A Climate Change with Matt Matern Climate Podcast

Foreign This is not about saving the Earth. This is a really about saving business and being more competitive going forward. It’s not directly taking on Putin by having walkable communities, but it’s strengthening America’s resilience, strengthening our economic resilience, as well as our community resilience, which enables us to stand up more to tyrants like Putin.

Joel Makower, he’s got an incredible background. He’s been in the environmental space since 1991. This is what’s going to ultimately be the end of the fossil fuel industry, at least as it’s used for energy production.

You’re listening to A Climate Change, this is Matt Matern, your host. I’ve got a great guest on the program. Joel Makower, really looking forward to talking to Joel. He’s got an incredible background. He’s been in the environmental space since 1991 he started publishing a newsletter back then, and then created a entity called Green Business, and now he’s the chairman and co founder of Trellis, which is kind of the second entity created from Green Business. Amazing work that you all have done over there. Joel has been the author of a dozen books, including one the grand new strategy restoring America’s prosperity and security and sustainability in the 21st Century comes from the very woke pentagon.

That is said satirically. So Pentagon is behind this stuff. So first off, welcome to the show, Joe. Thank you for joining us. Thank you. Matt pleasure, well, I was fascinated by that book in terms of reading a bit about it, and that you did take the ideas from things that Pentagon had done, a hard headed analysis of environmental trends and demographic trends, and all the things that potentially could be national security threats, as well as threats to American prosperity. And looked at it and tell us about your role in launching that book. Great.

Thanks, Matt. So back in the Obama administration, the then chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, Mike Mullen brought in a Marine Lieutenant and a Navy captain and had them sequestered them right down the hall from him in the Pentagon and asked them to come up with a vision at a strategy for America’s future, we never haven’t really had a strategy. There’s something that America has done called grand strategy. We’ve done it at various existential times, around the Civil War, around World War Two, fighting the fascism or containing communism, and where we align our economic systems with our foreign policy, to take on the big challenges of the day.

And so we hadn’t done this since communism fell in 19 it was at 91 and there was an opportunity to re envision it. So these they came up with a plan that embeds sustainability at the Center for a new global strategy for America, a business plan for America, if you will, that aligns sustainability, prosperity and security. And so I met one of the Marine colonel who had done that, and he had partnered up with somebody with foreign policy background out of so one of the DC think tanks and and three of us wrote this book called The new grand strategy, restoring America’s security and sustainability in the 21st Century.

So just to kind of take us through how that applies now, now it’s been a while since you wrote the book. Have we made progress on those fronts that you think are the most important as far as a grand new strategy, or are we backsliding?

So grand strategy is something we’ve done. This is the new grand strategy. We haven’t really done much. Fact, we’ve kind of backslid to your point that we haven’t really taken on. We’re still fighting the old war, or the old war being where you’ve got Russia or the Soviet Union back then and now China, and it’s this interplay for who’s the most supreme, and it’s all around that kind of strategy, and it’s not as much around, how does America really build its economic might, which gives it the soft power, something we’ve given up in the last Well, six months or so are basically our permission to lead in the world. Are the example that we set, and we’ve now walled that off with tariffs and other kinds of things.

So I don’t think that that grand strategy has gotten anywhere. However, there’s been, just in the past few months, not coincidentally, a new effort to sort of bring this to the fore, the idea that this can’t be the old ways of thinking on either the left or the right, but there’s a middle ground that really where this grand strategy really speaks to that we need to be addressing. So there have been writings in some of the policy papers and some of the Capitol Hill media, and increasing emphasis on this. And I think we’re going to be looking what politicians, what political leaders want to stand up and say, No, there’s a new way of doing things that we need to be trying because this isn’t working.

So define what this new way looks like. What are the things that make a new way?

