Ryan Grant Little: 0:42

Welcome to Another Climate Tech Podcast interviews with the people trying to save us from ourselves. You probably haven't yet heard of Glenn Hurowitz and his organization, mighty Earth, but my guess is you'll be hearing those names much more in the future. Mighty Earth is a global advocacy organization that combines the influence of large, established organizations with the agility and grit of grassroots activists, and draws on influences ranging from Napoleon to Netflix. I believe they're one of the most important voices of this generation and show the kind of courage we need from climate advocates. I reach Glenn in Washington DC. I'm Ryan Grant Little Thanks for being here, Glenn welcome to the podcast.

Glenn Hurowitz: 1:26

It's great to be here. Thank you, what an honor.

Ryan Grant Little: 1:29

I'm also the founder and CEO of Mighty Earth. Can you talk a bit about what the organization does and why you started it?

Glenn Hurowitz: 1:35

Yeah, Mighty Earth is a global advocacy organization. We aspire to be the most effective environmental advocacy organization in the world. I founded it really because we saw a need for an entrepreneurial, results-focused organization working on the biggest challenges that we're not getting enough attention For us. First and foremost amongst those was nature. It's 37% of the solution to climate change and yet gets something around only 3% of the funding. Of course, nature goes beyond climate change. It is how we're going to protect the animals and plants that are vital to life on Earth. To me, it's even bigger than climate change, as big as that is. We also work on other areas like industrial decarbonization, which accounts for 25% of global climate pollution but until relatively recently, was getting very little attention. We strive to be very agile. We bring the best of the business world into the way we run our organization. We also draw from classical military strategy and, of course, social change theory to run campaigns that can have a transformative impact on the biggest industries in the world.

Ryan Grant Little: 2:49

That's fascinating. Do you have a business or military background, or what inspired you to draw from those disciplines?

Glenn Hurowitz: 2:55

Well, I'm fascinated by military history and I find it very applicable to the campaign work that I do. Just to give you one example, napoleon is probably the greatest military strategist in history. Not always a great governor of lands and did some terrible things, but if you look at his military career from very early days, he had this simple brilliance. I think that's in many ways, what we aspire to, too is a broad principle. One of the key military strategies that he applied rigorously was concentration of force. When he was relatively junior, he constantly faced opponents who had much larger armies than he did, but they made the mistake of dividing their forces. They would send one army over to capture territory in one direction and in another way. What Napoleon did? He kept his armies together and he would go after one army first Once you would actually have more numbers. Once the opponents were divided, he would beat them. He was also a great tactician and very agile. Then he would run quickly to capture the other army. That way he was able to overcome forces many times the size of his. That's how his legend built and partly how he gained such prominence For us.

Glenn Hurowitz: 4:13

We operate in a very target-rich environment. There are so many companies responsible for environmental destruction, we're pulled in a lot of directions. I think that's a temptation that afflicts anybody, not only in the campaign space but really in business or in life. We try to be as disciplined as we can in focusing on the key companies or policy makers In our work to transform industries. Typically that means tackling the largest company in an industry first. That might be counterintuitive. I think sometimes people say, oh, you should go after the one that's already innovative, that's doing the best, maybe a little smaller has a small penetration. I think that's historically what a lot of environmental groups have done. Our experience is that the largest company in the industry sets the terms of the industry. You can change them. It might be really hard, but if you can change them you can get everybody else to follow relatively easily. It's very hard for companies to resist the competitive pressure of a dominant player who is adopting stronger standards.

Ryan Grant Little: 5:12

As Fasini, I'm wondering also on the topic of focusing efforts, because, as you say, you work in a target-rich environment and you're working on topics ranging from palm oil to aluminum production, to apes and much, much more. How do you decide where to focus and when? Are you running all these campaigns simultaneously?

