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John: Welcome to another edition, the veteran’s days special day edition of the Impact Podcast. This is truly a special edition, it is thirty-two years in the making. I will get into it why in a second, but we have got the ultimate veteran badass with us today. He is an adventurer, explorer, entrepreneur, philanthropist, and author. That is what we are going to be talking about today, I got his book right here, I have read it twice actually. We have got Dean Stott, welcome to the Impact Podcast Dean Stott.

Dean Stott: Thank you very much, John. I appreciate you having me.

John: This is an honor, and thank you for being with us. Dean, before I get asking you questions about your fascinating and truly inspiring journey, both in the military and outside of the military, can you share your background a little bit? Just teeing up in terms of military family, get it going into the military, becoming basically one of the top people in the world with regards to skillsets and what you accomplished there and then after the military. Give a little bit of your bio first.

Dean: Of course, I will probably start in the beginning. As you mentioned, I was born into a military family myself. My father was in the military, both my grandparents were in the military as well. So I grew up in a town called Aldershot which in the UK, is a home in the British Army. I was immersed in that military environment. When I went to school, the airborne regiment used to parachute into our field. It was not strange to see helicopters flying over to schools and guys jumping out of the skies. So I am very much immersed in that environment and as a young boy, I always wanted to be a fireman, always wanted to be a firefighter. When I got to the age of seventeen, I left school and there was not really much employment going on, so I thought well maybe the military is a potential option for me. I approached my father and I told him of my intentions. He gave me those warm comforting words over the last two minutes. Probably was not the response I was actually expecting but at nine and a half stone and 5 foot 7 inches, I could probably see where he was coming from. I generally believe there is no point in arguing with someone until you are blue in the face. I just thought well, I will go away and I will prove him wrong. I did that, I joined the military at seventeen. My father was in role engineers and I also joined in role engineers as well to get a trade and something back. By the age of twenty-one, I was a para commando diver at PTI. I have done every arduous course in the role engineers that was open to me. The only other path for me then was UK Special Forces. I had pretty much put the bed any doubts of my father that I would last two minutes. But coming from an army background, the normal transition for us is the Special Air Service. But the Special Boat Service had just opened their doors up tri-service. Prior to that, you had to be marines. It is one hundred percent marines. I applied for UK Special forces selection for the Special Boat Service. So just your listeners are aware, the course is exactly the same. The SAS and the SBS do the same six-month course together. So much to the disgust of my friend in the army, in the SAS, I went down the SBS route and I was fortunate, six months later, to be selected and became one of the first army guys ever to go Special Boat Service. I think now fifteen years on, something like fifteen to twenty percent of the SBS are now army recruits. So, being one of the first is what opened those flood gates. But again, it sort of goes with that theme that if you tell me I cannot do it, it just gives me more fire in my belly to prove you wrong.

John: One of the themes in your great book, and again this book is just amazing for our listeners and now viewers out there, Dean Stott’s Relentless from SBS to world-record breaker. And I have marked this book up and I have written all over it and one of the important themes I took out of this Dean, you tell me if I am wrong, when people tell you you cannot and they put a chip on your shoulder, you take a chip, you make it a boulder on your shoulder and then you proceed.

Dean: Yes.

John: You literally take that chip and you make it much bigger than it is in your mind and you lean in, and you go.

Dean: Yes, I do not take it personally. People always try to compare you either to themselves or people they have seen in the past, but you are unique. You are one on a kind. There is no point of you trying to sit there and argue with him and prove them wrong verbally. The best way to do it is through action. Just take on board what they said and use that as almost fire and energy. That negative energy are then turned into positive energy and when it does get a bit hard, you always remember what they were saying. Then you come back successful and you do not need to say anything. Your actions just spoke volumes.

John: For our listeners out there that want to find Dean, that want to have him speak at one of their events, or buy his book on Amazon or Audible, you go to www.deanstott.com. Dean, talk a little bit about your experiences in the military and really the badass stuff you are doing. I am going to a page in a book which comes down to just life. I love this line here that you said in terms of some of the tighter moments you got into why you are in the military, this sentence here, “My call when it comes down to it, the biggest moments in your life always are.” The accountability and the personal accountability that you take for everything you do, “My call.” There is a whole book to be written just on that issue. Talk a little bit about your experiences and how you made the right decisions most of the time during your military experience.

Dean: I think the reason we are one of the best militaries in the world, the Special Forces, is because we are always learning from our mistakes. Not because we are the best caliber and the best training, so we are always in these various scenarios. I always believe you cannot be experienced without experiences. Obviously, some of those situations maybe early on in my career, I would make the wrong call but I had learned from that and then I would never make that mistake again. The accountability is the big one. I know the story that you are referring to there. I was in a situation where I was dressed up as a local Taliban in Kandahar and I had missed– obviously I am getting too much there, I had misread the situation. But it was on my call, I thought I have been compromised and there was a threat from the general public. What was great about that is obviously, talking back to HQ through the radio is on your call. They cannot question your decision because they are not in your seat. You are the only person in that position. You got the atmospherics, you are feeling[?] the pressures, you know that you should not be there. That is why I always say you need to step back and look in. A lot of people rush in and make the wrong decision. I think that is what I did to that and thankfully, I then found out they were making me aware that my turban was stuck in the door, whereas actually, I just misinterpret the whole scenario. But should I had made the wrong decision, I am accountable for my decision but that was what saw on the ground and that was how I read it. No one else back in the UK or back in HQ could question my decision and that is the reason why we go through such arduous training, because you are making key decisions which can have really bad consequences if gone wrong.

John: Talk a little bit about your experiences in the military, other experiences. You were involved with counterterrorism and all sorts of fascinating situations, how long was your career in the military? And share a couple of your favorite anecdotes.

Dean: I joined the military at seventeen. When I joined the Special Forces at the age of twenty-eight, I joined at the height of war and terror. It was the busiest time of the UK Special Forces. I was out in the Middle East on operations, I would be diving off cartel boats in Columbia, or I would be rescuing hostages at the East Coast of Africa. I was literally living and breathing what these children out there are playing, Call of Duty. That was sort of my lifestyle. Obviously, because of security reasons, I cannot go into too much detail on some of the operations, but it was very vast. I did sixteen years in total. Whether it was in the Special Forces, whether it was in the military, everything I just enjoyed it. What I really took away from the military, we talked about the unrelenting pursuit of excellence that if you are going to do something, you do it to the best of your ability. Which is think is a great force[?]. It is not just in military or school, it could be in anything you do. Whether you are a carpenter, whether you are an accountant, you just give it your one-hundred percent. I did enjoy the humor. The military have a very dark sense of humor and I think you need to have a dark sense of humor because you are in certain scenarios and situations in which if you took it too seriously, it would play on your mind mentally, so I have in that. But my father, as I mentioned, is a big part of my life. When he was in the military, he was the army soccer coach and manager. He was very competitive and I had a very competitive streak from him and I had love that about the military. I did not feel threatened by others, but I was just competing internally against others, and you are in a great environment with other competitors, other athletes as well, so yes I really soaked up. I generally thought I would only do about two or three years in the military. I then sixteen years later, at forty, I had to leave prematurely because of the parachuting accident.

John: Share a little bit about that crazy accident because it bears discussing. You had to overcome a lot just to survive the problem that happened when you were jumping out of that airplane.

Dean: Yes. We were due to go back out to Afghanistan and we were on pre-deployment training out in Oman and we were doing what is called a HAHO Jump, a High Altitude High Opening Jump, which is a method of insertion that we used. I think it was the third or fourth jump of the day and I had done hundreds of these jumps before. You exit the aircraft at 15,000 feet so you are on the limits of oxygen. Then the parachute opened straight away. I mean you travel up to 50 kilometers or thirty minutes flying time in the air to get to your designated area.

John: Wow!

Dean: It is just normal procedure. I did, I believe, the fourth jump of the day. Exited the aircraft and unlike the other jumps, my legs got blown up above my head as I exited the aircraft and my leg got caught in the line above my head. So my first concern was to clear the legging time before the parachute opened. I could not free it in time and then the parachute went top and opened behind me. My leg got pulled up over my head into the right and thankfully my leg did release. If it did not, it could have come completely off. Just straight away with the pain, I knew there was a problem. The pain was that severe that I was vomiting through the pain. But because of the altitude, I was also drifting in and out of consciousness. The rest of the team were unaware that there was a situation at this point, so my first concern was to stay with the team, get to the descent[?] but also land it. Because you have got one bad leg and you need to try and land it well. There is obviously risk of damaging the other leg.

John: Right.

Dean: I approached the descent, I saw the approach of the other parachutist and I have gauged the winds correctly and I landed perfectly on one leg but unfortunately, the damage sustained ended my career. I tore my ACL, my MCL, and my lateral meniscus within the knee.

John: Oh!

Dean: My hamstring, my quad, and my calf muscle as well. So all the supporting muscles around the knee as well. Unfortunately, after sixteen years, that was the end of my career. Now in reflection looking back, that was a big period in my life, probably a dark period in my life. Everything I had known from a young boy growing up in that military environment and then joining the military itself. The military is very good, they are like your mother and father. They clothe you, they feed you, they pay you on time. You do not care what sort of tax you are paying, you are just doing the job that you love. To then sort of be told, “Thank you for your service, you are no longer required.” I went through what is known as an identity crisis. You have gone from working in a tight-knit unit and a team, part of a tribe, and then basically told to leave. And how do I now fit in society? What are my skillsets? Where is my role or purpose? That was the first obstacle I had to overcome.

John: Let us go back to that injury. I do not want to just overlook that injury. Any of the things you just mentioned on their own is a very very bad deal, meniscus tear, ACL full tear, you had compounded injuries to your leg which I just wanted to review here because when we go on to some of your other massive and beyond-inspiring accomplishments, I do not want to overlook. How long did it take you to get well just from your injuries?

Dean: Initially, it was the same time as the volcanic ash from Iceland which had just shut down all air traffic globally. I was in Oman. The gold scenario would be to fly straight back to UK and start physio straight away because there is a chance that you can rebuild it. You see rugby players who tear ACLs but continued playing, but obviously, they have their other supporting muscles, which I did not have.

John: Right.

Dean: My first obstacle, I had four weeks in a hotel in Oman just on painkillers because there was no flights available to get me home. I finally got back to UK, I think it was about six weeks later. I got to the hospital, already you can see the muscle wastage in the leg, got sent home, came back another six weeks later. They then lost my MRI scans and there was then a spiral of other medical issues. It actually took me forty-four weeks before I got operated on.

John: Forty-four weeks after the accident?

Dean: Forty-four weeks after the accident. I tore my lateral meniscus probably about eight years before and I was operated on within seventy-two hours and back running. Just tells you the difference, you know the scale. So that obviously contributed to obviously me leaving as well. Which was sad really because I do love the military, I love promoting the military. You almost left under a bit of a dark cloud, the fact that your medical was neglected. But for me, I just picked myself up and we just carried on.

John: Was it harder for the doctors to help you? If they had operated much sooner, post-accident, versus forty-four weeks, would have things gone easier and better for you just personally?

Dean: Yes, potentially I may still be in. You never know.

John: You never know. Okay, so now you are out. You are out of the bubble, the tribe, what you were used to for all those years. You are out of the military and now you had to find a new way.

Dean: Yes, I had to find myself. Also, to add to the pressure, my wife was also eight months pregnant. So not only are you stepping into a new world, my wife was eight months pregnant. You hear stories of people transitioning to civilians. Some can be quite smooth, some can be quite turbulent. Now thankfully for me, mine was quite smooth. My life is very entrepreneurial. Last year she was a runner up Businesswoman Entrepreneur of the Year UK.

John: Wow!

Dean: She was a bank manager running a few banks when I met her. She set out my first security company on her blackberry watching tv. For me, I think it was like three months of paperwork. She took away a lot of those, potentially, additional pressures that were put on me and my focus was just to try and find work. But yes, with her being eight months pregnant, I did not know whether if there was any work out there and if there is plenty of work anyway. Without sounding like Liam Neeson, people with our skill sets our natural progression is the private security sector. So it was a natural step for me.

John: [laughter].

Dean: Within forty-eight hours, I was out in Libya in Benghazi during the height of the Arab Spring in May 2011. Gaddafi was now in Tripoli. He had been corded. But as soon as I hit the ground in Libya, I soon identified that the Libyans did not want it being another repeat of Afghanistan or Iraq. Once Gaddafi had fallen, they wanted to take control of their country. They did not want private security companies walking around with weapons, etcetera. Also, I was chatting with some of the big private security companies and they were charging six figures sums to these crisis managements and evacuation plans for NGOs for the oil and gas sectors, and MNLs, but when I started scraping the surface, I soon identified that there was actually nothing in place itself. So that got the cogs going in my head. You know for me, I wanted to find a niche within the industry. I did not want to just work with private security companies. With my sort of mindset, I wanted to strive to be the best that I can be. So I flew home two weeks later, my wife gave birth to our daughter Mollie and I said, “Look, do you mind if I take some life savings out of the account?” and she said “Yeah, what is your thoughts?” So I told her. So I flew back into Libya and I bought thirty weapons on the black market, because there was a huge proliferation of weapons at this point. I just buried them between Tunis and Egypt and spent a month on my own in the desert just right to my own evacuation plans, burying weapons, communications kit, and money. That is what I did, I then sold it to some of the oil and gas sectors and just monitored that. My sort of main passion or my main drive within the private security sector was the corporate industry, it was the closed protection. The great thing about the security industry is very similar to the military. When you tell people you are in the security industry, I think they think that you are a doorman from the local nightclub. It is a very diverse sector as well.

John: Right.

Dean: Surveillance, closed-protection, coaching, or mentoring, there are a lot. Every time I got a phone call, it was a different job. Whether it was taking UAE world family superyacht from Barcelona to Maldives, whether it was training the Curtis Special Forces to fight ISIS, and the next phone call would be to go to the World Cup in Brazil. It was a great industry and I was enjoying it. I just finished the London Olympics in 2012, and I was out in Libya again in Benghazi and it was September 11th, 2012 and it was the evening that the American ambassador that got killed in Benghazi. I think they made a film called 13 Hours.

John: Right.

Dean: I do not know if it was the right place, right time or wrong place, wrong time. But I was in the city that evening and I was asked if I could help a German oil company get their engineers safely back to Tripoli. So I got eight German engineers safely through safehouses that I had in the desert and gotten home safely. Because of the success of that, two years later, I was in Brazil covering the World Cup and it was called the Tripoli War. It is a civil war between the military and the government, which is still ongoing at the moment, I got a phone call that the Canadian embassy were now stuck in Tripoli and could not get out. And my name kept coming up, they said “This is the guy you need to speak to.” And I work on my own. Everything I do, I work on my own. So I flew back in, had a great fixer and I came in and just sat down with him and I helped and planned and got them out. So I singlehandedly evacuated the Canadian embassy, eighteen military and four diplomats from Libya to Tunisia. It sounds very sexy and it sounds very Hollywood, but actually, I have never had to dig up any of my weapons. They are all in position. The actual success of this was understanding the political inferences, the tribal inferences, the demographics of the country. Not going in with a lot of the guys and loaded weapons and just pulling our way through, it is actually all about communication. Speaking to the right people, letting them know our intentions. So the British embassy, the week before, got shot at at every checkpoint that they have gone through, which obviously was spooking the Canadians. So, myself and my fixer went out, we did not speak to the guards, we spoke to the tribal elders responsible for that region. Actually, it was all about communication and respect. Just letting them know who we are, that we were no threat, and what our intentions were. And that is pretty much my approach in the private security sector. It is not about being passive-aggressive in image, it is about having respect, and being more discreet and being non-intrusive, but just keeping those lines of communication open.

John: Dean, a couple of things, first of all, it does sound Hollywood but it also sounds fantastically dangerous.

Dean: Yes.

John: It sounds very dangerous. Is this called– I mean help me out, this is again, from my Hollywood knowledge and also some friends, is that what is called a Hot Extraction?

Dean: Yes, it can be called a Hot Extraction. But for me, this is when the pin dropped for the second time for me. I came home from this trip and I had blood on my shirt and I said to my wife, my normal procedure when I got home was to wash my clothes, repack my clothes ready for the next phone call. And I said to my wife, “Can we get the blood out of my shirt?” I had blood on my shirt because I was administering first aid on an RTA, a Road Traffic Accident at the border. And my wife said, “Yes we can get the blood out, but I am more intrigued in how the blood was there.”

John: [laugher].

Dean: I told her what I have just done and she sat back and said, “Have you heard yourself?” You know for me, it was almost a throwaway comment that I just evacuated the Canadian– but that was my life at this point. But the pin dropped when my wife then highlighted, I have only been home twenty-one days in a three-hundred and sixty-five-day calendar. You know chapter sixteen in the book is called Dead or Divorce and I think that is where we are here. What it was is I was actually trying to match the adrenaline rush I had when I was still in the Special Forces.

John: Right.

Dean: Without having to come to terms mentally that you were no longer in that group. You no longer have that support network above you, the government, the helicopters, the aircraft. So yes, that was a real realizer for me. But I just got so immersed in working in those countries, Somalia, Yemen, Libya, and I just felt comfortable in those countries when in fact now looking back, yes it was quite dangerous.

John: Before we get on, for our listeners out there who have just joined us, We have got Dean Stott with us. He is a veteran of the British Special Forces. He is an adventurer, explorer, entrepreneur, philanthropist, and he is an author of this amazing book. Look at how many places I have marked it up here. I am so fascinated, there is so many things I need to ask him about and I bought a couple cases from my company and for our listeners out there. This book has so much in it for everybody. You could it on Amazon, you could find it on Audible, also on www.deanstott.com. You know, Dead or Divorced, one of the themes to this great book and you actually had a line on your book that said, “No man is an island.” Your wife Alana has been not only your cheerleader and supporter.

Dean: Yes.

John: She is your teammate. On almost every chapter she shows up. Whether through encouragement or coming up with as you said, a business model post-military, the support. We are going to talk about her throwing a Guinness Book of World records in your lap in a minute or so, but finding that rush that you were so used to with that whole military around you in the private sector, it was a quest that is so fascinating and I think that you are still on it. You are a very young man still which is the fun part of your life. But your wife is truly a special human being and been a heck of a partner and I think that should not get lost in the messaging here in that anyone to accomplish the greatness you have, the fact that you chose such a wonderful person to be your partner I think is such an important message that our listeners hear out there. So anyway, hats off to your wife Alana. I hope I get to meet her one day, but man, she shows up in this book in so many ways and is such a huge support of yours. I am so impressed by how you guys have operated as a team to succeed over and over again.

Dean: No, I think I am very fortunate. Like I said, I felt there was a void when I left the military being in a tight-knit unit, and a team. And then actually then found it closer to home. It was actually here all the time. It was just I was not aware of it. As I have mentioned, Alana is very entrepreneurial. Anyone who knows us as a family knows that basically, Alana is the one behind the driving. She is the one who is managing everything. We know our strengths and weaknesses. Mine is more of the physical and Alana is very much more of the mental.

John: That is okay.

Dean: Yes.

John: You got it both covered. So now, on to the next mission.

Dean: Yes.

John: Pursuing in a relentless way excellence and being relentless in your pursuit of excellence and that adrenal rush, talk a little bit about how you and Alana came up with the most fascinating Pan-American highway challenge that you created and you obviously killed. I want you to share the whole story behind the story.

Dean: Obviously, after the Canadian embassy, and Alana and I chatted, we then soon realized that it was actually lack of communication between ourselves. She thought I wanted to go away all the time and I thought that she needed me to go away to bring in the money. Alana was now a property developer and she said, “Well, no I do not need you to go away, we are very comfortable back home. Why do not you just hang up your boots for a bit and do that?” So I thought “Perfect! I will do that, why not?” And during this whole period, it is probably five years now from the injury to where we are at this stage. I neglected my own physical and mental wellbeing because I have been so fixated on the work, just working and helping others. My injured leg was now two kilos lighter than my good leg because of the muscle wastage. I decided to buy a push bike and just cycle to and from the office. There is only about eight miles there and eight miles back and I thought, “Well perfect!” But straight away, just being active again, I felt a huge weight off my shoulders. Where I got to in the military is because of my physical attributes, that had been taken away from me, that I could not run anymore. Actually being on a bike, I felt like doing some sort of cardiovascular, I felt a lot better. I just cycle to and from the office and I spent a month with Alana doing this property development. You can imagine with my backstory, sat with these architects and planners meetings, I was not really interested in the plumbing system. It was more of the coffee and the biscuits.

John: [laughter].

Dean: Alana could see that glaze over my eyes, you need to do something. But obviously not smuggling people across borders. So, it was about a month before my fortieth birthday and as a young child, I always read the Guinness Book of Records. I was always fascinated in these people’s feats. And I said, “Well I have always fancied doing a record.” And she said, “Well what end?” And I said, “Well why not cycling?” Cycling does not seem to be hampering my injury. I was always conscious of my injury and what could potentially hold me up. And I said, “Well cycling does not seem to be an issue.” So I was thinking– I lived in Scotland at that time, I was thinking maybe the length of Scotland. And then my wife then found the world’s longest road which runs from the southern point of Argentina to Northern Alaska which is 22,000 kilometers. So she clearly wanted me out of the house.

John: [laughter].

Dean: Just so the listeners and viewers are aware, because of the curvature of the Earth, it is equivalent of cycling from London to Sydney and then another 4,000 miles. And I thought, perfect, that is the perfect challenge for me. So having only cycled 20 miles, I applied for the Guinness World of Records and Guinness came back six weeks later and said, “Yes, you have been successful on your application.” So I thought, “Perfect.” But during this period as well when I left the military, I have been doing a lot for charities and I was a Special Boat Service ambassador for Scotland, an ambassador for the Role of British Legion. I did a lot with regards to military charity. So for me, rather than just doing the challenge, I always like to give back in philanthropy or raise awareness. And so, I am going to massively name drop now.

John: Yes.

Dean: Good friend of mine, who is Prince Harry, him and I have known each other about thirteen years now. Him and I have done a lot of stuff with charity together before behind closed doors. So, I rang him up and I said, “Look, I am going to cycle the world’s longest road.” And he said, “What charities will you do it for?” This is back in 2016.

John: Right.

Dean: Himself, his brother, and Kate, they were just about to launch a campaign called Heads Together, which is about mental health. So I sat down with Harry, I was aware of mental health within the military. I have seen it first hand with some of my friends and obviously, experienced it myself. But I was not aware of how big of an issue it was throughout the whole of society. Be it postnatal depression, young children, teenagers, all the way to fully grown adults. It affects everyone.

John: Right.

Dean: So I thought that is the perfect campaign for this challenge. And that was the PAH team. So harry then introduced me to the Royal Foundation and we started the dialogue. The first meeting was how much are you planning to raise and I said one million pounds because I wanted to keep them at the table and I did not want them feeling, “Why are we here for ten thousand pounds?”

John: Right.

Dean: The enormity of the challenge have to replicate how much we are trying to raise.</>

John: Right, makes sense.

Dean: Yes, and then the second question that got posed was what is the message that you are trying to promote? I was like, I had not really thought about it because I was [inaudible] Harry asked me. So I sat down for a minute and I said, “well, physical activity helps your mental state”, and they are like, “oh no, you cannot use that”, I said “why not?” and they said, “because it has not been scientifically proven.” I said, “that is fine, but I do not need a scientist to tell me that I feel good when I am physically active.” So I ignored them anyway and carried on promoting that message and that was the message I was trying to promote in this challenge. So with mental health, its free coping mechanisms, one is medication which you are trying to avoid, communication is a big one, but for me, it is the physical activity, it is finding yourself.

John: Awesome.

Dean: So that was the start of the PAH project.

John: Okay good, and we are going to talk about how that turned out, because I know the ending because I have read your book now twice, but I want to go. So now, you started cycling, you had a goal…

Dean: Yes.

John: You knew what the mission was.

Dean: Yes.

John: It is 22,000 kilometers.

Dean: Yes.

John: You also had a financial goal, you put a million pounds on the line.

Dean: Yes.

John: What happens? Start the journey for us. How do you even figure out? I mean, obviously, you have always figured out who the right specialist are, but how do you figure out? Where you start, how you traverse this, the planning on this is just fascinating.

Dean: Going into this, I was not a cyclist, but coming from the Special Forces, coming from the private security, the success of those operations were down to that military stuff, meticulous planning, and detail. So straightaway, it is just pen and paper. What is the objective? This is the starting point, this is the objective, and I just took a military set of orders and just put it on the challenge. I just crossed out ammunition. The two elements of the challenge is the physical element, achieving the aim, and then there is the monetary element, trying to raise that money, and I think the monetary is even harder than the physical.

John: Right.

Dean: Again, Alana was the campaign director, she sort of manage, helped, assist, all the sponsorship as well. For me, I was doing the planning, I know fourteen countries and it is a lot more to it than just grabbing a banana and in cycling not, you know what I mean? There are so many things you need to consider, security issues, seasons, what time of the year you are going, you are going through a country in the middle of the elections. It could be–

John: Dangerous.

Dean: In unrest. There are so many factors you would not really think about, but these are normal sub-factors that I always consider when I am doing operations around the world. So, yes, I just put all that down to paper. But again, one of the things we did in the Special Forces, which I thought was great, it is called a hot debrief. As soon as we came off the ground or whatever we are doing, before we even go clean ourselves up, clean our weapons, anything else, you have a hot debrief. The three questions were what worked? What did not work? And if you are going to do it again, what would you do differently? We are always learning and always evolving. So I thought, no, I was reading magazines and books about the Pan-American Highway and learning about cycling, but for me, I thought the best people to ask are those who have done it before you.

John: Yes.

Dean: I approached the previous record holders, and I post those three questions to them. I gauged my plan on that. So, they all started in Alaska and finished in Argentina.

John: Wow.

Dean: All their issues were in Central and South America. Be it political unrest, bureaucracy at the borders, languages, spares for the bike, so for me, as a military man or a planner, I thought why take a gamble with the 2nd half of the challenge, why not address those issues early? Get them out the way, and then when you get to North America and Canada, you are in a good position.

John: Right.

Dean: One of the things I did is I actually did the opposite of everyone else, I turned on [inaudible], and I say, “well, that is my start point. My start point now is Argentina and not Alaska, which then changed the times of the years when I needed to cycle. So, that was the first part. As a soldier, I have been to the desert, I have been to the arctic, I have been to the jungle. Some of the areas I was going through, it went from plus 47 degrees centigrade to minus 18 on the chart.

John: Oh, oh.

Dean: You know, the Atacama Desert in Chile is 120 degrees Fahrenheit. I have done it in the desert, but I have not done it eight to ten hours on a bike. So when I was training, I thought, well how can I replicate those environments? So I flew out to Dubai, did a two-week heat training out there, so I could satisfy myself that–

John: You were ready.

Dean: Yes, I was ready. Central America is 100 percent humidity. I had a friend who had a CrossFit Gym out in Thailand so, I spent two weeks out there training, and altitude wise, there is a center down in London called The Altitude Center, the room is simulated to altitude. The biggest climb on the Tour de France is about 21 to 23 Kilometers, my biggest climb is 67 Kilometers from sea level to 4 and a half thousand meters in a day, so it is literally everything on steroids. So, I did a ten-hour static bike ride in The Altitude Center to again tick the box that I am comfortable in those environment, so that was sort of the things that were going on in the background in regards to my training. The money side, as you have mentioned, living in Scotland and I was having to fly down to London a lot to meet potential sponsors, to meet the charities as well, and you can imagine how difficult it is going into somebody’s blue chip companies, standing in front of the board and say, “Well, I have never cycled before, but I am going to cycle the world’s longest roads, break a world record and raise a million pounds for mental health. I think a lot them thought I had mental health problems myself, and showed me the door. But thankfully, this is 2017, and the Heads Together Campaign had now launched in UK, so it is very much a topic of conversation, and a lot of the corporates wanted to get behind it, like corporate social responsibilities as well.

John: Yes.

Dean: So, it is very much– I was going that way as corporates wanted to get involved it. Then, I clashed at the right time with a FTSE 100 wealth management company, and we had the conversation, I told them what I was doing and they sort of looked beyond me, they believed in everything I said. They even said, “we know you are not a cyclist, but we believe you are going to do it.” So, that helped a lot for me. At this point, I was using my own money, I have put fifty thousand pounds of my own money to get it up and running to where it should be.

John: Right.

Dean: These people have to believe that you are going to do it, and me putting my own money is a big thing. They thought, “well, if he has put his own money, and then, we believe he is going to do it.” So, that helps.

John: Dean, how much of a support group was on the journey with you? In terms of travel team and things of that sorts supporting you.

Dean: Yes, I sort of looked at it, I was not a cyclist. At the beginning stage Harry and I did a promo video together, and we are getting requests from all over the world of assistance. I needed like a bike mechanic, I needed a soft tissue therapist, I needed a medic, and things like that, so that I could just concentrate on the cycling. We have these guys come forward and assist us, but hindsight is a great thing. I thought people were doing it for the right reasons, and it was not the case.

John: What?

Dean: I always joke that the bike ride was the easiest part of the challenge. As you start evolving, the medic on day 13, I had to send home because he was bullying the documentary team, the mechanic, the soft tissue therapist in Mexico wanted to promote their businesses and sort of hijacked the campaign name. They said, “you cannot do it without us.” So, I left them in Mexico, and cycle with my friend who was driving the vehicle. Things you do not really factor in on paper.

John: Right.

Dean: Managing people’s ego.

John: Right.

Dean: Moving forward, everything has to be in contracts and NDAs and things like that. I just assumed that yes, they are doing it for the right reasons and they are professionals and in the end it was not the case.

John: So, let us talk about three goals here. A, the goal was to get through this whole Pan-American Highway.

Dean: Yes.

John: And then the million pounds, and then also, what was your timeline? Tee up, share with our audience your timeline that you are shooting for to beat that record?

Dean: Yes. When I applied for the world record, originally, it was 117 days.

John: Right.

Dean: When Guinness came back to me six weeks later and said you have been successful, it had already been beaten. No, sorry, it was 124 days, when I applied.

John: Right.

