Building a Sustainable Future: Josh Dorfman on Climate-Friendly Construction

Josh (00:00.27)

South Carolina, about five blocks from the ocean. we actually, like, we looked at New Milford. We almost bought a house. fact, we were under contract on a house maybe right before the pandemic, I would say, like 2018 in Madison, Connecticut. Like, we were just, we lived in Nashville for like eight years. And then we're like, let's go see what else is out there. We just kind of, we like that area. New Milford, that's like, we like that area. Yeah.

Jeffrey Bradbury (00:01.73)

Ooh.

Jeffrey Bradbury (00:29.774)

My guest today is an amazing entrepreneur, CEO and host of a fantastic podcast called Super Cool. And today we're going to talk all about environment, technology and how he's helping to revolutionize the way that our planet is moving forward. I want to bring on today Mr. Josh Dorfman. Josh, how are you today? Welcome to the podcast.

Josh (00:48.008)

Thank you, I am doing quite well and really thrilled to be here. Appreciate you having me.

Jeffrey Bradbury (00:52.768)

I am so excited that you are here today. Recently, we were at a conference down in San Antonio. And one of the topics that was really interesting to hear teachers talk about was how do we teach climate evolution? How do we teach climate change? I know that's something that you're familiar with. So let's just kind of dive in. Who is Josh Dorfman? And and what are you doing these days to change the world?

Josh (01:17.054)

So I have spent the better part of the last 20 years thinking about those exact kinds of things. How do you bring people along around climate? How do you do that? How do you do it in the context of living in the US, living in our system, and making it feel relevant to people, seeing how they can be part of it? So I've done things. Years ago, I had a TV show, radio show called The Lazy Environmentalist, where I would travel around America trying to help people understand how they could kind of.

go green and easy, lazy, super convenient ways that fit their lives and cost a lot. Today, we kind of look at that through a business lens. And so we have a new platform. It's a media platform called Super Cool. And the premise behind it is the moment that I believe we're living in, when you get beyond the headlines and beyond the doom and gloom and beyond the prevailing feeling that the clock is ticking and we're not doing enough.

What you actually start to see is that across cities, 15,000 cities have climate action plans. Lots and lots of startups that work on climate solutions have progressed and are now in the market scaling their ventures. And trillions of dollars are being invested around the globe into solar and EVs and battery storage and nuclear. it's just, there's so much happening that is underway yet underrepresented in the media. So Supercool really tries to shine a light on what's out there, what's working, what's real today so people can see what's going on, how to act on it.

Yeah, and how maybe these solutions might impact them.

Jeffrey Bradbury (02:45.986)

You can find out more information about that over at get super dot cool. There's a great newsletter and amazing podcast. And I gotta say, why? Why are you using newsletters and podcasts as the medium to share the story to get people aware of how is that helping you create change in our environment?

Josh (03:08.408)

When we took a look at how to build a, how to get stories out, how to get a message out today, we track what a lot of people are focused on, the attention economy, right? Where are eyeballs going? Where are our earbuds moving? And where are people digesting information? And so that's what drives our choice. It's not, you I do love podcasts. I love radio. I love doing that.

kind of talk interview. I imagine quite like you, I get a lot out of it. I kind of think that way. And then for me, a newsletter, as you know, as a teacher, I've always found the best way to try and teach someone something is to actually try and write it down and have it make sense to get your thoughts really clear so that you can communicate them. And so it's very helpful as we're, with our platform, we'll talk to folks who are doing things like,

This week we talked to this company that built, it's in tens of thousands of homes, a new electrical panel, and it's called SPAN. And you need this electrical panel. If you have an old home, you actually can't get the EV and the new heat pump and the new digital induction stove. Your house isn't wired for it. Instead of spending thousands and thousands of dollars to go electric, which is part of the solution to climate change, you can upgrade your panel.

So I need to go learn all this stuff about what the heck this guy's saying so I can then go communicate it to our newsletter audience as they've listened to the podcast as well. So it's always for me, it's like leaping from that to batteries to formula E, electric drag racing. I mean, you name it, we gotta figure out, we gotta understand it.

