If you’ve listened to a lot of this podcast, you’ve heard me walk many guests through sharing their values on sustainability and acting on them. If you haven’t, you should, in my opinion. Why do they enjoy what most people consider deprivation and sacrifice? You can learn to do it. A growing team of us teach workshops in sustainability leadership. One is coming up soon, September 10, 2024. This episode[…] Keep reading →

I’d heard of Strong Towns for years, mainly through guest Jason Slaughter‘s Not Just Bikes video series, and finally joined the community by taking a couple of their courses. I can’t recommend them enough. Chuck Marohn founded that community. He found and publicized several of their core discoveries. Some include: North American cities grow based on a Ponzi scheme, the combination of a street and a road fails at both[…] Keep reading →

Since I’ve been studying so much American history and seeing American presidents as role models, I couldn’t help stumbling on a characterization of my development. Before I acted, when I knew the problems with pollution and depletion but contributed to them as much as everyone around me, I was like Thomas Jefferson speaking about freedom while owning slaves. Today I still pollute and deplete, but far less than before. I’m[…] Keep reading →

You’ve probably listened to Bruce’s past three episodes, so you probably know he wants a path to exist that leads people to want to live more sustainably and spread that change to others. It would mean them overcoming their addictions. By them, I mean all of us, since if we order takeout, fly, and drive big cars, we’re in the group that has to change. His experience with addicts tells[…] Keep reading →

I’ve written before that to fix our environmental problems we have to change culture. Say you wanted to learn a culture to where you were fluent in its language and culture. Which would work better? Say you wanted to learn Nigerian language and culture Read books by people who haven’t lived in the culture or spoken that language, with the intent that only after you learned them fluently you would[…] Keep reading →

I ask guests to do episodes 1.5 when they tell me they couldn’t do their Spodek Method commitment or keep postponing. Sometimes they say they don’t want to share that they didn’t do it. But experience has shown that talking about that vulnerability by sharing that they didn’t do it overcomes it. Then redoing the Spodek Method usually leads to it working better than expected. The goal isn’t perfection, after[…] Keep reading →

This week I finished: Behind the Beautiful Forevers: Life, Death, and Hope in a Mumbai Undercity, by Katherine Boo: Engaging, intimate, researched, poignant. It’s hard to imagine it was written by an American, not someone who lived there. This book recounts a period in a Mumbai slum from the perspectives of a few of its residents. Their lives interact. The global economy affects them. Some things they can control, others[…] Keep reading →

Amazing results and gratitude I walked back from surgery. To clarify: I walked two-and-a-half miles on the knee they did surgery on a couple hours after they did it. Years ago I would never have imagined it possible. Now I know it’s normal, but experiencing it hits more viscerally than hearing about it from friends. Recovery will take weeks or months, but it seems little given what they did. I[…] Keep reading →

My latest pulse measured at a hospital was yesterday: 44 bpm, but with an asterisk since I had just had knee surgery under general anesthesia, so who knows what drugs were affecting me. On the other hand, maybe it was just because I had been lying still for a couple hours. My pulse is the number in the upper right corner. My blood pressure was 111 over 79, which a[…] Keep reading →