E111 - Ellen Windemuth from WaterBear and Off The Fence

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Welcome back to the Green Element Podcast, where we feature business leaders and innovators transforming their operations to be more environmentally and socially sustainable. I'm your host, Will Richardson, and I can't wait to meet our guest today and help you on your journey of sustainability. Ellen, welcome to the Green Element Podcast. Thank you so much for joining us today. So you are Ellen Vindermuth, CEO of Off the Fence and a new startup, Water Bear Network, and chair to Jackson Wild Film Festival. Brilliant. Thank you so much for being on.

Thank you, Will.

Could you just do a bit of introduction about who you are and in your own words? I think that's really important. Thank you.

Well, in my own words, I would say I'm an aging media entrepreneur and I've been working in documentary for most of my career. So I started my company Off the Fence about 28 years ago. And about 12 years ago, we started developing a concept for our own global interactive video platform.

Okay, and what's— I guess it would be quite good to learn more about Off the Fence and the kind of the reach that you have there, so therefore then we can go move into Water Bear.

Yes, because they're both very connected. So I started Off the Fence all those years ago because I couldn't really find a proper job. And I was one of the first people who thought that it would be sensible to not only distribute documentaries, but actually develop and produce them, as well as co-produce them to really work with the burgeoning global community. So that's what we did. And that's why the company got quite big. So at one point we had 8 different offices in 8 parts of the world. That were doing production and some distribution. And then we became so entrenched that we pulled back. So now we have offices in Amsterdam, London, Bristol, and of course in Mainz, Germany. I sold the company to ZDF Enterprises almost 2 years ago, and ZDF Enterprises are the commercial daughter company of the German national broadcaster ZDF. So that has really strengthened Off the Fence to a large extent, as well as enabling me to work harder on our future-proofing ourselves via the launch of the Water Bear Network, which we're about to launch on November 25th.

Brilliant. And, um, did you— were you in any particular niche in Off the Fence, or is that what's— is that what the Water Bear Network is about?

Well, I think, you know, in general, Will, documentary— the documentary business is a niche business anyway, um, and, and we've always been very happy with that. Uh, Off the Fence was always involved in, uh, science in natural history and in history, as well as a number of social documentaries. My personal specialty is natural history, and you might have seen our latest film on Netflix, which is called My Octopus Teacher.

No, but I'm certainly going to have a look.

That might be a nice one for your list if you feel like watching something, I think, quite nice. I think it's a moving film, and it's a film that that takes natural history a little bit further than the classic BBC structure, because we're working really with a friend of mine who suffered from very bad adrenal fatigue and then healed himself from, you know, borderline mental illness by starting to swim in very cold water and by tracking underwater and Then really our film story starts when he meets a baby octopus.

Right.

Quite cool.

Yeah, I can't wait.

Quite cool.

And my other half is really keen on octopuses. Oh, good.

Oh, good.

Easy sell for me to get in.

It's a fun one for this weekend. It's doing really well on Netflix.

Oh, brilliant. Oh, cool. Thanks, Ellen. Water Bear Network is what we're really talking about, and it's obviously something that all of our listeners are incredibly interested in. So could you tell us what Water Bear Network is?

Yes.

Well, first of all, I'd like to tell you what a water bear is.

Okay.

Because you're probably not as much of a science nerd as we are, but a water bear is a tiny micro animal, also called a tardigrade, And the water bear can withstand nuclear radiation. He can withstand boiling water. He can live on the bottom of the ocean. By accident, a bunch of water bears were spilled by an Israeli rocket on the moon where they now reside. And if you go to the desert and you leave a water bear to dry out, his entire DNA will crumble. But if you go back years later and just add water, it comes back to life. So we like the water bear for many reasons, but we like the name the Water Bear Network because the network stands for the resilience of nature. It stands for the quality of resilience in general. And that's really what we hung the whole network up on. What the Water Bear Network is, is it's a global interactive network about our future life on the planet. And it looks at all 17 UN Sustainable Development Goals. We're going to build on the network by really just, in a way, playfully, in a fun way, introducing more and more documentaries. We're going to actually walk people through absorbing all 17. SDGs, and we're going to start with where I think it all begins, which is biodiversity. We're going to start with the human relationship with nature. I think everything begins with our relationship with nature, and if we have a healthy relationship with nature, from there I think we can extrapolate out very easily to absorb the values reflected in the 17 SDGs.

And we know how powerful documentaries are. I mean, you're speaking from Netherlands, but with David Attenborough doing the work that he's doing at the moment, his recent witness statements and stuff like that. So I don't know the reach of him. I know that in the UK, a lot of people are watching it.

Yeah.

