Ep. 33 - Real Leather without the Cows
Provenance Bio is now coming out of the shadows and is ready to start talking about its big plans to keep people wearing leather, but instead of it coming off the backs of cows, they’re leaving those cows out to pasture and making real leather, animal-free.
Ep. 27 - Your Trash Is Tom Szaky's Treasure
You know the story: there’s a bright college student who drops out of an Ivy League school to embark upon an entrepreneurial journey, founding his own company and building it into a major success along the way. No, we’re not talking about Mark Zuckerberg or Bill Gates here. Instead, we’re talking about Tom Szaky, an immigrant whose family fled Hungary after the Chernobyl disaster, eventually sending him to Princeton, where he dropped out to launch his startup called TerraCycle. Their goal, as the company touts, is to make “recycling the unrecyclable not only feasible but desirable and profitable!”
Ep. 25 - Can Helping the Homeless with Surplus Food be Profitable? Jasmine Crowe is Betting on It.
For a lot of people, when they walk by someone who’s homeless, their inclination may be to look the other way. One day for Jasmine Crowe, however, she not only didn’t look the other way; she saw a profitable business opportunity in helping connect the hungry with perfectly good food the rest of us are throwing away.
Ep. 24 - How Often Should Workers be Paid? Safwan Shah Has an Idea
In this episode, Safwan offers a history of why we have the two-week pay period in the first place, and even gets biblical on us, citing the thoughts of both Moses and Mohammed. Yes, it turns out they both prescribed that employers pay employees for their labor right away.
Ep. 22 - Turning Down the Global Thermostat
There are few people who know more about climate change than Columbia University’s Graciela Chichilnisky. Not only did she propose and design the carbon credits trading system under the Kyoto Protocol, she also was a lead author of the 2007 report from the UN Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change that won the Nobel Prize. Not too shabby.
Ep. 19 - Giving Farmers a Fairer Shake
Paul Rice has devoted his life to trying to give the farmers who grow our food a fairer shake. That crusade has taken him from the coffee farms of Nicaragua to founding his own certification program for fair trade that now certifies a wide variety of products you probably buy all the time, from coffee and tea to sugar and even clothing.
Ep. 17 - Cleaning for Good with Biokleen
Today, Biokleen is nationally distributed and is one of the biggest names in natural cleaning products. The company’s Clean for Good program not only commits to environmentally-preferable ingredients, packaging, and energy, it also ensures that purchases of its products go to reforestation and other restoration programs. In other words, Biokleen is a textbook case of conscious capitalism, and we’ve got their managing director, Barry Firth, on the show with us this episode!
Ep. 16 - Will Mycelium Materials Save the World?
You may know that mushrooms are fungi or that some medicines, like penicillin, are created from fungi. But just as plants are extremely diverse, fungi are even more so. Companies like Ecovative are just starting to peer into what we can do with fungi to help right some of the environmental wrongs humanity’s been committing.
Ep. 15 - Making McProgress for Good
When you think about picking a career that’ll help make the world a better place, do you think of working at the largest fast food company in the world? You may not, but that’s indeed what Bob Langert spent his career doing. The former McDonald’s executive was at the forefront of many of the decisions the restaurant behemoth made relating to social responsibility, from retiring styrofoam containers to paying tomato pickers more to improving farm animal welfare.
Ep. 12 - Building a Sweeter, Slavery-Free Chocolate Industry with Tony’s Chocolonely’s
Tony’s Chocolonely went from zero to the #1 chocolate bar in the Netherlands. And in 2015, the company started in the US too, offering slavery-free chocolate that’s quickly gaining popularity among Americans. We’re fortunate to have the US manager of Tony’s with us on the show, Michelle Wald, who’s a wealth of information not just about the problems in the cocoa industry, but about how businesses can be a part of the solution.
Ep. 11 - The Business of Saving Coral Reefs with Sam Teicher
What if entrepreneurs could harness the power of business to actually make it profitable to quickly rebuild coral reefs? That’s the bet Coral Vita is making. The Bahamas-based start-up is pioneering on-land coral farming techniques that rapidly grow corals at 50 times the pace they’d normally grow, then transplanting them onto imperiled reefs.
Ep. 9 - Lindsay Reinsmith and Jason Payne Are (Lab-)Growing a More Cultured Diamond Industry
Human rights and environmental advocates have tried to reform the diamond mining industry, but what if the answer was as simple as just growing diamonds in a lab? That’s what start-ups like Ada Diamonds are betting on. They sell lab-grown diamond jewelry that’s molecularly identical to naturally-formed diamonds, but for only two-thirds the price. In fact, the FTC just changed its definition of “diamond” to make it clear that lab-grown diamonds are indeed real diamonds, and that companies like Ada can market them as “cultured diamonds.”
Ep. 8 - Saving Trees with Joe Luttwak, the Entrepreneurial Lorax
Hear from Joe in this new interview about his journey from working at Ferari to founding a guitar company to now founding and running a company whose goal is, just like Dr. Seuss’s Lorax, nothing short of saving the trees.
Ep. 7 - Simon Griffiths on How Toilet Paper Can Save Lives
Toilets drastically improve health, life expectancy, school attendance rates, and more. And this episode, we’ve got someone who says every trip you make to the toilet can be a feel-good experience–since the company Simon Griffiths started, Who Gives a Crap, was founded for one reason: to give people in the developed world toilets.
Ep. 6 - The Saudi Arabian Prince Who’s Investing in a More Humane Future
His Royal Highness Prince Khaled bin Alwaleed bin Talal isn’t your typical vegan. A son of the man TIME magazine calls the “Arabian Warren Buffett,” he uses his wealth and influence to build a more sustainable world, supporting everything from plant-based and clean meat start-ups to virtual aquariums and clean energy.
Ep. 4 - Bharti Singhla Ushers In a Pollution Revolution
Black pollution is the new green in India, as Bharti Singhla points out in this episode. A chemical engineer, Bharti’s the executive vice president of strategy for Chakr.in–a start-up founded in 2015 that’s innovating a way to clear the air in a nation that according to the WHO has 14 of the 15 most polluted cities on the planet.