Through the Noise with J. Renay

Bard MBA in Sustainability
  • 5.0 (11)
  • Business

Most leadership talk is noise. This show is something else. Through the Noise with J. Renay is a conversation about what actually happens inside leaders when the path isn't clear — when systems resist, the stakes are real. Hosted by J. Renay Loper, each episode brings together leaders with something to show, not just say: people who've shifted how decisions get made, held difference without collapse, and stayed grounded when it cost them something. The show's working hypothesis: complex systems don't shift through technical fixes alone. They shift when leaders can stay relational while navigating difference, uncertainty, and competing truths. That takes something interior — something practiced. Through the Noise examines what that is, and how real leaders cultivate it. This isn't a show about leadership as status. It's a show about leadership as a practice — especially when no one's watching. New episodes every other Friday. Through the Noise with J. Renay is part of Lead the Change — a podcast series from Bard College's Graduate Programs in Sustainability.

Episodes

  1. 3d ago

    Larry Confino on Positive Stubbornness

    What if telling positive stories — at a moment when negativity sells — is its own act of resistance? Renay sits down with Larry Confino — independent documentary director, producer, and the filmmaker behind 50 States of Sustainability, currently airing nationally on PBS in its second season — for a conversation about what it takes to spend twenty-plus years pointing a camera at people who don't make headlines. Larry has been an independent filmmaker for over twenty-five years. He has made feature documentaries about a lost Sephardic Jewish community in Greece and a legendary East Village nightclub. He has done client work for HBO, PBS, Disney, and Canon. But the project that drives him now is one he built from scratch during the pandemic: a documentary series traveling state by state, sitting with engineers, miners, tribal leaders, farmers, and CEOs working on some piece of the climate puzzle from where they stand. He calls it a personal search for optimism. He has filmed in more than twenty states. This conversation is not about climate solutions. It is about what a storyteller does when the attention economy is built to reward what scares us — and how Larry made the deliberate, costly choice to tell stories that don't sell. He calls the inner capacity he keeps finding in the people he interviews "positive stubbornness" — the willingness to keep going at a problem too big for any one person to solve, because the alternative is to give up.  They cover the West Virginia coal miners Larry refuses to villainize, and what it costs to hold reverence for hard-working people while telling a renewable-energy story. The Chippewa engineer in northern Minnesota who is replacing energy poverty with energy sovereignty by building solar on Red Lake Nation. The deep geothermal technology that could cut global emissions by twenty-five percent if its engineers can perfect it. And why Larry believes the people doing this work are not driven by obligation but by something stranger and more durable — the intellectual challenge of refusing to give up. Larry's measure of this work isn't audience size. It is the woman who watched a clip at a community screening, walked up to him, and told him she was changing jobs. This is a conversation about narrative as a tool, collaboration over extraction, and what hope looks like when you treat it as a discipline.

    50 min

  2. May 15

    David Biello on Why the Planet Doesn't Need Saving

    What if the planet doesn't need saving — and we do? Renay sits down with David Biello — TED's science curator, longtime Scientific American editor, and author of The Unnatural World: The Race to Remake Civilization in Earth's Newest Age — for a conversation that quietly dismantles almost everything we assume the climate conversation is about. David has been on the environment and energy beat since 1999 — long enough, in his words, to be cynical but not long enough to be depressed. He'll tell you the planet doesn't need saving. We do. Our cities, our food systems, the entire architecture of a life built for a climate that no longer exists — that's what's at stake. And what stands between us and a livable future isn't a missing technology. It's a way of thinking. This conversation is not a tour of climate solutions. It is about attention — what David chooses to notice, what he refuses to, and how he keeps his footing in a world where every message is weaponized and every source needs a second look. The throughline is short-term thinking: the quarterly result, the daily metric, the next outrage in the feed. David names it as the one thing he wishes leaders would unlearn — the same answer Andrew Winston gave in our first episode, arrived at from a completely different room. They cover why David cuts through the noise not with a system but with a network. Why the last 10,000 years of climate stability are the narrow band that all of human civilization was built inside, and what it means that we've already stepped out of it. And why "check the sources" applies hardest to the things you already believe. This is a conversation about responsibility, the long view, and what it takes to keep noticing the world while you're trying to change it.