Glenn Hurowitz: 5:34

We do run a lot of campaigns simultaneously. I mean, I'm not personally running them, I guess I oversee it all. We have a great team and one of the things we've purposely done to draw on your question about business leadership and business learning from business we've really tried to build a team, especially the leadership level of very talented individuals who can navigate without much control, so that they are we call it the informed captain model, and you know my job as the organization leader and their job as team leaders is to lead by context, provide the information about our goals, what's happening in the outside world, strategic direction, funding, political info, intelligence and then give them a lot of leeway to make their own decisions. Now, that requires hiring incredibly talented people who are able to navigate with confidence themselves, and that's part of a lot of what we do. So, yes, we work on a lot of issues. I think we don't work on issues where there's a lot of great work already happening at scale. So, for instance, we haven't done that much on coal and electric utilities, not that it's not very important issue, but rather there's organizations like Sierra Club, bloomberg, philanthropies, many, many other projects on as many others, who have been doing excellent work, funded quite generously for many years and are getting results. You know you've seen a dramatic decline in use of coal power in the United States and that's spreading. In contrast, some of the issues you named are not getting anywhere near enough attention.

Glenn Hurowitz: 7:02

So I spoke about nature broadly is wildly underinvested in. I mean, the extinction crisis is, scientists believe, 10 times more severe than the climate crisis, as bad as that is and as freaked out as I am about that. And so you know we're drawn to that. I think especially the nature world has been dominated by wonks. I think you know, in some ways science is a great strength of the environmental movement and in some ways scientists can be a weakness of it, because they don't naturally gravitate to political strategy or they think that because they know so much about science, they can do political strategy. They don't think about how to effectively communicate. It's not necessarily always a top most priority for them. And so you know we certainly draw on the best scientists and we work with a lot of scientists, but we're trying to bring something different.

Glenn Hurowitz: 7:48

So you know I look at issues like the meat industry, you know, causes more pollution than the entire global transportation sector. I often say, you know, electric vehicles are a big deal. Meat is an even bigger deal and for many years we were really quite lonely in trying to tackle their deforestation, their lack of regenerative agriculture practices, not shifting to alternative protein. I think our fortunately, we've got in a certain scale now, but nowhere near big enough to tackle this challenge. And there are good organizations as well working at it from different perspectives, like good food institute on the all proteins and others working on these different components, but what we try to do is really, and more broadly, I think there's a real gap in advocacy. So I think you know much of this work is funded by philanthropies and the large climate.

Glenn Hurowitz: 8:35

Philanthropies tend to have a very technocratic orientation. They are interested in temperamentally. They want to fund studies, research, policy. In my view, in general, what we are lacking is not great ideas and powerful solutions, it's rather the political will to get there. This is not a new phenomenon, but it is one that I think is under recognized. You know where you have political leadership. You know, as we've had with President Biden, you can get the inflation reduction act, which is causing an enormous shift in how the United States economy runs and is driving decarbonization both in our country and globally through achieving economies of scale. That would not have been possible without determined political effort and funding.

Glenn Hurowitz: 9:22

For politics, you know, but that's mostly going to energy and transportation, which is all really important, I find in the nature world in particular, you know, the people who understand nature's importance very often don't get politics or advocacy, or if they do get it, they don't see themselves in it. And so the consequences, you know. We see dozens of studies come out pointing to the fact that we need to value nature, make trees worth more alive than dead, that point out the value of nature, climate, but that doesn't necessarily change the dynamics. It doesn't cause a company like JBS or Cargill to change the way that it is doing business. It doesn't cause governments to adopt better policies to protect nature, whether by, you know, creating new protected areas or banning trade in products related to deforestation. That all requires a lot of political and organization. So there's not enough of that. We've taken on these challenging tasks of doing it in a, you know, relatively resource scarce funding environment, and so what the challenge that sets for us is? We have to punch above our weight, and that's really our goal.

Ryan Grant Little: 11:27

Yeah, a lot of my week goes to working with scientists, helping them to translate kind of the things that they know and the solutions they have into stories that other people can use and policymakers can understand and that the public cares about. It is definitely a gap and, as you say, the knowledge is there to a large extent. Right, this isn't a shortage of ideas and technology, it's a shortage of political will and understanding to a large extent. You talk about the change that mighty earth makes as being a perfect storm of campaigns, communication and practical engagement with decision makers, and I wonder you talked a little bit about this already with I think you called it informed captains but what this kind of orchestration of that perfect storm looks like. So how do you keep track of all these different campaigns? Do you have people leading different topics and kind of? What does that process look like? How does it look to make that you know, alternative sausage.

