Supercool

Supercool

Supercool spotlights climate innovations that have moved beyond the lab and into the market. Hosted by climate-tech founder and author Josh Dorfman, Supercool features CEOs, founders, and operators building businesses that are decarbonizing energy, transportation, food, materials, and buildings. Each episode explores the strategies, execution, and business models behind companies that cut carbon, grow profits, and redefine modern life.

  1. 11h ago

    The Profitable Climate Solution: Integrative Design for Radical Efficiency — with Amory Lovins

    Nearly 50 years after Amory Lovins published his landmark Foreign Affairs article, “Energy Strategy: The Road Not Taken?,” we have made enormous gains in efficiency. But we have barely scratched the surface of what better design can deliver. Few people have shaped modern thinking about energy more than Amory. He co-founded Rocky Mountain Institute—known today as RMI—and has spent five decades helping companies and governments dramatically reduce energy use while improving performance and lowering costs. At the center of Amory’s work is integrative design for radical efficiency—optimizing whole systems rather than individual components to use less energy, material, equipment, and capital and achieve far greater efficiency gains. In this conversation, Amory explains how redesigning pipes, pumps, and motors could dramatically reduce global electricity use; why integrative design remains largely absent from engineering textbooks, government forecasts, and climate models; and how his home in the Colorado Rockies stays warm enough to grow bananas without any mechanical heating system. The most overlooked climate solution may not be another breakthrough technology. It may be better design, and one of our most powerful tools for profitably solving climate change.

  2. Jul 22

    Reprised | Rare Earths, Recycled: Cyclic Materials Cuts Into China's 90% Head Start

    Rare earth magnets power the modern world and the clean energy transition. They’re inside every electric vehicle motor, wind turbine, MRI machine, and computer hard drive in a data center. But the world throws most of them away. Less than 1% are ever recycled. And today, China controls nearly 90% of the global supply. That’s the crisis Cyclic Materials was built to solve — by turning circularity into industrial reality. In this episode, co-founder and CEO Ahmad Ghahreman explains how his team figured out what the industry long thought impossible: separating rare earth magnets from steel before they’re lost forever. We explore the engineering that makes rare earth recycling commercially viable, the spoke-and-hub logistics model to power urban mining where end-of-life products are abundant, and why companies like Microsoft, Amazon, BMW, and Jaguar are already lining up to work with Cyclic Materials. If the clean economy is going to scale, it needs rare earths. Cyclic Materials found a way to recover them — not from a mine, but from the discarded machines all around us. Show Notes:Guest: Ahmad Ghahreman - CEO, President, and co-founder Company: Cyclic Materials For more low-carbon innovations now scaling—and the playbooks driving their market adoption—subscribe to the podcast plus our: * Weekly Newsletter * Climate Adoption Playbook * Supercool on Instagram  * Supercool on LinkedIn

  3. Jul 15

    Circularity is Strategy: Why Billion-Dollar Brands Are Betting on Resale

    Resale has become more than a sustainability initiative. For billion-dollar brands like Patagonia, Levi's, and Michael Kors, it's become core business strategy. In this episode, Josh Dorfman talks with Terry Boyle, CEO of Trove, the platform helping leading fashion and apparel brands launch and grow their own resale businesses. Terry explains why resale is gaining momentum for reasons that go well beyond climate impact. Done right, it attracts new customers, improves margins, creates revenue from products already in circulation, and gives brands greater control over inventory and supply chains.He also shares how Trove has evolved from operating warehouses into a software platform that enables brands to build resale programs across products, markets, and sales channels. For Terry, the environmental benefits of resale are real. But they're not what gets the deal done. The strongest case for resale is the business case. Show Notes: Guest: Terry Boyle, CEO Company: Trove For more low-carbon innovations now scaling—and the playbooks driving their market adoption—subscribe to the podcast plus our: * Weekly Newsletter * Climate Adoption Playbook * Supercool on Instagram  * Supercool on LinkedIn

  4. Jul 8

    Twenty Years to Supercool: A Replay with Tom Szaky, CEO of TerraCycle

    What do China, a sustainable furniture startup, and a blog called The Lazy Environmentalist have to do with Supercool? This week, we're taking a short summer break from new interviews, but not before sharing the story behind the show. In a special extended introduction, Josh Dorfman traces the unexpected path that shaped his philosophy on climate innovation—from working in bicycle-lock factories in China, to launching a modern sustainable furniture company, to the accidental creation of The Lazy Environmentalist. Along the way, he shares the question that has guided every company he's built for more than two decades: How do you get millions of people to adopt better technologies without asking them to become environmentalists first? Then, we revisit one of Josh's favorite conversations with Tom Szaky, founder and CEO of TerraCycle, whose remarkable entrepreneurial journey began with a simple but radical idea: that waste could become a valuable resource. Show Notes Guest: Tom Szaky, founder and CEO Company: TerraCycle For more low-carbon innovations now scaling—and the playbooks driving their market adoption—subscribe to the podcast plus our: * Weekly Newsletter * Climate Adoption Playbook * Supercool on Instagram  * Supercool on LinkedIn

