While saving the Amazon grabs headlines, the trees right outside your front door shape your life in important ways. The more trees in your city neighborhood, the less crime, the fewer prescriptions for antidepressants, and the lower rates of asthma, childhood leukemia, and other immune diseases. These leafy giants affect everything from healthier newborns to longer life expectancy to higher property values. Geoffrey Donovan, an urban forester and economist with the U.S. Forest Service, joins the show. His groundbreaking research over the two decades is reshaping how urban planners and policymakers think about the essential public health and economic role of trees in city life.

Show Links:

Guest: Geoffrey Donovan

Organization: U.S. Forest Service

Grant Program: U.S. Forest Service's Urban and Community Forest Program

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In an industry that moved fast and defied cities, Veo chose a different path: partnership over disruption. Co-founder and CEO Candice Xie is building one of the only profitable micromobility companies in America by leading with discipline, transparency, and respect for the people shaping urban life. While competitors flooded streets and flamed out, Veo continues to earn trust — winning 90% of city RFPs and operating in over 50 markets nationwide. Candice joins Josh Dorfman to unpack how Veo’s strategy of asking for permission, designing durable hardware, and prioritizing community needs became its true growth engine. This is a masterclass in scaling deliberately, proving that in 2025, the climate-tech companies that endure aren’t the ones that move the fastest — they’re the ones that build trust the deepest.

Show Notes

Guest: Candice Xie, CEO and co-founder

Company: Veo

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Every day, 27 million kids ride 500,000 school buses—the largest transit system in America. And yet, this 80-year-old relic is stuck in the past: buses are late, routes are inefficient, and parents have no clue where the bus is or when it’s coming. Ritu Narayan, founder and CEO of Zum, decided to fix it. All of it.

With real-time tracking, smarter routes, and electric buses, Zum has modernized student transportation for 4,000 schools, including the school districts of Los Angeles, San Francisco, Seattle, and Boston. In Oakland, Zum introduced the nation’s first fully electric school bus fleet, slashing emissions and cutting the number of buses needed nearly in half.

Zum isn’t just about buses—it’s a tech, Human Resources, logistics, and infrastructure company rolled into one. The result? Parents can breathe, kids get to class on time, and school districts finally have a system that works.

Ritu joins Supercool this week to discuss how Zum is making school buses smart, sustainable, and better for everyone.

Show Notes
Guest: Ritu Narayan, founder & CEO
Company: Zum

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There are trillions of dollars of clean energy projects ready to be built—and trillions more in capital waiting to fund them. But the system connecting the two is too slow, fragmented, and expensive.

That gap is what Alfred Johnson set out to close. A former Treasury official who helped steer markets through the 2008 financial crisis and later served under Janet Yellen, Johnson co-founded Crux to build the financial software layer the energy transition was missing.

Crux connects developers, manufacturers, and investors across a marketplace for clean energy finance. In just two years, it’s closed over 120 transactions worth billions—turning a bureaucratic tangle of documents into a liquid market built for speed, trust, and scale.

This conversation explores how liquidity, intelligence, and automation are accelerating capital into hard infrastructure—and how Crux is becoming the financial engine powering today’s clean energy industrial revolution.

Show Notes

Guest: Alfred Johnson, Co-Founder & CEO

Company: Crux

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People aren’t looking for a mission. They’re looking for products that improve their lives.

In this Supercool episode, host Josh Dorfman takes us back to China 30 years ago, when a billion people rode bicycles but nobody wanted one. Everybody wanted a car. He realized China would have a billion of them—and wondered where all the oil would come from.

Three decades later, China is still getting its cars. But the cars are changing. During the first half of 2026, almost half of all vehicles sold there were electric or plug-in hybrid. Two-thirds of its fully electric cars cost less than their gasoline-powered equivalents.

Josh explores how the EV revolution is moving beyond cars, from electric school buses and 18-wheelers to boats and soon the skies.

Climate tech entrepreneurs aren’t asking people to want less. They’re giving people more of what they want while using less of what the planet can’t afford.

How do you make boating an extremely efficient form of transportation?

You lift the boat out of the water.

Vessev’s electric hydrofoils use underwater wings to raise almost the entire boat above the surface, dramatically reducing drag. The result is a new class of commercial passenger vessel that’s three to five times as efficient as a conventional boat, cheaper to operate, and feels like flying.

The opportunity goes beyond electrifying today’s boats. Cities around the world are crowded with cars and trains while the waterways they were built around remain largely unused for transportation.

Vessev sees a future where waterways become fast, efficient transportation corridors.

CEO Eric Laakmann joins Josh to discuss the technologies making electric hydrofoils possible, why commercial boat operators care about lower costs and a better passenger experience, and what happens when a climate solution wins because the product is simply better.

Show Notes:

Guest: Eric Laakmann, CEO

Company: Vessev

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Climate tech CEOs are running a long, consequential, high-stakes race. Where do they go when they hit unfamiliar terrain?
Chris Wedding created Entrepreneurs for Impact so they could turn to each other.

Through Entrepreneurs for Impact, he brings together 45 CEOs of investor-backed climate companies to candidly share what’s working, what’s broken, and what they’ve already learned the hard way.

Chris brings an unusual combination of experience to the room: a PhD in environmental science, a background in private equity and finance, more than 15 years teaching climate tech, investing, energy finance, and strategy at Duke and UNC, and significant time practicing meditation in Thai and Zen monasteries.

We talk about how CEOs navigate capital, focus, changing markets, customers, and the moments when they realize the thing that actually needs to change may be the way they’re leading.

Guest: Chris Wedding

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We think of a building as something permanent. Its interior is anything but.

A lease comes up. A new tenant moves in and renovates the space. The building may last for 100 years, but its interiors will be updated again and again. Old materials get ripped out and thrown away. New materials take their place.

David Bergman has spent decades working to change how the industry approaches sustainable interior design. He teaches Sustainable Systems at Parsons and directs the world’s only degree program dedicated specifically to sustainable interior design at the New York School of Interior Design.

Now he’s launching the Center for Circularity in Interior Design to continue moving the industry forward.

David joins Supercool to talk about circularity, embodied carbon, designing for disassembly, and training the next generation of designers to build the future we actually want.

Show Notes:

Guest: David Bergman

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