Business for Good Podcast

For centuries, the ocean has been a place to extract value: fish, oil, minerals. But a growing wave of entrepreneurs and institutional investors are asking a different question. Can protecting the ocean become a business in itself?   In this episode of Business For Good, Paul Shapiro speaks with Justin Worland, a journalist at Time magazine who recently published a cover feature on companies worki...

What if giving away your profits actually made your business stronger? In this milestone 200th episode of Business For Good, host Paul Shapiro sits down with Peter Singer, widely regarded as the world's most influential living philosopher, to explore why companies should commit at least 10% of their profits to effective charitable causes and how doing so might attract customers, motivate employees...

In 1986, Gene Baur co-founded Farm Sanctuary with a simple theory: show people how factory farming works, and they will stop eating animals. Forty years later, per capita meat consumption in America has risen from 196 pounds to 232 pounds per person, and the number of farmed animals entering U.S. slaughterhouses has doubled from roughly 5 billion to 10 billion.   In this episode of Business For Go...

Is alternative protein really a failing industry, or are investors just applying the wrong timeline?   Noga Golan, Founder of Food Impact Partners and Food Impact Careers, has an unusually clear view of that question. Her executive recruiting firm and free job board sit at the intersection of candidate demand and company hiring across the global food innovation landscape.   In this episode with Pa...

How does a nuclear energy startup with roughly a million dollars in revenue become an $8 billion publicly traded company sitting on $3 billion in cash? In this episode of Business For Good, Paul Shapiro sits down with Caroline DeWitte, Co-founder and COO of Oklo, to find out what investors are betting on and why the company believes it can deliver.   Oklo is building compact nuclear powerhouses th...

What if the same drilling technology that powered the shale boom could be redirected to produce clean, carbon-free electricity around the clock? In this episode of Business For Good, Paul Shapiro sits down with Tim Latimer, CEO and chairman of Fervo Energy, to explore how a former oil and gas drilling engineer built one of the most celebrated clean energy companies in the country in under a decade...

What if the same drilling technology that powered the shale boom could be redirected to produce clean, carbon-free electricity around the clock? In this episode of Business For Good, Paul Shapiro sits down with Tim Latimer, CEO and chairman of Fervo Energy, to explore how a former oil and gas drilling engineer built one of the most celebrated clean energy companies in the country in under a decade...

Nuclear energy was supposed to transform the world. Then came Chernobyl, Three Mile Island, and Fukushima, and public trust collapsed. But for 25 years, engineers across a dozen countries have been quietly designing a new generation of reactors built to fail safely without relying on human intervention or mechanical backup systems. And the target date they set back in 2000 is almost here.   In thi...

Most founders assume that building a great product and serving customers well will be enough to protect what they have built. Eric Ries, author of The Lean Startup and the new book Incorruptible, argues that the assumption is dangerously wrong.   In this episode of Business For Good, Paul Shapiro sits down with Eric Ries to explore why successful organizations are systematically pulled toward corr...

Every year, roughly a billion birds die from flying into glass windows and buildings. The problem is massive, well-documented, and largely invisible to the public.   In this episode of Business For Good, Paul Shapiro talks with Dominique Waddoup, CEO and Founder of BirdShades, about how she went from studying giant honeybee behavior in Nepal to building a company that makes glass visible to birds...

Right now, roughly 40% of global emissions come from the built environment. Most of those emissions are hidden deep within the materials themselves, in the concrete, steel, and plastics that are mined or extracted from underground at enormous energy costs. What if that model could be reversed entirely?   In this episode of Business For Good, Paul Shapiro sits down with Allison Dring, CEO of Made o...

Coral reefs cover less than one percent of the ocean floor but support roughly a quarter of all marine life. They are dying fast, and in many places, the physical structure of the reef itself has already crumbled away. Without that foundation, coral larvae have nowhere to land, and marine ecosystems cannot recover on their own.   In this episode of Business For Good, Paul Shapiro talks with Dr. Ul...

What if the things you believe are best for the environment are actually making it worse? In this episode of Business For Good, Paul Shapiro sits down with Hannah Ritchie, data scientist at Our World in Data and author of Not the End of the World and Clearing the Air, to challenge some of the most widely held assumptions in sustainability.   Hannah explains why locally produced food rarely has a m...

