343 Sustainability in the Hospitality Industry with Levar Jackson

Hi. This is Paul Zellizer and welcome to the Awarepreneurs podcast. On this show, we dive deep into wisdom from some of the world's leading social entrepreneurs. Our goal is to help increase your positive impact, your profitability, and your quality of life. Before we get into today's topic, I have one request. If you could hit subscribe and do a review. We got an awesome review today for episode 337 of Megan Bott. Anyway, if you could do a review on your favorite podcast app, it helps more people learn how to have positive impact through a values based business.

Thank you so much. Today, I am thrilled to introduce you to LaVar Jackson and our topic today is vertical integration and sustainability in the hospitality industry. LaVar is the founder and CEO of the Yo Group, a sustainable and impactful hotel development and management group. Yo Group is making great strides to be the vanguard of hospitality and sustainability as society transitions to an interconnected, intelligent, and low carbon world. LeVar Jackson, welcome to the show.

Thank you for having me. I'm very happy to be on.

There is a few things to talk about here that you guys are doing such awesome work. And but before we get into what you're doing now, LaVar, what would somebody wanna know about you and your background, you know, to give them a sense for the work you're doing now?

Well, I I I'm one of those people that was kind of like the jack of all trades. I've done so many different jobs except for food service because I'm very clumsy. And I've worked at the airports. I've done I've worked at CSA. I've done so many different jobs in my background, but I've spent a large amount of my life, adult life in hospitality, particularly around art and sustain I was trying to do some sustainability around art because hotels are, you know, change out very quickly. And instead of having all the art go in the garbage, what can we do to help keep that out of the waste stream? I also ran a nonprofit. It's called the NWH New York. I was the first president of color and gave away the most money for, scholarships.

We give hospitality student scholarships. And, we and we made our awards focused on impact versus just GPA because the person that has the 4.0 is gonna either get a scholarship through us or someone else. But the person that's struggling along with a 3.0 or a 2.9, but their life circumstances keep them from being able to achieve higher, I really want to focus on that because I have my own experiences going through school. I worked 3 jobs to graduate school without any loans, but I nearly worked myself to death and nearly broke myself. And I became an adult, and I was like, I don't want anyone else to go through that.

Yeah. Yeah. Beautiful. So we'll find a link and put a a link in the show notes so people can go check out that previous work. And then along the way, you said, okay. Hospitality industry, there's some things we could do different here. Is that fair to say?

Yes. And hospitality has a unique value proposition for changing industries because it's such a large industry and in many countries that are are, you know, island nations or are even the global south, tourism is their number one industry. So hotels, hospitality has an enormous push and they have an enormous push around the contracts that they sign. So when you're doing a hotel, there's $5,000,000 for flooring or textiles or electronics. And depending on that's an individual hotel and they then can redirect that to more sustainable things, you make a huge impact without actually really doing anything. And it's it's just such low hanging fruit that because hospitality is a very old industry, that's kind of like, this is the way we've done it and this is the way we're always going to do it. And we have to kind of break that stigma. Like, yes, you the things that work you keep, but the things that do not work, you move on from and you try a little new things and then you build on on top of that.

When When it comes to sustainability, just got back from a conference, and they're still talking about LED light bulbs and low flow toilets. And, you and I as individuals have not been able to have access to non low flow toilets or non LED light bulbs for 20 years. So if the hospitality is that far behind and we need to push it far ahead. When it comes to the way hotel is, you have a hyper concentration of people being highly wasteful in a very small space. So you've got a 150 sick, you have a 150 room hotel. That's 300 people. If it's 2 people per room, maybe it could be more, it could be 4, it could be 6. And they're, you know, coming in, turning the AC all the way up or the heat all the way up.

A lot of people like to see in their clothes in the bathroom, and then you're not supposed to

do that. But it's I mean, like, it it's highly wasteful for the amount of, like, hot water that has to be produced.

I might have been guilty of that. Yes. I stayed at a hotel where someone did some life hack with the iron and made grilled cheese, and I came I, like,

plugged it in.

And at some point, I'm like, hey, who's cooking in here? So I understand that, but sometimes, like, you don't wanna use the iron and you use the steam. So steam machines for hotels could actually prevent that. So you don't have to come in direct contact with the steamer and you could just steam your clothes without having coming in contact with the iron. But so those are like little changes and you can change the little things that, you know, like little things can steer the boat. You don't need a huge, you know, like over correction, just slight changes. You know, I I'm still a firm believer in, like, cleaning everything. We've just got out of a pandemic. We do not need to roll back into another one because we're not washing sheets.