Glenn Hurowitz: 12:19

Yeah, well, the alternative sausage. You know it's surprisingly smooth and I think, unlike bills being hashed out here in DC, the closer you get, the cooler it looks and the more inspiring it is. So we try to be rigorous, at least about you know the process. So we have each of our campaigns is led by a relatively typically a relatively senior person who's got a lot of experience, and then they will have staff under them and then we have a lot of partners. So we fund nonprofit organizations with grants, particularly in developing countries. As well, as you know, we have contractors and others who are helping us out and we do brainstorms that bring in, you know, different parts of our organization communications, grassroots and leadership to develop a strategy. We do a lot of research to figure out what are the most powerful levers. So, you know, right now we are working on the meat industry, as I mentioned, and we did a significant amount of investigation to figure out which are the companies that have the most power to move the industry, and we developed this great map showing you know how retailers could move some of the largest meat companies, what government policies might change them and where it was politically feasible to do that. It requires an understanding of the supply chain. But when you do that, I think you find unexpected outcomes sometimes, or lesser known approaches that, if you follow them, can really supercharge it. So with the meat industry. So the most important companies to shift are really JBS, cargill and Bungie. They're three companies. Cargill and Bungie are American, jbs is Brazil based, but the third largest meat company in the United States and you might think that it's, you know, the big supermarkets and retail companies in the United States that would be able to move them.

Glenn Hurowitz: 14:08

Now, while there's some truth in that and those are important, what we found was there's actually two French companies had the biggest influence over the meat companies, especially when it came to stopping DeFar Station. So about 80%, 85% of beef in Latin America where the DeFar Station is happening is sold domestically, so it's very little is exported to the United States because we produce so much meat here. So what we found was the two biggest supermarket chains in Brazil Carrefour and Casino and their subsidiaries are the key companies that can actually influence JBS and some of the others to change. So what we've done is we've launched a big campaign in France and a big campaign in Brazil, and there's also a lot of Carrefour in Spain, and so these are probably not companies that most Americans, or, frankly, american philanthropists, have heard of, but they're incredibly important.

Glenn Hurowitz: 14:58

And so we focused our media, our advertising, our grassroots actions in France and in Brazil to move those companies.

Glenn Hurowitz: 15:07

And we just had this amazing TV story on France 24 the other day where our French director and our Brazil colleague were showing how they could go to a supermarket, scan a barcode of a package of beef and figure out if that beef came from a slaughterhouse connected to illegal deforestation, land grabbing from JBS or other companies. And then they were able to say okay, carrefour, despite all your promises, you're still selling beef that is connected to this deforestation. Now the interesting thing is, and the challenge it creates, we are going after the most powerful levers. I think getting people, the general public, donors, to understand that tackling something in France and Brazil and the sophisticated strategies really is what may make a difference Can be a little challenging because nobody's heard of these brand names, right, and so that's part of our communication challenges, say you know, supporting us, supporting our volunteers, supporting our staff in doing this work can have outsize impact, but it may be on targets that are incredibly important but rather obscure to an American.

Ryan Grant Little: 16:10

Gilberto Tomazzoni, the CEO of JBS, gave a disastrous interview at the New York Climate Week a few weeks ago where he reiterated claims, their net zero claims, which they basically been forbidden from pushing because they've been revealed to be greenwashing. But I would have been watching that interview. I was amazed. It just really felt like he didn't care to a large extent, right, I mean, it was so obvious the questions he's being asked and I mean just the insouciance that he showed about some of these questions. And I wonder, you know, are we winning the battle against groups like that? You've called their IPO as their upcoming potential IPO, as the biggest climate risk IPO in history. Where are the points of leverage? So it's the grocery stores. Where else is anyone else listening to this?