Episode Summary:  Five years ago, billionaire investor Jim Mellon came on Business For Good and laid out his thesis that cultivated meat and precision fermentation would transform the food system. Since then, venture capital has fled the space, plant-based stocks have cratered, and many startups have gone under. So why is Jim putting even more money in? In this episode, Paul Shapiro reconnects wit...

Episode Summary:  What if the next great venture opportunity isn't in AI or fintech but in protecting nature itself? In this episode of Business For Good, Paul Shapiro sits down with Tom Quigley, Co-founder of Superorganism, one of the first venture funds built entirely around biodiversity protection.   With a freshly closed $26 million fund, Tom explains why over half of global GDP depends on hea...

Episode Summary:  What if AI could help prevent bird strikes, train collisions, and livestock attacks by communicating with wild animals in ways they already understand? In this episode of Business For Good, Paul Shapiro speaks with Sára Nožková, CEO and Co-founder of Flox Intelligence , about building AI systems designed to detect wildlife and guide animals away from danger.   Sára explains how h...

Episode Summary:  What if the most abundant protein on Earth has been hiding in plain sight inside green leaves? In this episode of Business For Good, Paul Shapiro sits down with Ross Milne , CEO of Leaft Foods , to explore how a new approach to food production could unlock massive amounts of high-quality protein directly from plants.   Instead of feeding crops to animals or waiting for plants to...

Episode Summary:  What if one of the highest-leverage climate and poverty interventions isn't a new technology, a policy mandate, or a venture-backed breakthrough, but simply making permanent contraception easier for men to choose?   In this episode of Businesses For Good, host Paul Shapiro sits down with Dr. Douglas Stein , a Florida physician known as "The Vasectomist," who has performed 45,000+...

Episode Summary What if the global food system isn't "broken" in the way sustainability debates usually claim, and treating it that way leads to worse decisions?   Paul Shapiro sits down with Jan Dutkiewicz and Gabriel Rosenberg, authors of Feed the People , to unpack how industrial scale and trade created unprecedented food abundance, why "eat local" and small-farm nostalgia collapses at 8 billio...

Alternative meat looks like it is collapsing. Startups are shutting down, funding is drying up, and headlines are calling the category finished, but that reaction may reflect a misunderstanding of how technological revolutions actually unfold. Bruce Friedrich, President of the Good Food Institute and author of  Meat: How the Next Agricultural Revolution Will Transform Humanity's Favorite Food and...

Episode Summary A rice field does not look like the starting point for a scalable building materials company until you understand the economics behind it.   In this episode of Business For Good, Paul Shapiro sits down with Chris Guimond, Founder and CEO of Modern Mill, to explore how discarded rice hulls are being transformed into ACRE, a wood like siding, decking, and trim product designed to rep...

What if the fastest path to reliable clean electricity is not a new reactor design, but a new place to put one?   In this conversation, Paul Shapiro speaks with Elizabeth Muller, CEO of Deep Fission, about a plan to place a conventional pressurized water reactor roughly a mile underground to use geology, gravity, and groundwater for containment, pressure, and emergency cooling, potentially cutting...

If you've ever checked the ingredients on a baked good, you know how ubiquitous eggs are. They bind, they lift, they emulsify, they hold moisture — they're simply the structural engineers of cookies, cakes, and muffins everywhere. But they're also volatile: prices spike, supply chains break, and for anyone with an egg allergy or who's avoiding eggs for animal welfare or environmental reasons, eggs...

What if planting trees could be not just good for the planet, but also a profitable business? In this episode, I'm talking with Ben Dell, the founder and CEO of Chestnut Carbon — a company that's raised nearly $400 million, including $250 million of that in 2025, to turn farmland back into thriving native forests across the United States. And he's already forging major carbon removal deals with th...

What if one solution to fashion's waste problem is literally growing on our own heads? Every day, salons around the world toss out millions of pounds of freshly cut human hair — a clean, protein-rich, renewable resource that mostly ends up in landfills or incinerators. But what if that so-called waste could become the next sustainable textile? My guest on this episode, Zsofia Kollar, is the founde...