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This Sustainable Life — Science & Medicine
This Sustainable Life

Do you care about the environment but feel “I want to act, but if no one else does, it won’t make a difference,” and “But if you don’t solve everything, it isn’t worth doing anything”?

We are the antidote! You’re not alone. Hearing role models overcome the same feelings to enjoy acting on their values creates meaning, purpose, community, and emotional reward.

Want to improve as a leader? Bestselling author, 3-time TEDx speaker, leadership speaker, coach, and professor Joshua Spodek, PhD, MBA, brings joy and inspiration to acting on the environment. You’ll learn to lead without relying on authority.

We bring you leaders from many areas — business, politics, sports, arts, education, and more — to share their expertise for you to learn from. We then ask them to share and act on their environmental values. That’s leadership without authority — so they act for their reasons, not out of guilt, blame, doom, gloom, or someone telling them what to do.

Guests include:

Dan Pink, 40+ million TED Talk views

Marshall Goldsmith, #1-ranked leadership guru and author

Frances Hesselbein, Presidential Medal of Freedom honoree, former CEO of the Girl Scouts

Elizabeth Kolbert, Pulitzer Prize-winning author

David Allen, author of Getting Things Done

Ken Blanchard, author of The One Minute Manager

Vincent Stanley, Director of Patagonia

Dorie Clark, bestselling author

Bryan Braman, Super Bowl champion, Philadelphia Eagle

John Lee Dumas, top entrepreneurial podcaster

Alisa Cohn, top 100 speaker and coach

David Biello, Science curator for TED

Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

Latest Episodes:

750: Alden Wicker: To Dye For: How Toxic Fashion Is Poisoning Us. You'll Be Shocked Mar 21, 2024

Show notes

Since recording this conversation, I've mentioned to a lot of people, "you wouldn't believe the situation with dyes and poisons in our clothes."

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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749: Sven Gierlinger, part 1: Transforming the Culture of a New York Hospital Chain as a Chief Experience Officer Mar 15, 2024

Show notes

I heard about Sven through the articles below about the cultural change at Northwell, a chain of hospitals around New York City.

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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748: Stephen Broyles, part 2: A Calming, Life Change From One Small Commitment Mar 13, 2024

Show notes

About fifteen minutes into this conversation, it hit me how powerfully Stephen's commitment affected him. (Sorry I took so long to catch on, Stephen!) All he had to do was volunteer around a body of water.

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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747: Go Alan Go!, part 1: The drummer rocking Washington Square Park Feb 17, 2024

Show notes

Regular listeners and blog readers know I talk about litter and how much we wreck nature, especially my neighborhood's back yard, Washington Square Park. Click the links below to see some of the worst litter you've seen, in a supposedly nice part of town.

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.

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746: Martin Doblmeier, part 1: What We Can Learn from Dietrich Bonhoeffer Feb 15, 2024

Show notes

I'm searching for role models including people who changed cultures and undid dominance hierarchies, particularly people who came from status. I can think of many who came from subjugated classes, but not many who could have declined to engage, but did instead.

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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745: Mattan Griffel, part 2: Is our dependence on polluting behavior "addiction"? Feb 04, 2024

Show notes

I have spoken and written at length how I see our relationship with polluting behavior as qualifying as addiction, a view that I think helps frame the challenge of sustainability. Overcoming addiction is harder than creating new technologies or taxing things. It takes powerful internal social and emotional skills. Just acknowledging one is addicted and harming others is a big hurdle, let alone acting on it.

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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744: Stephen Broyles, part 1: What Is Social Work and How Does It Relate to Leadership and Action? Jan 25, 2024

Show notes

Regular listeners and readers of my blog will know my sustainability leadership workshops and one of the participants of the first, Evelyn (she's in the video on that link). After being the teaching assistant for a couple cohorts, she is leading this winter's session.

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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743: Benjamin Hett: The Death of Democracy: Hitler’s Rise to Power and the Downfall of the Weimar Republic Jan 22, 2024

Show notes

Regular listeners know how I look for role models in similar situations to ours regarding the environment. We know our polluting and depleting are bringing us toward collapse, but instead of acting, we procrastinate on acting. We rationalize and justify our inaction. We abdicate our responsibility, capitulate, and resign to complacency and complicity.

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?

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742: John Brooke, part 2: American slavery transformed to today's industry and anti-stewardship of our environment Jan 20, 2024

Show notes

If John's specialty in deep history weren't valuable enough to understand how our culture's dominance hierarchy formed from the material conditions of the dawn of agriculture, he also specializes in American history, including slavery from before the Revolutionary War through to the Thirteenth Amendment.

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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741: Tony Hansen, part 2: Volunteering hard labor creating meaning and generosity Jan 10, 2024

Show notes

You'll hear Tony's story of rolling up his sleeves and doing some hard labor. You'll also hear the labor being just the start of the reward. He shares about the less tangible but not lesser results in community, emotional reward, enthusiasm to do more.

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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