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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:

340: Michael Turner, DDS, MD: On the front line of Covid-19 in New York City May 19, 2020

Show notes

Want inside views of covid-19 in the epicenter of the epicenter?

Michael has been working at the front line of Covid-19 in New York City.

He's also my brother-in-law who has known me since the 80s. I started the pattern of bringing people to share inside views of my work with my mom's episode, which I encourage you to listen to.

He shares inside views on the flaws and weaknesses of both.

He starts by sharing stories only surgeons can---for example, of saving someone's life on an airplane. You know in movies when the plane captain asks if there's a doctor on board? It happened to Michael when he was the only doctor on the flight---then just starting. He says he didn't fully save a guy's life, but it sounded close. Based in New York, he also treated a Victoria's Secret model and famous actors and singers.

Then we covered the pandemic. You'll hear how he risked his life to conduct surgeries of patients with Covid-19, inside views of doctors fed insufficient information seeing the pandemic dawn on them, dealing with government, and dealing with the looming threat of having to choose who might live or die. Most of all, hearing the inner sentiment that drives a care giver to go into harm's way for another person's health.

Then we talk about what brought me to invite him: his seeing me change over the years. I got more than I expected and different views than my mom.

It's two conversations---one on the front lines, the other personal, both meaningful, both honest and candid.

My mom's episode

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339: Brooklyn Borough President Eric Adams: Food Matters May 19, 2020

Show notes

Brooklyn Borough President means Mayor of Brooklyn. If Brooklyn separated from New York City, Eric Adams would be the mayor of the third most populous city in the country. If it separated from New York State, he'd be Governor of more people than 15 states.

In this episode you'll hear why in 2013, Adams was elected Brooklyn borough president with 90.8 percent of the vote. He shares his transformation from his diet causing him to nearly losing extremities and vision to loving food they way I do.

We cover the gamut of food issues---politics, education, business, history, but most of all family, community, and personal joy, community, and connection. It's hard to keep in mind hearing him how far he came in only three years---meaning have far you can go in three years if food isn't the joy to your life it is for him.

People like him are why I created this podcast. The environment and food lack leadership. When you bring effective, authentic, genuine leadership to the environment and food, look at the difference. You'll hear how fast and thoroughly he changed and the passion and conviction he speaks with. You can imagine how deliciously he eats.

Do you doubt he will make a difference?

I can't believe people think one person changing doesn't make a difference.

Official Brooklyn borough president website

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338: Abbey Ryan, part 1: Technique and Mastery Through Practice May 14, 2020

Show notes

I consider leadership a performance art and the environment the most beautiful thing around. Abbey and I talked about beauty, art, performance, teaching, technique, craft, and everything that goes into mastery.

She has little experience with burpees. I have little with painting, but we connected on mastery. I think I can safely say we both look forward to our next conversation. Just after stopping recording we both commented on how much we enjoyed connecting on what underlies all fields amenable to mastery.

Abbey has painted a painting daily since 2007. As someone who has done burpee-based calisthenics and written blog posts daily for nearly as long, I couldn't wait to talk to Abbey about the personal growth, community, connection, self-awareness, self-expression, and so on that come from a daily practice.

I learned about her from podcast guest Seth Godin's book Linchpin, but watching her videos (links below) showed me the beauty of her work. More than that beauty, I enjoyed watching her connections with people learning art from her.Do you want to make an activity you care about a pillar of your life? Why care about classics and masters? Listen to Abbey.

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337: Why we feel miserable under lockdown May 09, 2020

Show notes

I discuss the connection between perceiving lack of variety in food made from scratch and feeling miserable and bored under lockdown, despite having access to all the world's art, music, literature, and culture ever recorded and more material abundance than kings only a few generations ago, despite our material abundance being only slightly less than a few months ago.

Here are the notes I read from for this episode:

Yesterday recorded episode with Rob and my stepfather
Talked about food variety, said mine lacked variety
Only tried three times
People always see theirs as varied, others as not
People say I don't like Chinese or Indian, billions, huge variety
I see McDonald's and Taco Bell as same
Count Chocula versus Froot Loops
I made something with broccoli versus zucchini or cauliflower as different
I see industrial food as the salt, sugar, fat, convenience treatment
Add sugar versus add salt, people see as different, but to me corn flakes and Fritos are basically the same
Supermarket carries same things year-round. Seems like variety because at any given moment lots of choices
But once the prime pleasure becomes salt, sugar, fat, convenience, same to me.
Because there's the raw flavor, which can differ, but we've reduced that variety to monocrops so only a few varieties of mango here, despite abundance in nature, and zero radishes for most people
To me variety among apples is huge, which I cherish
German beer law -> abundance and just local ingredients is huge compared to their four
People lived since dawn of our species on local ingredients
When did we become so entitled that we should get anything we want whenever, wherever?
What's so bad about not having berries every damn day?
A farmer nearby wants to provide food for me and you
Instead a large part of your money goes to Saudi Arabia for fuel, Madison Avenue for advertising, Wall Street for finance, and Venezuela for farmer now not feeding their people
So my parents, who have lived here for over a decade, say there's nothing available local this time of year
It's like someone who played loud music their whole lives to deaf saying there's no bird songs
The human aspect is important to me. I would probably eat meat, which until just before this time of year would be our option, and we'd cherish it, not take it for granted and ship from all over the world
Then treat with salt, sugar, fat, convenience
So no, I don't consider Filet-o-Fish as different than a burger, nor Taco Bell as different from McDonald's, Olive Garden, etc
They all treat the raw ingredients as commodities.
I want to treat them as a painter treats paints on a palette or a musician treats notes on a scale. A piano has 88 keys. A trumpet three valves.
No variety?
Let's get to bigger picture.
I've also come to see our educational system as equally tone deaf
Some will see history as completely different subject than economics
Or even humanities as different than science
Even there, most humanities people will see math and physics similar
Most science will see history and philosophy as similar
To me, if they all teach the same skills of reading, listening, taking notes, analyzing how they teach to analyze, but not to learn their own values and create own skills, teaching the same compliance
That most Americans or people in East and West, when confronted with new problem, can't help
Mandela, in prison 27 years, lived more free in 10x10 foot cell with forced labor than people today.
How do I know? Because he created his happiness despite few raw ingredients, yet people today with much more comfort, convenience, and variety feel depressed and bored.
I learn from Thoreau, who lived off the land. Read Walden and Civil Disobedience. People today miss the point by saying he interacted with people. He found that being put in jail for not paying taxes to avoid
supporting slavery and an unjust war made him more free.
People who emerge from our educational system learn dependence, not independence. Rob complains about system and as best I can tell spends his time in solitude trying to find how someone is causing his problems rather than appreciating nature that no matter how we try to dominate it, will never go away nor be weaker than us.
With zero evidence constructs a world view that Chinese labs were trying to hurt him. Mandela learned to relate with and help the people imprisoning him, realizing the problem wasn't the people, but the system
People make themselves depressed, despondent, angry, and such unable to apply their compliance and analysis to understand a situation beyond what school taught.
Victor Frankl lived a life of more happiness and bliss in Auschwitz, or Jean-Dominique Bauby, the guy from The Diving Bell and the Butterfly who suffured a stroke that led to him devoid of voluntary control of any muscles except his left eyelid and who wrote a book that became a bestseller and a movie that won awards, He did it by connecting with the people around him.
They lived more variety and happiness than people today who want to riot when they only have access to all the food in the world, all the world's knowledge, video to anyone and everyone, all the art, music, literature, movies, ever recorded
As well as the tools for themselves to recreate those works or even make their own
So go ahead and call my bowl of cereal one day with a bartlett pear and the next with an anjou pear lacking variety while your Wheaties
different than your Spaghetti-os, which I see as the same
While you complain, plan to riot against people suggesting you live with slightly less material abundance than yesterday, by your own prideful boasting greater than kings of only a few generations ago, and sink into depression and rage
Miss out on seeing that the same process happens with travel as with food. Just as they industrialize food to produce what superficially looks like variety but beneath the surface is monotony, people's actual experience of Italy versus China have become as different as different sections of Disney World, while they can't see the nuance between going on a bike camping trip versus spending a week to learn bike mechanics. Or they can't see that spending a week on a meditation retreat might change their lives more, despite probably less emissions, than crossing another item off a bucket list that is actually less photogenic than the million pictures on the net, that they degrade by going and also degrade where they came from.
