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John Shegerian: Welcome back to Green is Good and today we’re so honored for the first time ever to have Procter and Gamble on. We’ve got Len Sauers. He’s the Vice President for Global Sustainability at the iconic and legendary brand, Procter and Gamble. Welcome to Green is Good, Len Sauers.

Len Sauers: Thank you, John. I appreciate it.

John: Well we appreciate you and we appreciate Procter and Gamble and before we go into all the great work you’re doing at Procter and Gamble, Len, can you share please first with our listeners around the world the Len Sauers story? Talk about how you even got here. What led up to this position at Procter and Gamble?

Len: Thank you, John. I appreciate the opportunity to talk about P&Gs sustainability program. I’m actually quite honored to be the head of sustainability of a company like P&G that sees sustainability as a responsibility and as an opportunity. I’ve been with P&G nearly 30 years now. I have a PhD in toxicology and started with the company back in the late 80s in our product safety organization doing risk assessments for our new ingredients and new products to make sure they weren’t going to cause adverse effects to people or the environment. I developed a great love for that kind of work and over the years, have had the opportunity to advance the science of sustainability through jobs that I’ve had and then the opportunity to work externally developing partnerships with NGOs and governments to advance sustainability so when the job of Vice President of Sustainability opened up, I was a natural fit for it because of the background that I had.

John: Gotcha, and that’s wonderful and for our listeners out there that want to follow along visually and also see some of the great work that Len is doing at Procter and Gamble, you could go to www.pg.com/sustainability. I’m on the site right now and first of all, it’s gorgeous. It’s so well done and laid out and colorful and inviting. I got to tell you it’s a beautiful website and I want to talk to you about the things I’m seeing on it but before we get there, we just passed this week the wonderful yearly event of Earth Day. What did P&G do to celebrate Earth Day this year?

Len: Earth Day, it’s a great day for Procter and Gamble. We try to have Earth Day Celebrations across all of our sites around the world, trying to engage our well over 100,000 employees in this event. We see it largely as a celebration in some ways, the celebration of all the great work that’s being done by P&G employees around the world, the great work being done by our R&D employees as they develop products that enable consumers to lower their environmental footprint, the great work by our people in operations as they drive eco-efficiency in our plants and reduce the footprints of our plants and then the great work that our employees do every day as they lower their footprints within the office space and we take this celebration a step further because it is a unique time where we can educate our employees at the same time, since we have contact with them and we can educate them to understand that the decisions they make every day that they do their jobs that they drive sustainability into the company and can really create a better tomorrow for all of us.

John: I love that, a better tomorrow for all of us. That sounds great. On a macro corporate level at P&G, what are the goals for P&G sustainability on a corporate level?

Len: We try to integrate sustainability into the rhythm of the company’s business because we see it both as a corporate responsibility. We want to grow responsibly. We see that as the right thing to do but we also see it as an opportunity to build the company’s business by driving down costs through eco-efficiency and creating new products that can drive top line share so for us, we’ve set a long term vision for the company in environmental sustainability. We want to ultimately be the company that uses 100% renewable materials or recyclate in all of our products and packaging and have those materials go to plants that are run on 100% renewable energy, have those plants create products that enable consumers to lower their footprint, and then on the backend, have zero consumer and manufacturing waste going to landfills.

John: I love it. That is so awesome. Talk about the journey. Len, you and I know that sustainability is a journey. What does the journey look like leading up to your 2020 goals? How are you going to achieve all the things you just laid out?

Len: Well, if you think about this vision that I laid out for you there, it really comes around three key areas; the idea of conserving resources, the idea of driving renewable resources, and then the idea of finding value in waste so we’ve set a series of 2020 goals that are kind of focused in those areas. One goal, for example, is to replace 20% of all petroleum-based raw materials with renewables so we have basic research programs going on throughout the company with those new renewable technologies. We set a goal of 30% renewable energy by 2020 so we have our individuals working in our product supply organization, finding opportunities to develop solar power, wind power, geothermal power at our manufacturing facilities around the world. We’ve set a goal of 20% reduction in packaging and we have very senior packaging engineers evaluating all of P&Gs packaging today, looking for opportunities to make eco efficiency changes in them and make less packaging, more environmentally friendly packaging. We have 12 of these 2020 goals with programs around each one of them, taking the expertise of senior P&G people and dedicating them towards working towards improvements there.

John: Wow, and I’m on your site here, and again, for our listeners that want to follow along, it’s www.pg.com/sustainability. On the site, I’m reading the words zero waste and our listeners hear that all the time. What does zero waste mean at Procter and Gamble?

Len: This is a program that we have within our manufacturing right now of driving to zero waste out of those sites. Any manufacturing site will generate waste. I mean, it’s just an inevitability and it’s something that happens across our 140 operations around the world. As we started looking at this a couple of years ago, we found that about 1% of the raw materials that were entering a P&G plant were leaving as waste and it was usually product that was off specifications that we couldn’t sell, scraps, maybe ingredients we didn’t use anymore, and this stuff was all going to landfill. Now I use the term 1%. You may not think that’s a lot but for a company the size of Procter and Gamble, it’s a really a lot of materials and it was a true waste and that’s why it’s called waste. It was a loss of value to the company, to our shareholders and it was also a negative on the environment so we set up a program within the company to find value in this waste that we were sending to landfills. We put together a group of a couple of dozen individuals, bright creative individuals that went to each of our manufacturing sites and worked with the people at those sites to understand the waste that was going to the landfill and see if they could find a stream of value for that waste so it could be diverted and repurposed and there’s just been wonderful opportunities created out of that so for example, as you know, P&G makes disposable diapers and we had scraps from the processing there that was going to the landfill. Those scraps now, instead of going to landfill, are being used to make trash cans, parking lot dividers, and hangers. We have a tissue/towel business, which has some paper scraps associated with it. Instead of going to landfill, they’re now being turned into newspapers and legal pads. We had waste from our beauty care plants that is now being reformulated into leather care products and I can give you hundreds of examples of waste at P&G that had been going to landfills that is now being repurposed and diverted into something of value. We’re very proud of the fact that right now, 60 of our plants are zero waste to landfill and although there’s environmental benefit to all of that, I will add one point about the business value of this. This program, over the past five years, has brought $1 billion of value to Procter and Gamble because not only are we selling the waste that used to go to landfills, but we’re not paying the landfill costs so $1 billion in value just by handling our waste better.

John: So really, Len, let’s go back then to the top of the show and recap this. The truth of the matter is that you’re making sustainability part of the DNA and culture of Procter and Gamble, therein everybody there feels good that they’re making a better tomorrow for themselves, their family, their communities, and the world but also there’s a massive economic benefit that your leadership team can turn around and then share with the analysts, the street, and its investors around the world.

Len: You are 100% correct and when you look at it that way, that’s when you’re most successful. We look at sustainability as an opportunity to do good things for the consumer, good things for our business, and good things for the environment and when you’re able to do all three of those things, that is really the sweet spot that ensures success.

John: It’s so fascinating and for our listeners out there that just joined us, we’re so honored to have for the first time ever, Len Sauers, Vice President of Sustainability of the iconic and legendary brand, Procter and Gamble, very important brand. When they do things, people listen around the world and they’re making the world a better place and so let’s talk about this. Five and a half years ago, when I started Green is Good, people would come on the show and they would have to make the argument that going green is not only the right thing to do but it’s not more expensive. The whole discussion has moved now, as you’ve laid out. It’s not even not more expensive. It’s actually a profitable endeavor. As you say, it’s the sweet spot of sustainability.

Len: Exactly and for a company like Procter and Gamble, 4.8 billion people use our products every day so think of the opportunity in something like that, where if you can develop products that enable those consumers to drive down their environmental footprint, you’re making great strides and a great contribution to sustainability but if in the process of enabling those consumers to drive down their footprint, you can enable them to reduce their water use, reduce their energy use, reduce their greenhouse gas emissions, reduce solid waste, you are also providing a value for those consumers so if I think of a product like Tide Coldwater, for example, which we came out with several years ago, that enables consumers to use cold water for laundry instead of hot and still get excellent cleaning performance, you’re causing that consumer now not to have to heat that water in their home. That provides a great value and cost saving to them as individuals so here’s an example of where, for 4.8 billion people, we can reduce their greenhouse gas emissions by having them use cold water. We increase sales by creating a product that they want and then the consumer saves on this by having a reduction in their utility bill.

John: It’s such a win-win-win on every level and that’s so cool about what you do and what Procter and Gamble does is you do lay it out numerically. Four-point-eight billion people a day use your great products and so when you make a decision and when you educate or engage your consumers, you really get to move the needle in all the environmental sectors around the world in making the world a better place but talk about consumer engagement, Len. How do you, in this world of short term memory and social media, and we’ve evolved from Facebook and Twitter now to Snapchat, how do you engage your consumers with regards to your great products? How do you constantly stay in front of them and keep them educated to the importance of what you’re laying out for us today?

Len: Very good question and actually, it is a difficult one to answer at times. P&G has an expertise in consumer understanding and we went through a series of studies to understand consumer attitudes around sustainability and what we found is that there’s a small niche of consumers, say about 15 to 20%, and these are people that are really, really into the environmental movement and to the sustainability movement, such that they are willing to accept some sort of tradeoff, either a higher cost or a decrease in performance, in purchasing products that claim to be green. We find that there is a huge middle stream , main stream consumer, about 70%, they’re really aware. They really want to do the right thing but they are not willing to accept a tradeoff. They will not accept an increase in price or a decrease in performance to use a product that claims to be sustainable and then there’s another group off to the side, again, about another 15% that are just value conscious consumers and really aren’t engaged in this debate so we decided as a company that we were going to focus on that mainstream consumer, that 70%. We thought that’s where we could make the biggest impact but in order to do that and meet the needs of that consumer, you have to enable them to be sustainable but not ask them to accept a tradeoff in cost or performance so when I talked about Tide Coldwater a few moments ago, we actually had to go through extensive R&D efforts to boost the performance of our laundry detergents in cold water because the heat of water does provide some cleaning benefit so we had to give the consumer a product that met their needs on performance and also, it didn’t cost more so it met their needs on value so when we engage these consumers like this, we’re giving them what they say they want when it comes to sustainability and fortunately, with 9,000 R&D people, we have the ability to develop these products that meet all their needs.

John: I love it. That makes so much sense. How you just broke it down makes so much sense. Talking about your great consumers that love your products, I being one of them, my family being one of them, we love talking about solutions on this show, on Green is Good. What are a few things people can do to lessen their environmental footprint when it comes to engaging in consumer goods, Procter and Gamble’s consumer goods?

Len: When I think of environmental footprint, as you just said it, as sustainability person, I think of energy, greenhouse gas emissions, solid waste, and water. Those are those major environmental metrics that kind of drive everyone’s footprint and as we look at our products and how we can develop those, we focus on opportunities to reduce in those areas so you think of Tide Coldwater, really one of our first executions in this area. It helps you save energy. When you save energy, reduce greenhouse gas emissions so the one thing I would tell all of your viewers right now: start washing your clothes in cold water using P&G’s products, Tide Coldwater, Tide Pods. That is the one single thing I think anyone can do that’s simple and really adds a meaningful benefit. We’ve also put out products that reduce water use, for example, our Cascade Platinum, very high performing product for the dishwasher, allows you to skip the pre-rinse, allows you to operate the dishwasher on the eco-cycle, tremendous reduction in water when you do those kinds of habits, thousands of gallons a year that a consumer can save. Our Pantene dry shampoo just came out not too long ago, keeps hair fresh, healthy without having to wash it, saves water there, and I would just add, finally, any product that’s been compacted in some way. Compacted products really provide great sustainable benefits across their entire life cycle. We came out with Mr. Clean liquid muscle, which is a 2.5X concentrated product. That product, in and of itself, because it’s concentrated, has great sustainability benefits, so seek out those compacted products.

John: Got it and Len, we’re down to the last two minutes or so. I read about P&G’s Children’s Safe Drinking Water Program. Can you explain some of the latest milestones you guys have just achieved and talk about water and safe drinking water? Because that’s also become one of the major topics around environmental studies in the world now besides climate change. Having drinkable water is critical. Please talk about P&G’s recent victories with regard to Children’s Safe Drinking Water Program.

Len: Children’s Safe Drinking Water Program, I think, is one of the ones that we are most proud of. There are many, many people around the world that don’t have access to clean drinking water, children, individuals that live in the developing regions. When there’s disaster like floods and natural disasters, clean water becomes scarce and if you think about it, in many ways, drinking water should be seen as a right for all so we have developed the technology that this program is based on that enables you, through a very simple packet, which we call the P&G Purifier of Water, it can be put into the most nonpotable of water and make it drinkable in 30 minutes and we have been working with partners around the world to get these packets, these P&G Purifier of Water in the hands of people that need it around the world, that don’t have access to clean drinking water and we just hit a milestone with this program, which we started in 2004, has just delivered its seven billionth liter of safe drinking water. Seven billion liters now we have delivered around the world.

John: Congratulations.

Len: And as part of the P&G’s Clinton Global Initiative Commitment, which we made a couple of years ago, we have committed to save one life an hour with this program, providing this safe drinking water to children in need around the world .

John: That is just wonderful and Len, I just want to say thank you so much for coming on today and I want you to come back. You’re doing so many great things at Procter and Gamble and our listeners need to hear more about these great things because this is really just another great example of an iconic and amazing brand like Procter and Gamble. When you guys make decisions, the world truly changes. Len Sauers, thank you and Procter and Gamble for making every day better for people and the planet. You are truly living proof that green is good.

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John Shegerian: Welcome to another edition of the Impact Podcast. I’m so excited to have this edition because I’ve got a good friend with me today, Rob Kaplan. He’s the founder and CEO of Circulate Capital. Welcome to Impact, Rob.

Rob Kaplan: Thanks, John. It’s great to be here. Thank you so much.

John: You know Rob, there’s no greater person and for the reason why I do this show than to have you and be talking about all the great important work you’re doing at Circulate Capital. But before we get there, I would love for you to share your backstory, your history leading up to the formation of Circulate Capital, with our listeners and viewer’s information.

Rob: Great. Well, I spent about ten years in corporate supply chain investments. I was in the beverage industry for a number of years, and then I took on a role at Walmart, where I was responsible for supply chain partnerships, investments, and ended up taking over sustainable packaging globally for the company. I moved my family to Arkansas. We were really excited about the potential for scale and impact there. As we started getting more interested in the space of plastic and packaging, we saw a huge opportunity, which was if we improve recycling infrastructure in North America, we could potentially reduce the carbon footprint by increasing recycled content in every package on the shelf at Walmart.

For a company of that scale, that’s when it really starts to get interesting. We were trying to eliminate tens of millions of tons of greenhouse gas from our supply chain at the time. We developed an investment program to focus on that. We anchored it as Walmart and incubated it and spun it off and that is what became the Closed Loop Fund and Closed Loop Partners, which is the firm that I co-founded to take that idea forward.

A few years ago, a number of our corporate partners asked us to think about emerging markets. Some research had just come out that found that most of the plastic that gets into the ocean comes from a handful of countries in South and Southeast Asia. If we invest in recycling infrastructure there, we could cut the flow of plastic pollution in half. That was kind of our founding inset. I would start by landscaping, looking at the pipeline, looking at different countries, and as 2018 rolled around, the whole topic exploded. Suddenly, plastic pollution was no longer this blip on the radar. It had become a top priority for CEOs, Prime Ministers, and consumers all around the world.

And I found myself in a unique situation where while everyone else was kind of just waking up to the problem, I just spent the last year so developing an investment strategy as a solution. Long story short, we decided to accelerate it. It didn’t make sense to run it out in New York, so we spun it off, and I created Circulate Capital in the summer of 2018. We launched Circulate Capital Ocean Fund, which has raised about $100 million. Our investors are Coca-Cola, PepsiCo is our first investor. Unilever, Danone, Procter and Gamble, Chanel, and several others. We’re investing in companies and technologies that prevent plastic pollution in some of the highest leaking countries: India, Indonesia, the Philippines, Vietnam, and Thailand.

John: These are some of the greatest brands in the world that have entrusted you with this tremendous responsibility, but also as you said, opportunity. How’s it been going since the inception? When you sat down, I remember, I literally remember vividly like it was yesterday, visiting you and Ron up in your first office for the Closed Loop Fund, and it was so incredibly wonderful to visit you both, but also so entrepreneurial and humbling because that’s the humble beginnings of every entrepreneurial journey. So when you wrote the business plan for Circulate to spin out, has it been going to plan or how’s it evolved per your original vision?

Rob: It’s been going pretty well. I’d say we’ve exceeded some of our expectations. and then we struggled in other areas. In the first year of investing, we had committed about $40 million, just in seven transactions out of our hundred. So doing seven deals in our first year, 40 million, was beyond our target for our first year of deployment, and that’s been very exciting. In particular, we’ve been focusing on India, we’ve had a tremendous opportunity.

Actually, that’s part of what’s exceeded our expectations, we now see potential to invest another 100 to $200 million in India easily over the coming years. I think Southeast Asia, Indonesia, Vietnam, Thailand, the Philippines, has been more challenging to develop larger deals. So that’s been sort of our new focus. Of course, COVID really challenged everybody in the space and has slowed down a lot of progress. The good news is most of our portfolio, in fact, all of our portfolio companies, are doing well. They were profitable businesses before the pandemic. But growth has slowed. It’s been difficult to really expand it over the last year or two.

John: Rob, going back to- And for our listeners and viewers, we’ve got Rob Kaplan with us. He’s actually doing this interview from Singapore where he lives now with his family. I’m in Fresno, California, the beauty of technology makes us seem like we’re back in the same room again. For our listeners that want to find Rob, his colleagues, and all the great work he’s doing, please go to www.circulatecapital.com, circulatecapital.com.

Rob, talk a little bit about the tipping point? You start this journey in sustainable packaging and plastic reduction at Walmart. It really made a big mark there and then evolved to create the Closed Loop Fund and now, Circulate Capital. Why does it seem like the world has just woken up to what you knew and others knew years ago? Why now is this massive almost over-exuberant, but not over, but corrective exuberance out there in ESG investing with institutions, corporations, and family offices around the world? Explain why it all kicked in and came together at once? If you could explain how the stars aligned, I’d love for our listeners and viewers to hear your take on that?

Rob: Yeah. That’s a great question. I mean, I’ve been working in environmental sustainability topics and initiatives for twenty years, and I’ve never seen the progress, especially within the plastic space, but even in ESG broadly over the last few years compared to the last twenty years. I think there are a few things. I mean, one key part, especially in the space where we work has been through social media. Plastic is tangible, we all touch them every day. It took a few viral videos of a turtle with a straw up its nose and some other terrible things for people to really get that visceral connection. When you talk about climate change, it’s literally invisible. It’s very difficult for people to connect to that same idea, as it is with something that they buy every day and they’re surrounded by. I can’t- I’m sure you figured out these conversations. But people are like are disgusted by how much plastic they have in their household and you know, around them at any given time, and they love talking about it. Yet they don’t stop buying it, of course.

John: Right, right.

Rob: But it’s that kind of change where people are able to connect to the topic in a different way and I think that has really changed. Then on the corporate side, ESG, and the financial industry, ESG has really taken hold in a different way. Once momentum that’s been building, I think expectations of corporations and other private sectors have evolved over the past few years. Thanks to the recession, thanks to the pandemic. Climate change is now getting increasingly urgent. And so a lot of the deals and questions that people I think were let’s wait and see about maybe ten years ago are now coming to fruition.

John: We read about all these wonderful stacks, of course, Tesla leads the way, and then there have been so many others, maybe nine or ten EV autonomous specs that have come out. With regards to circular economy investing, ESG investing, is plastics getting its fair due, or is it still underweight and more capital should be flowing to the plastic solutions like you represent instead of into the 10th or 12th, or 15th, EV autonomous vehicle company?

Rob: Yes, and I’d even broaden it beyond just plastics to the circular economy, which is how do we make a profitable resource out of the resources we’ve already extracted from the environment? Plastic is an example, but metals, textiles, apparel, food, and agriculture, there are many resource loops that remain wide open and are massive inefficiencies. I mean, I think you sort of answered part of your own question there, right? There’s been- one thing that investors are really good at is chasing each other. When they see one deal, they get a lot of FOMO, and they want to be a part of something similar.

That’s part of what we’re trying to do in the space where we operate, is to demonstrate that there are financial returns to be had here that this is an under-invested sector and that in the Crowd Capital in. We do that by demonstrating an investment track record, but also by showing that it’s possible in making these co-investment opportunities available and showing the pipeline, and showing that there’s a lot of opportunities out there.

John: What are some of the biggest hurdles that you have learned in your journey, especially in the last three years with Circulate Capital in plastics recycling and the circular economy? What do you have to overcome to continue to scale what you’ve already invested in, and also to bring more plastics and plastic types into solution-based recycling opportunities?

Rob: When we look at our portfolio, we’re investing in a number of exciting recycling companies across South and Southeast Asia. Nepra is the largest dry waste collection and sorting company in India. They operate in three cities, they build MRFs and sorting facilities. They’ve done three, they’re about to do three more, and the plan is to get them to twenty more cities in the next five years. That’s like a pan-India solution to solve waste problems for a billion people. It’s a really exciting opportunity that no one has really invested in before. Dalmia and Srichakra are building some of the first food-grade, bottle-to-bottle recycling facilities in India. No one’s ever done that before either. You need to buy food-grade. You can’t put recycled content in plastic packaging for food in India because it doesn’t exist.

I think some of the challenges that we’ve seen in the portfolio are what I classify as the growth mindset, right? These are companies that have been profitable today are successful entrepreneurs because they’ve grown organically. They never took on outside capital, they’re family businesses. I mean, you might even relate to some of these in some of your earlier podcasts. It’s a different mindset to go from- actually, we’re going to sell part of this company, we’re going to bring in an outside partner and go from one facility to an extra line to ten facilities. And that’s a big evolution for a lot of these companies and it takes time to get people on board with that idea.

John: Culturally speaking, you’re saying?

Rob: Yes, exactly. Risk tolerance and all of that. So that’s a big part of our portfolio management. That’s where we spend most of our time is helping develop that idea, not just the culture, but like the leadership mindset for the entrepreneurs, the CEOs so they can go there.

John: As you mentioned at the top of the show and at the top of the podcast, Rob. You have some of the biggest brands on the planet that have invested in your fund, Coke and Pepsi, Procter and Gamble, Danone, Unilever, I mean, not only credentials but huge brands. But you also have family offices and private investors. Many funds just choose one of those three sectors to raise capital from and become experts just with that sector. Why did you choose strategically to mix it up and open it up to all three verticals?

Rob: Yeah, great question. I’ve been very proud of the fact that we’ve been able to raise $100 million for these types of innovations and solutions, but it’s going to take much more than $100 million to solve this problem, especially in this part of the world. It’s going to take many, many billions of dollars. We’re only going to get there, that’s the type of capital if the pension funds, sovereign wealth funds, large scale infrastructure funds, the folks who are financing the future of infrastructure in Asia, start allocating capital to waste and recycling in a circular economy just like they allocate it to bridges, roads, and ports. So that’s part of our idea of catalyzing capital is by starting with strategic partners, like the corporates that we’re talking about. Bringing in private investors like family offices that have a personal connection or strategic interest in what we’re doing, but also want the returns, and building pathways to start to engage those more institutional and conventional investors who are currently waiting on the sidelines of the sector.

John: You’re down in Singapore, you can pivot Indonesia, you can easily pivot Indonesia, Philippines, India like you said, the whole Southeast Asia region. This is the top of the second inning, the bottom of the first inning, top of the third with regards to what you think this is going to be in terms of a journey with Circulate Capital and the plastics recycling model that you’re creating?

Rob: Yeah. We aim to build Circular Capital into an institutionally-backed investment management firm where we see ourselves as almost a platform for impact investing opportunities for the region. I think it’s a nascent space out here. It’s nascent in the US, it’s even earlier here. By being able to create a product and platform at scale, we think we can help others move further faster and join along with us. We also think about other regions. We’re talking a lot about Latin America and the Caribbean these days. There are a lot of similarities to the models that we’ve understood and invested in here that we think could be applicable there as well. And obviously, there are similar problems to be solved for.

John: For our listeners and viewers who’ve just joined us, we’ve got Rob Kaplan with us today. The founder and CEO of Circulate Capital. To find Circulate Capital, please go to www.circulatecapital.com. You can find Rob, his investors, and everything he’s doing over there. The important and impactful work at Circulate Capital on his website.

Rob, you know, you started a new fund, a disruption fund called the Circulate Capital Disrupt. Explain how that continues on your vision and mission, but also diverges a little bit and gives you some more- spread a little bit of your vision out a little wider?

Rob: Yeah. As we started to launch Circulate Capital, we started to get approached by a number of family offices, private investors that were interested in our sector but didn’t really have a good way to participate. So as that demand started to build, we decided to create a new fund. And at the same time, we started to see tremendous opportunity on the innovation side. While we are investing in the fundamentals of collection, sorting, processing, and manufacturing, building markets for plastic waste in the region, we also saw an opportunity to bring in new technology that hasn’t necessarily been scaled yet. Innovative materials, digitization and deep technologies, advanced recycling technology that can depolymerize plastics into their building blocks to create higher quality plastic outputs, and turn waste into a greater value. And we saw that we were well-positioned to find those fields, source them, and diligence them, but also understand how they can connect into this region with our existing portfolio. So as all those parts are to come together, that’s why we launched Circulate Capital Disrupt, which is a fund that brings more capital into our existing strategy from family offices and private investors. But it’s also allowing us to invest in some of these more innovations that we think could create a more disruptive impact over the time period of our investments.

John: Last year, in the midst of the global pandemic, you did seven investments. How many have you done through the first half of this year? Are you on track for another seven, or how many do you believe you’ll get done this year?

Rob: We’ll probably do another five or six this year, depending on both of the strategies. We’re really focused on Southeast Asia. As I said, we’re trying to balance our strategy, 50% in India and 50% in Southeast Asia. Now that we’ve been quite strong in India, our big focus is Indonesia, Vietnam, Thailand, and the Philippines.

John: You know, there’s a lot of young people that watch this show and listen to it around the world and they want to become part of the solution. They just don’t want to work for a paycheck anymore. The economy is changing. The workforce has absolutely changed. Even the pandemic probably truncated the change and is expedited as well. What advice can you give for young people in high school and in college that want to be the next Rob Kaplan? That want to go out, and not only make a nice living to buy groceries and pay for the roof over their head, but they also want to be part of changemakers, someone who can wake up every morning and know they’re impacting for the positive to the world and making it a better place.

Rob: Yes. It’s a difficult career path. I mean, I think you can probably appreciate this too, but it’s non-traditional. It’s not like you can do, see that path and say, “Okay, these are the five steps to follow.” At the end of the day, I’m a bit more of a jack of all trades than any particular expert in any given area. But that’s sort of what has been my success. I think the key principle I’ve used throughout all of my careers has been when I’m presented with an opportunity around what I want to do, I asked myself, “Where can I make the most impact?” And that’s been kind of how I made that decision, how I went from non-profit, profit in the public sector back to business school to switch to the private sector, went to the beverage industry, went to Walmart, went to Closed Loop, and now, Circulate. In each of those ways, I was trying to make more impact in a different way. I think some people would look at it and say, “Well, get really good at one thing, understand that, and then try and make an impact after that.” I think those are both really viable pathways, and it kind of depends on what makes you happy. I learned early on for myself. I’m much happier when I have that intrinsic value, where I get that impact than about anything else, and the extrinsic parts start to work out at the end.

John: But as you said, there’s no clear path for success in the entrepreneur’s journey, especially those who are doing things that haven’t been done before like you are. The fact of the matter is, someone like you with your background could have stayed in a very, very, very cushy, corporate, or even fund what you’ve already created at the Closed Loop Fund, and not disrupt your life, per se and your family’s life in Brooklyn, and move all the way to Singapore. So there’s also an element of not only risk-taking, and faith in what you’re doing, but also the ability to be a little uncomfortable in the journey to effectuate the greatest change. And not that Singapore is uncomfortable, I’ve been there numerous times, I love the country, but it’s not the norm when you’re born in America and you’re raised in a certain part of the United States to go live in a foreign land with your entire family, not a bachelor, you’re married with children, and to be this change-maker and the catalyst for change in that situation. I give you a ton of credit. But I don’t want the audience to think that any of these things, any of this journey comes easily to anybody.

Rob: Yeah. No, that’s true, and let’s be honest, I mean, really, the only reason I’m able to do this is because of my wife being excited about that same idea of where we can make the most impact and getting along for the ride because, otherwise, that would not have happened.

John: By the way, after thirty-seven years, I can say this woman is the same as me, and that’s how it worked for me too. So there’s no disagreement on that at all, Rob. Rob, talk a little bit about 2022 and beyond? You know, the exciting part is still you’re super experienced twenty years behind you. But you’re still super young as lifespans go now and predictable work life spans go. I mean, Warren Buffett is still killing it at ninety years old. And greater goals are not going to be traditional like our grandparents were, and somewhat retired in our early 60s. Where do you see, give me the next two to four years ahead for you in Circulate Capital and expanding your vision?

Rob: Yeah. We’re having that conversation right now about what the next five years kind of look like. If things go according to plan, we may have almost fully committed Circulate Capital Ocean Fund One in the next twelve to eighteen months. We’ve done 40 million already, we’ll do another probably 20 or 30, and pretty soon, with follow-ons, it’s time to think about what’s coming next? So that involves the big question about like, what’s fund two? What’s our follow-on fund? Now, we need to start thinking about that. We have, as you noted, raise this new fund. It’s more of a parallel vehicle. It’s a way for private investors to engage in our existing strategy. So that’s our big focus for the next year. But we’re starting to think about how do you turn this from a 100 or $200 million strategy into a 500 to a billion-dollar strategy over the next five years? What does that mean in Asia? What does that mean in India? What does that mean, potentially in other emerging markets like Latin America?

