Hello everyone, welcome to Green IO the podcast for responsible technologists building a greener digital world, one byte at a time.
Why this podcast? What to expect in Season 2? Take a 5 minutes walk-through with our Host Gaël Duez 🎙️

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Transcript

Gaël:
Hello everyone, welcome to Green IO the podcast for responsible technologists building a greener digital world, one byte at a time.

Our digital world has a tremendous impact on the environment, and its trend makes it even more unsustainable than almost any other industry. To address these issues, we need everyone on deck within the Tech industry and beyond. It’s a challenge compared to other sectors. Take the worldwide road freight for instance, it accounts for roughly 4% of all GHG emissions like digital tech but not all companies operate a truck on their own and not everyone has a small delivery van in their garage.

Here's where Green IO comes in. I started my journey as a podcaster a year and a half ago, with a fulfilling 1st season. Together, you and I had the pleasure to meet more than 30 guests across 22 episodes. Looking forward to our second season, we’ve sharpened the show’s identity, honing it to 3 key principles.

First:“Embracing diversity”

With their diversity of gender, of countries, of lines of work, our guests allow us to see the world under multiple angles. And this diversity of angles strengthens our systemic thinking muscle which is crucial to tackle the ongoing environmental crises. Plus, it allows us to be ready to welcome thought provoking conversations like the one I had with Anne Curie - an acclaimed O’Reilly author on Green Software about the futility of code optimisation!

Anne:
"Write code that is absolutely good for the language that you're writing in. Because compilers do a fantastic job at optimizing your code for you. Don't second guess your compiler."

Gaël:
2. The 2nd principle is a bias for action & problem solving
Each episode will focus more and more on a precise problem to solve. This is why I enjoy inviting doers like Drew Engelson - Starbucks’ head of engineering.

Drew:
“ So I thought, you know, how do I go create my own metrics and, you know, ultimately said, okay, well I'll look at our cost that's directly correlated to the number of resources I'm using or our compute hours and for various services and built like a mapping between those metrics I have easy access to from our cloud dashboards. Apply some algorithm to it and, and come up with a number. Right? And I did that and we created, you know, a chart over time. And in addition to that also thought about building a recommendation engine.”

Gaël:
3. The 3rd and last principle is “Building bridges”
In his podcast “The Great Simplification” Nate Hagan stated that we need more diplomats within the sustainability field to enable people with strong identities (climate change, biodiversity, climate justice, global south, etc.) to discuss with each other and achieve common understanding. I’ve always pictured myself as a bridge builder with a constructive stance. This state of mind is also what I’m looking for with our guests. As illustrated in the 1st episode of season 2 by Harriet Kingaby who remains constructive even when facing greenwashing mistakes!

Harriet:
" What we often see driving greenwashing is not necessarily organizations sitting down and saying 'How can we mislead consumers' (though we definitely see that). Often you might see an overexcited marketing team who were really proud of something that the organization has done, who actually, (I think, with the best will in the world), spotlight it, ignoring the other stuff that the organization does."

Gaël:
Focusing on building common understanding allows us to be optimistic, and I remain - like Christiana Figueres - a stubborn optimist. This is also what I’m looking for with guest like Sandy Dänhert talking about sustainable design.

Sandy:
"This is what it can look like. It's not boring, it's not outdated, it's not just minimalist. It can be minimalistic if it fits the brand - and that's cool as well - but it doesn't have to. It can be vibrant and colorful."

Gaël:
And following these three key principles, we will target 2 complementary goals in this 2nd season:

Training our systemic muscles, and
Sharpening our green skills

To train our systemic muscles, we must be curious. We will explore various environmental topics like carbon accounting, electronic waste, impact business model, anthropological studies, greenwashing, and new legal frameworks, to name a few.
We will also sharpen our green skills. How we - as responsible technologists - we can reduce the environmental footprint of our activities. We will get the latest tools and hands-on insights on focused topics such as impact measurement, Greener Data science and data engineering, Sustainable Design, Sustainable Product Management, Green Software development, Sustainable Cloud operations, etc.

We will have episodes that touch on both goals, and some that focus on just one. But all the while we will achieve our main goal, to make our digital world greener, one byte at a time.

Green IO Season Two starts next Tuesday September 5th. I’ll see you there.

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