Building Houses Out of Grass w/ Josh Dorfman

Josh

Yes, not even circular, no circularity to it, certainly nothing linear about it. But I will tell you, the most profound experience I had was when I was 23, I went and lived in China for a couple of years. And I was thinking more so at the time about diplomacy, maybe a career in CIA, I didn't fully know.

I had written my senior thesis about China and its weapon sales to the Middle East, trying to curry favor with Middle Eastern countries to gain influence, know, over vis-a-vis the United States. This was 30 years ago. So all my professors were like, you don't know what you're talking about. And I was like, I got a hunch. So, you know, I think that bore out pretty well. But I was teaching English at a university in Nanjing and randomly got a part-time job in a factory that made bicycle locks.

for a company called Kryptonite, which was mostly for the US market. But there were also, I came to realize a billion people in China 30 years ago riding bikes with developing country, biggest country, right, very populous country. And so I went to work for Kryptonite full time, tried to sell bike locks to the Chinese. That was a bad idea because the bike locks being American products were more expensive than the bikes, which is why I eventually went to business school because it took too long to realize like, hey.

Would you like a bike? Buy a lock, get a free bike. ultimately what I came to realize as a couple of years there was like, not only did people not want bikes, they all wanted cars. And I saw, I saw a highway get built from like zero to complete in about a year and a half going from Nanjing to about two or three hours away to Shanghai. And I realized one in America that would probably take

at least a decade to complete, they'd still be working on it probably today. two, nobody wanted a bike. Everybody want cars. saw this country developing. I didn't know anything about climate change or global warming, but it really led me down this path to think, what does it mean when, when there's a billion more cars on the road in China? And then you think about India developing, you think about Eastern Europe developing and everyone trying to raise their standard of living, trying to catch up to America. And we were exporting the American dream. We were like, yeah, be like us.

Globalization, that's when globalization was considered a good thing. And that led me down a path to start thinking a lot about climate change, how we develop and how do we continue to live our best lives in a way that is aligned with the planet's capabilities to sustain them and for future generations to have that same opportunity. That's really been the driving force of my career and the ventures I've worked on.

Jeff Albaum

Hmm.

I feel like the atypical thing here is if you're having the thoughts of you're interested in climate, you're interested in how a lot of people can have, can increase their quality of life in a sustainable way, at least from my perspective, that doesn't necessarily scream, go to business school, or like, there's gonna be a business overlap, right? So how did you start thinking about the combination of those two things?

Josh

I was completely schizophrenic for a while. So as I was educating myself on climate and going to protests against the World Bank or the World Economic Forum because corporations and elites had too much power, here I was like, you know, getting my MBA and try to like figure out my career. you can imagine my friends who came from a more corporate background and were really excited to go work for like,

you named JP Morgan or whatever, we're like, dude, what are you thinking? And I was like, man, if you could be in my brain and you saw what I was thinking, like you would run. Cause I was just, I was really in a, was still, you know, I was 25, 26 years old, really trying to figure out my worldview and trying to understand like these things that seem so at odds at each other, could there be a way for them to align? It wasn't immediately clear to me that like business could be a force for good.

Jeff Albaum

You

Mm-hmm.

Josh

that the profit motive could actually be a way to drive down carbon emissions. Those things took a long time for me to form those views. And what ended up happening was I would come home for the holidays and my younger brother would be like, here comes Josh again to make us all feel guilty. And I just thought, how did I become this guy? I grew up playing sports. I played

I played football at Penn. I was a different kid growing up and now I was in this different head space with a different worldview. Certainly been influenced by living out of the country for a while. But I thought, I don't want to be miserable. I don't want to make the people I love miserable. I'm not affecting anybody's behavior. I'm not influencing anyone to recycle more just because I'm bent out of shape and angry and upset and pissed off.

Jeff Albaum

Mm-hmm.

Josh

What do I do with that? And it still took me years to figure out what to do with that so that I could feel more comfortable in my own skin and still feel like I could go out into the world and affect change.

Jeff Albaum

And so what was the first venture as you were formulating your worldview, what was the first venture that you started on or went down the path? What did that look like?

Josh

Well, I went into a PhD program at George Washington University in 2002 thinking, now's the time, know, I've just turned 30. If I don't go get a PhD now, like the dream of being the next Jack Ryan will die, you know? So I have to go like, go get this degree and like folks, and the only way I was gonna get into any PhD program was to leverage China, which was fine, cause I was happy to. Somehow they got in and it was like,

political science in China and the environment. And after a semester, I just realized, yeah, no, I don't know how anybody gets a PhD. My brain does not like, know, this is way too theoretical. I am not into this. And I was in this classroom, you know, again, now I'm like, it was 2002, 2000, I was like 30 years old. I'm in this classroom. It's like winter, January. We're reading this book, something about who rules the world by this. I'm sure brilliant professor from Stanford, but he was a terrible writer.

And I just remember saying there thinking like, you know what, I don't care who this guy thinks rules the world, who my professor thinks rules like, I don't care about any of this anymore. I am just going to leave this classroom, never come back, and I am just going to help Americans consume better stuff more sustainably. Like, I like stuff.

or two thirds of our economy is consumer, you know, is consumer driven. It's our consumption. If I can shift that in a more sustainable environmental direction, that's what I'm going to do. Cause like I'm done thinking about this. had been six or seven years since I'd come home from China. was the last spot I needed to be in for like my idea formed. And I started a company called the Vavi, like Viva V live life. And it became this modern design, eco-friendly retailer, which continued to evolve and

sort of eventually with a focus on furniture and home furnishings that like super modern design made from, know, it could be reclaimed wood or recycled steel, but a furniture collection that was just stunningly beautiful. And I felt, you know what, if I do this, then I can convince people to change their behavior toward more sustainable solutions without having to lecture anyone because it just.

