We spoke about leadership and sustainability. We focused on crossing political boundaries. We shared about our successes in these efforts, how important we consider such tactics and strategies, and how much that success is missing in the US.

He invited me to participate in this year's conference, as you'll hear in our conversation. I wrote back that I don't fly, so I'd like to but transportation would be a challenge. I didn't say that I consider conferences that dozens to thousands of people fly to counterproductive because I didn't yet know enough about the conference or him, but I offered a few ways to make it work.

You'll hear more in the conversation, but I suggested to him what I've suggested to a couple other conference organizers. If enough people who were flying might switch to a chartered bus, I could help that process.

Tune in to hear our conversation on that topic. Also, you'll learn more about EarthX, Peter's relationship with EarthX and why they brought him on, and his start of the Spodek Method. As often happens, it seemed like it couldn't work until it did, and then he looked at his commitment with enthusiasm.

• Peter's home page
• EarthX's page
• For its 2026 conference

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Our conversation grew more compelling and interesting as we spoke. The early parts about energy sources besides fossil fuels you may have heard before, but give context.

After she shares the realizations that prompted her to lead are what I valued. In particular, she exposes and clarifies how people have simply ignored fossil fuel production or extraction in favor of accounting methods and seeing if they can offset things but not decreasing extraction.

She also talked about her strategy, which differs from Paris Agreement approaches and is based on how treaties on land mines and chemical weapons succeeded. She also shares some eye-popping statistics, like how much fossil fuels are used just to transport other fossil fuels, which is just over two-thirds.

The bottom line is almost too simple to say, but it bears repeating: we have to stop extracting fossil fuels fast. Tzeporah is one of the few working on, undistracted by things that don't stop us from extracting them.

• The Fossil Fuel Treaty Initiative
• Her TED talk: The bad math of the fossil fuel industry
• Her book: This Crazy Time: Living Our Environmental Challenge
• Her Wikipedia page

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She spent decades in the field documenting violations against farm animals and in the office preparing cases and writing about her investigations in articles and books. Her efforts to expose and prosecute animal abusers were often thwarted by network television producers and by law enforcement authorities. Producers considered her findings too disturbing. The law refused to prosecute abusers. Instead they provided cover for the meat industry---a billion-dollar industry.

She gives an inside view behind the closed doors of U.S. slaughterhouses and factory farms. She also shared her challenges and successes in documenting and exposing the findings.

As a memoir, Out of Sight has been described by reviewers as a “detective story” and a “page turner” that they “can’t put down," probably for her personal challenges related to her diagnosis with a rare medical visual condition she shares in our conversation.

• Gail's web page
• The Humane Farming Association
• Her most recent book: Out of Sight An Undercover Investigator's Fight for Animal Rights and Her Own Survival
• Her first book: Slaughterhouse The Shocking Story of Greed, Neglect, and Inhumane Treatment Inside the U.S. Meat Industry

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The War on Cars is a podcast that delivers news and commentary on the latest developments in the worldwide fight to undo a century’s worth of damage wrought by the automobile, approaching the topic from all angles, from politics to pop culture. They release two regular episodes and one Patreon bonus episode per month.

Doug and Sarah's Book

Cars ruin everything. That’s why we need Life After Cars.

When the very first cars rolled off production lines, they were a technological marvel, predicted to make life easier and better for everyone; yet a hundred years later, that dream is running on empty.

Instead of unbounded freedom, the never-ending proliferation of automobiles has delivered a host of costs, among them the demolition of our neighborhoods, towns, and cities to make way for car infrastructure; an epidemic of violent death; countless hours lost in traffic; isolation from our fellow human beings; and the ongoing destruction of the natural world.

That’s why we need Life After Cars. Through historical records, revealing interviews, and unflinching statistics, Sarah Goodyear and Doug Gordon, hosts of the podcast The War on Cars, and former host Aaron Naparstek unpack the scale of damage that cars cause, the forces that have created our current crisis and are invested in perpetuating it, and the way that the fight for better transportation is deeply linked to the fight for a more equitable and just society.

Life After Cars expands on the podcast with new interviews and original content—offering something for everyone, from longtime listeners familiar with the harms of car culture to those just beginning to imagine a world with fewer metal boxes zooming around.

Cars as we know them today are unsustainable—but there is hope. Life After Cars will arm readers with the tools they need to implement real, transformative change, from simply raising awareness to taking a stand at public forums.

It’s past time to radically rethink—and shrink—society’s collective relationship with the automobile.

• The podcast: The War on Cars
• The book: Life After Cars

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Oh wait, she also worked with series creators Joel Bach and David Gelber (of 60 Minutes); chief science advisors podcast guest Joseph Romm and Heidi Cullen; and episode hosts including Cameron, Schwarzenegger, Harrison Ford, Ian Somerhalder, America Ferrera, David Letterman, Gisele Bündchen, Jack Black, Matt Damon, Jessica Alba, Sigourney Weaver.

Oh, and the series won an Emmy for Outstanding Documentary or Nonfiction Series.

She was engaging, informative, open, and fun. We laughed a bunch We talked about her passion for the art and practice of storytelling. You have to be true to the science, but you can't skimp on the story or take for granted it will work. We also talked about her background that brought her to this level.

• The Years Project
• Its YouTube page
• Maya's curated climate list

UPDATE: After we recorded, Maya noted that about halfway in, she said "Bread and Puppet theatre in San Francisco." The actual troop was The San Francisco Mime Troupe.

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I've read a lot about plastic and hosted many authors. I won't lie. Before starting the book, I thought I should read it because I knew her, but didn't expect much.

Instead, I learned a lot new. I found it engaging and compelling. I recommend it.

Yes, you'll learn things that are sobering, but you'd rather know than not know, especially things that affect your health and safety and your family's. It also guides you to how to respond, personally, socially, and politically. Judith cares and has experience.

Start by listening to our conversation. Then read the book.

• The Problem with Plastic: How We Can Save Ourselves and Our Planet Before It’s Too Late
• WEBINAR with co-authors Judith Enck, Adam Mahoney, and Melissa Valliant, January 28, 2026

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Silvia and I had a wonderful first conversation that led to a commitment that sounded like she'd enjoy it and doable, but in the end wasn't quite. Even if a quick hike north of the city would be enjoyable, catching a Metro-North train from Columbia University isn't that convenient and her schedule may not have bee as flexible as she suspected in our first conversation.

For those listening to these conversations to learn the Spodek Method, in our first conversation I didn't check with her how practical the commitment was given her constraints. As the leader of the interaction, I should have asked ahead to imagine her schedule, the logistics of catching the train, and so on. The key measure the first time someone acts on their intrinsic motivation isn't how big it is. It's if they person does it.

When someone acts on intrinsic motivation, they'll find it rewarding. If they feel reward, they'll want to do it again and the next time will be bigger, especially if they've always considered acting on sustainability a sacrifice or something that has to be big or any of the other myths people propagate. Sadly, even ardent environmentalists lead people to think of acting more sustainably as something they won't like or won't find rewarding when they use tactics like trying to convince, cajole, coerce, or seek compliance.

In this double episode we hear how she did something more practical. At the end, note that she's open to doing more.

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Enter Sandra Goldmark, as a member of a growing movement to fix things and make things fixable. She's also an Ivy League professor at Barnard and the Columbia Climate School, so, no, professors don't have to be out of touch.

I met Sandra before the pandemic, at a shop she set up down by the South Street Seaport to repair things. Besides her own book Fixation, she was mentioned in a book (The Repair Revolution) in my sustainability leadership workshop alumni book club.

Lest you think people have to be born fixers or educated as engineers, a preconception that I find still holds me back, she shares her background not growing up with those things. On the contrary, she found she enjoyed it and found community.

Listen for a basic human approach to fixing things and changing culture.

• Sandra's home page
• Her book, Fixation
• Her page at Barnard

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The article said that he said that "at the population level, scientists can see telltale signs that those chemicals are undermining human health, adding to growing male infertility or growing cases of ADHD." This outcome suggests a violation of this nation being founded on protecting life, liberty, and property, and the consent of the governed. I also found from this video, Food Contaminants and Additives, that he reported his results thoroughly, taking care not to venture outside his research.

I had to talk to him.

We talked about his research, what brought him to a new field, now burgeoning, of learning about chemicals that disrupt our endocrine systems---that is, they mess with our hormones. You'll hear that he didn't intend to go into it. It was (tragically) growing in importance since our hormone systems are becoming increasingly disrupted, as are those of many species.

I should be more accurate. They aren't passively being disrupted. Consumers are paying companies to produce chemicals that do it.

It sounds slimy and scary. I'd rather it didn't happen, but since it does, I'd rather know than not know. I think you would too.

• Dr. Trasande's NYU faculty page

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Her tenure at the Wall Street Journal told me she would communicate it effectively, pulling no punches. As much as I prefer not to link to social media, this video review by Chris van Tulleken, bestselling author of Ultra-Processed People, is about as positive a review as I've seen, all the more since he clarifies that he doesn't know her.

So I invited her to talk about her book Consumed: How Big Brands Got Us Hooked on Plastic. It launches today (October 7) in the US, so I've only finished the beginning, but it delivers. In our conversation, she describes what to expect when you read it, plus her back story driving her to write it.

Many reviews describe her humor. You'll hear that I held back from asking her about how she worked humor into the topic, since she's not a comedian so I wouldn't expect to perform unprepared, but no worry, she made me laugh unprompted and shared more humor from the book. Obviously it's a serious topic, and Saabira's work shows how much more serious than you probably thought, but being depressed doesn't help solve it.

• Saabira's home page
• Her New York Times piece that brought me to her: Throwaway Plastic Has Corrupted Us
• Her book page for Consumed
• The video review we mention by Chris van Tulleken, bestselling author of Ultra-Processed People

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Listen for yourself, but I hear Zach working with three motivations:

His surfer, outdoors self wants to conserve, protect, and enjoy nature and enable others to do the same by experiencing it.

His CEO self wants to deliver what his customers want, despite what they want including polluting and depleting---that is, hurting people and wildlife---beyond what nearly anyone who ever lived has. They don't know it and his company's current message implies that they're helping, not hurting.

His leadership self wants to improve himself and his work, to resolve conflict, to explore his boundaries and his team's to see if they can change the world.

This situation exists in nearly everyone I know: we love humanity and nature, we live in a culture that rewards the destruction of each, and we want to help resolve that conflict. The difference with Zach is not that the stakes are higher. It's that he is willing to share this internal conflict publicly, not to hide it or act like it isn't there. Only by examining one's blind spots and vulnerabilities can one grow in the areas we care about most. Zach is out on the forefront.

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Zach plays a leadership role in the local chapter and was one of the organizers for this event so we interacted more. He was open and sincere about learning about my work and sustainability leadership. As you'll hear, he runs a business that pollutes and depletes---that is, hurts people and wildlife---a lot. Like nearly all businesses that do, it portrays itself as clean and helping people stay clean while doing things that pollute and deplete.

Not many people face their inner conflicts, let alone voice them publicly. I see no other way to resolve them. No one has solved the challenges Zach is choosing to face. I know they can be solved as does he, I suspect, but getting there will be hard. Restoring sustainability to his business, among the most polluting and depleting, will be hard, mostly people and cultural challenges, not technical or legislative.

I see Zach as a potential pioneer. Let's see if we can help him achieve what few others are trying and most are just covering up.

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He shares the commonalities of what he sees in me and my work with the people he's known and worked with who are also working or worked to change the world, including Martin Luther King, Stokely Carmichael, John Lewis, and his wife, Mindy Fullilove. In the process, I end up sharing parts of my upcoming book. His experience with them, as well as working with prisoners and his experience with psychology and social work, gave me space to open up about racism and my past.

This episode felt personal to me. Normally I try to showcase the guest, but his experience and demeanor ended up mentoring me. I felt like I got more out of the conversation than he did, but he said he loved it.

This episode differs from most on this podcast. I suspect you'll like its openness, previews of my next book, and his warmth.

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What a relief! This episode shares some of my experiences. Some I liked, like that it helped me develop resilience, it saved me more money, it led to my food being fresher, and it led me to connect with people ranging from local residents to indigenous people around the world to people who lived without electrical power in the past, which is all your ancestors up to the most recent few.

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This episode shares a saga of my confusion and exasperation at people throwing away and not accepting perfectly good food. I don't want to take it but the alternative is to throw it away.

While it's tragic that poor people don't accept this bounty of nature and our broken food system, I'm concluding a bigger picture. I think a large fraction of Americans don't know what to do with fresh, unpackaged produce. They know how to eat apples and bananas. Even other fruit, let alone vegetables like zucchini or radishes, I think they don't know what to do with. I mean, you can pick up a tomato and eat it, and heirloom tomatoes have so much flavor, eating them is like eating gazpacho. Well, the flavor is subtle, so if you're used to doof like Doritos and Ben and Jerry's, you won't notice their nuance and complexity, but still, eating them takes no skill.

A couple recent blog posts on the topic:

• When did you last prepare a full meal from scratch, not one packaged product?
• More fresh juicy local peaches and heirloom tomatoes than I can handle, saved from waste by rich and poor alike

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He started by sharing his growth as an animator and director at Disney. Soon enough we dove into talking about the overlap between leadership and things he loved about his career: directing, teamwork, self-expression, and empathy. We talked about being generous, what it takes to get the best out of a team, and how it feels when you do. We distinguished leadership from authority and how many people confuse them.

You'll hear we both enjoyed the richness and depth of our exploration of similar passions from different directions. Plus you'll hear the back story Snow Bear that gives it its richness and depth.

• Aaron's web page

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In earlier conversations with him, I shared what brought me to him. I had been telling people who acted as if acting on sustainability was a burden. I pointed out that people who acted in the Civil Rights movement took greater risks and undertook more challenging work, risking jail, risking physical injury, going to jail, being beaten, and worse, compared to eating fresh, local fruits and vegetables. I continued that I bet they would consider those experiences high points in their lives, ones they wouldn't take back or trade for anything.

Then I saw him speak on a panel and heard him describe his experiences. I invited him to the podcast and he shared some experiences relevant to acting on sustainability, as well as on education, leadership, and more.

In this episode, he speaks in more detail, including about big challenges they faced: should they continue with nonviolence or adopt violence? He shares the emotional tenor of conversations of people living through history, not knowing answers.

First, we talk about fishing, family, and disappearing nature. I'll cherish this conversation. I think you'll value it too.

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I invited him to the podcast after seeing a talk he gave on the 300th birthday of Adam Smith. My recent learning more about Smith and other Enlightenment thinkers led me to find relevance between their thinking about how to live together without hurting each other and how we handle polluting and depleting today. I knew Glenn studied Smith for longer and in more depth than I have so I invited him to share about Smith.

We started with his background, having worked with the White House. He then shared about Smith, in particular not seeing just his economics in Wealth of Nations, also his philosophy in Theory of Moral Sentiments.

I shared some of the views I've been developing, though not comprehensively. He responded, politely and informatively, considering my inexperience expressing my ideas. He pushed back and educated.

I couldn't help also sharing how much I'd learned at business school that was relevant to sustainability and I found little elsewhere, especially the social and emotional skills of leadership. I couldn't help building up my alma mater and the value of leadership in the task of changing culture.

• Glenn's home page at Columbia Business School

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Then she went. You'll hear what it did for her. I had to compare her description to what many people derive from big vacations to Hawaii or Bali, but she spent nothing, didn't have to plan, and didn't pollute or deplete.

Her sharing about her experience recreating a wonderful past experience led to her sharing many unique challenges of living without money. Jo will lead you to think differently about your world and relationships to your loved ones and nature.

• Jo's home page, including her post on catatrophism we talked about

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Changing culture requires leadership, not just management. Effective leadership inspires. Adam's latest book is Inspire.

You can imagine my enthusiasm to talk with a star professor at one of the world's top institutions (to which I'm deeply connected) teaching leadership on the topic of how to inspire and become an inspirational person and leader.

We begin by talking about his background, how he began working in psychology, then moved to teaching at a business school, and the rewards he found there. Of all the departments and schools in a university, I believe business schools' leadership departments provide the most useful and effective tools and people to solve our environmental situation.

In other words, if you are interested in solving our environmental problems, you can learn from Adam. We mostly talk about his book, Inspire, and how to put it into practice.

