Awarepreneurs Inteerview - Josh Dorfman

Hi, this is Paul Zelizer 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. It really helps this podcast grow, helps more people learn how to have positive impact through a values based business. Thank you so much today. I'm thrilled to introduce you to Josh Dortman.

Our topic is to sell sustainability. Don't talk about sustainability. Josh is going to explain that in just a second. Hold on. Josh Dorfman is a climate entrepreneur, author and media personality. He is the CEO and host of Supercool, a media company covering real world climate solutions that put carbon that cut carbon, increase profits and enhance modern life. Josh was previously the co founder and CEO of Plantit, a carbon negative building materials manufacturer which was named to Fast Company's list of the most innovative companies in 2024. He's founded two modern design sustainable furniture companies, directed vine.com, an Amazon E commerce business specializing in natural and organic products, and served as the CEO of the Collider, the first, the nation's first innovation center for climate resilience and adaption.

Additionally, Jos was previously known as the Lazy Environmentalist, a media brand he helped develop into an award winning television series on Sundance Channel, a daily radio show on Sirius XM and two popular books. His work has been featured in the Wall Street Journal, the New York Times, Forbes, TechCrunch, Fast Company and Routers. Josh has also made regular appearances on national television and radio programs including Morning Joe, Fox and Friends, and NPR's All Things Considered. And it's the only guest to ever ride a bike right onto the Martha Stewart Show. Josh, welcome to AwarePreneurs.

Thank you so much, Paul. Just such a pleasure to have a chance to speak with you.

You've been at this a long time and I'm really excited to introduce our guest to your work. So give us a little sense. Josh, welcome. Wind the clock back a little bit. You've been in sustainability and climate before. It was a cool thing. Before a lot of people were talking about it, before it became a dirty word in certain circles. Right.

What got you into climate and sustainability?

The short of it is I moved to China after college, 1995. I was thinking about a career at the time in maybe foreign service, maybe CIA. I didn't actually know, but I had been an International affairs major as an undergrad in university and felt if I could just get to China, I could somehow see the future, that this was going to become a very important relationship in the 21st century. I was teaching English on a university. I got a part time job working in a bicycle lock factory for then a very famous company called Kryptonite Bike Locks.

I remember them well. Yeah.

An American company had invented the original U shaped bicycle lock. And it was a wonderful experience. I went to work for. To. For. I went to work for Kryptonite full time, traveled around the country, opened more factories. We were looking at a billion Chinese people at the time all riding bicycles. And I thought, my gosh, I don't really know a lot about business, but I do see a billion, you know, the billion number, the market number that gets American companies to drool over what they might do in China.

And sometimes that goes well, more often it goes awry. We were early in that, two years into that, I was in southern China. We were partnering with a Chinese businessman to open another factory. And I was traveling with him to this restaurant. We were going to consummate the deal drinking a combination of grain alcohol or baijio, which is kind of feels like grain alcohol and, and snake blood. I guess I didn't know that. But you drink that in southern China and, and now you're, now you're partners for life. And so we're in the parking lot before we go into this restaurant, this guy takes me aside and says, josh, look, my Mercedes is the biggest Mercedes in this parking lot filled with Mercedes, even though it's Communist China, 1997.

I'd seen so much over the last two years prior to that in terms of the highways and bridges and tunnels coming in. And everything coalesced in that moment. And I thought, there's going to be a billion car drivers here. I don't know anything about global warming, I don't know anything about climate change, but that seems like that is going to be problematic. And that led me on a lifelong journey to work on that challenge.

Got it. So give us a sense of the early days. I mean, did you start with the lazy environmentalist? How did you start leaning into climate and sustainability as a career path? What did it look like when you had this light bulb that went off into how do I make this a career?

Yeah. So I came back to the States eventually, got an MBA from a school called Thunderbird, a school for global business. And I was going through all of the kind of learning, trying to figure out what would my career path be? I didn't immediately figure out what I would do with that knowledge, but I never lost it. I couldn't just kind of of siloed away and move on with my life in 2004. So this was now probably seven years later. Seven years after I came back from China, I decided I was going to start my first company. It was called Vavavi or like Viva V Live Life. And the, the emphasis was I didn't have a full vision, but I thought, I'm going to start a consumer products focused company that is going to aim to make living sustainably modern, contemporary, cool.

I'm going to go find the best designed stuff that's going to be made from environmentally friendly materials and start to change the way people think about what living sustainability might mean, find ways to try and make it fit their lives, enhance their lives, or just meet them on their design criteria and how they make choices for what they consume every day. So that was really the genesis.

Nice. And at that point, being a sort of young in your career, young entrepreneur, talk to us a little bit like, what helped you get started? Talk to us about the questions I always get asked. What was your initial, you know, starting capital and what was your network like and could you just pick up the phone and did you, you know, have the relationships that allowed that company to move or was this pretty new to you, trying to move into that space.

