This Sustainable Life

Tom Szaky has been working on waste since his undergrad days at Princeton in 2001. Then I suddenly heard about him from many sources in the past few months.His company, Terracycle, recycles waste others don't. The new initiative, Loop, got attention at Davos and support from many companieswhose business plans depend on producing waste, within an economic model that promotes growth. He also published a book, the Future of Packaging, coauthored by top executives from these waste and growth places. I wrote more notes from that book to prepare for this conversation than any book, including Bob Langert's, McDonald's former head of Corporate Social Responsibility (that episode is still being edited).It never mentioned reducing consumption, twisting, as I saw it, the idea to reducing material per package. Almost no one gets the subtle but critical distinction between efficiency and total waste. Our polluted world is the result of centuries of increasing efficiency and total waste. Nearly every initiative extends that trend, missing that efficiency in a polluting system leads to more efficient pollution.His book did talk about responsibility, the counter to our system's goal of externalizing costs. So the book missed the most important part of handling waste, reducing supply and demand, but got responsibility. I wondered if he was serious or yet another person confusing feeling like you're reducing waste while increasing it, the way the Watt steam engine did, Uber does, widening roads does, and LED bulbs look on track to.You'll hear from this conversation that, as best I can tell, he understands the system issues and the need for systemic change. For therest, listen. He understands and seems to be acting for systemic change.I hope this conversation is the first of many, not just to hear about his personal challenge, which is pretty big, at least to me. I still eatcheese, about the amount on one pizza slice per year. Actually, it's been decreasing annually. Maybe I'll use his action as inspiration.I'm glad he got and explained the reasons behind reduction and explained why his book didn't touch it. I've heard enough to believe he understands the most important directions and changes. I don't know enough about the details of Terracycle and Loop to tell if I think they'll work.It's refreshing to talk to someone who understands the key issues. Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

If you've never heard Carl Sagan's spoken essay Pale Blue Dot, you'll get to hear it in today's episode. It still chokes me up.Here is an Earthrise image taken a few years ago like those he contrasts the pale blue dot image with. The Earth straddling the limb of the Moon, as seen from above Compton crater. Taken by the Lunar Reconnaissance Orbiter in 2015.Here is the Pale Blue Dot image. Seen from about 6 billion kilometers (3.7 billion miles), Earth appears as a tiny dot (the blueish-white speck approximately halfway down the brown band to the right) within the darkness of deep space. Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

A few months ago I attended the Summit. It was expensive, so I wasn't sure I'd get the value out of it that I paid.As it came together for me, I met the founder, Elliott Bisnow, and then happened to meet his mother, Margot, this episode's guest. She was a big part of making the event great for me. As you'll hear in the conversation, she was like a force of nature, connecting people, doing what leaders do despite no formal role, as many leaders work.To give you some background on her formal leadership, she was an FTC Commissioner and Chief of Staff of the President’s Council of Economic Advisers. Today we more talk about her book: Raising an Entrepreneur: 10 Rules for Nurturing Risk Takers, Problem Solvers, and Change Makers, which applies more to leadership and non-parent relationships than I bet she expected.I wish you could see her at work. She would say she wasn't working, but I think effective leadership, like any active, social, emotional, expressive, performance-based art, when mastered, feels and looks effortless like the person is just being him or herself.One of Summit's main goals is to create an environment where people can connect. Among that crowd, Margot connected people more than most. She may have felt and looked like she was enjoying herself and she probably was, but I've spent years developing skills, experiences, and beliefs to do that and I bet she did too.I wanted to share a bit of someone who appears a natural leader. Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

Today, I'm sharing what value being a guest offers to influential, well-known people.I call Oprah and her peers the single-name people -- people everyone knows by single names: LeBron, Serena, Sergey, Larry, Barack, Elon, Bill, Mark, Madonna, Giselle, Venus, Meryl, Bruce, Maradonna, Cher, Beyonce, Messi, Jay-Z, and so on.I also mean anyone influential or with an audience -- people in politics, accomplished actors, journalists, singers, artists, and the like, bestselling writers, public speakers, winning athletes, and so on.If anyone listening is someone like them or knows them, this episode is for you.I'll say it bluntly, but nothing you haven't heard before: we could potentially could lose civilization. If we don't, it will likely be because people changed culture.Rare moment in human history, where change can create legacy on the scale we see only every few thousand years. Buddha and Jesus level influence and legacy.This podcast emerged from seeing that we lacked leadership. Every scientist and engineer says we have the technology and other means. The question is will we. That's leadership.We live in a leadership vacuum and you, famous person, can help fill it to great personal growth and joy. You can do it just by being a guest on this podcast. Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

