How A NEAR-DEATH Experience Led To Changing The World & MAKING AN IMPACT! | Hakan Bulgurlu

And suddenly I could hear people talking from 100 meters away. I felt like I had the vision of a hawk. This insane amount of strength just came to me.

What were the sort of mental hurdles you had to overcome in order to think you could do it? And then what were the challenges you faced in actually doing it and getting to the summit?

Yeah. The first hurdles I had to get by was getting permission from my wife, of course.

You were going to leave me a widow? What are you talking about?

Yeah, I mean, it was... I won't say it was easy, but once she saw how determined I was, and I framed it in a certain way. I first went to another mountain to really see if I could do it. I trained very intensively and everything worked out.

I went to Aconcagua and South America.

Mainly Aconcagua was the big trial and that was very difficult because I was arrogant. I was trained, I thought I could just skip the couple of days. Well, I did walk up but I thought I could walk up faster than anybody else and just arrived late because it was Christmas and I didn't want to leave the family. So what I should have done in four days, I did in five days, I did in two to base camp and of course I got Altitude sickness. And that was my first lesson. And then the next one was bad weather coming down the mountain. The porters had to, we ran down, but the porters carrying our stuff back down, they got stuck overnight on the mountain. And they had to use our stuff to actually save themselves to survive. Those were a little close and they gave me a taste of what it was like. so for me, the problem was arrogance and self-confidence because I'd done everything that could be done. I hired the best organizer who had a perfect track record and I trust him, I trust him with my life anywhere, Lucas Fortin Bar. And then I did all the preparation I needed to do, the diet, I had all this help, I talked to mountaineers, I even, what made me most nervous was something- But you weren't a mountain climber, this wasn't a- I'm not a mountain climber. I always made fun of people who climbed up mountains to walk back down. I mean, I understand climbing up a mountain to ski down, But I don't get walking up to walk down. But then once I decided that, okay, what's going to be this shocking thing that I do that actually grabs attention for this cause? And I decided, then of course I started learning about it. And now I have a huge amount of respect for mountain climbers, don't get me wrong. But I was as prepared as one can be essentially. So I had this overconfidence that when I got there, I would go up and come down easily. Oh boy, is that not true? You need a lot of luck. Obviously, you need skill and experience, but you need luck and mental, you need to mentally be prepared because it's extremely, extremely difficult. And the dangers are not, they're objective dangers, so meaning you have no control over them.

The weather.

The weather, a Sarac may fall on you. At one instance, a gas canister fell from a higher camp and literally passed one meter in front of me. If that even hit your arm, you're basically not coming back. And I didn't realize many things. You know, I had this impression that as we had two Sherpas each, you know, very strong men, we had, you know, we probably had the best Sherpas on the mountain, the best organization on the mountain. But it was a very unfortunate day, you know, many people died. 11 o'clock when you were there. That morning is the famous morning that was on the COVID of the New York Times with the lineup on the south side from Nepal. I was climbing the north side from Tibet. So there were less people, but it's more technical, colder. There were still a lot of people and 11 climbers died, unfortunately, on that day. But it's very, you know, it changes you because you have to deal with people that are dying. You're on a single rope. You have to actually unclip and step over them and clip back in. And I had many difficult, many, many difficult moments. I mean, near-death moments as well. I do not know, should I describe them or?

Please, please, I mean, just the image you just said, I am still digesting, which is, in order to climb up the mountain, you had to unhook from the rope, walk over a dead person, and hook back in and keep going.

Yes, essentially. Walking down, especially. And it is worse. It is not a dead person, but a person that is dying. So that's begging you for help. It's begging you for water, for oxygen. You can't stop. One of the, you know, this is a difficult truth that most mountain climbers won't talk about, but essentially you're responsible for your own life on the mountain and nobody's gonna help you and you certainly shouldn't help somebody else because that's gonna cost you your life. And this becomes pretty clear to you when you're climbing. It's not selfishness, it's self-preservation, it's just fact. For us, what went wrong is basically during the climb, it took much longer than expected because of the bottlenecks. And when we got to the top, we were very late. So coming back down, when the weather changed and we had severe gusts of wind, which actually blew off a lot of the oxygen stored on the way down, and a lot of the Sherpas left basically. So we were left to go down on our own without any guidance. and on the way up, you have something called a Jumah, which gives you a point of reference. On the way down, you don't have a Jumah. And so if you fall, essentially, and you're immobilized, you're gonna stay there.

I, you know, I never understood the media.

You're not hooked into a rope on the way down. You are hooked in a rope, but you have to change ropes all the time. And if you fall, the Rope doesn't arrest your fall. You just fall for the length of that rope until the next point. And, yeah, I mean, I never understood, you know, media reports that say, oh, this guy fell off the ledge on, you know, at 8,300 meters or the Mushroom Rock at Everest and there's a search going on for him. Nobody is searching for anybody. If somebody falls there, they're not coming back. It's that simple and everybody knows that. But for some reason, for weeks you hear that he's been searched for and this and that. Coming back on the third step, I'd given my sunglasses to a friend who had an issue with his and I was wearing goggles. They fogged up. My regulator froze and I lost my footing. And I was holding onto the rope. It's about a 35-40 meter cliff and holding onto it. And then of course, huge exposure below that as well. So you're looking from the, well, this is at the top of the world, right? Yeah. It's at 8,700 meters or something like that. And I lost my grip and as I'm slipping with the gloves, I took out the regulator. and of course, without oxygen, you don't have much time anyway. Pins and needles in your brain start almost instantly. And I started slipping down. I remember this intense pain in my belly, in my gut, and almost like I've gone to the bathroom on myself, that weird feeling. But then suddenly I could hear people talking from 100 meters away. I could, you know, I was looking, I felt like I had the vision of a hawk and this insane amount of strength just came to me. And I pulled myself together and I managed to actually come down, get a grip. And then one of our guides from further below saw, came, changed my regulator, got a new tank, and basically saved my life. But later, my friend Andrew Huberman, who I know as well, mentioned that we have a nerve once fired. This is the moment that saves a child from under a car by lifting it as a mother. When that fires, you also get neuroplasticity again, and you can rewire your character. And I think all of those near-death experiences changed me completely.