Dean: And it came back six weeks later, it has already been beaten, it was now 117 days. For me, when I was doing my planning, I was looking at potential scenarios and contingencies, but were certain things that were out of my control, be it natural disaster, [inaudible], third party influence. So, I thought, we use a thing called fudge in the military, we give ourselves a bit of fudge and so I said, I am going to aim for 110 days. Not because I wanted to smash it by a week, but should we encounter any of those situations, it is eaten into that fudge, it is not eaten into my record time. So, that was always my target, 110 days. I took 10 days off the South America world record and did it in 48 days. The original record is 58 days which is great. So my decision to go south to north was a great decision because I had a tail wind through Peru which is 2,500 kilometers, and logistically, it was not a good decision. You can get a vehicle from Alaska down to Argentina and not have a problem. Coming the other way, we had to swap vehicles in every country, which is slowing us up on the borders. So, Alana being the campaign director decided we will buy an RV and a four by four and get it shipped from Fort Lauderdale down to Panama so, when I fly over from Cartagena, those vehicles will take us all the way to the end. So, that was the plan. Alana got a phone call two weeks before I was coming into the end of South America saying that the vehicles had not been loaded on the container, and they are still stuck here in Florida. So, thankfully my wife, my PA, and a couple of my friends have foresight to fly over, and they moved the vehicles 4,000 miles in eight days, from Florida through Mexico, through all of Central America to Panama, and I broke the world record in the morning, flew over and an hour later, Alana came in with the keys. So, again, as we talked about earlier, Alana is very much running everything in background to keep the campaign going. What was great about that, not only so much the achievement that they did, but I have heard about bureaucracy at the borders, but I had not witnessed it in South America, that is because it was all to come in Central America. They got held up at gun point in some of the borders, and everything else. So, for me, it was great knowledge and information going in to the next phase. I would always cycle and make sure I hit the borders at night so, if we are held up it was eaten into my sleep time and not the cycle time. We got through Central America, I got to North America on day 17, I am like, perfect. I am now fourteen days ahead of my target. I was like, I could take a days rest if I need to. I did not realize how big an issue was getting into America. I did not know whether it was because of the language, that everyone now spoke my language, I did not know whether it was the calorie[?] options were a lot better. And also maybe because the previous record holders have never had any issues in North America and Canada, [inaudible], I have left everything behind me.

John: Right.

Dean: An hour after getting in, I had five missed calls of Alana. She is very good at keeping distractions away from me. My initial concern was my children.

John: Right.

Dean: I got into the phone, and she said, “Oh, we have been kindly invited to Harry and Meghan’s wedding.” How is that?

John: Great!

Dean: So, Alana being Alana, it only works out to me to get the last flight home was day 102, which is fifteen days ahead of the target. So going into the phone call, I was fourteen days ahead, ten minutes later, I am now a day behind. All my efforts have just been taken away from me. It is very nice to be invited to such a prestigious event.

John: Yes.

Dean: My time I was cursing. But then I got to Lubbock in Texas, and the next day it went 60 mile an hour winds and tornadoes, and I was grounded for another twenty-four hours. There is an app on your phone called Windy TV which gives you the strength and directions of the winds.

John: Right.

Dean: it did every hour for two weeks, and so I just put pens to paper. I just made a plan in that twenty-four hours, I had to cycle 340 miles in the next thirty-six hours to miss the next weather window, and I just played chess with mother nature through North America and into Canada. Originally, I had seventeen days planned for North America, cycle in eleven and a half. But the luxury I had being in North America and Canada was security.

John: Right.

Dean: In South America and Central America it was dictated by first light and last light, and I had to be off the road. Whereas, in North America and Canada, I could cycle through the evening, and that is where I got my gains and I got a week outside in a place called White Horse, and the world record is very much secure. The Royal wedding was secure unless I was going to get eaten by a grizzly bear. Then I got a phone call about a professional cyclist who was sponsored by all the big brands, Red Bull, the Austrian cycling team, who have just come out on social media that day, and said that he was going to cycle the Pan-American Highway in August and be the first man to do it under a hundred days. So that just changed the dynamics again completely for me. I cycled for twenty-two hours in the last thirty hours in minus eighteen to make sure that I came in and became the first man in history to do it under a hundred days. But the great thing about this, we talked about the importance of planning and everything else–

John: Right.

Dean: But it was actually, as we say in the military, the best plan in the world until they start shooting back. That was not in the plan, it is actually being reactive to the situation on the ground. For me, the situation kept changing. So rather than getting upset, I just reacted to what was in front of me, and if I had known about the wedding or the cyclist from day one, it maybe too much, you may have pushed yourself too hard.

John: Right.

Dean: But as it was in front of me, I was reacting even to the very last two days, the plan was changing.

John: Unbelievable! Share a little bit about how many miles did you average a day?

Dean: So, I finished it in ninety-none days, twelve hours, and fifty-six minutes. I had five days off, three due to weather, and two due to logistics. So, we have done ninety-four days cycling.

John: Right.

Dean: That would be an average of a 147 miles a day, for 94 days. But my average speed was 16.8 mile an hour. A lot of people asked me, such a huge talent, how do you break that down mentally? How do you compartmentalize that? And for me, it has been like a special forces selection is six months long. You do not go on day one thinking about six months.

John: Right.

Dean: You think about, what is in front of me today? What do I need to achieve today to get in position tomorrow. And that is why I did this, I broke it into countries, broke the countries into days, and broke the days into stages. So, nutrition and hydration were key for me to keep weight up. So, I would have breakfast, and I just cycle as fast as I could for two to two and a half hours, and I would get off the bike, have some food and water for 30 minutes. I was very disciplined in my timing. So, I was then back on the bike, and all I would do is look at the next two hours. I would not look at the afternoon, I would not look at tomorrow or next week. For me, it was just doing four training sessions a day.

John: Right.

Dean: Before you have done a day, you have done a country, you have done–

John: I want to go back to that word you just used, discipline, But before we do that, it is so fascinating in that you made it so it would not overwhelm you. It was two, two, and two, four times a day.

Dean: Yes.

John: Which does not feel overwhelming when you break it down like that, but if you wake and say, I got to go do eight hours, that is 16.8 miles per hour to get through today, that feels a little bit overwhelming.

Dean: Yes, it does. But I am very objective driven and I see other people doing challenges, and they are like–

John: Right.

Dean: Well, I am two parts behind today, what I would do is I will catch that up tomorrow. Well, you do not know what is going to happen tomorrow, you could have another back day and be 20 to 30 miles behind, which then plays through your head. So for me, I always make sure I hit my objective for the day, because then when you start the next day, whether you make those extra two or three phone calls, you know you are in a good place, you are where you should be the next day, which then helps you. So, for me I think I had really strong winds for the first week, and I was 39 miles behind by the end of the first week, but my target was still a week ahead in world record, and then once the wind has changed, I was then well ahead. I was then achieving my objective and getting further which then mentally, I was getting stronger and believe that I could do more. Before I had even gone over, I had never done more than 150 miles, and at the end, you average 147 miles for ninety-four days. So, it is just believing that you can do it.

John: We all love food, and I would love your little anecdotes in the book about the food quality in different places, and I especially love when you came in to Tim Horton’s and you talked about just your experience and your love of just running into Tim Horton’s and the donuts, and the coffee. How many calories, I know you have this measured, were burning a day? And you were having to consume a day to keep going.

Dean: You are averaging between nine and twelve thousand calories you are burning a day, but your body can only consume seven thousand from food, so the rest have to come through fluids. So, I knew from the start it was almost like an arctic exploration, I would lose weight from the day I started to the day I finished. I think in America with Tim Horton’s, thanks to them, I actually put a bit of weight on. But I do not look like a cyclist, I am very stocky. When I started the bike ride I was 90 kilos. I remember my coach, he had his way, he had me as thin[?] as his pen on day 1 at two to three percent body fat, but again, going into the ride, I had knowledge with my time in the military like, our special forces’ selection is six months long. You start one hundred percent fit and in pristine condition, you will burn out week two or three, now this is not a sprint, this is a marathon.

John: Right.

Dean: So, I always start at seventy-five to eighty percent fitness, but carrying weight because then what you do is you shed the weight as you get fitter. The first few days are always hard, I mean, you start eating in to your reserves. So, I finished to bike ride at 78 kilos. I lost 12 kilos in weight. The decision to keep that weight on early was a good decision.

John: Before we get going, we have Dean Stott with us, you could find Dean at deanstott.com. Also, his great book, I have read it twice, I bought two cases for my friends, family, and company. This is a great and inspirational book here, and I recommend everybody reading this book. Buy it on amazon.com, Audible or anywhere where great books are sold. Look at how many places I marked it up on. I mean, I just really enjoy the book. Let us go back. Now, you finish up, you have made it to the wedding, thank God, you have made it to the wedding, talk about the financial goal, how did that work out?

Dean: So, when I crossed the finishing line, we raced, at that point, it was over five hundred and thirty thousand pounds.

John: Wow!

Dean: No, about six hundred thousand. Before I had even set off, the company who had sponsored me had an annual company meeting in London, and they said would I come down and guest speak at the O2 Arena in front of ten thousand people, I said, “Yes, of course.” That evening, they raised two hundred sixty five thousand pounds and doubled it. So, before I had even gone on the rides we had five hundred and thirty thousand. We then raised another thirty thousand through the general public. My PR team, thirty thousand pounds is still a great achievement, but they said, “You are showing no emotion.” People like to see people suffering, when you come on it was almost like a military operation, and that was me, I think once I break down in tears, you know, I crashed a bike in Chile and had food poisoning in Peru, maybe I should have called it a day, but I was trying to promote that unrelenting pursuit of excellence. But after coming back, we also had the main fund raiser, big event in The Hilton, in London and Harry came along as a guest on the stage and did a Q&A session, and there we made another three hundred thousand pounds as well. But what was interesting is the fact that, before I had even gone on the bike rides, we had raised seventy thousand pounds in an event in Scotland, and fifty thousand pounds of that was a deposit for the hotel in London, so before I had even gone on the bike ride, we were planning the welcome back party, and then the events manager, she kept saying to me, she said, “but what is your contingency?” And I never used to answer it. Alana would answer, she said, “Well, a contingency is we go to Dean’s funeral.”

John: Oh my gosh!

Dean: When I got back actually, I sat down with her and I said, “I never used to answer because for me, there was no contingency. If I knew there was an easy option or there was an alternative. When things get hard, you are naturally stirred to that alternative options. So, I just blocked out all my outs, there was no other outcome other than actually doing it. I told her that and I think she then got my sort of mindset.

John: Dean, now, I am sensing something now, you are sitting today in Southern California. You have moved now over to Southern California. So, you are available for speaking events in the United States, and also to promote this great book that you have now in the United States, Relentless – the relentless pursuit of excellence. I am sensing a little bit of a kumbaya here. Wait a second, Harry has moved to Southern California, you have moved to Southern California, are all of you guys now moving to Southern California and hanging out together? What is going on? I want to understand, what is this–

Dean: Alana and I, when we met eleven years ago, I was down in San Diego with the Seals down there doing some work, and she had just done a road trip as well, and we just love America. We love the vibe, the lifestyle, and it is trying to– and so for us, we were getting really busy again, and we sat down in Christmas and said, what is it that is important to us, and it is that balance of the Ying and Yang, with the lifestyle, with the family. California has always been the place that I had fancy, and [inaudible] there is no good time to move. But moving during the pandemic, wild fires, and on the eve of election, there is better times to move, but for us, I always joke that I have stepped off helicopters into worst.

John: We are very grateful to have you here, and you are going to be a huge success in the US. You know, two questions I have before I let you go today. A, you look, still, amazing physically fit. What do you do everyday now to stay in shape, ready to go shape?

Dean: Yes, as I have touched on earlier, physical activity helps your mental state.

John: Yes, agreed.

Dean: Now, when I get grumpy, get on your bike, go do some CrossFit, do something. So, for me, my USP, which sets me aside from other adventures is I take a challenge or a discipline I swore I have never done before and find the biggest challenge. So, my next challenge which is penciled for this year, which is obviously now moved because of COVID, is to kayak the river Nile from source to sea [?] which has never been done before. The most I am trying to promote people is, it is never too late to start small. I am forty-three, I broke my first world record at forty-one. I am really trying to get that message across. So, I do a little bit, I mean, I still stay on the bike. I still do some upper body stuff. I do not do weights, I have never done weights. This whole body weights stuff.

John: Really?

Dean: Yes, because in the military, we used to get tested in the military but it was never, how much can you bench press? It was almost how many pull ups can you do? How many bends or press ups, so I always focus my energies on that.

John: Level of intensity, of difficulty. Rate, I want to do a compare and contrast now, the Pan-American Highway Challenge that you did, which obviously, you have accomplished and beat the world record, and now have set the world record, and kayaking the Nile. Compare and Contrast.

Dean: Two very different challenges, the Pan-American Highway, there was a world record, there was an objective to hit. I had a target to hit.

John: Right.

Dean: The Nile, no one has ever done it, you are setting the bench mark there. So, for me, I am very conscious that I have set my own goals in my head because I do not want to be out there nine months later, paddling. I have got a family. But there is more of a story to tell. I would not be tapping my watch to the documentary team every five minutes. If there is something of importance to record then we will do it. But I have a number in my head, it is a hundred days again. I going to go for a hundred.

John: Now, I am not by any means a Nile river expert, but I have read that there are crocodiles in the Nile river.

Dean: Yes.

John: This is not just a physical and mental challenge to bet your upper body and your cardio in shape, respiratory in shape too, pull this off, you might be navigating very dangerous waters at different times during this period. Is this not true?

Dean: Yes, very true. It is the world’s longest river. It is 4,280 miles. It start from Luanda and you got crocodiles, you got hippos, you got civil war in South Sudan, you got malaria, it has got everything. Which again, is a great challenge and a great story. What I love about it is, the Pan-American Highway the roads are there and it is more physical, but this there are going to be different tribes, different culture, and you actually do not know how to move along the Nile unless they say so. So, having those local fixers, it is going to be great. I always promote the physical activity mental state but with the Nile, it is great. There are so many arms from it, raising awareness slavery and human trafficking, poverty, pollution. The Nile is the lifeline of Africa and it has got the most powerful waterfall in the world as well.

John: Will there be a fund raising element around that as well, Dean?

Dean: There will be. I will have a fund raising but I would not be so fixated on that because that would very much distract you from the goal.

John: Fair enough, fair enough. Dean, I look forward to meeting you in person. We welcome you to America. We are grateful for your service, fighting for freedom around the world. Do you have any last things you want to promote before– I am going to promote your book at the end here. Is there anything else you would like to say before we sign off. I am so grateful for all the time you spent with us today.

Dean: I appreciate your time and one of the other reasons I am over here is, one of the feedback from the book is yes, you are a great endurance athlete but you are a security expert, why are you now in that. So that is also one of the reasons I am here is to promote another way of skinning the cat when it comes to security. Just purely from my experiences around the world, and they have obviously been successful. I just love to help people. I can do that.

John: For our listeners out there, Relentless, Dean Stott’s Relentless, you can get it on Amazon, you can also buy it on Audible, or on his website www.deanstott.com. The unrelenting pursuit of excellence. You want to inspire others, you give them this book, you tell them read this book. They will pursue excellence after that. Nothing is impossible if you read this book. Dean Stott, I just got to tell you something, thirty-two years ago, I moved to California with my family, young family, and my daughter and I used to spend a lot of time– we did not know anybody, we are in Redondo Beach, and we used to go to a little shop down the street, it was called Good Stuff. It was the first time, she was a little two-year-old, she saw a man in a wheelchair, and she used to go up to that guy and he befriended her and she befriended him, and she became very comfortable around him, he was just a lovely human being. This became a ritual every week and after we had lived here for a year, it was in 1989, I picked up the newspaper one day, I saw he was on the cover of the July 4th weekend newspaper entertainment section. I said, why is this guy that we see at the little shop every day on the cover of the entertainment section? And he was a gentleman named Ron Kovic. A movie on his life called Born on the Fourth of July had just come out with Tom Cruise playing his life. I read his story that day and I watched the movie, and I always say to myself, if I ever have the opportunity to honor the veterans that fight for freedom, fearlessly fight for freedom, I am going to make use of that platform and I got lucky in life with business and I got very lucky and honored with this podcast. Dean Stott, I am honored and blessed to say that you came on today, graciously came on today, and I am grateful for you as a human being on what you have accomplished, fighting for your great country, for freedom and democracy around the world, and what you did post-military is also unbelievably inspiring. You are a great human being. I am grateful for you. Any way I could introduce you to anybody in this great country, you deserve as much publicity.

Dean: Amazing. Thank you so much. I really appreciate having me. It is an honor especially the first one, the first veteran.

John: You set a very, very high bar. There is going to be much more to come. We are going to have you back again. Before you go to the Nile, we are going to have you back so you could tell the story of the Nile. I am sure that is going to be a whole another book. Thank you again for everything. I cannot wait to receive our books from you. We are going to share with our company, I am going to share with lots of friends and relatives. Continued success and thank you for all that you do, Dean Stott. Thank you again.

Dean: Thank you very much, John. I appreciate it. Thank you.

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. I am John Shegerian. I am so honored to have with us today Jonathan King. He is the Vice President of Corporate and Legal Affairs of TCL. Welcome to Impact, Jonathan.

Jonathan King: Thanks for having me. I appreciate it.

John: Jonathan, we were talking a little bit off air. This is your first time on our show, and we are so thankful for you making the time to come on, because we are going to be talking about your tremendous and great efforts that you are making, and impacts you are making at TCL. But before we get into that, share with our listeners and our audience a little bit the Jonathan King backstory. How did you even get into this position? And what got you interested in doing this kind of great work?

Jonathan: Yes. So for me, when it started, I started working for a little company called Go-Video. It was located in Scottsdale, Arizona and it was the inventor of the VCR and VCR. It was a dual VCR. It copied one tape to another with the idea that you could rent a tape or buy a tape and then just immediately start your own library. Needless to say, that got the attention of Hollywood and they became famous, or you could say infamous, for the fact that they really were not well thought of by the Hollywood community and it developed into a few lawsuits. Nevertheless, what came out of it was an incredibly innovative company that developed the DVD-VCR. It developed one of the first MP3 players that came into the market in the United States. It ultimately ended up becoming a subsidiary of TCL. That is how I came onboard TCL. That started back in around 1999 and that was when there was the transition from analog to digital, just starting, and you saw digital television showing up and we were introducing some of the first to those. We saw MP3 players come across. We are just the first ones that had been introduced, and really a couple months before we introduced ours. We saw really one of the largest consumer upgrades in history take place where everyone realized they had to take their old CRT 4 x 3 TVs and trade them in for these beautiful 15 x 9 or movie-set style TVs. Everyone was so in love with the new products that they did not think about, “What are we going to do with the old crap?” That is what got me into the recycling world and the sustainability world, because ultimately that was what brought about everything you see today. It is what brought about states starting to think about, “What is going in our landfills?” It started to create a more circular economy. People started to think about designing for the future. People started to really come across the idea of, “Wait a minute, these things are becoming more and more affordable. I can get two, three, four, or five of these in my home. What am I going to do with the old one?” So that was what really started the whole revolution.

John: Okay. Let us talk about that. When guys like you and me travel and we go to Europe or Asia, we see sustainability has been culturally ingrained there and circular economy behavior, at least, 50, 60, 70 years. Those countries in Europe, the UK, France, Spain, are much more geographically challenged than the big old USA, same with Seoul South Korea and Japan. They were into sustainability way before we even knew the word here in the United States. How is it challenging to bring sustainability efforts to the United States with a great big brand like TCL and make it stick, and make it work, and make people want to listen?

Jonathan: Well, those are really two questions. The first part of that I think is the fact that we are made up of fifty states and territories, and the District of Columbia and we have representation from all different types of groups. Getting everyone onboard with one plan or one vision is obviously going to be a lot more challenging than Japan or even Europe. But with that said, I think it is coming around, from the perspective of TCL, we were actually very fortunate. When we launched the TCL brand in the United States, the vision of what we were really basing the company on was an employee-centric vision. The employees got together. As we grew, we decided what was important to us. What we came across was all these different companies out there and with all these historic brands, they are really just brands that stand for– some stand maybe for innovation, Sony with the Walkman, [inaudible] into the Walkman.

John: Right.

Jonathan: Panasonic has its own history and so forth.

John: Yes.

Jonathan: Apple has its own history.

John: Yes.

Jonathan: What we realized is yes, we create amazing TVs, we create amazing products, but we want to be known for something more than that. So we created what we call the TCL Cares program. It was an employee created program and one of the four legs of that program is the environment. What we said is everything we do, every decision we make, has to have the environment in mind in some fashion. That means if we are creating products, it means we have to come up with a way to do something environmentally friendly so that we put products out there and figure out a way to, in some senses it sounds strange, but bring products back. Some of that circular economy based but for us what it really came down to is electronics recycling was our focus. What we realized was everything that is made in a product is going to be again made into a product. The idea of creating that circular economy and creating electronics recycling programs that bring the products back around and recover all of those different parts and minerals, and different things, it really just enables the world to be in a better place and that was the central focus of our environmental program.

John: So when you started that give me a little context, what year was that, just so I understand better.

Jonathan: When we started selling TCL TVs into the marketplace that was about 2014. This was after we had just put our toe in the water. We wanted to understand the market, understand the environment we were operating in, and then we started doing what we did and realized the formula we had to come up with was, to put it simply, incredible. We started witnessing double digit, triple digit growth. We grew two times, three times over year to year and we went from being what I think was the 17th or 18th largest manufacturer of TVs by volume in the United States to being the number two TV manufacturer by volume. I think we did that in really only about five years.

John: Jonathan, just so our listeners can understand, in your industry that is a meteoric rise. It is literally never been done before.

Jonathan: Yes, it is really unheard of. TVs are one of the most competitive spaces in consumer electronics and I have been in a lot of different consumer electronics categories in my 20 plus years in the industry and I got to tell you TVs are definitely one of the most competitive. It is price competitive, it is feature competitive, it is brand competitive, it is retailer competitive. To accomplish that type of growth means that you have to have not only some amazing products that work unbelievably, that have incredible reliability, that have incredible quality, but it also means you have an incredible team behind you and that is something we take a lot of pride at. We built our team piece by piece. Every person on our team is really worth several people on anyone else’s team. I will put anyone on this team up against anyone else. We can take anyone and that is what did it. Retailers love working with us, consumers love purchasing our product, and it has given my sustainability team the leeway to do some incredible things. In most other companies they look at it and say, well, hold on, I do not want to go that route. In our company we say, no that is not the way we want to go, we want to explore that. What can we do to make that better? What can we do to take advantage of that so that consumers can participate in it more and that has given my team the ability to be so creative in their solution.

John: So interesting. You went from literally the new kid on the block in 2014 to now number two. The number two brand in the United States. How does that increase both the spotlight and the responsibility to now be a leader? Because you were just a rookie. When you are a rookie you are given a lot of latitude, when you are the new kid, but now that you are number two, everybody is focused on you. Everyone is looking at you for the next move in sustainability. Talk a little bit about that and then we are going to go back and talk a little bit about some of the other things that you are working on.

Jonathan: Yes, you are absolutely right. As you are rising people do not notice you. You have a lot of freedom, you can do a lot of things. Then when you start getting noticed, everything you do starts mattering a little more, a little more, and then all of a sudden, and you do not realize it right, but all of a sudden you become everyone’s target. That is when you start realizing, wow, all these things are getting thrown at me and I did not really realize it right away, but they are all coming to me at the same time. Why is that and that is when you realize because it is working, because what we are doing matters, and people are taking notice. Once people were focused on, how many units can I sell, how many retailers can I be in, it was really for us a question of what kind of impact can we make? How many cool features can we add to a TV? How many amazing different features can we come up with for the future so that each time we introduced a new line it is something amazing and something new that people gravitate toward and love. I will just give you an example. One of our TV models is one of the most heralded TVs for the gaming sector. Gamers love it. It has this amazing following. What we realized is wow, we can be in the TV space and we could focus on entertainment in the home, but we can also focus on gaming entertainment in the home as well as professional gamers and so forth. TVs really are the centerpiece of the American home. It always has been since the introduction of the TV. The fireside chats around the radio eventually transformed into the family gathering around the TV. I grew up that way. I was a product of the 70s and the early 80s watching Friday and Saturday night TV. The television set itself was where everyone gathered around. You really do have a responsibility as the second largest TV manufacturer to do things in a really innovative, quality, affordable way so that you are not just catering to one sector of the market but you are catering to all sectors of the market.

John: It is so important. I so agree with you including, and I am older than you, but even my children were growing up even Thursday nights on NBC with Seinfeld in that lineup was where we all gathered and have so many great memories of being around the TV watching that great lineup of shows in the 90s. Sustainability in the last 20 years, talk a little bit about how the last 20 years have been historically with manufacturers with regards to their interrelationship with sustainability and what is your vision now in 2020, where is it going to go from here on?

Jonathan: Yes, I think it is important to, as I was saying before, to take a step back and look at the history.

John: Yes.

Jonathan: What happened? Understand how we got to where we are today. I am so privileged to have been in the electronics industry to witness that transformation, from analog to digital. It is that transformation that provides the context for sustainability in 2020. Back in 1999 or just when digital televisions were starting to come into the US market. You saw everyone marveling at the picture, and that was back in the time when you would go to the consumer electronics show and see these consistent images of close-ups of flowers with little honeybees on them, and how you could see the detail, the same images and you go from booth to booth and see the same images on each TV. Every booth had TVs in them because it was the next thing. Then once that became adopted, everyone took those square products that we got rid of and put them in their garage or put them in their closet and forgot about.

John: Right.

Jonathan: Every one of those TVs became a huge, huge challenge for the future. The same goes for the upgraded digital media players, and MP3s, and the upgraded DVD players, and what to do with VCRs, and all these products built up. I was fortunate to be around replay TV and a part of that when it was doing[?] about, and the time-shifting of TV and how everything began to not be based on tuning in at 10 o’clock on Saturday night, but you could tune in whenever you wanted to because you could all of a sudden control that. I always marvel at the fact that my kids were born in a post-replay TV and TiVo world where they do not know anything but time-shifting a TV. That is all they know. Now they are in college, but that is really all they know whereas for us, it is a whole different world. All these products, these analog products built up, we did not know what to do with them. All of a sudden that is when everything started to change and we started to realize instead of repairing, we were replacing and that is just an honest way of looking at it, and because you could not take a CRT TV and turn it into a digital TV. You could not take the VCR and turn it into a DVD player, and you certainly certainly could not take a Walkman and turn it into an MP3 player. So all of those that built up had to have a solution and I think everyone started looking around and realizing as they took up more and more space, what are we going to do with this? That is what drove the revolution today. So much of the recycling that we see today, so many of the solutions, so many of the state programs that you see today that have rules where consumers cannot throw these products in the landfills anymore, and you have to have solutions for them, this is what drove that. It is that evolution and it took that many years, five, ten years after that started happening for it to build up and people to realize that we had to have a solution. Then fast forward, in the last 10 years we have come up with all these amazing different solutions for recycling, for these processes that are so state-of-the-art, the robotics involved in it now, the way you can separate out these valuable materials and then create a situation where these materials can go back into the process and you do not have to go mining for it, and you do not have to go shopping for it. It just saves so much in terms of resources in the United States. That takes us to where we are now, where we have these amazing solutions in place and TCL is a big part of that. We what we have tried to do is create a recycling solution in all the underserved communities across the country so that we could really bring about solutions for people that did not know what to do with it. We took the EPA America’s recycles they had pledged so that we could inform people, enlighten people on the positive aspect of this, and that is when we started what we call now the TCL Take-Back Tour, where we are creating events around the country that bring awareness to consumers in different towns of the ease and convenience of taking these products and recycling them and all the good that it can do for their own local communities. Let us be honest, this is a local community issue. Every local community across the country has their own town dump and landfill and places where these products go. When these goes into the ground, it affects them at the local level. It is about getting down to that local level and informing them. We have created this incredible program where we go across the country and we have these events in partnership with some of our amazing recycling partners and we try to do this for free so that we can raise awareness for it, and it has worked out really well. The reception has been phenomenal.

John: I love it. Making recycling localized. Making recycling convenient is one of the pillars of just responsible and great recycling. For our listeners who have just joined us, we have got Jonathan King with us today. He is the Vice President of Corporate and Legal Affairs at TCL North America. To find Jonathan, his colleagues, and his great brand, please go to www.tcl.com. I am on the website now, when you click the sustainability button there are so many great programs that Jonathan and his colleagues are doing to make the world a better place. Plus, there is also a newsletter that you could sign up for. I highly recommend that you do that. Jonathan, let us go back to what we were just talking about, your Take-Back Tour and the circular economy. To just disavow any of our listeners, first of all, one of the big myths about recycling and also about just good environmental practices that I think we have both learned in our journeys is that degradation of the environment is a borderless event. If they are doing the right thing in New York but the wrong thing in New Jersey, that affects all of us. New York, New Jersey, Connecticut and the whole planet, so even though there is only twenty something states that have laws, landfill bans, the truth is that when doing responsible recycling the right way obviously, as you just pointed out, it is zero waste, zero landfill. All of the items that come out of old electronics, like your great televisions, are steel, plastic, aluminum copper, gold, silver, palladium, lead, all of that gets recycled and goes back to beneficiary use, potentially back into new television sets. Is that something that you are excited about every day more than ever, and are you also starting to use more of these materials back into your new products?

Jonathan: Right. The answer to that is yes and yes. We are absolutely more excited about it. When it comes to the states that you referred to, you are absolutely right. There is legislation in about half of the states while the other half of the states not as much. What we try to do is focus on a kind of a two-step process. In the states that have the focus, we do what we call Above and Beyond. It is called Above and beyond, it is a simple name, but it is true. What we do is we go above and beyond. Where we have certain goals that we established, we establish goals that we not only meet but we exceed. If we set a goal, for example, in a state where we want to recycle a million pound, we set a higher goal. We try to recycle more than that, a million and a half pounds perhaps, 1.1 million pounds and so forth. What we try to do is exceed it so that at the end of each year we beat the year before. We measure each year based on what do we do the year before and how much can we beat it. Not can we barely beat it but how much can we beat it. Then, when it comes to the other states, the ones that do not have as much, we try to run some of the events through that. For example, our TCL Take-Back Tour that is going to actually take place on the weekend of America Recycles Day coming up in November, I think November 14th is the date, we have an event that is going to take place in Tampa, Florida, an event that is going to take place in Rogers, Arkansas. We have another event that is going to take place in Fresno and we have another event that is going to take place in Aurora, just next to Denver. Each one of these events represents a time zone of the United States and the idea is that in at least every time zone across the contiguous United States, we are trying to raise awareness for the benefits of recycling.