Well, it starts with what we’ve done always. You know, we did in world. World War Two we’ve done during the Cold War, just leaning on the economy, leaning on the private sector to build the new technologies and to create a foundation. We did that when we created the war effort in World War Two, and we really ramped up production lines and assembly lines and learned how to make things in ways we hadn’t before. We did that in during the Cold War, where we ramped up a lot of our technology space and the internet and things that came out of that that really started those security issues.

Now, how do we keep communication lines open during a massive attack where they cut telephone lines and things that’s kind of one of the backgrounds of the internet. So there’s this a lot of building that we do that becomes the source of our economic power, which becomes the source of our soft power in the world, which becomes the source of our hard security power in the world. So in the book, we outline three big pools of demand around walkable communities, regenerative agriculture and resource productivity. And if we give lots and lots and lots of examples of how that rolls up into providing economic security and as well as national security and environmental security and so it’s really hard to summarize in two minutes, but that’s the gist.

Right? Well, I guess our listeners, as well as myself, are asking the question, hey, how does regenerative agriculture or walking communities create a more secure world win up against Vladimir Putin and the Chinese Communist Party?

Well, it’s not directly taking on Putin by having walkable communities, but it’s strengthening America’s resilience, strengthening our economic resilience as well as our community resilience, which enables us to stand up more to tyrants like Putin regenerative agriculture literally depleting our soils and me going to be made worse by the ravages of climate change and regenerative agriculture techniques protects our literally, our buried treasure, our top soil, which is the lifeblood of our food system, which is the envy of the world, but it’s quickly fading away because of our agricultural techniques that gives us the security, not just here in America, but also in the world.

As we go back to the way we were becoming the bread basket for the world, at least for many commodities, it keeps rolling up that way. You start to get the picture when you see that as we’re more secure and resilient and adaptive to a world that’s very different than it was 1020, 30, certainly, 40 years ago, and that are able to adapt to climate, biodiversity crisis, social equity crisis, and all of the things that we’re confronting right now, we become much more secure, much more able to take on the challenges that we’re seeing globally.

Well, certainly we know that the agriculture sector contributes mightily to global warming, and practices there have polluted may rivers and pollute the oceans, so having cleaner agriculture helps on those fronts, and as you said, sustaining the soil that has is such an important part of the strength of America is being able to feed itself and to feed the world, actually, in many cases. So let’s pivot a little bit to you being called by the Associated Press the guru of the green business practices. And that’s what Trellis does. And tell us a little bit more about Trellis and why your work in that space is so important.

Well, I’ve been, I’m a journalist by training and and about well, 1989 wrote a book called The Green consumer, looking at the green consumer marketplace. Realized that there, after spending a lot of time writing and speaking and traveling to talk about that, that there really was no green consumer movement in the United States, but that the companies I was being asked to come in and talk to about those so called green consumers were really grappling with a lot of issues that they’re still grappling with today, energy, water, climate and carbon, toxics, material flows. And that was interesting to me.

So I launched a monthly newsletter back in 1991 called the green business letter. I’m old enough to say the sentence. And then the web came along, and I created a Knowledge Hub called Green biz.com and green biz grew into a company that does events as well as the media and that we do, and we have a membership network of sustainability professionals from around the world that we bring together, both in person and online. Last year, in 2024 we rebranded the company from Green biz group to Trellis group. So that’s the company. Now. I’m the co founder and chair. I don’t have as much of a day to day operational role, but I’m still very involved with the company in other ways.

Well, it’s fascinating, as I looked into the company, you guys do a tremendous amount of conferences where you have hundreds of speakers and lots of major companies come and tell us a little bit about how that has impacted the world and the business community. I saw apple in 2010 I think they. Launched an initiative to go net zero, or all kinds of other initiatives have been announced at some of your conferences that are pretty major initiatives.

Well, we bring together the cream of the crop our membership network called the Trellis network, we’ve got about 200 of the world’s biggest companies and their sustainability professionals, but also the people in supply chain and operations and facilities and carbon and purchasing and marketing and communications and finance come together to learn from one another in a safe environment. And that’s kind of what we do, is we bring the people together to have those kinds of conversations in a safe space.

