SEE THE SHOW NOTES AND LISTEN AT: Rethinking Business and Circular Economy with John A. Lanier

Katie Whalen [00:00:05] Hi, I'm Katie Whalen and join me each week as I talk with experts around the globe about Circular economy. You'll find out what's being done to make it a reality and if it can really solve the problems it promises. It's time for Getting in the Loop.

[00:00:19] Welcome back to the Getting in the Loop Podcast. I'm your host, Katie, kicking off episode 17 with two announcements. The first is that this is the last week of June 2019, which means that the Getting in the Loop Podcast will be moving onto a summer schedule for the next two months. During July and August, new episodes will be released every other week instead of weekly. You can catch the next episode, Episode 18 on July 8th. This gives you some time to catch up on previous episodes that you haven't had the chance to listen to yet. The second announcement is looking ahead towards the fall in September. There will be a train the trainer session for risk and race, which is a serious game I co-developed to simulate circular business operations and the financial side of running a circular business. If you want to learn more about how you could use this game to raise awareness and engage others in discussions around circular business models, I invite you to head on over to businessgame.gettinginthelooppodcast.com to learn more about the game and the upcoming two day train the trainer session. Again, that's businessgame.gettinginthelooppodcast.com to get started helping others learn about circular business models.

[00:01:42] Today, I am thrilled to welcome John Lanier, the executive director of the Ray C. Anderson Foundation to the Getting in the Loop Podcast. John works to advance the legacy of Ray, his grandfather, who many of you might recognize as the founder of carpet tile manufacturer interface. 20 years ago, Ray detailed his and interfaces sustainability journey in his book Midcourse Correction, and John has now released an update called Midcourse Correction Revisited. In today's podcast, John and I discussed Ray's legacy, what has happened in the 20 years since Ray first documented his journey, and John's vision for the future. It was such a pleasure talking with John and after the recorded interview, we actually continue talking for another 20 minutes about all things at board games because John and I have some shared favorites. But enough about games. Let's get to the show.

[00:02:36] Thank you so much, John, for coming on the podcast. I'm really excited to have you on today. And I can't wait to get started. To start us off, where are you calling from?

John Lanier [00:02:46] I am in Atlanta, Georgia. It's been my home for years. I grew up in the Atlanta area. And after college, it was time to come back home. This is a great place.

Katie Whalen [00:02:58] Yeah,  I have to admit that I've only transferred to Atlanta because it's one of the- I think it's the busiest airport, actually, in the United States.

John Lanier [00:03:09] But yes, it is. It is. Which is good and bad for me. I get a direct flight everywhere. But it's it's quite a circus anytime I'm at the airport.

Katie Whalen [00:03:17] Yeah. Yeah. Could you give us a brief background of your history and what you've been up to?

John Lanier [00:03:25] Yeah, absolutely. I am. For the purposes of this podcast. I think I am best described as one of five grandchildren of Ray Anderson, which is such an honor and joy for me that I got to grow up with a man who has come to be known as the world's greenest industrialist.

[00:03:47] I was trained as a tax attorney and after doing that for a couple of years, had the opportunity to come and work with my family at the Ray C. Anderson Foundation, which is the the family foundation that Ray left his estate to after he passed away in 2011. So my work is to be a philanthropist supporting environmental sustainability causes and in doing so, building upon the legacy of Ray Anderson.

Katie Whalen [00:04:19] Excellent. Yeah. Wow. We're going to dive into this in a little bit more detail. I was just curious, could you give an example of some of the causes that you've been supporting through the foundation?

John Lanier [00:04:30] When we got started, we had a tremendous advisory board. Some of the leading environmental thinkers, folks like joining Ben. Yes and Paul Hawkin. They urged us to not spread ourselves too thin, to concentrate our efforts on a few significant initiatives that could continue to tell Ray Anderson story. So we have been thrilled with the core initiatives, the long term partnerships that we've had. One of them, the first one and perhaps the one that captures the essence of Ray the best is a partnership with Georgia Tech here in Atlanta. That's where Ray went to school. And we have funded the Ray C. Anderson Center for Sustainable Business. It's in the business school here at Georgia Tech. And so it's a center where the Ray Anderson's of tomorrow can be educated young people who share their learning, the ins and outs of what it takes to be a business person. But they're also learning all of the ways in which that world intersects with natural systems. We've been very proud of the work they've done. We've also funded the Biomimicry Institute to do a global design. Challenged by a mimicry is such a tremendous discipline, something that that my grandfather and his company interface used with great success. So we found a few initiatives. Perhaps we can share more later on about others that we feel are capturing who Ray Anderson was and continuing his legacy.

