Heroes

I love being around horses for so many reasons. I was the child who was the "horse girl." And my love affair with horses started probably before I can remember. My name is Leah Goldman and I am an equine coach. Equine coaches are relatively new to the coaching industry. So turn his head to the left. Head to the left. They're not coming to learn how to ride. They're just coming to learn about themselves in a very unique and different way. What makes this work really powerful is the horse as the mirror. The exercise for you is about creating space, right? And creating boundaries and keeping those boundaries in place. Back, back. Are we having fun? And stop. You can maybe qualify for some of these larger therapeutic programs, which are so wonderful, or you could be interested in riding horses, but there wasn't anything in the middle. This really is quite a long journey of how I got here. I entered into a relationship and spent three years with this man who I thought was going to be my lifelong partner. He had been living a double life and had been in a relationship with somebody else for the entire time that we had been together. And it was a life-altering moment. Two weeks before I had found that out, I hadn't been around horses in a while and was really missing it. And I started riding when I was six. I found a horse that I signed on to lease for the summer. It just all started to come together. So while I was grieving the loss of not only this person who I loved, but you know the loss of this life that I thought I was going to have, I had this space to go to. A lot of what I just needed was somebody to be with me, right? And that somebody was a horse. That's really where my own healing started to begin. I was mentored and trained under a master coach out in Santa Fe, New Mexico. There's five horses. Every single one of them was laying down, except for one. I was like, I just, I think that's the horse that I'm the most connected to. And he walked right by me. And I was like, oh. I was like, of course, like I'm not good enough. And yeah, why would he come over here? And then all of a sudden, I kid you not, he turned around, circled in front of me, dropped to the ground, and dropped his head in my lap. I just, I lost it. I just completely broke down. It does something for you that sometimes people can't give you, right? You're looking for answers or you're searching for something. You're just searching for it and you can't get it you can't find it. And all of a sudden, you have this like powerful, majestic being giving you exactly what you need. And it was just like the two of us in that moment. And it was just like, everything's gonna be okay. I get a lot of people who have lost spouses, some people who have lost pets, and they need a place that they come to where they feel a sense of comfort and safety Let's head into the indoor today. Okay, come on, Booboo, we got some work to do. So before you do that, you know, remember, we want to always set the intention of what we're doing. So to conjure up or bring up things that really fill you with joy, right? That make you feel light, that make you feel warm, and go see what happens. C'mon Boo. When I try to explain it to people, they're often like, "You're not riding the horse?" Like no, I'm not riding—I'm never gonna ride the horse. I've never ridden a horse. It's not about that. It's about the being, not the doing. I am a psychotherapist. I sought Leah out because it was the middle of COVID I was seeing 40 patients a week, which is way too many. So getting out of my head, not thinking about my patients. Not wondering about COVID. Not worrying about my kids and all the things that they were missing. I didn't have to do any of that here in any way. It was just about finding peace in myself. I think the lesson for me is that I don't need to hold other people's things quite as tightly as I do sometimes. And as soon as I get here, I'm just centered. Thank you. They're not going to be able to take Saint home. But the hope is that you have a felt sense experience that will remind you when you're not on the farm, and life gets tough or chaotic or stressful, and you can have this moment of like, "Okay, let me just pretend like I'm in the field with Saint and I'm breathing with Saint." And I actually have many people who keep photos of Saint as a reminder, right? To slow down, to breathe, to just take a moment for yourself. I was mid-pandemic diagnosed with a rare chronic illness, called idiopathic subglottic stenosis. Essentially, my body will suffocate itself. I have always told Leah that the doctor saved my life, but Leah and Saint saved my soul. I have my fourth surgery coming up on Monday. Just really trying to get myself in a good position where I'm in the zone and really focused on myself, so I can come back even stronger. There's science behind it, and why this works that I can explain to you. But there's also this other side of it where things happen that I can't explain. Those are the moments, those magical moments a lot of the time that make a huge difference for people. So I'd already earned my credential, my ICF-credential as a certified professional coach, which is the International Coaches Federation, and spent about a year and a half going through that. The equine piece was really just taking my 30 plus years of horse knowledge, and just combining them together. So I had that idea, the summer of 2018. And by 2020, I was launched and ready to go. I mostly see women, although men are welcome to come. It just for whatever reason seems like women are more drawn to this space than men. I have worked with anyone, you know, as young as 18, all the way up to women in their 70s. Somebody who is an equine coach has to be incredibly observant. They have to be incredibly thoughtful. You have to be able to hold both the human heart and the equine heart masterfully. The client has to lead it because I'm here to help them. You'll always hear me check in with the client, "How are things going? How have you been? You know, we talked about this last time." I have probably like 10 to 15 go-tos that I use. Some of them are super short, really simple. Others take a lot longer. Saint is my heart horse. He is a manifestation of a horse that I have dreamed of since I was an adolescent. I remember thinking to myself as a child, "Someday, I am going to have a horse who has 16 one-hands, who is a chestnut, a gelding, a Warmblood. He's going to have a white blaze, and he's going to have white socks. When I started looking for a horse, I had posted in a Facebook group and a woman messaged me and she said, I think I have the perfect horse for you. And she sent me some photos of him and I was like, 16 one-hands, chestnut horse, gelding, Warmblood, white blaze, white socks. And I was like, "What's his name?" She goes, "Saint." And I was like, I can't—I mean, you can't make this stuff up if you tried. It's the perfect name for a horse that's doing this work. Heart Math is a research organization. What they did was they basically discovered that horses sync their heartbeats with one another. So essentially, if a horse is heart rate goes up, it kind of pings to another horse, and that's like, "Oh, do we need to be on alert? Do we need to be worried about something? Should we start moving?" What they found was that horses can sink their hearts with humans as well, from up to four feet away. But what that does is it can lower our heart rate. It can also lower our blood pressure, and basically puts us in this state of neutrality, which is just a place of ease. This job has changed my life in every way. In every way. I'm doing what I'm passionate about. I've always wanted to help people. I've always loved horses, I get to combine those two things and I get to give this to others. That's what makes it so worthwhile. You know, when I'm here and I'm doing something for myself, that's when the positivity comes out. Like when I'm with this guy. It kind of just melts everything away.

Leah Goldman is a self-described “horse girl” who turned her passion into a career after a devastating breakup. Goldman founded Fika Coaching to offer equine coaching sessions for personal growth and development. She draws on her skills as an International Coaching Federation–certified professional coach and more than 30 years of experience with horses. 

How horses healed my heartbreak and led me to an equine coaching career

Leah Goldman is a self-described “horse girl” who turned her passion into a career after a devastating breakup.

How horses and heartbreak led me to a coaching career

12, 12. Yeah, I love being around horses for so many reasons. I was the child who was the horse girl and my love affair with horses started probably before I can remember. My name is Leah Goldman and I am an equine coach. Equine coaches are relatively new to the coaching industry. So turn his head to the left head to the left. They're not coming to learn how to ride. They're just coming to learn about themselves in a very unique and different way. What makes this work really powerful is the horse as the mirror, the exercise for you is about creating space, right? And creating boundaries and keeping those boundaries in place back back. Uh Are we having fun and stop? Can maybe qualify for some of these larger therapeutic programs which are so wonderful or you could be interested in riding horses? But there wasn't anything in the middle. This really is quite a long journey of how I got here. I entered into a relationship and spent three years with this man who I thought was going to be my lifelong partner. He had been living a double life and had been in a relationship with somebody else for the entire time that we had been together. And it was a life altering moment. Two weeks before I had found that out, I hadn't been around horses in a while and was really missing it. And I started riding when I was six. I found a horse that I signed on to lease for the summer. It just all started to come together. So, while I was grieving, the loss of not only this person who I loved, but you know, the loss of this life that I thought I was going to have, I had the space to go to a lot of what I just needed was somebody to be with me, right? And not somebody with a horse. That's really where my own healing started to begin. I was mentored and trained under a master coach out in Santa Fe, New Mexico. There's five horses. Every single one of them was laying down except for one. I was like, I just, I think that's the horse that I'm the most connected to. And he walked right by me. And I was like, oh, I was like, I was like, of course, like I'm not good enough. And yeah, why would he come over here? And then all of a sudden I kid you not, he turned around, circled in front of me, dropped to the ground and dropped his head in my lap. I just, I lost it. I just completely broke down. It does something for you that sometimes people can't give you right. You're looking for answers or you're searching for something you're just searching for it and you can't get it, you can't find it. And all of a sudden you have this, like, powerful majestic being giving you exactly what you need. And it was just like the two of us in that moment and it was just like everything is going to be ok. I get a lot of people who have lost spouses. Um some people who have lost pets and they need a place that they come to where they feel a sense of comfort and safety. Let's head into the today. Ok. Come on, boo boo. We got some work to do so before you do that, you know, remember we wanna always set the intention of what we're doing so to conjure up or bring up things that really fill you with joy, right? That make you feel light that make you feel warm and go see what happens. Come on when I try to explain it to people, they're often like I, you're not riding the horse. I'm like, no, I'm not riding. I'm never going to ride the horse. I've never ridden the horse. It's not about that. It's about the being not the doing. I am a psychotherapist. I sought Leah out because it was the middle of COVID. I was seeing 40 patients a week which is way too many. So getting out of my head, not thinking about my patients, not wondering about COVID, not worrying about my kids and all the things that they were missing. I didn't have to do any of that here in any way. It was just about finding peace in myself. I think the lesson for me is that I don't need to hold other people's things quite as tightly as I do sometimes. And as soon as I get here, I'm just centered. Thank you. They're not going to be able to take Saint home. But the hope is that you have a felt sense experience that will remind you when you're not on the farm and life gets tough or chaotic or stressful. And you can have this moment of like, OK, let me just pretend like I'm in the fields of Saint and I'm breathing with Saint. And I actually have many people who keep photos of Saint as a reminder, right? To slow down, to breathe, to just take a moment for yourself. I was mid pandemic diagnosed with a rare chronic illness called idiopathic subglottic stenosis. Essentially, my body will suffocate itself. I have always told Leah that the doctor saved my life, but Leah and Saint save my soul. I have my fourth surgery coming up on Monday, just really trying to get myself in a good position where I'm in the zone and um really focused on myself so I can come back even stronger. There's science behind it and why this works that I can explain to you. But there's also this other side of it where things happen that I can't explain. Those are the moments, those magical moments, a lot of the time that make a huge difference for people. So I had already earned my credential, my IC F credential as a certified professional coach, which is the International Coaches Federation and spent about a year and a half going through that the equine piece was really just taking my 30 plus years of horse knowledge and just combining them together. So I had that idea the summer of 2018 and by 2020, I was launched and ready to go. I mostly see women, although men are welcome to come. It just for whatever reason seems like women are more drawn to this space than men. I have worked with anyone, you know, as young as 18, all the way up to women in their 70's. Somebody who is an equine coach has to be incredibly observant. They have to be incredibly thoughtful. You have to be able to hold both the human heart and the equine heart masterfully, the client has to lead it because I'm here to help them. You'll always hear me check in with the client. How are things going? How have you been? You know, we talked about this last time. I have probably like 10-15, go to that I use. Some of them are super short, really simple. Others take a lot longer. Saint is my my heart horse. He is a manifestation of a horse that I have dreamed of since I was an adolescent. I remember thinking to myself as a child someday, I am going to have a horse who is 16, 1 hand who is a chestnut, a gelding, a warm blood. He's going to have a white blaze and he's going to have white socks. When I started looking for a horse, I had posted in a Facebook group and a woman messaged me and she said, I think I have the perfect horse for you. And she sent me some photos of him and I was like 16 1 hands chestnut horse gelding, warm blood white blaze, white socks. And I was like, what's his name? She goes saint. And I was like, I can't, I mean, you can, you can't make this stuff up if you try. And I'm like, it's the perfect name for a horse that's doing this work. Heart Maths is a research organization. What they did was they basically discovered that horses think their heartbeats with one another. So essentially, if a horse's heart rate goes up, it kind of pings to another horse. And that's like, oh, do we need to be on alert? Do we need to be worried about something we start moving? What they found was that horses can sink their hearts with humans as well from up to 4ft away. But what that does is it can lower our heart rate. It can also lower our blood pressure and basically puts us in this state of neutrality, which is just a place of ease. This job has changed my life in every way, in every way I'm doing what I'm passionate about. I've always wanted to help people. I've always loved horses. I get to combine those two things and I get to give this to others. That's what makes it so worthwhile. You know, when I'm here and I'm doing something for myself. That's when the positivity comes out. Like when I'm with this guy, it kind of just melts everything away.

Jenny Nguyen was sick of watching women’s games on mute at sports bars, so she opened her own. The Sports Bra bar in Portland, Ore. shows only women’s sports. In just 9 days, she raised $50,000 to open the bar.

How I raised $50K in 9 days to open a bar showing only women’s sports

The Sports Bra bar in Portland, Ore. shows only women’s sports.

