SPEAKER_00 0:00

Hi everyone, this is Reasonable, a show about economics, business, and politics, and I'm Oscar Rivas. I'm excited to speak with my guest today, Dr. John Warner. Dr. Warner is a chemist and inventor and one of the founders of the field of green chemistry. Before entering academia, he spent nearly a decade in the private sector working for Polaroid Corporation. Along with his co-author Paul Anastas, he literally wrote the book on green chemistry and later helped to create the world's first PhD program in green chemistry at the University of Massachusetts Boston. You may also recognize him from the recent Netflix hit documentary, Plastic Detox. John Warner, thank you for joining me today. So some listeners may be surprised to hear a chemist on a show about economics and business, etc. Um But you're not just any chemist, you're also an entrepreneur and one of the founders of green chemistry. So before we dig too deep, that's probably a good place to start. What is green chemistry?

SPEAKER_02 1:08

Well, thank you. Um first, if we think about the word chemistry, everything imagine that you're looking at a Beyoncé concert, or you're looking at a scene from Times Square in New York, or some football game. Step back and look at that image. Look at everything in that image: the clothing, the pieces of metal, the pieces of wood, the all the things that construct the stuff in our lives. That is all chemistry. And all of that has been invented by chemists and material scientists. Patents have been filed, companies have created products out of it, and our economy is almost entirely, you know, has some deep connection with chemistry. And so, although usually when I talk about chemistry, people go, oh, I hated chemistry in high school, which is an acceptable response because a lot of chemistry classes are not well taught. But it creates this relationship between us and chemistry that we don't fully appreciate, that anything you can see, touch, smell is chemistry. Air is chemistry, water is chemistry. So if you look over the history of chemistry, we've done some pretty amazing things. We are, you know, I lost my closest friend in the 80s to a form of cancer that if he got it today, he would survive. My cell phone has more computational power than the Apollo space mission. Okay, we are feeding hungry people across the world. We are bringing people out of poverty. There are a lot of amazing things that have helped humanity because of chemistry and the products that chemistry makes. Unfortunately, there's also some problems. We're hearing about a red dye that causes cancer. We're hearing about components and plastics that cause birth defects and cause fertility issues. We hear about technologies that contribute to climate change and all these things. And you say to yourself, why in the world would any chemist make a product that hurts people, that hurts the environment? And that's a legitimate question to ask. And here's the thing: look at any university that you are living by. Go and look at the curriculum that is required for you to get a degree in chemistry, to get a bachelor's degree, a master's degree, a PhD. Look at the most prestigious universities that you can think of. And you will find that no university requires a chemist to learn anything about what makes a molecule toxic, what makes a molecule hazardous. So a chemist may learn how to make the color red. They may learn how to make the color red stick to a fabric. They may learn how to make that color red not go off in the wash and not fade in the sunlight. But if they've had no training in what makes a molecule toxic, how are they going to make it non-toxic? If they have no training in what makes a molecule hurt the environment, how can they do that? So essentially, what me and Paul andastis realized back in the early 90s was that this isn't as much an epic battle of good and evil between industry and environmentalism. It is a missing component of what chemists learn. And so the field of green chemistry is that body of knowledge that says, hey, if you're going to invent a product, yes, you want it to do the things that the product needs to do, but also make it not hurt humans and not hurt the environment. That isn't sufficient to just wake up one day and say, I want to do that. You need the skills in the training. I want to play the violin. You can tell me I should play the violin. You may can pass laws that everyone named John Warner must play the violin. But if I don't have a teacher training me how to play the violin, I'm not going to play the violin very well. It's the same thing with green chemistry. If we're training chemists to go out in industry and invent these products that our economy is dependent on, and they don't have a clue about toxicity and environmental impact, you get the world we're in today. But it doesn't have to be that way. Green chemistry is the science, not the political movement, not the social movement, but the science that should be embedded into the field of chemistry so that people make products that don't hurt humans in the environment.

SPEAKER_00 6:02

So I think that's a good distinction that you made there. You mentioned like good and evil. I think that a lot of these conversations, people don't use those words, but it ends up kind of being, you know. We we we love our polarization in our society. Yes. Yeah. And so you mentioned it's like it's not a political movement or a social movement. You're saying this is really at the go back, back, back into like a lab where somebody's literally creating these products. You're saying that's where the root cause is, or absolutely.

