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John Shegerian: 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 For more information on how ERI can help your business properly dispose of outdated electronic hardware devices, please visit eridirect.com.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: Welcome to another edition of the impact podcast. I’m John Shegerian and I’m so excited to have with us today, Dr. Liz Tyson. She’s the program’s director of Born Free USA. You can find Liz and her colleagues and her great work at www.bornfreeusa.org. Welcome, Liz.

Dr. Liz Tyson: Hi, John. Thank you so much for having me.

John: Liz, you’re giving us a little head fake today because you and I had a lovely chat offline. You have this beautiful English accent, but we’re actually having this conversation. I’m in Fresno and you’re in South Texas in the United States of America, right?

Liz: That’s right. I like to throw people off that way. Keep them on their toes.

John: You are keeping me on my toes. That’s for sure. Liz, though, you were born in the UK, share a little bit about your fascinating background and upbringing and journey leading up to becoming the program’s director of Born Free USA.

Liz: So yeah, as you said, I’m from the United Kingdom. I’m from Manchester in the North. And grew up there went to school, went to college there, and then kind of just ended up working in London in an office job in financial PR, which is a world away both figuratively and literally right now from what I do now. And I think I got to my early 20s, I realized it was the corporate world wasn’t really for me and I started to look around for other work. And really, the only thing that was good been very consistent in my life was animals, so I somehow manage to land a job working as an education officer and keeper of all things, a monkey sanctuary in the south of England. So I moved from London, down to the coast started looking after monkeys, not very glamorous, but wonderful work and that was kind of the beginning. So that was around 18 years ago.

From there, I’ve just had the opportunity to work with such amazing people. I’ve worked in Colombia. I lived there for 3 years, working in primate conservation field. I’ve got to work in the Middle East. I’ve done some work with organizations in Bolivia, Peru, [inaudible] Island. I’ve just been so incredibly lucky with the opportunities that I’ve had and then around 3 and a half years ago, the position here in South Texas came up of the director of one of the largest primate sanctuaries in the United States and I was lucky enough to be offered it. So I came over here, packed up, brought my dogs, and here we are. And since then, I’ve kind of developed my role into the program’s director.

John: That’s lovely. And one of our listeners want to know, you’re not only doing amazing and important work which were about to get into. You’re trained as a lawyer, you got your PhD in Animal Welfare Law, right, in 2018? So that’s how come you have talked to the doctor there. And now you’re doing this really important work. What exactly is Born Free USA and what goes on there?

Liz: Okay, some of you might have heard the name, you might have the song or the film, Born Free, there is a link. Born Free was founded back in the 1980s by the 2 actors who were in the film, “Born Free”. So Virginia McKenna and Bill Travers, and their son, Will who remains the executive president of the organization, founded Born Free. And really, the aim of the organization was to relieve the suffering of wild animals kept in captivity. They were really concerned about the keeping of animals, like lions, like elephants in zoos, and that was kind of where it started. And then from there, we’ve become a global operation. We operate a number of sanctuaries around the world. We’re a family, we have multiple offices. There’s Born Free in the United Kingdom, which was the founder organization and then Born Free USA. We operate as a separate organization but we are very much part of the same family. And so now, our work really encompasses a number of areas. We care for animals like we do here at the sanctuary where I’m speaking to you from. We have over 300 monkeys here under our care. There are other sanctuaries in Africa, in different countries in Africa, caring for other animals. We work in the field in conservation. We have an incredible program in West Africa, which works in a largely community facilitation to curve wildlife trade. And then we also do campaigning and advocacy to change legislation to make the world a better place specifically for wild animals. And that’s where my 2 worlds collide. So my legislative side and my animal care side somehow came together in what is for me, the dream job.

John: So your law degree really comes in to integrate use with what your doing and your PhD, both [inaudible]

Liz: Yeah, is [inaudible] luck than anything. Yes.

John: I don’t know about that, really. So at the sanctuary, are outsiders invited in or is it mostly just to care for the animals so there’s a place for them to go where they’re going to be cared and loved for?

Liz: Absolutely. So we’re not open to visitors and the reason for that is, I mean, first and foremost, we’re not a zoo. Our primary purpose is to care for animals and to give them a home for like that is the focus of our staff. That’s the focus of our donors. And we have like I say, kind of over 300 monkeys here who we care for on a daily basis. And many of them come from traumatic backgrounds. So they may have come from the pet trade, many of them have been kept in isolation for the beginning of their lives, which has both physical and psychological impacts on them. Some have come from the bar trees. So really, all we want to do is provide this really safe, secure, place for them where they don’t need to be stressed, they don’t need to be worried about anything. We care for them for the rest of their lives and our entire focus will be the monkeys.

John: And the capital to support your great organization comes from just regular donors, like myself, or big corporations?

Liz: We don’t have any corporate funding as such. Most of our funding comes from the generosity of individuals and grant-giving organizations. So grant-giving organizations and trusts. But yeah, it’s pure generosity that keeps our work going, for sure.

John: For our listeners and viewers who just tuned in, we’ve got a very special guest today. With us today, Dr. Liz Tyson. She’s the program’s director of Born Free USA. You can find Born Free USA at www.boardfreeusa.org. You can donate, participate, and learn much more about her amazing organization. Liz, you’ve talked a little bit about the primates that you house at your sanctuary. Two questions, one are they all types of different primates in terms of orangutans versus chimpanzees. Are they all? And then also talk a little bit about, I’m a Layman, and I assume most of our listeners and viewers around the world are the same when it comes to this specialty, talk a little bit about trade and primates as pets, and how really it looks adorable while you’re looking in but there’s a huge dark side and downside to that whole trade.

Liz: Yeah, absolutely. So, our sanctuary focuses predominantly on the cat species. So they wouldn’t actually live in Africa and Asia, and also baboons. So most people recognize. The big guys, we care for baboons. We don’t have apes, so we don’t have chimpanzees or orangutans. And like I say, over 300 of them are predominately Japanese macaque. So some people, they might not know the name, but if you seen the photographs, these are very fluffy, white monkeys with very red faces in the hot springs. Those are Japanese macaque. So that might bring up some imagery for some people. So those are the animals we care for and yet, some of them come from the pet trade, which is currently legal in the United States. And there is a patchwork of legislation across the various states where there are more restrictions in some areas than others but generally speaking, it is legal to have a pet monkey in the US and like you say they are adorable. And I know, goodness me. That’s why I work with them right there. They’re most incredible individuals and I think people think that because they’re so like us, they’d make great pets.

You know, they’re kind of something better than a dog or a cat. And honestly, because they’re so like us, that’s exactly why they make terrible pets. They are like us and that they’re very social, they need to be with their mothers and their fathers, and their siblings. And to be part of the pet trade, they are by default, taken from their family at a very young age. Initially, they’re like us, again primates, they have long childhood so they’re really vulnerable. When they’re first bought, they might be few months old, they’ll cling to you. It’s like having a very furry cute baby. The problem is that they get older. They know that they’re missing the things that they need. They’re missing the social upbringing, they’re missing this kind of complex hierarchy that they live in and they are ultimately wild animals.

So, what we see happen time and time and time again, they will reach a couple of years old, 3 years old, 4 years old, their canines will grow in, and they will start to attack their owners. What then happens is sometimes the monkey is killed and they might be confiscated, there’s nowhere for them to go. Or what we see happening so regularly is that they will just be put in a cage and that’s where they’ll stay. And in fact, we just rescued over this summer, a monkey called Gambit. He came from Las Vegas, a little rhesus macaque. And that was his story. He’d been kept as a baby. He was this really sweet little thing who everyone loved, he loved to play and then as he got older, I think he bit the mother of his owner.

And they got scared of him and rightly so, they are dangerous animals, he was put in a parrot cage which measured 2 feet by 2 feet by 3 feet, and he stayed there for 3 years. So by the time by the time the family contacted us and they absolutely did the right thing. They said, “This isn’t the life he should be living, can you take him?” We went to pick him up. It took 2 vets plus 2 other members of staff to safely sedate him because he was ricocheting around that cage like a whirlwind. He was so so stressed. We drove across country. It was quite the epic journey as you can imagine driving a monkey through X number of states. We came back here and then he’s been living with us for the past few months. He’s settling in okay, but you know, we can only rescue very few of them. So, there’s thousands out there, thousands.

John: Really? So the magnitude of the problem is much larger than the solution provides for this point?

Liz: Absolutely. So, really what we’re working on is a band. We’re looking for the introduction of a piece of legislation for the captive primates safety act that would ban private ownership. It would grandfather in those who currently own monkeys. So it wouldn’t actually affect anyone who was currently in possession of a monkey legally, but we really need to stop this at stores because if we don’t, we were mopping up the mess and we can provide at best a home to a handful of monkeys because they can live for 30 years. So we are constantly operating its capacity. So until we stop the trade, there’s nothing we can do really.

John: I love it. What are the odds of that getting through?

Liz: We’re hoping that it’s going to pass in the next few years. We really need people support. If you kind of connect with what I was just talking about and you’re interested in helping, then there’s information on our website where you can contact your representative. We’re looking for co-sponsors for the bill, been introduced in both houses at the moment. It’s early days, but the more support we get for it, obviously, the more chance it has a passing. I mean, it just seems like common sense, doesn’t it, really?

John: Oh, it makes total sense. Who’s lobbying the other side? I’m interested, like, whoever’s making money on this, is in that much money that these are organized attempt to keep it from being legislated out?

Liz: Oh, I’m not sure that there is necessarily a huge amount of opposition. I wonder more whether it’s- everything that’s going on in the world, anyone’s time, animal relation, we struggle to get a platform. And I understand that, that makes sense. So, yeah, I wouldn’t say that there’s any sort of particular group, which is really actively fighting against it. It’s more, we just need to get it on people’s radar. We need to get into understand it. Yeah.

John: Liz, you said these beautiful primates can live up to 30 years.

Liz: Yeah.

John: When things go right for them, if the doctor give the other side though, if that family from Las Vegas had not thankfully hold you, what’s the lifespan then of a primate who is in captivity like that and overly stressed out obviously?

Liz: I’ll give you this answer in a story which breaks my heart, but I think it’s a really important one to tell. There was a monkey called “Charlie”. He was a Japanese macaque. He was so beautiful. He was one of the most physically beautiful. I think he’s worth specimen. It seems so kind of impersonal, but he was just gorgeous. You know, if you saw a picture of a Japanese macaque, he was the example you would use.

John: Right.

Liz: And he was 7 years old [inaudible] to us. He’d been bred by a breeder. He’d been sold into the pet trade. He did exactly what I said happened. Usually, he got older. He bit, as I understand it, the grandson of his owner and the grandson was hospitalized. Thankfully, he was okay. But then of course, they wanted to get rid of the monkey. So the monkey was going to be destroyed but then a local rescue group stepped in. He was at this kind of boarding kennel setup for awhile while they found something for him. He moved to another sanctuary. He couldn’t get on with any of the monkeys there. If you think these animals are, they need to be brought up in a social situation.

So if you imagine bringing up a human child in complete isolation and then expect and to understand social cues, so he really struggled. He came to us and we tried everything to get this boy a friend who he could live with. He was either terrified or he was incredibly aggressive, and that was it. Those were his 2- he was polar opposite. So at this point, he’s about 7 years old when he came to us. And in the end, we tried him in different combinations. We couldn’t make it work. We were worried about him injuring one of the other monkeys. We taken a step back. He was staying in an enclosure on his own while we kind of regrouped and worked out what was best for him. One morning, I remember it so clearly, I was walking through the sanctuary. One of my colleagues called me over and said, “Liz, I think he died.” And he was lying there, this beautiful boy, and he passed away.

We did a necropsy, of course [inaudible] there’s no reason for him to pass away. He was incredibly healthy from what we knew and the necropsies showed that he literally passed away from cumulative stress and the physical impact stress of his life that had on his body. Seven years old and this boy lived until he was around 30 years old. He just didn’t really have a chance. And that plays out over and over again.

John: We’re going to change topics from the trade of primates as pets to another very difficult subject matter, the issue of trapping. Now, I’m not a hunter. I don’t own any guns. I don’t understand the hunting world. I don’t understand the trapping world. Can you talk a little bit about trapping and why is it so poorly regulated now? And what are some of the legal statutory fixes that are possible to help improve this horrible situation?

Liz: So yeah, trapping continues to be a kind of popular and the word for it is “pastime”. I think that’s one of the things that really kind of is stunning, that this is something that’s done as a recreational pastime. So in all Berth [?], California, Hawaii, and now, New Mexico [?], recreational trapping for fun is allowed. Now, when we [inaudible] about traps, the design of traps really have not changed in centuries. Those leg gripping traps, they don’t have the sharp teeth anymore, but they still break bones, they still cause injury. There are body gripping traps, which literally suffocate the life out of animals, or hold them underwater while they drown. Now, to use those at all is cruel.

We know enough about animals. We know enough about animal welfare now. We’re not 200 years ago. We don’t think animals are kind of unfeeling, sort of lesser than us creatures. We know that they suffer and yet we continue to allow these contraptions. There’s over 100 countries around the world that have either severely restricted or banned body-gripping traps for that reason, and the US isn’t one of them. So right now, there’s a patchwork of legislation across the state where some traps are banned, some traps are allowed, certain methodology of trapping is allowed, some of it is banned. What we really need is just this really comprehensive approach where we need to end it. The other thing that’s really shocking is that this trapping is allowed in the wildlife refuge system. So on these places where wildlife is supposed to be protected, by their very nature, that is what you would expect.

And you can be going out, you can be walking with your dog, you can be walking with your family, and believe it or not, those leg-hold traps can be lying there waiting for wildlife to be caught. So, we’re working in a stage system. Initially, we want that banned. We want it banned in the wildlife refuges. There’s no excuse for that. We then want to see recreational trapping banned. Again, this could be a fun pastime for someone to do. Honestly, find a new hobby. And then we want to work with authorities who continue to use trapping as a kind of quote-unquote wild life control methodology. We want to work with them to find out how can we bring that to an end. So, it’s kind of a staged approach, really getting rid of this absolutely frivolous use of it and then coming down to how do we get rid of it all together. How do we work with the authorities that still use it? To find better ways to manage wildlife, if needed.

John: Like you said, what kind of purse time hurts innocent animals like that? It makes zero sense.

Liz: Yeah, it’s something that causes so much suffering. I’m like you, I’m not a hunter. I don’t agree with hunting but there are certain arguments that hunters make about, you know, a clean shot is very important to not to not allow animals to suffer. Now, I don’t think they should be hunted at all. That’s a different discussion. But that absolutely cannot be said of trapping. Trapping inevitably causes suffering every single time. So it’s on a different scale. There’s just no excuse for it.

John: Okay. Just joined us, we’ve got Dr. Liz Tyson with us. She’s the program’s director of Born Free USA. You can find Liz, and her colleagues and all the important work they do at bornfreeusa.org. They’re also, of course on Facebook, Twitter, Instagram. You can find them in all the different social media platforms. Let’s switch to another topic. Liz, again, one that I grew up thinking was a sanctuary, a form of conservation. I grew up in New York City, the Bronx Zoo is a very, very popular place. I’ve lived in San Diego, the San Diego Zoo is a very popular place. But zoos, maybe are not as wholesome as they appear on the outside. Can you give a more balanced approach to really [inaudible] the cost and the benefits to zoo life for animals?

Liz: Sure. I think this is something that, I suppose, I kind of keep coming back to the same theme, and one of those is that we over the past, couple of centuries have learnt so much about animals, about their needs, about their complex societies that exist outside of our world. We’ve learned more about conserving species. We know that breeding a lion in our backyard is not going to save the species who are threatened in the countries where they live because species become threatened because of so many really complex geopolitical, environmental, all these different things which are not saved by breeding individual animals. And zoos were initially established to be these kind of places of scientific curiosity. So, like Regions Parks here in London, which was the first sort of zoo as we know it now was actually set up for the upper classes and to learn about these animals, and loads and loads of animals were captured. Yeah, it was curiosity.

And then gradually, it became something which the lower classes, if you like, were invited into as a pastime. So zoos were never really established as conservation centers and they’ve reinvented themselves over the years and argued that that is what they do. Now, only really up until the 1960s did zoos stop taking animals wholesale from the wild to stop their cages. So zoo breeding came in after the safety legislation. So the convention on the international trade in endangered species, which is a convention which is many many countries have signed up to, and that puts controls on how you could move animals around the world, basically. So they could no longer take animals from the wild, began breeding them, and then said this breeding was this idea of this kind of reserve population to release back into the wild, should it ever be needed? But it’s almost as if too much time has gone by for that still to fly. Because we know that these animals haven’t been released. We know that they’re not going to be released because we need to address the conservation issues on the ground. So really what zoos are, if we’re honest is a great day out.

And I don’t deny that I work with beautiful animals. I get how exciting it is to- I got to work in the sanctuary with lions. I understand how incredible these animals are, and how people want to see them, how children want to see them. But like you said, it’s the cost-benefit. It’s the balance. Now, these animals then have to spend their entire lives in these places that are too small for them, it’s same thing as the pet trade, too small for them. They don’t have their social needs met. They don’t have their environment met. They’re in the wrong climate. They have to spend much of the year indoors because they don’t have the right sort of weather. And still, we’re at the moment, there’s a plan to take elephants from the wild to send them to zoos. It happened just about 6 years ago. A number of elephants were taken. Some of them ended up in Dallas Zoo, here in Texas.

So animals are still taken from the wild while this industry is talking about kind of existing as a means to protect them, which obviously just makes no sense. So, I think really, what we would ask people to do is just really think before they go to the zoo. These animals can live for decades and they will live for decades in that place that you go to on a Saturday afternoon to pass a couple of hours. And can we really justify that, knowing everything we know and honestly, I really don’t think we can.

John: Interesting. So, besides just wholesale shutting them down, Liz, is there any middle ground here? Is there any way to repurpose these zoos and make them a lovely day out, but not harm our beautiful animals by needlessly caging them or putting them out of their real habitat, or is it really not the case?

Liz: I mean, I think the reality of it is we would like to see zoos phase out altogether. But if you imagine, say an elephant, who can live 70 something years, elephants have been born [inaudible] now. So there are decades left of, even if there was a decision taken right now that all the zoos were going to close, which isn’t going to happen, there would be a long run phase that period. So for my lifetime, for your lifetime, zoos is still going to be around. So first of all, there is a huge amount of time to work something out. We would really love to see happen is zoos to work together to consolidate, so that rather than having a solitary elephant here in this zoo and another solitary elephant over there, allow that work together to try and create something that is more akin to a sanctuary that puts the needs of the animals first and then gradually work towards, you know, if this really is something about education and we want young people to learn about animals, what are the options? What can we do that might be interesting or different? I don’t know if you’ve seen any of those. There’s a number of zoos that have had these sort of animatronic dinosaur exhibits, and it kind of travels around. So, why can’t we do more of that? And what an amazing thing or you do virtual reality, thinking at kind of outside of the box about what we can do and you know, in virtual reality, you could show a lion hunting.

John: Right.

Liz: Which obviously can’t happen in a zoo. You could show animals under the sea, so rather than having a dolphin in a swimming pool, you could show them in their natural habitat, and I think we’re so open to these kind of ideas in different areas, but it’s like, we’re just fixated on we need the living animal right in front of us to be able to enjoy them. And I just think we need to take the time to really think about what alternatives might be whilst going through this process of phase out and consolidation.

John: You know Liz, why I love to have great people like you on this show and honor you and your mission and your great organization is not only to tee up the problems and of course, expose the problems, and to also share solutions. And you’ve shared a lot of solutions today. Can you share some more ideas? We’re coming into the holiday period here. I know you have an adoption program at Born Free USA. Instead of buying more conspicuous consumption going on and buying more things that people don’t really need, is there a way that we could get involved with your great organization and adopt a sanctuary monkey or something? And do you use that as a gift for someone we care for, a lover, or something of that. What’s out there for our listeners and our viewers?

Liz: Absolutely. I need to tell you about Willis. When I think about the holiday season and the happiness and the joy and the kind of, I also think of the sort of the naughty little elves, and all of these, Willis is the perfect holiday monkey. Willis came to us about 3 weeks ago. He was confiscated by Chicago Animal Care. They contacted us and they were like, “We deal with dogs and cats, can you help? We have this little monkey.” He’s a three-year-old, vervet monkey and honestly, in my 18 years of working with monkeys, I have never known a more joyful little guy than this one. He is hilarious, and he spreads goodwill to all men and women and everything else. And he plays constantly like he’s someone who came to the sanctuary and he was just like, he couldn’t believe he had this huge space. He couldn’t believe he had all these new friends. He shows up, if anybody comes up and he sees him he’s like throwing things around and jumping around in his hammock and rolling himself in his blanket and trying to leap as far as he possibly can. He’s an absolute joy, and I can’t imagine a better monkey to adopt for the holidays than Willis. So we have this adoption scheme, it’s a virtual adoption scheme. Obviously, you can’t take him home. That would totally defeat the object.

John: Right.

Liz: But you get updates about him, you’ll get photographs of him and importantly, that money goes towards supporting him and his recovery, and all of the other monkeys here at the sanctuary.

John: Okay, so just an order of magnitude, how much does it cost to adopt Willis?

Liz: Willis is a very reasonable $52 a year and you get your little adoption pack, you get your photos of him, you get updates, which I send out in fact, so yeah, you get the regular updates from him and you get to know that you’ve contributed to [crosstalk]

John: Is Willis still looking for a home? Is he still-

Liz: Willis is going to live with us forever.

John: No, but is he still looking for someone to be one of his adopted families?

Liz: Oh, absolutely. Yes. As many people as you like can adopt him because he is the kind of monkey who would like a big family, for sure.

John: Okay, so here’s how it goes. This year, my daughter who’s above me here, she has a daughter named Coco. I’m going to adopt Willis for Coco, and I’m going to send you the check and that’s going to be my gift for Coco this year, Willis. She likes animals. My granddaughter loves animals so this is going to be a continuum of her loving animals.

Liz: That’s amazing. Thank you so much.

John: You already have your first taker on Willis, so yeah, I’d be out alone, Liz. That’s all I got. So I think that’s wonderful. And I really urge all listeners and viewers $52 a year. It’s a dollar a week. I mean, we should all get involved instead of buying extra gifts for people we love that they don’t need or they’re just going to push it into a closet. Let’s do something really positive and help Liz and all of our colleagues to make the world a better place and adopt a primate, a sanctuary monkey that everyone in the family will enjoy and love and also continue to do good word, and spread the good word of sanctuaries and all these important work. I mean, my gosh Liz, you’re doing great stuff. I’ll give you the last word before we have to say goodbye today, but it’s not goodbye forever. We’re going to have you back on and give [inaudible] the great message that you have, but I want you to sign off with anything you need to say before we have to say goodbye for today.

Liz: Oh, absolutely. Yeah, just to say thank you so much. I really appreciate the opportunity to speak to you and to be kind of given this platform because really, all of our work is possible and by the support of people, like your listeners are not just donations, but also getting involved in things. Like I said, the captive primates safety act, we’ve got the big cat public safety act that we need people to get on board with, head to our website. There’s a bunch of stuff you can do, donations are always welcome, but it’s not always that. It’s about spreading the word. It’s sharing something on Facebook, on Instagram, on those kind of things, it’s talking to your family about these issues. It’s about spreading the word and being part of this kind of family where we’re trying to educate and help animals.

John: Hey listen, Liz. Thank God for you. You are just the perfect person why we created this show. You’re making a huge impact. You’re making the world a better place every day, and I’m just so grateful to you for the important work you’re doing. Dr. Liz Tyson, she’s the program’s director of Born Free USA. You can find Born Free USA at www.bornfreeusa.org and you can adopt a sanctuary monkey for the holidays and give it to somebody you love and continue to help Liz make the world a better place. Thank you, Liz. I can’t wait to have you back on it another time and thanks for all the great work that you always do.

Liz: Thank you. It’s been a pleasure.

John: This edition of the impact podcast is brought to you by The Marketing Masters. The Marketing Masters is a boutique marketing agency offering website development and digital marketing services to small and medium businesses across America. For more information on how they can help you grow your business online, please visit themarketingmasters.com.

John Shegerian: Welcome to Green Is Good. This is the GoGreen edition of Green Is Good and we are so honored to have with us today back on the show again Ford Motor. But this is the first time for Dave McCreadie. Welcome to Green Is Good, Dave.

Dave McCreadie: Thanks, John. It’s great to be here.

John: You know, Dave, you’ve got an amazing title. I’m going to take your card and read it for our audience. You are the Manager of Global Electrification Standards and Sustainable Business Strategies.

Dave: It’s a mouthful.

John: It’s a lot. It’s a mouthful, but it’s an important title. And let me just tell you before our audience members – and we shared this a little bit off the air – the Shegerian family, my son, Tyler, is a proud owner and driver and user of your Ford Fusion plug-in car. It is just an amazing car. Not only luxurious inside, but I’ll tell you what, it just floats on the ground and he just loves it. I mean, he just. And it saves all sorts of energy.

Dave: That car has really been at the heart of our electrification strategy to give a lot of flexibility. And it sounds like your son uses it that way too.

John: Loves it.

Dave: If you need to take a long trip on a weekend that goes beyond the electric range of the vehicle, you have always got the gas there, but for people who are living in the city and can do the frequent plug-ins, as you mentioned your son is doing.

John: Yeah.

Dave: I mean, you can go without gas for a long, long time.

John: But you overcame with that car, which we will get talking about all your products in a little while. You overcame that range anxiety so you gave everybody – like you said, there is something for everyone in that car. Before we get talking about Ford – and for our audience members most of you know how to find Ford, but I’m just going to shout it out again: It’s www.Ford.com. Dave, share a little bit about your journey. You have a very important title and a very important role at Ford in basically the redefinition of what Ford really means in terms of the opportunity to offer new cars for a new economy. Did you grow up green? Did you get the green bug in college? What was your journey like?

Dave: I think I’ve always sort of had that mental slant to me about the environment.

John: OK.

Dave: Through the time that I’ve been at Ford while I was working on the vehicles themselves a lot of that was spent working on electrified vehicles, so our pure battery electrics and our plug-in hybrids like the Fusion Electric. I did that. I worked on that car.

John: Wow.

Dave: As I progressed through a lot of that development, I started to become actually a bit more aware of and interested in sort of the larger issue of electrification. So going beyond the nuts and bolts of the car and making sure it’s quality and safe and all that. Just how can we spur more adoption of electrified vehicles, make it easier to plug-in, all of the reasons that people might cite right now for why they might not want to buy one of those cars those are the issues that I wanted to work on, and so at that point in my career, I was able to sort of make a right-hand turn over into this other sustainable business strategies group and that’s what I do now.

John: That’s awesome.

Dave: Yeah.

John: And we’re lucky you do that, let me just tell you that. Let’s talk a little bit about GoGreen. This is the GoGreen edition of Green Is Good in beautiful downtown Seattle. What is your role here today? What are you speaking about? What kind of panel? And why are you excited to be here?

Dave: I’m very excited to talk about an initiative that we kicked off earlier in the year and that our CEO, Mark Fields, made an announcement of at the consumer electronics show back in January.

John: Yeah.

Dave: And that is the Ford Smart Mobility Initiative.

John: OK.

Dave: And so that is what my talk is about later this afternoon. And really the essence of what that is is how when you look across – and globally now – the challenges that face these megacities. We can look across some of the U.S. cities and think, “Oh, traffic is horrible and congestion,” and it is, but frankly when you compare that to what other parts of the world are dealing with, it’s pretty small peanuts.

John: True.

Dave: So there are some very large and almost intractable issues that are related to transportation everywhere around the globe and Ford wants to reshape itself into a mobility company. For the first 100 years of that, following our founder Henry Ford who wanted to provide mobility to the masses, this is sort of a new way to do that. So for the first 100 years, that meant basically selling a high quality and well-priced car or truck to someone right? Well, that is changing and it’s changing rapidly, and it’s good because it’s helping to address some of these global issues. So now as a major automaker, I mean, yeah, we still make our money by selling cars and trucks, but we are starting to rethink ourselves in order to address these global issues around mobility so that we can stay true to Henry Ford’s vision of providing mobility to the masses, but now we’re going to be doing it in a way that you might not think as a traditional way for an automaker. Things like car-sharing and bike-sharing and some of the other programs that we are looking at through these mobility experiments are really what we are talking about today.

John: I want to come back and talk about specific cars like the Ford Fusion in a minute. But you brought up Mark Fields. And Ford has been on the show numerous times – I want to say four or five – and we’ve been honored to have Ford on Green Is Good. I saw Mark on television a couple times recently making a couple big announcements. One talking a little bit about the future of driverless cars.

Dave: Right.

John: Is that in the future for Ford? Do you foresee driverless cars? I know that he said the technology exists and that you’re working on it. Is this something that you are really excited about yourself, Dave?

Dave: Oh, most certainly. And those autonomous vehicles – and they are starting to become now different degrees of autonomous vehicles and one of these mobility projects that I’m working on is maybe what you’d classify as semi-autonomous. But what Mark has been saying is really critical to the mobility efforts that we have going because, I mean, it’s no secret – besides Ford – all the major OEMs are working on autonomous vehicles now.

John: Sure.

Dave: And for me, my perspective is it’s less of a question of “if” they’re coming but more so “when” they’re coming.

John: Right.

Dave: And frankly, and what I think you’ll hear in the industry, is that the technology is probably going to be ready sooner than the rest of society is.

John: Ah.

Dave: Meaning there are a lot of regulatory issues, public policy issues. Think about the insurance implications. All these things have to be worked through.

John: Worked out.

Dave: And there are still a million more discussions that need to happen on those things.

John: If you were to guess today – and I don’t want to put you on the spot but just as s fun guesstimate for our audience – if you were to foresee out when all those major issues non-technical to Ford when those policy issues can be worked out, when do you foresee autonomous cars as a whole becoming part of our society fabric like Uber and Lyft are now as you say the shared economy?

Dave: Right. It’s a fun question.

John: OK.

Dave: And I think.

John: Give a range.

Dave: Yeah. I think maybe 10 years.

John: OK.

Dave: Fifteen years from now. Because what there is going to be is that I think there is a certain group of people who already understand – and maybe it’s the younger set.

John: Yeah.