All new and an all new space. And I think the first recognition of, for me, when it just hit me, okay, that here I am, I'm, I'm in, I am an entrepreneur now, was I remember waking up one morning and looking at my to do list and the 10 things I needed to knock out that that day. They all seemed very intimidating, intimidating to me. I'd never done them before. Even if it was as simple as potentially calling a vendor, making jeans, denim and saying, I'd like to carry your line. I never had that conversation. And I was feeling a lot of anxiety. And I remember like staring this reality in the face of if I don't make those calls, there is no one else here who's going to do it.

Right. It's all on me. And then you just start exercising. Of course, that muscle of, okay, I will make the call and then I'll make the next call. And then you become eventually habituated to the steps that you have to take and kind of be more okay with the whole burden riding on your shows. Right. That's the thrill, that's the, that's the rush, that's the challenge, that's the risk. From a startup capital standpoint, I was fortunate.

I was able to raise small amount of seed capital for my family to get started. I think probably more than anything else, they'd heard me complaining and being irritating and just kind of scolding of everybody for not doing enough. And now here I found this positive way to channel what had become my very big concern about the planet. And, you know, there was like, okay, you know, here's a little bit of C capital, Josh, go see what you can do. And I. And I ran with it. You know, I just ran with it.

And what went well and what were some of the not so great moments of that first company?

Well, I started the company in Washington, D.C. and I started there because I had actually quit a PhD program in political science at George Washington University, where I was going to study environment, politics, China. About half. Halfway through my first year, I thought, oh, this, this is not. This is not. I'm in the wrong lane here. I'm playing. I'm not playing too much strikes.

And so I, I decided to leave that program. Start vavavi. Go. Go all in. And I was so dedicated to it. And I remember an early conversation with one of my very close friends at the time, this woman, Brooke. She said to me at one point, she's like, Josh, you know, I so admire what you're doing. You know, you're dedicating your life to this mission of trying to, you know, green consumerism and make change easy.

And she said, and I was like, oh, thank you so much, Brooke. I really appreciate that. And she said, yeah, because, you know, it's not going to make one bit of difference, and yet you're doing everything. And I thought, wait, what? What do you mean? And so I, I felt in Washington D.C. especially at that time, 2004, on an island, I felt that there was not a design community in Washington, D.C. which is really what I was leaning into. There really wasn't much of a sustainability community, though. I can't say there was much of a sustainability community in most places in the country at that time.

I just wasn't around really my people. I moved the business up to Brooklyn in 2005, and I did it because at the time, so much of the best sustainable contemporary design was happening in Brooklyn. That probably makes sense. People come there from all over the country, very creative, but it wasn't just Brooklyn. What was so interesting was that it was like this moment pre Al Gore's moving Inconvenient Truth. I found that There were all of these people similar to me in some senses, in some senses far more talented as artisans, as designers, industrial designers all around the country, Kansas City, Atlanta, you know, not just all the obvious spots who had a similar vision of we want nice stuff that considers the environment. We don't want hippie stuff. We want stuff for us, and now we have enough skills to go make that happen.

And so I did start to find my people, but that was a challenge to really find the community that could support that kind of business.

Yeah, I started my business in 2008 and was also pretty early adapter in these conversations. And yeah, you were a very early adopter. And from there you started, you stayed with that and eventually you landed on Planted. And I really want to dig in here because this is maybe one of the first real scaled things I, as I was doing my homework, like, wow, that, that really, you got some traction with Planted. So tell us a little bit about Planted. What was the origin story there? And I want to dig in a little deeper because like I said, you, you moved a lot of needles in that business. But how did it start?

Yeah, thank you, Paul. And I think that's accurate. And, and for me, I've, throughout my career, I've. I've always wanted to be part of something that could scale. Earlier I'd gone to Amazon and built a business called Vine. It was like an online Whole Foods and thinking, okay, on, on it was a business unit of Amazon that this could really scale. But it was also early. The all the conditions weren't quite right, even internally for that business to really take off.

And prior to Planta, so Planted, we founded in 2021. Now about four, four and a half years ago, right before that, I had started my second furniture company. I was living in Asheville, North Carolina at the time. And it. For a number of reasons, it suddenly dawned on me that here I am in furniture country again. Right. Like I was or, you know, Favavi had been done furniture. Now I was starting to think about it again and I thought, I wonder if I could go find a factory to, to work with, to work on some furniture.

And I wonder if I could get my best designer from the Vavavi days who I didn't talk to in a decade to call me back and see if maybe we bring his line back. And we did. And we started this little company called Simbly Simple Assembly, Direct to consumer modern design, sustainable furniture, made in America, attractive price point. We were doing all these things that we felt really proud of. And then the Pandemic hit and that shut us down. And what I couldn't get, and I started thinking a lot about was materials. We were using a very high quality Forest Stewardship Council. So FSC certified plywood.

Beautiful, beautiful. And when I could get it, the quality was going down, the prices were going up. And I just started reflecting on is this the best we can do for the planet? We're still cutting down trees to make this sustainable, you know, product that I'm using. There's got to be something better. And I just kept kind of ruminating on that while I didn't have much to do because my, my factory was shut. In that moment, someone I knew said, hey, there's a guy down in Raleigh you should talk to. He's got a little manufacturing thing going too. And I took a look at this guy's site, website.