Glenn Hurowitz: 16:57

Yeah, so it is just so. People have the background, because, you know, I find these meat producers not well known. Jbs is this enormous company. It's the biggest meat company in the world, it is a Brazil based company, it's the largest driver of deforestation across South America and it is the third largest meat company in the United States. Its owners and the company itself have this terrible history of corruption, on top of all the environmental abuse and land grabbing from indigenous people. So the two owners of the company, wesley and Josely Batista, were imprisoned in Brazil because they and their companies bribed the president of Brazil and federal government at an enormous scale.

Glenn Hurowitz: 17:40

The SEC and the US Department of Justice find JBS about $256 million just in 2020 for their participation in a variety of corruption schemes, including the ones that led to their acquisition of pilgrims pride, another major US meat company. What's interesting is, even though this company is based in Brazil, they actually get around 49% of their profits in the United States and they want to expand their access to the US market. They also want to expand their access to US capital markets, so they are trying to get listed on the New York Stock Exchange and, over the long term, this could allow them to supercharge their financing to keep growing their herd, pouring more climate pollution into the atmosphere. They already are off the charts in terms of the amount of climate pollution that caused. Relative to any other food or agriculture company, they have more pollution than the entire country of Spain. So this is one company operating at this enormous scale. Needless to say, they have a lot of political influence as well, which is why we're focused on them, because we think if we can change them, it's easier to get different governments, whether in Brazil or Europe or the United States, to improve their environmental protection, because they won't have JBS lobbying them to weaken those areas.

Glenn Hurowitz: 18:53

And this IPO, though in the short term, is a little different. For most, the immediate purpose is to have the founding family of the company, the Batistas, who currently own around 45% of the shares, to get up to 85% control. So they're going to shift from class A shares to class B shares and concentrate the voting power of the company. We're really concerned about this because it means that independent investors will have less of a voice in how the company runs. So we've asked the SEC to stop the listing. It's an unusual step. However, it's also unusual to have a public company in the United States run by people who are so recently fined enormous amounts of money by the DOJ, by the SEC, for corruption on a grand scale. Of course, we filed an earlier SEC complaint against JBS in January because they had issued such utterly misleading climate information. They claim to be on a pathway to net zero by 2040, even as their cattle and other meat processing herds grow. They have not put out honest information about the climate and that's misleading to investors. They raised $3 billion in so-called sustainability link bonds based on what we believe is utterly false information that we've documented extensively with the SEC. So this IPO is an unusually significant opportunity for investors to have influence, for the SEC to have influence and also really to get leverage over JBS so it can improve its environmental policies, so it can reduce corruption.

Glenn Hurowitz: 20:29

It was great to have that David Gellis, the New York Times journalist. We were able to brief him in advance about all the issues JBS was facing. Our volunteers on short notice in New York City ran and did an event outside the interview and yeah, I mean I think Tomasone was just pummeled on stage. I hope we need JBS to change Now. Maybe that change comes because DOJ and SEC and other regulatory authorities around the world, including in Brazil, step in and say you know, and shut down the company. I don't know. You know to what degree that will happen. I think they will pressure them, but we actually what we really need JBS to do is ban and seriously monitor deforestation throughout supply chain, to require regenerative agriculture practices and to shift to a greater percentage of alternative protein so it can reduce the enormous impact that meat has, which, in case listeners don't know, you know, typically a plant based diet cultivated protein diet is like about 10% of the land use and climate impact of meat, and so we're trying to get to a point where, by 2030, of 10% of the world's protein is alternative protein. That will create the economics of scale that allows a bigger transition. But it really needs companies like JBS to be part of that transformation, and so we are pummeling them from different directions, but in the hopes that they will change and you know we do that we talk to JBS even as we're beating up on them to say here are the solutions.