Dave: Who have already shown an inclination that they don’t necessarily want or need to drive, and especially if they live in urban areas. The fact that you would be able to go from point A to point B like you can on mass transit and read the paper or listen to music or generally not pay attention to where you are going. I think there is a certain set of people, though, who love to drive, love the experience of driving, and I think those people are going to be a little bit slower to come along.

John: So in the future, Ford will buy Uber and then we can be in an autonomous Uber car.

Dave: I think you just solved the problem right there.

John: There we go. Going back to some of your specific great and amazing cars. Like I said we’ve been blown away by the experience we’ve had with the Ford Fusion. Talk a little bit about the reinvention of Ford in your specialty. In the electrification of cars. And what models do you have for our audience members out there that you are excited to share with them now and what do you have in the immediate pipeline coming out later in 2015 and maybe 2016 that you can share and get our audience members looking and taking test drives in Fords?

Dave: Sure. Great. So right now Ford offers three plug-in vehicles.

John: OK.

Dave: The Focus Electric, which is a pure battery electric vehicle. Then there is the C-Max plug-in hybrid and the Fusion plug-in hybrid like what your son has.

John: Right.

Dave: So the range on the Focus battery electric is 80 miles.

John: Wow.

Dave: The range on the plug-in hybrids just the battery itself can give you about 20 or 21 miles of electric range and then like we were talking about earlier you’ve got the gasoline power train to back that up.

John: Right.

Dave: So one of the exciting things where the industry is heading now and certainly Ford is included in this is taking the range of these electric vehicles and really upping the ante. It’s pretty clear that range is still a major consideration – and rightfully so – for people who are considering buying an electric vehicle, although there is so much data out there in terms of the average and even the 95th percentile person how much they drive every day. And automakers are smart. They size the batteries according to that data yet people still are weary of “what if I get stuck” or whatever.

John: Right.

Dave: And part of what can help that of course is public infrastructure that’s there to help you plug-in the vehicle when you are getting short.

John: Great point.

Dave: And so there are a few things that can be done on the infrastructure side to really help the adoption of the vehicles. but the point I was going to make is that what you’re going to start to see is the range of these vehicles start to become more and more so that whereas the first generation of battery electrics you see were between 70 and 80 miles, this second generation that is coming out from Ford and others is going to be.

John: Break 100 soon?

Dave: Significantly more. I mean I can’t really talk through what exactly is coming.

John: Right. But soon it’s going to be extended from 80 and above.

Dave: Right. Yes.

John: So more and more people will be enticed to come in and get over their range anxiety.

Dave: That’s right.

John: That’s exciting.

Dave: And like I said coming along with not only having more battery to help you get where you need to go. Through the progression of the last number of years there has been a great inflow of public infrastructure out there whether you’re talking what some people classify as slower charging, which is just a lot of the chargers that you’d see around the city right now.

John: Yeah.

Dave: But what is also coming to support is high-powered DC chargers.

John: Wow. Fast charge.

Dave: Fast charging, which is almost more akin to the time that you spend – five minutes – at the gas pump.

John: So you’ll be able to run in, pick up your dinner at Whole Foods while you’re charging your car there, and literally, you’ll have a full charge for the next day.

Dave: That’s exactly right.

John: That’s awesome. For our audience members that just joined us we’re so excited and really lucky to have with us Dave McCreadie from Ford. Let’s just say, he is one of the top bosses in electrification and also sustainability.

Dave: Wow. You’re really pumping me up. This is good.

John: At Ford. We’re talking about some of your products. So right now you have three in the car category. What other lines are going to get electrified in the coming months and years do you think?

Dave: Well, I think what you’re going to see and it’s not only because of consumer demand, but there is also another driver for the auto industry which is regulation.

John: Oh, OK.

Dave: Throughout the U.S., there are states that are classified as “green states,” and there are mandates in those states that every automaker needs to sell a certain percentage of their total fleet to be zero emission vehicles or partial zero emission vehicles.

John: Wow.

Dave: And if that doesn’t happen, there are pretty stiff penalties to the automakers for not doing so. So like I said, there is a consumer poll here and there is also a regulatory.

John: Push.

Dave: Government policy push as well. So in order to get to those numbers, what you are going to see is the technology start to proliferate across the lineup beyond just the small stable of cars, which Ford is out with right now.

John: So when you come on a year from now, more of your vehicles will probably be electrified and succeed.

Dave: That’s the direction in which things are headed.

John: That’s exciting. Let’s talk a little bit about social awareness and consumer adoption. Let’s talk geography. We are sitting here in this beautiful city of sustainability and innovation, downtown Seattle. They are lucky that the GoGreen Conference – this is the GoGreen edition of Green Is Good for our audience members that just joined. We are here today – you and I and other thought leaders – at this conference and Seattle, Vancouver, San Francisco, Portland, L.A.

Dave: Right. John

Shegerian: Is the adoption of your great electric cars and vehicles going left coast to East Coast or is there some other sort of social adoption going on that you can share with our audience members?

Dave: It’s a great question, John. Your perception is largely correct.

John: OK.

Dave: I mean when you look at the markets in which Ford is selling the majority of its plug-in vehicles, it’s definitely on the West Coast here.

John: OK.

Dave: And that is perhaps because of social attitudes and greater awareness perhaps of the environmental concerns.

John: Interesting. It seems like also there is a Millennial movement. Just employees of my company and others that want to migrate to Seattle, Portland, San Francisco. There is also a movement of Millennials to some of these innovation and sustainability hubs and cities that have leaders that really get it so maybe there are also concentrations of potentially – like my son who is 22 – your user base who is really excited about electric cars.

Dave: That’s right. John: So maybe some sort of combination is going on.

Dave: There is.

John: Yeah.

Dave: And I want to key off a point that you just mentioned about leaders in some of these cities that get it.

John: Yeah.

Dave: So here is a great example of something that is not in the West Coast. I’m not sure if you are aware but the city of Atlanta over the course of the last, I think, couple years now has been the highest rate of adoption – I don’t know if it’s per capita or whatever.

John: Yeah.

Dave: Of electric vehicles in the country. Even with California.

John: No kidding.

Dave: And it’s because of the incentives that have been placed on the vehicles through the state and local government. So, I mean, that is still very much – that is another one – getting back to some of the issues with adoption.

John: Yeah.

Dave: One of the hurdles that the automakers are still working through and trying to get over is the fact that in general when you are talking about two comparable cars, one is an electric vehicle and the other is not the electric vehicle is usually more expensive.

John: Right.

Dave: And it’s because of the battery and these batteries are very expensive singular components of the vehicles and so while all the automakers and others in the industry in general are madly rushing to try to invent the cheaper, long-lasting, quickly recharged battery and things are heading in that direction, but in the mean time, customer adoption really needs to be helped by continued government involvement with incentives and things like that.

John: That’s a great point. I never thought of it that way, but just in California when my son was buying his car, we saw that if he put the label on – the sticker – outside of his car, you get to ride in the carpool lane.

Dave: That’s a big incentive. The HOV lane.

John: The HOV lane just with one person and in the city. And other city leaders such as Santa Monica not only do they have lots of charging stations and Whole Foods and other great brands that are really getting excited about this revolution, but also you can park on the streets there and you don’t have to feed the meters.

Dave: That’s right.

John: For free.

Dave: That’s right.

John: So I mean like you said there are lots of great government leaders now both locally and on a statewide basis that are pushing the adoption of your great and very innovative cars. We’re down to the last three or four minutes or so, Dave, and I want to go back to Mark Fields and combine that with what you are doing. Recently, he also announced that you guys are opening up an office and innovation hub in Silicon Valley.

Dave: That’s right.

John: Talk a little bit about how that interrelates with what you are doing exactly in mobility and what can we expect to be coming out of Silicon Valley.

Dave: Sure. That’s a great question. So yeah we just were out there in late January for the grand opening of that lab.

John: Yeah.

Dave: And it’s very exciting and really dovetails just perfectly into the innovative nature of Ford Motor Company. And really the charter out there is kind of coming from a confluence of factors not the least of which is the connective car and the wireless mobile networks and the bandwidth and low latency that they have and just really the ubiquity of – I mean, everywhere you go now your cell phone works, right?

John: Right.

Dave: And works well. And that pipeline into the vehicles is allowing for enabling so many innovative features – many things we haven’t even thought of yet – for just services that you can one day have as a customer while driving your vehicle. And so that lab out there really has as part of its purview is to embrace that connected car and to help Ford navigate through where we want to go, what services can we provide, again, for not only just electrified vehicles but all vehicles, from everything ranging from technology to help you park easier to just overall connectedness.

John: That is so interesting. You know which can help also with real-time traffic reports.

Dave: Very much.

John: Or also shortcuts to get places so you save energy getting to places. Also, some folks have told me outside of the car industry is there is actually technology coming to cars that is somewhat akin to the wearables that are now coming out in Apple Watches and other great electric wearables such as you’ll be able to – when people are holding the steering wheel and touch the steering wheel – be able to get your….

Dave: Vital signs. Yeah.

John: Vital signs and other things that are downloaded to either your car and announced to you or on your dashboard or something. And is this part of what the innovation lab over there at Ford is doing?

Dave: Yeah. I mean it’s really wide open.

John: So exciting.

Dave: There are so many things that are on the horizon for that and that lab is squarely right in the middle of a lot of it so it’s been really exciting.

John: Well, we are going to let you go today, Dave. We know you have a panel coming up but we are going to invite you back to continue the journey.

Dave: I’d love to be back.

John: To continue the journey of sustainability and mobility at Ford and keep sharing with our audience which is very interested in these important topics. For our audience members out there to learn more about everything Dave is doing with his colleagues at Ford, please go to www.Ford.com. Dave McCreadie, you are an inspiring business leader, sustainability superstar and truly living proof that Green Is Good. Thank you very much for being with us today.

Dave: Thanks so much for having me, John.

John: Thank you very much.

Dave: Great.

John Shegerian: 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: Welcome to another edition of the Impact Podcast. This is a really special edition, and we’re so excited to have with us today Dr. David Klimstra. He’s the chief medical officer and the co-founder of Paige. Welcome to the Impact Podcast, David Klimstra.

Dr. David Klimstra: Well, thank you, John. I’m so happy to be here. Really nice to be able to chat with you.

John: Well, happy to have a New Yorker on with me. I know you’re in Upstate New York today, but I know you do a lot of your work in the city and I’m so thankful for you joining us. I’m in Fresno, California today, but it feels like we’re together and we’re just having this nice conversation.

David: Yeah. Very good.

John: David, I’ve learned a little bit by meeting some of your colleagues and studying a little bit about what you’ve created, a Paige Prostate. I want to get into that today. It’s so important for our audience to hear. But before we do that, I’d love you to share a little bit about the Dr. David Klimstra journey. Where did you grow up? How did you want to become a doctor? And how did you even get on this path to start with?

David: Yeah. Well, at this point in my career, it’s a long story, but I can make it concise. I’m actually a Midwesterner. I grew up outside of Chicago, but I’ve been in New York for 30 years. So, I can talk like a New Yorker if I have to, but I went into medicine because I was always interested in science and developed a passion to provide care for people who needed it and specifically had an interest in cancer. So going through medical school and exposed to a variety of different specialties, that was at Yale, I became interested in pathology because I really enjoyed getting into the details of the disease and understanding why a disease happens. I’m also sort of a visually oriented individual. I think that certain people are drawn to careers that use their inherent interests and I always like the visual aspects of things. So, looking microscopically at tissues, which is what pathologists do, was very appealing to me.

John: Were any of your mom, dad, or grandparents doctors or in the medical profession before?

David: No. My father was a researcher and ended up as an administrator in a pharmaceutical company. So he was in a healthcare-related business but not an MD, but I had a family friend early on who was a pathologist that inspired me a little bit to go into medicine, and then I kind of said, I’m not going to follow Bernie[?] and be a pathologist just because Bernie was a pathologist. But as I went through the different disciplines, as I said, you kind of gravitate to things that touch your native abilities and interests, so.

John: I appreciate your humbleness, but you just sort of let it out in a very quiet way that Yale was your medical school. As I’ve learned over the years through my good friends that happened to be doctors as well in different specialties and they’re Yale graduates, Yale probably is the best medical school in this whole country, if not, not the world. So, congrats for that. That’s not just a throwaway comment that didn’t get by me, Doc.

David: Okay.

John: That’s a heck of an accomplishment and good for you. So you become a doctor, you go to Yale, you become a doctor. You start practicing in New York City, or where did you start practicing your [inaudible]?

David: Well, so after you finish medical school, you go through a residency and, at the time, probably the leading diagnostic pathologist in the world, a fellow called Juan Rosai, was the head of anatomic pathology at Yale. I did a rotation with him as a medical student. I got to know him and very quickly became aware that this is the person I wanted to train with. So I stayed at Yale for my residency, which was 3 years of anatomic pathology training to diagnose disease by looking at it microscopically and applying a variety of studies to the tissue to fine-tune things. As I was finishing my third year of residency, I was supposed to stay and do a fellowship with Dr. Rosai, and then he left Yale to go to Memorial Sloan Kettering. So I said, well, what am I going to do? This is the guy I was supposed to train with. He says, don’t worry, you can come with me. So I signed up in 1991 for a one-year fellowship at Memorial Sloan Kettering, and I stayed there for 30 years.

John: He was your mentor and is he still alive? Does he happen to be still alive?

David: No, regrettably, he passed away about a year ago and he left Memorial in 1999. So he was the chair of the department, After he left, I stayed there and I went up through the ranks, I became the chief of surgical pathology and, ultimately, I became the chair of the department in 2011. So for 10 years, I was the chair of the department at Memorial Sloan Kettering.

John: What an exciting thing. Now, you go to Yale, but you got to be the understudy to, maybe during the time of his life, one of the greatest pathologists on the whole planet. So, what a great blessing and honor.

David: Yes. I was enormously privileged to be able to do that. Yeah.

John: So now, you’re a pathologist, you’re obviously at the top, top, top of your profession. Thank God for these people like you out there doing the important work you did as just strict[?] pathologist. Where did you get the entrepreneurial streak to make you want to become an innovator and entrepreneur and go out and create Paige? For our listeners and viewers out there that want to learn more about Paige, which we’re going to learn a lot more about the rest of this interview, you could go to www.paige, P-A-I-G-E, .ai. You go to www.P-A-I-G-E.ai. So, where did you get this streak from, Doc?

David: So, yeah, it’s interesting how this evolved. When I became the chair of the department, my overriding mission was to try to introduce any useful new technology to help us better diagnose pathology tissues.

John: Okay.

David: This ran the spectrum from genetic testing, advanced protein screening and digital pathology. So digital pathology, basically, means instead of looking at glass slides using a microscope, you scan the glass slides. It makes a digital counterpart and you look at them on the computer.

John: Okay.

David: It sounds straightforward but it’s been very slow to penetrate into practice. The reason is because it’s an expensive transformation. The scanners that you need cost a quarter million dollars a piece for a large department. We had thirteen of them at MSK to scan less than the entire volume of slides that we produce. So it’s something where we need to develop tools to make this worthwhile. The so-called return on investment is challenging. So, what we decided to do was to hire engineers, mathematicians, and computer scientists to take these digital images. Because once they’re digital, you can now manipulate them. You can now study them in a way that you can’t do with a glass slide, using what’s known as computer vision technology to analyze those images. The computers can learn to analyze them in a similar way that a human will analyze them.

The difference is that you can feed a computer 10,000 of these things and let it work on it for a week and it learns from that huge volume. You can imagine how long it would take a human to accumulate that same experience. So we started doing this as a research tool and gradually began to realize that you could build these artificial intelligence models in a research environment, but they were not robust enough to actually use them. So how are we going to take this? The whole idea is to introduce these innovations into clinical practice. How are we going to take an innovation that we created in an academic department with limited resources and make it robust enough, get FDA approval, get it generalizable so it works in everybody else’s department? The only way to do that is to have a company that can raise capital and create the infrastructure to do this.

So, with my colleagues who cofounded Paige, we decided that we would do this and form a company, spin-off from Memorial Sloan Kettering that would use the data that Memorial had and the computer technology that my collaborators had developed to produce clinical-grade products that could benefit patients.

John: Let’s go break this down. First of all, there was a problem. You saw there was a void in the marketplace from just doing the analog typical way you did pathology historically and that you were trained to do, and just your own eyes, laying your own eyes on it. Now, you had a way to put it against other sample sets in a technological way and build a database that would allow clearer results, a clearer path forward for the machine[?] tested.

David: Yes.

John: So, when you say scale, obviously, you were able to build a great database at Memorial Sloan Kettering because of where you are and the volume of people you see. What did you mean on a meaningful scale level to make it a real business enterprise? How big did that database have to grow and how big did you have to get it for what you want it to be meaningful that would have benefit outside of just MSK, and also be able to then clear that other major hurdle of getting FDA approval?

David: Right. So, it’s a great question. I think that the fundamental issue with machine learning is data. The challenge to this is that you can teach a computer to discriminate two different things.

John: Okay.

David: A nice example that I’ve heard is you can show a picture of canine animals to a computer. Some of them are wolves and some of them are dogs. So you tell the computer, these are all wolves and these are all dogs, and ask the computer to figure out how to tell them apart. The problem is the computer did it, but when you dig down into it, the reason that it figured it out is because all the wolves had pictures with snow in them, and the dogs did not. So the computer wasn’t actually looking at the animal. It was looking at something else.

In order for these things to work, you need to train it with every conceivable scenario. So you would need 10,000 pictures of wolves, some of which would have snow and some of which would not.

John: Right.

David: We adapted technology to enable the computers to learn by themselves essentially. So, if you wanted to, for instance, train a computer better to recognize a wolf and a dog, what you would do is go into that picture of the wolf and circle just the wolf and say, don’t look at the background, just look at this, and same with the dog. You could do that for a couple of hundred pictures, but once it starts getting beyond that, I mean, you can imagine how much agony it would be for someone to go in and a little. So, what we’ve done is we’ve trained the computer to learn by itself. All it knows is somewhere in this picture, there’s a wolf, and somewhere in this picture, there’s a dog. But if you show it enough pictures over time and you let it iterate on this repeatedly, it learns, and that’s what we were able to do at Memorial Sloan Kettering because we have 25 million slides.

So for any disease, and we’re going to talk about prostate cancer, we have tens of thousands of slides of prostate cancer, which is a data resource large enough to train these very data-intensive models.

John: So, I have to tell you just a quick, funny anecdote. I’m not an AI person. I’m not an engineer by trade. I’m an entrepreneur. I happen to be asked to speak at a conference in the fall of 2019 in Armenia.

David: Okay.

John: So at this big wonderful dinner, I was invited to sit at a table and the last speaker was this guy, he got up there. He’s 6’3″ and I’ve never seen him in my life. He’s Armenian and he’s telling the whole audience that the future of medicine is AI and AI is going to be powering so many great solutions in the future.

David: Yeah.

John: Again, I didn’t know him. So after he got off the stage, it was a little mock stage, really, it was just this ballroom setting, but he had all of our attention. I was riveted, and I don’t know anything about this stuff. I was introduced to him after and that happened to be Noubar Afeyan. So, fast forward six months later and he’s on Bloomberg, and MSNBC, and CNN with Moderna, I said, oh, I guess I really knew he was out to something back then. But, obviously, we didn’t even know about COVID back then. So then when I read about what you did and how you’re also taking AI, and now applying more, how do we want to call it, Doc, is it optical AI in your situation? Is it more optical-enacted AI?

David: Yeah. Computer vision is a good term for it.

John: Got it.

David: It’s training from images.

John: Right.

David: Yes.

John: So now, as you continue to scan more and more images, your database only becomes better, richer and smarter at what it does, right?

David: Correct.

John: So let’s talk about the journey. So when did you get together with your cofounder partners at MSK and say, okay, we’re going to incorporate or create an LLC or whatever you did, what year was that?

David: We started working on this in 2016, I believe. I mean, these ideas percolate a little bit. You’re having poppy[?] together and you say, geez, this is going to be tough to do in this academic environment. We need to raise some money and power this up and make a company. Those discussions went along. They weren’t going anywhere until we met Norman Selby. He’s old Mackenzie[?] guy. He’s a business guy. He’d been involved in founding many companies. He loved the idea and the three of us work very closely together with some other colleagues to figure out how to actualize this.

John: Okay. So let’s take a pause. Was Norman a client, a patient? Is he just a friend just through social networks?

David: No, he’s actually a board member at MSK. So, he was familiar with what we were doing at MSK in general.

John: Got it.

David: Once we all realize that there was something here, we started talking about, how can we move this forward? So that was maybe 2016.

John: So how much money did you have to raise to start to see if your vision can get traction?

David: Well, how much do we have to raise is one question, how much we did raise is 25 million.

John: Perfect. Okay, that’s what I really meant but you’re right. Did you really want to raise more, was that the point? Did you really want to…

David: Well, the company’s raised now 220 million after three funding rounds. So, yes, we did want to raise more and we did raise more.

John: But you got it. But like you and I are of the age that we remember the old stone song, sometimes if you don’t get what you want, you get what you need. You got what you needed, obviously, right?

David: Yeah. We did. Yeah, certainly enough to get things rolling. Yeah.

John: Got it. So then how did it play out? Where in the journey did you know, when you went to bed at night, that your original coffee chat vision with your colleagues was really going to work? You really were going to eventually get this to where it really was going to change the world for the better.

David: Well, so that’s a great question because a lot of what we did was a projection. Even at the point where we were doing fundraising, I mean, we had created these computer vision models. But as I said before, they were created in a smaller scale way in an academic environment. They had not been raised up to the level that they could be generally used. So, people had to go bet on faith that the technology would work, that the data were adequate to train these, that they could get FDA approval. When did I realize that this was a reality?

John: Yeah.

David: I mean, you could say it was two months ago when the FDA finally approved it, but it was earlier than that. I mean, I was a skeptic. I am a skeptic. I mean, pathologists are skeptics by nature, and I was like, is this really going to work? But we kept trying it, and as you started to see the output and the results, it was very encouraging and then we started running clinical studies to see how pathologists used it and they said, wow, this is great. We love it. It’s helping us. So it wasn’t like a lightning strike, but it was a gradual realization sometime in the last two years that this is actually going to be possible and it’s going to work.

John: So you took your results and you packaged them in the way that they need to be packaged and you deliver them to the FDA. How long did that process take and what was their general feedback? I know you just were approved just a mere few weeks ago. Explain that lead up of packaging it, sending it over, and then that waiting period and I assume there’s a Q&A period as well?

David: Right. So our journey with the FDA was not the typical journey. We applied for and received what’s known as breakthrough status, which gives us special access. Typically, when you apply to the FDA, you present them what you want to do and they say, no, this is not right, you need to fix this, and you go away and you come back. It’s not a dialogue. When you have breakthrough status, it gives you special access and sort of a sprint period when you have a lot of one-on-one discussions with them and they advise you on what you need to do. This is very important because our device was the first ever to be considered by the FDA for artificial intelligence in diagnostic anatomic pathology. There was never any other approved device prior to ours.

So we had to work with them to devise an appropriate study that was statistically rigorous, that considered all of the different scenarios. Diagnostic pathology is a very complicated endeavor. It’s not like a blood test, where you put in a sample and out pops a result. It’s an interpretation of structural alterations in a piece of tissue. So, ensuring that a machine can help a pathologist do that better requires extraordinarily rigorous validation. Actually, you asked me how long it took. It took three years. We started in 2017. The first time we went to the FDA, we are just saying this to you, we didn’t really know what we were doing, but they didn’t either. So it worked out well.

Typically, that first visit to the FDA, they have a couple of people meet with you in a conference room and say, okay, well, here’s what you need to do. We showed up there, we’re fifteen people, which was a testimony to the level of interest the FDA had in looking at this kind of a product. They’ve never seen one before and they were really curious. They sent people from radiology, pathology, other disciplines to come in and look at this product. So, we were honored to be able to work with the FDA on this to help establish the parameters that were established for our approval. Now, set the roadmap for anyone else who wants to bring a similar product. So they’re going to have to meet the same standards that we did. It was quite a journey.

John: So, now, you get approved. This product you’ve created at Paige is called Paige Prostate.

David: Yes.

John: For our listeners and viewers who want to find Dr. David Klimstra, his colleagues and the great work they’re doing at Paige, please go to www.paige, P-A-I-G-E, .ai. Paige Prostate, explain the differential level. Now that it’s approved by the FDA, what is this going to mean in the months and years ahead for prostate pathologies getting diagnosed and creating a path forward for the patients that are lucky enough to have this applied to their pathology?

David: Yeah. So, the important thing to understand, as I said a minute ago, is that pathology is an interpretive discipline. So, some things are subject to professional judgment. It’s also a matter of finding a needle in a haystack. So I don’t know how to explain this without some graphics, but you can imagine you’re looking at a microscopic slide or that you put it on your computer or not. It’s like looking literally for a needle in a haystack. There’s an acre of real estate there and somewhere within that real estate, there may be cancer, and it can be extraordinarily tiny. So because of these factors, the practice of pathology is imperfect. It’s like any other judgment. Sometimes the judgment is spot on. Much of the time is spot on and sometimes it’s not, and sometimes you find everything that’s there and sometimes you don’t.

So the reason this is so impactful is because there are things the computers are better at than humans. Looking for the needle in the haystack is one of them. So, if you have an acre of real estate, a computer can look at that in 7 seconds and tell you if there’s something there, once it’s trained to recognize what it’s looking for. That’s what Paige Prostate does. It looks at the entire slide and it points out for the pathologist any areas that it thinks are likely to be cancer. Then the pathologist can focus their attention on those areas. If they’ve looked at the slide already, they turn it on and they realize, oops, here’s an area I didn’t see or here’s an area that I thought was maybe suspicious, but now that Paige Prostate has pointed out, I realized that this is cancer.

So, the benefit to the patient is it improves accuracy and improves detection. It reduced the number of diagnostic errors in our study for the FDA by 70%. So, it’s not an autonomous diagnosis. It still requires the pathologist to look at that image and say, yes, that’s cancer. Or maybe I need to do some additional studies.

John: Right.

David: But I realize that there’s something here that I should look at more closely.

John: Wow.

David: But it works with the pathologist, it’s an additional tool to help them be more accurate.

John: So, it’s 70% more accurate. Help me because I’m not a doctor nor do I follow FDA besides what we’ve all been following with COVID. Is 70% literally off the charts when it comes to improving and creating a compelling reason for them to approve you? Does ten usually get drugs passed if it was a 10% and you blew the doors off? Give me some sort of context here.

David: Yeah. I wish I could tell you that there’s a magic number that they would approve.

John: Okay.

David: There is not. Obviously, it has to be statistically significant improvement which [inaudible].

John: Got it.

David: It also has to prevent going the other way, right? If it finds more cancers, but it also calls things cancer that aren’t, that’s not good, right? So, it’s got to be balanced and it was, it did not result in false-positive diagnosis, but it did eliminate by and large the missed cancers. That’s huge for patients. There’s so much that flows from pathology diagnosis. People don’t realize how critical pathologists are to their treatment. Their doctor is making a decision based on that pathology report and the doctor has no basis to question it, right? They can’t look at the slides themselves. They take the pathology report and that is dogma from the standpoint of dictating treatment.

John: So you get approved, Doc, and I’m sure that was a happy moment in your career and your life. Obviously, it should be, and what a great thing you’ve done with your cofounding partners. The champagne, the bottle cracks open, but now the Paige is turned.

David: Okay.

John: What’s the future? I assume one of the greatest opportunities and challenges that you’re facing now is, how do you now democratize this great technology that you’ve created?

David: Yes. It’s a huge challenge, bigger than you would think, because in order to use this, you have to be in the digital environment. They can’t use this with a routine microscope. You have to have digital pathology. So, in order to use it, we need for the pathology community to embrace the digital format. Sadly enough, as I said, this is an expensive transformation, it’s going to take a lot of these kinds of tools for pathologists to say, you know what, I want to be in a digital environment because I can use Paige Prostate. I can use Paige Breast. I can use this detection system the Paige built that will tell me whether this colon cancer is a bad one or not. We’re working on a whole fleet of these things.

So, what’s next is that we have to get to this tipping point, where these tools are so powerful, that the pathologists want them and the doctors want them and the patients want them. The patients say, I want to go to a place where I can have computers help with the diagnosis because I’m confident this will be more accurate.

John: Right.

David: That will push the field to embrace the digital environment that it hasn’t done so far.

John: So, I assume given your status just as a leading pathologist at MSK and around the world, there’s some sort of pathology annual conference that you get to go to. This is the pitch you’re going to be doing there. What is the numbers? So if I’m a pathologist at Cedars-Sinai in LA, which, of course, is another great leading institution, et cetera, what do I have to do? Is it just me convincing my partners, let’s buy some of these machines, or how complicated or simple is this whole, basically, generational shift now?

David: Yeah, it is complicated. I’m not going to trivialize this. We did this at Memorial Sloan Kettering, started it in 2008 and it’s still going. It’s a culture shift.

John: Got it.

David: It’s possible to simply dive into the deep end of the pool and say, I’m going to buy a bunch of slide scanners, I’m going to plug them in and we’re going to be digital on January 1st.

John: Right.

David: Most places don’t do that. They buy one. They use it for research and teaching and they gradually get used to how to use it. Then they buy another one and then they say, maybe we should have some of these slides digital. It takes a long time. So, the real impediment is the return on investment. It’s not just the pathologist, you have to convince the administrators and that’s your partner, they’re the ones with the purse strings, right? So, we have to be able to show that we’re going to be more efficient. We’re going to be safer. We’re going to have better patient care. We’re going to get reimbursement for doing this. All of these economic arguments that will allow administrator to embrace the cost of the transformation. That is a community effort. That’s something that there’s societies, there’s a digital pathology society that works on this, the College of American Pathologists and all these advocacy groups that are helping to build the use case. So we can say, okay, let’s do this.

John: Got it, understood. Obviously, the total addressable market is massive here, not only in the United States but around the world. If I’m a pathologist and I read your success rate here, how you got FDA approval, and I’m listening to this podcast and I’m listening to you say 70% more accurate, just from a business standpoint, from an administrator, a business standpoint, from a doctor, like you said, the whole ecosystem of people that are involved, it sounds like from the ground up, clients like me, patients like me should be asking their doctors, when are we going to get this? Then once they get it, once the pathologist at Cedars gets it, do they or immediately they won before they build up their own database? Are they able for just, say, Paige Prostate, are the urologists and the doctors at Cedars able to tap into your database in terms of getting accuracy from day one when it comes to the Prostate?