It looks beautiful. It actually competes on its aesthetics. That seems like a pretty good way to go try to effect change rather than trying to hammer people over the head with my values. I don't need to sell them on my values. I'll sell them on nice stuff that has my values embedded in it.

Jeff Albaum

And what was the price point for these things? where do they fall within the, call it the cheapest pieces? Okay.

Josh

Super luxury and part of that was no economies of scale. These were artisanal type products and I knew that. And so I thought, well, recognizing that, I don't think anybody will pay more for a product that is like quote unquote green, even though there's a lot of market research which would allege that people do. I just don't believe that.

There was no opportunity at that time, two decades ago, to build a company that could compete really at lower price points that was going to have environmental values. It just didn't really exist. And so I felt like I'm not going to try and like fight that losing battle. I'll try and like compete on design and put the designers that I'm working with head to head with whomever else, because I just think I can win on design at a certain price point that is, you know, more elastic and there's more, you know, so I have to find folks who have disposable income.

Jeff Albaum

Mm-hmm.

Josh

That was challenging to figure out the market, but I just wasn't gonna play that game of saying, you people are like, oh, green's too expensive. I'd be like, well, yeah, it can be, but that's not what I'm, you're not buying this because it's more or less expensive. You're buying because you think this $3,600 dining table, you know, or coffee table looks great in your house. Instead, but what I would have is people who would come to my showroom, which was in Brooklyn. I had turned my apartment into my showroom and I was living in it.

because I was in New York City and rents are expensive. didn't have, you it was only, was like one or the other. was like, nah, screw it, it's both. I'll just live in my furniture show. And my landlord was absent and I never saw him. And so no one seemed to mind. And so I just, you know, was basically living in my retail store. And,

which was only a problem when people would be like, you know, I hear them whispering, know, I think somebody lives here. And like, there'd be a sock in the corner or something, you know, where my sales, well, my sales manager, Jody would be like, dude, I love working for you, man. Like, I love the mission, but like, if you want me to sell your bed, you gotta make your bed. You know, I'd be like, you're right. You're right. You know, fair criticism. I'll take that, you know, the fair criticism, but we would sell these beautiful stuff. And I remember this woman calling me.

someone working for me delivered a coffee table to Long Island and the woman called me up and I can hear her husband losing it in the background, right? Because the credit card bill has just shown up. He's like, $3,600 for a coffee table? And she's on the phone, she's like, hey Josh, you told me this was eco-friendly, right? And I'm like, yes, it is. She's like, how? And I'm like, tell your husband,

it is Forest Stewardship Council certified wood, right? And she's like, Jack, it's Forest Stewardship Council certified wood. It's good for the environment. And you hear him like, well, you know. And she's like, okay, thanks. I'm like, call me back if you need anything else.

Jeff Albaum

That's nuts. Okay, so you had this showroom and you were building this up as a furniture brand and then what happened next?

Josh

Well, what happened next was what actually happened on the way from Washington, DC to Brooklyn. Cause I had one employee at the time when I was building Vavavi in Washington, DC, when I'd quit my PhD program, we were working out of my apartment. So, you know, I'd hired her as my office manager. So we made a deal. I had said to this young woman, Lucy, I was like, look, if you pack up the van that we take to trade shows and stuff and drive with me up to, to Brooklyn.

I'm not going to need this van anymore. It's your parting gift. You know, like thanks for working for me. You she was going to stay in Washington, DC. So she agreed. So we were on the New Jersey turnpike. This was the end of 2004. It's about 10 30 at night. You know, it's been a long stressful day, just getting everything packed up, getting out of this apartment. I'm driving. She's in the passenger seat and she seems to be having like a panic attack. I don't know what's going on, but suddenly she's like, gulping gasping for air. And I'm like, Lucy, are you okay? And she's like, Josh, look.

have to ask you something. I have to get this off my chest. I couldn't ask you when you were my boss, but you're not my boss anymore and there's something I really need to know. So I thought, my God, she is attracted to me? This is crazy. Like it's true, I'm not her boss. right? Like these lines no longer are blurred, but I'm going to this new apartment. I've never been there. I'm subletting a room in Greenpoint. There's a roommate.

I don't know the logistics, know, so I freak out. But eventually I'm like, look, it's okay, you can tell me anything, whatever's on your mind, I'm sure it's gonna be fine. So finally she's like, look, okay, I don't want you to take this the wrong way, but are you really an environmentalist? I mean, you're always in the shower, you barely recycle, you were gonna throw your bed out, I took it to the homeless shelter, you don't act like an environmentalist, you don't talk like an environmentalist, you are a giant a-hole. So.

I was wrong. She wasn't attracted to me. She slept on the couch. She took my van the next day. I never saw her again. But she was right. there was truth. So I wrote a blog entry in early 2005 about myself and I was like, you know what? I'm going to own this. I'm going to own this hypocrisy that's being pointed out to me. And I ended up writing this blog post called the lazy environmentalist.

about myself and I was like, here's the deal. I take long showers. I know I'm using water. I know I'm using energy to heat that water, but I do my best thinking in the shower. And as much as I'm concerned about my impact, I'm not going to take a shorter shower. I would love a low flow shower head with incredible water pressure that does the job for me of reducing my impact. And I want an Audi TT convertible. And I don't care if it's hydrogen or electric or biodiesel or whatever the technology is, if