The design of it was awful. And I'm a very kind of aesthetically driven, design focused, as you're probably hearing, kind of person. I thought, yeah, I don't really need to pursue this, this conversation, but Wada, the guy who owns the, the company and the website, very persistent. We eventually get on the phone and, and I start talking about all my, you know, frustrations with materials. And he says, well, what would you do? And I said, I don't know, maybe, maybe find something like maybe hemp. I don't know a lot about it, but. And he's like, oh, I have six trash bags of industrial hemp in my garage. And so I said, wait, you what? Like, who are you? What are you talking about? What's your deal? And he's like, yeah, we just moved here.

You know, I just spent eight years at SpaceX. I was leading the team responsible for the life support, life support systems that kept astronauts alive on the Dragon crew spacecraft. And I thought, wait, wait, and you landed in Raleigh? Durham. Like, what is going on? He's like, well, you know, I'm an engineer. I put together a spreadsheet. I had in the columns all my criteria, you know, the rows, all the cities. And Raleigh was number one. We got here, there's a lot of trees and you know, here we are.

And so I, so instantly, I mean, we had just had this connection and we were both a little crazy, you know. And I said, you know what, we should start a company together. Like, I'm gonna, here's what we should do. I'm gonna shut my company down. I think you should shut your company down. We should go build a materials company. This could be a massive business and spacexers were already, a lot of them were thinking about this idea of carbon removal. How do we remove carbon from the atmosphere as fast as Elon was talking about.

In fact, he started an X Prize $100 million competition for it. And so we put these ideas together and we said, okay, well if we could come up with some biomass that could grow much faster than trees, develop something more sustainable, it could pull carbon also faster from the atmosphere. And then if we didn't just do it as a science experiment just to pull carbon and sell carbon credits and you know, try and have this, you know, sort of, in my mind, sort of not fully baked business model, but if we had something with utility, like if we make it a product, maybe we could do something really cool. And so that's actually what we set out to do four years ago. That's what we do today. What that actually looks like today for planted is we cultivate from the tissue culture lab through the greenhouse to the plants that we give to farmers. A vertically integrated company on the agriculture side that makes that or that grows perennial grass similar to bamboo. It's not bamboo, but it's similar.

It's actually thinner. So we can mechanically harvest it and it grows at an accelerated rate so fast you don't have to spray it with pesticides, insecticides. And it comes up before anything can actually weeds can come out of the ground. And then we got more SpaceXers to come to North Carolina so we could build a first of its kind entirely, entirely electric, no smokestack on the roof. Production technology that takes this grass, slices it very thin, presses it down, and really like 40ft later, out of this machine comes the equivalent of plywood, or what's now called oriented strand board, which replaces plywood. It's the structural panel you see every time you see a new building going up, it's the panel that gets nailed to the two by fours. It's the most utilized ubiquitous material in home building. We now make it out of grass instead of trees.

And so we were able to take all that carbon, pull it out of the atmosphere, not give it back up a smokestack, but retain it in the material and sequester it in the walls and roofs of new homes.

And listeners, that's how we got our title to to sell sustainability. Don't talk about sustainability. So help us unpack a little bit here. Gosh. Both. We'll fast forward 20, 25, give us a sense of what is planted look like now. Like how many OS a sheet of OSB is usually 4 by 8 if you go down to Lowe's or Home Depot or whatever. Like how many sheets are we talking about in an average year now?

So we are still in relatively early stage company. We work with the largest home builder In America, that's Dr. Horton. They make about one out of one out of every seven homes in America today. New home is a Dr. Horton home. Just, just last year, the tail end of 2024, we received an order from them for 10 million panels. 10 million panels is about the equivalent of 90, 000 homes in any given year.

That's maybe 10 to 15% of all the homes that are going to be built.

Wow.

It will take us some time to fulfill that order. We had a previous order from them. And so we are, we're starting to scale up with. Dr. We have some other contracts where we're now moving into other products or in the. As we start to look at the whole house and other things we can build with this machine. And so we've raised now, you know, some really important strategic rounds of capital. We'll have some more announcements coming shortly and we're just, we're in this position where the first line is built.

You know, we've gone through many of the certifications, we're stockpiling materials and really starting to get ready to, to put these products into market in a really big way. We just, you know, it was fortunate for us with Dr. Dr. Horton got involved with us pretty early. After our seed round in 2022, we did a $2 million seed round. And so we've gone through a lot of milestones together to build a lot of confidence in what we're able to do. It's. Yeah, it's a very exciting time in the.

Very cool. So what does it mean? Honest this day, even though we're going to unpack a little bit how you're getting to this very scaled sustainable impact through these incredibly fast growing grasses. Right. But that's not necessarily the first thing that a company like Dr. Horton or somebody is building. You know, seven, you know, one out of every seven homes in America. That's not the necessarily only thing they're interested in. Is that fair to say?