• Adam's home page
• Adam's page at Columbia Business School

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A big part of his job is handling preconceptions and objections. In this regard, his work overlaps a lot with sustainability leadership: people's preconceptions override seeing what's happening right in front of them. Listen to him on any other podcast and you hear he has to bend over backward and repeat himself on simple points that I would think should be obvious to clarify that helping men doesn't mean hurting women. His success shows me that we who work on leadership in sustainability can learn a lot from him.

His book Of Boys and Men takes him into challenging territory, but to do important work, sadly difficult. Many of these problems are not caused by boys and men, but boys and men experience them. I found it heavily researched, well researched, and well written. I don't think I'm overstating things, not that I came up with the following observation, but when society disadvantages girls and woman, people tend to say society needs to be fixed but when society disadvantages men, people tend to say men need to be fixed.

We can learn from his leadership.

• Richard's home page
• The American Institute of Boys and Men

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I wish I lived in a world with less sound pollution, but given that I do, I'd rather be aware and conscious of it than not know. Ignorance of how much sound was affecting me wasn't blissful. Noise still affected me. Awareness enables me to act.

But it's not what you think. More decibels doesn't necessarily mean more annoying. Lower decibels doesn't necessarily mean less. Just think of a whiny drone that sounds like a mosquito. I can hear an electric leaf blower as I'm typing these words and while it may be quieter than a two-stroke engine, it's freaking annoying and I can't tune it out.

Chris's book Clamor: How Noise Took Over the World and How We Can Take It Back describes more about sound, noise, how they affect us, how our understanding of them change, and new industries developing on sound design. I start by sharing how just the first chapter of his book illuminated elements of sound I hadn't thought of.

We cover in our conversation many of the topics his book does, not only the facts but the emotional and health responses, what we can do, what others are doing.

• Chris's home page
• Chris's newsletter
• Scientific American's review: 4 Books Scientific American Loved

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Right off the bat, Jo shares how her life before choosing to live without money was stressful, with less freedom or free time. If you thought having more money would give you more freedom, more free time, and less stress, her experiencing the opposite may prompt you to consider the basics of human interaction. What does it mean about our lifestyles, values, and beliefs that having zero of our culture promotes having more of actually giving us what we want?

In earning a doctorate in experimental science, maybe the most fundamental thing I learned is that no matter what I expect or want, nature is always right. If my theory predicts one thing but nature does something different, nature is right and my theory is wrong. Jo's experience suggests something wrong at the heart of economic theory.

Anyway, you'll hear how she learned of the possibility of living without money and acted on it. You'll also hear our mutual appreciation and admiration of our living without things society teaches us we can't live without. We're not extreme. More like we're conservative and loving.

• Jo's page: Jolowimpact Moneyless Low Impact Living

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Do people in the big city want to hear why some guy is walking around looking at trees and the sky? They wouldn't know he was bird watching until he told them. Do you think they'd welcome him or consider some guy with big binoculars too odd?

I don't think I'll spoil anything by giving away that the several conversations he initiated went well because the issue is how they went well and how it led him to feel and act the next day and after.

Aren't we all looking for ways to talk about the environment and sustainability that bring joy, affect people, and result in them expressing gratitude?

• Ryan's home page

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He recounts learning to lead through emotional awareness, using social and emotional skills he developed through practice in our coaching. He connects with people meaningfully: patients, their families, the other members of his team, everyone.

He talks about not telling people what to do but to listen and act with empathy and compassion, that he's developing through deliberate practice.

Maybe the most heartfelt part of our conversation comes at the end where he speaks about his longtime vision and dreams for being a doctor. As much as he wanted to care for patients and their families, now he sees how much the skills of leadership enable him to help far more people by leading others to care more effectively.

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Read them both and you'll see he inspired what I wrote and he wrote a lot more, with more research and editing. I recommend reading it and listening to his podcast episode there, but I'd start with this one. In our conversation, you'll hear more details and back story.

The core idea of his piece: Every fuel we’ve ever used, we still use, and more than ever. If you think that by ramping up solar and wind that in any way that new energy availability will decrease our use of old energy, you’re dreaming. More likely you’re lying to yourself.

That idea is hard for people to swallow if they think humanity's best hope for survival is what they call "clean," "green," or "renewable" energy and learn that those sources aren't clean, green, or renewable. It matters to do the numbers. Mark does.

For the record, I come to different strategies than Mark, but I agree with his starting point in the article. I don't think we should start from denying the numbers.

• Mark's home page
• His recent article in City Journal that prompted me to invite him back: We’ll Never Have an Energy Transition
• His appearance on the City Journal podcast on that piece: Green Energy Fallacies

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We met in Prospect Park on one of the peak birding days of the year. Tons of people were out with powerful binoculars and cameras. You'll hear lots of birds chirping in th background and even people who knew Ryan coming up to talk to him.

Nature is everywhere. We can enjoy it where we are when we want.

You'll pick up how much fun we were having, wonder we were experiencing, and community we were connecting with. Nature makes such experiences happen.

Have fun listening to us in nature watching and listening to birds and birders. Keep in mind: the point is only superficially birds and birders, as important as they are. The point is that you can access nature and create moments. It doesn't hurt to have an expert who wrote the book on local wildlife, but it's not necessary. As I mention in the recording, if you plan to visit New York City and want to explore, I'd recommend Wild NYC over nearly any guidebook.

• Ryan's home page, which links to his book Wild NYC: Experience the Amazing Nature in and around New York City

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It seems an overwhelming majority of people I talk to who haven't explicitly learned leadership associate leadership with the opposite of what I mean when I talk about leadership. They think of it as imposing authority, manipulating, convincing, telling people what to do, and the like.

My definition of leadership is helping people do what they already want but haven't figured out how. Rob shares how he is learning and improving his leadership. People in sustainability can learn a lot from his fast and significant learning.

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Despite his working with prime ministers and across Europe and the world, and acting in many ways already in his life, he was also worried about feeling judged or guilty.

As he learned more about the Workshop, especially listening to Lorna's episodes before and after she took the workshop, he went for it. The nerves he started with faded before the first session ended, as you'll hear.

You'll also hear that instead, he ended up fun. Try to count how many times he says the word in the conversation. He shares about the rewards (also the work). One big benefit: He lives in a home he's rewilding, already surrounded by nature, but the workshop led him to appreciate more.

As much as he appreciated nature more, it sounds like the people and community that came with the workshop created as much value as the other changes. Maybe also the connections what he learned helped him create and deepen outside the workshop.

Make sure you listen to the end. Andy shares the most in the last 10 to 15 minutes. Hearing people share things like he did makes all the time, effort, and other resources creating the workshop worth it.

When you're ready to join, here's the link.

• Andy's personal page
• Lorna's episodes that led him to expect not guilt but fun

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But we can do the best we can. The best we can is all we ever could do. Even if our culture weren't creating all these environmental problems, conflict would always exist. Restoring lost value to our culture that would restore stewardship would keep us from having to hurt innocent people, contributing to this suffering, just to live.

Doing the best we can replaces despair, helplessness, hopelessness, anxiety, and all the internal conflict resulting from giving up on our values with meaning, purpose, love, and passion. People say action is the antidote to those things, but not just any action. The action must be effective, as part of a plan that leads to meaningful results.

This series shows what action will work for you in the moment and for humanity in the long run, leading to global cultural change, restoring basic human values we've jettisoned in a fool's trade for what we think of as comfort and convenience but has become satisfying short-term, meaningless craving.

This summary shows what you can do, on a different scale than avoiding straws. It means taking leadership roles to bring others with us. It's hard work that will take years, but you will love it. You will grow and you will help others around you grow, as well as your whole nation and species to grow from timidity and hoping for the best to restoring values of love, stewardship, family, community, and more.

To follow up:

• The videos of this course
• My book, Sustainability Simplified
• The Workshop and community

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Business people say "culture eats strategy for breakfast," and our culture, while paying lip service to sustainability, promotes and rewards polluting, depleting behavior. Celebrities play a major role in setting culture. When I tell people, "Taylor Swift is probably in an airplane right now," they know what I mean. No one disputes because even if she isn't flying literally that moment, she flies plenty.

Yet billions of people want leadership. They want to follow people living by their values.

This lesson shares the potential legacy available to any celebrity in an area of global demand that can last centuries to millennia. Those doing performative, ineffective things won't reach it, but that constraint doesn't mean celebrities have to act perfect.

They don't have to act perfect.

They only have to show they are doing their best.

But they have to act genuinely and authentically, allowing their vulnerabilities to show.

The Spodek Method enables them to automatically, which is why so many of my podcast guests return for multiple episodes.

To follow up:

• The videos of this course
• My book, Sustainability Simplified
• The Workshop and community

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They're like two tired boxers who get stuck toward the end of a fight in an embrace, holding each other up, acting like they're punching but not. On the contrary, they've evolved into a mutually supportive dance, pandering to their bases, pointing at each other, not taking responsibility.

Yet there are political paths toward sustainability, which is why I work in sustainability leadership, as opposed to sustainability itself. We need leadership, not performances designed to look like leadership but are the opposite.

This video shows conservative, libertarian, and liberal approaches to sustainability from each tradition's principles, including limited government, free market approaches and anti-racist, anti-imperialist, anti-colonial approaches. All are based in the opposite of coercion, convincing, cajoling, or manipulation.

They lead to what appears the only solution that works, an APPLE PIE amendment. While it will work, it's as hard for people as dependent on pollution and depletion as we are to envision as the Thirteenth Amendment must have looked to plantation owners. Yet the Thirteenth passed, replacing the most divisive issue in America's history with a source of unity.

Passing the APPLE PIE amendment will unify us. Future generations will wonder why we took so long.

To follow up:

• The videos of this course
• My book, Sustainability Simplified
• The Workshop and community

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People act on their own motivation that they felt before I met them. Instead of me motivating them, it was more like I unleashed and inspired them. That's the difference in acting on intrinsic motivation instead of extrinsic.

Every other sustainability effort I'd ever come across convinced, cajoled, coerced, lectured, manipulated. It might get compliance, but squashed motivation.

When someone wants to do something but doesn't know how to achieve it, and you know they'll thank you for helping them do it, that's a business opportunity.

This video explores the potential to revolutionize leading people and cultures, even global, toward acting more sustainable. It covers just leading yourself to live more by your values, to working with our team, to starting a project or venture yourself, up to creating a culture-changing project creating a legacy to last centuries and beyond.

I'm not saying you can just start these projects tomorrow. Our culture has poisoned the market so much that nearly everyone associates living more sustainably with making their lives and cultures worse. The Workshop will lead you to know otherwise from hands-on practical experience, but it will take time to build the market.

Then we'll see demand from billions of people.

To follow up:

• The videos of this course
• My book, Sustainability Simplified
• The Workshop and community

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I share my path toward discovering a solution that works, now called the Spodek Method. Changing culture requires many things, and leadership is one. The Spodek Method is an experiential leadership technique that prompts people to share and act on their values---that is, based on intrinsic motivations. I describe how it works and what it achieves, in yourself and others.

So you don't have to take my word for it, I share the experiences of people who have learned the technique, some renowned. Some took my Workshop, others were guests on the podcast. Once you get the Spodek Method and a sense of how it prompts you to transform, I share the vision, mission, and strategies it enables in my mission of changing global culture through a path that is intrinsically rewarding for everyone who tries it.

To follow up:

• The videos of this course
• My book, Sustainability Simplified
• The Workshop and community

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They are symptoms. They all result from our behavior, which results from our beliefs, stories, role models, images, and what makes up our culture.

If we magically fixed all of the environmental conditions making the headlines, but didn't change our culture, we would recreate them.

Every time you say, "individual action doesn't matter," blame someone else or BP, or anything that keeps you polluting, depleting, living unsustainably, you contribute to that culture, even if you really wish you weren't. You fund the lobbyists creating the political forces accelerating more polluting and depleting.

Only by understanding the actual problem can we avoid distractions and solve it.

The video goes into more depth and detail. It sets up all the later videos.

You'll never see the world the same again.

To follow up:

• The videos of this course
• My book, Sustainability Simplified
• The Workshop and community

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I don't like wasting my time any more than anyone else does, nor do I want to see people continuing to

• Lower earth's ability to sustain life
• Destroy others' life, liberty, or property without the consent
• Deplete from nature to where there is not enough as good in common for others

I'm partly insulted that they think I'm wasting my time or that I haven't developed a comprehensive plan that stops all those things that works at every stage, mainly by working on people's existing motivations. It's based on the Spodek Method and other effective leadership techniques.

I posted a series of videos I call A Short Course in Sustainability Leadership that outlines the plan. I designed it for people who want to act and lead, not abdicate and capitulate like nearly everyone else. I recommend watching the videos, which are on this page, but I'm posting the audio here.

To follow up:

• The videos of this course
• My book, Sustainability Simplified
• The Workshop and community

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This conversation was one of my first engaging on race unscripted. It's tempting to see some issues as immediate and conclude we have to address them first. This view misses that unsustainability causes them, including racism, tyranny, and corruption. I'm not saying sustainability alone will solve them, but as long as we live unsustainably, we keep causing them.

You'll hear a lot more in the conversation. This conversation exemplifies what our culture needs more of.

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We talk about volunteering, homelessness, slavery, Africa, the South, and more. She worked at the Lone Star Cafe, which was a famous club in the 1970s and 80s, so shared some big names of people she hung out with, like Willie Nelson, James Brown, Courtney Cox (we couldn't remember her name), Bruce Springsteen, and more.

We recorded in the lobby of her building, so you can hear people coming through and some sound issues. She spoke more softly than her usual self when I turned the microphone on, so I urge you to watch this video to see her energy outdoors. It was taken by a TV crew doing a story on me but they didn't use it.

She asked me not to share her picture, so I'm only showing her side picture here, during a winter delivery, but she's okay with my sharing the video that still came from.

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This podcast is about sustainability leadership. You probably envision a sustainable world, or at least trying with everything you can to help achieve it. Maybe you've adopted my vision and mission. Developing leadership skills and experience as Giora have is essential. We can learn from him.

Beyond his leadership skills and experience, his doing the reps earned him credibility and developed integrity, essential elements for effective leadership.

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Getting to where I take years to fill a load of trash means I've researched waste a lot, so based on the headline, I thought, "yeah, I've read this story before. I'll skim it so I can say I read it and then move on to important things." Instead, I was fascinated and found plenty new. I had to read his book, Waste Wars: The Wild Afterlife of Your Trash, which came out last month. I can't recommend it enough.

Whatever you know about waste and pollution, the book shares more and it's relevant to your life if you value liberty, freedom, justice, not killing people for profit, and not destroying your own health, safety, and security. Our system of waste forces us to act in opposition to those values.

We don't have to. We can change the system. Understanding it helps. Listen to this episode, read Alex's book, and read his opinion piece. Here are its opening paragraphs:

In the closing years of the Cold War, something strange started to happen.

Much of the West’s trash stopped heading to the nearest landfill and instead started crossing national borders and traversing oceans. The stuff people tossed away and probably never thought about again — dirty yogurt cups, old Coke bottles — became some of the most redistributed objects on the planet, typically winding up thousands of miles away. It was a bewildering process, one that began with the export of toxic industrial waste. By the late 1980s, thousands of tons of hazardous chemicals had left the United States and Europe for the ravines of Africa, the beaches of the Caribbean and the swamps of Latin America.

In return for this cascade of toxins, developing countries were offered large sums of cash or promised hospitals and schools. The result everywhere was much the same. Many countries that had broken from Western imperialism in the 1960s found that they were being turned into graveyards for Western industrialization in the 1980s, an injustice that Daniel arap Moi, then the president of Kenya, referred to as “garbage imperialism.” Outraged, dozens of developing nations banded together to end waste export. The resulting treaty — the Basel Convention, entered into force in 1992 and ratified by nearly every nation in the world but not the United States — made it illegal to export toxic waste from developed to developing countries.

• The NY Times opinion piece Alexander wrote that led me to him: The Story You’ve Been Told About Recycling Is a Lie
• Waste Wars: The Wild Afterlife of Your Trash at Hachette

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In looking for a guest speaker on sustainable consumerism, she found the New York Times profile on me. She decided to invite me before realizing I'd gotten my MBA where she teaches. Only when we spoke did she learn I focus beyond just living sustainably to creating a leadership program with a mission to change global culture.

When I spoke to hear class, I spoke about changing culture, which in some ways conflicted with the marketing goal of selling more products. It also resonated with many of her students' interests in creating a more sustainable world. I got a lot of attention after class. We recorded this episode before I guest-spoke at another section of her course.