How I raised $50K in 9 days to open a women's sports bar

How I Raised $50K In 9 Days To Open A Bar Showing Only Women’s Sports

My name is jenny Win. I'm the founder and owner of the sports bra here in Portland Oregon. It's a women's sports bar. When you walk into a sports bar, traditional sports bar, you expect 24 7 coverage because there is 24 7 coverage of men's sports. Statistically 95% of all sports that are on tv or men's sports. And so our goal here is to take the 5% that is on tv and just put it on blast. I just knew I wanted to feel familiar. I wanted people to walk in and just feel like it was a regular sports bar. It's just a lot of decor stuff, memorabilia and that kind of that warmth of being in a familiar sports bar kind of dark, a little bit cozy. But then you change what's represented, you change what's on the tv. These are women's team flags. All the athletes are female athletes. That kind of stuff. When people say women's sports aren't popular. It's because people aren't seeing it. It's a bit of a catch 22. It's like, well nobody's watching women's sports. Well, no women's sports remain shown. It's really difficult. It's really difficult. It's like you have to be in an Internet detectives in order to find where to watch women. I was trying to stream the national team game the other day at work with some friends and we couldn't find it. I love the idea that if this place was packed, people driving by walking by talking about it would see that there are women's sports fans and they would see it. They'd hear about it and they'd be like, oh, people are into it. It shouldn't be a novelty, but it is a novelty. There's been women's athletics that have been agreeable on media for years. You know, women's tennis has always been an agreeable sport, you know, that people watched. And I think what, what I saw happen is that I saw women's basketball. Uh and ESPN really developed a strong relationship and we began to see more and more women's basketball. Um you also have that sec, you have the PAC 12, you have so many of those networks now that need more content. And so there's much more women's content available for about 14.5 years. I played pickup basketball with this hodgepodge group of women, we shared a love of sports and so we would go out before or after, um pick up and try to watch games and it was always a chore, you know, always trying to find Bar that was big enough to take a group of 12 and then also who would change the channel for us. And then not only that, but some of the people in our group are vegan, those dietary restrictions are really hard to find at sports bars. And then a large portion of our basketball group are queer folks or non binary folks. And so looking the way we do kind of feels unsafe in a lot of the traditional sports bars, There was one particular moment that stands out in my mind when it kind of clicked and it was in 2018 when our basketball group went to go watch the N. C. Double A women's championship. And I think there was like three seconds left, the game was tied and eric takes one dribble and launches a three pointer right at the buzzer and it goes in. So here we were like a dozen of us just going crazy on our own. I threw my hat across the bar and while I was standing, I realized that no one else in the entire bar was watching our game. So everybody's staring at us like we're absolutely bonkers. Anyway, we're leaving the bar and we're kind of like milling around the parking lot still kind of just high off of the game. And I was just like, oh my God, that was the best game I've ever seen. And one of my friends was just like, yeah, it would have been so awesome if the sound had been on, I hadn't realized that we'd watched the whole game with no sound. Right. Then I said, the only way we're ever going to watch a women's game in its full glory is if we had our own place. And I remember driving home and I was like, oh, we had our own place, what we call it, you know? And the very first name that popped into my head was the sports bras. It just made so much sense. All you're doing is you're taking a sports bar and you're changing the channel on the tv. So it's like a tiny switch and then it just became an inside joke. Whenever we went out to sports bars and we were frustrated with something, we'd be like, oh at the sports bra, this game would be on, oh, it's a sports bra. You know, they have gluten free buns for my burger with the sports bra. We'd never run out of toilet paper in the women's restroom or like all the things that, you know, sports bars kind of fall short on all the time. We got to talking about how when we were kids, if our parents had taken us to a place like a sports bra, how much of a difference that would have made in our lives to have a place that we walked into and felt represented or felt seen once I launched the Kickstarter, it was the first time that I put it out into the world. And by day three I was getting emails from all across the country right away. I had people coming up and being like, thank you for doing this, thank you for being an asian woman who opened a business and then people coming up and being like, oh a lesbian owned bar. I didn't think about it. I was just so focused on the sports bra and getting this off the ground. I created a space that I want to be in. So it is me in the end, but when I was conceptualizing it, I didn't think about it like that. I just wanted it to be a place that I felt good. I thought being a chef would help and I think it has, I mean, I think it's helped me like 0.5% 99 point whatever, 95% I don't know anything about. That was hard reaching out to people asking for help learning as much as possible. I mean, the learning curve for me was like a straight up and down wall for like the last year, I would say doing things with intentionality was really huge for me. And so I thought about how women's sports is underrepresented. And then I thought about what else is underrepresented. And if you want to create a space that's for everybody, you gotta try to represent everybody if we can do that through our menu. If we can do that through our physical space, let's do it. At the very beginning, I reached out to like network streaming services, All these things to get permission to play a bunch of different things that on top of trying to open a business was a lot of work. I felt like it was somebody else's full time job to try to find content. So just women's sports is a national sports media company and they have like hundreds and hundreds of hours of digital media on Youtube. So I reached out to them and I just told them about the sports bra, this concept and they're like, we love what you're doing, what do you need from us. And I was like, I'd love to have your digital content and they were like, okay, what else? Like literally that's how it went and like my heart like burst out of my chest. And then I reached out to ESPN and the same thing happened. I was on a call with seven like female executives from ESPN W and they were just over the moon with the concept. But once the word got out, the roles got reversed, then it was networks streaming services, all of these other things reaching out to us asking us to play their stuff at the very beginning, we definitely had some issues with haters. There was some like right wing blog that came out and I probably got like 45 1 star reviews saying things like oh they wouldn't let me in because I had a beard or oh they spent my burger when they found out I was a man or you know, like just all kinds of ridiculous stuff. One of them said that I held them down and made them watch the W. N. B. A. Playoffs. I would read the comment, I'd be like, oh what do I say back to this guy. And as I was thinking it like 16 other people responded with like way better things than I could have said. And I was just like, Oh the community has got this and that's how it's always been. We were able to be there on their opening night and I think that that was the moment that you could see that Portland was here to lift jenny and her organization up. I get tingles when I think about that night because the line went around the corner, there's definitely a community that just kind of I think was already here and now has a place to gather at the bronze, which is really nice. It feels like a place that I feel really comfortable in a place where I can be myself and watch things that actually are interesting to me and have that not be something that is viewed as an inconvenience to other people, but it's celebrated. People ask me jenny, why hasn't anyone done this before? Seeing how difficult it was for me to get open and get the content and all the, all the stuff that we need to make it a success so far. I don't think it would have been possible five years ago with the content that was on tv or with the investment or the interest in women's support. And I think timing was just right now for it to happen. I honestly think in the next 10 years women's sports could overshadow men's sports as far as popularity goes. I think a company like the sports bra is proving too many other companies within Portland's or outside of Portland that you can have a successful business focusing on women's sports. You know, like the, the NWSL championship game was played on broadcast on CBS and like a ton, almost a million people tuned in and that's a really big deal. So like, it's nice to finally see that. I think the kind of powers that be in sports economics are paying attention to women's sports and starting to recognize the value and we don't need to question whether it's a good idea or not and just commit to supporting women in athletics for real cultural change to happen. And I think women's sports is about cultural change, real cultural change takes, you know, according to Gloria steinem takes about 100 years. And so I think we're about halfway through that as women's sports are shown over time, we get a chance to fall in love with the athletes the same way that we do for men's sports. You know, so we can show women's sports and we can be able to prove that women will watch, men will watch families will watch women playing sports. I've had, I don't know, maybe 70 people reach out asking to open a sports bra in their town or city, um, multiple investors, just hordes of interest. Um, but besides that I've had people reach out who want to open their own thing. That is a women's sports bar. I've had sports bar owners reach out and ask how they can incorporate more women's sports into their sports bar. And so all of these things to me is part of the mission jenny. And the people around this saw a need and they're like, well, we're not gonna wait for anyone to do it, we're just gonna make it happen. So much of what we experience is, what is in existence, right? It's hard to know what the possibilities are if you can't see it. And so I think that having created this space when people come in here, I feel like it opens up a whole new set of possibilities to introduce a women's sports bar where the culture is built around celebrating and empowering and supporting women's sports. It's about time take one

All right, so this is our studio. This is [Studio] 3K and this is where everything happens. I'm Janice Huff. I'm the chief meteorologist at NBC News 4 New York. We are the station scientists, even when it's not the weather, even when it's earthquakes, even when it's—anything that has to do with science, NASA, space, whatever. You have to be a scientist and a presenter, both. We don't use a script because the graphics that we show, like the satellite pictures, radar, and all the other graphics with all the fronts and things and the 10-day and all that—we're basically telling it through through the pictures. I've been doing this job here at NBC in New York for 28 years. I've been in television, weather broadcasting, probably closer to 40 years. This is one of our touchscreen monitors. We can use this for weather, as well as this large monitor right here, also useful. And then over here is our green screen. We stand here and do weather here. It's a big studio with lots of monitors that we take full advantage of. These are not all my clothes. Only this stuff is mine. But we have lots of weather anchors here. So six of us. And between the six of us, we all have clothes back here and lockers, and places to put our shoes. People do recognize me, people always have something to say about the weather. We are extremely accurate, but that's not what people remember. They always remember the one time when you may not get the snowfall right, or you may not get the area that gets the rain versus the snow. And everybody always remembers those times, of course. Blizzards are our big thing here on the East Coast. Forecasting itself is probably one of the biggest challenges. And we are most accurate, at least 90 to 95% of the time. There's very few times when the forecast is doesn't turn out the way we had hoped or the way we have predicted it. There's 10 meteorologists in our family that are helping each other all the time and collaborating, especially when there are big, big storms. We probably have the biggest team of anybody here in this area, we're the envy of most. Janice has such a rich history here. She is so kind and warm and welcoming to everyone. It is just so easy to work with her. And the person you see on camera who's so inviting and warm and welcoming to the viewers, someone who really cares—she's like that off the air. When we have the breaking weather situations, a lot of times that can be serious, but kind of we just watch her and it's just—it comes so easy to her. So I would say kind of, we watch an awful lot of us because it just rolls right off the tongue. She's a pro. She's really ready for anything at any time. We are in the Storm Team 4 Weather Center for NBC. It's right behind our studio walls. Our studio is just on the other side of this wall. It's a team effort. It takes a lot of people to get this act together every day. We have several shows throughout the day, starting with our morning news at 4 a.m. We also have an 11 a.m. newscast. This is where all of the work gets done every day for all of our weather casts that go into each and every newscast. That's all of the forecasting. That's all of the graphics that gets done for the actual weather cast, and all the discussion. And we have our lunch here. We live here pretty much. There are people here practically 24/7. There's only a couple of hours at night when no one's here. We collaborate with Janice. It's pretty much an ongoing conversation between the members of the weather team. We use Microsoft Teams to basically keep everybody abreast of any changes in the forecast. Any interesting tidbits in the forecast that one of us is saying, we'll put it into a team's note so that everybody can see it. Janice is pretty much on call 24/7. I go home and about 11:45 Every night and get right back up at 9:40 in the morning and start all over again. That's interesting. I knew I wanted to be a meteorologist when I was about 10, I think. I discovered the word "meteorology" by reading the encyclopedia because back then we didn't have computers at home. That's when I figured out what a meteorologist does. And I loved the weather since I was a little little kid. And so I decided then when I was 10 that that's what I was going to study when I went to college. My degree is a Bachelor of Science in meteorology from Florida State University. My minor is mathematics. Graduating from college, I was the first person in my family to do that. Even though it was many years ago, I still look back on that as a major accomplishment. And to also get a degree in meteorology, which is a major accomplishment for anybody. Once I got to interview President Obama. A bunch of meteorologists, including myself, were picked to come to the White House when he was president and talk about the climate report, the climate assessment. And it was amazing to be there and actually speak to the President about the state of the climate and the weather and be at the White House which is really cool. Definitely as a woman of color, I didn't see people who looked like me doing weather on television when I was growing up in the '60s and '70s. There were a handful of women, one being June Bacon-Bercey, who actually broke that barrier before I did, and became the first African American woman with a degree in meteorology to actually do the weather on TV back in the '70s. So there were a couple of people that came before me. Yet, I never saw her on TV when she was actually on television back then, because she was in Buffalo, New York, and I was in South Carolina. So I didn't see anyone who looked like me doing what I do. That's why I never thought about having a career on TV doing it. I bought this when I was in Tanzania in the Serengeti. We went on vacation. It was more than just going on vacation. It was kind of symbolic, in a way. I've never been to Africa, so. And since the majority of my roots are in Africa, not from that country. But it was my first trip to the motherland, as you say, and it was quite the experience of being in a country where practically everybody looks like you. But that's the flag of Tanzania. And I've wear it all the time. I never take it off. That was in 2018. It's just just a reminder of my trip and when it meant to be there. We expect it to be quiet night tonight. The fun part about this job is just being able to do what I love. It's not really work when you do what you love, right? Most people are never going to be able to say they've worked anywhere for 28 years. But to say that I've worked at 30 Rock for 28 years is a tremendous accomplishment. Of course, there's a little bit of luck involved and things that I have no control over. But that's a huge deal now when I think about it, and I'm really happy that I've been able to be here this long. If you want to be a meteorologist, focus on your studies, math and science.

Chief Meteorologist Janice Huff shares a behind-the-scenes look at how weather forecasting at NBC 4 New York comes together. She delves into her successful journey of nearly 40 years in the field, from wanting to be a meteorologist at age 10 to meeting President Barack Obama. She also honors June Bacon-Bercey, the first on-air Black female meteorologist in the U.S.

Meet this NYC meteorologist who's been predicting weather for 40 years

Chief Meteorologist Janice Huff shares a behind-the-scenes look at how weather forecasting at NBC 4 New York comes together.

Meet this NYC meteorologist predicting weather for 40 years

Bye. All right. So this is our studio and this is where everything happens. I'm Janice Hoff. I'm the chief meteorologist at NBC News for New York. We are the station scientist even when it's not the weather, even when it's earthquakes, even when it's anything that has to do with science, NASA Space, whatever you have to be a scientist and a presenter. Both we don't use a script because the graphics that we show like the satellite pictures, radar and all the other graphics with all the fronts and things and the 10 day and all that, we're basically telling it through, through the pictures. I've been doing this job here at NBC in New York for 28 years. I've been in television. Weather broadcasting probably closer to 40 years. This is one of our three monitors. We can use this for weather as well as this large monitor also use. And then over here is our Green Street. We stand here and do weather here. It's a big studio with lots of monitors that we take full advantage of. These are not all my clothes. Um Only this stuff is mine, but we have lots of weather anchors here. So, uh, six of us and between the six of us, we all have clothes back here and lockers and places to put our shoes. People do recognize me. People always have something to say about the weather. We are extremely accurate, but that's not what people remember. They always remember the one time when you may not get the snowfall, right? Or you may not get the area that gets the rain versus the snow. And everybody always remembers those times. Of course, blizzards are our big thing here on the east coast forecast itself. Probably one of the biggest challenges and we are most accurate at least 90 to 95% of the time. There's very few times when the forecasts doesn't turn out the way we had hoped or the way we have predicted it, there's 10 meteorologists in our family that are helping each other all the time and collaborating, especially when there are big, big storms. We probably have the biggest team of anybody here in this area. We're the envy of, of most Janice has such a rich history here. She is so kind and warm and welcoming to everyone. It is just so easy to work with her and the person you see on camera who's so inviting and warm and welcoming to the viewers, someone who really cares. She's like that off the air when we have the breaking weather situations. A lot of times that can be serious, but kind of, we just watch her and it's just, it comes so easy to her. So I would say kind of, we watch in all a lot of us because it just rolls right off the tongue. She's a, she's really ready for anything at any time. We are in the storm. Team four weather center for NBC. It's right behind our studio wall. So our studio is just on the other side of this wall. It's a team effort. It takes a lot of people to get this act together every day. We have several shows throughout the day, starting with our morning news at four AM. We also have an 11 AM news cast. This is where all of the work gets done every day for all of our weather casts that go into each and every newscast. That's all of the forecasting. That's all of the graphics that gets done for the actual weather cast and all of the discussion. And we have our lunch here. We live here pretty much. There are people here practic 24/7 and there's only a couple of hours at night when no one's here. We collaborate with Janice. It's pretty much an ongoing conversation between the members of the weather team. We use Microsoft teams to basically keep everybody abreast of any changes in forecasts, any interesting tidbits in the forecast that one of us is seeing. We'll put it into a team's note so that everybody can see it. Janice is pretty much on call 24 7. I go home at about 1145 every night and get right back up at 9:45 AM and start all over again. That's interesting. I knew I wanted to be a meteorologist when I was about 10. I think I discovered the word meteorology by reading the encyclopedia because back then we didn't have computers at home. That's when I figured out what a meteorologist does. And I love the weather since I was a little, little kid. And so I decided then when I was 10, that that's what I was going to study when I went to college. My degree is a Bachelor of Science in meteorology from Florida State University. My minor is mathematics. Graduated from college. I was the first person in my family to do that even though it was many years ago, I still look back on that as a major accomplishment and to also get a degree in meteorology, which is a major accomplishment for anybody. Once I got to interview President Obama, a bunch of meteorologists including myself, were picked to come to the White House when he was president and talk about the climate report, the climate assessment. And it was amazing to be there and actually speak to the president about the state of the climate and the weather and be at the White House, which is really cool. Definitely as a woman of color. I didn't see people who looked like me doing weather on television when I was growing up in the sixties and seventies, there were a handful of women, one being June Bacon Bey, who actually broke that barrier before I did and became the first African American woman with a degree in meteorology to actually do the weather on TV, back in the seventies. So there were a couple of people that came before me yet. I never saw her on TV when she was actually on television back then because she was in Buffalo, New York and I was in South Carolina. So I didn't see anyone who looked like me doing what I do. That's why I never thought about having a career on TV, doing it. I bought this when I was in Tanzania in the Serengeti. We went on vacation. It was more than just going on vacation. It was kind of symbolic in a way, I've never been to Africa. So, and since the majority of my roots are in Africa, not from that country, but it was on my first trip to the motherland, as you say. And it was quite the experience of being in a country where practically everybody looks like you. But that's the flag of Tanzania and I wear it all the time. I never take it off. That was in 2018. It is just a reminder of my trip and what it meant to be there. We expect it to be a quiet night tonight. The fun part about this job is just being able to do what I love. It's not really work when you do what you love. Right. Most people are never going to be able to say they've worked anywhere for 28 years. But to say that I've worked at 30 rock for 28 years is a tremendous accomplishment. Of course, there's a little bit of luck involved in things that I have no control over. But that's a huge deal now, when I think about it and I'm really happy that I've been able to be here this long if you want to be a meteorologist. Focus on your studies, math and science.

Anna Leigh Waters is the top female pickleball player at 16 after becoming a professional player at 12. Waters won eight triple crowns in 2022 and is coached by her mother Leigh Waters, who is also her doubles partner. According to her rep, she now earns a high-six-figure salary and is sponsored by Fila, Paddletek, and Carvana among others. 

Meet this pro pickleball player earning six figures at 16 years old

Anna Leigh Waters is the top female pickleball player at 16 after becoming a professional player at 12.

