Hear Me Again on America Out Loud: Living the Simple Life Off the Grid With Josh Spodek

April 4, 2023 by Joshua
in Audio, Education, Leadership, Nature

Rob and Andrew, hosts of America Out Loud’s radio show and podcast After Dark, hosted me. I’ve been on their podcast and they’ve been on mine. I think I can safely say we’ve become friends across political divides, exactly the sort that everyone annoyed by today’s polarization.

The episode is titled Living the Simple Life Off the Grid With Josh Spodek. Here’s the audio:

We spoke about

  • My disconnecting my apartment from the electrical grid in Manhattan for nearly a year so far
  • The sustainability leadership workshop (also called a mastermind group) my team has started
  • Leadership in general, how to learn to lead, and the characteristics of a leader
  • Several issue in astrophysics and astronomy, including billionaires launch rockets to other planets

Here are the episode notes:

Bestselling author Josh Spodek recently returned to After Dark to give updates on living off the grid (without electricity) and his new sustainable leadership master class. Spodek has been living without many modern conveniences for almost a year.

He unplugged this refrigerator and does most of the charging of electronics at New York University, where he is an adjunct professor. What little electricity he does get is from a used solar panel. He charges it using the sunlight on his apartment’s rooftop.

Initially, the former Ted X speaker, wondered if he would be able to turn his daily life inside his apartment off the electric grid, he is going on a year without it. This is all thanks to him living by his “environmental values.” This has helped him find traditional ways of doing things without electricity. He said up to a hundred years ago; no one had an electric grid.

In addition to living off the grid and doing burpees (he has done over a hundred thousand), and limiting his garbage production, he instructs a leadership class on his podcast using the Spodek Method, a methodology he developed over time. It involves leadership through environmental sustainability. He is this same methodology in a course he is teaching at NYU.

The idea is for participants to act on their intrinsic motivation to bring about an environment that they prefer. He said he won’t be telling individuals taking the class what to do, but rather helping them get to where they want to be, but not knowing how.

Listen to this broadcast from last August we did with Josh: Living The Simple Life With Astrophysicist Joshua Spodek

Joshua Spodek, Ph.D. MBA is a three-time TEDx speaker, #1 bestselling author of Initiative and Leadership Step by Step, host of the award-winning This Sustainable Life podcast, and professor at NYU. He holds a Ph.D. in astrophysics and an MBA from Columbia, where he studied under a Nobel Laureate and helped launch a satellite. He is one of the founders of an invention that showed animated images to subway riders between stations. He has taught and coached leadership and entrepreneurship at NYU and Columbia Business School. He has spoken at Harvard, Princeton, West Point, Google, IBM, The New York Academy of Science, and the Children’s Aid Society. He has appeared on TV and in the NY Times and Wall Street Journal to discuss Sustainable Life and leadership. He was called the “best and brightest” in Esquire’s Genius issue, “astrophysicist turned new media whiz” by NBC, and “rocket scientist” by Forbes.

Spodek has swum across the Hudson River twice, has done burpees daily since 2011 (165,000 and counting), takes 16 months to produce one load of garbage, and hasn’t flown (by choice) since March 2016.

Website: joshuaspodek.com
Twitter: https://twitter.com/spodek


After Dark with Rob and Andrew on America Out Loud Talk Radio can be heard on weekdays at 10 pm ET. Listen on iHeart Radio, our world-class media player, or our free apps on AppleAndroid, or Alexa. Listen to other episodes of After Dark, available on podcasts.

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