John: Awesome. That’s great. Well, Rob, we’re going to continue to track your journey on the Impact Podcast. I’m so grateful for your time. I know we’ve been dealing with time differences and stuff to get this one done. I’m just grateful for everything you’re doing.

For our listeners and viewers out there, to find Rob, his colleagues, and all the important work they’re doing, please go to www.circulatecapital.com. Rob, you’re a good friend. But you’re also making a huge impact and making the world a better place. I’m so grateful for all that you’re doing for all of us.

Rob: Likewise, John. I’m a big fan of yours and the great work that you guys are all doing over there. It’s been an honor chatting with you today. Thanks for having me.

John: I look forward to seeing you in person, either in the United States or in your side of the world now, as well as we get through this pandemic.

Rob: Absolutely. Take care.

John: Have a great day, Rob. Continue the success.

Rob: Bye.

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, speeches, custom experiences, live streams, and much more. For more information on Engage, or to book talent today, visit letsengage.com.

John Shegerian: Welcome back to Green is Good, and we’re so thankful and excited to have Neal Saiz with us today. He’s the Director of Safety, Health, and Environment for Unilever North America. Welcome to Green is Good, Neal.

Neal: John, I really appreciate it. Thanks for having me on the show.

John: We’re so happy you’re here. It’s your first turn on Green is Good, and bringing with you your great brand, Unilever. We’re so excited. Since it’s your first time on Green is Good, Neal, I’d love you to share with our listeners first the Neal Saiz journey leading up to your position at Unilever, and also how you even got here.

Neal Saiz: Good. So, I’m relatively new to Unilever and to the East Coast. I spent the last 20-25 years in the automotive industry, so it’s kind of refreshing. I had to make cars, and now I’m learning how to make food and tea and ice cream, so it’s a very exciting change for me.

John: That’s so interesting. Were you involved with any of the greening of the car industry when you were in the car industry?

Neal: Well, I was predominantly safety and environmental, running the manufacturing sites, so day-to-day operations. Not really on the side of the design side of the vehicles.

John: Gotcha. OK. And so talk a little bit about your role at Unilever now. What is actually now your day-to-day in your new position at Unilever?

Neal: Well, it’s been kind of interesting. I’ve really been on a road tour, trying to visit all of our factories, really understand our business, so I’m kind of still in that learning phase, getting ready to make that next shift into kind of the big picture and strategy phase, so I’ve been on the road for the past eight to nine months. I’ve visited almost every facility in North America, and I’ve also visited some of our sites globally. So, it’s been pretty exciting. I’m a little worn out. It’s good to be in Jersey and spending a little bit more time with my family.

John: Since you’ve now had this time to travel and roll up your sleeves and get familiarized with the new industry you’re in, can you speak of some differences that you’re seeing between your new industry that you’re in and the automotive industry, which you just came out of?

Neal: Absolutely. I’ve been involved, like I said, in environmental and safety for almost 25 years, but in the last 10 years, I’ve seen a big shift into sustainability. It’s kind of exciting because you’re seeing the change from traditional compliance with our sheet professionals, to really thinking bigger green, recycling, and renewable energy, some of the more exciting things. But I tell you, the difference between automotive is amazing. Our stakes are much smaller. The sites I dealt with in the automotive industry had 3,000-4,000 people under one roof, and now we have sites with anywhere from 200-600 people, and they run completely different, much more personable, a lot more direct interaction with the people.

John: Interesting. So, now that you’ve got familiarized, what’s the next step in terms of your evolution at Unilever in terms of driving change and evolving change with regards to sustainability, energy, and the whole green revolution?

Neal: Well, it’s really two things. It’s really communication and standardization. So, what I’ve seen, John, is we’ve got a lot of facilities out there that run independently, and we’re trying to pull them all together, share information a little bit more, not try to reinvent the wheel, and get everybody kind of working on the same page. I think we’re getting close in a very, very short period of time.

John: Gotcha. So, what new trends do you see that you could implement at Unilever that they have not leveraged yet, but are going to be highly valuable to Unilever in the years to come?

Neal: Well, I tell you what. I want to share with you we introduced this recent partnership with NRG, and it’s really huge. So, NRG is one of the country’s largest energy providers. You might say, “Why would you partner up with them? They’re predominantly coal.” But it’s interesting because their CEO and our North American President got together and said, “Hey, how can we do something really, really big? Forget about incremental change. Let’s talk about transformation here.” They threw out 100% renewable energy by 2020. Of course, it scared the heck out of me because that’s quite a bit to accomplish, but we’re thinking big, we’re going big, and it’s moving very, very quickly. What it’s going to do is, we currently buy Green RECs. If you’re not familiar with it, it’s renewable energy certificates for 100% of our electricity in the U.S. So, we may not generate it on site, but we’re going to buy it from companies that do generate it, so it’s kind of a credit or an offset. So, we’re going to move into generating a lot of this energy on our own, either on site, off site, and what’s really exciting is we may eventually sell power to the community. We may sell power to other business partners, and possibly even our competitors. So very, very cutting edge. We’re learning as we’re going. In fact, I’m missing a meeting right now with our team. We’re moving very, very fast in a very short period of time.

John: For our listeners that just joined, we’ve got Neal Saiz on with us today. He’s the Director of Safety, Health, and Environment for Unilever North America. To follow along while you listen to this show or to learn more about Unilever after you hear this show, you can go to unileverusa.com. I’m on your site right now, Neal, and it’s just amazing. You have not only a very visually beautiful site, but it’s full of great information with regards to sustainable living. I’m on your sustainable living plan right now. It’s all about green and sustainability, so this is something that Unilever has adopted and is part of their and your DNA and culture.

Neal: Yeah, and it’s even more than that, John. We don’t have a separate environmental or sustainability business plan. This is our business plan. Our CEO, Paul Polman, he’s the real deal. He’s recognized globally for his cutting edge view on this. He sees this as something that’s very important to the future of our business. This is really what’s going to set us apart from our competitors. Our USLP aims to double the size of the business while reducing our environmental footprint, and we’re doing it. Again, a lofty goal, but let me throw some statistics out there. Just in the last five to six years in North America, we have reduced our carbon dioxide per ton of product produced by almost 75%. That’s amazing. These are things that I was trying to accomplish in my previous career, very, very difficult because I didn’t have that type of leadership behind me. Water, I’m sure all your listeners have been reading the stories about Lake Mead recently. I mean, we’re a couple of years away from starting to shut the water off to parts of Nevada and California. So, it’s kind of scary stuff. We’ve reduced our water per ton, again in North America, by 56%. Quite amazing, considering a lot of our products have water in them. NRG, 20% less. We do have some very energy-intensive processes. We have to keep that ice cream cool, obviously, in some of our food products, and then probably our biggest accomplishment, North America was the first cluster in Unilever to become zero-waste landfill for non-haz waste in all of our manufacturing operations.

John: Wow, that’s incredible.

Neal: It is. It’s quite incredible because, like I said, I tried to do this in the past, very, very difficult if you think about it. Where I come from in Michigan, there’s a landfill 5-10 miles away from just about every operation I had. Huge, huge culture shift.

John: When you went to all the different locations, Neal, is part of your goal, as you say, in terms of standardization, getting everyone to not only message the same and get the culture the same at all of them with regards to sustainability, but also to share and trade best practices among all of them, both nationally and internationally?

Neal: Yes. We do work globally. All the cluster directors, similar to myself, we communicate quite a bit. We have regular meetings, but absolutely. Trying to make sure that we’re all kind of doing the same sort of things and learning from best practices. But I will say, all the sites are living to the spirit of the USLP. All new projects are living to the spirit of the USLP. Again, we’re taking this very, very serious because a lot of times, people are being very shortsighted, they’re not thinking long-term. We are thinking long-term. We’ve also challenged the traditional one-to-three ROI return on investment for capital. We’re saying, “Hey, OK, let’s look at the entire life cycle of this process, and see what really makes sense.” This is helping to fund some of these bigger sustainability projects.

John: Because of your new position, you get to have a lot of visibility into some of the biggest trends that are on our horizon. When you see trends with regards to renewable energy, what are some of the bigger trends that you can share with our listeners? What’s coming our way? Is it going to continue to be solar and wind, or do you see other things as well?

Neal: Well, wind is incredible. You can throw up some huge wind farms and supply a lot of electricity to people, but that’s something you can actually do onsite. Solar is changing every day, but the real big thing here, John, is we can’t wait. You can’t wait for the next greatest, best technology. We have to move forward now. It’s getting better all the time, but I mean, there’s a lot of things. CHP, combined heat and power, solar, wind. But the other thing that you forget about is we really are focusing on efficiencies, so we’re trying to reduce what we’re actually consuming, whether it be waste, raw materials, or the energy consumption on our sites. That’s probably the biggest thing that we’re focusing on right now.

John: For our listeners who just joined, we’ve got Neal Saiz on. He’s the SHE Director of North America for Unilever. You know, Neal, after your name comes the initial CSP and CHMM. Can you share with our listeners, and with me, by the way, what those initials stand for?

Neal: Those are a couple of credentials that are recognized in our industry. The Certified Safety Professional says you come from an accredited university, you’ve got at least a minimum amount of time in the industry, and you’re good at taking tests. More importantly, consulting, but again, it’s something that’s very big in automotive in our larger assembly plants. We expected a person to be a CSP. CHMM, Certified Hazardous Material Manager, so really getting into managing waste, recycling, and those sort of things. Again, same type of criteria. More important in consulting, but I got it, so I put it after my name. It looks good.

John: That’s great. And what is SHE mean? That just stands for Safety, Health, and Environmental Director of North America, SHE? 

Neal: Yeah, and every company is a little different, so I’ve just gotten used to the SHE. Sometimes it’s EHS, HSE, but we’re SHE, Safety, Health, and Environmental.

John: I love it. To learn more about what Unilever is doing, the great work that they’re doing in sustainability, it’s www.unileverusa.com. Neal, one of the common themes you’ve brought up a couple times today is the issue of leadership and how companies really get sustainable in terms of their culture and DNA comes from the top down. You’ve drawn some differences between Unilever, where you are at now, and the automotive industry. Can you share some more thoughts and some more background on how you came up with that, and why you see that continuing to be the right way to go in terms of a trend, in terms of how we’re going to change the world together as big business goes, and also as the nonprofits go? It’s from the top down.

Neal: Absolutely, and automotive is doing great things. It’s more focused on their vehicles, and probably less focused on their manufacturing sites, but I think they’re getting there. Obviously, we went through some tough times. I’ve been through the bankruptcy, I’ve been through the plant closures, very, very lean times. Now they’re getting to the point where they can focus on those sort of things. But leadership, I mean, it’s key. Our zero-waste to landfill would have never happened without the support of our Senior VP for the Americas, Harold Emburger, who’s one of my line managers. Never would have happened, we would have never got to this point this quickly without his leadership. Same thing with our CEO. I mean, it sure does make my cause a whole lot easier when our CEO of our company is pushing the USLP.

John: So, the leadership does make a difference, and then the accountability on the back side on achieving the leader’s goals is the other side of the coin. Neal: Absolutely. It makes it much easier for me. I’m just delighted to be here because people think about it, all facets of the business, whether it’s the supply chain, logistics, our customer development, our sales force, they are all living the spirit of the USLP.

John: That’s just wonderful, and it’s so great to hear that Unilever has gone zero waste to landfill. You know, we’re down to the last five minutes or so, Neal, and one of the things we like to share with our listeners and we like to have our great thought leaders and our business leaders share with our listeners is solutions. Can you take the last five minutes to share some of your thoughts on what our listeners can do out there, whether they’re in business, nonprofit, whether they’re students, or whether they’re just great people living in their home and they want to be part of the solution, not part of the problem anymore? Can you share some of the changes that they can make, or the things they can do, to help make the world a better place?

Neal: I tell you what. Don’t hesitate to contact me. Believe it or not, I’m not the expert. I’m just kind of steering the ship with some of these activities. I’m surrounded by people who are way smarter than I am. I can link you up with some really, really good people. The main thing is recycling, even at home. I personally wasn’t recycling 5-6 years ago. I can’t throw a plastic bottle in the garbage without my six-year-old daughter giving me a dirty look and pulling it out of the garbage, so really our future is our children. We’re starting to partner now with our customers and our vendors in sharing this information, so again, if anybody is interested, please contact me. I can link you up with the right people. There’s a lot of easy things you can do to really get started.

John: That is just great. What does the future hold now? Now that you’re there and you’ve toured the locations nationally and internationally and you’re going to catch your breath a little bit and then go out again, what’s your goals in the next three to five years at Unilever in terms of driving sustainability forward and being always on the cutting edge?

Neal: I think the main thing, John, would probably be we want to be part of the business. I think we’re getting close, but to continue to integrate with our operations, being involved with projects on the drawing table versus when the show up at the factories, that’s key, making sure our designs are proper, but really becoming part of the business, and not just the police force enforcing regulations on the side. So, I think that’s probably the most important part in the next 3-5 years, and really just continue to drive the message home. I mean, there’s pockets of resistance. Everybody has their own agenda, but for the most part, I think we’re all on the same page.

John: When I was preparing for this show, Neal, I read a great story about things that you’re doing there. Can you share one of my favorite stories with regards to the amount of soap that you guys donated to the Clean World Foundation, and what that means, and how that makes a better world with regards to the great work that you’re doing just on the soap issue?

Neal: John, you definitely need to get in touch with the Clean the World co-founder and CEO, Shawn Seipler. This guy is amazing. I had a chance to meet him. He started this business in his garage because one day he was at a hotel and he says, “What happens to all this soap?” He’s like, “Hey, it’s going to the landfill, but how can I help and reduce millions of deaths due to poor hygiene out there?” Unilever personally has donated over a million pounds of soap that may have been off-spec, we couldn’t sell to the consumer for any number of reasons, but there’s really nothing wrong with it. They’ve taken the soap and they’ve distributed it to basically all over the world. 17 million bars of soap in 96 countries Clean the World has covered, so we’re really excited to be part of that group. This is all product that wouldn’t have ended up in a landfill, but would probably have gone to waste energy for us. So, a win-win for both sides.

John: We’re down to the last minute or so, Neal. You mentioned your daughter, and I’ve got two children also, and I consider guys like us, we’re the sustainability immigrants, but our children are going to be the sustainability natives that are going to take this whole revolution to another level, of course. What’s your thoughts for our young listeners out there in the United States, and we have listeners of course around the world, what’s your thoughts and pearls of wisdom for them to get involved in terms of just changing the world, being part of the sustainability movement, and also maybe being the next Neal Saiz?

Neal: Well, they get it, so I think as they mature, they’re going to be teaching us, and they’re going to be taking us to the next level. It’s funny because different industry, I mean, people are much younger here in Unilever than they are compared to where I come from, so I’m learning from these folks every day.

John: That’s so nice. That is just so nice. Thank you for coming on the show. We’re going to want to have you back on to continue to share the ongoing sustainability narrative at Unilever, and the continued success that you’re having there. Neal Saiz from Unilever USA, go to www.unileverusa.com to learn more about all the great things Unilever is doing in sustainability. Neal, thank you for your inspiring leadership in sustainability. You are truly living proof that green is good.

Neal: Thank you, John.

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 and honored to have with us today, Sam Dennigan. He’s the founder and CEO of Strong Roots. If you don’t know what Strong Roots is, it’s the burgers that I eat at my house. Strong Roots makes these wonderful delicious burgers. We’re going to be talking about those and everything else Strong Roots makes and everything behind the company. But before we do that Sam, welcome to the Impact Podcast.

Sam Dennigan: Thank you so much for having me Great to be here. Nice to meet you, John.

John: Hey, great meeting you too. You’re sitting in beautiful New Jersey today. I’m in Fresno, California. Your roots are in Ireland and my roots are in New York. So, I guess technology allows us to connect and be more connected than ever before. And for that I’m grateful. Sam, before we get talking about your company, for any of our listeners or viewers who want to find your great company Strong Roots, they could go to www.strongroots.com. Tell us a little bit about the Sam Dennigan backstory. How did you even get here?

Sam: I grew up in food, John. I was lucky enough. My dad had inherited a company from his dad, my grandfather, and my namesake. So, ever since I was a child, I was in and around fresh produce, potatoes vegetables, salads. My excitement on a Saturday morning as a kid was going to work with my dad so that I could go out of the trucks with his drivers and do stops so that I could grab ice cream in there and their service station on the way.

John: That’s a lot of fun. How much fun is that? Those are great memories.

Sam: Yeah. I mean everything from as long as far back as I can remember has been about food. So, I initially had no interest in the family business. Through school, I have almost gone in a different direction. I was a designer. I was an artist. I wanted to go into advertising. Then once I got in to do that, it started pulling me back in. I think when you’ve got such strong roots in agriculture and food, and so many family members that make that business fun, you’re destined to get in there anyway. My family’s business is of the same name. It’s called Sam Dennigan and Company which is a large wholesale distribution food service supplier, kind of like a UNFI or a KeHE in North America.

John: Oh, really?

Sam: Yeah. I grew up in that business and I’ve worked in it for 10 years as a career before starting Strong Roots. So, I did everything from washing the floors to check in the orders, to running the IT department, to having lots of experience in operations and sales and marketing. Then eventually, I ended up discovering brands and food specifically and I matched off my creative ability from my very brief time in our college with this love and passion for telling the stories about agriculture. I grew up knowing about where things came from and I love telling the stories about it and adding value and interest to products. In fresh values, that’s quite difficult because it’s quite commoditized. But I wanted to find a way, and Strong Roots has been that way. After 10 years in the family business, I wanted to do something myself. I found a couple of opportunities and had done lots of travel globally, looking at different agriculture growing regions principally Spain, South America, North America, various different parts of Europe. Ireland is self-sufficient in the summer season, but in the winter season, everything is imported. All the fresh produce is imported from Europe and further afield. So, I used to have to try and figure out where it was coming from, where we were getting it, and how much we needed. So, my education from a very young age was just where food came from and I realized that that was what people needed to understand. They needed to understand about how they could get it, where they could get it from, but also how they could do it sustainably. That’s what’s led us to the foundation of Strong Roots and the journey that we’ve been on for the last 6 years.

John: So, a lot of that makes total sense in terms of your background, this wonderful produce name with your name on it, fruits and vegetables, national footprint. Where is the epiphany to say, I want to get involved with making plant-based foods? Given that you came out of that industry, but did you realize that you wanted to change the world and make the world a better place because plant-based eating is necessary just for all of us to feel better and to cut down on carbon emissions? Was it political? Was it emotional? Was it just strictly business? Oh my gosh. This opportunity is so much white space in plant-based eating. Where of all these different data points- when entrepreneurs put together data points and they come up with an epiphany and make a decision, where were you leaning the strongest towards when you came up with this great company, Strong Roots?

Sam: I was developing a brand in Ireland under a license from General Mills at the time, which is a brand that you’ll know well, which is Green Giant.

John: Sure.

Sam: We had licensed the brand from the General Mills organization as a group of companies in Europe that we’re trying to bring Green Giant into fresh produce. It’s obviously been very successful in the US, and the US company who had the license of the brand wanted to bring it to Europe. I was tasked with trying to figure out from a research basis, is this something that our consumers want? This is all in fresh, remember. This has nothing to do with frozen plant-based food at this stage. But what I uncovered in probably early 2011, 2012 was ultimately this trend that has now become a huge part of our lives- vegetarianism, veganism, and plant-based eating on a mass conventional scale as opposed to something that had been quite niche for so many years before. My expertise is in agribusiness. It’s in crops. It’s in varietals. It’s understanding seasonality. What was very clear from a consumer point of view was that people didn’t want the standard vegetables that they had been served for the previous 20 years. And that was something that was consistent both from private label and from brands in the Irish market. When it came to things like carrots and cabbage and potatoes, people were sick of them and we coined this phrase during that piece of research while which was, what are the aspirational vegetables that people were interested in? One of the main emergers in Europe specifically at that time was sweet potato. Sweet potato has gone from being 0% of market share of potato in Europe to being almost 25 to 30%. today. It’s had a huge growth in Europe where it never existed before. That research phase just proves that this was bigger than any brand. It was an opportunity to get ahead of the curve in terms of what the consumer was expecting to see, what they were seeing on cooking shows, what they were seeing in cookbooks, what were chefs doing in restaurants. It was very much a conversion from the world of very, very premium quality, white linen service restaurant food into retail. How do we make the jump, and how do we make the jump at a price point that people will buy it on mass as opposed to just a tiny, tiny corner of the store?

So, during that period and the development of that project with the General Mills brand, I realized how big this opportunity was. But it wasn’t until 2015 when we changed tack from the fresh world into the frozen world. The reason that it was so important as a pivot in a shift from fresh to frozen is because fresh was able to innovate faster. Fresh was commoditized. Fresh could get to the market quicker. Whereas frozen had been undeveloped in Europe for 30 years. You had french fries and potatoes. You had meat that had been riddled in scandal from the hoarse meat crisis specifically in the UK in the early 90s, and then you had these beige products that were covered in breadcrumbs and gluten, and they were covering either chicken or beef or cheese and nothing in that category, nothing in the frozen world whatsoever was geared to a healthy lifestyle. Pizza ice cream, potatoes, french fries, etcetera. So, all we did was do the opposites of the market was doing. We were the first to do it in Ireland and we were one of the first to do it in the UK and that had snowballed into from this one piece of insight, from this relatively inexpensive piece of consumer research which was people don’t eat meat [inaudible] anymore. That was the epiphany of hold on, we’ve got something here. We got to move with it.

John: That’s so awesome. Hey, go back. I just want to ask you about sweet potatoes because I grew up eating sweet potatoes since my grandmother did it. It was a family thing. But different products- we’ve seen almonds and pistachios and pomegranates with POM Wonderful get their star treatment. Did the uptick from 0 to 30, 35% of sweet potatoes happen because of some unique advertising campaign or with the consumers’ tastes change or how did you guys go from 0 to 35 on sweet potato consumption in Europe?

Sam: I think to be fair, most of the industry would be accepting of the fact that the North Carolina sweet potato commission and the universities down there did an unbelievable marketing job for sweet potato not just in the US with the rise of brands like Alexia and lots of development in private label, but also in Europe. Those guys, they had a crop, they had government investment, they had the lower social demographic area that they wanted to put back to work and still do, and ultimately, they had to make use of the crop that they were famous for. I think they’re probably single-handedly responsible for the emergence of sweet potato into Europe and it’s just not slowing down. It was our first product which we actually made and produced in North Carolina and then exported back to Ireland. We were the first sweet potato fry brand in Ireland, the second in the UK, and we were laggards. Fresh have been a huge thing in Europe for years, but we were the first ones to make it a frozen french fry.

John: That’s wonderful of sweet potato fries are just, for me, the best. Just the best. Sam, Since I haven’t been to your beautiful country yet- and I intend to go either later this year or sometime next year- how was the trend of, obviously, now I understand your business model, your vision. Where was vegetarianism and veganism as a trend in Ireland at the time? Is there a huge population of vegetarianism and veganism, or is it now just slowly building?

Sam: You’ll know that Ireland is very famous for 3 things: its beef, its water mainly carry gold, and its dairy products. It’s the cornerstone of an export industry in Ireland so in short, there are much less vegans in Ireland at that stage, at the inception of the brand than there are now. It’s changing rapidly. It’s changing really quickly. We’ve gone from being non-existent to a very big part of the fabric of our Irish consumption and UK consumption in a very short space of time. But it’s really, really recent. You’re talking about the last 5 or 10 years emerging as a trend, and I would say it’s principally, reducetarian, flexitarian as opposed to from vegetarian or vegan. There’s obviously a very, very core central group of vegan consumers that have been in Ireland for years, but now it’s mainstream, and it’s only being mainstream for a relatively short amount of time.

John: If you just joined us, we’ve got Sam Dennigan. He’s the founder and CEO of Strong Roots. To find Sam, his colleagues, and his delicious products, please go to www.strongroots.com. I have 2 of the boxes of the products that I enjoy in my household. As my listeners and viewers know, I’m a vegetarian. I’m a vegan. Been a vegetarian for over 40 years. Vegan just about the last 12 or 13. These products, these burgers are just delicious. Simply delicious. How many products do you have now, Sam, approximately? You launched about 6 years ago. How many wonderful, delicious products do you have in the frozen section?

Sam: Across the group, we have about 15 unique products right now. Six of those are in the US with lots more coming soon. But yeah, we’ve got 15 roughly split between what we call potato or a notato, which is our are carb production area of products. We do delicious products like cauliflower hash browns, zucchini hash browns, sweet potato fries, and a mixed root vegetable fry made from delicious beets, carrots, and parsnips which are quite an unusual combination in North America but are doing really, really well here. And then from a meat alternative perspective, we have the two burgers that you’ve shown everybody, but also another burger and a whole appetizer range of bites ranging from spinach to pumpkins and sweet potato, all delicious. We’re a taste-first brand. Sometimes we leave things in there like gluten, although it’s being reduced more and more all the time to make sure that they taste great first.. Everything else comes after that.

John: Your products taste not great, they taste beyond great. They’re just delicious. You know, Sam, about that, we have listeners and viewers around the world. In the United States, obviously, we have a huge listener base in UK, in Ireland, and way beyond, in Asia as well. Where can our listeners and viewers find your great products now here in the United States, and in UK and Ireland? What kind of stores are carrying- I buy these at Whole Foods here in the United States. So, Whole Foods, I know is counted. Where else can our listeners and viewers find your great products?

Sam: Whole Foods is a national account for us, so you can find those products as well as for others in all of their stores in all of their locations. We’re also in approximately 2,000 Walmart stores, both coasts in the South of the Great Lakes as well. Not so many in the middle yet, but we’re working on it. And then on the both coasts in the specials[?] natural retailers, you’ll find them in Wegmans, in ShopRite, you’ll find it in Sprouts, you’ll find them in The Fresh Market, and really, really soon in the next few weeks, we’re going to be launching with Kroger across a lot of their banners as well in about just over 1,000 stores. We’ve been making tracks and they’re available for everyone across the country now.

John: You know, Sam given your background, you gave me a great data point because I know these companies well. My wife’s family is in the food business as well, generations speaking like yours was. Because your family owning Sam Dennigan and Company and being that it’s a UNFI or KeHE type of company in Ireland, and you understanding distribution, how much of an advantage for you the fact that you grew up in that industry, you worked there for 10 years, you understood distribution- For you to invent a great product is one thing because we know there are lots of wonderful entrepreneurs out there, inventing and creating wonderful, and tasty products in all different food sectors, even in the beverage sector. But getting it distributed is a whole different art and business model. How much of an advantage did you have because of your family history?

Sam: I think that’s a really good question. I think one of the leapfrog steps that we were able to make was we could have- we didn’t by the way- but we could have avoided setting up the stall at the farmers market to prove the concept. We did that because we wanted to engage with our customers, but we knew what worked and what didn’t work. I was very fortunate to grow up in a situation where there was a warehouse of brands that I could walk around, looking at where the big pallets[?] were and where the small pallets were and knowing that that’s working and that’s not working and those guys are in trouble. So, understanding from a first-person experience of what was happening was unbelievably invaluable because you knew not just of how to distribute a product, how to build a pallet. What kind of a case to put it in? How to make everything as easy as possible in the supply chain to move it around so that everyone’s job was easy. And I think those are the biggest pitfalls for start-up food companies. It’s about moving from, “I’ve got something delicious,” to, “I can distribute this nationally.” It’s one of my biggest points of mentorship when I’m speaking to young brands is don’t assume the start is the end. You’ve got to write the perfect picture of how this looks in a thousand stores to get them in a thousand stores. There are so many steps and hoops to jump through to get there. It’s phenomenal. We had a huge leg up for sure.

John: Because you speak of it so calmly. When I have friends or I made investments in the food and beverage space, they’re literally frantic about getting distribution and they don’t even understand- The political ecosystem that exists in that industry is so unique, and you’re so wise about and calm about it, and obviously, you’re succeeding in it. But others sometimes never find their place or find their audience because they just never understand how to break into it. So, it’s just fascinating what you’ve done. You’ve not only created delicious products but also because of your experience and your education, family and formal, you really have broken the code on distribution which is just, it’s just wonderful. Talk a little bit about, let’s go beyond taste. Talk about social and ecological benefits to being a plant-based eater or at least making part of- like you said, I think the days of ideological, I’m a vegetarian, I’m a vegan and God forbid I taste meat again ever, hell will freeze over. I think those days of ideological discussions are fading away. And as you say, people are learning to incorporate delicious products- and again shameless plug, but because I love these products, I’m allowed to shamelessly plug them. I think people are flexitarian, pescatarian, but they enjoy great plant-based eating. Talk a little bit about some of the great benefits that come along with shifting our diet to more plant-based eating, social, environmental, and ecological benefits that are just huge.

