming from, partially the Me Too movement, coming from Larry Fink in the financial institutions pushing down on their portfolio companies. A lot of European influence is sprinkled into there too and how far ahead they were on sustainability further than we were ever in the United States. Where are we now in your mind with regards to the journey in sustainability compared to when you were part of the genesis of the whole movement?

Graham: Comparing it to Web 1.0 where…

John: Yeah.

Graham: Yeah.

John: How far they’ve moved. Have we moved far enough and are we on the right track?

Graham: Yeah. Great question. A tricky question. Yeah, I think we’re pretty early.

John: Yeah.

Graham: I was part of Web 0 1995, but then…

John: Yeah. That’s early.

Graham: There probably were people back, there certainly were people, it was 72 or something when the DARPA natter and everything…

John: In modern times, given that Google started in 98, 95, you were at…

Graham: Yeah, we were early.

John: …ground zero. You were ground zero.

Graham: Yeah. I think we sadly, we’re probably only in like 98, 99, 2000.

John: Wow.

Graham: I don’t know. It’s hard to say. Certainly, if you just look at the main graph, the carbon, it’s just…

John: Yeah.

Graham: We’re certainly not winning.

John: Well, like you said, this stuff has become ubiquitous. Sustainability is still not ubiquitous.

Graham: Yeah.

John: Back with what you’re doing with Carbonauts, trying to democratize your sustainability and bring it to your city to the people and to the corporations.

Graham: I don’t like to be negatives. I don’t think…

John: No.

Graham: …it helps very much.

John: No.

Graham: Obviously we’re in a very serious situation and now compared to 2004, you just have to look out the window sometimes. Certainly California, either it’s on fire or it’s in a drought or it’s flooding.

John: Right.

Graham: Yeah. The situation is serious and there’s unbelievable news daily and we do have very high awareness. What’s been really gratifying is seeing these big clients that we’re working with have really aggressive goals.

John: Right.

Graham: It used to be people were setting 2050. It’s easy to say something in 2050 when it’s 2018. That’s a long way out. But that has changed. Now it’s 2040, 2030, 2025. People made the commitments and now I think they’re like, “Oh my God, that’s really around the corner.” They’re sorry. There’s, I’d say, there’s fantastic news on a daily basis. I think there are lots of vested interests. It has been bumpy, it’s going to be bumpy. That is absolutely clear. But I think we’re definitely headed in the right direction. Although you can’t see it yet in the graph. I think we’re headed in the right direction. I’m optimistic that we will figure it out.

John: I agree with you. I’m very optimistic.

Graham: Yeah.

John: Do you feel that the, and i love the brands, of course, it’s exciting the brands that have signed up to already use your great service. I think you’re going to get many more brands and I think you deserve to. In terms of engagement, I’m 60, my kids are 36 and 30, is it more the millennials and Gen Zs that are signing up and are leaning in, or are you seeing it across all age groups?

Graham: In terms of the people that we generally are hitting, it’s, I’d say, that probably our primary demographic are moms.

John: Right.

Graham: I think it’s pretty clear if we just had the women direct things, we probably wouldn’t be where we are.

John: 100%

Graham: Moms are very connected to their kids and are looking forward and they care and they care enough to actually do something. I’d say that’s a lot of our demo. I feel like this is not a very well researched statement, but I feel like a lot of the youth are a little bit more, they don’t have the cars, the houses, the money. They’re getting started out. They’re a little bit more about pushing on governments and corporations and stuff, which is absolutely necessary. I feel like that’s a little bit more of what they’re into in terms of our focus. Our clientele probably end up being a little more at 30, 40, 50, 60s. Yeah.

John: Which by the way, I think, although, like you said, it’s not science yet, but as you say, the young generation is untethered to what my generation was raised on, which was, “Oh, you need a house in the suburbs and it’s got to be four bedrooms, and you need two cars and a spare house up in the mountains.

Graham: That’s it.