We talk in this episode about how that class went from her perspective as well as differences between sustainability leadership and marketing. We did the first part of the Spodek Method. You can hear that as a business educator, she analyzed it, so we talked about that analysis.

• Silvia's page at Columbia Business School

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Giora did. A friend of his who was a client of mine recommended he get coaching from me. We worked together for several years. People who think my podcast is primarily about sustainability may think it's off-topic, but those who know I focus primarily on leadership will see this conversation is exactly what I focus on and I think is most necessary and lacking from sustainability.

Recently he told me one of the most heartwarming things I'd ever heard. Despite that our coaching focused on his professional life, he told me that coaching improved his relationship with his daughter in ways he couldn't have imagined. That improvement was one of the greatest changes to his life.

Since I teach leadership to people who took my sustainability leadership workshop, I asked if he would share for this podcast his experience learning leadership through me. I believe his experience will tell people in the sustainability simplified community what to expect from learning leadership.

In this conversation, Giora and I focus on three points in our coaching relationship:

1. Before starting: his decision to get coaching
2. His reaching the c-suite and finding the culture there
3. His transformation with his family and daughter

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We did the Spodek Method. Since he works on engaging people to create mass change, you'll hear him both responding and evaluating the technique.

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Regarding role models, she also looks to sustainable indigenous cultures, and not to give solar panels or western-style schools to, as if we know better, but to learn from with humility.

She uses different language, which I tried to learn from.

• Osprey's book: The Story is in Our Bones: How Worldviews and Climate Justice Can Remake a World in Crisis
• An excerpt in Resilience.org

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Nobody looks forward to going to jail, yet people did. Their actions make mine look easy and fun. Still, I suggest, I bet they consider those actions of going to jail or even being attacked by dogs or beaten some of the best events of their lives. I doubt they regret it. I wanted to confirm my beliefs.

I didn't go out of my way, but I looked out for people who had marched, protested, and gone to jail then. Then, a few months ago, I saw Robert Fullilove speak on a panel on leadership for Columbia's alumni community. He stole the show. That is, he was entertaining, engaging, fascinating, and informative. He spoke about many things: education, public health, prisons, and, catching my ear most, his involvement in the Civil Rights era.

I brought him to the podcast as soon as I could, meeting him in his office. We talk about all the topics he did and more: education, public health, prisons, his involvement in the Civil Rights era, and more. In particular, not only does he not regret going to jail for other people's freedom, he considers that experience essential for him teaching public health today.

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Then we spoke about his experiences recreating the awe and wonder he recalled from his childhood. I predict you'll find the experience heartwarming.

We inadvertently ended on a cliffhanger: if his experience improved his life while leading to consuming less and requiring less extraction, what if everyone improved their life while lowering overall economic activity? I think you'll enjoy our build up to that view. You'll have to wait like us for the next conversation.

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Then she shares her path to coaching on sustainability. She worked in the heart of the corporate sustainability accounting and reporting. She saw it mostly did nothing and often exacerbated the situations it purported to solve.

She has created a practice that exposes and helps fix these problems. I ended up coaching her back in asking her to clarify what a potential client would see in her work to start working with her.

As I wrote before, Lorraine understands our environmental situation more accurately than nearly anyone. We have to change our culture. Transforming leaders of industry is necessary if we expect to change the system.

• Lorraine's home page

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He works in policy so he describes how he sees personal change leading to systemic change more than trying to start with something top-down alone, like working from government or coercion. As I understand, he sees more than most that starting from intrinsic motivation, as the Spodek Method does, can lead to exponential growth in cultural change.

Time will tell, but I see it happening.

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In this episode, Lorna shares her experiences, reactions, and thoughts from taking the workshop. They're all multifaceted. They come from her classmates, leading them in the exercises, being led by them in the exercises, curiosity, and more. She shares vulnerabilities as openly as her discoveries and new commitments.

I predict you'll find her engaging and captivating. Longtime listeners have heard me talk about the workshop, maybe Evelyn, but you might think consider me biased as the person who developed it and Evelyn as someone else leading it. Check out Lorna's experiences.

If interested in learning more about the workshop or taking it, contact me.

• Lorna's home page
• Her TED talk

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If you ever want to infuriate me, maybe the most effective way is to get me talking about environmentalists who talk only science and policy, just what they consider the facts that make them right. They try to browbeat people into doing what they don't do themselves, as if integrity, credibility, and personal, hands-on, practical experience didn't matter for leading others. They're essential. Oops, I could feel the fury rising.

Josh and I talk about what works in leading and influencing others. Listening works more than lecturing. Empathy more than instruction. Intrinsic motivation over extrinsic.

Also we talked about finding and experiencing the beauty of nature, including something of his Kauai experience in Chicago, not despite but in part because he picked up litter too. As always, once people start picking it up, they find more than they thought, including in places they pass daily.

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Many people today see co-ops as luxuries or privileged, which seems bizarre to me since they did it because they didn't have much time or money and had three children to feed. I also see them as not capitalist, communist, or representing any particular political or economic system. They're just people shopping together.

Nick Romeo's book title refers to Margaret Thatcher saying there was no alternative. Quoting Wikipedia:

"There is no alternative" is a political slogan originally arguing that liberal capitalism is the only viable system. At the turn of the 21st century the TINA rhetoric became closely tied to neoliberalism, and its traits of liberalization and marketization. Politicians used it to justify policies of fiscal conservatism and austerity.

In a speech to the Conservative Women's Conference on 21 May 1980, Thatcher appealed to the notion saying, "We have to get our production and our earnings into balance. There's no easy popularity in what we are proposing but it is fundamentally sound. Yet I believe people accept there's no real alternative." Later in the speech, she returned to the theme: "What's the alternative? To go on as we were before? All that leads to is higher spending. And that means more taxes, more borrowing, higher interest rates more inflation, more unemployment."

I grew up knowing plenty of alternatives to what other people couldn't imagine alternatives to. Nick's book treats plenty of alternative systems that work. I found the book while researching Mondragon by way of his New Yorker article How Mondragon Became the World’s Largest Co-Op: In Spain, an industrial-sized conglomerate owned by its workers suggests an alternative future for capitalism.

Beyond the details of particular alternatives like co-ops, purpose trusts, letting citizens make crucial budget decisions, job guarantee programs, and so on, his book undermines the belief that no alternatives exist. Unquestioned beliefs are a big part of culture. Sustainability is full of them. They show a failure of imagination and promote it too.

Nick's book reverses that course.

• Nick's home page
• Nick's articles at the New Yorker

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Alden has had her electronic bike in Vermont for some time but hasn't ridden it. She's used doing the Spodek Method as her excuse to ride it, but it's taken time. This time she used it and you'll hear both how she got it working as well as the challenges. As tends to happen with acting on sustainability, even the challenges end up rewarding.

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Then we talk about nuclear and other policy issues. Heritage's Project 2025 came up so he shared some back story the news doesn't cover about it.

Then we return to acting. On my suggestion, he invites me to visit and fish. I see this call as the beginning of meaningful collaboration and friendship based on a different approach to sustainability than I've seen in mainstream environmentalism.

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Unlike most others, once she saw their counterproductivity, if not outright lies, she left. She works to promote an "economy in service of life." I think it's easy to see that our current global economy is not serving life. The amount of life on earth is decreasing.

Lorraine shares her history of ramping up on mainstream sustainability, her disillusionment, her acting by her values to exit, and her finding what to do. We also commiserate on the challenges we face in living by different cultures than mainstream. It's hard. We face headwinds every day, even from people who want to help us; especially from people trying to help us, like people who claim to be environmentalist but don't change culture or themselves.

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Lorna knew about the Spodek Method and workshops for years. I don't know why she didn't join one until now, but something clicked and she decided to. I think meeting Evelyn led her to see the technique appealed to people like her and unlike me; that acting as much as I do on sustainability didn't result from a quirk of mine.

In this episode, she shares her views, concerns, and thoughts about the workshop and how it might affect her and her relationships. We plan to record another conversation after she finishes the workshop. If you haven't thought about taking it, learn more about it here, then compare how you feel about taking it with what Lorna expresses.

I don't know about you, but I'm curious how she'll experience it. Have I overpromised? Is there something quirky about me leading me to unique or unusual results?

Don't forget to come back to listen to her experience after taking the workshop.

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In this episode, you'll hear heartwarming stories of Nick's childhood with his father, then Nick today finding a way to manifest what he experienced then. You'll also hear he just got married, so I predict the commitment he made in this episode helps contribute to his growing family life.

I'm starting to find it hard to believe people see others as opponents regarding the environment and sustainability. Treating them that way makes things adversarial. I wish they'd stop. Let's see if working together, practicing sustainability leadership, such as with the Spodek Method, helps us work together to solve our environmental problems more effectively.

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We shared our concerns about the Inflation Reduction Act coming from different standpoints, but agreeing with each other.

Our main conversation was about approaching sustainability from a view of freedom, not coercion or imposing values. I share my view that

If you think living more sustainably makes people’s lives worse, you have to become a better dictator.

If you think living more sustainably improves people’s lives, you learn to become a better marketer, entrepreneur, or leader.

Travis agrees on the problems with top-down coercion and we took off from there.

• My interview in Washington Square Park where the interviewer tried to rile me up.
• My post: If you think living more sustainably makes people’s lives worse, you have to become a better dictator. If you think living more sustainably improves people’s lives, you learn to become a better marketer, entrepreneur, or leader.

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This episode gives an inside view of how I develop ideas in our entrepreneurial team. In particular, I share a few insights into what I offer in the workshops. I've long known to avoid facts, numbers, and lecture. I avoid convincing, cajoling, and coercing, which I call bludgeoning. Most sustainability work I know of go in those directions.

I've long seen leadership as a performance art. We learn to practice arts through practicing the basics, which is why my books Leadership Step by Step and Initiative teach through experiential learning: practicing the basics.

Our sustainability leadership workshops teach the basics of sustainability leadership. As with any skill or art, mastering it creates freedom to express oneself, as well as liberation, fun, self-expression, self-awareness, and other skills that make life transcendent.

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Instead of my planned conversation with Dan, we recorded my experience and thoughts about the conversation with the guy injecting on the sidewalk. I haven't edited anything. I recorded with just my headphone microphone so sorry about the audio quality, but I think you'll be able to understand us fine.

I also didn't prepare. I'm not speaking from notes or even more than a few minutes to reflect. You'll get to hear my thoughts raw.

As it happens, Dan is about a third of the way through my book, Sustainability Simplified. It came up in conversation, so you'll get to hear the impressions of someone who has read it. Only at the very end of the call did I think to text Dan the pictures, so listen to the end to hear his thoughts on the book.

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I looked up the book and author and found both fascinating. I scheduled talking to Solomon unrecorded to meet him and see if the connection would fit. I like bringing leaders from any field to sustainability since the field nearly completely lacks it. Solomon and Alan both seem like leaders, so I invited him.

Quoting from the book's page:

Praise for Solomon Schmidt:

“You are a very talented young man with a bright future ahead of you.”

—Pres. Donald Trump 

“An amazing young author.”

—Mike Tyson 

“[You have] quite a remarkable record. [I’m] really impressed.”

—Dr. Noam Chomsky 

“Solomon, thanks for all you do.”

—Gov. Mike Huckabee 

“Solomon...is perhaps the youngest child historian in America.”

—Steve Doocy

“Solomon’s doing the hard work and getting after it.

—Jocko Willink 

“[I have] admiration for all [Solomon is] doing to make this a better world—and a more educated world.”

—Dame Jane Goodall

"A reputable author."

—Rep. Jamie Raskin

We talk mostly about Alan, though also about Solomon. We don't talk much about sustainability, though the leadership shines. I am confident you'll find this episode, Solomon, and Alan fascinating. I'd love your thoughts.

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I learned that many people working to abolish slavery worked hard when drafting the US Constitution to make it able to support abolitionism and to disallow property in man. Slaveholders opposed them, so they accepted compromises. Still, they put enough into the Constitution to enable weakening the institution enough to eventually end it. I wondered if sustainability might have similar precedent, like some law or phrasing of the Constitution that might have disallowed polluting or depleting.

It turns out there was. It was in John Locke's Two Treatises on Government. The more I researched the man, his writings, and our Constitution, the more he seemed to apply to our environmental problems. That research led me to a paper by Susan Liebell, which I link to below.

My conversation with Susan explore the application of his work and theories.

• Her paper that brought me to her: The Text and Context of "Enough and as Good": John Locke as the Foundation of an Environmental Liberalism

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Early in our conversation, he describes some of their differences and similarities, and why he chose Cato. He shares some of his training and background that led him to his views.

Then we talked about a few issues: the Inflation Reduction Act, regulation, how government funding of many programs results in industries growing without being profitable from its customers. We look at several moral hazards, including government gaining money and power from permitting polluting behavior and distributing funding evenly so everyone votes for something even if it doesn't help.

We recorded just before the election so talked about recording again after the election to talk about how its results affect the political, energy, and pollution landscape.

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Jan went to town on his commitment. You might wonder if there's any appeal to picking up litter. Is it worth the effort? Who cares, anyway? After all, more people litter than pick it up, as anyone can tell by how much litter there is and how much it's growing.

Yet the pattern I've discovered keeps happening. On the other side of working on sustainability is always community. I can't prove it always happens, but so far it does.

In Jan's case, he found community, in particular, people who had long wanted to act. They were just waiting for someone to lead them. When someone did, they embraced acting.

How many people around you are waiting for someone to activate them? How much community is waiting to form? How much easier do you think it will be than you probably expect, based on Jan's experience?

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We practiced the Spodek Method, him experiencing it for the first time. In this first conversation, he only experienced being led to share what the environment means to him and coming up with a commitment to help evoke that meaning. You can hear that beyond just participating in the exercise, he's also analyzing it as a professional. We'll have to wait for his second exercise to hear his experience and analysis of the whole exercise.

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That episode describes my journey to start volunteering as an auxiliary police officer and the background to it. Depending on how well you know me or not, you may find the activity as surprising as I do, though I seem to be a minority in that regard. Everyone else congratulates me. I remark on how different this part of my identity seems compared to the younger me who protested America's involvement in Central America, disrupted graduation to protest Apartheid, and knew friends who chose to be arrested at such protests.

This episode recounts one of my first activities as an auxiliary. One month ago today I participated in uniform in the Sixth Precinct's September 11 memorial service. I didn't expect the experience to affect me as much as it did. It did, so I'm sharing it, along with how the activity emerged from living more sustainably, related to how living in unsustainable modernity inhibits introspection and reflection with constant distraction.

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Jan is Dutch, living in Germany, so can't vote in the US, but acts on sustainability locally. He told me he found my podcast made him feel empowered to act in a world where most people seem resigned not to act.

I invited him to share more and to experience the Spodek Method. Beyond recording this episode, he joined the sustainability leadership workshop.

To other listeners: if you're interested in sharing, others can learn from you. I invite you to contact me. You don't have to be a guest, but you may like it. You can also connect with the rest of this growing community.

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For 300,000 years, humans lived without plastic. We created this system, maybe thinking only of the effects we wanted, imagining these toxic effects wouldn't happen. Maybe we didn't imagine they could happen. We don't have to create these materials or use them. We are creating more all the time. There's just so much oil, it's so cheap, and there's nothing stopping producers from creating and selling them. Nearly everyone agrees a role of government is to protect you from my taking or destroying your life, liberty, and property, yet businesses and government gain money and power from creating them.

Jane's research and courses inform us of the dangers the producers don't want us to know about. In this episode, she shares how she discovered this problem, what she's doing about it, and details about the problems. She didn't originally intend to go in this direction, but chemicals from plastic were leaching into other experiments she was doing. The producer of the leaching materials didn't tell her. She had to do new research to find out, saw its seriousness, and kept going.

It's scary to learn. Still, while I'd rather live in a world where we don't permit people to poison us and profit from it, as long as we do, I'd rather know than not know.

• The Food Packaging Forum
• Their Crash Course in Food Contact Materials and Health
• The article she co-wrote published in the Journal of Exposure Science and Environmental Epidemiology the day of this episode: Evidence for widespread human exposure to food contact chemicals
• A CNN article on Jane's research that happened to come out the day before this episode: Toxic chemicals used in food preparation leach into human bodies, study finds

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Sorry I'm writing little about and the episode is long, but for now I wanted only those interested to learn in so you have to listen all the way through to hear the full scope and details.

• The episode I quoted in this one: 366: The Cops, Jocko Willink, and Joe Rogan
• Another episode I mentioned: 506: I lost $10 million on September 11, 2001. Here is what I learned from those who sacrificed and served.

