Vault Episode 2: O2 Utah/ Stewardship Utah - David Garbett

We're excited to bring back this incredible conversation with David Garbett, founder of O2 Utah—now known as Stewardship Utah after its recent merger. This transformation marks a new chapter in local climate advocacy, continuing the mission to protect Utah's environment and improve air quality across the state.

Imagine hiking the breathtaking trails of Salt Lake Valley, the crisp mountain air filling your lungs, only to realize that the air could be cleaner, healthier, better. This very realization is what drove David, a Salt Lake native with a deep love for the outdoors, to launch a movement dedicated to environmental progress. His passion for nature, combined with his upbringing in a large, football-obsessed family, laid the groundwork for his commitment to fighting for Utah's air and open spaces.

In this episode, we retrace David's remarkable journey—from negotiating landmark public lands bills to going back to school to earn his business and law degrees. He shares insights into the political dynamics that shaped his path, the role of social and emotional learning, and the importance of creating solutions that deliver a double bottom line: environmental impact and community benefit.

You'll learn how elections can influence climate policy, the unique challenges facing Salt Lake City's air quality, and the critical role of biking and walking infrastructure. David's story is a powerful reminder of what it means to stay informed, get involved, and make a tangible difference.

We're thrilled to share this conversation again as Stewardship Utah begins its next chapter. Join us as we explore how local advocacy can transform the air we breathe and the communities we love.

Head to www.smalllakepod.com/merchandise for Small Lake City Gear!

Join Erik as he supports Fork Cancer, a night of food, drinks, and live music—all for a great cause. Grab your tickets at utah.acscanforkcancer.org and enter Erik Nilsson to help him hit his $12,000 fundraising goal!

Please be sure to like, review, follow, subscribe and share the podcast with your friends and family! See you next time 

Chapters

• 1:38 Air Quality and Environmental Advocacy
• 16:09 Exploring Career Transitions and Environmental Advocacy
• 25:26 Soft and Hard Skills in Education
• 30:45 Funding's Role in Political Change
• 40:00 Power of Elections in Climate Advocacy
• 55:24 Challenges and Priorities in Environmental Advocacy
• 1:00:26 Salt Lake City's Air Quality and Transportation
• 1:09:21 Improving Transportation and Infrastructure
• 1:19:12 Legislation to Regulate Bromine Pollution
• 1:29:27 Get Involved

Transcript

Speaker 1: 1:39

What is up everybody and welcome to the Small Lake City Podcast. I'm your host, eric Nilsen, and welcome back for Episode 2. Thank you so much for listening to Episode 1. And I hope you all enjoyed it.

Speaker 1: 1:50

Today we are going to be covering a pretty different topic, but I think it's one that is near and dear to most people's hearts in the Salt Lake Valley, and I think if we were to ask everyone across the valley if they had one issue that they could wave their wand and fix, it would be one of the top answers and you might be thinking about it already, but it is the air quality in Utah. For those that have been here for a little bit of time, you've probably seen it slowly get worse. You've seen a lot more national attention, with the Great Salt Lake drying up and the threat of heavy metals entering our air and becoming a much less safe and harmful place to live. So today we're going to be talking to David Garbett, who is the founder of the nonprofit O2 Utah, which is a nonprofit geared towards getting legislation passed to fight air quality and climate change in Utah. So excited to share this with you all and hear about some of the solutions towards these problems, because sometimes it feels like traction isn't being made or these issues are getting ignored. So join in and hear some of his commentary on what he is doing to make this city a better place to live.

Speaker 1: 2:54

Enjoy, hey, eric, great to be here. Hey, thanks for coming. I'm so excited for this one because obviously the point is to talk to people in a broad aspect of things. I mean, we've covered everything from entertainment to entrepreneurs to, I mean, almost, love stories, and now I really want to touch this in environmental peace because it's so relevant to other people. But kind of want to start with from the beginning and hear how you came to love such a beautiful place and kind of the foundation that was built there. So I mean, born and raised in Salt Lake, what part of the valley were you raised in? What was your family like?

Speaker 2: 3:29

Born and raised here in the valley. As you know the distinction between Salt Lake City and everything else I grew up in. About half my childhood was in West Valley and then half in Sandy. Went to high school there in Sandy Valley and then half in Sandy, uh, went to high school there in Sandy and, um, I've been away and back a few different times but keep getting drawn back, uh, here to the Valley, specifically to Salt Lake city. Um, so, yeah, most of my life here.