Or even as my stepfather describes meeting the people or the land in faraway places, while missing out that his very own childhood created
the same results by going places on foot, miss out that the variety and diversity of people is everywhere.
My greatest recent vacation was the day, just to see if I could, I got on my rowing machine and rowed a marathon---that is 26.2 miles.
You would say I didn't leave my apartment and with disdain say I missed seeing Macchu Piccu or some other thing beyond my physical horizon, while I found myself, physically, emotionally, and made myself more able, more creative, less needy, physically, emotionally,
intellectually.
It wasn't just a day but a journey, since a month earlier I had rowed half a marathon for the first time, that feat a couple months after seeing people do it during the crossfit games, which I found researching a guest on my show who won the crossfit games after winning a gold medal in the Olympics, whom I met from another guest on the podcast from several months earlier who had won the Americas Cup, whom I met from learning to sail, which I learned to cross the Atlantic because I challenged myself not to pollute by not flying.
While most Americans seem unable to put two and two together to see the opportunity to create the joy, happiness, bliss, community, and
connection that someone the Nazis tortured, that Apartheid tortured, and whose stroke deprived of voluntary control created.
You think they're dead. Some of you probably think they're dead white males, as one entitled student described my heroes including Mandela, MLK, and Gandhi. I find them more alive than probably you find alive most of your Facebook connections including possibly your spouse, as Rob tells me many people are looking to divorce as they meet their partners more.
So go help bankrupt your local farmers, saying they can't provide you with food in the winter and help support despotic regimes and a system making more despotic regimes, lying to yourself that you aren't contributing to it
And lament that after the vaccine everything will return to normal despite connecting with people around you more, as the guy I mentioned to Rob that my step-father and I talked to yesterday told of finally learning that his son was languishing in school, but flourished when his own father actually spent time with him.
His father said he wouldn't go back to the old way.
He could have learned about his son any time. Why didn't he? He was busy. He had time for things not his son but not his son.
Compliance-based education may have resulted in a child getting an A, but not knowing his father, or rather knowing his father doesn't have time for him but does put him in a place that bores him.
Teaching below him more likely led to him getting a low grade, not high, less factual understanding which nobody cares about anyway, and shoved down learning experientially value, meaning, and purpose, connection, family, ability, creativity, initiative, and what makes life abundant.
Now he has less, but he's finding more, he's creating more.
He says, as you have the capacity to, that he would have changed earlier, had he known.
Reverting back to before means you are passively accepting the compliance and impotence that supports those regimes, keeps you stupid however vaunted your degrees and able to regurgitate information but not tell the difference between radish varieties to where you call salads with two different varieties lacking variety
And you would have reacted as I would on mentioning putting pears in cereal, that I won't because pears' flavors are so nuanced and delicate that I would rather eat my oats plain in order to savor the pears
Except when they're in peak season and so abundant and cheap that I feel richer than a king when I indulge in them, appreciating the abundance of nature, not the scarcity of soul in your supermarkets and convenience restaurants, however crispy on the outside and tender on the inside, and your prepared restaurant meals full of pleasure bereft of feeling.
Now watch your farmer sell his land and pay some Saudi prince while you make yourself powerless to love and spend time with your child when restrictions decrease and you can do what you want.
Go complain and use your compliant, entitled dependence to turn greater material abundance and prosperity into emptiness of meaning and purpose and feel superior to my walking four miles to meet a guy in person who can tell me where my local farmers will sell me a rutabaga you wouldn't deign to eat as it lacks variety, while my life overflows with abundance of meaning, purpose, sensory delight, and even amid this tirade love.
I have to admit as I write and speak the word love that I'm hit with humility, what little I have, that my poor rhetoric and reflection have
led to a tone accusatory and condescending.
Maybe I'm wrong. Maybe I'm fooling myself. But I'm sharing not to put down but to invite you to try, not sample or visit, but sincerely, authentically, and genuinely try to live this way for a while.
Maybe start with food. For a week or two go for nothing packaged, no added salt, sugar, fat, nothing made extra convenient. Cook everything from scratch, maybe more than a week or two, until you master it, which may take months and will make you as sore as someone using muscles for the first time in their lives, but when strengthened will enable you to achieve more than ever.
I predict you'll wish you had earlier, that you'll connect with your world, community, and family more than you thought possible, that you'll
open yourself to learning, growing, and connecting.
If after you master local foods you return to Cracker Barrel, please teach me why, because I'll have something to learn from you.
I predict instead you'll want to share what you've learned with others, and you'll be able to do the greatest thing anyone can about our environmental problems, greater than not flying, greater than avoiding packaging, greatest of all: you can lead others---people, communities, corporations, and governments -- to love, honor, and steward nature, which includes us.