Teen pickleball player Anna Leigh Waters earns six figures

At the beginning of the year. This was my first ever triple crown at the end of the year. This is actually my eighth triple crown of 2022. This is the biggest trophy I have ever received. I'm Anna Lee Waters. I'm 16 years old and I'm the number one female professional pickle ball player. Mhm. Pickle ball has become so popular because anyone can play, any age can play and any skill level can play. You can have fun, you can be competitive. It's just a sport for everyone with the first pick in the 2023 major league pick a ball draft. The new Jersey fives select Anna Lee Waters so good everywhere on the court. There is no weakness in this young lady, Anna Lee was unquestionably the number one pick I think for everybody in the draft, people are picking men and women and to have a number one pick that was a female player and to have more women's picks in the top 10 than men was really remarkable and says something about pickle ball. She is a young phenom ranked number one in the world, both in singles, mixed doubles and women's doubles. She is the most dominant player in the game at the tournament of champions. I won the most or had the most points in that tournament. I was ranked the number one women's singles player at 14 years old. I feel like the achievement that I'm most proud of didn't actually happen this year. It happened in 2019 when I won nationals with my mom. I remember after we won the match, she like jumped and then she started like running around the court and I was like chasing her, like wanting to hug her and like celebrate with her waters and waters. It was our first huge tournament that we went together. I think I had an out of body experience. We had reached a goal that, you know, that we had set because I never thought of pickleball as a job. But at the same time, like, I guess it kind of is, it's a very fun job, especially this year. A lot of big companies have gotten into the sport. I've also seen a big growth in like celebrity pickleball. I've had a lot of sponsorship opportunities. I have an agent now. I am so young and to, you know, learn as many things as I'm learning and, you know, be a part of sponsorship deals and learning about contracts. Sometimes I'll see like the checks that come in and I'm like, save it. I'm saving, I'm put in the bank. I try not to spend my money. You see someone like Michael Jordan who can like design their own shoe and then I'm sponsored by. So I'm kind of designing a shoe with them. It's just kind of cool that I can be kind of grouped into like an athlete that's making their own shoe, which, which is amazing. Annie and I started playing pickle ball at the exact same day, the exact same second, we evacuated our home in Florida due to a hurricane and we went to visit my father who lived in Pennsylvania and he asked us, you know, do you want to go play pickle ball? And at first we were kind of like, no, because we didn't know what it was. And I was pretty young. I think I was 10. So we thought it was an older person sport, but we went and from the moment we stepped on the court, we were, we were hooked. First time I hit the ball, I was like in love with the sport. We played like three times a day for like two weeks straight while we were up there. From when I first started playing, I played with my grandfather and my mom and I can still play with my grandfather and my mom. It's fun, but it's also embarrassing. Uh, as I got older and older, obviously, I got worse and worse and as she got older, she got better and better. Unfortunately, at the previous national tournament Lee was injured. So when Anna Lee was going into a finals match, she had nobody to warm her up. So I actually warmed her up. I really don't know the outcome of the success of the warm up, but she won. So I guess I did something right. Anna Lee and I play a few times a week. Some of that is playing, some of that is drilling, watching Annaly compete. She's feisty. She's an animal. She's an absolute beast on the court. I'm a full time student, but I am also a full time professional pickleball player. So hopefully I'm gonna make a career out of this. You got that right on his mic. Can you send it to me? Yeah, when I'm home, I usually play pickle ball five days a week. I usually drill like two times a week and then I'll play games three times a week. If I'm drilling, it's around two hours. And if I'm playing games, it can be anywhere from like 2 to 3 hours. And I'm usually in the gym five days a week as well. I would say average in a day, I'm working out like four hours and even on my off days, I'm doing either some kind of cardio or walking. She started off as a soccer player and tennis player converted, I think at 11 and she learned the game went pro at 12 lightning quick hands. Great court awareness, great court coverage. I have a lot of different skill sets from different sports for soccer. It was, it's definitely like the footwork and the fast sprinting and the lateral movement and stuff for tennis. It's definitely the form. The form is very similar if you watch tennis and pickle ball. But there is a big difference between like strategy and pickleball and tennis. So I had to learn that Anna Lee and I had come from tennis and the minute I stepped on the court, I just wanted to hit the ball hard and everybody kept telling us like you're not playing correctly. This isn't how you play. You have to hit soft, you have to hit these dinks. But it's just what came so true to, to me and Anna Lee was this power game. So we just continued with our game. And the next thing you know, we were winning national championships at the pro level and we were known for our aggressive style of play. A lot of people ask the question like, how do you guys play on the court together? Isn't it hard that she's your mom and that she's your daughter is in the dynamic. Weird. But I feel like for us it's the opposite. Like we have this mother daughter intuition where we know where the other one's gonna be on the court. And if we miss a shot, we know the other person is not going to be mad at us. So we just feel like you know, we can play how we want to play. We don't have to worry about disappointing our partner because no matter what happens on the court, we're a family and that's what families do. They stick together. I travel with not only my mom but also my dad win or lose. Me and my family always go out to eat and I have a really special bond with my grandmom. She's been home schooling me from third grade on, I'm in 11th grade. Even before I started playing pickleball, I was home schooling and it just really worked out because I couldn't travel and do all the things that I'm doing with pickleball right now becoming a professional athlete. I am so proud of Anna Lee. Her coaches and her other sports have always told us what an athlete she was and what potential she had. But you still don't necessarily go to like, oh professional athletes. This is probably a very futuristic goal, but I want to play pickle ball in the Olympics one day I grew up watching the Olympics and I think it would be really cool to represent my country. And I also want to see pickleball grow like in other countries. I also want to see pickle ball grow in like high schools and get younger kids involved. And that's something that I'm working on now. So in the beginning of this year, one of my goals was to get a triple crown and I ended up getting eight this year, which was amazing. If I've accomplished the goal, there's still something better you can do. So I feel like next year I'm gonna try to get nine triple crowns, uh, which would be, might be difficult, but I'm gonna try to do it. I'm just really, you know, enjoying the ride and I wanna keep going as long as I can. Uh When we came home, we decided we were going to get a ping pong table. I think we played about two weeks before Anna Lee got so good that nobody wanted to play with her anymore. And I don't think we've played ping pong since.

“We can’t be so reliant on just one country no matter who the country is,” the Consumer Technology Association CEO told Fortune. “So there’s an effort towards reshoring and a lot of executives are thinking about that.”

CTA’s Gary Shapiro on what rising tensions between China and U.S. could mean for tech and innovation

“We can’t be so reliant on just one country no matter who the country is,” the Consumer Technology Association CEO told Fortune.

CTA’s Gary Shapiro on rising tensions between China & U.S

Gary, thanks so much for joining us today. Thank you. It's an honor to be here before such an important group. Um I have a few questions for you, but I want to start pretty broad. Um curious if you can just share uh from your point of view from where you sit. What's the state of the state on the tech industry in the US? We've obviously seen extreme highs, extreme lows. Um Everybody is dealing with the fallout of Silicon Valley Bank at the moment but, but talk to us a little bit about just um what you're seeing from your perspective. Good, bad, ugly. Well, the tech industry had a great run, especially during COVID when everyone had to stay home and use technology just to get basic work done in the white collar world. Um But the way the system works in the United States, the free market system is there's ups and downs the advantage of it down and we're definitely in a little bit of a down now is it's an opportunity for entrepreneurs and innovators to emerge to start new businesses. But between inflation, high interest rates, a little bit of a slowdown and then the Silicon Valley bank uh going under and being bought. Uh you know, there's some concerns at the, at the end of how are we going to finance these things will systems emerge to replace that important bank so we can get the money to start up so they can run their operations. And I think with the continuity that you know, another bank buying them, I think will be ok. And I also think that yes, there are layoffs with a lot of people are hired. I think it's a rejiggering of what kind of skills are needed by people. But with literally tens, if not hundreds of thousands of people that are once working for big tech companies unemployed, that's an opportunity for a lot of innovators and entrepreneurs to emerge. Yeah. And at the same time, obviously a lot of innovation, especially on the generative A I side and, and in other areas. So what do you think we're going to see bubbling up during this current period which is obviously tougher economically on a lot of companies? Well, definitely there are some areas of, of very rapid growth. Uh You mentioned A I, obviously that's the big one. There's all sorts of different ways of approaching business that some people think it's bigger than the internet itself. And it's going to be have a really positive impact in all sorts of areas from health care to uh the way kids learn education, self directing there's so many different things, but like everything in technology, it's a tool. And if you go back to the invention of or the taming of fire to the wheel, to the printing press, to the airplane, to the telecommunications and computers and the internet, they're all tools and they could be used to help mankind or they could be used for less, more nefarious purposes. And that's uh that will be the struggle we'll see in countries around the world as we figure out how to create the lane so that companies can innovate and do great things and solve some of the most fundamental problems in the world. I mean, today, I was on a phone call with people related to the United Nations who were talking about how technology is solving so many of the world's most fundamental problems and helping us achieve the goals that the UN has. And I think that's the positive thing that we're all working towards, which will make a difference. So speaking of the United Nations, um obviously, we've, we've seen ups and downs on the geopolitical side when it comes to tech innovation, collaboration, um partnerships across borders and, and there are rising tensions again, including between the US and China. So what do you, I mean, first of all, give us a little bit of an assessment on that. You talk to a lot of tech CEO S, what are you hearing? What are the primary concerns? And then I'm wondering also how do you see that hindering or helping maybe um some of the acceleration of, of these technologies as the competition heats up. I think there's two categories of people in the United States if you will, that are focused on these issues, one of the politicians in Washington and there's definitely a bipartisan agreement that we have to do something uh given the experience of supply chain issues and, and the different points of view that China and the US have, we have to, we can't be so reliant on just one country no matter who the country is. So there's an effort towards restoring and a lot of executives are thinking about that. I saw a recent survey that 70% of, of affected companies are, are planning on ways to deal with this restoring effort. Um The question is how long it will take, how quickly it can happen? Um And what's the realistic timetable? And I think a realistic timetable is probably more 20 to 30 years in three or four years, which perhaps some policymakers envision the CEO S themselves I think are, are they're more realistic. Um They view the some of the world tensions as things outside their control. I mean, there's a fundamental view a lot of us have that you get through free trade, you get greater understanding and, and sharing, you're less likely to have conflict. Uh That's something which, you know, I hope we balance out a little bit with the, the rush to judgment of, of saying that, you know, it's not, you know, political leaders make decisions and the rest of the country sometimes pay. And I don't think there's any animosity uh towards Chinese as individuals. Uh It's a very productive company country. We rely on it. I think the lesson of COVID, we probably rely too much on it. We saw shortages of products which affected everything from health care to technology companies and things like that. So there's a lot of reality and there's the political world and those are two different and then there's the free marketplace of companies wanting to do business with each other. And I think smart business leaders will figure out how to do that if it has to happen in a third country like Vietnam or, or elsewhere in Asia or even in North America or Europe. I think we'll figure it out. But single source supply has never been a good decision for companies because it gets you maybe a lower price in the short run. But in the long run, it could be deadly to the future of any company. So supply chain issues aside, um China clearly presents and and has for a long time, a very, very large market for American tech companies and and for other tech companies elsewhere. So what are you hearing on, on that front? How are American tech CEO S looking at just the market opportunity? In China, given some of the recent tension. Well, definitely the the global political tensions make it much more difficult in terms of the calculus because that's outside of the control and there's not much you can do about it. So it's almost a digital decision. Do you do it or do you not the economic um things, the manufacturing cost, the supply chain, those are all measurable risks. I mean, some things you don't anticipate. Like I think that the cost and shipping costs between the US and China a couple of years ago was on nobody's radar screen that it would go up so much. And that was a real big factor issues like tariffs, which we've been working to try to get the US to reduce between the US and China. That's become a clearly political issue and it's not likely they will be reduced even though they would help us fight inflation. But definitely the geopolitical issues if there's action against Taiwan and things like that, that's like it's economic nuclear terror as far as probably many, many American companies and politicians are concerned. Ok, back to, to innovation and just the, the rapid pace that we've seen um the the acceleration of, of both innovation and um digital transformation. I know these are all buzzwords but they're real. We're actually seeing this in action. We've seen it in action over the last few years. Do you think that um given the, the, the economic slowdown Now, where do you see things going in terms of that innovation and the adoption of technologies um obviously a slowdown in spend. But do you think that we can use the momentum during COVID to keep that digitization effort up and, and how are companies looking at that? Well, I think there are certain areas which are rapid growth like cyber security. Obviously, that's a global problem that every government has to deal with and faces. Uh Certainly there's the generative A I where we've already seen almost $3 billion invested very quickly. Uh Cloud computing is still very important, very hot efforts to deal with climate technology are very, very significant. Um in many different ways, Digital twins is something and it's an opportunity to, to move product quicker to market by really having artificial intelligence and computers work together and create simulations and figure out what works. And it's just not for products and technologies, it's for health care and drugs in so many areas, even prosthetics, for example, will benefit from a lot of these technologies like 3D printing combined with artificial intelligence. So we're going to solve a lot of individual problems in the world through technology. There's a huge amount of opportunity there. But certainly these, these changes in the economy, the changes in politics, there, there's some storm clouds, we'll just have to, to work through. But in the long run, I think humanity will be better off business opportunities will be created kids will be educated better, we'll live healthier longer lives. And I think this is a worldwide effort to meet some of those very important lofty goals of, of keeping air, clean water, clean, having an environment, making sure people aren't hungry, things like that. And technology is going to solve a lot of these problems. Tell us a little bit about CE S um next year. Is it going to be different? Do you already have a sense of what the big trends are going to be? How early on do you plan it? Well, we plan years ahead of time in terms of reserving all the different major locations in Las Vegas since January. But the CE S 2023 was an exceptional event. Almost 100 and 20,000 people. Uh Well, over 2000 exhibitors and more than one out of three people were from outside the United States to global event. And there was a lot of focus on artificial intelligence. The the automobile mobility market is huge. Uh Obviously so many other areas are hot, robotics, food. And we we'll have some big announcements and some big names and some big things because people still one thing we learned in COVID, people want to get together and innovate occurs much more easily when people are face to face with that five cent environment. So you could create the relationships and the magic occurs of different industries getting together and stimulating each other. And that's why events like CS and, and frankly, the Fortune conferences are so important. Thank you so much, Gary. I appreciate you taking your time and talking to us, sharing your views with us. Thank you and, and great luck with the conference. Thank you.

In The Ground Up we sit down with entrepreneurs to get the story on how they were able to build a successful business.

The Ground Up

Slutty Vegan founder Pinky Cole dives into her story of how she came up with a provocative way to sell vegan food and turn it into a $100 million brand from the ground up. The Ground Up showcases founders and entrepreneurs who worked their way up with a business ideas and turned it into a success story.

How I started a $100 million fast casual restaurant called Slutty Vegan

Slutty Vegan founder Pinky Cole dives into her story of how she came up with a provocative way to sell vegan food and turn it into a $100 million brand from the ground up.

Because of my confidence, I got me at least paying $1,200 in a 650 square foot space. And at my grand opening, I had about 1200 people, I couldn't believe that so many people would stand out in line to support me and that's when I knew I had something really big. I was on the front page of the New York Times in the food section. Like we built a multimillion dollar business and that was game changing for me. Yeah, Hey, what's up? It's pinky cole. I'm 35 years old and I'm the founder and ceo of the world famous $100 million brand, slutty vegan A. T. L. Born and bred in Atlanta Georgia, having a television background. I said, you know what, I know what people watch when they watch tv, they want stuff that's in your face, racy raunchy, that's going to make them pay attention. But when you think about veganism, veganism has always been known to be pure flavorless, clean, very clean, very green. And I said the two most pleasurable experiences in life is sex and food. If I can make people think about sex and think about food at the same time, I know that I can peel the layer back and educate you about veganism in a way that you've never seen it before. I'm originally from Baltimore Maryland. I grew up in a single parent household. My father did 23 years in prison while my mother worked multiple jobs to make sure that she took care of the family. I can remember my mom working so many jobs and learning how to cook with my grandmother because my mother was always gone working or pursuing her own entrepreneurial endeavors as a musician. My father was and is an entrepreneur even behind bars, he would call me and tell me books to read, he would teach me about stocks, he would teach me how financial independence was the most important thing in this world and I became a hustler at a very young age, I used to throw parties, I used to sell candy, I would sell food when I graduated from college, I didn't have any job lined up except for teach for America and I'm like, I don't want to be a teacher, no shade to the teachers, but I knew that it was in the middle of a recession and I had to figure it out. So I packed up my bags and moved to Houston texas to work at teach for America. I was out there for five days and I realized that I do not want to do this and my friend gave me $40 and I went to the airport and I can remember sitting in the airport with my yorkie Rudy and a guy walked up to me and I was bawling crying and was like, what's wrong with you? And I'm just like, I'm not happy, I don't want to be a teacher inside of the classroom, I'm gonna in other ways and he said I'll be right back. Do you know this man walked away from me and he came back and he gave me $240 just enough money to get me and my dog Rudy home and I never looked back after that. I moved to los Angeles California to be an actress and then I started doing background work and I thought that I was good at it. But then one of my sorority sisters said, listen, you were broke, you need some money, I'm gonna give you a job working in television while I was working at the Maury show. I had this bright idea to open up a jamaican restaurant and don't ask me why I just like a Jamaican restaurant, let's do it. I actually took over somebody's lease and I was paying $2400 a month, which is crazy now because you can barely $2400 a month, that's a light bill. Now. I went to Google and Youtube and I started learning everything I could learn about the restaurant industry, I barely knew what I was doing. I still don't know what I'm doing, but I barely knew what I was doing. I had the restaurant for about two years and then I had a grease fire and literally lost everything in the grease fire. My car got refold, I got kicked out of my apartment, I went flat broke, I got an opportunity to work in tv again, I was working as a casting director and I was done with restaurants, I was working on a Tv show, they had a hiatus and I started delivering for doordash and while I was delivering for doordash, I'm like okay, cool ghost kitchens, I've never heard of ghost kitchens, but I see it happening in L. A. I realized I was just preparing for what I was about to create just a couple of months later and when they asked me to go to Atlanta temporarily to work on the show, it hit me like a light bulb and I came up with this crazy as concept called slutty vegan. I didn't have anything written down, I didn't have a blueprint, I didn't have a business plan, it was just an idea that sounded good. I started slutty vegan as a ghost kitchen, It was like a $5,000 startup cost to start slutty vegan. So I had to get my permits, I had to get the facility which was like $1,200. I had to order my food. I had to get my first employees, I had to set up all of my online digital delivery platforms. A lot of entrepreneurs don't realize that if you really want to grow a company, you have to reinvest everything. When I tell you every single time I was reinvesting, I was not taking any money for myself. At first I was just making sure that my employees were paid and that I had food in my business. The reason why I started a food truck is because the facility told me that I had too many people coming to the building so I had to go, so they put me in a parking lot and I had to find a food truck on the fly, didn't know anything about a food truck. The food truck was $45,000, so I had to put $10,000 down and every single week I was paying like $3400 every single week to make sure that I could pay it off and I paid that off in like like two months, two or three months. I got a DM from somebody on Instagram and he told me that there was a restaurant that they were leaving the restaurant and it was available if I wanted to rent it because of my confidence, I got me at least paying $1,200 and 650 square foot space. And at my grand opening I had about 1200 people. I couldn't believe that so many people would stand out in line to support me and that's when I knew I had something really big. It's the people who are the meat eaters that come to slutty vegan most because one, they want to learn what the hype is about to, they have an idea that they can try this vegan thing and if it's good, maybe I can continue on this path and three slutty vegan is a vibe. Uh I'll be honest, I wasn't the most savvy business person when I started study vegan, but when it came to like price and I'm just like, okay, $16 sounds like it would make sense, that's the price. Like I didn't do any like extra calculations, but I grew as a business owner, I actually met the ceo of shake shack first randy Geraghty and I reached out to him, I'm like, hey, randy, you don't know me, but I got a really popular restaurant in Atlanta and I would love to be able to sit down with you because one thing about pinky cole is, I'm gonna shoot my shot, He responded, we went to lunch and and we built a friendship and ever since then he has been such a great mentor to me. And then a few months later I get a call saying that Danny meyer came to slutty vegan on a late night with a few of his friends and he loved the experience and they wanted to talk. It took a long time to get the investment. It took about nine months slutty vegan will be a billion dollar company from my mouth to everybody's ears is listening to this. Four years ago, slutty vegan was just a ghost kitchen concept and four years later the company is now valued at $100 million when you come to slutty vegan, it's a party, The atmosphere is just amazing, the music is booming through the speakers, the employees are dancing, everybody wants to be a part of that. The fact that I have $100 million business, I still pinch myself every day. Like I'm not talking about a million, I ain't talking about five million, I'm talking about a black woman who owns $100 million business. Forget the fact that I'm just a black woman, a woman, a minority owned business, A woman whose family is from Jamaica who comes from humble beginnings who literally has never had a silver spoon in her mouth. Like you are looking at the new american dream, I don't care if you're black, white, blue, yellow, green, funny vegan, it's for everybody.