    39 min

  3. May 1

    Dr. Ben F. Chavis, Jr. on Making Time Serve the Movement

    What does it take to sustain leadership across decades of struggle? Dr. Benjamin F. Chavis, Jr. has been a political prisoner, a denominational executive, the CEO of the NAACP, a Nation of Islam minister, co-founder of the Hip-Hop Summit Action Network, president and CEO of the Black Press of America, and host of The Chavis Chronicles on PBS. He coined the term environmental racism — from a jail cell — at a time when neither the civil rights movement nor the environmental movement had language for what they were both circling. This conversation is not about the highlight reel. It is about what it costs to hold moral clarity across six decades of struggle, reinvention, and contradiction — and what this moment is still asking of him. Dr. Chavis reflects on what has remained constant through every organization, ideology, and storm he has weathered: a commitment to freedom, justice, and equality for all people. He shares how faith carried him through a 34-year prison sentence as one of the Wilmington Ten, how he learned to transform contradiction into fuel rather than paralysis, and why the current moment demands intergenerational organizing rather than overwhelm. They cover why preparation — not just skills or capacity — is what carries leaders through a polycrisis. How a jail cell became the birthplace of a paradigm-shifting concept. What the African liberation movements of the 1970s reveal about the same extractive forces driving environmental and economic injustice today. And why truth cannot simply coexist next to falsehood — it has to remove it from the dialogue. At a moment when the historical record is being actively narrowed, Dr. Chavis is a reminder of what it looks like to stay in the work — not despite the noise, but through it.

    46 min

  4. Apr 17

    Andrew Winston on Winning and Losing at the Same Time

    What does a guitar lesson have to do with corporate accountability? More than you'd think. In this episode, Renay sits down with Andrew Winston — author of Net Positive, TEDx speaker, and one of the most clear-eyed voices on sustainable business — for a conversation that travels from music theory to quantum physics to what it actually costs a leader to stay silent right now. Andrew has spent decades trying to get companies to see themselves differently. But beneath the climate strategy and the ESG frameworks, he'll tell you what he's really working on is narrative — the story that says the purpose of business is profit, full stop, and that the purpose of a career is making as much money as you can. He thinks that story is broken. And he thinks the silence of business leaders in the current moment is not neutral — it's a choice, and it carries a cost. They cover: why collective courage may be the only path forward when individual leaders are afraid to move first. Why empathy is under deliberate attack — and why that should alarm anyone paying attention. What AI war gaming simulations reveal about the danger of removing humans from consequential decisions. And why Andrew believes we are, simultaneously, winning and losing  This is not a sustainability conversation. It's a conversation about what it takes to stay human, stay honest, and stay in the work when the pressure to go quiet is everywhere.

    51 min

  5. Apr 9

    Leading Through the Noise: Introducing the Inner Capacities of Real Change

    Welcome to the inaugural teaser of Through the Noise. Leadership educator J. Renay Loper introduces a show dedicated to exploring the gap between how leadership looks from the outside and what it actually feels like on the inside. In a world filled with the "noise" of performance, speed, and uncertainty, Renay asks a fundamental question: What actually has to happen on the inside for leadership to work on the outside? This season, Renee moves beyond "theory in the abstract" to examine the inner infrastructure that allows leaders to shift systems without losing themselves or the people they lead.

    8 min

  6. Apr 9

    Trailer: Through The Noise with J. Renay

    Welcome to Through the Noise with J. Renay

    2 min
  • 6 Episodes

5
out of 5
11 Ratings

About

Most leadership talk is noise. This show is something else. Through the Noise with J. Renay is a conversation about what actually happens inside leaders when the path isn't clear — when systems resist, the stakes are real. Hosted by J. Renay Loper, each episode brings together leaders with something to show, not just say: people who've shifted how decisions get made, held difference without collapse, and stayed grounded when it cost them something. The show's working hypothesis: complex systems don't shift through technical fixes alone. They shift when leaders can stay relational while navigating difference, uncertainty, and competing truths. That takes something interior — something practiced. Through the Noise examines what that is, and how real leaders cultivate it. This isn't a show about leadership as status. It's a show about leadership as a practice — especially when no one's watching. New episodes every other Friday. Through the Noise with J. Renay is part of Lead the Change — a podcast series from Bard College's Graduate Programs in Sustainability.

Information

  • Creator
    Bard MBA in Sustainability
  • Years Active
    2K
  • Episodes
    6
  • Rating
    Clean
  • Copyright
    © Copyright 2026 All rights reserved.
  • Show Website
    Through the Noise with J. Renay