Katie Whalen [00:06:07] So that's a good place to start off. I think a lot of the listeners are familiar with your grandfather and this is an ability to journey that he and his company interface undertook is probably one of the most well-known and studied business transformation examples of the 21st century. In regards to sustainability. So although most listeners are probably familiar with his journey and the interface journey. Could you just give a little bit of background for those who aren't?

John Lanier [00:06:35] Yeah, I suppose I buried that lead. The Ray Anderson story is the one I enjoy telling the most. Ray was a Georgia boy and after graduating from Georgia Tech, he caught the entrepreneurial bug a few years into his his climb up the corporate ladder. He took the plunge and started interface, a carpet tile manufacturing company that had to scratch and claw in its first 10 years. But it found success. And the U.S. market, the commercial floor covering space. So by 1983, Ray was able to take the company public and it grew to become the world's largest carpet tile manufacturing company. And in 1994, when. Ray was 60 years old and in every respect had been a successful business person. That was the year that he read Paul Hawkins The Ecology of Commerce. And the book fundamentally changed my grandfather's life. Up to that point, he'd never seen any dark side of his business. But this book showed him that his industrial manufacturing company and all of the industrial world, it's the sector responsible for the greatest amount of environmental degradation. He and Ray's own words had been convicted as a plunder of the earth. He called it his spear in the chest moment. And from that day on, he was committed to making his large, publicly traded industrial manufacturing company as sustainable as possible, and that the success that the company has had in the now twenty five years since Ray's epiphany has been tremendous. They have proven the business case for sustainability by becoming a a more profitable, a more successful company because of the authentic commitment to sustainability. And when I when I mean that, I mean, a very high bar interface conceives of sustainability as the point at which it does no harm through its operations must be powered entirely by renewable energy with zero waste, completely benign emissions into the environment, and a fully closed loop manufacturing process such that old carpet can be disassembled and then reassembled into new carpet. All of that goes into this vision, and because interface was able to be more profitable, more successful because of the environmental commitment. What Ray called doing well by doing good. That is what changed the paradigm around what business can do in the environmental space.

Katie Whalen [00:09:18] I'm reminded of something actually mentioned this earlier podcast a couple of weeks ago about one of the things that struck me when working with people from Interface is just that the company culture and how sustainability and the idea of sustainability is embedded into the core in the fact that you can go to, you know, anyone who is working regardless if they're in the head office or working on the floor, if they're driving a forklift truck like they're they know what the mission and the story and the the the environmental core aspects being key to the to the company. So I think that's quite that's quite powerful. The awareness in the company and the spread of this idea.

John Lanier [00:10:03] That culture shift was the most important part. And it's what my grandfather largely spent most of his time on his. His value was not coming up with the next engineering breakthrough that would de materialize carpet for the business ever so slightly. No. That was up to the people of interface. His job was to lead the charge for that culture change, to give the entire business this higher purpose. And he succeeded. It took years. Don't get me wrong, it was a a process for him to convince people he wasn't crazy, that he wanted to pursue this sustainability piece. But when he did and that culture shifted, it became so crucial to so many other successes that culture shift retained the best talent, attracted new talent, and allowed for this global business to have a lingua franca that everyone in the business was able to tap into. If there was an innovation breakthrough in Thailand, you better believe that it was going to be replicated and copied in Holland and in the United States to the greatest extent possible. That's only possible because of this culture shift.

Katie Whalen [00:11:20] And your grandfather detailed his journey and in this this what was needed to make this journey possible interfaces sustainability journey. Twenty years ago in his book Midcourse Correction, and you have now released an update called Midcourse Correction Revisited, which we're going to explore. And I can't wait to dove into that. My first question, though, is more general. Why revisit the book?