Award-winning songwriter Barry Dean and brother Jered Dean cofounded LUCI, a company that's changing an industry by turning “dumb wheelchairs into smart wheelchairs.”

How we started a company helping 500,000 people In wheelchairs

Photograph by Ted Willis and Corey Shepherd for Fortune

LUCI is changing an industry by turning “dumb wheelchairs into smart wheelchairs.”

How LUCI is helping 500,000 people In wheelchairs

Rhiannon is active, she races in the winter special olympics every year she likes to play indoor soccer, she wants that full life. And so for her to have that full book of memories, she's got to be able to get out and do things and lucy makes it easier and easier and the easier something is, the more we can pack into a day. Lucy is truly an innovative product by the most innovative product I've seen in about 10 years that can really impact clients functionally help them to either drive a power chair where perhaps they couldn't do that at all before or certainly drive it with much better confidence, competence and safety. So it's very exciting. Were the first company in this industry to ever make a smart connected device. Our ability to push out over the air update and have lucy keep getting smarter and smarter over time is a completely new idea in this industry. So lucy is an add on accessory for a power wheelchair that turns a dumb wheelchair into a smart wheelchair. We add sensors in the brain and connectivity to the power wheelchair so that the user has increased independence. That helps not run into things. Not drive off things, connects the user to their team and to the modern world. Obviously its mission. All we're you know, we're dealing with my daughter, his niece going, we need to solve a problem and all her friends, you know that are in the same boat. She has cerebral palsy. She gets a power chair when she's maybe five or about to be five and she touched the trigger. And it the speed had not been a justice. And it took off you know six miles an hour straight into a wall and she was fine. But I then promptly parked in the garage because I was like this is too scary. I wish I could say we sat down and said we're going to start a company. It was absolutely not that it was weird solve a technical problem, build the I. P. And the prototypes and then surely there will be companies that you know that that will do this. My basement became the headquarters of lucy for a while about a year later. I think we got our first three employees and then got an actual space. But yeah Catherine's been the north star from the beginning and then we've added two and met so many amazing people. Rhiannon was born with a rare birth defect called skit successfully. So it's a development delay in the brain and it affects her motor and verbal. Um So she's highly intelligent but you know she's not able to walk. My name is I am 16. I am my high school junior with her skits and hopefully she also has spasticity. So when she's trying to make her body do something sometimes the body will go the opposite direction or her tone will kick in and she'll go full forward and you can see the scars around the house where the chair would get up against and nothing slows it down. There's a lot of injuries in the wheelchair space more than there are people having motorcycle injuries and ending up in the er, 175,000 year. People ending up in the er, because of wheelchair injuries using a power chair is actually tougher than I think a lot of people think it takes learning in order to operate this very heavy device within an environment. These wheelchairs cost as much as a car. They weigh 3 to £500 without the person in them, but there's no modern technology on them. I mean, it's really kind of a boat, battery, some wheels and a joystick. Uh and good luck. The only safety stuff on a wheelchair would be a seatbelt. I mean, we we did crash testing with one of the top independent facilities in the country and they're saying that just running into a wall in one of these chairs at full speed violates the laws set up for cars and forward crashes and there's no bumper, the knees, the feet, your toes, That's the bumper in a wheelchair. I have had some clients I've worked with who have tipped over a chair and maybe broken an arm or injured their head. So, these are very, very serious concerns, Lucy is always looking looking for the clear path and if there's no clear path, it just brings you to a stop. We're seeing now with the users, we have, we're preventing over 10,000 collisions or drop offs, tip overs every week. This is the alpha prototype, the very first prototype, March 2017. It's off the shelf sensors, just whatever I could get from spark fund and find in the garage. It proved the theory that we could do it. So we really quickly went to a beta prototype about a month later. Katherine used this data prototype for a year and a half and during that time we tracked all the data from it learned where it worked and what didn't work well. And so we took all the stuff we learned here and developed what lucy product is without today. So lucy product looks like this. We call this the smart frame and this mounts onto a power wheelchair. And so you take this smart frame mounted down there, it plugs in between the joystick or the drive method and the motors and adds multiple kinds of sensors. So we have cameras um, one on each side of the user and one in the back. And then we have our own type of ultrasonic sensor that we develop and then hidden in here and down on the foot plate of the wheelchair. We have our own proprietary millimeter wave radar. And so take all that put it on the chair and that means your chair doesn't run into things. Doesn't drive off things is connected to the modern world. You can interact with lucy through Alexa through your phone. So turns it into a modern device. So when I first heard about lucy, I have to admit the first time I heard about it all I thought this can't possibly be true. And then when I learned more about it, started seeing some videos and had a chance to finally see lucy, I was really quite amazed that it worked as well as it did. It's an extremely sophisticated system. I was also excited because I work with very complex clients and anything that I can bring to them that helps them to be more functional than they are. I'm all in. We were hoping that it would be safer but it it is so much more with all of the independence and the confidence and watching Ryan and smile as she heads out the back door by herself and just her and ninja her dog and they're just off and they're gonna go for a walk and you're just not worried. It's fantastic Lucy has given me so much confidence. I am able to be more independent and do the things I want to do. She's 16 years old, she doesn't want mom and dad looming over all the time. Now she can go act like a teenager, we have a saying internally which is, life is a team sport. We have different clinicians, we have activity, people, we have specialists involved and doctors, so we set up the, my lucy app so that people can actually set up a team and choose what information to share the right or the driver of the chair can decide. This information needs to go to my doctor. This information needs to go to my caregiver. They can share uh battery status so that an alert goes out and let people know, hey, um, you know, Katherine's at this location, her battery's low, She may get stranded soon. You might want to check in right. One of the next things that we're working on. It sounds really simple, but it's just a pressure monitor for air cushions. That's not a hard tech list. That is just a knowing that there's a problem and getting the tech into the hands of the people that need it. Now that you actually have a computer and connectivity and a smart wheelchair. It becomes a freeing device not just for mobility but also for health. One of the things I'm really excited about that we just announced is the pediatric solution. Now you can get a wheelchair for a very young child with lucy on it once kids start crawling their vision and visual perceptual skills really explode all sorts of the area areas of the brain. Just like if kids don't have this ability to have independent mobility before the age of five, it changes the whole waterfall of development of possibilities for them for their whole life. You can't get that back. I think this is going to really change a lot of people's lives. So lucy is right now getting funded by insurance and Medicaid and the V. A. But usually there's some pushback because it's new technology. So if I recommend a power chair for a client, it's being paid for by an insurance company or by a state Medicaid program or perhaps a federal Medicare program. Well, the problem is something new comes along and there's not room in our current construct for how do we deal with a truly new product once these funders see it that first time in real life, what it can do for that user, we found that people tend to flip pretty quickly to, oh this actually makes a lot of sense. I think they're starting to come around especially on the lucy device because they're starting to see what long term It actually will save them money. Rhiannon is priceless but her equipment around her is $30,000 every time she rolls out the door and goes somewhere. So you obviously you don't want it bouncing off of things. It's been an interesting learning curve for us to learn how to combine the fact that there's that passion, there's that personal need That has built a real company that's really doing things in a real market now. We're at that place of raising our first funding and doing all that and that's going very well. But it's a very different path I think than most companies go on because it's already for sale. It's already in 40 states, you know, I mean hundreds of users, a lot of people see this and it is a mission all company. We have a cause, you know, we talk about moving at the speed of the need, you know, the internally those kinds of things. But the fact of the matter is although suddenly realized this is a real incredible business opportunity as well. There's an assumption that wheelchairs are a real niche that there's not very many people using wheelchairs in the world. And that assumption is wrong. Uh, there's, you know, a million more people in wheelchairs in the US than there are electric vehicles in the US. We have a lot of these conversations about equity. But what is sometimes left off of that scale are people with disabilities. It's a broad range of people. Some of those people will require a power wheelchair to be as independent as possible. It's easy to look down upon people who are less functional than ourselves. And I think we need to remember that one of the beauties of assistive technology. One of the reasons that I enjoy assistive technology so much is it levels the playing field. So now someone who didn't have mobility before can be mobile. You look five years down the road and I think this will be um, inevitable that this technology is on every power wheelchair sold and you'll start seeing a lot of interesting new health and wellness options for wheelchair users, manual and power. There we go, Oh, now you're giving love.

On The Clock

Toshihiro Saito, the assistant director of F&B operations at Hotel Barrière Fouquet's New York, delves into what it takes to become a certified cicerone, also known as a beer sommelier. He also shows us how to pair five different beers with food. Please note: The following beers are not sold at Hotel Barrière Fouquet's New York and prices may vary.

What it's like drinking beer on the job as a cicerone, or beer sommelier

Toshihiro Saito of Hotel Barrière Fouquet's New York delves into what it takes to become a certified cicerone, or beer sommelier.

Being paid to drink beer as a cicerone, or beer sommelier

Toshihiro Saito, the assistant director of F&B operations at Hotel Barrière Fouquet's New York, delves into what it takes to become a certified cicerone, also known as a beer sommelier. He also shows us how to pair five different beers with food. 

Toshihiro Saito, the assistant director of F&B operations at Hotel Barrière Fouquet's New York, delves into what it takes to become a certified cicerone, also known as a beer sommelier.

flight bitterness but not anything extreme. I am a certified cicerone. It's also known as a, I think the very first idea of beer sommelier or cicerone sort of comes off as a person who's drinking beer all day. Unfortunately it's it's not as glamorous as that. There's actually a lot of legwork that actually goes into it before the beer actually ever gets presented to the guests. You need to start doing tastings, you need to start doing pairings, you need to start building out beer menus, finding the right glass where getting the right chillers. I was working at Gastro Pub at the venetian. There weren't too many people in las Vegas that actually had such a wide selection of beers. Had a cicerone actually on our staff when I started talking to him I started figuring out you know what there's so much more to learn about beer than I actually already knew I knew about I PS. And um supporters. I knew about stouts but to start talking about beer in a way that was almost like so romantic to become. And I think you really just need to be a beer nerd at heart. You need to start picking up books, you need to start doing your research, your knowledge about all the different styles of beer. You have to know about the srm the gravity of each beer, how it's been brewed, how it's been made, the history behind it, what it's supposed to taste like Being able to talk about it almost like wine. I think I've tasted about 500 beers now, maybe even more. There has been one or two instances where I have become slightly inebriated, opening up magnums of or doing these fantastic beer tastings, beer dinners. It's just one of the first of the job becoming Cicerone was probably one of the most difficult tests and exams that have actually ever come across. There's actually four different certifications. Each one has to be completed before you can go on to the next level. The exam was actually the course of an entire day. It was tasting for a major portion of it. The knowledge and theory portion of it was probably over 50% and then beer pairing was, I think about the 25% of the actual exam. It was an extremely arduous test, but very fulfilling, rewarding. Even after everything was done today, we're here at Hotel barriere Phuket and we're gonna be trying five different beers. We have a really nice, beautiful assortment going from light to dark. This is awful cold. This is a very unique style of beer that actually hails from the region of cologne in Germany. Think of champagne, I would pair this with fried chicken, it would be really nice carbonation just to go ahead and cut through the fat on the chicken. This is saison dupont. There's a really nice background to it. It is a farmhouse ale, so it has a little bit of like a barn Yardy sort of characteristic to it, but phenomenal, one of the best pairings of my entire life was actually done with the, I had this particular style with a triple cream cheese, a little bit of honeycomb and with a really nice crusty baguette. And that was the absolute moment where the light bulb went off and I said, wow, pairing beer and food is such a magical experience. This beer is is Tracy Fontaine from dust translation. It means three fountains. The style is an old goose is actually a blend of three different lamb bix, one year, two year, three year lambic from linda meant this actually pairs extremely well with a hot lobster roll the butter, the bread, the sweetness of the lobster itself extremely delightful pairing. This is ceo tiara is a Flemish red coming from Belgium. However, this beer itself is actually brewed in Italy is triple fermented first time in stainless steel and then aged in cognac barrels. This beer pairs extremely well with barbecued meats such as brisket and also strawberry cheesecake. So this beer is paola, its imperial Baltic porter hailing from the region of Estonia essay comes from the area of the Baltic Sea. It's much more malt driven. So you have flavors of coffee, chocolate, even really nice, rich molasses. This particular beer pairs extremely well with, say, a coffee crusted steak or even a flourless chocolate cake. When I first started, I thought that 300 beers was the crazy exorbitant amount for a beer list Now and days. I mean I've come across places that are even over 500 and 600 different skews for beers. Cicerone are definitely more in demand now, people are much more in tune to what's in their glass. They want to know more. They want to be able to go ahead and find these fantastic beers and they're asking the right questions. No, absolutely not.

Fortune Well

Try this quick and healthy stuffed pita recipe from registered dietitian Rena Shapiro, containing ingredients that can help boost your concentration and memory.

Improve your concentration with this quick stuffed pita recipe

Try this quick and healthy stuffed pita recipe with ingredients that can help boost your concentration and memory.

Try this quick recipe to improve your concentration

Try this quick and healthy recipe with ingredients that can help boost your concentration and memory.

Today, we're going to be making a stuffed pita with all these lovely ingredients to help improve concentration and memory. So, first, we're going to cut our whole wheat pita in half and we're using whole wheat because that helps to keep you full a little bit longer. It's high in fiber, helps to lower cholesterol and keeps you full for a nice long time. Next, we're going to take our arugula and stuff. The peta, it's high in antioxidants including folate iron and calcium, which helps to protect and aid our brain function. And then we are going to add our feta cheese, which is great for calcium and bone health and also the B vitamins for healthy nervous system. We're gonna add blueberries which are very high in antioxidants which are very important for brain function. Then we're gonna add our avocado that is rich in monounsaturated fats, which are our healthy fats that we need for proper brain function as well. Then we're gonna add pecans which are rich in vitamin E. It's another antioxidant and that's specifically to boost our memory. Then we are gonna add a little bit of lemon. Again, it's an antioxidant containing food and then a drop of olive oil again, rich in antioxidants that we need for absorption of all our vitamins and minerals. Now, we've made our quick healthy and delicious snack. I hope you enjoy it.

According to the CDC, Candida auris “presents a serious global health threat.”

What you need to know about the deadly fungal infection Candida auris

What you need to know about the deadly new fungal infection

If you've overexerted the muscles in your forearm, try this simple stretch with Austin Afshar from Spear Physical Therapy.