Speaker 1: 3:59

And one thing I know about you is that you're a huge BYU football fan and would do almost anything to get football tickets. If I remember correctly that you had a bet with your mother to get season tickets.

Speaker 2: 4:15

Yeah, you know, as always, I feel like I have to one first of all, thank you for disclosing my childhood addiction that I haven't been able to overcome. And then, second of all, yes, I feel like I need to explain this to everybody. Look, when I was a kid, my best friend living next door was a big BYU fan. So I became a BYU fan and at one point I think when I was 11, my mom told me that if I practiced the piano for a year without missing a day, she would buy season tickets for me for football. And of course, that sounded incredible. So I practiced every single day for a year, except for one, except for one. And my mom said, hmm, maybe next year. So then I had to practice that whole second year, finally earn those tickets, and I maintained those for years. But the thing is, you can't just walk away from love like that, even if you try and I have tried, trust me, I have tried. But at this point, what are you going to do? Hey?

Speaker 1: 5:18

I'm always BYU fan yes, BYU fan. No one's perfect, but no, I'm always BYU fan. Yes, BYU fan. No one's perfect, but no, I love that. I love that your mom's like well, you know, we said 365, you did 364. So the clock starts over again.

Speaker 2: 5:31

Yeah, exactly. And the other question people always ask is like oh so you must be really good at piano. It's like, no, it's not, like that was quality practicing. I mean, it was just sitting on the bench, you know, plinking the keys with one finger. This is, it was all about earning the tickets, not becoming a great musician. Check the box. Yeah, exactly, Love that.

Speaker 1: 5:50

So I know you come from a big family. You're remind me how many and where you fall within them.

Speaker 2: 5:55

I am the oldest of eight kids.

Speaker 1: 5:57

The wisest of eight kids? Yeah, sure, and I'm lucky enough to have met a couple of them and it's so fun to see you guys. You have a really fun dynamic and get along really well. Um, which sibling would you say you're closest with, and what brings you guys together the most?

Speaker 2: 6:10

We're all pretty close actually. Um, I feel like I've got relationships with all of my siblings. Half of them are here in Utah, the other half are outside. So obviously those that are here I see a bit more. But no, I feel really lucky and we're all close. We still do things together, spend time together, we'll do vacations, hang out. So I feel like I've got relationships with all of them. Nice, and then I mean any sort of activities, hobbies that populated your youth.

Speaker 1: 6:41

So I feel like I've got relationships with all of them Nice, and then I mean any sort of activities, hobbies that populated your youth outside of piano and BYU addiction.

Speaker 2: 6:53

Any sports. Yeah, I mean, growing up I did a mix when we get to this. When I was a kid, I had this, uh, this issue that affected my knees and so eventually started interfering with sports and I couldn't play for a while um team sports and had to find some other things to do that didn't bother my knees as much, and that's part of the way that I started to get into outdoor activities, which is how I was really introduced to some of these incredible landscapes that we have here in Utah and that piqued my interest in environmental issues. Spending time out in these places and has had so much to do with the most of my career path.

Speaker 1: 7:44

What were some of those first things that drew you out there? Were you mostly just like kind of hiking around, I mean biking? What was some of those first activities? And I imagine you started pretty close in the valley and then expanded from there.

Speaker 2: 7:54

So the two first activities were really when I was 12, my dad took us backpacking for the first time, and before that I mean the time that we spent outdoors was basically the 4th of July and the 24th of July We'd go. Our extended family would do a picnic up in Big Cottonwood Canyon and that was kind of it. We didn't camp, we didn't do much outdoors and my dad wanted to do something to change that. His sister was a big backpacker so he invited her to come over and take us backpacking. We actually went down to Southern Utah. We were down in what is now Bears Ears National Monument and yeah, I was just totally blown away by the landscape, Didn't know that those kinds of places existed. Had so much fun doing that. That was my kind of initial introduction to the outdoors and from that started doing other things like hiking closer to home, shortly afterwards started skiing resort skiing, which then later on became one of my.

Speaker 1: 8:57

So your family didn't ski much growing up. It was your own initiative.

Speaker 2: 9:00

No, in fact, when I was 13, watching the 13, uh, watching the winter Olympics turned to my dad and said how can you never take us to do this? And he thought it would be like a one-time thing. He'd take me and, you know, get it out of my system, cause he had never seen him go skiing, even though he did some in high school and college. Um started at 13 and, yeah, I loved it from the beginning.