Today's guest, Sean, is a friend. We recorded this conversation before the podcast launched in November 2017. It took a while to get through the editing process, but I wanted to post it to document the evolution of the podcast and me.For Sean, it shows him as a leader of leaders, since all the guests since followed him. In showing that I grew as an interviewer, finding a purpose, strategy, and voice, I hope it shows the accessibility for anyone to take an environmental leadership role.This conversation helped the podcast's strategy emerge. It's largely based on learning that community influences behavior more than facts.So I'm bringing world-renowned guests -- people in everyone's communities. If Oprah shares her environmental values, acts on them, and shares that the results bring her joy and liberation, I think many others will -- not blindly following her as a celebrity but acting on their values as she acts on hers.This conversation enabled what came next. Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

Nobody likes being coerced to do something you don't want under threat of punishment. Nor do people like being told they're wrong or ignorant by someone else telling you they know better.Yet it happens all the time. Much of our politics and public dialog -- our leadership -- is about coercion, self-righteousness, hitting people over the head with facts, and the like, especially around the environment.It doesn't work. Rather it works at something -- at people resisting, disengaging, undermining leaders' authority. The opposite of what we want. Particularly in the area of environmental behavior. There's a lot of self-righteousness, attempts to coerce, expectations that facts will change behavior.Why do we do it? Would you be surprised to find that our educational system specifically teaches us that way, yet almost no one notices it. W don't have to work this way. For most of human history we haven't. People are recreating education that works at not just factual recall and coercion but developing children as people.Today's guest, Peter Gray, is an expert on just that. What you will find unbelievable at first, if you're like me, and will misunderstand, but as you pull at the string, you'll find the whole sweater unravel, revealing something new. We talked about self-directed education, which I think you'll find fascinating and not what you expected. What started for me as unbelievable but transformed into what you'll hear.It's longer than my usual episodes, but it's what I wish I had heard decades ago. If I were a parent or grade school kid, I'd love learning Peter's work..I hope you follow this link to my blog post linking to his column, book, and other related resources. Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

I confess I haven't interacted directly with Al Gore so I don't know how he leads in person. I saw him on stage once, but the person interviewing him, Jaden Smith, was 20 years old and I didn't see grasped the situation. Jaden is Will Smith's son and promotes a bottled water brand---that is, he sells something nearly free with extraneous packaging, which I consider needlessly polluting. My main interaction with Al Gore is through his movies and reading about him in the media.I would love to have him as a guest. I would love to hear him share his history and the history of the movement from his view. He's won a Nobel Prize, multiple Oscars, and more. I could learn incomparably more from him than he could from me. So when I suggest he's missing something, I mean that in the context of his getting much more. But he's not perfect or omniscient.I love what he's done to reach where we have, but reaching the next step is going to require leaders who live consistently with the values they recommend to others. People look for any excuse they find to say, "He's doing it" or "She's doing it, so I can too."If you put in front of someone trying to quit smoking a lit cigarette, no matter how much people are determined to stop, they at least feel motivated to smoke. Given enough time, many will smoke. And when they do, they will think something justifying the behavior, saying in the moment why it's the right thing to do, because emotions drive reason more than reason drives emotion, however much people fantasize otherwise.Now add to the person sitting there, multiple industries spending trillions to advertise, government subsidies meaning that I'm helping pay for it even though I don't want to, those industries paying people to figure out how to hide the problems, influence the smokers through sophisticate marketing techniques.Now throw in a surgeon general who smokes, who makes movies showing himself or herself smoking, telling people the dangers of smoking while smoking, telling others not to smoke. And the family doctor smokes. And the nurse. Everyone telling you not to smoke smokes.The same would happen to someone trying to quit eating too much salt, sugar, fat with putting a gooey chocolate lava cake and an obese surgeon general eating bags of Doritos, family doctors drinking soda while telling people not to eat salt, sugar, and fat.Or an alcoholic trying to stop drinking with a surgeon general holding a bottle of rum, a family doctor with a six pack of beer, and so on.This addictive behavior and the self-serving justification people feel before doing it sadly closely describes people's environmental behavior. In my experience, when given the choice between comfort and convenience that pollutes or challenging themselves to avoid polluting, people will use any excuse to continue the comfort and convenience. Two days ago I attended a symposium at NYU on sustainability. The last several talks talked about the problems with single use containers and plastic. As soon as it ended, they all drank wine in disposable plastic cups. I didn't see anyone show any concern.People are missing the joy and emotional reward of living by their values, which increases with the challenge of doing it. It's like your team coming from behind to win. The greater the deficit, the greater you celebrate the win.Carbon offsets are a nice fantasy, but they don't remove greenhouse gases from the atmosphere or ocean. They limit the rate of increase, which is not decreasing. The way they motivate people, their net systemic contribution is probably to lead people to pollute more overall.My model of leadership is to help people do what they want to but haven't figured out how. It's not about convincing, seeking compliance, or coercion. It means helping them identify their values and goals, then to help them achieve them, consistent with the leader's vision.To motivate people to change their behavior, a leader must practice the behavior he or she recommends---at least not to violate it. Until they do in the area of the environment---if you ask anyone to do what looks like a sacrifice and they think you aren't doing it, their greatest contribution may be to create votes for populists. The irony and one of the biggest experiences I'm trying to share through this podcast is that when it clicks, acting by your values isn't sacrifice. It's the opposite. For that matter, it takes less time to click and register as joy, fun, and other ways rewarding with each practice adopted.The crazy missing point is that living by their values would improve their lives and effectiveness, at least by my experience. People who say one thing and do another think they're changing the system but are supporting it, comparable to a doctor or surgeon general who smokes or drinks soda. Stopping living by the system's values of growth and externalizing costs and living by and promoting ones like enjoying what you have and taking responsibility for how your behavior affects others will make them more effective and happier.Not saying saint or perfect. Saint implies morality. Not good, bad, right, wrong but practical matter of helping people live by their values. He has plenty of followers who share his values. I think nearly everyone. Perfect, well no one is. I'm not. You don't have to be. You need only show you're doing your best.As for all other listeners, pointing at leaders not living by their values doesn't make you abandoning yours any less a personal abandonment. I should say that in the positive. The sooner you face and overcome what inhibitions and challenges stand between you and living by your values, the sooner you'll find greater meaning, purpose, value, passion, growth, and all the things I know you value more than the comfort, convenience, or whatever you get from your equivalent of smoking, eating junk, drinking.You can lead. Do you have kids? Coworkers? Neighbors? You can lead.Back to Al Gore, I'm not him and I don't know his community, so I could be wrong, but I see someone with a lot of behaviors inconsistent with the future he describes. He and his supporters may say, yes he causes a lot of emissions, but each use is justified.They miss two big things.One, people will follow his behavior. SUV example.Two, they're missing what he could do more effectively. Instead of going places in person, it looks to me like he could empower more people to do his role. To franchise what he does. Maybe he's doing so as much as he can. If so, I would think he should publicize how much he's polluting and clearly demonstrating how any lower emissions of his would increase emissions globally. If he can't show that, I think that his next great step will be to live by the values he promotes and still be as effective. I am confident he could. When he does, I predict he'll wish he did earlier.If I'm not presuming too much, I believe being on my podcast would help him. Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