So how about we use sustainable, you know, like cleaners or and we use, you know, like gray water to wash the clothes or captured rainwater or whatever is locally available. So it's trying to produce as much in the community before you go out of the community. There's some money things on that as well, so I'll get into the entrepreneur side. But I'll I know I can ramble, and I should give you you guys everything at once.

That's great. Great. And and just to give folks a sense, like, I live in New Mexico which has a very robust tourist economy, and our biggest, so so New Mexico has 2,200,000 people in our entire state, we're a pretty rural state, we're about the size of Colorado. And the biggest event, the biggest tourist event, but the biggest event of the year is something called the International Balloon Fiesta. People from all over the world come to New Mexico, specifically Albuquerque. We have 1,000,000 visitors in a state that has 2,200,000 people. Do the math. Right? So so we certainly have a sense of how significant an impact that the hospitality you know, those 1,000,000 people, some of them bring their RVs or whatever, but most of them are staying somewhere that is along the lines of what you're describing.

And you can imagine the trash we see, the waste we see, the, you know, the lines, the inefficiencies of cars sitting on the highway idling, like the impact of those 1,000,000 people who don't live here far outweighs the 1,000,000 people who do live here who have certain routines in place. So I'm just sharing that to give a sense of the scale of how hospitality done not well can disproportionately have a very negative impact. Is that resonating at all, Lamar?

Yeah. So from a systems perspective, it's much easier to build for the mean than the peak. And that's why usually, like, if you're in a very hot place and it gets hot and they tell you turn on the AC, your systems are built for the median and the mean, not for that peak. Because if you're all the way up here a 100% of the time, then you're wasting how much ever difference is, you know, excess capacity, you know, 99% of the year. So you've got that 1,000,000 people there that all of a sudden crushing in the year, you know, hitting the waste treatment centers, even if there's in the RVs, that poop has to go somewhere. I mean, you know, they're plugging in their things at the campground. That's electricity that's being pulled. Again, the with the road things, all these things.

How do you do it in a way that doesn't destroy us as a society, the planet, or like the animals that surround us. And that is it comes into I was actually watching this documentary. It comes into, like, I like this thing that NASA did, and it's called in situ resource utilization. So it's like, how do you get the best and produce what you need in the situation as closely as possible? So, you know, like, you go to Mars, you're not gonna knock on, you know, New York's door and say, hey. Can I have some bread or some milk? You've gotta figure out what you're doing there. So, are you able to, you know, process all the the stuff that you need to in New Mexico or New York or wherever the heart you're getting hard hit? You know, it's pointing to a systems efficiency versus point efficiency. And that's something that we need to realize as we're very good as a society pointing out point efficiency. So if something is 98% efficient, sure.

But if it's wasting further down the line, it's going the garbage, then it's not really efficient, is it? Even if it was 98% recycled, but when you're done with whatever you're doing, it goes in the garbage. Then is it really is that really something that you wanna do? So then is it nearly 98% efficient or is it 50% efficient or is it 20% efficient? Shipping and goods using the right, you know, materials at the right time for the right things for the right lifespan and second lifespan. So, for instance, I'll so I'm just giving you, like, a background on my methodologies and I'll go deeper into hotels and how this can work. But what are what's going to be used and disposed of should be biodegradable effectively and immediately. Like you have a straw. It shouldn't be plastic. Bioplastic is fine because that does break down as natural and as you can eat it and it's not gonna kill you. And so, like, you that should be biodegradable.

But your kelp shouldn't be biodegradable because you should be

able to keep that for quite a long time.

So using the appropriate materials in the right space. So I I

come up against, you

know, leather and that people say how leather is not important. And and, you know, from a you know, if it's a disposable item, it should never be leather because it the amount of energy and the amount of carbon output that you put into it is gonna be immensely outweigh the the benefits. But if you have this, you know, I for my for instance, I have very eco friendly sneakers, and I have a leather pair of sneakers. My eco friendly pair of sneakers disintegrate after every, like, 6 months to a year. Is that green if I'm constantly throwing this stuff out? Even if it's compostable, you still have to put the energy into it, packaging, shipping, and then it is multiple shipping movements because it goes from, you know, where you know, like manufacturing to warehouse. Excuse me, it doesn't even go. It goes from farm to manufacturing to warehouse. So couple of different warehouses then to the store, then I have to pick it up or it gets shipped to me, which is another, you know, you know, jump of transportation.

And then I'm throwing it out.

And then 6 months later, you're doing it all over again.

Yeah. Yes. But for instance, I have a pair of leather sneakers I've had for 7 years that I just get, you know, resold every year or so. Is that less or more sustainable? I say it's more sustainable because the energy is being put, but I'm getting the work out of it and getting every drop of, like, you know, carbon output that was put into it. So you can take that that mindset of system efficiencies and put that into hotels. So how can you get what you need to get as close as possible? So it doesn't mean growing your own food for the restaurant. Does it mean producing your own products on on on-site? Does mean producing your own energy on-site? Does it mean producing, you know, like heating and cooling on-site sustainably? So there's also some other background things when it comes to, materials, and we'll get I'll get into that. There's a lot to go through, And my mind is always racing like a mile a minute.