David: Yes.

John: Wow.

David: Because the basis for this FDA approval is that this product has been trained on 30,000 cases from 800 different institutions, so it generalizes.

John: Got it.

David: This is not something that you plug in and it continues to learn from your cases. It’s already trained. So you plug it in, and on day one, you can turn it on and it works in the cloud. So, by the time your digital slides are ready for you to look at, the algorithm has already run and it will immediately show you the results. Yeah.

John: So Paige Prostate is off to the races. Like you said, you raise a lot more money now for the socialization process for [inaudible] out there.

David: Yeah.

John: But, you’ve developed a technology just like what we’ve read with Moderna and all these other RNA companies, Pfizer, that has other applications. A couple of minutes ago, you mentioned Paige Breast. How many other pathology subsets that have such high stakes and are such large diseases, such as breast cancer, prostate cancer, and others, will you be able to take your great Paige technology and apply it towards?

David: Another great question. I mean, people think of cancer as one disease and it’s actually hundreds of different diseases. Even within an individual organ, breast cancer is not breast cancer. It’s ten different subtypes of breast cancer. Every different organ and every different subtype is special and requires training and requires significant numbers to train the algorithms. So, the answer is that, in theory, you could build an algorithm for every different kind of cancer and every different diagnostic scenario about the cancer. It’s not just diagnosing the cancer, it’s describing what grade is it, how severe is it, how far has it spread. Does it have any other features that we need to know about that might predict response to therapy or prognosis outcome?

So, in theory, you could develop hundreds of these. In practice, you have to pick things that are going to be beneficial to a lot of people. Prostate cancer was the first one to start with. There were some economic reasons behind that. There were some simple workflow reasons behind that. Breast, obviously, a very important cancer that we need more information about who needs treatment and who doesn’t need treatment, what kind of treatment they need. Lung cancer, colon cancer. I mean, the common cancers are, obviously, the ones where it would help the most people.

So, we already have on the roadmap about four or five different other cancer types. Then within those cancer types, we have specific questions that we’re trying to address that are relevant just to that cancer type. Then on top of that, there are some issues that transcend every different kind of cancer. Probably a lot of people have heard about immunotherapy. It’s the hottest new thing. Yeah, okay. So, even though therapy is amazing, it can completely eradicate a cancer, but it only works in certain cancers. How do we figure out which ones those are? That’s a very difficult question and we’re struggling to do that. The answer is that you devise different so-called biomarkers that you can put on the cancer and say, okay, this one looks like it’s going to respond. This one looks like it’s not. By the way, you want to know which ones aren’t because these drugs are extremely expensive.

John: Right.

David: Right? So, what if you could do that with a digital algorithm like we’re developing, just from the routine mythology and say, this is going to respond in that? What if it was applicable, no matter what type of cancer you have? I mean, that’s the kind of thing that we are very excited to do working on because it has such broad applications, both commercially and for patient care.

John: So exciting. So now, Paige Prostate approved, when do you start moving down the road on the other verticals to start working towards building up their data sets that [inaudible] towards approval as well?

David: Luckily, for us, the data that we have is licensed from MSK. So we already have four and a half million slides digitized, which is, as far as I’m aware, the largest collection of pathology data in a digital format. So we were already moving well down the road on many other things. Breast will be the next clinical tumor type that we’re developing and the algorithm is more complicated because there are more questions to answer about breast biopsies than prostate biopsies. So it’s more facets to the algorithm. But many of these are already in progress, there are teams working on them. The data are already ingested at Paige and being analyzed right now. So, we’re hopeful that we’ll be able to release a number of new organ-specific algorithms within the next year.

John: Doc, how many pathologists are there in the United States? When you’re looking at your universe of how many people that you’re hoping to convince, this is the right way, this is the better way to go and this will help us be better at our profession. No such thing as perfect but this will help them and the doctors that they serve and the patients that you serve be better and come up with better results. How big is that market both here in the United States and around the world? Is it just…

David: Well, and that gets at a very important point. So there’s thirty some odd pathologists in the United States.

John: Okay.

David: But we have a much greater number of pathologists per capita than many other countries. Surprising, some of these other countries, like Germany, has a much lower proportion. If you start looking at underserved countries, it’s almost unbelievable how few pathologists they have. Four or five in a whole country. So, we use the word democratize and we use that word a lot because this technology isn’t intended to be a standalone diagnosis.

John: Right.

David: But, where you have no access to pathology care, it has the potential to be amazingly impactful, just to help triage patients and get them into the right general bucket. So, the market size, global market size is enormous. You look at the number of cases of cancer every year in the US alone. If we can provide additional incremental, useful information on even a subset of those, that’s billions of dollars in market.

John: As a businessman, now, taking off your doctor hat, what’s the next step? Do you have to raise a lot more capital or do you access the public markets because now the public markets seem so much more post-COVID, which we’re moving towards a post-COVID rolling? It seems like the investment world, the equity markets are very excited about now more health care, good health care, preventative health care. When you’re talking to advisers and other smart people in New York and other people that you have access to, which is big, I’m sure, what’s the next step as a business enterprise?

David: Right. Well, I’m not businessman, by the way, I’m a doctor, right? I’ve gotten into businesses a little bit, but I’ve heard it said that any startup with revenue is clearly not going in the right direction. But, that being said, I think at this point, getting revenue is actually something we should be doing. There’s many ways that we can do that by using the product we’ve built and by working with other organizations who are interested in the space.

John: Right.

David: Partnering with pharmaceutical companies and other testing laboratories to implement our technology in assessing their patients for drug trials or predicting outcomes, and things like this that are being done. So, that’s certainly one objective. The other objective is to push this digital adoption that I told you about it. You can’t use our products unless the laboratories are digital, and we can’t get more data until they’re digital. So, it’s a kind of a catch-22 that we have to help them get into the digital environment and then the data available to develop and validate these will grow exponentially. So that’s clearly part of our goal and we partner with other companies in this regard, who build the scanners that scan the pathology slides, because they have the same ambition that we want to make sure that this technology is available for every patient. So that’s the immediate ambition.

John: So after prostate, will come breast, and after breast, will come colon, you think, in terms of your subsets?

David: Yes.

John: Wow, that’s so exciting.

David: I didn’t mention but there’s bladder in the mix there. It’s a less common cancer, but we had another reason to work on that so there’s bladder cancer algorithm. We’re interested in almost every different major tumor type. So there are other things in the pipeline, but the ones you mentioned are the closest.

John: So exciting. Doc, this has been great. I want to let you have the last word before we have to say goodbye for today, but we’re going to continue to have you back on just to share this incredible journey and these important breakthroughs in medicine that more people should learn about and ask their doctors about and actually request, so they have the best available health care to themselves and diagnostics to themselves like we all want. So, I want to give you the last word on the months and years ahead for you.

David: Yeah, thank you so much. I mean, it’s been a great conversation and I think you’ve drawn out a lot of the important facets of what we’re doing and why we’re doing it. I mean, pathology has sort of struggled for a long time because nobody knows what we do. It’s behind the curtain almost entirely. I think my closing comment would be that we’re in possession of enormous quantities of data in medicine. A lot of it comes from pathology. Genomic testing, genetic sequencing of tumors. A lot of these studies that we do are generating these huge data sets, almost so much that people don’t know what to do with it. So our ambition is to find a way to bring all of these big data sets together in an integrated fashion that best informs treatment, incorporates everything. Even radiology, laboratory testing, the digital images I’m talking about, genetic sequencing, and computers can integrate that together and produce a much more informative assessment than any one of those technologies by itself.

So, if you ask me, where is this entire field headed, that’s what I’m going to say. It’s big data analytics that will pull all this together and make it much more manageable. So that’s my ambition. I want to see pathology leading in analyzing the data related to patients’ cancers and other conditions.

John: Dr. David Klimstra, you’re exactly the reason why we do this show. You’re making a huge impact. You’re making the world a better place. We’re all so grateful for you and all the work you’re doing at Paige. Again, for our listeners and viewers that want to learn more about what Dr. David Klimstra and his colleagues are doing at Paige, please go to www.paige, P-A-I-G-E, .ai, paige.ai. Learn more about all the great technologies, Paige Prostate and the other great subsets that the Doc is working on. Doc, we’re going to have you back so you can continue to share your success and journey on making the world a better place and making us all have a chance to be healthier and live better and longer lives. Thanks again for all you’ve done.

David: Thank you, John. It’s been a pleasure.

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 Shegerian: 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.

Hi, this is John Shegerian. I never could have imagined when we started the Green Is Good radio show back in 2006 that it would grow into a big podcast called The Green Is Good Podcast. Now, we’ve evolved that podcast to the Impact Podcast, which is more inclusive and more diverse than ever before. We did look back recently at some of our timeless Green Is Good interviews and decided to share some of them with you now. So enjoy one of our great Green Is Good episodes from our archives. Next week, I’ll be back with a fresh and new episode of the Impact Podcast. Thanks again for listening. I’m grateful to all of you. This is John Shegerian.

Voiceover: Welcome to Green Is Good. Raising awareness of each individual’s impact on the environment and helping to create a more beautiful and sustainable world. Now, here’s John Shegerian, Chairman and CEO of Electronic Recyclers International and Mike Brady.

John: Welcome to Green Is Good, Mike. It’s so great to be in studio with you today.

Mike Brady: It’s always a good time, John. I just can’t wait because we’re going to have so much fun in the next hour or so informing and entertaining and empowering our audience in a lot of ways that we can make simple changes to make our world a better place to live for our kids and future generations. At the same time, we’re in some very cool stuff technologically in a lot of ways so we can save ourselves a little bit of green in the bargain.

John: Yeah. Mike, this show today is really going to hit home for all our listeners. Sometimes, we tackle very big subjects. Sometimes, we tackle complex subjects. Today, we’re going to try to keep it as simple as possible.

Mike: It’s going to be as simple as your plumbing. When, really, you think about the mysteries of plumbing…

John: Sure.

Mike: …when it comes right down to it, plumbing is actually pretty simple. We can make it very complex, but we’re going to talk about plumbing today and we’re also going to talk about lights in our homes.

John: That’s right. The other beauty is sometimes, we have these amazing iconic brands on the show, Ford and Molson Coors and all these wonderful great brands that were born here in the United States and are just now international brands, but we also love to have the entrepreneurs on. Today is that great balance also. Today, we have the amazing iconic brand, Roto-Rooter on the show.

Mike: We can sing the jingle together.

John: That we both grew up with, by the way.

Mike: There you go.

John: Then we have an entrepreneur who’s in the lighting. In this lighting specter, which we’ve covered before, but she has a new twist to this. She’ll be able to share some entrepreneurial vision plus also the lighting vision. Going back to complex and bigger issues and tying it back to Roto-Rooter, Mike. The simplicity of the Roto-Rooter story is going to be great. Tie it back to what we’re living through right now as a country and as a world. Again, we have potentially another Chernobyl on our hands with this oil leak or whatever is going on.

Mike: Yeah. If you’ve been following it all for the last month or so and when there was that just horrible explosion on a offshore oil drilling rig in the Gulf Coast and you just saw what happened to be almost biblical proportions in the oil spill that made the… It actually eclipsed the spill way back one of the Exxon Valdez up in Alaska. This is really something we have to pay attention to more than ever now.

John: Yeah. I didn’t realize, my wife was reading to me this weekend that in 1969, there was also a similarly big oil spill of at back in those days huge proportion off the coast of Santa Barbara.

Mike: I remember that growing up, I was in high school and volunteered to help go try and clean up. A lot of people just came together, just thinking about “we got to do something about this.”

John: Here we are again in poor Louisiana and that whole Gulf Coast, which was devastated years ago since a few years back by Hurricane Katrina. Now, potentially is going to be devastated again economically by again, the environmental harms that potentially we’ve done to ourselves.

Mike: Yeah, exactly. When people talk about getting fish oil in their diets, I don’t think this is what quite what they had in mind.

John: Amen, Mike. Again, there’s huge issues that we like to tackle out there, and one day, we’ll have some specialists from the oil industry on to talk about what’s going on right now. Much more beyond what Mike and I can cover just as laymen here, but we hope to bring you that story one day.

Today, we’re going to be talking about water and water conservation and the necessity for that with Roto-Rooter and how they’re going green. We’re also going to talk about the lighting issues in your home. We have our version of tool time today at Green Is Good. Come on back.

Voiceover: If a little green is good, more is even better. Now, back to Green Is Good with John Shegerian and Mike Brady.

John: Welcome back to Green Is Good, and we’re so honored today to have Paul Abrams who’s the public relations manager at the iconic Roto-Rooter Group, which is the largest provider of plumbing, repair and drain cleaning services in the US and Canada. Welcome, Paul, to Green Is Good.

Paul Abrams: Well, thank you, Mike and John, my pleasure to be here.

John: Well, Mike, we grew up with the great Roto-Rooter brand. It’s so wonderful to have Roto-Rooter on Green Is Good today.

Paul: Well, thanks. Thanks. It’s been an interesting journey for us for about a year designing the screen program. I’m more than happy to talk about it. I’m proud to talk about it.

John: Before we go and talk about green, and by the way, for our listeners out there, Paul is a pro at this. He’s an ex TV reporter. We’re turning the mics on him today. Tell us a little bit about this. What is this Ghost Hunter stuff? What is Roto-Rooter doing with Ghost Hunters? What are you doing on television with them?

Paul: Oh gosh. This is the sixth season, I believe, for Ghost Hunters on this sci-fi channel. Jason Hawes and Grant Wilson are real life Roto-Rooter service technicians out of the Providence, Rhode Island branch. They approached us 6 years ago about the show and said, “Hey, this is something we do on the side, but the producers would like to incorporate our daily lives, our real-life jobs into the show, if you guys would be interested.” Of course, talking about paranormal stuff just scared the heck out of our senior management team, so they said no.

I said, “Oh gosh, you got to reconsider. I think this is a great move,” and they actually met Jay and Grant and said, “Gosh. Yeah, this seems harmless enough and they’re great guys and some of our best service technicians, so let’s do it.” We have, it’s been great for us.

John: Well, hats off to you guys. What a great tie-in for the amazing brand Roto-Rooter. Anyway, today, we’re going to be talking green. Mike and I, before we brought you on the air, we were on your great website. Mike’s going to talk about that in a little bit. We were talking about this amazing factoid that you have on your ROTOgreen website. For our listeners out there who want to see all the great stuff you’re doing at rotorooter.com, go to rotorooter.com and then click on to ROTOgreen button.

Let’s talk about the facts. By 2013, thirty-six states are expecting local, regional and statewide water shortages, even under non drought conditions, according to the US General Accounting Office. Paul Abrams, is there any doubt why Roto-Rooter went into this green program and why you’re starting all these green initiatives right now?

Paul: Well, not in my mind. I mean, I think it’s just the responsible thing to do. As you mentioned, we’re the largest plumbing repair and drain cleaning service in the US and Canada. What that means is that we’re in over 4,000 residential homes and commercial businesses every single day, and that’s about a million and a half places a year that we’re working on the plumbing. Because of that, we realize that we’re better positioned than just about anybody to make a real difference when it comes to water conservation.

John: Let’s talk about that. Explain to our listeners. What does that mean for them in their house if Roto-Rooter comes out and you tell them, “Make me green?” How does this whole thing work?

Paul: Well, what we do is first, we tried to design a program and thought, “Okay, we could do A, B, C, D, E, all the way through the letter Z,” but then we thought, “Let’s stick to our strength. Let’s, the old saying, keep it simple, stupid.” Then we realized that gosh, we work on a lot of toilets. We work on a lot of sinks. We work on a lot of bath tubs and showers, so let’s find easy ways to do this.

The first thing that we did is to say, okay, what kind of parts do they make these days that are better when it comes to water conservation than the parts we’ve been using for years and years? Once we looked around, we found a couple of obscure small companies that were making some really interesting parts. We just said, well, the simplest thing to do is, let’s change overnight to these parts, and even just by default, our customers will be greener than they were before.

John: Well, let’s just pretend for a second. You’re the Roto-Rooter guy and you’ve now come to the Brady household, Mike Brady’s home. Now, you’re walking in the front door, and Mike says, “Make me green and make my home green.” How is this going to work? Where are you going to look first? Where are you going to point out to Mike to do a retrofit on his house on your whole new ROTOgreen program?

Paul: Well, the first thing Roto-Rooter’s going to do is ask if they can do a quick inspection of your home or your business and look at the plumbing. We’ll take a look at areas that use the most water and will make recommendations from there. For instance, we’d look at your toilets and determine how old they are.

John: Okay.

Paul: If they were made before 1993 or since 1993 rather, they would use 1.6 gallons of water with every single flush. What we would recommend is installing some dual flush converters inside the toilet tanks, along with a new more efficient fill valve that we’re using these days. The combination of those 2 parts is going to save you a whole lot of water because if you think about it, 4 out of 5 times that we flush a toilet is for liquid waste. We don’t need all 1.6 gallons of the flush power to clear the bowl of liquid waste. Instead, you’ll use about maybe eight tenths of a gallon or less.

Now, for solid waste, the user is going to want to select that button on the toilet that gets full flush power. If you push the buttons the right way, then 80% of the time, you’re going to be saving water with a dual flush toilet. We can convert it, and it’s going to cost a lot less to make that conversion than replacing your old toilet with a brand new one.

Mike: Now, let me ask you this, Paul. If you were coming out in as John suggested, you came to my house and you started doing this. You talked about the 1, 2 converter, if I said, “Geez, oh man, what a great idea. Can you install that right now?” I mean, would you be able to do it right then? Or will we have to make a future appointment in most cases?

Paul: No, we’d be able to do it right then. We actually stock these green parts on the trucks now. In almost every case, especially when it comes to a replacement parts, we could do it right then and there.

John: That’s called the dual flush retrofit?

Paul: It is. Yeah. Some Roto-Rooter locations in certain parts of the country might be using a different brand, but we’re partnering with a company called MJSI Incorporated. I like the company because the guy who founded the company is both a licensed plumber, a master plumber, in fact, and an engineer, so he’s got just the right qualifications to just design some really great stuff. He’s come up with a dual flush kit that is relatively easy for our guys to install. They can do it pretty quickly, and it just makes such a difference.

Mike: We know, so much easier too than having to swap out the entire toilet. I’m thinking about this. Now, tell me if this isn’t a great training aid. If you’re trying to teach your kids, you’re toilet training them, you go number one, number two, you can really put some teeth into it this way. I mean, this is going to make it a real learning experience, right?

Paul: Well, ironically, my own son is 3, and we just got him off of diapers in the last few months. He is doing exactly what you said. He’s pushing the small button for pee-pee and the big button for everything else, and it’s good. I try to raise my kids in an environment where they appreciate how much water is being used. We’ve got one of those big corner jacuzzi tubs in the house that we bought. Sometimes, they’ll want to use that, but I always tell them, “No, let’s use your bathtub. It uses so much less water.” I think when you raise them that way and teach them those sorts of green values from the start, then they appreciate that.

John: That’s so true, making it part of our DNA is such a great, great point, Paul. Let’s now move on from there. Now, first of all, Mike and I are sitting here and we think we hear a lot, we see a lot. We’ve never even heard of this. You’re the first company putting out this dual flush retrofit?

Paul: As a matter of fact, there are probably some small plumbers, regional, local plumbers around the country who just got the green thing going, who knows how far back who were…

John: Right.

Paul: Some guys were actually jury-rigging these things. As far as I know, as far as major plumbing companies, we are the first to actually make these things widely available. Roto-Rooter’s got a history. We are a pretty sizable company, and one of the things we can do is take some of these high-tech devices in some cases and obscure devices and bring them to the forefront and make them common. You’ll find in a Roto-Rooter, a guy, one of our service technicians, he’s going to have one of these high-tech fiber-optic cameras to inspect your plumbing. Whereas, maybe some small guy can’t afford to bring those products forth. We’re trying to do that with these green parts.

We’ve looked far and wide for some really good stuff that makes sense and is going to hold up. That’s just as important as anything. We’ve tried to just bring these parts to the forefront and make them widely available.

John: Before we continue our tour through the Brady household, like stay at the toilet for a second. Now, what people always want to know is pocketbook is how expensive is it and more important than that, what’s my return on investment? How quickly will the water savings then return the investment? Do you have any sort of ROI on that kind of dual flush retrofit that you could share with our listeners?

Paul: Yeah. Well, I can tell you what we’re doing. At Roto-Rooter, we’ve got 5 test families that we’re following on rotorooter.com under the ROTOgreen heading. We’ve got a single guy. We’ve got an empty nester couple. We have a family of four and we have a family of six. Plus we have an apartment building. I think it’s sixteen apartments in it. What we’re doing is we’ve made green changes to each of these family archetypes and we’re monitoring their water bills for a year.

We’ll show on the site, here’s what they paid in water and sewer cost in October 2009. Here’s what they’ll pay in October 2010. You can see a side-by-side comparison, and I’m actually working on better graphs that will provide more information that we’re going to be putting up on the site shortly. That shows some of the cost. It’s a little challenging to get the Apple’s[?] thing. The reason for that guys is that water and sewer costs are going up so quickly in some parts of the country. If you look at what they were paying last year in water and then you look at the savings, you might go, “Oh, gosh. Well, hey, that month, they only saved eight bucks on their bill. What’s the big deal?”

The larger story that sometimes an Excel graph doesn’t tell you is that, well, yeah, but if they had made these changes, their water bills would have cost them another $18 or $20 above what you’re seeing here because every year, I think we can safely say, from now on, the days of cheap water and sewer are behind us. It’s going to get higher and higher.

Here’s our goal, to answer your question, we’re working on this now. Right now, as of today, while you and I are speaking, we don’t have that completely nailed down. You’re going to pay a plumber charge, which is okay, here’s what it cost by the job. What I’m trying to do now is bundle things so that we can say, “Okay, here’s how much Roto-Rooter can save you in a year. What we’re trying to do is make it so that whatever the cost is, you’re going to make it back in a year in water and sewer savings. That’s our goal.

Is that there today? No, but I hope within the next couple of months, we’ll finally have that just worked out and put in place because let’s face it, if you’re looking at a return after eighteen or twenty-four months, you’re going to go, “Eh, I don’t know.” If I’m really a green-oriented person, I’m going to say, “Yeah, I’ll do that.” If I’m not, let’s face it, money talks. If we can give those folks a return on their investment to say a year, then I think we’re going to attract a lot more people. We’re working through that crunching numbers. Prices vary for Roto-Rooter market by market so it’s not the easiest thing in the world to work out, but we’re determined to do it.

Mike: Well, Paul, you’re talking about the return on the investment in a year’s time. One of the things that I think there’s really no arguing about, especially for those of us who live in the Central Valley here in California, water has been such a big issue, not only here in the Central Valley up and down the state, but there are other areas in the country, Georgia, for example, and parts of the South just suffering drought-like conditions for the last several years.

A really disturbing statistic is the one that I found on your site as well, the green portion of rotorooter.com that between 1900 and 1995, the rate of population growth raised twofold. Global water consumption grew sixfold. That is a harbinger of things to come when it comes to the water that we have to share and how we’ve got to be better stewards of it. You’re just right on the money with some of these retrofits and these green tips that people can put into everyday practice in their everyday living at home.

Paul: Yeah, you’re absolutely right. Not only is water becoming scarce and therefore, more expensive, but on the flip side and that’s another one of the strengths we have at Roto-Rooter is you also pay for what goes back down into the sewer. If you’re saving money by putting a dual flush and/or a low-flow showerhead or what have you, then that’s less water down the drain. They don’t typically meter that, some markets do, but they don’t typically meter that every month like your water.

They’ll take 2 or 3 months out of the year and say, okay, from November to January, Mike used X number of thousands of gallons of water. So that’s how much we’re going to charge him on sewer. We’re going to determine that his sewer rate is this many gallons, so that’s what he’s going to pay for the next year. If you make these changes and your water going down the drain is cut back significantly, then you’re going to save a lot of money on the sewer side too.

John: That’s amazing. Now, I want to leave the toilet area and get the rest of Mike’s house done here. Before we leave the toilet area, for people who don’t want to do flush, who want the EPA WaterSense toilet, that’s right up your alley at Roto-Rooter, right?

Paul: Yeah, absolutely. We switch out a lot of toilets. Those new toilets are fantastic. You don’t have to make a choice like you do with the dual flush.

John: Right.

Paul: They just use 1.28 gallons of water with every flush. That’s a pretty significant savings.

John: That’s an option also when it comes to the toilet area.

Paul: It is. If you’ve got an older toilet, what we do is we say the WaterSense, toilets are great for our customers who have older toilets that require 3 and a half gallons of flush or 5 gallons of flush, some of them even up to 7 gallons of flush if they’re pretty old. The 1.28 gallon ultra efficient toilets make the most sense for those customers. Again, if you have a 1.6 gallon toilet, it’s probably a lot more cost effective to have Roto-Rooter rebuild your existing toilet with these green parts than to pay us to replace the entire toilet.

You’ll actually save more water over time with a dual flush than with a 1.28 gallon toilet because again, 80% of your flushes will use less than a gallon of water with a dual flush. That is the case. It’s also worth mentioning that we have retrofits for urinals and commercial flushometer style toilets that yield similar water savings for business customers.

John: Perfect. Well, Paul, we have about 5 minutes, and I want you to walk with the Bradys throughout the rest of the house and point out what else they could do in their bathroom, shower, their bathtubs and the other rooms in the house, the kitchens and the laundry so our listeners can get a little taste of how this really works.

Paul: Happy to do it. The shower is a major water waster. Most shower heads today use between 2.2 and 4 gallons of water every minute. Roto-Rooter standard replacement shower head now is one of these next generation low flow models that use only a gallon and a half of water per minute. Its flow is so good and so strong. I’ve got two in my house. You won’t even notice that you’re using a low-flow showerhead until you look at your water bill.

Imagine saving, say, 2 and a half gallons per minute over your old shower head. We know through our research that the average shower is about thirteen minutes. That’s a savings of 33 gallons of water with every shower. If you assume that a person takes a shower every day, then that’s an annual savings of about 12,043 gallons per person.

Mike: That’s amazing.

John: That’s amazing.

Paul: It is. If it’s a family of four, that’s 48,000 gallons of water a year.

John: As Mike and I always talk about, little things can add up to make big differences. Walk us through the sinks, faucets, the kitchens and the laundry room.

Paul: Okay. The older bathroom faucets will use about 3 and a half gallons of water a minute if the tap’s wide open. The EPA WaterSense program puts their stamp of approval on any faucet flowing at about 1 and a half gallons a minute or less. Roto-Rooter can replace your faucets with a WaterSense approved faucet, but let’s face it, faucets are expensive. If your faucet’s in good condition and it’s not leaking, we’ll swap out the aerator, that’s that little round screw on screen on the tip of your faucet, with a water saving version that will cut down your flow to a maximum of, say, a gallon a minute or even a half a gallon a minute.

You just don’t need all that extra water if you’re brushing your teeth or you’re shaving, so all that water is flowing down the drain. That’s not a difficult fix. If you’re a DIY kind of guy, go to the hardware store and find them and do them yourself. You don’t have to pay us to do it, but just do the right thing and get it done.

John: Right. Great point.

Paul: Some of the other things we’re working on. You’ve got sinks, faucets. You can do it with a kitchen sink, but let’s face it, you’re not usually running that so much unless you’re rinsing your dishes that way. We don’t typically cut down the flow as much on a kitchen sink. The other area we’re looking at, turning our attention to is water heaters.

John: Sure.

Mike: Okay.

Paul: Tankless water heaters, they’ve got these new efficient heaters that are hybrids that are just about as efficient as the tankless type. I think those make good sense. The solar water heating, some of our West Coast Roto-Rooter locations are doing that. We hope to take that nationwide. We’re not there yet. We’re crawling before we walk. We’re on our way there.

John: Hey, Paul, we’re down to the last 2 minutes. We also have so many of our listeners in the Sun Belt and here in California. How about the outside water conservation? Are there some tricks? Are there some great hints that you can give to our listeners using Roto-Rooter or just them themselves can do to help conserve water on their outside usage?

Paul: Yeah. Well, watering is such a- oh, boy. They’ve got heads now that are directed and they’re much better than the early waterheads that used to be on home watering system. They’re directed, they’ll use less. If they’re missing, you don’t want that kind because they will evaporate. A lot of that water evaporates. It’s just wasted. Timers, my goodness, the timers change everything, and there’s really a lot of water savings to be had if you use the timers.

John: Got it. Last few comments on Roto-Rooter and what you’re doing with ROTOgreen. Any other few things you want to tell our listeners in the last minute?

Paul: Well, I’d say this. Are we perfect? No, we’re not. We’ve got little ways to go and we’re happy to take suggestions from people on ways that we can improve. This is our first. We spent about a year designing this program and we’re determined to see it through and to keep coming up with new ways to save water and help our customers. I think that’s just the only attitude you can have. It’s not a big business thing for us. We’re determined that we’re going to do it. If going green and saving water falls out of fashion next year, we’re going to keep it up.

John: Well, Paul, Mike Brady and I are really appreciative and thankful for your time today. This is great to see an iconic, wonderful, great brand like Roto-Rooter, which was invented and started in 1935 go green now. It’s such an honor and so great to share with our listeners. We just want to say thank you very much. We want to send our listeners to your great website, rotorooter.com and click on the ROTOgreen button. Paul Abrams, you are truly living proof that green is good.

Voiceover: If a little green is good, more is even better. Now, back to Green Is Good with John Shegerian and Mike Brady.

John: Welcome back to Green Is Good. Mike, we have the second half of tool time today at Green Is Good. We’re going to be having a wonderful story about an entrepreneur who has some great lighting technology, but I just want to look back a little bit. I thought that Roto-Rooter story just really was inspiring and I think you and I were both amazed a lot of what Paul was sharing with us.