Jeffrey Bradbury (04:48.312)

I love that story because that's basically how we started here 14 years ago, I had something that I needed to share. So I'm going to start a podcast, we're going to interview some great people. And now we can talk about it. Now we can teach it. I've been listening to your show, you've got some amazing guests on here. The thing that I didn't know existed, because I've kind of been out of this world for a while as a spectator, but using EV in Formula Racing, that was an interesting one. I mean, I've always looked at these

you know, I watch indie cars, I was starting to get into f1 a little bit, but there's just a lot of waste. There's a lot of gas going into that stuff. But there is a movement right now maybe you can talk a little bit about it to how do you make this sport environmentally friendly? What did you learn from that episode?

Josh (05:33.512)

That was fascinating. was, you know, and for me, I mean, we live in the South and so my son got very into NASCAR when he was eight. So I've actually been to a number of the track, Charlotte, Bristol for the night race. But yeah, you see the impact. And then going back a decade, so F1, the Formula One racing body, right? A lot of folks came together and said, you know what, we see where the future is going. Our audience isn't really growing globally. We have a massive audience, but the...

there's a different future emerging. How do we get smart about this? Can we build a platform? And so they started working on Formula E. The cars looked like Formula One race cars. And what was fascinating was starting from zero, you had really brilliant minds like, you know, the Andretti's, right? The, you know, some of the legends of the sport, but the cars, the technology wasn't there. So we had on the race director for Andretti Global Racing, Roger Griffiths. And he's talking about, were in Beijing in 2014. The batteries.

were so weak at the time that everyone was afraid to even get in formation, like the formation lap before the race starts, because they were afraid they're going to drain the battery. You fast forward to today, the technology is amazing, the cars go 200 miles, plus miles per hour. But the reason why they got to 500 million racing fans globally, which is a striking number, is not because they went out there and they started selling sustainability, although that did attract sponsors who wanted a platform to do that. But they said, OK, look, we've got, one, we've got some limits here on this technology, and we've got some strengths.

Jeffrey Bradbury (06:49.868)

Mm-hmm.

Josh (07:02.654)

The limits are we just can't run a long race, right? So let's run shorter races. Let's run a 45 minute race. Well, that kind of reflects how people want to consume entertainment today. People don't really have the attention span for a two or three hour race, right? Okay, so we're going to turn that limitation into a strength. Now we have a real strength. These cars are quiet. So we don't have to ask people to come out to a track that's far away. Let's just put the race right in the middle of the city. Let's turn it, since the cars are quiet, let's bring music. Let's create a festival environment.

Let's create an environment that actually is family friendly because the noise doesn't actually bother kids. Let's do all this stuff to design a new experience. And let's experiment with the racing as well. Let's bring in things from like Super Mario Brothers. Now there's a tack mode. And so the last thing I'll say is Roger said to me, if you go to Monaco for the F1 race, I mean, who wouldn't, right? But he's like, if you go to that race, the car that gets in the lead, it's probably going to win the race, right? There's very few passes. But if you go to the.

the Formula E race at Monaco, you're gonna see 400 passes. You're gonna see frenetic racing because we have things like attack mode and we've borrowed all these kooky things, but it makes for a much better entertainment product. So you have this sustainability platform. Everyone's racing on electric cars. The battery technology is getting better. The cars are going faster. All that technology is bleeding into the private sector, the Jaguar and BMW. And yet everyone's there enjoying this climate solution because it's wonderful entertainment and there is a lot to learn.

from how we reach people and get them excited about the climate solution, you don't have to go bang them on the head about a climate solution if you can wrap it in something that people want to consume because it's just better than the conventional way we're doing things right now.