Speaker 1: 9:25

Yeah, I feel like, if it's hard to love Utah in its entirety unless you can ski or enjoy winters to some extent, but then, at the same time as I go through my head, there's no way to love a Utah winter unless you're on a mountain, tend to using gravity to go down it. So that's fun Cause. I was always taking that for granted because I mean, growing up it was always like Saturday mornings, grandpa will be here with the truck at seven, we will load up, we will go, there will be Gatorades and candy in the back, we will go there. We usually snowbird. I mean, we started Brighton, then snowbird, and then, as he got older, went to snow basin cause it was better for him. But we would always go to the I mean pure, was it pure? 49, the sourdough pizza place. I had snowbird every single time, get the same pizzas. It would be me and my cousins and then we would come back and it was just like. It was just such a core memory that I take for granted because a lot of people didn't get to have that.

Speaker 1: 10:12

Yeah, but then, like on the other side of the coin, because I was raised in a primarily like single parent households where my mother was working a lot, and even before then, before my, before my parents split up, like there was, I mean, so much going on that there wasn't only like, hey, you know, we got some family time, let's go, let's go hike, let's go camp, let's go do this. I mean, and it's, I think it's a similar situation you talked about where we had this one camping trip every year that we would go up into the Hyuintas, fish at the same lakes, do the same hikes, do the same Like granted, it was great, like it was me, my cousins, my grandparents, my aunts and uncles, and in such a good experience. But at the same time, like I remember, when I first kind of moved back to Utah, after moving away, I was up in the avenues and I was like walking around, just like hiking in the foothills, like around the dry creek and up around there. I'm like how did I never do this?

Speaker 1: 11:27

because I lived on north cliff drive there like I was right there, like all I had to do was literally start walking for like 300 feet and I'd probably find a trailhead, and it wasn't until, I mean, the tldr is like did van life, saw all these other beautiful places in the the us and was absolutely floored. And then all of a sudden I come back to salt lake. I'm like this is so much easier, it's so accessible, it it's all right here. Then it's like the diversity and and all of that such a such a fun thing. So now I have this like huge checklist of things that I want to do, not only in Salt Lake but in Utah, which is great because there's so much to experience, but at the same time, like the list is so daunting that it's a little overwhelming. So I'm so I'm jealous that you were able to find that in an early age and find that passion that eventually drove you to do kind of what you're doing today. And so I know that you left Utah for a period of time. I mean, where all did you go and what were some of those tidbits you took away from those experiences?

Speaker 1: 12:23

Let's take a quick break. Hope you're enjoying the episode. So far. One big announcement is that Merchandise is live. Go head over to the website smalllakepodcom to check out the Merchandise. We have great shirts, hats and sweatshirts. I went through a rigorous process to make sure I had the right person creating my merch and the right t-shirts and sweatshirts to do it. So go check it out, go cop some gear and look great this season in your new Small Lake City merch.

Speaker 2: 12:57

Yeah, my first foray out of Utah was my Mormon mission to Dominican Republic when I was 19. I was away for two years, came back, finished college here, went away again to the Northeast, to Boston, for law school. Came back because I wanted at that point. The reason I did law school is I had wanted to work as an attorney specifically for the Southern Utah Wilderness Alliance, working on protecting our incredible public lands.

Speaker 1: 13:26

I was like, and that's such a specific thing to do. I'm like so impressed that you're like, okay, so I'm going to go to law school and I'm going to do this specific role at this specific place. I mean, what got you to, or what was it about that organization that drove you to it so specifically?

Speaker 2: 13:40

I mean I told you that I had that introductory backpacking trip, uh, when I was 12, in what is now grand staircase or, sorry, what is now Bears Ears National Monument and kind of, from there, started paying attention to these debates and discussions that were always in the news about public lands. And I mean, the place that I grew up in was fairly conservative, so if anybody was talking about these issues they were usually talking about, like you know, the term would be those dam enviros. You know they want to do all this stuff that doesn't make any sense. They're trying to lock people out of land and that's what I grew up around. And then, you know, found, ah, this is not accurate at all, this isn't what people are proposing for public lands, and just really quickly became enthralled by what Southern Utah Wilderness Alliance stood for the lands they were trying to protect, their vision for how Utah should treat its public lands and was writing.