SPEAKER_02 6:38

So imagine you have the scientist come from the most prestigious university in the world. They have published amazing papers and amazing journals. They've done amazing things, and now they're working for a company and they invent a new technology. We need a new uh coating for the next car, for the next Ford F-150 or something. So they invent this new shiny coating that's just amazing. Oh my goodness, this looks really cool. Wow, we can really sell this really shiny coating. And then they start you know moving the research into development. And then they start, you know, say, okay, how are we going to manufacture this? They start manufacturing it. And then after it's out and people are buying it, they find out, wait a minute, this is emitting some fume that is, you know, making people sick.

SPEAKER_00 7:36

Yeah.

SPEAKER_02 7:37

All that money has been spent before that. So now it's it's like, oh my God, we have to fix this problem. But if that scientist who graduated from that prestigious university had a clue about the potential impacts on human health and the environment, maybe they would have thought of that when they did that first invention before the millions of dollars of investment were spent. So after it's on the market, now we have to get legislation to ban, we have to hire lawyers, we have to remediate, we have to pay people to fix the problems, we have to pay people who have gotten sick. Think of all the but imagine the simplicity of just not doing it in the first place. That's the open dream of green chemistry. And announce the prevention type of thing.

SPEAKER_00 8:26

Yep. Um I kind of heard you talk about this concept a little bit, which I like the analogy you used, which was uh we kind of imagine inventions like, oh, I'm gonna I'm gonna invent something to fix this toxic invention, right? Where in reality, somebody, I think you used the event the example of like two guys on a golf course and say, Hey, I have a truckload of this shit. What do I do with it? Or how do I make money off of it?

SPEAKER_02 8:49

That's my whole, that's the what what's happened is the let's call it the human-built world, all the things that we touch and buy and use and everything. There was the first generation of this happened probably in the 40s and the 50s, that the chemical industry exploded, that we started World War II had ended. There was all kinds of stimulus for the economy. Let's make stuff, let's make the US, let's make the world rebound from the disaster of World War II, and everyone just, wow, let's make stuff. And so what happened was scientists in some labs, oh, when I put this together with this, make this thing. Look at it. It's stretchy, it's sticky, it does this. And they made all these materials. Then, after the materials existed, step two, what do we do with these materials? Oh, I'll make a spoon, I'll make a jacket, I'll make a bumper of a car. So the world was invented because we had these inexpensive, high-performance materials, and we invented the world. Now what's happened is we've kind of changed that process that we have over, in my opinion, overemphasized the criteria of design and the specification. So now what happens? We don't, we forgot how we did it the first time. And now we sit in a room and someone says, Oh, it has to be blue, it has to be stretchy, it has to do this. And by that third or fourth circle, nothing, nothing fits that description. And but the thing is, that's not the way it was done in the first place. So now we say, how do we invent a non-toxic replacement for this material? And although that's what we need to do, and that's a big part of green chemistry, the better approach is to invent non-toxic materials and let the design community create a new generation of products. If we go one by one going backwards to replace the mistakes made in the past, that's necessary and we should do it. But there's a lot of uncertainty and a lot of failure that's gonna happen. But if we do it the other way around, realize the way the world worked the first time around and make all these sustainable, non-toxic, cost-effective materials and just reinvent everything. That's both, but that is not how our investment community is put together this now, this time. It's all about what is the market share of the product you're gonna make, as opposed to what are the availability of the materials.

SPEAKER_00 11:31

Yeah, and so on the show we talk a lot about incentives. You're kind of unique in that I think when people think of chemists, they think of a pure academic just in a lab somewhere or just teaching. Um, you've spent a decent amount of time helping corporations, helping businesses make make products. Uh, can you can you give me a little bit of of your of your private sector background?

SPEAKER_02 11:56

So I feel that academia is the noblest of professions. Educating the next generation of people is super important. I played the academic game very, very well. I was a professor for almost 14 years, full-tenured professor of chemistry, full-tenured professor of engineering in the UMass system. In fact, I got a very nice award by the president of the United States, spent a half an hour in the Oval Office with Bush Jr. And so I really played the game well. But I did what no intelligent person would do. I resigned from two full-tenured professorships and lost the job security of two full-tenured professorships so that I could focus on getting products to market. And so every time as a professor, a company might want to have access to the stuff I was working on, the university would have oftentimes an unrealistic expectation of what that economic relationship should be. And where I'm saying, I just want to see the product get to market. I felt that I could have those kinds of conversations a lot better if I was untethered from a bureaucracy that had other expectations. Now you gotta understand this is in the mid-90s. The world has evolved, and now, you know, 20 years later, I I'm, you know, I might reconsider that decision. But back then it wasn't an appropriate place for me to try to get products to market.