Relieve forearm tension with this one minute exercise

Follow these simple steps to relieve tension in your forearm.

If you find yourself playing tennis or maybe you just have some tension in the top of your forearm. Try this stretch. Mhm. What you wanna do is you want to put your arms directly out in front of you and you're gonna put gentle pressure on your hand to bring it down. You should feel a gentle stretch up at the top of the forearm. You want to hold this for 10 deep breaths After 10 deep breaths, gently relax your hand and bring your arm back down while doing this stretch. Be careful not to put too much pressure on your hand. You don't want to feel any discomfort in the wrist.

Black barbershops have a long history of being staples of the African American community, and now a new generation of barbers are paving the way to advocate for mental health and wellness among Black men across the U.S.

How barbers are becoming mental health advocates for Black men

A new generation of barbers are paving the way to advocate for mental health and wellness among Black men across the U.S.

How Black barbers are becoming mental health advocates

The barbershop has just always been a safe agent for the black community. Period. I believe that we're on a road of advocacy which can help to overturn stigma about mental health and black men and boys across America. There's a true disconnect culturally within black professionals in the mental health field. And so the confessed project of Americans helping to deploy mental health tools to the barbers and stylists that work with their clients. Everyday suicide is the third leading cause For young black men and boys. But only 4% of mental health professionals are recognized as African Americans and we really park it there. We really think about why is that the challenge a majority of African Americans are less likely to receive treatment than the general public. The stigmatism around it is this mindset that we don't need to talk to anybody. But the reality is that we do. And so that's where kind of the barbershop comes and play. The barbershop has just always been a safe haven for the community. Period. Historically, we think about a lot of the work that happened, the civil rights era around voting and civic participation. A lot of those episodes in our history happened in black barbershops and so barbershops have played a huge staple, not only in the civic participation, but in regards to the quality of life for Black Americans and their families, it's always been a free space for free conversation. And when people build a relationship with their barber per se, um the barber becomes more than just the person cutting their hair. When you see this person every single week, we build these relationships. They feel like they can confide in their barber in ways that they can't confide in, in their own homes. We know our clients like that with a few words, we can tell it's something different than the last time that they sat in our chair. We like to believe that the training that we provide are seen as too just like CPR first aid, active listening, a better way to listen to their clients, to support their clients validation, being able to validate someone's emotions and feelings, positive communication, being able to communicate in a positive way, have a positive tone. Lastly, a stigma reduction, being able to de stigmatize mental health, being able to combat negative language and negative thinking around mental health. About 10 years old, I got dropped off at the barbershop. I was raised under a single mother. So her idea of me being exposed to men was dropping me off at the barbershop on Saturdays. So I would hang out at the barbershop all day, sweep the floor straighten up the magazine racks, et cetera. And I kind of made my mind up that, that was like the coolest guy in the neighborhood. You know, he was the one that everybody respected. And I wanted to be that guy just raised this standard and be this standard for my community. I was introduced to the confessed project. By way of Lorenzo, I felt like connecting with the confessed project allowed me to feel like I was a resource for my community. It's been a joy to be on this journey um of continuing to uplift just the iconic history of Black Barbershops. The organization since 2016 has now impacted 2.4 million people across 48 cities in 28 states. Over 50% of the barbers that we've trained are more inclined to understanding mental health than they were before. And over 90% of those same individuals received therapy or have therapists connected to their barbershop. We're not therapists, but I think we can converse eight to a point that we can discover whether something's really going on. And if I need to refer them to a therapist, historically, we've just always kind of been the gap between having someone to speak to professionally and the person that really just didn't even want to listen to them. My advice is confiding people that you really trust, spend time with them and, and really value your self care whether it's made attention before you go to sleep or walk, whatever it, I think we just gotta, we really got to tap in for someone who's dealt with, you know, major depression and who's been in recovery with mental health. One of the key things that I recognized was having a regiment around. How do you support your own mental health? Whether that's through journaling exercise, whether that's also through a better support system. My hopes for mental health, especially in our community is, you know, that we're more open about what we're going through just having real conversations. My message to young black men and boys was to be encouraged that it is a path of head, but there's light truly on the other side of the tunnel.

You missed out on some sleep during the workweek and are looking forward to sleep in and pay off that "sleep debt" once the weekend rolls around. But is that actually good for you? Sleep scientist Dr. Rebecca Robbins breaks down our sleep cycle and everything you should know about our natural circadian rhythms.

Fact or Fiction: Is it possible to pay off your sleep debt?

Dr. Rebecca Robbins of Harvard Medical School breaks down sleep cycles, circadian rhythm, and "sleep debt".

Is it possible to pay off your sleep debt?

Dr. Rebecca Robbins of Harvard Medical School explains.

One of the most common trends in our population is curtailing the amount of sleep that we get during the work week and thinking that we can repay our sleep on the weekend, doing things that we often view as luxurious like sleeping in. But believe it or not, sleeping in is one of the worst things that we can do for our sleep spending enough time sleeping is of course one of the most important and central parts of what we're increasingly referring in the field to sleep health. It is a myth to think that we simply crawl into the sheets and enter the state of sleep and then we wake up and haven't moved an inch to the contrary. Sleep is actually a very rich and very variegated process. The gold standard of sleep measurement is something called policy sonography and that is largely done in the context of a laboratory setting. Policy. Sonography simply refers to multiple modes of measurement. We're gonna be monitoring your brainwaves, your respiratory effort, your heart rate, a host of different things that allow us to understand which stage of sleep you're in at which time Over the course of your sleep. When we crawl into the sheets at night we enter some of the lighter stages of sleep and we're entering sleep slowly and it's a stage stage one and two that are marked by slightly slower brain waves in the wake state. But as we're entering sleep, this is a period of time in the lighter stages of our sleep at night. They were very able to be awoken by noises or things that are going on around us. Then we enter stage three deep sleep, which is the closest thing we get to hibernation as human beings in a 24 hour day and then something fascinating happens after about 20 minutes in a healthy sleeper, we enter our first rapid eye movement period of the the dreaming period of our night actually plays a really vital role for our brain to bring up events that happened from the day. The rapid eye movement sleep is where we believe. We got a lot of the benefits cognitively of our sleep and our ability to retain and remember information. What's so fascinating is that the structure of sleep is actually intact almost remarkably no matter the amount of sleep that you get. So what's so fascinating is that the human body and the brain adapt to that maybe shorter period of sleep. But then in the nights following those nights of curtailed and shortened sleep, our body and our brains actually spend a little bit more time in rapid eye movement sleep, we call this rem rebound because such a vital stage for our cognitive performance and excellence. Our sleep is governed by two processes. The first is called our home a static sleep drive and what that refers to is our overall sense of sleepiness. That homo static drive simply builds with the amount of hours that we've been awake over the course of the day and then that declines it's repaid with our sleep over the course of our nighttime. The other process that has a really significant role in our sleep is something called our circadian rhythm. Now that rhythm as it sounds eggs and flows over the 24 hour day in a very rhythmic, beautiful and predictable fashion and our circadian drive determines the times that we're optimally alert and times that work optimally sleepy over the course of a 24 hour day. The circadian system is most influenced by our environment and the pattern of light and darkness in the world around us. The on switch to the sleep phase of our circadian rhythm is darkness going into an envoy is free of light when we're ideally able to align our wake up time with sunlight exposure. That flips the off switch, stops the floodgates of melatonin and allows us to be alert and go about our days without the presence of those time cues. Our circadian rhythm becomes very confused and unsure when it should be awake and when it should be sleepy. Now when we change our sleep time, believe it or not even one hour makes a big difference. So if you've ever slept in late on a saturday morning and wake woken up 234 hours beyond your normal work week, Wake up time and felt really groggy. The circadian system is why, because what you've done is you've actually done the same thing as popped in an airplane and fly into a new time zone so your brain is starting to play catch up. We often think that sleep is just relegated to the nighttime hours or just the time that you plan to start sleeping. But believe it or not, a good night's sleep really starts as soon as we wake up. So things to keep in mind over the course of the day are getting natural light exposure. That helps us think our circadian rhythm to the pattern of light and darkness around us exposure to natural sunlight also can boost our energy. So ideally what we want to do, not only get enough sleep, but one of the core tenants of sleep is keeping a consistent sleep schedule. We're all so unique and different and diverse that we each have a different sleep need now do your best to protect that night in and night out.

Texting on your phone or checking your social media can lead to "tech neck," or extra stress and discomfort on the back of your neck. Try this simple stretch with Austin Afshar from Spear Physical Therapy to help alleviate some of that pain.

Fix your "tech neck" with this one minute exercise

Texting on your phone or checking your social media can lead to "tech neck," or extra stress and discomfort on the back of your neck. Try this simple stretch.

Follow these simple steps to fix your "tech neck."

We live in a world where we're constantly on our phones, tablets and computers while you're looking down, checking your email, text and social media, which you're also doing is putting a lot of extra stress on the back of your neck. We call that technique technique can lead to a lot of pain and discomfort If that's you try this exercise that will strengthen the back of your neck and help alleviate some of that pain. So what you want to do is make sure you're standing and you're staring at something directly in front of you. The next step is you're going to gently pull your head directly back. Think about giving yourself a double chin, Hold for three seconds After three seconds, relax and do it again. You want to try to get in three sets of 10 for a three second, hold throughout the day. One thing to just be aware of is try not to pull your head back too much, it shouldn't be uncomfortable. Again, this exercise is great if you find yourself looking down at your phone, looking at a computer or a tablet or even looking down at a book or newspaper

Sodas with prebiotics are all the rage right now—but just how good are they for you? Registered dietitian Maya Feller explains.

Fact or Fiction: Are prebiotic sodas really good for you?

Sodas with prebiotics are all the rage right now—but just how good are they for you?

Are prebiotic sodas really good for you?

Registered dietitian Maya Feller explains.

Our prebiotic soda is good for everyone. Prebiotic sodas are kind of hot right now. This trend really started because manufacturers are looking for ways to make foods functional and a prebiotic soda is exactly that. It's got prebiotic fibers added to it so that it's mimicking the fibers that we're eating on a daily basis. Here's the thing. Many of the people living in this country don't actually take in fiber on a regular, In consistent basis. So that actually means that we're not meeting the recommendation for our intake of fruits and vegetables. There are recommendations for fiber intake that are based on sex assigned at birth. So the general recommendations are around 25g of fiber per day for women and about 35g of fiber per day for men. When we're talking about prebiotic sodas, what we see Being promoted as healthy is actually the high fiber content. Some of them actually have like 32% of the daily value for fiber. Now, here's the challenge is that amount of fiber is good for some people. However, it's not good for everyone. Also remember we're talking about liquid fiber going in the way that your body is absorbing. It is rather rapidly one Indyk later when we're thinking about, am I eating enough fiber is kind of what's going on with your digestion. So if your digestive system is functioning optimally, you will be excreting stool and that's a really good thing. If you're not, then maybe we want to think about increasing your fiber intake when we're thinking about the human microbiome. We are filled with millions of bugs bacteria. Probiotics are the non digestible carbohydrates that actually ferment further down in the colon and they act as nourishment for probiotics. So, prebiotic fibers, when we're thinking about where they're found in food, are found in things like Jerusalem, artichokes, dandelion greens, garlic, onion, the skins of almonds and other nuts also have plenty of prebiotic fibers. Probiotics are involved helping to increase the diversity of gut bacteria. And when we're thinking about overall health, specifically immune health, when there's a diverse set of gut bacteria, right? Lots of different good bugs. There tends to be better immune health expressions and that's why we really love prebiotic fibers because they're that nourishment for the probiotics. Probiotics are found in fermented dairy products. They're also found in pill supplement form. If you're taking a supplement, you want to make sure that it's from a safe and trusted source. Another thing that I like to remind people about probiotics and the colony forming units is that probiotics when taken too quickly and in excess can actually also cause gi distress. So we like to remind people that there are multiple strains and really you want to work with a qualified health care provider who can help you make the choice that fits your health and nutrition needs. So some of the things that people might want to think about when they're choosing a prebiotic soda is actually the quantity of added sugars. I like to remind everyone that four g of sugar is about one teaspoon. So if you're seeing a product that has multiple teaspoons of added sugar and perhaps that's not a choice that you want to make on a regular basis. Just because a product is marketed as good for you, doesn't mean that it's good for all. If you're a person that has a sensitive stomach, if you have a history of digestive distress or any kind of irritable bowel syndrome, a prebiotic soda may not be right for you. I always like to remind people that health trends are health trends, right? And sometimes we hear them when we think I've got to get on that trend and usually what I actually say is hold on one second, let's evaluate. I want you to think about where you stand right now with your pattern of eating. How do you feel about it? Our fruits and vegetables showing up? Are we seeing holy ancient grains, What does animal protein look like on your plate? I want to think about the full picture before you jump on that health trend and start adding supplementation. And let's think about what your base looks like and how you can really modify it to meet your individual needs.

Pickleball has burst into the mainstream due to its low barrier to entry and variety of health benefits—including the opportunity to socialize and build community—and investors big and small have picked up on the trend.

How pickleball became the fastest growing sport in America

Pickleball has burst into the mainstream and attracted big-name investors due to its low barrier to entry and variety of health benefits.

Pickleball has burst into the mainstream and attracted big-name investors due to its low barrier to entry and variety of health benefits—including the opportunity to socialize and build community.

there's this massive explosion and it's just really taken off first time hit the ball. I was like in love with the sport and I think once people play it, they become addicted to the point where they don't ever want to play anything else. Pickleball is a paddle sport, combines elements of badminton, table tennis and tennis. It's similar to tennis where you're trying to get your opponents to make an error either by hitting into the net out or letting the ball bounce twice and you're trying to score points. So first team to 11 wins the game, the dimensions are exactly the same as the badminton court, so it's 20 ft wide by 44 ft long. Pickleball was started and sort of 1965 by the pritchard family from Bainbridge island Washington and in Washington they had these boat races where they would have a boat which is the stronger rowers and then the B boat which was kind of random people thrown into the boat together and they would call that the pickle boat, they were looking for a game for their kids to play. They had ping pong paddle ball, they were trying to play badminton, they didn't have enough stuff and so they set it up and started playing the game kind of took off from there When I discovered pickleball, it was the middle of the first summer pandemic and I think there were the ideal conditions for the sport of pickleball to kind of really thrive. It was a game that families could go outside, you can easily set up a net in your driveway. Once people started playing it really kind of took off. Pickleball has a very low barrier to entry. You can learn the game in 10, 15 minutes. So relative to other sports where the learning curve can feel quite steep before you can actually play a game of all, you can really just jump right in from the get go. It's a low price point from an accessibility perspective when you play it, you can play it at a very active manner. You can play it very casually from when I first started playing, I played with my grandfather and my mom and I can still play with my grandfather and my mom. So I think this is really cool that you can just play with all eight Throughout your family. So I just think it's a sport for everyone and that everyone can do together. And so there's a really fun, joyous element to it as well. As of today we've got about five million active players growing at 30, We expected to be close to 40 million players in the next 10 years. If that happens, it would be the largest participated in the us, my friends when I first started playing pickleball had absolutely no idea. But then once it kind of exploded there, like seeing me on tv and stuff and they're like, oh my gosh, this is like a real thing, I would say in the beginning of my pickleball career when we would go and travel somewhere and we would tell someone why were in town, they would be like, what's pickleball? And we'd have to explain it to them and now when we go and I'm like, oh my gosh, I love pickle ball, I played all the time or I just started playing pickle ball. I feel like everyone knows what it is when you look at sort of the amateur grassroots game and you have five million players going to 40 million. That would be more than tennis or golf. So you have a mass population of players playing when people are playing games, they're gonna obviously buy equipment, they're gonna buy merch, they're gonna join clubs, they're gonna watch professional league. So when you think about that huge community, uh, there's a tremendous investment opportunity. There are a number of celebrities and athletes that have a real passion for the game. And as a result of that passion, a significant amount of them have been investing in MLP and other ventures in Pickleball. The Kardashian started playing it. Vanderpump rules, it was featured on there, some major athletes like Lebron James and Draymond and kevin Love and tom brady and kim clijsters started purchasing major League Baseball teams, longoria visit Azul Heidi Klum, I met Jamie Foxx, Michael Phelps, Larry Fitzgerald, like I played pickleball with all of them, there's like so many celebrities that are getting into Pickleball or that have pickleball courts at their house or investing to pickleball, there's just a lot of engagement because people fundamentally are looking to invest in where they have a passion and I think a lot of these folks come from a passion of playing and then they recognized that sort of growth in the game and that's the reason they come in to invest. Community is such a key aspect to pickleball. Once you get into it, once you start playing it's very easy to have this passion for it and want to play it every day. So when you find others who share this passion you instantly have this connection. It's one of these games where if you've never played it before you can show up to a court and people will always embrace you. They're really interested in teaching other people how to play it within a couple of games, you'll know all the roles and you're never gonna leave that community. Um It's really fanatical in that way which is really wonderful. I really look forward to it growing. Two point where 40 million people are playing in the U. S. And that number more than doubles globally. I think if we can do that it unites people, it brings people into community. It brings a lot of things that we sort of need in the world in the country and I'm pretty excited about all those things

If you're concerned about your posture or dealing with rounded shoulders, try this simple stretch with Austin Afshar from Spear Physical Therapy.