Glenn Hurowitz: 21:52

Now, the frustrating thing in the meat industry is that change has not happened. They have not as much as it has in other industries. They have not been as open minded. So when we tackled palm oil and rubber and our allies worked on pulp and paper, we had this enormous success, in part because it took campaigns. It took a lot of pressure from their customers and investors. But, like I sat down with the head of Asia's largest agribusiness, which has controlled 45% of the global palm oil industry, I got there because we were bringing serious pressure on them from customers and investors. But once I was in the room with him, he was quite open-minded about the fact that they could expand palm oil onto previously deforested land instead of native ecosystems and quickly set a policy.

Glenn Hurowitz: 22:33

And this is a Chinese company, essentially ethnically Chinese, doing most of its business with China, based in Singapore. Nobody's ever heard of it and while it did take pressure, once they decided to change they actually implemented it and we were able to get 90% of the palm oil industry signed up to the same standards within a year. Our allies did the same thing on pulp and paper, we did the same thing on rubber and there's been this 90% plus decline in deforestation for all of these commodities in Southeast Asia. It's a gigaton scale climate win and on the one hand, I think we did a great job campaigning. On the other hand, I think we were maybe a little lucky that the leadership, the Asian leadership, was strong and as American, it's very disappointing to me when I see American companies like Hargo, like Bungie, like Costco on the retail side not showing the same leadership that Chinese companies did. I'm pretty ashamed. I don't like to say that, but it's sadly true.

Ryan Grant Little: 23:22

Yeah that's totally fair. I mean, it's courageous work that you're doing. I have some experience with the meatpacking industry. I ran a biogas company in the mid-2000s and our primary suppliers are slaughterhouses, providing basically the stuff that doesn't go to rendering or to food, and I had some interesting conversations there, you know.

Ryan Grant Little: 23:42

Once, sitting at a table at a beef slaughterhouse and just as they were about to sign a contract for tankers of blood that we were going to be taking, he stopped and said now if a tanker gets left overnight in the parking lot and we get a summons from the Ministry of Environment, just so, you know you'll end up like the crab tree brothers and the next time you start your truck will be the last. And I didn't think to mention that while I drive an Audi A3, but I think the point was well taken and you know that happened a couple of times when I was working in that industry that you know. I think where the business is dealing with killing large mammals, the sanctity of human life might not be top of the list. And I wonder you know I'm sure you deal with some concerned campaigns have pushed back from companies Do you ever worry for your safety or the safety of your team?

Glenn Hurowitz: 24:38

So I think you know we have a certain immunity in terms of our own team maybe not immunity but, like I think you know, the companies that we tackle are reluctant to go after a US based organization. I think you know we are pretty well politically connected in the United States, especially at the top levels of the Biden administration and the Congress, and you know our colleagues in Europe in many cases are equally well connected in Europe and Brazil and Japan elsewhere. So I think the risk is not so much for us. We have a time space or risk, and we do have big security protocols and security consultants to manage that and make sure that people are safe. I think the bigger risk is sometimes to partners on the ground and civil society organizations on the front lines who may not even be like so directly connected to us, but you know they're the people that we're trying to help and support and they are on the front lines. There's, you know, when it comes to protecting nature, there's all these studies that show, particularly in Latin America, that where you have indigenous people with control over their lands and with rights to their lands, usually the conservation outcomes are way better because they are where they are willing to defend their lands. They are the best offenders and so you know we support them, and a lot of times they don't have that much political power because of the contempt that big meat businesses or logging businesses or the governments have towards them and because they're living out in the forest without access to the corridors of power. What we are able to do with our campaigns is change that dynamic very often, and so we're able to say to corporate decision makers and government policymakers you need to listen to the indigenous people who your operations are affecting or who this policy will affect.

Glenn Hurowitz: 26:19

So one of our biggest successes, with a lot of other organizations in the past year, was passing a law in Europe called the EU Deforestation Regulation. It bans trade in products of deforestation. It's a really big deal. It gives legal force to the voluntary policies that we've been successful in instituting. And you know, I think part of the reason that came about was we were able to take representatives of indigenous groups, local civil society, to Brussels to hear about what they thought the benefits of this policy would be in disincentivizing deforestation and land grabbing. That was countervailing pressure to the governments of some of these countries and to big business meat industry, cocoa industry and others who were lobbying against the law. The European policymakers were able to hear from people from those countries were directly affected by this proposed policy. That'd be beneficial and I think that's one of the reasons it passed.