SPEAKER_00 13:28

So I kind of mentioned in the intro, um, people might know you from the recent Netflix documentary Plastic Detox. Um when I watched that, I think I don't remember the exact quote, but I was I remember thinking, oh yeah, you know, plastics, I think chemicals in general, like I think you said it earlier. When you just say these words and people have all the if I just say the word chemicals, right? People that that doesn't produce a good feeling in you. Um plastics. And I think uh just even like things something as simple as like a plastic straw. Um I think some sometimes we get caught up in this, oh okay, we either have to deal with this negative thing or we have to get rid of it. And a little bit about what you've talked about is okay, what if we just make it with a different material? You're you're you're you're you're going down to like the actual building blocks, right? Could you say a little bit about that specifically with plastic? Because I know that's a hot topic right now.

SPEAKER_02 14:30

So before that, again, I'll just make a comment about plastics detox. All right. I when I was about 28 years old, I was arguably one of the most successful chemists on the planet. At 28 years old, I already had 50 or so patents. I was on the cover of Celebrity Magazine, inventor, crazy person. I had all these awards and everything. My head was this big. I am the greatest scientist who ever lived. And I lost my two-year-old son to a birth defect. And lying in bed the night of my son's funeral, I'm asking myself, did something I touch in the lab cause this? Did something, heaven forbid I got an award for cause this? And that's when I reflected upon my education. And the answer to the question, while obviously full of anguish, the fact that I couldn't answer that question is what drove me to do what I've you know done in the in the future. So the the point here is again, if chemists aren't trained, then they can't do this. And so I have so I left academia, started my own independent organization, but it is mission-based. It is focused on getting products, and unfortunately, unfortunately, depending on how you look at it, I am foregoing, you know, financial returns. I have to live, I have to do it, and I run a 20,000 square foot lab with, you know, 18 amazing people that work with me called the technology greenhouse. And since 2007, we have filed 383 patents. We've invented technology for over a hundred companies, and we've spun out nine companies based on our inventions. And so this can be done. It's a lot of hard work, and a lot of people don't want to do the hard work that we're doing, but every single one of our inventions have green chemistry built into it to show the world that it can be done.

SPEAKER_00 16:41

So you and Paulinassis wrote the book on green chemistry, and there's 12 principles that chemists use. Um one that caught my attention was about especially when it comes to businesses, is it needs to be cost effective basically when you're inventing something new because it it it can be it can be safer for people, but if it costs people, if it costs industry a lot more to make it, that's tough.

SPEAKER_02 17:10

Well, so so that's technically not one of the principles, it's one of the guiding concepts that I wish we were in a world that people did want to pay more because something doesn't hurt the environment, that the people manufacturing it aren't exposed to hazardous materials. I actually wish we were in a society that did value that so much that it would be unfortunately, we aren't in that society. So I have to remove my passion and say, okay, let's be pragmatic. Imagine you have a product that works better than a product that's currently on the market, that costs better than a product that's currently on the market. And oh, by the way, happens to be better for human health and the environment. Who would reject that? And so the vision is imagine a world in the future where we're not compromising. Every product is doing what we need it to do, costing what we need it to cost, and it's just safe and non-toxic. But unfortunately, we have a bit of a history where companies have said, oh, buy our product because it's better for human health and the environment. If you're a good person, you will buy this product. It doesn't really work as well as the other technology, and it's a little bit more expensive, and that fails every time. So who is the only person who can address the performance of a product? Who is the only person who can address the cost of a product? Who is the only person who can address the impact on human health and environment? The inventor. And if the inventor doesn't have the training to do this, what are you going to do later on? You can you can't go back and change the chemistry that is fundamental to the technology. And so that is the premise is that if we had it, so if you accept that, better performance, better cost, oh, by the way, better for human health environment, that would be gobbled up by the economy and by industry, that's exactly the problem. 90% of the technologies have not been invented yet. And that's the rub. People think, oh, if we pass laws and force industry to do something, that assumes that there's something else to do. And 90% of the time, there aren't alternatives. Because we have 200 years of modern chemistry, people have been cranking out all these things, not caring about, well, it's not that they don't care, but not thinking about the design of the toxicity and the environmental impact. And so now here we are in 2026. We don't have the alternatives. We want the alternatives. So to me, the crisis isn't in desire, the crisis is in ability. Until every university requires chemists and material scientists to be trained in green chemistry, we're going to continue to do the same old, same old. And so that's the dream, that's the vision. Is from my perspective, industry wants better performance, better cost. Oh, by the way, better for human health employment. Governments want it. The society wants it. Everyone wants it, but we haven't changed the way we teach chemistry and material science to be able to achieve it yet. It's happening, and it's happening at an interesting rate, but it's not fast enough.