Fix your rounded shoulders with this one minute exercise

If you're concerned about your posture,  or dealing with rounded shoulders, try this simple stretch with Austin Afshar from Spear Physical Therapy.

Follow these simple steps to fix your rounded shoulders.

We see a lot of people in the clinic that come in and concerned about their posture, specifically having rounded shoulders. Rounded shoulders can lead to a lot of discomfort in the back as well as pain in the front. If that's you, this exercise is for you. What you want to do is you want to stand up nice and tall arms by your side, you're gonna bring your shoulders down about a half an inch and squeeze your shoulder blades gently together. You're gonna hold for about three seconds After that, relax. You're gonna feel yourself get pulled to the front. That's a good sign that tells you that you need to be doing this exercise. An ideal number is going to be three sets of 10 for three seconds. Again, this exercise is great if you're concerned about your posture or if you find yourself in a prolonged seated position in a car or on a plane.

Conventional wisdom dictates you should always aim for eight hours of sleep a night. Is that fact or fiction? Sleep scientist Dr. Rebecca Robbins explains the thinking behind the eight-hour sleep recommendation, and offers tips for people struggling with sleep.

Fact or Fiction: Do you really need eight hours of sleep a night?

Sleep scientist Dr. Rebecca Robbins explains the thinking behind the eight-hour sleep recommendation, and offers tips for people struggling with sleep.

Do you really need eight hours of sleep a night?

do we all need eight hours of sleep at night? I think for many years we've focused really solely on this idea of getting enough sleep and kind of focusing on this magical a number. But the truth is the recommendation for sleep duration is actually a range from 7 to 9 hours. The eight hour sleep recommendation is simply overly simplistic because all of us are so unique and different and our genes in part determine how much sleep we need on a regular basis. But then other factors also loom large for our sleep. If you've had a really into Activity, if you're going through a really intense period as a student of exams and studying, then you will benefit from increased sleep that night. The key message here is that by and large are sleep recommendation is intensely personal. It takes the average, even healthy sleeper, about 15 or 20 minutes to fall asleep. When people tell me they're getting eight hours of sleep, that actually means that they're getting closer to maybe 7.5 or even seven hours simply answering the question. How do I feel in the morning after? Our sleep can be an extremely powerful measure of the quality of our sleep. Now that's important because you or I could spend the same amount of time sleeping. But maybe you or I are experiencing something stressful or maybe we had too much caffeine the day before. Other things like our environment where we're sleeping, there's noise in the environment around us, all of these factors combined to increase or decrease the quality of the sleep that we get another myth is that there are some people that can get by or do fine on less than seven hours. But all of our research shows without a shadow of a doubt that those that are consistently sleeping six or fewer hours at night are at increased risk for chronic conditions. In the short term we see in increased risk for simply poor mood. Maybe you're more prone to feelings of anxiety or feelings of depression, but unfortunately, those can snowball pretty quickly into serious mental health concerns. Our vigilance also decreases. Were less able to get more and give more at our workout. Make healthy nutrition choices in the longer term when we monitor individuals that aren't getting enough sleep consistently night in the night out. That puts them at increased risk for a host of adverse outcomes. And those could include things like cardiovascular disease, high blood pressure and increased risk for heart attacks, obesity and stroke. We also want to be managing our stress over the course of the day, stress is the number one cause of insomnia. If you have an experience that is a little stressful, try to cultivate a relaxation response, Consider journaling or doing a brief period of meditation to try to re center exercise is also beneficial for slaves. Now, nutrition is also directly related to our sleep. Such that maintaining a healthy nutrition is really important for the quality of our sleep. You want to stop eating ideally about an hour or hour and a half before you want to be falling asleep, caffeine consumption and alcohol are also important consideration for our sleep. When you consume caffeine, you actually have to count down about six hours, sometimes, even more than that for the time that it will take for that caffeine to leave your body ideally tapering off and not having any more caffeine after noon is that caffeine consumption could interfere with your sleep that night when it comes to drinking alcoholic beverages, one small glass of wine at night, especially when coupled with dinner might not be a problem, but much more than that can interfere with your sleep. Now unfortunately we don't have a silver bullet that will put us right to sleep. And so we have to set ourselves up for success by thinking of all of the sleep strategies that we've talked about so far reserve this time before bed as time for you. Unplug from your day, switch off your screens and start to transition to a different mentality. Try to shift your mindset, try to slow down your breathing, do things that you know, really relax you whether that's a warm shower, a warm bath, switching off your phones, starting a relaxing skincare routine, putting on body lotions that have smells and aromas that relax you and soothe you. These strategies when practice diligently will give your brain a cue that what comes after these relaxing activities is sleep

Whether you've been sitting on an airplane for a prolonged period of time or woken up on the wrong side of your bed, this simple stretch will help relieve pain in your neck. Austin Afshar from Spear Physical Therapy explains.

Try this one minute stretch for neck pain

Follow these simple steps to relieve pain in your neck, trapezius, and upper shoulders.

airplane travel can expose you to a lot of uncomfortable positions. We've all been there, we've woken up, we get a lot of pain on the side of our neck and we're unsure what to do next time that happens to you. Try this stretch to start off, you want to keep your eyes locked on something in front of you and you're gonna slowly bring your left ear to your left shoulder. You should feel a gentle stretch on the right side of your neck where your upper trapezius muscle. What you want to do is hold this for 10 deep breaths. After 10 deep breaths, slowly bring your head back up, take a break and then you can do the other side while doing this stretch. Make sure not to turn your head up or down and again, keep your eyes locked on something in front of you. This stretch again is very valuable if you find yourself falling asleep on a plane or if your prolonged sitting for work or travel.

From mud masks to meditation apps and more, this year's list of top lifestyle products contains picks from CEOs, scientists, business leaders, and health innovators.

Introducing Fortune's top recommended lifestyle products for 2023

Introducing Fortune's top recommended fitness products for 2023

6 top recommended fitness products for health and wellness

Path to Zero

BluShift made history in 2021 for launching the first commercial rocket using biofuel. As rocket use grows so does concern about polluting the stratosphere. Small companies are developing innovative solutions to the problem.

This eco-friendly rocket fuel can change the space industry

BluShift made history in 2021 for launching the first commercial rocket using biofuel. 

BluShift made history in 2021 for launching the first commercial rocket using biofuel. As rocket use grows so does concern about polluting the stratosphere. Small companies are developing innovative solutions.

BluShift made history in 2021 for launching the first  commercial rocket using biofuel.

Rocket launches are gonna increase by some tenfold over the next 10 years. Going from a very small percentage of contribution to climate change to a very large portion. We're doing stuff to make our airplanes more sustainable car transportation more sustainable. What are we doing for rockets? Why is it important to address the issue of sustainability of rocket activities? The stratosphere is a region of the atmosphere that is extremely sensitive to small changes, primarily that's due to the mass of air that's there. You're up at 1/10 to 1 1000 of the pressure when you deposit exhaust products up their, their impact on climate, their impact on ozone is disproportionate. If the surface you've got something that lasts for a few weeks in the stratosphere, you've got something that lasts for a few years. There are two kinds of particles, there are black carbon particles and there are aluminum particles and these particles have a huge lever arm in terms of their influence on climate and ozone because they're in the stratosphere, the same materials emitted at the surface of the earth would have no impact at all. That's where the uniqueness of rockets comes in. There are a variety of rocket fuels that are currently in use very generally. We don't think of the environmental part of it when we think about their uses were thinking primarily about the energy that you get the cost and the safety of those fields across the industry. We're seeing a handful of companies working on bio fuel alternatives. I'm Sasha, dairy and Ceo and founder of Blueshift Aerospace, It was about a decade ago that I started blue shift and it really started on a farm. They have to be my brother's farm and at the time we were testing out a certain type of rocket engine using petroleum fuel. And I sat down my brother's kitchen and I saw the certain substance on his windowsill. He just pulled off the farm a few weeks before and I thought gosh, if this if this could work as well or even close to as well as petroleum alternatives, it's a much more sustainable way of fueling rockets. And so it was like maybe two weeks later we tested out the fuel. Found out not only did it work, it work better than the petroleum that we made history as the very first company to have launched a rocket commercially using a carbon neutral bio derived, non toxic rocket fuel. We saw the media and the public questioning the larger rocket companies, why why aren't you doing things in a more sustainable way? In the past, the space industry has been dominated by a few very large players. Us government soviet government, chinese government. But now space is becoming a free market commercial activity. And so we expect small companies to start to play a role here. Gregory Constantine ceo of their company. Their company is a carbon utilization company that takes carbon dioxide before it's captured from the atmosphere and turns it into useful products that can help shape our future. Yeah. The beauty about working with groups such as Nasa is they're really focused on pushing innovation and pushing research and development. And some of the work that we're doing with them is really geared towards the rocket fuel that we're making from carbon dioxide and how we can optimize the use of the work that is done in academia. And the work that is done in lab doesn't often find its way to commercial realities as well. And because it's a big challenge. Um and so we try to spend a lot of time innovative business solutions as well that allow that innovation to see the light of day in the real world, thankfully some of the work that we're doing with groups like Nasa as well allows us for that research and development into actuality small companies that innovate. If they can innovate and there's all this room for growth, then they can change the face of the space. The biggest challenge right now is the research, we have to understand now what these different propellant types will do in the future. We know that the amount of carbon dioxide put out by a medium sized rocket is about the same as an airline flight. And we know there are thousands of airline flights every day and there are only a few 100 rocket launches each year. So when it comes to the big picture aviation has thousands of times greater impact than spaceflight. But when it comes to the upper part of the atmosphere, there is no aviation, and rockets are the only game in town. The spaceflight industry, It's very small right now. And if it froze that way, we could write the paper and and go home. But we think it's going to grow a lot and that's why we have to get better scientific information.

Shared e-bike companies like Citi Bike aim to improve their goals towards sustainability.

How e-bikes are challenging green transportation 

So our focus on sustainability starts with the product itself. And so we're really focused on getting and putting the best products on the street. And so I think what a lot of folks are advocating for and what they see as the future is that we go from a two car household to a one car household with more trips taken on public transportation by foot, by bike, by electric bike, by cargo bike and by all the other future modes that will be smaller and more efficient. I'm Laura Fox, I'm the general manager of city bike for lift. Citi bike is a part of lift and it's a core part of how lift provides the world's best transportation services in new york city. We've been here for about 10 years already. Uh, D C boston over 10 years. The transportation is the largest sector for emissions that cause climate change and private car ownership is the largest portion of those emissions, so we need to get people to drive less. I really think that e bikes are car killers in the best of ways. Um, there's been a number of studies that have shown that when people buy an e bike themselves that they reduce their driving habits by about 70%. And a lot of the analysis in this space shows that if people just took about 15% fewer car trips, we could reduce overall transportation emissions by at least 12%. Electric micro mobility is the term that's used to describe 2 to 3 wheeled vehicles that are powered by electric battery and typically under a certain weight e bikes, electric scooters. Um, some folks would even call certain lighter weight electric mopeds, electric micro mobility, even though electric bikes have been around in china since the eighties, it really just started taking off in the US about five years ago and really picked up even more during Covid. And during the lockdown oftentimes you can imagine I'm the bike lady in the room who is getting people telling me, oh, that's nice. But no one's going to ride bikes. And I love saying, you know, last 3, 28 million rising 1.3 million unique riders at a time when not many new Yorkers were riding. We really have to optimize the operations themselves to ensure that we're being even as sustainable as we possibly can within the core operations first is one of the core problems of bike share is how do you match supply and demand? Um, and the term that we use to, you know, try to do that is called rebalancing. So bringing bikes from one location and taking them to another, um, or creating more capacity in one location itself. And so bike angels, which is an innovation that we've had in the system for about six years now is a core way that we reduce the vehicle trips required to take bikes from one place to another. My name is Rachel met and I think I started with the bike angels program soon after I became a member last fall, it's just a Gamification of the program where it will show you on the app, all of the docks and it will give a point value to each of the docks. So now I've been a member for over a year, but my membership has been extended by over six months, so I did not just have to pay my annual fee. Again, I don't have to do that for another six months, but I'll continue getting points and that will probably be pushed out and we see that for all the rebalancing work that we need to do across the system to meet supply and man by angels are a third of all of that work, if that reduces the number of lift trucks that have to move bikes around, that's fewer cars on the streets. And I love that as a cyclist and pedestrian to make our streets safer for everyone. A second piece within operations on that sustainability metric is how do we repair as many bikes in the field as we can to reduce the number of bikes that have to come back to depose. And then third is we think about the longevity of the hardware itself. The large majority of the emissions over the life cycle of the bike would be from manufacturing. So to get the lowest greenhouse gas emissions per mile of, over the lifetime, you want to expand the lifespan of that vehicle and that's often a challenge in the context of, because the vehicles are used very intensively, they're kept outside, you know, and sometimes that goal of expanding lifespan is intention with other pressures they might be facing, such as replacing the current fleet with new models that might have improvements or you know, be safer in other ways. And so we continue to bring that mindset of how do we design and pressure, test and reliability, test those products and bring in all of our operating knowledge to know what's going to really last at left in Citi bike, the need to be green and to make money are, you know, combined, right. If we were to put out a bad product or to have inefficient operations, we would lose money. And so really there's great incentives built into the program to deliver on outside of mode shift, which is a core part of the business model to ensure that we deliver the most sustainable operations um for the system. I think that there's a couple of different key parts. When we think about the future of micromobility for city bike, we're in the middle of $100 million investment to double the size of the city bike service area, bringing it to more and more new Yorkers at the end of it will cover 60% of new york city population, the more we can make these options available and make it easier to be environmentally conscious and be sustainable um the more likely more people are to do it. And I think in the future we'll see new types of vehicles, including some that are starting to come out that are enclosed three wheeled vehicles that have the, you know, the sort of footprint more of a bike but are actually like enclosed and protect against the elements. So we may see some evolution. But to date, micro mobility is primarily about electric bikes and electric scooters. And I think the transition toward electric micro mobility is only just beginning.

Companies like Samsung and Fairphone are focused on making products that use recycled and ethically-sourced materials.