Speaker 2: 14:44

You know I remember writing middle school reports on public lands protection. Just really loved their work and thought that that was. We needed more advocates to work on protecting public lands. So that was my dream in going to law school was to learn how to be an effective advocate for public lands, for the environment. So, yeah, I was fortunate enough to come back here and start working for, uh, sua, southern Utah Wilderness Alliance, right off the bat. Um it it was. You know there were a few bumps along the way, but got back here and worked with SUA for 10 years, wow.

Speaker 1: 15:28

What were some of the highlights there? I mean things you got to work on um kind of in summary.

Speaker 2: 15:33

So many, uh you know, while I was there, um, we had a few big lawsuits that we we succeeded in stopping some bad projects. We also, uh, you know, one thing I was proud of is we worked with two different uh oil and gas companies out in the Uinta Basin and areas that we cared about to work on some and negotiate some compromises to help protect vulnerable lands.

Speaker 1: 16:05

I'm sure that has to do with a lot of I mean oil out there and kind of the friction that tends to lie between those two.

Speaker 2: 16:12

right, I mean that's the big oil and gas producing part of the state. Um, the the last few years of my time there were largely spent working to negotiate a big public lands bill. Uh, the best way I can describe it is this was the bill that had to fail so that we could get Bears Ears National Monument. President Obama had made clear to the Utah congressional delegation that he was interested in doing what the tribes had asked. And this intertribal coalition of a number of different tribes that were asking the president to set aside Bears Ears National Monument, he had told Utah's congressional delegation tribes want me to do this. Of different tribes that were asking the president to set aside Bears Ears National Monument. He had told Utah's congressional delegation tribes want me to do this. I'm very inclined to do it, but I'll give you space and time to see if you can figure this out, see if you can put together legislatively a package for this area.

Speaker 2: 17:07

And the delegation ultimately didn't succeed and that's part of like I said that was part of. One of the checklist items for us to get the monument was that we had to have that opportunity. That was a meaningful experience to me that would be engaged in those discussions Certainly saw a lot of you know. It's shaped a lot of my thinking on political dynamics in part why I think our political leadership is so bad on public lands. Um really had a firsthand view of that when I was there, um and, as you know, fed into a lot of what I'm trying to do with O2 Utah.

Speaker 1: 17:52

Yeah, I'm sure that's that's a good ask and say is I bet that all set such a strong foundation? Because obviously what you're doing a lot now is dealing with probably a lot of those same legislative bodies, a lot of those same processes and a lot of those I mean conflicts that can arise, I mean between I mean legislation trying to get things done, people trying to keep their power, get reelected and at the same time, try to balance what the people they represent want, and so that's awesome that you were able to do that for 10 years. I mean kind of looking at that experience in hindsight and postmortem. That middle schooler you, or that pre-law school you, if you could go back and talk to that person, would you? I mean, what would you say to them about the experience and if it met those expectations that you had at the time?

Speaker 2: 18:36

oh, yeah for sure. Yeah, nothing, I wouldn't say anything different, so just keep at it. Sure it was. I mean, I, I love that job, I love doing that work. I hear people talk about the sunday scaries. You know, never once felt that when I was working at sua, like sunday night would roll around and I think, oh, I have to go to work tomorrow, great, sweet.

Speaker 1: 18:59

Yeah, it was always a joy to go into the office do you still work with a lot of those people in sua or kind of some?

Speaker 2: 19:07

not enough. Uh, you know, eventually I reached a point where I felt like I had some ideas and kind of feelings that I wanted to follow and that it was time fortersweet to leave SUA after 10 years than you know, some feeling of like, oh I'm done or I reached the end of my line here. It was kind of hard to step away just because I loved it so much. I loved everybody there I worked with. I thought the issue was great yeah.

Speaker 1: 19:45

So then? So you had these feelings of wanting to do something else and move on. So what was the next step after that?

Speaker 2: 19:52

Went back to school the old Debbie Madison. Ties into your. Yeah, exactly, I had to go finish high school. I don't know why I just pictured you waiting for the bus?