Mike: I’m really inspired. I really love the whole idea because as you know, John, my wife Marina and I bought an older home last fall and it was a property that had been flipped by some investors. One of the toilets needed to be replaced, period. It was replaced with a low-flow toilet, but the other one was in good shape and it’s standard. The water folks came out and did a water audit and they said, “Okay. Well, this really ought to be replaced.” Haven’t gotten quite around to getting that toilet replaced, I’m thinking now about the 1, 2, the flush option.

John: The dual flush option.

Mike: Dual flush makes a lot of sense.

John: You see how an iconic brand like Roto-Rooter can reinvent themselves and go green and help really all of us join in the Green Revolution, which is you say, Mike, all the time, the little things, if we all just take little steps in our house, in our work, in our daily driving habits, we can make massive changes together as a country and as a world that can really help the environment but also help us live better, cleaner. I think the Roto-Rooter story’s just a great one.

Now, in the second half of the show, Mike, we have the second half of tool time. We’re going to be talking about lighting and a little surprise, also little towels. Our great spokesperson, Annette Hunter, who’s coming on to talk about the Ionic Bulb that she has and that she sells, which helps clean up our air in our house but also reduce the energy that we spend to light our houses. She also has a new towel that she’s going to be sort of whispering to us about. That’s high-performance towels, which potentially can help us also in our household living. This is a totally tool time show.

Mike: There’s some really cool stuff, and I’m looking forward to the towel because it’s a microfiber that you can use the towels more frequently between the times that you have to wash them.

John: Which is fascinating, which means less water.

Mike: Less water, absolutely less energy used to do the laundry.

John: Good point.

Mike: I’m thinking, I wonder if they make sweat socks out of this stuff.

John: And other things that we all want to use. I think our listeners should come on back and hear Annette Hunter at Green Is Good.

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Voiceover: If a little green is good, more is even better. Now, back to Green Is Good with John Shegerian and Mike Brady.

John: Welcome back to Green Is Good. We’re so honored to have Annette Hunter on with us today. Annette is what we call a green entrepreneur, which makes her a green ecopreneur. Annette, welcome to Green Is Good.

Annette Hunter: Oh, thank you guys for having me. I’m so happy to be here.

John: Well, we’re so honored to have you because you are truly the reason why Mike and I started this show because we are so lucky to have these wonderful great brands on with us all the time, these iconic brands. We truly love when we have eco and entrepreneurs like you who are out there sourcing these new items that can totally change the world. We want you to talk about your new light bulb, the ionic light bulb today.

Annette: Oh, thank you so much. Well, the neat thing about the… Well, I have the Ionic Bulb. That’s the name of the product.

John: Ionic Bulb, sorry.

Annette: Yes. Well, let me ask you guys a question. What if somebody told you that cleaning the air in your home was as simple as changing a light bulb?

John: I’d be there in a New York minute.

Annette: Let me tell you, with the new Ionic Bulb, it really is that simple. The Ionic Bulb combines 2 high-tech solutions into one. First, it’s a powerful air purifier that cleans the air in your home or office completely. Second, it’s an energy-saving CFL light bulb.

John: Wait a second. You’re taking 2 environmental issues and solving it with 1 solution?

Annette: Exactly. Right in a light bulb. It’s actually that simple.

John: When Mike sent me this, when he got the email about what you were up to and he sent it to me and said, “Hey, let’s talk about this one. This sounds amazing,” our jaws opened. We had never heard of anything like this before. Had anything like this ever been out in the marketplace before?

Annette: No. What you really have is you have those huge bulky air purifiers that cost like $200, $300, $400, sometimes, even more than that.

John: Sure.

Annette: Those air purifiers, they make a lot of noise and they don’t really work that well. I mean, you have to clean out the filter and sometimes, you have to buy a brand new filter as well. What we were able to do is since microchip technology has grown exponentially, microchips now are able to filter the air. We were able to put that microchip right on a light bulb. The moment that you put your light switch on and your light bulb turns on, the microchip works immediately. What that microchip does, it emits negative ions into the air that attach themselves to pollutants. Then it eliminates them entirely. It leaves the air in your home or office crisp, clean and completely fresh.

John: Okay. What should we be worried about as a homeowner as all of us are living in some form of dwelling, all of our listeners? What should they be concerned about that that is in the air in their home that this bulb would help remove from the air?

Annette: Well, first off, just regular dust. This will eliminate the dust. It eliminates air pollen.

John: Okay.

Annette: If you have pets, pet dander. It gets rid of the odors of your pets as well as regular odors that we exude. It gets rid of allergens. It also gets rid of smoke. I don’t know if you guys are cigar smokers, but being green, I’m sure you’re incredibly healthy and you would never do something like that.

John: You’re absolutely right. Wait a second. We love having people like you, Annette, on because we’re fascinated by both 2 things, your product and your entrepreneurial vision here. How did you stumble across or find this light bulb? How do you know for sure it works? How much area does one lightbulb cover? How many do we need for our home or condo or apartment?

Annette: Oh my goodness.

John: A lot of questions.

Annette: Let me get the last two first.

John: Okay.

Annette: It can do a whole 100-foot radius, one bulb itself. It’s scientifically proven. We have all the certificates for that.

John: Got you.

Annette: It’s absolutely guaranteed to work. Why don’t I do a little bit of the science with that and why… I can explain to you why something like this would work.

John: We want to hear the science, but first of all, where did you get this vision or epiphany to find this bulb?

Annette: Well, I’m actually an investor and I look around for interesting products. I saw this actually on the internet and I saw that they weren’t doing a good job of selling it. Then I talked to the gentleman that had the bulb. We got in a conversation, and I said, “You know what? Why don’t I take a job at this?” Then they were able to introduce me to the scientists, and I was able to combine it in a certain way that worked better. Also, I was hoping to just give it a voice. It didn’t have a voice before, and that’s what we’re trying to do here.

John: Revolutionary products that just are existing a void on never going to see the marketplace and they can never go and help change the world. You saw the opportunity.

Annette: Yeah, exactly. It’s like, I don’t know, an artist that has no audience. So trying to bring it to the audience.

John: Okay. We love it. Now, tell us about the science.

Annette: When you turn the light bulb on and a microchip starts working, it releases negative ions into the air that attach themselves to the pollutants. Now, this kind of tech, nature has done this since the beginning of time. If you’re next to a large waterfall or the air after a big rain storm, it’s incredibly clean and crisp and it smells lovely. Now, a lot of people assume that it’s the water effect of washing away the dirt or airborne particles, that it’s just the water washing everything away. Actually, what happens is that it’s the negative ions that are released from the lack of stabilization in the air.

When ions are released into the air and they attach themselves to the pollutants, that actually is what’s happening that cleans the air all over the world. We’re able to do that in your own home with this bulb, with this microchip.

John: Your Ionic Bulb has the same effect as like a wonderful rain shower in our home or something.

Annette: Exactly.

John: Wow. For our listeners who want to go right on now while Annette’s talking about her great bulb, you could go on to newionicbulb.com and you could order the bulbs right now as you’re listening or you could at least go and see what’s going on. Keep going with the science, Annette.

Annette: Another effect. I mean, we’re not selling it as this, but the neat thing about this when after you have a huge rainstorm and the air is beautiful right afterwards, it’s been scientifically proven that humans, animal life and also plant life get a calming, soothing feeling, an effect after such an event. They’ve scientifically proven that that really, really does happen. Not only does it clean your air, the negative ions do like some music within your body that cleans. Or I’m not exactly sure, but it resonates within the body itself and calms you as well. It has many, many different layers to what this does. It’s again, capturing nature and putting it within this 1 product.

Mike: You know what’s really cool in that? I love dichotomy, and in this case, negative really becomes a positive.

Annette: Exactly.

Mike: I’m thinking exactly, I knew a friend about ten or fifteen years ago that did a lot of travel. He was on the road. He was an entrepreneur, as a matter of fact, but he had this little device in his cigarette lighter plugged in in his car. We went to lunch one day. I was looking around and said, “Hey dude, did somebody rip off the cord to your phone charger?” He said, “What are you talking about?” I [inaudible]. Well, isn’t that a phone charger? He says, “Oh no, don’t you realize? Don’t you notice how when you sit in this car, you just feel really good?” I said, “Well, actually, yeah, why does it smell so good in here?” He said it’s a negative ionizer. He had one that he kept in his car and he had one that also plugged into his hotel room. This guy was the most positive negative guy I ever knew.

Annette: It’s the yin yang.

Mike: There you go.

John: That is so funny. Okay. The science really works, and the bulb is really what you say it is. Your website’s a great, great website. Now, what we talk about a lot of times, Annette, with entrepreneurs and people that have great new emerging brands is as the Green Revolution evolves here, people want to know A, how much it cost, and how soon is my return on the investment?

Let’s first talk about A and then we’ll come back a little bit and talk about the second half of your great bulb. Not only does it clean the air, but then we’ll talk about the energy-saving. Talk about the cost. How expensive is it? For this new amazing revolutionary technology, is it very expensive compared to the other bulbs out there?

Annette: No. We have an incredible offer. The reason why we’re doing this is because we do want people to go out and buy it. It’s a crazy price. We are offering 4 Ionic Bulbs for $20. Actually, it’s 19.99.

John: Wow.

Annette: That’s 1 bulb is less than five dollars. If you go to the market right now, 1 CFL bulb, the average price is about $9.99. We’re almost half of that, and it’s got the air purifier as well.

John: All of our listeners can find this on your great website, newionicbulb.com.

Annette: Yes, new ionicbulb.com. You get 4 new Ionic Bulbs for 19.99. That is less than regular CFL light bulbs, and it’s about the same price as these old light bulbs that no one wants to use anymore anyway.

John: You’re saying that each bulb can cover about 100 square feet in a house or an apartment or a condo?

Annette: Yes.

John: How many bulbs are in an average household? I don’t know that number. Do you know that number?

Annette: Yeah, the average household actually is about fifteen to twenty bulbs.

John: Wow. Okay.

Annette: Fifteen to twenty bulbs.

John: This can make a huge difference. If people buy your bulbs, it can make a huge difference in the air quality that they breathe. Number one.

Annette: Number one, absolutely.

John: Now, let’s talk about the other issue, the energy issue. Mike and I have had all these great energy company, solar companies and all these fascinating guests. Energy is a very complex issue. How we approach it in that here is that we all can take simple steps that can lead to a big difference. Here, your bulb is one of those classic and new simple steps that our listeners can take to help make a difference with regards to the energy problems that we have right now.

Annette: Oh, it’s incredible.

John: Talk about that.

Annette: One, 1 Ionic Bulb, 1 one Ionic Bulb eliminates the equivalent to the emissions created by 1 million cars. That’s 1 bulb.

Mike: I’m just sitting here trying to wrap my head around that. A million cars. Holy smoke.

Annette: Yes. One bulb is the equivalent to one, eliminating 1 million cars, the emissions created by 1 million cars.

Mike: Well, Annette, not only from an emissions savings standpoint, but from an energy-saving standpoint. My wife and I just bought a home last fall. We had been renting before, but in the time that we were renting, I really got the CFL bug in a big way. I got tired of replacing bulbs. Well, we moved all the CFLs with us into our new home, and I probably won’t be replacing those for some time. When I do, I want to do the Ionic Bulb. I just think about the energy savings with an Ionic Bulb right now. Using CFL that is clearly the way to go right now, but also being able to clean the air in the home and not have to be tied down to one of those air purifiers. We’ve tried [crosstalk].

Annette: [inaudible] air purifiers, and they’re so incredibly noisy. They have this constant hum. The Ionic Bulb works silently. You will have no idea that it’s working, except that the air in your home will smell good. Oh, it doesn’t have any of those air fresheners, those awful smells. If you have flowers in your house, you smell the flowers, but you’re not going to have an allergic reaction to them.

Mike: Wow.

Annette: You don’t have to have potpourri or anything like that because it cleans the air naturally as well as saving energy. One of these bulbs lasts as long as ten ordinary bulbs, so that’s why I completely understand you taking one of your CFL light bulbs and bringing them with you. That lasts as long as 7 years. One of these bulbs lasts 7 years.

Mike: It really is amazing.

John: That is amazing. Besides your great website, where soon to be can our listeners, Annette, buy this amazing light bulb?

Annette: Well, okay, so we do have the website, newionicbulb.com.

John: Right.

Annette: I have a toll-free number and I can give that to you now or later.

John: Yeah, of course. Give it to us now. Go on.

Annette: We have a toll-free number. It’s 1-800-220-2652. That’s 1-800-220-2652. That’s also newionicbulb.com.

John: Right.

Annette: Late August, early September, we will be on the shelves of CVS and Walmart, and we have a lot of other stores that we’re in talks with that definitely starting up.

John: That is incredible. Now, put your ecopreneur’s hat back on for our listeners [inaudible] lots of budding ecopreneurs that listen to the show across the country and the world actually on the Apple iTunes network, besides the United States. How do you now, 1 great young lady with a light bulb in hand, go convince the people down in Bentonville, Arkansas or at CVS to carry this on their shelves? How’d you do that?

Annette: It’s really quite simple. First, it’s cost-effective.

John: Okay, fair enough.

Annette: It’s so much cheaper to buy one of these bulbs than it is to buy any other light bulb. No matter where you are, you do want clean air. Let’s say we’re in West Virginia and you’re living in a coal mining town. The dust, it’s so difficult. People have so many allergies there and respiratory problems.

John: You’re right.

Annette: Something like this will actually clean the air in their home or office. They can go to a respite, their home can be a respite, a clean haven.

John: That’s really important because Mike and I, we tape the show and we broadcast it from Fresno, California, which just the last 5 years or so, Mike, right, has one of the worst air qualities in all the United States.

Mike: Yeah. Unfortunately, in that day, the recent reports have come out again, and we got a failing grade when it came to air quality. It’s really not good. I’m thinking of something else too. As you mentioned it and you gave a real visual about the dust and the allergens. I’m thinking from a purely housekeeping standpoint. This would make dusting a lot easier as well, right? You wouldn’t have to dust your furniture nearly as frequently?

Annette: No. No, you wouldn’t because the moment this light is on, it’s eliminating the dust particles. Then in the spring, it depends on where you live, if you’re living in the Northeast where I live right now, you get a lot of pollen and this will eliminate it from your home as well.

John: Got it. It saves energy and cleans up the air in the environment. Come this fall, come September and this fall, our listeners cannot only buy it on your great website, they can go to CVS or Walmart and buy your light bulbs there.

Annette: Yeah. I’m quite confident that it’ll be in many, many, many, many more stores.

John: Is there an industrial version of your light bulb? Will you eventually also not only create home versions, but will there also be office versions for offices?

Annette: Yes, absolutely. We’re capable of making any sort of bulb.

John: Speak about making, are these products made in the United States or are they made somewhere else? How does your production [crosstalk].

Annette: These bulbs are made in China.

John: In China? Okay.

Annette: Yes, and they’re shipped over here.

John: With your specific technology, patented technology and things of access?

Annette: Patented technology and the energy star quality. The quality is the best you can get.

John: Was the inventor from this country or from a different country?

Annette: South Korea.

John: South Korea?

Annette: Yes.

John: Wow.

Annette: Yeah, there’s a huge intellectual scientific class that is dominating South Korea right now. Science is really what they’re teaching greatly in the colleges and high schools there.

John: Well, Annette, I didn’t share this with you earlier, but I’ve been to Korea numerous times, maybe a dozen times in the last year. One of my investors is the–

Annette: I see you didn’t go to jail, did you?

John: No. Oh my gosh, she found out, Mike.

Mike: Jig’s up now.

Annette: No, he’s here. He’s okay.

John: Jig’s up. He’s on the radio with me. Go get him. No, but what you’re saying is absolutely true. It’s fascinating that South Korea’s a small little country, 50 million people. Just think about the brands they’ve created, the LG brand, the Samsung brand, the Hyundai brand. Those brands are some of the most dominated international brands in the world right now.

Annette: Yeah. Their prices are pretty decent, but I have to tell you, the quality is pretty much the best there is as well.

John: That’s right. You actually got it from a South Korean inventor. You then now have become the spokesperson, the ecopreneur visionary and the marketing person behind bringing this to market here in the United States and beyond.

Annette: Yes.

John: That is so fascinating. That’s so encouraging for all of our listeners who want to reinvent themselves and leave the job they’re in right now or go become a green entrepreneur out of college and things like that. That is so amazing. Talk about some of the challenges. When did you actually discover this light bulb? Take us from when you discovered it and met the entrepreneur and today. We have about 3 or 4 minutes left. Why don’t you share a little bit of that journey with our listeners? People always like to hear the journey.

Annette: Well, I would say that I was introduced to this lightbulb about 2 years ago, but I thought that they were doing a good job. Sometimes, there is a language barrier too that makes it a little difficult. I mean, when you’re dealing with scientists, they have a certain type of understanding of the world that makes it a little difficult for them to go out to the public and really verbalize what their great discovery is. It was a little bit difficult for them to get an audience like I said earlier.

About a year ago, I would say about now, May last year, I said, “Oh, gosh, maybe I can help you. Let me help.” He said, “Yes, please help me.” Since then, I was able to really just find out how to market it, how to brand it, how to get it to the public and to talk to you guys.

John: Annette, we’re down to the last minute or so. Do you have some final thoughts or pearls of wisdom for our listeners out there?

Annette: Oh my goodness. You know what, the world is getting incredibly small, and we have to take care of this world. We absolutely have to take care of it and we have the opportunity to do that. Through technology and through wisdom and through knowledge, we can do this. It’s as simple as changing a light bulb.

John: Well, there you go. Annette, after you get into CVS and Walmart, Mike and I are going to have you back to talk about how the journey’s going and how the scaling of your great company’s going. For all listeners who want to buy Annette’s amazing Ionic Bulb, go to newionicbulb.com or call 1-800-220-2652. Annette Hunter, you are truly living proof that green is good.

Annette: You guys are making me blush.

Voiceover: This program will be available for downloading in a couple of days from our station’s website. Keyword podcast. Thanks for listening, and join us again next week at the same time for another edition of Green Is Good.

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, livestreams and much more. For more information on Engage or to book talent today, visit letsengage.com.

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.

John: Welcome to another edition of the Impact Podcast. I’m so honored to have with us today our first edition ever in 1500 shows from Australia Leif Cocks with us. He’s the founder of the Orangutan Project. Welcome to the Impact Podcast, Leif.

Leif Cocks: Thank you.

John: It’s an honor to have you on, Leif. The work that you’re doing is just so important. But before we get talking about the Orangutan Project itself, tell us a little bit of your background, your biography, where you grew up, and how you got even interested in this wonderful animals.

Leif: I grew up in Hong Kong, one of the largest most dense metropolises that you can imagine. But even then, when I was a very young child, I had a love of animals and wildlife. I started working with 15 orangutans and discovered that not only they’re beautiful animals but they’re also self-aware beings, just like we are. They don’t belong in captivity, no person does. But I also discovered that they are being slaughtered in the most horrific way that we can imagine and driven to extinction. That started my lifelong mission to save orangutans on the vision that one day, all orangutans will live free in the wild in secure habitat in viable populations.

John: So you grew up in Hong Kong, I’ve been there many times now. I grew up in New York City and like in Hong Kong and New York, very similar lots of tall buildings, lots of concrete. I got my love from animals because I grew up with racehorses and I became a professional trainer of horses and things. Where did your love of animals and orangutans come from? As a child, did your mom and dad have a love for animals? Or did they take you to zoos? How did that even start?

Leif: Certainly, love of any subject could be nurtured but I think for me, it was fairly innate although we lived in a flat in this apartment complex, 25-story buildings in a 15-in-a-row concrete. My bedroom was like a little menagerie, budgie guards and tropical fish and aquariums and terrapins.

John: Oh my God.

Leif: So, I created my own little jungle in my own room. So for me, I think it was an innate love of the wild and animals.

John: Was your family originally from Australia before they settled in Hong Kong. So that’s how you ended up back in Australia?

Leif: Yes, exactly. Because my father was a art director for advertising agency so he moved to southeast Asia when I was 18 months old so that’s where I was brought up. But we eventually came back to Australia where I did my university education and started formally studying and researching orangutans and their conservation.

John: So your classic education in terms of your Masters of Science and things of that such were basically in this field. You knew you were going there and you studied this at university before you actually started in 1998 the Orangutan Project?

Leif: It wasn’t kind of often a parallel process of working with the orangutans and I wanted to learn more about them to help them so my postgraduate diploma in Primate Behavior, my Masters of Science studying orangutans. We’re there to help me discover and learn and get information to help orangutans. At the same time, parallel to that again was I started the work in the Orangutan Project to help save them in the wild.

John: For our listeners and viewers, we’ve got Leif Cocks with us. He’s the founder of the Orangutan Project. Please to find Leif and the great work that he’s doing with orangutans and to support this important organization. Please go to www.theorangutanproject.org. I’m on that site right now. I have it up in front of me. It’s a gorgeous site. It’s very informative plus also, there’s ways to get involved and donate and things of that such and learn much more about Leif. Leif, talk a little bit about the problem. Let’s first, before we talk about the solutions that you’re working on, thank God, you’re doing this great work. What’s the problem? Why are we even? In 2021, why are we slaughtering these gorgeous animals? None of this makes sense to me.

Leif: It’s about greed. Greed from a very few people. A few people are destroying the rainforest for the value of the trees and replacing a rainforest with unsustainable formed monoculture, such as palm or pulp paper. What they’re doing is they’re taking away the economic, environmental future from Indonesia. They’d taken away the land and the environmental services from local communities, destroying biodiversity, killing the orangutans, and contributing to climate change in one of the most significant ways. They’re basically destroying the planet as such and passing the true cost onto the powerless orangutans, local community, biodiversity, then future generations. It’s just exploited to more aware that they basically extract wealth at the expense of others.

John: Comparatively speaking, I’m 58 years old, so when you and I were young boys growing up, how big was the orangutan population and how we destroyed it in these last 3 or 4 decades? How much is it? How much are we destroying it? And how desperate is this need for you to have this very important organization?

Leif: Well, the first 20 or 30 years of our life, they’re pretty much OK. There’s vast tracts of wilderness left. In the last 20 years, the big multinationals have come in and destroy 80% of the rainforest, 80% of orangutan home, and the population have plummeted to the point now that they’re all on the verge of all populations tipping over to become unsustainable and collapsing, including the rainforest collapsing. Because you need a certain amount of rainforest to support rainforest. And so, you have these tipping points, we’re at the verge now, in this decade. Whether things that you basically, the orangutan population and rainforest itself would virtually collapsed or we can rebuild now to save the planet and the orangutans.

John: In 1998, you decided to found this world-renowned organization. Now, world-renowned organization, the Orangutan Project. What was your mission when you launch this? I know we’re 23 or 24 years later now, but first, when you launch it, what was your mission and what was your focus then?

Leif: The mission is that one day all orangutan can live in the wild in secure populations in viable habitat. That basically recognizes two things; one is as critically-endangered species, they deserve to survive and their survival is intrinsically linked to our survival because we have to save the planet in order for us species to survive. The second thing is to recognize that these are self-aware persons, the most intelligent being that sheds our planet, we can have a conversation with them and they don’t deserve to be killed and slaughtered as simply as an agricultural pest.

John: Oh, being slaughtered during this process or is it a de facto slaughtering, as you say, in the liquidation and the wholesale destruction of the rainforests, or is it a combination thereof of both?

Leif: The classic scenario is they destroy the rainforest and obviously, then orangutan could either die in the process or starve. Because now, there’s not enough food to support the remaining orangutan because of the destruction of their areas and they basically become agricultural pests and try to eat the young palm oil that’s planted there or they raid local villagers crops. And so basically, they become vulnerable and then end up being slaughtered.

John: It’s also important to note that orangutans should not also be in zoos. We should not be supporting the captivity of these beautiful animals for our own viewing pleasure in in a zoo setting.

Leif: Yes, there’s two aspects to that is although, zoos can do some really wonderful stuff. For example, reintroducing numbats or the California condor. These very targeted programs for small species can actually work out quite well and they can do a great deal of benefit. But what zoos can’t do is save megafauna. They can’t save elephants, tigers, orangutans, gorillas. Their population is unsustainable by their very nature. So zoos can’t save their own collections neither. No conservation value for keeping orangutans in captivity. The second thing is that regardless of the wonderful care that many orangutans have been given by dedicated, loving zookeepers. The analogy I give is that in refugee camps, run by most wonderful people who care for people who want to help them. But we know the long-term internment of people in these camps called a long-term psychological damage because that person’s have to control who and when their contact with, they have anxieties about the future, worried about the path, they need control over their environment. Therefore, as persons, equally orangutans, don’t do well in captivity, they’re mentally damaged by the process. No matter how loving and caring that the keepers are for them. And this is why they can only really successfully live a meaningful life in happiness if they can live that in the own environment, in their own societies.

John: What’s the general age range of an orangutan that lives in its natural habitat in a rain forest setting that’s not been destroyed yet? How long do they typically live?

Leif: That’s a very good question. In the wild, we are not quite sure because [inaudible] 40 or so years. We think they must live at least, since the early 60s, for they’re the slowest reproducing species in the world, the orangutan to survive. Early 60’s, if not a little bit more, would be the classic lifespan for a wild orangutan. Unfortunately, captivity when I did the research on captive survival, even when taking out very high infant mortality, most orangutans would on average die in about 12, 15 years. A few could survive longer but you can see the long term chronic stress of captivity, basically undermines the immune system and makes them vulnerable to diseases and health issues including diabetes. It’s widespread in the captive community. We simply doesn’t exist in the wild population.

John: For our viewers and listeners who just tuned in, we got Leif Cocks. He’s the founder of the Orangutan Project. You could finally support his important organization at www.theorangutanproject.org. What exactly are you doing? And what can we do to help you and also support other great organizations like yours in around the United States and wherever our listeners, we have listeners all around the world, obviously, how can we support you and your efforts and how can we turn the tide on this absolutely tragic information you’re sharing with us today that these animals are endangered and it’s only at our own hands that this happened?

Leif: The first thing is to, I guess, highlight the time span we have to work with. Now, what we’re hearing from COP26 is it look we’ve got 10 years to turn things around. After that, there’s feedback loops which means that the the ecosystem, the planet may be unrecoverable. And so, we’ve got 10 years to turn this around. It’s no surprise we have 10 years to turn this around for the orangutans. The reason is these things are intrinsically linked. Destruction of rainforests causes about 28% of climate change and then the feedback loop where increasing droughts etc., are basically destroying the rainforest. So, rainforest is affected by climate change and so mostly populations are being slowly dwindled and orangutans are basically a lowland species and the palm oil and the pulp paper and the coal mines tend to want the lowlands as well. So, we really only got next 10 years to save viable ecosystems of the right type, shape, and size of rainforest to take the orangutans, elephants, tigers, and indigenous human communities through this crisis. After that, the rainforest will not be sustainable. The population of the orangutans will not be sustainable. Our vision is that one day within the next 10 years, we can secure a ecosystems of the [inaudible] the rainforest to secure these populations and provide the biological basis to start rewilding the planet to make it once again sustainable for human life, as well as all the other biodiversity.

The second part of the question, what we can do about it. Now, we’ve kind of been sold this lie for the last 10 or so years that our individual actions can make a difference. Individual actions have never made a difference. Humans are extremely successful, most successful species on the planet. Not because we’re particularly smart as individual or capable as individual, but because we had a capacity to collectivize. Smart people, collectivize, capital in businesses to make a lot of money. Smart people, collectivize, political interests, and parties to make a significant difference. Individuals can’t. That doesn’t mean as individuals, we don’t have a moral responsibility to live a life without hurting and affecting others and in a negative way. However, if you really want to achieve something, we got to put aside this lie of us saving our planet through our personal choices. We’ve got to collectivize. In this particular situation, one of the cost-effective ways we can mitigate climate change and the most significant thing we can do to the most vulnerable persons on the planet, the orangutans, is to collectivize in organization such as the orangutan project and we work together to achieve the vision. So what can people in America around the world do is there’s two things that people can do is that they can provide funds, we all vicariously by position, in developing nations, standard of living is subsidized from the exploitation of others and other countries. We can give back at least some of that to solve the problem. That’s a basic moral obligation of the privileged position that we’re in. And so, please become a contributor to the Orangutan Project or another organization that can effectively help achieve your vision for better future. The second part is we call all our leaders accountable. One thing I mentioned, we got 10 years to turn this around, but 90% of the human population has no ability to affect meaningful change. They don’t have the money to give. Secondly, they have no political path. They live in totalitarian dictatorships, poor struggling to feed their families. It’s only us in countries such as America, UK, and Australia as examples, that we have wealth, but also we have a possibility of political influence. We can affect our leaders decisions. Therefore, the moral obligation of of us being the most important generation of human history, This is a 10 years that’s going to determine the future of humanity. Those tens of thousand years that occurred before, there’s no more important time than now and we have the small subset of humans that have the capacity to make meaningful change change and change the planet. We have this great obligation and privilege to act and act now decisively through collectivization in to make meaningful change before it’s too late.

John: You’ve been doing this work, this is a lifetime of work, but the Orangutan Project, Leif, has been a child of yours, a baby of yours for almost 24 years now. How has it evolved in terms of your view as the progress you’ve made been and the response you’ve gotten from, as you said, political leaders, and others of influence, been appropriate or helpful so far? Or if you’ve been discouraged and just plowed it on in the wake of lack of action by even intelligent leaders that are out there?

Leif: There is a couple of elements to that. One is actions for governments have been wholly ineffectual. The reason being we’ve lost control of most of our democracies to self-interest of life, business, and multinationals. It’s the same in America. There’s several papers published that America no longer than fix our democracy because the decision of government doesn’t reflect the will of the people. It reflects the rules, their funders. So, there is this kind of inability, I guess, for governments all around the world to actually affect a meaningful change. So it’s been extremely ineffectual. On the other hand is look, I work with so many wonderful Indonesians who have dedicated their lives, put their lives on the line, often have their lives lost to save their future, for the countries, to save the land of indigenous communities, to save the economic future and the biodiversity of Indonesia. And so, what I do believe, is effective in the time frame. Yes, we have to reform our political systems to make them more democratic and more inclusive of benefiting everybody in the community, but in order to meet the time frame, what we’re doing, working with wonderful local organizations and people and indigenous communities and working together to save the ecosystems. The wonderful thing is, if we’re discovering through developing agricultural systems on rainforest canopy, such as trade, coffee, cocoa, honey production is that we can work with a local communities that they can become prosperous and economically-affluent through keeping the rainforest intact and therefore making that culture sustainable. So, a huge win-win solution. I hope to leave this planet, leaves its ecosystems not only environmentally, but economically-sustainable to pass on to future generations. Now, we have to take these communities through this transition because it takes 5 to 7 years to study agricultural systems. You may be surprised that we actually feed school children. We educate them, we provide scholarships, and we support women’s rights and and women work groups as some examples. Because it’s not wildlife versus people or the environment versus kind of these win-win solutions. And we’re taking the indigenous communities through this and developing their success into the future. That’s kind of, I guess, 2 examples of what we’re trying to achieve.

