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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

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Latest Episodes:

820: Andy Samuel CBE: From worry before the workshop to Fun and Community during and after May 23, 2025

Show notes

Are you thinking about acting more but concerned about feeling guilty or judged that you aren't doing enough? If so, you'll love this conversation. I feel honored to work with people with Andy's background and community, which you'll hear about in our conversation.

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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819: A Course in Sustainability Leadership: 6: Our Brighter Future May 12, 2025

Show notes

This last recording in the series brings together the opportunities. We can't fix all the world's problems or to go back in time and change history. We can't change that people are already dying by the tens of millions annually from environmental problems, a number projected to increase by factors of ten or more.

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:

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818: A Course in Sustainability Leadership: 5: The Celebrity Opportunities May 10, 2025

Show notes

Look up "Greatest of All Time" on Wikipedia and you'll find Muhammad Ali. This lesson shares how he went from being just the heavyweight champion of the world to the greatest of all time, transcending sport to becoming a statesman.

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:

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817: A Course in Sustainability Leadership: 4: The Political Opportunities May 08, 2025

Show notes

Sustainability has become a polarized partisan political issue, despite everyone wanting clean air, land, water, and food. In the US, neither the Democrats nor Republicans have a vision of or plan to sustainability. Both rely on purported solutions that exacerbate and accelerate our current results. Since we reach the general through the specific, I focus on US political opportunities. I believe those outside the US will see clearly how to apply the spirit of this video to their homes.

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:

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816: A Course in Sustainability Leadership: 3: Business/Entrepreneurial Opportunities May 06, 2025

Show notes

The solution in video 3---the Spodek Method---creates a new, more effective situation than anything I know of in sustainability.

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:

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815: A Course in Sustainability Leadership: 2: The Solution May 04, 2025

Show notes

Now that we understand our environmental problems as cultural, proposals based in technology, market incentives, and legislation don't address the problem. They generally won't achieve the desired outcome and will often achieve the opposite.

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:

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814: A Course in Sustainability Leadership: 1: The Actual Problem May 02, 2025

Show notes

Do you think our environmental problems are rooted in greenhouse gas levels or emissions? Or biodiversity loss? Or any of what makes the headlines?

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:

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813: A Course in Sustainability Leadership: Quick Introduction: Welcome to the Sustainability Simplified community Apr 30, 2025

Show notes

Many people see whatever part of what I do, think that's everything, and conclude I'm just doing some personal action or other form of spitting into the wind.

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:

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812: Robert Fullilove, part 3: Politics, family, race, and sustainability Apr 20, 2025

Show notes

Our third conversation matches the first two in intrigue and quality. We talk about the things that came up for Dr. Bob that got in the way of his commitment. These issues come up for nearly everyone (implying they aren't personal, but cultural beliefs): politics (including reacting to Trump), family, and race.

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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811: Tina Tombstone: A friend I volunteer delivering food to the needy with Apr 15, 2025

Show notes

Tina is one of the central characters in that group that everyone knows (another is Kevin Fucillo, also a podcast guest). We go back a few years. She was born in the south in 1933, so you can do the math, but you'd never guess. She's at times a firecracker, full of life, ready to handle anyone. She's friendly to all, but ready to police anyone overstepping bounds. She's always caring about the community as a whole and each person in it. She goes out of her way to help people beyond just delivering food. The community wouldn't be the same without her.

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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