SPEAKER_00 20:44

Yeah. So is are there any examples of that that the average person would could relate to of here's here's what we used to use, and then here's like a a cleaner version, I guess, if you want to call it that?

SPEAKER_02 21:00

So back in 1996, Paul and Asthas led and I helped uh the con the building of what is what was called the Presidential Green Chemistry Challenge Award. It's the only award given by the President of the United States with the word chemistry in it, ironically. And for the last 30 years, five companies or individuals have received this very prestigious award where they have a product on the market that has transformed, that is using the principles of green chemistry. If you go on the website EPA Green Chemistry Challenge, you will get six-page descriptions of 150 different technologies, and you look through, oh, I use that product, oh, I use that product. And that's the thing is from my perspective, I ironically don't really want us to be celebrating. That a product is safer and non-toxic. I feel society should believe if a product is on the market, it is safe. It is that's not the case. That is not the situation we're in very right now. And so the film plastics detox is saying you need to take the responsibility yourself to do the research to keep yourself safe. Sadly, today that is true. But I don't want that to be the future. I want people to have a compact with industry and reverse that if you can buy a product in the market, it has been thought through and it is safe. So my dream is not to teach people to defend themselves, but teach the inventors to make everything safe so that that people have enough to worry about. They shouldn't have. So people that are skilled with research get to be safe, and people not skilled doing that research have to die or get sick. That's just not cool. And so it really the responsibility is squarely on the inventors. Policy takes so long. If government says, oh, we're gonna ban this material, good luck if anything happens in 15 years. Policies take forever to do. So we need, you know, so we need to work with policies, but banning products is always a problem because look at the Clean Air Act. The Clean Air Act did not force the auto industry to invent the catalytic converter. The catalytic converter was already invented. The Clean Air Act mandated its use. And although it sounds subtle, it's important that the solution was invented and then the government policy mandated its use. Because if you look always through time, saying shaking your fist and saying, don't do this, don't do this, is far less effective than do this instead. And so we focus so much on banning things that if there isn't an alternative, then the lawyers are gonna fight the ban because there's no alternatives. So if we can load the world up with alternatives, then legislation and bans can in fact work.

SPEAKER_00 24:18

And I so just to kind of say it back to you, we're kind of we're kind of obsessed with regulation and uh like subsidy subsidize this. But to your point, like if there's not an actual alternative to to that thing you don't like, it it doesn't matter. You can yell and scream all you want.

SPEAKER_02 24:39

And so think of the plastics industry, okay. Back in the 40s and 50s, you know, we started making polymers. We made polyethylene, polypropylene. If you think of the sorry to sorry to jump in. What what is a polymer? Okay, so a polymer is when you take small molecules and they react together to make long chains of molecules. If you think of you have a bead, you have a pearl. That is a monomer, it is one pearl. If you get a string and you put a hundred pearls on a string, that is many pearls on a string. If you take a monomer, a small molecule, and you polymerize it, put it on a string, then you have a polymer. There is nothing scary about polymers. Our skin is polymers, our hair is polymers, everything in our biology, leaves, trees, bunnies, beetles, beavers, bugs, everything is made of polymers. And so polymers isn't the scary word. Some polymers have problems, but the word polymers isn't the problem. Some polymers are the problem. And so back in the early 1900s, kind of related to World War II and depression and stuff like that, the US government allocated an insane amount of subsidies to invent the plastics economy. All right, right now, today, in 2026, approximately seven million dollars of subsidies today are allocated globally for the plastics industry every minute. All right, and so if you integrate since the beginning of plastics, it's about a thousand trillion US dollars. Okay, depending on different people have different estimates. What it is is a massive number. So it's not that the plastics, the polymers are special, it's the amount of financial resources that went into it. If you imagine that we went back in time and we took cellulose, the stuff from plants, we took cat hair, for God's sakes, and we put that kind of money into it, everything in the world would be made from that. It's not that there's anything magic about the materials. What is magic is the government subsidies that went into it. Unfortunately, in this generation, that's not going to happen again because no one would have the political will to do something like that. Nevertheless, that says that it's not a technical challenge, it's an economic challenge.