John: Leif, approximately, is it known how many orangutans are left on this planet right now?

Leif: The honest answer is we don’t have it because we don’t have the time, resources. They’re hard to find so that their estimate based on counts is with this huge variability in it. But what we do know is that they’re critically endangered, we hit the highest category of concern before extinction. They’re all on the brink. We really only got the next few years for to turn this around. We also know that because orangutans adapt to the environment through culture predominantly, not natural selection, same as humans. We pass our culture from generation to generation which makes us far more adaptive to ever-changing environment. Orangutans do this by having very long maternal periods. They suckle the infants for 8 years and they stay with the mother after 12 Years, learning the culture, they’re born with brains, we could program by the mothers. This system works really great for adaptation and they reproduce very slowly invest in a very few offspring. But unfortunately, that makes them very vulnerable to extinction when it’s super predator such as humans come along because they can’t bounce back easily. We also started the international elephant and international tiger projects to bring those species under an umbrella of protection but they’re falling out of our protective umbrella that we set up for orangutans in these ecosystems. But let’s say for tigers, what we’ve discovered is if you protect them, they bounce back fairly quickly. They bring relatively quickly. They adapt to the environment for natural search and rise in culture, but orangutans, don’t do that very well. And in fact, if you only kill 1% of the females in a sustainable population a year, the population spirals to extinction.

John: What you just said is fascinating in that you’re saying females might go through their whole life and all you have one offspring.

Leif: Usually, maybe about 3. There’s 3 species of orangutan. We going to careful not to generalize, but let’s take this amount to an Sumatran orangutan. The have the first baby at 15 and then there’s 9 years between individual infants and they’ll keep breathing and obviously until they get very old. They’re very slow levels of reproduction. But on the other hand, they’re the most caring, loving mothers. The infant mortality is very low. In fact, actually, maternal mortality of the female orangutan in the wild is the same as female mortality of humans giving birth in America.

John: Oh my gosh.

Leif: They do look after each other and without an external predator, they do have a very high rate of survival and do quite well.

John: Going back to something you said earlier, the absolute tragic nature of the slaughter of these beautiful animals. They share about 97 or so percent of our DNA, so they’re the closest, these these great great apes are the closest to us out of any of the species that are that are out there?

Leif: They’re not our closest relative. The closest relative actually the chimpanzee which is 99%.

John: Wow.

Leif: But in some ways that actually makes orangutans actually much more cool. Humans and chimpanzees share this trade of aggressiveness and warlike behavior. Chimpanzees and humans would look at another person and want to destroy them. We will destroy others. We would have warfare against other tribes. So that’s a nature of our aggressive ancestors. Orangutans don’t have that. They’re far more noble form of persons. To give an example of this is we killed over million orangutan, slowly slaughtering them to extinction in most horrific ways that we can manage, machete then burning them alive. And although orangutans are 7 times stronger than a human and the males have canines the same size as tigers, not one time in recorded history, not in any zoo or wild or sanctuary, that an orangutan has ever killed a human being. They’re not capable of what I call a kill switch and wanting to totally destroy another being as we do. That’s the added tragedy. They had some more humanity and persons, we share our planet that we should be emulating in so many ways. These are peaceful, loving creatures and we are destroying them as we speak.

John: Intelligence level you said of these beautiful animals is very high in terms of being able to process information and communicate with humans as well.

Leif: Exactly. I said the most intelligent being shares our planet and as persons they have anxieties about the past and your worries about the future, so what a person does is project themselves in the past and the future, not just living in the now. Therefore, their capacity to suffer is much greater than animals that are less intelligent. Humans, we suffer a lot. Most of our suffering is in our minds and it’s about past and future very little of our suffering is actually in the now. Orangutans are the same. I’ve had to care and consult orangutans which been bombed in World War II because when the fireworks, they believe that in bond again, and you have to console and try to rebuild these minds of orangutans which have their mothers slaughtered and eaten front of them, the little minds that are damaged.

John: So they’re capable of having PTSD like humans?

Leif: Exactly. We just discovering how fantastic they are. Researchers, for example, a discovery not only useful in thousands of plants to feed off the youth plants are medicines, topical treatment to treat malaria. And when they go, “Okay, wonder what they’re using, what the different medicines for.” Surprise, surprise. They go to the indigenous communities who are using the same plant for the same issues. So you got these 2 persons trying to frost basically also find the same solutions of medicines and passing those culture down from generation to generation. This is one of the reasons that it’s so important to save these populations. We’re not only saving genetic diversity, beginning framework to survival. We have to save the culture as well, without culture they can’t adapt to the environment. So think past and future generation. One of the interesting things is when we would talk about orangutans being persons. Male orangutans have this big cheek pads and a throat sack. They call out to attract females and keep other males away and like a big megaphone. In the evening when they nest in the trees, they will say, future me. I’m going to go up and move this direction in the morning. So they then point their big cheek pad and basically call into into the direction that they’re going to go the next morning. So they already plan the next day. They’re always thinking ahead into the future. In fact, that have this huge cerebral cortex which is basically this computer simulation. This is why, ley’s say, in zoo situations you probably see chimpanzees trailing area trying to do something. They say escape, rolling, running around. Orangutan would just sit then, just run the program in the head over and over till they get the right solution then just walk out and escape.

John: You save a lot of energy, they refer to their brain to really help them work through things.

Leif: Exactly. It’s a huge survival mechanism because when you’re like body like brain animals like orangutan, you got to conserve energy in the rainforest and so they don’t act, they act once decided and has thought about it for a long time before they make any actual action in itself.

John: So, really some of what you’re sharing today, besides supporting great organizations, like yours, it’s also to support politicians and other leadership that really are truly going to make strides towards turning this environmental crisis that we’re living through around because part and parcel with turning the environmental crisis and the wholesale liquidation of our environment around the world around will be also helping save the orangutans around the world as well.

Leif: Yes, exactly. We got the 2 forces and it actually goes down to brain biology. You have the conservative force and if you have a conservative mindset of brain, new information is it gives you fear. That’s a good reaction because making changes is dangerous. Things that go better but they all seemed to have to be good but the conservative mind look at things like climate change or a better way of doing things and we act with fear and then cognitive dissidence turned away. I think an American term to Liberal mind reacts new information by excitement. Oh, this is interesting. These opportunities climate change. We need to change this and that’s all stuff. And so, you have to kind of forces, with the mind reacting to the new situation with fear and denial, not because they’re unintelligent, that’s just the way their brain is setup or reacting to it. There needs to be some balance because, let’s say, take the Arab Spring. We can make these rapid changes, but then the end up really badly. There was that kind of balance there but my predominant message is we do need predominately politicians with the progressive outlook, because we have to make rapid change. We have to make this daring changes in the next 10 years. So all the conservatives and can actually benefit to it many times in the world. We need very progressive and quickly-moving policies in order to save this planet now, so I would encourage people to go for those visionaries, the visionary politicians who are willing to make the hard decisions and changes and change the [inaudible] because I guess now is not the time for more conservative nature to dictate our outcomes because we will go under.

John: Leif, I want to let you have the last word on any thoughts you want to share with our listeners and our viewers and our readers around the world. This is a very critical mission and project that you’ve created and we’re of course grateful for your time today. But therefore, I want to give you the last word and then I’ll sign off for us together.

Leif: I guess my last message is actually doing good and helping others is the pathway of the joy and happiness. There is no sacrifice in a meaningful, selfless life. If we live that life, we find the happiness within us and express it through intelligent ways in the world. Actually. It’s a win-win situation, all these are win-win situations. So, there is no sacrifice here. Working for our own power, name, fame, reputation, and money, inevitably, you can see yourself lead to misery and unhappiness. But if we work for others, in a sense of community and direction, we become happier and we express our happiness. So there’s no downside of living a meaningful life that helps others because it helps us as individuals too.

John: Leif, you’re living a very meaningful life. We’re so grateful for your time. I know it’s very early in Australia right now and we’re very grateful and thankful for the impact that you’re making at the Orangutan Project. For our listeners and viewers and readers out there that want to support Leif and want to find or connect with Leif in this very important mission at the Orangutan Project, please go to www.theorangutanproject.org, theorangutanproject.org. You can donate money, you could support, you could connect with Leif and his colleagues, and help save these beautiful animals. Leif, thank you for making the world a better place. Thank you for the impact that you’re making. Thank you for being selfless and really, really just doing this really important work. I’m just grateful for you. God bless you continued good health, and I just want you to continue to succeed in this great mission.

Leif: Thank you.

John: This edition of the Impact Podcast is brought to you by the Marketing Masters. Marketing Masters is a boutique marketing agency offering website development and digital marketing services to small and medium businesses across America. For more information on how they can help you grow your business online, please visit themarketingmasters.com.

John Shegerian: 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: Welcome to another edition of the Impact Podcast. My name is John Shegerian, and I’m so honored to have with us today, Ryan Holiday. He is one of the best-selling authors that we have today in the United States. This is his 12th book we’re gonna be talking about today, Courage Is Calling. Ryan, welcome to the Impact Podcast.

Ryan Holiday: Yeah. Thank you for having me.

John: You know, I’m not only a huge fan. I read your daily stoic and you already have at 34 years old, a huge body of work behind you. The obstacles away. Ego is the enemy, daily stoic, stillness is the key. I mean, for million-plus copies New York Times bestseller. Before we get talking about church-going, where did you grow up? How did you even get on this journey of being this prolific writer?

Ryan: I grew up in beautiful Sacramento, California. Not a child of writers or really anyone involved in anything sort of like this. My dad is a police officer. My mom’s a school principal. Sort of ordinary civil servants kind of a family and, I just felt I fell in love with books. I knew I wanted to do something around books. I wasn’t sure if I could be a writer. I just knew that I loved reading and I wanted to do something very different, then how my parents lives were. I didn’t wanna go to an office. I didn’t wanna have a job and, ended up here through a variety of a strange twists and turns but I wrote my first book when I was 24, I think. So, I do have a body of work behind it but I also got started earlier than most. So it’s somewhat unfair advantage.

John: Right. What informed you? What made you such a bibliophile growing up and what books informed you to say, this is maybe a path I’m interested and taking?

Ryan: Yeah. I really loved the books and I love reading, but I didn’t really get turned on to the kinds of books that I like now and so much later probably, 18 or 19 years old. I just was a prolific reader of anything. The Hardy Boys Books and then my sister would have Nancy Drew and I’d read that too. I read literally and anything that was between two covers. So I think, I started just loving the printed word. I loved the experience of reading. It wasn’t until a little bit later on that I really got sort of exposed to philosophy and, even this sort of genre of self of. I remember what I graduated from high school. My aunt gave me a copy of man’s search for meaning, which was probably the first book in this kind of genre that, I guess, I’m in now. That sort of exposed me to, that a book could be more than entertainment, that a book could really not just teach you about a specific thing. Like, book about gardening or book about how to use a computer but a book about how to sort of actualize as a human being. That was probably the book that sort of opened my eyes the most or at least at first.

John: When you wrote your first book when you are how old?

Ryan: 24. I wrote an expose of the marketing industry, which I had been in for several years, after college. I started writing on this 24 I think came out right after I turned 25.

John: Got in. So, you have all these books behind you. You’re a New York Times bestselling author. You’re also seen as one of the top philosophers out there right now. I enjoy your daily stoicing. For those who want to find you there, they can go to www.dailystoic.com. Sign up, get his daily, get Ryan’s daily newsletter. It’s so informative and actually really inspirational to get that every day. What prompted you then to now go into this, what is gonna be, I believe, the series that you’re gonna be writing, the four cardinal virtues you started with Courage Is Calling, what then prompted you to take on these four virtues now and start with Courage?

Ryan: So, my first book of philosophy was this book I wrote called The Obstacle Is The Way. Which I didn’t really have much in the way of plans for. I thought, I wanted to talk about this sort of very specific way of thinking about stoic philosophy aimed at a very specific thing, which is sort of the obstacles that life arose in our path. It was my sort of first, I’m may said my breakthrough book. I followed it shortly thereafter with another book, which I had been thinking about before Obstacle came out, but ended up becoming more of a sequel to Obstacle than I had intended. Or at least that I had planned for. So, one book became two books and then the third book in that trilogy which came out in 2019 was called, Stillness Is The Key. So I sort of backed in unintentionally to this three book series. Although none of it was planned as far as what follows each book. So there’s sort of three independent but related books. So as I was thinking about what I wanted to do next, I was thinking about doing a book on Courage. I was interested in the topic. Then, the fact that Courage is the first of the four cardinal virtues really excited me. Not just because that goes to the core of what stoic philosophy is about. But, I like the challenge of having to try to do a series. So, as obviously, philosophically very interested in the sort of the idea of courage and it’s relation to the other virtues. As a writer, I was also excited by the challenge of tackling something as complex as of four book series.

John: So when you were going into this, you took on Courage first because you believe it’s central to the stoic virtues or…?

Ryan: The cardinal virtues are the cardinal virtues of both stoicism and Christianity.

John: Okay.

Ryan: ‘Cause our way back, thousands of years, courage, temperance, justice, wisdom, these are the sort of the– Cardinal comes from the Latin cardo, just means hinge. So these are sort of pivotal virtues. I’ve written about the many times before I just had never written a book about them. So, there, could you do one book on all four virtues like a four-part book on all four virtues? Or would you decide to tackle it as four distinct books? I was excited about doing that. Then, I started with courage, what it tends to be what is listed first? When you list them, we move the order around but typically courage comes first. I think it’s the most essential of all the virtues in that you cannot have temperance, or justice, or wisdom, without courage. You really can’t have any of the virtues without each other, but I think courage is sort of the buy-in on all of the virtues. So, it just felt like the right place to start.

A lot of this stuff is kind of an intuition, right? When someone says, “Oh, why did you decide to write a book about this or what?” You just sort of learn as an artist who trust what is interesting to you? What you’re thinking about? What you cannot think about. That’s really what it is. I mean, honestly, my first book came from the fact that I kept talking about it and I finally thought I’m just gonna write a book about this and then I won’t have to talk about it anymore. Which is never really how it works, but you’re just motivated by this itch that you can’t seem to not scratch.

John: When you decided you’re gonna do this series, before you started writing a word on Courage. Did you already have in your mind which book you thought? You thought hasn’t, you haven’t done while yet. It was gonna be the more difficult challenge, right?

Ryan: Certainly. I mean, I thought courage would probably be the easiest. Courage is right down the middle as far as what it is, how you illustrate it, and why people care about it. There’s no society on Earth, past or present that does not hold up courage as an admirable thing. There’s no society, the ancient culture of X that celebrated it’s cowards. That doesn’t exist. So courage felt the most red meat of all of them. I’m in the middle of the self-discipline book right now or temperance, which is proven to be trickier than I thought. But it also sort of straight down the middle. I think Justice will probably be the hardest book. One because it veers the closest into politics, right? It’s the most clearly based on a sense of right and wrong which obviously, there’s a lot of disagreement about.

So that’s probably the book that I am most intimidated by. Then the one that I have the most reservations about is the Wisdom book. In that writing a book about wisdom, all the books have this, but writing a book about wisdom, it still feels a tad presumptuous to be writing about that topic. So the Wisdom book has it’s perils for different reasons.

John: You know, in your book, and again, for our listeners and viewers out there, Courage Is Calling: Fortune Favors The Brave. Ryan Holiday, his with us today. This is gonna be actually our Thanksgiving edition of the Impact Podcast because I think this is really a real special call to action and Ryan, you really written, as you could tell book that I’ve enjoyed tremendously and gotten a lot out of after my 59 years, a lot that I never even learned or even understood before. You’ve explained it simply and really clearly here with illustrative stories. In the book, you talk about, you mentioned that we price courage maybe the most but this courage is in absolute short supply. What’s your definition of courage? What you want your readers, listeners to come away with from this great book?

Ryan: With the definition that I have in the book, first stipulating that we tend to see there– there being two types of courage. We call moral courage and physical courage. Physical courage, pretty obvious, that’s the courage of a soldier, or a fireman, or something. Moral courage is more of the courage of a whistleblower, or a scientist, or a groundbreaking artist, or some.

John: Right.

Ryan: But I think what both those forms of courage share is willingness to put one’s self on the line for something or someone. So, I think at the core of courage is obviously the idea of risk. If there is no risk, if the outcome is guaranteed, courage is obviously not in play. Risk is, courage is predicated on. There being some form of danger. Reputationally to your actual health, whatever it is. If the company is guaranteed to succeed, it’s not courageous to go started.

John: Right. One of my favorite things that you did in the book is you give all these illustrative examples of courage. You mention, and quoted so many great people. I made a little game of it. I started writing down just like a, my list of.

Ryan: Oh, wow.

John: Of everyone that you gave some great stories and quotes from. One of my favorite stories that I relate to the times that we’re living in right now is you. You brilliantly explain the Kitty Genovese story. Kitty Genovese as you explained it, and the neighbor that came to her rescue, put herself on the line, when no one else was doing anything. Is so relatable to what we just went through in 2020 with George Floyd and just two weeks back on that train in Philadelphia with the woman who was brutally attacked. Unfortunately, as you pointed out, history will repeat itself unless we learn from those mistakes. When you hear about, or read, or watch the news about these, those kind of recent things, you just shake your head and just, you know, when people say, say something, why not say something, do something?

Ryan: Sure.

John: Right?

Ryan: Yeah. I think it in the, as it pertains to that expression, the idea of saying something is doing something right. I think it’s interesting when you look at the Kitty Genovese story, it is this sort of shameful story that we’ve told ourselves about, the indifference of neighbors particularly in the sort of the modern city, which it was in some ways. Then in other ways, she was held by a neighbor as she died. A neighbor, who she knew quite well, who had left her apartment and her small child inside to go answer these screams and finds her dying sort of neighbor there. Then asks for zero credit or recognition for this sort of this experience even as she is implicated for a generation as being part of this horrible tale of indifference to and inhumanity. I don’t know. I don’t know why that happens. I mean, you think abut the girl who won the Pulitzer Prize for taking the video, George Floyd. I mean, it wasn’t just that she took the video. I mean, she stood there filming the police who may, you know, clearly were not wonderful human beings or they wouldn’t have been in the middle of murdering this man. As you said, it’s more than just sort of seeing something but doing something about it, trying to take some active step towards solving a problem. I think what’s interesting about that the George Floyd thing is you have– the woman filming into obviously sees something wrong. But you have the two other officers just standing there, or kneeling there, as their boss does this horrible thing right in front of them.

There’s a line from Marcus Aurelius where he says, you can commit injustice by doing nothing also. It’s, of course, easy to say this isn’t my problem. This isn’t my fight. This is an up to me. I don’t care about this, but you are complicit in the outcome of what happens.

John: What makes it worse to me is in that situation, the recent Philadelphia train attack situation is back in the Kitty Genovese days, Genovese days, people could have said, “Well, I didn’t hear her. I wasn’t at home that night.” This is now a world of we’re all become sort of democratize reporting, and that people have cell phones.

Ryan: Yeah.

John: So the fact, we know people were there and people were watching, they were filming it. So that can even compounds the complicity like you said of an action.

Ryan: Yeah. I think that’s right. Maybe that should remind you that like, hey, people are always watching and that run ought to go through the world acting as if someone is watching. So you mentioned Daily Stoic Email. The email today that we sent out to the list. Obviously, I write them in advance. The point of today’s email was talking about how your children and your grandchildren are gonna ask you about what you did and what the pandemic was like. So, just in the same way that I asked my grandfather about D-Day and I asked my grandmother about the depression. You’re gonna ask them about, they’re gonna ask you about this historical event. What are you gonna be able to say, are you gonna say, “Well, I posted a lot of misinformation on Facebook about it.” Right?

John: Right.

Ryan: Or are you gonna say, “Hey, I volunteered in a vaccine clinic, or we did X, Y, or Z. We kept you guys home. Bob, what are you gonna be able to say?” When your kids ask you and you start to describe your experiences in this time, are you gonna seem like you were part of the problem. Or you gonna seem like you’re part of the solution. Or you’re gonna seem sort of wildly out of touch. There’s a famous exchange with John F. Kennedy, where John F. Kennedy sort of admits that he’d learned about the great depression in Harvard. He was rich and his life was so sheltered that he missed the great depression. He wasn’t 5. He was 15 during the great depression.

So you’re like, oh, wow. Okay. So this person, they were part of the problem, but they were also part of the problem, right? This is exactly the kind of out of touchness that probably cause the great depression to begin with. So, as we kind of think about how history is going to judge us. Like, the larger scale of history but just also your future self. Where you gonna think about yourself in 10 years? Hopefully society will have progressed in 10 years. Hopefully will be kinder, and gentler, and more equitable, all these things. When you look back at where you were, you’re gonna be like, oh. You know what I mean? I didn’t do everything that I could.

John: You talk about in the book, you give some great examples, and of course, you mentioned one of my heroes, Pat Tillman.

Ryan: Mm-hmm.

John: How we’re all gonna be call.

Ryan: Yes.

John: Different times in our lives. But we have to be ready to answer that calling, and the calling could be as you pointed out. You gave so many brilliant examples throughout the book. One of the great examples was the six second example with our brave troops that prevented many people from dying over in the other side of the planet, but with Pat Tillman. He answered his calling and he said, you know when you get called, you can feel it. Can you explain to our listeners and readers, what do you mean by that? How can we get better in tune with ourselves? So when we know we have to make, we have to exhibit courage, we could actually get over our fear and over ourselves?

Ryan: So everyone gets the call, but almost everyone refuses the call. If you’re familiar with the idea of the hero’s journey, which Joseph Campbell puts forth.

John: Yep.

Ryan: One of the steps in the hero’s journey is the refusal of the call. So this is part of it. We have this sense, or we hear this voice, or we see this inspiration that calls us to do something. Almost invariably, we come up with reasons why we can’t do it, or we can’t do it right now. Steven Pressfield call this the resistance.

We don’t say, “I never gonna do it.” We say, “I’ll start tomorrow.” So I think understanding that this sort of tension. If it was obvious, everyone would do it. It’s not obvious. It’s hard, and we wrestle with it. For me when I dropped out of college to become a writer, when I decided to go from writing book, writing marketing books to philosophy books. These were not easy or obvious decisions. I went back and forth about them. I had a lot of doubts about them. But you sort of have to go towards that scarier thing.

The call is there. The call is usually a, we’re coming up on Halloween here, the call is coming from inside the house. But you have to answer, you have to decide to act on it. Because what would a world look like without the Pat Tillman’s, or the Florence Nightingale, or the Winston Churchill, or the Martin Luther King. Martin Luther King is just a ordinary pastor in Birmingham. No, in Montgomery. He doesn’t have to get involved. There were other black preachers and major black churches that didn’t step forward. There were some that just step forward but not as far as king did. To think, I think he’s 25 years old. Like, we often think, you think of Thomas Jefferson and George Washington as old men, but they were in their early 20’s and 30’s when this happened. They weren’t certain about it. It was scary as hell, but they proceeded anyway, they answer the call.

John: They answer the call. You talk in the book about your own fear. As you just pointed out, switching from the marketing guy to a philosopher, dropping out of college, dropped out of law school. It wasn’t an easy decision. Of course, you always, the abyss is always scarier on where you are today. What do you want? So many amazing quotes in this book, and as you can see I’ve marked it up. But anyone who can quote both Martin Luther King and Frank Serpico book is someone that I’m a huge fan of.

I took out so many quotes. I wrote down so many. What would be your favorite two or three quotes in the whole book that you want people to see her in there, to see her in their brain and keep front of their brain every day as they work through their journey?

Ryan: So one of the ones I love it’s often attributed to Andrew Jackson, although he probably didn’t actually say. But, it’s this idea that one person with courage makes a majority. The whole world depends on people who stood alone on a certain issue and brought other people around. Again, to go to Martin Luther King. Martin Luther King was, I think at a 60 or so percent disapproval, disfavorable opinion at the time of his death, not even a majority of African-Americans were a fan of Martin Luther King. But this is what happens when you are ahead of your time. Is that you often upset people or your hard to wrap your head around? So the idea that that it’s gonna require standing alone. It’s not always as high stakes as civil rights. It might just be, hey, this is the direction that I think my industry is going to go in. Everyone on your team might be convinced you are completely wrong. That maybe why you have to break out on your own, or why you have to put in more of your own money on it, or whatever it is. But the point is, being okay standing alone, having the courage to do that, and the perseverance to understand that this is how change happens from person who takes a position and convinces other people to come along with them. One of my favorite ones though and I think we’re in the middle of this right now is, although courage is rare. Even amongst people who think they understand courage. We have trouble understanding what it’s about. So there’s a quote from the poet Lord Byron that I have towards the end of the book. He says, tease the cause makes all that hallows or degrades courage and its fall.

Is it courageous that Kyrie Irving is willing to risk for $400,000 in game to not get vaccinated? Because he’s protesting vaccine mandates or whatever. I mean, it’s certainly risky. I certainly a scary thing to do. You’re betting millions of dollars on a thing you believe. The problem is, when we’re talking about courage as a virtue. It has to be in the pursuit of what the stoic would call the right.

Courageously, protect your right to be a victor of a deadly virus, is not what we’re talking about when we’re talking about courage. Was it courageous for Robert E. Lee to break with the country that he had served honorably for years to side with the State of Virginia? Was he courageous under fire many times? Of course, but we also understand and this is why we’re having this debate now about these statues.

That there’s something empty and a hollow, not hallow. Hollow about discouraged because it was in the pursuit of a monstrous injustice, on monstrously incorrect cause. So when we think about the virtues, we have to understand that they’re related to each other. Not only discourage have to be balanced by justice. It also has to be balanced by wisdom. So if you’ve courageously decided to jump off a cliff, that everyone told you you’re gonna die when you hit the ground. This were wisdom comes in. The wisdom to accept information and integrate it. Is really, really important and so, yes, you can courageously resist vaccines as much as you want. But if you’re the reason you’re doing that is because, you’re also, again, to go to Kyrie Irving, a person who believes the world is flat. You’re an idiot. You’re not great. That’s an important decision.

John: The book came down on the Kyrie Irving story to me is Muhammad Ali. He was a hero because, he have the courage to push back against the war that he didn’t believe in.

Ryan: Sure.

John: It turned out that history was on his side and he lost a lot of his career because of that.

Ryan: Yes. Look, there’s also, even if he was wrong. There were conscientious objectors in the Second World War. I think we go like, look, the cause itself was not bad, but we understand there’s a severe– sorry, a sincere religious conviction behind the resistance. So, even if Vietnam was not a travesty or a tragedy, and Muhammad Ali, there is a sincere religious conviction. That is motivating the decision that he’s making. It’s just important to say that courage is truth-telling. But if you’re just rudely telling truths to hurt people’s feelings, that’s not what we’re talking about.

John: Right. Again, we’ve got Ryan Holiday with us. This is the Thanksgiving special. We all should give thanks for Ryan and his new book, Courage Is Calling: Fortune Favors The Brave. We could all use wisdom on how to be more courageous in our lives. Every one of us. Ryan, one of the things I love about the book is you talk a lot about the stoics. Obviously, which you’re a philosopher. What do you think if the stoics were here today? They came down for just two days here on this planet. So everything that was going on. What would they be intrigued about and be fascinated by? What would they be totally turned off about what’s going on right now?

Ryan: Let’s say you dropped a Marcus Aurelius into 2020.

John: Right.

Ryan: Here you have a guy who was head of state during the beginning of the decline of the Roman Empire. Who’s also the majority of his reign is made up of what we now refer to as the Antonine Plague. So I feel like he’d have looked around and accepting some of the technology been like, this is very familiar to me. He would understand. Actually that’s one of my favorite quotes and meditations. It certainly became more so over time, but he talks about how during a plague. He says, there’s two types of plagues. He says there’s the pestilence that destroys your life and he said there’s another that affects your character. I think we’ve seen this also during the pandemic where people who, whether they got COVID or not, also got some sort of character infection. That made them sort of deeply selfish, or susceptible to conspiracies, or we’re just, when you watch a video of some lady screaming at a supermarket clerk, who asked them to put on a mask. You’re like, you might not have COVID, but I pretty sure you got something worse. You caught something. So, the Marcus was familiar with that 2000 years ago, I find to be really interesting. I said accepting the technology. I do think they would be appalled by our dependency on these devices. That are our inability to focus for 5 minutes on the simplest of tasks.

I think they would struggle to comprehend that. I mean, obviously, human beings have always struggled with attention and focus and whatever. I think they look at at our dependency on these devices and ask why we’re doing this to ourselves.

John: Got it. One of the things I love about your journey and your only 34 which, my two children are above me here in this and this was up on my walls four years before this pandemic ever hit, but it turned out to a nice background for all my Zoom calls.

Ryan: Yeah.

John: My daughter’s 34 and she’s a lawyer and I’m so proud of her. I mean, she’s 35. I think, oh, my gosh. I mean, that’s such a young age, you’ve done so much and now during the pandemic, you are called again. When all of retail shut down or virtually all of retail, you decide to go counter to the absolute trends that are existing in 2020, which was literally a silence that I’ve never seen in my 59 years in the United States and around the world. You opened up a bookstore called “The Painted Porch” in your hometown now, where you live in Bastrop, Texas. Explain, what, where that calling came from? Why you decided that 2023 is the big Debi [?] was the right time to answer the call. How’s it going on since you launched this? I’ve been online. I’ve seen the books for all the photos, and it looks just gorgeous and beautiful and something out of a Norman Rockwell painting. Why?