We do that both with 20 people in the room or two or 3000 people in the room, as we do at our annual green biz conference every year in Phoenix, Arizona, and the people in the companies are usually swimming upstream in their operations. They may be an army of two or five or 10 or maybe just one person in a multi billion dollar global company with huge mandates to reduce energy use and water use and increase material flows so that they become more circular and sequester carbon and lots and lots of things. They’re all pretty much working on their own, and they need a place to come together, to learn from one another, to share experiences.

And one of the beautiful things about this community Matt is that there’s this incredible spirit of generosity, uncommon spirit where people come together and they say, Sure, I’ll tell you how we did it, and I’ll send you the deck that we use to send to management to get their buy in. Here’s the language we put in our contracts for our suppliers or vendors. Is pretty competitive information, but they’d love to share, and that’s what they do at our events.

That’s pretty amazing. And I was struck by the amount of economic power that attends these events. I think I read that $16 trillion of sales comes through these companies, which is second only to China and the US in terms of economic power, that is pretty ginormous.

Yeah. I mean, these are, as I said, some of the world’s biggest companies and some of the big tech companies and retailers and consumer products companies, but also a lot of companies you’ve never heard of that are behind the scenes, doing the work because they’re part of companies supply chains, so they’re B to B companies. You don’t know their brands necessarily, but you you probably experience their products and services every day. And I think that’s what’s interesting, is that so much of this is happening behind the scenes, things that we as consumers or everyday citizens out there in the world don’t necessarily know about. And so that’s, I guess, both a problem and an opportunity for companies who can both work behind the scenes without a lot of focus on them, a spotlight on them, and just quietly do the work. But also, people don’t know that all this is going on.

Well, tell us a little bit about some wins that you’ve seen that come out of your conference that would bear attention from us and the general public.

Yeah, I don’t know that our conference is directly responsible for a lot of these initiatives. People ask all the time, what’s the impact of your conference? Well, we do a lot of conferences, and we don’t really know the impact of bringing people together and having them share information, but a lot of the impacts are more at the level of individuals who get insights, or maybe get new jobs or connect with other people that are having some of the same challenges and being able to work together to solve some of them. But what’s really interesting, Matt, is how companies are really thinking at major levels.

You mentioned Apple, for example, a few years ago, Apple made a commitment that they will mine nothing from the earth. And you think that’s amazing when you think about the laptops and phones and tablets and everything else watches and everything else that they make, and all of the metals and minerals that are involved there, that they’re going to be sourcing those from reclaimed, recycled materials. And they’ve made pretty good progress doing that. They’re not at all 100% but they’re on a journey. Actually, I think that the aluminum around MacBooks these days is all recycled aluminum that they’re not mining bauxite anymore to manufacture that aluminum.

So that’s just one example of companies sort of swinging for the fences, making big bets that we might not necessarily know unless you’re a student of sustainability, or you look maybe deep into the Apple website, but you go around the economy and you see lots of examples of companies that are rethinking their products, rethinking their supply chains, rethinking the business models, in some cases where it’s no longer selling a product, but it’s selling a service that product delivers, and that has lots of implications for who owns the product and what happens to it at the end of its useful life, and can it become an asset instead of waste a liability, and things like that. So as this stuff rolls out, it’s pretty interesting the impacts it can have.

Well, I appreciate your modesty in not trying to claim credit for all the good works of all these companies that go to your conference. Though, those of us who’ve gone to conferences know that some of those things are subtle and it’s hard to measure exactly where they go. But. It many times. I know I’ve been impacted by conferences that I’ve went to, and I changed my practices after going. And it sounds like given the amount of high powered companies that go to your conferences and pay to do so, that they must be getting something out of it less, or they wouldn’t be coming back year after year to do it.