If it's what I want and what I can afford and it's green, awesome, I will do it. But it's incumbent upon you industry to figure this out for me, consumer. It's not my job to change my beer, just because I won't. Like whether I should or I shouldn't, you can guilt trip me, lecture me, doesn't matter. I'm not gonna change. I care, I'm lazy, I'm setting my ways, I'm a lazy environmentalist. And I think millions of Americans feel like I do. So I wrote this blog post. And like shortly thereafter,

A guy calls me up, he's like, hey, I read your blog post. I'm like, how, like how, how could, like, how did you, he's like, I think that's a really interesting idea. And he was a producer for a online radio station, still exists today, Voice America, not to be confused with Voice of America, but VoiceAmerica.com. He's like, let's turn this into a radio show. And so we did, I actually turned, let's, started this thing called The Lazy Environmentalist out of my closet in Brooklyn.

predated podcast so I would go into my like soundproof my closet I'd go in there I'd call into the show I'd get guests calling in from wherever they were in the world kind of like podcast but then eventually it got picked up by Sirius Sallie radio and then I went live every day on Sirius and then I was fast forwarding but I became I was Martha Stewart's Earth Day guest in 2007 just as my first book was coming out and then I became Brita's national spokesperson like the water pitcher company

a pair of water pitcher with an alginine water bottle and get rid of disposable plastic water bottles. And I was doing a lot of media for that. And then Sundance channel, Robert Redford's channel called me in and they're like, Hey, we think this would be a cool TV show. Go have lunch with this guy, Dave Metzler, who created Queer Eye for the Straight Guy. If you remember that show, I was like, really? And they're like, yeah, go have lunch with Dave. So I go have lunch with Dave. Like we're lunching in Manhattan. Like, so you want to turn this into a TV show? He's like, yeah, it's gonna be great. Come out to LA, we'll shoot a pilot. I'm like, and it's my show?

Jeff Albaum

Yeah.

Josh

the host like it's like he's like, yeah, it's gonna be great. Come on out. We'll do it. So I did and the show got green lighted. So we did two seasons of this reality TV show and that's what happened.

Jeff Albaum

Dude, that's wild!

Josh

It was wild. was totally wild.

Jeff Albaum

And what year, so you said you were fast forwarding, but what years was this encompassing?

Josh

This was all 2005 to 2010. So Al Gore's movie, An Inconvenient Truth came out in 2006. That was an incredible catalyst for our culture to start paying attention to the environmental story. And the way the mainstream media wanted to cover that story, or mainstream media, the way everyone from like Vogue to GQ to everyone in between wanted to tell that story was through what could you buy? Right? Like it was a very like...

Jeff Albaum

Okay.

Josh

So I was right place, right time. I knew I had the best collection of cool green stuff. I was working with the best designers for my furnishings furniture company. And on the Lazy Environmentalist radio show, which was now live every day, I was talking to the best designers and companies and like most interesting consumer choice, you know, like sustainable in the country, if not the world. So I was well positioned.

for this explosion of interest that then happened, you know, kind of that, kind of through the Great Recession, and then things petered out a little bit, but I rode a wave.

Jeff Albaum

That's amazing. And did you notice or feel like your worldview had changed or was shifting as you were, like you said, talking to the best people in the world, what changed throughout that time in your worldview?

Josh

I mean, I would say there were two things that kind of crystallized for me. The first was, it must have been in early 2007, we were doing a radio show and I wanted to do a show about eco-friendly transportation. And at the time in 2007, that meant, I mean, if you're gonna look at cars, which is what I wanted to do, there was only the Toyota Prius. There was nothing else on the road that matched the Prius. There were no electric cars, the Chevy Volt.

Jeff Albaum

Mm-hmm.

Josh

that General Motors was promising was still years in the future. So, you know, but I wanted to do something that was entertaining. I didn't want to just talk about the Prius, like that was boring. I found this guy, John Whelan, who went by the moniker Plasmoboy. And Plasmoboy was a drag car racer in Portland, Oregon. And he had just set the speed record for like the quarter mile.

And he did it because he worked in a warehouse and he, as he said to me, he like quote unquote borrowed all of these batteries from a giant forklift and put them in the back of a tiny 1972 Datsun, which is like a really, really small car and figured out how to like, you know, wire the car up. So he had an electric car and he gets, so I find him, he gets on the call and he's like, Josh, you wouldn't believe it. He's like the other night at the track.

I'm at the track, I'm racing this Corvette and I blow the doors off this Corvette and I go up to the driver after the race and I'm like, how do you feel about the fact that I just kicked your butt with a car running on American made energy? Like, plugs in. And he's like, you should have seen this guy's face, man. He's like, Josh, I'm telling you, it's zero to 60 in like 2.5 seconds, 800 pounds of torque. This thing is like a rocket ship. And we had this tiny little show. Like it was live, but like, you know, maybe my mom called in occasionally, no one called in.

the phones lit up and it were these truck drivers like in their 18 wheelers and they were like going nuts and they're like, how did you do that? Can I DIY my pickup truck? And they were so interested. And as they were all going back and forth, I thought, oh my God, if I could just bottle this, this is it. This is exactly what the movement needs because everyone calling in who's so excited about this environmental solution, electric cars, none of them environmentalists. Like none of them care about saving the planet or polar bears or anything.

Jeff Albaum

Right.

Josh

Right, but like they still love the solution. And so that crystallized for me that if you frame environmental choices in terms of people's values, the things they care about, you can actually create a lot of progress. That was a really instrumental kind of moment for me, because that's really what I've been trying to do for two decades. The last one I would say was at the kind of peak of like lazy environmental.

success. I had two books, I had this TV show. I'd had lunch with Robert Redford because he owned Sundance Channel. It was sick, man. It was sick. I got invited out to the tip of Long Island to the Hamptons Book Festival to give a talk. There was an opening night party in Montauk at this very bougie, she-she place. They sent a car for me and I was like, yeah, really? I have arrived.

