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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:

230: Brad P, part 2: Change your habits, change your life Oct 12, 2019

Show notes

Brad identified the problem of people acting or not as our emotions and behavior, which many forces contribute to. We also talk about media and scientists.

This refinement of the understanding to emotions points to what to work on that I see few environmentalists unaddressing: emotions, feelings, and community, not technology, innovation. Almost the only emotions they evoke are fear, panic, and worry, which don't motivate acting on the environment. They motivate disengaging from the speaker.

If you associated attraction coaching with trickery or games, you might not expect this identification. On the contrary, Brad knows about relationships, people, and teaching. These things happen to lead to more intimacy---physical, emotional, and intellectual---and they are big elements of leadership.

We talk about vegetables, CSAs, helping people in need from the opioid crisis, habit change, and long-term cooking habits with long-term girlfriends. On a personal note, I've found it very relieving to share this part of my life that I've kept confidential so long. In retrospect it's more like sports and acting than I thought.

As I've mentioned, I haven't shared this part out of fear of people with preconceived notions but powerful voices misunderstanding and attacking. Maybe later someone will push back in a way I feared, which would be from a misunderstanding. So far I think people understand.

Listeners who contact me tell me they find the podcast inspirational. I love when they tell me the passions they've unearthed. Yet many tell me they haven't changed their behavior.

I hope Brad's experience shows you that whatever effort you put in, you'll find it worth it. If you aren't acting on listening, you're missing out. When you act, you'll not only pollute less, you'll love life more.

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229: How might future generations view us? Oct 11, 2019

Show notes

I believe many people believe we live in an age of wonder and that people from any other time would envy us.

I believe future generations will not look at our flying and pollution not with envy but with horror, as we look at slave holders and people who didn't resist Hitler.

The sooner we get that into our thick skulls, the sooner we'll enjoy life with less craving, excuses and acting like spoiled brats.

How many spoiled brats do you know where you think, I like how spoiled that person is, I'd like to be like them? But they don't know it, do they? So we don't know it either, spoiled brats that we are, telling ourselves we can't live without eating pizza in Napoli before we die while putting local farms out of business eating vegetables flown from wherever.

Or could we live so future generations see us how we see Frederick Douglass, Rosa Parks, or Oskar Schindler?

William Deresiewicz's Excellent Sheep

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228: Kicking puppies praiseworthy? Oct 11, 2019

Show notes

People keep describing my environmental actions as praiseworthy. I think they do it to make it seem harder and less accessible to do themselves what they expect will be hard, deprivation, sacrifice, and not what they want to do.

Making what I do sound good makes what they do normal. I prefer to see not polluting as normal and polluting as abnormal and worth changing.

I feel that praising someone for not polluting is like praising someone for not kicking puppies or abusing their children. I suggest seeing not kicking puppies as normal and kicking them as abnormal.

This episode explores this perspective.

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227: Economists don't know what they're talking about on growth Oct 10, 2019

Show notes

A few words on growth and how people misunderstand it, especially economists.

I start by talking about my window garden cherry tomato plants and how the inability of the insects eating them to regulate their growth and up destroying the plants and thereby their own population.

Can we outdo bugs?

I'm not sure. An educated friend showed surprise to me that his having four or five kids is one of the biggest effects he could have on the environment. How can we not get this? People don't seem to think in this area but instead parrot knee-jerk irrelevancies that distract from that if we don't control our population, nature will for us, which will be painful on a scale we've never faced.

We can replace the cultural value of growth with enjoying what you have. When I learned to enjoy what I have more, growth started looking more like craving. I haven't seen craving make for a great life.

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226: Brad P, part 1: Dating coaching, leadership, and the environment Oct 07, 2019

Show notes

Today's episode with guest Brad P, a dating coach and guru---well, former, since he's moved on, as he'll share---partly reveal a major part of my social and emotional development as an adult.

He was in a sense my boss when I coached mostly men but a few women on dating and attraction skills, which I did before coaching executives, entrepreneurs, and so on on leadership, initiative, entrepreneurship, and more mainstream things.

The episode begins with a long introduction to address the extraordinary misconception about coaching dating and attraction, especially for men.

While I haven't kept it formally secret, I haven't shared it publicly, though I tell all my coaching clients soon after starting working with them since it opens up the coaching relationship and makes for faster and deeper improvement. I've also shared with my family. Now I'm sharing it publicly, that I taught and coached people on skills in attraction and dating. I was the #1 coach in the #1 market for the #1 guru.

My corporate leadership practice is so based in openness and facing and handling vulnerability that I had to share. Not sharing it was keeping me back. Nearly everyone I've shared it with is intrigued and supportive, but the media covers people who like to create controversy, so I've feared attacks, however unsupported. Well, I can't live in fear of people with misunderstandings. Rather, I choose to face the fear and handle the consequences, knowing that the more anyone knows about me and this part of me, the more I believe they'll support me and my choices. I consider this work some of the most helpful to my clients, community, and world.