Ryan: So to be fair. I started before the pandemic. I just decided not to quit during the pandemic. I think, if you had told me, I didn’t decide in March, the opening of books were not be a good idea. But I did stand in the empty bookstore in March and go, “I can’t believe we have to do this now.” It was a long journey. It was an exhausting. It was an expensive and terrifying journey in many ways. But it was a really good experience. So the weird thing, I love books, you can see books behind me. I love physical books most of all, that’s how I read. But now even as an author, something like 60% of my book sales are digital. Either ebooks or audiobooks. Obviously, I’m very grateful for that but something about the physical experience really means something to me and as we were looking for some office space for our company. We sort of came up with this hybrid idea of office space plus, there was a storefront involved. So it worked out at someone accidentally as an opportunity to do both. It’s turned out to be very cool and fun. It was harder and took longer than expected, but it’s been a really cool experience and there’s something about being part of a community, doing something in the real world. I can hear right now like little kids running around.

John: Right.

Ryan: Excited. There’s something I love about that.

John: Hey, listen. I love it. I grew up in New York City and one of my favorite places of peace and enjoyment was Fifth Avenue in 18th Street, the big Barnes & Noble, their flagship store. So opening up a bookstore sounds wonderful. Just during a pandemic, maybe not so much, but how it was call…

Ryan: It was not the best business decision, but it’s been a fun personal experience to say the least.

John: Talking about personal experiences. You’re married with two boys.

Ryan: Yes.

John: I know you take that seriously. I’ve read what you’ve written about fatherhood and being a husband. Yeah. I know you really lean into it. How do you find time? Even how busy you are, how much you loved to read? Also, you’re writing, you’re already writing the second of this four series the book on Temperance. Where do you find time to get into your flow and actually still continue to to be at the peak of your abilities?

Ryan: I mean, it’s kind of an unfair profession. I mean, if I was a professional baseball player, I would be away a lot more. I would be dependent on other. What are the benefits? Part probably why I chose it, but you sort of a lone wolf as a writer as far as doing your actual thing. So you’re able to kind of squeeze it in into different pockets, but I’m a big creature of habit. Part of the reason we did the bookstore, part of the reason we live where we live, was kind of setting up a system to optimize for those things that allow all of them to be possible. If I had a 90 minute commute or something, obviously that would eat up large chunks of the time. So I try to sort of design my life around the things that are important to me, but it also means, saying no to sort of stuff that maybe would ordinarily be perks of the profession to a single, rider my age, or something. I’m not experiencing but that hasn’t been something I’ve particularly missed.

John: Right. One of my favorite quotes in your book is the world is a narrow bridge and the important thing is not to be afraid.

Ryan: Yes.

John: Explain why you put that in the book and what that means to you and why that was so important to put that?

Ryan: Yeah. It’s a little Hebrew prayer. There’s actually a great novel called “The World Is A Narrow Bridge” by a guy named Aaron Thier, which I love as well. But to me what the wisdom of that prayer is it’s like, when you’re walking you’ve ever been on like an narrow rope bridge or something over some canyon. It’s just like, just keep walking, don’t look down, don’t look over the edge. Don’t stop. Don’t look behind you, just get across the bridge. Any of those other things as tempting as they might be, are very dangerous. ‘Cause you slow down, you lose your heart to continue, suddenly get really nervous. You just got to get across.

John: Got it. A lot of your writings that I’ve read before, before even Courage Is Calling. You talk about stoics virtue of controlling their response, how all learn to be better at controlling our response. What do you want people to learn when you write about controlling their response and how the stoics held that in high esteem? How we can all get better at practicing that and actually exhibiting that kind of behavior?

Ryan: I think look at the core of stoicism is the idea that we don’t control what happens, we control how we respond. That’s life. Right?

John: Right.

Ryan: So I think if you think about justice as a resource allocation issue. Are you gonna spend time on the things you don’t control, or you’re gonna put all of that energy towards the parts of it that you do control. So I think stoic just tries to say, what part of this is up to me? What can I do? Where can I move the ball forward? I’m not saying, I’m perfect at it. On the contrary, I just know. Sometimes you get all worked up in something and you’re like, what am I really saying here? What you’re really saying is, I wish that it hadn’t happened to this way. But it did. So are you gonna spend time litigating that? Or you gonna focus on what comes after?

John: Yeah. You made a point in the book where you said, or in your book or somewhere else when I read one of your passages. You said, “Really, do you ever feel excited, or do you look back favorably on a time where you got mad or got it exploded at somebody or something?

Ryan: Sure.

John: You never, it’s not fun to look back at those moments.

Ryan: Yeah. I mean, I don’t think I’ve ever lost my temper and then been proud of myself after. Are there certain moments where I’m glad I stood up for myself? Yeah, but even in those moments, I say, I wish I’d done that without saying X, Y, or Z. Right?

John: Right. You get to meet a lot of people like you said because of your, over four million copies you’ve sold Ryan. You’re a New York Times bestseller, many times over. Athletes, entertainers, and so many leaders, military leaders around the world read your books. So you have great access to so many people, but I’d love to know is if tonight and tomorrow night, you had two chances at dinner. One tonight with someone who is still living, not a family member.

Ryan: Sure.

John: Go to dinner with somebody and tomorrow night with someone who’s passed. Anyone who’s passed. Who will be there your two favorite people to have dinner with, past and still alive?

Ryan: Yeah. I mean, I’d love to meet General Mattis. I’m a big fan of and I know a little bit, but we’ve never met in person. So if I had to pick a living, maybe I’d go there. I mean, I feel like I would lose my stoic credentials if I didn’t choose Marcus Aurelius. But if I had to pick, let’s say you’re limiting it to an American, I think Lincoln probably.

John: It could be anyone. No. [inaudible].

Ryan: No, I’m just saying. If I can choose two, I’d say Marcus Aurelius number one.

John: You’ve got a bonus one [inaudible].

Ryan: Exactly.

John: Yourself limited it. I got it. Again, Courage Is Calling, you can buy this book not only at the Painted Porch but at Barnes & Noble Amazon and every other place you can buy great books. This is just really one of the favorite books that I’ve read in 10 years. You can see how much I’ve marked it up. You talked about David Brooks in the book. You talked about The Second Mountain. Can you share a little bit about what you mean about the Brooks? What Brooks meant by The Second Mountain?

Ryan: Yeah. The Second Mountain is, he said sort of once you climbed the top of the first mountain, that’s your career success. What is the second mountain for you? What do you sort of giving back? What is the other thing that you’re doing? It’s a great book. The title and anything, it gets up there. Anyways, I’m gonna talk about that more probably in the Justice book but, to me the second mountain, the bookstore was part of the second mountain. Was like, hey, I’ve had this success. This is the thing I’m good at. What is a cool thing I could do in a place that I live? What’s another project to tackle that might not be as financially lucrative, but might be richer in meaning or purpose? It’s certainly been that. So I think the second mountain is sort of what is it that you are doing, after you have achieved the thing that you wanted most in the world.

John: Got it. I love that you’ve talked about and, well, first of all, you talk, you share some stories that I’ve never heard. I mean, I love the story that you shared. If you wanna just hit the high notes on it. I think it would be fun for our listeners and viewers on the relationship between Martin Luther King and Richard Nixon, which I had never read that or heard that anywhere, and relationship between JFK and Martin Luther King and how to phone calls could have probably turned that whole election.

Ryan: Yeah. So Nixon and King were actually friends because Nixon was in charge of Eisenhower’s civil rights platform. So they met each other many, many times. Then, Kennedy did not really know King until the 1960 election and King is arrested in Georgia, on these sort of trumped-up charges. There’s real concern that he’s either gonna do a long prison sentence or he’s gonna mysteriously disappear while in police custody. It’s gonna be murder or lynched.

John: Right.

Ryan: So Coretta Scott King, who’s pregnant I think with their third child at the time, calls both campaigns and says, “You guys got to do something. You can’t let my husband die.” Both parties had some civil rights planks in their campaign. Nixon decides not to get involved. She doesn’t want to be seen as grandstanding. He wants to wait until after the election. He also doesn’t wanna lose some of the southern vote. It’s a razor-thin there anyway, doesn’t wanna lose the southern vote. So he doesn’t get involved. Kennedy on the other hand decides mostly at the prompting of his brother-in-law, Sargent Shriver, to place a phone call. One to Coretta Scott King and then his brother both called the judge in Georgia and they ultimately sort of apply enough pressure that King is released.

Martin Luther King, when he gets out of jail, he’s like stun. He would have sworn that it would have been Nixon who would have helped him, not Kennedy, who’s a democrat, who is more dependent on southern democratic support. He’s just puts out there. What happened? He’d been planning to vote for Nixon, and he changes his mind. I think Kennedy goes on to win the presidential election by like 30,000 votes across three states. Almost entirely people think due to the swing in the black vote, due to this two phone calls that he makes. So, I think it’s an important example of how a single but 30 second bursts of courage can change one’s life. Conversely that a momentary lapse of courage. A moment of cowardice can change your life for the negative as well.

Nixon doesn’t get involved ‘cause he doesn’t wanna hurt his re-election prospects and ends up costing himself the election. When we have these moments, when our conscience is telling us what to do, we feel that pit in her stomach, you just gotta do it.

John: You gotta answer the call.

Ryan: Yes.

John: You’re very self-reflective, Ryan. I really enjoyed the after forward. I have to tell you, the afterward was really interesting to me. I never heard that story, never read all that. I had just seen the business side of that story. Never understood the underpinnings. It’s the American peril, your involvement with American peril, and as you said, you’ve already pointed out during this interview and other places. Complicity is just as bad as [inaudible].

Ryan: Sure.

John: But I love when you write about yourself. Like 34 mistakes on the way to 34 years old. It’s that do you enjoy the process of being so self reflective and on varnish? Is it a cathartic experience for you? Or do you find it informative to the platform that you’ve created? Or is it a duality of both?

Ryan: I think it’s both. I mean, I do think as far as counter-programming goes. Most people celebrate their successes and talk only to a very selected picture of sort of who they are and how things are going.

John: Yeah.

Ryan: I certainly understand is for branding purposes, but it’s also kind of boring. Because everything’s positive, everything’s going well. Nothing feels particularly real. So I do try to sort of consciously make an effort to sort of show how things actually are, and I think people appreciate that. But I also feel like, it’s just really easy to buy into your own crop. I try to sort of consciously, like look at things, like I did in this story. I could have told some sort of narrative that presented myself as a particularly courageous person, or I could have shown all the things all, but I don’t know. It just didn’t feel right. I talked earlier about intuition. There’s just a part of me that said, the best way to wrap up this book would be with a story of cowardice, or as a failure of courage as opposed to somehow trying to coast ride on the coattails of these people whose stories you’ve just told. So it just felt right. I certainly benefited from the experience of reflecting on it as well, but part of it also, it just felt like the honest thing to do.

John: Before we let you go today Ryan, I wanna talk about two fascinating shows that really hit a big during this pandemic. One was the last dance with Michael Jordan. The ten parts, right. I believe it was episode 8. The last part of it, the last 45 minutes was the only time he got emotional during the whole interview. He had a quote. This is when he literally started breaking. We have to see him break. He said at the end of episode 8, “Leadership has a price and winning has a price.”

Ryan: Yeah.

John: If we replace the words leadership and winning with the words courage, do you find that that analogy is absolute spot-on?

Ryan: Yeah. I mean, when you look at whistleblowers. I had, what’s his name? Who’s the whistleblower? Oh, Lieutenant Colonel Vindman on my podcast. The white house whistleblower. You look at what that decision cost that got. It cost him, not only him, his military career, but it cost his brother, his career as well. So these things don’t come for free. They come at a cost. I think that’s right. But that’s what makes it so impressive. Again, if it was free. It was easy. Everyone would do it and there’d be a lot more Michael Jordan’s and as there’d be no Michael Jordan’s.

John: You know, we all grew up, especially during this pandemic. Moderna became one of the great brands now that we all know about because they have breakthrough technology with Pfizer, to come up with this, the great vaccination. But we all look back then to Jonas Salk, and you mentioned Jonas Salk in the book. I always knew him for, of course, creating the polio vaccine. I never knew until I read your book that he didn’t patent it and he didn’t, again, personally take advantage of that great breakthrough.

Ryan: But there’s another woman, her name is Dr. Katalin Kariko. She had been working on MRNA vax research for 30 years. She came to America as an immigrant from Hungary with $900 in her pocket. She never made more than $60,000 a year. She constantly had to fight for funding. She was constantly having to fight for her job. Everyone thought this was this sort of scientific dead end and then lo and behold 2020 comes around and suddenly it’s the ticket and it’s the invention of a lifetime or the breakthrough of a lifetime. It wasn’t easy for her. I’m sure it took a lot out of her, and I’m sure it took a lot out of her family, but we need people like that. Where would we be without people like that, right?

It’s almost unfathomable.

John: My last question for today, and then I’m gonna leave you, of course, ‘cause you’ve been so generous is about our new hero of the world, Ted Lasso.

Ryan: Yes.

John: So Jason Sudeikis, he was being interviewed the other day and he said, “Listen. How did you come up with such an amazing an idea or to execute into the series when your life was sort of falling apart? You and your wife had split. You were separated from your children and stuff.” He talked about. He said, “Listen, you have a choice.” You talk about this choice in the book. He said, “You have a choice.” You can either become when the world crushes you, and it’s going to crush you. All of us are gonna somewhere somehow getting knocked down, or beat up, or crushed. He goes, “You can become a pile of 206 bones.” Broken bones, which means he goes it’s, “All your bones are broken. If we all have 206 bones, he goes that means you’re a pile of 400-plus bones, or you can put yourself back together, get up, and move forward every day. If you do it right, the bones have come together and healed even stronger then when you started.” You talked about the Japanese are called kintsugi I think. It’s K-I-N-T-S-U-G-I. Can you talk a little bit about how all of us in some way, shape, or form were broken? How we can either decide that death is the option or where we’re gonna come back stronger and smarter?

Ryan: So what I love about Ted Lasso is the show and I sort of talked about this a little bit in the book is I love just earnestness. It’s like a positive show. He actually sincerely tries to be a decent human being instead of this sort of action hero, or anti-hero, or whatever you want. I love that. I think hope is probably the most courageous thing that there is, or just earnestly trying. ‘Cause you know one of the most courageous things you can do in this life. So I love that. The art form you’re talking about it’s a Japanese form of art, where let’s say a piece of pottery breaks. Instead of gluing it back together, they attach it either via gold or silver. So the thin becomes, not just more valuable as a result, but it becomes more beautiful as a result. It’s a fascinating form of art. I think it’s a good metaphor for the human experience, right?

You can break and become stronger as you heal in the broken places, or you can become weaker and more vulnerable in those places, but that’s your choice. I think, look, the last year is has been really hard. Last year and a half has been really hard. Some of us are gonna emerge from this better, and some of us are gonna emerge from this broken shells of human being. Again, you look at some of the ways that people being [?] now. The things they say, you understand where it comes from, it’s been a rough year and a half. But, the choices are we gonna be made better, more kind, more loving, more connected, more appreciative, more generous, as a result of what’s happening and we’re gonna become bitter, and angry, and aggressive, and anti-social, as a result of what’s happened. That’s ultimately to go back to the question about, what do you control? That choice is on you.

You didn’t choose what happened the last year and a half. No one would have chosen it. If they did, but it did happen. So, what are you gonna emerge looking like. That’s the question.

John: Got it. That’s why you’re here with us today on this Thanksgiving special. We want people to emerge better with more courage. Ryan, my lifelong friends since I’m 5 years old. So that’s 54, 55 years now. Greg Saffer, first told me about you and he’s still, of course, my good friend. He told me about your coins and this coin…

Ryan: Oh, lovely.

John: This coin sits underneath my speaker here. So when I do all these interviews and at my business desk, I’m always able to remember but, can you just share with our listeners why Memento mori, and you could live life right now means so much is something that we all should keep in mind as we move through this journey?

Ryan: Well, I think the point about the pandemic stands. Is it, it sort of, it put and stoic relief, how fragile life is. How you really can’t take anything for granted? How things can change in an instant? The stoic wanted us never to lose sight of that. To remember that we’re mortal, to remember that we’re not in control, to remember that life has a definite end. Every single person who’s born will die. When that is? Is an open question, but it could be five minutes from now, it could be 50 years from now. But how are you gonna spend that time? Who were you gonna be? What decisions are you gonna make while you’re still in control? Again, those are the important questions.

John: For our listeners and viewers who wanna buy these coins, you can go to the dailystoic.com. Sign up for Ryan’s newsletter. You can buy this book. You can buy it, of course, at the Painted Porch, or you can buy it on Amazon, Barnes & Noble, and all great rip bookstores, both physical bookstores and online in the United States and around the world. Courage Is Calling: Fortune Favors The Brave. Ryan was kind enough to sign a bunch of copies for us. We’re gonna be giving them out during our Thanksgiving special. Thank you, Ryan Holiday. You are making a huge impact on this planet. You also made a huge impact on me and my family. Thank you for this time. We’re really grateful for all that you’re doing.

Ryan: John, thank you so much.

John: Thanks, Ryan. 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, livestreams, and much more. For more information on Engage or to book talent today, visit letsengage.com.

John Shegerian: Welcome to another edition of Green Is Good, and we are so honored to have with us today Phil Lisotta. He is the Senior Director of Architecture of Qualcomm. Welcome to Green Is Good, Phil.

Phil Lisotta: Thank you very much. Nice to be here, John.

John: Great to have you today, and you represent one of the great brands in the entire planet – Qualcomm – but before we get talking about all the great work you’re doing at Qualcomm, I want you to share with our listeners first, Phil, your journey, your story leading up to joining Qualcomm and then how has it been since you’ve been there.

Phil: I think it – my journey if you will – started back when I was in college at Carnegie-Mellon University in Pittsburgh. Everything starting there is focused on the environment and sustainability, building correctly. After college, having worked at multiple different architecture firms, I ended up here in San Diego and worked for an architecture firm that had Qualcomm as a client and I designed one of their first LEED Gold buildings. Then I came on board and started working here about – what was it – eight years ago now.

John: Eight years ago. Before that was green architecture something – when you were in college was green architecture already being discussed and that was something on your mind, or has that been a recent phenomenon evolution in the last 10, 15 years?

Phil: No. I think – it might not have been called “green architecture” at the time, right?

John: Right.

Phil: I mean, that was back in the 1990s.

John: Right.

Phil: But it was always a focus, right? I mean energy, sustainability, building your building in a way that is responsive to the Earth – I think – has always been a tenant of Carnegie-Mellon’s design program. Then, it has just been continuing throughout my career. I think it’s finally getting to the point where pretty much every single architect in the world is paying attention to this now.

John: So you joined Qualcomm about eight years ago. You are the Senior Director or Architecture for Qualcomm. What does that mean? What does “Senior Director of Architecture for Qualcomm” mean? And share a day in the life and a year in the life of what you’re doing right now.

Phil: You know, I ask myself often, what does that mean because my role is really very wide here at Qualcomm. In-house, we have a significant team that supports our design process. It starts with space planning, strategic planning, looking at what we call the “butts in seats.” How do we organize those people? Then it leads to the design side of things of how do we design the space? How do we pick the seats that those butts go into? Then looking at the mechanical systems, electrical systems, working with the facility’s maintenance team to make sure that we’re picking the right equipment. Then it goes into the construction management aspect as well. I have a fairly robust team that really focused on are we building this the way we really want to build it? So it’s a very wide organization, and most companies really don’t have that type of breadth, and I’m grateful to have a team that has that technology.

John: How big is a team like yours?

Phil: Over 30 people. Closer to 40.

John: Wow.

Phil: Yeah, it’s actually, really, a small multi-discipline architecture firm.

John: Right.

Phil: And it’s global too. We’re focusing on projects all around the world. It’s not just here in San Diego, where our headquarters is, but all of our locations around the world.

John: Right. And sustainability. We’re so appreciative you’ve come on the show today. As you evolved as an architect, when did all the facets that you’re talking about whether it’s the chairs that people are sitting in or the water that they’re drinking, the quality of the air that they’re breathing in the buildings that you build – when did the whole 360 start filling in for you? Was it during your time in college, or was it some sort of epiphany, or people you met along the way that further sparked your interest in this, Phil?

Phil: Well, I think one of the jobs that I had after college – I worked for an architecture firm and then I left that firm and I went to look for a landscape architecture firm. I worked there for about three years, and they really wanted me for my project management aspect, but I remember going in there the first day going, “What am I doing? I know nothing about shrubs and trees?” and I was a little concerned. But having worked there I really realized that the environment is connected to the buildings that we design and that outside-inside sort of dichotomy is super important. I think that’s really where it started for me. But once the USGBC really started pushing the LEED program – I think – is when I realized that it was a much more multifaceted design solution. I had the great opportunity to do Qualcomm’s first LEED Gold building here when I was working for an architecture firm here in San Diego and that’s – I think – sort of where Qualcomm – it started before I got here that they were focused on this as an important part of the facility’s business.

John: Talk a little bit about the Pacific Center. I know I’m interrupting you.

Phil: Don’t worry.

John: The Pacific Center. Was that the first building you worked on or when?

Phil: No.

John: When was the Pacific – OK.

Phil: No, actually, the Pacific Center is our latest building that we’ve done. We have multiple LEED facilities and we have a lot of other facilities that we just didn’t do the LEED certification on, but we feel that they meet or exceed most of the LEED certifications. But the latest project at the Pacific Center – we call it “Pacific Center” because it is actually on Pacific Center Boulevard here in San Diego – that project is over 380,000 square feet of our newest location, which we really started about three years ago. We started it with our employees, saying, “What do you want in your new building?” We sent out a survey and connection to nature, natural ventilation and light were the three biggest things that our employees really wanted.

John: So you really started it from the ground up. You were listening to your constituents – so to speak – which are your coworkers and employees, and wanting to know what they wanted for their workspace. But workspace is really a misnomer nowadays because it’s really a living space. They’re living there so much of their lives you wanted to hear from them how to create the best environment for them to be working, living during the day.

Phil: Absolutely.

John: That’s so cool.

Phil: And we realized being here in San Diego that being in a building is also being outside of the building. We have such wonderful weather that capturing that was a big tenet of one of the things that we were trying to do.

John: That is so interesting. For our listeners who just joined us, we’re so excited and honored to have Phil Lisotta. He is the Senior Director of Architecture of Qualcomm. To learn more about Qualcomm and all the great things they’re doing in sustainability, go to www.Qualcomm.com. Phil, talk a little bit about you got the feedback from your colleagues of what they wanted. Talk a little bit about, then, the process of planning and then building this – this is a Gold or is this a Platinum LEED certified building?

Phil: It’s Gold, actually. It’s Gold.

John: Got it. So talk a little bit about building then, planning and building this building.

Phil: Sure. So we worked with multiple design team members, right.

John: Sure.

Phil: Where we hired architects and engineers. We have a lot of that staff on in-house as well so we really worked together to guide us to a solution that we feel really excels. The natural light and additionally water use, especially here in California. 

John: Yeah.

Phil: Was extremely important to us. So we had a bunch of bullet points on the wall, and we kept going back to that during the design process to make sure that we were meeting or exceeding those goals, and we were very successful in doing that. I think this was really the first project that we took a holistic approach and really looked at how that connection to nature and the sustainability was going to hold out. It was really important for us. I think if we hadn’t gone back and forth during the design process to make sure we were meeting that I think we would have missed some things. But we were able to do it, we were able to do it on budget and on schedule, and the employees that have moved in there this past January are pleased as punch so.

John: Phil, what does the process take? For a layman like me. You did the survey. Now you have the facts and the figures. You have the big data in front of you, and now you’re sitting with your fellow architects and it’s time to plan and build. From the time you got that data to this January, when your colleagues were moving in, how long was that whole cycle?

Phil: It was about three years in the making and it really started with multiple master plans. We tried lots of different options like “what is the best way to use this site?” The existing site had three buildings on it to begin with and a parking garage and lots of parking lots and we said, “We really want to change this to a more pedestrian space.” So that sort of pre-prototyping – if you will –

John: Yeah.

Phil: Of different master plans took us quite a few months just to do that. That was even before we actually designed a building. It was like “how does the site really react to that?”

John: Wow.

Phil: Then it gets developed further and further and further, and you would keep narrowing down our solutions to where we feel that we came up with a great architectural design of the buildings as well.

John: And for our listeners out there to learn more about what Qualcomm does in sustainability it’s – when you’re on your website, which I am right now – sustainability is part of your culture and DNA. It’s very obvious at Qualcomm. Can you share with our listeners what does that translate to in terms of the practices that are implemented across the offices that you build for them?

Phil: Well, I mean, I think we look at the environment – at least on the facilities side – is it super multifaceted? There are ways to look at what kind of retrofits and improvements that we can do to minimize our energy usage, our water usage, what kinds of designs can we do in our data centers to reduce that energy use, and it goes all the way to providing electric vehicle charging stations for our employees. We’ve actually won – for almost 10 years in a row – awards from the City of San Diego and the county for recycling programs that we’ve provided here at the company. So it’s really from everywhere. We look at it on all ends to the point where we got rid of water bottles in our refrigerators and we provided everybody a reusable water bottle. So every little bit helps and I think utilizing all of our employees’ ideas and ways to save and ways to minimize our impact is huge. And I think our design lately has been looking at more natural daylight for everyone, better ergonomics at their work station, better ways to minimize their energy usage in the labs where a lot of our work is being developed and providing options for people in different ways that they work. I mean, the whole millennial discussion – we could spend an hour on that alone, right?

John: Exactly. When you said they’re “pleased as punch,” that really struck me, and I’m sure our listeners, because you really listened to them so they should be – in theory – pleased as punch if you built what they were asking for and it all turned out to be that integrative. Their comments and their wishes turned out to be a building that really exemplified what they were looking for and that is fascinating to me. That’s fascinating.

Phil: It’s interesting, though. Even though I say “pleased as punch,” you can’t please all of the people all of the time, right? So- John: Of course. Phil: And there are always views about the guys that do have a little bit of a problem with the design. They’re the loudest, right?

John: They’re the loudest.

Phil: Yeah. But I think, honestly, way more than 80 percent of the people have – based on occupancy surveys that we’ve done – have said that they really prefer their new workspace over their old workspaces, and I really think that natural light and natural ventilation are the two biggest impacts to that survey. John: The silent majority is pleased as punch, and that is good enough for all of us. I love it.

Phil: Yeah.

John: So let’s talk about three things. Air quality. So you say there is indoor-out – explain the ventilation thing, and how do you get the best air quality, which everyone is thinking about nowadays? How do you get to ensure the best air quality for your colleagues inside the office space?

Phil: Sure. So, like I mentioned, San Diego is a wonderful place to be. Our weather is just perfect. And, even more strangely, this building’s location makes it even more ideal. So it is just far enough away from the coast to not be too moist, but it’s inland just enough to get some warmer air.

John: Right.

Phil: So we have a weather station on the building – actually, we have multiple – and it’s constantly looking at the current conditions both air quality, if there are particulates in the air, humidity, temperature, wind and direction. And if those sensors all align and the weather conditions are good, the air conditioning will enable the employee to go over and push a button which opens up the windows, turns off the air conditioning, turns onto strictly evacuation mode and allows that to bring that fresh air into the building.

John: Whoa.

Phil: If the climate conditions change, the windows will automatically close and go back to the air conditioning mode.

John: Wow. I love it. That is really cool. Another important topic that of course we are the nation that the world is talking about now but you’re living in a hotbed of it down in – we’re all living in a hotbed in California but even on a micro discussion you’re getting a lot of publicity in San Diego with the big desalinization plant that is going in. Water. How do you ensure water conservation in the buildings, in the structures that you manage and also build and retrofit?

Phil: Sure. And in all of our newer buildings we’re definitely using better than the standard low-flow fixtures.

John: Right.

Phil: I mean, a no-brainer. But a lot of the stuff that we’ve done on the Pacific Center site is looking at water in a different way. The City of San Diego really requires us to minimize our water being put down in the drain – if you will.

John: Right.

Phil: So we have a lot of bio swells, a lot of biophilia stuff going on on the site to minimize our water being treated or needing to be treated. Capturing a lot of the water on the site – if you will – to feed the plantings and by specifying the correct plants in the first place so that you don’t have to overwater. But even in all of our other buildings we’re making retrofits to all of our toilets and our sinks and showers and that’s a significant impact. But even more so utilizing the city’s reclaimed water system has been a huge benefit to us. So instead of using potable water in our air conditioning systems and our chiller plants, we’re utilizing the reclaimed water that the city provides and minimizing that potable water use in those areas.

John: So you’re speaking of like the recycled grey water and things of that such?

Phil: Yes. Exactly.

John: Got it.

Phil: I think that’s the majority of our water usage in our buildings is through our air conditioning and our chiller, and by minimizing that – the potable use – to instead use the reclaimed, it’s a big savings.

John: You know, Phil, you mentioned a very hot topic a couple minutes ago, and you said we could spend an hour on it and I’m sure we could. We’re down to the last two minutes. Talk a little bit – though, in a truncated fashion – of the millennial opportunity. With you building these beautiful buildings and listening both to the natural environment in San Diego but then to the constituents and colleagues that you have at Qualcomm, does that make recruiting better and easier for your HR department of the millennial generation because you’re building such great and wonderful and sustainable properties? And does that also then further drive home – in a physical sense for a technology company – that you’re so progressive and forward-thinking in terms of sustainability and is a place that those Millennials should be working at?

Phil: I don’t have any hard data on that, but I can tell you the year before – well, actually, the year that we started designing the building-

John: Yeah.

Phil: Some of the vice presidents of the organization that was going to go in to the new building said, “We lost interns that left a few weeks early because they really didn’t feel connected to their co-workers.”

John: Yeah.

Phil: And I took that hard and I said, “We need to change the way we’re designing our space so that they can remain engaged with their co-workers and their bosses and their employees,” right?

John: Right.

Phil: And since then, the design – I think – has evolved and we’ve paid attention to how the millennial generation works differently than all the other generations. I think that we’re doing a better job of it but honestly I don’t really have any data specifically saying that “hey we’ve recruited the best guy because he said he saw the building.”

John: Right.

