I found Dr. Trasande quoted in a Washington Post article The health risks from plastics almost nobody knows about: Phthalates, chemicals found in plastics, are linked to an array of problems, especially in pregnancy. He said, "Endocrine-disrupting chemicals are one of the biggest global health threats of our time ... And 2 percent of us know about it---but 99 percent of us are affected by it.”

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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Reading Saabira's New York Times piece Throwaway Plastic Has Corrupted Us told me she saw more about plastic and its effect on our culture than most. A quote from it: "The social costs of our addiction to disposable plastics are more subtle but significant. Cooking skills have declined. Sit-down family meals are less common. Fast fashion, enabled by synthetic plastic fibers, is encouraging compulsive consumption and waste."

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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Zach and I got so into our first conversation that we had to take a second one to get to the Spodek Method.

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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I met Zach at an event I spoke at sponsored by the Young Presidents Organization, whose members tend to be successful in business. The criteria to join require it. I knew the people would be friendly, but suspected they would pollute and deplete more than most without realizing it.

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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Since our fourth recording, Dr. Bob and I spoke at length about what's driving me and keeping me going beyond where nearly anyone else does on sustainability leadership. We cover in this recording most of that conversation, plus we go in other directions.

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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This week, I charged my solar panel and battery on my roof for the first time for over 18 months. My building had to do maintenance during which no residents could access the roof. They told us the job would take 5 months, but it took over 18. They also didn't say exactly when it would start until one day I got an email that said I couldn't access the roof until they finished the job.

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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Late summer means produce at peak ripeness, especially peaches and heirloom tomatoes. Regular readers of my blog and subscribers to my newsletter have read of how my volunteering to bring overstock food from stores to places that give it to anyone for free has led to my getting for free amounts I can barely keep up eating that people turn down.

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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Aaron and I met after I got to see a screening of his recent short animated film Snow Bear. I knew about Aaron's achievements from participating in some of the biggest animated movies of all time. I expected to talk about art, creativity, and expression, topics I love. We did, after first hitting on leadership, especially empathy.

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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Dr. Bob worked in the heart of the US Civil Rights movement in the 1960s. He shares stories of his interactions with Stokely Carmichael (later Kwame Ture), John Lewis, and more.

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 can't help but call Glenn "Dean Hubbard" since I met him as a student at Columbia Business School. That was 2005, making him one of the guests I've known the longest.

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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We jumped in to talking about her Spodek Method commitment. She lives in a suburban area. There's a place near her that borders on bush, which I guess is Australian for undeveloped land. This spot with a bench designed for experiencing nature has been a short walk away from her for a long time, yet until now she never experienced it. Even this time, she put off acting on the commitment.

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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Adam teaches leadership at Columbia Business School, where I learned there were classes in leadership, which changed the direction of my life. Regular listeners know I consider leadership the most important missing element in sustainability. To change the environmental effects we're barreling into, we have to change the causes, which are our behavior, which result from culture.

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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When people talk about helping men, a lot of people think any and maybe every man might just have latent misogyny, so helping him risks augmenting misogyny. Richard Reeves has researched the situation extensively and for whatever advantages they (we) once had in some areas, still have in some of them, society has been kicking us down, especially in education, income, medicine, and law.

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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Sound pollution is pollution. You know it's been growing for your whole life with little sign of decreasing.

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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Can you imagine living without money? Humans lived without money for 250,000 years, so it's not necessary for life. Money seems like an invention on par with the big ones, like fire, the wheel, writing, and language.

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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Ryan shares his experience approaching people to share in his joy. The task is not easy anywhere, least of all the Bronx, where he doesn't live but was visiting.

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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Rob starts by sharing his experience from leadership coaching in the context of a hospital with people in intensive care as well as their families. Situations are often emotionally intense. Treating just facts doesn't work, or can work against you. It can be "terribly ineffective" (not unique to medicine).

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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Reading Mark's recent piece We’ll Never Have an Energy Transition in Manhattan Institute's City Journal prompted me to write my recent post, When they say “transition fuel,” they mean “more polluting and depleting,” not less pollution or depletion.

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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This recording went far beyond my usual preference for recording with guests in person when I can.

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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Rob is one of my coaching clients. I asked him to be a guest here since many people perceive leadership and learning it as different than I mean. His work in medicine may not be at the center of sustainability, but I work in leadership, which I apply to sustainability. Listen to this episode to learn what changes to your life you can expect when you take my workshops. Listen to him for the full picture, but I think you'll hear profound and enduring personal growth, professional growth, improved relationships with spouse, children, and coworkers, promotion, security, connecting with your passions and realizing them, and more.

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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