I get to the party and my name's at the door and this woman comes over, one of the organizers, and she gives me a hug and she motions another woman over and she says, would you take Josh in and introduce him around? And everyone's gorgeous, you know? And she's like, of course, and she takes my arm. She's like, come on, darling. And we're walking into this party and I can see her like turn back and mouth to the other organizer, you know, like, who is he? And she mouths back like.

He's the lazy environmentalist. And she gives like a thumbs up and I can see this out of the corner of my eye. And we go into this party and we go right up to this like, you know, tall, beautiful group of people and she cuts in and she's like, everyone and everyone turns and she's like, I want to introduce Josh. And you know, they're kind of curious. And she says, he's the last environmentalist. And they're like, you are? And I'm like, what?

No, I'm lazy. haven't, know, but then there was like, you know, close range, right? So that stayed with me too, because I never really took it all that seriously. I liked it. I didn't really imagine that this was going to be my full on career, but I did think about that because on the one hand I thought, well, that was a bummer, but maybe there's some truth in that because if we succeed, right, if we actually solve these big

know, climate, planetary challenges around climate, which I believe we are today, or like the trajectory is really interesting, then maybe we are the last environmentalist. Maybe that's not a term we're going to need in the future because it just becomes the way things are, you know, we get smarter.

Jeff Albaum

Yeah. Okay, so walk me through, you said that you believe we are today. So what does today look like for you in the grand scheme of environmentalism?

Josh

2025 was the first year in history that globally investment in clean energy, solar, wind, electric vehicles and other technologies, the first year ever that investment in clean energy doubled fossil fuels. Never happened before. $2.3 trillion flowing into clean energy, about a trillion going into fossil fuels, which has been kind of steady state. That tends to be what gets in.

One thing is saying steady, clean energy is on a rocket ship trajectory. We don't always see that story in America, but that's what's happening around the world. AI in 2025, which in America feels like the biggest story to us, is a massive story. $1.5 trillion invested into AI in 2025. It is massive. It's not bigger than clean energy, right? So.

There's a story here, a rollout that's happening that is really not being covered particularly well in the media that we tend to consume, especially in America. On top of that, if you look over the past, you know, now probably 10, 12 years, over 2000 climate tech companies have raised series B venture capital or beyond, growth stage capital. And the only way to get to growth stage capital is to be proven.

and basically be at commercial scale and market. So these are companies with technologies that are helping their customers either make money or save money while cutting their carbon and improving the experience for their own customers. Right? So life gets better, gets more profitable and carbon gets cut. there's, you know, a lot of those companies went on business, but hundreds and hundreds didn't. So there are all these solutions in the marketplace, whether it's buildings or mobility or agriculture.

that are driving the shift toward, in my view, what the future is going to look like and really taking market share right now. So, that's a very exciting story to me.

Jeff Albaum

100%. Where do you see yourself in all these intersections?

Josh

So two things, so still a storyteller. So I did start a brand called Supercool two years ago, because as I'm describing to you, Jeff, I felt that this story was largely hidden from Americans. And this is more of a business to business story. This is, and it's not just like a good news story. This is more like the way that what interests me, what I get very curious about are companies like

I'll give you two examples. There's one called BrainBox AI. actually, AI and clean energy are very interlinked today. So companies using AI to drive really amazing efficiency and discovery. So BrainBox AI takes over the heating and cooling systems in large buildings. It's it's cloud-based. And what it knows is it knows the

the angle of the sun hitting the building and those the wind speed around the building and those the carbon intensity of the grid, how much carbon is, how much wind solar is feeding into the grid at any given time. knows the price, the cost of energy at any given time. And it knows with like 95 % certainty who's going to occupy a giant office floor six hours into the future. And so that means instead of spiking the energy,

right before everyone gets there or spiking the AC or spiking the heat to try and heat or cool the space, it can gradually do it adjusting to all of those different conditions to optimize for energy, really for energy. So it can cut energy costs by 25%, which means it can cut carbon by up to 40 % in a building and nobody's doing anything different, right? The building is actually operating the same. It's just more comfortable for the people occupying the space, which is why after getting implemented into 17,000 buildings,

They were acquired by Train Technologies last year, a huge kind of HVAC, AC, know, company in that industry. That's one. So I tell like, we talk about that story. When we had them on the show, a woman called me up and she said, I can't remember if she worked for Brookfield or she worked for a big commercial developer. And she was like, wow, I didn't know about that. And I didn't know that was de-risked. And I didn't know that our competitors are using that. I'm going to bring it to my CEO. That's our theory of change. The other one is this company, Zoom, Z-U-M. Zoom.

is solving a problem that is actually a massive crisis in America that we don't see because it's so localized. And what I didn't know, and I don't think most of us are really cognizant of, the largest commercial fleet on the roads or transportation in America, do you know what it might be? What would be the largest commercial transportation fleet?

Jeff Albaum

trucks, trucking companies.

Josh

School buses. There's half a million school buses on the road Monday through Friday. Nothing even comes close. You can put planes, trains, everything that doesn't even come close to how many school buses are right. Cause like it's moving our kids around. it's right. So this woman who Ritu and Ariane, the CEO, she gets on the phone with me and she's like, or on my podcast, she's like, Josh, crazy thing. Your kids go into school and middle school or having the same experience on the bus that their great grandparents had.

Jeff Albaum

Mmm.

Sure, sure.

you

Josh

like our grandparents, right? Like nothing's changed in a hundred years. It's the same or 80 years, whatever it might be, right? Like, which means once kids get on the bus or once the bus leaves like the depot in the morning to go pick up kids, nobody knows where it is. Like, how's that possible?