Glenn Hurowitz: 27:54

Also, you know we are able to. When we influence companies, we insist as part of their policy and part of their practice that they invite indigenous groups in and they listen to them and they get permission to operate in their territories. I think one of the proudest moments for me is when that happens. You know, I remember I was in Gabon and we've done this very sophisticated campaign involving the Singapore Sovereign Wealth Fund, banks companies all over the world to influence this company that was operating there and destroying a lot of forest, and we've succeeded in getting them to stop deforestation.

Glenn Hurowitz: 28:25

I went to Gabon to meet different government ministers and our local partners and the company only wanted me to go meet with these officials and I said guys, I'm going to fly back to the United States if our local partners you know much more than I do about what's needed in Gabon with the government policies are how this should be implemented than I do, because they had all these phone calls back and forth for an hour, you know, could he bring them or not? And they finally, of course, said yes, and we bring them. And you know, there was a lot of suspicion between the two groups, but actually I was able to step back because our partners were way better suited than me to making the case and we, you know, broadly been able to put them in the lead, and so that's when it works well and that's the dynamic that ultimately, we're trying to achieve.

Ryan Grant Little: 29:05

Yeah, sometimes it's just about bringing the right people into the room and stepping back.

Glenn Hurowitz: 29:09

Yeah, and I think that's absolutely right, but I think it's also about having the political leverage to make that happen. Yeah, because you know, when I was in Gabon, for instance, I remember our partner said they were like we don't fully understand how you did this. I mean, you're this organization, you're based in Washington DC, you launched this big campaign in Singapore on the sovereign wealth fund, you're working in Europe, you're working in Japan on these banks, and somehow you got this company that we've been working to change for many years to change, and it's great. And so, you know, they felt for the first time that they had real access to decision makers, and I think what we can do is change that balance of power on the ground so that they can have real influence.

Ryan Grant Little: 29:45

You do some work in the financial industry as well. I saw that Barclay is a target basically, and on a previous episode I talked to the founder of Mother Tree who is calculating the CO2 footprint of bank accounts and Barclay's tops. Basically it's number one bank for having the worst. You know, if you have an account there you have the worst CO2 footprint basically out of any bank.

Glenn Hurowitz: 30:08

That's so interesting. I will check that out. I was not aware of that, actually, and that's a powerful talking point for a campaign.

Ryan Grant Little: 30:13

Yeah, it's really interesting. I mean, he's, of course, got like a calculator as well and provides alternative banks and there are ways, basically, that you can reduce your. You know, by choosing one bank over another, you can reduce your carbon footprint by 80% in some cases, and it's really astounding actually, the numbers you know and the tons of CO2 if you've got, especially if you're a company and you've got a substantial amount of money in a current account. So, yeah, that was an eye-opener for me as well. Well, you talked about, you know, being in touch with investors in Singapore, working in Gabon, being based in Washington DC, you're working politically and on the ground in South America. I'm curious, what does an average day look like for you, or is there such a thing?

Glenn Hurowitz: 30:55

There's not really an average day for me. I think that's probably a good thing, because we try to be dynamic and entrepreneurial and nimble. If I'm here, I'm currently at our HQ, mighty Earth Plaza, which is actually just a rented space in the WeWork. But one of the good things is we've been able to grow a bit and with that scale that has freed me up more to do things like talk to you and do more external communication and tell the story of what Mighty Earth is doing. I do have to spend a lot of time fundraising, so we are primarily funded by philanthropy right now.