Sam: It’s kind of tiresome, but still relevant to need to explain on a regular basis that we need to consume less animals in order for the Improvement of personal on planet health. There are no two ways about it. And for me, who follows a balanced, Mediterranean lifestyle and diet more so than any end of the spectrum, for me, it’s about understanding how to create a demand as a result of easier access. So, our objective as a brand is to be a gateway for non plant-based eaters to eat plant-based foods without a huge amount of education. How do you make it easier for people to access things without ramming it down their throats and without making them feel guilty about things at the same time? Let’s bring people to the water as opposed to pushing them in the pool. So, for us, we have been led there by the consumer. You’re asking a question about what was the initial spark, what was the epiphany? For me, it was a better knowledge of business and something that could be done better, and a story that could be told better to connect with consumers. I’m a storyteller and I’m a marketer at heart and I want people to understand the truth about the food industry and the tiny, tiny changes that they can make in their day-to-day diet to make overall huge improvements in consumption and planetary and personal health. So, for us, it’s taking a specialty of the knowledge of food and sharing that. Frozen is the best way of eating seasonally, eating out of season, so that things don’t have to be shipped across the world in 5 days so that everyone can have a ripe cherry tomato that never came from anywhere close to their front doorstep. Our objective is to not only educate people about eating more vegetables, which is what our goal is, but also that it can be tasty without any, all-natural ingredients. This is convenience and taste without overcomplicating things or without putting products and ingredients in there that are for elongation of life or necessary. Frozen is a natural preservation method, which means that everyone can eat healthy and sustainably at all times without hazarding a thought. You know, I have this line that that rings very true for people quite often which is, you should be able to look at the front of the pack and understand and trust a brand that is doing the right thing without having to look at what’s in it at the back. We need to move to a situation where trusting a product because of the efforts of the brand, be they sustainable or educative or trying to disrupt a culture of consumption for better human health is there without having to look into what’s the real motive here? Who owns this company and so on and so forth. So, for us, we’ve always been a company who wanted to do good in addition to a company who wants to make profit. We have recently become a B Corp, and to be honest, it was really just a registration of something that we were already doing. We set out as a company and a group of, 40 people now who feel that we have a privilege as a business who’s succeeded, that we can’t just sit on our hands and not do anything about the communication of better health. So, B Corp was I suppose, an illustration of how we could join the club of other people who are doing it, but we’ve always done better business in recycling our water waste, using our vegetable waste to create bio gas to power the turbines that create the electricity for some of the plants that we run using regenerative agriculture. And most importantly, looking after the mental health of our people, while we push them to work so hard to do all of this that we’re looking after them at the other side as well. So, they’re just things that are part of the Strong Roots fabric and culture. But I think we’re- I was delighted to see on LinkedIn somewhere today that there is now 4000 B Corp companies. But in the grand scheme of things, it’s still a tiny tiny amount in comparison to the amount of businesses in the world.

John: For our listeners and viewers, Sam, can you walk them through what being a B Corp company really means? Because not most people understand it.

Sam: Yeah. The easiest way to explain B Corp is the idea of a triple bottom line. It’s about planet, people, and profit, and not just one of those things. So, making sure that while you’re doing business, you’re doing good at the same time. There’s no reason that companies especially food companies could be in any way meaningfully doing harm to either society, or planet, or personal health. So, B Corp company is being a part of an organization that has a collective. It’s trying to do better business by simply acknowledging that when we think about making profits, we have to think about the planet and we have to think about our people and the people in society at the same time.

John: You started your company in Dublin. You still have your headquarters there. You’re in New Jersey right now. Explain a little bit about Dublin as a startup community. I know a lot about San Diego. I know a lot about Boston and the Cambridge area and Silicon Alley in New York, Silicon Valley in California, Seattle, and in the Pacific Northwest. What’s Dublin like? Is it a great area to start a startup like yours and create a whole new industry?

Sam: Absolutely. Dublin’s awesome not just because I lived and grew up there, but Dublin has become an incubator for some of the best and most Innovative businesses in the world. There’s a lot of food businesses that have become famous on the island and off the island, but it’s particularly known for tech. It’s a really, really driven tech hub. There are some great incubator programs. One in particular is called Dogpatch, which is, which is run by various different organizations in collaboration with the government and has been hugely subscribed over the years. Things like web so much have been founded in Dublin, which is one of the central points there at the Silicon Valley Community as a central place of innovation, in addition to the fact that there are some of the biggest food companies in the world that are based in and around the island of Ireland. But the best thing about Dublin is that the camaraderie in people. It’s a place where people want good business to be done, but people love having fun at the same time. That is the key mix of things to understand when thinking about Dublin. I’m hoping you will experience that when you go there.

John: I will. I’m so excited. Trust me. Was the industry shocked because your family brand is such a big name in you’re of course named after the namesake brand? Was it a little bit shocked? You could have taken the easy way in life, and nothing’s easy. And I don’t want to degrade generational family members that go into their family business. No such thing as easy. But you could have had a nice position that is set for you with your name on the family brand and just stayed there and made a very great living I’m sure and done really good by selling delicious fruits and vegetables and produce throughout Ireland. But you took the different route, You took the road less traveled. You found a new mountain to climb. Was the industry shocked? Was your local community and family and friends shocked? Were you always the guy they knew would just going to go do something different one day?

Sam: No, I certainly wasn’t naturally entrepreneurial. I felt I had a privilege through the education that I had grown up in to go and do something more and that there was this huge opportunity that I wanted to create a global brand. And therefore, a clean break and fresh runway was the way to do that. Yeah, of course, family’s shocked, customers and industry shocked for sure for a very, very short time, but then as soon as we launched, I think the pieces got together for everybody. It’s a very small community both in food and in Ireland. Food globally, Ireland locally. I’m still doing what I did for 10 years through the family business, just in a different way. For me, I think it is about using the knowledge that you’ve got to the best advantage because so many people don’t get the opportunity to do it.

John: How many countries do you sell in now, Sam?

Sam: I’m sure I’ll get this wrong because it’s getting bigger by the day, but I think we’re available in about 15 countries today. Ireland, the UK, and the USA being our home markets where we’ve set up shop and have local operations. We also sell in far places like Iceland, we sell in the United Arab Emirates, Qatar, Singapore, most recently in Belgium and the Netherlands, and soon-to-be in Australia and Canada. So, the footprint is growing by the day. And yeah, it’s great to see. We’re realizing our dream which is awesome.

John: Sam. You’re a young, young man, and you’ve already accomplished a lot. Give me your vision of the next 5 years. Where do you want to take Strong Roots, and where can it go?

Sam: We set up to create a global brand and that’s what we’re doing, but we’re far from being there yet. So, when I think about how we can tell the story about sustainability and plant-based consumption and making it easier to access foods that are both affordable and tasty at the same time, our goal over the next kind of 3 to 5 years is to make our products available for about 10% of the global population. So, we want to exist in territories and have enough distribution to be able to achieve that. I mean, ultimately, we believe that we’re the Birds Eye or McCain’s of the next generation. Those foods were our foods. Those foods were our parents’ foods. And what we’re trying to do with Strong Roots in a sustainable growth pattern is to be able to build a brand that people trust without the palaver or showmanship and something that’s really bettered in something real. So, that’s the goal. So we’ve got a steep mountain to continue to climb but the team are up for it so I’m very confident.

John: I have no doubt that when I have you back on this show, you’re going to be up that mountain and getting closer to the top because [inaudible].

Sam: That’s awesome. That’s awesome.

John: Oh, and you have a great brand. I’m so excited about it because we’ve moved away just from plant-based burgers, which of course, like I said, I love but I have a 1-year-old granddaughter, my first granddaughter, grandchild, and getting her on your spinach bites and cauliflower bites and red and sweet potato fries, she loved that stuff, never even know what the other stuff existed out in this world. And once she’s on your stuff as a young kid, that will set patterns of good eating, set her up for a life of success of good eating habits. That’s why I’m so excited to have you on today and to share your journey, to share your story. It’s so important for people to try your brand. You don’t have to be 100% vegetarian. You don’t have to be 100% vegan, but you got to try Strong Roots. All their great products are so delicious, and they’re also good for you. They’re good for the environment. They’re good for the community you live in. Sam Dennigan, you’re always welcome back on this show. Thank you for the great food that you make at Strong Roots. For our listeners, go to www.strongroots.com to find Sam and his colleagues. You’re always welcome back on the Impact Show. You make the world a better place. Thank you for being what you are and making such a great brand of food brand for all of us to enjoy.

Sam: John., thanks for having me. This has been awesome. An absolute pleasure to meet you.

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

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 loops platform spans the arc of capital from venture capital to private equity, bridging gaps and fostering synergies to scale the circular economy. To find closed-loop partners, please go to www.closedlooppartners.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. And now we’ve evolved that podcast to the Impact podcast which is more inclusive and more diverse than ever before. But 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. And 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.

Announcer: 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. And Mike, it’s so great to be in the studio with you here today.

Mike Brady: Always a pleasure, John, and springtime in the valley boy just doesn’t get any better than this does it?

John: This is a great time of year to be alive in the Central Valley of California.

Mike: You know, I just wonder if springtime makes us a whole lot more appreciative of the world around us. We’ve been through a winter and of course, our winters here are nothing like other parts of the country or other parts of the world. But just to see nature in a whole new way. I mean, the greening of everything around us makes us really think what a beautiful planet.

John: It is really. It is. And this is such a green time of year here, which is, it’s so much fun. We still are the ag belt of the United States, if not the world. And most people don’t even realize that this is the number one place in the world for raisins. And for garlic. And for so many other agricultural products. I think cotton and tomatoes too. We’re right in the top one, two, or three.

Mike: You’re absolutely correct here in the Central Valley, we got plenty of sunshine only means the water.

John: Yeah, and actually caught and I’m sure it’s going to come up in some of our discussions today. Because Mike, part of our discussions today is going to be around clothing and shoes. And I don’t know much about organic clothing. I don’t know much about the shoe and the shoe movement when it comes to the greening and sustainability movement. But we’re going to learn a lot today and I have worn once or twice organic quote-unquote organic t-shirt. And I’ll tell you it is a lot better feeling than just a regular old T which I’m just used to just wonderful old t-shirts.

Mike: Well, I never even thought about that think about organic and we go grocery shopping and all of them were using pesticides or whatever try and be as is earth-friendly as possible. But I never really thought about an organic t-shirt.

John: So a lot of what we’re doing today is we’re going to be talking about those issues which go back to here in the valley, there is a lot of organic food being planted now and a lot of organic products being grown here. I ran into a guy recently and he told me he was growing he just planted thousands of acres of organic olives and he said that’s the next big thing.

Mike: Hmm, interesting.

John: So, I mean the valleys are not only the ag belt of the world but I think has a bunch of new ager new cutting sustainability products on the way here.

Mike: Well, you know what? I’m thinking just a weird visual. A dad and the mom just driving with the kids in the backseat heading down 99 points do cotton fields, you know what they’re grown over their kids? T-shirts. We don’t think in those terms.

John: We don’t, but I think soon to be and that’s the fun part about what we do because we’re yet to share that word a little bit.

Mike: Well, very good. So let’s line out the show today. Who we got for guest number one.

John: Yeah, guess number one we have Marci Zaroff and Marci is going to be talking about what she’s doing in the Eco-fashion world with regards to organic sustainable clothing and on the backside of our show today. We have an amazing brand. We have Timberland today, Timberland shoes on the show with us. So it’s gonna be another one of these great shows that talking about things that do not necessarily usually cross our desk.

John: Okay, so fashionistas you have been alerted to stick around. It’s gonna be a great hour. Come on back for more green is good.

Announcer: 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 excited to have Marci Zaroff up on the show today she’s calling in from Florida. And Marci is… We kill the whole show if we just spoke about her biography Marci is the founder and former CEO, president of under the canopy and she’s currently launching FASE, F-A-S-E, could go see that on Facebook, Fashion, Art, Soul, and Earth, and she coined the term and Pioneer the market for eco-fashion.

Mike: How cool is that? Marci, welcome to the show.

Marci Zaroff: Thank you. Thanks for having me.

John: So we’ve never had someone like you as Mike said in our intro earlier, a fashion Easter in the Green Revolution, who fuse style and sustainability. Marci, what is this? What’s going on? And what are you doing?

Marci: Well, eco fashion, when I started this, this whole concept and building this market, it was somewhat paradoxical, and people you still give me like, I was insane. Because those concepts of ecology and fashion are quite the opposite, historically. But my goal was to fuse those worlds together and to show people who live consciously and mindfully that you can be fashion-forward and also be responsible to the planet and to show people that are in the fashion world that they can actually buy product that is stylish and high quality and fits well and the right colors and on-trend. But be mindful. So it’s a new market that I believe is really the future of fashion now.

John: Okay, so wait for a second, you had this idea, but what changed? I mean, what was your inspiration Where was your epiphany?

Marci: I was always been a fashion consumer, I kind of joke that my background is that I got Best Dressed in high school. So it’s one of those things that just naturally, I was wanting everyone to take shopping growing up, but when I got a business degree actually started a school in New York, that today is called the Institute for integrative nutrition. So my background is that I started on the food and beauty side. And it dawned on me after a decade in that world of organic and natural food and beauty that there was a missing link in that whole wellness equation, and that you couldn’t really support food without supporting fiber, because the whole premise of organic agriculture is the interconnection and nature and building soil and crop rotation, and all these different ways to actually protect and build soil to build a stronger plant. And so, therefore, when I started to learn about that, and I started to marry that with my passion for fashion, I saw that there was a market opportunity that that consumer who is buying and thinking more consciously would eventually be evolved into.

John: Well, so, I understand Fashion, Art, Soul and Earth, FASE, which is on Facebook for our listeners out there. So explain what happened in 96, that you started under the canopy. And what did that mean then?

Marci: Well, my original goal was to revolutionize the fashion world and to demonstrate that again, style and color, and quality are not mutually exclusive with social and environmental responsibility. But when you look back on the history of organic clothing, from a simplistic standpoint, it was once that kind of frumpy boxy, boring Bayes overpriced temps, potato sack type of stigma that when people would think of organic clothing, that’s what they would think. And what I really wanted to do was drive the market from hippie to hip and to make fashion or clothing that people wanted to wear that people wanted to buy. And that ultimately made them not only look good but feel good inside.

John: Okay, keep going. I’m sorry.

Marci: No, no. So under the canopy, the whole premise is that we all live under the canopy of the planet’s ecosystem together. The brand was launched in 1996, after I coined the term eco-fashion, to become the pioneering brand to start telling that story and educating the consumer. And then simultaneously working with farmers and factories worldwide, getting in the trenches, and helping connect those dots to create and develop products that people would buy simply because there it’s a great product. And oh, by the way, it’s also organic and sort of shocks people to recognize that it’s not about “Why would I buy organic?” It’s “Why wouldn’t you buy organic?”

Mike: That’s really brilliant Marci because you do it exactly right. And it’s kind of like working backward a little bit. When the goal is really all about better ecological living but no, like you said early people think about Eco-fashion, the first thing you think is, “Okay, if it’s ecologically sound, it’s probably hippie and doesn’t look that good.” But to get something that really catches somebody’s eye, especially somebody with a real sense of fashion, which you obviously have, you’re in the right place and doing exactly the right thing. to just be able to hook them on the back end is “Oh, yeah, by the way, you’re doing something really good, not only for the planet but for your kids and grandkids.” That’s brilliant.

Marci: Well, it’s an important industry. And I think a lot of people don’t realize how important it really is. Because the apparel and textile industry is one of the most toxic industries in the world. And conventional cotton as an example, most people think is natural, or they even think it’s organic because that’s what they’ve been told. But when you pull the curtain back on just regular cotton, regular cotton that’s not organic, is actually one of the world’s leading causes of air and water pollution. And it is the most heavily sprayed industry in the world. So cotton represents as an example, less than 3% of the world’s agriculture, but uses over 25% of the most harmful insecticides and the most toxic pesticides that are out there.

John: So when you started this movement, obviously, you’re a pioneer in this whole eco-fashion world. Back in 96, this was before anyone knew that the Green Revolution was here to stay. Obviously, you did, you pioneer this, how is that evolution explain to our listeners into Mike and I, 96 to 2010. I know we crossed over you won many awards along the way. But we’ve crossed over somewhere in this whole climate change issue and the political will is there now. And Al Gore is our green rock star. So the Green Revolution now people know is here to stay. But how was that climb up the hill, Marci, from 96 to now?

Marci: Well, it wasn’t easy. So anytime anybody tells me I got lucky, I get to bat them in the face a few times. It’s been a very exciting journey. And a lot of it has been grounded in education and getting out there and talking about the solution to the negative ramifications of the textile world and to demonstrate that currently that industry, contributes to the destruction of soil and, and the destruction of ecosystems and pollutes the water that we depend on the air that we breathe. And so it’s a matter of shifting the paradigm and, and again, giving people products that they actually want to buy and wear. And that ultimately, the kind of product people want to support, simply because it’s a great product and what was happening, what was that we’re finding is that when you plant the seed of saying consciousness into a consumer, who might be now shopping at Whole Foods and buying organic food, or, looking into eco-travel or being mindful about climate change issues are for whatever way, however, the consumer is, is learning about, how their choices can actually make a difference in the world, that seed gets cultivated with that person typically says, “Well, what else? What’s next? What more?” It’s that evolution. And so what I found back in the 90s, was in the early years of the organic food and beauty movement was that people were asking that question, and when you look at the two basic necessities that everybody has to buy out there today, it’s apparel and food, right? We all wear clothing. And it made sense that, especially with the interconnection in nature, and a lot of people don’t realize this either. But 60% of a cotton plant ends up in our food stream. So in the form of cottonseed and cotton oil for feed for dairy for snack foods. So actually, cotton is going into our food in addition to being on our bodies. And when you think about how much cotton is in everybody’s wardrobe, between the clothing you’re wearing, and the sheets you’re sleeping on, and the towels and robes you’re using in the bathroom, you have it against your skin, pretty much all day long, and all night long. And our skin is the largest organ in our body and our primary organ for absorption. So it’s not just about what you eat, it’s about what you wear.

John: So now, now that the world is really catching up with your vision, I mean, really. I mean, the Green Revolution is here to stay. We’ve passed that tipping point. What’s next for you? Like how are you going to now take everything you’ve learned and done the last 14 years and make it into that your next great thing? What’s happening, what’s in the pipeline for you and the whole apparel, fashion sustainability movement?

Marci: What’s really exciting is that what was once a very niche idea has now shifted gears in the apparel world where I work with a lot of major retailers. I’ve launched organic programs for a lot of the major major retailers out there. And it’s no longer about staying ahead. It’s about not being left behind. And so I’m seeing factories and worldwide and retailers jumping on this bandwagon where there’s now a platform to get a product out into the market. And my focus has been on building a retail store chain that is called face that’s going to be vertically integrated. And where I believe we’re going to be very groundbreaking in the market for this whole concept of eco-fashion, is we’re going to be bringing the first wearable and affordable, sustainable fashion to the marketplace. So we’re going to break the stigma that you have to pay more for organic clothing, we’re going to break the stigma that it’s not stylish. And we’re going to give people a product that looks great, feels great. And oh, by the way, it’s organic. And it’s less expensive than the conventional counterparts because we’re vertically integrated, working with farmers, because all these years that I’ve built the market, I’ve built farm projects, and I’ve worked on such a ground floor level that we can pass that value now to the consumer. And again and give the consumer now that choice that is kind of a win-win for all the players.

John: So for our listeners who want to buy now or getting excited and want to buy the affordable eco-fashion that you’re going to be creating, where the store is going to open, where can they buy these products? And explain what’s when and where.

Marci: Okay, so FASE two is going to be launching this fall, we’re going to be opening our flagship retail location in Santa Monica, California, we’re gonna have a lifestyle lounge in the stores, we’re going to have mostly women’s wear a little bit of men’s wear that we’re calling What’s his face a little bit of maybe he wears his face some products called home face. And then some sort of underwear that’s called interface can be a really fun, brand, very engaging, and we’re gonna open our second store in New York City in October. And then we’re going to roll out nationwide from there. And in addition, for all those who don’t live in those cities, we’re going to have a state-of-the-art e-commerce website that will be launched in September. Between now and then, as you said earlier, people go on our Facebook page and sign up to be on the FASE, F-A-S-E fan page, then we’ll keep them abreast of all these openings and launches.

John: That is just amazing. So you’ve worked you’re saying from from from the beginning, from growing all the way to working with the retailer. So you really know the whole cycle, and you understand every element and every step along the way?

Marci: Exactly. I mean, the goal for me has been to offer farm to finished fashion, that we can pass that value to the consumer were at the end of the day buying great apparel, they’re getting value and values.

John: And are you going to be working with any specific designers? Or do you have your own design team? Or how does that work when we’ve never had as a guest someone from the apparel industry talking about these issues? Explain, where your product? Is the product going to be domestically grown? Or are the best farms in different parts of the world? How does this work?

Marci: Well, most of our cotton is coming out of India, where a lot of people don’t realize this, but every half an hour a conventional cotton farmer is committing suicide, because of the whole what we call the pesticide treadmill, where there’s a paradigm that’s just not working and the farmers are ending up leveraging their farms to the pesticide companies and the banks in order to afford the pesticides which ultimately are weakening their soil and their plants and ultimately creating a model that doesn’t work. And so we’re really excited to help the farmers, we’re excited. And that’s probably one of my favorite things that they do is when I go over to India and I’m working in the farms. But we’re really excited about giving people a product that’s not only made from organic cotton but it’s also made from other innovative fabrics like ecolyptus is a new fiber we’re going to be bringing to the market with the face brand and ecolyptus is made from Eucalyptus.

John: Where’s that come from?

Marci: The Eucalyptus has actually grown on managed tree farms in South Africa and is manufactured and broken down using a non-toxic recycled detergent. It’s completely chemical-free and it’s manufactured in a closed-loop system. And of course, the eucalyptus has grown without any pesticides or chemicals and minimal water because you blip this grows very quickly. So it’s another really great eco-friendly fiber. We’re going to be offering in our line organic cashmere, organic denim, organic leather, organic silk as well as organic cotton. All different types of fabrics from boil to French Terry to Jersey, just so there’s a very deep and wide array of fabrications and designs for people to enjoy, and it’s gonna be a really exciting collection.

Mike: Marci, we are just totally blown away. And we’re sitting here with our jaws really on this studio console. But when you mentioned organic leather, what’s the story behind organic leather?

Marci: Well, if you think about free-range, chicken, free-range beef, it’s a similar concept. The animals are being treated humanely they’re grazing on natural feeds or grass, they’re not being injected with hormones and antibiotics, and steroids. And there’s actually be… I happen to be a vegetarian, but there are people that want free-range meat, and by all means, when you look at leather as a byproduct of the meat industry, for those who are eating organic meat, it’s a question of, again, about the environment, is that going to go back into the environment, or used as a byproduct for another industry now, for those people who are vegan and don’t want, in our line to see organic, leather, silk, or wool, or cashmere, we have plenty of options like e-gullet, this and all the different blends of organic cotton fabrics that we’re going to be working with.

Mike: So there’s plenty of choice for everyone, which sure seems to make a whole lot of sense, because really, it is coming full circle, and that there is no waste because obviously, not everybody is going to become a vegetarian before life on this planet is through. So for those who choose to eat meat, or continue eating meat, this makes an awful lot of sense. This is one of the most sane propositions I’ve ever heard in my life. This just makes so much sense, Marci.

Marci: Plus the leather that we use is formaldehyde-free, it’s vegetable-tanned. So, we go beyond the fibers themselves. And that’s the case in all of our fabrics, and our cotton’s and everything, we use only low impact dyes. So there are no heavy metals, there’s no formaldehyde. There are no bleaches. So, we look at not just the fibers, we look at the manufacturing processes, we’re supporting fair trade I’m helping transfer right now actually launched the first USA certified Fair Trade textile program for the United States. And that’s going to be coming out later this year, as well. So I’m really excited about that, where we’re going to be making sure that farmers and factory workers, cotton farmers and factory workers in India specifically but ultimately worldwide, are being paid fair prices and being treated with fair working conditions. And it’s a really exciting program.

John: This reminds Mike and I. Mike and I had the head of the Rainforest Alliance on he called in from Costa Rica and what you’re doing in eco-fashion, he obviously Rainforest Alliance does that in the food industry. So it’s fascinating what you’re doing now, this is a massive match venture, though, are you back for it? Do you have a lot of partners that you’re allowed to talk about? I mean, how are you putting this all together? This sounds like Wow.

Marci: Well, I have a phenomenal management team. They’re all rock stars out of the apparel world and e-commerce world. I’ve got investor groups that have come on board that are just really wonderful strategic partners. We’ve got a lot of celebrities involved. We have many of them you’re allowed to talk about? Well, we’ve got pretty strong friendships with a number of celebrities. So one of our advisors is resent our tat a very dear friend. We have people like Alicia Silverstone and Amy Smarts and Anna Getty that are fans of our products. We have been starting to plant the seed and introduce the product into the market very slowly from the sample lines that we have. And we’re seeing just an exciting response from women of all ages, really from teenagers to women in their 20s, 30s, and 40s. To the moms of the teenagers in their 40s and 50s. And everybody is really responding extremely well to the product. I’m also working with James Cameron’s wife, Susie Cameron, on a whole initiative. We’re calling ourselves the Eco-chic warriors. And the goal is to green the fashion industry and I’m on a board that Suzy actually founded.

John: Wait for a second though. You just mentioned all beautiful women. I mean, where are the guys in this whole? What’s going on, Marci?

Marci: Well, that’s the fun of the brand that you got to have some what’s his face for what’s his face, right?

Mike: There you go for regular guys, right?

Marci: Yes, there will be some wonderful men’s men’s wear in the line as well. Just coming out of the gate. It’s going to be more limited but over time we will grow that part of the man.

John: So you really are true when the people say up in the air, you’re up in the air because you’re down in India, I assume you’re also in it since you’re doing the Ecolyptus, you’re in theory, you go to Africa. So you’re on the road a lot.

Marci: I do a lot of traveling. And, again, it’s been a very long journey. But an exciting one, I’m very passionate about this marketplace. And I think we’re at the tipping point right now and seeing this whole market really take off. There are all kinds of efforts going on beyond even the Eco-chic warrior group, there’s the NRDC has launched a whole initiative called cleaner by design, which is going after the whole fashion world, on the very, very big level of the Nikes of the world and, and looking at how they can be more engaged in shifting paradigms. And we’re just seeing a lot of players globally that are now getting involved. And I’ve definitely been in the trenches. And I’ve had a great time working with just such a wide array of people from the supply chain, as well as on the retail side.

John: Marci, we’re down to the last minute or so. But do you have any last words of wisdom for budding entrepreneurs or other visionaries out there that sometimes the mountain looks too high? Obviously, what’s your… I mean, do you have any last words you want to share with our listeners?

Marci: Well, I’ve always sort of subscribed to the vision is the art of seeing things invisible. It’s one of my favorite quotes by Jonathan Swift, and to stay true to what you believe and to follow your heart and visualize the future to be proactive and not reactive, and to be authentic, and transparent, because I think those are all key parts of the whole green movement as well and to look at how to take one step at a time because it can be kind of daunting entering this arena. But the journey of 1000 miles begins with one step.

John: Well, Marci, Mike, and I are so thrilled that what you’re doing and we’re so honored to have you on today, and we’re going to have you back after your stores start to open in your online shop is up online. For all our listeners out there, you could go to Marci’s FASE Facebook page, F-A-S-E. It’s amazing and wonderful. And Marci, we wish you all the luck opening up in Santa Monica, New York City, and getting your online retail store going. And for all the amazing work you’ve done, and everything you’ve dreamed up since 1996. And we wish you all the luck in the world. And Marci Zaroff, you are truly living proof that green is good.

Marci: Thank you, guys. Thanks for having me today.

Announcer: 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, who knew that you and I could be walking around in our Fonzi-s leather jackets that are made out of organic leather.

Mike: How about that? Organic leather I still like that, that whole concept just kind of boggles the mind. But I really liked when we were talking to Marci just about the confluence of fashion and the environment altogether.

John: And what did you call her?

Mike: Well, she is a fashionista.

John: I love that.

Mike: She’s an environista.

John: Environista. I love it. That’s even better. So that was great so a whole show on clothing and the sustainability movement with regards to clothing and organic clothing. But not only she also took us through the whole product chain, the whole how where it’s even grown and how it’s grown and the importance of where it’s grown, how it’s grown in the people how they’re being treated. who’s growing it so, it’s much more deep than just pulling something off the rack.

Mike: Yeah. And the other takeaway for too, John, I thought when she made such a great point Marcy did when she’s talking about the biggest organ on our body is our skin and how much of our body touches clothing.

John: Great call, Mike. That’s right.

Mike: So it really makes so much sense. So that really was a fascinating first half hour. And if you’d like that, boy, are you gonna love the second half.

John: Well, we got Betsy Blaisdell on who’s the senior manager in charge of environmental stewardship for the great Timberland company, which we’re going from clothing to shoes, and Timberland has been a very green company for a long time. But Betsy is another green rock star, just like Marci. And it’s a perfect bookend to this hour today, Mike, because Betsy is going to talk our talk to us about all the great things Timberlands doing in the climate change area, but also with our own products, and also with our own stores. So I think everyone should come on back and hear Betsy talk about Timberland at Green is Good.

Announcer: 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 and excited today to have Betsy Blaisdell on. She’s the senior manager of environmental stewardship for the great Timberland company, which is in New Hampshire. And Betsy, your focus is on environmental stewardship. What does that mean and welcome to Green is Good, by the way.

Betsy Blaisdell: Thanks very much. My title on environmental stewardship means I oversee our company’s environmental footprint around the globe. So I measure what our environmental impact is as a company, and I worked to reduce it.

John: Okay. So around the globe, you’re sitting in New Hampshire, what is around the globe meet for Timberland, where how many places do you have around the world that you have to tie together?