Jeffrey Bradbury (08:41.102)

And I've been to a few races over the last many years, I went to Dover in Delaware to see a race, I went to Indy. And it was an amazing experience to see 400 or 450,000 people all together. And just to see what the technology has changed. I mean, the way that these cars are developed is a direct result, I would believe, for how do we use technology to do things bigger, better, faster? How are you seeing the the advancements in technology?

outside of racing, we talk about homes, we talk about construction, we talk about just the way that our schools are being built to be more eco friendly. What excites you and what are you seeing on the future that maybe we can start to put curriculum around so we can teach the next generation about being eco friendly?

Josh (09:30.664)

Yeah, I love that question. I think one of the things that springs to mind for me outside of electric vehicles, and there's some other really cool stories, there's this notion I'm sure you're familiar with of the circular economy, which is kind of like taking the notion of reduce, reuse, recycle, and kind of like saying, OK, how do we think about that more holistically so that if a material gets created,

How do we make sure that it stays in circulation? one person's waste is another person's treasure, how do we keep things circulating? And so we've brought on a whole bunch of companies that we feature to look at that from many different angles. One of the things that comes up a lot today is this conversation around rare earths, rare earth metals, rare earth magnets. We hear about it a lot in the news because China controls a lot of that industry, which is creating tension and anxiety concern here in the States and the West.

There's a company called Cyclic Materials. We talked to their CEO, Ahmad Gariman, who figured out a way, it's the first company ever that figured out a way to recycle these rare earth magnets so they're not lost forever. Now that rare earth magnet is what powers an MRI machine, a wind turbine, an EV motor, a hard drive in a computer in a data center. All of that needs these rare earth magnets. And then what he figured out to do was,

you know, say an electric car is being recycled, right, like a Tesla or something is being recycled, they're gonna take that motor, they're gonna recycle the steel, they're gonna recycle, you know, maybe it's the, I I don't know all the parts with the copper, whatever's in that thing, right? And they would love to get the rare earth magnet, but these magnets are so strong, they just adhere so strongly to the steel that no one ever figured out a way to pull them off affordably, right? He did. And so there's now,

a company that just shipped a ton of rare earth magnets. They're a Canadian company, they're opening a factory in Arizona. But what it's a lesson in is this new kind of like circularity, urban mining. So they're saying, okay, China's got all the manufacturing over there. We've got all this stuff over here. What if we tap into these waste streams, right? And then figure out innovative ways to get the rare earth magnets back. You all these things at the bottom of the periodic table, all of these like, right, like these elements that are so critical to our civilization.

Josh (11:54.588)

It's a way to teach about how do you do recycling, how can technology play a role, how can creative thinking come up with different kinds of solutions. Ahmad himself was a professor up in Canada in this area, and he saw the future. And so I see so many solutions like that that are just really, I think, empowering and inspiring, what science can do, what technology can do. It's a very exciting time for those types of things.

Jeffrey Bradbury (12:19.702)

with where does artificial intelligence play into this game? If any, I would imagine it's making the technology easier, safer and quicker to purchase. But in what way are you guys using AI to help solve the environmental problems?

Josh (12:33.844)

It comes up all the time today. We talked with, as an example, a company called Brainbox AI. I don't know why all the companies we're talking to on this show today happened to be from Canada. This company got started in Montreal, but they're all over the US. fact, they were just acquired by trained technologies. Brainbox came up with an idea to use AI to be able to look at a building, look at really kind of any building, but say like a major office building, and to be able to predict with 96 % accuracy,

who is going to occupy a certain floor on the building, say, six hours from now. So if you know that with 96 % accuracy, then what you can do is gradually either start to raise the temperature or lower the temperature to get to that right optimal point for six hours from now. What that lets you do is be able to say, OK, let me go look at the grid. When is clean energy on the grid? Let me actually turn the systems on when the clean energy is When are prices lower? Let me run when prices are lower.

What's the sun angle? What's the wind speed? What's the temperature? What's the dew point? What's, know, all this like ingest all this information. And with AI, cut energy bills for buildings by up to 25 % and cut their carbon footprint for their HVAC units by up to 40%. It requires very little hardware for the building operator. And one of the things that was really fascinating to me when I talked with Sam Ramadouri, their former CEO, you know, he said to me, because I was saying to him, who do you sell this to? Do you sell it to the sustainability person?