It's fair to say, like, talk to.

Us about the sustainability impact and talk to us like, when you're working with a large home builder, let's say, where does that fit on their list of priorities and what are some of their other priorities?

The, the way that I look at sustainability and the way that it's played out with Dr. Horton when we were introduced in early 2022, tail end of 2021. Sustainability was a door opener and I think it still is today. It can potentially start a conversation. It's not necessarily the best way to even start a conversation, but potentially there can be some alignment there. And the thing that's so interesting about home building, given how important it is to the American economy and of course to everyone, to Americans, to humans, it's just a fascinating industry from the standpoint of sustainability at the, I wouldn't say the bottom end, but at the, at the end where there's less scale, at the lower end, where you have, you know, builders who are building, you know, 5, 10, 15, 25, maybe up to 100 homes, you have incredible green builders, right? Sustainable builders, high quality, do stunning work. That doesn't scale though. And if you're going to go to market, if we were going to go to market and try to sell to those builders where there's real alignment in our appreciation and values around the planet, that's such a challenging thing to do.

I mean it's, it's, I think of it like hand to hand combat. You're selling right? Just you got to open a distributor and support the distributor and go out in the market and constantly be there shaking hands and getting right. It's hard. Takes a lot of resources. At the top, when you look at the publicly traded builders who today are commanding maybe 30 to 40% of the entire home building market, well, they're public now, so they have different stakeholders. And as with different stakeholders comes more awareness of sustainability being one of the things that now that company is going to have to consider more in the massive middle. Nobody pays any attention to sustainability. It's a non starter, right? It's all price and value.

And how much, how much value do I have to deliver to a homeowner for the least amount of price or cost, right, to or to build my business. And then at the very, very top, the very top, you have essentially three builders. You have Dr. Horton, you have Lennar and you have Pulte, who are so much bigger than everybody else that they have to think about their supply chain in a much more strategic way because they need to know where that supply is coming from now and into the future much differently than everyone else. They can't go to Home Depot, they can't go to the biggest distributor without a lot of foresight and planning and be like, hey, we want xyz millions of tons of product, it might not be there. And so we became very strategic to them. It's not just about the, they like the sustainability. The product itself is better than the product they use today.

It has different, different types of, it reacts to moisture differently and moisture is a big deal for these types of products. So there's a, there's an advantage on the product, but it's really strategic in the supply chain. And we, and we understood that very early. We were building a modular technology with a different input grass. We can grow in far more places than you can plant trees. It gives us much more flexibility with them in their supply chain to plug in the, that can give them a strategic advantage. And that was also very, very appealing.

Very cool. So where are you in this big order, right? I heard you say like 10 million units or something like that. Where are you in that order and what does that mean for revenue for the company here in 2025?

So we are, so we now have, you know, our machines pretty much running, you know, constant. And like I said, I mean, it's first of its kind technology. And here's what I mean by that. If you were to go build a mill today that makes these panels, the oriented strand board or plywood, you're Talking about minimum 200 million up to $500 million investment just to get, just to try and get that thing off the ground. And then the companies that ultimately become our competitors, none of them, they don't make their own machines, right? They go import them, they buy them from a couple companies in Germany or elsewhere. And nobody knows how to build a machine. No one knows how to make a machine. We knew the only way that we could compete in the way that we wanted to compete was to shrink that mill down.

Instead of looking like a small town, make it something that's in total maybe 140ft long, can fit into almost any warehouse in America, can be put anywhere entirely modular. And so our factory is not just this one massive eight story tall. Imagine press that just stamps out, you know, these, these boards. Then you slice them and you go, what our factory looks like. You imagine a factory with like 50, you know, lines running in parallel to each other, right? Made for, you know, almost like a hundredth of the cost. And each one might actually be doing well with 100. It wouldn't necessarily be that or 50, but each one can be doing a different product. Each one can have a different thickness, each one.

And in one factory you can do incredible things that can't be done anywhere else on the planet. And so it's taken us several years to dial in that tech. We now have the line running consistently to stockpile this material. It's going to start going into homes on a regular cadence now with Dr. And then we just start to scale up from there. And so I don't want to oversell where we are in terms of we're not dominating the market yet and actually where all our products showing up in the world. But we have laid the groundwork for what we really view as transformational change for this industry.

Beautiful. Anything you could share with our listeners, Josh, about how do you develop a strategic partnership? I'll say, listeners, this is one of my favorite strategies and I think it's underutilized. I'm thinking of a fabulous entrepreneur here in Albuquerque where I live named Lauren LeBeau. And her product similar to yours uses natural fibers. It's evaporative cooling pads. It and the innovation is that she's found ways to create evaporative cooling pads which use much less energy than air conditioning using natural fibers. They work better, they're cheaper and they're natural products instead of plastics. And she has a fabulous strategic partnership that we'll eventually get Lauren on the show and talk to her about.