I think that’s right. I mean, as someone who goes a lot of conferences, you know that so many of the presentations you see is just one way it’s we did this and we did this and we did this and this and this, and isn’t that great? And for us, it’s really the what of sustainable business is interesting, but it’s the how, where all the value is. So it’s like, Great that you did that, but how did you do that? What did it take? Who owned it? What permissions did you need? Who had it be at the table? Were there costs involved? And what were those costs? What was some of the pushback, or the barriers, or the speed bumps, and how did you navigate those what do you know now that you wish you knew then those kinds of of answers.

And that kind of information is what people will come and pay, you know, admittedly large amounts of money and several days of their, of their valuable time, plus travel costs to go to one of these conferences, to really come away with, oh, now I get it. First of all, it’s interesting that that company is even doing that. And second of all, I know a little bit about how they did it, and I have permission to come back and learn, learn more about how they did it, if I need deeper dives.

Yeah, that’s incredible. The sharing of information and to empower the sustainability movement. Tell us, you know, you take us back to the origins of sustainability, because you were kind of there on the ground floor, what are the a little bit of the overarching story as to your part in it, as well as seeing some victories along the way?

Well, we’ve seen this grow and change and at the same time stay the same. So let me explain that when we, you know, first started in this 35 or more years ago, people were talking about environmental health and safety, which was largely a bunch of engineers looking at, how do you adjust the smoke stacks and drain pipes and dumpster releases and all those things so that you pollute less? And then we got into efficiency and saving energy and doing well by doing good, which is, how do you get some reputational benefits while also getting some bottom line benefits as well, then companies realize, well, it’s not just about improving the bottom line, it’s growing the top line.

How does this grow revenue and become an engine for productivity and innovation and new products and services that help people and the marketplace and at each stage, there’s new challenges and new opportunities. Now we’ve got companies talking about a zero waste in circular economy, in net zero carbon emissions, or even being carbon negative, sequestering more carbon than you use. And at the same time, they’re still grappling with a lot of the basic issues around smoke stacks and drain pipes and dumpsters. And there’s some of the most proactive and innovative companies.

Are some of the chemical companies that are looking at, how do you create circular models for plastics, which, of course, are a big problem, and they’re still dealing with huge legacy issues. So there’s no such thing as a green company or even a good company. There’s just companies that are at different stages of this, and sometimes at multiple stages at once.

Well, tell us a little bit about the initiative in California to limit single use plastics, and how that is something that you may have had to deal with, with business partners, that are people who are attending your conferences, and how they can navigate that and make it a reality.

Well, this is not just a California thing. I mean, the perils of plastic pollution are global now is particularly in Southeast Asia, where a lot of this plastic has gotten dumped and fills waterways. And some of the more progressive states, like California and New York and others, are looking at, how do we limit the pollution? How do we incentivize a circular economy where plastic gets turned back into new plastic? You know, a lot of people say that plastic is the problem? Well, plastic solves a lot of problems, but the real problem is plastic waste. If we can keep plastic in circulation, and granted, there’s a lot of pollution just created in manufacturing plastic that needs to be dealt with, but if plastic can have a continuous loop of uses, it becomes a lot less problematic than if it ends up in the waterways and littering the land, but it’s not a perfect solution.

So California is looking at, how do we basically stop a lot of the problems? How do we create both penalties and incentives for doing the right thing, penalties for doing the wrong thing? And this is part of a global phenomenon. We’re looking at plastic waste, and then you’ve got the big brands, you know, the Procter and Gamble and the unilevers and the cloroxes and many, many, many others whose products all come in plastics, and they’re trying to deal with this too. And so just give you one example of how challenging this is and the level of it being addressed over the past few years, Colgate Palmolive, which makes, of course, Colgate toothpaste one of the, I think, the first or second largest toothpaste produced.

Here in the world, started looking at, how do we make these toothpaste tubes, which are made from, I don’t know, four or five or six or seven different materials, and because of that, are inherently unrecyclable, how do we make them out of just one material, in this case, high density polyethylene HDPE, or number two plastic that we find in milk jugs. And it took them close to seven years to develop this make sure it it worked and people would use it and still buy it. How to work with the what’s called the murfsa municipal recycling facilities, where our curbside recycling goes, to make sure that these things would get sorted, along with the other number two plastics.