Your smartphone is bad for the planet; these companies want to help

Your smartphone is bad for the planet

Samsung and Fairphone are focused on making sustainable products.

there's an unsustainable consumption pattern that's happening. You know, we talk about fast fashion, but fast tech right at their phone, we strongly believe that we want our business to be a force for good and for us that means both environmentally socially, but also financially maybe it's coming off the pandemic, but I think the timing that is really right for these products and I think it's it's good for a company. But I think more importantly, I think it's good for the environment. If you're not considering social and environmental impacts when you're making business decisions, then you're not making fully informed business decisions. Mhm. The electronics industry is notorious for making thin light capable machines when you know, mobile computing started in the 80s. It wasn't something that came into the consciousness of corporations. You know, maybe we should think about the fact that this cobalt mine is in a place that may use a lot of child labor may use a lot of unclean energy to get it out of the earth. We still want thin light fast devices but there's a growing movement that is really interested in how sustainable something is in our few the rapid life cycles and the short lifetime of devices actually is the main problem um designing a device that is meant to last and also building the ecosystem around it that actually a device can last longer by introducing this longer term vision. Um I also start immediately tackling problems not only for the planet, but also for the people in this, in this supply chain. If you look at mobile products, about 80% of the life cycle, greenhouse gas impacts all the way from raw material extraction through production to use and then back around again is in production and so it doesn't make sense, you know, to be throwing these things away, I sat down with Mark Newton who is the head of sustainability for Samsung. Now, Samsung is a massive company. They don't just make smartphones and refrigerators and washing machines and home appliances, they also make semiconductors, they make battery packs for electric vehicles, they're a tremendous company. Their goals are pretty aggressive, so by 2030 they want to become net zero with consumer electronics, they have manufacturing plants, they have locations all over the world and that means that in order to become net zero, they have to essentially work with each individual country to raise up the infrastructure essentially. Samsung is sort of planting the flag and saying, okay, you know, we're going to do this and we're gonna make this happen, sustainability is crucial for tech because of the level of consumption and how integrated tech is into our everyday lives. You know, the most sustainable phone is the one that's in your pocket. It's the one that you can use and repair and change and swap and customize as technology gets better. Fair phone is a company that started in 2013 and their whole model is essentially to provide a smartphone experience, that you know, looks very similar to say, your iPhone in your pocket that incorporates sustainability recycling bility, repairability and even ensuring fair wages for workers Every year. We sell and buy their 4, 1.4 billion smartphones worldwide and we use them around 2-3 years and then after use less than 20% actually is handed in for recycling. It's actually a huge waste machine Plus also these rapid lifecycle said you can imagine the effect it has on the C. +02 and material use, but also the short term focus is quite a big influence on the people working in this supply chain. They're doing something in this space to innovate for long enough that larger companies are coming to them and being like, okay, what have you learned? How did you do this small part that you see here, it makes your phone shake and that's made of constant from here. What can we learn from you so that we can incorporate more sustainable products. You wanted a compromise to be as small as possible because for me, my goal as fair phone is I want my users that they love to keep their phone and use longer. Yet for me, what is beautiful? Is it beautiful? They're just thin thinner, thinnest or is it actually beautiful that say, hey, there's a design idea behind this that cares for the materials for the people working in the supply chain and for the environment. Ace is interesting because they're known mostly for gaming computers. They offer a lot of really innovative stuff in that space. They also work in chromebooks, things that kids use at schools. They're launching their very first sort of 30% post consumer recycled laptop called the vero. We've made sure that it is used to operate able so it's pretty easy to pop in more memory or in a gaming laptop to put a different graphic processor. And so I consider that table stakes today where the customers want that and the idea is over time, there's no premium, you know, it's chicken and the egg as you get scale and you get your production lines up the the added cost to have recycled plastics comes down and after a while it'll be just, you know, I think everyone will have green products. The question is how soon will people have it? We're ready now. And I think some of the competitions maybe a year or two behind Once, it's part of our design criteria. Um, just like energy efficiency and performance and all those things. Just as part of that trade off analysis that we do then it just becomes something that is ubiquitous with the product are buds to pro it has 90% recycled content in the plastic even one generation before we were like really proud to get 20% recycled content and so we know we can do it. I went into this story thinking why hasn't this happened? Like why haven't we seen more green products on the market, all of those sort of different groups are converging to move us towards the future that's a little bit more sustainable from an employment perspective, from a global supply chain perspective from an environmental perspective. The first step is that we want to raise awareness. So we uncover for that complex supply chain and figure out, hey, where are things going wrong? The second step is that we innovate in our company and our supply chain on solutions to the malpractices that we found. But then the third step is that we want to convene other industry players and convince other players, hey, we now have a scalable solution that works, join in one of the things that I'm seeing that's really driving a lot of this is investor interest in the idea that companies that are considering sustainability in their business model are better run companies. It can be commercially successful to make both ethical choices in your supply chain and indeed be a commercially successful company. But I think ultimately, you know, I don't think, I don't think that we're coming out with green product of higher margins and make more money. I think it's just that the market is going to be asking for green and rather being a slow or fast follow, we want to leave the market. I am quite hopeful and I also see the different actors. I see legislation upcoming. I see other companies also moving in this direction. So I really am hopeful that Fair phone is not going to be the exception like we are now, but that we in the in a few years time, this actually will be the more instead of the exception.

Hydrogen fuel cells have several advantages over electric batteries.

Why hydrogen could fuel the future of transportation

this isn't who wins? This is a solving a pathway to dick carbonized transportation. We think electric vehicles and hydrogen fuel cell vehicles are complementary when it comes down to it, the objective here has to be transforming our total transportation system and making it a zero carbon path that is commercially viable, deployable across all sections and segments. Mhm There's an awful lot of historic discomfort around things like the hindenburg. That's, that's one of the folks always reference, you know, and what we've seen consistently is that, you know, if you treat hydrogen in a well organized and and respectful manner as we have in all industrial gasses, which is a perfectly reasonable fuel to you, education is critical for people just to even understand that Toyota sells a fuel cell vehicle, it's not just about Toyota to bring the solution, right, This is about the whole hydrogen economy, that's out there, right? So when you think about what makes fuel cell vehicles work is you have to have the hydrogen, you have to have the stations and you have to have the vehicle. So in the same way that we're building momentum, the rest of that hydrogen economy is also building momentum. Now, companies have their own sustainability goals and their own targets, it's the customers and the end users that are actually pulling others forward because they're saying in order for us to meet the goals that we've said to our shareholders by 2030 or 2050 we need to have these technologies, I think that's why people feel like that, the momentum is really here now and the time time is now when we produce hydrogen by electrolysis, you split a water molecule and you split into hydrogen and oxygen and in a fuel cell, what we do is we put our our hydrogen back into the fuel cell And it recombined hydrogen, uh, and the, the oxygen and doing so, an electron runs around an external circuit and that is the electrical charge that you, you you gather, we've been working on fuel cells for about 25 years. So it's not a new thing. The difference between maybe a battery electric vehicles and fuel cell vehicles, not that much right. You know, you're using the same sort of electrification. It's got the same electric motor, you're having similar, you know, controls that are on it. It's just the difference of how big of a battery you need on there or if you're using hydrogen as your source of energy to actually move you forward. The advantage of a fuel cell electric vehicle, it can refuel very quickly. So it's a very similar experience to say, a diesel vehicle, you can refuel it in 15 minutes and whether that's a truck or a bus or a train or ferry. And also the higher power requirements because in order to have a fully electric truck, for example, you would have to have a significant amount of batteries that would be heavy and that would reduce the payload. And so all of those customers that are in commercial vehicles and trucks, they're using those trucks for a purpose, right to deliver goods and if you reduce the amount of goods that they're able to deliver, that's a bad business model for them. So, um, in those larger vehicles and applications, that's why our fuel cells are an advantage over battery electric challenges in the fuel cell space has been infrastructure. So you need to be able to refuel these vehicles. That's one thing, the other is the cost, both the initial cost of a hydrogen fuel cell vehicle, um, and the total cost of ownership now that's been coming down significantly over time and will continue to do so, I think there's a couple elements. One is the cost of hydrogen itself, Green hydrogen for example, which is hydrogen that would be made from renewable energy. Part of that, we've seen the cost of renewable energy, the wind or solar have obviously come down tremendously. And that's a big input into the cost of producing hydrogen and producing that great hydrogen. So you need the cost of the fuel to come down and then you also need the cost of the equipment with any emerging technology. One of the big challenges is that manufacturing piece. So high cost of manufacturing, especially in in new technologies is quite common. So moving into that industrial scale production, you know, large scale standards that we would see in any other manufacturing industry improvement against, you know, manufacturing errors and things like that drive costs then rather dramatically. So as you have a maturing in the technology and the supply chains around the components improved, you also get significant cost savings there as well as those just pure manufacturing games that we see in every sector. When we think about sort of the generations of developments of fuel cell stacks and modules, we are now getting a point where, you know, we have that level of power and efficiency that are coming out of those platforms to really be a good cost solution for, for the applications that are being put in as a hydrogen economy. You know, we have to think about how all the different sort of players come together and actually help to help the issue. As one team, there's a lot of interest in hydrogen hubs right now, a lot of them around the country, a lot of states and a lot of areas are looking at it. They want to get in on the hydrogen economy. Hydrogen hubs are really important for the industry. For the whole hydrogen an economy. I think the scale, in most cases, you're looking at being able to produce hydrogen on site. We've seen that on a smaller scale at things like a porch. So there's all different kinds of equipment and support. You have the trucks, trucks, they are taking the goods back and forth. But you also have terminal tractors, you also have other pieces of equipment that can be fueled with hydrogen policy or other things make a difference that backing in and encouragement that confidence from from whether it's the state or the federal government or even other entities that want to support this. Just help to give a little bit of a lifting hands and say, hey, we believe in this even in those sort of maybe transitional times to make sure that that were being supported the way to help us see us through to the end. I think water is like that basic fundamental of life. You know, it's like without water, we don't live, right? And I love that it's water that's being used to create this oxygen hydrogen that's being used to sort of support mobility, right? So that for me is like personally a very beautiful picture of this fundamental of life that we need to be standing with. Something that can be fundamental in your mobility and transportation, right? And something that is in abundance here on earth.

Farmers need large retailers like Walmart to push the transition to a more sustainable agricultural future.

Regenerative farming will take multiple stakeholders to take off

Regenerative farming will take many stakeholders to take off

it's true that we have to change the system. But what it means is that we have to change the farms, right? And so what we want is we want integrated farms, we generated farms not regenerative practices, right? Because that's the problem. It's all at the practice level. We are coming to realize that that there is a lot of potential within agriculture to address a lot of our biggest land resource concerns and climate change issues. But there's just not enough emphasis on what it means. If we want to work with agriculture, what does it cost to make that happen? Yeah, I'm laura gentry, I'm the director of water quality research for the Illinois corn growers Association and I'm a soil scientist. So soil scientist studying the chemical, physical and biological properties of our soil. My particular area focuses on agriculture and specifically on maintaining soil quality and soil health. In row crop agricultural, there have been many, many terms for regenerative agriculture. That's sort of the term du jour right now, always the idea is producing safe healthy crops with a reduced environmental impact, maintaining clean water and healthy soils, precision agriculture tools that can help farmers to make better decisions around nutrient utilization, chemical utilization and make sure that more of it ends up in the crop where it's intended versus running off into our water or remaining in our soil. If you really want to be a regenerative, what you have to see is changes in greenhouse gas emissions, right from agriculture and changes in other environmental indicators from habitat water quality, right? It's just such a complex system that if you want to make any change, it's really hard to do that, as just one individual firmer large corporations should be looking to to assist farmers because ultimately they will benefit from from helping us to do well to be competitive, whether they're doing it to be able to make public facing environmental commitments around water quality or climate change or whatever, or whether they're just doing it because they're stakeholders are demanding it. There's plenty of reasons out there for these large corporations to work directly with farmers to help them to have a reduced impact on the environment. My name is Michael Hancock and I oversee implementation of our sustainability in the shows for food and grocery areas globally. At Walmart, we came up with three sustainability initiatives through Moonshot goals and that was really, we want to be powered by 100% renewable energy, We wanted to create zero waste or have zero waste in our supply chains, and then three is we wanted to sell sustainable products that were good people on the planet. The midwest collaborative has eight members from the corporate sector and walmart is one of those and then three of the big Ngos, we really look at the sort of three legs stool of support for farmers and so that is the uh financial support, so that's cost share for, you know, buying a cover crop seed and making sure that they have the right equipment, it's technical support so that they know how to do it and that they can ask questions from agronomists and other farmers do that have been doing this and then it's the social support, that big picture vision is what guides us every day. You can really see significant change in that landscape, um particularly if you're looking at things like water quality, soil health, biodiversity factors, things like that first and foremost is we want to manage the system that we already have in the office today. And so one of the things that we can do on that, because there's a lot of work that can still take place. I think when you take a look at grain rotation or different types of products that can be grown to be able to assist on that, that definitely is really good. We want to be able to minimize the inputs that go into production citizens what were clearly looking to do is to continue to lean in on the current calculators that exists for the science based targets. And as those calculators are developed by the leading scientists that are out there, we will read those tools and the access available to our suppliers. The bigger picture is that if we want to promote a sustainable regenerative system, we should have a more diverse production system reflected in a more diverse retail system, walmart is at the tail end of the supply chain and our greatest power, more design availability or our ability to convene right and send a signal to the marketplace on what we would like to see in terms of practices to deliver on the outcomes that are really going to be necessary to sustain our planet. Consumer pressure is critical in moving USDA and state level policies into A more truly regenerative direction. These big corporations that we can channel, if you will some of these consumer concerns, but everybody has to share some responsibility really. The buck stops with the farmer, everybody upstream of the farmer is looking down their nose going, how hard is it? And you know, why don't you sit down with one of these farmers and talk to them about how hard it is. We're not asking you to give up 15% of your income. Why do you expect that from from farmers? If we are really serious about reducing climate change and reducing greenhouse gas emissions from agriculture, what we need to do is eat less meat, Whatever meat we eat, we need to bring it back as often as possible to pasture. That will reduce the demand for grain as it reduces the demand for grain. It opens up spaces for growing things like being things that human schemes you really can't settle in the margins here. It's a problem solved. We are acutely aware of the impact that we're having on our soils, we do feel a responsibility to be sure that the next generation is going to be able to produce crops, produced food produced fiber and fuel, with the resource that we're leaving behind our soil is a national treasure. We need to maintain it. Yeah.

App makers hope they can encourage eco-friendly habits by making it fun to track and reduce carbon footprints.

Can gaming apps help us reduce our carbon footprint?

the problem we're trying to solve is that we have to reduce global emissions by 40 to 50% in the next eight years so that we can hit our global targets by 2030 and then hit our net zero targets by 2050. And of course we need sweeping policy change. We need companies to be making different choices. We need infrastructure investment, but there's also ways that we, as consumers can accelerate the pace of change. A lot of the changes that need to happen are very, very big structural changes. But obviously there is an element there of behavioral change, what we eat, how much we waste, how energy efficient our homes are. There are things there that we can control, what is our target outcome in this case it's pro environmental behaviors, advantage of games and apps is that they can break down those really big behaviors into achieved football. My name is Katherine Dunn. I am a journalist and I live in London in the UK. I've been an energy reporter in particular, but also kind of a climate reporter for years. I was an editor with Fortune for about three years where I mostly covered climate change and I'm really interested in what it takes for countries. What it takes for economies companies and people to actually kind of meet the goals that we've set out for ourselves when I wake up in the morning. The first thing I have to do is bring my dog for a walk and on that walk. My favorite thing to do is to get a little coffee and stand in the park watching my dog run around barking at all the other dogs causing chaos come in completely ignoring me. How hard is it to bring in a reusable cup, You can see all these little like frictions there where I'm like, okay, I have to find the cup inevitably, I've left it in the bottom of the bag and it's disgusting. I mean it seems kind of crazy that a reusable cup is just such a simple change that you can make and yet I still struggle with it. The problem is that people don't know where to start when it comes to climate change. And so if you want to understand what you can do about climate change, starting with measuring your own personal carbon footprint, probably the best thing to do. So the carbon footprint in simple terms is the carbon connected to anything you do, anything you eat the transit you took that day, the energy used in your home on one level, it's pretty simple, it's the carbon you're kind of responsible for as an individual, but once you start to think about it, you realize that it is like the sum total of everything you interacted with that day, luckily now there are apps for that the climate agenda and changing your behavior, these are tough, long term things to do and so we all need a little bit of support. My name is christian arno Founder of paw prints an app that helps you reduce your carbon footprint, my name is essentially paul and I'm the founder and ceo of Zorro, Zorro is an app that helps you use the power of your spending to take action on climate change. There's a few ways we use Gamification, um one is that your own emissions, you sort of see that progress over time, you can also see your progress versus others, there's the leaderboard and in the context of separate people into teams, I would be more likely to do something because I wouldn't want to let you down. Part of it is making sure that individuals find financial value and and other personal value in it as well. One of the most challenging things about climate change and about carbon is that they're invisible and distributed and Gamification is a way of making that feel immediate and satisfying to someone when they make progress. Gamification is essentially anything designed to make a non gaming activity more fun. My name is Benjamin Douglas, I am a second year PhD student and psychology department at the University of Wisconsin Madison and we study pro environmental behavior and persuasive messaging, essentially behavior change. How do we, how do we motivate people to do things that they might otherwise not do on their own exploring is available, apps on my phone, what you can find even in the app store right now is a lot of apps that will help you calculate your carbon cost effectiveness of an app is going to depend obviously on what's in the app, so if you are using things like points and leaderboards and progress towards all those elements of Gamification, make people want to return and therefore more likely it's going to be successful. There is persuasive evidence that Gamification helps us learn, so it's more fun, then you might actually want to do it. And ideally you would do those to the point where you feel like you've kind of built up a habit, I absolutely think everyone has a part to play in keeping the planet livable. If you're spending money, then you have the power to take climate action. You know, we're only going to vote a few times in the next decade, but we do spend money 2-3 times a day. And so if you spend money, you know how to take climate action, if you have to draw up, we all have a stake in the future, but the reality is that many people in the world have more pressing concerns and that's why I think the reward element of which Gamification is a part is really important to achieving the widespread spread changes over the past several years. Been this increased anxiety and rightly so about the effects of climate change, really, we're seeing across the board is people trying to find any solution that will work. I think people are looking for tools to understand how they can change their emissions and tools to better understand their emissions as well. In a way that feels trustworthy Gamification is one that has potential and because it has the potential to work, you know, it's another area we can explore.

Toxic chemicals in beauty products disproportionately impact people of color, leading to health issues such as infertility and cancer. Here’s how activists and companies in the clean beauty industry are trying to change things.

The fight against toxic beauty

Toxic chemicals in beauty products disproportionately impact people of color, leading to health issues such as infertility and cancer.