John Lanier [00:11:48] 20 years, 20 years old. It's a good question. We could have simply said, wow, that that first book that Ray wrote in 1998, it was tremendous. And if anybody wants to read it, it's out there. Go find it. But we believed that the book truly had another life to live. It was only a few years and to raise sustainability journey that he wrote that. So most of the book was forward looking. It's what he wanted interface to do. And in the time since, they've largely done much of that. It's what he called creating the prototypical company of the 21st century, a company that is truly and authentically sustainable and then working to become a restorative enterprise. They hadn't done that yet, but that vision that he laid out 20 years ago. It's still so valid today. It has withstood the test of time.

[00:12:51] If he had to lay out the vision all over again for what the prototypical company of the 21st century would look like, Ray would not have changed a thing. For that reason, we felt like we could bring the story up to date. Show the readers of this book how far interfaces come, explore why they became a more profitable enterprise because of sustainability. But preserve Ray's original words. The seven chapters in that first book so that a whole new generation of people can be inspired by who he was. And it was an honor of a lifetime to be the person chosen to write the six new chapters to be added to my grandfather's original seven.

Katie Whalen [00:13:37] Yeah. So you you pick up where he left off and look at what has happened in the past 20 years since then. And I had the chance to look at the book and I will link to it in the show notes of this podcast in and I couldn't help but think that he does a great job of handling it over to you because your section talks a little bit more about macro economy and the big picture. So not just interfaces journey, but also in the global perspective.

[00:14:11] And there is a section in clothes like at the end of his first part where he's talking about a speech that he gave at the at an international accounting firm in Amsterdam in 1996. And he is talking about Earth's limited capacity. And it ends with I think you should rethink economics and accounting. I don't know if you if you hear nothing, say you, kind of, know which part that is. Since Ray's speech in 1995, so the last 23 years, do you think that we're on the right track with our rethinking?

John Lanier [00:14:48] I think so. Little work has been done in that space. In the book I interviewed a lot of people. One of them was Andrew Winston, who is an accomplished consultant to green businesses, and I appreciated his insights. I asked him somewhat a similar version of the question that you've asked me if he is fundamentally optimistic about where sustainability is in the business world. And his answer was twofold. He said, I'm both optimistic and pessimistic. I'm I'm optimistic because there's not a Fortune 500 company that doesn't have at least one and most probably have many people whose fulltime job it is to work on sustainability.

[00:15:31] It is fully on the corporate agenda and that is a tremendous success. But he was pessimistic, pessimistic because of the the scope of the challenges that we still face and pessimistic that we need to be even more rapid in solving the challenges that we have. Well, to answer your question, I'm going to modify his slightly. I have seen sustainability just as Andrew has. It's been put on the corporate agenda.

[00:16:02] But I have not seen many people asking questions about the full macro economic system. I believe that we've done a lot of good work in microeconomic sustainability. And for anybody who's not familiar with the fundamental difference between microeconomics and macroeconomics, and this has taught all around the world in universities, it's simply the difference between economics at the scale of one company microeconomics, the rules that govern how one business operates, and then macroeconomics is the systems dynamics. So at the national or even international scale of how our commercial system functions, we have seen a lot of work being done with businesses reducing their waste, businesses developing circular models with businesses, acknowledging the impacts they have on biodiversity. So much of it is about what one business can and should be doing. So important. But what about macroeconomic sustainability? We have to be thinking through what sustainability at systems scale would look like, and we can't just be focused on the micro scale.

[00:17:18] Ray was onto that for sure, and it's something that I I felt needed to be explored in this book because it has not been addressed by many thinkers in the sustainability movement.

Katie Whalen [00:17:32] And and you did mention that how you looking- You had these different interviews to help you sort of explore this, this, this, this. What needs to happen in terms of this macroeconomic change? Maybe you could give one or two insights that you had while doing this and doing the research, investigative research for it for your book.