So for a hotel, we'll start out with the basics. So you need heating, cooling, electricity. So you can't you have a hut if you don't have those things. And how do the the planet gets the more you need that cooling? How do you get that effectively without having to pull from the grid? Because now you have all these people, like you said, New Mexico, everybody's hitting this grid that's negatively affecting the residents that are living nearby. So how do you do something that's fair to the people? So either you're driving the electricity costs up, you're causing brownouts if this if the system isn't capable? And how do you move that stuff around? So are you building new lines? Like, it it becomes this, like, knock on effect of, you know, the road to hell is paved with good intentions where you're like, oh, yeah. You get, like, all this business. And then there's a knock on effect of how do you adversely affect the community. And this is why people put up a lot of fights around hotels going up in their neighborhood because you're tracking all these people.

And it isn't really a boon for the people in the in the neighborhood. So we have a energy generation system to reduce heating, cooling, electricity, and you do it in a systematic fashion. So for instance, you have this hotel, you have a, you know, have a 100% roof space. So you're like, okay, I'm gonna put up nothing but solar panels. How about so it's 98 so like you say, it's 98% efficient at turning solar solar sunlight, you know, sunlight into electricity. But it wastes a 100% of the heat energy that touched that roof. So should you, like, as a, you know, like meter that out so that you can provide all the heat from the heat that, you know, hot water needs, you know, heating in in a, you know, in a hotel that has a restaurant, you can preheat oven so you're not having to use as much electricity or fossil fuels to do it. You know, heat that oven up.

You can already get all that heat out of the roof and not have to turn electricity into heat. Every time you convert energy into a different form, you're losing some electricity. So it becomes it may be 90% at the at the top of the roof, but then as DC power and then the DC power has to become AC power and the AC power then has to become heat. And there's all those a lot. There's little losses. How do you, like, concentrate that? And I thought for a long time, how do I do this? And this is how I came up with the system. It's not about it's also, like, recapturing heat or or waste. Like, nothing should go to waste.

If we as individual always told, like, our money has to make money when we're not doing stuff to be financially viable. The same should be said for energy materials, all that stuff. So nothing goes to waste. You have a server room. You're dumping out a bunch of heat because, you know, the computer put out a bunch of heat. Why not recapture that heat? That's that's hot water right there. You're gonna have to use a run those servers anyway. But instead of now, it's it's a source of heat that you normally wouldn't have.

You know, like, you have heat pumps. The heat pumps are dumping heat outside. Do something with that heat before it hits outside. And, again, that's hot water. That's, you know, cooking things. It's a good way of thinking things holistically, I think, is our next step. Since we're very good at point efficiency, we need to move to holistic, you know, thoughts.

Makes a lot of sense when it's a 103 degrees in Albuquerque and you're heating up the ovens to make your wood fired pizza or whatever it is. Right? Like, I can imagine being more skillful than that. So so that's one bucket, Lavar, is you really helped the hospitality industry think about energy, and you gave us quite a few examples. Something else, and it's actually in our title, vertical integration, or the circularity, and and you were talking about textiles when we chatted before I hit record. Right? So give us some so so we'll come back to the energy and how you stack all these things, but like just chunking it down and helping our listeners understand. I thought that was a great example. So talk to us, Now, you know, if it's a big hotel, you used a 150 rooms. Right? That's a lot of sheets.

That's a lot of towels. Right? You know, you go swim in the pool and you use a towel, then you come up and you take a shower, and then that's another towel. Right? And those towels need to be washed and then they wear out a lot. Right? Give us an example of how do you help the hospitality industry think differently about textiles and things like that when it comes to circularity?

So I always like to put when it comes to sustainability, I always try to make sure there's an ROI. Because when there's an ROI or it's much easier for everyone to follow behind. So if you produce something locally, you there's an ROI on that, even if it costs slightly more, which is, you know, shipping delays, which are shipping costs, which we can get into are the state of the world, in fact, particularly around shipping. But there's also like ethical issues around like human abuse. But so we have an you can try to create industries that are positive for the people and the planet. So you can do that with textiles. So we we have an algae grow system that you can turn the algae into. It's like an amazing system.

You turn it to food. You can turn into a bunch of things. But textiles is one of them. So you can turn that into a you could turn it to sheets. You can grow the algae no matter where it is. So it doesn't have to be in an arable plant, land. You can do it in the basement with some grow lights. All you need is the automated system.