Betsy: We have operations and more than 20 countries, our product around the world. So we’re in Europe, we’re in Asia, and we have factories that are based all over the world too so I’m looking at both our facilities and all those countries, communicating with consumers and all those countries. And then also the countries where our factory sources were actively engaged in and working with our factories on improving environmental standards.

John: So wait for a second, you’re really I mean, talk about a huge position in such a critical position, you’re helping in terms of the product control and how it’s manufactured, then you’re also internally the stewardship issues in terms of getting the employees on board with this and motivating them to be part of this. And then also messaging to the consumers?

Betsy: Exactly.

John: Wow. Okay, so tell us a little bit about, like, let’s go through all three of those. Let’s talk about the manufacturing side and reducing waste and the process of making Timberland a more sustainable company from a manufacturing and design perspective.

Betsy: Sure. So I think on the manufacturing, and where we have the most impact, yep, is making better decisions at the front end. So where we design and develop our products, work with those teams to give them good environmental information, so they can make better choices, it’s a lot easier to design a product and assign materials to it that have a smaller environmental impact, than to go to our factories and unfairly say, Hey, you guys need to figure out you need to figure out how to make your emissions less, you need to figure out how to use less water, it’s far more effective if we work on the front end. So that’s really the focus of our initiatives, provide good information to the folks designing and developing.

John: And then your employees, how do you get them to enjoy and make the green DNA of Timberland part of what they do inside the company and also outside of the company?

Betsy: Like I say, it’s not a very hard job. And if you were in the Timberland building right now you kind of get it, we’ve got this great outdoor culture, because we’re in the outdoor industry. So I think the connection for our employees is somewhat explicit. You work in the outdoor industry, you care about the outdoors, we recreate outdoors, we’re designing products for consumers, who love the outdoors. So it’s fairly implicit.

John: Great, and then when you’re tying together, what sounds like a daunting position of tying together 20 or so operations around the world, do you have point people or point teams that are sharing best practices and inspiring one another in terms of things they’re discovering, or things that are coming up with among all your facilities around the world?

Betsy: We do, we have global stewards. And those are employees that apply to have two years of time where they get written into their expectations, specific corporate social responsibility, responsibilities.

Mike: Wow!

Betsy: Those employees really act as ambassadors for all of our corporate social responsibility initiatives, which include both environmental and community service initiatives.

John: Wow. So then, you’re the glue that brings all of them together and gets the information shared among all of them and throughout all the upper management of the company than I take it.

Betsy: Yeah, we have a great team here in New Hampshire, that helps manage it. So it’s not just me, but a group of really enthusiastic people.

John: So now, we come up into the big question of, of your consumers, then how do you know that that your wonderful consumers who love your great products can understand all that you’re doing to ensure that your products are designed, manufactured, and that green is really part of the real DNA of Timberland? How do you message that to the consumers?

Betsy: We’re a little cookie, we’re sort of inspired by nutrition labels that are on cereal boxes. So our way of communicating is providing the information about the impacts of the good and the bad associated with our product right on our product in on a label that looks just like a nutrition label on your cereal box. And so consumers can see when they check out a Timberland shoe at a store, what some of the environmental impacts are associated with both our business and product. Or if they’re shopping in our store, they can see the changes we’ve made to our storefronts that make them LEED-certified, which is a green building certification, or they can go on our website and see at earthkeeper.com, how individuals can become earth keepers through small individual actions, or by joining us and raising our voice more politically on important issues like climate change.

Mike: You know, it’s amazing too, Betsy, because as you and John are having a conversation right now, I’ve gone to the earth keepers section of your main website of Timberland calm and would really urge our listeners, if you’re listening to this morning, lingering over a cup of coffee, perhaps at your computer you have a laptop with you really need to check this site out and pay particular attention to the earth keepers portion of the site or go to earthkeepers.com. But this is really amazing, showing just the whole process of birth to rebirth, if you will, of different materials being repurposed and put into these beautiful new footwear products.

Betsy: Cool, thanks. I definitely encourage folks to check it out. And you mentioned the products, which of course, is another important way we can communicate to consumers what we’re doing, we can give them these great environmental guests with purchase shoes that are great performance shoes that look cool, but also have contained recycled and organic materials as well as renewable materials as well.

John: So I walk into one of your new LEED-certified stores, and I’m looking at the different shoes I want to buy. And so I can compare and contrast, which of the shoes are even greener, which ones made out of more recycled material than the others or had less of a carbon footprint.

Betsy: You can and in fact, you’re going to increasingly be able to do that with more and more data because well, we have product-specific impacts only on some of our shoes. Now, beginning next year, you’ll be able to see that on all of our shoes. So in the meantime, you can compare attributes of things like recycled content and renewable materials next year for those data geeks that are out there, you’ll be able to see all the nitty-gritty on our shoes that that excites me. Hopefully, I’ll excite others as well.

John: The nitty-gritty. Well, I saw a commercial a beautiful Timberland commercial on television not so far back that showed X amount of that great-looking shoe was made out of recycled material. I got all excited.

Betsy: Yeah, well, I’m glad to hear you’re excited. I think something even cooler that we’ve come out with are shoes that can be pulled apart disassembled for recycling by Timberland. We can recycle the components into new shoes.

John: That is so awesome. So wait a second. Now, Betsy. So now you’re messaging these messaging this to the consumers? How much do the consumers care? And when they’re comparing your products versus other products, that your shoes are greener and your stores are greener? Explain that. And is there any apathy out there that you have to overcome?

Betsy: Yeah, I think in a tough economy, like the one that we’ve been in, consumers are more careful about how they spend their money. And so when they make a purchasing decision, they’re going to look at all the criteria they typically do. This is a good looking too Is this too high-performing? I think they’re also increasingly purchasing with our values. So they want everything equal. If a company and a product bring their environmental values to action, they’re more likely to purchase that product or purchase from that company. And I think that’s what we’re seeing, figuring out how to communicate that clearly to consumers. So the choice is easy is continues to be a challenge.

John: Got you. And now Timberland, really from its makings from its inception was a green company anyway. And so, is this a great time to be at Timberland doing what you do there because the world is in the world in the marketplace has caught up to sort of what your DNA is, anyway?

Betsy: Thanks for saying that. I think it’s a great time because there’s so much collaboration within our industry that has really moved the needle on environmental improvement. So it’s not just one or a couple of companies working in the space. It’s an entire industry working in a really collaborative way to say, “Okay, what resources do we need? How can we better communicate to consumers so that we can drive real improvements?”

John: Betsy, behind the scenes, do your competitors share best practices? And obviously, to the consumers? You all are competing, but to yourselves, are you sharing best practices and pushing, pushing each other to more greats to environmental stewardship?

Betsy: We absolutely are.

John: Great, great. Great. So So what are some of the things that are coming up that are important to Timberland? Like you said, shoes that can be taken apart? When does that come out?

Betsy: So those shoes, those Timberland shoes are actually already available in our stores. They’re part of our earth keepers line.

John: Okay. And what’s in the pipeline that you said, that’s coming, the more labeling and more than nitty-gritty on the labeling?

Betsy: Yeah, for Timberland, we will continue to do more product-specific labeling of environmental impacts on our products. But what’s more exciting to me is that we’re working with the outdoor industry association and outdoor industry brands on developing a common set of metrics, the idea being that we all work with our suppliers and measure them in a common way so that we can drive real progress. And this summer, the outdoor industry group that we work with, it’s called the Eco working group will be launching its first phase of metrics for outdoor industry products. And what’s awesome about that is we’ll all be able to understand the environmental attributes of our product in a common way.

John: So that’s a macro collaboration to create to effectuate even bigger change, you’re saying.

Betsy: Exactly, yeah.

John: Wow. So talking about bigger change, we know the Copenhagen Climate Conference came and went and if you were a lot of people just said big whoopee doo. I mean, not, not a lot really came out of that. We know your company has been a thought leader and a change provoker on climate issues. What are the next steps with regard to climate change? And what do you foresee happening that your company’s doing?

Betsy: So I think that there are two things that that we’re focused on now post Copenhagen. One is making sure that aggressive climate legislation is passed in the US, we think that that would be an important signal for real movement on an international deal. I think the other focus area for us is really raising the consumer voice on this issue showing that consumers care to buy low carbon products, they care for governments to take action on this issue on their behalf. So raising that consumer’s voice is another important part of our platform. And that’s where we really rely on social media and social engagement through earthkeeper.com.

John: Okay, so earthkeeper.com and social and consumer voice, great, great, great points to bring up. How do you listen to your consumers? How is information fed back to you and to your colleagues at Timberland? So you could respond to them into their needs?

Betsy: Sure, there are a bunch of different ways, I think the coolest way that we have is, Jeff, our CEO leads a quarterly call. So in the business world, we do a quarterly call for our financial release, that’s very standard for a publicly-traded company. I think what’s really unique about our company, and Jeff is that we also have a quarterly call related to corporate social responsibility. And each call has a different focus. We just had a climate focus on our last quarterly call it consumers and NGOs and anybody with a real interest in these issues can get on the call with our CEO, and ask questions. So that’s, that’s one way that the highest level of my company, plus the CSR team, myself included, get good feedback. Another way is this earth keeper comm site if folks go on there, they can see we have a section called voices of challenge where we ask very specific questions of our consumers and stakeholders around thorny issues, things that we haven’t figured out things that we really need help with. We’re looking to have a very active dialogue on that site. And consumers can get on there and ask questions, and we respond to them directly.

John: Okay, Betsy. So now the million-dollar question which we ask all great people like you that are in these kinds of important positions that run great brands, Twitter, Facebook, is this part of the initiatives that Timberland is part of?

Betsy: Timberland is definitely on Twitter and Facebook. And my CEO is the most active tweeter I’ve ever seen in my life. So it’s actually hard for me to tweet because he and I like to tweet about the same thing. So I almost [crosstalk]

John: I got you. So but you aren’t doing it. So a couple of you and your colleagues and your CEO are the ones really tweeting at Timberland.

Betsy: Yeah, we really are tweeting, Jeff is particularly active. We’re also on Facebook regularly as well.

John: So what’s the greatest piece of inspiration that’s come back to you, the value of social media, people want to still brands still need to understand the value of social media, as do consumers or people out there that just shrug their shoulders at it, what has what’s been the greatest nugget that has come back to you, Visa V, Facebook, or the social media networks that you’ve been able to integrate into your company or take as a form of inspiration?

Betsy: I think all critical feedback we get on the site is definitely been an inspiration for me, it lets me know that there are consumers out there and stakeholders out there that are really paying attention to these issues. And that and that they do care. So any critical feedback we’ve gotten off the site has been particularly valuable for me during our agenda and initiatives.

John: Got you. And so Are you hopeful and is Timberland hopeful that climate policy and climate change will start changing in the near future, or you’ll be able to influence some of that change?

Betsy: We are hopeful we were really engaged in the house debate over climate. And now that the Senate is heating up again, we look forward to participating in that dialogue and showing that there is a strong business case a strong economic case for seeing climate legislation passed.

John: You talked about LEED certification, and it’s an acronym. And so for our listeners out there, the fact that you’re making your stores LEED-certified, I don’t want that just to get easily passed over what does that mean in terms of actual tangible things that our listeners will understand that you’re doing to make your stores greener and leaner and better?

Betsy: Well, I encourage them to go in because we actually display how we do this on our wall.

John: Wonderful.

Betsy: Yeah, for us, it’s mainly using reusable materials that we source locally. So if you go into a Timberland store, pretty much everything that you look at, except for the clothing and footwear, which is beautiful, and new, is reclaimed materials, and we’ve simply repurposed them, not reprocess them, but just repurpose them to become a store fixture, that the fact that we have incredibly energy-efficient lighting, I’d say look up better lighting, but it was kind of blind, it’s very bright. But believe it or not, they’re LED bulbs that use about five watts of energy, which is way less about half the amount of compact fluorescent if you can believe it, and they last about 50,000 hours, which is awesome, it means we don’t have to really ever change these things out. So very energy-efficient lighting and reclaimed materials are the big ones. The things that you might not see as close up is we work with the malls that we occupy to establish bike parking, public transportation routes, greater access for smaller vehicles, so preferred parking for hybrid and alternative fuel vehicles. Those are the conversations we’re having because that creates improvements for other tenants in the building.

John: Right, right. So all are all the new stores that you’re building from here on in all LEED certified, is that what’s happening?

Betsy: We’re in the process of certifying our third store, our third new store, and all of our future stores are going to meet the LEED standard, the LEED silver standard is our target. And we’re not gonna necessarily fill out the paperwork to get all the stores certified. But at least we’ve gone through the process for our standard design and know that standard needs the certification.

John: Got you. Hey, let’s talk about let’s go back now, which in turn the conversation a little away from the consumer for a second talk about employees. So what are the things internally you have such you sit in New Hampshire, which is historically a great green environmental state also? And now, what other things do you do internally, for the employees to show your green DNA that allows them to show their green DNA and further inspires them and motivates them?

Betsy: Well, I like that we’re doing this call the day before. Because tomorrow over 7000, folks will be serving with us on Earth Day. So we, as a company, go out and serve in our communities on community greening type projects, so trail restoration, tree planting, removal of invasive species, beach cleanup, etc. We do that around the world and, and enjoy this amazing benefit that we have paid community service time we get 40 hours of paid community service. So that’s one example. Next month, we’ve got Bike to Work Month, where we will create a fun little challenge for our employees to bike commute. And in New Hampshire, we do some fun things like courses on how to maintain your bike we even bring in the local puppy wheelies bike shop to help our employees tune up their bikes for commuting to work by bike over the summer. And so it continues every month, we try to find some cool way to keep the engagement going.

John: So every employee gets 40 hours of paid community service. That’s amazing. And it’s also inspirational. And that’s great. And you also incentivize employees for being entrepreneurial and coming up with the concepts that confer the green the company or green your mission?

Betsy: We do. In fact, every year we have an award, called the Carbon Walsh environmental award for excellence. And it’s given to an employee or a team of employees that come up with a very innovative and sustainable way to reduce Timberlands environmental footprint. And this past year, we gave it to one of our folks in retail construction, he helped develop all the lead lighting that is now going into our stores around the world.

John: Wow, so let’s go back around the world. Now you are the senior manager in terms of environmental stewardship, and it is a worldwide position do you have to travel a lot to go visit other Timberland locations around the world?

Betsy: I do. Absolutely. And increasingly, I’m getting better out to limit that. I think it’s not so much traveled to visit Timberland facilities, it’s more travel, to meet with other brands for the type of collaborative work that we do to ford our agenda. So, that’s the rub. It’s those are the most effective meetings that I have had. But we haven’t completely figured out how to do that yet at a distance. So I do a lot of travel, I tend to call it a trip chain, I figure out how to get everything on the way out and everything on the way back sort of like going to the grocery store and figuring out how to fit 15 more errands. And while you’re there. So I’ve gotten really good at that. But I haven’t eliminated all travel yet.

John: But it also, I’m sure it gives you then a unique and important perspective as you travel to different continents around the world and see different cultures in the green DNA of those cultures. And it allows you to even be better at what you do by having that travel, you get a great perspective, I’m sure, for sure. It allows me to be more realistic, and also much more creative and how I create tangible resources for factories that are under a lot of constraints. Betsy, we’re down to the last three or so minutes. And there’s a lot of people out there that listen to our show, we get a lot of feedback and emails that are young people that are either in college or just getting out of college, and they want to be you they want to be part of the Green Revolution. And they want to earn their way up to your position is there are some pearls of wisdom that you could share with our listeners, our young listeners are entrepreneurial or are green motivated by our green agers out there that want to become the next Betsy Blaisdell.

Betsy: I love that term that you just use, I’m gonna have to copy that from you. That’s great. My advice would be when they get to college or an MBA program, look up an organization called net impact. It’s an organization that works with business students, business students in particular, that have a real passion for CSR. It links them up with other students interested in working on CSR-related projects, as well as companies that are trying to push forward a commerce and justice agenda. And I think, my advice for people that want my specific job is to take your skills to a company who a company that shares their environmental values, and start off in another business discipline like it or supply chain or even marketing and develop your skillset there. I think that bill makes you a credible business person, and slowly began to add more and more sustainability-related projects to your job description. Build that over time, get your experience and then essentially prove yourself so you can make it into a CSR role. It’s really hard to go straight into corporate social responsibility. Because our teams are very small we act as internal consultants. So when we do look to hire we look within we look at those passionate employees who have proved themselves in the business have demonstrated their passion over time and we take from that pool versus necessarily going external.

John: Well, Betsy, Mike, and I just want to say thank you for your time we know how busy you are and what a big position you have. We’re both honored and humbled. By your time today and all the information you’re able to share with our listeners. It’s truly inspirational. We ask all our listeners out there to not only purchase Timberland products to support such a great company but go to their website to learn more about what they’re doing. Timberland comm or earthkeeper.com. Also, as Betsy said, net impact for all our green agers out there. Go learn more about the net impact so you can become the next Betsy Blaisdell. Betsy Blaisdell, you are living proof that green is good.

Betsy: You’re way too sweet. Thank you so much.

Announcer: This program will be available for download 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.

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John: Welcome to another edition of the Impact podcast. This is a very special edition because we’re so lucky to have with us today, Doctor Peter Kozlowski. Doctor Kozlowski is known and he’s just released his book – Unfunc Your Gut. Which I’ve read, as you can see. I don’t have any guess on that I haven’t read their books. Doc Koz, thank you for joining us today on the Impact podcast. It’s just a joy to have you on.

Peter Kozlowski: It’s an honor to be here and I’m very, very grateful. Thank you.

John: Well, you know Doc, I know you through some common friends of ours. My business partner has spoken so highly of you for years and I already feel like I know you but I really felt like I got to know you more after I read your book. But before we get talking about your functional medicine, practice, and all the great work you’ve done and your new book here, Unfunc Your Gut. Can you share a little bit about your back story? How did you even and why you even became a doctor? Not only just a doctor but one that specializes in functional medicine.

Peter: Yes, yes. I would have never guessed. Even when I started my residency, I would have never guessed. But yes, my story starts with my parents, I’d say. Like most of us. But my parents are both doctors and they were both doctors in Poland and they moved just due to the political climate there. They moved to the United States. Seven months before I was born. So I was born a first-generation American. And that’s a big part of my story, it’s just, what it’s like growing up being a first-generation American. But my whole life and then my grandfather was a doctor, my aunts are doctors. So there are all types of doctors in my family.

I never really wanted to… I wasn’t sure what I wanted to do. When I went to college, I went to Arizona State for undergrad. I basically went there to party. I started as a pre-med student. But my chemistry class, my freshman year was Monday, Wednesday, and Friday at 8:30 in the morning and I could never make it on Fridays because Thursday was our big night to go out. So pretty much all my friends were in business school. So I said, “You know what, I’m going to do business school so I don’t have to go to class on Fridays.” So when I was 18, that’s where my priorities were at. And that kind of led me down a road that people would uncover my book of recovery. So I ended up just dealing with my mental-emotional, spiritual health through alcohol. Through being a first-generation American. I created trauma in my own body from just never feeling good enough. From never feeling like I wanted to fit in. Or never feeling like I fit in.

And so I created this discomfort in my body and it was always taken away with alcohol. So I got my degree in Economics and Psychology. It’s what I studied as an undergrad and I had an internship that’s my summer, like between sophomore and junior year and then junior and senior year working in subprime lending. And there were tons of dollar figures in that business at that time and that’s what I wanted to do. And my parents wouldn’t let me. They’re like, “Listen, you need to go get more education.” Like, “This is a business that is no good.” It’s not going to survive. “Get more education.” I had no idea what I wanted to do.

So during my senior year of college, my best friend came back from spring break and was just feeling unwell. She’s like, “I don’t feel good, I’m sick, I have a rash.” “I don’t know what’s going on with me.” Over the course of two months, she got diagnosed with lupus. And the most aggressive form of lupus I’ve ever seen because she passed away one week after our graduation. So little, it was around two months from diagnosis to her passing. So that to me, kind of was like, the biggest thing I felt was helpless during her whole situation. I borrowed my mom’s medical books and I was trying to read about what lupus is. I had no idea.

But there’s nothing I could do, and that to me I guess inspired me to think about going back into medicine. At that point, I had already committed. My dad’s idea was for me to learn Spanish and so I had committed. I bought a one-way ticket to Barcelona, Spain. And after I graduated, I flew out to Spain and studied Spanish. Did all types of odd jobs, played on a semi-professional Rugby team. The best year of my life. While I was there, I started applying to pre-medical post bachelorette programs. Which are basically, you just do the science classes that you didn’t take during undergrad because I didn’t take science in my business training.

John: And Doc, you already had started recovery by then? Or this was…

Peter: No

John: No, not yet. Okay. I just want to understand the timeline.

Peter: No, I was definitely…I mean in Barcelona I worked in a bar.

John: I got you.

Peter: Barcelona. Working in a bar is a good place to work on your alcohol as well.

John: By the way, It’s also hanging out with other addicts. Perfect bunch.

Peter: Right. Exactly. So I went back. While I was there, I got into some pre-medical post-bachelor programs and I went into that. And I mean, I went from being a bartender in Barcelona to being in pre-med classes with like 18 year-olds at NYU and it was quite a culture shock, to say the least. I made it through. Took my medical, the MCAT. Applied to all the best medical schools and didn’t get into any of them. Just rejection after rejection and I was just like, “This is crazy.” So I got this book from, I think it was US news. The best medical schools in the country and the back was a section about Caribbean Medical Schools. So I looked at it. I was like, “What is this? ” And basically, it’s all-American students. I mean, over 95% of the class are kids from the United States or adults and the rest are from Canada. But you spend two years on the island which I chose the school in St. Martin. So lived there for two years which is also a great place to keep going without a drinking career and also medical schools. A great place to meet other addicts. I’d say as well.

And so I went to Caribbean Medical School. The first two years were on the island. The second two years were back in the U.S. working at hospitals around the country. With traditional medical students taking all the licensing exams and then applying for residency. And I got into a family practice residency. And it’s still at this point, In my whole thinking was just traditional medicine. I’m going to follow everything that I learn in school and not think outside the box.

And I also at this point thought I had it all figured out. I was just…I wasn’t a mean person, but I wasn’t…all I really cared about was myself, I think. And at the end of the day, that’s how I made the kind of most my decisions was just what was best for me always. Very egotistical. And when I got into residency as part of my medical license, I have had a DUI in my history and so I got into this monitoring program. To have a medical license, I had to do drug screens every week and they basically are like, “You can’t drink anymore.” And I had never tried to not drink and I wasn’t a daily drinker. I was a weekend drinker. I kind of had the attitude of getting my work done and then play hard, party hard is what I did. No suddenly. It was just overnight all of a sudden. You can’t drink and I had been partying since I was 14. I just had no idea how to deal with life. And so eventually it got to the point where I “relapsed”, I wouldn’t call it really a relapse because I never really tried to get sober. But it was looked at like that and I was recommended to go to treatment. So I had to take six weeks off of my intern year of residency to go to treatment. And that changed my life, obviously, in a lot of ways. But more than anything, it got me to functional medicine as well as for a career. Because treatment for my alcoholism wasn’t about the alcohol. It was about life and how to manage life. And there was nothing about alcohol. So I was so confused. I was there with all these other professionals and I mean, I just, I was so confused. None of it. I thought an alcoholic was a guy under the bridge and these are all successful people around me. I’m like, “What is going on here?”

John: Very high function. Very successful folks.

Peter: Right. Right. And so when I got back from treatment and went back to work at my residency program. There is this one doctor, his name is Doctor Batra, we’re still friends. He was one of our attending doctors and as a resident, you learn from your attendings. As a family practice resident, we would do different rotations every month. So we would do OB one month, outpatient one month, cardiology one month. Every month was different.

And we would do inpatient service. So taking care of hospitalized patients. And every time Doctor Batra came onto our team, he would start every patient on a multivitamin and vitamin D. And we thought it was ridiculous and a joke. And we would make fun of him. And we would be frustrated that we had to write these orders to put people on these supplements because nobody else did it. Nobody talked about it, nobody even considered it.

So one day, we were in the call room. It was 2 a.m. overnight on a Sunday night and I just kind of asked Doctor Batra. Doctor Batra, why are you weird? Why are you different? And he goes, “Well, I’m studying this thing called functional medicine.” and I was like, “What’s that?” So, he showed me the website and it’s all taught basically, outside of Medical School residency. It’s taught. You have to spend your own time and money to learn it, right?

And so there are different conferences and so I went. I signed up for just the general first conference and I was like, “Let me check this out because we had to do some kind of conference.” And from the first hour there, I knew that I could never look at medicine the same way and it was all taught from anatomy, physiology, biochemistry levels. So, this wasn’t, I mean, if you would ask me about alternative medicine, I would have laughed. Like, “That’s made up, that’s not even real.” Like, “They just make stuff up.” And this was all taught just evidence-based and I was just like this. And the other thing that shocked me was that this conference. I mean, I was, I think I’m pretty sure I was the youngest one there because I was still just an intern and in residency. There were cardiologists, ophthalmologists, surgeons. All these people there and I’m like, “What are you guys doing here?” “Why are you wasting the time and money to study this?” And just people I was meeting there were like, “This is the future of medicine.” If you’re here now this is where you should focus your career and so I did. I was just…I mean most of my friends and I think my parents even thought I was nuts. Like, “What you, you know, going to invest this time into this?” and it definitely turned out to be the best thing I ever did. Because I feel like I can actually help people get better.

John: Speaking, you know, when you think back to your best friend in college.

Peter: Yes.

John: Now with what you know today, do you believe if a patient like that – that young, but that sick walked into your office, you’d be able to help them? Maybe even intermediate the very bad ending she had as well.

Peter: I don’t know. I would love to say yes.

John: Of course. Of course.

Peter: The…I mean, the nice thing is, I mean, I’ve worked with multiple patients with lupus that are now in remission. But the reason I say I don’t…I mean, it’s not everybody, and also I just never heard, seen, read anything about a progression that was that fast with that disease. So if we had time, more time, I think we definitely could have got it under control. Now with what I know now. But it’s definitely a blessing to work with people with that diagnosis now and offer them hope.

John: Lupus, if I’m not mistaken is categorized traditionally as part of the autoimmune disease category. With rheumatoid arthritis, MS, and other diseases similar to that. There seems to be a rise of those diseases in the United States, you know. And as you pointed out in your book, there’s a rise in just a lot of the bad things that we do to ourselves. The food abuse that we do and other stress levels that we have. And things of that such. Again, for our listeners and viewers who just tuned in, we’ve got with us today, Doctor Peter Kozlowski is known as Doctor Koz. You could find him at www.doc-koz.com. He also has his new book which I’ve read. We’re going to go into it now, Unfunc Your Gut. And you can find this in great bookstores around the world but also on amazon.com and other great online opportunities to purchase great books like this.

You know, Doc Koz, just a little background on myself. I’ve been a vegetarian since I’m 17. I’m 58 now. So that makes it about 41 years in about a vegan 14, or 13, or 14 years mostly plant-based eating. But I found your book so helpful because it spoke to me in so many ways in terms of stress, in terms of stomach issues that I’ve had no matter how clean I eat. There’s so much, other things that go into good health and also for health and bad outcomes and eating poorly at the wrong time and putting ourselves in a position to fail.

Talk a little bit about, first, your practice. Do people who have traditional doctors come to see you? Or they come to see you while they’re still semi-well and their bucket of illness you put in the bucket of problems. As you put in, the book isn’t filled yet and they just want to evolve and get better. And avoid catastrophe. Or do they come in when they’re fully broken down or on the way to breaking down? What or do you see a whole spectrum of patients in your practice?

Peter: It’s a great question. 99% of people that come into me are broken down. And I’m their last resort. They’ve been to Mayo Clinic, Cleveland Clinic, the major University Hospitals and they are just not getting any better. Which is the worst time to see a functional medicine doctor. I always try to tell people when I get the question, “When should I come to see you?” And because I don’t have any symptoms. So why would I spend time seeing you?

That’s the best time because functional medicine at its core really should be preventative medicine. Usually people, and I know this from my own recovery. Won’t really get drastic until they’ve kind of hit their bottom, right? And so, to make significant changes as we make with people whether it’s with diet, lifestyle, supplements, etcetera. Usually, people have to be at their most recent bottom, right? And so that’s the majority of people. I would love to work with more preventive medicine. People don’t know about it, right? People don’t know that functional medicine exists. You go to your traditional family practice doctor once a year. They don’t talk to you about gut health. They don’t talk to you about toxins. They don’t talk to you about your diet unless you probably have diabetes. And this is all the stuff that we can work on to prevent the disease from happening in the future.

John: So interesting. So people come to your last resort and they come to you with all sorts of issues. Not only gut issues, but they come to you with obviously. Then the outcomes from their gut issues. And so you have to unravel both. You’re trying to help them get back into some sort of equilibrium in terms of their gut health. Which will then hopefully, on some form of…I don’t want to say, cure. But, an evolution of their symptoms from their previous poor gut health will start to unravel and hopefully fully unwind at some point.

Peter: Exactly. Talk a little bit about how bad are we? I mean, in terms of gut health in America today. Of course, this would apply to our listeners and viewers around the world but I have, I mean, including myself. So I’m not going to put myself out of this. A love-hate relationship with my digestive system.

And as you said, it starts in the mouth. As you point out in the book, it ends at the very back, our rectum and the backside. Even though I “clean” historically and don’t drink alcohol and don’t eat meat or other…and try to shy away from sugar. I have not been immune from gut issues which then create a whole host of other symptoms in my body.