But anyway, it's a strategy that I've seen people like you and like her use very successfully. But it can go, you know, there's certain perils. Right. You're the small entrepreneur. Dr. Horton is not a small company. If they wanted to kind of take advantage of a small entrepreneur, it wouldn't be hard for a large company to set up contracts in such a way that it didn't work so well for that entrepreneur. Right.

There's lots of ways that this could go wrong. What did you learn about so far? It sounds like it's going well. What, what have you learned about how to set up a strategic alliance with a very large company that isn't necessarily sustainability isn't the first and foremost thing they're known for. And it's something that you're very passionate about. Tell us, like if you were going to replicate that or you were going to coach somebody to do a strategic partnership like that, what would you say to that sustainable oriented entrepreneur about partnering with the behemoth in an industry where it's not always front and center, two.

Things spring to mind. The first is, of course, you want to be able to spend as much time getting to know that organization as you can at many as many levels of the organization as you can if you're just dependent on say, one contact who runs the their venture investments. Right. Who's the one who might make an investment in you that can leave you out on an island, right? What happens if that, if that executive leaves the company, who's then your champion, right? So you definitely want to be able to take your time and figure out can you build the relationships with the purchasing team, with the finance team, can you ladder up to the CEO? So now I'm speaking very specifically, can you go meet executives and regional managers? Just, just can you build champions throughout an organization and including the sustainability folks. But really also you want to be leaning into the people who are going to view your product as solving a problem for them other than sustainability. Right. You want to get to the folks who all see some their interests are served by planted succeeding. In our case, that, that's one.

The other thing I would say is it's so tempting to want to. I mean if you can do both, I would say great, but and by both, I mean it's really tempting to be like not as the biggest check you possibly can, as early as you possibly can, you big corporation, right? Like that's always, that's of course every, every young entrepreneur, every young company is, is usually cash strapped. But what's equally important to getting all the, in the, the either the purchase dollars or the, the investment dollars into a company, I think is staging the right milestones to say go on a, on a journey together. And we're going to, so we young company will establish credibility with you. Like we're going to say, here's our milestones. We're going to execute, right? You're going to watch us execute and we're going to create a path together. And so as you create that path together, it creates all these opportunities for more touch points and it builds trust on both sides. Right? We see, okay, yeah, these guys are really bought into what we're doing and they see, oh, this young company can really execute and you start to forge bonds that really become deeper.

And I think that's one thing that we did very effectively and have continued to do with Dr. Horton that has served. It certainly served planted well, I think they would say the same thing on the other side. And it's been so instrumental in getting us to where we want to go because sometimes something goes slightly awry. We're counting on a certification. Maybe there's a slight delay and, and nothing gets blown up because now we have history together and we've shown, hey, we follow through. So, so important I think, to set up a relationship that way.

Such great advice, Josh. I really see some young companies get really excited and then they over promise the timelines or how the product is going to perform because they get excited. Oh my gosh, this really large company is interested in us and they don't take that time. And I love your language to do that journey together. I think that's such a fabulous strategy. So let's do this in a minute. I want to come back and hear where Planted is now and where you think it's going. You also have another venture I'm super excited to let our audience know about and some things you've learned in this long sustainability journey you've been on.

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I am super excited to be here with Josh Dorfman and we are talking about to sell sustainability. Don't talk about sustainability. And we unpack that a little bit in the first half of the show. Second half of the show, I want to get a little more granular on some of the other ventures you've done before we leave Planted. Josh, where do you see planted, like three years from now? Right. We're, we're middle of 2025, July of 2025, as we're recording this, you know, a couple years from now. Where do you think Planted? You've got this original 10 million units, big order delivered like. Yeah.

Where do you think the company's going?

What's so exciting about Planted is our factory today is in Oxford, North Carolina, about 45 minutes north of Raleigh, Durham. And we actually took over A former American spirits cigarette factory.

Oh my gosh. Wow.

Beautiful murals on the wall, which also in my mind says something about what was a 20th century crop and what now is going to be a 21st century crop. Crop. Because planted right. This grass is made for the 21st century. And we're starting to also have tobacco farmers who have lost those opportunities, whether it's with Reynolds Tobacco, with others to. We're starting to see them grow for Planted. And so I can tell you about what it means for Planted where we're going to be three years from now in terms of fulfilling orders into Dr. Bringing other, you know, products to market.

We're very excited, not just about making panels, but also about making the studs, the beams and all the things we can do. But when I think about impact for that company, I think about more growers, the rural communities that are growing for us, where they see opportunity to, you know, a lot of farmers are aging off their land and have concerns about will the next generation and the generation after that keep the land productive. Well, we see our conversations, multi generational conversations where the up and coming generations are very excited about Planted, both from an economic and environmental sustainability perspective. And so you're going to see our supply chain grow, which I think is incredibly important. And you will see more products come to market and we will be able to continue to fulfill our mission to pull carbon down from the atmosphere, which is really why we're doing all this challenging work that we're doing. At the end of the day, that's what drives us. But we know that that's not necessarily what drives our customer. And kind of to the point of this talk, that's okay.