SPEAKER_00 27:43

So, so I know when we talk about regulations, we've kind of already said, you know, it they can only do so much if the alternative isn't there. Um and I I get that. But I guess let me give you a scenario. Let's say, you know, US senator calls you up and says, Hey John, I I heard you're the guy to talk to about making these um cleaner chemicals. Yeah. What's the what's that low-hanging fruit that hey, what what are the three things I could go in and would make a difference for this field?

SPEAKER_02 28:16

So I will make the blanket statement that there is always, always the ability to improve every product. There is something we can do immediately right now that is economically feasible to improve every product. And so there is that short-term, gee, let's just make this change. And then there's always something that's a little bit harder, may take some investment, some money, we can do that. And then there are you know some long-term things to just completely transform. But here's the thing we have to accept the enemy of the excellent is the perfect, and the perfect does not exist. No matter what, if I say, look at this product, it doesn't cause cancer, it doesn't cause birth effects, it doesn't contribute to climate change, it doesn't make water pollution, someone's gonna say, but what about this? Oh, yeah, yeah. What about this? And there will never, ever be not another what about? And so if we say, okay, John, that's fine, you made your product not cause cancer, but it still hurts climate change, are you suggesting that until I address climate change, we let people get cancer? And unfortunately, to me, that's a no-brainer, but to some people, they want every problem solved. And that's a technical, very difficult. So, does that mean this we're gonna have to wait years? And interestingly enough, when we insist on getting more things solved, we're literally supporting the status quo. So we got to understand that we don't want to measure from perfection down, we need to measure from where we are to how much we've improved. And it's heartbreaking because we always want to do better. But if we don't release to the world better products that may not be perfect, but a heck of a lot better than what we have, then we're gonna be stuck doing the same old stuff. So we need to celebrate improvements wherever they come and allow people. So if I make it less cost synergetic and then you go in the lab, say, I'm gonna work on climate change. Well, I gave you a head start, because I give you that. Then someone says, Oh, he made it, I'm gonna do this. And that's how the world works is by sharing information and building. But if you're if I'm in the little closet not talking about it until I address all those instruments, hey, I'll die before I'm done, and the world will never get anything.

SPEAKER_00 30:51

Yeah. So is it I I guess when when I when I stop and think about it, I I kind of think, okay, what's something that people can kind of hold on to, right? Because there's so much information, and and the average person, you know, they can't do anything about this. They they can't go force these universities to put this in the curriculum. And they can't so like what's something that the average person can be like, okay, that this is a no-brainer. That's low-hanging fruit.

SPEAKER_02 31:20

All right. So so first, the I am hardwired to not tell people what they have to do. Sure. All right. I just I I hesitate because everyone has different economic situations, they have different personal situations, and what is the exact thing that you should do may not be the right thing for someone else to do. So, what I feel is to be thoughtful about the decisions that you're making. Do a little bit of research. There's a lot of bad science out there. So I it unfortunately you'll never be certain that you're getting accurate information, either that something is safe or that something is dangerous. And so just do the best you can. Find sources that you find is credible, that you can go and research. And offline, I will give you some links of organizations that people can go and look at to do that. Nobody is perfect, everything is imperfect, but just the very act of trying. But, you know, the the thing is, is we do so many things in our lives that are not good for ourselves or our environment. You know, the things we do every day, you know, you know, we don't eat the right food, we don't exercise, we drive cars, we fly in airplanes, that there's so much that we can do as individuals that we're not doing. That to pick on some other things is important, but we need to put it in perspective. That there's so many other things that we can do to make society better from a human health and environmental perspective. What we got to try to avoid is panic and fear. Because panic and fear itself is toxic. You know, and so I uh I lost a child to birth defect. I understand how important this issue is, but scaring the heck out of people without giving them an option of what to do instead is not the path forward. We need to be working on those alternatives so that we tell people don't do this, do this. All right. And so don't do this without a do this. We need to be a little bit hesitant. Sometimes there are some pretty nasty things that have been banned and should be banned. And I, in fact, feel that there are some things that haven't been banned yet that need to be banned. So bans are not out of the question when it has significant impact on human health and environment. We got a ban. But the lawyers will fight and they will win until there's an alternative.