How that then became the default for toothpaste manufacturers. This is just one small product. It’s a big market, but it’s one little, small product in our lives, toothpaste, but it can take years and years just to develop these systems to do these things. And so there’s a lot of companies working on a lot of different things, and a lot of entrepreneurs working on alternatives to plastics, and we don’t know yet how this story will end, or how long it will take, but what’s exciting is that regulations, like in California, like in so many other states and so many nations around the world, is creating this innovation pipeline that is going to, over time, transform things.

Yeah, that’s a great example of the challenges that we all face. I mean, it’s easy to kind of say, snap your fingers and take this product out of circulation, and it’s a whole nother thing to actually technologically accomplish that task. So appreciate you giving a real life example that you’ve also taken on a role of this music, sustainability and Alliance, and that’s kind of a fascinating gig. What are you doing on that front?

So as I stepped away, as I said before, from my operational role at the Trellis group, it’s enabling me to take on some other projects, and one of those is as the strategy director for the music sustainability Alliance, which is a industry consortium out of LA looking at, how do you reduce the negative impacts and increase the positive impacts of music performance, and so we do an annual summit every year in LA each spring, we have a Industry Council of tour managers and logistics providers and artist representatives and venue operators and service providers within the music industry. And it’s just really interesting space, because it’s one that’s both very public and you’d think would be very progressive, but it’s like so many older industries, it’s one that’s been really hard to change, and even though people in the in the industry know that they need to…

I see a bunch of music industry or music posters behind you, and I’m not sure if your head is hiding the Mothers of invention or not? Is it the Mothers of Invention?

Yeah, well, they were. They then became known as The Mothers. But, yeah, that’s the that’s the poster from. So these are from my youth, growing up in the San Francisco Bay Area back in the day. And you used to get posters when you go to the Fillmore auditorium or the Avalon ballroom, the two main rock venues of the day. And I, I saved them, and here they are as well, some of them. I got more, but this is part of my Zoom background these days, or Riverside in this case. But yeah, it’s a really interesting space, and I certainly touches some of my roots. Just a small aside.

In the late 80s, I did an oral history of the Woodstock Music Festival of 1969 that came out in both book and audio formats back for the 20th anniversary, and was released for the 40th anniversary again, and came out as a substantial part of a video documentary for the 50th anniversary in 2019 and so the music industry is part of my background as well.

Well, I know Frank Zappa would appreciate the work that you’re doing, I think it kind of relates to the environmental movement in that the current administration has done a number of things to kind of slow environmental progress down. It seems, though invention is is something that the administration may not be able to shut down, and maybe the harder they try, maybe the more inventive will have to become so they may be really in a backhanded way, helping us be even more efficient, more inventive, more creative than ever before.

Well, that’s putting a positive spin on something not very pleasant, at least in my sustainability world. But yeah, necessity is the mother of invention, and the Trump administrations and their crackdown on anything having to do with sustainability or climate or environment is creating a necessity for new and different kinds of approaches, technological, business, societal activists and in regulatory at that state and levels and those in other countries. So yeah, that is creating the necessity for innovation. What’s really cool about this space, whether it’s in the music industry or in industry writ large, is the amount of innovation.

And that’s what’s really what gets me out of bed every day. Matt is just being able to see that innovation, see how some of these big challenges that we face, data centers is one example, and how. How companies are iterating on data standards so that they become waterless, or can run on renewable energy, or have no emissions, or have emissions that can turn into other kinds of goods and services. That’s what’s really exciting about this space. The amount of innovation that’s been unleashed, not just in the past six months, but in the past 30 years that I’ve been watching this is really quite extraordinary.

Well, what’s your take on AI? Because it uses up a tremendous amount of energy, and has it made an impact in the environmental space that you’re seeing, and your fingers are on the pulse of a lot of different companies. What are you hearing?