Now, as far as the second part of your question, absolutely. That actually has a two-part answer. Yes, we are trying to put more materials back in the products, create more of a circular economy. That I think is what a lot of people talked about. A lot of people love to use the phrase circular. It is kind of a generic phrase right now. It does not necessarily have specific meaning. For us the meaning is every year can we put more into products than we did the year before, kind of as simple as that. Can we create a solution where our new line incorporates more of our old one? It is kind of like. New features but perhaps old materials and by putting those things together, the recycling of those things enables the product to be, of course, that much better. Then of course, there is the idea of the packaging. More and more there is a focus on not just the products that are shipping across the country and it is in everyone’s homes but the packaging. What is in the packaging? What happens to the packaging afterwards? That, of course, has become even a far more exacerbated issue because of the pandemic. What we try to do is, it is like a balancing act, right? You want a TV to show up in one piece, but at the same time you want a TV show up in packaging that can easily be recycled, that has easy recyclability, that has more materials in it that are made from recyclable materials, and the more you can do that the better off you are. Each one of these is a lot more focused than just one step, it involves a couple steps. I should even add from that what you have is a situation where consumers do not know what to do with recycling and as you know, when it comes to recycling bad choices often cost money. Consumers look at things and say, well, I think it is recyclable because it feels recyclable so I will recycle it. Often that is a bad decision because if it is not it can cause more problem than it is worth. We are the first TV manufacturer to actually partnered with how to recycle and we are adding how to recycle labeling to all of our packaging, which is going to start at the end of the year. Starting at the beginning of 2021, every part of the packaging will have a specific instruction on its recyclability and what to do with it.

John: I love it. That is just so great. We are talking about the consumers, you bring up a great point and because I am older than you and I have been doing this since 2004 or so, we got in this business before, Al Gore did Inconvenient Truth and won a Nobel Peace Prize and an Academy Award and well, the sustainability was a great run in the United States from 2005 to maybe 2010, then things sort of petered out. Just around when you stepped in 2014, things started coming back and now we see the rebirth of the Jane Fonda’s of the world going at it hard and also you have Greta Thunberg generation. So those are the bookends that I see right now and I have a model that I use but I want to hear your thoughts on it. The quest to get people to save the planet has to include the promise that they also are saving themselves. How does that work for you and how does that work with TCL in terms of your consumer base? How do we message that to them and get them to be more motivated to do the thing?

Jonathan: I think part of that goes back to who we are as a company. With the idea being, of course, that people want to emulate good things that they see. Our company, as I have said, is founded on the idea that we created certain pillars that every decision we made, they will be make as the company is filtered through. Of course the environment is an important part of that, it is one of the key pillars. With the idea that every decision we make is filtered through that, with the idea that we can be a successful company, very successful as far as brand recognition, as far as market share, as far as product breathe because we are introducing more and more products into the marketplace every year or two, people are going to want to emulate that. It used to be–it was about creating something, selling it, and then creating the next thing, and forgetting about the first thing. What we are showing is that you can do both. You can actually be environmentally friendly, you can make really good quality decisions about your products, about your packaging, and about what goes into all those decisions, and you can be successful at the same time and beat some of the most storied brands in electronics. That is what I think we are doing. I do think America and the people that are in America are always looking for the next best thing. When it comes to the way we sell products, we firmly believe that the way we do it is the next best thing and that people are going to be emulated going forward.

John: Our consumer base, which now is our children, are going to vote with their pocketbooks to those who they believe are doing the right thing compared to those who are not doing the right thing anymore, no matter what the brand name.

Jonathan: That is absolutely right. I have always used my kids as an experiment with the products we sold. It is fortunate enough to have them growing up throughout the years. They are as familiar with our products as anyone. One of the things they have always said to me is that it is about those types of decisions, it is about environmental decisions, it is about making the right decisions. The generations today are really incredible. They have an empathy that I just do not think a lot of previous generations had as of. In the past it was all about how much can you build, how much can you accumulate, these generations they are looking at it not really from that standpoint but, okay, how much can I [inaudible], am I going to feel good about it, and how do I build it and if I do not feel good about it, I do not really want to do it. It is really that simple.

John: I love that.

Jonathan: I think the way that that is really thought of by our kids is the way I think all the generations going forward are going to think about.

John: Jonathan, before I let you go today, you have been so generous with your time, share with our listeners a little bit about the coming tsunami of turnover electronics on the 4G to 5G turnover that is now just underway in the United States and is going to be with us for years to come here.

Jonathan: This is the next consumer upgrade, right? We are originally behind the analog to digital conversion. I mean, it is a problem we are still dealing. CRTs are still around.

John: You are right.

Jonathan: We are in 2020 going into 2021.

John: Great point.

Jonathan: So yes, this is absolutely something. I look at it a little differently because when we went through the first one, we really did not have a clue what we we are going to do and how we are going to handle it. There was not anything in place to push people and there was not really a reason for people to feel like they needed to do anything about it. Now fast forward, you have got new generations that care a lot more, you have got history that shows we have to do something. A lot of people do not know this but there are usually twenty to twenty-five, roughly, electronics devices that people have in their home and that is just growing exponentially now with smart devices and the artificial intelligence, and the devices that just over the last few years that we have all started buying. Imagine this upgrade to 5G and what is that going to mean. What it really means for TCL and for I think a lot of companies out there, is that it just means you have got to step it up even more. It means that you have got to get these programs perfectly in place, planned in such a way that you kind of eliminated the jinks, you have got everything going, you accelerate it, so that you can take care of these problems, so that you can reach a point where hopefully, and I think this is probably everyone’s goal for every product you end up selling, hopefully you can in some way bring one back. If you can hit that, I think this upgrade is going to go a lot better than the first.

John: Jonathan, we are going to leave it on that and I hope you are right. I am just so grateful both for your time today and also all the efforts you are making. For our listeners out there, go see what Jonathan and his colleagues, and the great brand TCL is doing to make the world a better place. Please go to www.tcl.com, click the sustainability button and you will learn everything that they are doing to building a sustainable future for the United States, and to make the world a better place and make the impact. Jonathan King, we need more people like you in this world. I am grateful for your time. Thank you for making the world a better and greener place. I cannot wait to have you back on the Impact one day to talk about all the other great things you are doing at TCL.

Jonathan: Thanks so much for having me. It was a lot of fun.

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

John: Welcome to another edition of the Impact Podcast. I am John Shegerian and we are so honored to have with us today, Kathleen Kirkwood. She is the founder of B.R.A., the Bra Recycling Agency. Welcome to the Impact Podcast, Kathleen.

Kathleen Kirkwood: Hey, thank you, John. Thank you so much for inviting me.

John: Oh, it is such a joy. You are in New York City today, my hometown. To have a fellow New Yorker on with me today, even though I am sitting in Fresno, California is just a delight and your work is so important. I want to get into all the important work you have been doing at the Bra Recycling Agency. For our listeners out there who want to find Kathleen, I am on her great website right now. It is brarecyclingagency.com. Before we get talking about that, I would love you first to share your backstory, how you even came up with this concept and what you were doing before 2010 and before you came up with this wonderful and important idea.

Kathleen: Yes. Well, we have to go back a couple decades for that story but quickly, I started as a model and I got hit by a car and the contract was canceled. I said, “What am I going to do?” I noticed in the 80s everyone was wearing shoulder pads when I was modeling, the designer. So I said “Why do I not make a shoulder pad for everybody?” and I made it with a clip-on piece of velcro and I went ahead and I sold it to Bloomingdales and it was the biggest thing in the 80s. In fact, Oprah called me.

John: Wow.

Kathleen: I got on the Oprah Winfrey Show so that changed quite a bit of things. Then a trajectory down to the early 90s, I auditioned for a television show called QVC. Nobody knew about it, but the name Joan Rivers was selling jewelry on it and I got on QVC. I have been on QVC twenty-eight years selling shoulder pads, where I managed to sell about 14 million pairs of shoulder pads for that period.

John: Whoa!

Kathleen: Then I started to work with the overseas factories of shoulder pads and bras and I designed a bra for QVC. I started selling bras. One day at my factory in China, I saw the trucks leaving the factory, which is really like a small city. It is bigger than a factory and it was truck after truck after truck after truck after truck. And I said “Well, well, well, what is going on here?” I get to see trucks in my life, but never from dawn till dusk, back-to-back going up the hill. They said “Oh, well, that is just one of our account. So yeah, we sell them about thirty million bras a month.” I said, “Thirty million a month?” and then it hit me. The numbers hit me. They hit me viscerally. So I was starting to go back and I said, “Well, I am going to recycle my bras.” I did the research, Google, whatever. It was 2009. N-O-T-H-I-N-G. There was nothing you could do. So I called the American Chemistry Council, that is French for the Plastics industry.

John: Right.

Kathleen: I called some recycling brokers and said, “Hey, I want to do that” and I got a lot of great support because let us face it, even the oil companies, the petroleum based companies, the polyurethane companies, they want to have a solution to recycle foam bras or textile bras or spandex bras into something, but nobody was willing to do it because why John, it costs money to do that. So I invested my own capital little by little and I have the support of brokers, American Chemistry Council and good people like Maidenform donating tons of bras for me to test. With the help of all those people I was able to and it is on the home page. You can see the original video from 2010. Thank you, Kamal Taylor, for being the camera person with me. We turned 1.2 tons of bras into commercial carpet padding by chopping, beating, taking out the plastic ring and slides, and shaking that through shakers, and that plastic went to bottle top companies. The polyurethane foam, the fabric, the textile, that went to Leggett and Platt and became carpet padding. The metal was extracted with magnets, high utility powered magnets and that we are going to collect and sell by the pounds eventually. We want to hit some nice minimums and eventually when we sell metal, because it is all steel by the way, underwire is steel.

John: Right.

Kathleen: We are going to use all that money to donate to breast cancer research, but we are not there yet. So it becomes a bottle top, a carpet padding and a potential donation for the metal.

John: That is incredible. Now I am on your website and again, for our listeners out there that want to find Kathleen’s very important and great website and also get involved, please go to www.brarecyclingagency.com. Now on their website is tons of important information, but I am going to read you what struck me, so important. It says right in the middle of the website. “Make an impact.” In New York today on the Impact Podcast, because you are making such a huge impact and it says here, “The average American throws away 81 pounds of clothing per year, 95% as worn textiles can become recycled, and only 15% of that gets donated or recycled.” What are we missing here in America? And this is 2020. This is the information explosion age. Where is the disconnect, Kathleen, and how can we help bridge that?

Kathleen: Well, I mean, you know the whole answer to this too. No one really cared about recycling before. My way of paying for all this, and that is critical because a lot of entrepreneurs, people even the past five years, they looked at me and said… You know, I will just be honest with you. I will make believe no one is listening, John. I will tell you some honest stuff.

John: I want to hear the honest stuff right now.

Kathleen: Okay, everybody now, close your ears.

John: Give me the insights please. Okay. Perfect.

Kathleen: They saw me, blond hair, blue eye, they are like, “Oh isn’t she cute?” We will do a little recycling and then when you go to the brand or the retailer and say, “Hey, you can use this as a marketing tool. We are going to charge you five cents a bra for you to offer recycling and we will do all the recycling or we will offer you this advertising vehicle to put your name on our permit or we will offer you a bin for your store, which is going to be 200 stores say, 80,000 dollars, something like that.” All of a sudden, nobody wanted to recycle because even back then the consumer was not ready. The consumer did not have the passion that the millennials, the Gen X’s has brought forward with caring and just basically putting their foot down and saying, “We are not going to buy from brands that do not have a sustainable message” or saying goodbye to single-use packaging or having some kind of recycling end-of-life solution.” So the shift of the public has changed the momentum of stores, retailers, brands and advertisers to say “Hey, let us join the party.” You need cultural change and that is what is happening and it is happening fast. I am very positive about it because even the naysayers that are still holding out like “I will think about it.” The train is moving.

John: Right.

Kathleen: I see it on my email every day. We are booked, we have calls.

John: Awesome.

Kathleen: We have people who were like “Hey, we are ready.” I cannot mention any names.

John: Right.

Kathleen: You could even say it like in my sleepy town where I live in Montauk, where people do not even know about the term “sustainability”, right? The biggest parking lot we have and believe me, this is a sleepy fisherman town, which is what makes it so great. They just installed all Tesla recharging stationary.

John: Wow.

Kathleen: Now, you can know that the town had to get almost 100% commitment from the town people to want to convert, because if they do not have enthusiastic support, the electoral board is not going to do that kind of change on a municipal level.

John: Right.

Kathleen: So you can see the train is moving. Brands want to recycle, consumers want to recycle, so it is very encouraging.

John: Yes. For our listeners out there that want to get part of now, get on the train and get moving in the right direction with all the great work that you are doing, again back to your website. Walk us through this. It says, and it is so simple how you laid it out, but I want you to share with our listeners how simple it is to actually now step into this world and get on the train. “Wash it, label it, send it.” Explain what that means so people know how they could get involved.

Kathleen: Okay. John, I want to make sure you were on the right website.

John: Yeah. Okay.

Kathleen: I got a sense you might be on our fabric website.

John: Oh, okay. Okay. Okay.

Kathleen: I am going to give you my website. It is brarecyclingagency.com

John: Okay, got it. Okay.

Kathleen: All right. Anyway, I did something special for you and for the audience today.

John: Oh, okay. I am with you.

Kathleen: What you want is to share with people how to do this.

John: Yes.

Kathleen: Now we have retailers signing up. You are going to be able to go to the retail.

John: Right, right.

Kathleen: We have brands signing up, you are going to be able to go to the brands. But today we worked with Quasi Technologies, which we have a partnership with in a way that you can, right now, text bra…

John: Oh my God. Okay.

Kathleen: Just the word “bra” to 79274 and you will get a downloadable free bra recycling label, because for consumers just to pay the bills, we charge five dollars and fifteen. But today, you can download it on your show Impact and you will get a free bra recycling label. You will get it on your phone. You can look at it because it is a text. You can look at it any time you want. If you are busy look at it later and you can mail in your bras and they will be recycled into carpet padding. I can repeat that one more time, John, if you do not mind.

John: Go ahead, please. Yeah, please.

Kathleen: Okay. You are going to text the message “bra” to the number 79274.

John: Got it.

Kathleen: And then you will get– everything is a link. It is tucked away in your text. When you get to it and you do not have to wait for anybody. You can do it on your own contactless.

[crosstalk]

John: Right, right. I know. I know. So I am on your site here and it is brarecyclingagency.com. I love this and there is a beautiful video with you on it. Do not burn your bra, recycle it. Now I see you talking to one of your colleagues in this facility. Where is this facility that shows this work being done? Can you share with us?

Kathleen: We have grown a lot since then.

John: Okay.

Kathleen: We have different facilities around the country based on location. That one is in Nashville, Tennessee.

John: Wonderful.

Kathleen: Which brings to mind, I just want to give a quick plug. I trained with Al Gore in 2018 to give his climate slides, thousands of people can do it anyway. So there is 24 hours where the whole world in 70 country gives the climate slides, which includes information about recycling and reducing in single packaging. It is October 10th, so you can just go to 24 hours reality. My presentation along with presentations in 70 countries will be accessible. You can see them live or you can see them on Zoom, but I am always saying that because you are looking at the video of my first recycling location, which is near Nashville, Tennessee where Al Gore is from. So it just brought that to my mind.

John: Oh, that is great. And this website is just wonderful, all the information is here. Now let us go into this. Back to what you were saying a little earlier and for those who are just joining us, we have got Kathleen Kirkwood with us today. She is the founder of the Bra Recycling Agency. You can find Kathleen and to get on the train and get involved by becoming part of the solution and no longer part of the problem, go to www.brarecyclingagency.com. Here it says “We pulverize, we magnetize, we red carpetize.” Now you explained a little earlier, but walk us through this. How much does it take? How many pounds of bronze does it take to make one yard of carpet padding for instance?

Kathleen: I am taking it, John. That is great. Because when I first started I was like, “How am I going to pay for all this? The idea of monetizing by the pounds was not an algorithm that I had at the ready. I had to really develop that over the years, many years. What I did first was charities. What I did with a company called Wacoal is I did the red carpet for the Oscar suites. They have the swag bags and all that.

John: Yes.

Kathleen: They sponsor everything. They have a big room in L.A. It is in Beverly Hills and all the celebrities come and they meet different vendors. It is expensive to sponsor. So, Wacoal sponsored the Bra Recycling Agency carpet and the padding to go to the Oscars suites and just tell the story and have Wacoal be the sponsor. That was so successful and we raised for that with Wacoal $4,000. I started to offer it to every charity. What happened is we still do a lot of it today. Charities use now where they can choose to sell, sponsorship on their red carpet using my recycled red carpet, which I work with a company and my padding underneath. Then they sponsor it, they say “Hey, at our charity event this month, you can sponsor a table or you can sponsor the journal or you can sponsor the recycled, sustainable red carpet.” We do this a lot in October for breast cancer awareness month and the charities in the events– well, obviously, before covid. You know, things have changed utterly and completely.

John: Yes.

Kathleen: But we have raised an average of 7,000 with a height of 20,000 for a sponsor, a company or corporation to put their name on the sustainable red carpet with the B.R.A. recycled carpet padding and it takes about a hundred and seventy-five pounds of bras to make a yard of the carpet padding. But that is nothing, I mean, that sounds like “Oh my God, that is a lot.” There are half a billion bras sold every year in the United States.

John: Wow.

Kathleen: That is 50,000 tons a month. So that is boys and girls going to the landfill, word is it is there for 40 to 50 years and instead, it is being converted to carpet padding, which are commercial version, typically sits in a building if it is integrated into the commercial carpet padding for 30 years. We estimate, we are stalling the ocean waste, and the landfill waste, and the incinerator waste for 30 years. But by then there will be something else going on. There will be new solution, but we are putting a whole pause on all that textile…

John: It is so amazing.

Kathleen: …spandex, lycra, whatever it is, steel. That is not going in the landfill anymore if we can get this up and running. I do not want to say we do not need help. I mean we definitely need help. Being on this show is a big deal for me.

John: For me, too.

Kathleen: Again, if you are listening to this, close your ears. Because even though the momentum is strong, the momentum against is also heavy.

John: Yes.

Kathleen: Why should we pay? Why should we do? [inaudible] we got covid, but I think for me, just to be positive because that is my nature, I think a lot of companies, retailers, they are coming out of the covid coma.

John: Yeah.

Kathleen: Because in March, April, May and June, it was like we do not know what is going on. We cannot do anything. So there was a complete blackout of progress for us at least in March, April, May and June. But now we are seeing people saying “Well, this is it. Maybe we can do…” You know, we offer now contactless through text and mobile. We offer contactless downloadable. So you can go to say a store like, let us keep our fingers crossed, Macy’s or something like that and you can tap or you can just text and they will transmit say a retailer’s form on your phone. We have a whole contactless selection now, which obviously is the priority for stores, retailers and brands.

John: That is just so awesome. How do we make a call to action today, Kathleen? Collaboration is really the best way forward. I know that is how it has worked for us in our recycling industry, in our sector, and I know you are doing the same thing. Who else do you want on board? When approaching our listeners, who else do you want to be able to contact you? Is it NGOs? Is it retailers? Is it nonprofits? Is it consumers themselves or all of the above? How can we continue to move the train forward for your B.R.A. Recycling Agency?

Kathleen: Well, thank you for that. There are three ways. The brands, the big brands, there are a lot of them. There is growing brands, there is big brands, even celebrity brands, which we are speaking to a few. They can pay our fee of about in the average of a nickel a bra and put on our certified tag, and then all the consumers that buy their bra can get their bra on a loop. So that tag will go to their phone. You click on it, tap or use the QR code or you could sign up online and that tag will get them a branded recycling label for the brand. So, brand is number one. Yeah, because instead of the brand selling one bra and keeping their fingers crossed that it will come back for another, just do what [inaudible] is doing with the loop. Bras on a loop. You get bra one and then you get another one. So, it is increasing sales, it is increasing loyalty and it is reducing any waste. We have a certification for brands. For stores, we have contactless downloads, we have” tap to recycle” and we have bins, and we have mailing envelopes. Then consumers, we have on our website a choice where consumers can say “I am doing this now. I am not waiting.” They can go right to that consumer page and they can do that or they can text “bra” to 79274 and get it right to their phone. They could also help us nudge the brands and retailers. They could be annoying.

John: Right, right.

Kathleen: Believe me, the brands especially, the retailers too, but the brands care. So if you love a brands, I am not going to mention any names, and you can just tag them on Instagram or Facebook and say “Hey, why are you not doing bra cycling with B.R.A. Recycling Agency?” I do not know. Just a little, “Why not are you doing this?” I think that helps a lot.

John: It does. It really does.

Kathleen: It does. Just say “Hey, what is up?” We heard this on LinkedIn or on Impact Let us get that going. Believe me, my phone will be ringing.

John: I love it. I love it. I am going to give you the last word for our listeners out there. Again, to find Kathleen, please go to www.brarecyclingagency.com. You give the last word. Tell our listeners what they need to know before we go and you are always, by the way Kathleen, invited back here to continue to share your great message and mission because you are making a huge impact. Please go ahead. You have the last word here.

Kathleen: Okay. On brarecyclingagency.com, there is a tab on the right, it says “consumers”. You can go there and pick whatever permit you want: The Free, the $5 or the Deluxe for $15. There is also on the right hand corner a form. You just fill out your name and your email and we will send you a free label. You can do one bra for free or for your show today Impact, which I am so grateful to be on. John, thank you. Thank you. Thank you.

John: Of course.

Kathleen: Thanks to Quasi too. You can text bra, just bra, to 79274 and we will text you a link to a label. You could try it for free and then you will have the information that you can bug those brands and retailers on Instagram. Let us get going.

John: I love it. She is Kathleen Kirkwood, the Bra Recycling Agency founder. Kathleen, you are both an inspiration and you are making a huge impact and making the world a better and greener place. Thank you from all my heart. I am so grateful for you in what you are doing and you are always invited back here on the Impact Podcast.

Kathleen: Thank you, Mr. Shegerian.

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 am John Shegerian. I am so excited to have with us today, Nancy Gillis. She is the CEO of the Green Electronics Council. Welcome to the Impact Podcast, Nancy.

Nancy Gillis: Thank you. Thank you. Thank you. I am so excited to be here. And I am so looking forward to our conversation.

John: So am I. And before we get into all the important and impactful work you are doing at the Green Electronics Council, can you share a little bit of the Nancy Gillis’ journey and story?

Nancy: Sure, I would love to because I think it is an interesting one and one in which I hope many, both younger professionals and women professionals, consider and potentially follow. And by that I mean, I am in an organization. We will talk about the Green Electronics Council that focuses on the intersection of sustainability, of technology, and of supply chains. And that is a really interesting and impactful intersection to be at. And I got there because as a young one, myself, and as many young people globally are now, I became interested in our earth. And I fell in love and what it offers of plants and animals, and played in the backyard and appreciated that.

So, I was first and foremost a sustainability advocate. And then I do not want to date myself, but I was still around when records were there and through the translation to CDs, and iPod so technology all of a sudden became something in which that is where my music wind. And of course, I wanted to be a hip person so I kept up with that. So, not only was I appreciating the nature and the natural world, I was also appreciating the impact of technology. And then when I started to put those two together, I started to recognize that my appreciation of the world and technologies were meeting up and where technology does a lot of fundamental, fabulous things like this podcast. But it also continues to be the source of a lot of bad things, environmental impacts that I did not know about and I started to learn about. And social impacts, the people working globally to make these great products happen. So, I could listen to my music, podcasts, or take classes. And that is where I hit that third area, which was looking at the supply chain because I cannot have these products in a way to where they do not hurt people and planet without looking at the supply chain.

So, that is where I ended up. So, I am a person who got my education in technology. I am a technical weenie, but also in system modeling, which supply chains or systems – global systems, important systems. And I have put those two educational backgrounds together in a job that is a nonprofit, where I get to be an advocate, and actually invest and I love first and foremost of the planet and other people on it. So, that is a little bit about myself.

John: That is wonderful. That is just wonderful. And, you know, frankly speaking, and I just wish we had more of you in this world. The world would be a better and greener place. But that is why you are here today to share your story and also the story of the Green Electronics Council. And for our listeners who want to find Nancy, and the Green Electronics Council, and our colleagues, and all the great and important work they are doing, please go to www.greenelectronicscouncil.org. I am on your site now. It is a wonderful site. There are lots of great information and important information here. Can you just start with what is the real mission? What is the baseline mission of the Green Electronics Council?

Nancy: Good question. So as I mentioned, kind of my own personal motivation and passion is sustainability, right?

John: Right.

Nancy: So making sure that the world continues to be both environmentally and socially as good as it can. And so the Green Electronics Council, that is kind of its mission as well. But it is also focused on a recognition of the value of technology. So what the Green Electronics Council tries to do, they are trying to create a world of only sustainable technology. And there are other organizations that are trying to do the same thing. So the way that we do it is rather unique. We seek to harness the power of purchasing the stuff that we buy. But it is not necessarily the power of individual purchases, because there are so many of them. And we are a small nonprofit. So they are kind of hard to influence.

John: Right.

Nancy: We actually seek to influence institutional purchasers. Those are the purchasers either on the public side, so government folk that at a national level, at the municipality, the city, or even private sector. So those big companies that we read about that are like trillion dollars in valuation, we try to get them so when they buy, they buy sustainable technology. And when they buy it, and these are individuals in their sourcing or procurement function, who by a stroke of a pen, one buying decision buy thousands of technology – laptops, mobile phones, copiers, printers, monitors, televisions, you name it. And in influencing them, and when buying so many, and buying only sustainable versions of it, that is a big demand signal to all of these companies who make those products. So, the Green Electronics Council simplistically, again, what we do is we seek to influence that the institutional purchasers, those buyers, to buy credible, sustainable versions of all of these different technologies that they use, to serve as a demand signal to influence the design and the supply chain behaviors of the major technology brand. That is what we do.

John: Got it. So you are known for your ecolabel, the EPEAT, that you have created, the EPEAT label. Can you explain to our listeners how that was created, why that was created, and what it means in terms of, as you put it, institutional purchasing?

Nancy: Good question. So you are right. The Green Electronics Council, in our support of institutional purchases globally, we got a number of tools and resources that we make available. And I will think about it. You are a purchaser. You are either buying for, I do not know the country, Germany.

John: Right.

Nancy: Or the country, Canada.

John: Right.

Nancy: And you have to buy 10,000 laptops, right? Because you are disseminating them to all of those offices of your government throughout your country. And of course, those laptops need to do a number of things. One of those is to be sustainable. So as you are looking at the fact of their size, and how fast they are, and how much memory they have, and all these other things that the people who are going to use them want to meet, then you also need to think about sustainability. So how can you think about sustainability as easy as possible, without even having to know about what is the recycled content and whether or not has hazardous materials, and those interested children actually put these together? I mean, it could be very overwhelming.

So as you mentioned, what we have created is an ecolabel. It basically is this thing that you can ask for EPEAT, and by saying, does your product meet EPEAT? You do not have to worry about calling out in your procurement, or when you buy these individual environmental and social requirements. All you have to say is EPEAT, and what we have done is we have made sure that those individual requirements, the one environmentally and socially that a product needs to address. So anywhere in that product lifecycle, so did conflict minerals, extraction phase. Conflict minerals come into play, where these products manufactured and assembled in an environmentally and socially responsible way. Is this product built for energy-efficiency when you use it, right? And increasingly, most importantly, when I am done with this product, is it going to be able to be recycled? Can I repair it, or is it just going to go to the trash? All of those things that you want those purchasers to care about under sustainability, we have wrapped them up really nicely in that ecolabel EPEAT. So, all that purchaser has to do when they are buying 10,000 of those be it a laptop or whatever other technology that EPEAT covers, they just need to ask for EPEAT, and boom, they get these highly sustainable products.

John: I know although you have created this guidance and the terminology EPEAT for institutional purchasing, as you say, a country, or a large organization that really can move the needle in sustainability. Is this something for our listeners who are just general consumers of electronics and other technologies also to be looking out for the EPEAT label themselves?

Nancy: They can, and that is a great question. In fact, I bet some of your purchasers are saying, you know, that are also listening to the podcast, “Hey, I am a purchaser. I have never heard of this EPEAT.”

John: Right.

Nancy: How impactful can this EPEAT be?

John: Right.

Nancy: Well, you know, what if they have never heard of us, that is okay. We welcome them to come to, as you pointed out, our website. We actually have a website, that’s www.epeat.net, for all the products who meet our criteria are on, so they can go there. But if they are going, tell me how successful, it is okay, because as I said we actually have not been targeted them. And here is a benefit that they should feel comfortable about, which is when you’ve got those institutional purchasers actually carrying the water, making that EPEAT requirement, and all of the major dollar spend are requiring EPEAT, then you’ve got the companies, just some of the companies that participate in EPEAT are ones such as Apple, Dell, HP, HPE, Asus, Acer. So a whole litany, that is just a sample of some of the brands.

When those institutional purchasers are making those requirements, those brands are meeting them. That means they are making more credibly sustainable products. And now think about it, it is not as if those brands are going to say, “You know what, I am going to do a supply chain that is highly sustainable and pumps out the sustainable products. And then I am going to build a whole other supply chain and all the costs related to make non-sustainable products.” Companies do not do that. So what is happening is, the companies are pumping out these more sustainable products to meet the demand of the institutional purchasers and the listeners to your podcast for going out. It is a high likelihood that they actually bought one of those EPEAT sustainable products and did not know it because that is the impact of institutional purchases. In fact, if one thing that your listeners can take away is an unsung hero in today’s sustainability and climate change movement, are purchases. But people who go in every day, look at contracts, make purchasing decisions, and make the choice to put that power towards credible, sustainable products.