And as you point out in the book – the worst thing that any of us could do…you had a great quote in there. I can remember the quote right now. But, and I’m guilty of this myself instead of going to a doctor or calling someone like you, the first thing that’s so many of us do, is we go to Doctor Google. And just totally freak ourselves out which then spins us in a wholly different…as you said something in the book when you want to really look up the symptoms that you have online, put down the computer and meditate. Meditate and practice good breathing and stuff of that nature. Which I found so on-point. Just for me, I’m guilty of all the things you point out in the book yourself and stress levels and everything else. And by the way, travel is also has been really… there’s nothing I’ve read, but I just know airplane, historically, pre-pandemic I travel 200 days a year and planes were not good for gut health. Ever.

Talk a little bit about why you decided to write this great book. I mean, obviously, I read it and I marked it all up because there are so many areas that I wanted to talk to you about. We won’t get to the mall today. But there are so many areas that struck me. Unfuc Your Gut. So you have this wonderful practice. What was the Epiphany that, “I better write a book and put this down into a book.” Because… fill out the because.

Peter: Yes. I think that it’s… I mean, I always had a dream of writing a book, so it was just always in the back of my mind and I think the time just happened where I worked with enough patients that I felt confident to be able to write it. I think that there’s a lot of misconceptions out there about our health and gut health. And a lot of things that are kind of misunderstood that I wanted to help clear up through my experience of working with patients. For example, chapter 7 is just about SIBOS – Small Intestinal Bacterial Overgrowth.

The majority of people, majority of doctors aren’t even familiar with this condition. It’s the most common thing that I see when I’m working with gut health. And one of the worst things about it is that if you tell a friend or something that you have gut issues, they’re going to tell you to eat more fiber and take a probiotic. Those are the worst things you can do for SIBO, right?

So, to me, I can’t tell you how many people I’ve seen better just from changing their diet a little bit and stopping their probiotics, right? If they have SIBO. So things like that I wanted to get out. In traditional medicine, everybody’s told that they have too much stomach acid. If you walk into a pharmacy, there’s an entire aisle of acid-blocking drugs. When you block your acid, you block your digestion, you block your ability to absorb vitamins and minerals. So even if your diet is fantastic, if you’re taking an acid blocker, you’re not going to be getting the nutrition you need. So we actually test which I explained in the book about how to test yourself for low stomach acid.

The microbiome, right? And kind of what you were saying. Things are getting so much worse and a quote that I always like. Hippocrates, a few thousand years ago, said, “All disease begins in the gut.” And what I always tell my patients is basically since he said that everything we’ve done is damaging to their gut. It’s the changes to our food supply, the changes to our environment, all the medications, the antibiotics. All of this stuff is destroying our guts and not everybody who has a gut is destroyed. Let’s say, is going to present with the disease, right? One person can have gut issues for three months and end up with an autoimmune disease, and the other person might have them their entire life and never know they had it.

So that’s where I use that bucket analogy. Where we fill our bucket with stress toxins, bad food, and eventually that bucket overflows into disease. And then the biggest point I wanted to make in my book is that the key to gut health is mental-emotional, spiritual health. And I learned that from my own recovery and learning that…I would have never guessed that was even an issue for me. Like before I went to treatment, I would have told you, I was perfect. I did tell my counselors. I was like, “I don’t need to be here.” “I’m only here because I have to.” And then it turned out that I had all this stuff I needed to unravel and still unraveling. So, the key to gut health is our mental-emotional, spiritual health. And from a science perspective, it’s because your gut and brain are connected. Your gut talks to your brain, your brain talks to your gut in a loop. There’s a nerve called the vagus nerve that runs from the brain to the gut. It also goes to the heart and lungs. That nerve runs on our autonomic nervous system. Our automatic nervous system.

So you don’t know it, right? It’s not like you’re nervous. So you’re turning that system on or off. It’s just constantly working. That nervous system has two branches -sympathetic and parasympathetic. And that is either fight or flight. Or rest and digest. So now that I live in Montana, the example I use in sympathetic responses is your hiking in the mountains and you have to run away from a bear. The blood is not going to go to your gut, the blood and energy are going to go to your brain and muscles to escape.

John: Right.

Peter: When you sit by the campfire, at the end of the night, and have a meal. That’s when you’re relaxed and in rest and digest.

People are living as if they’re running from a bear 24/7, right? We wake up. We go straight to our phones and see our emails and texts. And right away, the sympathetic nervous system is activated. And then it just gets worse for most of us throughout the day.

For many people that I’ve worked with, they don’t know it, but that’s damaging their gut. Being stressed out. Even if you’re not having bloating or diarrhea or abdominal pain. You’re not digesting your food. You’re shutting down your gut bacteria from growing. Your whole gut falls apart and the gut is the gateway into your body. It is a barrier. One of the most interesting things about the gut to me is that the inside of your gut is actually considered outside of your body. So it’s a long tube that runs through us. And the main job of that tube is really to decide what comes into our body and what stays out.

So I worked with so many people over the years with the same condition. Whether they have SIBO or candida or some other gut issue or food issue, and you could take 50 people. And 25 get better, and 25 don’t. And so, me, as a perfectionist, the only ones that I remember are the people that don’t get better. And the overlying theme, what I’ve found is that usually, it is the mental-emotional and spiritual.

Peter: I have people that are willing to do whatever diet. Not eat for weeks at a time. Takes whatever supplements, or whatever tasks. But, when I ask them to look at themselves, huge red flags go up, huge stop signs, and they don’t want to do it. And I get it because it hurts, it’s uncomfortable. Sometimes it’s still active. I mean, for a lot of us, it’s stuff that happened to us as a kid. But for many people I work with, it’s active relationships with family, etc. So it’s just really difficult to look at.

And what I really want people to understand is that your gut health is very easy to address. If you’re working with a functional medicine doctor. There’s good testing to diagnose what’s going on. But the most important thing that you can be doing is making your mental-emotional, spiritual health the focus of your health.

John: So interesting. You know, I’m guilty also of that too. I mean, look at the phone first thing and then the whole day is off to the races. And weekends, nothing ever stops. We live in this continuous loop of more is better. More text messages, more emails, more “productivity”. But, at what cost?

Peter: The cost is our gut health. A lot of people end up with autoimmune diseases or other chronic diseases.

John: You point out in the book and you made a lot of great points about holistically approaching in terms of breath work, potentially meditation, Bikram Yoga, and other ways of letting go. Including digital sabbaticals and things that such.

So, I mean, so it’s not just gut health and unfunc-king your gut. Isn’t just about the elimination of food and other items or abstaining or intermittent fasting. It truly has a lot to do with everything else that we do. Functionally speaking, therefore, functional medicine is what you’re doing.

Peter: Yes. I mean if you sum it up really well and it just kind of spurred a thought. Another point that I try to make is that with eliminating the foods, there’s a lot of very strict diets out there and they’re not the best for everyone, right? Like you mentioned you’re vegetarian. Vegan. And that’s a great diet for you.

John: Right.

Peter: On the internet, you can get convinced by your favorite social media celebrities that the paleo diet is the best. The keto diet is the best, the Mediterranean is the best diet. It might be for many people, but it might not be for you.

And what I try to tell people is, the worst diet for you is the one that’s causing you the most stress. And so, even if veganism is great for you, if it stresses me out to be vegan, then that diets not going to help. Because then again I’m activating that sympathetic nervous response and it doesn’t matter what I’m eating. I’m not going to get healthy.

John: Right.

Peter: What the internet, I mean, I obviously make fun of it quite a bit in the book. But, functional medicine wouldn’t exist without the internet, right? If people get, you know, or grew up getting these diagnoses spending five, ten minutes with their doctor, getting a prescription going home, and just being on that for the rest of their life. So they needed more meds. Now, you can go home and say, “Oh, I was diagnosed with Hashimoto’s thyroiditis!” And then, there’s all types of information out there about what people have done to heal.

So it’s definitely…I call the internet a blessing and a curse. My practice exists because people are searching for answers. But at the other side of it, I’ve just seen so many people that make themselves sick. Like, literally will be sick because they’re constantly worried about what could be wrong with them and you can go down any rabbit hole you want. So if you want to convince yourself that bananas are the worst thing for you. You can probably find somewhere someone that’s written something about the negative effects of bananas, right? Or if you want to convince yourself that a carnivore diet, just eating meat is the best diet for you. You can find that information as well.

So I just encourage people to find a practitioner that they can trust. And once you have that person, let go of the searching.

John: I love it. Doc, how is…in a world getting through and I’m starting to get on the other side of this tragic COVID-19. Prices[?] that stripped the world for the last 19 or so months. How is that change your practice, your view on medicine? The gaps that exist and how will your practice evolve post-pandemic with the lessons you’ve learned during these last 19 or so months.

Peter: Yes, that’s a great question. I’d say, the biggest thing I had changed in my practice personally is I now live in Bozeman, Montana. And I’m from shoot downtown Chicago, Illinois. And that’s where I lived and practiced. And a year and a half ago, living in a small town being a functional medicine practice. I don’t know that I would have survived because there’s just that people don’t know about it enough.

Whereas now I can live in Montana and work in Illinois. So, it’s amazing. A funny story to me is that I have an email from the publisher of my book from last February and she was traveling in India at the time of our first visit, er, our first appointment. And she emailed me and she’s like, “Okay, we’ll meet on Zoom.” And I replied and I go, “I don’t know what that is, but I’ll figure it out.” And that was last February and now I live on Zoom. So it’s just amazing how that changed. And that was what I learned is that I can do my job pretty much just as well as in person. I mean, I really prefer working in person with people.

John: Right.

Peter: But we’re still getting the same kind of outcomes. I mean, we’ve got a year and a half now of seeing patients this way and we’re still getting great outcomes. So it’s still doable. It’s just a little different.

John: Did the move also inform you that your practice can be even bigger than you originally envisioned in just downtown Chicago? Really because under those conditions, as of someone who’s getting great outcomes and still doing it over Zoom, but sitting in Bozeman, now. You could literally have clients from Paris to Shanghai to Beverly Hills and everywhere in between and simply get similar outcomes.

So really geography doesn’t really matter as much as it did historically. Is that part of? Also, lessons learned?

Peter: Absolutely. And the biggest problem with that is that you still have to get a license. Medical license in each state. So until I get licenses in other states, I couldn’t work with people in other states. So I know, from what I’ve heard, there’s been a lot of discussions politically about making just a nationwide medical license.

I think that this pandemic has taught us that that makes a whole lot of sense. But I don’t know the politics of that and how realistic that is.

John: So right now it’s more constrained to Montana and Illinois?

Peter: Because that’s where I have my license.

John: I got it. One thing, another thing out of many, many things I love about your book is you not only talk about problems. How they manifest and then what some of the results are. You gave great examples of case studies, of unwinding some of the problems and addressing some of the problems. But then in the back, what you also gave is a solution. Not only solutions to the problems but in terms of diet. You gave great recipes and things that people can… Really great stuff. I read all the recipes and they all sounded beyond delicious.

Talk a little bit about fixing our diet. And how, as you point out – it’s people get into this thing. All meat or nothing.

Peter: Yes.

John: All vegan. Plant-based or nothing. And we get stuck in these ideological loops that we think that if we break out or we veer a little bit off. Or enjoy a meal that someone’s grandmother cooked for us that wasn’t towards the diet that Kim Kardashian or Joe Rogan or somebody else some other influencers eating. That it’s going to be ultimately a disaster for us. Explain about opening ourselves up to foods that could be beneficial, but also as you say, in the book. Not getting stuck on the latest trend, the latest fad, the latest thing.

Peter: So, my favorite part about the recipes in the book is that actually one of my patients wrote those recipes. And it’s a woman that had rheumatoid arthritis that she’s been in remission for 6 years now. But she was a chef. So, when I started writing my book, I just wanted my book to be different than the rest of the functional medicine books out there. And that to me just kind of added a fun twist to it.

And she even wrote a little blurb in there about what it was like. What symptoms she had, what it was like to schedule a visit, come in for the visit, how she felt leaving the visit. So I just appreciate that part of the recipes and they are also pretty good, I think.

Yes, in regards to the diet, I think that a lot of people are just trying too hard, right? We just want to be perfect and follow the diet that sounds like this is going to be the best. And that’s fine if you can be perfect and it doesn’t stress you out, right? If you can be a perfect raw vegan and it doesn’t cause you any stress in eating that way, then that’s the right diet for you.

But if it’s stressing you out to figure out what to eat, how to prepare it, etc. It’s not going to be helpful. And if I could just give one dietary piece of advice to people. It’s to eat nine to twelve servings of vegetables and fruit a day.

A serving is about 1/2 cup cooked or a full cup raw as a serving. In the standard American diet, no vegetables for breakfast, right? It’s pancakes, it’s breakfast sandwiches, it’s cereal oatmeal. I don’t know. Oatmeal, I guess you could put some fruit in it. But, we start with no vegetables. Lunch, if you’re eating the standard American diet, it’s chicken sandwich, burgers, sub sandwiches with iceberg lettuce which is the one vegetable that has no nutritional value.

And so we’re two meals into the day and we haven’t eaten any vegetables and fruit. And the more research that comes out, they’re finding different micronutrients that are found in the different colors of food. So another thing to do and we frequently do this with kids, but we work with adults too. You should look at your plate and there should be all the colors of the rainbow on your plate. And if they’re not, then your meal is probably not nutritious enough. And for example, if you go to your favorite McDonald’s, Burger King, or whatever, the food is pretty much just brown and yellow, right?

I don’t count the ketchup and the pickle as colors in that example. So if you eat nine to twelve servings of vegetables and fruit, you don’t have room for the other junk, right? So you’re going to be satisfied without eating crap. So that to me and I mean over and over again, I just try to help people keep things simple and not overcomplicate things. And that’s one way that I found it just to be easy…it’s not an easy switch, but it’s a simple switch that people can understand and make.

John: You talked about supplements in the book. And I’ve been guilty myself of engaging and I want to say, dabbling in various supplements or the latest trend. But the one supplement that I never give up is a multivitamin and vitamin D every day. Or two vitamin D’s depending on how I’m feeling.

Talk about what your go-to are, your go-to supplements are. For those who want to try to at least fill any gaps that they might have in their system.

Peter: That’s exactly it. Multivitamin, vitamin D, and maybe a fish oil. But when it comes to fish oil, you have to look at the EPA DHA concentration of your Omega. The Omegas are great for brain health, heart health. Vitamin D, we’re pretty much all deficient in it unless you’re supplementing it.

My first practice, I mean, I’m from Chicago. And when I first started practicing. I actually open a practice in Florida. And in Florida, I thought everybody’s vitamin D would be good there, right?

John: Right.

Peter: Nobody had sufficient vitamin D unless they were supplementing it. Didn’t matter how much time they were spending in the sun. So, yes, people think that I’m going to be putting them on a whole laundry list of supplements. But in the majority of my patients were usually working to get them off of their supplements.

John: Got it. I got it. Doc, this has been great. Are there any final thoughts that you want to talk about before I let you go today? Again, for our listeners and viewers. This book is Unfunc Your Gut. Any final thoughts or takeaways that you want our viewers or listeners to come away with before we have to say goodbye for today?

Peter: Stay in the present moment, right? And that there’s a quote from Chris Herren, page 137 that I love. Yes, there’s…

John: Explain what you mean.

Peter: Yes. There’s a philosopher who said, “Anxiety is worrying about the future. Depression is worrying about the past.” So what’s the treatment? The present moment, right?

And that’s not how we live. We are constantly worrying about the next meeting. We have the next e-mail, we have to respond to the next patient I’m going to see or there’s someone in recovery. I mean, I can look back and just get really down about a lot of mistakes that I’ve made in the past. Right? And all of that goes away when I just focus on what’s in front of me, Right? And that would heal so many people if we could just stay in the present moment and it sounds like something so easy but it’s so difficult.

John: Yes.

Peter: It is a difficult thing to accomplish.

John: Right. Also, you made a great point in the book. I want to point out that part of why you enjoy being you. And what your practice is, as you said, when you are helping others, you really…everything else fades. Fades out a little bit.

Peter: Yes. And that’s something I learned from recovery. I see relate to in my patients that are in recovery. It’s like, we’re never worried about ourselves, we’re worried about somebody else, right? So helping people is, I mean, in recovery, it’s the 12 – step. But just in life, it’s the best way to get out of our own hats because…

John: You said, be of service.

Peter: Right. [crosstalk] The worst place to be.

John: Right. But that’s so wonderful. It’s a great message for all of us. Just to be of service. Because it not only makes the world a better place but it also just makes us better functioning people. It’s really wonderful. Doc, this has just been tremendous. I can’t wait to meet you in person. I felt like I’d known you already for years because of our common friend, Brendan.

For our listeners and our viewers, if you want to find Doctor Koz, if you want to go to him. He said he could work with you now over Zoom. If you’re in Montana, Illinois, you can go to www.doc-koz.com or buy also his book, Unfunc Your Gut. Amazon.com, Barnes and Noble. Other great bookstores around the world. It’s a wonderful book. I’ve read it from front to back. So much to learn here. I learned a ton. I’m going to change around some things I’m doing myself because of you, Doc. Doc, thanks for not only making us healthier people. For making the world a better place. Everything you do is going to that. And you’re making huge impacts. And I’m just grateful for you spending time with us today. Grateful for you writing this great book.

Peter: Thank you so much.

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, speeches, customer experiences, live streams, and much more. For more information on Engage, or to book talent today, visit letsengage.com

John: Welcome to another edition of Green is Good. Of course, this is the Hollywood Goes Green is Good with Debbie Levin as my co-host today. Today we’re so honored to have Rich Roll with us, the ultra-endurance athlete, author, and also vegan extraordinaire. Welcome to Green is Good, Rich.

Rich: Great to be here. Thank you for having me.

John: You know, Rich, I’m so honored you took some time to be with us today. I read your book two years ago, literally, this summer. Two years ago I read Finding Ultra. Share a little bit about that journey with our listeners who haven’t had the opportunity to read it.

Rich: Yeah, sure. I’m 48 now, but when I was 39 years old, I was a very different guy. I was a corporate lawyer, and I had about 50 extra pounds I was carrying around my midsection. I was also just kind of not happy with the profession that I was in and having a bit of an existential crisis about my place in the world. That happened to intersect with a health crisis, carrying around all this extra weight and heart disease runs in my family. I had an episode late one night, walking up a simple flight of stairs at my home, where I had to pause halfway up the stairs, winded, out of breath, sweat on my brow, buckled over. I had the fear of God in me. I thought I might be having a heart attack. It kind of snapped my denial about the way that I was living my life, this hyper-stressed lifestyle. I was subsisting on a diet that I call the window diet. If you can drive your car up to a fine dining establishment and roll the window down and they hand you food, that’s what you eat.

Debbie: You kind of need to really talk about that because I think too many people are on that window diet in this country. That’s an amazing term. I’m sorry. Go on.

Rich: Sure. You know, burgers, French fries, nachos, Taco Bell, Carl’s Jr., you name it. That’s how I was eating and living for the better part of my adolescence and adulthood. My mom would always say to me, “Heart disease runs in our family. You’ve got to watch out.” Her father, who I’m named after, was a champion swimmer when he was in college – I swam in college, as well – was an Olympic hopeful and American record holder, the captain of the University of Michigan swim team, a contemporary of Johnny Weissmuller and the great swimmers of that era.

John: The original Tarzans.

Rich: Exactly. He was never overweight, never smoked, continued to stay fit and swim his whole life, but he died of a heart attack at age 54, when my mom was still in college. So, of course, I never had the opportunity to meet him. When you’re young and your mom says you’ve got to watch what you’re eating, you’re like yeah, yeah, yeah. But by 39, it really had caught up to me, and that moment on the staircase really snapped everything into focus for me and made me realize not only that I needed to change how I was living, but that I actually wanted to. I had the willingness to make some real significant changes.

John: And get off the window diet.

Rich: I got off the window diet. I played around with a bunch of different diets to no avail, until I kind of stumbled haphazardly into eating a plant-based diet.

John: And for our listeners out there that are on the window diet, Rich, you were a lawyer. You were a Cornell, Stanford guy. The window diet isn’t a socioeconomic thing.

Rich: No. Well, it is for a lot of people.

John: It is for a lot of people, but in terms of education-

Debbie: It sounds like you should have known better, for lack of a better way of saying it.

Rich: That’s an important issue, I think, because dietary choices don’t necessarily have to do with intellectual mind. In retrospect, looking back, I’m also a recovering addict and alcoholic. I got sober when I was 31, but I think between 31 and 39, I kind of transferred a lot of that addict mentality onto my dietary choices. I think it’s very easy to throw around the word addicted. “I’m a chocoholic.” We do it very cavalierly, but I think it does warrant our attention to kind of really discuss food addiction because I think it is an epidemic, and I think when you look at how some of these processed foods are made, and specifically scientifically tested and devised, there’s a lot of money and marketing dollars behind getting people hooked on these foods that are not good for us. It does transcend our knowledge base or our intellectual capacity to know better.

Debbie: All the information that you’re getting from everywhere about healthy food choices and eating locally and eating naturally, was that just sort of not penetrating at all?

Rich: Not really.

Debbie: Clearly.

Rich: My wife was trying, believe me. My wife is the healthy one in our relationship equation, and I always joke that at that time, if you were to open up our refrigerator, there was a pretty demarcation line down the middle between the foods that she was eating and the foods that I was eating. She could see the better version of me inside, behind the thickness. By thickness, I don’t mean physical thickness, I mean she could see the heaviness, and she tried for a long time. Why don’t you try this? Why don’t you read this book? I went, “Yeah, yeah, yeah.” I think that goes to this issue of trying to compel people to change. You’ve got to want to change. You’ve got to be in that place where you’re really ready.

John: For our listeners who haven’t had the opportunity to read your first amazing book, Finding Ultra, it culminates with a huge event in Hawaii. Can you share what you accomplished in Hawaii?

Rich: Adopting this plant-based diet really revitalized me. It repaired my health and it gave me this tremendous resurgence and vitality that I could have never predicated. My whole life, I’ve been told, “You need to eat meat for strong muscles if you want to be an athlete. You have to drink milk for calcium for strong bones. Beef is what’s for dinner and milk does a body good,” and all these things. The idea that suddenly I was removing those products from my diet and feeling better than I ever had was a very disorienting, but also exhilarating, experience. That gave me so much energy that I started to get out and try to get fit again, almost because I couldn’t sit down. That set me on this new trajectory, where I became very aware of how resilient the human body is because I’d abused myself with drugs and alcohol and the window diet and corporate law firm lifestyle for so long, and in a very short period of time, I had become a very different person. I shed the weight, I had all this energy, and I wanted to challenge myself and see if I could repair my body so quickly, what am I actually capable if? If I really tested myself, what could I achieve? That’s what launched me into ultra-endurance sports and got me fascinated with that world.

Debbie: Which is what? Explain that.

Rich: It means whether it’s running or triathlon races that are super long. Everybody has heard of Ironman. Ironman is a super long triathlon. It takes you all day to do it. I do multiple-day races. I do this race called Ultraman, which is a three-day double Ironman triathlon that circumnavigates the Big Island of Hawaii, which is a big island. It’s about the size of Connecticut. In 2010, I did something with a friend of mine that no one had ever done, where we did five Ironmans on five Hawaiian Islands in under a week. An Ironman race every day on a different Hawaiian island until we were done.

John: For our listeners out there that don’t know what an Ironman is, just lay it out.

Rich: An Ironman is a very long triathlon, which in the period of one day, you swim 2.4 miles, and then you get on your bike and you ride your bike 112 miles, and then you celebrate that by then running a marathon.

John: You did five in seven days.

Rich: I did five of those in a row.

Debbie: OK, so I have a girl question. You went from this person to this person. This extreme person to this extreme person. How did that look with your wife?

Rich: That’s a great question. I think that when I started training, I was trying to answer questions for myself about who I was. In many ways, although it’s the sort of fitness and physical aspects of what I’ve accomplished that get the headlines, for me, it’s always been a spiritual journey. My wife is a very spiritually-oriented person, and she was able to see that I needed to do this to figure out who I was. It was a difficult time. We had many challenges. We were going through some financial stuff, the economy was not doing well, it was very, very difficult, and there were plenty of dark moments of the soul, where I would turn to her and say, “Why am I doing this? I should be spending more time putting food on the table.” My friends would tell me I was crazy, and she would look at me and say, “No, you need to get out and train. I don’t know why, but this is going to lead you somewhere. I believe in that.” It was really this tremendous capacity that she had, this belief that she had in me, and it really allowed our relationship to become much closer, much more intimate, and together we were really living this more faith-based way of living, where there was this idea that this could lead to a different direction. I wasn’t doing it so that someday I could sit down with you and be on Green is Good Radio. That’s a bizarre experience because I was doing this in obscurity, but she knew that I needed to do this for myself, that this was a way of me answering these questions and tapping into a greater self-awareness and a means of trying to express a more authentic version of who I was.

Debbie: That’s the best scenario because you were able to do this together authentically for each other, in a sense, because you gave to her the best gift, which was you.

Rich: Right. She was able to then get the husband that, I think, she initially saw.

John: You have also four children.

Rich: I do, yes. It’s a busy household.

Debbie: So where are they in all of this?

Rich: They’ve been amazing.

Debbie: How old are they?

Rich: We run the gamut. Our oldest is 20. The two older ones are boys, 20 and 18, and we have two girls that are 7 and 11.

Debbie: So the older ones really have seen you everywhere. What are they like? Who are they?

Rich: They’re amazing kids. We homeschool all our kids, which is a whole other thing.

Debbie: From the beginning or not?

Rich: Well, the two older boys went through the system until the last couple years of high school. The little girls have pretty much been homeschooled from the get-go. The older boys are musicians. They have a band. They’re filmmakers. They’re very creative. My wife is the artist, and she kind of sets the tone for creative expression in our house. I think the message that I try to put out there, and I think at least the older boys, because they’re aware enough at this point, really have intuited into their lives is that life is short and you should pursue your dreams. Our job as parents to these children is to try to help them identify what it is that they want to express and support that. Right now, with the boys, it’s music. They’re getting ready to record their first album. We have a lot of cool stuff going on at home around that.

John: That is just awesome. For our listeners who just joined us, we’re so honored, Debbie Levin and I, my co-host and good friend who’s the President of EMA, have Rich Roll with us today. Rich is not only a vegan evangelist and an author, he’s also a podcast host. He has almost 6 million downloads on his podcast, which you can find at richroll.com.

Rich: Richroll.com is the best place. You can find it on iTunes and anywhere that people listen to podcasts.

John: Amazing. Almost 6 million. You could be writing a whole another book on social media. Almost 6 million downloads.

Rich: It’s been a crazy journey.

John: For our listeners out there, we talked a little bit about, at the top of the show, Finding Ultra, but the really good news is that you and your wife, Julie, now have a book coming out called the Plantpower Way. Talk a little bit about the evolution from Finding Ultra to the Plantpower Way, and what’s going to be in the Plantpower Way.

Rich: Finding Ultra was really my memoir. It was my story, and it’s a family journey, of course, and that’s part of Finding Ultra. But really, we wanted to find a way to express what we’ve experienced on a more family-oriented level. As much as Finding Ultra was a story of athletic pursuits and this spiritual journey, and it certainly contained plenty of information about nutrition and how to perform as an athlete on a plant-based diet, it was not a cookbook. The question we get all the time is, “Alright, I get it. I’m onboard. I’m inspired, so tell me what I eat now.” That begged the question of I think it’s time to do a cookbook. My wife and I went to Barnes & Noble. We looked at all the cookbooks. We got all the vegan cookbooks, we’re looking through them, and I’m thinking there’s so many amazing vegan cookbooks out there, plant-based nutrition cookbooks. If we’re going to do this, what is it that we can bring to this that’s different or has not yet been expressed? What I noticed was that I didn’t really see a book that spoke to just typical modern American families, whether you’re vegan or paleo or whatever diet you’re on. The average parent who’s thinking, “Yeah, I want to be healthier. I don’t know about vegan. Maybe, but I know I need to eat more plants in my diet. How can I get my kids off the mac and cheese and the Cheetos and all of that? How can I create better lifestyle habits for my family in general to make better choices?” That was really the marching orders for “The Plantpower Way.” “The Plantpower Way” is a cookbook. It’s got about 120 amazing, delicious plant-based recipes. They’re all very easy to prepare. There’s nothing precious about them. They’re all super fast and very hearty. It’s not like we went out and partnered with some chef. My artist wife, Julie, these are the recipes that she developed when I began this journey. She had to figure out how am I going to feed this guy who’s out training? He’s training 30 hours a week. He comes home, he’s tired, I’ve got to feed him so that he can wake up the next day and do it again and sate him, but also I’m not spending all day in the kitchen. I’ve got to create something that my kids are going to eat too, and that was the equation that she was trying to solve. The recipes that are in the book are all very authentic to how we live and how we eat. They’re very family-friendly, and the idea is that they are going to be satisfying to anybody, whether you’re an ardent carnivore or your crazy uncle who’s coming over for Thanksgiving, the idea is that this is just delicious. Above and beyond that, most cookbooks are just recipes. They’re recipe books. I would say almost more than 50 percent of this book is lifestyle guidance. It’s opinion pieces, it’s tools, it’s resources, it’s all of this additional educational information about how to transition into a more plant-focused way of eating. Long opinion pieces and articles about where do you get your protein and how can I get my kids more interested in healthy eating and is it important to buy organic and what is this business about GMOs and gluten and all these kinds of things that we hear about, but most people are too busy to go home and go on the internet and really spend time researching it. So we wanted to make this very accessible, and throughout the book, sharing our family journey. There’s a lot of incredible lifestyle photography. It’s a very beautiful book. It’s a book that you could leave out on the coffee table that anybody could enjoy just paging through it, and a book that I think not only that you would use every day, but that I really think has the power to change people’s lives.