Well, AI, like any tool, like a hammer, you can use it to build something, or you could, you could hurt something. And AI is similar. You can use it to create a better world. You can use it to spoof and commit fraud at a massive scale. When you think about the sustainability challenges that we face, the climate, material flows, plastics, the grid, the design of cities, water systems, these are incredibly complex topics to unravel, and AI is really good at analyzing, optimizing and predicting how these things can change. And so AI stands to truly benefit the sustainability movement by addressing some of these things at the scale, scope and speed we’ve never been able to have until AI came along that said AI is also being used to optimize oil and natural gas drilling and extraction. Oil companies use it to be much, much more efficient at creating the kinds of fossil fuels that are polluting the planet.

So it’s not cut and dry. There’s big energy use, but we’re now learning, how do you create AI systems that aren’t tied to the grid, that don’t necessarily use fossil fuel energy, that can be run off of of a number of different kinds of fuels. We’re seeing AI systems that can run with no water, using waterless cooling, and we’re seeing AI systems that can take up a lot less space because they’re much more densely packed, and can do a lot more and a lot less space. So some of these data centers that are the size of small cities can be a lot smaller. So, you know, AI is a tool, and it can be used for good or for ill.

Well, I’ve seen a lot written recently about improvements on the battery technology, and that seems to be a breakthrough, or certainly hope for the future, that if we can make a breakthrough on that it would, it would be incredibly helpful, and in having the electric car industry, as well as all kinds of other things weaned off of fossil fuels, what’s your sense there as to the progress being made?

Yeah, I mean, that’s one of the really exciting areas, one of many, by the way, but the advances in battery technology are being accelerated by AI, which is able to look at various chemistries, novel chemistries, different materials and chemicals that you can put together in different combinations that will enable denser energy storage, Faster discharge, faster recharge. And so batteries already are coming into play. We’ve seen in some of the big storm areas that we’ve had here in the United States already this year, that battery storage has enabled the grid to keep going, because it was able to first of all take this extra solar energy and wind energy that was being generated that wasn’t needed in real time and store those for use later on.

This is what’s going to ultimately be the end of the fossil fuel industry, at least as it’s used for energy production. This is really also going to keep the grid intact by not having to make electricity travel such far distance as they can be used much more locally, maybe even on site. I have solar panels on my house and battery storage, so that when the grid goes down, even when it doesn’t, I’m powering my house more on solar these days and on energy from the grid. But if the grid goes down, which it does, I have a day or so worth of energy use in my house. So the resilience it creates, the predictability it enables, and the security that facilitates is all really an important part of this, and of course, it also reduces the need for fossil fuels.

Well, I’d say one of the things that is going to have to drive the environmental movement going forward is being profitable. And how have you seen sustainability actually improve the bottom line of companies? And where do you see that going in the future?

Well, first of all, companies don’t consider themselves part of the environmental movement. They may be part of a sustainable business movement. They may be part of not even think of themselves in that they’re just doing the work because it’s better for the bottom line, because it cuts costs, it raises revenue, it attracts talent. It helps companies be a preferred supplier. This is not about saving the Earth. I mean, it is. That’s not why companies are doing these things. They’re doing these things because it’s better for them.

Because if you’re reducing the amount of materials you used to use to create something, if you’re shipping the. More efficiently, or using manufacturing processes that run on bio based materials and renewable energy, you’re potentially saving a lot of money and creating opportunities. You might also, by the way, be sequestering carbon, which then you can sell some of those credits in the open market and turn those wasted materials into assets for somebody else. There’s a lot of business opportunity here. It’s been said that climate change is a business opportunity masquerading as an environmental challenge, and really, that’s what it’s about, as much as anything.

Well, maybe that’s the reframing that it has to take in years to come, is that, hey, this isn’t some airy fairy tree hugging thing exercise. This is advanced capitalism and profitability is key, and the companies that are the most sustainable are going to be the companies that are the most profitable.

