Future Optimist

On this show, I’ve given you boatloads of examples of people who turned their unique passion into a career. Today we tap into the wide world of birding with my guest, Scott Whittle. Watch this episode on YouTube All episodes: beattheoftenpath.com Scott has turned his passion for birds into a start-up with far-reaching implications for conservation and human wellbeing. His company, Terra, allows yo...

Andres Avello grew up in Florida, where the water was a big part of everyday life. Discover how his life took a series of unexpected twists and turns, leading to him leaving a great and stable career to build a business. Watch this episode on YouTube All episodes: beattheoftenpath.com Andres knew he was meant to build a company, and he knew he was meant to do something with the water. Now he’s bui...

Skye Blackburn has made an enormous impact in her native Australia with a truly innovative idea: edible insects: Watch this episode on YouTube All episodes: beattheoftenpath.com She combined a lifelong passion for insects with a degree in food science to create a groundbreaking edible insect company. Today, she’s educated over a million people about the future of food and the importance of adding...

Kyle Rand is the co-founder and CEO of Rendever. He grew up volunteering at a senior living community and later went on to study cognitive decline in the aging population at Duke University. He was recently named to Forbes 30 Under 30 and his company was just listed on Time’s list of 100 most influential companies in 2022, outstanding achievements both. Watch this episode on YouTube All episodes:...

Google's new chat bot LaMDA might have just crossed a threshold—the most major in our lifetimes. Whether AI is currently conscious isn't the question we should be asking. Read the full transcript with LaMDA here: https://cajundiscordian.medium.com/is-lamda-sentient-an-interview-ea64d916d917

Dane Baker is the founder of EcoCart, an inspiring way for businesses and ecommerce customers to offset their carbon footprint. Watch this episode on YouTube All episodes: beattheoftenpath.com Dane is a serial entrepreneur who’s always seen the world a little bit differently. He wanted to find a win/win/win for businesses to offset their carbon footprint, right at the checkout stage. What does thi...

Saasha Celestial-One is the COO and co-founder of Olio, an eco-conscious start-up that’s raised over 50 million dollars in funding. Her concept is simple: we throw away so much good food. In fact, up to 40% globally. Her app makes it easy to give away leftover food, both for individuals and companies like supermarkets. Going on a trip? Just take a picture of the food in your fridge, upload it, and...

Nely Galán is one of those guests that makes me feel like the scene in Wayne’s World… I’m not worthy!    Her story is everything this show represents. She came to this country as an immigrant from Cuba when she was just five years old, and through her own grit and determination worked her way up to become the president of entertainment of Telemundo, one of the most well-known brands in all of tele...

Johnny Crowder is an enigma wrapped in a mystery wrapped in some tattoos. Ok, not that exactly, but he is a perfect example of the kind of story I’m looking for on this podcast. He’s a touring death metal singer, a public speaker and TEDx presenter, and the founder of Cope Notes, a tech start-up that provides a positive-psychology text message a day to people who are struggling with mental health....

Dustin Feider is one of those rare individuals who makes work that will blow you away. He’s a professional artist who took a highly unusual, earth-forward twist. He put years of design experience into the work of creating out-of-this-world, custom tree-houses. These aren’t your average tree-houses. They look like a cross between Apple’s vision of the future and Avatar—these things are freaking inc...

When it comes to an outside-the-box success story, Marina Tran-Vu's is incredible. She worked for years as a corporate marketer, working for and with major brands. She was supposed to just be visiting Vietnam from her native Canada, but then the pandemic happened effectively trapping her in another country. Rather than give up the fight, she doubled down, building a pandemic business for eco-frien...

Luc Houle just had a successful Kickstarter, getting funding for his eco-friendly, biodegradable shoes. It’s no secret that the billions of shoes around the world mostly end up in landfills, where they will take more than 1,000 years to decompose. How many pairs of shoes do you own? Yep, that should tell you how big of a problem this is. Rather than just bitch about it, Luc created a fully biodegr...