John: Next time when you come back on Green is Good with Debbie and I –

Debbie: We want books.

John: We want books, we want Julie, and we want you to bring one or two of your favorite recipes so we can eat.

Debbie: We’re going to do a full-on cooking day. That’s what we’re going to do.

Rich: Julie would love it. She’s the one you’ve got to talk to.

John: That’s alright. Do you talk also about vitamins and yoga and meditation also? Is that covered in the book?

Rich: Yeah, absolutely. One of the things that I always say is that good health begins and ends with what’s on your plate. Even as an athlete, I can’t vouch for having a poor diet. Your diet has to be dialed in. I also think that wellness is so much more than diet. People think a healthy diet and I’ve solved my wellness equation. The truth is that we need to adopt a more comprehensive approach to what it means to be truly well, and that include mental health, emotional health, spiritual health, physical health, all of these things. Meditation, mindfulness, yoga, these are all parts of my equation, my wife’s equation, our family equation, and that’s throughout the book as well.

John: That’s great. For our listeners out there and our viewers out there, they can buy the book on amazon.com or Barnes & Noble or any great bookstore out there.

Rich: Yeah, you can preorder it now. It comes out April 28th, but it’s available for preorder now. In fact, if you go to richroll.com, we have a preorder page, and we’re giving away about $300,000 in preorder gift incentives, which is exciting. We partnered with all these amazing companies that are creating great food products and also kitchen utensil-type products that we use, and they all said, “Yeah, we want to be part of the Plantpower Way. What do you need?” It’s great to be able to offer that to people and to my podcast listeners and everybody who have been on this journey with us and say thank you. Not only will you get this great book, we’re going to give you all this extra stuff as our way of saying thank you to helping spread this important message of health across the country and the world.

John: Rich, you’ve become, with a tribe of 6 million now, you’ve become a great ambassador and evangelist both for good health, for good living, and, like you said, the right kind of lifestyle. Where does it go from here? Where does the journey go from here? You’re still a very young guy. Julie is a young woman. Where are you guys going to go with this?

Rich: I wake up every morning excited about trying to find new ways of spreading a healthy message. The unfortunate truth is although people like yourselves and your listeners and my listeners are super interested in healthy living, at the same time, the statistics bear out a very different picture of what America looks like. Right now, heart disease is certainly and remains America’s number one killer. One out of every three people will die of a heart attack by 2030. They’re estimating that upwards of 50 percent of Americans will be diabetic or pre-diabetic. Seventy percent of Americans are obese or overweight. We have a huge problem on our hands, and there’s a lot of work to be done. Where I take this from here is trying to double down on my efforts and everything that I can do to try to reverse these trends because we’re in a crisis right now and we need all hands on deck.

Debbie: Fortunately, messaging is at a high, and with social media and the ability for people to get information and to be influenced by people with a voice has never been in the place that it is right now. That’s a gift. If you’ve got logical information and if you have a relatable story, and you have an amazing relatable story because you, in a sense, were everybody. Take the corporate lawyer out a little bit. You were everybody, and the fact that you could feel better and be productive. You’ve got a family. It’s not like you’re a lone guy doing this in isolation. You actually represent so many families out there and that you can do this. I think it’s an amazing story and an inspiring one, and one that people could relate to. Your voice is so important for this.

Rich: Thank you. I think it’s really important that people truly understand that sustainable wellness is not an elitist ideal. I think that that’s one trend that’s kind of happening right now that we need to talk about because there’s this idea that I’d love to eat healthy, but I can’t afford to shop at Whole Foods.

Debbie: It’s totally changed, though. If you think about it, Walmart is the largest seller of organic food than anyone in the world. It is available. The more we support companies that are huge and big corporations that are doing sustainable products, the more they’ll be available to everybody, and that’s just a reality. I think that, again, what you’re saying is exactly right. I think that it was more elitist 10 years ago when we met, and it has definitely changed because the affordability is changing. When people can go and they’re like, “I can get this product and this product is kind of the same price,” there is no decision. They’re choosing the healthier item if they’re given the facts. Again, if they’re reading about that and they’re reading about it in social media and they’re reading about it from people whose experiences they can relate to, it’s something that we can definitely change the way our future is.

Rich: Absolutely.

John: Rich, we’re down to the last couple of minutes, unfortunately. Two questions. It’s hard for Michael Jordan or for John Elway to step off the field. You did the ultimate endurance athlete feat. What do you do now in terms of how do you for a bike ride? What do you do to get your endorphins going and the adrenaline moving? What’s your day look like in terms of just moving around and feeling that high again?

Rich: That’s something that I grapple with every day. A lot of guys fantasize about going to Vegas and having a big weekend. My fantasy is if I could just live in a cabin in the woods, then I could train all day. That’s not my life. Again, it goes back to that question of how do I be a steward of this message? I get up every day and I train, but I’m not race fit right now. I don’t have the bandwidth or the time to devote to training for another one of those races at this moment, because I have a greater responsibility to steward this message in different ways, like being here with you today, as opposed to being out on my bike training for five or six hours. In a year or two, maybe that’s the best way for me to carry the message. I certainly feel like I have more to say and do in athleticism, and there are challenges I’d like to take on. Right now, there’s different avenues, like podcasting and radio shows and all the like, and our book coming out, but I still love it and I get out every day and train and I’m on the trails. I’m not putting in the crazy hours that I was to get ready for Ultraman. That goes to balance. Being well, being healthy, is about how you balance all these things in our life. Everybody is being distracted by so many things, and we’re busy and we’re stressed and we’re just trying to put food on the table. How do you build in healthy practices throughout your day in a sustainable, balanced way? I’m not a very balanced guy. I like the extreme. I like to go all the way to the wall. For me it’s a spiritual challenge. How do I still do these things that I love and be present for my wife and my kids and still carry this message in all of that? I wouldn’t say that I’ve solved that equation, but I’m always trying.

John: Last question today, Rich. Best advice. You yourself are considered a guru, and people are listening to your advice. What’s the best advice that you’ve ever gotten?

Rich: The best advice that I’ve ever gotten is mood follows action. I think that when people are trying to change their lifestyle habits, whether it’s, “I really should go to the gym,” or “I really should make a better food choice,” a lot of times they say, “I’ll do it tomorrow,” or “I’m not up for it right now. Maybe when I feel better, then I’ll put the running shoes on.” For me, that’s my mantra, mood follows action. If I want to change how I feel, I have to take the action first. When I’m mindful about that, I have more aptitude for making the better choice.

John: That’s awesome. Rich, we’re going to have you back. We’re going to have you back with Julie with the book here and with some of the recipes. To find more about Rich Roll, go to richroll.com. Download his podcast. Let’s get him up to 10 million downloads. Also, buy Finding Ultra or his new book, “The Plantpower Way,” on amazon.com, Barnes & Noble. For Debbie Levin, I’m John Shegerian with Rich Roll. Rich Roll, you are 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, 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. I’m so honored to have with us today, Christine[?] Lagally. She’s the founder and CEO of Rebellyous Foods. Welcome to the Impact Podcast, Christie.

Christie Lagally: Thank you. Thank you so much for having me.

John: Oh yeah. It’s an honor. You’re up in Seattle today. We’re here in Fresno and Seattle seems to be this hotbed of startups and technology. We’re going to get to that in a little while. Before we do that, share with our listeners and our viewers, a little of the Christie Lagally back story. How do you even get here, Christie?

Christie: Yeah. I’m a mechanical engineer by training. I started my career in the aerospace industry. My early jobs were working on spacecraft. I worked on a solar sail for NASA and did a couple of other fun projects in the space world. I went on to work for Boeing commercial airplanes. I actually worked at a couple of other consulting companies in between working on spacecraft and essentially, roller coasters and things like that. I had a really good time being a mechanical engineer and doing everything from design work to manufacturing work, to a wide variety of things like that. But as many people often feel in their lives, that sometimes you just get to a point where you want to either try something different or you’d really just want to address something important to your heart and your soul, for me, that was addressing large-scale meat production because I saw the impacts that it had on on animals, and on the environment, on people’s health, and really, really just wondered why can’t we make more plant-based meat? What is just stopping us? What is holding us back? A lot of people don’t realize that in the United States alone, we produce over a hundred and eight billion pounds of animal meat. And yet, we only produce about one-half of 1% of that volume in plant-based meat. As a result, the vast majority of Americans don’t have access to meat replacements even if they wanted to. That just didn’t seem like the right way to solve the problem because it wasn’t actually solving the problem.

John: Right.

Christie: And so, I started Rebellyous Foods based on the idea that if we could address the manufacturing problems, which I had experience as an engineer, that I could actually make a meaningful difference in how much plant-based meat was available to the world.

John: Where did you grow up?

Christie: I grew up in Golden, Colorado. Shout out to Golden, Colorado, and lived for a time in California. I went to school in California at Sonoma State and did my engineering degree at UC Santa Barbara and eventually[?], just went up the West Coast all the way to– I did my masters in engineering at the University of British Columbia. So, all over the map but all over the West Coast really.

John: If my geography’s right, you grew up at the home of Molson Coors area?

Christie: That’s right, actually. I mean, very, very, very close to the Coors plant. We used to say on the playground that it smells like a Coor’s Day because you could smell the malts just about a mile away. But yep, it’s Golden, Colorado for you[?].

John: That’s wonderful. Wonderful. You’re in Seattle, which is not only a wonderful city to live and to work in, but it’s truly the hotbed in many ways. Besides Silicon Valley, and Silicon Alley, and Boston, and San Diego, it’s really a hotbed for great startups. I mean, some amazing wonderful brands obviously. Just to share the obvious, you have Amazon, Starbucks, but you have Boeing, and Nordstrom’s, and Costco, and so many great brands. Alaska Airlines, out of your Seattle area, isn’t it a great place for a young person like you to make a start-up like this? A technology startup?

Christie: I think it’s a great place to start up a company. There are a lot of reasons too. First of all, in the food industry, the Northwest is a hotbed so to speak for, it’s not very high here, but it’s a hotbed for the food industry.

John: Right.

Christie: Plus[?] protein the industry. I mean, not only that, we actually have a lot of the oldest and most successful plant-based meat companies in the entire world, which are actually here in the Pacific Northwest. Gardein, Tofurky.

John: I realized that. They’re [crosstalk] all [inaudible]

Christie: Yeah, all right here. Field Roast, right here in Seattle, Washington, Nutpods here in Seattle Washington, Good Planet Foods, to plant-based dairy as well.

John: Whoa[?].

Christie: This really is a fantastic place. Part of the reason is that we have the schools around, that our agricultural school. So, there are lots of great food scientists and people who study agriculture and food production. We have professionals who know how to do these things. Lots of great engineering schools, lots of great engineering tech, so that combination of food and tech ends up being a really good match here in the Pacific Northwest.

John: So interesting.

Christie: Yeah, a lot of people care about these issues.

John: Right.

Christie: Lots of motivated people too.

John: We talked a little bit off the air and I want to share that my listeners and viewers know that I’m a vegan. I’ve been a vegetarian a long time but what I find with one common thread with all great entrepreneurs, is not only do they find white space in voids but they also find things that matter to themselves and you share with me a little bit when we’re off the air that you’re vegan yourself.

Christie: I am.

John: Share a little bit about your journey in plant-based eating and why then you saw this void. I’m sure what informed you were part of your journey in plant-based eating. Seeing this void then and deciding this is a great and important void to fill. Share a little bit about that part of the journey.

Christie: Yeah, sure. I mean, we were kind of talking about how long we’d been vegan and I just calculated in my head. It’s been 26 years.

John: Whoa. Whoa.

Christie: I’ve been vegan for a long time so I’m going to date myself. I was 19 when I went vegan and I actually went vegan for animals. I cared about what’s happening to animals. I was already a vegetarian like you.

John: Right.

Christie: And then I learned about the dairy industry, I learned about the egg industry and was said, no horrible pun intended, but just cold turkey. I just said[?], [crosstalk] “Oh, I’m definitely not doing that.”

John: Right.

Christie: The interesting thing is I’ve never been a very good eater which is just a silly thing to be. But I always thought it was just because it always made me so sick. I went vegan and suddenly I was like, “Oh, my God. Food is good.”

John: So interesting.

Christie: But I was so allergic to dairy. I was so allergic to eggs and I didn’t know it. But I was just suffering horribly from allergies, and intolerances, to eggs, and dairy. I’m like the world’s worst person to ask how to go vegan. Just [inaudible]. Just go. Just go. Just do whatever. It was so easy for me.

John: Get out[?].

Christie: Yeah. It was so easy for me because my reaction to it was just to, instead of feeling different, I felt just so much better.

John: Same goes for me.

Christie: Yeah.

John: But let’s go to that word you just use though because I’m much older than you. So, go back to that word easy. When I became a vegetarian, when I was 17 years old, which is now 41 years ago, then a vegan, I don’t know. Anywhere between, let’s just say 13-14 years ago. It was such a void of fun things to eat. Comparatively speaking to where we are today, today’s are[?] the light[?] to go to the store and see [crosstalk] all the plant-based food.

Christie: That’s true.

John: I mean, but it wasn’t even that way seven years ago, you know?

Christie: No, it wasn’t. Yeah. It’s been a big difference now.

John: Yeah.

Christie: We have plenty of replacements now. I think for me, some of the biggest best replacements have just been in the cheese space. Like, I love Miyoko. I’m so addicted to Miyoko’s cheese.

John: Oh, huge fan. Huge fan.

Christie: I know. I’ve always just like, “God. It was full. Actually, really good after I eat it.” It’s like all these micro-bacterial [inaudible]. It was good.

John: Just think about the pea protein milk that they have and the almond milk. When you go to the plant-based yogurt section, it wasn’t like this.

Christie: Yeah, exactly. Exactly. We’re very lucky now to have [inaudible]

John: We’re really lucky. But I was so excited about what I shared with you off the air, 10 years ago when I had Ethan Brown. When Seth[?] asked me to have[?] Ethan on, and Ethan came on and just was so fantastic. He came on a couple of times and of course, his company has been doing so well but I’m a huge fan of his company. I love Impossible, I love Gardein, they’re all wonderful for different reasons. So share with our listeners a little bit about, so you, now have been in that world because you’re living it and eating it, where did you see the specific void that you wanted to fill and how did you want to fill it, and how’s that journey going?

Christie: Yeah. I mean, I started to look at this when I was looking for opportunities to start a company, to make a difference in this space. I really looked at it from an engineer’s perspective. As a mechanical engineer, what I was trying to understand is how do I use my skills? A lot of people are looking for the same opportunity. How do you use your skills? What do you know? How to do it professionally? How to do well in order to make an impact?

John: Right.

Christie: I’ve come to since believe that almost anybody can make an impact to make the world a better place in terms of plant-based eating, and vegan options, and just making the world a better place for animals, people, and the environment. But I was really looking for where my skills would fit in and as a manufacturing engineer, that was the best use of my skills. It was to come up with a company that was solving the manufacturing disparity between the volumes and the hundred of billion pounds of animal-based meat that I mentioned earlier, versus that small 500 million pounds of plant-based meat that we make now. And realizing that, we’re very much in a lot of ways, this industry as it is today, is standing on the shoulders of giants who have developed really, really good products for plant-based meat. The early Tofurkys you know? I was always a big fan of Tofurky. I can’t even eat anything else. I’m so addicted to it.

John: Right.

Christie: The early Tofurkys were just the beginning and we’ve created more and more interesting and more flavorful products ever since, although I’m still a big fan of Tofurky in every way, shape, and form. Seth Tibbett and his vision, David Lee at Field Roast, and his vision, [crosstalk] for making all sorts of interesting plant-based meat products, has really given us the opportunity to go to the next level.

John: Right.

Christie: We wouldn’t be in a space where we were ready. There was so much demand that we could garner investment that we could use to develop the next tools to make plant-based meat. If we hadn’t had that history 20 years before [crosstalk] of Artesian cooks, and product developers making really good products and making them better and better.

John: Right.

Christie: But now we’re at a place where we need to get it out to everybody and being able to do that is another whole skill set and it just happened to be the skill set that I have, which is to develop tools that can essentially make plant-based meat more available, affordable, and high-quality for everyone. Because once you make good products, then you’ve got to always make good products and you got to make more and more good products, and it’s really quite mind-boggling how much infrastructure we have to put in to support a measurable difference in the plant-based meat industry when it’s compared to the animal-based meat industry. And so, that’s where I chose to start a company around and that was the company that I started in 2018, called Seattle Food Tech actually, 2017.

John: Right.

Christie: Seattle Food Tech now goes under the name Rebellyous Foods.

John: Which for our listeners and viewers who’ve just joined us, we’ve got Christie Lagally, she’s the founder and CEO of Rebellyous Foods. To find Christie and her colleagues, and the great food product she’s making, please go to www.rebellyous.com, R-E-B-E-L-L-Y-O-U-S. I am on your site now, I love your site. It makes me hungry [inaudible]. Where are you on the journey right now? Because you took on, instead of just plant-based meat protein, you took on the chicken sector.

Christie: That’s right.

John: When you really understand what’s going on with regards to chickens, and how many chickens a year are slaughtered for consumption, and the antibiotics and the other, share with our listeners the impact you make by taking on this sector and where are you in that journey right now?

Christie: Yeah, chicken is the most consumed meat in the entire world. It used to be pigs or pork until early or late 2019 when much of the pig population in China was wiped out by swine flu. While a lot of us were seeing the pandemic come down the pike, China was also dealing with a massive swine flu episode, of the swine flu epidemic, if not a pandemic in the animal agriculture industry in late 2019. Until that time, pork was the most consumed meat in the entire world. It’s now chicken and a lot of the reason that it’s chicken now is because people are pretty shy about growing the pork industry as much as it did because it got huge, and of course, it got wiped out by swine flu.

John: Wow.

Christie: I think it was like 25% of the industry [crosstalk] but I might have that wrong.

John: Wow.

Christie: Somebody look that up. I don’t know.

John: Right. Right.

Christie: But it was really, really massive so much so that it actually shifted the balance in terms of animals that we consume for meat. So, chicken, being the largest consumed, the largest portion of the, basically, the meat industry, and then also the food industry, because the food industry is largely dependent on meat. Here in the United States, about 25% of it is cows or beef, as we call them, and 25% is about pork or pigs. And then out 50%, almost 50% is chicken and then we also eat turkey, and rabbits, and things like that. It’s amazing that we eat the[?] animals. But we do eat more chicken than anything else. This actually poses a number of major problems. I mean, first of all, it’s the slaughter of billions upon billions. About nine billion chickens in the United States alone, which often suffer far more than any other animal although who can say who suffers more sometimes?

John: Right.

Christie: We also see a lot of unnecessary risks in the chicken industry. From the time they’re grown in huge warehouses, they are at major risk of bird flu. We just talked about swine flu, we just talked about [crosstalk] coronavirus and the pandemic bird.

John: Yeah.

Christie: Bird flu is a major fear [inaudible] [crosstalk]

John: With Avian flu?

Christie: Avian flu.

John: Yeah.

Christie: Yes, exactly. A lot of people are tracking this very, very closely, and in December of last year while, again, all of us were distracted by and rightfully so, our own pandemic, swine– Pardon me, bird flu or avian flu, actually jumped to seven poultry workers in Russia and they eventually reported it to the World Health Organization. Avian flu is a risk in every intensive animal agriculture of birds across the world. There are no continents that don’t have bird flu anymore. So, it is a major risk and the riskiest part of bird flu is when it jumped in 2014 to about a hundred people. I can’t remember which country was in. It killed 60% of the people that got it.

John: Oh my God.

Christie: You would think about COVID-19 being a 3-5% loss of the people who got it. 60% of people who died of bird flu, who got it. It’s a very, very dangerous situation to have as growing chickens at enormous volumes and intensified animal agriculture. If we haven’t learned our lesson from COVID or swine flu, maybe we’ll let[?] it from bird flu. But we need to replace the chicken industry on a large scale right now.

John: So, what I find with people[?], and it’s an overused term, disruptive[?]. But I call them innovators like you, you’re an innovator, is they love to take on the biggest problem. And if now chicken, is the biggest meat consumed in the world, good for you. You actually chose so well in that, of course, no one can predict swine flu would happen and pigs would get wiped out. But you really were choosing what was one of the biggest meat-based products, animal-based products, in the world to replace. How’s that journey been going? Where are you now with your product? Shameless advertisement, where can our listeners and viewers taste your great food? By the way, I love your tagline, no harm, no fowl.

Christie: No fowl. Yeah.

John: That’s such a great tagline.

Christie: At Rebellyous, we make three types of products. We make chicken nuggets, tenders, and patties. They’re for sale at grocery stores across Washington, Oregon, and soon to be California. Also online at GTFO It’s Vegan, it’s an online site that I highly recommend.

John: Right.

Christie: Yeah, we’re doing great. We launched our mainstream retail product on February 1st of this year. This week you can find them in Safeway and the Pacific Northwest. We’re pretty excited about that. Yeah, we’re just seeing a lot of good responses to the products and just continuing to ramp up as quickly as possible. The products also won an award recently. We got a Sofi award from this, a Specialty Food Association for being best new plant-based meat product which is [crosstalk] [inaudible]

John: Oh, I can’t wait to try it.

Christie: Yeah, it’s really good.

John: I’ve seen photos and that’s one thing that’s been missing. I’ve never had real good plant-based chicken. I love the meat products out there like you said, Tofurky, the Field Roast, Ethan’s food at Beyond, Impossible’s food is great, and I love Gardein. I love them all for different reasons. I’ve never had good chicken though so I’m so excited.

Christie: John, you got to check it out.

John: I’m so excited.

Christie: You can get it on GTFO It’s Vegan.

John: Okay.

Christie: That’s the only way to get it.

John: But it’s coming to California soon you said?

Christie: Yeah, we’ll probably be in California before the end of the year. I know that seems like a long timeline but it’s always hard to predict, especially in post-pandemic.

John: Right.

Christie: But yeah, we’ll be in California fairly soon.

John: How exciting. So, it just started selling in February in the Pacific Northwest and how did you get it out? Did you do tasters at supermarkets? How did you get people to start sampling it? Because that’s always the beginning of the flywheel.

Christie: Yeah. So, because it was a pandemic, we couldn’t really go out and just hand out samples and things like that.

John: Right.

Christie: That exactly what we’re not supposed to be doing.

John: Right.

Christie: What we did is we shipped all sorts of people, all different people of all walks of life, of all backgrounds, all interest, we shipped them the care packages, and have them video themselves trying the product.

John: Wow.

Christie: If you go to our YouTube channel, the Rebellyous YouTube channel, you’ll find our tested by all, approved by all campaign. It’s super fun. You’ll get to see all of your favorite friends. People you know, people you don’t know, and families, kids, enjoying our product, people of all ages. It’s super fun. But that was our solution to getting our word out. We run an aggressive social media campaign because we’ve got these great videos. We even have one with the chicken trying our plant-based chicken. I think her name is Flor[?].

John: [inaudible]

Christie: You got to check out that one too. She gobbles down that nugget like it’s really good so…

John: Oh, I can’t wait. I’m going to buy some online then like you said. I can’t wait till it comes to California. So, things are going well with the rollout.

Christie: Very well.

John: Congratulations because that’s no easy feat. Now, explain to our listeners and viewers, Christie, the connection between plant-based eating especially when it comes to meats like your product, the chicken products, and climate change, and how we really get to know[?] and make ourselves healthier by eating cleaner and better, but also we do get to participate in making the world a better place when we vote with our pocketbook and our decision-making on eating your great food products.

Christie: Yeah. A lot of people don’t realize that animal agriculture is one of the largest sectors of emissions for greenhouse gas emissions. It’s actually even larger than transportation. Within the animal agriculture’s emissions group, beef is about half the emissions of the entire industry, which is why a lot of environmental investors like to invest in beef replacement companies. But the other half is chicken, pork, and I guess a little bit of turkey because the chicken industry is so big even though on a per pound basis, it’s a lot more product. With pork, it actually puts out as much greenhouse gas emissions as beef does. We understand that it’s really important to really replace as much meat as possible whether it’s beef, chicken, pork, turkey, whatever. Because these have enormous emission consequences and on a per-person basis, it can really, really add up. So, the more you can choose it to be your every day, choose alternatives to meat, like plant-based meat or just plant-based eating in general, the more you can make a really big difference in essentially[?], the temperature of our planet, and we need even more like public support in doing so.

John: Right.

Christie: So, being able to go into a cafeteria and asking for something that’s plant-based also makes a big ripple effect. We see that a lot from our customers.

John: Buzz[?]. It does. Even going to your supermarket manager or your local store manager and just saying, “I’d like to have more plant-based options.”

Christie: Yeah. Exactly.

John: Christie, there’s a lot of young people that are entrepreneurs and waiting[?]. They’re in college now, they’re in high school now, they’re getting out of college or grad school, and they want to be the next Christie Lagally. Share a little bit about how they can be involved in starting an impact business, and getting involved with climate-focused startups, or other startups like yours, that make a true impact to make the world a better place.

Christie: Yeah. I mean, I think, first of all, it’s really helpful for people to understand what they love, what they’re passionate about, what they like to do because as much as it is important to care about the mission, it’s also important to like what you do. At the end of the day, it’s really hard to do a job you hate even though it’s something you’re working towards that you love.

John: Right.

Christie: I really encourage people to find their passion from both perspectives. But a really good way to get started and it was something that I still do today is actually just to volunteer. If you can take the time away from work, or your family, even just doing an hour a week or something like that of volunteering that gets you involved in meeting other people, that are part of the world that you wish to make a difference in. Whether that be climate activism, or animal activism, or just whatever social justice issues. For me, it’s voting rights. For me, it’s women’s rights. For me, it’s animal rights. It’s also climate change and human health, and all of those things matter a lot to me. To this day, I still volunteer on boards and volunteered to do political advocacy, and things like that, because those really helped me refine my passion. So, I really encourage people to do that. Even if it’s just an hour out of every week to you know, imagine, you’re just not watching television that day, you’re writing[?] your senator[?], getting involved in a political campaign, or volunteering for a voting rights advocacy group, or something like that, makes a really, really big difference. For me, I volunteered with the Humane Society of the United States and they really helped me understand the various different ways I could address meat production and that was really, really valuable to me. That actually led to me starting Rebellyous Foods.

John: That’s a great message. Instead of just taking, you’re saying be of service. Be of service.

Christie: Absolutely.

John: It’s so wonderful.

Christie: Absolutely.

John: Not said enough and I’m glad you said it that way, and I’m glad you talked about the importance of that. Share a little bit about your vision. Where can this go? I mean, first of all, when I interviewed Ethan, originally, I asked him, I think it was off the air. Originally, I asked him, who are some of your investors? And he says, the first two people he mentioned were Bill[?] Stone and Bill Gates. I said, “Whoa. Whoa” and he explained to me how this hit. Like as you said, a lot of their initiatives were important to them. Climate change, famine, and just making the world a better place overall, and it was such a big opportunity that’s why they invested. Is the response, and you don’t need to give away any secrets source[?] or names, but similarly speaking, because they’ve been down that path before, and as you’ve said, others have been as well, has both the institutional and private backing for an adventure like yours, woman CEO, a very important topic in this world today, plant-based eating, a very important topic in climate change, very important topic, you’re eating a lot of macro trends that I can see a lot of people getting behind. But a lot of entrepreneurs say, “Hey John, it’s still hard to raise capital.” Share a little bit about the macro trends behind your back but also, how’s the fundraising gone to expand on your vision?

Christie: Yeah. I mean, I’m not going to lie. Fundraising is hard. It’s really hard to make sure you get all the right information in front of an investor so that you know that they know everything you know and that they can make an informed decision about putting money behind your company and supporting it. But I think more than anything else, it’s really finding something that makes a difference in something you’re passionate about and you have to find other people who are passionate about it. For example, I’m passionate about plant-based eating. I’m a vegan. I’ve been passionate about that for a long time, but I’m passionate about engineering and I’m passionate even more about putting the two together and making a substantial difference in the meat industry by scaling the plant-based meat [inaudible] [crosstalk].

John: Right.

Christie: And so, that’s a very refined set of investors that understand how, that first of all, understand the problem and then really, really want to work on that particular solutions. When it comes to investing, it’s finding those other people. It’s finding the match in the card game, so to speak.

John: Right.

Christie: But also care about out that small little area and you can always narrow it down by talking to a lot of investors, maybe agtech[?] investors, or climate investors, [inaudible] [crosstalk] understand these things.

John: Right.

Christie: But I think a lot of investors won’t and don’t be discouraged by that because you know 90 plus maybe 95 per all of all investors I’ve ever spoken to, did not invest in our company so you got to talk to a lot of them. It’s definitely a numbers game.

John: Number’s game.

Christie: Yeah.

John: Just talk a little bit about your vision. How scalable is this? You’re up there in Seattle, you’re starting in, of course, Oregon, and Seattle, and Washington, which makes sense, coming down to California and also online. Eventually, soon you’ll be all across North America. But how big can this grow?

Christie: Yeah, I’m really glad you asked it that way because what you identified was the geography of our CPG products, right?

John: Right.

Christie: It’s obviously part of our vision because that’s exactly what we’re doing. But it is not our ultimate vision. Our ultimate vision is to convert chicken processing factories into plant-based meat production factories. We are developing and have already developed technology that will be fully ready on June 28 for investors to visit, that is actually capable of removing a couple of pieces of equipment from a chicken processing facility and convert it into a more efficient and more high-margin plant-based meat processing facility. That is what I think will move the needle on how much plant-based meat is available to stop thinking about it from one company and one like[?] getting bigger to thinking about as[?] injecting our technology into the industry, the chicken industry, and transforming it into the plant-based meat industry.