John: I love it. Nancy, so explain to our listeners how it works. So, if I am a manufacturer, if I am Apple, or Dell, or any of the other great and wonderful brands and iconic brands you just mentioned, and others, of course, want to get the EPEAT label for the newest gadget I have just created, then I come to your organization, and you put it through some sort of the rigorous testing and your algorithm to make sure that it hits the criteria to be labeled EPEAT certified?

Nancy: Kind of.

John: Okay.

Nancy: You’re real close on that.

John: Okay.

Nancy: So you are right. If we have got a brand who says, “Hey, I want to be covered by EPEAT,” and EPEAT is the leading global ecolabel for technology products. It is used by more purchasers than any other ecolabel. And right now, it is used by purchasers in 42 countries. So you can well imagine why we are honored to actually have those iconic brands be part of the EPEAT program. But it is not easy, and they’ll be the ones to tell you that because if you are meeting the needs of institutional purchasers, and they are buying a whole bunch of, I mean, just in 2019 there were more than $4 trillion worth of ban against EPEAT. I am telling you, unsung heroes are those purchasers, they are putting a lot of power behind this.

And so, let us just say there is a brand and they say, “Okay, I want my products in this category.” And again, EPEAT covers things such as laptops, tablets, mobile phones, televisions, printers, multifunctional copier devices, even servers, right? For their data centers that are so important now to connectivity, things such as that. So we covered most of the technology that is currently in what we would consider our home or external office environment. And if a brand wants to get it covered, they need to come to us, and they need to first signal. And then what we do is, of course, we show them the criteria that their products need to meet. Now, we are a unique label, and that we are not just the required criteria. So it is not just, “Oh, I need it, I need EPEAT.” No, no, no. We are one that likes innovation and technology. The one I talked about. I am passionate about technology. Technology is awesome. And we want more better technology, but we also want that more better technology to be increasingly more sustainable.

So for EPEAT, the criteria are required. You do not meet the required, you are never going to be considered EPEAT. But we also have optional criteria. So a brand can come in and say, okay, I have met the rather high required, that was tough enough. But you know what, I am committed to sustainability. Because I too am a brand in the technology sector, so my employees, and my customers, I know they care about sustainability. So I have chosen to have my products meet optional criteria. And it is purely a choice. And these been our criteria that really make sure that that product continues to be sustainable on the environmental and social front. And the more optional these products meet, the more that product is considered either as silver, or the highest level, gold. So EPEAT is an ecolabel where you can buy EPEAT products, EPEAT products at the silver level, EPEAT products at the gold level. And if you are at the gold, it means that that company has actually invested the maximum amount to make sure that their products are sustainable. That they are personally invested in that. And they are invested in making sure that those products, that innovation is happening, just not for usability like the camera is better, the sound is better, the RAM is bigger, so the battery lasts the longest, but also that it is as innovative as possible for the benefit of people and the planet. And so that is a little bit about it. So you have got a brand who comes to us, they pick the criteria optional ones, again has to meet the required or else we would not even talk to them. And then you would think so do we assess it? No, no, no. Because we have developed the criteria. It would be a little bit of conflict if we said, “Oh, yes, you meet it.”

So, no, we send them out to major certification firms. These are firms that again, maybe some of your listeners are aware of, but these are the big, been in business for 100 years, certifying other aspects of technology. So firms such as Underwriter Laboratories. If you look at a lot of your products, those are the guys who make sure that the technology is safe. That when you plug it in, your hair does not stand on end, it’s so safe. Those Underwriter Laboratories Company to Rhineland, so we even have an international firm. And again, these being firms, they are actually the ones who work with the brand and check those criteria, make sure that those products meet our criteria. And once those firms say, “Yes, we checked it, this product actually is,” then we put it on that website that I talked to you about, the www.epeat.net.

John: Right.

Nancy: And then it is an EPEAT product. And then all those big institutional purchasers, the ones who spend about $4 trillion last year on EPEAT, that is when they can go ahead and feel comfortable about buying it.

John: I love it. For our listeners who just join us, we’ve got Nancy Gillis. She is the CEO of the Green Electronics Council with us today. To find Nancy and her colleagues and all the important work that they are doing at the Green Electronics Council, please go to www.greenelectronicscouncil.org, or as Nancy said earlier, to learn about all the products that are EPEAT certified go to www.epeat.net. Nancy, we are living through this strange and tragic COVID-19 period that has hit not only us in Portland, and Fresno, and the United States, but everyone around the world right now. And work at home has now become normalized, which means people have left their offices where they’ve had their desktops and all their– let’s just call it legacy electronics sitting in their office and their desks, hopefully, one day to return to in some way, shape, or form. But now they have had to also outfit their homes to be connected vis-a-vis Zoom, and emails, and text messages. So, there is now a boom in the electronics industry. What is your take in terms of the technological boom that we are living through partially due to this COVID-19 pandemic, and all the electronics that are coming out of it, and it is in relationship with the future of sustainability, and the ecosystem of our planet?

Nancy: Wow, if that is your closing question, I thought you were just going to ask me, so what is your thought about sustainability? But you have just wrapped the future and planet and put it all together. But– [crosstalk]

John: You are up for it and we do not have to eat the elephant in one bite, you can just go bite by bite, and we could walk through it together. Let me hear you because I know you have a take on this and I really am interested in that. I know our listeners would be as well.

Nancy: I do. And I appreciate you allowing me to tease you and to do so in such a way that does not minimize the fact that we are at a time that, I even tell my own staff, is unprecedented. And it seems like such a small word for where we find ourselves in this world. It does not do justice to the tremendous upheaval, and change, and cost of life that we are living through because of COVID. And one of the things that we really see with this almost immediate move towards working from home has been that, you know, we started this conversation I said, hey, consumers, individual consumers, if they do not know EPEAT that is okay because we have been targeting institutional purchasers.

Well, guess what, with everybody working now from home, those individuals, consumers, they have become institutional purchasers. Because they are buying products to be able to work from home. They are buying technology products on behalf of the need to work for their companies, and so that kind of has made them institutional purchasers. And with so much reliance on technology, there has been a tremendous increase in the demand for connectivity, for networks to work. We find ourselves also because we are at home and sadly, this is not a good thing. It becomes a little challenging to separate, right? We no longer close our office door, pick up our satchel, and go down to the parking lot and either get in our car or wait for the bus. We do not do that anymore. We hopefully get up from the couch and walk out of our bedroom then to our kitchen.

John: Right.

Nancy: And because that separation is not there anymore, we find ourselves actually maybe staying a little bit longer on the computer and maybe using it a bit more, just getting the next email. So suffice it to say, this tremendous move has really caused more people to buy more technology. In fact, there are waiting lists for certain types of laptops and so forth because everybody needed them all at the same time. It is kind of like toilet paper, right? It is really hard to get when you really need it. But that usage and the inability for us to use what we have done before to separate work has meant that there is so much more draw on the energy. There is so much more draw on those products. There is so much more buying of those products.

So people who, yes, we were end-consumers and actually our ecolabel EPEAT was not one that we were targeting. You have now become institutional purchasers. And I need your listeners to recognize their power now as well. I need your listeners to recognize that now when they have a choice, they should be actively seeking credible, sustainable technology products. And they can do that through, of course, EPEAT. And we’re proud to say that actually, Amazon which is where a lot of people go, especially in North America but also overseas, to find technology products. That Amazon is featuring EPEAT products as part of their climate pledge. So, you can go on Amazon and you can find EPEAT products.

John: That is awesome.

Nancy: You could also go find products such as ENERGY STAR, which is another ecolabel that has been out there even longer than EPEAT. And EPEAT actually has ENERGY STAR in it. So when you are buying an EPEAT product, you are already getting an ENERGY STAR product. But what I would like to say is that for all of us now who are constrained, first and foremost, protect yourselves and of course, do stay home, do try to socially distance, do the wearing of your mask, if I may say that on your show, but do be doing that. We are a science-driven organization. We believe in science. And that is what the best science is telling us. But also, as you are working from home, if you are one of those who are lucky, we are lucky if we are able to continue to work and have it be from home. Now is your time. If you care about this Earth, if you care about this planet, if you have children that are driving you mad, that you still care enough about them, to keep this planet for them buy credible, sustainable products. Buy those laptops, those TVs, those tablets that you are putting in your children’s hands so they can continue to be educated buy those things and look for EPEAT. That is what I would ask.

John: Nancy, that is a wonderful way to close a show. I just want you to know you are always welcome back on the Impact to share all the great things you are working on at the Green Electronics Council. For our listeners again, to find Nancy and her colleagues at the Green Electronics Council, please go to www.greenelectronicscouncil.org, or to find the EPEAT certified electronics to purchase please go to www.epeat.net. Nancy Gillis, you are an inspiration. You are making a huge impact. You are making the world a better and greener place. I am grateful and thank you for being with us today on the Impact Podcast.

Nancy: Thank you so much for this opportunity, and be safe and be well to you and to all who listened.

John Shegerian: This edition of The Impact Podcast is brought to you by Engage. Engage is a digital booking engine revolutionizing the talent booking industry. With hundreds of athletes, entrepreneurs, speakers, and business leaders Engage is the go-to spot for booking talent for your next event. For more information, please visit letsengage.com

John: Welcome to another edition of The Impact Podcast. I am John Shegerian, and I am so honored and excited to have my longtime friend with us today, Nil Zacharias. Welcome to The Impact Podcast, Nil.

Nil Zacharias: Thank you, John. Thanks for having me on. It is good to talk to you as always.

John: It is always, we used to have lunch together on the Upper West Side in New York, and today you are in Venice, California, beautiful Venice, California. I am actually in Fresno, California, and it is great to be here together. Even though we are both in California, we are not physically together, but whenever I speak with you, it is just always reconnecting with a longtime friend. It is just so wonderful to hear your voice.

Nil: Likewise, it is good to always talk to you. I look forward to it, and I am excited about this conversation today.

John: Nil, before we get talking about all the important and great things you are doing at Eat For The Planet, can you give us a little bit of your journey, the backstory because you do have a fascinating backstory leading up to this great platform you have created? Can you just share that with our listeners first?

Nil: Yes, how much time do you have?

John: [laughter]

Nil: How far back do you want to go? But I will try to keep it–

John: Yes.

Nil: I have had many twists and turns in my twenty-year work career, but it is been fun. It is all been me just following my passions, and it usually leads to interesting fun projects and jobs and opportunities. So, I started my– updated myself now, obviously, twenty years ago, I started my career, actually, as an attorney. I spent a few years in a law firm and realized that that was not the life I wanted to have. No offense to any attorneys out there. It is just I was more excited by the work my clients were doing than the work I had to do. So, it became obvious to me that I needed to get some experience in the corporate world, I really was fascinated by technology and innovation at that time, and the Internet, and everything that came along with it. So, I ended up spending, after two years in a law firm, ended up spending the next eight to twelve years working in the technology industry.

Nil: I worked at companies like Double Click, which were acquired by Google. I worked at a startup that was acquired by Yahoo, spent five years at Yahoo. I also did a little stint in management consulting at PWC. All largely focused on media, the intersection of technology and innovation and kind of started off initially doing risk management work because of my legal background and then eventually started getting more involved in the business side of things. So, it was an interesting evolution in that space. So, I feel like my career has had two chapters, I had that whole chapter that lasted about a decade, and then I got curious about the food I was eating, and then one thing led to another. This is really cutting a long story short, I realized that the food I was eating was contributing to some of the biggest threats this generation is facing, which is the climate change. That then began my new journey over the last, I would say, decade focusing on my passion now and my vocation, which is trying to do my part to transform our food system. This is why we are here today.

John: Yes, and for our listeners out there, to find Nil and his great work at Eat For The Planet, you can go to www.eftp.co, eftp.co. It is a beautiful website. I am on it now myself. Talk a little bit about– now, you are here and you have become Nil, and I have known you for a lot of those ten years, maybe all of them, and talk a little bit about the plant-based food industries and what inspires you every day now to be one of the great-fought leaders and messengers in that industry.

Nil: Thanks, John, I think I appreciate the kind words and the high praise. I do not think I deserve all of it.

John: No, you do, you do.

Nil: I do think that, as I said, my passion for the last decade or so has been transforming our food system or at least doing my part in helping in some way.

John: Right.

Nil: I do think that the plant-based food industry is a big key to this transformation, and kind of going back to why I shifted paths in my career and started focusing on food system, it was really learning about climate change and realizing that if you do not do something urgently we are going to have a significant problem. We are already starting to see the effects of it. So, climate change is going to, whether we like it or not, it is going to impact public health, it is going to impact our economy, it is going to impact our ecosystems. This might be a fact most people do not realize, and it does not get talked about often enough, although, I think, intelligence analysts have been saying it since the eighties but climate change is also a national security risk. I wish people brought this up more often. It is because maybe it will make more people pay attention, would think that climate change is a political issue or is polarizing in some way. It is just reality.

Nil: When climate change takes effect, which is happening right now, we are going to see floods, we are going to see extreme weather events, we are going to see heat waves in higher frequency and higher intensity. When that happens, automatically, we are going to end up facing destruction to property. We are going to face an impact on human lives, and people are going to be forced into migrating away from areas where the sea level is rising, and where natural disasters are happening. And so, you follow the thread here and you see one thing will lead to another. We are going to end up facing a refugee crisis, and when that happens, we are going to see food and water shortages. Again, this is not something I have made up. You can read reports about this. Eventually, it leads us down the path where we are going to have conflict over resources, where there is going to be economic distress, social discontent. Basically, you end up creating the most fertile breeding ground for radical ideologies. That is what eventually leads to conflict and war. This is not a future, I think anyone of us– firstly, no one wants to live on a planet or have their kids grow up or their grandkids grow up on a planet that does not have clean air, clean water, but when you realize maybe that is not the only things at stake, maybe there are these downstream effects that impact us in ways that we do not clearly see, it makes the issue of climate change even more real.

Nil: So what does it have to do with food? I think, quite simply, I wrote a whole book about this so I am not going to bore you with all the science, but I do think that the reason food is important for me is because of the facts, right? Twenty-six percent of human-caused greenhouse gas emissions are attributed to food production, processing, transportation, and about fourteen point five percent of overall greenhouse gas emissions is from the livestock sector. So, going back to your question about plant-based, I mean, it is pretty clear, by shifting our reliance on industrial animal agriculture and relying more on plant-based sources of food, plant-based products use far less resources and have far less of an impact. It gives us a fighting chance to mitigate, at least the food-related greenhouse gas emissions, and then it is not just greenhouse gas emissions, industrial livestock production contributes to soil erosion and land degradation uses of water, leads to biodiversity loss, the impacts are just– and pollution, it is just– and on the oceans, it creates dead zones. So, there is really no end to the problem with industrial farming or factory farming.

Nil: The simple solution is that if you could shift our protein consumption towards plants, we maybe have a fighting chance. Here is the sad reality, if we do not do it, right? Here are two reasons why we need to do it, and if you do not do it, we have no hope. Number one, our population is about seven point six billion today on the planet, and we are expected to be ten billion by the year 2050. At the current rate of production of meat, and the current demand for meat on this planet, there is no way we can feed that population of ten billion without destroying the life support systems that keep this planet as amazing as it is. So, firstly, it is unsustainable. We cannot sustain this level of consumption. We need to diversify our protein. Secondly, even if you get it completely right on clean energy, right? Even if you transition all energy from coal and natural gas to solar and wind and other renewable energy sources, we have absolutely no hope of preventing catastrophic climate change if we do not tackle the food problem. So, food is paramount. It does not come up often in conversations around climate change. That is why I think it is the most impactful area to focus on and I think plant-based is part of the solution, a big part of the solution.

John: I love that. Just the other night, I watched the new movie, “Kiss The Ground,” and I was amazed at how much I did not know about how our food is grown, how farming really is in America, and how we could really get it better from what it is, and go back to regenerative farming compared to the tilling farming that we have going on. There is so much to learn about that, and so much that we could still do to make the world a better place, so I am on board with you. We are living in this very strange and tragic time of COVID-19. From your lens, what has this weird period of 2020, this pandemic period, revealed with regards to flaws in our food system that we did not even see before?

Nil: That is a great question. I think this year has been– it has been a year that has revealed so much to us in so many ways.

John: Right.

Nil: One, of course, the pandemic, but then the downstream impacts of just having to lockdown cities and the impact on the economy. It is just been, it has been really fascinating, and I feel really grateful and lucky that I am safe and I have work, and I know a lot of people are not that lucky right now. So, I firstly want to acknowledge that. In terms of the impact on the food system, I think, kind of jumping off what I said earlier about climate change, I think there are some parallels to be drawn between this whole pandemic and what we are seeing and can expect to see with climate change. The difference is that climate change is a tricky enemy. It is because the effects of climate change unfold in slow motion and the effects of the pandemic unfolded in warp speed. It all happened really quickly, and we felt the impact right away. So, everyone, whether we, as– we try to avoid it in the beginning, our government tried to avoid it in the beginning, pretend it could hopefully go away, but eventually, it was just moving so fast and things were changing so quickly, and the science was changing so quickly that we needed to act and we started to feel the effects.

Nil: When it comes to food, it has been very real, I mean, whether it is the meat processing plants that had to shut down because of rising rates of infection just because of the way meat processing plants are structured and the lack of distance between people who work on the floor. So, there was an impact on food production. There were talks about a meat shortage in the beginning of the pandemic. On the farming side, they had their own challenges because when we shut down cities, and we shut down businesses, including restaurants and food services and universities and places that basically farmers rely on to supply food, so farmers who were dependent on restaurants and food service were suddenly faced with a few months ahead that were completely uncertain. So, we noticed that there were farmers who had crops that were wasted, some had to dump excess milk. There had to be a mass slaughter of animals in farms because there was just no market for it. So, there was like an entire breakdown, a disruption in the way we traditionally produce and distribute and consume food, and then consumers– you might not know anything about the food system, but I am sure if you tried walking into a grocery store in the early days of the pandemic you saw empty shelves.

John: Right.

Nil: It was the most bizarre feeling I walked under the Whole Foods here in Venice, and there was nothing. I felt like I was in a disaster movie, right?

John: Right.

Nil: Then you add the additional layer of rising unemployment and economic hardship being faced by people. It basically ended up magnifying this food access problem that we have in this country. So, people who are food insecure have even bigger pressure on them right now because either they do not have employment, they are struggling to eat healthy, they have kids who are now at home, they have to balance working multiple jobs if they are lucky enough to have jobs and tutor the kids. So, it is a really rough diamond, but people have realized that. I think the pandemic has started as in a nutshell that our food system has a lot of vulnerabilities and needs to be– the word I use is resilient. It needs to be resilient. If what I talked about climate change was about we need to make sure it is sustainable, that it lasts, and it can feed us, and that it can preserve the planet, it also has to be resilient enough to face the consequences of bad things happening, whether it is viruses, whether it is food shortages or natural disasters, either caused by climate change or otherwise.

Nil: So, much like what has happened with a pandemic, we are going to see similar impacts, not exactly the same but similar impacts as climate change unfolds. Even if we do our best to mitigate the damage of climate change to transform our food system, the reality is that we are in a race against time, so we are going to have to build resiliency in our food system as we try to make sure it is also sustainable and capable of feeding the planet in a way that is not going to destroy our natural resources in the long run. So, I think the big lesson, at least food-related from the pandemic, I mean there are many other lessons about eating healthy and immunity and all of that stuff, but just from a systems perspective, I think is that we need to be more resilient, we need to plan for disasters, and we need to make sure that the decisions we make around our food system today will be the right ones when we look back thirty, forty, fifty years down the line. I mean, that is the reason we are in the spot where we are, because we made this decision sixty, seventy years ago, without thinking about the long-term consequences.

John: For our listeners who just joined us I have my good friend, Nil Zacharias, with us today. He is the founder of Eat For The Planet. You can find Nil and his great work and important work at eftp.co. His podcasts are there. His books are there, and that is what I want to talk about next, Nil. You mentioned earlier your book, Eat For The Planet. I read it. I loved it. What can our listeners expect to learn from your book if they go online and buy it today?

Nil: Yes, I mean, if you are even remotely intrigued by anything I have said so far, and you feel like when you hear the words “climate change” and “sustainability”, your eyes glaze over because it just sounds so boring and scientific, and kind of abstract. My goal with that book, the Eat For The Planet book, and then we released a cookbook, following that as well–

John: Yes.

Nil: The goal with the book was really to try to distill this complicated science, and present it in a really easy to digest package. Everything from the size of the book, which is pretty small, to the fact that most of the statistics and the science is presented in the form of infographics, were all designed to make the book accessible and easily consumed by someone who probably does not like books or definitely does not like books about science and climate change and sustainability. So, it really delivers the facts, and that was the whole idea behind the book, to deliver this important knowledge and the science that has been around now for long enough but still seems to be largely ignored in the mainstream conversation. Not just in the mainstream media about food but also in terms of the environmental movement, food has largely been ignored until very recently. So, I do think if you are curious about this, and you want a quick book that you can reference and get some interesting facts to see how you can do your part in avoiding this crisis and helping to transform our food system, I think that is a great book. Obviously, I am biased.

John: Yes, but no, it is a great book. I have read it myself. I love your book. You have been so kind to host me on your podcast before. I love your podcast, Eat For The Planet. Talk a little bit. It is on your website. Talk a little bit about Eat For The Planet podcast and some of the thought leaders you have had on and how you have been curating that podcast over the past few years.

Nil: Yes, thank you. I have definitely, firstly, as you said, I have had you on as a guest. I really enjoyed the process of putting together that podcast. I have been doing it now for three years. I will tell you why I started the podcast. When I first started working on issues related to the food system, as you know, I first launched a media platform back in 2013. I was originally on your earlier podcast talking about that years ago.

John: Yes.

Nil: In fact, I think that was the first podcast I was ever on. So, this is funny that I am here years later.

John: Yes.

Nil: So, I first launched a media platform and as I was doing that, I ran it for a few years, and I have exited that business since, but one of the things that I realized is that the food system and this problem that I was trying to tackle was this really complicated web of interconnected issues. On one hand, you have consumer behavior, and initially, I was very focused on inspiring and educating people, and so I launched that media platform. I eventually wrote the books because I felt if people had the information, if they were presented the knowledge in a simple clear way, they would act on it. I do not necessarily not think that now, I just think that that is maybe not enough. You have to educate people but you also have to change the market conditions. So, on one hand, you need to do behavior change, make sure people do their best but sometimes people might want to do their best but the system is just designed in a way where they are just not able to afford the food that they want to buy that is good for them and the planet, or they have no access to it. I started to, I think over around the year 2015, 2016, I started to also think about how I could use my voice, my background, my skills, my connections to impact market-based solutions around changing the food system. So, my first attempt to do that was how can I help this growing plant-based food industry that was– now, people seem to be familiar with it, but back in 2014, 2015, it was just starting to break out with brands like Beyond Meat and others that had just launched. So, I launched the podcast as a way to highlight these fascinating entrepreneurs who were doing these groundbreaking things, who– so, using the platform of the podcast to really highlight the innovation that was happening, the smart and talented entrepreneurs that were leading these companies, the investors were focusing on it, the change makers who were out there thinking of interesting solutions to basically transform this entire web that is our food system into something more sustainable in the long haul. So I have had the pleasure and honor to sit down and pick the brain of some of the smartest people in the food industry, from the founder of Whole Foods, John Mackey, to John Shegerian.

John: Oh, I remember.

Nil: And many others who each have approached this with their own– who have all arrived at the same problem that I am trying to tackle and find solutions for, but are doing it in their own unique way. I think together we form, we kind of make up this really interesting ecosystem of people and companies that are all mission-driven to make sure that we can have a food system that we can be proud of fifty years down the line.

John: I love it. Again, I just had the greatest time coming on your podcasts, and I love listening to episodes, and I love the episode with John Mackey. He really is sort of the godfather of the industry, and it is just wonderful to hear, always hear his thoughts or read his thoughts. Nil, one of my favorite things about getting together with you in person or like this, telephonically, is hearing your vision for the future, and science is going to win, we are going to get through this COVID thing and get to the other side, hopefully not a new normal, hopefully, a new better. What exciting projects are you working on now that you want to share with our listeners?

Nil: Yes. Wait, where do I begin? Again, with this one too but, as I said, I am really fortunate, I get to do really fun, exciting things, and just to kind of jump off the whole market solutions thing I was just talking of, I really think of like my approach to helping transform the food system, at least doing my little part in helping transform the food system, whether it is highlighting the work other people are doing or doing some of it myself. It really, you can put it into like three big buckets. One is the behavior change bucket focused on consumers. As I said earlier, I launched a media platform, I co-founded another company called 80/20 Plants that is focused on habit change and inspiring people to eat more plants, I wrote the Eat For The Planet books, that is all been driven and targeted towards consumers. On the market side, I have been advising companies in the plant-based food space around strategy about how to streamline their internal operations, how to redo their brand, and how to position themselves and create opportunities in the marketplace to make sure that more people get access to plant-based products in this industry, which is now, in the last year, had about five billion dollars in retail sales, continues to grow.

Nil: How do we continue to outpace the growth of all other food in the retail sector? How do we keep this momentum going? And so, recently, in fact, a lot of my time has been spent launching projects that are focused on unlocking opportunities in the market. So, last year, I started an event production company called Spire, and the goal was to– initially, we launched a couple of events. One in L.A. last year that was to connect entrepreneurs, professionals, investors that were working in the plant-based food industry in the Southern California region, especially, L.A. is such a big hub for companies in the plant-based and natural food space, but really wanted to create that sense of community and connection so people can exchange ideas and learn from each other. So, that was one new project I launched, and we did a couple of other events and started producing events. And, of course, you know where this is going, then COVID hit.

John: Right.

Nil: No events are happening for the foreseeable future. It will come back, as you said. This is not going to be the permanent normal. That is one way. It is like real-world events that connect people together and speaking of events, I also partnered with a new trade show that launched in 2019, called Plant-based World Conference & Expo. I actually produced the entire conference for plant-based world. The first expo happened last year at the Jacob Javits Center in New York. It was supposed to happen again this year, but as you can imagine, has not because of the pandemic, but we will, of course, return next year. Again, back to this idea of making connections, unlocking opportunities, what can happen when you create a trade show dedicated to plant-based companies and because this industry is growing so fast, and so big– it is so big now that we actually need our own trade show. That would have been unthinkable a few years ago, people would have laughed at us to think of that idea, but right now, we cannot keep up with the demand for that trade show. So, it is coming back next year. That is been one big project, and I have a new project launching that actually was inspired because of some of the things that happened during the time of the pandemic, and recently that have been happening in America that has impacted a lot of people, is this whole issue that I mentioned earlier about food access.

Nil: The plant-based food industry is growing really fast. As I said, it has witnessed about eleven point four percent growth in the past year, but the issue and the problem and the challenge really is that the people who need access to the food, this food the most, the people who are hungry for plant-based foods do not have access to it or just cannot afford it because it is only available in specialty stores. It is not everywhere. I started brainstorming ideas with a couple of friends around what kind of project could be launched to tackle that problem. So I am very excited to say that we have a new project launching in November of 2020, where we are actually– it is called Plantaga. We are bringing plant-based products. I am running a prototype in three bodegas or independent corner stores. I know, John, you are very familiar with the term bodega.

John: Yes.

Nil: Some of our listeners might not be. It is a classic New York City corner store, and typically full of unhealthy grab and go products. They tend to be the lifeblood of communities, and they are all around the city. They are even in Manhattan, but in the heart of places like the Bronx or parts of Brooklyn, they are the only place where you can get food. There are no supermarkets in walking distance, and most people do not own cars throughout the city. So, the bodega has become a big hub for where people buy food because it is also affordable but, unfortunately, largely unhealthy, but the people in these neighborhoods do want plant-based food. So we have developed this whole idea of introducing plant-based options in three specific bodegas. We are launching this whole concept.

Nil: We are bringing in a branded cooler called the Plantaga cooler. We are also going to transform the deli menu, the food service menu at these bodegas to include classic New York City items like a breakfast sausage, an egg sandwich, or bagel and cream cheese, but just entirely plant-based. What is even more interesting about the project is not only are we bringing access to some of the biggest brands in the plant-based space, we are also offering at a cost that you cannot find anywhere else. That is because we are basically acquiring the products directly from the brands, and we are kind of in some ways disrupting the existing distribution system for the purposes of this pilot, and then running a socialist experiment meets a research project. Of course, you show people who have never tried plant-based foods, how delicious, and how familiar they can be, what can happen? So, I am very excited about that project. It is going to launch in November and run for three months in New York City, called Plantaga. You can learn more at eatplantaga.com or definitely come to my website and sign up for my newsletter, and I will be promoting it on the podcast as well, so you can learn all about it there.

John: I cannot wait to have you back on, Nil, to talk about the success of Plantaga. Everything I have seen you do over the last ten years has become a massive success, and that is why going back to the top of the program, you become one of the most important thought leaders in the whole plant-based industry. That is why I am so grateful, not only for our friendship but also for all you do. For all listeners out there today that enjoyed today’s show with Nil Zacharias, please go to www.eftp.co to find these two great books, his podcasts, and all the other important and impactful work that Nil is doing at Eat For The Planet. Nil, I just want to thank you again, for being my good friend, for all the impactful work you are doing, and for making the world a greener and better place every day.

Nil: Thank you so much, John. Thanks for having me on today and for giving me a chance to share some of my story and the work I am doing, and I cannot wait to meet up with you in person once the world gets back to normal.

John: It will be soon. Thank you so much.

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

John: Welcome to another edition of the Impact Podcast. I am John Shegerian, and I am so honored and excited to have my good friend. Dr. Michael Galitzer with us today. Welcome to the Impact Podcast, Michael.

Dr. Michael Galitzer: John thanks for having me. It is a pleasure.

John: This is a special edition of the Impact Podcast because A) I have been a client of yours for about ten years, so have many members of my family, and you run a very, very special practice. I want to get into that in a little bit, but before we do that, Doc, I want you to share with our listeners some of your fascinating backstory on your evolution from a college student to becoming an MD and then how you got into Energy Medicine.

