David Breslauer is the co-founder and Chief Scientific Officer of Bolt Threads. He leads technology innovation at Bolt, creating and incubating biomaterials for improved consumer products. His obsession with biomaterials began with graduate research on silk during his Bioengineering Ph.D. at UC Berkeley and UCSF.

After successfully experimenting for months in their backyard with materials given to them by a refinery, Nick and Thomas went on to found their start-up, got accepted to the prestigious Techstars accelerator, won a quarter-million dollar grant from the National Science Foundation, have filed for provisional patents on their process, and have now raised hundreds of thousands of dollars from investors. In short, they’re ready to get to work.

If you’ve ever wondered what happens when you donate a bag of goods to Goodwill, what happens to the things that don’t sell, and what happens if you try to reclaim a donated item, this episode will answer all your questions. On this episode we’ve got Goodwill exec Lori Dearwester to tell us how it all works.

There are few people with more credible voices on police reform than Brooklyn Borough President Eric Adams. As you’ll hear in the interview, Adams talks about how his experience of being beaten by the police while in custody as a black teenager led to him become a police officer himself for two decades, and then ultimately to a life in politics.

One serial entrepreneur, Rich “Raz” Razgaitis, is trying to make plastic-free tap water cool again, and wants you to think of single-use plastic water bottles as if they were as socially unacceptable as cigarettes. And so far he’s raised $25 million in venture capital to wage his purified tap water crusade.

You’ll hear in this interview what role Isha Datar thinks nonprofits like hers should play in a nascent industry whose start-ups are attracting hundreds of millions of dollars of venture capital. As well, Isha discusses the fact that many of the people now working at cell ag start-ups have come through New Harvest and its ecosystem.

In many countries, walking down city streets vividly brings to life two serious problems: plastic pollution and poverty. While there are charities trying to address both of these concerns, serial entrepreneur David Katz in 2013 thought there was an opportunity to marry the two issues and build a profitable business out of it. The result: Plastic Bank.

Rodrigo Garcia Gonzales and Pierre Paslier began ordering ingredients off Amazon and Alibaba and tinkered away in their kitchen. With a rough prototype in hand, they decided they’d launch a Kickstarter to see if there was interest in a new company that would make alternative packaging from seaweed. The result: A million dollars poured in and Notpla became a reality.

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.

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!”

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.

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.

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.

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.

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!

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.”