How did it change you?

Well, it made me much more focused on this singular purpose of really using every platform and means I have to fight what's happening to the world. We have children who are going to have children, and we need to leave them a better world than we found. We're not going to end up leaving them a better world. unfortunately, but at least we need to leave them a world that they can live in. And I started focusing much more on the people that I care about, my children especially, you know, in the past they would come, I mean, I'm a busy CEO, they'd come and say, Dad, come let's play and I'd say, oh, let me finish the email, let me finish my coffee. I'm busy now. No, I don't do that. I just drop everything and I say, Yes, time's yours, you know?

Yeah.

And I think these are, if I, it's been three years now, right? It's quite a while. So I have to remind myself because the world changes us, But I do believe that my brain got rewired on that mountain. And we've progressed a lot. Look at the company.

What way that you get rewired in your brain?

I think my character changed in that I started, you know, really understanding and behaving, easiest way to describe it, I think I went up a boy and came down a man, you know, I matured. I understand what's important and what's important is family and close friends. And what matters are legacy, right? As I told you, I want to be able to look my daughter in the eyes when I'm 62 and say, hey, I did everything I can.

Yeah. And when you kind of now look at the way you run your business, the way you relate to your mission as a CEO, how did that change?

Well, accelerated this transformation. We've now become carbon neutral across our global manufacturing operations, which isn't easy. We manufacture in South Africa, Pakistan, Bangladesh, these are places where there's no regulation.

And they don't often care about that.

And they don't care about it at all. I mean, they care about other things. They have a long way to go until they're wealthy enough to, you know, care about that. But so in places like that, we're driving change and it makes good business sense. We, you know, we're growing very fast. So it's actually paying off. And every study I see, the latest BCG study I saw indicates that 85% of consumers are now choosing, actively choosing products and services from companies that have been leading the path. Yeah, 85%. And it's still low, but it's important. 10% are willing to pay more. And that dynamic is going to continue shifting and regulation is going to come quite aggressively. So it's basically a winning strategy. And I think everybody sees it now. We just had a head start. Staying ahead is going to be very difficult, by the way. But people often ask me why I climbed. And quite literally, it was I had difficulty getting people to listen to me when I was talking about the climate and the crisis that Earth is in. And I thought, what could I do that would get people's attention? And literally, Everest did happen. When I spoke, people would look at their phones every five minutes or so, start yawning. When I started talking about Everest, everything stops. Everyone's fully focused. But yeah, the whole mission was to raise awareness and then talk about the solutions as you phrased it. But I love the introduction phase. You said, as a business or a business leader, we were trying to create solutions to the problem as opposed to feeding the problem. And I think that really describes everything in one sentence.

But to me, it's so striking what you're doing because there are narratives that are emerging in business around being a positive impact on creating climate solutions, but very few companies are actually doing the work. That is because a lot of the motives that drive businesses are shareholder value and profit. You found a way within that framework to actually drive the right types of solutions. What led you to reimagine what you were doing? What led you to sort of first realize that this was something that you as a business leader and CEO could actually impact?

Well, I realized early on that it actually makes good business sense as well. If you think of appliances and you have 14 brands, they're pretty much the same. It's a commoditizing industry. You go into a shop, there's endless choice, it's just price differences, option differences. But if you were presented with one that is completely sustainable, it's coming from a carbon neutral company that's recycling its appliances, that has the most energy efficient appliances, naturally consumers are tending to choose those now because there is this great anxiety out there. But for me, the big realization came actually through the preparation for the expedition to Everest because it was eight months of intense planning, learning, obviously physical, mental preparation. But in that process, we also were quite prolific with social media, letting people know every day what is happening to the planet and what they can do. And the initial intent there was to draw attention to the melting glaciers. Nobody talks about the glaciers. Well, some people do, but not many know about what's happening. And if you think of this whole geography from China, Pakistan, the whole of the ASEAN region, essentially India, Bangladesh, they depend on glacial water coming from Himalayas. Brahmades, the Himalayas. And 50% of those glaciers are gone.

50%.

50% are gone. This is science, right?

They've melted in the last decades.

This is in the past 50, 60 years. But the acceleration, of course, is in the past 10 years. We've had seven of the warmest years in the past 100 years have been, or ever actually recorded, has been in the past 10 years. And what's happening is, you see, when you look at the Syrian problem, for example, 5 million refugees, you got 1 million in Europe, government's changed in Europe because there was 1 million refugees. I mean, Hungary got 10 or something and ended up with Orban, right? So you look at Turkey with 4 million refugees, it's real. And that was caused by water. There was no, you know, water simply ran out and people in the countryside moved to the cities and that usually causes war. In the war. Yeah. And if you look at what's going to happen in the whole basin where these people depend on Himalayan glacial melt, you're talking about 2 billion people moving onto other people's land. So- Not a million.