Jeff Albaum

Right.

Josh

Like that's a crazy thing. Right. And I'm like, gosh, I'm like, you're right. That's a great, that's, that's a crazy thing. And she's like, so what do we do? Well, we put technology on the bus. Obviously we can know where the bus is, but we can use AI to route those buses in the most efficient routes, which no one thinks about. Like no one has the, has ever done that before, which means these diesel buses aren't idling in neighborhoods, just spewing fumes anymore, which also means, cause we can do this too. If like Timmy isn't going to school cause he's sick.

Jeff Albaum

Yeah, totally.

Josh

mom and dad can open the app and say, Timmy's not going to school. The bus doesn't sit there idling for three minutes waiting for Timmy to come out. It just reroutes. So it became so efficient that in the city of Oakland, Oakland became the first city through Zoom to actually electrify all of its school buses because Zoom went to the transportation director and said, okay, we just figured this out for your school district. You have 136 buses, which you were running in a really dumb way. You actually only need 74.

So we're gonna graveyard your diesel buses and we're just gonna buy you 74 electric school buses, because that's what you need. And part of the way we're gonna pay for those is since they have such huge batteries and they're really only running a couple of times during the day, right? Pick up, drop off, cetera. When they're already charged and they're already running, we'll just like take all that energy in the batteries and we'll sell it back to the energy company. We'll sell it back to the grid, right? Which is what they do.

Jeff Albaum

Wow.

Josh

They're now in 4,000 schools. They're in almost every major school district in America because kids, and this is the chronic problem, are doing the right thing, taking the bus to school. And from Buffalo to Manhattan to Richmond, Virginia to Dallas and everywhere else, they're still showing up late to school because the system is a 20th century system that is not modernized at all. So quality of life is going up for everybody. Major problems are getting solved and carbon is going down. That's the future that I see us moving toward.

That's what excites me.

Jeff Albaum

That's amazing. And I love, I love your perspective. It's like, it's very optimistic. It's, maybe it's just the type of news that I tend to consume is very pessimistic. So it's a very refreshing, refreshing take.

Josh

Well, here's the thing. What I see is, because this is the work that I do, right? So it's, it is, it's exciting to me. I think it is an optimistic view. I stood a few years ago. I was talking with a reporter, this guy, Eric Rosten from Bloomberg, who's in a similar space. He's a climate journalist. And what he said to me, he was like, Josh, if you look at the pace of innovation today in this clean energy transition, getting off of fossil fuels.

We can be frustrated by it. can feel like it's, you know, in the, in the daily minutia, it's, you know, it goes forwards, it goes backwards. We have an administration who's pro, you know, clean energy and then we have one that's anti, but in the, in the wider scope, this is the fastest pace of innovation in human history. How fast we're adopting these technologies. If you look at coal, you look at oil, like all of it just took way longer to, actually be adopted. The question always is, are we going fast enough?

given the challenge of climate change and how vast and intractable it is. So you have these two competing things going on. Unbelievable pace of innovation. Are we going fast enough to avert these tipping points where the impacts of climate, there's kind of points of no return? Hard to know. My view is we should be doing this no matter what, because if you just want to move to like the best, most prosperous, most abundant, coolest future,

you will just implement these things that are happened to also be cutting carbon because there's just a better way, you know, modernizing, frankly. So, so I still hold like I, I, I'm an optimistic person, but it's not, I try not to be, I'm not like Pollyanna ish about it. You know, it's not like, yeah, everything's fine. Cause all this stuff exists in the world. We have to go faster. Like there's a lot we have to do, but it is awesome at the same, but it is also awesome.

Jeff Albaum

Right, right.

Sure.

Okay, so you brought up Supercool, you brought up the other company you started, so talk to me about Planted.

Josh

So Planted, yeah, so Planted came about five years ago. And you know, Planted also is like this sort of, in my mind, like it is, well, I'll tell you what it You can decide if you think it's super cool or not. Five years ago, I was very frustrated because I had started my second furniture company. I was living in North Carolina and I thought, you know what, I'm going to give it a go as a manufacturer. And what I'm going to try to do is something that's really, really difficult to do, almost impossible to pull off. I'm going to like create a design brief.

for my company, we called it Symbly, simple assembly. So was like Ikea style, flat pack, knock down furniture, simple assembly, but like one tool, like no screws, just like, it was really clever design. But I thought, here's what we're gonna try and We're gonna make this in America. We're going to have really beautiful design. We're going to have sustainable, or excuse me, like attractive prices, like it'll be priced competitively.

and it's gonna be as eco-friendly as possible. here's the fourth thing, like, almost impossible to do that, like, and actually get in America. But we were coming pretty close in Western North Carolina, and then COVID hit. That was good at first for a furniture company, for every furniture company, because people were setting up home offices. We had desks, we had stuff you could buy. And then our factory got shut down, and it was really difficult for us. And the whole time I was thinking about material, because we were using an FSC certified,

plywood or something like I would have used years before. But in my downtime, what I was ruminating on was materials. And I kept thinking, how is it in the 21st century, the best material available to me to make something out of for furniture is still a tree?

That doesn't feel right. Like, shouldn't we just leave trees in the ground? Like, can we think of something that's like better somehow, more environmentally sustainable? As I was thinking about that, I was introduced to a guy in the Eastern part of the state or down in Raleigh, Durham. And we got on the phone, someone suggested we should talk. He had a little manufacturing company. He was actually just, he was making like climbing holds for gyms out of plywood, which seemed odd, but then I learned who he was and.