John: Like you said, they’re part of this real shared economy, and they’re very comfortable with Uber, Airbnb…

Graham: Yeah.

John: …and CityBike and all the wonderful shared economy services that have come up in the last 10 years. Like you said, that can again help be the wind at the back of this whole new sustainability push…

Graham: Yeah.

John: …and carbon push to neutralize where we are and get to carbon neutrality for all of us, not only corporations, but all of our households and all of us as people.

But you are brilliant and great and super creative. Obviously, art and architecture is all part of the creative, and you’re the makers. You took that and you just transferred your skillset and your creativity brilliance into internet and web. But that’s just another form of art, really what you did. Treehugger I still see is art. It’s beautiful. What you originally created, I remember the original issues, I saw it this morning and it’s still beautiful. Why not today, in terms of what you’re doing with Carbonauts, is it okay to create hand content to go along with what you’re doing live where you don’t see that as usable or as it’s not reaching really the audience the way they want to be reached. As you say, coming to people where they are now?

Graham: Yeah.

John: Is that ability still there, or not as much as it was back in Web 1.0?

Graham: Yeah. Well, we’ll do that. We just get a little bit nervous about cannibalizing ourselves. But we’ll do prerecorded content and we’re starting to do some experiments with News Corp, etcetera on that. The irony though, or the paradox is, you sign up for a course that’s online that you can do 24/7, 365 days a year.

John: Right.

Graham: It’s the most accessible, and yet you end up not doing it because it is the most accessible. There is something about signing up for a workshop, a single one or a multi-session where it’s a time and you’re going to be there and the teacher and your fellow attendees are going to notice if you’re there or not and you’re going to be engaged. We think that that’s really powerful and then and we try to make it about them and get them really connected and interacting so that it’s really sinking in. It’s not just a one way what you’re sort of watching something, but you’re busy on your phone. We’ll do that stuff and certainly a bunch of our stuff is on demand. We look at the people. There are buckets of people within companies and some of them are going to just dip their toes and so they’re going to be light, and some of them are going to be medium, and then some of them are going to be change agents that are going to really get after it. We are trying to offer stuff for each of those. We work with our clients to develop a program. We look at a whole year, and so what are we going to do this month? Some of the stuff, yeah, some prerecorded stuff available at all times, some customized newsletters every month, ask-me-anythings a couple times a week, workshops, a book club, a film club so we have a whole bunch of activities. Then we can help them do stuff for Earth Month, we can help do stuff for New Years, for Climate Week, etcetera. We really try to be their partner in developing a drumbeat of content that helps get people climate literate and enthusiastic and taking action.

John: That makes so much sense.

Graham: Yeah, so we’re a real partner for our clients.

John: I love that. That makes so much sense. Like you said, when something’s available 7/24, it’s like putting a book on your nightstand that you never get to because it’s always there.

Graham: Yeah.

John: I think you’re really onto something. But talk a little bit about, and I know you’ve been kind enough to invite me to it, of course I’m embarrassed to say I haven’t made them yet, but I’m going to make them this year. This is one of my resolutions for you.

Graham: Excellent.

John: I really do want to come to your sustainability dinner series. Talk a little bit about what you’re doing with that in California and nationally and…

Graham: Sure.

John: …and what’s your vision of your sustainability dinner series?

Graham: Great. I should remember. I can I get you a link. We actually have a nomination link, so if anyone wants to nominate themselves or others for these…

John: Yeah.

Graham: …then maybe you can put it in the show notes or something.

John: Yeah, we’ll put it in the show notes for sure. By the way, for those who just joined us, we have Graham Hill with us today. He’s not only the founder of treehugger.com, many moons ago, but he’s also now the founder of Carbonauts. You can find them at Carbonauts at .carbonauts.com. Graham go right into the dinner series.

Graham: Sure.

John: Excellent. We’ll put that into the show notes.

