Synopsis
Beyond talk, to actionHear leaders and luminaries take on personal challenges to live by their environmental values. No more telling others what to do. You'll hear their struggles and triumphs.
Episodes
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466: Shaun Donovan: New York City Mayoral Candidate
29/05/2021 Duration: 37minShaun Donovan is running for Mayor of New York City. Technically not a national or global position, but in practice it is. Many call it the second hardest job in America. Most New York City mayors affect the nation and world.With a city this size, there are many issues. I focus on two: leadership, which means character and social and emotional skills, and sustainability.Regarding leadership, character, and what motivated him, I heard Shaun share vulnerability. I’m impressed, considering his experience in the White House and beyond, and how many politicians share prepared messages more than themselves. I’ll share his bio and then our conversation.Regarding sustainability, I asked him about litter, biking, farmers markets, and more.Shaun for NYC: Shaun's campaign page See acast.com/privacy for privacy and opt-out information.
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465: Markus Pukonen, part 1: Around the World With No Motors
27/05/2021 Duration: 59minMy friend bought a sailboat, I mentioned to him my goal of sailing off North America, he told me about this guy posting weekly videos of circumnavigating the planet without using motors. I watched a bunch of videos. I had to learn more.He's "traveling in one consecutive journey around the world by as many motor less means as possible, including rowing, swimming, kayaking, standup paddleboarding, sailing, running, biking, skiing, skateboarding, velomobiling, walking backwards, and pogosticking. Friends and fellow adventurers join for support throughout the journey and help to create change through communication, education, and entertainment."I caught him in India soon to sail to Africa.People describe my behavior as extreme. Extremely fun! Actually, it’s more like most humans. Most westerners are extreme in our dependence, separation from family, separation from nature, obesity, addiction, heart disease, diabetes, working long hours, and so on. From their extreme position, normal me looks extreme.I keep going
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464: Resilience: Six months with the fridge unplugged
22/05/2021 Duration: 12minHere are the notes I read from for this episode:6 months with fridge unpluggedMom's advice, her fridge2 articles: Vietnam and power grid safetyExtreme? Extreme fun200,000 years"Heirloom tomatoes" used to be "tomatoes"Connect with peopleOff grid in Manhattan?Solar batteryWhy LeBron practices free throwsTo become world class you have to practice the basicsOtherwise you don't know what you're talking about and lose credibility See acast.com/privacy for privacy and opt-out information.
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463: Brad Hoylman, part 1: From New York Senator to Manhattan Borough President
20/05/2021 Duration: 46minBrad isn't just a longtime elected legislator, he's also a neighbor who represents me. Most campaigning politicians speak in talking points. Maybe for being neighbors, maybe just out of his personality, I heard him opening up and sharing about the man behind the campaign.We spoke about what motivates him, his vision, New York City, Greenwich Village, and government leadership. He spoke thoughtfully, with reflection on political topics but also other personal ones, like the environment, drugs, and drug dealers and use in our "back yard,"---that is, Washington Square Park. I would have expected a politician to dodge some of those questions.Here is Brad Hoylman, the person behind the campaign.I hope our conversation helps lead to New York City legislating decreasing the supply of plastic and packaging choking our oceans and air.Brad's campaign page See acast.com/privacy for privacy and opt-out information.
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462: Bill Ryerson, part 3: The biggest impact you can make
19/05/2021 Duration: 22minHeartwarming is the best word to describe Bill's experience that I can think of.In today's episode, Bill and I start by talking about the incomparably larger impact of having fewer kids, especially in a country that pollutes as heavily as the U.S.Then we talked about Bill exploring his snowy yard with his grandson. The opportunity to do so was there for years, but he didn't act. You'll hear how he loved it.What natural experience might be sitting waiting for you to discover and enjoy? See acast.com/privacy for privacy and opt-out information.
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461: 24 Hours With No Electrical Power (After)
16/05/2021 Duration: 13minMy notes I read from:What I did:Kathryn Garcia in Washington Square ParkFarmers market (compost, oregano)Ride to BrooklynGrain de Sail sail boatVisit with friendCalisthenics by candlelightWake up, no clockThink, reflect, calmMeet to pick up garbageNotes on no power:29 to 30 hours since recording last episode, 26 with circuit breaker for apartment disconnectedLess of a big deal than I expected, though the fridge already being off probably lessened effectTemptationTimeDarknessLightOutdoorsEatingCalm, relaxedMy values See acast.com/privacy for privacy and opt-out information.