We're not here to necessarily sell you on sustainability, but because you might not want, you might not care as much as we do, we've got to figure out all the other ways to have our product satisfy the needs of your business so we can fulfill our mandate and our mission about sustainability. Because we do care deeply about that. And so I think that we are. It's still early days, I think Planted has an incredible team up and down across the business side, the operation side and the ag side, and is so well positioned to, Steve Jobs might say, make a dent in the universe.

Love that. It reminds me of an episode we did with the Yaupon Brothers. The only native caffeinated plant in North America. There's these two brothers had the fabulous opportunity to tour their facility. I will put a link to that episode. But that reshoring in your mind doesn't just mean the actual factory, which it does, but I love that you're including a sustainable ag and how families that want to make a living from the land can have opportunities, not just what's happening in the factory where you're also innovating. So I'll put a link to that episode in just a bow. If I knew how to make a living as a gardener, I'd be a gardener or a farmer myself.

I don't. It's hard work and it's not easy to do in the desert southwest, but I always have such a fond spot. And we've got to get smarter about how we're growing things and using our soil. So when somebody's doing something innovative. Just a big bow to you, Josh, and a big shout out for including that layer of sustainability. Yeah.

Thank you, Paul. Thank you. Yeah, it does feel extremely satisfying. And not, not just. I mean, it is satisfying, honestly. It's also really fun. I mean, the people that we get to go meet from the, the North Carolina Department of Ag to farmers when we're way out in the country and the, the experiences that you have and the appreciation that you have, you know, for the land, for how big this country is, for how, you know, it just, it just makes me always, I always come back from those visits feeling so much more optimistic about America, about our future. I really love it.

Yeah. So planted continues to grow. And you give us an idea, listeners. I'll put a link in the show notes, go check it out. But you're not done yet. You have another venture called Supercool. Tell us about that venture.

The animating idea behind Supercool flows from plan. So I stepped down as CEO last year and I picked my head up after now several years just focused on building materials and construction and the home building industry. And I started looking around thinking what else is going on that's really innovative around climate? And the answers that came back just floored me. And what that amounted to were really, I think three or four trends. The first being you've had a decade now of climate tech ventures that have raised their seed round their Series A and now on to series B and beyond and to get to Series B and beyond. You are beyond pilots, you are at commercial stages, you are scaling now. And we're talking about probably over a thousand climate tech startups that have, have done it. None of them are still here, of course, companies still fail, but many, many are.

So I started seeing all of these solutions in market that actually cut carbon, improve the profitability of their clients. Other companies they serve and in many instances are also raising quality of life by virtue of what their service does. It makes our lives better. And I thought that's really interesting. And then I looked globally in 2024, at the level of investment into clean energy technologies was $2 trillion, nearly doubling what's ever gone into fossil fuels in a single year. This year it's going to do it against 2 point. It's on track for 2.2 trillion. That's solar, that's EVs, that's storage, that's the grid, that's wind, that's, you know, geothermal.

All sorts of technologies beyond what we understand typically in our everyday life here in America, what's happening in the world. And then you have 15,000 cities around the world that have city climate action plants turning their, their cities into living laboratories, from Lincoln, Nebraska to Ann Arbor to the big cities. And I thought we're in a new moment. We are in as this guy Keith Zeim Zakheim, who runs a, an ad marketing agency around climate called Antenna calls the age of adoption. And I think that's right. All of this is underway, but underrepresented. Super Cool, the company I started aims to chronicle what's happening. Case study these technologies and solutions that are working, that are out there for business leaders and decision makers so that they could say, oh, I didn't know about this company, Brainbox AI that has a solution that cuts the H Vac energy use by 25 to 30% in carbon and you know, very low lift, very little hardware to get off your own.

I didn't know that I could take that to my CEO or my CFO and not lose my job because that's actually going to be good for the company. So we do that over and over and over again. That is our theory of change, that all of these solutions are underway, they are underrepresented in the media, but they are amounting to really systemic change that's underway in our society and our civilization. And, and we want to shed a light on that so it can just go much faster.

Beautiful. One of the co founders here in New Mexico of NM Climate, which is our climate network here in New Mexico. We have such fabulous things happening here. So maybe we'll be in touch because I got a lot of folks that you might want to interview.

Perfect, Perfect. I would appreciate that.

Cool. So we're super cool out as a venture, so that's fairly new in the past year, it sounds like.

That's right. We launched Super Cool about a year ago. We raised a small seed round for that venture and we see an opportunity to build a really important media platform around climate solutions, low carbon innovation, whatever buzzword you want to use. So that's a podcast, that's a weekly newsletter, YouTube. We're getting into events. We're looking at doing something hopefully really cool around Climate Week NYC this fall. And I just see repeatedly as I talk to other now not just entrepreneurs but executives, large companies, small companies. This same value proposition of the companies that succeed is of course we care about sustainability, but I am not trying to sell somebody else on sustainability.