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Listen to the episode for his views in more detail. He is as sincere as they come and has thought the issues through.

I couldn't help wonder how many political conservatives and libertarians care deeply about the environment yet get called "not caring." If they care but approach it differently, if I said they didn't care, it would drop my credibility in their view.

I valued this conversation for his sharing openly. I think we could use more like it. Plus we did the Spodek Method and can't wait to hear how his commitment goes. I predict it will affect his relationships. Heritage is influential. I wonder if it will affect politics.

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A core of our conversation is where a society or state draws a line between things that benefit some people but hurt others. Some things may make messes but everyone agrees should be allowed, like exhaling or pooping. Others everyone agrees should be illegal, like putting poison in someone's food. But what about putting poison in the air in the process of doing something people like, like flying?

We talked about free markets too.

We also did the Spodek Method. Nick grew up near me, so his description of nature resonated more than most.

• Nick's profile at C3 Solutions

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If the process only led to a few people changing, or even many, it wouldn't be worth pursuing. Unlike almost any sustainability work, it can lead to global cultural change and a joyful, rewarding path to it. It doesn't require sacrifice or deprivation. It may look like it from our current culture, the culture that's lowering Earth's ability to sustain life, increasing isolation, and decreasing health, safety, and security globally, despite our reaching such pinnacles of scientific and technological achievement.

Hear in this episode how we can change the world by having more fun.

Then contact me to learn more and sign up. The next workshop begins September 10, 2024. You'll only wish you started earlier.

• The Sustainability Simplified Entrepreneurship Strategy
• Contact me to learn more and sign up

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Why do they enjoy what most people consider deprivation and sacrifice?

You can learn to do it. A growing team of us teach workshops in sustainability leadership. One is coming up, September 10, 2024.

You can become a leader in a movement to live joyfully sustainably, to change global culture at the last minute.

Here is the recommendation I quote

I would like to share with you my experience with confronting climate change head on this year. I decided to make it the year I stop my gloom and doom and to let go of my self-talk that reinforced that I am helpless to do anything. I am discovering that changing my own behavior is joyful and empowering. Deprivation and sacrifice are the OPPOSITE of how I feel about the daily journey toward habits that care for our beautiful planetary home.

How did I come to this change of heart? My daughter took a class with Josh Spodek in Sustainability Leadership and I happened to be at her house while she was taking it. This led to conversations that challenged my pessimism about being able to do anything more than I was already doing. My pessimism about individual action making any difference was challenged. It fundamentally came down to “I can continue along as I am and for certain nothing will change, or I can take the reins of my part of this giant puzzle and have the chance to be a part of the solution”.

A large part of my motivation came when I used an online carbon calculator to determine my “carbon footprint”. I discovered that from flying alone for the first seven months 2023 I had belched out over 10 times the amount of carbon that is considered the “sustainable limit” per person per year. This number didn’t even include gasoline, natural gas, or any other modes of consuming or polluting. It literally made me cry. It also made me get serious.

I took the course that my daughter had taken and found a source of support, inspiration, information, and skills that were new. One of the things about this class that I think is most powerful is that there is nothing “prescriptive” about it. There are no lists of things you should do now and things you should avoid now. No one is deciding for you or shaming you into choices. Instead, it is an inward journey of connection to one’s own internal motivation that is grounded in our own experiences in nature. It is a process of continuous improvement, so I didn’t decide to reduce my trash consumption and then stop when I did that. I look every day for new ways to lessen my impact, and every time I find another way I feel GREAT and motivated to figure out what’s next.

I am writing to invite you to take this class. Josh’s model is to use conversations with each other as the foundation of connecting to our internal motivation, conversations using the Spodek Method. These conversations help build a community of people who have experienced the joy of taking self-directed action in one’s own life. As with any BIG problem, the solutions require all of us. This class helps, one person at a time, to build a community of people who see themselves as part of the solution. I think you will be surprised and delighted with the empowerment you feel to take action.

• The Entrepreneurship Strategy
• Contact me and sign up
• The episode with Trish, who has cancer

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I invited Chuck because of the overlap between city planning and sustainability. Over half of humans live in cities. Many can't avoid following the patterns of where to live, traffic, where to eat and shop, and how to spend money determined by their urban environment. I often say we don't need more electric cars, we need fewer roads, not that electric cars help.

I also learned from reading about him and you'll hear in our conversation that I wanted to learn from his having started a community running against the mainstream values making a lot of people money. I see him as a role model in this way. We talked about it some, but then got into the Spodek Method, which I think you'll hear he enjoyed.

• Strong Towns web page
• Their courses (I've taken 101 and their Not Just Bikes courses so far and recommend them)

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His experience with addicts tells him it's hard, maybe impossible. On the other hand, while people may be conflicted and may have suppressed many of our emotions around the environment, we love nature.

In this episode, we hear the Spodek Method finally clicking with Bruce. One interaction with it isn't supposed to change the world itself. It creates a mindset shift, which one has to follow with continual improvement to change one person, then to spread, but here you can hear it clicking.

Ideas that spread, win. Emotions too. Here is a case where the emotion kicked in with someone skeptical. It's not alone a solution, but a proof of concept. In entrepreneurial terms, the technology works.

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Alden wasn't doing her ebike commitment, as you'll hear in this episode. She also shares some of her priorities in the rest of life. Many people think they don't have time for sustainability, but that view is a red herring. The Spodek Method acts on strong emotions the person likes. Emotion and values are related. To manifest powerful emotions is pretty close to living by your values, which is what our time is for.

We redid the Spodek Method. Listen for yourself, but I'd say she enjoyed the process. She came up with a new commitment. She also shared why she expects this commitment will be easier. We also shared common natural joys like foraging, permaculture, and wild food.

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The Week is one of the few programs on sustainability approaching it as a leadership effort, not management or lecture. Anyone can do it. It's a series of videos you watch with a group, then engage in discussion about it. It's different than the Spodek Method, but shares many aspects.

I could describe it more here, but the best way to learn is to hear his description in our conversation, then sign up for it.

• Frederic's program The Week
• His book Reinventing Organizations

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You can tell he believes in the vision and isn't trying to answer askew, or maybe I'm not picking up on cues, but the interaction is both not clicking but not falling apart either. If you're learning the Spodek Method from the How-To Guide or a workshop, or finished either, I think you can learn a lot from these conversations. Also, from Bruce, a lot about addiction, science, and applying them to modern life.

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At a social event, I met a woman who works at the Cato Institute. I told her of what I was learning and invited her to talk about it. She said sustainability and the environment weren't her focus, but she could put me in touch with colleagues. She knew Jack Spencer from the Heritage Foundation.

I share some of my background, generally left politics, but opening up to learning more from (podcast guest) Jonathan Haidt's work, then attending an event at the Trump Bedminster Golf Course, which led to learning about the Leadership Institute. There I took Conservatism 101, which led the above.

Jack shares some of his background, also not starting on the political right, and how he applies the above to politics today, especially energy, regulation, subsidy, and the motivations of government employees and what he sees happen as they gain power.

We don't reach the point of talking policy. I started to bring up the Spodek Method, but became so engrossed in Jack's sharing about nature, I followed up with it, especially wondering if he experienced environmentalists saying he didn't care. He clearly cares plenty about the environment.

This conversation is different than nearly any I've heard on sustainability. I think you'll like it. My main flaw was my inexperience in talking about some topics so was tongue-tied at times.

• Jack's profile at Heritage Foundation

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At a social event, I met a woman who works at the Cato Institute. I told her of what I was learning and invited her to talk about it. She said sustainability and the environment weren't her focus, but she could put me in touch with colleagues. She knew Nick Loris from when he worked at the Heritage Foundation. Now he works at C3 Solutions---the Conservative Coalition for Climate Solutions.

I invited him to talk about our approaches to the environment, both our historical journeys and our philosophical views. We talked about first-principles approaches from a limited government, free market view.

I haven't heard conversations like this one on sustainability. You'll hear genuine curiosity and learning.

• Nick's profile at C3 Solutions

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You'll hear he's involved with it more. I was curious to learn about parts I don't know about. It's outdoors so it operates 24/7, 365 days a year. New York City has no lack of hungry people, nor places with extra food. It's insane to see how much we waste, except that nearly every American wastes food. We can reduce that waste.

I hope hearing our conversation inspires you to volunteer more, waste food less, and appreciate what food you have. Volunteering for me replaces time in front of screens, so it saves time and money. It connects me with my neighbors, including the hungry and homeless.

I write about Kevin in my upcoming book, so if the book isn't out yet, I hope it whets your appetite to read it. If it's later and you've read the book, this episode will let you learn more about a fellow volunteer.

Besides volunteering, you can start a community fridge. As you'll hear the woman who started this one has moved on, and the community continues to grow and thrive, though it has its challenges.

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We also talk about our vision to create sustainability awards. A few of them exist, often won by companies on the forefront of sustainability like Coca-Cola and DuPont </sarcasm>. We want to make meaningful, authentic ones. Since some would be for contributing to sustainability and others would be to highlight greenwashing and other nefarious, deceptive anti-sustainable practices, we want a name that can suggest positive and negative. Listen to hear what we came up with. In a few years they'll become the go-to sustainability awards.

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I shared before how unbelievably delicious Andrew's food was, even if it were at a top restaurant. But he works at a hospital, so it was healthy too. I almost don't go to restaurants any more since they just pile salt, sugar, and fat onto everything. I don't need a stick of butter in every dish.

I also tasted his food at a chef competition. He's shared his background training at groundbreaking top restaurants.

I couldn't help indulge in asking him about behind the scenes in top kitchens and he shared. We talked about his artistry, how he learned, and teamwork.

He also shared about his commitment, which led to talking about leadership, changing culture, intrinsic emotion, and liberation. How long can you go without your phone?

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A big topic is finding and creating meaning and purpose. My life is overflowing with them since no one seems to be leading on the biggest issue or even know effective things we can do. So I was curious how sustainability fit into Chip's curriculum.

Since he started a program from scratch, I was curious how it started and what drove him. Then we did the Spodek Method.

• Chip's home page

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He likes the idea of the Spodek Method. He hopes it works beyond just one person. He's not sure it can. In this episode we start practicing it.

Working with him was one of the more challenging times doing the Spodek Method. I expect that as more people learn it, these conversations with Bruce will make effective lessons in challenging cases. He wasn't trying to challenge me. So far, it just works with some personalities more smoothly than with others. Finding examples of different types lets me learn how to apply it with different people and personality types.

Some types I haven't figured out. Let's see how things go with Bruce. If you're learning the Spodek Method, I think you can learn a lot from this conversation. I'd say it's advanced. On further thought, it might be me. Maybe other people would have an easy time. If so, let me know what I might be missing.

• Bruce's home page

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This episode presents conversation between two people who have left mainstream culture and are living more how many people agree we should, but hold themselves back. So they speak in speculation and generalities. They still think more sustainability means lower quality of life because they can't speak from experience otherwise.

Erica and I can, so we do. We don't lament missing out on things we don't do any more because we don't miss them. Moreover, we realize they weren't helping us in the first place. Soon we'll all talk about how much we prefer living more locally with less stuff. Today, for listeners who suspect it's possible but haven't witnessed it, enjoy listening.

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We began by talking about recent news: Greta Thunberg taking a political stand and acting publicly on it on an issue unrelated to the environment. Guy described how he saw this action distracting and undermining her credibility in sustainability. We got to talking about overwhelming tribalism today.

In the process, Guy shared views he once held that he overcame, specifically about Apartheid. We talked about ones views changing.

In the end we got to Guy sharing what I read as something he's had to settle on: that while he generally prefers limited government, low tax policies, with our environmental problems, he's concluded otherwise. Like with national defense, where you need aircraft carriers and such, with the environment he's concluded we need big government solutions.

I shared some of my views on big action but to limit government's ability to permit pollution. I read that the views were new to him and attractive. They led him to read my book. Sorry you have to wait until fall to read it, but what I share in this episode hints at why he's written a wonderful endorsement for the book.

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Andy was the Executive Chef at the hospital where we met who prepared that food. It was amazing. It would have been amazing in any restaurant, let alone a hospital.

We talk about two main things. One was the art of food preparation. Andy shared his path there from washing dishes through working with chef Raymond Blanc, chef Daniel Boulud, and the restaurant Rouge Tomate. At each stage he learned appreciation for ingredients and honed his craft.

The other was changing culture. Regular listeners know my goal in sustainability is changing culture. Nearly all attempts to change how our culture impacts Earth's biosphere use technology, market reforms, and legislation. Those things don't change culture.

Northwell Health is deliberately changing their culture around food. They've come a long way, but can still go a long way. Changing culture means resistance, including from the people it would help. It's hard and takes a long time. In the case of Northwell, I hear that despite the challenges, nobody wants to go back.

We living in unsustainable cultures could benefit from learning what Northwell achieved.

Here's the picture Andy mentioned:

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Yet we care about the environment. If we expect to be told what to or lectured at, we hold back from sharing. Dave seemed partly to hold back, but he also works in leadership so overcame the inhibition and shared.

He didn't do as much as he hoped, but the parts he did he enjoyed. If you're concerned about acting yourself, you might appreciate Dave's experience. Starting new habits or even just acting once or twice for the first time can be challenging. When done for intrinsic motivation, you'll feel meaning and want to continue. Dave also skipped some Dunkin' Donuts, which seems like a big success to me.

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Is this pattern not outrageous? Adam reinforces about how widespread the patterns are.

The result is growth in addiction beyond anything before and people keep finding more ways to addict. People often feel isolated and helpless. Addiction wrecks your self-esteem. We miss that our culture supports it. Adam shares how they keep us coming back for things we don't even like.

Adam teaches at one of the world's top business schools. He doesn't oppose business, but he explores our culture's addiction problems. He elaborates on the problems, research, and possible solutions.

At the end, I ask him his thoughts about the viability of contracts and society when people can control others as predictably and effectively as by coercing through threat or violence. We as individuals are outmatched by corporations and institutions able to control people this effectively with big, long-term consequences.

• Adam's home page
• His book Irresistible: The Rise of Addictive Technology and the Business of Keeping Us Hooked

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I'd heard of Rat Park and later remembered Johan Hari mentioning Bruce in his TED talk where he said "the opposite of addiction is community". I couldn't wait to talk to Bruce. Carl introduced us. We spoke. Bruce clarified the demon drug myth. I described how addiction and doof figure in my sustainability leadership work.

In our conversation, Bruce described how working with self-described junkies in the early 1950s led him to reinterpret the common wisdom "proved" by experiments that some chemicals addicted people, end of story. He then described how he created Rat Park, which showed a lot more nuance and alternative explanations. You can read about Rat Park on Bruce's page or this comic book version, but his description in our conversation is engaging and thorough.

Then he shares how people continue to stick with the old view of addiction and drugs. It's easy. It takes parents and others off the hook.

He describes new views of addiction. You won't see addiction the same after. If you want to stop polluting and depleting yourself and help people you know and communities you are a member of, this conversation will change how you view it forever. You'll approach it with more understanding, empathy, and compassion.

• Bruce's home page, aka Bruce K. Alexander's Globalization of Addiction Website

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Then we talk more about flying, following up our last conversation. From Peter's perspective, I view flying too black-and-white, not considering someone's reason for flying or what benefit it might provide. I don't challenge that perspective. I'm just looking to learn from my guest. My book treats that perspective.

Then I share my new take on his drowning child analogy as it relates to sustainability.

Other topics too, but we close with our mutual appreciation for calm conversation and democracy, both lacking these days.

• Peter's home page

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Anna's book Dopamine Nation is one of the most accessible I've read. She covers the scale of addiction, how much it's increasing, how it works, her personal history with her own addiction, and the stories of several of her patients.

After she describes her background, we start by talking about the shame that accompanies addiction and makes it hard to share about, including our personal experiences of it. We cover how much our culture and economy have embraced addiction. It's profitable, after all.

She describes in lay terms how addiction works, how it disrupts homeostasis and the results, for example tolerance. She talks about the paradox that as we create more material abundance, we see more anxiety, depression, and other problems. We find addictive things lead us to feel we're treating our problems, but more often add to them.

She asked me about avoiding packaged food, doof, and other sustainability experiments. I read she asked out of genuine curiosity, recognizing I'm not just doing it for myself. I think she wants to practice sustainability more and is looking to learn how.

We talk about our culture. She identifies commercially-driven epidemics for profit. You can tell I enjoyed this conversation.