Two billion.

Two billion. Two billion. And they depend- It's not going to go well. It's not going to go well. Everyone thinks it's a monsoon. The monsoon comes, it runs off. It's actually the glacial war they depend on. And scientists say this varies that the rest of the ice will disappear in the next 30, 50 years. But I want to talk about solutions as well. And the solution to that, of course, is stopping putting carbon in the atmosphere, decarbonizing, because that's what's causing the melt. Now, I got here because that was part of the reason I climbed Everest. But in that preparation phase, with the videos I was producing, trying to help people along the way of what they can do differently every day to impact. And there are so many things. They're very simple. But people started following what I was doing because they were curious. Why is this guy doing this? He's got three young children. He's CEO of one of the biggest companies globally in the appliance industry. It looks like a great job, although it's quite problematic.

Why would you put yourself at risk?

Why would you put yourself at risk? It doesn't make any sense. So people got curious and started following and they started really eating up the sustainability I was actually putting out there. The methodology behind it. and I saw that.

And then- the methodology behind what your company was doing to solve the problem.

Well, that, but also what they could do every day, eat less meat, choose, turn the lights off. Very simple, electrify everything. There are so many solutions that we in our lives can adapt and implement, which will have an impact at scale. And what happened was, unexpectedly when I came back from Everest, is inadvertently would really strengthen the purpose of the company. What happened is everybody through the risk taking I had done and maybe through the awareness of the preparation process, everybody started believing that this was really what we need to do. And our vision statement, our mission, everything reflects that. So an engineer in every corner of the company started thinking, how can I do what I'm doing more sustainably? Lose use less plastic or use more recycled plastic. Conserve water, energy, what technology can I work on that will reduce the consumption of energy, hence reduce the carbon emissions? It snowballed and the company suddenly became a purposeful business. I mean, of course this is a journey. When I say suddenly, I mean, I realized it at that moment. And it's a team effort.

I'm grateful for that. What was your aha moment that got you to go, oh, I need to.

Change what we're doing as a company? The aha moment was when I took my children, I'm a sailor, I love sailing and I've lived in Hong Kong for many years. sailed around Asia quite a lot. But in Thailand, there was this particular Maya Beach, everybody knows about it because of the movie. I loved that beach, you know, and I'd stop by.

I took my children to that beach.

Was that from the movie with Leonardo DiCaprio? Yes, it is. And you know, they had to shut it down for a year or two years or something. Then COVID came along, so it's been stayed shut for four years. So hopefully now it looks better. But I took my children there over a Christmas vacation, and it was shocking. I'd prepped the children saying, you know, we're gonna find treasure in a cave. special. This is one of my most beautiful places. We swam ashore and I was knee deep in plastic. Knee deep in plastic. I was carrying my children. They were small. And my daughter looked up to looked up at me and said, why? And I couldn't answer. I just couldn't answer. Why? For what? And I decided that, you know, that wasn't going to happen again when I'm, you know, nice and mature, a little bit older, but young. because I follow what you preach. I want to be able to look my children in the eye and say, I did everything possible. Everything possible I could do, I did. And that includes with the business platform. Yeah, so that was the aha moment, the real aha moment. And until that moment, I really thought that it would take a huge amount of capital and resources to transform the business. But it's not the case. There are so many low-hanging fruit. And I'll give you an example. I think it's interesting because there's so many business leaders out there who think that it takes a massive amount of money and effort to do this. But an engineer came up with a solution and something that I'm very proud of now because we started using, instead of engineering plastics to harden the tubs of the washing machines, he figured out we could use discarded PET water bottles. and we've used tens of millions of them, hundreds of millions of water bottles in our washing machine.

Plastic water bottles.

Plastic water bottles that are discarded, that are floating around the sea. So we collect them, we buy them, we have them turned into pellets and we use them in the drums. And the end result was that actually the material cost was less than what it would have been and the strength was good enough, which meant that we were making money by saving money. Profitable. Profitable, yeah. And there's so many things that are profitable. So many simple things people don't think about, like calibrating all the equipment on production lines, the amount of energy you save is incredible. The list is so long, I won't go into too many details.

No, it's fascinating because most businesses, I think, have the view that if we start to invest in this way, it's going to cost us money. And what's really not built into the price of goods is the true cost of the goods in its impact to the environment, to climate, to human health. And, one of the things you've done, and I sort of really want to highlight this, is you figured out a way to deal with one of the big problems with washing machines, which is microplastics getting in our water supply, polluting the oceans. I mean, pretty much every fish you eat is full of microplastics. And, that affects our human health. And, I always joke that if we were food. If humans were food, we would not be safe to eat because of how polluted we are. And you figured out a way to solve that. Can you talk a little bit about the microplastics issue and how it came to your attention and why you care about it and what you've done to fix it?

Well, I've always cared about the oceans. I mean, that became pretty clear with what we were speaking about. Yeah, at the beach. The idea was actually hatched here in Kaaplanke, where we are today.

Essentially, by the way, everybody listening, you might hear birds in the background. We're on the coast of Turkey overlooking the ocean and there's a bird nest.

Outside where we're doing the podcast.

So you might hear the birds, but that's okay.