Michael: Glad to tell you about that John. Basically, I went to college in Buffalo, New York, grew up in New York City. Med school in Syracuse, came out here for my internship, in LA, and move right into Emergency Medicine which I did a while back, it was 1974 or 1975, and became board-certified, actually one of the first one hundred doctors in the country to become board certified in ER as a new subspecialty at the time. I worked in LA, in the ER, for fifteen years when there were no trauma centers. So the traumas went to the nearest hospital and that became quite an adventure working in North Hollywood. You can imagine that. We used to say the moon has always fallen in North Hollywood. I did that for about fifteen years, got burnt out, hard work, 24-hour shifts and you do not really get to see the results of the patients that you treat. You admit them, and you sew them up but you never see how it turns up because you only see them once. Really in the ER, John, you are seeing people at their physical, emotional, and psychological low point because why would you go to ER?

John: Right.

Michael: And so, after all, you are really starting to think about, “Is everybody out there a little cuckoo?” because that is all you see. You do two-twenty-four shifts, and that per week is a lot of work. After fifteen years, I got a little burnt out. I was looking for new areas to get into and came across the nutrition practice in Westwood which was close to where I was living at the time, the Westwood part of LA. They wanted me to do general practice and nutrition. So I need the general practice of being an ER doc. I really did not have a clue about nutrition. This is like 1986. So I tried to learn it. I was single and started to read books, went to seminars, watching the tapes at the time, become a nutritionist and nobody [inaudible]. One of the people who drink at dinner was my best friend at the time, and in running all these new tests in nutrition found out he had Mercury toxicity from a mouthful of silver fillings.

I heard the expert talk at the time at a medical conference, Hal Huggins, from Colorado out of state and asked him who I could refer my friend to local. His agenda is to change out the fillings. At that time we do like a blood test to find out what metals were compatible with your blood, like a food allergy test, and the results came back. I referred my friend to a dentist in LA. He came back from the dentist and said, “This guy had this machine from Europe and he was testing my finger. He is holding an electrode and he was measuring my skin resistance and had valves for each different metal and he gave me a list of all the valves that were metals that [inaudible] the body and organelles that match the body and they exactly match the blood test.” So I said, “If you can figure this out without blood, I want to meet this guy.” So I am at the dentist and he told me about these people from Europe who were giving the first seminar on this technology called electrodermal screen. I took that in like December of ’86 and I was off and running. So in the space of three months, I had actually switched from nutrition into this whole new area of quote-unquote Energy Medicine, which I have been doing for the last thirty-two years. It has been very rewarding. The traditional medicine looks at the body from a physical point of view.

John: Right.

Michael: X-rays, CAT scans, MRIs, biopsies, mammograms, and from a chemical point of view, blood test. So you are looking at the structure and you are looking at biochemistry, but most people that I see do not feel well and yet they check out pretty good on the physical and the chemical level. It is because there is a deeper electrical level or energetic level, sort of referred about as Energy Medicine where the changes are occurring. Now if you see a cardiologist he would do an electrocardiogram to look at the electoral heart, and essentially the electrical impulse precedes the physical heartbeat. A neurologist would do an EEG to look in the electrical brain. So we look at the electoral liver, kidneys, pancreas, adrenals, thyroid. It is the idea being that your body is an orchestra and these organs and glands are instruments in that orchestra. Some are sluggish, not in tune, which you cannot see on blood tests. When they are strong and in tune, and if we can get everything that is sluggish to be strong, the orchestra plays better music.

The other concept is toxins. In the ER, we were concerned about life-threatening toxins, overdose of sleeping pills, carbon oxide poisoning. This medicine says we are exposed daily to toxins in the air, water, food, heavy metals, pesticides, chemicals, certain foods can be toxic. Toxins accumulate in our bodies and our bodies do not work as well. So the goal is to right the orchestra, strengthen the weak organs, and also to lower the toxicity level in people, and I do pretty successful in doing that. At the same time, the practice has expanded in terms of also looking at hormone levels. Hormones are really, really key. It is an ever-expanding practice, so to speak, but the key points are to strengthen these organs that are not working as well, and also reduce the toxicity, and looking at your body from an energetic point of view.

John: For our listeners out there, I just want to reiterate, because Dr. Galitzer is a friend of mine and I am a client of his, he is actually an MD as he said. First, he was an MD. So this is not some woohoo medicine, voodoo medicine, because when you start talking about energy and all these other things, alternative holistic medicines, some people think it is just out there, but you are an MD, straight up MD before you evolve into this Energy Medicine practice.

It is just fascinating. For our listeners out there to find Dr. Galitzer or to go make an appointment to see him, please go to www.drgalitzer.com, and let me give it to you, dr., d-r, galitzer, g-a-l-i-t-z-e-r .com, dr.galitzer.com. Michael, I have been in your office hundreds of times over the last ten years and I am not going to talk about any of the celebrities or world-class athletes that come to see you, but you have a fascinating array of people. Given where you sit in West LA, you have a clientele list of the who is who, or what is what of finance, of entertainment, of the Sports World, of the political world, and just normal run-of-the-mill Joe’s like me and members of my family. Can you share a little bit about if people want to feel better or are not feeling well, who is someone that should be coming to you? Should they wait until they are sick or should they be coming to you otherwise, just to start feeling better and getting on a better path of wellness, whether it comes from food, or some of the energy principles that you want to share with them, or otherwise?

Michael: Well, thanks for that description there John. Most of the people that I see had issues of fatigue, they cannot sleep, they have got digestive difficulties, they have got allergies, their joints hurt. Well, I would say probably fatigue is a huge issue. Insomnia is a huge issue. People say they go to sleep and wake up and cannot get back to sleep. But I see all sorts of people, I see people with cancer who know that they want to do traditional therapy, but also they want to keep their bodies strong. So I think cancer is a tug of war, the energy of the cancer versus the energy of the body. Traditional medicine tries to kill the bad guys, but sometimes they weaken the good guys. So, if we can keep the good guys strong, which certainly can be done, while people are doing traditional therapies for cancer, then people win. That is the goal, is to get people to win.

The oncologist, probably, they do not quite understand it and frequently they are not happy with it. There is a saying in medicine that, “If you are not up on it you are down at it,” but basically you cannot really as an oncologist be aware of all this whole integrated medicine with nutrition, detoxification, drainage, hormonal balance. You just do not have the time to really understand that. So patients basically do both, and when patients do both they do great. The statistics in oncology or really the survival rates, they are all based on people that do not do both. So it is kind of like you cannot compare apples to oranges. So there are no studies that say, “Well, if you do integrative approach and you do the traditional approach, what are the results?” There are not any studies and it is unfortunate, and so when people hear about there are no statistics and not realizing that they can be helped at any stage. So I see general chronic fatigue a lot, chronic viral illnesses a lot, allergens a lot, just about anything. I would say the only thing I probably have had no success with would be Lou Gehrig’s Disease, ALS, but I see people with all sorts of chronic conditions and also probably late-stage Alzheimer’s, I think that is an issue that is difficult, but early on I think there is a lot to be done for just about anything.

John: For listeners out there also, you are not only an Energy Medicine Pioneer, but you are also an anti-aging expert. I am fifty-seven years old and have been coming to you for about ten years. You are a little bit older than me, but you look ten years younger. So for our listeners out there that are interested not only in feeling well but in also looking your best, I think there is a lot to your energy medicine and your lifestyle changes or tweaks or alterations that you suggest to your clients that can do all of us well. If people are interested in looking their best on a daily basis, can you share some of the anti-aging approaches that you have for people who want to come see you just for looking their best and feeling their best at the same time?

Michael: Sure, sure. I think the basics are nutrition, water intake, sleep, and exercise and that is the basics. You cannot imagine how many people who do not do the basics, they do not drink enough water, do not exercise. I think one of the hardest things to do is to get people to– motivate people, especially people over fifty or sixty to exercise on a daily basis. I think if you eat every day, you should exercise every day. So I try and tell people that your body is a Ferrari, you want high octane fuel into your Ferrari by eating food, and once you fill-up the tank you want to take it on the track. So you have got to move your body, and walking the dog is just not enough. So it was really about the basics, but again, people here, say in LA, for example, the sun shines but there are a lot of toxins, you get your car washed and the windshield does not look too good a couple of days later, so getting toxins out of the body through a process called drainage, which is stimulating the liver and kidney system, that is where toxins move through on their way out into the end, the stool, it is highly important. Optimizing nutrition, highly important.

Once you get the toxins out, then you can get to drainage, then you can move into what is called detoxification, that means pulling toxins out of the binding sites in the tissues from which they go through the liver and kidney systems and up, but you have got to do drainage first before you do detoxification. So drainage before saunas, drainage before colonics, drainage before castor oil packs to the liver, drainage is key. So what can that do to a workout? So when you do a workout, a lot of people do when they go to the gym and do workout they basically get on an exercise bike or treadmill or stair climber to increase blood flow. So, think about drainage as increasing blood flow to the liver and kidney systems. Once you get off of the treadmill then you want to go to the weights, or the machines to strengthen your muscles. So once we get to detoxifying, those strengthen those key organs, that we can identify through very objective test by the way, heart rate variability and bioimpedance. So this is like real medicine looking at the heart and nervous system, body fat, body water, and so we do an objective test and at that point, we will look at the hormones. Most people who do not feel [inaudible] think they have a hormonal imbalance and most of the time that hormonal imbalance are the adrenal glands that do not work as often as they should. The adrenals are the first organ affected by stress, mental stress, emotional stress, nutritional stress, even logic too, environmental stress when you are exposed to pesticides, electromagnetic stress when you are talking to your friend with the cellphone for an hour.

John: Right.

Michael: Physical stress you had at the gym or you had surgery, or infectious stresses, that you realize you have infections. So, most people have one stressor and a lot of people have many stresses occurring at the same time, the adrenals fire all the time, eventually, the adrenals get tired. We are going to handle stress, it goes down, stress is no longer a challenge, it becomes a threat. We cannot differentiate big stress from little stress and you are overacting little things. You get tired. Think of the adrenals as kind of like the gas pedal in your car, where is the thyroid is more or less the fuel injection system. One thing that happens frequently, John, is anxiety from the adrenal situation. So picture your brain having a conversation with your adrenals in the morning, and the brain says, “Look, I got a lot on my plate today and I need to do this, this, this and that and I need you, adrenals, to secrete hormones to get me through the day,” and the adrenal says, “Well, I am all tapped out. Well, you are going to get anxious because you do not have the resources to deal with the challenges of the day.” So, frequently, anxiety starts with your adrenals as opposed to starting with your brain, it is a two-way street and the ability to discern in which way that street was going is really, really important. So hormonal balance is very, very key, support the adrenals, of course, supporting the thyroid.

Then we move into other hormones for longevity. When women turn around fifty and move into the stuff, having [inaudible], have night sweats, hot flushes, cannot sleep, that is real suggestion for bioidentical hormones, which basically is made from the AMS, bioidentical estrogen and progesterone, and even testosterone for the woman, very, very key because if you cannot sleep, then there is no way that you can regenerate and optimize your life. So that is one aspect of hormone imbalance. Guys over sixty, sometimes over fifty, also need testosterone. So to structure and bioidentical can be very, very important. There are some people that do well with growth hormones. Growth hormone, I think, have got a really– one of the things that I have learned here is that people love sugar, and sugar takes a lot of people down. If your, you know, your sugar levels and you do not have insulin resistance and you eat well and your exercise well, for some people growth hormone can be really, really important. So, again, if you are looking at optimizing nutrition, optimizing your water intake, your sleep, and your exercise, and you have a low sugar diet and you do bioidentical hormones after you have got the toxins out and strengthen the weak organs, then you can really go pretty far in terms of longevity.

John: Doc, I find that all those things you just shared have worked for me, and I am going to be frank with our audience here, everything you just said has kept me feeling the best I have ever felt in the last ten years of my life, but we are taping this podcast during one of the most unique circumstances ever in the world history. This COVID-19 crisis, and I know myself, I had to reach out to you, to come to see you in the coming days ahead because I live in Fresno, California where our business is based out of and the air quality here over the last five months has averaged a hundred and fifty or more. One night when I was driving home it was four hundred and fifty. I have not been into a gym since they have closed the gyms down. I have been going to the gym since I am fifteen years old. The external stresses that we are all facing, whether it is through the media or other channels, the COVID-19 has put us all under external stresses that we have never seen or felt before, probably, and if we have seen or felt it before it has just been now maximized, it is more of a burden on us than ever before. So talk a little bit about navigating, I know we are closer to the end of this crisis, hopefully, because vaccines and monoclonal antibodies are on the way, but we are probably closer to the end because science hopefully will win, but we still have a ways to go. How can our listeners out there get to navigate this crisis, this world crisis, and feel better and get through this with the least amount of damage to their whole system?

Michael: Well, that is a great question. So, first of all, I would like to say that I think the media has been completely irresponsible and not sharing information on how people can improve their health because that is the bottom line is-

John: Right.

Michael: -how do you improve your health? Wherever you are in this realm from disease to help you– how do you get better?

John: Right.

Michael: So, there is a lot more than just wearing a mask and social distancing, and unfortunately, they do not seem to be going to convey that information. So, John, I would say that the immune health is actually trumping longevity at this point, so the question is, “What is a virus?” So, when we explain to people the concept of virus is [crosstalk]. So, basically, we are going to use an analogy of your car that overheats. Now, when your car overheats, there is an issue with the water system. It is not enough water in the system or one of the hose is broken, the car gets too hot, and so think of the car as being too inflamed and then think of water as being what is called an antioxidant, to quench the heat from the [inaudible]. Well, that works great. Then, say the car overheats again, okay, there is another hose that broke and so you again fix that, put more water in the system and you know, but if the car continues to overheat, then water is no longer the treatment, antioxidants are no longer the treatment. The engine of the car is weak, and that is what happens to the cell when the cell is exposed to all sorts of toxins over time, whether it be smoke, pesticides, heavy metals, poor nutrition, no exercise. The cells are no longer creating up energy like the engine in the car. At that point, the cell becomes very susceptible to viruses. So the energy is low in the cell and viruses can go in and take care of that. So that is kind of what happens with any kind of virus, whether it be the flu, or cold, or in this case the coronavirus. So, the question is, how do you energize yourself?

John: Right.

Michael: How do you energize the immune system?

John: Right.

Michael: So, antioxidants at that point are not the answer, oxidative therapy is the answer. So, you can basically do intravenous vitamin C, it helps people with all sorts of viruses. Some people are using intravenous [inaudible], intravenous hydrogen peroxide, ultraviolet light to the blood. Now, that is a very acute situation where if you had something that was really knocking you out, then those kinds of things would be very useful in doctor-patient setting, and there are a lot of doctors who do this kind of medicine using pretty aggressive techniques. However, before you get to that point, how do you protect yourselves from not getting to that state? Again, what is the media not telling you? Well, everybody should be taking vitamin C, probably 2,000 milligrams twice a day. Everybody should be taking Vitamin D. There are studies that show that the higher vitamin D level the stronger the immune system and the susceptible to viruses. So 5,000 iu, international units, of vitamin D, take it with some milk because it is fat soluble. Echinacea is an immune stimulant. Astragalus is a Chinese herb that is an immune stimulant. Zinc 25 to 50 milligrams a day is an immune stimulant. There is an herb called AHCC, called Empower that stimulates the natural killer cells in the thymus. There is another option called BRM4 which stimulates the thymus gland.

The thymus gland that sits behind the breastbone, John, is the key immune gland. Anything that will stimulate your thymus gland will strengthen your immune system and making much less susceptible to these viruses. There is something out there called peptides, injectable peptides, thymosin alpha-1 that is a massive stimulant to the immune system, into the thymus gland. You got to take a probiotic which is putting the good bacteria into your gut. So there is a lot of things that you– no, I do not think the media should be telling people to do injectable peptides. I think it is a little more advanced. But to me, they should certainly be telling people to do vitamin C, and vitamin D, Echinacea, Echinacea as a capsule which is an immune stimulant, and like I talked about, AHCC and also astragalus. So there is a lot of things that we could do to strengthen the immune system, to increase the energy in your cell so that you are not susceptible to viruses, and if you do get, unfortunately, this coronavirus, it is not going to take you out. I think that is what people are scared about.

John: Right.

Michael: People are scared about dying from this virus as opposed to maybe not having any symptoms of the virus. There is a whole lot of study that came out of Sweden at the end of June that said we grossly underestimated immunity to the coronavirus because we have not looked at the thymus immune system response, not the antivirus but the thymus gland which is like the first guy to respond to this virus. So these vaccines are really trying to increase antibody levels.

John: Right.

Michael: But if you can stimulate your thymus gland, they are like the infantry, think of the antibody is more like the bombers up above who go down and bomb out the virus, but if the infantry could knock it out and what we just mentioned earlier and talk about all the supplements, it is all about stimulating the infantry, and so the article basically said that there is a lot of people who are measuring to cell responses, thymus cell responses, natural killer cell responses, and a lot of the asymptomatic people that are not going to spread the virus because of the fact that they have a huge immune response, but we have not measured that at all. So what we talk about is how do we stimulate our own thymus gland, our own immune system in any situation, especially now, with the weather changing pretty soon. Unfortunately, people kind of go off their little rhythms, thanksgiving, Christmas time, you eat too much, drink too much, too much sugar, and they are going to get the virus, most probably, and they are going to get scared because they would not know if it is the flu or the coronavirus. So, I think we are still early on in this thing. The key thing is do not wait for the vaccine to improve your health.

John: Right.

Michael: These are the things that you can do right now. Get back into exercising, you can exercise at home if you go to the gym. You can eat right. Unfortunately, people are home more and therefore eating more sweets because they are watching the news and they are doing emotional eating. So, again, it gets back to sleep, exercise, water, and nutrition. So there is a lot to do and I think the media is a little responsible on not telling people what they can do and I do not think it is right.

John: Doc, for our listeners out there who have just joined us, we have got Dr. Michael Galitzer with us today. You can look up his great service and reach out to him and make an appointment at www.drgalitzer.com, d-r-g-a-l-i-t-z-e-r, drgalitzer.com. Michael, you are not only an Energy Medicine Pioneer and an anti-aging expert but you also are a best-selling author. That is how I met you. I read the book where Suzanne Somers had written the preface to the book and explained her experiences with you which were nothing short of remarkable. Can you explain what you have put in your books and also your new book that is coming out in the near future?

Michael: Well, the book is called Outstanding Help, John, because when you listen to people, they do not want to live to a hundred if they are going to be in a wheelchair.

John: Right.

Michael: Or in a nursing home. So, basically, people want outstanding health. They wanted to have outstanding health, and as a culture, we were [inaudible] we get Super Bowl, Academy, Awards, gold medals, people want to be outstanding whether it be a parent or at the work that they do. So, deep down people want to have outstanding health, and if you have outstanding health you have longevity. So that is what, really, people are after. They want to have energy, they wanted to have the same energy they had twenty years or thirty years ago. So, it is do-able. Basically, the book addresses what you need to have that outstanding health, what you need to have emotional health and emotional balance, what you need to optimize your nutrition, what you need to get the toxins out of your body, how do you create hormonal balance and optimize your hormonal system, what Energy Medicine techniques are available to people right now in terms of homeopathy, acupuncture, things like that. The interesting thing is that when people talk about energy, what will give me energy, and okay, we will give you energy but do not forget we dissipate our energy through our thoughts and through our emotions.

So, the question is, what are you focusing on? The perfect example right now is the current situation, you cannot really focus on things that you cannot control. So you really cannot control the virus. You really cannot control who the president United States is going to be. You cannot control the riots. So, the question is why would you dissipate your energy and focus on things that you cannot control? So a lot of the– when you get down to it, the emotional component to help is critical and that plays itself out in something that is called the autonomic nervous system, John. That is the automatic nervous system, the system that controls things which do not have to think about, your next breath, your next heartbeat, your blood pressure. These are automatic things. There are two parts of the nervous system, the sympathetic nervous system, which is like performance, help us if you wanted to do a hundred yards dash. The parasympathetic nervous system is rest, and relax, and recovery. How long did it take you to get your breath back? Of the two, the parasympathetic, the relaxation nervous system is really more important. Everybody is sympathetically stimulated. Everybody is out there performing and everyone is actually getting very agitated with the current situation. That is all sympathetic. But, okay, so now that you are sympathetically energized, which is creating an imbalance, how do you relax? How do you recover? Do you do deep breathing? Do you meditate? Do you do yoga? Do you connect with nature? Do you go inward?

So I think that that is the problem. Well, that is the issue right now. We are glued to our TV sets with massive sympathetic stimulation which causes us to be emotional and we are not doing anything to relax. So we actually measure that in a test called heart rate variability, and everybody gets one of those tests on their first visit, to look at how variable each heartbeat is in length from the preceding heartbeat. The more variable each beat is, the stronger the parasympathetic nervous system, and usually the healthier the person is. So, again, we talk about a few things that you can do to strengthen the parasympathetic nervous system, and one of the things that I find very useful is a technology called NuCalm, N-U-C-A-L-M. Actually, I co-wrote a book on NuCalm called A New Calm, and it is a neuroscience technology where people basically have an eye cover and a disc that they put on your arm that has gathered frequencies on it, and when you listen to music and entwined in the music, your Alpha and Theta brainwave relaxation equivalencies that cause you to get into a parasympathetic relaxation state.

We have done testing with it. It has been tested thoroughly in Harvard and you can produce and increase relaxation response to increase strength of the parasympathetic nervous system, which is really maybe the most important thing one can do for immune health and longevity. So, I highly recommend that people look at this technology. You can go to their website, nucalm.com and just listen to what they have to say. So, I find that very helpful. Again, when you look at the world right now, we are too sympathetically driven and I think we have a president that ticks that mode, and I think we all need to slow down and relax. I think the more we can do that the more we can go inside, the more we can connect with nature, and the healthier we are going to be.

John: I think you are so right Doc. First of all, I found myself during this whole COVID period more stress-eating than I have ever done in my whole fifty-seven years. I cannot agree with you more about the stress eating and everything else, and that thing triggers a whole another host of problems. Going back to the heart rate variability, is there a range that you want to see people in or what is weak and what is strong? Is there a number or is that specific to the person?

Michael: Well, John there is a– so, the example would be if she had a pulse restriction where you think that each beat is 1 second. Well, if that is the case there is no variability. But, if one beat is 1 second away, the next beat is quite .98, and the one after that is 1.02, that is beat-to-beat for her body.

John: Right.

Michael: So this stress test where we look at the variability both lying down, where it is easier for the heart to get blood to the head, and standing up with its gravity. So gravity is a stress, standing up is a stress. Not only do we want to know heart rate variability lying down, but we live in a world where we are moving. So we would like to see both patterns of the heartbeat when we stand up, and then it is plotted as an XY axis +4 to -4 for sympathetic, and +4 to -4 for parasympathetic. We frequently see that people are too strong on the sympathetic and negative on the parasympathetic. So, maybe -1 on the parasympathetic and -2, -3 to -4. So, basically, it shows people where they are, but the interesting thing about this test is that it also measures your stress levels. It is something called tension index. So there is a numerical readout where you should be under 200 standing up and a hundred lying down. I have seen people x50,000. So when people see that as a visual, that they are -4 and that their tension index or stress levels are high numerically, it is great feedback for them. So it is a great test.

Once we see where you are, then we can start talking about, number one, what you can do on the deeper inner levels and also the key organs for the parasympathetic nervous system are delivered, and the adrenals. So we can, again, we talked about the liver and its key role in getting toxins up, the liver is a very, very important organ, and the first four letters in liver is live. So once you see where you are on that heart rate variability test, we can start talking about how we strengthen the liver, how do we strengthen the adrenals, what can we do on the inner planes to restore that balance of too much sympathetic. Now, traditional medicine knows this, and so, say hypertension is a perfect example, high blood pressure, hypertension, the sympathetic is too strong. The traditional method really does not have drugs to stimulate the parasympathetic, so they treat the imbalance by weakening the sympathetic, like a beta-blocker, Inderal, Propranolol. So medicine understands the imbalance and they correct it by weakening the sympathetic nervous system, which is a good idea, but the real key is to strengthen the parasympathetic nervous system.

There are some people that think that that is what causes a heart attack in a person. It is like an underlying weak parasympathetic nervous system, and then it is exposed to sympathetic stress, where would be June 6 running, or somebody getting angry at their spouse, instead of acute sympathetic stress on top of a weaken parasympathetic nervous system that can cause the heart attack. So the question then is what can you do at that point? Well, if you keep your parasympathetic nervous system strong, which we have been talking about, then maybe you can handle that acute sympathetic stress. So there is a lot to this that– your viewers may realize that one-third of the time the first symptom of heart disease is sudden death. So you do not even know this is going to happen to you. All these steps that one can do can certainly remit this sudden death heart disease and all the other things that come out of that.

John: Doc, we are going to wind down today, but I want to give you the last word. Is there anything else you want to share with our listeners before we sign off for today? Because I have learned so much, and I know our listeners have. I am just grateful for your time today. Anything else you would like to share before we sign off for today’s episode?

Michael: Well, I think we have covered it all, John.

John: You have said it all. I love it. I learn every time I am with you and I always love being with you. You are my favorite doctor that I ever go with. Every other doctor I always get bad news. I always come to you and I both get hope and I learn something, and to me, when I walk out of your office with hope and also learning something, I am all good. That is how I feel about you. I know everyone else I have ever sent to you tells me the same thing, and my brother calls you the savior of the ship, of the Shegerian family, and I have to concur with his name for you because you have just done just wonders for our family. I am so grateful to you. For our listeners out there who want to connect with Dr. Galitzer, please go to www.drgalitzer.com, d-r-g-a-l-i-t-z-e-r. Doc, I am so grateful for you in every way, for myself personally, for my family, and also for all the great information, you get to share with the world, make us all healthier and better. You did that again today with all listeners. You are always welcome back on the Impact Podcast, and thank you for being such a wonderful and important guest today.

Michael: It is a pleasure, John. To all of you who are out there, let us stay safe.

John Shegerian: This edition of the Impact Podcast is brought to you by Engage. Engage is a digital booking engine revolutionizing the talent booking industry with hundreds of athletes, entrepreneurs, speakers and business leaders. Engage is the go-to spot for booking talent for your next event. For more information, please visit letsengage.com.

John: Welcome to another edition of the Impact Podcast on John Shegerian and I am so honored and excited to have back with us today, Colleen Patrick-Goudreau, also known as the joyful vegan. Welcome back, Colleen.

Colleen Patrick-Goudreau: Thanks, John. Thank you.

John: You know, you are such an important person right now, I believe in America, because of what is going on with covid-19, but also just the food crisis that we have. Before we get into all the important work that you do as an animal advocate, an author, podcaster, social commentator and the joyful vegan, which you truly are, tell us a little backstory. What led up to your evolution to becoming this important and critical voice?

Colleen: I do not want this to sound like a sound bite because I have said this before, but I think it is important to say again, is that I often characterized my journey as I did not become vegan as much as I removed the blocks to the compassion that had been inside of me all along. We talked about becoming vegan as if it is some kind of transformation to a different person as if I was not compassionate before I was vegan, and of course, I was. We all are. I grew up as a kid who loved animals, did not want to hurt animals, did not want to hurt anybody, still do not want to hurt anybody. It is a basic principle that most of us hold, right? It is what we are taught and it is what we are encouraged. I was that kid who did not want to hurt anybody but I did not know I was eating animals. I had no idea and my parents fed me animals. When I confronted them with “Why am I doing this?” Wait, I thought we just had these animals in our home or I went to the zoo. I went to the petting zoo or there are images of these animals all over my clothing, their images all over my plates, all over my lunch box, in my wallpaper. All these ways that we encourage children to be connected with animals, my parents did that. When I asked them why, it is the typical response that that is what they are here for, that is how we raised you. We cannot live without them. They sacrifice themselves for us, all the things that we tell ourselves in each other to normalize the consumption of animals. And so, I was that person and you just internalize it and think you are doing the right thing because if you do not do it, then it is dangerous or it is not natural or you are going to hurt yourself or etcetera. When I was able to become a critical thinker and for some, I mean this journey could take… it could be fast, it could be slow, it is the same journey for everybody. I happened to be about 19 or 20 when I picked up a book called Diet for a New America and I just could not believe what I saw. What that meant was I could not believe what I was participating in. And so what do you do when you see something like that? Your natural response is to say I do not want to be part of it. The only way I could distance myself from it is to not buy those products. That started me on the journey of learning more, reading more, making changes in my own life, making changes my own diet, in my own perception, consciousness, and several years later after that. So I stopped eating land animals, continue to eat aquatic animals and certainly eggs and cow’s milk, animals milk. Then I read more books and I read a book called Slaughterhouse, but I do read happy books as well. This is not bedtime reading. It was not an easy book to read but what it did for me, John, it was the most pivotal awakening. It was the most pivotal thing I did that really contributed to the final awakening, which was it does not matter how the animals are raised. It does not matter where they come from. It does not matter if they are on the happiest farm or if I raise them in my backyard. The idea of taking the life of someone who does not want to die, but not even that, it is in an institutionalized way so that you have the slaughterhouses where you have these workers who are desensitized. You have these animals who are scared to death, who do not want to die, they are fighting. What you have is unchecked violence. It is institutionalized violence. When I read that book and listen to this words of the slaughterhouse workers and how they felt and what it did to them and what they did to the animals, it was heart-wrenching to say the least and it was that systemic violence that I just did not want to be part of. That was the moment where, as I said, I did not become vegan as much as I removed all the blocks, all the excuses, all the barriers to the thing that of course was the core of all of that, which of course makes all of us upset. That is why we do not want to read that stuff, which was my compassion. And so I “became vegan” and that was 21 years ago or something and it has been the best, most wonderful experience. That is why I call myself a joyful vegan and I have always characterized this lifestyle, whatever you want to call it. This way of living and thinking and seeing the world as joyful because there is no better feeling than waking up in the morning and manifesting you have inside of you. How does it get any better than that? Right?