Selected publications

• Lembke, A., Digital Addictions Are Drowning Us in Dopamine, The Wall Street Journal, August 13, 2021
• Lembke, A., Eyal, N. Is Social Media Hijacking our Minds?, Pairagraph: A hub of discourse between pairs of notable individuals, 2021
• Lembke, A. Unsafe Supply: Why Making Controlled Prescription Drugs Available for Unsupervised Use Will Not Target the Syndemic of HIV, Hepatitis C, Overdose, and COVID-19, Journal of Studies on Alcohol and Drugs, 2020 Sep;81(5):564-565.
• Lembke, A. Purdue Pharma is Done Promoting Opioids: Here’s Why It’s a Big Deal, Fortune Magazine, Feb 2018
• Lembke, A., Papac, J., Humphreys, K. Our Other Prescription Drug Problem, NEJM, 2018; 378(8):693-695.

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I met her when she was a panelist at an event on promoting hurting people less by flying less. I invited her as someone to explore her journey of reducing her flying. In our conversation, the shared how she went from learning the possibility to promoting staying grounded. Many stages overlapped with mine, from the analysis paralysis of not starting to finding more travel experience despite less flying, or rather because of it.

She shared how you need to act to see what we have to do, not just to change ourselves but to change culture. After being in room where Paris Agreement was signed, she realized, we have to do what the signatories agreed to. It means action, not just talk. She realized that every nation, company, and individual has to live sustainably (to which I add: we'll love it even though from our current perspective it looks like sacrifice).

The point of acting on important issues is to know how to lead others. Science, facts, and lecturing had their role, but have to act on emotions to motivate and sustain action.

Much of what she said was music to my ears.

• Kimberly's book Under the Sky We Make
• Her Substack newsletter We Can Fix It
• Her home page

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Stefan has been reporting and publishing on flying for decades longer than I've worked on it. I met him following a panel he participated in hosted by Stay Grounded on the impacts of flying on people and wildlife. That talk was on frequent flyer programs, but Stay Grounded works on many related issues.

After sharing his background, Stefan talks about his research. My biggest takeaway: People believe a lot of myths about flying. Partly the industry promotes the myths, but people will do whatever mental gymnastics they have to to accept those myths, even when they're blatantly false. Some things Stefan shares:

• Around 2 - 4 percent of people fly in a given year outside their country
• People who fly think more like half the population flies
• Flying is heavily subsidizes, so poor people help fund rich people flying
• Airports and airlines are often supported and bailed out by taxes
• Poor people are hurt more

Stefan shares more information in more detail. Despite knowing much of it, even I was outraged anew at new things I learned of how much flying hurts people and how much people who fly pay to cause more of that suffering, while telling themselves they are helping. Of course, they aren't choosing to fly from reasoning things out. They want to travel without effort, feel inner conflict at hurting people, and try to resolve their inner conflict by rationalizing and justifying their choices.

Here is the post I refer to, documenting the travels of a guy whose email newsletter I subscribe to: What do you think of this person’s flying habits? (part 1).

• Stefan's home page
• His page at Linnaeus University, including links to his recent publications.
• Some recent publications:
• Are emissions from global air transport significantly underestimated?. Current Issues in Tourism. Status: Epub ahead of print
• National tourism organizations and climate change. Tourism Geographies. Status: Epub ahead of print
• On track to net-zero? Large tourism enterprises and climate change. Tourism Management. 100. 104842-104842
• Net-zero aviation : Transition barriers and radical climate policy design implications. Science of the Total Environment. 912
• A review of air travel behavior and climate change. Wiley Interdisciplinary Reviews : Climate Change. 14 (1)

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If anyone can say she deserves to relax and not have to work on problems, nobody would tell someone with incurable cancer she can't spend her time how she wants. Trish has incurable cancer. She worked her whole life to enjoy her retirement. She didn't grow up planning to act on sustainability. She didn't plan to take my sustainability leadership workshops, but her niece, Evelyn, and sister, Beth, told her about taking the workshop so she did.

In this episode, you'll hear Trish sharing why acting on sustainability and leading others is spending her remaining time how she wants. She once envisioned flying around in her retirement. She could and no one would judge her. But having learned that she can make a difference from the workshop, she's acting on sustainability. Living by your values and helping others live by theirs isn't deprivation or sacrifice.

The above is my read of Trish's situation and motivations. Listen to the episode to hear her describe why someone who could do anything she wants and doesn't have to care about people far away or younger finds helping future generations and people far away she'll never meet the best way to spend her precious time. Then sign up for a workshop to create as much meaning in your life.

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The people who gave me the ride were having a great time. In a big van, they were picking up people here and there, navigating intersections with no traffic lights. We all had a great time, which continued when I reached my girlfriend's place. Later I heard of people dancing around bonfires and so on.

For months afterward, when we saw someone we hadn't seen since the blackout, we asked each other's blackout experience. I soon noticed that nearly everyone enjoyed themselves.

At first I thought it odd, since we suspected terrorism at first. After a while, I realized technology wasn't the unalloyed good I had thought it was. I started telling friends I was thinking about taking time off from things that used power regularly. One person responded, "You know, orthodox Jews have been taking time off from technology every week for thousands of years."

Martin Doblmeier returns for a second conversation to talk about his latest movie, Sabbath, which explores the day of rest in culture. The movie explores several groups each of Protestants, Jews, Catholics, Muslims, and secular communities. It covers history, stories, motivations, and many relevant viewpoints.

You'll hear me in the conversation considering how to manifest and explore this concept in my like. I predict you'll consider bringing more sabbath to your life. Since recording the conversation, I've been thinking about how to manifest some regular rest in my life, seeing if I can bring others in on it.

Whether you act or not, you'll appreciate how Martin's movie provokes introspection. How did most cultures lose this day of rest? At what cost did we lose it? Do we want to restore it?

• Watch Sabbath online
• Martin's site: Journey Films
• Upcoming screenings and events
• Educational materials, including many thought-provoking and conversation-provoking questions and discussion points

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We recorded now on the occasion of his new book, Get Over Yourself! How to Lead and Delegate Effectively for More Time, More Freedom, and More Success, on improving your skills working with others, like all his books. He shares stories of himself and clients, often personal, leading to practical advice.

Sustainability requires changing American and global culture, which requires entrepreneurship and leadership.

• Dave's page, which links to his books and how to book him for a one-on-one
• Apprentice

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I found her comments valid, including a criticism of something I said, so contacted her afterward and invited her to the podcast. I also think people who hold Nobel Prizes are more influential than those who don't, in general, and a goal for this podcast is to bring the most influential people.

The conversation was fun and a blast! She does more than research and promote less flying. She lived off-grid long before I started, for example, something we could bond on.

More than any actions, I found her tone and attitude engaging and infectious. She enjoys living more sustainably. Most of the world acts like each step of living more sustainably means more deprivation and sacrifice. What do you know, they haven't tried it. Erica has, and found joy and liberation as I did.

She is a role model. We can all enjoy sustainability as much as her and more than we enjoy life now, twisted up inside knowing we're hurting people (and wildlife). Enjoy our conversation. Join the club of living joyfully sustainably.

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The most common response has been something like, "Oh yeah, I've heard. It's terrible."

Then I share some of what Alden shares in this conversation and they say, "Wow, I didn't realize it was that serious," and become very interested to learn more.

Our clothing touches us intimately. Microfibers enter our lungs. Our children, everyone is affected.

You'll value learning from Alden in this conversation, then reading her book To Dye For, then acting personally, then acting politically.

• Alden's home page
• Her book, To Dye For
• Her conversation on NPR, among many media appearances

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I recommend reading the Post article before listening to this episode. It may read overly positive about the food, but Sven and I ate just after recording at the hospital the regular food they serve patients. It was incredible. I would never have dreamed food at a hospital could taste so good and look so appealing. I figured American hospitals had just capitulated and converted to doof.

From a leadership perspective, I'm most interested in the processes and people behind changing a culture. Serving better food overlaps with the environment in that everyone knows and agrees high-quality food beats low-quality, especially at a hospital, and everyone knows clean air beats polluted air, but we created a culture that makes low quality hospital food and polluted air normal. Sven helped turn around a system and not just any system. Hospitals handle life and death, face heavy regulation, include doctors with special needs, and more things that raise the stakes. He has to deal with people, technology, finances, and everything.

He seems to have succeeded. Can Sven be a role model for we who are trying to change global culture?

Two articles featuring Sven:

• Washington Post: Hospital food is a punchline. These chefs are redefining it.
• Becker's Hospital Review: How one health system rewrote a menu and big cliché

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His experience shows the impact of intrinsic motivation. Maybe observing and spending time by the water means as much to you as to Stephen. Maybe it doesn't mean that much to you. It means a lot to him. Things mean as much to you that may not mean as much to others, but acting on them becomes meaningful. That resonance what happened with Stephen, because he picked his commitment based on his connection to nature.

Wouldn't you love to be able to help others bring things they care about to their lives as Stephen does? You can, by learning the Spodek Method.

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Today the opposite: someone who brings joy, fun, creativity, music, and dancing to the park. Alan began playing drums in the park three years ago and he rocks the place. Click to watch this video of him in action, though when he plays different music, he creates different vibes, so the video shows only a tiny slice of that magic.

You wouldn't believe how much effort he needs to perform each time he plays. You also wouldn't believe how good playing makes him feel, and everyone else there too.

If I report the awful, I'll report the awesome. Feel inspired to bring value to your community, even if it isn't designed for profit, though you should donate to his funds since he's a street performer and can use your support (I'll post a link when I get it from him). If you have to work as much as him, you'll love it all the more!

Photos and videos of the park when flooded with litter -- the opposite of what Alan brings. Be prepared to cry.

• LGBTQ+ People’s Garbage and Leaving It Worse Than You Found It: The Pride and Queer Liberation Marches 2023
• Not only Pride and Queer Liberation: A Regular Day in Washington Square Park
• After the Pride and Queer Liberation Marches 2022: Washington Square Park wrecked again. I could cry.
• “Pride Destroyed the Park”, Washington Square Park after a parade (Video)
• More Pride, Less Pollution in 2022

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Dietrich Bonhoeffer is one. I could share more about him, but my guest today, Martin Doblmeier, made a wonderful documentary about him available online free. It's worth it to watch the documentary before listening to this episode if you don't know much about Bonhoeffer.

Martin had more insight into Bonhoeffer than many. He met many people who knew him, and he featured them in the documentary. As you'll see, the documentary is thoughtful and considerate, which told me Martin must have thought deeply about what motivated Bonhoeffer. He shared about these things in the conversation. We also connected it all to sustainability leadership.

• Bonhoeffer (2003) | Full Movie
• Martin's film company: Journey Films
• Martin's film Sabbath

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Not seeing the huge challenges of taking on one's addiction and trying to overcome it, facing withdrawal and so on leaves us not doing the hard work and using effective tools like listening, role models, compassion, and so on. Now multiply the number of people addicted by billions. If billions of people are addicted to flying, container ship-delivered goods, air conditioning, and so on, we better start soon.

Mattan and I talk about how well addiction describes the challenges of changing culture toward sustainability. He's an experienced professional in the field, but not a licensed or trained professional, though licensing and training aren't necessarily as educational as time spent with people overcoming addiction.

Listen for yourself, but I heard him see the comparison as valid. I'm also asking him since this addiction model of polluting and depleting appears in my upcoming book.

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Often when I talked to her about leadership, she would comment, "We do that in social work too, but we call it" . . . and she'd mention a practice she was learning while getting her Masters in Social Work at Howard University. I'd heard of social work, but didn't know what people in the field did.

She put me in touch with one of her professors, Stephen. We had a great conversation talking about the overlap between leadership and social work, which led me to invite him on the podcast. Here he speaks about

• Social work
• The overlap of personal action and change with systemic change
• Influencing without authority,
• The need to live the values you want to evoke in others
• The need for experience where you want to influence

and more.

Doing the Spodek Method, he picked up on it and took great interest, as I read, seeing its practicality in and applicability in social work.

• Stephen's profile page at Howard University

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Humans behaved this way in the face of slavery, especially during and after the Atlantic Slave Trade, which led me to bring several guests who were experts on that period and people who acted against it.

Humans behaved this way in the face of fascism too. I'm not comparing people today to Nazis, but to Germans who may not have been Nazis, and may even have opposed them, but continued paying taxes, supporting them, and not opposing them. This episode brings my first subject-matter expert in the field of the rise of the Nazis. I've written and brought guests on who knew some people like Dietrich Bonhoeffer, Sousa Mendez, Raoul Wallenberg, and Oskar Schindler, but I haven't learned about the politics and conditions that led to Hitler's rise.

Benjamin Carter Hett's book The Death of Democracy recounts that rise, to critical praise (of the book, not Hitler's rise), including new historical information.

How could people watch it happen and not stop it?

What can we learn from them to stop ourselves from procrastinating and watching it happen?

What options do we have? What options can we create?

• Ben's home page
• His book: The Death of Democracy: Hitler’s Rise to Power and the Downfall of the Weimar Republic
• His page at the CUNY Graduate Center

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We start with his sharing what drew him to the two fields. Then I introduce what led me to want to learn from him. I share a main thesis of my book, starting with the journey that led me to see how today's industry and technology evolved from slavery. To clarify, I understand that machines and industry didn't help end slavery, but sustained the system, including its cruelty, just changing the mechanism.

As I heard, my thesis is essentially accurate. He shared more history of how slavery evolved from before the Atlantic Slave Trade, through North American chattel slavery, how the framers of the Constitution handled it (or sold out on it), how it evolved with cotton, and more.

If you are interested in how our culture still practices the cruelty that slavery did, though with more people suffering and dying, listen to this episode. Then read my book when it comes out to see how to channel the motivation to change that system to effective action.

• John's article on deep history, a short version of his book: Climate, Human Population and Human Survival

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Given his leadership role and experience, we talk about the Spodek Method. I took the liberty of pulling some what he said and formatting it. Listen to the conversation for context for the full meaning, but here's some:

You opened some doors. The idea [to act] was there but I'd come up with excuses for why I couldn't engage now. If [I'm] honest I'll be a whole lot more effective right now . . . than I might be in fifteen years time. It makes a huge amount of sense to do right now so I thank you . . .because I don't know if I would have acted on it. Now that I've committed to it, I will.

Very few have done what you've done: changing diet . . . stopping air travel. . .

[Those] not doing it:

Don't recognize what it takes

Don't recognize the benefits of it, and

Can't credibly convince others.

There's no better way than trying it yourself. You can then speak with authority and awareness, as opposed to just saying oh we should do this but not really intending to.

Sometimes [we] require some form of awakening that . . . gives intrinsic motivation to do something, something different . . . through that action of doing something differently, you can build momentum.

The Spodek Method is one of those tools to enable that awakening.

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In the summer of 2016, a fifty-seven-year-old Texan named Stephen McRae drove east out of the rainforests of Oregon and into the vast expanse of the Great Basin. His plan was to commit sabotage. First up was a coal-burning power plant near Carlin, Nevada, a 242-megawatt facility owned by the Newmont Corporation that existed to service two nearby gold mines, also owned by Newmont.

McRae hated coal-burning power plants with a passion, but even more he hated gold mines. Gold represented most everything frivolous, wanton, and destructive. Love of gold was for McRae a form of civilizational degeneracy, because of the pollution associated with it, the catastrophic disruption of soil, the poisoning of water and air, and because it set people against one another.

Gold mines needed to die, McRae told me years later, around a campfire in the wilderness, when he felt that he could finally share his story. “And the power plant too. I wanted it all to go down. But it was only that summer I got up the balls to finally do it.”

We talked about his doing the story, speaking with McRae, developing a relationship with him that involved his girlfriend and other people he knew. What's it like to hear your voice in an FBI file? Also, the media's and public's taste for such stories.

Whatever your views on how to respond, if you understand or support people like McRae or consider them counterproductive (he knows he's a criminal), you'll rarely find such inside relationships with such remarkable people elsewhere.

• Chris's cover story in Harper's: The Machine Breaker Inside the mind of an “ecoterrorist"  (at archive.org)

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How did humans create a culture that manifests the opposite of many of their values? Why do most people defend that culture, resist changing it, and promote it, even when faced with evidence that it's sickening them, isolating them, killing them, and risking killing billions more within our lifetimes? If we can't answer these questions, we'll have a hard time changing our culture and therefore the disasters we're sleepwalking into.