It does itself and then puts out a ready to use product, you know, centrifuge it out and then you can press and do those things. So I'll give like a brief, like, view of the world and why the need for being able to produce that here. So we are at the end stages of globalization. So globalization effectively forces people who do not have a lot of money to work for below, like, effectively slave labor. There's plenty of sweatshops. There are, in fact, forced labor shops. And how do you break that chain? Because, again, these hotels, we put multimillion dollar contracts on the line. If we turn away and say, hey, no ethical violations and has to be made in a place that has decent wages that shifts things.

But of course, there's, you know, ROI on that. So globalization forces effectively encourages and force it, but it encourages human rights abuses. How do you get away from that? Producing it locally when hotels if again, you take this 150 room hotel and you plop it down, down down the street from you. $9 out of every $10 that are spent at that hotel leave the community immediately. So how do you capture that money and keep it there for the community as well? So benefit them in a way that's not just, you know, Effectively near poverty wages in the U. S. So the average hotel worker makes about 33,000 and is 36,000 is the federal poverty level in 20, 24. I don't know what it'll be in a couple of months.

So how do you do that? Create industries that because you don't have to do all the shipping and those all these other logistics, you can pay the people more because you're not having to do all this stuff. And again, risk is all is a is a corporate liability and costs just as much. So you'll say, okay, doing this shipping, you know what I would let's go down this, you know, globalization route, doing all the shipping. The Panama Canal is at 50% capacity because it has been raining for the last year, but some climate change. So anything that's coming from Asia to the US, there's a good chance it's gonna get heavily delayed. And if it doesn't rain for the next couple of months, the Panama Canal ceases to function. So how does it get around? It's gotta go all around the south of South America, right by Antarctica and all the way back. That's not a viable, shipping solution.

You know, the Suez Canal is still damaged. They need to shut it down to, like, make effective repairs. So if another ship crashes in that same area, the canal is going to collapse. Now, those 2 canals take care of the majority of heavy goods shipping in the world, and it'll be absolutely devastating. So we have to see that and be prepared for just in case these bad things happen. COVID gave us a glimpse into like not being able to get things here in the U. S. Those canals, you know, fail it's gonna be far worse than than COVID could ever have happened to our, like, our globalization, our needs for, goods.

So producing the things in as close as possible to your hotel is just as valuable and should have a price tag on it as slightly higher wages because you built it in, you know, locally in the, you know, like,

US. Turns out that people like towels when they go to hotels.

Yeah. So, you know, we can get into the the the goods on, you know, how, you know, algae is fantastic and it makes these fantastic things. And I think I have it's what it is me from algae somewhere in here.

And they

make sure you can make it in textiles and absorbs carbon as as the process was a carbon negative is a sealed system. So it was 98% less water is 90% more water efficient than cotton or corn because you don't have any runoff. You don't have any evaporation because it's a sealed system. And other ecological things you can think of is fertilizer runoff. They don't there's no for a fertilizer runoff because you do have to add, you know, a bit of fertilizer, which are usually iron and a little bit of phosphate and that kind of stuff. That's not getting out into the wild and contaminating, you know, other things. You're also bringing, you know, agriculture, textiles to places that normally may not be able to support it. So if I build a hotel in the middle of the desert, I can have that sealed system and that sealed system for textiles, we can use algae that's saltwater based.

We do not need freshwater. So we're not fighting for resources for our consumption. So I can hearken back to, you know, sustainable initiatives that end up being really terrible for the immediate environment. Almonds in California are one of them where they're soaking up so much water because it's a Southern California is a desert. If they make a song about it, it never rains in Southern California. If you're in a place that never rains, it's a desert. So, you have to realize that sometimes you have the good thing, but it doesn't fit in the place you wanted to go. Or you have, you know, like, electric cars, not just electric cars, batteries in general, because you do with sustainable energies with, like, wind and solar, you have peaks.

So you need a battery storage system to hold that energy for the your night times or the winds not blowing as hard. Those batteries are being made by, like, slave labor in, you know, in in the Congo and DNC and all these other things. So make sure that what we're doing isn't harming people in a way. If it's not sustainable for the people, it's not sustainable for the planet because we're not gonna do it because we don't wanna hurt people. If it's not sustainable for for the planet, we're not we shouldn't do it because it hurts people. So it comes down if you really don't wanna be egocentric with it, we need them both to benefit us because we can't live without both things, without the people and without the planet and, you know, create positive industry. So when I sat down and I these are my patents. Like, I came up with them in my wild, crazy mind.