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336: Julian Guderley: GreenPlanet BluePlanet May 08, 2020

Show notes

If you measure an interaction with someone by how much it affects and improves your life, my conversation with Julian was profound. Why? His conversation led me to start meditating regularly---something I've considered for year but never implemented, until the morning after our conversation.

Longtime listeners know I've meditated for nearly 15 years. I've chosen infrequent deep dives---5-10-day retreats with no reading, writing, phone, internet, or talking---finding that I've gotten most of the value of daily practice from my other sidchas. The morning after our conversation, I started and have kept going since. I credit Julian's conversation.

I met Julian after hearing an episode of his podcast featuring Wen-Jay Ying, an entrepreneur who founded one of the CSAs I get my vegetables from in New York. I learned more about his podcast: he hosts well-known guests to speak about the environment and human views on it. He focuses on emotions, leadership, action, authenticity. He also does solo episodes sharing his thoughts. He coaches on leadership.

In other words, he works similarly to me. His voice is different, though, so you'll hear from Julian a different approach to similar topics. One of my first observations from his talking was on the speed of my thinking, which could be more relaxed. I predict Julian will get you thinking too.

I recommend listening to my appearing on his podcast.

Talking to Julian put me in a different frame than usual, more introspective. I'm not sure if it's coincidence so soon after my Springsteen episode and my episode with my mom, or maybe an effect of the global lockdown. It's led me thinking more openly of the lockdown as an opportunity, not to detract from the experiences of people in pain, dying, or risking their health for others who are.

What might come of our time locked down?
What will happen on its own?
What won't happen unless we take responsibility?
How can we serve others?

---

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335: Rhonda Lamb, part 2: reversing food deserts May 06, 2020

Show notes

The quote you just heard was Rhonda's description how showing people how to cook the way I showed them could save time and money for people to enjoy fresh fruits and vegetables.

After Rhonda and my first conversation, I recommend watching the video of my going to the Bronx for the group Rhonda assembled at a church for me to demonstrate cooking my famous no-packaging vegetable stew.

This conversation came shortly after that potluck. Rhonda and I share hear how that event went. One woman said you couldn't cook that way up there, but then everyone else said it was possible. Rhonda knew everyone there, so listen to our episode to hear her read.

Rhonda sounded to me upbeat about her Bronx community finding value in learning this way to cook from scratch. She says the transition takes time, but that once started, the transition would happen.

On a personal level, I feel vindicated from people repeatedly evaluating my suggestions that this style of cooking could help people by my identity---or rather their perception of it---instead of how it could help people and communities.

There's no question that different neighborhoods have different access to food versus doof. My questions to you

Do you accept that difference?
Do you consider it fair?
What are you doing to change it?

I don't think we have to accept it. I'm helping change it. I'm helping reverse the trend of doof producers extracting money from communities with less defense to their manipulations. They claim to offer convenience but make people dependent, creating lifestyles to spend less time with family to work at low wages.

I recommend you help this process instead of sustaining what McDonald's and Starbucks are doing---perpetuating poor health and impoverishing people and communities.

Rhonda and I have become friends, over vegetables. She met my mom, I met her son and community. Food brings people together---in my experience, more when you meet the farmers and prepare fruits and vegetables from scratch.

Episode 319: Avoid doof
Episode 320: Confronting doof

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334: Jethro Jones, part 2: Biking in -40 degrees. Why not? May 01, 2020

Show notes

This episode starts off strong with Jethro's matter-of-fact description of riding a bike in minus 40 degree weather. He's a principal going to school, but could be talking about radical mountain biking. I don't remember my principal being this badass. I don't remember anyone talking about activity like this so understated. I wouldn't be able to hold myself back as he does.

Tell me if you don't laugh when he talks about what the cold does to his tires. You'll notice we recorded a long time ago when we talk about Greta Thunberg.

Listen to the end, especially after he talks about his daughter, where we get into what actions like these are about. It's about meaning and purpose and living an intentional life of those things---how accessible those things are, yet today's world makes it easier to live passively, losing meaning.

I learn from every guest, but Jethro led me to some new places. He came to me with this commitment, from listening to other guests. Unpacking that clause, ". . . then what I do doesn't matter" hit me listening to him. If a clean environment means something to you and you say things including the phrase, " . . .what I do doesn't matter . . ." about something meaningful---first, it does matter. Where we are now is the result of people's behavior.

Second this is your chance to create meaning in an area of importance. You don't have to ride a bike in Fairbanks, but what can you do?

Everyone talks about what they can't do. Well Jethro---a regular guy---rode his bike to work every day, including in -40 degree weather. What can you do?

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333: A racist with a heart of gold is still a racist Apr 30, 2020

Show notes

This pandemic continues to reveal new aspects of relationships—or rather spending time with people does. I think we used to spend more time with people, not mediated by the internet or distracted by screens and other powered things.

I shared a new analogy in my conversation with my mom that several people liked. I found that my stewardship contrasting with my mom and step-father's wanting to live like they always have reminded me of the 70s television show All in the Family.

For those who don't remember it, the show garnered huge audiences and stellar reviews. From Wikipedia's page on it

All in the Family is an American television series that ran for nine seasons, from 1971, to 1979.