The episode is long but covers a lot about relationships, education, personal growth, attraction, overcoming fear, and more.

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225: My role model: Jonas Salk and the polio vaccine Oct 01, 2019

Show notes

Polio terrorized the world. People died and became paralyzed and there were no defenses to it.

Science understood it and eventually Jonas Salk found a vaccine. Just having a vaccine wasn't enough. They needed massive global public projects to disseminate it.

Is the connection to our current environmental problems obvious? As I see it, our behavior is causing the problems. If I'm not too full of myself, this podcast's technique, which I describe in my TEDxNYU talk, in a sense inoculates people from inaction on environmental values. It changes people to where they enjoy wasting less and taking responsibility.

We don't need a massive global public works, but what if we spread that technique globally. Instead of trying to figure out how to feed 10 billion or how to accommodate billions in third world countries wasting and polluting as we do, what if first worlders reduced our waste by 75 to 90% and the world over we chose to decrease our birthrate to where we lived well below the carrying capacity?

We could solve many of our environmental problems and improve our lives.

Am I crazy to see the polio vaccine as an inspiration?

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224: Clarifying my strategy Sep 30, 2019

Show notes

People commonly misunderstand the goals of this podcast. I tried in this episode to clear up two common misunderstandings:

They mistakenly believe my goal is individual change---to influence one person at a time.
They mistakenly believe I act on my environmental values to lead people by example.

On point 1, this podcast focuses on leading people through community. You may hear me leading one person at a time per episode, but I'm not picking people randomly. I'm picking people on more people's community than most others. My goal is for listeners to feel, "I'm not the only one doing this. People in my community are too. It's time I acted more." I'm working my way to people known by hundreds of millions of others.

I'll note that I offer value to these well-known people: a legacy valued by billions. I walk them through a process that shows them as authentically and genuinely acting, even if they don't know much about the environment, so listeners want to support them, not judge.

On point 2, I act as everyone does. I do what I think is right for myself. You probably don't blow smoke in babies' faces or in hospitals. You probably don't kick puppies. You don't do these things to make sure others don't smoke around babies or in hospitals or kick puppies. You don't kick puppies because you think it's right. You're probably happy if your behavior leads others to avoid smoking or kicking puppies, but you'd not kick puppies even you knew you wouldn't affect anyone.

I expand on these point, including notes about Oprah Winfrey, LeBron James, and a few others.

Bottom line: I'm focused on a strategy I think can work where everyone benefits. I'm not just hoping for the best.

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223: Adam Quiney, part 2: Do the Thing Sep 25, 2019

Show notes

This episode is two thoughtful, intelligent people sharing environmental thoughts. I think the thoughts we share are what a lot of people think but don't share enough.

We cover action, leadership, motivation, caring, beliefs, integrity, and Adam's challenge on "imperfect" (which I put in quotes since I prefer non-supermarket apples) apples.

I suspect you'll hear things you've thought about but maybe haven't shared, not just environmental, though we mostly hover around there.

Most conversations I hear devolve into abstract, academic, analysis and blame, things like government should do X, corporations should do Y, or this law should pass---anything but acting themselves. Yet acting raises awareness more than awareness leads to acting. And the fastest, most effective way to influence companies, government, and other institutions is to live by your values, which will make you a leader.

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222: Why Eat Insects? Sep 22, 2019

Show notes

Between insects, kelp, vertical farming, lab-grown meat, and other clever options, why didn't we think of them before?

Because we had better options!

Few meat eaters choose crickets over steaks and hamburgers, but we've squandered what was once plenty with overpopulation. We've become more efficient, but we've lost abundance.

With a lower population we could keep abundance.

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221: Climate March Reflections Sep 21, 2019

Show notes

Here are the notes I work from for this episode:

From climate march

Went 3 times:

Before lunch to participate in organizing group, went to Foley Square. Seemed like tens of thousands, maybe six figures.
On my way to a meeting, walking on lower Broadway
After my meeting, just ending

Didn't hear speakers. In fact, I shared with my sister the impressions you're about to hear and she said the speakers said the opposite, which I'm glad to hear.

I'm going on the hundreds I could see immediately around me, the tens of thousands I could generally see, and the few I heard speaking.

Ostensibly about children, but when I hear adults saying it's kids, I hear them excusing themselves, not taking responsibility. Why only kids?

No secret that country politically divided and adversarial.

Fell into political divide calling conservatives and oil people enemy. Easy but won't influence. The people they call enemies aren't trying to pollute and they aren't so clean.

I heard Greta is avoiding U.S. politicians. I predict she'll say stop demonizing and making politically adversarial.

Missing is addressing the beliefs and systems that many of these people probably sustain.

Role models: Mandela and Gandhi.

They aren't enemy, system is, which is driven by beliefs. We want to change beliefs, including in ourselves.

My message: we'll like and be glad we did, wish we had earlier. Like not smoking: hard to change not to stay. On contrary, will find disgusting.

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