Do they have a budget for this? And he's like, no, no, no, we don't sell it to the sustainability person. We sell some of it to the CFO, if we can. We sell it to the facilities manager. We sell it to all these people. We can do predictive maintenance with the AI. We know it's going to break before it breaks. Tell them to replace or just keep it optimal. But he said to me, he's like, Josh, here's the thing. Nobody wakes up in the morning who operates a building and thinks, you know what I really need today? I need more AI in my building. Like, so you can't.

just go sell the technology, right? You have to still sell the application and make it really, you know, show people how it fits their goals and needs. And we see a lot of that with AI today.

Jeffrey Bradbury (14:39.778)

Well, I think right there is where I'm gonna put the finger on you because, you know, coming back from these conferences, having other ed tech companies on that is what they're selling, you know, look at us, we have these features, and teachers are starting to revolt a little bit because they're tired of features. And I think when we're looking at this from a classroom lens, or from a student lens, and the curricular lens, like, okay, we get it.

AI is here, you have it, it's nice. But how is it impacting the classroom? How is it making our life easier? How is it making the stuff around us? And I think if we can start to continue to have those conversations, and you can see there are some companies out there that are looking at the why that are looking at the how is it going to be affecting and impacting? I think those are the platforms that are out there that are going to be successful with everything. The companies that are out there saying look at this widget that I have, it's new and shiny.

I don't see them succeeding as much. Is that the same thing you would say in your world?

Josh (15:41.382)

Absolutely. Yeah, I'm trying to think about it from the closest thing in with AI that we've seen to education. And it's not exactly education. It's actually the school bus. But I'm trying to think about it. And maybe there's something here that resonates for you. There's this company called Zoom, Z-U-M. And it got started really not that long ago, five or six years ago.

Jeffrey Bradbury (15:54.755)

Mmm.

Josh (16:07.924)

the CEO, woman, Ritu Narayan, had four children. She dealt with the pain of school bus not knowing exactly when the kids were gonna get home. It was late, it was delayed, and all that pain that school systems, of all sizes, but really big school systems kind of face. And so she said to me, she's like, Josh, you know what's crazy? That your kids on the school bus today are having the same experience as their grandparents had last century. School bus hasn't changed. Which means, if I'm a transportation director for a school district, once that driver leaves the

the yard in the morning, I have no idea where he is. I just have no idea, right? The parents have no idea. Once a kid gets on the bus, nobody has any idea. And you think like, yeah, how can that actually be the case in the 21st century? So Zoom came up with a way to one, help everyone understand like through an app, is just where everyone is. But what they started doing using AI.

was optimizing school bus routes. So they said, okay, well, let us like start to take over the routes. Like now we can see where the school bus is. We can see traffic. We can learn if a kid's gonna not go into school in a day, a parent can go on an app, say, oh, Tommy's not going to school, the bus reroutes. So by doing that, they were then able to, so one today they're in 4,000 schools. But what they did with the Oakland School District is they went to the Oakland School District and said, okay, we've been optimizing and running your bus system. You have 136 buses.

Here's what we're going to do. We're going to electrify all your buses. We're going to make 100 % EV school buses. And they did. It was the first system in the country to do that, big school system. But they said, because we've optimized through AI the school bus routes, you actually don't need 136 EVs. You only need 74. So we're going to buy 74. So we're going to actually do this in a way, because we're going to buy less and these can do more, the economics actually work.

Kids are gonna get a better school bus experience. Communities aren't gonna have diesel running through their neighborhoods. Kids are gonna get to school on time. It's gonna be a less stressful environment because it's quieter, et cetera, et cetera, et cetera. And it literally is a win-win-win. And so AI is an enabler in that sense. You still need all this really smart business thinking, strategy, finance. How do you make this work? And how do you really make it work for a school district and that transportation director, right? That's the customer.