I sat down and I thought, how could this patents be abused? And I tried to fit it in so that the abuse wasn't there. So I'm very willing and working with governments now to license it out so they can use it in their countries unfettered by me. So I'll provide as much support as I can. It's going to be very low cost, particularly around, you know, governmental things. How do I prevent bad things from happening? It's it's something I'm very personal and passionate about, but we'll get back to hotels. We'll pull it back. So create a circular economy. How do you create that circular economy in this hotel? It just takes a little bit of mental work, but it isn't too far, you know, too far in the future.

So every hotel by most major brands, every 5 to 7 years, the hotel has to be, they call it a PEP, it's a improvement plan. Not the one you get at work where you get I guess it kinda is. It's not a performance improvement plan, but it's a property improvement plan. And most of the things have to go. So you have to be up to brand standards. How do you as a hotel owner or how do I, as a hotel owner, overcome this thing that tells me to throw everything away every 5 years?

And we're talking about new beds, new couches, new textiles, maybe even new fixtures in the bathroom. Right? That's the kind of thing we're talking about.

Painting things. Everything's gotta get gutted and it goes. You can sometimes keep some really hard goods which are built in, which are you can maybe able to keep, but that's real dependent on the brand. I'm not going to throw any brands underneath the bus because I do not need a lawsuit. But how about so we'll go back to that theory of disposable, compostable longevity. You can keep kind of deal. So the soft goods, should be the soft the soft product or soft goods should be compostable. So that's the algae sheets that are 100% fine to be composted.

Even cotton sheets could be bamboo, natural fibers, not polyester because that's not compostable. Do that. So that stuff you do have to change because the people do wild things in hotels and they get things dirty. So that's fine to go and be composted because that it should go. What about the hard goods? Those shouldn't be compostable. So, like, for instance, you have this desk in this hotel room. It should be long lasting, but, also, it's the perhaps taking that Japanese phrase of what it's actually, I think it is. But I may be totally wrong where something ages, but you make it pretty and you, like, paint a little bit.

So then you take that desk and you bring it up to brand standards because you made it a little bit prettier. You made it a bit kind of like a living art piece where, you know, it it's patinaed maybe, but you keep it clean and nice. It may have some dings in it, but it's dings of love, and you can add a little bit of like gold flakes and make it look pretty. If you do have to get rid of that long lasting desk, then how about you do a yard sale effectively and sell it to the community so that someone else can enjoy this desk instead of it ending up in the landfill, even in the recycling bin or, you know, being, you know, turn into mulch? How about you stop that from that? Because recycling does take energy. I I don't know where we got that idea, which is probably the plastic manufacturers that recycling is free, but it's not. It takes quite a bit of energy to recycle things. So and if there's any sort of negative chemicals in during the recycling process, they leach out because they're you know, like, you chop up the wood, you wash it off. That water has to go somewhere and it gets it doesn't get treated appropriately and it goes out into the environment.

Same thing with plastics. That's how we got a lot of microplastics in our water. The recycle the plastic gets recycled, but as is being chopped up, small little plastic pieces get washed away during the process and they end up in our fish and now enter to our bodies. So that's so you you create their circularity by selling a basket community, but you're also creating an event that normally wouldn't have a revenue stream that you normally would not have as a brand or a hotel. I'm having that community come down that normally would not interact with you. So I live 2 blocks from a Sheridan. There's no reason for me to go to that Sheridan unless I'm cheating on a spouse or something. Like, that's not real.

You know what

I mean? I'm joking, but there's

no reason for me to to patronize there. The restaurant is okay, but it's not something I need to patronize. But if they sold these like, if they sold that beautiful chair or a beautiful desk and I could get it, you know, we know, you know, you know, 50, 90% off, why wouldn't I go down there and buy it? So then for the hotel, you're now making money. You don't have to spend on waste removal. You don't have to, like, write that off either. So there's a lot you can do. And if you do want to donate that stuff, you could donate to schools, you donate to the charities and write that off and, you know, in a tax benefit. Lazy business has gotten us to the point where everything's disposable because that's easy.

And only the do just think a little bit outside of the the bucket, you know, outside of the, you know, everyone's like outside of the box. Just think a little bit outside of that box and say, how can I get more money but also do something that's good for the planet? And just reselling your objects instead of throwing them in the garbage is hugely good for the planet.

Beautiful. Love it, Laura. So these are 3 buckets. There's many more. Again, we talked in our chat before we hit record, but the energy bucket, the circularity bucket, another example of the desk, not just the textiles, and then the economic impact and really, like, what you were saying, the average hotel worker being under the poverty. They're working full time, but they're under the poverty line, 33 k and the poverty line's 36 k. And then when you start to stack these together, very interesting things happen. What I wanna do in a moment come back and hear more specifically how your group works with hotels and what some of the results you've seen.