It sort of made more sense. was just kind of a little bit of a detour. So we get on a call and this guy Wada is like, man, you're this cool company. I just start complaining about material. He's like, well, what would you do? Like, I don't know, but there's gotta be something, maybe bamboo, maybe hemp. And he's like, I've got six trash bags of hemp in my garage. And I was like, what? are you talking about? Who?

Why? And he's like, well, I'm experimenting. I'm like, well, who are you? He's like, I just moved here. I spent eight years at SpaceX. I was in charge of keeping astronauts alive on the Dragon Crew spacecraft. You he ran the life support systems. was an engineer. I'm like, and you moved to Raleigh Durham? Like, why? He's, you know, he's like, ah.

Los Angeles smells, I just needed to get around some trees. I put a spreadsheet together, Raleigh was at the top of the list, my wife and I got here. There's a lot of trees. So, you we stayed and I'm like, okay, well, that's crazy. But if you're here, I got to figure out how to start a business with you because like, this is like, how the hell does a space Xer show up in like these, like this rare thing. So, so I'm complaining about material. He was thinking a lot about carbon removal.

How could you pull carbon from the atmosphere as a way to solve climate change? And really thinking about it from an engineering perspective, it's like, and I love this perspective, it's like, carbon is not the problem. Like carbon, like dioxide, that's not the problem. Like carbon is a source of, is an element, is a source of life. The problem is it's in the wrong place. It's just in the atmosphere where it's causing us issues because we're burning fossil fuels. like, but.

If we can take it out and turn it into something, it's basically a free resource. Like, how do we, like, can we go get it? And so we started putting these ideas together and we thought, well, huh, if we can figure out something, maybe hemp that grows exponentially faster than trees, and then we don't have to cut down trees. Well, trees are timber, timber goes into building materials. Maybe we could start a building materials company. Maybe we should call up some, some home builders and ask them.

like what we should make and if they'd be interested. So I lived in Asheville. Asheville is like one of the greenest places in America, right? All these green builders. Some of my friends, call them up. like, hey, I got this guy from SpaceX. We're gonna make something probably out of hemp for like home building. We're gonna build a factory. What should we make? And they're like, there's this thing called OSB that we use a lot of them. Like, what's that? They're like oriented strand board. It's an engineered wood panel. It's the thing you nail to the two by fours.

of a house, when you're building a house, it's structural, it keeps the house up. I'm like, okay, what's wrong with it? They're like, well, if it gets wet or if moisture gets into it, you got a big problem because it's structural and it will degrade and that's like really bad on the job site and certainly bad for a house. I'm like, cool. We're going to make something probably out of hemp or something that will be way better on moisture. Would you be interested? They're like, yeah, of course. I'm like, okay, call you in like a year.

I go, anyway, Wada and I started this company, call planted. got Nathan, our third co-founder, who's now the CEO to leave SpaceX. He'd been there even I think longer than Wada and he came East and joined us. We got more SpaceXers to come. We were working in this little prototype shop in Durham, just like this rinky-dink prototype shop, because SpaceXers to their credit are also like dirt cheap. They don't spend any money. And so we were like in a kind of actually dangerous part of Durham.

And we're like, all right, let's go raise like $2 million. And somehow we figured that out. investors would come to this little shop. And when I got there, the first thing I saw, Wada, so basically we're doing bench scale prototypes, trying to figure out, could we take hemp or bamboo, something, figure out, could you slice it kind of thin, put a little resin on it, press it, how does it perform? The mixer that we would use.

Wada had gone out and bought a treadmill for about a hundred dollars off of Craigslist. And then he went out and bought a 40 gallon, this big black pickle barrel and put some wheels on it and bolted it to the treadmill. So you could run the treadmill on fat burn and put a little hemp and a little, you know, glue or whatever resin in the thing. then like prepare. So we would have, Jeff, we'd have these like pretty cool investors show up, you know, we're trying to raise money in there because they're like, yeah, SpaceX, North Carolina, let's go.

And they come into like this like terrible part of town and they see this mixer and if they're, you know, they're like, what the F is this? You know, like where's like, where's like the rocket ship stuff, you know? And then they're like, and then you had to explain to be like, no, no, no. Like this, this is the mixer. And if we didn't do it this way, we'd have to go and buy something off the shelf for like $2,000. And then they did see their eyes light up, right? And they're like, got it. You're going to be really good stewards of my capital.

Here's a check, you know, so that's kind of how we got going on this crazy business. And to just fast forward five years later, we're in 120,000 square feet. We took over an American spirit cigarette factory that shut down because North Carolina is tobacco country. got, we've, getting, um, former tobacco farmers to convert to growing what net we don't grow hemp. actually grow a perennial grass grows like 20 feet tall in the season. you think of bamboo, we found it through the North Carolina department of ag.

grows like 10 times faster than trees. We get it, we harvest it, we can slice it very thin. We have built the first production line. We miniaturized a mill. A mill is like the size of a town where like when you're making something out of trees to do this with these massive smokestacks, because when a log gets to a mill, it's about 50 % water by weight. And so you gotta get all that water out, you gotta burn stuff, right? So all this carbon is going back in the atmosphere. And we thought, what if we could electrify this whole thing?

No smoke stacks, no carbon going back in the atmosphere. We'll just grow something through photosynthesis that pulls it down and then we'll create panels that go into homes. And so today we have a standing order from DR Horton, the largest home builder in America. They build one out of every seven homes. We have an order for them for 10 million of these panels, which is about 90,000 homes. There's a ton we're still figuring out, but we have like really put the basic foundation of building blocks of this business in place.

Jeff Albaum

Dude, that's amazing.

Josh

Thank you.