John: Yeah. No, you are so right. But it is also great that you coined the term “joyful vegan” because now I am 57 years old. So when I was 17 years old and very sick living in a dorm in Boston University, overweight and living on dorm food, I realized there had to be a better way. So I got lucky I ran into, at a bookstore, Michio Kushi’s book on Macrobiotics. Literally, his original tone on the benefits of eating that way and that started my journey of eliminating, as you would say, the blocks of feeling better. I got better literally right away just living on brown rice and miso soup and vegetables and it just evolved from there. But so many people look at that as a burden, some form of new burden that they take on or cross that they bear that they are eating that way and there is no happiness associated with it. And you have turned that whole concept on its head.

Colleen: Well, I cannot take credit for that necessarily, but that is definitely how I perceive it as well and that is what I try to teach.

John: Where did you then evolved to realized you want to do more than just do it yourself, which is always to me the way to do things in terms of becoming a leader? My favorite poem, which is the shortest poem in the world and the easiest one when I had to remember, when I was a child growing up was by Muhammad Ali. It goes like this, it is real simple, “Me, we” and it is literally one of the most powerful poems and it applies to you. You started this journey 21 years ago. When did you decide it should be “we”? When did you decide there is more to this and that you have got a voice and a message to share that is important that others have to hear and then you started moving forward?

Colleen: Yeah. It was probably even more than 21 years ago because when I was vegetarian, I… so the answer is very quickly because my perception was “I did not know this, now I know this and now this is what I am doing.” So if other people know this, they will make different decisions and I can help them through that transition. I was always very naturally a problem solver and a solution seeker, I should say.

John: Okay.

Colleen: So, even when I was just vegetarian and still eating other animal products, I immediately wanted to learn more “no more” and teach others. And so I have these memories of when I had my little— I do not know, first Macintosh Apple computer with a clip art and I was making my own brochures and flyers about puppy mills, about vegetarianism, about vivisection and testing on animals, and I just immediately started doing outreach. I was always very inclined toward that. When I became vegan, it was stepped up tenfold because the passion and the response you have, it is just true when you eliminate all of it, I think you just feel more able, freer, more liberated because you are not connected to the violence anymore. When you are vegetarian, you are still kind of are, you are still making excuses. I did. I made excuses. I ate whatever you call it, humane milk and humane eggs and free-range this, because you still want to perceive yourself as a good person without having to make too many changes.

John: Of course.

Colleen: That is what I did. But when you become vegan, it really is the step into “I am completely awake. My eyes are wide open. What I know now, it is horrible and painful to hold but I am not part of it and I can just feel a lot more free.” And so when you become vegan, that is why there are a lot of passionate vegans because you are just so awake and aware and you want to shake everybody and you want everyone to see what you see. That is why it stepped up for me tenfold when I became vegan and I quite literally did that. It has always been outreach and education for me and kind of framing this all in a way that is accessible for people so that it taps into their own compassion. I always say that I am not asking anybody to live according to my values. I am urging people to live according to their own values because most people, whether it is health or ethics, it does not matter. It can be both obviously, but if you are not living according to your deepest values every day, we are off. Something is off and we are not connected to that. That was for me, it has always been about education and outreach. I started leafleting. I know that sounds so dramatic, but it was wonderful. I actually really enjoyed this part of my advocacy. I used to do Street TV. I used to stand on the street and show slaughter videos and hand out “why vegan” pamphlets and have these wonderful conversations with people who would be in tears and trust me with their pain and trust me with their questions. That was when I realized I really love this role. I really love being able to help people through that and answer the questions about protein and about eating out and about traveling and about protein and about cooking and making lunches and about protein and all of the things that we still get. I loved it. And so that just kept me going. Okay. What else? What is next? Oh, people do not know what to cook. Okay. With my masters in English literature, let me teach them how to cook. Right? Whatever I could do to give people the tools they needed to live according to their values. That is how it happened for me. It was very organic, but it has always been toward “How can I give people the tools they need to do the thing that they feel strongly about?”

John: Well, first of all, let us go back to the protein issue because I just got to ask you the question that I am sure you have been asked more than any other question. Because veganism, you cannot get enough protein, how many people do you know or have you met or that have died of a protein deficiency? Because of course, we know that you cannot get enough protein as a vegan, isn’t that correct?

Colleen: That is right. That is right. That is really the gist and that is the gist. I mean you said it, diseases that we are suffering from in industrialized and Western countries and Western areas. Their diseases are excess. They are not diseases of deficiency. I do not know anybody with Kwashiorkor, which is the scientific term for protein deficiency. I do not know anybody with Scurvy. I do not know anybody with rickets. Those are diseases of deficiency, and that is not our problem.

John: Right.

Colleen: What we have are diseases of excess, which is the heart disease, the cancer, the diabetes, high blood pressure, high cholesterol, etc. Those are diseases of excess. That is why you will find cardiac specialist and cardiovascular wards in hospitals. You will not find Kwashiorkor specialist or Scurvy specialist in the United States or in Western countries. And so, of course, but that is what we have all been fed. That is what we have all been taught.

John: For our listeners who are just joining us, we have got Colleen Patrick-Goudreau with us, a.k.a the joyful vegan. To find Colleen and her amazing work, which we are going to get into right now. You can go to www.joyfulvegan.com. Colleen, go back to English literature. You went from that as your classic education. How did you become not only the social advocate and this animal advocate, but even more specifically you became an entrepreneur maker? You are no longer a taker, you became a maker. How did you go from English Lit to becoming a prolific, not only writer, but cook? I mean, did you have any cooking in your background for our listeners out there? Just listen to this. Seven best-selling books: The Joy of Vegan Baking, The Vegan Table, Color Me Vegan, Vegan’s Daily Companion, On Being Vegan, The 30-day Vegan Challenge, and now also The Joyful Vegan: How to Stay Vegan in a World That Wants You to Eat Meat, Dairy and Eggs? I mean, English Lit I can see helps you become a writer, but I mean cooking and all that experience and making and having the guts to make? Most people have lots of dreams, but becoming a maker and entrepreneur, whole different skill set.

Colleen: That is really lovely. Thank you. That is really lovely to hear that.

John: Sure.

Colleen: That is that is lovely. Thank you. I get that I am stubborn. I am driven. I am a doer. I used to joke that on my headstone, it would be just “she got stuff done.” I just am a doer. I do not do everything perfectly. I mean there is lots that I do not do well. I mean, I do not feel like I have a head for business etcetera, but I can write and I can use the skills that I have. That is what I have always held onto. What are you good at? What do you love? What is my contribution? And the answer was communication. I mean I would say even more broadly than just… writing has always been my passion, but the higher categories really, communication. So even teaching the cooking classes, even though I am writing the recipes and the cookbooks, I will be honest. A lot of that is communication, because you have to anticipate the reader. That is about communication. When I am writing a recipe, I am thinking about who is reading this. Writing recipes, teaching cooking classes, writing books, obviously writing a sentence, writing podcast, whatever I am doing, it is about communication. I think the thing that characterizes all of those things, the thread that runs through all of them certainly is my passion, but it is also my ability to communicate this information in a way that will empower people and inspire people. So the answer is I love finding ways to frame this information or any information in a way that people can walk away saying “I never thought about it like that or I can do that or that is an interesting way to look at it.” That is my goal. I want them to feel, the reader or the listener to feel inspired, to feel empowered. The cooking part, again like I said, I do think some of that is communication, but I know I was not trained ever at all in the culinary arts. I always loved to cook and I have always loved to share food with people and as an offering quite literally as a gift. I think it is a gift to be able to share food with people and give them good, healthy food. I have always loved that but I could tell you right now, you asked me when I was 10 or 20 or 30 if I would be teaching cooking, and that is not all I do obviously, but I would have said you are crazy. That is not on my list at all. I see it for me as a means for communicating the values and the issues of compassion and wellness. I see it a means to the end as opposed to the end in itself.

John: That is fascinating, but also your making is gone way beyond. Now you have this website joyfulvegan.com and you do weekly live and on-demand cooking classes. Can you share with our listeners what that looks like and feels like and how that is working for you?

Colleen: Oh, it has been so wonderful. I am so thrilled. I used to teach cooking classes. I taught them for 10 or 15 years. I taught my own for about 10 years and then I was teaching for Dr. McDougall and some other folks.

John: Wow.

Colleen: Yeah. For a long time. But about five years ago, I think now I stopped because it is a lot of work, John.

John: Yeah.

Colleen: It is a lot of prepping and shopping and lugging all the food and driving and setting up, doing the teaching and then setting everything up, breaking everything down and do all the dishes and bringing everything back home. It is a lot of work and I wish I could do it. I love teaching live. However, because it was too much work and I do not have my own cooking studio and I am not planning on doing that. When covid happened, it was a really interesting thing. It was not because of covid, I was teaching, I was hosting conferences in person here in Oakland. I was calling them compassion and action conferences and we did three years in a row and then when it was time for the next one with the book coming out, I just did not have the bandwidth to do it. So we decided to host it online and a very good friend who is also been an assistant to me over the many years. She trained me on everything I needed to know for Zoom, to do conference online. That one in February and that was very successful and after covid. By April, when I realized that people are locked down. We all need some joy, we all need some food, we all need some kind of practical skills. I just said “Wait a second. Why don’t I just offer a cooking class? Do it on Zoom and see if anybody signs up. Because at least with this kind of cooking class I do not have to first reserve the space and see who is going to come and how much it is going to be to rent the space and how many people I need to make that money back, whatever. I could just say “Hey! I will just put it out there and see if people are interested.” Now, it is September and I have classes scheduled almost to the end of the year. I am working on those, but I have been teaching them weekly now since April and clearly people are interested and clearly, people are looking for these kind of things. It has been amazing.

John: You know, you are not only a prolific writer, a best-selling author and now all also doing these classes on your website, and again for our listeners, it is www.joyfulvegan.com. But also on your website is your great important podcast Food for Thought. Share a little bit about that platform and the voice that you share over that platform for our listeners who are interested.

Colleen: Well, the podcast is very close to my heart. It is something I started doing 14 or 15 years ago now.

John: Wow.

Colleen: So it is kind of old school and frankly, I am probably old school. There is lot more sleek, modern, hip podcasts out there, but I started doing mine really is not an essay. I mean my podcast have always been me speaking. It surprises a lot of people, especially those who listen because you do not think, I mean, I hope and this is what I have been told that you cannot tell that I am reading, but I write out every one of my episodes before I record.

John: Wow.

Colleen: What that means is these are basically essays. I have a thought, I want to convey and I want to do it in the clearest way possible. And so I start from the beginning to the end like you would write an essay and I take my listeners on a journey with me. For 15 years or 14, it is going on 15 years next year, people have been sticking with me and loving it. Yeah, I tackle everything related to living compassionately and healthfully, whether it is food, whether it is myths about veganism, whether it is nutrition, whether it is animals, animal advocacy, communication and just living a good life. That is really what the podcast is about. So, I love my podcast and I cannot imagine not doing it. The classes have been taking a precedence right now just because there is so much of it weekly.

John: Right. Given that we are all living through this very difficult period of covid-19, do you feel that when we get to the other side of this, Colleen, and we go to hopefully some form of new better, are people going to now be taking care of their health more than ever? Because it has become obvious statistically that those who have the worst results from covid-19, if they are infected by it, have comorbidities that are tied to diet; heart disease, diabetes, overweight and other of those comorbidities have given the worst results. Is this a bellwether for the future that people are going to now use this as a wake-up call or do you feel otherwise?

Colleen: I wish that were the case. I wish everything were the thing that we receive should be the bellwether for the change that needs to happen. It will be the case for some. It will be the case for some and it will not be the case for all but something else will be the case for others. This is what it looks like and this is why you have to keep doing the work. You are doing and I have to keep doing the work I am doing because there will be some people who make that connection and seek out resources to make the change.

John: Right.

Colleen: It will be this that compels them to do. So just like for you, it was the feeling you had and the book that you read, and for me it was the feelings I had in the book I read. For others it is covid, for others it is going to be a heart attack, for some people it is going to be seeing an animal suffer. For some people it is just going to be meeting a vegan. It is just different for everybody and all we can do and to not go insane, all we can do as the people doing our work, is to do our work and not be attached to who is going to respond to it. That is the way I have kept saying as an advocate and as someone who does this work is when people thank me for doing this work. Honestly, the gratitude is to the people who find my work. It would be nothing if I did not have listeners. My podcast would mean nothing if people did not listen.

John: Right.

Colleen: My books would be nothing if people did not read them. It is because people seek out the information that I am able to do it. It will always be some but it is not going to be all. I am hopeful but I do not think it is going to be a panacea.

John: Hmm. I love the title of your new book, The Joyful Vegan: How to Stay Vegan in a World That Wants You to Eat Meat, Dairy and Eggs. For our listeners out there, you can find all of Colleen’s books on her website on amazon.com and at a good bookstore around the United States in the world. Listen, Colleen. The title is important. I want to go into the importance of what you wrote about in that book. Talk a little bit about the push-pull of writing that book and the pressure that you were under from big industry, big business to eat the junk that is out there, but also talk of concurrently about since we have spoken last, the rise of possible burgers beyond meat [inaudible], the most delicious vegan cheese’s I have ever tasted in my life and the rise of that new industry. How is that all weighing out? Is it easier to be a vegan today than ever before or is it more difficult because of the social, peer and business pressure that we are under the title of your book?

Colleen: So I wrote this book because I know how good it feels to make a change like this and I also know that people struggle. I know that people struggle staying joyful, but also staying joyfully vegan or just vegan. One of the reason they do not stay vegan is because, I would argue, is that because they are lacking some joy. I wrote this book because I really wanted to put my finger on why do people struggle, why do people stop being vegan. What are the warning signs, the danger signs, and how can I give them tools to be able to stay vegan? And again, I am just going to say it. How can I give them the tools to continue to reflect their deepest values in their daily behavior? Because that is what it is. Being vegan is not an end in itself. It is not a club to join. It is not a badge to wear. It is the means to an end, and that end is unconditional compassion and optimal wellness. So, how can I give people the tools so that they can continue to feel empowered and emboldened to live according to their values without being shaky, without being threatened? Those threats come from the inside, it comes from us and those threats come from the outside. One of the outside sources you named already is the industries that have money to make, but I am just going to say it before I answer the second part.

John: Sure.

Colleen: That it also comes from us. If we do not feel confident enough to stand up for what we believe in, if we did not learn the communication skills to be able to convey the values that we have, to be able to say “Yes, I am vegan and I love it because I do not want to hurt anybody” without feeling like we are going to step on someone else’s toes because they are going to feel guilty that we are vegan and they are not. If we are hung up on all that stuff, we are not going to be able to just be settled and content. All our own internalized struggle, it is getting the pushback, it is getting jokes, it is feeling like we do not belong, it is feeling out of place, it is traveling and feeling like where am I going to eat? There are all these internal struggles that if we do not feel confident and embolden and empowered just being a little different which we are, it is kind of going against the norm, not conforming to eating animal products. Then we are not going to stay vegan. Some of the struggle is not just from the external, it is from internal. It is the pressure we feel and that includes how we internalize the messages we are getting from big business. That is still on us, right?

John: Right.

Colleen: That is really what all I can do is say “Here are some skills to be able to withstand all of it, whether it is coming from friends or family or social pressures or media or marketing or the big business, or your own discomfort.” The only thing we can all do is how we handle it individually. That is what this book is about, is the kind of these common threads that we all experience when we have this awakening, whether we do it for health or ethics, and then how to make sure that we feel secure in staying that way. As far as your question “Is it easier to be vegan with all of the wonderful plant-based commercial products out there?”

John: Right.

Colleen: I would say actually, my answer to that would be “I do not think it is easier to be vegan. I think it is easier for non-vegans to eat these foods as opposed to eat “vegan food.” Now vegan food has been around for thousands of years. They are called plants. The idea that now there is renaissance of vegan, we have had vegan food, it is called plants. And so, we always had opportunities to eat. It is about convenience. Now there is more convenient plant-based foods and they happen to be pretty processed. Now I am not someone who is anti-processed food. You take a peanut, you make peanut butter. That is a processed food. So I am not opposed to processing our food. There is little processed and there is highly processed and we can talk about that. So for me, it is more that there is the availability of convenience foods that non-vegans and vegans alike can have access to and the real trick, the real golden key is making them as affordable as animal products. The problem is the subsidies of the… it is mostly the grain. It is mostly the grains that is fed to the animals. It is the grazing land that the government allows ranchers to use. That is actually tax-supported land etc. Because all of those things that make animal products cheap, there is the perception that anything that is not an animal product, if it is a plant food whether it is a whole plant food or processed, commercial vegan product that it is more expensive. The thing is that is not more expensive, it is that meat and animal products are so artificially cheap. Are we going to change the public’s view on that? For some, yes, but not for all. In the end, they are going to want convenience and they are going to want low cost. The onus now is unfortunately on these vegan companies or I would say the companies who are making these plant-based products. They are not all necessarily vegan companies, which is fine.

John: Right.

Colleen: …to not only make them taste great, not only to have great marketing, to have great distribution, but also to get the cost down. That is a lot of pressure for these companies. What I am seeing and I know you are seeing it as well, you are seeing the large animal product companies, the meat and dairy companies, purchase or invest in big companies because they are thinking “Hey, wait a second. I could make products that are going to be better for the public. I can market them in terms of them being better for the public.” Look, there are CEOs of these companies who do have scruples. They are not all evil people. They are making animal products because that is what they have always done or known. They are on their own journey as well. I think their products are awful and it is horrible and it is creating a violent system that is hurting animals and people. My point is that when they buy these vegan companies, they are doing it because it could make money.

John: Right.

Colleen: They are seeing that there is money to be made in vegan products. So that is one of the ways we are going to see these company, these products go down in price, but you are still competing against a subsidized system. But there is hope, there is so much hope and I am excited about that. Now, I have been vegan for a long time. Do I like those products? Absolutely. I love them. I support them. Do I eat them a lot? No, mostly because I just really like whole foods, but that is just me.

John: Got it.

Colleen: It is not like I am not against them. I want everyone to have access to them. I hear vegans complain about them for this reason. I hear plant-based people complain about them for that. Just everybody embraced the change that is happening and it is a good thing and let us celebrate the fact that they are not animal. That is a good thing.

John: Before we say our sign off for today, I want you to share any message about the future where you want to take. You have such an important and critical voice. Listen, I have been a vegetarian 40 years of vegan or so, 12 to 15 years and I believe so much and I vote with my pocketbook. My wife and I vote with our pocketbook. We have invested in vegan restaurant chains and other things because we believe. We want to live our ethos and like you do as well. When people show an inkling of interest in veganism or just living better or healthier, I send them to your website. You are, to me, one of the most important voices of the Health, Nutrition, Wellness in America right now, and I do not see that stopping. I always see that growing. Where do you want to take the important platform that you have built and take it into the future? Where do you see you going next?

Colleen: Gosh. I just want to just keep spreading the message of… again, I want people to listen to their own conscience. And I want people to listen to their own hearts and their own desires, and to feel empowered and to not be beholden to the past, to not be beholden to who they were before, what they did before, what others are telling them, but be beholden to what you know to be right and what you know to be true and you can never go wrong. You can just never go wrong. This concept of compassion, self-compassion, compassion for others is as old as the hills. This is nothing new. My message is not about some newfangled philosophy. We talk about veganism like it is some kind of new-fangled modern-day friend. This is compassion and it is about wellness and that is what I just want to keep conveying to people is that, again, manifest your deepest values in your daily behavior and you will reap benefits you cannot even anticipate. That is my hope for the future.

John: Thank you and you are always welcome back on the Impact Podcast to share any message, talk about one of your new books, podcasts or anything you have got going. This is why I do this as a mission, and it is so important to get your voice out there as much as we can. So thank you for all the great work with you. For our listeners out there that want to find Colleen and her great work and important work, please go to www.joyfulvegan.com. You could find her weekly live and on-demand cooking classes. You can find her podcast and you can find her new book, The Joyful Vegan: How to Stay Vegan in a World That Wants You to Eat Meat, Dairy and Eggs on amazon.com, on her website. Colleen, you are truly a gem of a human being. We need more of you in this world. I wish there was more of you. You are making an impact and making the world a better and healthier place. And for that, I am grateful. Thank you for joining us today on the Impact Podcast.

Colleen: 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 am John Shegerian, and I am so excited to have with us today, Kate Fazzini. Welcome to the Impact Podcast, Kate.

Kate Fazzini: Hi, John. I am really excited to be here. Thank you for having me.

John: You know Kate, you are a fascinating person. I am so excited that you are here today because you are so unique. You are the CEO of Flore Albo, you are a cybercrime expert, you have just created this new venture, and you also have a fascinating background. So, for our listeners that do not know about you yet, share a little bit your journey has been leading up to the point of founding Flore Albo.

Kate: Sure. I am happy too. I am going to do a little disclaimer here because I actually just hosted an event for an organization called CyberPOL that is based in Europe. I was on Tel Aviv time for ten hours. I started at one in the morning and I finished at about eleven. So, if anything comes up rusty just please forgive me.

John: Wow.

Kate: I am running on fumes.

John: Got it.

Kate: I think if I forget anything about my past… So, thank you so much. I have a cybersecurity communications firm called Flore Albo. I started out a very long time ago dabbling in cybersecurity, working for independent clients here and there, and I was also a journalist, and then I was fortunate to get hired at JPMorgan Chase and I had this wonderful experience there. I was there from 2011 to 2015. So there were just– I mean if you can remember all of the incredible interesting cybersecurity stories around those times, it was a crash course. I was brought on as a communications person to JPMorgan and I was very quickly given to what was called then IT Risk and Security Management, the team that managed IT, but they did not have a cybersecurity, they did not actually have a CISO at the time. So, the cybersecurity team fit underneath that IT risk banner. It is kind of an unusual org structure today. So I got a chance to see up close and personal this incredible, very dramatic organizational shift and I was right there on the executive team working with people to communicate this.

Kate: Not long after that, they offered to help me get my Master’s Degree in Cybersecurity, and they promoted me and they brought me into the cybersecurity program which was amazing. This was all coinciding with the birth of my son, my first child. It was a really busy, crazy time. I got my Master’s Degree. I later went from JPMorgan to a consulting firm called Promontory Financial Group, which is now a part of IBM, and we were kind of the boutique consultancy focused on regulatory issues, and I, again, at this amazing opportunity to see inside some of the world’s biggest technology companies who are clients of some of the other big financials besides JPMorgan and some of the mid-sized whereas, I am sure you are aware, there is an enormous disparity in what they can do in cybersecurity, and it was again this incredible experience. Then, from there, when IBM made the excision I got laid off, along with a lot of other folks, and it was just at a time when the Wall Street Journal was trying to hire some cybersecurity reporters, and I thought, “You know, that sounds really cool. I wonder if I could do that,” and they hired me for whatever reason.

John: You sound shocked! I mean, come on, you should say “They hired me.”

Kate: I have been a– so I started out my career as a journalist, I worked for The Columbus Dispatch in Columbus, Ohio. I had gone to Ohio State and– I mean, working at The Wall Street Journal would have been a dream and I thought, well, I am giving that up to go work in cybersecurity, and then it was sort of like it all came together. It was the most amazing experience of my life. It was incredible, just being there around the buzz of that news room. I often tell people that there was an editor who had– this kind of guy, who would call him and curse him out all of the time, and he would like put the voicemails on speakerphone and it was hilarious, and then it turned out later on that man was Michael Cohen.

John: Oh my gosh. Oh my gosh.

Kate: How cool is that?

John: That is really cool.

Kate: I love being at the center of things and that was just such a cool experience. Then I got pulled in to CNBC after that. I consider this all kind of one troublesome journey.

John: Yes.

Kate: Then I got to another incredibly cool front-row seat. I got to learn about the TV side of that business and how to talk about cybersecurity in a way that was very, very high level, even more high level than at the journal in sound bites. It was just so valuable and all through this weird and exciting journey, I just kept noticing the holes, the disconnects, and one of the things that I have talked about at this conference earlier today is the fact that if I go back and look at the metrics, I have written hundreds of stories on cybersecurity, if I look at the metrics the stories that do the best are the ones that outline for a personal cost. We spend so much time in cybersecurity and with this really kind of warlike companies, everything is very crowd strike, great company, but certainly, the imagery is there and most of them sort of follow suit. It is war.

John: Winners and losers.

Kate: Yes, exactly. Exactly. That is perfect because that is then how we end up treating employees if you do something wrong. You need to be punished if you did something stupid. I am saying there is a way to engage people. We kind of know what it is. We know what they are interested in. Let us engage with them in a different way. Let us educate them. So I have been building educational modules. I work with a lot of universities. If you see the logo, it is a tulip. It is very feminine. That is actually like I– we talk about women in cybersecurity a lot, I think we need a little femininity in cybersecurity too. We need, and I do not know if that is going to be a controversial thing to say, but-

John: No!

Kate: -the soft touch.

John: That is not, and we are going to get back to that. For our listeners out there that want to reach you or want to connect with you, your website, which is just newly been put up and it has a contact form, so they could go to www.florealbo, f-l-o-r-e-a-l-b-o.com, florealbo.com and they can fill out the contact form and reach you, and it is a beautiful logo. As you said to me off-air, before we went on the air, it means…?

Kate: So Flore Albo means white flower in Latin. It is something that has held a lot of meaning for me. So, at the early part of the century, white flowers were a term that was often used for women who were shopgirls in these big department stores, and they were the ones who would kind of take all of the chaos and make it look like you just walked into this very nice studio and, “Would you not like to sit down and buy what we are selling?” My grandmother was actually a white flower in the Lazarus Department Stores in Ohio. So, I like to bring that same mentality of we have this huge logistic operation behind the scenes going on, but we want you to see, we want you to buy into what we are trying to sell you in terms of how to be safer, how to keep corporate assets safer. That is what I am trying to do. I know that I am supposed to have an elevator speech…

John: No, you are not. No. I love this.

Kate: An elevator speech when you hit the button, stop the doors from opening.

John: You are a newly minted entrepreneur, Kate. This is better. This is actually– really, it is actually great, and it is really important. Woman moving up the ranks and through every glass ceiling that ever existed in every sector, but why not cyber, which as you said has been so winners and losers, war-oriented, testosterone-driven. This makes so sense. This makes a lot of sense.

Kate: I am glad. I am glad it is landing. I am not saying that approach is even a wrong one, there certainly are reasons to take that approach, but it often, and again, it goes back to– I am sure a lot of listeners do not– it is hard to maybe envision on the other side of the journalism spectrum how much in terms of metrics that we just as reporters are able to see about our stories, like immediately how many people are reading it, how long they are reading it for, how they are forwarding it. I mean, it depends on the tool that you are using but you can see so much, and in almost every case, the stories that did really well were stories about extortion emails, these like scammy spam emails. This was not about Iran cyber attacking a dam, which is a very interesting story.

John: Right, right.

Kate: But, people, I mean, millions and mill– the difference was millions of people engaged versus maybe a few thousand, and if you think about that in terms of a corporation you want to have all two hundred thousand of your employees more interested in this and it is that personal approach and it is not– I think in cybersecurity, a lot of times I hear, “What is it going to take for people to pay attention? What is it going to take for them to understand? They should care about this more.” Well, you might think that, but what they care more about is being embarrassed in front of their friends, losing a few thousand dollars to ransomware, certainly if they are a business owner they have a lot of exposure, but they care about, and that makes sense, and there is nothing wrong with that. So, trying to reach people where they are, I think, is one of the big solutions here.

John: It is. I want to go back to a couple– I want to unpack some of those things you just said. First of all, one of the messages, “Sex even sells in cybersecurity.”

Kate: Yes.

John: Okay. Okay, so just to be clear. I am just going to unpack this. To go back to the metrics part, because that is fascinating, just as a journalist, we will leave cyber out of that part of it, but go back to that vertical of the discussion in terms of, “Does then do we become, as journalists, a journalist becomes so metric-centric that it then dictates the kind of articles they will write in the future as they see other of their work product succeed or fail based upon– even if it was a great work product that did not get a lot of forwards or readership, will you then go cover more on the topics that are getting forwarded and read?”

Kate: No. I will say absolutely, that happens. I was really fortunate to be in a position– because the Wall Street Journal, they are really, really heavily focused on just it being good reporting. At CNBC, I found to be very much the same way where it was not– I came on as a specialist. It was not this enormous metrics heavy focus. However, it is one way to see that people are engaged and that your story is doing well. So I would try to control for things like a breaking news story. So Facebook came out with a story about a breach, they announced it and we are able to get up a headline really quickly, that story might do a few hundred thousand views, but with the caveat that people are going to click really fast, it is like a three-paragraph, four-paragraph story, I did not really count those as the ones that I would say these are the ones that did the best because they were just very kind of quick and dirty. You will see with some headlines, the clickbait headlines, which I just despise, I think we all do.

John: Right, right.

Kate: Where it says, “Find out how this thing works,” and it is just like, “Why do not you tell me? Why do not you just tell me in the headlines?” That is how it is supposed to work.

John: Right

Kate: But you do see some of those quick hit, clickbait-y things doing really well. There are other tricks like if you put Mark Zuckerberg in the headline it tends to do really well. So, you will see Mark Zuckerberg shoved into a headline where he does not belong, like a conference featuring Mark Zuckerberg starts at three o’clock, and it is like, no, that does not count. I would try, if I was going through my head of, “Was this something that got a lot of views for other reasons or not?” And then, you have this, it is a really hard for the news business right now because for a long time they had this model that was based on revenue, based on, you know, you could prove your viewers just like the guy in Times Square with the clicker, counting people looking up at your sign, and that is how they would determine how much a sign would get. What has happened with COVID is that advertisers have pulled back anyway, coverage is getting– like the news channels now, I mean, look at the news. It is insane, like every day is new insanity and they are just getting tons and tons of play, advertisers are still pulling back. So you are looking if this model is going to work anymore, I do not think it is. I think that there is a lot of– so there are going to be a lot of people trying to figure that out really fast as to what is going on.

