Adam teaches leadership at Columbia Business School, where I learned there were classes in leadership, which changed the direction of my life. Regular listeners know I consider leadership the most important missing element in sustainability. To change the environmental effects we're barreling into, we have to change the causes, which are our behavior, which result from culture.

Changing culture requires leadership, not just management. Effective leadership inspires. Adam's latest book is Inspire.

You can imagine my enthusiasm to talk with a star professor at one of the world's top institutions (to which I'm deeply connected) teaching leadership on the topic of how to inspire and become an inspirational person and leader.

We begin by talking about his background, how he began working in psychology, then moved to teaching at a business school, and the rewards he found there. Of all the departments and schools in a university, I believe business schools' leadership departments provide the most useful and effective tools and people to solve our environmental situation.

In other words, if you are interested in solving our environmental problems, you can learn from Adam. We mostly talk about his book, Inspire, and how to put it into practice.

• Adam's home page
• Adam's page at Columbia Business School

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When people talk about helping men, a lot of people think any and maybe every man might just have latent misogyny, so helping him risks augmenting misogyny. Richard Reeves has researched the situation extensively and for whatever advantages they (we) once had in some areas, still have in some of them, society has been kicking us down, especially in education, income, medicine, and law.

A big part of his job is handling preconceptions and objections. In this regard, his work overlaps a lot with sustainability leadership: people's preconceptions override seeing what's happening right in front of them. Listen to him on any other podcast and you hear he has to bend over backward and repeat himself on simple points that I would think should be obvious to clarify that helping men doesn't mean hurting women. His success shows me that we who work on leadership in sustainability can learn a lot from him.

His book Of Boys and Men takes him into challenging territory, but to do important work, sadly difficult. Many of these problems are not caused by boys and men, but boys and men experience them. I found it heavily researched, well researched, and well written. I don't think I'm overstating things, not that I came up with the following observation, but when society disadvantages girls and woman, people tend to say society needs to be fixed but when society disadvantages men, people tend to say men need to be fixed.

We can learn from his leadership.

• Richard's home page
• The American Institute of Boys and Men

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Sound pollution is pollution. You know it's been growing for your whole life with little sign of decreasing.

I wish I lived in a world with less sound pollution, but given that I do, I'd rather be aware and conscious of it than not know. Ignorance of how much sound was affecting me wasn't blissful. Noise still affected me. Awareness enables me to act.

But it's not what you think. More decibels doesn't necessarily mean more annoying. Lower decibels doesn't necessarily mean less. Just think of a whiny drone that sounds like a mosquito. I can hear an electric leaf blower as I'm typing these words and while it may be quieter than a two-stroke engine, it's freaking annoying and I can't tune it out.

Chris's book Clamor: How Noise Took Over the World and How We Can Take It Back describes more about sound, noise, how they affect us, how our understanding of them change, and new industries developing on sound design. I start by sharing how just the first chapter of his book illuminated elements of sound I hadn't thought of.

We cover in our conversation many of the topics his book does, not only the facts but the emotional and health responses, what we can do, what others are doing.

• Chris's home page
• Chris's newsletter
• Scientific American's review: 4 Books Scientific American Loved

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