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460: 24 Hours With No Electrical Power (Before)
15/05/2021 Duration: 08minHere are the notes I read from for this post:---I posted the other day an exercise to think about going twenty-four hours without using electrical power. To clarify, that exercise was to think about it. I don’t think many people would do it. Even orthodox Jews leave their refrigerators plugged in, as well as clocks. The meters to their homes would register power being used. I’m talking about the meter reading zero. They often leave lights on. Personal choices may mean some don’t use any power.I don’t know Amish, who might do it, or people in societies without power. I spoke to someone who lives where her power drops for days at a time, but she says everyone gets in their cars, which use spark plugs, to go places to charge their phones and use the internet. I don’t know anyone who lives off the grid.Even during the blackout in 2003 and after Hurricane Sandy, I still used battery power. My ten-day meditation retreats and two two-week trips to North Korea still used plenty of electrical power each day.Here’s tha
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459: Jonathan Hardesty, part 3: How to Continue a Sustainability Podcast
15/05/2021 Duration: 01h26minJonathan and I have a good rapport. We joke around. I love his expressiveness as an artist. I think he values stewardship more than he's behaved so far in life, so I hear him enjoying aligning his behavior with his values.In this episode we review his leading his kids and wife in The Spodek Method from last time. You'll hear touching family interactions.The I teach the second interaction with guests---how to lead that conversation. See acast.com/privacy for privacy and opt-out information.
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458: The Spodek Method: How to Lead Someone to Act Joyfully Sustainably
12/05/2021 Duration: 23minI’ve taught a half-dozen people the technique I use in this podcast---the hosts of the other branches of the This Sustainable Life podcast. They started calling it The Spodek Method, so now I do too. It's enabled me to reach amazing people, many of global renown, who enjoy the experience. It doesn't alone solve all the world's problems, but it works. The Spodek Method leads a person to share and act on environmental values.You can do it too with communities you’d like to join. You would contribute to a mission of changing culture from seeing stewardship and sustainability as a burden, chore, deprivation, and sacrifice to wanting to do it based on experience, expecting joy, fun, freedom, community, connecting, meaning and value. Why Learn the Spodek Method?Before: Deprivation, Sacrifice, Burden, ChoreAfter: Joy, Freedom, Fun, Community, Connection, Meaning, PurposeIf you would like to lead your community, try it. If you’d like to grow yourself, have others do it on you.This episode presents my teac
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457: Jon Levy, part 1: The Art and Science of Cultivating Influence
12/05/2021 Duration: 42minJon is famous for bringing people together and creating community, see the New York Times article on him below. He invited me to a few of his events before the pandemic and they lived up to the reputation.His latest book, You're Invited: The Art and Science of Cultivating Influence comes out the day I'm posting this conversation, May 11. We talk about how the book came to be. We're both geeky and prone to talking theory, but neither of us would stop there. He shares how he put theory into practice. At first he makes it sound simple, but he also talks about the challenges and struggles he went through and how far back he had to start from.For our common interests in creating community, I've wanted to bring him here for years. See acast.com/privacy for privacy and opt-out information.
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456: Jonathan Hardesty, part 2: How to Start a Sustainability Podcast
07/05/2021 Duration: 01h28minThis episode is really two.Remember that he started art late in life, so the first two-thirds talks about art. Also his experience with his kids and family picking up trash. You'll enjoy hearing his and his family's joy doing it. I imagine you'll also feel sober about his unpleasant surprise at how much trash there was to pick up.I hope you'll feel inspired to pick up trash too. I think you'll find yourself surprised at how much more trash you'll find when you pick it up than you expect from just looking.The second part, I walk him through how to lead someone in my technique for this podcast. He's considering starting a branch in the This Sustainable Life family, specifically to reach evangelicals, especially in Texas, a group I'm enthusiastic to connect with. Most environmentalists approach them judgmentally and critically, which prompts division.As you'll hear, Jonathan and I expect to connect with them so they enjoy acting.If you're interested in starting a branch of This Sustainable Life, this episode sho
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455: J. B. MacKinnon, part 2: What happens when you pay for quality?