I think many consumers feel that if something is available on the shelf at the store, then it's safe. And that's not always the case, we know that people of color are disproportionately affected by toxic chemicals and consumer products across the board. The good news is that the more that we're aware of this, and the more that we're pushing for accountability and change along the supply chain, the more we will have a positive impact and this is solvable. The clean beauty segment or the natural beauty segment is growing rapidly. We can make change in this industry and across industry to ensure that we just clean up our act. Unfortunately, products that are marketed to Women of color often contain more toxic chemicals than products marketed to white women. Whether it's chemical hair strainers that are known to have formaldehyde. We can talk about skin lightening creams that have mercury systems of power and oppression such as racism and Classism and sexism may impact our beauty worms, consequent beauty rituals, chemical exposures as well as health outcomes across a life course, Women of color are major consumers of the beauty industry's. They're not only using more products, but there are likely to be using products that have a greater toxic load. Beauty ideals, both in this country as well as across the globe are very much informed by systems of power and oppression such as structural racism, colonialism and essentially Eurocentric beauty norms really are the pervasive ideal that impacts all of us with white femininity really being at the top of this beauty hierarchy, very lovely crystal right beauty cream. The closer you are to the top of our pyramid, white femininity, the more social and economic benefits you'll be afforded. And so that propagates certain types of products that are heavily promoted, heavily marketed. Two women of color to help them attain that. Look, I'm a black woman. I remember I was 12 years old when I got my first hair relaxer for 20 years. Um I was I was doing that with my hair and I didn't realize the potential health risk seeing the disproportionate youth and products that were marketed to people like me that really hit close to home. Sadly a lot of the chemicals that you would find at a hazardous waste site are also found in our beauty products, largely because they do remain unregulated. So there's lead it's particularly of concern because it can have irreversible impacts on the brain, especially Children's brain. There's mercury, which is also a known human carcinogen. There could be asbestos in talc related products, another known human carcinogen. There's satellites and parabens process of chemicals called endocrine disrupting chemicals which can mimic hormones in our bodies even at small amounts which are particularly of concern to reproduction. So there can be many chemicals in a product that aren't listed on a label. So for example, because of trade Secret laws, companies don't have to disclose the specific chemical ingredients in the fragrances and certain products. So they can just list fragrance, even though fragrance can include 100 different unique chemicals, some of the conditions that disproportionately, for example, impact black women that may be linked to chemicals in these products include asthma related outcomes, pregnancy outcomes such as preterm birth, pregnancy related complications that may impact maternal mortality, such as pregnancy related hypertension, gestational diabetes, impaired learning and development in Children. As well as a whole host of different types of cancers. Women who used hair relaxing products as a child, they have a 40% greater risk of early onset period, which is a risk factor for breast cancer. The law around beauty products haven't been updated since 1938, that was before World War II. That's absurd to protect consumers, the Food and Drug Administration and the Federal Trade Commission, respectively. Keep careful watch for harmful ingredients in cosmetics and for misleading claims and advertisements. The FDA, The agency that is supposed to oversee this industry doesn't have quite frankly the power that it needs to actually do anything. The FDA doesn't know how many cosmetics are on the market in this country. It can't do a recall of something. So it's a really weak law basically useless and we really need reform. There have been bipartisan efforts to update that law, but those have failed in the absence of that. Certain states have started regulating what's in Personal care products. So in an under regulated space, what could we do differently to make the space as products possible and advocate for change credo is the largest clean beauty retailer in the United States for credo, the way that we define clean Credo. Clean standard is really the nexus of safety, sustainability and ethics all held within the through line of transparency. The credo Clean Standard is about 28 pages, very comprehensive guideline that all of our brands have to sign and adhere to. We're trying to accelerate companies free formulations and introduction of safer cleaner beauty products for women of color. Clean Beauty should be about creating products that have the lowest environmental impact and lowest health impact. It's not just about eliminating the toxic chemicals But ensuring the youth and the adoption of favorite chemicals. The global beauty industry is at this point over $550 billion beauty is still an emerging part of that. There's more companies that are trying to make green products. There's also retailers that are trying to have an influence on what's being sold on their shelves. So for example, Target and walmart now have chemical policies on the book, 99 cent stores unfortunately don't and that's still a place where a lot of people buy their products. A lot of clean beauty products really are situated or being promoted at higher end stores right, that may not be accessible to many women of color. One of the things that is important to us at E. D. S is that there's a democratization of clean beauty. The process of making clean products for everyone needs to be a holistic one. So certainly we need to be more of a demand and more investment from investors and from brands at the beginning of when they're conceptualizing products, making sure that there are products for everyone, either targeted especially for certain needs, especially textured hair, for example, or making sure that you have a product that can really serve a wide variety of customers. But I also think that we need to invest more in the industry in terms of just really taking a step back and saying, who is at the table, we need more women and more women of color in positions of power, whether that's as an investor or as an entrepreneur or as chemists and formulate Urz, it's time for companies to really recognize that the ingredients that they may have been using all this time, there are better solutions. We absolutely continue to need a sea change across the entire beauty market. So that means every brand, every retailer and every ingredient supplier putting at the core safer ingredients. We're seeing that customers really want safer, more sustainable products, more equitable products, more transparent products and they're willing to reward those companies that are doing that work with their dollars

They’re also less likely to have access to the technology and jobs that would help make a difference.

Climate change disproportionately affects communities of color

Climate change's effects on communities of color


Climate change disproportionately affects communities of color


while climate change is a global phenomenon. To be sure it affects different populations and different groups differently. Conventional climate risk assessment assumes the impacts are the same across the board. The problem is because of inequity, this is simply not true. It really feels like a lot of this technology is going to the rich white green and main, not really to the most vulnerable communities that really need it. Communities of color in the United States are disproportionately affected by the drivers of climate change, greenhouse gasses and air pollution because they're literally living, they are situated next to oil refineries, chemical plants, methane leaks from oil facilities, waste facilities that are also emitting noxious fumes and methane and you know when it comes to women and their exposure to the drivers of climate change to air pollution, polycyclic aromatic hydrocarbons which are molecules released during the burning of fossil fuels actually are clearly linked to the occurrence of breast cancer, especially women of childbearing age should be very concerned about this because we've recently discovered that these molecules burned with fossil fuels make their way through the placenta into the exposure with the fetus in fact, and this can have lifelong effects. And then the outcomes of climate change are the things that we are seeing every day now. So extreme weather events like extreme heat events or storms and sea level rise may be the most scientifically supported and substantiated is just the simple rise in temperature and we feel these this rise in temperature most acutely in in cities, cities tend to be much hotter than rural areas and in cities, people of color and poorer people are living in the hottest areas in most cities across this country, around the coast. We have poor communities and communities of color that are living in flood zones and zones of risk for these extreme weather events and storms. They mean they're facing the brunt of climate change and also they have tremendous challenges and recovering from these what's become really chronic events. The problem is that we have built an energy infrastructure relying on fossil fuels that disproportionately affects communities of color, poor communities. That problem is so obvious that it makes the solution obvious, which is empowering those communities to reduce exposures to reduce our reliance on fossil fuels and to eliminate some of the emissions that are happening right now To me, the brownfields, the pollution, the asthma that's all been here. I think the piece for me that was sort of adding insult to injury is, you know, we've gotten more than our fair share of the environmental beds Now, all these environmental goods are coming. This green wave of energy efficiency jobs, renewable energy jobs and I'm not seeing or or I wasn't seeing black and brown people happy table. We're trying to turn our attention more to the sense energy justice. Pieces of really thinking about how do we create jobs build wealth and reduce energy burden for communities of color almost. You think of the gold rush in California, We've got a new nation. Energy off the coast of massachusetts in offshore wind like this is for everybody. They're just all these opportunities and jobs. We want everybody to get those jobs, but we want to make sure black and latino and indigenous people are not left out of those fundamentally. If you're a business and you're serious about measuring managing climate risk and tackling climate change, you have to understand the connection between equity and climate work. It's inextricable if you're working on climate solutions in the transportation sector and you don't realize that women around the world globally travel four times further than men, then how can you fully understand how to effectively reduce transportation emissions? The challenge. And of course the opportunity is that women are fundamentally underrepresented across business, across politics, across leadership of all types meaningful progress toward climate action necessitates so much more than simply offsetting carbon emissions. It necessitates fundamentally changing the system that got us here. If we could empower communities who are being disproportionately exposed to actually protect their health and well being, they would be given a critical role to protecting the health and well being of all of us. We need everybody at the table, we need all hands on deck and we need to be intentionally inclusive. The quicker that everyone understands That climate is part of their job, the faster will get to net zero And I also want to extend the argument today, the quicker that people realize that equity is also part of their job, the faster we will get to net zero.

Regenerative building design goes beyond being carbon neutral - it makes a positive impact on the environment.

How architecture can slow climate change

how do we create something that's incredibly unique, ultra sustainable and better to live in than your typical urban multi family building The built environment. So existing stock and obviously everything that's going on with construction itself, responsible for approximately 40% of all global carbon emissions. So on the path to net zero, the sectors obviously got a really clear role to play in mitigating climate change. We're not just talking about the environment, we are talking about human health and we're talking about social impact as well to be a regenerative building. It means that you're making a commitment to having a positive impact in the world when we use the term sustainable. What we're generally referring to is the idea that something is giving back as much as it's taking from the universe. And generally speaking, when we use that term, we're thinking about the environment and when we talk about regenerative, we are talking about positive impact. So it means you're really trying to figure out how is this building going to give back to all of the planetary natural systems? How is it going to literally make people healthier by by interacting with it? By being in it by working in it. And then how is it going to have a positive social impact on the community? How is it going to bring people in to create a sense of belonging to provide jobs that are good jobs. Those are all the ways that we define regenerative design and architecture. Ridge entry design has got a lot of key benefits. It can improve air quality in the immediate area through the use of things like green roofs and skins. If we look at the design of energy systems will generate more energy than it actually needs. The options there for storage and removing the reliance on on grid supply um which then has the same knock on effect of removing the need for the infrastructure that's associated with standard energy delivery methods. And of course all of that has an impact on the local ecosystems through using rainwater storage can actually reduce that. So if he's run off and improve not only the quality of the soil but provides a reduction in the amount of possible water that's required from things like water supply and sewage etcetera as well. So this is a mid rise building that is basically built lot line to lot line. So it's extra edge ultra urban, right? It's on hikes street and capitol hill, the most famous kind of street in Seattle. We built it using traditional techniques, right? So we focus on the areas that have the biggest impact for the least cost. And so what we ended up doing was coming up with ways to do thicker walls with more insulation where needed triple pane windows that have an amazing seal from an energy perspective. So they're very insulating and so we land with this luxury building that's using 60 70 plus percent less energy than any brand new other building that's going on and for just a tiny tiny premium on the cost On the north side of the building. We have a 70-foot mural hand painted by an artist and it's really beautiful and it's got integrated lighting that changes as you walk by it and then, you know, I think that we're very smart about how we pick our finishes and how we do say our cabinets, casework, etc, and our place, we always spend more money on that stuff because it's the thing that people want. So this building a building like soulless while adults are sustainable. There's zero compromise from any perspective for anyone that lives there, right? It's beautiful from the outside, it's beautiful from the inside, but we're not asking higher rent than, you know, any new building around us really. MBS conducts a number of industry reports and we've recently launched the sustainability report for this year. What we found from that was only 14% of the respondents, which were all construction professionals from from around different areas of the sector. We're working on green projects all the time, so it didn't paint a very clear picture that people were doing this continuously. The report asked respondents to explain how important sustainability was to them. eight out of 10, that replied said that sustainability was very important topic to them as a person, which I think links into the human morals of people typically just wanting to do good. However, only four out of 10 said that it was important to their business. Now, this is going to have impact of wide and varied different options, but I think it's gonna be topics around the priority compared to other industry drivers, such as profit margins, delivery times, etcetera. Um, it's gonna sit and maybe compliance as well. It's going to sit maybe lower on the business agenda than it would be to the individual. Um, that's not responsible for keeping the business running. The unfortunate reality is that just because maybe a green building is worth more over time and that it can command higher rent and that it's healthier for us. That doesn't actually create as much market movement as we hoped it would because so many people just don't have the capital to invest in these things up front. We need to change policy and regulation to make that start to be more accessible and more required for the rest of the world. Property taxes are the number one thing that can dramatically move the needle with regard to how does the building Pencil financially. Right. So if you know, you can get a 10%, tax savings for an old sustainable building, that would be enough to make almost everybody do it at the moment, we are still trying to get construction to be sustainable. Obviously, sustainability is effectively the halfway point to regenerative design. However, projects allow it. Um, there's no reason why they can't be hitting the regenerative design requirements. Now we don't feel there has to be any sort of compromise. You can have ultra luxury and ultra sustainable. So just you can have high end buildings that are ultra sustainable and they don't have to cost a huge premium. The amount of energy that you save with smart design, better insulation, better windows, heat pump technology, et cetera. Some of the really kind of blocking and tackling things is significantly more than you saved by simply adding solar panels or something like that. But just incentivize it, incentivizes through tax savings, Incentivize it through less requirement for electrical build up things like this and people will do it. We, as designers and constructors of buildings have a lot of control over the amount of carbon that we are responsible for when we build a building. Because we can make very simple. Oftentimes zero cost decisions to lower our carbon footprint. Just by making a slightly more thoughtful decision about what we put into the building in the first place. Right? Mhm

As crops dry out due to climate change, desperate farmers are turning to technology and policymakers for help.

How changing water supply is reshaping agriculture

this past weekend, friday saturday and sunday was 105108104. Anything that's alive and outside is just being dehydrated as you stand there and watch it even if a plant was standing in in water, the root system cannot uptake the water as fast as it's being dehydrated out of the lead. Yeah, I'm Cody Carson, I am a row crop farmer, uh run some cattle and I have, I grow a lot of crops. I've often said if it's legal and ethical and might make a buck, I've probably tried to grow it at some point. I've been in the Texas panhandle all of my life. We have been in a little bread basket uh that has been a very profitable and and very efficient part of agriculture for the last 50 or 60 years. But what I have known all of my adult life is coming to an end in a rapid change. The limited irrigation is totally restructuring how I farm and then you stack the drought on top of it over the last two or three years. And it has, has been a real eye opener for a lot of us. When I look at what I have done for most of my adult livelihood, it was based on having an adequate amount of irrigation water. And we used to have general rains every spring. You could count on rains every spring, the last several years, there's been nothing average about it with growing population increasing climate variability and growing water demands worldwide. Fresh water supplies are being stressed options or providing safe, clean, reliable water supply will require the adoption of innovations of various sorts. There's a lot of things we now know about how to manage water today, that we didn't know even just a couple of decades ago, we can replenish our groundwater basins to collecting rainwater, we can reuse wastewater. The technology is there, but we need to make sure that the public is confident there is a consensus that at least climate variability seems to be becoming more common, particularly in areas like the southwestern United States. Many scientists expect that we will see longer and more intense periods of drought. What we need is a sense of urgency to bring people together to plan and have the foresight in terms of water supply options further. We also need to have a dialogue about how we use the water. Do we need to have large lawns in residential communities? Or can we think constructively and realistically about more drought tolerant landscape arrangements that are aesthetically pleasing but are more appropriate to the kind of climate we live in. But we need to really expand some political capital and thinking long term about the fact that we want to manage this resource in a way that will ensure that our grandchildren don't have to worry about these problems If this drought continues on. I don't see any recovery. I don't see any light at the end of the tunnel anyway to change what's happening. The people in these small black communities are going to have to reevaluate and rethink what we've done for the last 50 years is not sustainable and and we're going to have to transition That next phase of growth is happening from the mechanization side. If you look at at crop production for the last really 25 years, we are significantly increasing the amount of of things that we are able to harvest from the land with less inputs. When we are able to specifically apply the right amount of pesticide, the right amount of fertilizer and the right amount of water to a very specific plant for a very specific area of a field. Were able to get a whole lot more production out of that particular acre with even less production. The fundamental technology that has led to this is when tractors can drive themselves. When tractors understand where they are in a field using GPS technology, it sort of opens up a lot of different things. When we begin to talk about some of the water specific related issues, there is a growing movement to put sensors into the soil so you can determine what the actual moisture needs are. So, as those irrigation systems are going through the field, they're able to specifically apply the right amount of water only where it's needed and not where it's not needed, that conserves water that conserves fuel that prevents runoff and all the positive things that come out of knowing exactly what what you're applying at the right time in the field. So when a farmer is able to in real time use their tractor and your tractor is able to collect that data. What's going to be able to come out of that integration of data and technology to really produce a lot more crops on the same amount of acre in our goal to be long term viable. I have currently shifted my cropping strategy to what I deem as being long term viable or sustainable. Good for me, financially, good for what fits the climate of my geographical region and good for the soil and the environment in the long term, not just maintaining the soil, but hopefully regenerating the soul. We have to remember that we are all in this together. Water problems are not problems that are limited to certain groups, where they're caused by certain sectors. All of us have to work together to figure out a way to manage are constrained and overstressed water supplies and we need to be prepared to make some changes in our behavior so that from a prudential standpoint, there will be an adequate amount of water for all of us and for all of our grandchildren. Okay. Yeah, yeah.

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