Graham: Yes. Great. I’ve always been a social person. I love bringing people together. Literally in my loft in 2000 in New York, we used to have a regular thing with a bunch of environmental people that would come over. We had a little group, a little offshoot of the Natural Step. This has been something I’ve always loved doing it. I’m newer to Venice Beach. I was 19 years in New York. I just was like, I want to get into the green community here. I was pretty integrated in New York and I really want to figure out LA and so I started doing these dinners. Now we’ve done, I don’t know, 35 of them or something.

John: Wow.

Graham: Basically I find cool sustainability people, ideally at some big companies so that they might be interested in working with us. But also cool nonprofits and cool startups and investors. Yeah, I order some vegetarian Indian from this amazing place called Mayura. We do them either in my backyard, I have a long table and they’re usually somewhere between 14 and 18 people. Everyone comes at seven and we have some drinks, and then food comes. Sometimes I have someone speak for a little bit. We do intros going around the table so everyone knows each other. Then I write a LinkedIn post and I connect everyone. It’s just trying to build community around sustainability. It’s similar to how Green Drinks, which I think is still going strong in some cities, but I don’t think it is in LA. It’s just a fun way to meet everyone and connect everyone. For me, it’s very rewarding because I see people making new friendships and off doing projects together and getting people jobs and that’s really cool. We started to do more a targeted one. Tonight I have one for sustainability investors. Next week is more for CSOs higher up in the food chain and sustainability. We’re doing them in Venice, we’re doing them in Seattle, we’re doing them in Vancouver, we’re doing them in Boston. That’s where we have staff and then when I travel I do them as well. Yeah, it’s great. Then it’s just a nice way for people to find out about the Carbonauts and then some of them end up saying, “Hey, maybe this is something we could bring to my company.” It’s just a nice way to meet people and it’s good for business.

John: Good for business. Yeah.

Graham: It’s been really rewarding.

John: That’s great.

Graham: I’m excited Katharine Hayhoe we’re…

John: Wow.

Graham: …talking, I just connected with her and she happens to be coming through town so we’re gonna try to do one around her. Yeah, been really fun.

John: What are you excited about as we go into 2023 now and, we’re taping this episode in the first couple weeks of 2023, there’s lots of new technology coming our way with regards to hydrogen and battery recycling and new EV brands and all sorts of cool stuff.

Graham: Yeah.

John: What gets you excited and on the new technology that will further accelerate the sustainability revolution?

Graham: What really gets me excited is when people we’ve actually helped transform and has, yeah, we’ve really helped them build a new identity and they’re really getting after it. That’s what’s most exciting. But tech stuff, I think it’s pretty obvious that we’re going to need some pretty big breakthroughs if we’re not going to end up in a world of hurt.

John: Right.

Graham: Yeah, I find that stuff very exciting and I don’t know what it’s going to be. Small nuclear I think is pretty amazing. I always get fusion and fission mixed up, which whenever the new one is, fusion?

John: Right.

Graham: Yeah, fusion is what we do most fusion. It sounds like it’s still probably decades away. Of course, solar and wind and geothermal all these things, if we can develop and make broadly accessible really clean energy, we can do a lot. Because if you think about it, these direct air capture things, we’re very likely going to have to figure out a way to take the stuff out of the atmosphere. If we have a lot of clean energy, then that’ll very much help us do that. That stuff’s very exciting. Maybe small nuclear can be safe and work well. I don’t know the energy stuff, I think is what is mostly is very exciting. I think the one thing that is starting to get some traction, luckily, is biodiversity. I think there’s a lot of talk about carbon. But we can solve for carbon and we do need to solve for carbon. We can sell a crappy world as a result. Biodiversity is very important. That stuff’s very exciting, definitely appeals to the nerd in me. Again, talking to National Wildlife Federation, they have building habitat in your back backyard, planting, figuring out how to make it friendly for pollinators and for other animals and build the biodiversity. The nerd in me just loves that stuff. Really excited to work with them on that. Yeah, any cool biodiversity stuff is great. I’ll tell you about my BFF is this woman named Courtney Nichols Gould and her man Gordon Gould have a company called New Atlantis. They are doing a metagenomic analysis of the ocean in marine protected areas, MPAs. Then attaching it to the blockchain. Basically figuring out a way to understand the health of the ocean and then make it an investible asset so that if the health of the increases the idea is that the asset increases and so that you could get real money into these marine protected areas and really help us save our oceans.