I've been trying to answer them. Learning about our ancestral past for 250,000 years before agriculture, why and how agriculture started, and what changes agriculture prompted tells us. John Brooke's book, Climate Change and the Course of Global History: A Rough Journey, starts to answer these questions. It's a book of deep history and environmental history---that is, going back hundreds of thousands and even millions of years, treating how environmental changes influenced human behavior.

John and I talk about the field of deep history, how we learn the incredible detailed and fascinating histories of how environments changed and people reacted over many time scales. I would find the scholarship fascinating on its own, and all the more because it's relevant to our environmental situation today. Changes that started twelve thousand years ago started patterns that persist today. In fact, some of them are the dominant factors in how we interact with the environment, in particular how dominance hierarchies formed, what patterns they set into our culture, and how they persist.

I hadn't heard of this field before his book. If you hadn't either, you'll love it.

(He also studies American history including slavery and abolitionism, another relevant part of history. We'll cover them in our next conversation.)

• John's home page at Ohio State
• His book, Climate Change and the Course of Global History: A Rough Journey
• A shorter article John wrote on deep history: Climate, Human Population and Human Survival

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Jacquie didn't complain about costs, but she did say she was too busy. She was even busy working on sustainability. I suggested in our first conversation that cause and effect might be the opposite of what she expected. That is, I suggested that her busy-ness wasn't keeping her from nature but that her disconnect from nature was distorting her values to where she did many low-value things that kept her from what she valued more.

I based this prediction on seeing the pattern many times. I think of it mostly in people insisting they buy takeout food (really mostly doof) and coffee to save time because they're so busy, but the ones who switch to sit down for meals and coffee find it gives them more time, not less.

In our second conversation, you'll hear many things, including this pattern play out in Jacquie acting on her intrinsic values and seeing where it leads.

I recommend connecting more with nature to help restore your values and priorities, which will create more time and energy in your life, allowing you to save money too.

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Maya appeared on a panel, Securing Climate Justice Through Green Amendments: The Held v. Montana Victory, that discussed that case. The more I learn, the more I realize that however impossible it may sound, we can't solve our environmental problems for good without amending the Constitution.

On the panel with her was Michael Gerrard, professor at Columbia Law School, one of America's foremost environmental laws. In today's conversation we talk about the possibilities about a constitutional amendment banning unsustainability. Mark my words: we will make one happen. If you're like I was, you'll think of how impossible it sounds for a dozen reasons. How could it pass? How could it be enforced? How would we define sustainable? Would we return to the Stone Age. But the more you think about it, the more essential it will sound, which may take months of consideration, or did with me.

Listen to learn more on constitutional law and the environment from a top practitioner and teacher.

• The panel Michael appeared on with Maya: Securing Climate Justice Through Green Amendments: The Held v. Montana Victory

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I see addiction to doof as serious as addiction to illegal drugs. Increasingly medical professionals are recognizing what they would call ultra-processed foods as addictive. Plenty of other polluting things---fast fashion, cell phones, etc---are addictions our culture promotes. The product sells itself! What could be better for the GDP.

Mattan cofounded Ophelia, which treats opiate addiction online. He shares the deaths he and people his community experienced that prompted him to start the company. You can see in his bio his entrepreneurial background.

He brings a unique, healing, effective, passionate voice to addiction. You can tell the time and effort he's put into understanding the people he helps.

• Mattan's home page
• Ophelia: Online opioid addiction treatment that (actually) works

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Knowing me and my actions prompted him, but there was more to it. He faced challenges from his family and profession, but found parts easy too. He started biking to jazz gigs by electric bike. What jazz musician bikes to perform?!? . . . with his equipment in a bike trailer?!?

I had to bring him here. If a jazz musician in Los Angeles can bike to work and enjoy it, a lot more people can than admit it. I think of jazz musicians as where cool originated. I see Casey raising sustainability's coolness for everyone.

• Casey's home page (he's done more than play jazz)

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The article led me to read Alon's book The Land Is Full: Addressing Overpopulation in Israel. You can't understand the situation there without including population---including human violence and environmental degradation.

Alon isn't only a professor. He also served in the Knesset, Israel's parliament. He's one of the few politicians to talk about overpopulation. In Israel it's impossible to miss, though many people still want to keep growing it.

In our conversation, we talk about population, participating in politics, the meaning of his book title The Land Is Full, and Hamas.

• Alon's page at Tel Aviv University

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She asked me for advice, we got to emailing, and I invited her to be a guest, following the lines of other impassioned listeners who contacted me. You wouldn't believe it from her sounding natural and confident in our conversation, but she hadn't been on a podcast before.

In our emails, she talked about how busy she was, which I hear from everyone, especially businesspeople, who say: "I'd love to work on sustainability. It's very important to me. I just have to do this one thing first, then I'll get to it." If you've felt that way, you may learn a lot from Jacquie and our experience doing the Spodek Method.

Working on a podcast may sound like me talking to guests a lot. There's a lot of solo work, so I can't help but quote her from her first email again, since I appreciate her validating all that solo work: "Again, I’m a hug fan of the show and yourself. You’re an inspiration and a wonderful reminder that individuals don’t have to fix the worlds problems overnight by themselves."

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All of these things are happening in the Congo. If you think solar and wind are sustainable or avoid human suffering, read Siddharth's book Cobalt Red. If you listened to my last conversation with Adam Hochschild on his book King Leopold's Ghost, you know about the west's cruelty in the Congo. It hasn't ended. Adam put me in touch with Siddharth.

The book will change your views on what we call clean, green, and renewable. Siddharth doesn't outright say it, but it seems every rechargeable battery, therefore every phone, electric vehicle, laptop, and so on should be labelled: "Produced with slave labor."

• Cobalt Red
• Reviews in the New York Times and L.A. Times

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• 475: We Can Dance Around Environmental Problems All We Want. We Eventually Reach Overpopulation and Overconsumption
• 294: Population: How Much Is Too Much?
• 251: Let's make overpopulation only a finance issue
• 250: Why talk about birthrate and population so much?
• 248: Countdown, a book I recommend by Alan Weisman

I invited Wolfgang and Chris to talk about their different views and see if they could learn from each other and we could learn from them. That's this episode. I clarified I wasn't looking for Crossfire-like talking past each other but seeing what each or the other is missing and mutual learning. I think you'll enjoy the conversation. My only regret is that we couldn't have talked longer because we could have covered more.

Past guests who spoke on population

• Jane O'Sullivan
• Alan Weisman
• Alexandra Paul
• Bill Ryerson
• Dr. Michael Gurven
• Karen Shragg

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Because the Firm influences people at high levels of business and government, therefore potentially able to help change culture, I'm very interested in working with them. They are as prone to inertia as any other group, so I'm curious how much they can change others. After all, it's hard to help someone stop a habit while you keep doing it.

I consider the Spodek Method the most effective way to help people who want to lead others lead others---a mindset shift followed by a continual improvement. It opens the door to systemic change, which begins with personal change.

If you don't mind my spoiling what happens a bit, but I think I can safely say that Tony responded positively to the Spodek Method. Listen to hear how. I can't wait for the second episode to hear his results.

• Tony's publications at McKinsey

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Many companies are making strides toward goals for greening their businesses but need to find ways to maintain the momentum now that they have tackled the easiest challenges. Others are about to embark on their sustainability journeys and seek a roadmap and best practices. Increasing regulations, particularly in Europe and the U.S., and demands from investors are pressing businesses to define, monitor and publish their net zero targets and green their practices and products.

The IPCC reports that there is a closing window in which global citizens can mobilize to reduce carbon emissions and hope to achieve the target needed to stabilize the climate. It is becoming clear that it is up to leaders to transform corporate and political cultures to meet these inside and outside pressures. The webinar panel featured guest speakers:

• Lorna Davis, TED Speaker, Coach and Board Member, created largest B-Corp on Earth (Danone USA)
• Gautam Mukunda, Author, Podcast Host, Senior Advisor, America’s Frontier Fund and Professor at Harvard and Yale
• Michael Ventura, Advisor, Author of Applied Empathy, Entrepreneur and Keynote Speaker
• ​Bob Inglis​, former U.S. Congressman for South Carolina, Executive Director of RepublicEN, leader of EcoRight

They shared success stories and lessons learned: how they got reluctant board members, voters, and employees on board; what products and processes they prioritized and how; how they held suppliers accountable; what worked; and what didn’t. Speakers discussed their journeys and answered questions. If you are a senior executive responsible for mobilizing your organization’s sustainability initiative, a shareholder who realizes her investment companies’ efforts need a boost, a citizen considering running for office, or a board member who wants to catalyze the greening process, you'll enjoy this lively panel.

Moderated by Joshua Spodek PhD MBA, a premier voice in sustainability leadership, host of the award-winning This Sustainable Life podcast, four-time TEDx speaker https://joshuaspodek.com/tedx, bestselling author of Initiative and Leadership Step by Step, professor at NYU, and leadership coach.

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You might say to me---someone who avoids packaged food, in his fifth year on one load of trash, who eats citrus peels, who almost never throws away something edible---their perfect for you. But avoiding waste alone wasn't what made me invite them here.

What made me invite them here was their attitude: They're fun! They make enjoying every last bit of food fun. I invited them here because I'm working on changing culture and they belong to the culture I do, which is joy, freedom, fun, and delicious. I don't hear anything from them that's obligation, judgment, telling people what to do, our what I call CCCSC bludgeoning (convincing, cajoling, coercing, seeking compliance).

They also win awards and organize community.

Listen for the fun and freedom of it. Enjoy never throwing food away again.

• Their restaurant, cafe, community center: Mei Mei Dumplings Factory, Cafe and Classroom
• The New Yorker article on them: The Sisters Behind the Fridge-Cleanout Dinner
• The New Yorker article on doof that mentioned them the week before: The Perils of Highly Processed Food

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The liberation, fun, and intimacy of sharing one's fears, anxieties, and other vulnerabilities from acting more sustainably in a corrupt culture that makes it hard, all the more so in teaching others to reveal these things and still to act, led us to get to know each other. We decided the world could benefit from hearing how people who have acted to live significantly more sustainably sound: fun, playful, but still challenging.

We decided to livestream our conversations for people to join and ask questions. Setting up the technology is taking time. Do we wait to figure everything out before starting? Hell, no! We just started recording with what we could. When we get livestreaming working, we'll do it there and hope you can join us to ask questions, challenge us, and whatever you want.

In the meantime, here's how we sound. We start with Evelyn sharing about a sustainable cooking workshop she led at a culinary school with a chef. He invited her as an expert even though she only started anything on sustainability about six months ago. Then I talk about my third annual cooking workshop I led in the Bronx. Many digressions and such along the way.

Learn more about the workshop here. You'll love the experience.

• Our first recorded conversation
• Our second recorded conversation

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As a podcaster myself, I wanted to know how she came to win all those awards, start all those podcasts, and found the company that produces them. If you think you've struggled and failed, you'll love her story since she struggled and failed on the way to success.

I recommend listening to her podcasts. First listen to our conversation to learn about the person behind the microphone.

• Amy's home page

By the way, I misstated about my friend's small car. It tops off at 25 miles per hour, not per gallon. It doesn't have an internal combustion engine.

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He spoke about some difference in his views and feelings brought on by his commitment, but mostly he talked about the beauty of nature flying-distance away. I want to help people find the beauty or any value they like of nature where they are, or realize that it's possible, or worth fighting to restore if we've paved too much of it over.

So it's a different conversation than usual---both friendlier between us and more abstract on his connection with the environment---though you might hear differently.

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In this episode we get a sneak preview of his next book, How Not to Age. Since he mostly covers diet, I wanted to check how much the book covered. Since my biggest problem with aging is my torn meniscus, I looked it up first, and the book covered torn menisci.

Since my diet overlaps so much with his recommendations, I shared my diet and exercise. We talked about his book, his web presence, and what I love: behind-the-scenes stuff.

I also shared my doof concept with him and he started using the term too. He's on a book tour, so we kept it short, but if nutrition is important to you, listen.

• Nutritionfacts.org

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David knows as much about the history of the need for the Thirteenth Amendment, its evolution, and its passing. In this conversation I share some of what I learned since our first conversation. I read him as supportive of something new and promising. I'm biased since I wanted to hear what will motivate me. Listen for yourself to a conversation that may be an early part of a historical movement.

As I've said before, an amendment wouldn't solve our environmental problems and it can only pass with overwhelming popular support, but the idea of it can make it possible and without it many environmental problems will never end.

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I interviewed and learned I got high reviews there, but I had entered business school to improve as an entrepreneur and stayed on my path. Several friends worked there and at its peers Boston Consulting Group and Bain, as well as other consulting firms like Deloitte.

I heard about Michael's book while I was reading books on colonialism, especially Heart of Darkness and King Leopold's Ghost. Leopold crafted a public persona of a benevolent philanthropist helping end the Arab slave trade in the Congo while creating a huge, cruel slave state he profited from. Given what I knew about McKinsey, I read several reviews and watched videos of the authors. They showed a company crafting a benevolent philanthropic image while profiting from others' suffering---promoting tobacco, opiates, dictatorships, and, most relevant to sustainability, oil and petroleum states.

Maybe I was looking for patterns that weren't there, but they made me wonder how much McKinsey and its peers had become a modern King Leopold. The book presents some devastating finds. It's well researched, as you can imagine how anything it revealed wrongly could prompt lawsuits. Beyond McKinsey's work with the world's most polluting corporations and nations, many McKinsey people transitioned to help run some of the world's most polluting companies, including previous guest and three-time Global Managing Director Dominic Barton.

In our conversation, Michael reviews some of the book and shares back stories into how he and his coauthor Walt worked. We treated many areas of McKinsey's work, but focused on sustainability-related ones.

• Michael's column at the New York Times
• His book When McKinsey Comes to Town
• Its review in the Times: Book Review: “When McKinsey Comes to Town,” by Walt Bogdanich and Michael Forsythe

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I met Jim there, felt inspired to do something similar near me, and invited him to the podcast. He talks about what made it possible, what's happened since it started, resistance, celebration, and more.

After we recorded, we walked around my neighborhood and he showed what streets would work best to start the program with. I'm already starting to act.

Before we overbuilt streets for cars, people did fine without cars. Once built, people adjusted their lives, forgot how things worked before, and claim they have no choice to drive. They act like this privilege and addiction helps the poor it impoverishes or people who can't walk everywhere whom it traps.

The answer is to change our environment so cars aren't so necessary. People can adjust back.

Please listen to my episode with Jason Slaughter of the video series Not Just Bikes for more advanced city changes. The U.S. is sorely lagging.

• Queens’ 34th Avenue Shows What Open Streets Can Do for People
• 34th Avenue Oral History on Jim Burke
• Designing Open Streets video

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That's what pollution does. A lack of a clean environment means that someone polluted it and hurt you, your children, your loved ones. You don't have a right to a clean environment if you are an American, or likely anyone. Instead, others have the right to destroy your life, liberty, and property.

Three states have amendments where you can sue for it, but it's hard and the nation doesn't overall.

What would you do if you lost your right to free speech? Would you not work like hell to restore it? Wouldn't you recognize that others would figure out ways to profit from limiting your speech, maybe charging you for it, as a bottled water company would charge your for water? You'd act fast to prevent them from eroding your lost rights more and holding them from you.

Maya is doing that work for your potential right to a clean environment. We start with this perspective, then consider how serious it is, what you can do about it, and how important it is.

In short, you would much prefer life with the right to a clean environment at the constitutional level, as much as you want all the rights in the Bill of Rights.

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Today's guest is a top historian and I found our conversation fascinating. He knows the history like an encyclopedia and can analyze it to answer my questions immediately.

We talk about anti-slavery politics, abolitionism, Frederick Douglass's interpretation of the Constitution over time and in comparison to William Lloyd Garrison's and slave owners', and more.

The big question we pursue is can we use the Constitution to make our nation sustainable? If so, how?

You'll hear I'm narrowing in on answers. David and I will speak again. This conversation sets the groundwork. I believe it's history in the making, in that it's leading to political solutions for our environmental problems caused by our culture.

• David's home page
• David's page at Yale

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Then he shared about the growing communities of professionals and non-professionals. We both talked about trends in tourism, psychedelics, and sustainability. A lot of people are flying around and doing other things that lower Earth's ability to sustain life in the name of helping. They're achieving the opposite of what the marketers sold them on. Others are homogenizing and assimilating cultures in the name of promoting and protecting them.

We talked about his experiences with his commitment from last time, including appreciating nature where we are, not feeling we have to drive or travel to find it.