Before we do that, I just wanna take a quick break and hear a word from our sponsor. Are you passionate about making a difference but feeling stuck on how to take your mission driven business to the next level? You don't need a lengthy coaching program. You need targeted advice from someone who understands the unique challenges that social entrepreneurs face. With my strategy session package, we'll focus on your most pressing decisions, whether it's clarifying your value proposition, optimizing your marketing strategy, launching a new product or service, or adjusting your pricing to align with your mission. These sessions are perfect when you know the direction you wanna go, but you need someone with experience to help you get there. If you're ready to unlock your potential and amplify your impact, book your strategy session now. The link is in the show notes. Welcome back, everybody.

I am here with LeVar Jackson, and we are talking about vertical integration and sustainability in the hospitality industry. So I think people got a sense of some of the buckets you've been thinking about, Lamar, and how you stack them together. We could go through all the buckets, but then this would be a 7 hour podcast interview, and you're busy and so is our listeners. I think people have a sense of the kinds of areas of expertise you've been really doing a deep dive in, and then putting them together gets some pretty amazing results. In the second part of the show, we'd like to get a little more granular. So this is the thinking that led to the formation of The Yo Group. When did you actually incorporate, and give us a sense of what does it look like on the ground right now?

Oh, wow. We're almost at our 3rd anniversary at the end of the month. So it is

Congratulations. Thank you.

Thank you. Thank you. Thank you. It it's on the ground now. We've done our tech development, and now we're working on our first property. It's looking like we will be 100% carbon negative through the the whole entire process. And we we can hearken back to our energy system. We're going to be making money from the second our energy system is built, not just from the time we open.

So we are providing electricity back to the community that's made sustainably, and we're doing it for our shorter price. We've got a couple of hotels in the pipeline, and we were very happy about that. And it may give me an emotional breakdown because I don't think I'm supposed to build this many hotels at once. But, you know, if you see me, like, crazy on the train, if you're in New York City, it's because I'm just having an emotional breakdown. But

So you're actually that you're gonna actually be developing and owning properties, and the plan is you'll keep those properties and manage those properties. Is am I understanding correctly?

Yes. There is one property that we're doing that is gonna be we're gonna try to set a trend, which is after 30 years, we'll give the hotel back to the community and make it a public benefits corporation.

Oh, wow. Very cool.

And have that hotel pay for the roads, the infrastructure needs, and see if that model works. Because I if I can't make money in 30 years, I don't need to be in business. So we're doing a you know, that one is a huge, you know, private the public private partnership, which is slightly slow in your key, so I can't talk about that or I'll I'm sure they have snipers in the building for that. But

It was nice knowing you, and thanks for being an innovator. Yeah.

Exactly. But I think that's a model that can work a lot, particularly around developing countries, the global south. How do we not just be an extractive business from materials and energy, but also money? So, like, yeah, I can extract the money during my operations, but at the end of the day, that hotel, that land is worth money. I don't need a $100,000,000 at the end of it. I've already gotten my value out of it. You guys can have it back and it is a flourishing continuing business. So then it provides us stuff. So it's already providing heating, cooling, electricity for the community.

How do you can go further now? Perhaps it's paying for capital projects, maybe paying for schools. However, the municipality is gonna use that money is now in their pockets. So you're welcome. There's one less toll or, like, tax hike you can get if this this model should work out perfectly.

That's beautiful. I love it. So you're working on several properties right now, trying not to have a mental breakdown while you're doing it. And give us a sense of like, in this one example, I was one of the questions I get all the time is, yeah, Paul, that sounds great. How do you get the startup capital for that? So I'm gonna pass it, it sounds like at least in one instance here, the project you were just referring to, there's some partnerships, private investment plus public investment, is that fair to say? And is that typical for the projects you're working on, or is it more typically private investors? Are these people you're pitching that you already know? Are you pitching strangers? Like, I wouldn't be doing my job if I didn't ask you about where do you get the capital to do something like this?

So we're our capital is a very weird way that we raised because we do have this technology. A lot of our stuff came from licensing. So we're going on a project in Gambia. We're licensing a bit of tech over there. We're also gonna help build that out. So we didn't need as much startup capital because we need startup capital for development. My god. Yes.

That absolutely hit my wallet in the worst way possible, but we earned it back because we're doing all these things. Every property that we're building is a public good by design. We're providing heating, cooling, electricity for that community. We're providing sustainable industries. So creating an algae industry right there. And that's been that algae industry ends up being spun off. So we need it for our textiles and the things to get started. After that, we sell it out and it becomes his own spin it out to be his own company, and it hires people in the community and it provides all those things that provided for the hotel.