Jeff Albaum

And so from when you got your first investor to now, like how long did that time take? So he said five years total, but like when did you start taking investment? When did you start raising money? All that stuff.

Josh

The, so we incorporated the company coming right up on five years, like May, 2021, we incorporated the company and the last call we made before we decided to actually start, we'd already been talking to builders, figuring out, you know, what this could be. I called a guy who had been a former senior executive at a company called wire wirehouser. They're one of the largest building materials companies in the country. They also, they're vertically integrated. own like 10 % of all the private forests in America. This company goes back.

over 150 years. And so I called up a guy who had just left, see if he might be willing to talk to me. And he was, and I said, look, here's what we're thinking about doing. We think it could be hemp. We're going to build an alternative material building company. If we're, if we're succeeding, is your former employer or anybody else going to just get in our way and try and shut us down? Are we going to be a threat to like the hegemony of trees or the, you monopoly of trees? He was like, he just was like, no.

no one's gonna pay any attention to you ever. I'm like, why? He's like, well one, you're not the first rodeo. There's been wheat board and a million other things that have tried to come, that never works. So no one's gonna care. And two, this market's so big, you could be a billion dollar company and no one's even gonna notice you. No one's gonna pay any attention to you. You're not a threat. And I was like, sweet, let's incorporate.

that was May, we basically started trying to put a pitch deck together and go out to investors over the summer of 2021, failing miserably, you know, pitching lots of investors, trying to hone our own story. but by that fall, you know, we'd gotten better. I, we had this like sledgehammer test that we were posting a lot on LinkedIn. did this sledgehammer test. You know, we made the panels look bigger than they were. They were still maybe like 12 inches long, but

We had two sledgehammers coming down and one went right through the OSB board I'm describing that the industry uses and the sledgehammer at the same simultaneously bounced off of our, I think it was hemp panel at the time. And that thing went like crazy viral. It was hemp because the Berlin Museum of Hemp reached out. like, Hey, can we have this for, I'm like, yeah, absolutely. I think we're still in the Berlin Museum of Hemp. There's such a thing. But this woman who had been on my radio show years before, because years before she'd had an eco-friendly fashion company.

she reached out and she said, look, I'm in a different line of work, but I think my boss would be really interested in talking with you. Her boss had turned out was Biz Stone, who had co-founded Twitter and was like, you know, just a legend in Silicon Valley. Had his own venture firm, you know, was doing investing. He was the board chair of Beyond Meat, just like, I mean, legend. And so suddenly we're talking to Biz, you know, we're still in like, you know, we're Zooming with Biz, like during COVID from North Carolina and

You know, one thing led to another tickle a bit, but Biz eventually came into the business in a pretty big way. He rose a pretty sizable check during our seed round. And once we got Biz, it became a lot easier to get the rest of the cash and kind of be on our way.

Jeff Albaum

Sure, sure. And so the product as you're making it now with this perennial grass, how does it compare to OSB? Like at the end of the day, like it's.

Josh

it's, I mean, it's night and day better. What we've optimized for with the panels that we make, we've optimized for moisture resistance, because that proved to be really salient. And so even when we were meeting the folks from DR Horton, when they would come to North Carolina, it was moisture resistance that was really the key performance differentiator where they thought, yeah, this actually solves problems for us.

They're also very interested in the fact that we were just standing up another, a supply chain that's different from trees so that it gives them more flexibility in their supply chains, more resilience, right? It's not all just like one thing, right? So there was a strategic interest. Other than that, I mean, the panels are far stronger than what the industry uses today, but what we don't really think a lot about is that

The industry, when we build homes today, what we're really optimizing for is cost. It's always cost, right? Homes are expensive. We're always trying to optimize for cost. So the materials that we use today, like the panels we use to build houses out of are basically like the, how can I say this? They're the least, they're the most crappy thing that meets code, right? They're like good enough to like be structural enough that like your house isn't going to fall down, but that's it.

Jeff Albaum

Mm-hmm.

Josh

It's because it's really, you know, relatively cheap to make these products called oriented strand board. We make products that can be far stronger. We make products that are far more moisture resistant. Um, and the part of the reason it can be stronger is because when the products made from wood that are engineered out of wood, they don't really have a lot of layers to them, right? You're not really pressing that much fiber. We slice this grass exceedingly thin and still retain its structural fiber, its rigidity.

Jeff Albaum

Mm-hmm.

Josh

So we can compress a lot more fiber, which can get to something that can certainly be a lot stronger. It also means just applying a very small percentage of resin, we get far more coverage. There's way less room for water to seep into our panel. it's a different morphology. It's a far different approach. had to invent all of those machines to do that. But with all that said, we're competing on moisture because that's what some of the builders actually

Jeff Albaum

Hmm, interesting.

Josh

do care about and will influence a purchase decision versus strength. It just has to be strong enough. But everything else had to be exactly the same, same density, same weight, so that this is a drop in replacement. No one on a job site would even necessarily know that they're building out of grass instead of trees. No alternative techniques, nothing that would get in the way, create friction. That's really what informed a lot of our product development.

to create that type of product that can have easy entry into the industry.

Jeff Albaum

And how long was it from original hemp maybe idea to final perennial grass product that you're selling?

Josh

Well, it was all during 2021. So that was all just a race to test everything we possibly could. So, and we were thinking by the end of 2021, certainly early 2022, you where are we going to go to contract? We were, you we were in fields with hemp farmers. were, you know, trying to, you know, be, you know, trying to build those relationships, right? Which take time, build trust with the farming community. And so, you know, we're raising money. We're out traveling all over the state.

shaking hands, eating barbecue, talking to folks who might grow for us. It was awesome. It was so fun. But we had to decide in early 2020, I think it was early 2022, right around that time, were we going to pay farmers to start the process of growing hemp? We were skeptical that hemp could be our material for a number of reasons. Or were we going to go down this alternative path with perennial grass and

for us, for this particular use case, we made the right choice. Hemp can do a lot of amazing things, certainly a big fan, but it wasn't the right use case for us to do it for kind of competing against trees in this application.