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We talked about what motivates her to write, how she chooses her columns, and how she writes. I was looking for encouragement to take on difficult topics with confidence, since I'm doing it in my book. I'm concerned my book could be maybe not banned but attacked for taking on topics people tell me to shy away from.

She gives an inside view of an industry and vaunted institution. She also encouraged me a lot. If you're interested in exploring your boundaries, I expect her words will help you too.

• Pamela's opinion column at the New York Times
• Her home page

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Arnold can also talk with integrity for living by the values he talks about. We see the challenges similarly, though I focus on changing culture and he focuses more on technology.

Talking about culture and meaning comes later in this conversation. First we talk in numbers about the patterns he sees in power use, then we expand to reducing battery needs overall, though mostly in houses and transportation.

We also talk about most likely outcomes for humanity. He sees similar results to what I expect if humanity continues business as usual, which isn't pretty. I think we can do more than he can, though I recognize few people think hundreds of millions of Americans can reduce their overall impact something like ninety percent in a few years. I didn't think I could until I did.

Listen and find out why I looked up the lyrics to 99 Red Balloons and watched the Matrix for first time in at least a decade.

• Arnold's company YouSolar

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Luckily nobody told them they couldn't do it! Likewise with the people behind Drew Gardens in the Bronx, Harlem Grown, my credit union, or countless other results of community organizing.

I wrote about it in If you think food coops cost more or complain that some people don’t have access to them, you don’t know what you’re talking about and are exacerbating the problem, but my mom was there. In this episode we talk about how they helped organize a group of families to save money and time to buy higher quality food. Later that group folded into Weavers Way coop, which is one of my favorite parts of my childhood. I didn't recognize it as such as a child, though.

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At last I read his most renowned book, King Leopold's Ghost, which we talk about in this episode. I came to it after reading Heart of Darkness, which it complements. Regular readers know how much I've found imperialism, colonialism, and slavery. King Leopold's Ghost covers the case of Belgium's king pulling it off while cultivating a philanthropic reputation. It's shocking and more relevant than ever, given the continuing imperialism, colonialism, and slavery in Africa today, now for our cell phones and electric vehicles. They aren't clean, green, or renewable.

Adam shares the highlights of the story. Again, the writing is simple and clear so I recommend the whole book. Start with our conversation. King Leopold's Ghost is as relevant to today as any book. If you're concerned about the environment and how corporations and government can promote themselves as green while behaving the opposite, I can't recommend it enough.

• Adam's page at UC Berkeley's Journalism School

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When I asked him if he could imagine a world where no one polluted, he shared that he hadn't thought about it, but find the idea almost beyond conception. Think about it: if someone can't imagine an outcome, how likely do you think that person can achieve it? How likely do you think they'll subconsciously sabotage attempts? Won't it seem scary?

Can you imagine a world without pollution? Matt points out if we pollute, we violate Do Unto Others As You Would Have Them Do Unto You. That means people who can't imagine a world without pollution can't imagine a world restoring the Golden Rule.

Listen for our conversation on this topic. Matt also talks about large changes he's incorporated in his life, already starting to avoid flying.

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He and I know each other partly through a guest also in finance I did several episodes with, Whitney Tilson, though we emailed before we found Whitney in common.

Regular listeners know a strategy of this podcast is to bring leaders from all areas to sustainability, which lacks leadership. I also look for people in fields that people who call themselves environmentalists often call the enemy. They talk about finance people as just looking for profit, not caring whom they hurt. I think they're presuming someone's intent based on what they see. I think psychologists call that presumption the fundamental attribution error.

I don't agree with them. I think everyone has deep, intrinsic motivations on stewardship, but you have to listen more than project onto them to learn it. When it comes out, if you enable them to act on it, they may find the action inspiring and meaningful, and want to do more. I think you'll hear that happen with Guy.

I found his book, The Education of a Value Investor, an engaging read that shows the opposite of him caring only about money or profit. I can't wait for our second episode.

• Guy's home page

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I'll let you read the article to find where she lands on not flying. I expect you'll find she covers your angle and others.

It's challenging. We know it pollutes. We know it's not necessary. We want to do it, so we convince ourselves that what we believe is wrong is right, that the plane was going to fly anyway, that we're powerless to choose otherwise, and various other rationalizations and justifications (I used to. Now I find it repugnant). Though eighty percent of people alive today will never fly, we who fly feel like everyone does. So we convince ourselves that flying is inevitable, benign, and does more good than harm. Yet for people who fly, it's often their greatest contribution to pollution.

Such are my views. I suspect you probably haven't heard people thoughtfully, intelligently explore the subject. In this episode, we do.

• Kate's home page

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• “With deep, compassionate reporting and elegant prose … Ostrander finds creativity, vital hope, and a sense of home that outlasts any address.”—Michelle Nijhuis, author of Beloved Beasts: Fighting for Life in an Age of Extinction
• “As each new climate calamity obliterates, incinerates, or engulfs entire communities, we shudder to think our own could be next. Gently but purposefully, Ostrander guides us into places that have known this nightmare, not to shock but to show that the meaning of home is so powerful that people will make surprising, imaginative, even transcendent leaps to hold on to theirs. By her book’s end, you realize that maybe you could, too.” —Alan Weisman, author of The World Without Us and Countdown
• “What does it mean to maintain a sense of place in an age of climate change? In At Home on an Unruly Planet, Madeline Ostrander explores this question with searching intelligence and uncommon empathy.” —Elizabeth Kolbert, Pulitzer-prize-winning author of Under a White Sky: The Nature of the Future

The book comes out in paperback today (As I wrote in part 1, I don't get a commission, I just couldn't stop reading the book).

In today's conversation, we talk more about what people are doing in the communities she spent time with. I may not have conveyed enough in the notes to part 1 that she spent years with these communities. She didn't just drop in on them. She created enduring relationships. She shares more from behind the scenes and her personal relationships with people who start with creating gardens and bike programs. They don't stop there. They organize to find ways to move oil refineries out of their neighborhoods.

I brought up how Chevron doesn't buy its products. We all do. What they do, when we fill our gas tanks, buy airplane tickets, buy things shipped around the world, buy disposable diapers and other plastic, we fund their efforts. In my view, we have to change those patterns, not wait for them even if we say it's their responsibility. So Madeline and I talk about that view a bit too: individualism, capitalism, profit, and sustainability. Also, the way out: fun, community, gardens, persistence, and taking responsibility.

• Madeline's Home Page, featuring her book At Home on an Unruly Planet
• All her published articles and essays
• Her stories at The Nation

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Madeline spent time with several communities to find out what problems they faced, how seriously, and what they were doing about it. The result is she sensitively portrayed them in her book At Home on an Unruly Planet: Finding Refuge on a Changed Earth. The book reads at time like she's projecting doom, but she isn't. She's describing things as she sees them and the people there describe them. The second half of the book talks about what people are doing. It's sobering, but if we want to do anything, we have to know where we are and how fast we're changing.

In our conversation, beyond describing highlights of the book, she gives backstories of how she picked them, what motivated her, her goals, and more.

GOOD NEWS: the paperback comes out tomorrow. (I don't get a commission, I just couldn't stop reading it once I started).

• Madeline's Home Page, featuring her book At Home on an Unruly Planet
• All her published articles and essays
• Her stories at The Nation

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I see some of humanity's effects on the environment that could affect our population beyond what the UN projections show not as low-probability high-impact events, but already happening. I mean things like depleting aquifers or fisheries that hundreds of millions of people rely on or plastic building up in the ocean. Several major rivers don't reach the ocean, including the Colorado, Tigris, and Euphrates. Solving these problems could be low-probability.

They’re like driving by looking only in the rear-view mirror.

Our relevant question is not, as the UN projections imply, “how do we feed ten billion?” It’s, “might human population collapse?” By implying we don’t have to worry about collapse, I see the UN discouraging acting on sustainability, in my view.

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We ran into each other and talked about his new company, YouSolar, comparing how much power, energy, and reliability he supplies his clients with my little portable battery and panels I have to carry to my roof.

In today's conversation, after he shares his background, he shares YouSolar's grand goal, which is to change the grid, not just provide solutions to some clients. He's looking toward systemic change, filling in a power gap.

• Arnold's company, YouSolar

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A friend who also teaches leadership at NYU knew my background and had talked about climate with her students. She scheduled a call to talk sustainability leadership with me to help prepare. She told me she would record it, but since we were talking on the phone and I wasn't using my recording microphone, I forgot. I felt like I was just talking to a friend. I'm posting that recording: what I sound like when I haven't prepared and don't know I'm being recorded.

In this case, I'm talking with someone I know who wanted to talk about sustainability, so it's not out of the blue with a stranger, but unrehearsed and raw.

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Greg is CLC's CEO, leading that project on the ground working with politicians. If you're curious how it can work, he explains it in our conversation.

You'll hear my long-standing concern that people and organizations who focus on climate and greenhouse gases end up increasing other problems. He sees in some areas that if you solve part of the problem you increase it in other areas, like squeezing a balloon, as he puts it, or whack-a-mole, as I do, but doesn't speak about that problem in focusing only on carbon.

I also didn't get to ask him about the fourth pillar of the case: "significant regulatory simplification." Could it open the door for more pollution and a net lowering of Earth's ability to sustain life?

Still, listen and hear directly from him on the bipartisan effort he's leading.

• The Climate Leadership Council
• Americans for Carbon Dividends

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Gernot combined economics with sustainability before others did and kept at it, putting him at the forefront of environmental economics. As regular listeners know, I value experience and living by one's values, not just talking about it. How else can you gain relevant experience, credibility, integrity, and character? How else do you know what you're talking about?

Gernot has acted plenty. He talks about living more sustainably in his personal life along with his family. (As a side note, you wouldn't believe how many people tell me living sustainably with a family is impossible. It's not impossible for him, nor was it for all humans for 300,000 years. What makes it hard is marrying someone who doesn't share your values, which is another problem from sustainability, but not for Gernot).

He talks about how he renovated his loft here in New York City. He also led renovating the house he grew up in in Austria as a teenager.

He also shares an experienced environmental economist's view of the world and life. He speaks in plain English, not academic-speak, so I find him engaging and enlightening.

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David travels the United States to record what he sees and reports it in Traveler's Guide to the End of the World. He comes from a literary background, so he puts it in the context of past nature writers. He also has a daughter so asks scientists what the world will be like when she is his age. The book is not always easy to read, but always engaging and fascinating.

He represents nature. He declines to lead about it, which, if you know me, I see as the most important course we can take, but there's no denying the value of seeing the world as it has become.

In our conversation, he shares his background, motivations, and the process of researching and writing.

We talk about ultimate Frisbee too, beyond since we both loved it when we played. It also informed our views of our roles in the world.

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He answered thoughtfully and reflectively, not with the usual reactivity and emotional intensity most people do, protecting their feelings of guilt and shame, as I see them (I wrote The reason you feel judged isn’t because environmentalists are judging you. It’s because you have a conscience.) Several audience members told me they appreciated my asking the question. So when we spoke after he finished his stage performance, I asked if he'd mind following up the question in our podcast conversation.

So we spoke in more depth about flying versus not flying. I think I can safely say we both learned from each other, though I think he hasn't spoken with many people who have stopped flying to gain from their experience.

Coincidentally, his talk on stage was fireside chat-style with podcast guest AJ Jacobs. Small world. If you like intelligent, thoughtful conversation, check out Think Inc., the company that organized the talk. They host events with many speakers who are peers.

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Regular listeners know I find that when anyone focuses only on carbon, greenhouse emissions, and climate, they almost always miss our other environmental problems, like plastic, pollution, deforestation, and you know the rest, Bob agrees the tax incentive should apply to these other areas, though I'm not sure he acts on them. It's easy not to change the system, but to make it more efficient and accelerate it overall, even if you lower problems in one part of the system.

But mostly I wanted to hear his views and strategies, not press, so I hope I listened more than challenge.

He also shared his inside views of people in finance approaching a tipping point of realizing we have to protect our environment -- everything, not just climate.

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His goal was to plant a tree. He ended up with a new tree, plus he planted other plants. Listen to hear the story. More than what he did, I recommend listening to his emotional experience. Did he have to do all the things he did? Could he do other things that are more mainstream but might pollute more if he wanted?

We talked first about the problems with what most people mean when they talk about teaching children, helping poor people experience nature, and a few other tactics people promote without thinking them through, as I believe. They sound great. What are they missing?

Matt has thought through such issues more than most and was patient enough to let me share some of my views.

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Bob brings two huge new things to climate (he talks about climate almost exclusively among our environmental problems, though we touch on others briefly in the conversation). First, he knows risk management. Most of his career, he didn't think much about the environment, but when he learned about it, he identified that we have to manage risk, so he dove into the issue.

Second, he connected with a group of conservative politicians promoting what he sees as the most effective solution: a carbon tax. That he's working with groups normally seen as resisting climate action could bring people together.

Also, just after we recorded, the New York Times published a big piece on Bob: A Renowned Economist’s New Idea for Stopping Climate Change.

A personal note: I don't challenge his views because I'm learning them and meeting him. I agree our economic system doesn't account for pollution and depletion. Without proper accounting, no business can stay in business that long, nor can any government. So I consider proper accounting essential, but it's only extrinsic. It doesn't change our culture or the values driving it. Since our culture has abandoned, at least regarding how we treat each other when mediated through the environment, Do Unto Others As You Would Have Them Do Unto You, Live and Let Live, and Leave It Better Than You Found It, a tax won't fix a values problem.

I didn't challenge Bob in it in our conversation, but I find when people focus on climate and greenhouse emissions they nearly always "solve" them with "whack-a-mole" ideas that increase biodiversity loss, deforestation, and other problems. They claim they're solving one thing at a time, but I see them not addressing the culture causing everything.

I look forward to more conversations with him.

• A New York Times piece on Bob: A Renowned Economist’s New Idea for Stopping Climate Change

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But population is one of the most important factors in sustainability. Everything becomes easier when population isn't near or above what Earth can sustain and harder when it's above.

I came to Chris from reading his paper on modeling population growth, Footprints to singularity, which showed a couple things. It clarified that UN and peer projections lacked feedback mechanisms so couldn't show population decline. If your model can't show a population decline, it will blind you to the possibility and therefore keep you from preventing or preparing for it. It also leads you to ask, "how do we feed ten billion people" instead of seeing that we can't without causing a steep drop in population soon after, a pattern called overshoot and collapse.

Second, it showed a good chance that population would likely decline significantly soon. It and he also reinforced my confidence in Limits to Growth's dynamical systems approach.

Chris's paper prompted my contacting Wolfgang Lutz, and I recommend listening to his episode too. I hope to bring them together on one episode to see if they can reconcile their differences.

Oh yeah, I also enjoyed and learned from the class slides for his undergraduate course in human population.

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Then we spoke about coaching and leading people to reach their potentials, which he experienced on the receiving end in reaching the Olympics twice and does now with others, and he appreciates me doing in corporations and on sustainability. You'll hear we both admire each other and are learning from each other.

A curious note: you'll hear me puzzled at his tone, which I couldn't place. It didn't convey the sense of accomplishment and freedom his words did. We're still getting to know each other.

I also think he expects acting more sustainably to take more time and money, when I find it frees both.

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Want to stop people working there? I suggest it helps to understand them. We can start by understanding ourselves. Stopping ourselves from supporting that industry is easier than stopping them, so I recommend starting with ourselves.

Note: we recorded this episode a few years ago, before I fully developed the Spodek Method.

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How do you find out how to coach each person, athlete, executive, or otherwise?

How to you lead a team to give to their potential?

How do you keep everyone motivated?

How do you keep yourself motivated?

We both deeply appreciate each other's experience. You'll hear us trying to learn from each other. I want to learn how to shift sustainability, which everyone gives lip service to, from trying to avoid losing to winning by having fun, giving everything we've got, learning our deepest values, and acting on them. Dan does those things.

• Dan's home page

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I wanted to bring him here not for the campaign alone but for his acting with integrity and character, even if not a huge campaign. How many pro-sustainability, anti-Trump Republicans do you know of? I saw determination arising from personal action.

I also learned he's trying some things, like buying a hydrogen-powered car. My research shows the science and engineering showing hydrogen cars won't work for most of what we use cars for, nor trucks, planes, or container ships, but he's acting on his values, not just pointing fingers. He will learn from the experience.

