50 episodes listed below
Climate tech, capitalism, and controlled chaos.
Climate Mayhem sits at the intersection of startups, climate pressure, and practical money flows. Its conversations move from EV charging and battery recycling to regenerative food, reforestation, human composting, and climate-conscious investing.
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Climate Mayhem frames climate action as a collision between planetary urgency and business reality. The show is less interested in abstract virtue than in whether climate-tech companies can actually build, sell, scale, and change infrastructure. Its conversations range widely. Battery recycling becomes a discussion of waste streams, cathode material, lost precious metals, process time, yield, and carbon footprint. EV episodes look beyond the simple promise of electric cars and into charging behavior, grocery-store parking lots, off-street parking barriers, and the slow replacement of gas-station habits. Food-tech episodes follow the Bambara groundnut from degraded soil to grocery aisles, showing how a crop can address water use, farmer income, and regenerative agriculture at once. Death care is part of the climate system too. In the Recompose conversation, human composting becomes a way to talk about nutrients, soil, conservation, family rituals, and regulation. Finance gets similar treatment. The Zach Stein episodes ask how capital, interest rates, subsidies, electric vehicles, fossil-fuel degrowth, and climate risk fit inside the same economic machine. The tone is loose, conversational, and sometimes rowdy. That looseness helps. Guests are allowed to explain how their technology works without being trapped in a polished pitch. The hosts push on practical details, but they also leave room for origin stories, uncertainty, and big claims about what could change. Climate Mayhem is strongest when it shows the unglamorous mechanics behind hopeful ideas: ducts, chargers, recycling machines, seed systems, supply chains, financing, and policy nudges. It treats climate tech as a field full of strange edges and necessary compromises. The show suits listeners who want to understand the people trying to make environmental repair investable, manufacturable, and normal.
Made for: For startup-minded listeners, climate-tech followers, and operators who want practical conversations about building companies around environmental repair. It also fits curious generalists who prefer founder stories with technical and financial texture.
What sets it apart: Climate Mayhem stands out by pairing casual, irreverent conversation with detailed looks at infrastructure-heavy climate solutions. It keeps returning to the uncomfortable question of whether climate progress can scale through businesses that make money.
We've spent hundreds of years damaging our Earth, we'll need to spend billions saving it. A hypothesis on saving the planet, tested through interviews with for-profit, climate-tech changemakers at Impossible, EVgo, Cloud Paper, DroneSeed, and so much more. Produced By Daniel Steenkamp (@Daniel Steenkamp)All Rights Reserved.
Dead soil, spent batteries: Ty Wolf-Jones and Jacob Kubica make your climate optimism explain itself.
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Short reviews from the PlayNext desk, based on the episodes we processed.
A thoughtful look at human composting as circular business, regulatory challenge, and return to the living world.
Climate Mayhem finds a strong, tangible way into circularity through human composting, following how a founder's personal story becomes a business built around returning bodies to soil.
A buoyant, technical look at battery waste and the machinery meant to recover more value from it.
Battery recycling gets a clear, surprisingly lively airing through Green Li-ion's 10-year push to turn battery waste straight into battery-grade cathode and anode material in one process.
A concrete climate-food conversation about a crop, a farmer network, and a grocery product.
The conversation with Chris Langwalner frames the Bambara groundnut as a practical agricultural tool: a legume that fixes nitrogen, grows on degraded arable land and sandy, poor soils, and uses very little water.
A clear climate-tech discussion of rates, EVs, subsidies, and the risk of a super El Nino.
Part two keeps Climate Mayhem fixed on a blunt climate-tech question: can capitalism turn greed, ambition, and innovation toward solutions? The episode treats finance less as background noise than as the machinery climate work has to move through.
A clear-eyed climate-tech discussion that takes incentives and product advantages as seriously as moral urgency.
Climate-conscious investing gets a practical stress test here, with sustainability and capitalism treated less as slogans than as a working tension.
Rob Walling on bootstrapped SaaS growth, plateaus, and exits — with founders who lived them.
Abbey Ashley's playbook for turning your job skills into a virtual assistant business.
SaaS operators on scaling, pricing and AI, metrics included.
Alex Blumberg interviews guests like Megan Phelps-Roper and Shane McAnally about failure and reinvention.
Climate Mayhem’s live episode at the Georgetown Steam Plant brings together Laura Sullivan Cassidy from Recompose and Sarah Osell from Animate Studios for a conversation about human composting, circularity, and the laws needed to make them real.
Climate Mayhem - Presented By The Daily Marketer, episode #109, focuses on Green Lion and lithium-ion battery recycling with Leon Ferrant, who co-founded a startup built around a 10-year proprietary machine.
Chris Langwallner, founder of the BAM nut and CEO of What If Foods, ties Bambara groundnut to degraded soil, climate, and grocery shelves across the U.S.
Climate Mayhem #107, Part 2 centers on Zach Stein explaining why higher interest rates, inflation, and the IRA could reshape climate tech investing.
Climate Mayhem episode #106 centers on Zach Stein, CEO and founder of Carbon Collective, and the question of whether investing can help align capitalism with sustainability.
Andy Frank says Sealed frames home upgrades around human behavior: people want comfort and are short on time.
Andy Frank says energy efficiency could meet almost half the climate challenge with today’s technology, citing the International Energy Agency.
Josh Garrett argues that climate products such as Teslas and induction stoves should be presented through practical benefits, including convenience, cost, and performance.
Discussion about the challenges and future of electric vehicle charging infrastructure, comparing it to gas stations.
The host interviews founders of climate tech companies to test the hypothesis that for-profit businesses can solve environmental problems.
An interview with the founder of DroneSeed about the origin story of the climate-tech startup.
A series exploring the behind-the-scenes of marketplace businesses through interviews with leaders from companies like Uber and DoorDash.