Caspar leads a fulfilling life and helps people do the same. What's his expertise? How has he found purpose more than others? Why do corporations book him to help them with morale? He sailed around the world with his family. He lived a comfortable corporate life. He didn't have to do something out of the mainstream and independent. It forced them to figure out their narrative and purpose. Since most people don't challenge themselves that way, they don't learn about themselves so much. Were his choices easy? No, he had to figure it out by acting, no different than anyone else. His leaving the corporate world made him more valuable for the corporate world. Anyone can do it. Few do. It's like environmental leadership. Anyone…

I've learned in leading that you can lead people best when you meet them where they are. That means speaking their language and understanding their perspective. Many people I talk to take their cues from the Bible, including guidance on how to act regarding the environment. Among them, the term stewardship plays a key role. A steward is one who manages another's property, finances, or other affairs. Everyone views and means things uniquely, but I understand them to mean the world and everything living on it, if we steward them, they aren't ours, but we steward them for both the true owner and future generations so they can enjoy and steward them for their future generations. This episode explores the source of stewardship as an…

I've learned in leading that you can lead people best when you meet them where they are. That means speaking their language and understanding their perspective. Many people I talk to take their cues from the Bible, including guidance on how to act regarding the environment. Among them, the term stewardship plays a key role. A steward is one who manages another's property, finances, or other affairs. Everyone views and means things uniquely, but I understand them to mean the world and everything living on it, if we steward them, they aren't ours, but we steward them for both the true owner and future generations so they can enjoy and steward them for their future generations. Again, everyone reaches his or her views in his…

Brandon loves negotiation and teaching it. He learned from the top in the field and practices it apparently 24/7. We start our conversation by covering negotiation as developed by an FBI hostage negotiator---Chris, his father. More than the family nature of their business or the FBI basis of his training and technique, I enjoyed his educational approach to negotiation. Brandon wants to help you improve. Keep in mind, his view of negotiation is not the mainstream view where you just use tricks to defeat your counterparty under high-stakes tension. Listeners who have read my books or taken my courses, or know and appreciate what I call Method Learning, will hear that Brandon's teaching technique is like mine: you learn from practicing the basics. The conversation…

Everybody talks about political polarization, the communication messes this nation and world are in, and how people who disagree can't talk to each other any more, so we can't resolve conflict. I do it too---that is, get into conversations where I shut down meaningful communication---though less than before, telling me that we can learn to communicate effectively. I've learned tremendously the times I've reversed that trend---that is, to listen to people I disagree with. I learn from them, probably more than I learn from people I disagree with. Today's episode covers an interaction within a community of people formed to increase dialog. Even in a community for that purpose, I find them not knowing what to do about it, even augmenting the problem. One of…

When I studied physics and spent time in universities, I met a lot of Nobel laureates. Physics is Nobel heavy so Columbia physics connected me to 3. Other science departments led me to another 1 or 2. The business school led me to another. Seth Shelden and ICAN---the International Campaign to Abolish Nuclear Weapons---won the 2017 Nobel Peace Prize "for its work to draw attention to the catastrophic humanitarian consequences of any use of nuclear weapons and for its ground-breaking efforts to achieve a treaty-based prohibition of such weapons" Their goal is a UN treaty like the one to ban land mines for nuclear weapons. After forming in 2007, 2 years before tomorrow, July 7, they achieved, with the help of many others, The Treaty…

People ask me if I worry or lose sleep from my environmental habits in a world where most people pollute profligately and unnecessarily. In this post I try to illustrate by analogy how it feels. How would you feel if you were magically transported to the 50s or 60s and most people smoked and drove cars with no safety equipment but they all considered it normal? Or to 1850 Alabama and someone offered you products made by slave labor? Here are the results to a search on "Mountain Dew teeth," to which I refer in the audio. This click is safe, it's just text search results, but you may want to prepare yourself before clicking from there to images or videos, except that you see…

I've said it before and I'll say it again. Tom's Do The Math blog is one of the best site on internet. If you measure a site by how much it can improve a reader's life and human society, I challenge you to find one with greater potential. A couple peers include Low Tech magazine and Sustainable Energy Without the Hot Air, which is a book that you can download for free. Tom makes the physics behind the environment and our interaction with it simple and accessible. If you don't like math, well, it's the language of nature, so it's important to understand what's happening in nature. But even so, the point of collecting data and calculating results isn't for the sake of the math.…

From our first conversation you know Tim's history as a musician and founder of the Eden Project. This time you'll hear the passion of a man who loves restoring the Earth's ability to sustain life and human society. He talks about the spirituality of his work, connecting to the Earth, eating, and growing. For city dwellers like most of us, he shares the potential for that connection available to all of us. We have to take the steps, but the emotionally rewarding results are there. As you listen to this episode about food, plants, land, connection, community, and many things wholesome, I recommend contrasting Tim's world with, say, Facebook or Doritos. In my experience, they disperse community, make connections superficial, and plasticize nature to create…

Laura and I go back a few years, from being on her podcast. We talk about her concept of emotional obesity: a parallel between physical health and emotional health. I find it a rich analogy on many levels. Characteristics of addiction to food that cause obesity resemble thoughts that cause emotional obesity. She describes her concept in more detail, but I find most helpful about it that it enables you to make yourself emotionally healthy in the ways you make yourself physically healthy. You'll note the parallels in problem and solution as she describes it. Think of thoughts you kick yourself with. If your friend said those things you'd leave that friend. Yet we keep doing it, unable to see that we can stop it.…