We just had a company on the show called Wasteless that does dynamic discounting in grocery stores. There's this whole issue, as many of us know, around food waste. All the, the, that amounts to something and you think about food waste in general. The last research I saw it said it amounts to 8 to 10% of all carbon emissions comes from our food systems. Right. It's massive. So this company Wasteless said, well, gosh, like you've got all these grocery stores, they're, you know, everyone's racing toward this expiration date. Once you hit the sell by date or, or 24 hours before a grocery store slashes prices, some of the product moves but most of it goes to waste and it's gotta be thrown away.

What if we, two months in advance, six weeks in advance, just dynamically discount the Chobani Yogurt by say 1.7%, might that encourage someone to buy it? And let's keep learning and let's keep measuring and it turns out that works. And so they're all over the world, whether it's in with Carrefour in France and Argentina or you know, other groceries in America, everywhere that's now working. And it's a seamless way to, to, to, to get at the challenge. But they don't go into a grocery store and say we're going to, we're going to help you with your sustainability. Or they say, hey, we're going to help you manage your inventory. We're going to, we're going to help you keep your margin intact and we're going to do this great thing for the environment. Right?

Very cool.

If I one more that I just might add, that's so different. We just did this show, I didn't know any of this going in, but we did this show with Formula e racing, like F1, like they look like Formula One cars but they're actually running on electric. It is today the fastest growing motorsport in the world. Electric form basically electra electric formula racing. 500 million global fans, TV audience. And so we got on the team principal, basically the CEO of the Formula E team. I don't know if you remember Mario Andretti or Michael Andretti, the Andretti family. We got this guy Roger Griffiths on the show.

I was so excited. And so he said he's been there from the beginning of Formula E was about a decade ago. Okay, how'd you do it? Well, we knew that we were competing against huge competitors. We knew that we had kind of crummy technology a decade ago. We couldn't even run cars. We couldn't even get cars to do just a normal formation lap where everyone lines up because everyone's afraid they were just going to drain the battery before the race even started. Right. Today, of course, the technology's gotten better, but what they did was so interesting.

They leaned into their strengths, Strength one being. Well, the cars are quiet, so let's go race right in the middle of cities so no one has to make a day of it. And that's really important because when you look at EVs, you know, the people who, who are interested in coming these races, they don't even want to own a car. They Uber to the race, right? Or they bike or they take public transit. So that. That was interesting. And then they said, we have to experiment like crazy. So they started borrowing from like Super Mario Brothers.

They have attack mode, where if you go over three lines on the track, suddenly you get massive boost. And so this guy Roger said to me, he's like, josh, if you go to Monaco for the Formula one race, yes, it's the most glamorous event on the planet, but the race is so boring because if the car gets in the lead, it's probably not going to lose the lead. If you're there for the Formula E race In Monaco, there's 400, you know, changes of position change. It's frenetic. It's awesome. They built a better product and more entertaining product. Sustainability, of course, underpins everything. It's electric.

But because it's more entertaining and a better product, their audience viewership is skyrocketing. And they're building an incredible business. They don't sell sustainability. They build on innovation and a great product. Of course, the like, the message underlying everything is, this is the future. And I find that just to be. There's so much learning for the sustainability community to take take from that.

Such a great example. So Super Cool is a podcast, right? How often do you publish? Where can people find it?

Correct. So so weekly podcast, weekly newsletter, where we go deeper and kind of explore more around, let's say in this case, motorsport, racing in general. Other things like, like they're doing, they're doing electric racing in the desert. Like, there's all sorts of cool stuff going. So we'll go deeper with our newsletter. All of it. We're on every platform in terms of the podcast. YouTube, our website is getsuper Cool, where people can find all of this information.

Where. And then in terms of social, we're everywhere. I tend to be more on LinkedIn. We're building up blue sky if folks want to find me personally and connect.

Cool. So look a little ahead. Josh, you tend, you know, I think Serial entrepreneur seems like it might be an accurate description of you. Like what? Where do you see Super Cool going and do you see other ventures that might be percolating?

Well, I would say serial creative person who starts ventures, because that's one outlet for creativity and I really love business. I just, I think of myself more in that vein. I love what we're doing with Super Cool and I think this is endless. There's so much rich innovation happening that, that we're going to be telling these stories for quite some time. We're going to bring more voices onto our platform, hopefully launch more podcasts with different angles. I see, you know, I just see so many counter narratives that I think are important. For example, when I look at the entrepreneurs we bring onto our platform who are building the most consequential, succeeding at building the most consequential climate, companies say, not just raising capital, but actually building massive, massive companies almost to a T. They're all over 50 years old, sometimes up into their 70s.

And so when you think about the, the cultural narrative around who's going to solve climate change and we say, oh, it's the younger generations. It's their challenge. They'll figure it out. It's like, well, yes, but you have so many people who are staying in the game and using all of their knowledge and experiences and wins and losses and successes and failures to understand what it takes to really build that skill scale. And so there's just a lot of paths for us to go down and stories that need to be told that I'm very excited to continue doing.