Everyone thinks about the environment. Nearly everyone gets bogged down in questions.What's best?Will this or that change make a difference?What does all the science mean?What should I do?Science answers some of these questions. Science is the study of nature. People associate it with going to the moon or people in lab coats, but it's about nature -- sunsets, gravity, why the sky is blue, as well as global warming, pollution, and resource depletion.Using computers, motors, eye glasses, and so on means your life relies on science. I find it beautiful, which is why I got the PhD in physics.Not understanding science or math means not knowing how to reach or understand answers resulting from studying nature and its patterns. Even understanding science doesn't mean knowing the answers. You have to do the experiments and calculate the results.Tom Murphy created his Do The Math blog to calculates the main questions on environment: solar, wind, nuclear. When someone says we can't grow forever, why not? What works and what doesn't, independent of how you feel about it?This episode is long, but I believe it may be the most important conversation I have on understanding environmental issues.We don't talk about the math details, which you can find on his site.The point of understanding the math is to liberate you from arguing about opinion to learning priorities and what works in what order.I urge you to listen to it through and to read his wonderful blog. Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

Ana works in Dar Es Salaam, Tanzania, Executive Director for Nipe Fagio (Give Me the Broom! in Swahili), my first guest who works in Africa.This conversation is about leadership in an area lacking it -- environmental action. I wish I met her before! It sounds to me like she leads effectively -- not telling people what to do but leading them.Ana promotes doing things, focusing on action. She's starting with beach clean ups and organizing people to act, but you can tell her vision is broader.I've spoken a lot about people delaying action by making a goal of awareness when they're already more than aware enough that their values are telling them it's time to ac.t Ana's focus on action reminds me that a main goal of leadership is to help people do what they already want to but don't know how.People want to act, they're just frustrated by mainstream society and comfort and convenience. I wish people saw how much people want to act. The potential to lead is huge. Ana is stepping up. You can hear the passion resulting from her work.There's joy when you overcome the challenges. If you want to lead, you'll learn what Ana did if you just start. People will thank you for helping them do what they already want to. Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

When I met Ron in business school, he and Recycle Bank, which he co-founded, were well regarded. He's continued to grow since.Beyond contributing into entrepreneurship in sustainability as an entrepreneur, he's helped create policy, appears often in the media, and now invests.In our conversation you'll hear on the personal side his passion. On the business side you'll hear the opportunities to start businesses and solve problems are increasing -- from the sounds of it, dramatically.He puts his money where his mouth is. If you came here for examples of leadership in the area of the environment, I'd say he sounds like a role model. He achieves business success. It emerges from transparency, which creates, as I hear it, trust, joy, and liberation where others might feel guilty.Restricted on connection, so sorry for connection problems.His success reminds me of Sandy Reisky's episodes. Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.