I call them Mark's babies. They're little baby birds. They're screaming all day. Feed me, feed me. What's happening is, and these companies are trying to do something about it, but they're the big offenders. It's synthetic yarn producers. So basically, most of what we wear today is made from synthetic yarn, which is made from petrol. And that synthetic yarn, when it's converted into fast fashion, which is designed for you to discard every couple of months, it just falls apart every time you wash it. It disintegrates a bit more. It's scary, but just, you know, if you wash a jumper that's made of synthetic yarn, just one jumper, you're dropping millions of pieces and literally measurable. in grams of microfibers that are so small, there's no municipality that can filter that. That all goes into the waterways and it goes into the oceans. And it's been doing this as long as we've been producing synthetic yarn, industrial. Oh, yes. Plastic.

Again, we get back to plastic. What was that movie, the Graduate, where.

Dustin Hoffman was like, the future is plastic. Yeah, exactly. It was on the COVID of a house magazine or something, I remember. What that means is we don't know the amount of plastic in the oceans. And we've worked with a lot of researchers in universities. Fish taken from the Arctic, it doesn't matter where you take the samples from, they're contaminated with microfibers. The terrible detail behind that is these plastic molecules actually attract chemicals. There's more than 80,000 man-made chemicals that are floating around as well. and somehow these molecules bind to those chemicals, they get ingested by the fish and they go into the flesh of the fish and then we eat this. It's a disaster, essentially. And it's a health crisis that's happening.

And is the biggest source of this basically our clothes?

It's our clothes, yeah. It's our clothes. So, I mean, there are so many sources, but clothes are a very big source of it. This is not a problem of the appliance industry, right? I didn't mention, the washing machine has no blame in this, but we sat down and we said, how can we solve this problem? We know it's not our problem. can we create a machine that can filter this out? And we came up with a filter, many patents after two years of research that filters out more than 95% of the filters. And then the filter itself is recyclable. It's a closed box because if you go and wash it and then put it back, it doesn't work. It all goes, right? So the system's there. Then we open source the technology and we challenge all our competitors to use it. I'm very happy to say that France has regulated now, California has regulated, soon every washing machine you buy will have to be fitted with one of these filters. Now, initially of course, people reacted in the company saying, wait a minute, this is our IP, we've worked really hard to develop, why don't we make money from this? And I felt that, and actually the whole leadership team felt that if we differentiate ourselves as a company that's truly doing this for the good of the environment, and we're sharing the technology not because we think we can't make a commercial advantage out of it, but because we think it should be universal everywhere that we will get more credit for this. And we have. And now this washing machine side-- that's.

Very, very enlightened view because I don't think most CEOs would go, let's give away our intellectual property, which we could make millions or billions of dollars on. But it's the right thing to do.

It's the right thing to do. You need to speed this up. And we need to do everything we can. It's all out. And companies that don't transform won't be around, Mark. It's not like Let me see if I can do it in five years, 10 years. Companies that don't transform now in this way are simply just not going to be around because consumers are going to vote with their money, right? People are scared, they're anxious, and as the symptoms get worse, the climate gets warmer, the seas get dirtier, we get sicker, people's reactions will intensify.

So how do you engage with other CEOs? Do they listen to you? Do they think you're kind of a nut job and you should just-- you're going to lose all your shareholder value and stock prices are gonna crash.

Yeah, I had a lot of that. I mean, I was called an industrial anarchist, you know? Ah, oh God, I like that.

That was a good one.

And another one is, of course, I'm always pushing for regulation everywhere, because government regulation is absolutely necessary to solve this problem. And that's also very, you know, it doesn't come intuitively to businesses or business leaders. When there's regulation, they always put their hands up and say, no, no, no, please no. I was not very welcomed, but now I think the world has changed. And at Glasgow, that was one of the biggest positive messages I can give you. At COP26, there was a big positive moment for me at Glasgow because for the first time I saw businesses were ready to do something about it. And it's simple because they smelled profit, right? They saw that if you differentiate yourself and you change quickly, you're going to get an advantage. And so CEOs are very excited now. The tune has changed. I'm part of the CEO Alliance at the World Economic Forum, and I see There's two types of CEOs. One is the one who gets a briefing from their sustainability team and just reads what they're given and you can immediately tell them apart. They're basically the breed that says, this is not my problem. I'm going to retire in five years anyway and the next guy can deal with it. But that group will increasingly have a tough time. And then there's a group which says, this is going to become a business advantage and they really start getting into it. And I'm hopeful. I see businesses transforming everywhere. It just has to happen faster.

Yeah, that's so exciting. Well, I want to loop back because you clearly have made some very impressive changes in your operations that drive climate solutions that we can all take advantage of, whether it's the microplastic filters or recycled plastics as part of the construction of washing machines or the improvement in energy efficiency. So you're reducing both the energy inputs to actually create the appliances and you're also improving the post purchase energy use and you're also reducing microplastics and you're also recycling the machines after. So you get to when you throw away your washing machine or your refrigerator or your stove, it doesn't just go in a dump, right?

Well, unfortunately it does in most of the world and this is what we found. So one of the things we have to do very quickly is energy efficiency.

Is it true? Like, I just interrupt for a second, but I remember, like, I had a fridge in my house. It was an old fridge. It was kind of broken. I had to throw it out.