  5. Jul 1

    50,000 EVs Later: How Amazon Is Remaking Delivery

    In 2019, Amazon made one of the biggest EV bets in business: 100,000 electric vehicles by 2030. Today, it is halfway there. Amazon now has more than 50,000 EVs on the road globally, including 40,000 Rivian delivery vans. But getting to that number has required much more than replacing gas vans with electric ones. It has forced Amazon to rebuild delivery around the realities of electricity: where vehicles charge, how far they can go, how weather, hills, elevation, route density, and time of day affect range, and which vehicle actually fits each market. That is why Amazon’s electric fleet now includes more than vans. It includes heavy-duty trucks moving containers out of ports, e-bikes delivering Whole Foods groceries in New York City, scooters in India, and other formats chosen for the way deliveries actually happen.In this episode, Josh talks with Emily Barber and Tom Chempananical about the operating discipline behind Amazon’s push to remake delivery at global scale. For more low-carbon innovations now scaling—and the playbooks driving their market adoption—subscribe to the podcast plus our: * Weekly Newsletter * Climate Adoption Playbook * Supercool on Instagram  * Supercool on LinkedIn

  6. Jun 24

    Everyone Inside Agrees—Net Zero Building Is Just Better

    If net zero is better, why isn’t it normal? We have the technology and the know-how. Schools, hospitals, and skyscrapers are already being built that are beautiful, cheap to operate, and carbon-free. And yet less than 1% are net zero. Drew Shula is founder and CEO of Verdical Group, whose team has worked on green building projects for clients including Apple, Meta, and NASA. He also founded the Net Zero Conference, now in its thirteenth year, bringing together more than a thousand building professionals annually. In this episode, Josh and Drew talk about Malibu High School, embodied carbon, California’s building policies, and the debate running beneath it all: what gets us to a net-zero world faster—better solutions or better rules? Show Notes Guest: Drew Shula, founder and CEO Company: Verdical Group For more low-carbon innovations now scaling—and the playbooks driving their market adoption—subscribe to the podcast plus our: * Weekly Newsletter * Climate Adoption Playbook * Supercool on Instagram  * Supercool on LinkedIn

  7. Jun 18

    Verse Raises $54M Series B to Help Data Centers Get Power Faster, Cheaper, Cleaner

    Some of the biggest, most sophisticated companies in the world have almost no real visibility into one of their largest costs: power. Contracts are complex. Prices swing. Grid capacity is scarce. Costs are rising. For some companies today, electricity can account for 30% to 40% of OpEx. For data centers, access to power determines whether a project begins operating or waits for years in a queue.Verse gives large power buyers visibility into their electricity use, so they can see what they use, what they pay, and where they can reduce costs. For data centers, Verse goes further. Its new product, Dispatch Intelligence, uses on-site batteries and software to make demand more flexible for the grid, helping projects begin operating faster without slowing down compute. This week, Josh talks with Verse co-founder and CEO Seyed Madaeni, who has spent his career at the intersection of power markets, grid software, and large-scale batteries — from PG&E to Tesla to Fluence. Today, Verse announced a $54 million Series B led by Bessemer Venture Partners, with participation from Google Ventures, NVIDIA, and others.Seyed also explains how the fastest, cheapest path to power is often the cleanest. Show Notes Guest: Seyed Madaeni, Co-founder & CEO Company: Verse For more low-carbon innovations now scaling—and the playbooks driving their market adoption—subscribe to the podcast plus our: * Weekly Newsletter * Climate Adoption Playbook * Supercool on Instagram  * Supercool on LinkedIn

  8. Jun 10

    High-Performance Passive House Windows, Made 20 Miles From Midtown NYC

    While companies across the construction industry were raising prices because of tariffs last year, Wythe Windows did the opposite: it lowered prices on high-performance, energy-efficient windows. Even more striking, Wythe manufactures them 20 miles from Midtown NYC. Darren Macri came to construction after film school at NYU and built the first passive house in New Jersey. That project exposed the bottleneck: getting the right windows in the U.S. meant importing them from Europe through middlemen, and when orders arrived wrong or incomplete, there was no one local to call. So he started making them in his hometown of Ramsey, New Jersey. Today, Wythe ships coast to coast for projects ranging from high-end new construction to affordable housing retrofits in places like the South Bronx, where better windows mean an immediate quality-of-life upgrade: lower energy bills, quieter rooms, cleaner air, and greater comfort. Now Darren is pushing the same idea further: from high-performance windows to high-performance retrofits for entire buildings. Show NotesGuest: Darren Macri, CO-CEO Company: Wythe Windows For more low-carbon innovations now scaling—and the playbooks driving their market adoption—subscribe to the podcast plus our: * Weekly Newsletter * Climate Adoption Playbook * Supercool on Instagram  * Supercool on LinkedIn

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About

Supercool spotlights climate innovations that have moved beyond the lab and into the market. Hosted by climate-tech founder and author Josh Dorfman, Supercool features CEOs, founders, and operators building businesses that are decarbonizing energy, transportation, food, materials, and buildings. Each episode explores the strategies, execution, and business models behind companies that cut carbon, grow profits, and redefine modern life.

Information

  • Creator
    Supercool
  • Years Active
    2024 - 2026
  • Episodes
    106
  • Rating
    Clean
  • Copyright
    © 2026 Supercool
  • Show Website
    Supercool