Josh (18:27.038)

But so they figured out what does this transportation director at a school district need? What does a school bus system need to do? How can we make that work better to support the school system's goals? And if we can do that, then we can build probably what's gonna be a pretty big successful business.

Jeffrey Bradbury (18:42.978)

think that's an amazing story of just how do you use these tools that are coming out there that are readily available and you're using it in an economically friendly way and economically friendly way as well. As an entrepreneur yourself, and I know you've got yourself into a number of different avenues. How are you leveraging the power of artificial intelligence?

Josh (19:03.604)

So before I started Supercool, I had started another company called Planted. Now Planted is a company that I created with two former engineers from SpaceX, literally like rocket ship engineers. So incredible to work with these guys, really eye opening. The idea that we were trying to solve was, could we come up with a better way to create building materials? Well really, let me start, let me actually say.

Could we come up with a way to remove carbon dioxide from the atmosphere, pull it down, to rebalance the system, right? This is climate change. The problem is not carbon. It's just it's in the wrong place. It's in the atmosphere, right? That's the problem. So we thought, could we come up with a system to pull it out of the atmosphere? Well, what if we found something that grew faster than trees? Trees are good at absorbing carbon, right? What if we find something that speeds up that photosynthesis process and that carbon removal process? We did. We found this grass.

grows much faster than trees. It's a perennial grass, kind of like bamboo. We built an entire vertical agricultural supply chain, never been done before, from the tissue culture lab to the greenhouse. We've got these little plants, we give them to the pharmacists in North Carolina, and we're growing this grass. Then with the SpaceX team, said, instead of building this giant factory that has these huge smoke stacks on the top, we're gonna emit all this carbon back, they were putting all this effort to take it out of the atmosphere in the first place.

Let's go entirely electric, no smoke stack. Let's invent a new production system. Okay. Well, how do you build that production system? It's a lot of engineering. But so we get to something that's much smaller, can go in any warehouse, plugs in, and you start to use tools and you start to use AI to inform that process, right? To actually in your engineering process. And so my only point here is like, and this company, by the way, just it's four years old. Last year we got an order from the largest home builder in the country, DR Hornet, for 10 million.

Jeffrey Bradbury (20:59.672)

well.

Josh (20:59.732)

panels, 10 million panels, the things you nail to the two by fours, right? Your structural panels replaces what's oriented, strand board and plywood. So it's off to the races. AI is an enabler, but we run this business planted to take carbon out of the atmosphere. We sell the panels because they're actually better than what that business used today. AI is one of the enablers that enables this, you know, positive cycle to, to kind of spin up and scale up and drive more positive impact.

Jeffrey Bradbury (21:29.738)

If somebody out there is looking to learn more about this, or even if there's any, you know, science teachers, environmental teachers that are looking to reach out to you, where do they go? And how do they get in touch with you guys?

Josh (21:39.956)

The best way to find what we're doing with everything I just described, super cool, whether it's a podcast, newsletter, all the content that we create, even planted itself, you can find all that or about me at GetSuper.Cool. We're on every social platform. I tend to be more on LinkedIn than others. We're also building up our presence on Blue Sky. So those are probably the best places to find.

Jeffrey Bradbury (22:01.006)

We're going to make sure that we have the links to this and all of the other resources talked about over in our show notes. You can find it over at teachercast.net slash podcast. Just before I let you go, I want to start to talk a little bit of that more media nerd stuff if we can a little bit here. How do you record your podcast?

Josh (22:14.654)

Go for it.

Uh, pretty much this similar setup. We are on Riverside. We are mostly doing, you know, we're trying to reach people all around the country and the world, just like you. And, but you know, podcasts, this is, uh, it's, homegrown. I'm sitting here in my kitchen. We kick the kids out, get set up, try and make it look as polished and professional as possible. So you might hear the occasional dog, the occasional kid, the occasional, the occasional someone winding in the background needing something.

But I feel like that's okay, right? I mean, this is a more kind of intimate conversation where you can get past just some of the talking points and hopefully speak a little more candidly and off the cuff and kind of in a very real way to guests and to hosts and have something that creates some insight.