Like, I had to take it to the dump, and I'm like, I don't want to take it to the dump, but I don't know where to put it, you know? Yeah, this is a, it's a tragedy because there's so many areas of waste around that. It's, it's just crazy. But what we did is, well, first thing we need to do is focus on energy efficiency. That means the fridge you buy today consumes less than half the energy of a fridge or maybe even 80% less energy than a fridge you bought 10 years ago. Now, you should use a fridge for more than 10 years. I agree with that. It should be durable, it should be repairable. But at the moment, the biggest urgency is to change it because the energy you're consuming is causing carbon emissions. And depending on where in the world you are, really bad, a lot of emissions. So, first mission is to do that. But when we started doing that, you know, giving starting campaigns, giving discounts to customers to buy higher energy efficient appliances, we couldn't find a place to recycle the old ones. So we had to build one ourselves. We built this Mad Max like facility, you know, 50 meters high that just basically chews up appliances. And we're brand agnostic. I think we've recycled more than a.

Million and a half today. And what that does is because you use the recycled materials.

Really?

So you don't just take your own appliances back.

You'll take anybody's. We'll take anybody.

General Electric or refrigerator, anything.

Anyone. And then we will use some of that recycled material ourselves, sell it or move it on to other industries, the rest. But there's another saving there because by not using verging materials, you're actually saving the emissions caused by the energy used when that material is being produced.

Yeah.

And again, the more energy efficient appliance in the consumer's home is consuming less so causing less emissions. I mean, what people need to do really is to really check the energy rate on the appliances they're buying. This is critical.

And it's on the appliance.

It's not difficult and it's regulated everywhere. You know, people are, everybody's looking for rocket science. Like we're looking for hydrogen, we're looking for, you know, trying to, how are we going to solve this crazy problem? Carbon capture technologies. Yeah. And, you know, spending billions and billions of dollars. Actually, all the technologies we need or which will have the biggest impact are here. the International Energy Agency, Fatih Birol, a good friend who leads it, calls it the first fuel. There are four groups of products, lighting, cooling and heating, cooling and electric motors that consume 40% of all power. If you actually used all of our energy efficiency technologies available today in those four segments, you would solve basically the problem of shutting down 4,500, I think, coal-fired power plants, 4,500 around the world. And these technologies exist today. So energy efficiency has to be the first solution in this fight.

It's so inspiring. And I think I'm going to jump back a little bit about how we sort of solve this problem at a scale and some of the challenges in the business world. But I kind of want to kind of loop back to your beginnings. how you got to be you, because there's not too many of you that I've met who, one, haggled their way to business in the Grand Bazaar, climbed Mount Everest, and reimagined the way of doing business in ways that could have been disastrous for your publicly traded company. But you took that risk, and you took that risk, you took the risk of climbing Mount Everest. So, kind of what made you you? Was it dealing with the, what was the magic sauce?

I don't know. I mean, I'm constantly First of all, I don't think that highly of myself, but thank you. I mean, I do. I try, I definitely try. But yeah, very early exposure maybe to nature. I mean, I always, I remember days when I was five or six, I'd go out with fishermen at four in the morning, go fish, and then they would have me sell their catch in the market because a cute kid speaks languages, you know? And I'd take fish home as pay. And, you know, my parents, my grandparents would always be very proud of me. you know, that they instilled good self-confidence, I think. But the bazaar is a different story. The bazaar, it's an incredible place. I mean, you've been there, 20,000 stores, it's the world's first shopping mall. Yeah. It's probably the world's first, even though the Dutch and Amsterdam claim responsibility for that, the first stock exchange, because they were trading gold there forever, for, you know, hundreds and hundreds of years, a thousand years at least. and the spice market. It's where all the spice moved from the Orient. So it's really the hub of trading. And there, there's a system where you apprentice system, where you start at the door, you're not allowed to do anything, then you move in, then you can weigh the gold, then you can actually quote prices, you have to earn your way up. And I just- so you weren't selling.

Spices, you were selling gold.

I was selling gold. I was working for a jeweler. I learned the real trade.

Okay, it wasn't just a little turmeric yeah, yeah, frankincense.

No, it was, it was, it was gold chains and diamonds and simple stuff actually, but, but, nice. And what I found is that if the customer trusts you, meaning if you build trust with the person you're dealing with, then they will actually prefer to buy from you, even if you're a little bit more expensive than the guy next door. And realizing that really is a big moment in my life because I've treated everything in that way that the trust is not something you can break with the customer. and any business, whether you're selling a service or a product, it's a, it's a trust, it's a relationship built on trust. Yeah. And I try to apply that on all the businesses. But, yeah, I worked in the bazaar. I remember my parents didn't want me to work there anymore because I was.

Making so much more than my allowance.

They didn't know what, didn't know how to control me anymore.

I was 13, I think. 13 years old. That's incredible. You know, it's interesting what you say. So you're taking the lead on this and you've done the right thing, and it's been sort of profitable for you and the company. But I think many, many business leaders, I think, imagine that it's hard to make those choices and they don't see the return and that the prices that are reflected in the marketplace aren't fair. Because if you do the right thing, it costs more. The other guy is actually creating all these downstream consequences that are, we call externalities. They're not actually externalities. They're built into the There are problems that are built into the way we do things. How do we get regulation? And as I see, I imagine this is not a friendly subject for you to talk about, legislation or regulation globally to actually build into the price of the goods and services that we have, the true cost of the goods and services in terms of their full spectrum, the life cycle analysis of all the things that are impacted by them. Because just in terms of the food space, that's where I am. The Rockefeller Foundation created a report called the True Cost of Food and found that it was basically three times the price you pay at the checkout counter in terms of his impact on climate, on health, on the economy, on social justice, on mental health, on learning, on productivity. I mean, the consequences of doing things the way we do them are so broad, but they're not built into the price we pay at the checkout counter. How do we create an equalization in the marketplace where You're not out there in the lead and then going to get penalized because you're doing the right thing, but it's actually not good for the company's bottom line.