John Lanier [00:17:54] Yeah, sure. I. I'll highlight the interview that I did with Ellen MacArthur and Andrew Morley, which was tremendous. They are the leadership of the Ellen MacArthur Foundation that has done such good work in advancing the Circular economy. I think that they understand better than than most anyone I spoke to the macroeconomic challenges that we truly have and that we're facing and that in the process of talking with them and others, I realized that change at this macro scale that I'm advocating for will largely happen through what I'm going to call an evolutionary process. There are very few macro systems, not just in economics, but writ large that can change because one person or one company decides I don't like the direction it's going. Let's make it a different one. Systems are too big for one individual actor to be too much of a disruptive force. So the way that systems tend to evolve and this will happen in economics as well is because certain external stimuli that are new, that are different will force that system to adapt. Well, if we're talking about macroeconomics, what stimuli are coming? A really big one is resource scarcity. And for anybody that thinks business as usual can continue indefinitely. I would point to the dwindling supplies of natural capital, our natural resources, as well as the ecosystem services provided around the planet. None of them are healthier today than they were 50 years ago, 100 years ago. And so we have a problem when we eventually have those those supplies of natural capital run into limits. It will be an external stimuli that will force the evolution of our of our macroeconomic system, either positively force that evolution or negatively. That's where we have a role to play. Do we want to take advantage of things like resource scarcity, global warming, a plateau in human population later this century, and use those external stimuli to create a better system? Or will we let them destroy the system that we operate in? That's up to us.

Katie Whalen [00:20:27] I was just actually at the World Circular economy Forum where they had a lot of presence from the Ellen MacArthur Foundation and there was a lot of talk about, okay, business and designers as well as policy makers. And so I'm curious, who  do you think has- Is there any one actor that you think has a role and sort of can be the driver for this change?

John Lanier [00:20:56] There are certain sectors that are going to have a disproportionate influence. I want to acknowledge the power of one. That's the name of one of the chapters in the book and one of my grandfather's chapters. And I look at an interface as as one company that has done so much to create a circular business model that's not perfected yet. But they've come so far and they see their way through towards the next breakthroughs that has influenced others to follow along.

[00:21:29] It has revolutionized the carpet industry interface. Competitors have had to catch up. They've had to compete with interface on positive environmental outcomes. That's that's tremendous. So the power of one is real. I've seen it with interface, and when a company like Unilever makes a strong commitment to these causes, great things happen. But I really do believe that we need to see so much more than just case studies of good. We need to see culture shift at these macro scales to solve these challenges and there's positive momentum in that direction. I'm seeing more and more discourse around plastics and that industry. If we can figure out how to shift the entire plastics industry towards something circular, that would be tremendously impactful. Similarly, in food systems, if if we can figure out how to transform that sector, its impact will go far beyond that which any single sector you'd think could food touches everything in this world. So there's some sectors that are strong leverage points, but I still feel like we we need bigger scale change.

Katie Whalen [00:22:49] Do you think that the initiative should come from businesses in these sectors or consumers or, you know, legislation governments? Which which kind of initiatives do you think have the most potential?

John Lanier [00:23:04] The answer is yes. It has to be yes. There's there's no other right answer to that question. There is a role to play in every respect and. And to compartmentalize those roles misses out on the system's dynamics as consumers shift their behavior, become more environmentally and socially responsible in their purchasing decisions.

[00:23:30] Then that's going to change the conditions in which businesses operate. And similarly, the extent to which certain businesses stand up and acknowledge their role to be good corporate citizens, they can fundamentally change the way in which people buy things. Use things. You look at what Apple did in introducing the iPhone. It has changed the way that we live on planet Earth. One company did that in government all along is setting the rules of the game. What if we saw extended producer responsibility laws go mainstream? What what would that do in terms of how consumers act? How businesses act? It will all happen together. And so ideally, we're trying to shift the role of those different sectors in our economic system holistically, collaboratively, finding ways to bring those sectors together and not say, okay, your job over here is this and you just focus on that. Your job over here, consumers is this just focus on that. We cannot be separating. It has to be holistic.

Katie Whalen [00:24:47] One of the things that I hear a lot of times from companies is that, you know, there's only one or two people who kind of gets it, you know, who gets this idea of that? If we can rethink our business model, that we can avoid some of these risks in the future. Do you have any suggestions on how. They can help spread that message in the rest of the company.

John Lanier [00:25:10] It's hard, it's hard to figure out how how exactly to shift culture and get your businesses looking further along in many respects. You need champions at every level of the business. There's got to be somebody in the C suite. I don't know that things happen without that. But similarly, you don't see change of people at the factory floor level aren't aren't taking it seriously and it can be at interface. One of the most powerful tools that they used was to put an incentive structure into place. If somebody came back with an idea that increased efficiency or reduced waste, that.

[00:25:56] Actually reduce the costs of the business. They get a bonus check for that. They get to share in the financial rewards that came along with doing the right thing and. It never became about people trying to get rich off of this. But that was a good way of rewarding people for. For what the businesses was trying to do. It's that sort of. A business must create the conditions in which it can change. And there's rarely one person who can do that. It's not a good answer to your question because it's just really hard to do.