It can provide for your home and other businesses. So it was not, we're not hoarding it. We just needed help us to get us off the ground, and then you can you guys can play. So it's been a different kind of way. So we do have a bit of public interest and public, money. We have a bit of private money, but we're we tend to pull from buckets that are not just about real estate. We pull a lot of money from impact funds. We pull a lot of money from, sustainable funds, pay, and and and even home offices and and that kind of thing where that's usually locked out for hotels

Yeah.

Because they're not particularly seen as public goods. They seem they're viewed very differently in Impact World.

So it's almost like the hospitality industry has economic development and sustainable economic development, and that's opening doors because you have this very innovative tech, the energy side, the algae and all the things you can do with that, that's getting you into conversations with both private impact investors and public investment funds that many hospitality brands wouldn't have access to. Is that fair to say?

Yes. And it's also brought in a bit of international money as well, so most of our money has not come from the US. And sad sadly, sustainability has been very polarized, you know, politically, and everybody needs a planet to live on. And it's not about taking jobs from anybody. I'm here trying to create jobs, new industries, normally places that wouldn't. So, you know, one of the cities that we're building in is in Pittsburgh and Detroit, and both of those lost huge chunks of their populations and industries still isn't as huge from Pittsburgh as it was before. How do you fill that in? We need a different kind of industry. So it's not about taking someone's stuff away from them.

It's being I'm firm believer of additive sustainability, not subtractive. I'm not telling you not to do something. I'm telling you we could do this, but it has to be this way because it's sustainable. So I think that's also an issue why it became politically divided is because the messaging around sustainability for the last 20 years has been don't do this, don't do that, don't do this. 1st is like, hey, let's figure out how to do it. Like, you know, like, yeah, in some places you do need cars, then you need to be able to do it sustainably. Like, that electric car is probably what you need. You know, you take that flight, you know, fly around the world.

It's also like a social good, like going somewhere else. It helps beat down xenophobia. It helps expand people's minds and gets them to think differently. And people, you know, think differently in different places because of their way they've they've grown up. Their language is actually really important to the way people think. And then you can bring that back home. And and and, you know, I refer to Japan before and the way they do service, I would love to replicate that Where you may go to the Middle East and they know how to handle heat. So you do passive, you know, cooling on in buildings.

I was actually reading about this. I don't know what it's oh, god. It slipped my mind. But they were able to create, like, ice in, like, Iran from this building, like, passively, like

All those towers. I think I know what you're talking about. I can't remember what they're called. Yes. I know exactly what you're talking about.

Why are we looking at that and, Nick, pulling that back? But that's also, like, a trip. I wanna take a trip there and see, like, hey. I don't know. Not as a US citizen. I'm allowed to go to Iran. I again, the knowledge when I used to work for the feds, that's scratched out the record. But that's, like, you know, that travel. But, hey, that flight, you know, produces a bunch of carbon, you know, roll these planes over to hydrogen.

The batteries aren't gonna do it because and it's not Hindenburg. It's a little bit of hydrogen. Hindenburg was a gigantic balloon full of hydrogen that also had, like, highly flammable, like, oil, petroleum all over its skin. So it was a bomb waiting to happen. So a small tank of hydrogen is fine in the plane. No more explosive at that size than the fuel that's already in there. So, like, figure out how to do it. And, you know, like, there are some sticky issues, like, you know, you like meats.

Like, do you, you know, continue down eating animal products? Like, yeah, some animals are should be using certain, you know, things. If you're not, you know, a vegan, that's fine. But beef is probably not it. But if you wanna eat rabbit, rabbit is less carbon and in intensive than even rice. And chicken is not that bad either. Pork is slightly higher. But, of course, you know, like, defocusing on meat is fine. You know, like, give people back the ability to do what they wanna do.

You know, take that cruise. Perhaps that should be algae based fuel for that thing. We can also produce, you know, biofuels with the algae that we do produce. So we're trying in the Gabriella project to turn over some of the schools, like, mechanical, like, land keeping things and, like, tractors over to biofuels and have the that biofuel be able to produce on-site in a place that normally is dependent on oil. They have to go, like, tons and far away to, like, the, like, one gas station in the town, buy the oil, and then come back. It just you know, it also reduces local health issues. Like, do it in a positive way that gives people something to say, like, yeah. I'm happy to to do this.

You know, I'm I'm we're going through vendor selection through a for the hotel. I looked at, you know, like, using wood, but it's a cloned wood so they grows faster. There's a lot. There's a lot to, you know, take in when it comes to doing all this stuff.

There's a lot. I love what you're up to. So right now, you're working on you've got these licensing deals and you're doing these public private partnerships, really innovative fundraising. Thank you so much for sharing that, Nava. Give us, like, coming attraction. If you were to look ahead 3 years from now, where do you think some of this technology will be, and where do you think the old group will will be on the ground 3 years from now as best you can tell?