And we are seeing a real a surge, I guess, and an understanding of what needs to happen in order to look at climate change and change our habits.

Yeah.

It's such an important thing that you're doing, really.

Thank you. You know, David Attenborough's reach is huge. It's not just UK-wide, it's worldwide. People believe him. They rely on him to to take a measured stance on things like climate change. So I think he's being enormously helpful. What Water Bear is doing is actually coming in from a slightly different angle. I think you need lots of angles to illuminate these issues to people. And our angle is a little bit more, it's a bit younger, it's more youth-oriented. And it's basically also, the attempt to include the work of all the NGOs that are doing amazing things in the field that has not yet been shown on an app. So we're launching WaterBear already with over 75 world-level NGOs.

Wow.

Like Conservation International, WWF, African Parks, Tusk, Sea Shepherd, they're all part of us and each of them get their own proprietary page on Water Bears. So we're gonna have a lot more people than David Attenborough to tell you about what work is being done in the field, what are people doing about climate change, what are they doing to combat biodiversity or any other of the issues.

And will you be, will you be splitting the topics up by the different goals, the SDG goals?

Yes.

And then each goal has its own subcategories as well. Will you be exploring those individually? I'm just trying to visualize how it works.

We've actually thought about this a lot, and we thought that doing that would make life too complicated, and we don't want to make the viewer's life complicated. We actually want to declutter Mm-hmm. All the information and all the misinformation that people are getting. We want to declutter this very often kind of ghettoized existence on social media where you sort of go down this tunnel, you have no idea what's really happening. So the way we're going to do it is we're going to start by quarterly themes. And our theme in the first quarter is going to be biodiversity. And through the lens of all these biodiversity documentaries and mini-documentaries, you're going to experience all the work that these NGOs are doing, what people are doing in a constructive way. You will see the problems, but you're not going to see, you know, devastating problems without solutions. You know, we're about suggesting solutions and showing you solutions, what people are doing about it. So that's the first quarter. The second quarter is going to be about climate, very obviously. It's incredibly important. And again, the documentaries that are about climate are going to introduce you to a number more of extra SDGs that are going to come in our climate stories, but you're going to learn the SDGs through the story. We're not going to come and preach to you about what the SDGs are. We're not Academics, we're storytellers. We're very accurate storytellers, but we're storytellers. So we're going to give you a bunch of stories related to climate through which you will be able to absorb more learning about the SDGs. After that comes community. So that again will take us into slightly different levels on the 17 SDGs. And the 4th one is going to be— I'm just thinking what the 4th one is. I'm completely blanking.

It will come to you, don't worry.

It'll come to me. I'm sorry about that, but it does happen to me now and again. I've said it so many times that I've blanked on our 4th quarter, but I'll come back to you.

So I'm visualizing— I would imagine you're aware of the Banff Film Festival, but some of our listeners may not be. So the Banff Film Festival is, and the Ocean Film Festival are film festivals centered around a theme, and they are written or directed, etc., by people, and they're more niche, I guess, documentaries. Is that what we'll be expecting? I mean, they are amazing. They're absolutely amazing documentaries.

They're wonderful.

But is that Is that what we'd be expecting?

I don't think it's quite Banff. I don't think it's quite Banff. I think Banff is great and we're partnering with a number of festivals. So the Jackson Wild Festival is one of them. The New Festival in Africa is one of them. We're partnering with, yeah, I'd say several others. EarthX is a fantastic green festival in Texas in the United States. We're partnering with them. So we're going to have our own voice. We're gonna have our own language. It will skew a bit younger. It will be less classic documentary. It will be a little bit more short form. It'll be more—

That's what I think I'm getting at. That's what I'm trying to get at in a really bad— I'm articulating in a really bad way.

It's gonna be more fun. It will be beautiful. So we want the channel to be beautiful. We want people to, you know, find it visually appealing. But we're not going to go with really classic storytelling. We're going to be a bit more upbeat, a bit faster.

Great. I can't wait. I can't wait. And you're launching beginning of November?

We are. And if you'd like me to go through the 4 quarters again, I can because I now remembered.

Go through all 4 of them. I'll go through all 4 of them. Biodiversity, just to make sure that I'm listening. So I've got biodiversity, Yeah. Climate, community, and—

Circularity.

Circularity.