First of all, spot on. I mean, this is the problem, right? We need to put the price of carbon emissions into the products and services that we use. It's full stop.

I was not just carbon, but everything, right? Yeah, pollution, degradation, health.

Exactly. Everything. But carbon, we can actually pinpoint now. that's why I say carbon, it's low hanging fruit. Again, I was on the World Bank High Commission for Carbon Pricing years ago and I saw that's another accelerator in my own development, by the way, when I started seeing unadulterated data from scientists, like the IPCC report. And the only way forward is basically putting a price on carbon and that price gets absorbed by the goods and services. Europe is pretty good. at regulating. And by the way, I'm very much for regulation. I think it's the quickest solution. Global regulation is difficult, but Europe has done a great job. Europe really now has mandatory carbon offsets for businesses. They're forcefully, they're going to implement a carbon tax, a carbon border tax. So if you're importing from countries which actually don't mitigate the carbon, you will have to pay a tax.

Like China.

Like China. But this is a great way to do it. the only problem is Europe is Tiny. Yeah. Europe is eight percent of emissions. So Europe can only be a great example. It will take. Businesses need to do this. It's always the case. You know, businesses need to lead and then governments will follow. I, I highlighted Europe because I, you know, the green deal, as they say, I call it a good deal. You know, it really is a good deal. But will the world follow quickly? I have my doubts. So as businesses, rather than wait, you need to push the envelope yourself. Also, look at it this way. As a business today, we're sustainable, we're doing well, we're making money, we're growing. But the risk to our future is that I will have to take on the cost of those carbon emissions. And those carbon emissions, everyone talks about, I'll get a bit technical now, scope one and two emissions, no one talks about scope three emissions, which is what scope three emissions is what consumers when they're using your product actually emit carbon. And that's a huge percentage of the problem is actually that in the world. You need to make commitments as businesses to actually cut those today because the cost of that in the future when there is regulation is going to be so high, you won't be able to manage your business. Today, it costs you carbon credit maybe 80 in Europe, 80, 90 dollars, let's say. There's no saying that won't be $2,000 in five years, 10 years, or maybe even $10,000, nobody knows, or maybe 200. But the important thing to factor is that you need to take measures now to A, cut the carbon emissions so that you don't have that cost, and B, create credits yourself by doing things like recycling and using recycled materials and store it on your balance sheet, so you're actually hedging the future of the business.

But carbon offsets are problematic in a sense because it's like, well, I can be an oil company that's creating a lot more fossil fuel problems and natural gas company producing tons of methane from fracking that's three times the amount of methane that cows produce around the world. And I can then buy a carbon credit to offset the negative impact I'm making. There's something about it that seems a little bit disingenuous. Would you? How do you think about that?

I think the first the first goal has to be cutting the carbon emissions everywhere you possibly can. By next year, Architech will have 50 megawatts of solar power on all its roofs. I mean, we're not a power company. That's like power company scale, 50 megawatts of power. Why? Because we want to cut the emissions at the source. So we will use clean power.

We'll make the power ourselves and which.

Will end up saving you money. Yes, it does. Payback is quite quick. I have to say, the business sense also helps, but you need to first cut all emissions. Then I agree that buying carbon credits is a very shady market at the moment, but it's cleaning up. Article 6 at COP26 again was one of the big achievements where double counting, the infrastructure is coming in to where actually capital will flow to places like rainforests, like mangrove forests, patches of ocean to preserve kelp, coral, that kind of thing will start happening because of the capital flowing. And in the book, I interview many people, many scientists who are fighting really hard to preserve what we have, but somehow capital is not flowing to them correctly. And I think the system coming into place now, maybe not today, but in five, 10 years, will be an efficient way of rechanneling capital.

Meaning that by actually pricing in carbon into the marketplace, it will sort of reshuffle the deck and allow- Yes, it'll be mandatory to do the right things and incentivize the right choices. And the same thing in healthcare, you know, we know that the solutions for most chronic disease, which is better food, and yet we have a food system that- Is broken. Is broken and is driving chronic disease that we don't deal with through proper incentives. We know, for example, the cure for diabetes is eating differently, and yet we don't pay for food as part of healthcare. The joke Wendell Berry says, you know, we have a healthcare system that pays no attention to food, food system that pays no attention to health. And it's similar sounding in the business world. So what was it like being in Mount Everest, seeing the glaciers melt? I just came back from Antarctica and I haven't talked about a lot, but it was really striking to see the impact when we were there. We had days there, they were over 100.

I saw a picture of you, so it kind of been too cold.

No, it was like 50 degrees above normal temperatures there. There was a calving event of a glacier that was reported in the New York Times, it was so massive. And we witnessed it. And it was really disturbing to see in real time the impacts of climate and what's happening and to see the impacts on the populations of mammals there. And it sort of shook me up a little bit. How did that impact you and change what you think about?