SPEAKER_00 34:00

Yeah, the the the through line in in a lot of what you've been saying is the the pragmatism of okay, what works? You know, and exactly and and one step in the right direction is one step in the right direction. Uh and it's and it's the boring stuff, right? That makes makes the difference.

SPEAKER_02 34:17

Yep, exactly. And that's I very, very blue-collar, feet on the ground kind of person that just listen, I just want to see the change happen. And any kind of change is not going to be perfect, and people on either side of the debate are gonna have to compromise, but we gotta move forward. And so winning an argument, but not changing the world is unacceptable. Losing a little bit of the argument, but making the world a better place is more important. So we need to not be embracing in the fight as much as we want to embrace the solutions. And so the fight will always, no one is going to be 100% winner. And so we need people to say, okay, temporarily, not forever, but temporarily, let's compromise and let this product get to market because it's a heck of a lot better than the other. Still not perfect, but it's better. And then to celebrate these things, instead of throwing stones at how a product is not good enough, which is always easy to do, we need to get into the mindset to celebrate because if the economy is rewarded, if companies are rewarded by doing the right thing, they'll do more. But if they try to do the right thing and all they do is get assaulted because it's not enough, they'll say, Well, screw that, why even bother?

SPEAKER_00 35:51

But I wanted to ask a favor. With all the noise out there, I still believe word of mouth is the best way to spread ideas. So if you're enjoying this conversation, please think about sharing this episode with someone else that you think would enjoy it. I'd appreciate it. Okay, back to the show. I kind of wanted to pivot to something you mentioned earlier, which is like, okay, so many people have a negative connotation with chemicals. Like you said, that's probably happened over time, but um you you said it earlier. I think you have over 300 patents. You you think of yourself as an inventor. I think I read something about I don't know if it was Nike or Adidas you created or uh a product. Some of both of them. Could you uh I'm I'm I'm interested in in what that was and and kind of how somebody could look at look down at their shoes and be like, oh, that's that's chemistry.

SPEAKER_02 36:45

So it's interesting. In 2015, I found myself on the center stage of the United Nations General Assembly. I was with uh Artidas, someone from the board of directors of Artidas in an organization called Parlay for the Oceans. So Parlay for the Oceans and Artidas wanted to come up with a recycled material to make their running shoes. And so they found a lot of ocean waste is a lot of waste plastics in the ocean. And so I helped invent a technology to take waste plastics in the ocean and to convert them into running shoes. And right now, I think there are three products on them, three classes of products on the market sold by Adidas called the Parlay Ocean Plastic, this, that, and the other thing. That is an example that exists right now today, as you know, one is another example. There's a company called Hairprint. If you go online, myhairprint.com, uh, people are coloring their hair all the time with some pretty nasty stuff. Hairprint is a technology I helped invent that uses food grade material. You could literally eat it. I don't recommend you do, you'll have a very bad day, but you won't die, you won't get sick. It's but, anyways, it's it uh restores the human pigment to gray hair. So it's not painting the hair, it's not coloring the hair, it recreates the human pigment. That's an example. There's a company called Collaborative Aggregates. Collaborative Aggregates has in has uh commercialized a process to when the sun and the air shine light on asphalt pavement, it gets brittle and hard. And so every year, 10% of all asphalt is being repaved. If you take all the asphalt in the United States and push it together, it's larger than the state of Wisconsin. Okay, that's a lot of asphalt. So what we do is we dig up the old asphalt, put it in a landfill, maybe use a little bit, but then buy new petroleum, new new pebbles and rocks, and repave. Collaborative aggregates has a green chemistry technology that allows you to reverse the oxidative damage with no new petroleum, without anything to repave, on and on and on. Those are just three of many examples.

SPEAKER_00 39:18

Wow. And and if if somebody was listening right now and they're kind of thinking, you know, this chemistry thing is is kind of cool. I think I want to be a part of that. What would you say to them to say to kind of make them how would you sell chemistry as a field that somebody should go into?