[00:26:41] Fortunately, Ray was a powerful person in his organization as well as a humble person who wanted others to share in the success of the company. So he tapped into it. And we need more people like him.

Katie Whalen [00:26:56] Yeah, yeah, definitely. I know this is difficult cause I also struggle with this, but do you have any examples of initiatives that you think are doing it? You mentioned eliminate MacArthur Foundation.

[00:27:07] That is doing quite a lot to bring together business and consumers. Maybe not so much consumers, but at least awareness to consumers and bring together business and policymakers.

[00:27:17] Do you have any other examples that you think are really exemplified exemplify? The action that is sort of the correct step.

John Lanier [00:27:30] There are a lot of players in the space. I'd say if you sure the Ellen MacArthur Foundation, if you just look at their list of members, you see how many corporations are taking this seriously. So that's that's. There's no point in singling out one of those members because the strength is in the roster of them. But I will point out one company and this is slightly anecdotal, but I think it captures so much of the sort of change that we need to see that companies, Patagonia, they get a lot of credit for their sustainability and commitments, both environmentally and socially, and they deserve more. But when I saw Patagonia several years ago on Black Friday, the day after Thanksgiving here in the United States, which has become a consumerist dream and environmentalists worst nightmare. Patagonia. Asked their customers not to buy anything that day. They said, don't buy our stuff. Don't buy anybody stuff. Go outside. They were a company willing to say, don't buy. There are very few companies saying that right now. I read Yvonne Renard, the founder of Patagonia, is his his autobiography is memoir in Preparing for Midcourse Correction Revisited and one liners do it out. He said he wanted Patagonia as customers to be owners, not consumers. What a difference that makes when you acquire something and you take ownership of it. Well, you will preserve it. You will repair it. You will perhaps at the end of its life, give it to somebody who can continue to use it. If you're a consumer, well, then it assumes that you will use something up and then need to move on to the next thing. That is a mindset shift that Shannon and all of Patagonia championed to make US owners if we see that happen at scale in commerce. I will be so encouraged to to see that shift. And it's one that in my own life I'm working towards. I and I've seen others as well.

Katie Whalen [00:29:54] Yeah. Yeah. That is a great example and also a great book. I remember reading that as well. And just there is so much just I think that's also the one where he talks about going and being the first people to be doing organic cotton and visiting the cotton fields. And so, so many different parts of that book were very memorable for me.

[00:30:16] Yeah, I think we have a lot that we can do as our own well, users of products and and not consuming, but being sort of the the place holder before it's put passed on to someone else and rethinking that. And definitely Patagonia has been doing that with also having like us used apparel, second hand apparel that they have on there. I think it's called remade.

[00:30:43] So they have definitely been trying to not only have this sufficiency mindset that they're passing on to their users as a products, but also having this this marketplace and enabling their users to actually pass on the clothing after the first use.

John Lanier [00:31:01] So which is really important. It shows that. Building the circular economy can be done in so many respects. It's not about perfecting recycling. Far from developing, the circular economy involves a new approach to marketing. It involves design of products to last. It involves creating new markets for things that can be second hand only at the very end of the value chain.

[00:31:32] Should we turn to recycling, because there's so much more value that we can benefit from when we value the things that we own.

Katie Whalen [00:31:43] Yeah, and I- it sometimes frustrates me as well because something like this is kind of a relatively new concept, right? That we that we get rid of things once we once we are not using them anymore. Like, you know, when you were when you were like 100, 100 years ago, they would, you know, repair everything and really make sure that, you know, your address was your address couldn't be repaired anymore. And then you would get rid of it, you know, and then it would be turned into dust, rags or things like that. So this idea of consumption is only kind of a recent recent thing, which is kind of mind boggling.

John Lanier [00:32:21] It is. It is. You look at the Great Depression in the United States, a tragic time. But it was a time when people saved every scrap of everything that they had because they might need it. It was a time when people understood they were not living in abundance and they changed their lives accordingly. We are not living in abundance on planet Earth. If you look at the the data of of all of our natural systems and the decline that there in abundance is out the window. But people don't feel that. People continue to think, oh, that gallon of milk that I only drank half of and the other half spoiled, I can just go buy another one. That is in abundance mindset. And it's a luxury that we don't have. It does not match reality.