How could I forget about circularity? So the 4th one is a really important one because we're living in a take-make-waste economy. We're living in a linear economy in which we've learned this also now through COVID, in which we see that our distribution systems are incredibly elaborate, incredibly wasteful. We are using too many base materials that are running out. We've completely— we've become completely overwrought and reliant on a fossil fuel industry that actually needs to shut down. How do you do that? The way to do it is what we call economic biomimicry. And economic biomimicry is basically retooling your economic system to emulate the way nature works, because nature has no waste. Nature functions as actually one coherent system where everything circulates and where waste is avoided and where overuse or extinction of any animal or plant species is Is is highly unlikely. So if our economy mirrors that, and of course circularity is going to touch on a lot more of the SDGs. Circularity is really going to tie up all the whole exercise of going through and and educating about the 17 SDGs. It it really covers some very key SDGs.

Brilliant. Brilliant. And how will you be distributing this? Is it through purely online? Is it—

It will be a mix, Will. It will be— we're going with, you know, we're an app in the very most basic space. We're an app. And if you go to the app, you can actually do a lot of different things. So every time you watch something, a control panel comes up and it allows you to do different things. That's what makes it so interactive. So if you watch something, let's say your favorite topic is whales, then you can watch a number of movies on whales. Then you can find out who's doing fieldwork on whales and what do their short films look like? What do their articles sound like? What do their podcasts sound like? You can donate to the NGOs in question directly.

Right.

You can share clips on social media. You can share information on social media. You can get in touch with the NGOs and become a member. You can volunteer directly in a number of volunteer programs. You can buy, you can purchase various sustainable products from these growing local economies, and you can There's some other things. There's a couple of other things you can do, but I guess these are the key ones. So that's what you can do on the app. We will have a version of Water Bear available for these hybrid set-top boxes so that, you know, you might find Water Bear on, I don't know, Sky or Youku or, you know, these set-top boxes. You're gonna find Water Bear over time Pretty much everywhere. So you can use it on your mobile, you can use it on your tablet, and you can use it on your desktop. And you'll hopefully also be able to use it on your TV. The functions might be impeded if you, if you, you know, if you're trying to donate via a remote, that's not the same as being on a laptop or on a phone, being able to donate or share on social media or purchase goods or— Or travel or volunteer.

I would imagine if your target audience is younger, then the versatility of mobile phones now and TVs. I mean, we often, if we want to watch something that I'm like, actually, I can't be bothered to even find it on, say, Amazon Prime or whatever, I just use my phone and just cast it onto the projector. And it's almost as easy, to be honest with you, And it certainly saves time. And so therefore, that's—

Yeah, I think once people know where to find it, I think that's a really good option because then they retain the full interactive functionality that the technology allows.

And so you've mentioned NGOs quite a lot, and NGOs are notorious for being biased or quite one-sided in their opinions. And how is that taken into consideration? I'm trying to think of examples of that. And obviously, if it weren't for the NGOs, I mean, I'm thinking about, say, Greenpeace and what the work that they have done, I mean, with Apple, for example, and what them just getting Apple to be more sustainable and more environmental. It was a huge, huge— the ramifications were enormous across the whole of the world. So we know the good that they do, but we also know that they do err on the kind of quite extreme side of things sometimes and may not paint the whole picture of actually what it is. How does that fit?

Well, first of all, WaterBear is an unprecedented place where all these NGOs, now already 75 NGOs with very differing mandates, have all agreed to be on this platform. So the first thing to do, that's— I felt very similarly to what you just expressed, not quite the same way in that I just think that the different NGOs have very different views. and do very different work. But I think that certainly the ones that we've onboarded are all fabulous, are incredibly good at what they do. And there need to be a lot of players on the chessboard to create change. So we need change in green and in yellow and in red. And whether that means that, you know, there's Sea Shepherd doing amazing work or there's WWF doing amazing work, there's Greenpeace doing amazing work, there's African Parks doing amazing work, there's— PAMs and Leaders for Conservation in Africa doing amazing work. They all come from different points of view, but they're all doing work that is effective. We'd like the viewer to make their own choice on which line of, you know, which line of NGO action they agree with most. A lot of people just want to know more. And, you know, especially young people, wanna be empowered to be able to dig deeper and say, well, I'd like to know what's being done about whales by whom and what I like. And maybe there's an NGO that completely reflects my, you know, my values, the way I feel about the issue. And I can actually become a member or I can donate or I can volunteer. I can be part of this. So I think giving people the choice in an overseeable package on this app with all these lovely documentaries, Is a really good way in.

It's incredibly powerful, particularly at the moment where we're seeing the NGOs are struggling to bring money in because a lot of money comes in from events and they are not bringing in nearly as much as they used to. So you've almost come along at exactly the right time, aren't you? I hope so.

These NGOs are really dedicated groups of people. And I would hate to see their funding go down at a time where they're more crucial than they've ever been before. And at a time where we are running out of time to fix this.

Yeah, absolutely. Absolutely. And I hope people remember that. when they watch it and listen. And so I'm assuming—

they donate lots of money to the NGOs.