John: When you were in a quiet place thinking about what your next venture or step in your career was going to be, what voids were you filling in the marketplace when you started Flore Albo? Why? In terms of, Kate, in terms of was it just because you think cyber is going to be one of the greatest trends in the next ten years, or is it a combination of that and also you are going to soften up a little bit the approach to it in terms of being more accessible. I will tell you, and I want our listeners to know this, I met you because you were much different than others. I am approached all the time on cyber opportunities, cyber issues, et cetera, and I reached out to you and you were very different in how you handled my reach out than other folks, more male-oriented folks in the cyber industry. So where were you looking in terms of– because when entrepreneurs are trying to figure out something that really interests them, total addressable markets and what they think the future is of that industry and if it is even personal to them, what categories were you checking there and what other metrics were you considering when you started your new company?

Kate: So there were two things that had just bothered me for a really long time ever since I had started at JPMorgan Chase, is things– and by the way, thank you, John. I should have said that first. Thank you for reaching out to me. I really appreciate it. This has been great. So, there were two main things that had always bothered me. One of them was there was this constant struggle because somewhere between 2011 and 2015, all that listeners guess when, cybersecurity where I was working went from a very back burner arcane sort of discipline to absolutely having meetings every week with the board of directors. So they needed that board-level presentation, that was one of the things that I helped work on. They needed a weekly board-level presentations and it was not just that, it was that polish, that bankers polish, explaining things, not getting agitated when somebody does not know what a DDoS attack is. If you have talked with a cybersecurity person you know what I am talking about, where we would not spell and they would be like, “What are you talking about?”

John: Right.

Kate: Just helping the people who were decision-makers really understand what the problem was and what their role is and doing something about it. There was this huge gap between we had these amazing capable cybersecurity people, and throughout the company, we had these amazing communications people, graphic designers and things, that could never get together. We never had the budget for an outside firm because if you are a cybersecurity group, how are you going to say, “I need somebody to come in and make PowerPoints.” I remember reading job descriptions where they would describe basically a PowerPoint ninja, like that is all you want, you just want somebody who is good at PowerPoint, but it would say, “You need the CISSP and all of these cybersecurity certifications,” and I am thinking, “You are not going to find somebody who has all those cybersecurity certs who wants to make PowerPoints for a living.”

Kate: So, I wanted to bridge that gap of you have these cybersecurity organizations that have a lot they need to say, they are not necessarily a quick to say it, and you have to have somebody there to quickly not get on a waiting list, which was something we experienced. They have to be able to do it within a couple of hours sometimes, and it was not just a big breach, we would have– I saw in Promontory two issues, like a really minor issue somewhere in Japan always came up because they have a few different regulations than everybody is used to. So something would go wrong, and then you would have to do this remediation plan before you got a regulatory finding in Japanese and English, and it was sort of like pulling all of that together in a timely fashion was very, very difficult and being culturally aware and making sure that everything fit what their offices did because obviously, we do not have retail branches there. That was a huge challenge. So being able to have a firm, somebody in the middle who you can call and can quickly turn that stuff around and you know it is going to be accurate and you are not going to have to explain to a poor marketing person what a DDoS attack is over and over again.

John: Right.

Kate: And you are not going to have to explain to a cybersecurity person why he has to like chill out when he is in the boardroom and that is it is. It bridges that gap.

John: Got it.

Kate: The other thing was in education. We needed so much spot education. This came up at Georgetown too. I actually built a program for cybersecurity communications that is part of their applied intelligence program now that I teach. There were no courses out there like that. Now, there were people who, and I would meet at conferences, who would say, “Oh, we have all of the stuff that you need for that kind of course,” and this could have been the cybersecurity communications course or like a corporate course, let us say training information risk managers how to do their jobs really well, how to convince people in investment bank to slow down their production so that they can do their job very difficult. So I built these courses for Georgetown and then I saw that there is a way to do it kind of in a modular way, so that, again, when you are bringing on let us say business information security officers and your staffing up an entire organization of those people, how do you train them? What you do is you say to the CISO, “Just make some training,” or “Write down the stuff you want to do.” Again, when you put anything else on this poor person’s plate–

John: Who is already overwhelmed. He is already overwhelmed.

Kate: Right.

John: Right.

Kate: And is not an expert in education. So I brought on a couple of people too that had worked with me at JPMorgan Chase who are working with me now, and also just some people who are really good education builders and the different platforms that the technology platforms that there are for that blackboard and canvas or the big ones. We have been helping a couple of universities.

John: That is great.

Kate: Just starting their– build up their cybersecurity program and have it be really relevant and not based on ten or twenty-year-old textbooks. Have it be just relevant from the voices of the people doing the jobs. Those are the two holes I was trying to–

John: Okay. So, commercial hole and educational hole, and I do not want to glance over the fact, you are so humble, I do not want to glance over the fact you are a professor at Georgetown University.

Kate: Thank you.

John: Right? Okay. I just want to make sure that I get that out for our listeners. Again, for our listeners who just joined us, we have got Kate Fazzini. She is the CEO and founder of Flore Albo. You can find Kate and contact her through her website www.flore, f-l-o-r-e, albo, a-l-b-o.com. You know, Kate, let us also– and by the way, I am just going to say this in truth in advertising, our firm is going to do work with Kate. I think she is amazing. That is why I am having her on the show today, and that is how we got Kate on the show because we contacted for commercial purposes. I think if you are interested or you need help, she is the person to contact. Kate, let us go back to COVID-19 and where we are in cybercrime. Is it fair to say in 2020 and beyond, so far where we are, cybercrime pays? Given that in the recent statistics that I read, but correct me if I am wrong, the cybercriminals made away with approximately three trillion dollars in 2015, this year somewhere close to six trillion. Are those correct numbers, generally speaking, and just the cybercrime still pay for the bad guys?

Kate: Cybercrime definitely pays. That I know for sure. The numbers can be so difficult as you know to quantify. I am a numbers nerd. So if I hear a number I need to go back and see the methodology.

John: Okay.

Kate: Sometimes they arrive at it through estimates, but I think that a lot of the estimates honestly are probably underrepresented. They are probably higher, and the reason is that there is a really, really long tradition of anyone but the top regulated companies not reporting the incidents that they are having. Now, we do have some regulations in place now that require those companies to report. GDPR is the one that most people know. The interesting thing about that is that if you are a victim of ransomware, and you pay two million dollars in a ransom because the way that most of these regulations are set up, they describe that the criminal has to actually have the information and be able to view it if it is encrypted on, and technically, they might not be able to see it, there is a little bit of a loophole there. So there are still a lot, a lot, a lot of companies getting ransomed, quietly paying it, and making it go away. It is not legally reportable. In the past, when ransomware first started coming out and other types of like extortion where they would actually read your emails and say your, “Geez, you are a huge jerk. Give me a million dollars and would not tell anyone.” That also was kept very quiet. So I think that those numbers, most of the numbers I have seen I think are probably low.

John: Okay. Let us go back. You just mentioned GDPR. So GDPR gets passed in the EU on May 25th, 2018, and America, as America typically does, says on the federal level, “Well, if the EU is doing that we are going to do it bigger and better,” and they start putting in all different forms of their own version of GDPR to get passed, it has not passed yet, and then the state said, “Well, you guys are too mucked up in all your infighting. We are not going to wait for you. We are going to pass our own versions of GDPR in data and privacy.” So California, Nevada, Maine, and New York go out first, many other states, about twenty other states have some form of pending legislation as well. Is this now the trend, regulating and restricting much more than we ever saw back at Starbucks and HIPAA and anything else, has GDPR come to America, and around the world, by the way, Asia, South America, Middle East, enforce and is it going to continue to tighten the noose on how organizations handle their constituent’s data?

Kate: I absolutely think it will. I think that GDPR is kind of twofold. In some ways, it is much harder on companies. Obviously, you have things like this three-day waiting period that was cut down from thirty days, sometimes ninety days, and other regimes but what has happened is that it makes almost everything, every little piddling crime reportable, many of these companies that touch the EU now, they just report absolutely everything. This is why you get like five hundred emails every month saying that your data has been breached, or it may have been breached, or we think that there was an incident. It is certainly– my opinion is that I do not think that it is very effective because you are just flooding the marketplace with information that people cannot do anything with. “If my data has been breached fifty times, what more can I do other than monitor my credit? I have already got so many credit monitoring in place, there is not much more that I can do.” But, it will definitely keep tightening.

Kate: There is going to be I think a huge reckoning with what the China cybersecurity regulations, China cybersecurity regulations is, I am sure you have been following, require companies they are doing business there to use china-based and operated cloud service providers, and in some cases to open up their source code, and it is a way of, some might say codifying the IP theft that China has been accused of in the past. Others would say that it is just they are trying to protect their own IP from other people who are trying to get the information. Those are the two sides. I think that that is going to be very difficult, as you see with GDPR going towards increased privacy. But some of the other countries, Russia is another one, going towards more surveillance of the corporate activities going on within their borders. You are talking about a really complex back and forth because is it a privacy breach if the Chinese government sees all of your information and you did not give them permission to, but we will require to, so I think that basically, it is a good time to be a lawyer. That is my answer. My mother was right. I should have gone to Law School, unfortunately.

John: I think you are doing just fine Kate. Before we get talking about your great book, Kingdom of Lies, which I have read myself and I want our listeners to read as well, and we are going to talk about that, I want you to share some of the communications, pearls of wisdom that organizations can learn from your experience of being both on the Wall Street Journal and the media side of things but also on the Cyber expert side of things. What are organizations missing in how they relay and share information about their own skillset and other issues that they might have surrounding privacy and data controls in cybersecurity?

Kate: I mean one thing that I have certainly observed is there is definitely a sales mentality within the cyber security space and I see a lot of executives who are in cybersecurity and they have to brief the board, and they come at it with this big agenda, and it is sort of the same thing as a sales call in a way. It is not that I am going to inform them of the real threat, or perhaps they are, but it is not as if I am going to inform the board of a down-to-earth, “Look this is what we are looking at today. This is what we need.” It is that I need money for something and I am going to try to tailor all of my materials to convince the board to give me money for that thing. A lot of times, that will come across as a square peg in a round hole because the board is just reading the Wall Street Journal and they saw that Target’s CEO was fired as a result of this stuff and they want to know like how does that happen and it is a different level of bringing that stuff. You just cannot wedge all of your wishes and hopes into that one meeting or it is not going to go anywhere. I believe that corporations do a better job when they open up a dialogue where there is understanding on both sides of why they need one another and there is not– I think that it is wrong to say that it is bad to be overly technical. It is bad to use big words when they have no meaning.

John: Right.

Kate: I think that you can allot people who do that especially in the technology world. But, boards, Executives CEOs, like C-suite, they do want to know how things happen. They do want to know sort of the technical steps required for things to go wrong and being able to describe that like that inside baseball, “Okay, here is what happened to Equifax. There was a memo. A guy did not get the memo. Chaos ensued.” Just being able to put those steps into clear action, I think that boards really appreciate that. They want to be a part of the solution. They do not want to feel like they do not understand the topic.

John: Got it. For our listeners out there, I have in my hand Kate’s great book. I have read this book, Kingdom of Lies. They steal your identity. They take your money. They ruin your life. Welcome to the Kingdom of Lies, the unnerving adventures in the world of cybercrime. Kate, the book is coming out this week in Poland. It is already out on Amazon where I bought it from, and I asked our listeners to buy it from Amazon or other great book stores in your area. Tell us a little bit about what they could expect to find in your fascinating book because I loved it and I am in this business. So I love you to share what our listeners could expect.

Kate: That is amazing. Thank you so much, John. I am actually blushing. I have not done that in a long time.

John: It is just the lack of sleep. It has nothing to do with my comments.

Kate: Oh, no.

John: I am teasing you. I am teasing you.

Kate: My book actually just came out. It comes out in Poland this week, in Polish, which I think is the coolest thing.

John: It is very cool, by the way. That is very cool.

Kate: It has got this cool cover and I just am so excited to receive my copies and I am doing some Polish Media stuff too. So, my book, it was a lot of what had ended up on the cutting room floor from my previous life and my journalism days, a lot of stories. I got to meet a lot of criminals in my journey, including when I was a consultant. I had a remit from one client to find a certain group of cyber criminals and just find out why they were doing what they were doing and that led me into this really interesting world. I met some really, really interesting people. I met some people who I found out, that despite their turn into the dark side, I had a lot in common with. It was just lots of long-term interview. So you get to see, especially, there is a young woman who I interviewed extensively who grew up in this village in Romania that eventually became a very centralized kind of cybercrime village where you have a lot of people who are doing ransomware, other types of malicious software, living in the same area. She just described this scene of this little very quaint village that she had grown up in and then all of a sudden there were lots of money, people coming in flashy cars, and the whole tenor change and then she ends up sort of inadvertently going to work for one of these. I am in quotation marks saying companies. I was just struck by as I continue to be the business like structure of the criminal organizations and how it is often similar to the corporate structure. There are so many overlaps. There are often just as many bad guys. Some of them just happen to wear suits, others wear suits but are… I do not want to do a hoodie thing. I think most people would kill me for that but…

John: But they are organized. They are very organized.

Kate: Exactly. They are very organized. They are very businesslike.

John: Right.

Kate: I ran into some of these groups that had customer service lines where if you were being ransomed you could call. There was a nice lady and she spoke English and she could tell you like, “Okay, do not panic. You can just send the money here and it is all–”

John: It is unbelievable. It is just unbelievable.

Kate: It is such an interesting world and I am lucky to have it had been picked up by a big publisher and it has been a wild ride for sure.

John: Is Poland just the beginning of the international journey? Do you feel other countries will–?

Kate: So it was out in the UK, it did really well-

John: Yes.

Kate: -there, later last year. I am interested to see how it will do with coronavirus. I have a few other I think European contracts. It is fun. Once it goes international, I do not have a lot of control over there, so I just sort of wait, then they tell me. Then it is also coming out in Taiwan, which would be the Chinese version, which I think will be interesting because there is quite a bit in there about a former Chinese intelligence official who just kind of goes into a life of crime, and he describes being able to basically steal information and sell it as business intelligence on some freelancer platforms, which I think is a pretty interesting way to do it.

John: I have read a lot of cyber books. Yours is my favorite. I highly recommend it to our listeners. Again, it is Kingdom of Lies. It is on Amazon and other great places you can buy books. Kate, this is your show. I am so honored to have you today. I want you to have the last word before I have to say goodbye.

Kate: All right. Well, first of all, thank you. I feel like maybe my mother called you before this and told you to say only nice things to me.

John: She asked me not to say anything.

Kate: Okay. Oh, no, I mean, I am so honored. I have had a really wild journey. I have had– with COVID happening I think we have all had a chance to re-evaluate things. I had maybe thought about launching a company very far down the line, but I was really fortunate that my company got selected for the Goldman Sachs 10,000 Small Businesses program, and I am now learning how to be an entrepreneur and think in a different way. I think it is going to be a great journey. I am a mother too and this virus has hit families really hard, and in a way, it was the perfect time for me to leave the nine-to-five world. When I was thinking about my goals, and it is going to sound kind of low level, but when I was thinking about my goals at the beginning of this year, I thought, “I want to be able to pick my kids up after school.” I can work after that before, but I just want to be there and I am tired of working through that moment, and this has helped me do it. You know what, at the end of the day, that is what makes me so happy.

John: Kate that is all that matters, if it makes you happy. That is a great goal by the way. That is a great goal, and good for you, and you should. For our listeners out there that want to find Kate and want to hire her firm or her services, either for commercial purposes in cybersecurity or education, please go again to www.florealbo f-l-o-r-e, albo a-l-b-o.com. Kate, you are making a huge impact as a woman entrepreneur in the cybersecurity space, thank you. As an educator, thank you. You are making the world a safer and therefore better place, and thank you for being our guest today on the Impact Podcast.

Kate: Thank you so much, John. I really appreciate it.

John Shegerian: This edition of the Impact Podcast is brought to you by Engage. Engage is a digital booking engine revolutionising the talent booking industry. With hundreds of athletes, entrepreneurs, speakers, and business leaders, Engage is the go-to spot for booking talent, for your next event. For more information, please visit, letsengage.com.

John: Welcome to another edition of the Impact Podcast, I am John Shegerian. I am so honored to have with us today, my long time friend and great human being, Scott Silverman. Welcome to the Impact, Scott.

Scott Silverman: John, thanks so much, and any time somebody calls me a great human being I feel like next time we physically connect, I got to buy you a cup of coffee.

John: Well, either that or we are going to least give each other big hug, was hopefully it is after we get through this Covid crisis and be just nice to hug people again.

Scott: Well, if you want to hug me, you got to keep your mask on brother.

John: No problem. No problem at all. That is no problem at all. I want to get into all the important work you are doing as a crisis coach, or family navigator, the owner, and entrepreneur of yourcrisiscoach.com, before we do that though Scott. I want you to share a little bit about your back story in your own words. I know your back story is fascinating, it is important for our listeners to hear, from your own voice.

Scott: Thanks, John. I will be brief about that because I want to– I really want to bring it forward to what is going on today and I am happy to do that because I know people who do not know me and easy way to get to know me is, my name is Scott H. Silverman, just Google me and you will find out everything you want to know and I am one of those kind of guys. I am going to give my phone number out right now, John, if you do not mind.

John: No, go ahead.

Scott: It is 619-993-2738, 619-993-2738 and I dare people to call me. I am one of those people if I get is unusual unknown name in my phone, I pick it up because it is a way for me to try to help a family, get one of their loved ones into treatment. So let us go back. So you and I met by the way when I was running a non-profit working, well, people coming out of jail and prison. You are in the recycling business and I was in the upcycling business with people and we had a great conversation around that and it is been something I will never forget, so thanks to for today in the opportunity. Growing up traditional family, I was in a retail clothing business, one for kids and parents who worked all the time and I was just one of those kids that got in trouble periodically and then I got involved with mood altering substances and self-medicating and then it grew to substance abuse and alcohol and crashed and burned and eventually decided I was tired of living and tried to end my own life and luckily I had there was divine intervention there and luckily I got into treatment, I had my wife who, we only been married 2 years, so she saw the worst of it and she was willing to stand by my side and help me get through what I needed to, went to treatment that was back in, gosh, 1984 in November.

I have been clean and sober now for a little over 35 years, so I really appreciate every day that I have, that I do whatever I can to help others. Once I got sober, my whole world changed. Went to changed, there was no looking back and I have been lucky and I have been fortunate and now I spend every waking moment I have, working with others and once I left the family business it was recommended. I started over, I was on state voc rehab and disability for a couple of years, trying to figure out what to do, the housing business then started a non-profit, and worked with people who had barriers and non-traditional working past just like me. I did that for decades and left that business about 10 years ago. Seven years ago, I do not know why, it is just a calling, I guess. With a guy, we just started this outpatient substance abuse treatment programs called Confidential Recovery, wanted to work with First Responders and we did. That is kind of how confidential got started. Then I grew my crisis coaching business simply because the, oh, so much of what happens with treatment is a family member calls and says, “I have a loved one, I have a significant other, I have a son and a daughter, or uncle, or neighbor, or co-worker, or colleague.” What I did was, I used my own personal experience with the non-profit and working with people who have defined as the community throwaways. Running a homeless agency, I got a lot of experience doing with all kinds of different levels of people of with needs. I tried to do things in a way that was out of the box thinking. Because traditionally in the social service world, they want to keep their job if you will, by keeping the people in front of them in and some sort of a framework of need which is interesting because that is kind of why I started my non-profit. That with social service providers and they said, “Well, Scott, if you are successful when you get our clients jobs, what will we do?” My answer was, will get a job. I have always kind of thought the system and I am still doing it that way. Now, working in a credential facility, we take insurance, but the crisis coaching piece is what I am really passionate about. You have a friend that wants to call me and we talked and then, if they want to hire me, great, if they do not, I give people free, 20, 30 minute coaching and then we figure out what is best. The cool thing about today was Zoom and working off the internet, I can coach people anywhere. With Skype, Zoom, and phone itself, so that is what I am talking about more and more today, that is how I created my own podcast. It is actually called Scott is talking with happy hour. Well, John, we are going to get you on that before the end of the year [inaudible].

John: No problem.

Scott: I called that happy hour because that was one of my favorite time was, when I was drinking was that the end of the day. When I was finished with my cocaine and methamphetamine, so I can kind of mellow out and go home and smoke a joint, and go to sleep. That was kind of how my life was, a hundred hours a week working, and 80 hours a week under the influence until I turned 30 and 66 now so clearly, I like to believe what I am doing is working and I want to try to give us much of it away as it possibly can and help others.

John: Your work is so important. Scott, your work is so important. Your recovery OG and that is why it was really important when I relaunch my podcast to have you on because this is still not being covered. As you know, I am also in recovery, not an OG like you are but OG enough that, again, I see the stigma. Talk a little bit about the stigma. You know, the shame of asking for help and raising your hand. Now, that so many celebrities have come out with issues way around drug addiction and all sorts of other types of addiction issues, is the stigma still there or is it started to come off, or are we still living under that huge cloud try to find– trying to get people to raise their hand and reach out to great people like you?

Scott: Well, let me– I am going to answer that question a different way. First of all, because as an SME and I just, you know, there is so much data out there and I pretty much like the old, you know, the Hoover syndrome I sucked it all up. So right now, the way the science goes, fifteen percent of our country has an active addiction issue that will erupt in the next 12 months. Fifteen percent.

John: Oh, boy.

Scott: It is even more staggering to me is of the fifteen percent, I was one of them. Each day that they are either under the influence are coming off of a night of being under the influence, they negatively impact seven people. So if you add up to seven people plus the fifteen percent that means eighty-five percent of our country right now is going to be negatively impacted, either by the person who is under the influence or if you are coming in contact with them. I am talking a family member, a co-worker, someone on the road is impaired, or someone who is running your business, or working with you, or they are responsible for something, or teacher, or lawyer, or doctor, under the influence. They are going to have a negative impact at seven people if they are in once under the influence.

So to answer your direct question about stigma. It is probably improved to some degree, but let me back up, I am sorry. The percentage figure I want to use and throw at you and the reason for that is, right now is forty billion dollar industry, forty billion that people are spending, insurance companies are spending to provide treatment for individuals. The outcome of that treatment, the average person will spend 28 days and it is substance abuse treatment program or substance use of abuse program. All they do is the 28 day program, I am sure where it is and how much it costs. If that is all they do according to science, ninety-five percent of those will relapse within 90 days to 6 months, ninety-five percent. So can you imagine a business that has a ninety-five percent value array? I mean it is like, so when you think about it, there is a lot of discourage families out there. Number one, that contributes to the stigma. Secondly, it is a shame based oriented unfortunately a disease, but when you look at the disease of addiction and I call it a disease and you liken it to something like, the worrying that I really want is diabetes. Diabetes is a disease. Once you get diagnosed and you get a form of treatment and you are checking your blood sugar level every day and you are putting insulin your body, those are tools in your recovery plan. You can live a very long time, and the same thing with substance abuse issues, but for some reason people are ashamed when they have the issue. If they raise their hand and talk about, “Hey, I need help.” What happens is people feel, they feel like they either be judged or they are not judge because people think it is immoral failing. Meaning, if you do not pick up that drink, John, you will not have a drinking problem. Well, that does not work for a guy like me. If I pick up the drink and I take the drink, I am going to want another one and I m going to want another one and that is part of the disease. My brain is just wired that way. So yes, it is helped a lot that you see some of these movie stars come out, or was Eminem just recently publicly stated. You have got 12 years and Robert Downey Jr., his got one of the best phrases. He said, “Every time I did cocaine I broke out in handcuffs.” They are talking about in a way they never have before, but on the other hand, the level of that celebrity it also is expiring in many ways at a much higher rate, the morbidity rate right now for people at first of all the much younger. Second of all, they have all these great things happening for them. You know, it is interesting. The science says that the disease of addiction, success is as much about a bigger barrier than failure, because failure is like an old sweater. I do not think we have done much– we have not done enough, they put it that way with stigma.

When you think about the opioid crisis that we have had over the last 12 or 15 years really accelerate the last 5 or 6. So many people, we are getting– gotten to the point where they have gotten on prescription medication now. You know opioids little bit more for pain, but how many people are taking medication right now. In this country, we are a pill-oriented consumer and what five percent the population we have eighty-five percent of the medication for dealing with stress, anxiety, depression, sleep deprivation, and just coping skills. I think it is something like fifteen percent or twenty percent of our children, young kids on, some form– something like Adderall or something near to it. We are a pillar in society so that contributes to it as well and I think what happens is, families are concerned but the addict themselves, do not they have a problem. I mean, look at these kids right now in their twenties that are going to these, they call them Skittle Parties. They go to these parties, everybody brings their favorite self-medicating pill, and they put it into a bowl, a certain time of the night or morning it was stops, goes to the bowl and grab something. There is counterfeit medication that is going in these things. There is Xanex going, there’s Percocet. Valium, Oxycontin, and a lot of it right now is whacked with heroin and or Fentanyl, so we are seeing kids overdose. You know, mid to late teens and early twenties, we have never seen before so in some of that obviously is accidental but there are a lot of kids that are self-medicating because I just cannot process. Now, with marijuana were California, so as you know, marijuana became legal two years ago now and the potency content of that is 28 times greater when I was smoking it back in the seventies.

So when you think about that and of course that keeps the brain from developing. When you are 15 to 25, if you are putting that kind of self-medication in your body, your brain does not build and your maturation rate does not develop. Families have to make a decision. We are going to let Johnny smoke dope, and live at home, or we are going to have to kick them out, and make them homeless, so they get to that impending doom and they are not sure what to do. That is where my crisis coaching and family navigating. It is really been an opportunity because I am not a therapist. I am not a clinician. I am not a doctor. I am not a lawyer. I am not a cop. I am just a guy with a lot of experience, so I kind of come at this in a different way, but what is funny when I sit in a room, like I am on the prescription drug abuse task force. I am on the methamphetamine task force and I am one of the few people in the room, who I used to call myself an unlicensed pharmacist dealer. I am retired now. My daughter says, “You have to say you are retired,” unlicensed pharmacist. So when I come to the room and attend to these meetings, I bring a level of efficacy that is a little different than some of them and not the end there is a county people, but these are meetings would criminal justice, the DEA, the US attorney, the medical examiner. I mean, these are the people I hang out with them because they are the ones who are dealing with the spillage right now and the overdose and it is going on. We just had, I was on a Zoom meeting yesterday and I heard there was three more young people had died in our community over the weekend at one of these events.

They go to these parties and people are making counterfeit medication, making it look like Xanax, Percocet, or Valiums, or even Oxy but what they are getting is at cut with Fentanyl and Fentanyl is so deadly. It is really killing so many people but I do not even know if that answers your stigma question, but I do know this that if we as a country, we are losing about a hundred and seventy people a day right now. Overdose, last year, I think it was north and the claim was 2019, 72,000 plus which is more people actually than died in Vietnam. Right now, obviously with this Covid situation, many people are home and alcohol consumption or sales are up sixty percent. Fentanyl overdoses are way up, methamphetamine distributions wider than ever the dark web. You can buy anything on the dark web and have it shipped to you through the post office. So access to medications, agree with receivable.

John: Did you mean, I never heard and I follow the recovery industry quite a lot. I never heard the term crisis coach before because that is a term you coined yourself, or something that was already out there, or did you normalize it?

Scott: You know, I would like to think that I have been using it a long time because I, you know, life coach just did not fit for me. That became a really big thing I think about 15 years ago and I like the idea of crisis, but then what happens is when people kind of embrace the term crisis, it is almost like, this disease of addiction is the disease of denial the inability to feel feelings. So was not a great messaging, so I have really shifted over to family navigator. So I call myself crisis coach family navigator because that is really what I am doing. I mean, I run an outpatient program but people need a higher level of care. What I do is, I help them get into detox. I refer them over to residential treatment,. I make sure that they, you know, if all they really needed maybe is to check in with an addiction psychiatrist. I try to make the appropriate referral because outpatients more the back end. The reason I wanted to do outpatient was I believe either treatment or is recovery. Treatment is when you get stabilized, you go to the detox, and recovery to me is what we do the rest of our life. So that is why I like the idea of the outpatient piece and I chose First Responders because I just, I used to work with people coming out of jail and prison as you know, came, and visited.

John: Yes.

Scott: That was the population I wanted to serve now. So I figured now, I am helping the people used to raised my old clients. So it is an interesting, you know 360, but the end of the day, we are working mostly with professionals. We are talking doctors and lawyers, law enforcement, says law enforcement is north of twenty-five percent that is there alcohol and self-medication outcomes. That is their data. When you see four cops standing on a corner, according to science, one of them has a potential problem that will erupt this year. The American Bar Association self disclose that three percent of the lawyers in our country have an alcohol abuse problem. You have been in business a long time, John, you know if someone is disclosing, something like that, it is probably a lot higher. It is funny how it got disclosed, they were here at a conference a couple years ago. There was someone from the media and the room where they were talking about, how we have to take care of her brothers and sisters and the bar association.

Because you cannot walk into a courtroom drunk does not really look too good. It is really hard to perform when you are under the influence and if you are talking about saving somebody’s life, same thing with doctors. They really do not even, that statistic is interesting because I cannot seem to get that one, but of course they have been, you know, the AMA is very, very closed about that and when a doctor gets in trouble, I mean it was a doctor up in Orange County that was over selling Oxycontin. It took the DEA’s office almost three years to process, it is a woman. Prosecutor, three years, and they knew that she was writing dirty scripts all that time and probably a decade before. Criminal justice system, unfortunately, I do not think this is a criminal justice problem. I think this is a holistic issue just like diabetes. We have to help people, we have to let him know there is hope and help, and we have to let him know that treatment works. We have to let them know that it is okay, there are three magic words hardest to say, “I need help.”

John: You know, Scott, for our listener should just join us. I have got Scott Silverman, long time friend, just doing very important work. You need to hear his message today. You could go to his website, yourcrisiscoach.com. One phone number, can they reach on Scott.