•  Matthew Matern for President 2020
• The Satyagraha Alliance

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As before, Christopher doesn't hold back, nor does he speak inaccurately. I recommend reading the article first, though you won't go wrong listening right now. Here's how it starts:

In the annals of industrial civilization, the Green New Deal counts as one of the more ambitious projects. Its scale is vast, promising to reform every aspect of how we power our machines, light our homes and fuel our cars. At this late hour of ecological and climate crisis, the Green New Deal is also an act of desperation. Our energy-ravenous culture cannot continue producing carbon without destroying the systems that are the basis of any advanced civilization, not to mention life itself. Something must be done, and quickly, to moderate the pressure on the atmospheric sink while powering the economic machine.

The consensus on the need for scaling up renewable energy is rarely disturbed by a disquieting possibility: What if techno-industrial society as currently conceived — based on ever-increasing GDP, global trade and travel, and complex global production and distribution chains designed to satisfy the rich world’s unquenchable appetite for bigger, faster, more of everything — what if that simply cannot function without energy-dense fossil fuels? What if, despite the promises of Green New Deal boosters, it is impossible to make sustainable the current system that provides billions of people sustenance, shelter, goods?

• Christopher's article this conversation is based on: The Green Growth Delusion
• Donate to Chris's nonprofit, Denatured (I did)
• Less Is More by Jason Hickel
• Small Is Beautiful

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Anyone who has talked to me about my work since I started watching and listening to Daniel's What Is Politics? videocast knows it's shaped how I view politics, meaning how groups make decisions. If we want to change culture, he covers much of the core. If we want to undo some people dominating others, it helps to know how dominance hierarchies form. The core is in anthropology, which shows how humans have related to each other going back hundreds of thousands to millions of years, and current material conditions.

We talk about creating videos versus writing books. Daniel shares a lot of backstory to his creating What Is Politics?, including his goals and greatest hurdles.

At the end things heat up as I share what I want to do, which he sees as impossible and a waste of time. Do you think he's right? . . . or that I should keep trying? I will be the first to say I lack experience explaining myself in this area. I just haven't had the chances, which is part of why I valued this conversation so much.

• The Do the Math blog
• Michael Albert's Wikipedia page and videos
• Jane O'Sullivan's World Population Day Presentation that debunks population myths
• My sustainability leadership workshop
• Robert Carter III, who freed 100 slaves starting in 1791
• The largest B corporation to date was led by Lorna Davis, a guest on this podcast. Here are her episodes.

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One thing I can express that I value: what he says about time parallels what I say about energy, specifically energy as physicists describe it, not emotional energy. We don't have infinite amounts of time or energy. If we see life as missing out on what we lack time or energy for, we'll crave what we lack. We'll be insecure. If instead, we recognize we don't have time or energy to do everything we'd enjoy, we can construct the lives we want, which will be abundant.

Being an episode 1.5 means he only started doing the commitment from last time, but is gracious enough and a leader enough to share, regroup, and if we can find another way forward. I bring leaders to sustainability because they have learned not to hide vulnerabilities, at least not all of them.

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Once you're outraged, then what? In this episode, Leah answers that question. She shares at a high level what people can do in their communities.

You'll hear a couple extra notes of interest from me. One is to see what techniques in the culture she's changing can apply in changing our culture in sustainability. The other is that my episodes with my mom talking about the racially integrated neighborhood she and my father chose to raise us in, as well as the neighborhood itself, Mount Airy, Philadelphia, factored into her research.

You'll also hear me recognizing a new element in how a cultural practice could start for one reason, say racism, then even after people in that system oppose racism, that system can continue and perpetuate the racism. At a certain level, I knew it already, but it hit me more viscerally when Leah explained it. You'll hear.

• The Just Action web page
• Just Action on Substack

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Can Learning to Lead Sustainability be fun, inspiring, and effective?

Yes!

I just finished leading my first workshop in leading oneself and others effectively to act more sustainably: enduring systemic change and immediate personal change.

Best of all: it was FUN! . . . both the workshop and the action it led to.

Don’t take my word for it. Listen to the participants results.

Today's post is the audio from a conversation with them on their experiences.

Better yet, watch the video.

You can learn to help change culture and restore a safe, clean, healthy world.

We're organizing two summer 2023 cohorts. If you want to help fix our world, sign up at https://spodekleadership.com/workshop

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When I first thought of a constitutional amendment to protect us from pollution, I thought the idea was crazy, but I couldn't stop thinking about it. The more I did, the more it made sense.

Since learning about the Thirteenth Amendment prompted me to think of it, I first spoke to previous guest James Oakes about it. Since it involved constitutional law, I spoke to previous guest (and Nobel Prize holder) Seth Shelden, who put me in touch with his constitutional law professor and previous guest Michael Herz. Besides my conversations with them one-on-one, I also spoke with Michael and Jim together. I recommend listening and watching those conversations for context.

My conversation with Maya:

Then I learned of Maya's work with "green amendments," as she calls them, at the state level as a foundation for the federal level. She has been working on it for years. She shares that history, including a major win in Pennsylvania and New York State's recently becoming the third state with a green amendment.

She describes the value of an amendment over statutory law, how current legislation doesn't prohibit pollution it legalizes it, the state of the movement, and goals.

If you, as I did, considered environmental amendments interesting but far-fetched, you'll love this episode. Maya is achieving the seemingly impossible and showing it's beyond possible. It's happening.

• She is the Delaware Riverkeeper, leading the watershed based advocacy organization, the Delaware Riverkeeper Network
• Green Amendments for the Generations
• Her book: The Green Amendment: the People’s Fight for a Clean, Safe, and Healthy Environment

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I speak about the concept of a constitutional amendment on the environment with former guests on the This Sustainable Life podcast:

• Michael Herz: Constitutional scholar and former lawyer for the Environmental Defense Fund (Michael's podcast episodes)
• James Oakes: US historian, focusing on the Revolutionary War to Reconstruction (James's podcast episodes)

We approach the concept from many perspectives, especially comparing it with the Thirteenth Amendment.

This is my first conversation with two experts on a topic I'm just starting to learn about based on very detailed fields, including law, history, abolitionism, and politics. I have to start somewhere. We recorded this conversation months ago and I've learned tremendously since.

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The second part gets more exciting. Gautam expresses that we need to develop technology to help people who aren't living as well as us so we can help them. (I may not have summarized accurately; listen to his recorded words for his precise meaning.) This view is like waving a red flag to me since I used to think things like that but now see otherwise.

We engage in different views on technology, progress, how humans used to live versus how we live today, values, and such.

In other words, we openly talk about the underlying beliefs driving our culture and individual behavior we don't question or talk about, but that guide our decisions and behavior. If we can only imagine a world working a certain way, we can't change course. If that course leads to billions of people dying, being stuck in beliefs is a problem.

I greatly appreciate a civil, productive conversation on topic that many find inflammatory.

The paper on human lifetimes: Longevity Among Hunter- Gatherers: A Cross-Cultural Examination, by Michael Gurven, Hillard Kaplan. Michael Guvern was a guest on this podcast. Quoting from the paper:

The average modal age of adult death for hunter-gatherers is 72 with a range of 68–78 years. This range appears to be the closest functional equivalent of an “adaptive” human life span.

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What happens? Does his life fall apart? Does he find more calmness?

Should you simplify your life by avoiding the call for the latest and greatest?

He shares his experience and you can find out (I'm not sure he did it for this podcast, in that I think he was planning to do it anyway. Still, he shares his experience).

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He shares in our conversation that we will transition to a low-energy future, what it will take, and how little we have tried to figure out if we can do it. It's worrying to hear how poorly we understand the problem, how unprepared we are now, and how poorly we are preparing ourselves.

What he shares is challenging to process considering the risk for catastrophe coming up. Situations like he describes is why I act so much. If you think scientists, engineers, politicians, or anyone understands the situation better than you and you can have faith people smarter than you will solve it, don't hold your breath.

I don't understand how people don't take responsibility, prioritize solving these problems, and act.

• Simon's home page
• Link to GTK videos: There Are Bottlenecks in Raw Materials Supply Chain – A Glimpse of the Systemic Overview Is Here, Discussion and the Development of the Solutions Have Started
• Summary of report: Assessment of the Extra Capacity Required of Alternative Energy Electrical Power Systems to Completely Replace Fossil Fuels, which also links to videos

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Conversations with Alan help me learn about the Kogi, with whom he's lived in the mountains of Colombia and made two documentaries with the BBC. The relevant differences is that compared to us, they live sustainably, free, and in abundance.

Alan shares more in our third conversation about what he's learned from them, including how they see us, which is sobering.

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Gautam's passion is to learn how leadership works, how to teach it, learning more about it, writing about it, the military, most relevant to our conversation: conveying what he knows and that passion.

The upshot: someone who knows as much as anyone about leadership, what works, what doesn't, learning more about it, how to teach it, and passionate to convey what he's learned. He also knows and has befriended some of today's most effective leaders, whom he mentions in our conversation. He calls General Stanley McChrystal "Stan."

Let's see if we can bring Gautam's knowledge, experience, and connections to sustainability.

• Gautam's home page
• Gautam's page at Harvard Kennedy School's Center for Public Leadership

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I've heard of increasing research into psychedelics recently. Reading reports of people who took psylocibin in clinical settings with guides for the experience, I was struck by how similar their effects to those of quintessential moments in the environment. Both talked about oneness, awe, humility, understanding, feeling understood, connectedness, and similar things, though, of course, each experience was unique. Many said that the effects of their experiences lasted sometimes years, potentially permanently. Many could stop addictions overnight without relapsing. Some improved relationships with loved ones.

I hypothesized that some of the experience of psychedelics might have been a regular part of the lives of our ancestors who lived in the 250,000 years or so before civilization, as well as those who live outside it today. Might the drugs just be achieving something remedial that had long been part of our lives?

Might we who live in human-built environments be missing deeply meaningful parts of our lives that were regular for nearly all our ancestors? Might that lack be contributing to our not knowing what we're missing when we capitulate, abdicate, and resign to choose comfort and convenience over alleviating suffering and caring for our neighbors?

I emailed with Roland Griffiths, the head of the Johns Hopkins Center for Psychedelic Research, which I understand to be the premier research center in the field. He put me in touch with Albert. I couldn't wait to compare the effects and potential of psychedelics with the effects and potential of simply spending time in nature.

• Albert Garcia-Romeu's page at the Johns Hopkins Center for Psychedelic and Consciousness Research

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He gave a comprehensive overview of who projects and how, at least as much as can be covered in under an hour. Some highlights:

Who projects based on demography: the UN, International Institute for Applied Systems Analysis (IIASA), and the Wittgenstein Center, among others.

He described what and how demographers project: Assumptions, methods, variables of age, sex, education, migration, fertility rate, mortality rate. He consistently repeated the importance of education.

On Limits to Growth, he pointed out that systems analyses include feedback mechanisms, but their demographics tend to be less sophisticated, for example lacking age structure or effects of education. Demographers don't take them seriously because of their oversimplification.

I asked how demographers include feedback. He described a few ways, including asking experts and translate their responses into different scenarios. What about big events like fish or aquifers depleting? He pointed out extreme events are hard to predict, though humanity's historical resilience suggests we'll figure out ways to level their effects. Demographers also include probabilistic models for tipping points, disease, and such, and report levels of variance.

The results of his research and projections: Human population peaking somewhere around 2080 at around 10 billion then declining. It may reach about 3 to 4 billion by 2200, which could be long-term sustainable, though the transition is uncertain. Humanity could reach a healthy, wealthy, more equal, more resilient, and well educated future, but not given.

Potential problems: heat waves, drought, floods, sea level rise. Humans can solve to some degree, but we have to prepare.

What to focus on: since population changes slowly, behavior, technology, and migration first, then education especially of women in the long term since its effects happen more slowly. Also family planning, women's health, contraception, and sexual equality.

We covered a lot, though scratched the surface, gives understandable overview of demographics and global population projections.

I put greater weight on difficult-to-predict extreme uncertain events. At least I'd make the uncertainty go down more than the symmetry I see, but our conversation was about learning and understanding, not debate. I've learned a lot each time I've listened to this episode. It's dense with information, but on an important subject.

• Wolfgang's page at the International Institute for Applied Systems Analysis
• Two of his major papers explaining how he models global population growth
• The end of world population growth, Nature, 2001
• Dimensions of global population projections: what do we know about future population trends and structures?, Philosophical Transactions of the Royal Society B: Biological Sciences, 2010
• Executive summary of his book World Population and Human Capital in the Twenty-First Century

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Alan is deeply involved with their joint project to learn to restore nature as they have shown they can. "Restoring nature" doesn't do justice for what they are doing. They are also sharing different ways of seeing and interacting with the world, which, as I understand from Alan, is not how they see the world.

Alan starts with a couple descriptions of how the Kogis view things differently than Europeans, including in ways we wouldn't have suspected were different. How does a medieval castle look to someone who has never seen a stone building? If they see something a typical European sees daily, how much else are we misunderstanding? What are we missing?

Their process for planting includes steps before planting of contemplation. What are they doing? What are we missing? Can we learn from them? Can we learn from them before we wreck them and ourselves?

What else about nature are we missing? How common are their views to other cultures that our polluting culture hasn't wrecked yet?

• The Tairona Heritage Trust, where you can learn about and donate to help the Kogi help us
• Alan's first documentary on the Kogi (1990): From the Heart of the World - The Elder Brother's Warning
• His second (2012): Aluna - An Ecological Warning by the Kogi People
• Alan's home page

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I described my work, my path to get here, intrinsic versus extrinsic motivation, how you can't lead others to live by values you live the opposite, and concepts relevant to sustainability leadership.

I didn't take them to task as much as I could have for living unsustainably, undermining their credibility and trust.

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She didn't. She had done those things for a purpose: helping make our world more livable, less polluted. They gave her greater skills to appreciate her purpose and implement it better.

As with most people, the challenges looked insurmountable to her. But unlike most people, she had once made a list to row across an ocean and, finding no impossible steps, she did it. Over and over. It's easy to look at her today and figure, "of course she could do it. She's an ocean rower. She was born that way," or something like that. But before she did it, she was a disgruntled employee and spouse looking for meaning and a way to improve her world, not a record-holding athletic champion.

So also unlike most people, she looked at what sustainability would take, saw no impossible steps, and knew she could help achieve it. That's my read.

I would have been happy to host her for the athletic achievements alone, but they were all stepping stones for greater service to humanity.

She describes her latest book, The Ocean in a Drop and her life experience and goals.

• Roz's web page, which links to her other books, videos, and more. You'll love it.

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She's here because mutual friends introduced us and her recent book, No Filter, that tells a different story than you'd expect of the once-most-highly-paid model. It deserves the positive reviews from the New York Times and elsewhere. As she describes in our conversation, she spent formative years behind the iron curtain, ingraining in her how to thrive with less, not more, which she caries with her until today. She also wasn't always considered beautiful. I'll leave you to read the book to learn about the toilet bowl incident we allude to in our conversation.

In any case, you'll hear someone much more approachable, humble, and resilient that you'd expect.

We recorded in the winter. She agreed to meet me in Washington Square Park to pick up litter together when the weather warmed up. Since models make great role models, the event could help change minds, behavior, and culture. I can't wait to tell you how it went.

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From the start of the conversation, Derek distinguished that he sees himself as an explorer, not a leader. He's exploring the frontiers of life following his whim or what he finds around him. He suggests that leaders give more direction to others to help them follow. He acknowledged with a "touché" that he does have a lot of followers, one of my main measures of a leader.

The next day, he posted to his page some related thoughts in, Explorers are bad leaders, which sparked lively debate in his comments. Many suggested more overlap than you might think.

His distinction led me to consider my role. I hadn't thought about seeing myself as exploring the frontier, but I have been. When I've had the option of leading others and exploring more frontier, I've generally chosen to explore more frontier.

Some examples: avoiding packaged food seemed impossible and took me six months to start. When I succeeded, instead of helping others follow that difficult challenge, sharing recipes and how I did it, I then chose not flying. Avoiding flying seemed harder than avoiding packaged food. When I succeeded in making a better life without it, instead of helping people along, I unplugged my fridge, then my apartment.

Maybe I'm exploring the frontier of sustainability more than leading. Still, it's funny to call a frontier territory where all humans lived for 300,000 years. I'm working on developing leadership skills and techniques that work.

Anyway, listen to the episode to hear how Derek got me thinking about my role and what's next for sustainability. We geek out on emacs, vi, and such things. I think I can safely say he sounded intrigued and will likely be back.

• Derek's home page, which links to all his work

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