So is it all through donations? You're not subscribing to Water Bear, or are you paying for the app? I mean, how are you—

Well, it's a free app, so people can simply subscribe for free. They can use the app for free. It's also important to say that we take no money for the donations. The donations go free and clear to the NGOs, because we do not want to enrich ourselves in any way off of the funding going to the NGOs. We want the NGOs to thrive. So our revenue model is a sponsorship model. We're basically going to be working with responsible companies to bring us sponsorship revenue and to do the right thing, really.

Brilliant. And have you got a place to go for sponsorship? Yeah, because I think that's really important for us to tell people.

Yes, we're talking to about 50 companies that sort of made it through the moral compass. You know, you really have to look carefully and we have a system that was perfected by one of our board members, which is called the moral compass. And we have to vet each of these companies to sort of, you know, to not want to greenwash. We can't afford to greenwash anybody. But there are a lot of companies that are doing a genuinely good job, a far better job than our national leaders.

I love the fact that you're vetting your sponsors as well.

Yeah, you have to, you have to, because, you know, we have this one chance at being credible and we will not compromise our credibility.

That's brilliant. And out of curiosity, obviously our target market for the podcast listeners are all usually purpose-driven B Corp type organizations. It's those sort of organizations that will probably walk quite quickly through.

Yeah, we're a startup, but we're in the process of becoming a B Corp ourselves.

Are you? Oh, brilliant. Oh, well done. That's cool. It's such an interesting network that is growing at the moment so quickly. I mean, we don't help organizations really become B Corps, but I know a lot of people who do, and I cannot believe at the moment how many people are going through it and going, actually, we want to set up ourselves for the future. We want to think about—

I was invited to a B Corp sort of a couple of away days with B Labs. And that was about 4 years ago. And I was completely hooked. I'm really sold on that way of running a company.

Yeah, Amsterdam's got a massive hub. I think it's the head of Europe in Amsterdam. Katie Hill is who I'm friends with.

All right. I know Marcello Palazzi. Do you know him?

Yes, I've met him, I think, online a few times. Yeah. Brilliant. Brilliant. And so what's the plan for the future? So you're going to launch in November. And you've got 4 seasons. What after? What next?

We're going to be dealing with different subjects every quarter. We're going to come up with, you know, a call to action for every film. We're going to have calls to action every month. We will have live events. So we have a live function. So we have so many— we have so much building to do to create this entire world. for an audience to just feel happy and safe and welcome in, that it's going to be once we launch, we will build and we will build as far as we possibly can in the shortest amount of time possible.

Brilliant. Well, it's been really, really good listening to what it is that you're doing. And I think one of the things that I was really excited about when we started initially talking about you coming on the podcast was we need conduits. Is conduits the right word? Like yourselves, in order to be able to understand more on what it is that we can do and how to do it. And as a professional who's been working in this industry for coming up to 20 years now, I'm loving the difference and the new things that are coming through and going, oh, this is so cool. This is so brilliant.

Yeah, we have a very specific function in this whole thing, and that is we are trained producers and directors. We're storytellers and we're aggregators. So this platform is, you know, the WaterBear platform is kind of a white label for, you know, all the great work that's being done in terms of storytelling and fieldwork concerning all of these 17 SDGs. So we really see ourselves as nothing more than an amplifier and a communicator for all this information.

Brilliant. Brilliant. Well, thank you so much for being on. What— we'll put all of the Twitter and social media and stuff and everything on our website, but is it— it's waterbear.com?

It's thewaterbearnetwork.com.

thewaterbearnetwork.com.

Yeah.

Brilliant. Brilliant. Thank you so much.

Actually, we might be able to come to both. I'm actually not even sure. I need to double-check that. Shall I double-check that with Poppy?

Yeah, do please. We'll send you a form to fill out at the end of this, so you'll be able to put all the relevant stuff in.

Great.

Brilliant. Thank you very much for today.

Thank you, Will.

And good luck for the future.

Thanks so much.

We will all need it.

I hope you enjoyed this episode. It's because of people like Ellen that we are able to understand the impact that we have had on the environment. And to have the Water Bear Network come into fruition at this present moment in time is so, so important and pertinent. Um, we are, as you know, setting up our Sustainability Solved community, and if you want to know more about that, please email podcast@greenelement.co.uk or go to sustainabilitysolved Thank you so much for listening. We will be inviting our podcastees at some point onto the community platform, so you'll be able to ask them questions. And yeah, thank you very much for listening. And please, as always, review us on your platform of choice. The more people that review us, the more reach that we get, and the more reach we get, the more we're able to understand what the problems are and how to reduce the environmental impact that we have. Thank you.