John: That’s exciting.

Graham: There’s crazy stuff like that, which I think is amazing. Yeah, it is really exciting. I’m, obviously, I’ve been doing tech related stuff since 1995 so all that stuff is really exciting and there’s so much that we can do already that’s really basic. We can live much lower energy lives. You can sign up for renewable energy anywhere you are in the US. Community solar is gaining a real traction and you can literally be on solar and save money even if you live in an apartment or can’t put solar panels on wherever you are. Electric vehicles are getting serious traction and have their issues, of course. But compared to the alternative are definitely better. Plant-based foods, just every single area is developing new, better, exciting, compelling product that often doesn’t require any sacrifice. That stuff’s definitely exciting. Cell-based meat, how amazing would that be if that happens?

John: Is that coming? They say it’s coming right?

Graham: They say. It’s exceiting. Yeah.

John: Graham, talk a little bit about, if I don’t work for Chanel or Amazon or AT&T but I really am so inspired by you and the carbononauts, are you going to open up a program this year or anytime soon that the general public at large could sign up for of course studies or other things that you’re offering at the Carbonauts?

Graham: Yeah. In fact, I believe we have some live right now. We also do direct to citizen.

John: Perfect.

Graham: I think we’ll do more and more of that. We like that. Corporate we like because we can develop a long-term relationship…

John: Sure.

Graham: …and a big program over years. If we can affect the corporation, it’s a huge thing. We look at it, our theory of change is that often there’s under 5% of a population that are doing the thing. The change agents really, if you could really support them and help them build that social norm you get some momentum, and if you can get to like 25%, that’s when, if it’s a thing that we know is right, intuitively, subconsciously, or consciously, then that’s when the whole thing flips. You don’t have to get all the way there. You got to get to 25% and the whole thing flips.

John: wow.

Graham: We’re largely about working with that 5%, getting the momentum to get to the 25%. You can see it, you can imagine us doing that within a company, trying to get the company to really flip. But you can also go up one level, and if you can get 5% of the companies and get it to 25% of the companies, then all the companies are going to flip. That’s our big theory of change.

John: That’s fascinating. The lift really is in, you’re not even when you look at 95% of the population in America, the lift is in 95%, you just want to get us up 20% more because then the flip will naturally happen.

Graham: Yeah.

John: Didn’t realize that. That’s brilliant.

Graham: Yeah.

John: That’s cool.

Graham: Yeah.

John: That’s really brilliant. Graham, I could just spend all day with you. I’m going to come to one of your dinners in the near future. For our listeners and viewers, if you’re inspired by Graham Hill and how can you not be, and the Carbonauts, please sign up. Go to the carbonauts.com. Get involved. He as a direct to citizens approach. Even if you don’t have working for a larger company that’s already one of his clients, you could be one of the citizens who signs up for his course series on sustainability and be part of the change, be part of the lift, be part of the future of changing our world to make it a better place. Graham Hill, you are definitely one of the key people that have made our world a better place. You’re the reason why I started this show. You’re the reason why we’ve been on our mission. You’ve been inspiring to me personally. I’m so grateful for your time today. I’m so grateful that you’ve stayed on this journey when you could have retired long ago and done a whole host of other things. Thanks for starting the carbonauts.com. Thanks for being on the show today. You’re always welcome back here and I do look forward to meeting you in person in the near future.

Graham: Thanks, John. It’s very sweet of you. It means a lot coming through from you. I really appreciate it. Yeah, and if anyone needs to reach out to me, I’m just [email protected]. Easy to find.

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