01/05/2021 Duration: 58minOur world values cheap and disposable---in food and doof packaging, furniture, cars, and near the top of the list, clothes, especially fast fashion. The world is paying for it in the sense of overfilled landfills, plastic disrupting endocrine systems of animals including us, oil wells everywhere, garbage patches in the ocean, and so on.I see us paying the price. We're always craving. Stuff always breaks. We feel compelled to buy new phones when the old ones should have kept working. We're obese from snacking. We're twisted up inside polluting while trying to convince ourselves we're not.J. B. MacKinnon's new book The Day the World Stops Shopping examines this part of our culture and for this podcast he committed to go against that trend by buying a quality pair of jeans from a place he knew the sourcing, labor practices, and everything else, the opposite of fast fashion. He also paid significantly more for them.Was the premium worth it? Should you do the same? What can we learn from his experience?We talk abo
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454: Richard Rothstein: Racial segregation in generations of U.S. law
29/04/2021 Duration: 59minToday’s guest, Richard Rothstein, is one of the experts on how the law has clearly and explicitly kept freedom, prosperity, longevity, opportunity, and more from people based on their skin color. This is no hard-to-believe conspiracy, tenuous claim, or cancel culture labeling. He shows laws in black and white the law says you can’t rent to blacks. Across the country in many spheres of life for generations. No secret. Plus he traces the repercussions that occur when one group can do things another can’t and how they ripple throughout society.Is his material valuable? Here’s one measure. I’m happy that my book Leadership Step by Step has over 100 reviews, averaging close to five stars. I know a lot of authors, editors, and book marketers. People seek that three-digit barrier. Richard wrote The Color of Law, a book on laws. That’s like a book on accounting. His book has over twelve thousand reviews, overwhelmingly five-star.As usual, I bring you the personal and leadership aspects of the work. I’ll link in the n
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453: Bill Ryerson, part 2: How can we talk about population? What can we do?
26/04/2021 Duration: 54minWhat's the Earth's carrying capacity? If we're above it and we choose to lower it, what happens to the economy?I've wondered these questions. I know the mainstream view gets it wrong because humans have lived sustainably. Their models say it's impossible, so they're wrong. They must be missing something, at least.Rapid population growth leads to poverty. It might be a party on the way up, but it's unsustainable. We can celebrate lowering population. Other cultures have. We can too.Bill starts by talking about how we can tell we're over the Earth's capacity, the dangers of relying on nonrenewable resources like oil. How do we achieve a soft landing if things collapse? Bill works on these things and speaks with experience and thoughtfulness, not just political bromides. We also cover birth control and immigration, topics relevant to the environment.These topics are critical, but not covered. For me, it's refreshing to talk reasonably about these things. The media doesn't.I also get him acting on his values. As
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452: Book Update #1
19/04/2021 Duration: 09minStarted thinking of book when I worked on initiative but put in background, expecting podcast to improveThat's been the case.Started getting serious about a year ago.You may have noticed a lot of guests with backgrounds in abolition: Eric Metaxas, Adam Hochschild, Manisha Sinha, Andres Resendez, Richard Rothstein (more on racial injustice)That's because abolition became major issue, then George Floyd amplified issueSo spent months talking with people and figuring out approach. Everyone said, “Josh, you could cure cancer, but if it touches on these things people will think you're trying to use someone else's issue.” or they'd say “You couldn't possibly understand, or at least people will think you can't” or they'd say “Some things you just don't talk about or compare because they're in another category.”So I went with people who devoted their lives to these issues and learned a ton.Next step: started writing outline, then text, revised three times.Started a writing workshop. Kicked writing into overdrive. Wrot
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451: Alexandra Paul, part 1: A Genuine Celebrity Role Model