Scott: They can call or text me anytime, John, at 619-993-2738. You know, what I hear from people, “Hey, I am in New York. You are in California.” You know what? You touch me, anytime because when I go to bed, I put my phone in another room because a lot of tweakers tend to call me between midnight and five in the morning. They were all old folk colleagues of mine. So call or text me, anytime, 619-993-2738 and I will help you answer some of the questions that you may have. About, you know, I am sitting here in a smaller rural area, so what do I do? There is tons of information online right now that people can get, there Zoom meeting you can go to for recovery. There are crisis hotlines across the country you can call. Suicide hotlines right now. There is people answering phones like them before and part of the reason the good news about the behavioral health mental health support coming up is because of Covid. We are seeing suicide rates, skyrocketing right now in our country and it is just, it is off the charts. You know what? We look at a traditional news week. You are not hearing about it overdose anymore. There are too much other things going on right now, different efforts and the crisis we have going on in general our country. Then of course being an election year what is going on with all that stuff at leadership level and black lives matter and what is happening with all of that, people are overwhelmed right now. Especially if they are at home and they are watching the news and we are going to see watch and mark my words in the next three years, we are going to see a level PTSD that we have never seen before in this country, because people who are bringing this stuff in their head and their heart, do not know how to process it. It is the average person does not know how to do it. I mean, we are just starting just took me a year and a half to get prepare, we are ready, we are now in network, we are going to be serving veterans now. You know veterans and then our community San Diego is the third largest city in the country of a veteran population. I just was told last week, there are 270,000 veterans in San Diego and half of them do not even have the appropriate level of insurance to get help. Most people who suffer from PTSD, most people have a substance abuse issue because the only way they feel better is when they self-medicate.

John: This is tragic. The relieving people…

Scott: I love foreseeing a professional and they are working through it. If half of them do not have insurance, you cannot go to the library and look up how to feel you to look up how to feel better. There are a lot of people in the recovery community who are not able to go to meetings anymore and I see him on the Zoom meetings and I have a colleague who is a psychiatrist and he lost four of his friends. Locally in San Diego in the last six months to suicide because in their business, you know, the hopeless helper business, when you cannot help people anymore, it is like a bad drain. It just clogs up and backs up.

John: So it is incredible the relieving our veterans who have protected all of us in our comforts in this great country that we live in, will leaving them behind that where they should be put almost in front of the line. Just incredible to me that I am going to, I want to actually…

Scott: I did not even know if we are, there just not something they are being ignored. I think the people just assumed that they know what to do and they do not.

John: Right.

Scott: When you are in a level of the pressure anxiety, you are not making smart decisions. When I talked with families, they have kid may go, “Oh, they wanted this, they wanted that.” I said, “Look, your child does not get a vote right now. They can vote about their next steps once we get the anesthesia removed and they are stabilized, but right now, if your kids telling you, they do not need to go to treatment and you tell me you just found 15 pills in their room yesterday and you found 20 the week before, they do not get a vote.” I mean, if they get to be involved with the conversation, I do not mean, it is more metaphorically. Meaning, listen to what they have to say, but let us do not let them dictate to you as a parent, what they are going to do next. Especially, it is like this. If your neighbor’s house is on fire.

John: Yes.

Scott: You would not change the channel. Honey, it is too cold to go out. You are going to make a phone call. You are going to call 911, you are going to throw a rock through their window. You just cannot and you know, this disease of addiction is really similar people are afraid, they do not know what to do. That is where the crisis coaching piece came in. So to answer that question, I just wanted people to know, I am not just the life coach and I have a real specific and I help people with behavioral issues. I helped this really nice lady. She calls me two years ago. She says my neighbor will not stop emailing and she is 87 years old. She saw me in one of the wish time’s articles. She goes, “Can you help me?” I said, “Well, tell me what is going on.” “He emails me. I email him back. He just bothers me, when we walk out to trash once a week. I see him and he will not stop emailing me” I said, “Are you respond to his email?” She said, “Yes.” I said, “You know, you do not have to.” She said, “What?” I said, “Stop responding to his emails.” She calls me in a week and she said, “Oh, my God Scott, it worked.”

Now, we are friends again. There you go. You know, just what I can do that is different than say some people. Well, I am not the family. I am a neutral party. I am like Switzerland. I am the escrow officer. I am the one in the middle. My dog in the race is simply helping the family. It is not many experts that really do that. There is usually a therapist for that one and a therapist for this one or that one goes over here, but I try to get the whole family of coalesce. California what? Fifty-four percent of the families have been– their relationships have ended up in divorce and a lot of them are better. So it is really hard to kind of get parents aligned what to do next with young child.

John: You know, the other morning, I was listening to Howard Stern. I am a native New Yorker, so I love Howard Stern. He is a big proponent of therapies, been in therapy a long time and he had only guy, young guy named Machine Gun Kelly. I am not exposed to his music, but he had a story to tell, a fascinating back story. One, which was full of addiction, losing both of his parents, and raising himself, and he talked about his best friend Pete Davidson, who is another Native New Yorker. I did pick Pete Davidson’s work but Pete Davidson came out and talked about his addiction problem recently, but Machine Gun Kelly went into the story about Pete was literally in a spiral. Literally, as you said out of his mind because when you are in the throes of depression, addiction, and everything else, when it all starts collapsing, you are not making rational decisions. It was Machine Gun Kelly who then got him to a Malibu Treatment Center which helps start turning things around, which leads me to the question, is if smart people who have loads of do, have trouble accessing treatment or knowing what to do. Why is it hard, so hard from rich to poor and everything in between to access treatment in this country when it should not be when this country so democratized when it comes to information and everything else? What seemingly should not be hard, why is it such a nightmare still?

Scott: Well, accessing treatment actually is not that hard. What is really hard, it is the family. There some studies that have been done that says, you know, earlier I talked about how, there is a ninety-five percent relapse rate that takes place. By the way that relapse rate does not matter what program it is, whether it is one of the anonymous programs I go to, or some of the biggest DBT or CBD, whatever initials you want to put on it, does not matter that if someone does not have a follow-up or a continuum of care. It is kind of like diabetes. You do not take insulin anymore and you have been diagnosed and your insulin levels go down. You are going to get sick and die. That is just simply how it goes. So what happens is with families, they believe if they, you know, we can we can love them to wellness. That does not work. According to the study, seventy-five percent of the people who relapse, seventy-five percent it is usually triggered by family. For example. Guy goes through a treatment center. 28 days comes home, parents are like, “Okay, you got to get a job now.” The same noise if you will, I am calling it noise. I do not need it judge anybody but the same noise at that addict was hearing before is now being heard and they just spent 28 days working on trying to get sober and get clean and stay clean. That is their goal. I mean, most people once they go through that withdrawal and the pain, they do not really want to go back. It is not easy a conscious decision. So what happens is the family sometimes can get in the way in a big way. So to your point about, when I have had calls from people in LA and they said, oh, there is so-and-so. Yes, they are making eight million dollars a year now and they have got an agent, they have got this, they have got that. I said, “Let us get everybody on the call.” Because if they are making that kind of money and they are doing that kind of parting and everyone’s just getting out of the way because they do not want to step on their toes. Trust me. They are all going to be going to their funeral. They are going to be to their funeral because you just do not get well on your own. Especially when it comes to self-medication. You know what I mean? Most people do not wake up one day and go, “Hey, John, you know what? I have decided I am going to get as high as I can every day, see if I can end my life by taking something I am not familiar with.” I mean, Whitney Houston. She was on prescription medication. She does street drugs and everything fell apart for her and then and I do not even know all the issues behind her. I am basically coding what I read in the newspaper, but it was Doctor Drew I think. They got on the news for three days and he was so pissed off. He said, “We know too much today to your point earlier about people who had a lot of success at whatever level it might be.” He said, “We should do better.” We said people in the entertainment industry said, he said, “They have been partying for years, but right now people who are on prescribed medication, who are taking street drugs, he goes his own a lot of studies around this yet. You put those two things together, your body does not deal with it well.”

You see some of these stars who, you know, just think of, Bellucci, just all of a sudden they are just gone. Now, we do not get to see the autopsy report and who knows, but according to what he said and what he knows and he lives in that world, the combination of street drugs with prescription medication and who knows what else? It could be at too much Advil or something, but if you mix drugs and this was a few years ago, so today just having a, or is it the type piece of like a pin tip, straight pin tip of Fentanyl can kill you. That is how smaller dose it is and keep in mind, the– I have got some close friends and the DEA where there is a guy that was busted a couple of years ago here in San Diego and they asked him the question. “Why would you sell something that kills your customer? His answer was, he said, “Every time there is an overdose. It makes the news. It goes my business bites so I do not worry about it.”

So that is my competition. That guy, that selling that stuff, making that stuff, importing that stuff, distributing this stuff, I think of him as my competition. I am not afraid of them because I know that if I can cut off his distribution.

John: Yes.

Scott: Yes, I am because that is what I used to do. When I did drug and gang eradication, I would cut off the consumer and the distributor. Maybe come to me one day. You know, Scott we come out a problem. That is sometimes a way to wake people up and go, “Hey, look, there are lots of different ways to make a living, but if you are going to do something that kills others every day, and you do not have a conscience, then maybe we should talk about it. Because eventually what is going to happen, someone is going to take their business which means they are going to take their life and that kind of thing. The survival mode is just, it is horrific. Right now, with the dark web that scares me more than anything because even law enforcement, it is so hard to find people in the dark web because that is where the dark web is about.

John: That is why it is cool dark.

Scott: Yes.

John: Hey, Scott, if you could change just one thing about society and I am just your great magic wand, what would it be right now?

Scott: That is a great question. I like to ask it as well because I think it is a great question. Thank you for that. I think probably, I want to put education prevention there. I also want to make sure that this conversation is important as the weather reports and not necessarily put out a way, but, we hear about the weather morning noon and night. We hear about things that are important and we hear about restaurant openings and we hear about traffic on the freeways and right now a big thing is our schools opening, not opening, closing. At the end of the day the conversation, to your question about stigma, it is just not a– look, the fact that you and I are talking about this now. It is pretty rare. I mean, I started my own podcast. There is a couple of them out there that talk about recovery, but not quite like this. It is mostly 12 step base anonymous stuff.

John: Yes.

Scott: The thing that is difficult and I am a guy from way back from DEA. I get trouble every time I said that publicly because the principles are, you do not talk about it, but my attitude is you know what. I think we need to stop keeping this a secret. I believe is anonymity in my opinion contributes to some of the stigma.

John: Of course, it does. Hundred percent, you are right. Hey, you know Scott, this point…

[crosstalk]

Scott: [inaudible].

John: There is no way out. No, that is why I wanted to have you on because I wanted it on varnish. I wanted from you, direct from you. Which leads me to my next question. I know a lot of people, Scott. I have had a blessed life in so many ways and thank God, I got clean myself and I am 57 now. I do not know anyone else like you, who works day and night literally and, again, you gave out your cell phone number, you tell people anywhere in this great country, Seattle, New York, Long Island, for Miami. Well, Hoya and everyone in between. You can call Scott, you could text him. Nobody like you, works day and night to help save lives. I have met tons of people in recovery and people who run recovery centers. Unlike others, I met you because when I first got, well, I read your book, “Tell me no. I dare you,” and talk a little bit about like the success of that book. I know you have another book coming out, talk a little bit about, what your vision is and where you are going in terms of your next book?

Scott: Well, the whole idea of “Tell me no. I dare you,” is how to take a no in turn into yes because people who are behind the eight ball and people who are struggling and people who have been pigeonholed, or people just think that they have low self-esteem, or and I learned all this when I talk to people coming in out of jail and prison and homeless people because, once you cross that line the feeling is I cannot get back. I cannot vote again. I am not part of society anymore. I do not even have a skill and I used to talk to, especially the women they were great. They go. “I do not have any skills. I have three children. I just spent two years in County Jail.” I said, “Are you kidding?” You have a skill of survival that perhaps. The fact that your children are still here and your mother’s been taking care of him, you technically, you still have an intact family. Those are great skills, you are a great advocate, you are good leader, you are supervisor, you are chef, you are homemaker, you are transportation expert, we used to put that on their resumes and they get hired at a heartbeat. It was amazing. For me, and the next book I am really excited about it. I was going to have it was supposed to be coming out this month and I pushed it back just because of what is going on, obviously with the Covid. It is all about the opioid epidemic and that is what it is called. The idea of the book is to try to help families and in that book are probably close to 35 stories of individuals who have had loved ones. Some of them have lost loved ones and it is their stories. So hopefully when the book gets out, and it is probably going to be January. Families will be able to pick it up and go, “Now, I know what to do.” So it is basically it is kind of like a GPS or a navigational tool which follows into my family navigator piece. So it is going to help families, understand the– first of all, we are not alone. Second of all, it is not their fault. Thirdly, it is a disease. Fourthly, there is hope and there is help. Last of all, “I need help” are three of the toughest words, but when you express them, generally, somebody the room will go I had no idea, how can I help. If nobody knows or the stigma if nobody knows you need help, they do not know how to help you.

John: That is awesome. Listen, for our listeners out there, Scott, I am so grateful for your time today and I want you to come back when the new book comes out. For our listeners out there that want to reach Scott in the important and great work and you want him to save a loved one’s life or your life, please go to www.yourcrisiscoach.com. You could call him or text him, 24/7 at 619-993-2738. Scott Silverman, you are just a unique and special human being, saving lives, making the world a better and safer place. I am so grateful for our friendship. I am so grateful for the work that you do, and I cannot wait to have you back on the Impact Podcast. Thank you, again.

Scott: Thank you, John. I really appreciate it.

John Shegerian: This edition of the Impact Podcast is brought to you by Trajectory Energy Partners. Trajectory Energy Partners brings together land owners, 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: Welcome to another edition of the Impact Podcast. I’m John Shegerian, and I’m so excited and honored to have my good friend Cliff Feigenbaum on with us. He’s the founder and publisher of Green Money Journal, and you could find them at greenmoney.com. Welcome back to the Impact Podcast, Cliff.

Cliff Feigenbaum: Great to be here, John.

John: You know, Cliff, you’ve been on Green Is Good numerous times, and your journey and your story is spectacular. You were a visionary, but I don’t want to talk about it — I want you to talk about it. I want you to share with our new listeners your journey and how you even came up with Green Money Journal in 1992 when no one was talking about sustainability in United States, and ESG was an acronym that no one had heard about.

Cliff: You know, it’s funny because it actually started the year before when I was working at a hospital in the northwest, and I started looking around and seeing how much were waste, how much paper was being wasted, you know, through payroll. We were just throwing out tons of paper, and I thought, “No, they should be recycled. Can we recycle?” and I went around to all the offices in the office building and collected paper and got a recycling truck and got things to start evolving, and it was so impactful that I ended up winning a recycling award from the city of Spokane, where I was living, for this. So, it was kind of a ties and a little bit of what you guys do, but that was the start of it.

Cliff: Then, in 1992, I decided — I was still working at the hospital and decided to find out what I had signed up in my 401k plan a few years previous and, you know, come to find out the mutual funds that I had signed up for not really knowing what I was doing had tobacco stocks in them, and I thought, “Well, how inappropriate for a healthcare institution to have retirement investments in tobacco.” So, that was really the seed that launched Green Money. I wanted to make basic informed financial decisions, and I couldn’t find a resource around sustainable or socially responsible investing, as it was called back then.

Cliff: And so, you know, everything was based — financial planners had a few newsletters — but there wasn’t anything for just people to read, and so that’s how we started Green Money Journal. It was like, “Let’s help people make basic informed financial decisions aligning their money with their values,” and that’s how we began. It was a four-page newsletter.

John: And it was a four-page newsletter. And when did that evolve? I’m on your website now, and I love your website — it has so much great information. For our listeners out there, I highly recommend to learn about sustainability and sustainable and responsible and impact investing. You got to go to Cliff’s great website. Its www.greenmoney.com. It’s so simple: greenmoney.com. When did you evolve that to a web-based tool?

Cliff: Well, the newsletter continued for many years, and then, in fact, we were early on the internet in 1995. We launched greenmoney.com. That was really, you know, I was like, “Inter what? Internet,” you know? So, it was less than, you know, it’s clean a website as it is now — that’s for sure in the early days — but it was a way that we could really move our information out to a much bigger audience. So that happened. We launched in ’92. We went online in ’95. In ’97, I got a call, and I wasn’t sure that it was who they said it was, but it was Bloomberg Press in New York City, and they said, “We’ve heard about you. You’ve been around for five years. We’ve heard about this socially responsible investing. We know it’s coming, and we’d like you to write a book for us,” and I was like, “Are you sure?” and they said, “Yeah, but you really know it, so we won’t edit it much,” and I said, “I don’t know if we can work together because you believe in just profits, and we believe in principles and profits.” They said, “No, we see this coming. Go for it.”

Cliff: So, in 1999, I went to Bloomberg’s headquarters in New York City and launched a book called Investing with Your Values. So that was twenty-plus years ago. Now, we see Bloomberg, you know, really adopting ESG and having the conversation on their TV and on the radio and so much. So, it’s exciting to be part of and to see the evolution of, as you said, this term of ESG, of sustainable investing and how it has expanded over the years. It’s nonstop work now.

John: Yeah, and you know, first of all, to your point about Bloomberg, I have to say this out loud. I love the guy because when he was mayor of New York, he made things happen that everyone said would never happen — one being get electronic waste recycling program going in the city. People said, “No, no, no, that will never happen. It’s a vertical city. You can’t responsibly and, from a reverse logistics basis, recycle electronics in New York. It’s vertical, and it doesn’t work,” and he made it happen. He made composting work. The guy really, really lived his values when he was mayor and imposed his will and made the good things happen — and that, I appreciate about him.

John: With regards to your website, it has evolved tremendously. What I’m so excited about is you and I — you know the old adage, “Great minds think alike.” When I met you years ago, this was all about green. That’s why I had this show called Green Is Good. It was all about sustainability. But the fun part now is when I’m on your website, greenmoney.com, when you read left to right, you have a button there called Impact Investing, and that’s why I renamed Green Is Good “Impact” because I wanted to just more than just strict green, you know? “Impact” is really where the world was going, and ironically you and I hadn’t even spoken about it. You have a whole button here about impact investing. Can you share a little bit, parse that out a little bit — how you think about it? Because you weren’t only a part of the evolution. You really led the revolution in this, Cliff, so talk a little bit about, for our listeners out there that are interested in learning about impact investing and sustainable businesses — how do you parse it and see them as separate categories, but where there’s also crossover?

Cliff: Well, really, the way to think about this is a chance to look at it in four different aspects, and that is when people look at their money, we’re going to ask, “What do you want to profit from, and what don’t you want to profit from? What business activity do you want to make money from, and what don’t you want to make money from?” So, that’s part of the screening-in companies and the screening-out companies that happens in sustainable and impact investing. The other aspect is engagement with companies because companies aren’t static. They’re evolving. We see companies responding to shareholders and stakeholders and making changes because maybe the board doesn’t quite get ESG at this point or corporate responsibility, but they’re willing to hear about it because the truth is that these are bottom-line issues — and we’ll get back to that.

Cliff: The fourth aspect is impact investing, which is a smaller subset of sustainable investing in the fact that you can invest locally in your local banks or credit unions or money that stays in your community. For example, here in Santa Fe where I live, there’s a community loan fund called Homewise, which is all about financial literacy and homeownership for low-income people, a lot of women of color. Here in New Mexico, their first house, they buy through home liaising, and they have to clean up their credit. They have all kinds of financial literacy, and they build homes. So I literally can drive through town and see my investment building a house, and I’m like, “That is what I call impact.” That’s where the money hits the palm — it changes people’s lives. We’re not just sending money off to Wall Street necessarily — that’s part of what people do — but we also invest in our communities, and that’s a growing, growing aspect of this.

Cliff: But let me just touch on one thing. You know, that’s the impact investing part. The sustainable business part and the different categories that we look at, we do look at four categories of sustainable business — energy and climate, as well as food and farming. All of those things are key — and I’m sure we’ll touch on that as we talk — but we see an unstoppable movement because these are bottom-line issues that are affecting companies. So, in the way that they handle their waste, the way they handle pollution — pollution is expensive. Waste is expensive. These are reputational issues because even if it gets down to the point where if you’re a good company, employee retention. People want to stay there. I spoke to somebody at SAP a few years ago, and they told me that if they lose an employee because it’s not a good place to work, they’re watching a hundred thousand dollars worth of training walking out the door. So why not invest in making a better company where people do want to work? There’s good gender diversity. There’s good upper-management opportunities. It’s a fascinating evolution towards how companies are becoming more responsive to ESG issues and sustainability.

John: Now, put your entrepreneurship hat on. You’re an entrepreneur. You’re a publisher of this very important journal in an independent publisher. How has your business model evolved since we’ve spoken last? Are you busier than ever? Is this like all the stars lining up for you? When I talk to leaders at companies — whether they’re in Europe, Asia, United States, or South America — everybody seems to now care. Everybody gets it, Cliff, about ESG, board rooms, Wall Street, and constituencies — both young and old. Circular economy is part of our vernacular. What does all of that mean — all this energy, all this media attention, and all these wonderful startups such as Tesla and solar companies and everything else — what does that mean for you as an entrepreneur?

Cliff: It means that my email is a tidal wave every day, and so our constant challenge is filtering to the relevant. We choose a topic every month. So, it can be sustainable agriculture. It can be women and investing. It can be millennials and money. It can be renewable energy or clean water. We choose a topic, and we go out and try and find some really, really top-notch people that we know, or don’t know, directly, but somebody does know them, to get us the best information and really unique aspect because we don’t put a lot of editorial control on writers. We just tell them, you know, “Tell us your story. Take us on your journey, because I can interpret what you’re saying, or you can tell us.”

Cliff: And so, you know, probably the most interesting part of this would have been for our twenty-fifth anniversary. We were able to secure Mary Barra, the CEO of General Motors. You write her vision of the next twenty-years of transportation — wow — and just an incredibly good article to really say that, though that was written three years ago, it really lines up to what they’re doing today. I mean, she really laid out their true vision, of where they want to go, and she was more excited. She said there’s going to be more change in transportation industry in the next five years, and there has been in the last fifty years, that it’s moving so very quickly.

Cliff: So, for us, the challenge is to manage what we’re doing well. We’ve gone from a quarterly newsletter in print, then we were doing both the newsletter and print and newsletter online, and after 20 years, we decided, “What can we manage, and how do people get information more these days? And so, we let the print go, and when it moved up to a monthly e-journal, and then, just the start of this year, pre-COVID, we went to twice a month. So, our e-journal, which is free, and people can sign up for it on the website, it’s free information because we’re advertiser-supported, and we have great, great partners that advertise with us over the last decades. So, it’s a really ongoing every-two-weeks publishing, and we could be weekly, because there’s so much good news out there, and people often ask me, you know, “Am I optimistic with everything that’s going on,” and I have to say, “The truth is, you know, yes, I am. I know there’s a lot of problems, and we’ve seen them, you know, exacerbate this year even more, but the amount of solutions that are coming through my email every day leaves me just wowed and excited about those. But yeah, yeah, we’ve got a really challenging but positive future ahead.”

John: You know, Cliff, I’m on your calendar for the rest of this year and early next year, and I’m fascinated by some of the topics that you’re going to be covering, such as faith and finances. Can you walk us through a little bit of what about what’s coming in November, and how do you interrelate faith and finances as with regards to the Green Money Journal?

Cliff: It’s actually where socially responsible investing started — it was in the churches. In the 1850s, Quakers did not want to invest in companies that used slave labor, and that’s where this whole thing began. And so, then, you know, it moved through the faith community, and then there was avoiding “sin stocks,” as they were called — tobacco, alcohol, gambling, weapons. Then, the environmental movement came in the ’70s, and that launched a bunch of new funds like Pax World — and even Dreyfus had one — so that was really a new beginning to add. Then, we saw more of the evolution of social issues have been added into the different types of funds that are out there and the different issues and different screens that are out there.

Cliff: So, there’s a constant evolution, but the faith part of it, for me, is the honoring of where it came from but also that there’s several faith-based investors out there — billions of dollars that are screening in different ways for their different aspects of their faith. And so, to us, we really like to have that as a conversation every year or eighteen months because it is still a big part of sustainable investing for people. Because the truth is that we’re here, you know, if we’re called to stewardship — and isn’t that what this is all about? This stewardship to the planet, stewardship of each other — and stewardship is a biblical term — and so, how do we align our faith and our finances? And so, I don’t tell people how to do this. I introduced a whole lot of ideas about how to have a discussion around those, and so, that what we’re going to be doing in November. Today, somebody just signed up to — I’ve been asking a few different people to write — and just today, we got our fourth or fifth writer for the issue.

John: You know, for our listeners out there who just joined us, we have my friend Cliff Feigenbaum on with us. He’s the founder and publisher of Green Money Journal. You can find Cliff and his great website and journal at www.greenmoney.com. Cliff, we have a lot of millennial listeners around the world — young people who want to be the next Impact entrepreneur. They want to change the world, or they want to invest in companies that are changing the world and live their values. I see a topic in February that you’re going to be covering, Millennials and Money, and we’ve seen the rise of Robin Hood and all these startups where millennials can get in and no longer have to go down to Merrill Lynch or all the type of institutions that you and I did as young people in America. It’s much different now — online, on their cell phone, or whatever is in the palm of their hand. Talk a little bit about what you’re going to be covering and what’s your take on millennials and money when it comes to green, sustainable, ESG, and impact investing.

Cliff: It’s really part of what’s called the wealth transfer. So, over the next twenty years, there’s supposed to be thirty trillion dollars that is going to move from probably older people to women and millennials, which are two groups that really embrace sustainable investing and really push it — and the truth is that the asset growth, even during this COVID year, has not stopped at all. Morningstar just announced that twenty billion dollars has moved into sustainable investing in the first half of this year — of this year — and that ties the record of 2019, when everything was going full-blast. So, even during a COVID year, the assets are moving towards sustainable companies and sustainable funds and impact investing, and so it’s a very, very exciting time.

Cliff: Our “Millennials and Money” issue, which we’ve done for, I think, five years —this will be our sixth issue, and we have all of our back issues on the website. People can go to the Past Issues tab and find all of these. Every February is our “Millennials and Money” issue, and what’s key about this is it’s all written by millennials. So, it’s like our Women and Investing issues — the whole thing is written by women — and so the Millennials is the same way. So, we get some really interesting perspective of some young up-and-comers in sustainable finance, in business, and in all kinds of different aspects. So, we really try and look for who should we be covering, who haven’t we covered, who have hasn’t been in there, who’s the new Young Star out there that is impressing us with what they’re doing or what they’re talking about or who they work for and are being given a really great platform through Green Money.

Cliff: So, for us, cash — what did I hear just this morning that Financial Times of London mentioned, so I mentioned twenty billion dollars from Morningstar reported, but that was just in the U.S. Meanwhile, worldwide, seventy billion dollars has been moving into it — because this is a worldwide movement, not just U.S. Sustainability or sustainable funds or impact funds, green bonds, all kinds of different things — so there’s a lot of money. This is why when you say companies are talking about, there’s a lot. It’s because money is really flowing towards ESG, which, I think, in some sense, we should Define what that means for your audience.

John: I love it. As an entrepreneur, Cliff, you’re doing so well, and you were so far ahead, but the world has caught up with you, really — what do you foresee when you map out and keep envisioning your brand, Green Money? Where do you see this going in the years ahead, and where do you want it to go? Where do you want to take it?

Cliff: Sure. Well, you know, I’ll compete with you by launching a podcast. How’s that?

John: That’s okay. It’s not a zero-sum world. That’s the way I want. There’s so much room.

Cliff: So, Green Money Talks actually launched earlier this year. One of the COVID impacts was to put that on hold for a little while, but we had a really interesting conversation with the head of Beyond — yeah, Beyond Meat — and so, we talked about that at a conference, and we put that as part of a podcast. We’ve had Native American leaders because in March, we did a whole month on indigenous people and impact investing, and so we had the head of the Standing Rock tribe talking on our podcast so people can see the that as well. So, that, we did about five episodes, and we’ll continue that, coming up probably in 2021, but I see much an ever-increasing because the ESG conversation is not going to stop on Wall Street. We see it on the financial channels, on CNBC. We see it in the Wall Street Journal. We see it, and what that means when we see ESG is looking at the environmental, the social, and the government factors and impacts of a company. So, we’ve seen, you know, California fires — that’s an environmental conversation. We see racial inequality — that’s a social conversation. We see companies being held to account — that’s a governance conversation. And so, all of these are bottom-line impacting conversations that companies need to have and be responsive to their consumers and their different stakeholders that are out there.

Cliff: So, I don’t see this stopping. I really do see this as an unstoppable movement towards people wanting to align their money with their values and having that questioning where do they want to profit from? What kind of world do they want to retire into? So, what companies are they investing in now? Are they providing the kind of world you want to retire into? So, for us, it’s really about answering important questions of aligning your money with your values — from the way you shop to the way you invest. For me, one of the things that I invest in is natural foods and organic products. So, I like stores to invest in a stock or two or a mutual fund that focuses on those areas because that, to me — I’m not as knowledgeable about clean tech as some people, and so my knowledge is really in where I care about is what I eat and farming and food — and so, that’s an area where I put some of my own assets as well as the local impact investing as well as a few of the mutual funds. Yes, advertisers are with us, but they also do a really good job and have really good reputations like Pax World, Domini, Calvert and several others that people can find information on our website about.

John: That is so great. And for our listeners out there, again, to sign up to Cliff’s great bi-weekly e-journal and his latest edition on Impact Capital, you go to www.greenmoney.com. It’s easy to sign up. You should sign up because he covers so many fascinating topics that we typically don’t hear about every day in the media, that we need to all learn more about, so we can be responsible and good investors. Cliff, I’ll give you the last word before we go. We still have to sign off today, but I always want you back to keep sharing the journey with the Green Money Journal.

Cliff: Well, thanks so much for your time, John, and just encourage people to head over to greenmoney.com, and all the information is free — and one thing that we really try and do is make bring the wall in Wall Street down. So, everything is very readable and very understandable. It has to pass through a lot of editors before we put it out there because we want to help people create the kind of world they want to live in using their money. We believe money is a Force for good in the world, and so, that’s why we call it Green Money.

John: Cliff, you’re a force for good in the world. You’re the reason I do the Impact Podcast. It’s just part of our mission here, and I just want to say thank you for making the world a better place.

Cliff: Thanks, John.