This week’s selected media, April 12, 2026: How to Get What You Want, Climate Capital, This Is Spinal Tap, Circle Game Online Course
This week I finished:
How to Get What You Want: Mastering the Art and Science of Persuasion, by podcast guest Josh Bandoch: This book compiles many essential building blocks of persuasion and influence into one place.
Josh B. and I talk about it at length in podcast episode 849. I wish I’d had this book decades ago. It handles myths many people hold about persuasion that hold people back, then builds up the skills and theory to influence and persuade people effectively.
I recommend it, and would if I didn’t know Josh B. In fact, our shared passion for learning, teaching, and coaching how to lead is a major piece of what connects us.
This Is Spinal Tap, directed by Rob Reiner: After watching The Princess Bride again after a long time, how could I not follow up with Spinal Tap?
What can I say that everyone already hasn’t? The movie created a genre. It’s funny, creative, smart, quotable, and everything anyone would want in entertainment. I could watch it over and over and probably will.
I don’t keep up with current movies so didn’t know the sequel came out last year. I imagine it will be impossible to reach the level of the original, but even if I like it half as much, it will still be worth watching. Maybe it will outdo it.
Climate Capital: Investing in the Tools for a Regenerative Future, by Tom Chi: Tom’s team contacted me to review the book, then to meet in person when he visited Manhattan last week. We had lunch before his book talk at Columbia Business School, where I went.
I also watched his talks with TEDx, Summit, and others I found online. He has a background in astrophysics too. He worked at top levels at places like Google, where he led innovative teams. Regular readers know I don’t hold such experience in high regard. I remember how much I admired Google in the 1990s, when I was in graduate school and learned how much they used Linux. Since then, my regard has about-faced.
This book focuses on technological approaches to undo ways humans have lowered Earth’s ability to sustain life and human life, as well as to clarify our situation and its gravity.
He invests in technological innovations to affect climate. Readers of Sustainability Simplified know that I find that history shows that tools like technology, laws, and market incentives end up serving culture, no matter how much we want them to do otherwise. Hence I focus on changing culture to restore lost values.
Still, he’s genuine, experienced, and dedicated. I intend to keep in touch with him.
When we met, he talked about Highlander Folk School, which I since researched. It trained people like Rosa Parks and Martin Luther King. Tom knows about such things, I take it, because he’s approaching our environmental situation from all angles.
Circle Game Online Course, hosted by podcast guest Evelyn Wallace: I quoted Evelyn on the back cover of Sustainability Simplified:
“This is what I’ve been looking for my entire life!”
Evelyn Wallace MSW, Howard University
After graduating my workshop, she and another graduate began Circle Game, which runs their workshops, based on the Spodek Method, but approaching different audiences in different ways. From their page:
Our Mission:
To help you reframe your relationship with the natural world and improve your quality of life… by discovering what living more sustainably means to you.
I’m honored to be the first graduate of their first course. Go to their page to learn more, especially if you’re near Oregon. Evelyn hosts in-person workshops there. I’m glad to have been able to do mine online, but will envy you if you get to do one in person.
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