Phil: But I think it’s very positive, and I’d go out to the buildings a lot and I talk to employees and I try to understand what is working and what is not working for them and I see the younger they are – I hate to do this because it says that I’m old but – the younger they are the more likely they are working in weird places. I mean, they work anywhere, right? They’re connected through their wireless device, which, thankfully, Qualcomm helps enable. But I would never think to go work on the couch that’s a lounge chair that’s off on a balcony, right? But they have no concerns taking their laptop and going there and working there for the day.

John: Well, Phil, thank you so much for spending time with us today. Phil Lisotta, the Senior Director of Architecture from Qualcomm. To learn more about what Qualcomm is doing in sustainability go to www.Qualcomm.com. Phil, I wish I could work out of one of the buildings you designed and built. And thank you for being living proof that Green Is Good.

John Shegerian: 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: Welcome to another edition of the Impact Podcast. I’m so honored. This is our first show ever that we’ve done an interview, in about fourteen years of doing this show, from Israel. So, welcome to the show. Oshik Efrati, he’s the co-founder and CEO of HomeBiogas. It’s an honor to have you today.

Oshik Efrati: It’s an honor to me, too. Thank you, John. Pleasure to be here.

John: As you just said off the air when we were chatting, just for truth in advertising, we’re connected because we have the same big brother. Ron Gonen is our big brother, with Closed Loop Partners. It’s an honor to be connected with such a great company on the other side of the world.

Oshik: You’re right. It’s a great honor to be part of the Closed Loop mission.

John: That’s right. Oshik, we want to talk about all the great work you’re doing at HomeBiogas, but before we get there, can you share a little bit about yourself? Because there’s so many entrepreneurs that watch this show and listen to this podcast. They say, “I want to be the next one. I want to be Oshik one day. I want to solve a big problem on this planet.” How did you get started? Where were you born and where were you educated?

Oshik: All right. First of all, I’m a father of two. I have two little kids. One is a five and one is seven years old. We live in Israel. I was born in Israel. My education, I studied Marine Biology. During my studies, I already started to invent products. At the beginning, it was tanks for filters or water purification filters for outdoor use. I discovered that I am good at it. I like it. I like to develop things. I love to solve problems.

John: When you were growing up, was Mom and Dad, were they inventors? Were they business people? What did they do for a living? What informed you and your childhood?

Oshik: Actually, my parents are immigrants from [inaudible]. My father was a gardener and my grandfather was a farmer. Actually, we’re not highly educated. They were simple people, hardworking. As a kid and a teenager, I was working with my father a lot. My father gave me a lot of responsibility. When I was a teenager, he already gave me a responsibility to run projects, sometimes complicated projects. He also gave me space to do mistakes. I think I learned a lot from it. After I finish high school, I went to the military like all young Israelis. I had the privilege to serve in an elite unit. That was actually a special unit and I was in this special unit for five years. After two and a half years, I became an officer. I was a commander of a team and then the commander of a platoon. I learned a lot during this time on leadership and actually managing complex situation, go through challenges, leading people to–

John: Excuse my ignorance. As an American, I’ve learned that the elite units are often in Israel. The Mossad, was that part of the group you were part of or some other elite unit there? Help me out.

Oshik: The Mossad does not belong to the military. In the military, there are mandatory three years. Everybody needs to serve for three years. Women actually are serving too for two years.

John: Wow.

Oshik: Yes, and because I was in a special unit and I was an officer, I stayed for another two years so in total, five years.

John: That’s what informed your leadership style and you learned a lot about leadership when you were going through that experience.

Oshik: Yes. Sure. It shaped my perspective on how to lead people and how to make them follow you. It’s all about self example, courage and values.

John: That’s really true — the courage and values. Now, you had great experience, you had great values growing up with family that tended to the earth, farmers and people that worked on the earth. Some of my in-laws are farmers. They come from a farming background. There’s great appreciation from your family with regards to the planet. Now, you learned leadership skills in the military. What was your aha moment that said, “Okay. I want to take my background and my skills that I’ve learned and want to be an entrepreneur.” When was that moment in your life?

Oshik: Yes. This has happened even before the military. I think it’s something that was first, when I was sixteen, I was already entrepreneur. I run small business of cleaning cars, and then taking care of people’s gardens. But I think that in the military, the patriotism to protect the country was very strong. When I finish the military reserve, this patriotism of taking care of only my country become bigger. It’s become bigger and wider to taking care of earth. I was traveling, actually, for two years around the world after I finished my military. I was in Africa and in the South America, Central America, Europe, U.S., Canada, and see different cultures. I saw beautiful places. After this trip, my perspective, I think I was not only Israeli or Jewish anymore. I was more open ,more universal.

John: You know what I call that? It’s so fascinating you said that because it’s so interesting. When you meet people that never travel out of their own city or country where they grew up, they have a limited view. But because you traveled, you went from like you said, just being an Israeli citizen and now, you became a global citizen.

Oshik: Exactly. For example, when I was in Africa, I’ve seen every day… I’ve been one year in Africa. Every day, I’ve seen the line of women that are going back from the forest with woods on the head and little children on the back. Actually, at the beginning, I thought that it was really romantic. Beautiful thing. They live on a natural way. But then, you start to understand that, actually, they are coming home and when you visit them in there small homes, you see them cook. Actually, you cannot stay for more than one minute. Amazing women because the smoke that the fire is making is actually killing. One hour of cooking is like smoking four hundred cigarettes.

John: Really? Oh my gosh.

Oshik: Then you discover that it’s actually causing the death of four million women and children every year, only from cooking. I discovered that it’s a massive cause of deforestation. Forest is the life of the world. Let me understand that it’s not romantic at all. It’s a community problem and someone needs to do something about it.

John: When did you have the aha moment with your partners? How many partners do you have, Oshik? How many partners do you have?

Oshik: Gladly, we have local partners today. At the beginning when we started the trip, we are three founders. It is in the air. We are good friends. This is very, very unique. We are partners, not only the business but we are also very, very good friends. We share the same values and we share the same vision.

John: Now, how big is this problem? You decided to tackle the food waste industry, the food with the composting issue of recycling food waste. How big is this problem, Oshik, of food waste in Israel and around the world?

Oshik: The food waste, first of all now we are in the time… We are living in a very… This year is a very special year. Actually, 2021 is a turning point on the way we are understanding. The world is understanding the climate change. It’s a turning point. It’s the year where governments, organization, and people understand that the climate change is something real. We need to change our behavior to tackle it. From that perspective, which is the most important one for me, food waste is… Greenhouse gases, the most little greenhouse gas is methane. It’s the strongest, one of the strongest greenhouse gases. Now, seventy percent of the methane is produced from food waste. Seventy percent of the methane is produced from food waste. If you can treat it in a way that will eliminate the methane that comes out of it, the benefit for the planet is huge. Now, another perspective, food waste is just growing year by year. We throw a lot of waste. We throw billions, more than one billion tons of waste a year. The collection of waste…

Now, we are actually… Most of the world is working on the linear economy. You buy the waste from… You buy the food from the supermarket. You eat some of it and then you have food leftover. You have food waste. You throw it to the trash can. Then a truck is coming and pick it up and take it far away. Sometimes, it can drive for four hours to a faraway length field. Actually, most of the waste is going to landfills and it go to the ground. And then the gas, the methane gas is going out to the atmosphere. Now, the solution that HomeBiogas is bringing is transforming from linear economy to circular economy. The food we bought from the supermarket or we even grow ourselves, we eat some of it with. The food leftover, we will put it in the HomeBiogas system? The HomeBiogas system will break down the organic methane and will produce a biogas. The biogas is composed from methane. The biogas we will use for cooking or for heating water so–

John: Let me understand this. You not only remove the methane, which is the harmful part of the food waste, but you’re then creating energy out of it. You’re returning something for beneficial reuse in this planet so we don’t have to further destroy our planet with more non-sustainable energy sources.

Oshik: Exactly. We are tanking the problem and turns it into a solution.

John: I love it. For our listeners in our and in our viewers who just joined us, we’ve got Oshik Efrati with us. He’s the CEO and co-founder of HomeBiogas. You can find home biogas at www.homebiogas.com. Oshik, what year did you found this company? You and your partners, what year did you come up with this idea?

Oshik: We founded the HomeBiogas at 2012.

John: That’s important because you just made a great point that 2021, and I fully agree with you, is our turning point where the world is finally waking up that the science is real. Climate change is real, and we’ve got to do something now before we let this beautiful planet burn down. How were the first nine years? Was it very difficult getting people to listen to you and understand what you’re trying to do, how big the problem was and how good your solution was?

Oshik: That’s a great question. Actually, at the beginning, when I was telling people about what we are going to do, they didn’t really understand. “What? You’re going to produce gas? To do trash cans? What are you going to do?” When you were explaining to them, they will look at you as three-headed or something like that. They don’t really understand. When I’m telling them… I was telling them it’s a new technology that we are developing, it’s a startup. It’s was something strange. We felt and we are still feeling that we are a pioneering that this as huge mission, a huge mission much more bigger than us to do here. It’s a mission-driven company. At the first year, yes, it was hard and the we needed partners. We needed investors. Only people like Ron Gonen and the Closed Loop were tensed enough and open enough with the same mission and the same values. By the way, it’s beautiful to see along this journey how the Closed Loop become big and the impact they are doing. Yes, so I think along with these nine years, almost ten years, we became from pioneer that is pushing our solution. Now, people are looking at us as heroes. It’s very nice because suddenly you get invited to podcast with John and you get invited to meet the Prime Minister.

John: I heard. Congratulations! In the last couple of weeks, you’ve met the Prime Minister. How is that? How did that work? How did that feel?

Oshik: It felt good. It felt really good. Mostly because, for me, the understanding that the leadership of Israel and the leadership of the world, the leadership of the U.S. President Biden now took the in climate change at the top priorities. It’s so important and it’s not only important for us, it’s important for our kids. It’s a very, very good year for this subject.

John: Now, your technology, I assume, is proprietary. It’s something you and your partners invented that doesn’t exist anywhere else right now.

Oshik: Yes, like every technology, of course, there are competitors. Of course, there are alternatives. We bring something very unique and we still invest a lot in innovation. I think it’s in our blood to innovate and improve ourselves.

John: Right. Your great invention, your great company now turns the methane of food waste into an energy source. Have you developed this for a home use, Oshik, or is this for commercial or is this both?

Oshik: We started with the homes. The first mission was to bring solutions to developing countries, in the places where I told you before. Africa, East Asia, those places that they don’t have energy for cooking so they use firewood. The first product that we developed was a HomeBiogas system for families. It’s still very successful. We got customers to use this, the families in more than one hundred countries around the world, probably in Africa and East Asia, in India, Nepal, Mexico, Brazil, the U.S., Australia–

John: Is that the map behind you? Changing people’s lives all over the globe, is that where all your systems are?

Oshik: Yes.

John: Already? All over the place. Wow!

Oshik: Yes, so we started with families and then the next stage was to tackle the problem of industrial kitchen works. Industrial kitchens are responsible for huge amount of food waste. They also need to pay for the collection. The cost of treating the waste is going up year by year and the regulation against taking the organic waste into landfill is become strict. Those industrial kitchens are looking for solutions. Industrial kitchen including the hotels, restaurants, universities, hospitals, they pay a lot for collecting the waste. They also pay a lot for energy. We bring them now a new product. Actually, it’s a new product that we worked on for the last three to four years and just started the implementation of it. It’s a very innovative product, beautiful. We put it near a restaurant or near the industrial kitchen of a hotel, the food will taste is going directly to the biogas system. The biogas system treats it, convert into biogas that goes back to the kitchen as energy, normally, for either heating water or electricity. It’s also producing liquid fertilizer for using it for local use.

John: Are you selling this all around the world now or only in Israel? Is this for sale? If I’m watching you right now from Paris and I have a hotel or restaurant, can I buy your system right now for my restaurant or hotel in Paris?

Oshik: For now, we only launched it in Israel. Next is we’re going to bring it to the U.S. This is the next market. We are going to do it together with the Closed Loop. We already have a very, very interesting projects that we are processing them. A very, very interesting projects. Even project that we haven’t thought that we will do like multi-family houses.

John: If I want to put your system in my house in California just for the home use, when will it be available to homeowners in the United States and other parts of the world to buy for our home use?

Oshik: Now, we have three channels of sales. One is online. You can buy it online. You can all wait and we ship it to you. Secondly, we have distributors that are representing us. Now, we have distributors in twenty countries around the world. Third, we are doing projects with international organizations. It can be like the UN or WWF, but for California for now, you can buy it online.

John: That’s exciting. Take your entrepreneur hat off and put your salesman hat on. Now, when I was going to buy solar for my house, I want to buy it to save the world and plan it, but I also liked that I’m going to save money because now, I’m going to have solar on my house. Is there a similar sales approach to HomeBiogas? Not only am I doing something good for the planet, but will it save my family money or is it cost-neutral? How does that work for a family or a hotel that wants to buy this and thinking about the return on investment for the environment, but for also the organization that buys it?

Oshik: Yes, so the good thing is that it’s not only helping the environment, but it’s also saving costs. The return of investment is normally less than two years.

John: Wow. It’s like solar. You’re really following the same solar model.

Oshik: Yes, we’re working on a Model. That is a win-win for everyone.

John: I love it. I just love it. Wit a second now. You’ve developed this great thing. You’re sitting in Israel. You’ve got all sorts of distribution and sales opportunities. When you and your partner sit in a room together and you dream about how big the problem is and what your solution is, how is this going to work? The problem sounds huge. I mean the problem of food waste sounds massive actually, and it doesn’t get a lot of TV or media attention unfortunately. It’s not very sexy. Talk about your solution and the opportunity to solve this problem over the next ten years.

Oshik: Yes, our mission is to bring a revolution to the existing way of treating waste. Organic waste is only forty or fifty percent of the waste. Once you take care of the organics, the other can be recycled. Actually, it’s part of a bigger revolution of recycling all the waste we are producing. At the beginning, we developed system for developing countries. Now, we took it to institutions. The next stage, we’ll bring it to multi-family houses and to advance houses. Eventually, we want to bring solutions to people to recycle their waste to save money on energy, save money on waste collections, and to make it affordable and available.

John: That’s beautiful. You’re going to democratized the solution. Your system will democratize the food waste problem. It will be the food waste problem solution that you eventually democratize around the world.

Oshik: Once you understand that the food waste has value, you cannot throw it away. It’s like money. It’s only paper. Now, I have here a paper. You don’t throw ten dollars to the garbage like how we throw waste. Why? Because it has value. Once you have the same… Just to understand, one kilogram of waste, which is something like what you have left over from cooking lunch for your family, you can create one hour of cooking gas. From this waste, you can put it in the biogas system. It will produce gas that will enable you to cook one hour. It’s a lot.

John: How about the big waste companies like Waste Management Republic Services? Are they great opportunities for you, too, to work with them so they can recycle food waste on their [inaudible] and other places so they don’t have to throw this into their landfills and take up space in their landfills anymore?

Oshik: Yes. Sure. Sure. All sources of food waste can be treated. Almost all sources of food waste can be treated on site. Eventually, that’s the future. This is where the world will go. There would be no reason to collect it and take it to a landfill.

John: This is going to help shift us, as you said, generationally, from a linear economy, which you and I grew up in, to a circular economy that our children and grandchildren will live in.

Oshik: Yes, exactly. The linear economy has started not long ago and it’s destroyed our planet. We’ll go back to the circular economy with solutions, technological solutions that actually will improve our life, will make it cleaner, and will also reduce cost, that will be more economical.

John: For our listeners and viewers out there, we’re so honored to have with us from Israel today Oshik Efrati, CEO and co-founder of HomeBiogas. You can find HomeBiogas and buy their great products at www.homebiogas.com. Oshik, tell me the truth here. When you and your partners are sitting together over dinner or lunch and you dream about this amazing solution you’ve created, are you going to become the Tesla of food waste recycling?

Oshik: First of all, we have bigger dreams and I believe that we came here to fulfill them. About this, it’s interesting because now, actually, these days, there is the biggest experiment of living on Mars. They took a biogas system to this experiment. You can see astronaut are using HomeBiogas.

John: Come on. Is it SpaceX or which company is using it to go to Mars with? Is there a certain company or a bunch of different–?

Oshik: Actually, it’s a huge project that they chose it, from all over the world, there are participant astronaut that come and they do it in desert in Israel. They use HomeBiogas–

John: That’s exciting. Congratulations! I love it.

Oshik: [inaudible]. Maybe one day we will bring HomeBiogas to Mars.

John: I love it. What’s the next step? What do you want our listeners and viewers to think about? Do you want them to go on your site and buy a system for their house now or do you want if they work in a restaurant or a large facility, a stadium or some other place that creates a lot of waste to contact you? What’s the takeaway for our listeners? If you love to give them points of action, some calls to action to help become part of the solution and to help support your great opportunity and venture.

Oshik: First of all, everything stopped with awareness. Be aware that after we throw the waste and the food waste to the trash can, try to understand where it goes next. Understand the problems it creates if it goes with the truck to a landfill. The next stage is try to find solution to reduce the waste. The next stage, find solutions to recycle it or, even better, upcycle it to use the waste as a source for something new, so the energy or power source as a new raw material. If you need help to recycle your food waste, we are here. We love to help you. It doesn’t matter if you’re a family, a business, a restaurant, a hotel or businessmen that want to create something new with us. We are here to help you.

John: Oshik, what I find with great people like you, great leaders like you, is you’ve mastered a form of courage. Like you said, you learned in the military about courage. Obviously, you’re applying it as an entrepreneur. It takes it takes a lot of courage to do what you’re doing, to not go work for somebody, to actually go try to solve a big problem. Talk a little bit about the courage that you learned about and are exhibiting it in your company. What can our next generation learn from you about when you’re called, when the call comes, because we’re all going to get called in one way, shape or form, how to make sure you’re ready to answer the call? Whether it was when you’re in the military or when you had this epiphany to start home biogas, how do you know how to answer the call? How do you have courage to answer the call?

Oshik: Okay. I think that we came here to this planet to do something meaningful with the years that we got live here. Do something, meaningful, some fun. Sometimes, it will be challenging. Most of the time, it will be challenging. The courage can come only in places where you have fear. Fear is part of the process and the courage is only to help you to go forward, not to stop and go backwards. Now, I think that our generation and even more the young audience that is looking at us, people that finished universities now that are looking for their next career, I think this generation will not go only for a career that will bring or looking for money or I don’t know. I think this generation has now a mission to fix what the old generation has done wrong.

This podcast is about the impact. If you look twenty or thirty years ago, businesses only care about doing money. I think at the beginning of 2000, it was starting to speak about “Do no harm.” Then it became “Do money and do good,” which is now the impact. You can do money and do good. But if it’s not doing good, if it’s not… The impact now in this generation, if it’s not doing good, so you don’t want any part of it. You will not buy those products. You will not support it. This is the future. I think, if I speak, if we have young entrepreneur, so people that are looking for the next career, I think this generation has a mission now to bring solutions to make the world a better place on climate change, on actually a lot of subjects that you can do good. The good news is that there are many opportunities to do good and do money.

John: Oshik, I feel like we really do have a same older brother like in Ron, but I feel so close to you in terms of your mission. You’re so right. The next generation is learning from people like you that it’s more than just a paycheck or profit. It’s about purpose. It’s about purpose and you’re a great example. I can’t wait myself to have a HomeBiogas system at my home and and tell my children about what you’re doing so we get it in their home. I want to thank you for being on today’s show. I love the statement above your head there. Changing people’s lives all over the globe. HomeBiogas’ Oshik Efrati. You can find HomeBiogas and buy his great products or contact him about what you need and what help you need wherever you are on the world at www.homebiogas.com. Oshik, you’re always welcome back on Impact to continue to share your journey. I really wish you all God blessings and I want you to continue your great mission of making a huge impact and making the world a better place. Thank you for joining us today. It’s my total honor.

Oshik: Thank you, John. It was a pleasure for me. Take care. Hope to meet you in person soon. All the best.

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 Shegerian: Welcome back to Green is Good, and we are so honored to have Mitch Jackson on with us right now. He’s the Vice President of Environmental Affairs and Sustainability at FedEx. Welcome to Green is Good, Mitch Jackson.

Mitch: John, Mike, it’s great to be here. Thanks for having me

John: You know, Mitch, you are amazing. I could take the whole 23-minute segment here and talk all about the awards you’ve won over the years and your journey. What I like to typically do with our great esteemed guests when we start is ask you to share your journey. You’ve been at FedEx 20 years now, and now you’ve ended up in a really great spot. You’re doing amazing things in that spot as the Vice President of Environmental Affairs and Sustainability. Can you share please your journey, 20 years at FedEx, and how you came to this position?

Mitch Jackson: Sure, John. I’d be glad to. I think one of the things that’s helped me is I’ve done a number of different things with FedEx. I’ve been out in the operation and seen how the movement of our customers’ goods occurs. I’ve been in our properties department and helped in the design of the facilities and the like, and then I’ve been doing environmental management issues for quite a few years now, sometimes more years than I’d care to imagine, but I think that broad base has given me a good understanding of what the company does and how to try to integrate sustainability into that core structure.

John: You know, this summer, you released the FedEx global citizenship report. Can you share with our listeners a little bit what that means and why you’ve released that, and what you want our listeners and the people who read that great report to take away from it?

Mitch: Well, I think transparency is a big part of what companies need to do with respect to sustainability. I mean, they need to be providing information to their stakeholders about how they’re performing. I think in this particular case, what the report does for us is it gives us the ability to share how we’re progressing on environmental sustainability with our external stakeholders, and also to show that the input and the value that it brings from our team members, our internal stakeholders. I think that that is probably a very big piece of this, which is to show this is what we’re doing, this is why we’re doing it, and this is how we’re performing in undertaking those initiatives that we have underway.

John: For our listeners out there, Mitch and his colleagues have created an amazing website. If you’ve got your laptop or iPad close by, Mike and I are on it right now. It’s www.environment.fedex.com. You talk about transparency. This sets the mark. This sets the bar in terms of your videos, in terms of your articles, in terms of how it’s organized. It’s truly so well done, Mitch. Mike and I have been on it the last couple days prior to the show, getting ready for the show, and we just wanted to tell you our hats are off to you. This website is just one of the best we’ve ever seen.

Mitch: Thank you for that. It’s a balance. You’re always trying to present information that is needed by stakeholders, but you don’t want to overwhelm them with information to where the narrative is lost by just simply reams of information. The way you convey it, I think, is as important as what you’re actually conveying.

John: Right. It’s so well put. One thing we’ve learned while prepping for this segment with you is that FedEx serves over 220 countries and territories around the world, and when you start adding up the planes and the trucks that support those facilities, talk a little bit about sustainability and just your fleet of planes and trucks, and how they interrelate, and you can make such a huge impact.

Mitch: Yes. Think about it for a second. We move the goods for our customers, but in essence what we’re doing is we’re helping to connect a world. So, when you’re serving 220 countries and territories, ultimately, that’s what you’re doing each and every day. And, so we realize that what that does is not only does that have an environmental impact that we have to address, but it also has a social good that it provides, and that’s providing access to the developing world to be able to reach markets so that they can improve their standards of living and improve their GDPs as well. But with respect to that environmental impact, when you’re operating and moving over 8 million packages a day, you’re going to be operating a number of global sources. In our case, it’s primarily aircraft vehicles. So, what we’ve looked to do is we’ve looked to focus initially, and what we did back in 2008 when we set our goals, is we set goals to reduce emissions in both of those and to improve the vehicle fuel efficiency of our vehicle fleet as well because we had to do that in order to be responsible. If you think about it, our role is to connect the world in responsible and resourceful ways, so we had to approach it from that angle to begin with.

John: You are sitting at such a fascinating position, given the times we’re in, and as the sustainability revolution is just picking up velocity. Now you have the huge opportunity working with FedEx, in terms of environmental affairs and sustainability. How do you not let it overwhelm you, Mitch? How do you pick the right investment priorities with regards to environment and sustainability?

Mitch: Well, I think two words come to mind right off the bat, and that’s materiality matters. If you’re focusing on the issues that you use each and every day in your operations, that’s a great place to start. For us, again, we started with aircraft and we moved to vehicles, and now we’re focusing on issues around renewable energy in our facilities. We’re focused on the sourcing of the paper that we have, and then even how we build our facilities. So, we’re building in our FedEx Express operations, we’re building to LEED, leadership, environment, energy and design. Those things, if you focus on what your impacts are and where you can have the major influence, which is what we do, then you can start to really get at the issue. I talk about something called practical environmentalism, and I define that as strategic and transformational environmental stewardship that adds value to the organization. It’s comprised of four different building blocks. It starts with performance. You have to be performing. It’s the foundation. Transparency, to be reporting and explaining what you’re doing and why you’re doing it and how you’re doing. Third is leadership. Figure out how to lead in the areas that you are having influence in, and take action in that respect. And then innovation. You have to be able to innovate and find new ways of doing things. I wrote a piece recently, and I said sustainability is not answering the question, “What have you done for me today?” It’s “What have you done for me for tomorrow?” And, so that innovation is a key part of that.

John: That is just great. One of the great things in your report and also the culture at FedEx is the people who work there, the FedEx team members, and their relationship to the environment and your sustainability and social programs. I read somewhere a great quote by you, where you said, “Sustainability is really a team sport.” Can you elaborate on that, with regards to your team member engagement and citizenship, and the evolution that you’ve fostered at FedEx?

Mitch: If you think about FedEx, we’re a service-oriented organization, so our team members are central and core to what we do each and every day. The couriers out interfacing with our customers, the pilots and the drivers who move the goods, as well as all of the support staff behind the scenes, make it an integrated approach that helps move those more than 8 million packages a day. Sustainability is no different, and if you’re actually trying to integrate sustainability into the organization, it has to be a team sport. What we tried to do with this report is we tried to show how the different work groups out there are actually helping us achieve our goals. We used case studies to show that, to be able to highlight the efforts that they were performing on. The key issue is we want team members engaging in discretionary effort that helps make the company better, better in our service that we provide our customers, better in the returns that we give to our share owners, and also the environmental benefit and environmental performance that we can give back to the communities that we operate in. Without that teamwork, without team members being a part of that, then you really don’t have an integrated program, and it’s not going to reach the full potential that it would have if you had done so. So, for us, what we’re trying to show in this report and also trying to illustrate to the team members is you’re critical to success of sustainability at FedEx. Keep doing what you’re doing.

John: That’s just great. A lot of big companies like yours have taken the 2020 approach, where they’ve created big goals for their company and have empowered their employees and team members to work towards those goals. Can you share a little bit about what are your goals for 2020 at FedEx, and where are you going to be focusing the next two or three years to help you get to those goals?

Mitch: I’d be glad to. It’s a good question because there’s a lot about goals as you set out in business and in the space. Back in 2008, we were the first to set goals in U.S. transportation logistics around reducing global aviation emissions and improving vehicle fuel efficiency. By the way, that actually followed our push in 2007, where we testified to the U.S. Congress, calling for fuel economy or fuel efficiency and greenhouse gas standards for commercial vehicles because they didn’t exist at the time. What we did is we set these 20 by ’20 goals, and the reason we did it is because we had to give a goal or a direction that we needed the operations groups to head, to meet. For us on both of those goals, for aircraft and for vehicles, it requires two different things. It requires asset replacement, so replacement of existing vehicles and existing aircraft, and it also requires changes in our operations, how we actually operate and perform each and every day. I think what I’ve been very pleased at is we set these goals in 2020 because they did involve asset replacement, but because of the early and rapid improvement in our operations, we are well on our way to achieving those goals and to achieving them early. John: That is just great. Mike here with me is more of the aviation expert, but I read some of the facts and figures in your report with regards to the replacement of 727s with 757s and also your new use of the 777s and the fuel consumption reduction that this has brought. Can you just share with our listeners some of these wow numbers, what you’re really accomplishing? I’ll tell you what. I almost fell off my chair when I was reading it. I want you to share because I’m sure your version will even be more full of great statistics than what I was reading. I’ll tell you what. Just from this, it’s just so tremendous how much FedEx is moving the needle with regards to the environment and sustainability revolution.

Mitch: I’m glad to, but Mike, John just said you were the aviation guy. He did pretty well talking about the different models of aircraft.

MIKE BRADY: Yeah, he sure did. It’s like, come on, John. Who’s zooming who here?

Mitch: So, I’ll use both of those examples. I’ll start with the 757s replacing the 727s, which are part of our domestic narrow body fleet. The replacement of that 727 with a 757 results in a 47% reduction in fuel consumption per ton carried because what we’re doing is we’re actually operating more efficiently with that 757 aircraft, and we can carry more freight as well. So, we actually get a big bump in fuel economy, but we actually have more payload capacity as well. What that really means is not only do we have a 47% reduction in fuel consumption, we have a 47% reduction in emission as well per ton carried. On the 777 freighter, the beautiful part of that aircraft is that it’s used mainly in our international operations. Because of the increase in payload and range, it results in an approximately 18% improvement in fuel economy, so therefore reduction in emissions as well. The beautiful part of that aircraft is that because of that extended range, it allows us to have a two hour later window or drop-off time in Asia in order to meet the same delivery commitments back home, so customers in Asia have now two more hours in order to drop off packages out of cities served by the 777 in order to get it back to the States or Europe or the like. I’ve talked about that being like the Holy Grail of sustainability because you’re improving your business capabilities, improving the choices for the customer, and reducing your emissions and being a better steward for the environment all at the same time.

MIKE BRADY: Mitch, that’s just amazing because any time that anybody can give anyone else two hours extra in a day, that is the Holy Grail. That’s amazing.

Mitch: Right. That comes into that issue I was talking about with respect to innovation. It does get at leadership too because we were fortunate to be the first to be able to use that 777 freighter, but without that innovation by the manufacturer, you wouldn’t have that ability. So, innovation is often a critical component of a good sustainability program.

John: The aviation examples were just tremendous, and thank you for sharing those, Mitch. Can you share a couple other business benefits that FedEx has experienced with regards to the deeper integration of your CSR program into the company?