I think that’s been actually the meme for quite a while, Matt, but there’s a countervailing force on the conservative side of the of the aisle that loves to point this out. As you called it, an airy fairy kind of thing. It’s not and very few companies see it that way, but they’re playing into sort of their base that sees this stuff is they don’t really understand it. They don’t understand the threats, they don’t understand the opportunities. They just think it’s weird. And companies don’t think of it as airy fairy at all. Companies think of this as hard business realities that they need to be addressing if they want to stay competitive, if they want to stay profitable well into the 21st Century.

I think, as a consumer of political information, I do not see the case being made that this is the path towards profitability, and this is hard headed capitalism. I don’t I don’t see people who are part of the environmental movement or progressives, or what do Democrats in general of making that case, or certainly not making that case effectively to the general public, and that just isn’t being made.

Well, I think that’s true of a lot of issues, Matt, where the political discourse does not reflect the on the ground realities. It’s a bunch of memes that work that they’re tested, but I assure you that in the business world, this is what’s going on. This is not, as I said, about saving the Earth. This is a really about saving business and being more competitive going forward. Well, tell us a little bit about say, Microsoft has, I think, made a pledge that they’re going to be net negative. Why would they do that? And why is that good business for them?

Well, that’s a question of whether they’re going to achieve that. Because I think the AI, as we talked before, which is at least in its current form, is a major energy consumer, is throwing off a lot of those plans. But tech companies, the AIS, excuse me, the Microsofts and the Googles and Amazons and a bunch of others, really see this as a way. First of all, they need to do this to remain competitive. Their competitors are doing these things. They need to do these things to attract talent, and there’s huge money saving issues, but not all of the business reasons for doing these things for every company is about money, a lot of it’s about risk, financial risk, sure, but also reputational risk, right to operate risk.

If you’re the biggest water user in a water stressed area, which is a lot of parts of the world, including the United States, you may not be able to set up shop there. It’s about technology risk. It’s about regulatory risk, and it’s also the flip side of that is about resilience. How do you stay resilient and competitive in a world that’s increasingly wobbly? Rather, it’s weather severe weather, whether it’s political and economic uncertainty, how does that happen?

And a lot of the measures that companies are taking are to ensure their supply chains we’ve seen we saw during covid, we saw in some of the Middle East conflict, how supply chains get or in China and tariffs and shipping, how supply chains, small ripples, can go across the oceans and and really mess up our economy. I think that’s a lot of the business rationale for this thing, not necessarily because it saves $1 or makes $1 although it does that too, but about risk and resilience.

Well, it’s fascinating, and just the whole breadth of this conversation is quite compelling. And appreciate your work in this area and for decades, and really it’s a success story to see you start from kind of humble origins of a newsletter to building up a very substantial organization. How big is Trellis? In terms of people who work there.

We’ve got, I think, a little over 40 people these days, scattered around the US and a couple of overseas.

That’s a very substantial accomplishment. And yeah, I was impressed by the work that you’re doing in so many different areas. And the work of bringing together companies and helping them collaborate so that they can get to these solutions more quickly, more efficiently, is important work. I would like to have listeners have an opportunity to know where to find. You and the things that you’re working on, and so maybe you can just kind of give a shout out to where they can find you.

Sure. Just go to Trellis, T-R-E-L-L-I-S, Trellis.net. You can subscribe to the Trellis briefing, which is a daily newsletter for free on that site. I can also check out my site, makower.com, M-A-K-O-W-E-R, and see what I’m up to, including, Matt, I’ll just have to say it, my own podcast called Two Steps Forward, which is out there in the world as well.

Well, everybody check out two steps forward. And Joel’s website and Trellis, and truly, a wealth of information created by the Trellis website, which I’ve checked out. And was very impressed by the depth of the work that you have done there, and kudos to you and to your team for doing that work. So you know, look forward to staying in touch with you and collaborating on this process as we move forward and likewise.

Thank you so much, Matt. Appreciate the opportunity.

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