Well, on Everest, I mean, you see, well, first of all, you don't see the glaciers, right? And then you see the line of where they used to be on the rock. And then you see where they are today. And it's like, it's like a skyscraper, the difference. And that's not coming back. And once you realize that, you start worrying about what can we save really? We've lost about 68% since 1970s of all wildlife on earth, the biomass. And we need to be fighting for what we can preserve. And when I was on the way down from the summit and this gust happened, I remember a moment when I was looking out and You have the curvature of, you can see the curvature of the earth and you can literally see the blue of space. It's a different blue. And I felt so stupid. I was like, who am I to think I can challenge nature? And what, like, what is this? I mean, or us humans, like we're unimportant, less important than a speck of dust. Nature will heal itself. It will go on its own cycle, but we will not. I mean, and I mean, you know this better than I do, but even yeast take the most simple organism with two celled creature, its instinct is to adopt to survive, right? I mean, they change, they adapt to the temperature, the atmosphere, the food source, whatever, very quickly because they want to survive. What's wrong with us humans that we're facing this catastrophe and we're not reacting to it? It's the strangest thing and we're supposed to be the most complex intelligent beings anywhere, if you ask some people. So this is a bit that I didn't understand. And on Everest, that really struck me that how small and insignificant I was and as a species we were. And how dare we think that we can challenge nature and win.

Yeah, we haven't really come into right relationship with nature. We've sort of divorced ourselves and disconnected ourselves in ways that make us think we're invincible. But, you know, I remember when I was in college, I was at a talk from this guy named John Trudell, who was the head of the American Indian Movement at the time. and all of us young idealistic college students were like, well, what about the Earth? The Earth is getting damaged. This is back in the '70s when it wasn't even bad. I don't even think they had a word for climate change yet. And we were just talking about pollution. And he's like, Look, he says, the Earth will be fine. It's humans we have to worry about. And I think we're at that existential moment where we might not survive as a species, and yet the ingenuity and.

Creativity gives me a lot of hope. So are you hopeful? I'm hopeful.

I'm very hopeful, right? Tell me why and tell us all why, because I think a lot of people have climate depression.

Yeah, well, climate depression is a real thing. I've been meeting a lot of young climate activists and I understand why now because it's a problem we've created, let's say middle-aged men and women, but mostly men, unfortunately that's the way the world works and that's how business and governments have been run. And, and you have these young people whose future is being destroyed by this, but they're not part of the conversation. They're not at the table. They're not at, you know, they're, they're, they're labeled as climate activists. And sometimes people listen to them, but they're not part of the solution. And they're angry. And I understand why I'm hopeful because a business, I see business taking interest as a, as a way, to differentiate and create profit. And in our capitalist system, that's the single biggest driver of change. And I also know that if businesses go, governments follow. So that really brings a lot of hope to me at least, because I now see action. In the past, everybody would talk, everybody would put on paper what they need to, but delay action. Now I actually really see action almost everywhere.

I mean, besides you, what companies are making strides to actually solve this in a real way? Not just in a greenwashing way, but in a material way.

So many like Schneider Electric is one, they make electric motors, they've done a phenomenal job. There's even, you know, companies which make paper that are, for example, for everybody it's different by the way, right? They are growing trees to harvest, but at the same time now they've realized that they're actually growing regenerative forests too, because, you know, so, if you multiply that, it actually starts adding up. There are many, many businesses. I mean, naming a few now would be a little unfair.

Yeah, I think it's starting to happen. I mean, obviously in the space that I'm in, which is food, and I think you've come to very similar conclusions that I have from a different perspective, which is that we have to solve this at scale. We have to do this through business innovation. We have to do this through policy change. That's why I created the Food Fix campaign. And I see businesses in the food space starting to change. A couple of friends of mine are on the sustainability board of Nestle, which kind of was the big ogre in the food space, is the biggest food company. And they had a bad reputation for infant formula propagation in Africa, which they couldn't afford and they watered it down and the babies were all malnourished. It was like a whole thing in the 70s. I don't know if you know about that, it was bad. They kind of have a different CEO now who's very interested in this space and has committed 80% of its supply chain to be regenerative agriculture by 2030. Now, I don't think they can achieve that, but that really struck me as a remarkable stand. Because I had a conversation with the president of Nestle in America a number of years ago, and I said, he says, I know this is necessary, but we can't do it because we can't get the supply chain to feed our monsters. To adapt. Yeah.

I mean, change is absolutely necessary, but scale is the key.

How do we get scale? Because people feel powerless. I think A lot of people listen to these stories and they feel, God, you know, okay, Mark Hyman, you can do this. And, you know, Hakim, you've got a, you're a CEO of a $9 billion company. You can make an impact, but I'm.

Just, you know, Joe or Sally or whoever. And I, what can I do? Like, I, how can I make a difference? Okay. Well, before I get to that, I want to talk about scale just briefly. Just to give one example of why it's important. Patagonia, we all love. I really enjoy, you know, mountain stuff, but it's, and they do the great thing. And, you know, it's good marketing for them as well. It works. but it's small. Small. Then you take what we do, 50 million appliances a year, you take the cuts we're promising in emissions by 2030, 11 and a half million tons, that's the equivalent to the country of Hungary a year. So you see what I mean.

And you're just one company.

One company. So you get enough companies behind this at scale, the tide is gonna turn, but that itself is not enough. So coming back to the individual, what we can do, we really need to make our, every day we make a thousand choices, millions of thousands of choices even sometimes. We need to make sure we're thinking about the impact we have every choice we make. The clothes we wear, the food we eat, I mean, you know better than I do, the appliances we buy, we need to electrify everything. We need to eat less meat for sure because of that.

Or less, less, well, we need no feedlot meat and more regenerative meat.

Yeah, yeah. But I mean, to grow that much regenerative meat for the world is also a bit difficult, I think, problematic. The whole food thing is too complex to get my head around, but I'll.

Stick with that one. That's my area.

Yeah.

But.