17/04/2021 Duration: 51minI saw a TEDx talk on population where the speaker spoke thoughtfully and persuasively on overpopulation. I consider the topic among the most important on the environment, yet nearly no one talks about it, so I had to find out who she was and invite her to the podcast.She turned out to be a huge celebrity. Most people who talk about population are academics, at least in my experience. They know the facts but tend to present them abstractly. Who was this Alexandra Paul?You could see from her bio that she's acted in movies and television. She cohosts the Switch4Good podcast on veganism with an Olympic athlete. She's also finished Iron Man triathlons and been arrested for non-violent civil disobedience. She's genuine, authentic, and mission-driven. Where others lecture or tell others what to do, she smiles and does it herself.If I hadn't met her, I wouldn't have believed she existed. She does and here's the conversation with her.Her official siteThe Switch4Good podcast See acast.com/privacy for privacy and opt-ou
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450: Brian Keating, Losing the Nobel Prize
08/04/2021 Duration: 35minThough I haven't actively practiced physics since defending my thesis in 1999, it felt great to talk science with the author of a book named one of the best non-fiction books of all time. The conversation stayed where nonscientists could understand, but we spoke, I think, how physicists do, though I'm out of practice.We talked about values, the difference between theory and experiment, the beauty of experiment, running experiments by the South Pole and tops of mountains, Einstein, Feynman, and technology. Of course, sustainability too.He shared about the writing of his book, the life that led to it, and the life it led to of becoming a spokesman for science.We also closed with him describing his podcast, where he interviewed me.Click here to see the video of our conversation. See acast.com/privacy for privacy and opt-out information.
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449: Chad E. Foster: How Do You Handle Huge Challenges? Not Big. Huge.
23/03/2021 Duration: 01h06minHow do you face challenges? Not little ones like a pandemic lockdown for a year. Big ones.Regular listeners hear me talk about role models like Viktor Frankl and Nelson Mandela in the context of handling life challenges. During the pandemic, for example, I recognize there was suffering before, there will be suffering after, and there's suffering now. Our challenge is not to take on things outside our control since we can't, but to figure out how to respond, not just to the world but within our hearts and minds.We're locked down. Nelson Mandela was locked down for 27 years. If he could create meaning forced to break rocks, I can find meaning in my home, able to go out every day, with access to communicate with everyone, access all the culture ever digitized, and so on.In the context of sustainability, do we just give up? How do we find hope and resolution to act even when everyone around us says what they do doesn't matter or that only governments and corporations can make a difference? What role models can we
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448: Robert Bilott: The Lawyer Who Became DuPont’s Worst Nightmare
20/03/2021 Duration: 57minYour blood contains PFOA, also known as forever chemicals. They cause cancer of several types, birth defects, and more.Dupont and other companies produced this stuff after learning it caused harm and dumped it into our environment. As best we can tell, they chose enormous profits over the health of their employees at first, and eventually all Americans and all humans because this stuff takes millions of years to break down and accumulates in our bodies.We know because Robert Bilott, today's guest, took on a small farmer's case. His cows were dying, we now know from water poisoned from Dupont dumping these chemicals. They pulled on the thread and the whole sweater unraveled. Robert's story became on par with those in the movies Erin Brockovich and A Civil Action.The highly-reviewed 2019 movie Dark Waters featured Mark Ruffalo, Anne Hathaway, and Tim Robbins playing him, his wife, his coworker. The New York Times featured him in its 2016 magazine article The Lawyer Who Became DuPont's Worst Nightmare. The most
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447: Kathryn Garcia, part 1: Candidate for New York City Mayor
19/03/2021 Duration: 32minKathryn Garcia, candidate for Mayor of New York City joined. No matter where you live, the mayor here matters. Many national trends in politics, business, culture, education, sports, and more start here. Our output in entertainment, culture, but also pollution and population affect the U.S. and world.I wanted to treat two issues: sustainability and leadership. Also hear Kathryn Garcia as a person, not just a candidate.Talk about a welcome change from all-too-common American politics! You'll hear a public servant speaking with experience, knowledge, and heat.There are more issues than a mayoral candidate could talk about in one episode with the city in the midst of a pandemic, ethnic and racial strife, a cultural scene that's been shut down, disparities in wealth greater than before the depression, and so on. I didn't want to leave them out but wanted to focus on these issues that matter to everyone, but are less covered elsewhere.You'll hear for yourself. I heard someone speaking from her heart and experience