So I made our hotels I want our hotels to be the incubator for innovation. So we've explicitly picked vendors who are doing wild things, and I know that I can make that money back up by selling electricity back to the community. So I have more play in in doing this thing. So, like, I selected a vendor who does paint that absorbs carbon when that cleans the air as the sun hits it. I selected a vendor that does a wood like product that absorbs carbon over its over its lifespan. You know, the I was saying about the trees that are cloned, but you can keep the wood. So, yeah, the trees grow quicker. Instead of taking 15 years to reach maturity, they take about 7 years, 7 to 9 years.

So the turnover is faster. We're gonna use them. Like, I you know, that's where I wanna be. I wanna be the partner for when you say, hey. I've got this wild idea, but I keep getting noes. I wanna say yes and say, hey. We've got a room with the like, I I imagine we're gonna have, like, a room of the future. So one room with all the new stuff that's in it.

It may not be a hotel wide program, but then you get tons of feedback on whatever product you're doing, whether it could be software based, it could be like a new thermostat, it could be all these things, new new style of light bulbs, and you get intense feedback very quickly. So that room is gonna cycle over very quickly. So you're gonna get fast, fast, fast versus if you put it into a residential, you know, establishment, you've got 4 or 5, maybe 6 people, and you've gotta work with them for 6 months and they figure it out. Because people think of things differently, when they get into that hotel room, they're gonna find the holes and whatever you're doing real fast. So they're going to find the weak points and they're going to tell you about it. So it's a it's a concentrated, quick study and accelerated way of commercialization, whatever the product is. And because hotels have a higher standard for safety, particularly around fire and electricity, it can easily go into offices and residential the second it gets certified at a hotel.

Love it. So you're really gonna be piloting and innovating and kind of inviting and people doing out of the box things. So if you've got an out of box thing in the sustainability world, go get a hold of LaVar.

Yes.

So, LaVar, I could hang out with you all day, and I know you're busy. Our listeners are busy. If there was something that you were hoping we were gonna get to, and we haven't touched on it yet on the great work you're doing, or there's something you wanna leave our listeners with as we start to say goodbye, what would that be?

I will leave it with you can do it. You could be the sustainable, hold companies just as accountable as you hold yourself because sustainability is a corporate problem just as much as it is a corporate liability as well as the personal liability. And I think it's the top ten companies in the largest company in the world. I admit most of the bad things that are in plastics and all this garbage. So you are told not to eat meat, but whatever large company is throwing tons of things in the ocean and, like, destroying the world. Hold the people, like, you know, hold the companies accountable as if they are people. And I think that will, you know, help the world. If you've got an invention, go for it, reach out to me.

If I can help, I can help, you know, I'll help you and if I can't directly help you, I'll put you in contact with someone else there. You know, reach down, help others up because the greatest minds may not be have access to the things that they need to be able to complete their things. How many more Einsteins are working in child labor camps because they don't have access to schools? How many more, you know, you know, Neil deGrasse Tysons there are, but they are stuck in a non ending loop because they can't break free? And I would like you know, if you're saying, like, a 10 year plan in my mind, I wanna be I wanna have a fund explicitly to go out into disadvantaged communities and bring that there because they they deal with climate change on a daily basis, and they have the least ability to leave or move or adjust because they don't have anything else. They don't have any anywhere else to go.

Yeah. LeVar, if somebody wants to get a hold of you and run an idea or say, hey. I got something, but I could really use some help getting it to market. How would somebody get a hold of you?

LinkedIn. You it's your group is always there. It's we are we have cover in the name, so the owners got it. You can reach out to me personally, Levar Jackson, you know, on LinkedIn. I would love to hear what you guys have. We're on Instagram as well. Just, you know, find just as, you know, Google or Bing, whatever search engine where the top results, and I will, you know, help you as much as I can. If you've got, you know, you wanted me to talk to students, I love doing that stuff too.

I love helping out students as well. So anything that I can do to help, I'm here for.

Lavar, thank you so much for being on the show today.

Thank you.

So as always, folks, put the links in the show notes to the Yo Group. You noticed as soon as I asked Lavar where to connect. He said LinkedIn, you know, listeners, if you've been around this podcast, I'm a LinkedIn fan. Go get yourself connected on LinkedIn and there's a couple episodes on that if you need some help. So all that will be in the show notes. Remember that we love listeners suggested topics and guests. So if you have idea for a show, somebody's doing something really impactful at scale, go to the Awarepreneurs website, look at our contact page. We have 3 simple guidelines and try to be really transparent about what we're looking for that feels like a fit.

Love listeners suggest a guest, so please send in your ideas. And lastly, I wanna say thank you so much for listening. Please take really good care in these intense times, and thank you for all the positive impact that you're working for in our world.