Today’s guest is Faye Wilson, a fascinating woman who constructed a career plan that saw her slingshot from the corporate world to her own, eco-friendly toothpaste and dental care brand. We discuss how she brought her idea to market, changing her own life in the process. She’s been featured in Vogue, Glamour, and a bunch of top-shelf media outlets, and her story is a great template for how you can...

Christie Lagally’s path toward starting a company should be deeply inspiring for anyone who cares about our planet. With a background in Aerospace Engineering, working at Boeing and other top-tier firms, she decided to put her brilliance and global perspective to work on tackling the problem of processed food and industrial food production. She used her expertise to create innovative new machinery...

Masami Sato is one of the coolest people you’re likely to meet out there. Seldom in my life have I had a conversation where I found myself so whole-heartedly agreeing with everything that was said. Masami has used her extensive life experience to build and improve a number of businesses, bringing care and humanity to everything she’s touched. 14 years ago, she got the brilliant idea to find a way...

Joel Tasche is the founder and CEO of CleanHub, a startup that aims to preserve and protect the world’s oceans by collecting and managing multi-layer packaging. This nasty packaging is a type of plastic that is almost impossible to recycle using traditional technologies. 80% of the plastic waste that ends up in the oceans is so-called flexible packaging or multilayer packaging, like chip packets,...

Javeno Mclean is a former professional cricket player who changed everything about his life to become a professional trainer and gym owner. His life is proof that our dream can come true and still leave us with a feeling of emptiness, and that helping others might be the thing we’ve been missing all along. Get ready to rethink everything with the energetic and charismatic Javeno Mclean, 2021 Natio...

All episodes: beattheoftenpath.com Watch this episode on YouTube . When the pandemic hit, Lucy did what any sane, rational, intelligent person would do: she quit her stable job and founded a bamboo sock company to help save animals around the world. No? Not everyone did that? Huh. Welll… Lucy Jeffrey did, and that’s why she’s not your typical person. In just a few years, her company’s saved hundre...

Brianna Kilcullen worked in the clothing industry for big brands, and she was disappointed in what she saw. So she built her own eCommerce company selling hemp towels. It turns out that towels have historically been a pretty wasteful product, so she created an eco-friendly alternative. She did 100k in sales in her first year, and she got big press coverage from outlets like Good Morning America an...

Abigail Harrison is known as “Astronaut Abby”, and she set a goal at a very young age to be the first person ever to set foot on Mars. Her path has led her to becoming a major advocate for STEM and particularly STEM education for girls and marginalized groups—people historically left out of the space conversation. She's built a following of over a million, and I could spend a long time singing her...

Spencer Burleigh is the founder and president of Rent the Backyard, a Y Combinator-backed startup that’s aiming to solve the housing crisis in the Bay Area and beyond. His innovative approach involves building pre-fabricated ADUs (or additional dwelling units) in the backyard of people who have them. The result? Affordable housing for the people living in the backyard, greater population density,...

Rebecca Eyre has a remarkable story that led to her becoming the CEO of Project HEAL, an organization dedicated to providing eating disorder treatment to people historically denied access. In this episode, I learn the true scale of eating disorders, and it’s shocking. But just as importantly, I learned how Rebecca didn’t truly “come alive” until she attached herself to a cause that she truly belie...

Beaumarchais: A Biography by Maurice Lever is one of the most fascinating biographies I've ever read. As you know, I seek out unusual success stories to provide us with better templates for our own life, especially if we feel weird, misunderstood, or like we "missed the boat". There is SO much to learn from this man's story. I give you my take in this special episode. Follow me on YouTube . Follow...

Dr. Sara Murdock has made it her life’s mission to bring diversity, equity, inclusion, and belonging to companies and organizations around the world. She works with executives and organizations to either proactively create a better workplace or to bounce back from PR disasters and rebuild in more conscientious ways. In her career she’s worked with 10,000+ people over 20 years, doing consulting, se...

Adam Hewett is quite literally revolutionizing music as we know it. It turns out that music can interact with our brains in a way that is completely unique to humans—no other animal on the planet is impacted by music the way we are. Adam has dedicated his life to using science and brain data to create brain-influencing audio—audio that can put the brain into states such as a “flow” state, deep sle...