SPEAKER_02 39:38

So I am a first generation college student. I did not do well in high school chemistry. All right. I think because they didn't want me to have to repeat it, they gave me a D, so I didn't have to get an F. I went to university as a music major. I was a musician. I had no interest in the sciences. And through a series of strange and perhaps definitely unfortunate things, my relationship to music was impacted because of some personal loss. And so on a whim, I wandered into the chemistry lab. And it's really interesting. All my life, I thought there were two types of people. There were artists and there were scientists. And because I was marginally okay at music, I must be an artist. But when I got into the chemistry lab and I saw that chemists created things, they made things, they designed things. I said, wait a minute, maybe I have this wrong. Bringing something into the world that didn't exist before, that's not art. That's not science, that's something far more human. And I imagined ramming my brain full of electrodes and composing a piece of music on the piano or designing some molecule. And I said, it's the same neurological activity, that invention, creation, design, whether it's a piece of music or a molecule, it's the same thing. And so once I realized my creative passions could be fulfilled in this, I can make my parents a little prouder of me. Um, that's that's kind of where I did. But I I see the composition of music and chemistry. The way to think of it is chemistry is the fundamental basis of biology. Everything in biology can be based on chemistry. Okay? Biology is the fundamental basis of neuroscience. How our consciousness works, all the different things our brain does is a fundamental basis of biology, right? Philosophy is a consequence of neuroscience. You get a group of people thinking big thoughts and philosophical things happen because of neuroscience, okay? Philosophy is the underpinning of mathematics. Okay, the fundamentals of math and mathematics is an outgrowth of philosophy. And mathematics turns into physics, is the fundamentals of physics, and physics is the fundamental of chemistry. This is a continuum. It's not like chemistry's over here, biology is over here. If you're an accountant, you're on that circle. If you're a musician, you're on that circle. If you're an engineer, you're on that system. The mistake we make is we put everyone in different buckets and we say, oh, I'm not that and I'm not that. And if we realize we're all connected, we're all we're all chemists, we're all musicians, we're all athletes. It's this weird thing that we have in our society that we want to label and put everyone in these little buckets. And that leads to, oh, it's not what I am, it's what I'm not. And so I go to a party and someone says, and I say I'm a chemist. It's usually a conversation stopper. You know, some of us verbally, you hear the record scrapper, and everyone stops. And then they sign up again, and everyone's looking at the V. And it's it's interesting. I I think part of it is, and I don't want to insult anybody, but chemistry is no difficult than biology or physics. But it is often the worst taught. There are amazing teachers out there. Don't get me wrong, there's a lot of amazing chemistry teachers out there. But a lot of times high schools don't have a chemist teaching chemistry. You're lucky if it's a biologist, it could be the phys ed teacher saying, open up page three. I don't want to be here, you don't want to be here. And it's just a really, and so that propagates this endearing, if you will, you know, relationship. So I usually say to people when they ask me what I do, I say, I'm a molecular choreographer. Okay, and so they use that instead of chemistry because, but but again, we got to get over the fear of chemistry because if we divorce ourselves from chemistry, then we accept. What we accept. If we roll up our sleeves and say, wait a minute, I'm part of this continuum. I'm not alien to what the word chemistry is. I want to understand more. Don't have to get a PhD in chemistry, but the fear and the running away and the rejection is far worse, you know, than any what anyone can do. So kind of get over it and realize that chemistry is not really that difficult. There are some fundamental concepts that are kind of easy to explain if you have a good person to explain it.

SPEAKER_00 44:35

And what would you say to somebody that they're like, okay, John, this sounds great. Let's let's create all these alternatives. But I look around and I don't have them, and we're just there's just so much um, you know, toxic, whatever you want to call it. What why should people be hopeful or optimistic? Because you seem like a pretty optimistic person for for saying that 99% of the alternatives don't exist.