Glenn Hurowitz: 31:30

We are really trying to recruit individual donors to diversify, because the thing with philanthropy is that sometimes they give large grants but it tends to be restricted funds so we can't jump on new opportunities that are really important or have money salted away for a rainy day and that can be really disruptive and risky if you have a delay in disbursement of a grant. Governments, in particular, that give climate funds. I've had a situation where we had a year-long delay in receiving disbursement. It's incredibly hard for an NGO to navigate that. So one of our priorities is we welcome the big donations from major philanthropy. I spent a lot of time with them and it's great and fuels our work. But we really need individuals to contribute as well. So if anybody is listening and wants to support us, you can go to mightyearthorg, slash, donate and contribute on a monthly basis or one time we really welcome.

Glenn Hurowitz: 32:22

I often say that money is like three times as valuable as a restricted grant. So I do spend a lot of time both traveling and on the phone with philanthropies and individual donors, and then I'm running an organization, so I'm meeting with our teams. We have a great vice president of programs who leads our programmatic work and he's overseeing that day to day. But the teams often will bring me in for brainstorms where they're based on my experience. They think I might have a good idea occasionally, and then a lot of times you have to oversee the operations, the finance, to make sure all of that is really rigorous, and so as we've grown we've been able to improve and scale our teams on that front, and so that's freed me up a bit more. But I do find this EO you always have to keep your eye on that and one of the things that we say. I just say every year I give a state of mighty earth presentation at our global retreat, which just happened, and I said we have to make sure that our operations and finance team keep ahead of our overall growth, and so we're making a lot of investments to make sure that happens. But, yeah, I really am trying to do as much external communications as possible and use the platform that I have to spread that word, I will say at its core, I think we're mighty.

Glenn Hurowitz: 33:37

Earth has had successes due to our culture. I think we really are playing an unusual role in being so nimble and being able to jump on these challenges, and that means that, even though our budget is modest, we are able to tackle some of the biggest companies in the world and often win. And so I will say, just to give some credit you know you were asking earlier about lessons from the business world we drew a lot from Netflix. They have this culture of freedom, of responsibility. They really prize some of the same things we do results, orientation, nimbleness, entrepreneurialism on their teams. They're not like their CEO and their senior leadership does not micromanage, and so those were values that we already had.

Glenn Hurowitz: 34:18

And then I read a book written by the founder of Netflix and his co-author, named Aaron Meyer, professor at the NC Business School called no Rules Rules, and it spoke to me because they had the same values but they had codified the culture to a much greater degree than we had, and so we've taken their learnings and really instituted it throughout the organization. So it's things like informed captain, where we lead by context, not by control. It's highly aligned, loosely coupled, so we want to make sure there's good communication throughout the organization so that people know what others are doing and where their work might intersect, but that they're not having to check in on specific tactical implementation with huge numbers of teams so they can move really fast. We try to eliminate process wherever we can. So that's and we can do that because we have such talented people who can make good decisions on their own. There are areas where we need to be really rigorous in process. I mentioned finance and compliance, and so you know it's an interesting tension where we want to have this very free entrepreneurial culture on one hand and then also make sure that we are complying with all the different nonprofit requirements that one faces.

Glenn Hurowitz: 35:26

I think tending to that culture, cultivating it, building it, setting a good example, rewarding people who live up to it, is so important. We just give reward at our retreat, as we do every year, to the ideal team player, the person who greatest most personifies the values of an ideal team player, which are humble, hungry and smart, and I think showcasing that and rewarding people who demonstrate those skills is really valuable. We have this rule no brilliant jerks and I think we're very lucky right now that we don't have brilliant jerks on our team and we've had to, you know, make hiring choices where sometimes you find somebody who's really smart, really talented, really expert, but you know, maybe they're not a jerk but they may not have the humility to thrive in an organization. And I think you need I think, in my experience, at least in our organization, you need true selflessness and dedication to the mission in order to succeed, because if you're really just self-seeking, it's hard to be as collaborative as you need to be in a culture that's as impact-focused as we are.