The show revolves around the life of a working-class father and his family. It broke ground on issues previously considered unsuitable for a U.S. network television comedy, such as racism, antisemitism, infidelity, homosexuality, women's liberation, rape, religion, miscarriages, abortion, breast cancer, the Vietnam War, menopause, and impotence [note not the environment]. Through these controversial issues, the series became one of television's most influential comedy shows, bringing dramatic moments and realistic, topical conflicts.

All in the Family is often regarded in the United States as one of the greatest television series in history. Following a lackluster first season, the show soon became the most watched show in the US during summer reruns and afterwards ranked number one in the yearly Nielsen ratings from 1971 to 1976. It became the first television series to reach the milestone of having topped the Nielsen ratings for five consecutive years. The episode "Sammy's Visit" was ranked number 13 on TV Guide's 100 Greatest Episodes of All Time. TV Guide ranked it as the number four comedy. Bravo named Archie Bunker, TV's greatest character of all time. In 2013, the Writers Guild of America ranked it the fourth-best written TV series ever.

Characters:

Archie Bunker: Frequently called a "lovable bigot", Archie was an assertively prejudiced blue-collar worker. A World War II veteran, Archie longs for better times when people sharing his viewpoint were in charge, as evidenced by the nostalgic theme song "Those Were the Days". Despite his bigotry, he is portrayed as loving and decent, as well as a man who is simply struggling to adapt to the constantly changing world, rather than someone motivated by hateful racism or prejudice. His ignorance and stubbornness seem to cause his malapropism-filled arguments to self-destruct

His foil was

Michael "Meathead" Stivic: Gloria's Polish-American hippie husband is part of the counterculture of the 1960s. While good-hearted and well-meaning, he constantly spars with Archie, and is equally stubborn, although his moral views are generally presented as being more ethical and his logic somewhat sounder. He is the most-educated person in the household, a fact which gives him a self-assured arrogance. He has intellectual belief in progressive social values.

So a major part of America saw the clash between a racist, sexist, bigot and an intellectual, more considered egalitarian. It worked in part because the two lived in a house together, leading America to see the values of two generations clash.

Looking back and even in that time, I think people recognized that Archie's views were unfair. He was racist and sexist, but you couldn't blame him. He was living values that made sense to him his whole life. A wife lived at home. He grew up in a white neighborhood. He fought to defend these ways and live in peace. Now these young people were undermining that peace. Why couldn't everyone just live how they used to when life worked? Those were the days.

My episode with my mom

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332: How leaders choose better Apr 27, 2020

Show notes

Leadership means choosing and deciding for yourself and for others. To lead effectively, it helps to know how you choose and what happens in your heart and mind when you choose---that is, how your intellect and emotions interact in the decision-making process.

This episode refines and adds an element to a model by a guest of this podcast, Jonathan Haidt, for how we decide. I describe his model---you may know it, about the rider on the elephant, which contrasts with a common model of a charioteer with horses. Then I describe how our world differs from the world where his model applies. His model still works as long as we're in a benign environment.

My model adds a different part of our minds from emotion and intellect. We live in a world where other people try to motivate us to do what they want, not always to help us. People get us to associate sugar-water with happiness or jeans with sex. They actively do it. The elephant isn't choosing among benign options as it did in our ancestors' world, little constructed by humans.

I present a model where our emotions are like an ox with a ring through its nose with people around it tugging at the ring.

That's the start of the model. I describe it more in the audio.

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331: Rob Harper, part 2: A Pro-Trump View Apr 25, 2020

Show notes

Our second recorded conversation covered Rob's experience with separating his recycling.

The first time we met we meant to record but ended up speaking for three hours, partly meeting as person-to-person and also talking about what people in this country with differing political views probably used to but don't any more. We also ate my famous no-packaging vegetable stew---a delicious way to minimize polluting.

The second time we recorded, but also spoke a good hour first. In other words, despite Rob supporting Donald Trump and my opposing, we're communicating a lot---in the style of Ruth Bader Ginsburg and Antonin Scalia. We don't plan to keep talking unrecorded, but we start and next thing you know we've covered a lot.

As you'll hear at the end of this conversation, we're talking about continuing our conversation in other media. Since recording, those conversations have happened, covering issues only comedians do, but seriously. Check out my blog for those conversations.

I find it refreshing to continue to learn his perspective and to air out a few views. I hope to learn how to help conservatives who value clean air, land, and water but who don't live by those values following my model for leadership---to help people do what they wanted to but haven't figured out how.

I'm curious where his environmental challenge will go. He may stop, but I suspect something will linger.

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