Awesome. Josh, with all your experience, as we start to wind down, if there's a young entrepreneur, I'm going to ask you what about those have been in the game for a little while. I'm not going to ignore what you just said, but the young entrepreneur is really wanting to make a difference in terms of climate and sustainability. But they're where you were when you launched your first venture. Didn't have a lot of capital, didn't have a big network. What would be your top suggestions for somebody in that shoe in that situation?

So I would say I guess several things and depending where you are in that journey. But if I were coming to it with kind of eyes wide open, trying to think about where are the opportunities and what skills do I need to go develop to participate in these opportunities, I would certainly try to, to read as, as widely as possible. Certainly listen to podcasts, you know, I think ours is good. There's David Roberts of Volts. I really love this wonky, such a wonky podcast called City Climate Corner where these two, one person's in the State House in Minnesota and the other person works with other cities where they go to small cities and figure out what's working and they case study. So I love it. So there's all this stuff to get into to kind of open your brain and understand what's happening on a skills level separate from climate. I would say think about just what you're good at, what you're drawn to and just go deep on it.

Because climate, the thing that I wrestle with, it's like oh yeah, we're going to show you the low carbon economy or we're going to show you the low carbon future at, at super cool. The reality is like it's not the low carbon future, it's just the future, right? It's like you don't go to China and eat Chinese food, it's just food, right? And like this is where the world is going and every skill can be applied to this economy and where it's headed. So scan widely, open your aperture, see what's out there, hone your skills on what you care about. There will be a place to, to bring those two things together that that's really what I'd say. And then be active on social, start to build, build a personal brand around the things you care about. Take some risks, put yourself out there.

Beautiful. And somebody who's been at it for a while, one of those 50 plus folks who's, you know, got some time in the saddle and is now finding themselves in leadership of something that really has the potential to make a massive difference. What would you say to somebody in that situation scenario?

Well, I think it depends where you are. I mean I my advice to, to someone to if you have the skills, if you're at a certain life Stage where let's say you can maybe, I don't know, sometimes people can afford to take more risk or they're actually at a life stage where they can't take any risk because they have kids who are getting older and college is coming up. Right. It just feels like, gosh, I'm actually not in a place where I can go start something. I think the good news is that if you look at some of the most well known, in certain respects, iconic sustainable brands, whether that's a Patagonia or a seventh generation, a Whole Foods, the ones that have been at it forever, so often as they grow, the opportunities that are in the leadership positions start to open up to people coming from a much more mainstream background because they can now truly bring skill sets and training that the sustainability industry or those companies recognize that they need as well. The other thing I would say when you. That was very interesting to me. We did a show on Boise, Idaho, because Boise, Idaho has the largest geothermal citywide system in the country.

And we talked to the woman who's in charge of it who now works for the city. And what was so interesting was that she had spent two decades working for, I can't remember which fossil fuel company. I mean, there's not that many. There's not that many anymore. She worked for one of the huge ones all over the world as a geologist, and she was able to use her skills to move into this really awesome role.

Very cool.

And she's seeing other colleagues increasingly having those same opportunities too. As clean energy just becomes energy, it will be the same. And all of those skills are in demand.

Beautiful. Gosh, I could hang out with you all day. You've done so much good work. And I know you're busy. I know our listeners are busy. As we start to wind down. If there's something you were hoping we were going to recover and we didn't get to it yet, or there's something you want to leave our listeners with as we start to say goodbye. What would that be?

Well, Paul, this conversation has been, it's been fantastic. I'm not left with anything left to say that I didn't have an opportunity to say. All right, so one thing, thank you for that. I would just leave. And if it hasn't been impressed on your listeners already, I would just try to emphasize that in my mind this is a moment. It is a moment for hope and optimism. It's equally a moment for despair and pessimism from a climate perspective. And where I'm going with this is in your daily life.

You can hold either of you and both will be real and valid. You could make the case, but one moves you more into agency and putting skills to use and being productive in the call it the battle, call it just the change that needs to take place. And I think I would just encourage people to try and lean a little more there if they're not already. And I think you're going to be delighted about what you might find.

Gosh, if somebody wants to get a hold of you, what's the best way for them to reach out?

Thank you so getsuper Cool. That is our website. That's our home base for everything that that we've talked about today and we're on. You can find the podcast everywhere, Every channel. Our YouTube is growing pretty fast. We're excited about that. I tend to hang out a lot on LinkedIn. I am cautiously working on spending a little more time on bluesky.

We'll see how that goes. But those are the places where we tend to be.

Josh, thanks for the good work and thanks for being on the show today.

Thank you so much, Paul.

So listeners, let's go do what we do. Tell people who care about climate to go listen to this episode and go check out Super Cool. Such a great resource. All the links will be in the show notes. I want to remind everybody we love listener suggested topics and guests. So if you have an idea for a show, go to the AwarePreneur's website and send it on in our criteria of what we're looking for right there. We try to be really transparent. And finally, I want to 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.

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