Jeffrey Bradbury (23:05.666)

Now am I correct in remembering you used to have a show on SiriusXM?

Josh (23:10.194)

That's right. Yeah, I had a radio show, a daily radio show called The Lazy Environmentalist. And eventually that became a reality TV show that I hosted on Sundance Channel. But the radio show was fantastic. it was a conversation about looking at all the ways that it was recognizing this. The underlying premise of The Lazy Environmentalist was, and I think it's still pretty valid, that nearly all of us do care about the planet.

right? Forget our politics aside, yeah, we all want to do right by the planet. But we're busy. We have a lot of things going on in our lives. We have a lot of competing priorities. To consider the planet, often just has to be really easy, really convenient, not cost too much. It just has to fit the way we want to live. And so the premise of the Lays Environmental was, can I go find those solutions for people? Can I show people ways to actually make

going green, live a more sustainable lifestyle, fit, hopefully enhance and upgrade their lives. I think that's still happening today. And yeah, it was really interesting. mean, 2007, we got this live show. get a call. So I was like, oh, I got a live show. I should put a book together. I did. I wrote the first Lazy Environmentalist book. And I get a call from the Martha Stewart Show. And they're like, hey, do you want to come on for Earth Day? This was 2007. I was like, of course. They're like, great. Maybe you can come.

You can come on and talk about turning off the tap and you brush your teeth. And I was like, well, let me send you some stuff. So I send them a solar-powered kind of robo lawnmower that goes out and mows the lawn by itself. I send these biodegradable, flushable diapers called G diapers, just the craziest stuff I can find. And the producer's like, yeah, we're going to do this. But she's like,

She's like, but you've never been on national TV before, so it's gonna be on you. And Martha likes to talk and it's your job to move her along, right? And move her as fast as possible through this segment. So it was an awesome segment, but the whole time I could see the producer right under the camera just being like, go faster, go faster. So it was stressful, wonderful. was yeah, a really cool experience.

Jeffrey Bradbury (25:18.328)

That's amazing. Have you done a lot of work in the school districts or in the school systems?

Josh (25:23.676)

well, I guess two things. mean, I did, I have taught a couple of times, but I mean, I was a teacher in China and China is kind of what in my formative years, in my, in my early twenties, taught on university. was briefly in a PhD program down at George Washington university and teaching assistant teaching freshmen international relations. So I've been in that environment. I kind of left to go start startups, which is how my brain works. And we did green a school.

principal in a school in Los Angeles on my TV show. So we have thought about how you bring this into the school system and make it operational.

Jeffrey Bradbury (25:59.662)

If you're looking to have those conversations head on over to get super dot cool. Check out their newsletter and listen to the podcast is a lot of great stuff. But the most important thing on that site is that contact button to get a hold of Josh. Josh, please come back on the show soon. We would love to continue this conversation. Maybe we can even get some other members of your team and maybe an Andretti or two would be really good to have right? How can we how can we put all that stuff together? Josh, I want to say thank you so much for showing up on our show today.

Josh (26:21.488)

Absolutely.

Jeffrey Bradbury (26:28.031)

Best of luck with everything and continue putting out some amazing audio and video content. Thank you so much for your time, my friend.

Josh (26:36.19)

Thank you as well, I sure appreciate the opportunity.

Jeffrey Bradbury (26:38.914)

You know, the Jeff Bradbury show is all about finding people that are making an impact in this world and helping them amplify if you are out there fit that category. We'd to have your passions of the world amplify. Check us out today over at teachercast.net slash podcast fill out our contact form. Would love to have you guys featured on this episode. Don't forget to that like and subscribe. And of course, you can find us on Spotify, Apple Podcasts, YouTube and wherever your podcasts are. And that wraps up this episode of the Jeff Bradbury show on behalf of Josh and everybody here on TeacherCast.

My name is Jeff Bradbury, reminding you guys to keep up the great work in your classrooms and continue sharing your passions with your students.