John: That being said, is it out of [inaudible]? If the question is too specific or too private, please don’t feel bad. I’m pushing back. But then, if that’s the case, if both, you know, you’ve invented this company, and your vision, both with your taste buds and your stomach, but also with your mechanical engineering in mind, because that’s the secret sauce you just mentioned, is your engineering side of you coming out? Then, that would to me, if I was in your board meeting, I’d be saying, “Well then, we’ve got to get a strategic investor like one of the biggest poultry companies to come in next.” because that’s the next step of where you’re really going with this thing. Is that true[?]?

Christie: Absolutely.

John: Is that in the wind, hopefully?

Christie: That is in the wind.

John: Okay, great. Well, good. I want you to go back on this show when you’re ready to announce that. I’ll be one of the platforms that you make that kind of announcement on because that– [crosstalk]

Christie: I would love to do that.

John: That would be such a happy day. That’s a happy day. You’re inventing a company that know[?] when you’re starting, the right way like any other innovator who starts a company, or entrepreneur who starts a journey one step at a time, Washington, Oregon, California, then North America. But because of the engineering side of you, this is a worldwide opportunity that you’re creating at Rebellyous Foods.

Christie: Yeah, it’s a worldwide opportunity. It’s also an opportunity to direct the future of the chicken industry into something more sustainable. This is a really big problem because as more and more people decide to eat chicken, as they replace pork with chicken, there are a lot of people investing in bigger and more expensive chicken processing facilities. We want to give them an alternative, a viable alternative, a manual that we can hand them, that says, instead of doing that, you can make chicken nuggets much more easily and much more cost-effectively this way, if that’s all you want, it’s[?] chicken nuggets, patties, and tenders, we’ve got a better solution for you from an industrial perspective.

John: Wow. That’s exciting. Is it going to mostly stick with chicken and expand on the chicken products or will you also then morph into other plant-based foods as well as time goes on?

Christie: Yeah. Rebellyous is definitely going to continue to expand. We focus on bread, battered, fried, products because those are the area that we focus most of our technology development on. So, the other thing that we bread, batter, and fry, in the United States are chicken or fish sticks. We bread, batter, and fry, all manner of chicken. Chicken pieces, chicken wings, chicken, whatever.

John: Right.

Christie: And we can make those types of products for plant-based too. But fish sticks is our next conquer because that’s another area that we can do a really good job of replacing processed fish products.

John: Well, I can’t wait to come back on Impact to announce a strategic partnership hopefully, with a big chicken producer, and also, I want to try your products. Also, fish sticks sound really good. For our listeners and viewers, to find Christie and her great products, please go to www.rebellyous.com, R-E-B-E-L-L-Y-O-U-S. Christie Lagally, you are making truly an impact in making the world a better place. Thank you for what you do and thank you for joining us today on the Impact Podcast.

Christie: Thank you for having me.

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 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. This actually is a very special edition because both myself and my guest Leon Kaye are in Fresno, California probably only three miles away from each other. Leon, welcome to the impact podcast. Before we get talking about all the important work you’re doing a TriplePundit, can you share with our listeners and our viewers a little bit on the Leon case backstory? How you even got here?

Leon Kaye: So in a past life that really wasn’t too long ago, I had the typical corporate job. I used to be in sales selling everything from financial data to consulting services. And then like a lot of people did over a decade ago, in the wake of the financial crisis of 2008-2009. I was part of a statistical layoff. The company for which I was working essentially said, “Our sales just completely stopped.” And they said, “All right, anybody here less than 18 months, you’re gone.” And this was the first job that I was hoping to build upon after I got my MBA over at USC. So I went through a period where I thought, “Okay, I’m at a point now, or maybe I just want to do exactly what I want to do.” And of course, this was in the early days of the Obama administration when everybody was talking about green jobs, and investments, and renewables. And so, like a lot of people out there, I decided I wanted to be part of this green jobs revolution, that was completely clueless on how to get there.

So I really just started all over. I was lucky enough where I had some little consulting gigs here and there to get in some income, but I was very interested in the sustainability space, always had been. A lot of this was instilled in me by my father when I was a kid. We were one of the few families that would actually go to the local community college and Silicon Valley that was biased to throw away our glass jars. My dad would actually save the glass jars and aluminum cans, things like that. So I always had this nascent interest in sustainability. I always felt it was important. So I started a blog that I was pretty good at updating for about nine years. I basically started the blog because I thought, well, I’m going to have to get discovered, exposed, seen somehow, so this seems the way to do it. And of course, this was when also social media was starting to get big.

Twitter had become mainstream along with Facebook and other platforms out there. So I developed quite a solid social media following, notably on Twitter. And one thing led to another. I started writing part-time for TriplePundit. I started writing for The Guardian, The UK, publication, which at the time, had a sustainable business portal. It’s since been shuttered now for several years. In addition, you start getting the gigs. One thing leads to another. I actually ended up in the Middle East working in Abu Dhabi for Masdar which is this huge sustainability, cleantech investment, and renewables investment arm of the Abu Dhabi government. So I worked there for a while. And in the meantime, I kept writing for TriplePundit. It was a good fit for me.

It was a good fit for them. It was actually, as they say in sales, it was lead generation because I just kept writing. Yet when you develop this body of knowledge you just know stuff. You don’t have to look it up you know it or you know where to find it quickly. So I developed a body of work. And then after TriplePundit was acquired by a larger company – 3BL Media – in 2017, I eventually became the executive editor. That’s the very [inaudible].

John: No, thank you. And as executive editor, do you have a pool of writers around the world writing on these topics that are of interest to TriplePundit or just a few? Or how does that really work?

Leon: We do. So we’re a very slim operation. It’s myself and a – I call her co-editor. She’s the senior editor and we essentially split the work of running the publication day-to-day. She manages a sponsored series arm of TriplePundit. It’s a reality for a lot of new sites, right? Internet advertising never paid out. So our revenue comes from the six-pack series that we saw the various companies and organizations were. They’re not advertorial. They have a say in the editorial direction but their co-branded with those companies. It was very similar to what I did with Guardian sustainable business. Then I run the site day-to-day figuring out which stories are going to run on our site. We rely on a pool of freelancers. We don’t have any staff writers.

So, we’re lucky enough that we have somebody who also has written for TriplePundit longer than me. She writes about cleantech and renewables. We have a fantastic writer who focuses on water and the water-energy nexus. We do have people overseas. We’ve got somebody who lives in Dubai. Actually, we have some people north of the border in Canada. Our tagline is: We make the business case for sustainability. I often have to tell this to comms, professionals, PR folks. I don’t describe this as an environmental publication. We’re a business publication, but we’re really interested in is the business case for sustainability. And it’s not just dollar-saved or dollars earned. It can also be brand or reputation, keeping your employees happy and content, and proud to work with the company. These things, I think we’ve seen, have become quite important over the past year.

John: Leon, for our listeners and viewers out there who want to find Leon and his colleagues and his great organization. Go to www.triplepundit.com. P-U-N-D-I-T.com. Although you’re a business sustainability publication, you do cover topics that are social and political, and the importance of leaders taking a stand, business leaders taking a stand on these issues of our times. Why is that important nowadays for businesses actually taking a leadership position on these important topics?

Leon: I don’t know if I would describe it as important as much I would say the reality these days is that companies don’t really have a choice. Everything’s out there. Everybody has a cell phone that can take video, right? But what’s interesting is that there’s research out there. We always hear about the snafus happening on social media where somebody films something. It could be how workers are being treated at a factory. It could be how animals are being treated at a food processing plant. It could be a racist incident. That there’s actually research out there saying that most of these so-called social media events, social media disasters are actually preventable. So everything is out there.

And I would say fundamentally, we’re seeing businesses respond to this reality because I’m seeing lots of data out there that are suggesting that consumers want their brands that they were loyal to – they want companies – to take a stand on these issues. And in fact, they are less inclined to buy products or services from a company that goes silent, that doesn’t take a stand. So for every executive that would say, “Well, you know what? If we do this we’re going to lose customers,” the counterargument is that, “Well, the reality is you’re probably going to gain some and it will quite balance out, I don’t know.”

But we’ve seen companies that have been in front of this for a while, like Patagonia for example, and they’re still doing well. And I just think that there’s no going back to how it used to be. And I think what we’ve also found is that when companies just can’t play both sides or they just can’t say, “We’re staying out of politics.” Because all you’ve got to do and I’ve done this when PR reps have pitched me stories about their clients. It’s so easy to find out who our accompanies have been donating to. So the politics have always been there. It’s just that everything is now out in the open. So again, to wrap up, is it important for companies to take a stand on these social and political issues? Personally, I say yes but I don’t even think my opinion matters because that is the reality companies are facing now. And I just think that barn door’s open, it’s not going to be shut anytime soon.

John: And covering these, since you’re a business publication, as you said. You’re covering more than sustainability. You’re covering inclusivity, diversity, and all the other important topics of our time that go into making a more sustainable corporation or organization.

Leon: Right. Well, I think one painful lesson of this pandemic is that all of these issues are intertwined, none of them are standalone. None of them are in a silo. It’s pretty clear that the pandemic can be traced back to just close contact with animals, right? Because we just keep growing, we keep creating more sprawl and we’re living in places that perhaps maybe we shouldn’t live, right? So the pandemic has reared its ugly head on the social side. Look what’s happening to a lot of these essential workers, health care workers on the front lines. Many of whom happen to be people of color, right?

So they’re often suffering at a macro level, the most. At the same time, what we’re finding now is we’re going to have a huge waste issue on our hands. Because of the fear of the virus, which I found a lot of it personally the science behind it is dodgy, we have been going through single-use plastics like mad. We’ve believed this at TriplePundit for a while. You can’t talk about the environmental impacts without the social impacts. Because what we’re finding with the environmental movement, which for decades was a largely white and upper middle class one, has been overlooking the impacts that communities of color have had to suffer through. We see it here in the Central Valley, right?

Any time you do a search for the most polluted cities or the cities with the worst air quality, I’m telling you depending on the source, anywhere from five to eight of them are here in the Central Valley, right? So everything’s intertwined. One issue simply affects the other. So I got to tell you, I think when I had my aha moment was years ago. The first-ever media trip I did was to Ben and Jerry’s headquarters in Vermont. I thought they’re going for fair trade. They wanted everybody to see why they did this. And it was either Ben, it was either Jerry. I can’t remember which one it was. I’d have to look up because it’s out there documented. But he was called on for – I don’t know what it was. They were calling him around. There were a lot of very super, very “green.” I would almost venture to say a stereotypical word, but treehugger types there, and they were calling him out on all kinds of business practices.

And one of the founders of the company said if I had a choice to live in a – and I’m paraphrasing him – in a dirty polluted world, where everybody had equal opportunity, and everybody was treated fairly as opposed to a clean and sustainable world, where there’s still a lot of unfairness going on. I’m going to choose to live in the dirty world. Obviously, we don’t really face that choice. But his point was made. And I bring that point up a lot of times. A lot of the time is that, look, being clean, being environmental, driving zero-emissions cars is important, but none of this is going to work if all people, of all backgrounds, of all incomes, are able to participate in this circular low-carbon zero-carbon economy.

John: Speaking of the circular economy. Circular economy and ESG have become hot buzzwords, hot acronyms of recent times. Sustainability is something that’s been around longer. How, nowadays, Leon, do you define sustainability and describe it to your readers?

Leon: That’s a really good question. If you ask me that question last week and if you ask me that question next week, you might hear very different answers. But I would describe sustainability as really balancing the two most important issues out there. And in one pillar you have environmental and then one you have the social. And if you knock one pillar down, both are going to fall. So it’s really about a world where everybody– This is a very high-level definition but in a “sustainable world” everybody has an opportunity to participate in the economy. And everyone should have the opportunity to live in a safe, clean, less toxic environment if that makes sense. And again it goes back to – you just can’t have one without the other, in my opinion.

John: It makes total sense. Leon, since you’re a journalist and you’ve been doing this quite some time. And not only just here, obviously for TriplePundit, but you’ve also traveled the world and lived in all different places and had been exposed to a lot. I’m 58 years old now. What I’m seeing is this polarization of recent times. Let’s just say the last four or five years of certain platforms that we watch on television and brand seem to be totally to the right, totally to the left. And the feeling of independence seems to have been eviscerated. Where does independent journalism come into play in what you do? And as you said, journalism has been sort of quasi-democratized. Anyway, everyone with a cell phone is really a journalist anyway if they could take a video or take a picture. But where do we now fall and where are we going to go? And where is the importance of independent journalism instead of this polarized journalism that we’ve all sort of gotten used to the last four, five years, right?

Leon: Well, I view the internet and social media the way I think a lot of people probably viewed maybe radio in the 1930s and ’40s when it was getting big, and the same with television in the 1950s and 1960s. It’s a great tool in many ways. It can also get us down a slippery slope towards that polarization that we are talking about now. So on one hand, yes, anybody can be a journalist. Now anybody can post something on social media. I mean, in some ways, it’s amazing, right? Not everybody is even a good writer. That’s not a knock, that is reality. It’s a skill, right? And sometimes you can own it, perfect it. But not all of us are born with it. So you don’t even have to write five hundred or a thousand words now. You could post that video, say what’s going on, and that’s it. And in some ways, that’s really good because that’s how a lot of us that were clueless out there really became aware of the reality that Black Americans face day after day in their interactions with the community and even the police. At the same time, however, as much as it’s democratized to plan your word, in many ways, it’s been centralized which is not a good thing. I mean, small-town journalism is dying. It’s just a few companies. At home, most of these newspapers, the internet model of advertising 20 years ago, we realized was a disaster.

And sadly with a lot of newspapers such as the local one here. I think by the time they realized, “Okay we got to put up a paywall,” it’s too late. I hope it survives. It’s been a solid paper for decades but I don’t know what’s gonna happen to the Fresno Bee and the subscriptions for prints which used to always be super cheap. Nobody thought about it. I mean, I’ve heard what they can cost and they’re expensive. So they’re caught between a rock and a hard place. So we try to be as independent as possible but we have our realities as well. We’re part of a larger company. And actually even before we were acquired by 3BL Media, our voice had always been not one about ranting and raving but just really trying to amplify the progress that’s going on in the business community. It’s easy to effusively praise a company for doing x, y, z on the sustainability front. It’s far easier, of course, to tear them to shreds and pick apart their arguments and say, “No, actually you fail.” But I’ve always argued that doesn’t do any good because it’s about progress.

So, at the same time as independent journalism goes, one trend I’m seeing, and we might see more people doing this, there are independent journalists out there. So, for example, one that I subscribed to is Judd Lugem, he’s based somewhere on the East Coast. He has brought to light a lot of the hypocrisy going on with companies where a lot of companies said, after January 6th, we’re not going to contribute political contributions and certainly not any to this edition of the caucus and then a month later or so it turns out they backtracked and a lot of the reporting that Judd Lugem is often on his own has been picked up by big media outlets. MSNBC, CNN, the major networks. So his model is that he relies on monthly and annual subscriptions which really aren’t doing much but I think he has a solid following.

He does not accept any advertising and he uses a platform. I don’t know which platform it is, but there’s another journalist out there – Emily Atkin, excuse me – he focuses more on climate change. Judd Legumes has popular info, you should be able to Google that and find it quickly. Emily Atkins is simply called HEATED. H-E-A-T-E-D, heated as in hot. So that is really independent journalism now. Because sadly, as a profession, it’s hard to make a living as a journalist. It’s a stepping stone often for a lot of people before they go on to careers in public relations and comms, I did that. I’ve been on both sides actually. I worked on the PR Comm side and actually stepped back into the editorial side, which you don’t see a lot. So if you want to support independent journalism and investigative reporting, see who your local newspaper is owned by and maybe it’s worth paying that subscription.

There are still very good big-name newspapers out there. So for example I subscribe to The Washington Post. I know they’re owned by Amazon or technically Jeff Bezos. But if you look at the Washington Post day after day, they cover Amazon and most of the coverage is not favorable or criticizes or simply brings to light what they’re doing. I mean when people say, “Oh, that’s negative journalism,” my response is, “It’s not negative, we’re just telling you what’s happening out there. Amazon workers are not allowed to take bathroom breaks? That’s not being made up. That’s pretty clear. That’s what they’re saying. That’s not negative reporting. That’s reporting what’s the fact. If you react negatively that’s on you, not the reporter. So there are some good publications out there and I just love the Washington Post work, and they cover everything. So it’s that balance of just, unfortunately, most of us gravitate to the news we want to read and the opinions which we agree. I don’t know when or if we can ever get away from that but in the meantime, there are independent journalists and there’s good journalism still going on out there.

John: For our listeners and viewers. We’ve got Leon Kaye with us today. He’s the executive editor of TriplePundit, you can find Leon and all of his great at TriplePundit, P-U-N-D-I-T, .com, triplepundit.com. Leon, with the sustainability revolution now finally taking hold in America for the real first time comparatively speaking to the cultural DNA that exists in Europe with regards to sustainable behavior, circular economy behavior. And even smaller Asian countries, such as South Korea or Japan, have been way ahead of us. Is your readership picking up year over year because more young generation people are really into this? Is that a trend that you’re seeing as well?

Leon: I mean, our readership is definitely going up. I think it’s just because quite frankly we do good news and we have a strategy that we focus on quality, not quantity. Like a lot of publications, we used to do seven, eight, or nine stories a day. I think I wrote half of them when I was a writer. But, no, we used to accept a lot of guest posting. And quite frankly, the strategy was just: Let’s give everybody a voice. In the meantime, we’ll get those web hits. I decided really the most manageable way to do this. So I’m not or my co-editor up to midnight every night, editing stories. I suggest just have a few, I keep a tight iron grip on the stories we run. And we do about three a day or fifteen a week. I’d rather have good quality than just have to be all over the place.

As for the demographics, I can’t really tell you with these new protocols [inaudible] out. It’s hard to get that info. But I mean, when I do a scan, a lot of the sustainability conversation is still occurring on Twitter. I realized that a lot of folks under 40, probably feel that’s old school. But a lot of the sustainability voices, they banter back and forth on Twitter and based on what I see with the little heads and icons and logos that I see discussing, liking, objecting to or what-have-you retweeting. I think we speak to more audiences. I would describe the composite sketch of a TriplePundit reader as somebody who’s either vested in or interested in sustainability space. Could be executives. I know we have a lot of high-level Executives that read us. And not just Chief sustainability officers, folks in marketing or EHS. We have a lot of students, people that want to have a crack at this career once they graduate from school or college as well.

John: Leon, I’m going to give you the last word. Where are we? I mean, finally climate change. Obviously, people like you or me were on to it long ago and realize it but there are still climate deniers out there. But now that most people realize this is a real thing and that we need to really make big changes to fix the environmental problems that we have in this world, especially around carbon emissions. Besides the ones that we talked about earlier in terms of inclusivity and diversity, how do you feel today where we’re sitting? As we get through this pandemic, science seems to be winning, I think. I don’t know. Where do you feel today? Are you hopeful about where we’re going as a society and as a world in terms of the environment? You’re in the middle of it, you get to see a lot. You get to read a lot and you get to learn a lot because of who you are and where you are at TriplePundit. Where do you think we are right now in this journey?

Leon: I think we’re very far from completing it and I’ll tell you why. I think the reality is if you see the data out there what we would have to do, we’d have to make some pretty hard choices as to society. And I think a lot of us know we have to do it but we don’t want to be told to do it. And two things give me pause on one hand. The right is using any opportunity to slam the Biden Administration for their supposed radical agenda. But if you even read about a conversation John Kerry recently had, he gave an interview. He said– I don’t know, the term exactly. Climates for the Biden Administration. And he is supposedly very passionate, but he even admitted that these projections on getting towards a net-zero or [inaudible], whatever term you want to use, a lot of it is relying on technologies that have not been invented yet. That’s pretty old, and in my opinion, is not a very scientific claim.

Another reason why I don’t want to be a climate, Debbie Downer. But it’s pretty clear we have to make some big changes and another huge bit of news that came out earlier today is that the International Energy Agency, the IEA – this was an organization that was founded in the 1970s as a reaction to the oil shocks that occurred as a result of wars in the Middle East and it will embargo as a result of the US and its Middle East policies. The IEA was fundamentally tasked with making sure there was a safe, stable, secure supply of energy across the world so we won’t have to go through these energy shocks.

You could say arguably that it did its job. I’m old enough to remember the gas lines at least in the late ’70s. I was really little. And we haven’t really had anything like that occasionally work except for things like hurricanes or what happened in the Southeast last week with that hack at that one terminal and pipeline. But the IEA today has essentially told the world to stop building coal plants and shutter the ones that you have now. So the fact that this agency that fundamentally has its origins are in the fossil fuel sector, I mean it’s not really an industry group, it’s more of an intergovernmental agency. I think those are things that we really need a [inaudible]. I remember all these debates in the mid-2000s, all these 2020 goals. Look how fast 2020 has come. And now folks are talking about 2025 or 2030.

And sometimes I challenge some of these comms professionals that say, “Oh, we’ve got these great 2030 goals.” And sometimes I say, “You know, a lot of people are saying 2030 might be too late. We don’t know.” And I really do think we need a level investment even in, again, many years ago. Years ago, The Economist, which is a very free-market-oriented publication talking about the economists that’s based in Britain weekly. They’re a very free market. It’s very liberal on social issues. But very, very I would say, conservative overall on economic issues. But even The Economist said the way we should approach climate change is how it should be explained as like an insurance policy. I mean, think about your family budget. What percentage of that is spent on insurance, right? To protect your home, protect your car, protect your life. All right. We spend a decent amount on insurance. The Economist well over a decade ago said we should probably spend about 1% on global GDP which might sound like a lot to some people, but that would also create jobs. So again, this ties back to what I keep saying, everything is interrelated. I mean these investments would also generate jobs. They generate new industries, companies. Maybe they would generate these new technologies that we have no idea about that John Kerry mentioned.

So I don’t even want to say I’m a cautious optimist. I think we really need to start moving on this and making these changes.

John: We need to up our game.

Leon: Yes. Yeah. And this should have been done yesterday. Many yesterdays.

John: Leon, thank you again for joining us today. It’s really nice that this is the first time ever I’ve done an interview and in fourteen years with another wonderful like-minded person. Both of us are in Fresno. This is a rarity for me, but it’s really been a pleasure. I’ve been a big fan of yours and TriplePundit. For our listeners and our viewers out there, please follow Leon and TriplePundit and their great work, it’s really important work, at www.triplepundit.com, triplepundit.com. Leon, you’re making an impact, you’re making the world a better place. And thank you for joining us today on the impact podcast.

Leon: Well, I don’t know about all that effusive praise. But I do thank you for having me and I’m glad we had this conversation. And again, John mentioned my website, if you want to see what I’m up to you can find me on a search engine, there are only two Leon Kayes. If you get the Barrister in London, you got the wrong guy. So it should be easy to find me.

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 leading the Solar Revolution, please visit trajectoryenergy.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 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 super, super-duper special edition because we’re so honored to have with us today, a fellow New Jersey native, Eric LeGrand. Welcome to the Impact podcast, Eric.

Eric LeGrand: Hey, John, thank you for having me on. I appreciate it.

John: Eric, you grew up at a part that I’m really familiar with – Woodbridge, New Jersey. I want you to share your fascinating youth and growing up in New Jersey, your love for football, what happened along the way, and how you even got here today.

Eric: Growing up in Woodbridge, New Jersey in a small town called Avenel. I grew up in a very diverse area, a mixture of a bit of everything here and I grew up seeing different religions, backgrounds, skin colors, everything has been here. We’re big in the sports and I love to say how my generation probably was the last generation that played outside from sun up until sundown, going to the park every day, like that’s how I grew up with whatever sport it was at the time. Football season, we played football. Basketball season, we played basketball. Baseball season, we played baseball, and build bike jumps and ramps, and stuff like that. That’s how I grew up, and I started playing, kill a man with the ball on the side of my house when I was four or five years old. Every now and then I would juke past the guy who’s holding us, Charlie, who’s five years older, and I will score a touchdown and that started my love for football. So crazy playing. Kill the man with the ball on the side of my house.

John: Wow. Now, you grew up, you were a Giants’ fan or Jets’ fan growing up?

Eric: I got a surprise for you. I’m actually a diehard Denver Broncos fan.

John: You’re a diehard Denver, you grew up–

Eric: You know why?

John: Tell me why.

Eric: When I was a kid, I was about seven or eight years old. I’m watching a game one day and I’m watching a Broncos and I played running back. Guess who the running back was, Terrell Davis.

John: Terrell. TD. TD.

Eric: I’m watching TD. I’m watching TD and I’m like, “Oh, I like this guy. I will follow this team from now on.” And now happened to be the year that they, well, I’m the one told in the Super Bowl, and here I got my “You know what? I’m following this team.” Here I am now. Jeez. Twenty-two years later, still a diehard Denver Broncos fan.

John: Well, that’s a great team, and they’ve had a great run, and I remember some of the greatest games and TD was one of my favorites as well.

Eric: I love that guy.

John: Where did you go to high school and when did you start playing organized football then?

Eric: I just started playing organized football when I was five years old. I played for the port running saints. I played flag football for my first two years at five and six years old. I went through the whole Mitey-Mite’s Junior Pee Wees, PeeWees, and then made its way to get up to the top and had to lose weight to be able to play because I was growing bigger, and bigger and bigger. And I got to high school, I went to Colonia High School which is where the kids in Avenel, that’s the part of the high school we go to, a part of town that we go to. I was able to receive a full scholarship after playing three games of varsity during my freshman year at Rutgers University and that’s when my recruitment took off and it was a journey since then.

John: You played at Columbia High School. You go to Rutgers, share–

Eric: Colonia. They’ll get mad at me because everyone always says Columbia, they’re like, “Eric, you got to tell people it’s Colonia, not Columbia.”

John: Oh, it’s Colonia. Okay. Sorry.

Eric: It’s alright.

John: You went to Colonia and you go to Rutgers. Were you one of the Blue Chips? Was it easy for you to make the team at Rutgers? How did that go?

Eric: When I first got there, I was recruited to play one position, middle linebacker and they actually moved me to defensive tackle nose guard, where I was 230 pounds and usually, people on my position – 290, 300 plus pounds – and I was in a whirl. I actually thought I lost the lovely game of football in my freshman year because I got moved to nose guard, then our second-string defensive man got hurt, I moved to the defensive end. Middle of the year our fullback dude isn’t producing, I get moved to offense on fullback. Then back to defensive end after two weeks, and then back to nose guard, and I was all up in the air. I’m like, “Why am I doing this? What is the plan here? Do I love the game of football anymore?” I actually had a meeting with Coach Schiano, who was my coach, and I said, “Coach, what’s going on here?” He said, “Listen, Eric, I trusted you to get a job done in each one of those roles. I would never put you out there if I didn’t think that you can get the job done. You’re going to learn along this journey – love is sacrifice. Sometimes, you got to sacrifice for the things that you love and you realize sometimes your plan isn’t always the best plan and you have to trust in us to guide you in that right direction.” That changed my whole perspective on the way I looked at it after that.

John: That’s such a great perspective, Eric. Isn’t that like when people say coaching doesn’t matter when you hear the backstories like that, coaching matters more than almost anything, right?

Eric: It sure does because I’m in the moment, I’m just sitting there, thinking in my head, “What is going on here?” And then, I go up there have a meeting with him and he tells me, “I would not have put you out there if I didn’t trust you to get the job done.” I’m sitting there and like, “Woah, this one’s totally different than what I was expecting.” He could have thrown anybody out there, but he trusted me in every single one of those roles to get the job done.

John: It’s tremendous. That’s just tremendous. Now, you’re playing on it. Now, you move to your next year, your sophomore year, was that the year that the tragic event happened?

Eric: That was actually my junior. When I’m in my sophomore year, I woke up to 260. “Oh my God. Coach might have been right here.” I actually start fitting in as I’m growing. I’m eighteen years old turning nineteen. Like, actually, the coach might have been right here. I’m gaining weight, getting stronger, not getting faster, things of that nature and I had a great season. We went to a ball game that year. We played in a, I believe it was a Saint Petersburg ball down in Tampa vs. UCF. The year before that, we were in a Papa John’s Ball versus Russell Wilson and NC State at the time. Those go really well for me. I had a great career and then the junior year comes and my injury, midway through the season.

John: Walk us through what happened. For people that don’t know your story, talk about that day, in the fourth quarter at MetLife Stadium.

Eric: We play that MetLife Stadium versus the Army Black Knights. The stadium had just opened up the year before so you’re playing in a brand new NFL stadium at The Meadowlands. As you know, John, from Jersey, that’s a big thing here.

John: That’s a big deal.

Eric: For a college program because it’s a dream where you want to get to. See, in front of everybody there. It’s a national TV game and we had just tied a game up 17 to 17 in the fourth quarter with five minutes left. I’m on the kickoff, I’m running down the field. I was facing the double team that game, which means two guys came to block me. On that particular kickoff, I was able to split right through them and had a good thirty, forty yards headstart down and Michael Brown was going to make the tackle on. I said to myself, “Do I want to use my head, or do I want to use my shoulder because this is going to be a big collision.” I said, “You know what? Let me use my shoulder and keep my head out of it because it’s going to be a big play.”

John: Right.

Eric: A teammate got down there about a half a second before I did and he dove at Malcolm’s legs. He tripped him up and when he tripped him up his body twirled in the air. I put my head down thinking it wasn’t going to be the tackle at all. The crown of my head goes right into the back of his shoulder blade and the next thing you know I’m lying on the ground motionless. The last thing I felt was my heels hitting the ground after my body went stiff.