Jeff Albaum

Got it, got it, got it. Josh, I feel like I could talk to you for hours, man. This is so cool. I do wanna start wrapping things up here. I have a couple questions I wanna ask you just as we head towards the end. And that is one, what's something that you've changed your mind about recently? You've talked about your worldview a lot. You've talked about the timeline that you've had to create that worldview. What's something in recent years you've changed your mind about?

Josh

Man, I feel like I'm changing my mind about things constantly.

I would say what I've changed my mind about recently is it's not even about work. Honestly, it's actually about being a parent. And I have, three kids.

I was raised in a very, well, I was raised in Westchester County, outside of New York City, in a place where it was like just, it was in the DNA that like, you're gonna get good grades, you're gonna try and excel at stuff, you're gonna go to college, it's almost like the path is in certain degrees set. Now I live in South Carolina, and my kids aren't me, two of them are far more,

challenged kind of like school wise, even just being in school. And I've changed my mind about what the right path is for everyone. like one of my kids is homeschooled. One of my kids is like having like, a reset from school where we actually took her out, you know, and I was just talking with a friend who came to visit and he's like,

He's like, how's that homeschooling going for her? I'm like, well, he's like, so you're saying it's a little bit more of like, you're a little heavier on the reset. And I'm like, yeah, you can say that. But I've just changed my mind that there's a path for kids, a path for development, a path for people to grow and thrive and ultimately reach their potential, that it doesn't have to be the way that it was for me. And I really try and bring that to how I raise my children, recognizing that it's a different time.

Jeff Albaum

Hmm.

Josh

And even if it weren't a different time, there was just many different approaches that work to help young people really reach their own potential.

Jeff Albaum

Hmm. I love that answer as a, as a new, new dad myself, I'm going to be taking that advice. So thank you. And the last question I have for you is what are, what are things that you allow into your life as inputs? So they could be podcasts, books, people you follow online blogs. What do you, what do you allow in?

Josh

Yeah.

I listen to tons of podcasts. really love, well, off and on. I like the podcast Prof. G. Did you ever listen to Prof. G? Scott Galloway. So I like that. tend to like him more when he's on it. I listen to Acquired, which I think is a very, very well done business podcast. Sometimes to founders. When I was getting my start before I launched Supercool,

Jeff Albaum

Yeah, Scott Callaway.

Josh

I was listening to, they just don't make that many episodes, this podcast called City Climate Corner. It's really nerdy, it's really wonky. It's these two kind of climate professionals in Minnesota. One works with small towns. I think the other does too, but the other went into like the state house as a representative. And so the show goes to these travels to these small towns, travels, mean, interviews people in these small towns around America that are doing this, just these really novel, innovative stuff around climate.

Like there's a town in, or well they were interviewing people from Ann Arbor and working for the city. And the people working for the city were talking about, and this was probably two or three years ago, they were talking about how they were getting ready to turn on their first green hydrogen tap. And I was like, Jesus, how many hundreds of millions or billions of dollars have been spent in Silicon Valley and elsewhere for like,

Green hydrogen, so hydrogen that's actually produced from clean sources, wind or solar, right? Like this ultimate fuel source. And here are these people who work for the city, probably make, I mean, it doesn't matter how much they make, but like civil servants make like 80 or 90,000 bucks a year. And they're like so innovative. Like they're actually, we figured out the capital stack of grants from the city and the state, and we got federal, blah, blah, blah. It's just like, it blew my mind. And it was also one of the reasons that led to Supercool, because it made me realize the solutions are just everywhere.

And if you can do it in some of these smaller towns, some red, some blue, whatever, just geography wise, you can do it everywhere. And so that's what I listen to. What I read, I never read climate books ever, because I just find them really boring. That's not something I tend to change my mind about a lot. like, I think I know how I feel about this stuff. But I did read this book. It was called Codename Helene.

And this is one of the greatest leadership books I've read. actually, it's a historical fiction based on a real life character written about this woman who she was Australian, but during World War II, she worked for the resistance in France. was, she was actually literally parachuted into France from the British to work with the French resistance. And, you know, a, a, a female leading like tens of thousands of male French resistance fighters is like,

really hard to fathom like in the 1940s given you know that culture is like an impossible thing but she did and she was it was like this such an unsung story of like how we won world war ii and and the way it's written and just her leadership style is incredibly inspiring to me so i like to find it's hard to know if you're going to land in one of those books but that's that's what i look for that's the input that i

Jeff Albaum

Amazing, amazing, I love that, I love all that. And what's the name, can you just say the names of your companies one more time so people can know if they wanna go to the website and check them out and learn more? Where's the best place to learn more and to reach out to you if they want to?

Josh

The super cool pod is everywhere. Get super dot cools our website if anyone wants to sign up for the newsletter and follow some of the other things we're working on. then planted is P L A N T D. It's a hipster spelling. think just the dot com wasn't available with an E. I can't remember why, but it's plantedmaterials.com. People can find what we're doing there. And then if anyone wants to connect with me, I am mostly on LinkedIn and that would be great.

Jeff Albaum

Okay, awesome. Well, Josh, you're you're amazing, man. I'm super excited to keep following your journey and your companies and thank you for being on here. I appreciate you.

Josh

Thank you, Jeff. Yeah, it was a lot of fun.

Jeff Albaum

Awesome. Bye everybody.