Ryan Grant Little: 36:26

I 100% agree. Hungry, humble and smart are also my hiring criteria, and you build amazing teams with that. There's no room for the toxic high-performer. It just doesn't work. To your point about restricted funding, I ran an NGO when I was in my early 20s and I used to dream about this because it rewires your brain as you try to look for ways to how can we make turning the electricity on and buying desks and paperclips into a project. Because the whole system around philanthropy is a bit broken in that sense where, instead of looking at the impact that you're creating with funding and just going from this money to this impact, it's always about what are you spending on administration versus projects, and it forces you to try to package things as projects, which doesn't serve anyone. There's still a legacy of that sticking around. Some of the more cutting-edge funders, I think, are shifting on that thinking, but you still see a lot of it.

Glenn Hurowitz: 37:28

Yeah, absolutely. I would say if you know any of those cutting-edge funders, please send them our direction. I think there's a lot of lip service to the idea of trust-based philanthropy, but in practice we don't see it at least in the climate world that much, at least from the larger philanthropies. And so I think this is a real challenge for the sector and in some ways I see some movement in the opposite direction, actually from the big philanthropies. Oh no, and one of the things that's very fashionable, it can be useful. It depends how well it's implemented.

Glenn Hurowitz: 38:02

Our funders collaborates where you have a lot of different philanthropies funding a sort of single grant-making entity. I've seen it done well where there's excellent leadership, and then I've also seen it where it can lead to groupthink and that can be really risky, especially when there's a sort of technocratically dominant strain to that. So I think to us, I wish we were 10 times as big. I think we could easily be 10 times as big. I think the world needs us to be 10 times as big, and we've set our organization up for scale, and so our biggest obstacle is really how do you raise the money to get there and how do you persuade either philanthropies or, over time, build a base of donors where you can really achieve the scale, because I mentioned the huge success we've had in Asia tackling palm oil or rubber or pulp and paper. Those are all $50, $60 billion a year. Industries the meat industry is a trillion-dollar a year. Industry, steel and aluminum are at similar scales, and so we need an order of magnitude collater size in order to really pick them on.

Ryan Grant Little: 38:58

You mentioned, of course, people who are looking to make financial contributions or philanthropies that come your way. But for listeners out there who have drunk the collate now after this conversation, how else can they get involved?

Glenn Hurowitz: 39:10

So, in addition to donating and joining our email list, which you can do on our homepage, I think we do do volunteer, engage volunteers in a variety of ways and all over the world. So, on our industrial decarbonization campaign, all over the United States right now we're recruiting volunteers to ask auto companies to use lower carbon or carbon-free materials like aluminum and steel and batteries, and we do very much inside-outside games, so we do demonstrations. We also do interesting things where we work with students, and they will go to companies that are recruiting on campus and say, hey, we don't want to work for you if you are causing outside pollution and not taking serious efforts to address it. And that's been very influential with companies because they care about what their employees think and many employees now even for big legacy companies. They want to feel like they're doing something good. They want to feel like they're solving climate change, they're making the world a better place. And if they discover, oh, gm is buying steel from super polluters unnecessarily and not investing sufficiently in green steel, this is what's going to make a difference in electric vehicle world, and so that's been incredibly powerful. So we're doing the on our decarbonization campaign. We have lots of work going on across the United States.

Glenn Hurowitz: 40:27

Similarly, I mentioned that lightning demonstration that we did in New York. It was because we had a network of volunteers. So, anyway, people want to like. Best way to connect with me personally and I can pass you on to the right person is on LinkedIn. So I write that's the main social media platform. I use. Glenn Hurwitz on LinkedIn and happy to connect, especially if you write a little message in the introduction request so it stands out. I get a lot of requests but or you know, I think that's yeah, we really want to build our volunteer network, and that's not just during the United States. We're doing a lot across Europe and in South America as well. So there's a lot of opportunities for people to get involved.

Ryan Grant Little: 41:05

I'll put links to all of this in the show notes as well. Excellent, glenn. Thanks so much for all the incredible work that you're doing and also for this conversation. Thank you so much, it's been a real pleasure. Thanks for listening to another Climate Tech podcast. It would mean a lot if you would subscribe, rate and share this podcast. Get in touch anytime with tips and guest recommendations at hello at climatetechpodcom. Find me, ryan Grant Little, on LinkedIn. I'll be back with another episode next week. Bye for now.