John: You had a C3, C4 injury in your spinal cord.

Eric: I remember the Traders come out to me, “Eric, is it your head or your neck?” At the time I said, “I can’t breathe.” They go, “Can you feel this? Can you feel that?” I said, “I can’t breathe.” Coach Schiano comes out down and looks at me and he goes, “E, you have to start praying right now.” Honestly, John, when you said that to me, I’m like, “I can’t move. I can’t breathe. I think my life is over right now.” My coach is telling me to pray. I started praying [inaudible] but they’re all this stuff, but at one point, I said, “God just take me at ease.” As nothing happened, I went back to panicking and they lift me up onto the board. I want to give a thumbs up to the crowd and nothing happened. I’m on my way to the hospital just thinking I’ll have a full-body scan and I was going to be okay. I come to find out they told my mom that night, “Your son has fractured C3, C4 vertebrae. He’ll be paralyzed from the neck down for the rest of his life. He’ll never walk again. Never breathe on his own. Never eat solid food. We’re hoping he’s strong enough to make it through the surgery.”

John: Wow. Did you have brothers and sisters?

Eric: My other sister was right there on the field with my mom at the time. It’s funny for that game. It’s a funny story. We were allowed four tickets for our allotment for each home game. Usually, when the kids are from Florida or PA or out-of-state, their parents aren’t coming so you use their tickets. That game I had twenty-five tickets so I had my mom, dad, aunts, uncles, the local pizzeria, Rocco’s Family Table. I had my neighbors or my coach from when I was in Pop Warner. Literally, I had twenty-five people there to see my last game ever. Crazy to think about that but my mom was absolutely devastated when she heard the news. They let me see her before I went into surgery and I remember, I guess the adrenaline had to be flowing still, it had to be, and I said, “Mom, I’ll be back.” Just like that. She heard that and everything changed. She said, “From here on out, whoever sees him or goes in his room, you have to have a positive attitude because he’s fighting already. You, guys, have to be fighting with him as well.”

John: So, you make it through the surgery, what happens after that? How does it go?

Eric: It was great. Just the outpouring of support is honestly what got me. Head Coach Tom Coughlin was the head coach of the Giants at the time, he comes by to see me says, “Overall the rookies like Jason, Pierre, and Paul at that time, and all the rookies came by.” From there Andy Reid, down the turnpike in Philadelphia at the time, comes up in his Hawaiian shirt sees me. I’m getting all pumped up. I’m like, “Once I get better, I will be a first-round pick. They know my name now.”

All this and other people I haven’t seen in years. I’m talking about elementary school, middle school days coming out of the woodwork. And then random people from all over the world are sending me messages. It was just uplifting and inspiring. It kind of made me, to my head, I’ve always been the type of person – if you’re looking to me for something or relying on me, I have to get the job done. That’s my responsibility. When I saw all of this happiness and you know what? It’s my job to get the job done here even though I had dark times, I was scared, and I was nervous but I always stay focused. This is my job now to inspire people and get yourself better because so many people are looking up to you.

John: Talk about how the rehab has gone. What they said you could and couldn’t do in the beginning and how you’ve pushed all the limits and move the goalposts right down the field here. Explain to our listeners and viewers how that goes in. For our listeners and viewers who just joined us, this is a super special edition of the Impact podcast. We’ve got Eric Legrand, he’s the CEO of the LeGrand Coffee House which we’re going to talk about in a little while. To find Eric and his mission, go to ericlegrand52.com. And, of course, to buy his great coffee, go to legrandecoffeehouse.com as well. Eric, take it from there, where did you start and how have you push the goalposts down the field now.

Eric: So, it actually started five weeks into my injury after they told me I’ll never breathe on my own, I was on a ventilator. I still have the scar to tell the story but I remember one night being at Kessler in West Orange, New Jersey, I was in laying in my bed and I was like, I can’t fall asleep, it’s uncomfortable and the noise from the machine, I just can’t sleep. So, I asked my respiratory therapist, “Can you please take me off this ventilator so I could just have some peace and quiet and fall asleep?” She goes, “Eric, if I take it off, you’re only going to last about a minute so I have to put it back on.” I said, “Good, give me that minute and I’ll fall asleep.” As she takes it off, and I’m not going to lie to you, John, I feel like I just got done running the New York City marathon. I was trying to breathe but I was breathing on my own and she was at, “Whoa. Whoa. What’s going on here?” An hour and a half later, I was still breathing on my own that night. Then she put me back on from there. Two weeks later, fully dependent on breathing on my own. I got hurt on October 16th, they told me I never eat solid foods again. That Thanksgiving I was able to eat full celery. My family got the feeding tube taken out of me few weeks before and the best part was I had a Super Bowl party that February 2011 after they told me I would never move anything from my neck down, I was in a Super Bowl party I wasn’t on one like this. My shoulder had started moving a little bit. It was rocking around, even shimmy shaking and all that. So, things have come back for me over the years and I just still continue to work my butt off to keep myself healthy and strong for the day that we find a cure for paralysis. And that’s why I build my foundation and so many things, not letting this disability hold me back from doing things that I want to do in this world. Until that day, I can go back to MetLife Stadium and lay down on that 25-yard line and get back up and finish that last play.

John: I love it. So, you really, right here on this planet Earth, experienced miracles already with your breathing, with your solid food eating, with moving your shoulders and your body, you’ve done things that the doctors just said we’re never going to happen. You’re a miracle, man.

Eric: I’m thankful to God and it made me get a new appreciation for life because I don’t focus on the things that I can’t do. I focus on the things that I can do and if it’s something that I really want in my life, I work my butt off to get it and I attribute that to obviously my stubbornness and I have my faith and also being an athlete and having that athlete’s mindset of being able to attack something, set a goal. It may not happen tomorrow or being able to work towards that work ’cause in the world where everyone wants instant gratification right now, I have kind of built old school where I’m willing to work and put in the time that it needs to be until I get there.

John: And you’re working with, explain to our audience, Eric, what you’re doing with your foundation, with the Reeves Foundation. How’s that work and the progress you’re making towards recovery on one day being able to get up and walk again?

Eric: Well, you want to hear a story that I think you would appreciate, John. So when I got hurt there, Christopher and Dana Reeve Foundation, well, they start pushing me from day one. They’re supportive and got to me whatever I needed. So, finally, probably, at the end of 2012 and the beginning of 2013 people were asking me, “Eric how can we help? What can we do? How can we still support you?” And I was like, “Mom, I think it’s time to find these, you know, form a foundation. And let’s get into helping find a cure for paralysis.” And I remember like, “Mom the Reeve Foundation, they’ve been there since day one. Now, why don’t we have a meeting with them?” She was, “That’ll be awesome.” I remember, I said, “Mom, who’s Christopher and Dana Reeve?” She goes, “Are you kidding me?” I’m like, “Am I supposed to know?” She was, “You don’t know who Christopher Reeve is, the original Superman in the 70s and 80s.” I was like, “Whoa, whoa, whoa, ma, you know I was born in 1990, right?” And she was like, “You’re killing me right now, son.”

After that, I did my research and I was like, “Whoa, I probably should know who that is but we formed Team Legrand of Christopher and Dana Reeve Foundation, which launched in the fall of 2013. I am proud to say, since our inception, we have raised over two million dollars for spinal cord injury research. We have our big event that we have coming up. Our 11th Annual Walk to Believe on June 12th, that’s just going to be absolutely amazing and it’s a 5k that’s taking place worldwide. Wherever you are, you can participate. So, I’m very excited to see how we continue to raise funds.

John: Two million dollars.

Eric: Yeah, but most importantly raise awareness for people with disabilities.

John: Before we get talking about you as an entrepreneur, talk about raising awareness with people with disabilities. The numbers that I’ve read when I was preparing for this interview, somewhere, like, 61 million people in America that have disabilities, is that close to reality, Eric?

Eric: Yeah, it truly is with some sort of disability, whether it’s a spina bifida, ALS, whatever type of disabilities, amputees, there’s some sort of disability. And I feel like a lot of times people get uncomfortable when they see somebody different, and I was taught a valuable lesson when I was at Rutgers by our coach Schiano, Coach Schiano always just says, “You got to learn to be comfortable being uncomfortable. Things aren’t always easy. They’re not always going to be black and white for you. You got to be comfortable being uncomfortable.” And here I am now, someone who has lived his life in a wheelchair for ten and a half years, I understand that and I accept it. I try to educate people, “Yes, I may look different than you right now or move differently than you, but that doesn’t mean that I’m not a human being, that I don’t have feelings or needs.” And I try to always educate people on being genuine, ask questions. Don’t look at somebody, they look at you and then you turn your head or you walk away or you just try to avoid them or you just sit there and stare at them because you don’t know what to say. Ask questions, don’t be shy but the most important part about is – be genuine about it. Don’t be rude. Try to see if there’s some handicap because you know what? You may have a conversation with somebody that looks different or has some sort of disability that may change your life forever. You never know where a conversation may lead.

John: So, well said, and there’s so much to that. I mean, the 61 million people also obviously include as you said, people that are paralyzed, deaf people, people that are missing limbs or blind, and somehow, there’s some of like you said, they’re pushed aside and become invisible and just your issue and Coach Schiano’s thought process and what you just said, you have to learn to be comfortable being uncomfortable, that’s a life lesson that all of us have to absorb and actually practice more and more. But when it comes to disabled people, why have we been so, like you said, shame on us for being uncomfortable just because we all don’t look like each other or act like each other or have the same skills as each other. We don’t also love one another and respect what the other one brings to the table.

Eric: It’s unfortunate to see it. I remember when Coach was saying that to me at the time, after doing 22 sprints after a two-hour practice, I didn’t care what he was saying about comfortable being uncomfortable but now, as I get older, it really sets now, I see what he was trying to teach us in life. That’s what happens. And then when it comes to the disability world, unfortunately, that does happen a lot of times. People are afraid to ask questions or they don’t want to upset somebody or they don’t want to be rude. Such a lack of the same thing, but I feel like we need to normalize more having those conversations, bring them to the table and I love, actually, what people are doing now with the diversity and inclusion. Big corporations are having organizations with DNI now, where people are involved, and you see people with disabilities, yes, I may not be able to physically do stuff, but I still have my mind. I’m still sharp, and we bring a lot to the table. And I’m so thankful to see now more inclusion and diversity into this world.

John: Inclusion and diversity. And the timing for your message, Eric, is somewhat perfect. For lack of better terms of being perfect. As you know, and I know, I grew up also in a very integrated part of New York and New Jersey and we were all one people, the child of the 60s, and the late 60s and early 70s, and my heroes growing up were Cassius Clay, Muhammad Ali, and Martin Luther King, Jr. and people like that so I didn’t know any better, but it’s still shocking to me that we’re living in 2020 and 2021 and we’re still having issues about people’s ethnicities, religious beliefs, colors, sex, male, female or in between, and like you said, we’re all people and we all have something to offer that has value, it doesn’t matter. Any of that stuff doesn’t matter. But inclusivity and diversion are so important now than ever before, I think. And young people like you get to actually be beacons of hope. Beacons of hope, which we’re in desperate need of. But correct me if I’m wrong, I know the Reeves have done so much and you’re doing so much on these issues, wasn’t this also an issue that was champion for years by the late great Nick Buoniconti, and the Buoniconti Foundation and what they did, in memory of his son’s accidents as well, similar accident, as well.

Eric: Yes, down in the Miami project and down to South Florida. Yeah, spinal cord injury research, Nick Buoniconti and I think Buoniconti Foundation is starting up their own research and trying to also find that cure, which is amazing to see, especially people like me who live in a wheelchair, 5.6 million people with some sort of paralysis, honestly, we don’t care who finds the cure first. The Reeve Foundation, the Buoniconti Foundation–

John: It doesn’t matter.

Eric: It doesn’t matter to us. We want, like Christopher Reeve said, “A world of empty wheelchairs.” And to see so much light now being shined on that and continuing as technology continues to grow every day, I’m just so thankful for it. Elon Musk was talking about putting chips in people’s brains to help people with paralysis – just crazy ideas that are coming out nowadays, but soon these crazy ideas are going to be possibilities for people.

John: How close are we? Tell our listeners of yours. I’m so interested. Is this something that’s going to happen in your lifetime? Is it even possible to happen in my lifetime? Even though I’m much older than you. What do you foresee here?

Eric: Actually, the Reeve Foundation is working right now with a big push on epidural stimulation where they’re literally putting up an implant and I want to say, like a machine, but like a little tiny machine into the lower part of your spinal cord. And, literally, you turn it on with a button, and you practice movements, and people are starting to move, stand up with a walker, take steps and regaining back bladder function, sexual function, sensation throughout their body, or bowel function, all this stuff by this machine. And even when they turn it off, the body is still continuing to be able to use this and it’s like retraining the brain on how to work maybe in a different way. But it’s insane to see the progress and that’s why I’m hopeful for the future.

John: How far, Eric? This is fascinating. How far are we from you getting to beta test this stuff and see how it works on you, how far?

Eric: I don’t know, it’s got to be in the next few years. I would think they’re out there, obviously, they started with lower-level injuries first, people that have a little bit more function in their upper body and they’re starting to work your way up to people that, when it comes to me, with a neck injury, with a spinal cord injury, they’re starting to test people now with the lower levels. So it’s cool to see people that I know that are in these research studies that are not too far down like I’m a C3, C4 but someone else is C5, C6 now getting tested and trying these methods.

John: That is fascinating, you just explained that really well. So, they’re going to move their way up, C5, C6 will get tested first, then they’ll move up there at the spinal cord, and then you’ll be next up to bat.

Eric: Yeah, like things of that nature, as you keep on getting the results and the testing, more and more people with this level of injuries, there are more and more data in there, more research that you have that you could apply to that next level. So, it’s pretty cool to see.

John: Wait a second. So, how often do you go to rehab and rehabilitation yourself?

Eric: Well, before COVID, I was going twice a week. At one point, I was three times a week and at one point, I was five times a week. But as I started getting older, I start having more things that you need to do and responsibilities in life. But before Covid, I was going twice a week, but I’m blessed that I have the equipment here at my home. When COVID hit, I was able to do pretty much 95% of the same rehab at my house that I’ll be doing up at Kessler, outpatient, in West Orange. I have my mom and my nursing aide turned into my physical therapist, occupational therapist for the past one year or so.

John: What’s your mom’s first name?

Eric: Karen. My mom is on all the behind-the-scenes stuff that goes down at the rehab sessions, all the medications, insurance, she runs it all and I’m so thankful for my mom because without her and her unconditional love, geez, I don’t know where I’d be.

John: Your mom’s one of those angels that have been put on this earth, huh?

Eric: She’s a special woman. We may butthead 75 times a day because you know how that is. You’re a 30-year-old son and you’re a mother, we’re going head-to-head at each other. And five minutes later, we’re back to whatever it is that used to be.

John: You’re back to everything’s all good.

Eric: I’m so appreciative of her.

John: I’m going to tell you a story. I’m so glad you told me Coach Schiano’s words where you have to learn to be comfortable being uncomfortable because you said it better than I could say it. But you and I had a chance, we got introduced because of our friends at Engage. And so I’m going to tell you a little story about disabled people and this is going to lead into your next venture – the coffee stuff, and you becoming an entrepreneur. So, I’m going to talk to you. So, I’m a serial entrepreneur. And, Eric, I have a business called ERI. It’s a recycling company. So, every year we host a dinner where we like to give an award to the board member who’s done the most that year. So, I had to hire a speaker for that board dinner. So, I saw this young kid in September, four years ago, in September of 2017. Blind, the first blind NCAA Division One football player, make his long staff, Jake Olson. So, I got in contact with him and I go meet with him in the mess hall over at USC with him with his partner, his roommate, Daniel Hennis. And I’m sitting there and I hired him that night to come to speak at my annual board dinner. But I had that same type of thought process that you just explained better than I could ever explain it, Eric.

I was sitting there and thinking, I was 54 at the time, and I was dressed the way you see me today. And I was thinking when I was looking at all these wonderful, good-looking kids in the chow hall, all who had their normal functions and everything else what we know is normal. I was thinking to myself, “What’s this kid going to do when he gets out of this college and the cocoon of college and football and everything else?” And I said to him, “What are you going to do when you get out of here?” And he told me what his goals and his dreams were around Engage, and I was shocked when I was thinking to myself of the math of my life, “How could I be 54 years old and I didn’t have one friend, not one, who is disabled? Blind, deaf, in a wheelchair, it didn’t make sense to me. And as you said, I think you said it best. I think it’s just that we’re all scared of the potential of all of us potentially being disabled one day because we don’t know God’s plan anyway. And so we just avoid the realities that exist around us by ignoring folks that are disabled or don’t look like us and what I started thinking about right at that moment is, “Why not Jake? Why does every CEO or leader or founder of a tech company have to look like Zuckerberg or Bezos or Gates, or any one of these wonderful tech people who have done really well for themselves? Why can’t the next person on Bloomberg or CNBC or Wall Street Journal be blind or deaf or in a wheelchair and be a beacon of hope for all these other disabled people out there that think they’re being shut out of the American dream?”

And so, when I had the opportunity to meet you today, and have you on the Impact, I’m like, oh, my gosh, Eric is not only someone I tremendously respect and I’ve followed your story since the tragedy that happened at MetLife, but now the fact that you’ve decided you’re going to become and besides raising millions of dollars, to make empty wheelchairs in the future, which I believe is going to happen because of great people like you and the Reeves and Nick Buoniconti and so many others. I believe that it’s time to also be focusing and putting a spotlight on the entrepreneurs that look like you too, that want to be part of the American dream of capitalism and entrepreneurship.

Eric: Absolutely. I appreciate that story, actually, so much, John, and the way that you just expressed that obviously touched my heart, because as you said, you go to meet with Jake, and then all of a sudden you leave, you’re like, “Wow, I can’t believe I don’t have a friend really that looks like him. But now I do and it’s opened my eyes up to a whole new world and it makes you start thinking differently.” And the same with me when I was stuck in my little bubble at Rutgers, as you said, that cocoon around college, once you get out of there, and now I do look different. It just exposed me to so much more. Even one of my times when an inpatient for five months, I got to them like, wow, there is a life outside of here where people are going through so much. And as I said, I’m not going to let this hold me back. And that’s how I create, obviously, besides my speaking career and speaking engagements, I launched now Legrand Coffeehouse where I have my own unique twist to it that I’m going with our brand now. I’m just so thankful. As I said, I’m like, you know what? I got great people around me. I have the ability I have my mind, I’m going to execute this and make this happen. I’m not going to let anything hold me back.

John: When did you come up with the concept? What was your inspiration? And how’s it been going since you launched?

Eric: I have actually a very funny way I came up with the concept because there was a typical millennial now, group text messages, pictures, and stuff, sent group messages of my friends from my hometown, sending their cups of coffee all last summer, and are every day, “Oh, I got this today.” “Oh, I got that today.” “I drink my coffee black.” “Oh, you’re putting too much milk,” every single day all summer long. So your opportunity presented itself in my downtown area, where they’re building these new apartment units with six retail spaces at the bottom. And I’ve never been a big coffee drinker, but I like cafes. You put me in a cafe and I’m enjoying myself. So, I said, you know what? Why not have my own cafe? But if I’m going to have my own cafe, especially with coffee, I want to try it. I got to try it. I tried my first cup of coffee in August of 2020 and I said, “Whoa, what have I been missing out on? This stuff is good. And it led me to like, you know what, Eric, if you want to make this a business plan, you got to do it the right way.” I hired a business advisor from Bellissimo, advisors in Portland, I got started learning about coffee, taking classes, doing all these different things to educate myself, and get myself prepared for our brick and mortar that’s going to be open up in September. But I said you know what, I want to bring my brand national. I want to put my own spin on everything that’s been going on in the world, I want to show, we want to bring unity to the community with a daily cup of belief. That’s our motto. And I launched our online store on January 12. And for four and a half months in the business, I’m proud to say we have sold to all 50 states so far. And business has been great. Work stadium deals. Working on the wholesale side has been amazing because you know what? I wanted something that people want and need every day.

Yes, a T-shirt is great for people wearing a T-shirt, and I put it in the washer, wherever it may be every few weeks. Coffee? People need coffee every day. So, I’m giving them that daily reminder of bringing unity to the community with a daily cup of belief and be the absolute best you can be, and attacking your goals every single day.

John: I want to ask you some more questions about that. For those who just joined us. This is a super special edition of the Impact podcast. We’ve got Eric Legrand. He’s the CEO of the Legrand Coffeehouse, but more important, he’s a beacon of hope for those who are disabled, who want to create empty wheelchairs around the world, raised over $2 million with the Reeves Foundation. And you can find Eric at ericlegrand52.com, and at legrandcoffeehouse.com. Eric, talk about the beginning. Besides getting educated and bring on these great specialists to help you learn, how did you write a business plan and raise the money and put together the whole thing to make this not only an online store reality but also make the bricks and mortar reality as well.

Eric: So, after hiring Bellissimo coffee advisors, they helped me go through a whole business plan. They’ve been doing this for 25 plus years. So, they know what it all entails when it comes to writing up a business plan for your coffee shop, you’re giving what you’re trying to build. It’s right next to a train station area. We put it together, we write up our business plan. And I did have some investors coming in that it’s not I needed them, but I wanted them. I did close family and close friends because I need to take care of the people that have been taking care of me for so long as well. And then you get a little bit of a loan to pay for some of this stuff. And boom, as I said in the meantime, I lost our online store. So, we’re going to have direct to consumer to build up some of the profits too I’ll use going forward to build a brick and mortar. So, I started off with the online store, get that going for nine months before we even open up shop for our brick and mortar.

John: Perfect. And the brick and mortar open in September.

Eric: Yep, we’re open there. I’m looking, again, to the beginning of the middle of September right now. You know, obviously, everything happens with construction and that but we’re looking right now September.

John: And tell our listeners and let me ask you the first question anyone asks a new entrepreneur – are you making a profit yet?

Eric: We are making a profit. The only time we weren’t making a profit was probably the first month?

John: The first moth is nothing.

Eric: Exactly. Exactly. We’re already making a profit, we’re seeing green, they’re red at the bank account. It’s going way down. When I’m looking at it, “Geez, when is this going to turn green?” So that has been great, and it’s been like I said, been able to share our message to all 50 states so far without even having our store opened up doing a stadium deal at Rutgers where we’ll be selling coffee for all the ballgames and we got a lot of stuff on the horizon in the future. A lot of plans, believe me. I can’t share them all right now but watch out for the Legrand Coffee, making sure also, you’re getting quality coffee. It’s not just, oh, it’s because of my name. No, you’re getting some of the best stuff that I’m learning about and educate myself on and making sure we’re not just going to give you some bootleg coffee, no, you’re getting some high-end, real deal, top-shelf stuff here.

John: You got, I mean, I’m on your website now and I love, I mean, I want to drink a cup just looking at this. You got Costa Rica coffee, Guatemalan coffee, Sumatra coffee, I mean, these are some of the best parts of the world where coffee can be sourced, right?

Eric: Absolutely. And well, they are all single-origin too so it means they come from one area of that country where they’re not being blended and stuff like that people like to blend their coffee and get a good taste. Well, we’re going to single origins that mean you’re getting the most quality taste of that coffee bean. And, don’t worry, we got some more stuff. Our next roast will be coming out on July 5. Look at that. I didn’t even tell anybody else. You’re getting it here first. July 5th, we got another one. I can’t tell you what it is. But we’re going to be introducing another roast on July 5th.

John: Alright, so I want to know what’s your favorite? When you wake up in the morning, what does your mom drink? What kind of coffee? And what do you drink?

Eric: So, my mom and I, in the beginning, I was so heavy on the Costa Rican. It was the first one I tried. First of all, I sampled that, I said, you know what? I like this a lot. This was my coffee. But then, I started to switch over to the Guatemalan, and I don’t know what has been I guess the more coffee that I’ve been drinking now, the Guatemalan just hits my taste buds a little bit more, it’s got that dark chocolate, there were some of the great fruit tones and I don’t know what it is but I thoroughly enjoyed them. People are like, “How do you drink your coffee? What do you put in it?” And all this stuff and I’m like, “Well, now that I’m a coffee connoisseur, I tried to mix. I drink it black sometimes, mix it with half-and-half sometimes. When I’m feeling froggy, I give it a cold brew. Mix all the fruity stuff, all that good stuff in there, throw it in there, and just enjoy it.”

John: Good for you. How can our viewers and our listeners order coffee from you and support all the great things you’re doing?

Eric: You can go directly to our website, legrandcoffeehouse.com, that’s L-E-G-R-A-N-D coffeehouse.com and try some of our coffee. Like I said, I know I’m the CEO and founder and all this but I would not steer you wrong. Once you’ve tasted, you’re going to be like whoa, this is actually some really good stuff.

John: Okay, legrandcoffeehouse.com, so you have all the coffees available, also do you have that nice little green coffee house t-shirt available also there?

Eric: See, I’m getting all the tidbits. The coffeehouse t-shirts will be dropping on June 15th.

John: June 15. That’s wonderful. What’s the vision? When I have you back on Impact, you’re always invited back here, Eric, whenever you want to promote anything you’re doing obviously. But two, three years now, I have you back on. You’re going to tell me, John, I got these many stores now across the United States. Give me a number, like how many you’re going to have?

Eric: I don’t know. How about we say, let’s go five years, we’ll go with my number from college – 52. Have us all throughout New Jersey then throughout the nation.

John: That makes so much sense. 10 years, very doable. That’s very reasonable.

Eric: I think so. The way that we’re growing right now, I believe so too, as we really get flourishing and things start to hit off and the deals that we’re doing, I think it’s actually doable as well.

John: This is awesome. I’m going to buy some of these. My wife’s a big coffee drinker, I love coffee as well. Can your coffees also be made into an espresso as well?

Eric: Absolutely. You can definitely make it an espresso. We actually get our coffee shops up and running where we can really have all the fun with the lattes, espressos, even throw some we’re going to get work with our Tees as well in there, so smoothies. So, all that. Right now, we have just the online stuff, but I can’t wait to get the store up and running because you know what I’m saying to a lot of my baristas, I’m like, “Listen, guys, this is my first time trying a pumpkin spice latte or a peppermint mocha. So guess what? You got to impress the boss. I got to be happy with it,” so I can’t wait to mess with my baristas, but I hired them and see if they’re up to the challenge.

John: Good. Well, what’s the plan? Once you get it going, will you go down there every day and you’ll be part of that?

Eric: I probably will be there in the early mornings because we got to open up early because of the train station. But, yeah, I’ll be there every day. I got my office in there, that’s going to be built in the stuff. So, I plan on being a part of it and learning as much as I can. I always tell people, “I’m willing to learn. I do not know everything.” This is my first go-around but that’s because I’m absorbing everything like a sponge and writing it down and getting ready. I actually say LCH to the moon when we started.

John: You say it’s by a train station, is it by the Woodbridge station?

Eric: Literally five steps away from the Woodbridge Train Station direct to New York City.

John: Oh, so that’s going to be like you said, you worked with the Bellissimo folks, the experts. So, you got traffic every day coming in and out.

Eric: 232 apartment units going above our retail spot. So, yeah, you know, John.

John: You know what you’re doing here. I got lots of faith in you, Eric. This is going to be, and you know what happens with an entrepreneur. When the first place works well, replicating that, and perfecting that making that the place that you test everything, you replicate that across the country, you’re going to the moon.

Eric: I truly believe that we’ll be making a whole lot of noise in the coffee business the next few years.

John: Well, I think it’s going to be a lot more than the next few years. I wanted to say this, this year, God willing if travel goes back to something sort of normal. I’m definitely going to come out back to my hometown in New Jersey and I’m going to come to visit you at the coffee store itself.

Eric: Come on down.

John: And we’ll sit down again. We’ll sit down again and we’ll do a follow-up to this interview right in person, right on your site itself and you’ll give me a grand tour and we’ll do the whole thing right there.

Eric: We’ll have a perfect wall to set up at the back of the shop for us, John.

John: Man, now, that just made my day. So, I just want all the listeners and viewers out there. I want you to support both what Eric’s doing with the Reeve’s Foundation, raising money to create empty wheelchairs around the world, and get everybody up and out, ericlegrand52.com. Eric Legrand, L-E-G-R-A-N-D 52.com, and then, legrandcoffeehouse.com, L-E-G-R-A-N-D coffeehouse.com. Go buy his coffee, his t-shirts that will drop on June 15, and other products that are coming out in July like he said are coming soon, and then go to the Le Grande Coffeehouse once they open in September in New Jersey, Woodbridge, New Jersey. Support Eric and all the great work that he’s doing.

Eric, I just wish you blessings in every way, man. You are a beacon of hope, not only in terms of disabled people and shining a great light of hope of what the future looks like but also, as an entrepreneur. An entrepreneur that is going to break through and be a beacon of hope, like Jake Olson is for all the people, 61 million people that have been historically ignored, but now we’re going to know that they could also be part of the American dream, just like you’re doing as well.

Eric: Thank you so much for having me on. I really appreciate this conversation. We got diamonds here so much and I’m so thankful for the time and being able to share my story with everyone listening today. I truly am thankful.

John: Thank you, Eric, for making the impacts you make and making the world a better place. You’re always invited back on the Impact podcast, blessings, and I can’t wait to meet you in person and give you a hug over at your new coffee shop in New Jersey in September.

Eric: That has got to be special, John. I can’t wait to have you out.

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, speeches, custom experiences, live streams, and much more. For more information on Engage or to book talent today, visit letsengage.com.