It'S pretty clear we have to move away from fossil fuels and consumers need to drive that.

So you feel hopeful looking at the landscape?

I am.

Business, policymakers, because you deal with government leaders, you deal with policymakers. Are they thinking about this the right way? Are they just, because it seems like, you know, in America it's the worst because, you know, you've got Congress that turns over every two years. And so all they're thinking about is the next election. And there's no sort of longevity of thinking, it's the next quarter, it's the next election. And it just creates all this short-sighted set of incentives which actually subvert what we all need to do and we all know we need to do to take care of ourselves and the planet.

Yeah, America tends to reverse its policies every couple of years, which is sad. I am hopeful because I do see traction in governments. I do see traction in businesses. Is it fast enough? Not really. A couple of years ago, I was saying there's 416 parts per million of carbon in the atmosphere. Today it's 421. Now, for us to reach our goals, that should have been much lower. We're supposed to, we're actually increasing still. And a lot needs to happen, but I'm a true believer in technology as well. And technology has to be a part of the solution here. And it is, capital is flowing that direction. Many believe the next 100 unicorns are going to come or decacorns, you know, $10 billion plus valuation startups are going to come from the climate space. I believe that. And in the book, I interviewed a lot of people who are working on technologies around that, carbon capture, you know, mass planting of trees. These are all solutions that we can do today. And I really believe that they're going to start happening, especially as we start feeling the impact of the, the destruction more, I think we're really going to speed up the solutions.

I think, obviously, I pay attention, you pay attention. And people hear the news and they hear the weather and they see the refugee crises and they see the food destabilization around the world and they see all these consequences. But I think it's very scary for people and people feel disempowered around it. discouraged. And I think you mentioned a number of things that people can do individually, but do you think the individual changes are going to make that much of a difference?

I really do.

As opposed to businesses and governments making the real change they need to make.

Businesses and governments have the responsibility, but so do we as individuals. And I think it's going to take collective effort to push the governments as well. You know, as people are more aware of what's happening, the reactions will be quite strong. and, and yes, I, I do believe. I do believe it's going to happen. It has to happen. Right. It does.

It absolutely does. I mean, I think it's very inspiring for me to listen to you talk about solutions that are in the business space because they've been the biggest part of the problem, but they also can be the biggest part of the solution.

Yeah.

And, and you're an example of how that actually can happen in an industry, which probably most people don't think about as a climate related industry. But every industry is, in some degree, a climate-related industry and has the potential through the kind of visionary thinking you have and the leadership you have and the technology development you have to actually solve this problem.

Yeah. I mean, every CEO or business leader doesn't have to climb Everest, right?

No, you did that for them.

But what has to happen is we have to evolve our consciousness and really be careful about our choices. And I believe it's happening. I see it everywhere, Mark. I mean, you must see it everywhere. Like people are so much more focused now and aware of their health and what they're eating and how they want to live their lives and how the medical system works. You know, all of that kind of awareness is also happening with, you know, what you put into your body, if it's poisoning you, you know, what you're putting into the air and the water is also poisoning you. And people are becoming more aware of this. I think we all collectively need to just be aware of the impact we have on Mother Earth. and we need to understand that we are responsible for what happens tomorrow. If we shoulder that responsibility and we really take it seriously that we have children, even if you don't have children, you know, that we actually try and preserve this beautiful, incredible planet that we have. You know, some people want to go to Mars. I mean, why would you want to go to Mars? It's a dead planet. And, you know, I heard some people say, if you wait here long enough, that might happen. that's not going to happen. We're not going to let that happen. This is just probably the biggest miracle that's ever existed, and it's called nature. And we need to we need to just get into harmony with it and learn how to live well and preserve what we have.

That's quite a beautiful vision. And I just want to share a little story I heard the other night because we're here in Bodrum in Turkey. We're recording this podcast and right literally out the window, we can see off the coast of the Mediterranean Sea, dozens of fish farms that are selling food to Whole Foods as sustainably farmed fish. But under the hood, it's not really that way. In fact, every fish is shot full of antibiotics. There's maybe only 60 meters of depth in the ocean and it takes up about two-thirds of that to farm these fish. There's millions of fish crowded in small areas. It's polluting the oceans. And it's just bad news in terms of the quality of the fish, the impact on the environment. And as a solution, there are innovative ways to reimagine how we do things. One of them was this thing called the Fish Bank, which I'd never heard about, which was the idea that our friend Barack shared about, which was he'd brought the president of Turkey here to actually show this problem. And he said, they solve this problem by leaving fish populations alone for long enough where literally every year the fish population will double until it starts to create an overflow of fish that if you go outside this protected area, the fish bank literally will produce dividends and these fish will get out of their protected area and create enough fish for ongoing harvesting without depleting the fish supply. So there's all sorts of simple ideas like this that all across all business sectors and all air society and human endeavor that we can actually start to lean into to solve these problems. And it's really the model that my friend Paul Hawken talks about that we had him on the podcast talk about, which is regeneration. How can we create a regenerative model of living, of business, of innovation, of technology? And I think that's where we're going. Not fast enough, but I think you're leading the way and I'd follow you up any mountain, Hakan. if you love that last video, you're gonna love the next one. Check it out here.

And when I first heard about this, I thought, well, come on. Like, that's not magic. It's not a fountain of youth. It's not a miracle, and it's not. But what it's doing is that meditation is actually lengthening your telomeres. And the way I like to think.

About telomeres is that they're like the little plastic thing at the end of.