SPEAKER_02 45:04

Yeah. Because change happens through optimism. Okay. Can you imagine if Reverend Dr. Martin Luther King said, I have a nightmare? All right. Maybe some wealthy people would have written a check, but no one would have got up off of their butts and done anything. People are not motivated by despair. Okay. And so hope is the only alternative. We have to, if you can't, you know, ask anyone in athletics, anyone in anything, if you can't visualize success, you can't achieve success. And so if the best way to damn society and make sure that we never get out of this mess is to say it can't be done. All right. And so that is not an acceptable alternative. I'm just a simple one-person thing. I can't make the world change, but I can certainly do whatever the hell I can do to help help that happen. And so that's, I think the thing is to reject the pessimism and the despair and find those little teeny pieces of optimism because that's what's going to change the world. And so there is two things. There's visualizing a future where every product is safe, every product is non-toxic. That's important. But then we got to accept that's a multi-decade journey. And so from today until that day, we're going to have some nasty products. So how do we control that? And it's most important to not go down the road of an epic battle of good and evil. All right. When I was a music major and I decided I was going to change to a chemistry major, I asked the professor, I literally had the clairvoyance to say, ask, is chemistry dangerous? If I become a chemist, will I put myself and my future family at risk? I honestly asked that question. But the person's response was, if you're asking that question, perhaps you should have another major. And I go, okay, okay, okay. Now it's not that the guy was bad, it's not that the guy was evil. It's just historically we have accepted that chemistry must be toxic. There are things in chemistry that have to be toxic. But we're not bad people, what we're going to do is we'll wear gloves to protect our hands, we'll wear masks to protect our lungs, we'll wear goggles to protect our eyes, we'll have factories install scrubbers and filters to protect the air, the land and the sea. So for 180 years of the history of modern chemistry, we've just said, okay, we're going to work with some pretty nasty stuff, but we'll mitigate the risk by limiting exposure. And interestingly enough, two problems happen. One, that means you add expense. And number two, stuff happens. Accidents happen. So the revolution that is green chemistry is let's stop depending on mitigating exposure and just make the molecules be fundamentally safe in the first place. All right. But protecting human health and the environment through exposure is going to have to still be there until we invent the alternatives. So we can't snap our fingers and tomorrow everything be green. It's going to take a while. So we're going to have to accept this as a process. And so it's that's a hard pill to swallow, or whatever analogy you want to use, but it's just the reality. And so we need to have reputable organizations that are, you know, our economy, our society is based on some problematic materials that I wish we could replace. But until we invent the replacement, we need to trust companies to do the best they can to protect us. And so that's that's part of the difficult thing is there's two aspects. Where do we want to be, and what do we do until we get there? And both are equally important.

SPEAKER_00 49:02

Well, we appreciate all the work that you're doing around green chemistry and and trying to get this uh mindset, I would call it, you know, in front of young chemists and what that's gonna do to future products.

SPEAKER_02 49:15

I I must say the most important thing, and I wish I talked about it throughout, there is an organization called Beyond Benign. Okay, so beyond benign, because if we need products to work better, cost better, oh by the way, they're beyond. So we go beyond benign. All right. So beyondbenign.org is a nonprofit organization run by Dr. Amy Cannon. And this is, in my opinion, the most amazing organization working in sustainability. They have this program called the Green Chemistry Commitment, where they ask colleges and universities around the world to agree to change their curriculum and bring green chemistry into the required curriculum. I can go to a CEO and convince them to change something. I can go to a government and convince them to change something, go to a university and try to get them to change their curriculum. Good luck with that. Nevertheless, Beyondbenine has 300 global universities around the world who have committed to this change. That's where it's at. And so if you're a student interested in green chemistry, look at beyondbenign.org. If you're a company trying to figure out what this community is, go to beyondbenign.org. If you're a government agency saying, how do we do this? If we can change the next generation of chemists so that when they go work for all these multinational companies, they actually do have a clue what makes molecules toxic, what makes molecules hurt the environment. Look out, world, because the inventions will start happening. But until we change how we teach, it's going to be a very slow, slow process. So, by all means, if anyone here wants to know more about green chemistry and how it relates to society, beyond benign.org.

SPEAKER_00 51:14

Well, thank you. John Warner, thank you for joining us today.

SPEAKER_01 51:18

Thank you. My pleasure. Been a pleasure. Thank you.

SPEAKER_00 51:24

John Warner is a chemistry inventor and one of the co-founders of Green Chemistry, co-authoring the defining text, Green Chemistry Theory and Practice. With over 300 patents, he has invented solutions for dozens of multinational corporations. His inventions range from assisting in ALS therapy to hair color restoration. In 2014, he was awarded the Perkin Medal, widely acknowledged as the highest honor in American industrial chemistry. For more information, you can visit the link in our show notes. Thank you for listening to Reasonable. The show was produced by me, Oscar Rivas. If you'd like to submit a question or have a guess you'd like to appear on the show, you can email contact at reasonable pod.com. Again, that's contact at reasonable pod.com. If you haven't already, please subscribe to the show and leave a review on Apple or Spotify. And most importantly, share this episode with a friend. Thank you.