Katie Whalen [00:33:18] Yeah. Yes. I think this is actually a nice segue to the question that I ask all of my interview guests who come on the Getting in the Loop Podcast and it's about the In the Loop Game that I created that actually is kind of what you're talking about in terms of getting people to experience this scarcity mindset and the fact that there is resource scarcity and we need to manage our national cap natural capital in a way that is different than sort of this take make waste way. And I know that you're a fan of games, so I'm excited to hear what you come up with, what you come up with, John. But the question that I ask all of the guests is if they could create an event for in the loop game, what would it be? And for those of you haven't had the chance to play it yet. So basically, you're a product producing company and you have to collect materials to produce your product. But there's different things that come up. One being resource scarcity and and the fact that there's also different changing market demands. So these are the events and. If you could create an event for for the game, what kind of topic do you think this event would cover?

John Lanier [00:34:38] I love the concept of this game and I will have to play this for sure. Can I cheat and give two? Because the first one I want to give is one that I don't think would actually work for the game, but would be tremendously disruptive. So the first one is human population plateaus.

[00:34:58] It is something that will happen this century. There is projections on on exactly when it will level out, perhaps mid century. The number of people on Earth, around 10 billion. Those are the best guesses. It doesn't matter the specifics. Eventually we're going to see population growth plateau and that's good for a lot of reasons. But it's going to present challenges because we have never in the last two hundred years of our first industrial revolution, we have never seen that economic system exist when there are not more people coming, more laborers and more consumers coming. What happens now? The reason I say. I think I'm cheating is that that's at a scale that an individual business in this game perhaps can't have an influence on. So the event that I look towards is a shock to the supply of oil. There's your second answer. Within a period of six weeks, the price of crude oil doubles and doesn't fall back down. What happens then? Well, a business like interface that has optimized for recycled content and tried to limit the extent to which it's relying on virgin oil, they are ready to kick tail in the marketplace at that point. So there maybe that's one that others have given as well. But I think if we see a doubling in the price of oil, that would be pretty disruptive.

Katie Whalen [00:36:34] Yeah, I think it's a great example, and I think it really hits home with events that already exist and kind of what I was going for in the game because yeah, there's a lot of price. The game itself focuses on 12 different materials that the EU and the US, some of the materials have been- The game itself focuses on materials that the EU has deemed us critical.

[00:36:57] So like neo and antimony, they're usually found in high tech products like mobile phones or laptops or wind turbine generators. So things that we actually need for sustainable energy transitions as well. So some of them also are on the US list of critical materials. But the idea behind a lot of these and why the governments have highlighted them is there's a lot of price volatility. So what I try to spread in the game play you realize like, hmm, I can avoid some of this if I actually start doing things where I'm reusing my products and recovering the materials, recycling exactly as you said with this oil example. So I think it's great. Thank you for that, John.

John Lanier [00:37:40] Yeah, absolutely. I love the concept of the game and it really shows what many businesses are realizing. If you begin to optimize your business for things like resource scarcity and things like global warming, if you begin to respond to the challenges that we're going to be facing in the 21st century, you can create a much more autonomous, independent and risk prepared enterprise. You can control much more of the factors that would otherwise be outside of your control. And that's a tremendous competitive advantage. There is so much competitive advantage that comes with being a good steward of the earth. And that perhaps is what my grandfather was most well known for.

Katie Whalen [00:38:27] Yeah, yeah, definitely. Well, thank you so much for coming on the podcast, John. It has been a pleasure. And I will link to your book in the show notes of this  at gettinginthelooppodcast.com. But is there a specific website or is it a place that you would like to send readers to learn a little bit more about you or the topics that we discussed?

John Lanier [00:38:53] Yeah, I appreciate it. Katie, and thank you for the link and the show notes. You can find out more about our foundation and our work at RayCAndersonoundation.org and you can go to midcourse.org to find the landing page for the book. I am excited to see who's hands it will end up in and I'll be honored by any person who flips through those pages.

Katie Whalen [00:39:24] Thank you for listening. I hope you enjoyed this episode. Poor show notes and links go to our website at gettinginthelooppodcast.com. And while you're there, subscribe to our mailing list to have new episodes delivered to your inbox every Monday. See you next week.