Mitch: Sure. I’ll use the vehicles. We talked about the vehicles just a couple minutes ago. On the vehicles, we really kind of follow what we call a reduce, replace, and revolutionize strategy. What that really comes down to simplistically is that through routing efficiencies, making more stops per mile to deliver packages, we’re able to use less vehicles for the volume that we have, so we reduce the number of vehicles that we have to use. The second piece is to replace, and that is actually to use the right vehicle for the right application or route. So, dense urban delivery areas would have larger vehicles with more cargo capacity, but therefore would have lower fuel economy, but they’re not really driving that many miles. Rural routes, which have more miles driven and less packages delivered, use the most fuel efficient vehicles that we can put into operation to meet the needs there. The revolutionize piece is to find new technologies that can bridge the gap between both of those urban and rural routes. For instance, we started working in 2000 with Environmental Defense Fund to bring hybrid electric vehicles to the marketplace because they didn’t exist in the commercial vehicle sector. That’s been a work in progress. We’ve now been working with respect to bringing full electrics into the delivery fleet. Hybrid electrics can work in some of that medium-range distance area. The electric vehicles tend to work very well in the urban environments, and so those efforts have been part of our leadership and innovation aspects of what we do. Our Chairman and founder, Fred Smith, has co-chaired an organization called the Energy Security Leadership Council, that has pushed for electrification of transportation. He’s also a member of a sister organization called the Electrification Coalition. As I’ve said earlier, we were also the first company to actually call for commercial vehicle standards around fuel economy and greenhouse gases because we realized that that approach would help drive the technical innovation and integration of these new technologies in the vehicle fleets.

John: Wow. Your Chairman and CEO’s great work outside of the company has even come back and benefitted the company with regards to energy policy.

Mitch: Absolutely. Not only benefitted the company, but is helping to benefit the country.

John: That is great. That is just amazing. Mitch, there are so many things to talk about. For our listeners who just joined us, we’re so honored today to have Mitch Jackson on, the Vice President of Environmental Affairs and Sustainability at the great company FedEx. If you have your laptop or your iPad open right now, go to their website, www.environment.fedex.com. Mike and I are on the website right now. It’s beautiful. I see here the EarthSmart program. Talk a little bit about EarthSmart. I know you launched it a couple years ago. What does that really mean, and where do you want to go with that?

Mitch: I’d be glad to. EarthSmart was our program that was intended to engage our team members in innovating and creating new services or products for the marketplace with sustainability in mind, to engage our team members to operate more responsibly in the workplace itself, and then it was also to be part of our volunteerism and philanthropic efforts around environmental sustainability. So, it’s really comprised of three programs, our EarthSmart Solutions program, which is about looking for new ways to do things. Our electric vehicles, our hybrid electric vehicles, fit into that category. The EarthSmart At Work was about operating more efficiently, recycling, focusing on energy reductions, etc. in the workplace. And then EarthSmart Outreach was that volunteerism and philanthropic area. In that, we’ve been working in several different areas. Probably one of the biggest examples of how that work has come to fruition is we’ve been working with the World Resources Institute’s Embark program. That’s their Center for Sustainable Transport. They and FedEx have been working in Mexico to try to provide some learning around how we move packages to some of the municipal bus systems in the large megacities in Mexico because the idea is if we can provide any learning or education for how we’re moving packages, maybe it will benefit them in moving people, where you’ve got millions and millions of people in the city each and every day. We feel that that actually benefits in several areas, including safety, congestion, environmental issues, and also in competitiveness for those cities to be able to compete in the global marketplace.

John: Got it. Mitch, we’re down to the last two or three minutes, and I want you to talk a little bit about the CSR reporting. You have a couple years behind you in this, but you have a huge future in front of you. What does the evolution look like the last three years, and where are you going with this in the years ahead?

Mitch: I think when you first start your reporting, you’re actually just trying to capture data. You’re really looking to put the systems in place to capture data, and that will continue as you add more metrics to the mix. But I think what we’re trying to do now is we’re trying to use that data for these metrics that matter and are material to the company, and we’re trying to use it in a feedback loop, if you will, to basically help us do better in managing those initiatives that we have underway, to do it in an even better manner. So we’re doing well, but there’s always room for improvement, and I think that that’s where we’ll continue to focus. What can we learn from how we’re doing so that we can do it better as we go forward?

John: A couple last parting thoughts. You’ve done so much so far. When we talk to great leaders like you who are at the apex of huge organizations, we always come away with a message that it’s a process. It’s never over, and it’s an ongoing process. What today are you most proud of at FedEx, of accomplishments you and your team have done already?

Mitch: I think that I’m most proud of the fact that we’ve been able to engage our team members, to have them understand the value that this brings to the company and to our customers and our share owners, and that they’re actually the ones that are out helping to bring this to fruition, to do this. We’re helping, but they’re the ones that are actually accomplishing this. I think the second thing I could say is we’re not following what I refer to as pinball leadership. What that is is we’re trying not to simply react to what others say is important. We’re actually trying to work on what we know to be important in the company, and to focus on those issues, so that we’re actually making a difference and actually helping to change what’s possible for all of our stakeholders.

John: That is so well-put. Mitch, I just want to say again Mike and I are so thankful for your time today. We know how busy you are. You are always a welcome guest to come back on the show and talk about the tremendous sustainability evolution at FedEx that you guys are doing, and how you’re moving the needle in such a big way, in such an important way. For our listeners out there again, to see what Mitch and his colleagues are doing at FedEx, please go to www.environment.fedex.com. Mitch Jackson, you are an inspirational sustainability leader and truly living proof that green is good.

John Shegerian: 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 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: Welcome to another edition of the Impact podcast. This is a very exciting edition of Impact. We’ve got Max Elder with us. He’s the co-founder and CEO of Nowadays. Welcome to the Impact podcast, Max.

Max Elder: Thank you John. I’m so excited to be here.

John: Hey, listen. Before we get talking about Nowadays, you’ve got a great product, which I’m a fan of and I’ve eaten your great product. Talk a little bit about yesterday. I want you to talk about where you grew up, how you even got here, talk about your journey leading up to founding this great new plant-based company.

Max: Okay, we’ll go back.

John: Okay.

Max: So, I grew up in Massachusetts, a coastal town in Massachusetts. My first job was working on- I was a lobsterman. Unfortunately, brutal brutal work. If you’ve ever worked on a boat.

John: I heard it’s brutal.

Max: It’s horrible. I regret it, but it was a good, good work for a young 15-16 year-olds. So, I grew up on the coast. I grew up with environmentalist parents actually. My father is a big environmentalist. We were one of the first families to buy Prius when they were available.

John: Really?

Max: And there was a strong ethos of social justice. My mother was a judge and my father, of course, was focused on sustainability at every turn. So, that led me to try to figure out how to have a positive impact in the world.

I went to college, I studied Philosophy, actually. I have a bachelor’s degree in Ethics.

John: Wow!

Max: And, spent a year studying at Oxford, trying to figure out how to live a good life, how to be a good person. And when I was there, I got wrapped up with some animal ethicists. And actually, when I left Oxford was invited to become a fellow at a think tank called the Oxford Centre for Animal Ethics. And for the past, I guess, at this point 9 or 10 years, I’ve done academic work on sustainability, animal welfare, and food systems. And, that was how I started to think critically about our relationship with to non-human animals. Fast forward a few years and I decided that I wanted to have impact. And when you look at the landscape of our relationship to animals, the way that we farm them is by far, the biggest challenge in the world. So, thought I would try to dedicate my life towards alternative proteins, and actually trying to create a future world alternative proteins are no longer considered alternatives.

So, I spent 5 years in New York City doing research and strategy in grant money. And a philanthropy foundation, moved out to San Francisco and spent 4 years doing strategy and innovation consulting across the global food value chain at a sort of hybrid think tank slash creative consultancy called The Institute for the Future. And then, last year, jumped ship and met my co-founder Dominic Grabinski and decided to start Nowadays. So, in many ways, I feel like Nowadays has been just 10 years in the making of my professional career.

I actually started in 2015 trying to build a cultured meat company back when there were only, I guess 2 culture meat companies incorporate in the world. I was really interested in seafood and aquaculture, very concerned about it. And decided I didn’t have enough experience to start a company back then; wanted to get more experience across the global food value chain. So, instead of starting that company, moved up to the Bay Area and started consulting for food companies. And that’s how I realized that none of these companies know what they’re doing that. That it’s not about knowing the answers to any of these questions, it’s about knowing what kinds of questions to ask in the first place. And, that’s, you know, if we want to have impact at scale and want to solve some of these problems across, labor, environment, health, that we need radical innovation. And the startup ecosystem is just perfect for that.

John: You know, first of all, it’s so interesting, what you’re saying. I think it’s important for all parents to hear what you just said about your parents, those seeds of greatness and of creating change-makers, like you, really are set from a very young age. They must be extraordinarily proud of what you’re doing right now.

Max: I hope so. Yeah, they definitely, I caused them some trouble when I was younger, for sure. So, hopefully…

John: What kids don’t do? Don’t be so hard on yourself.

Max: But yes, they instilled everything in me. And for better or for worse. When I look at the food system and a lot of the problems around health and access are not due to anyone’s merit. Your health outcomes and the social determinants of your health, in the United States, are totally dependent on the ZIP code that you’re born into. So it’s also good motivation for me and for Nowadays to focus on how we scale healthy, humane, and sustainable foods to communities who really need it. And, it’s really informed how we think about brand-building.

John: It’s interesting.

Max: Honestly, not just my parents, but also our ZIP codes. Because it’s interesting, there’s a lot of shame and blame in the modern food system and there’s a lot of shame and blame involved in health and eating junk food. And, we think that it takes herculean efforts in the United States to eat well and that instead of shaming and blaming people for their dietary patterns, we need to create healthy options with good value propositions that do jobs that need to be done for people and give people a better choice.

John: Well, if that’s so well said, and I think you’re so right. And I think democratizing healthy options is really where it’s at right now because we are at an inflection point. I believe that healthy options like you’ve created with Nowadays are more imperative than ever before because we’ve created such an environmental burden, in terms of what’s coming at us environmentally speaking. Look at the air problems we’re having in California. Just with all the fires and stuff. These are unprecedented times for a living and I know that’s a little bit of a cliche, but I promise you at 58, I can tell you it’s really not. We are at an inflection point right now.

Max: Yes, and it’s one that I think a lot of people are feeling acutely. And you know, this inflection point, I live in San Francisco. And last year, before I started Nowadays, I was sitting at home. My phone vibrates for a warning that there was a curfew at nights, because we weren’t allowed to go outside. And, you know, the state was on fire. There was a helicopter flying over my apartment because of riots for racial justice down the street. And, there’s a pandemic and I sat down for dinner and I just couldn’t help but think the food that’s on our plates is so deeply interwoven with all of the problems around me right now that I need to do something. And I don’t need to do something in a year; I don’t need to do something in 5 years. I need to do something yesterday. So, I spend every waking moment trying to solve these problems because we don’t have much time left, I think to wait.

John: Max, I so agree with you. So you meet your partner and how did you come up with what you were going to tackle, these delicious chicken nuggets at Nowadays and for our listeners and our viewers and our readers, please go to eatnowadays.com. I’m on the website. It’s really one of the nicest websites I’ve ever seen, eatnowadays.com. I’ve tried your product. You were kind enough, your people at your company, your colleagues were kind enough to send me these products. I want to eat 3 pieces, I ended up eating six because I loved it so much. And so, why did you choose to tackle chicken first? And how did you come up with the name and the whole concept?

Max: Yes. Okay. Well, the first day, John is, you can have 6, you can have 12, you can have 24. The beauty of Nowadays is that we make very clean, very simple plant-based meats. A few simple familiar ingredients and an unparalleled nutritional profile. And that’s really the ethos, that guides everything we do at the company. So, Nowadays was started originally because we realized that when we look across the landscape of alternative proteins. In the US, they account for less than 2% of the overall meat market. And to me, that’s a rounding error. That’s nothing. I mean, despite one of the biggest IPOs in the past, like, you know, decade. Despite some of these companies already saying, one and a half billion dollars of private equity. And despite a lot of media coverage, and a lot of conversation, and just like the Poltergeist, we are a rounding error compared to the meat industry. We can’t afford to continue to be less than 2% for much longer.

John: Right.

Max: So we looked at that problem and my co-founder, Dominic, and I tried to figure out, what is the barrier to really reaching mass adoption adoption for alternative proteins. Why can’t plant-based meats be 10% of the market or follow the alternative dairy market, which is now upwards of 15% of the overall dairy market, why aren’t plant-based meats there yet? And we came up with 2 reason: one, is that plant-based meat companies today don’t have a value proposition that speaks to a growing flexitarian audience. What I mean by that is when you actually look at the number of vegans and vegetarians in the United States, that number has stayed steady forever. It is not significantly increasing. What is increasing is the growing number of flexitarians across the country who are occasionally swapping out meat product with an alternative. Those people, when you ask them, what motivates them their primary motivator is health. We are in a public health crisis. We are in a global pandemic. And Americans are trying to eat a little bit better occasionally. But when you look at the landscape of these products, they are certainly more sustainable. They are certainly more humane. In terms of health, it’s kind of a wash, they’re better marginally, but it’s hard to communicate. And when you see these big brands saying things like, we have 40% less saturated fat, you know, I’m not convinced that that’s enough. So we realized we need to make plant-based meat products that are as good for you as they are for the planet. The second barrier, we’re convinced is price. And we’re convinced that there’s too much complexity in novel forms of protein production and in complex manufacturing. And so, we started out with the very innovative approach to product development and manufacturing, to be able to really compete with chicken, which is the most consumed protein in the world, the most consumed protein in the United States. And, by the way, the cheapest.

John: Wow.

Max: So albeit, artificially cheap, the industry’s been amazing at externalizing costs. But nevertheless, we need to compete in this commodity market. So, we’ve figured out a way to make plant-based meat cheap and make plant-based meat healthy. And if you can make it cheap and healthy and delicious, then we think you can reach mass market adoption very quickly.

John: Got it. And then how did you come up with the great name Nowadays, lovely name?

Max: A lot of late-night whiteboarding, to be honest.

John: Why?

Max: We looked at Wilton a bunch of the brand names used across the space and I love them all. They’re very masculine. They’re very product-focused. There’s a lot of, you know, we’re doing the impossible, we’re going beyond where, you know, starting a rebellion with rebellious foods. Those are all wonderful. But we wanted to create a brand that was much more accessible and approachable and non-judgmental. Nowadays has a sort of evergreen presentism to it. In 10 years, Nowadays will be about the present and the here and now. But it also acknowledges and have, in a non-judgmental and somewhat folksy way like that there’s something different about today. Nowadays, we don’t eat as many animals as we used to. Nowadays, we think about the connection between our plates and the planet, you know. So it’s a very, it’s an acknowledgement of something new and different. It’s kind of folksy and very accessible and it’s inclusive. We are trying to make a brand that people can really identify with. So Nowadays came up as a way that we were thinking about taking a sort of modern twist on classic favorites, that Gainey’s breaded fried chicken products, like nuggets and tenders and patties and making them healthy, humane, and sustainable. And doing so, in a way that people feel good about. And I think I think we’ve landed on something that works.

John: That’s s so wonderful. So you just so you whiteboard the name. You have this wonderful product, you and your partner have created. Where are you now? What did you have to do- all ventures take capital.

Max: I have capital. Yeah.

John: All dreams need the fuel to really help the fire keep burning and grow. How did that work for you? Where did you decide to raise capital from? And how is that part of your journey been?

Max: Yeah. Well, all ventures need capital. They also need an immense amount of luck. And we have benefited greatly from it. And very, very in a very talented team. So we have been very lucky in our ability to raise capital from wonderful folks, primarily funds from around the world who are focused on alternative proteins or health and wellness better-for-you brands. And the real answer is that, we found a few funds early on who knew us, as individuals. And who saw an early idea of vision, a prototype. And were willing to place a bet on our ability to execute. And that took a long time. So actually the first investor who wrote a check into Nowadays is VegInvest Trust. It’s run, the managing director is a woman, Amy Trakinski. And I’ve known Amy probably for the past, gosh,8 or 9 years. And Amy and I met many, many moons ago at a conference actually, in San Francisco. We’re both were living in New York, but we met at a cultured meat conference in San Francisco. And we hit it off. We started talking. And we kept in touch. And that was when I was working at a philanthropy foundation in New York City. It was early, early, before Nowadays was even a hope, a dream, anything at all. And we kept in touch over the years. And eventually, I called Amy and said, I’m going to start a plant-based meat company and I need your support and I know that you know me and I know you’ve watched me over the past, you know, 6 or 7 years do all these interesting stuff across the food system. And I know that you know that I can make this something that’s very successful with impact. And she said, yes, I know and I’m ready to write the first check. And once you get that first check in, it’s a whole different ball game.

John: Yeah, and you know, you bring up two great points. First of all, the power of relationships and building trust and nurturing those relationships over years. That’s such a powerful statement. And it’s so true. And so many people forget that very critical element to becoming a successful entrepreneur.

Max: It’s everything. It’s everything. I don’t know how Nowadays would have been able to do anything that we’ve done over the past year, year and a half if not for all of our relationships that we fostered for much longer than the company’s existence. And to be honest, John, we’ve made a lot of mistakes. Some big, big, bad mistakes, including mistakes with people like Amy. And it takes the long-term trust and relationships to make sure that those mistakes don’t cause you a lot of trouble. So, when you have that trust and when people know you personally, it’s a different kind of conversation; people are much more forgiving. And you need that when you’re trying to build because the one thing that I know is that, I don’t know what we’re doing. And I know we are going to make mistakes over and over and over again. The good news is we learn from them every time. The bad news is they’re, mistakes, nevertheless. So you need people to appreciate and respect you and know that you’ll learn from them and you won’t make them again and know that your vision and your heart are both in the right place.

John: And I agree with you and mistakes are just lessons in the journey. Just long as they’re not fatal mistakes.

Max: That’s right.

John: If you avoid fatal mistakes as an entrepreneur, they’re just good lessons and you just keep rolling. And if you’re transparent about it, you’re also very transparent about the importance of luck. And there’s no venture that I’ve been involved with that has been successful, that hasn’t leaned on luck. And a lot of entrepreneurs don’t admit that though. And that’s really not a good way to be because luck has so much to do with a lot of good things that happen. It’s good to say that upfront.

Max: Absolutely. Luck and privilege, John, I mean, we’re very privileged to have the relationships that we have. I know, we’ve worked hard for them. But when you look at the landscape of venture capital, and when you look at who’s getting investments, it’s very inequitable. So, we know that, we see it. And, and it’s for every Nowadays, there are plenty of great ideas for every one of me. They’re amazing entrepreneurs who don’t have the same opportunities. So if anything it makes us feel like we have more of a responsibility to do an amazing job and to take the luck and privilege that we have and turn it into something impactful.

John: So, if you’ve just joined us, we got Max Elders with us today. Max is the CEO and co-founder of Nowadays. You can find Max and his partner and his colleagues and their great products at eatnowadays.com. Max, where are you in the journey now? I know, I was lucky enough because your colleagues were kind enough to send me this wonderful package that arrived at my house about a week ago. Where can our listeners and viewers and readers find your products and where do you expect to go in the months ahead here?

Max: So everyone can buy our products direct-to-consumer. So you can go to eatnowadays.com and buy our nuggets. If you’re a first-time buyer, we have a 25% discount, which is very large. And we ship 2 days direct to your door.

John: Wow!

Max: So, online, we are in restaurants across the country and are scaling that. We are very excited about our restaurant partnerships. And we are in conversations with some large quick service restaurants, to some fast food chains. We love food service because of the size of the market. We’re really focused on having impact at scale and that requires us to find channels with massive volume. So we’re very excited and hopeful that we’ll be included on some very big menus in the near term. And then ultimately we’ll be omni-channel. We need to be omni-channel. So we are submitting for category reviews for retailers right now. So, soon will be everywhere. Right now, we love being online.

John: It’s great.

Max: To me, the most amazing thing, John, about shipping direct to consumer is for an emerging brand, we get to build relationships directly with our customers. So I know who buys our product. I can email them. Once we end this conversation, I can go online and I can call someone who bought Nowadays nuggets this morning and learn about them. Learn about why they bought maybe for a second time or a third time or a fourth time. Ask them how their kids like the product and that kind of feedback is just so critical for an emerging brand. So we love it. But we also love our restaurant partners and we were very excited for retail. So everywhere.

John: Max, yeah. And because chicken is the number one protein on the planet, I assume that once you democratize your Nowadays’ nuggets throughout North America, the international opportunities are all there for the taking for you.

Max: Absolutely. And you know, John, we’re not just a nugget company. We launched with nuggets because nuggets are a really fun category.

John: Right, they are.

Max: Americans love nuggets. Kids love nuggets. And we’re really focused on, we want to break into the mainstream family meal rotation. But we’re really a plant-based meat company and we’re focused primarily on chicken first. So we’ve got 3 other chicken skus in the pipeline, that we’re going to release very shortly. One before the end of the year, the second in Q1 of 2022, and the third probably also in Q1 of 2022. So there’s some other fun chicken products. But one of the things that’s quite important about Nowadays is that we’re focused on this segment of the meat market, where we think we can have impact, which is the, for lack of a better word, the junk food category. So, in many ways, these breaded and fried frozen meat products, nuggets, tenders, patties, popcorn chicken.

John: Right.

Max: They have pretty poor chicken, actually in the products. It’s very low-quality meat. The nutritional profiles are horrendous. The ingredient lists are terrible. And what we’re doing is targeting those categories and we’re reformulating those products with just a few simple ingredients and an unparalleled nutritional profile so that we can lead with the value proposition. That these do not only taste good, but they make you feel good. And that you can be proud to put them on your table for dinner or to feed them to your kids. And I think, you know, when we talk to a lot of people who eat animal-based nuggets, everyone knows that they’re not good for you. No one is proud to feed their kids nuggets at dinner. It’s a convenience food.

John: Right.

Max: It’s a cheap way. And so, if we can help people, we can enable and power and embolden people to feel better about what they’re putting in their bodies but still have the delight of an indulgent category like nuggets. Then we think we can win.

John: I so agree with you and I want to go into that. Well, I gotta tell you, I felt I feel like a kid again when I eat nuggets. I mean really. And it’s fun because it’s finger food. I could dip it in what I want and it’s easy to prepare and quick to prepare because we’re all short on time now. But I loved on your package and I know this was just sent to me as a special thing. But on the side of it, was your ingredients. So while I was eating the nuggets, I was focused on the ingredients and I was blown away that you only have seven ingredients and you’re gluten-free, soy-free, GMO-free. Talk about why only 7 ingredients, and why that’s better for us, not only from an environmental perspective, but just better from us as humans and consumption perspective as well?

Max: Now, we love our ingredients stack. It’s actually one of the things we’re most proud of. The taste is number one. We’re very, very proud of how the product taste. But it’s more impressive after you taste the product, to look and say, well, what is this made of? This tastes too good to be true, it’s seven ingredients. One of which is water, by the way, which is the number one ingredient in most alternative meats. It’s the number one ingredient in most meats.

John: Right.

Max: But after that, we use things like our protein comes from really from organic yellow pea protein. It’s a particular peas farm in the midwest. We’re really focused on making an ingredient list that people can read and pronounce and think that these are familiar ingredients. So nothing foreign and wild, nothing crazy. No binder stabilizers. No fillers. No preservatives. None of that junk. And it’s primarily because when you look across the landscape of the category, these products have 30, 40 ingredients. There’s added sugars. I mean, there’s sodium bombs. And you’re talking 500, 600 milligrams of sodium per serving. I’m having a heart attack when I read that. And so clean and simple ingredient list translates to a really unparalleled nutritional profile for us. And that, for us at Nowadays, we believe that that really unlocks an ability to speak to a really broad segment of consumers and of flexitarians. So, we’re hyper-focus on the ingredient list.

The other kind of elegant solution that a short, but ingredient lists and enables for us, is simplicity of manufacturing. And one of the things that I love is simplicity. It turns out that simplicity is very complex. And, especially when we think about the future of food and the future even of the alternative protein world. Things are getting really complex and I spend my life in this space. I study this stuff and there are new branded proteins that are coming online from companies. There are new novel forms of bio-fermentation that are creating new kinds of products coming online. People are doing wild genetic engineering of different plants to express animal-based proteins, like casein, to create dairy products. There’s just a massive, massive amount of innovation that translates to a lot of complexity. There are blended products on the market today, that are partially plant proteins and partially animal proteins. There’s just like there’s a lot. And I think, increasingly that’s going to be hard for consumers to navigate. And we’re trying to make eating well simple and that’s very hard to do. So a simplicity of the ingredient list, I think translates to a simplicity of understanding for consumers about what’s in this product.

The thing that I’m most concerned about is some of these alternative protein products, which I love, and I consume very much feel like fake food to me. They’re cookie cutter shapes. And, and when I talk to consumers, they always say, “Oh, that’s the fake meat right. That’s the fake X.”

John: Right.

Max: And I don’t want anyone to think that these products are fake and they’re not. They’re very real. They’re in fact, if people really understood how some of these meat products are made, we’d know how artificial they are.

John: Right.

Max: But nevertheless, I think like, the overall ethos for us is simplicity and a really easy understanding when you pick up a box in a moment when you need to make a decision, “Is this something I want to try?” We want the answer to be, yes. And we want to lower all the barriers to getting to, “Yes.” And plant-based meats need to lower the barriers for people to try.

John: You’re talking about manufacturing, that’s fascinating, Max. As the pull for your product increases, and as you democratize your great product, Nowadays, and for our listeners and viewers out there that want to find Max’s product, it’s eatnowadays.com. You could order it directly. It comes to you in 2 days. And soon to be found in more restaurants, and eventually retail around North America. But when you one day are going to be selling in Shanghai, in Singapore, and Paris, is contract manufacturing the kind of simplistic and delicious foods that you’re creating, plant-based foods, is that a complicated process to contract manufacturer them as you spread around the United States and around the world? Or is it actually easier than the industrial food state that we live in right now?

Max: That’s a really, really good question. So we are building Nowadays with a strategy to scale very quickly and very cheaply. And the way to do that is to leverage existing manufacturing lines. We, especially for the meat industry, these lines are cheap and ubiquitous, they’re everywhere. And we need to plug into them. So, the really radical innovation that Nowadays, is our approach to manufacturing. We are a meat manufacturer, first, and foremost, ramped up in a CPG brand. So, we have a patent that protects our technology, which is our ability to create whole cuts of plant-based chicken using pea protein. So, we take peas, we figure out a way to make whole cuts of meat. And those pieces of meat function, taste; they are meat. They are just made from plants.

John: Right.

Max: We can then ship those pieces of meat around the world, to all kinds of contract manufacturers.

John: Perfect.

Max: And the finishing line is battering, breading, frying, freezing. The finishing line, John, exists in your office today, I mean, it’s everywhere.

John: Right.

Max: And so, our vision is, in order to scale manufacturing very cheaply and in order to become a global brand very quickly, we need to be able to develop a product that plugs into those lines. Plugs into them very easily. Most alternative meat companies make the finished product, all in one process. They don’t make the meat first and then finish it into a value-added product like a nugget or a tender. We make the meat, and so that enables this really interesting business model of using contract manufacturers and not just specialized contract manufacturers, of course. Most food companies, when they scale unless they’re totally vertically integrated. Do you really want to scale big? You need to leverage contract manufacturers. The problem is that can get very complicated, it can get very expensive, and some of your technology, and your intellectual property can be wrapped up in that manufacturing process. So, we split the production process into our IP is in the manufacturing, and then finishing, those pieces of meats, anyone can do. You can do it in your kitchen.

John: Right. That’s so fancy. So you’re protecting the IP along the way, and also simplifying the process.

Max: Yep, bingo. Simplicity is everything. And simplicity, by the way, John, it saves a lot of money.

John: It saves a lot of money. Is part of your vision and dream, Max, after you’ve conquered the chicken category, will you be producing with your proprietary technology other meats, as well?

Max: Yes. Yes.

John: Good.

Max: We’re very excited about other meats. Chicken, of course, we love because we think that there’s been plenty of innovation done on beef right now.

John: Right.

Max: We think that there still is a lot of work that needs to be done on chicken. And quite frankly, I think that the environmental conversations around broiler chickens are nascent and people are overlooking the environmental impacts. And I think that they’re horrible. And so we’re really focused on overcoming some of those.

But we’re very excited about other animals and other animal-based products because our vision is that, we make food that nourishes, both people in the planet without harming animals, and there’s massive amounts of innovation that needs to be done across the board for that vision to be realized.

John: Max before I let you go today, you have any final thoughts for our young entrepreneurs out there that want to be the next Max Elder, that want to follow in your footsteps and make the world a better place and also make it a more tasty place, as well?

Max: Well, I’d say don’t be the next Max out of there because Max out there made a lot of mistakes and fumbles. I’m sure you’ll be better than the next Max. Maybe the only piece of advice that I have is that, you need to be radically obsessed with a problem that you’re trying to solve. Because I don’t know about you John, but entrepreneurialism is not necessarily my forte. This job is hard. It’s really, really brutal and involves a lot of mistakes, a lot of failure. You’re always doing too much and you’re never doing enough. And so, the type of grit that you need to wake up every day and stay up late every night is unparalleled. And so, you need to find something that you can’t live without, that you feel like, “Gosh, if I can do one thing in life, this is what I need to do.” And not what I want to do, what I need to do. Because it’s incredibly, incredibly challenging.

The other side of that coin though is, it’s the most rewarding thing in the world to wake up every day, and realize that everything that you’re doing, every waking moment, is for a mission that you deeply believe in. It’s not about the money. You’ll probably never make any money. It’s not about the- it’s only about the vision and the mission. And if you are unwavering in your conviction, then you’ll be really successful.

John: I love it. And that’s why you’re great, Max, because you’re relentless, and the relentless will prevail. They will. For our listeners and viewers out there again, I’ve eaten this product. I say it’s great. I promise you, you’re going to enjoy it. It’s Nowadays. You could go to www.eatnowadays.com and order it for yourself directly. Max offered a 25% off first time purchase. And I promise you, you’ll enjoy it.

Max Elder, you’re always welcome back on the Impact podcast to share your journey. We want to have you back on and we’re just so grateful. I wish you continued success, continued good health, and thank you for making an impact and making the world a better place.

Max: Thanks, John. I really appreciate it.

John: This edition of the impact podcast is brought to you by Trajectory Energy Partners. Trajectory Energy Partners brings together landowners, electricity users, and communities, to develop solar energy projects with strong local support. For more information on how Trajectory is leaving the solar revolution, please visit trajectoryenergy.com.