Speaker 2: 20:03

Just back to school. Yeah, back to school. And people I really admired that I thought were doing interesting things, had either done business school or done similar type training and the kind of the way they thought about problems, were going about solving problems, was really intriguing to me. Um cause, law school, you know. In contrast, law school and law is a very established, formal way for addressing issues, addressing problems, and, um, I, obviously there are great things about the law, but there are also some potential shortcomings. And having seen how other people approach big problems, I thought that I wanted to try something similar. So, yeah, I went back to school, went to business school, moved to California for that Because you also asked about my forays in and out of Salt Lake, so this was another one, my forays in and out of Salt Lake, so this was another one. In that 10-year period I mentioned briefly, I did spend a year working remotely from Canada, british Columbia, victoria, british Columbia. It's a pretty area, yeah, definitely. Yeah, pacific Northwest, it was great.

Speaker 1: 21:23

Don't get me started about the Pacific Northwest. It's the only place that holds a candle to Utah in my opinion. But yeah, I could talk about that for hours. So you realize you're in your career, you go to law school, you see the shortcomings in let's call it, this whole process, legal system, and then you kind of see business as this other avenue to maybe solve for these shortcomings that you found in law. I mean, how was that experience and how did that build upon that foundation that you had with SUA and in law school previously?

Speaker 2: 21:53

Yeah, it was incredible. I thought that, like I said, after 10 years at SUA, there were kind of two main feelings and reasons why I wanted to set out to leave. One was I had had my first child and it really changed how I felt about climate change. I would say before that I was, I was kind of worried about it. I thought it was a big issue, but then, when I had a child, really became super concerned and at one point, pretty depressed because I I felt like it was one thing for me to mess up the world for myself and another thing to do it for somebody else, and somebody else who is going to see even more of those impacts, and didn't think that I was doing enough to address that. So that was one compunction. And then the second that we've talked about feeling like, yeah, it's probably time to make myself a little uncomfortable and go out and see some new and different things to figure out how I can be a more effective advocate. Those were really the two drivers in wanting to do it.

Speaker 2: 23:06

And I found the business school experience again going back to law being established. Business school experience again going back to law being established. Law school at the highest level. I think law school is about helping people understand how to avoid risk. Business school, on the other hand, is about identifying and figuring out ways to take advantage of risk. It's a much different risk relationship. Yeah, that's kind of the two biggest differences, or those are the. That's the biggest difference, I feel like, between those two forms of education in a nutshell.

Speaker 1: 23:40

Yeah, I almost I don't know why it comes to mind, but I almost imagine, like some like Greek statue or something that like they're always super symbolic, right, and it's almost like I know that there is a statue of it, but it's like a spear in one hand and a shield in the other, where it's almost like your law school experiences the shield and like almost like you kind of explained this, like risk averseness and how to face risk, and then on the business side, it's almost like this spear of saying, well, how do we take advantage of this, how do we be more like offensive or aggressive with it? So I mean, in that experience I mean, was your experience in business school a lot of? I mean, was any of your coursework or any of the professors you interacted with more specifically on your long-term aspirations, or was it a little bit more general than that?

Speaker 2: 24:21

Sometimes I felt like a foreigner in a strange land because most people in going to business school they were there. The program I did in particular was designed for people that were a little bit older than traditional business school. They were there. The program I did in particular was designed for people that were a little bit older than traditional business school students who had more experience. We weren't executive MBAs, so these were kind of mid-career. It was the mid-career space and some people were going just to kind of help them springboard in what they were doing.

Speaker 2: 24:50

But a lot of people coming from spaces like finance, venture capital, banking, traditional kind of financial or business sectors, people in that space who were saying you know, I've come from environmental advocacy and I'm taking this flyer to see if this has anything for me to learn from. Uh, so I wouldn't say I did end up taking, when I was in business school I was about to say there wasn't you know, a lot of coursework that was directly designed to help environmental advocates become more effective. But so much of it was really impactful. I think in particular the courses that I took at the business school that had to do with interpersonal dynamics, social emotional learning, leadership, things that people would often describe as soft skills, found incredibly helpful.

Speaker 2: 25:52

Thought that those courses in particular had a lot for me to learn from. You know accounting I hope my accounting professor isn't listening still Like, why did I even have to take that? Was less enthused about some of those courses there was, you know maybe one other one I'll flag. That was a hard skill. I took a class called Measuring Impact, taught by this really interesting professor who's been on the forefront of a lot of research around. He's actually in the political science space, but Measuring Impact was essentially learning how to take this technique of randomized controlled trials and apply it to all kinds of different spaces that people might be in.

Speaker 2: 26:39

And in terms of a hard skill and just thinking around, you know, aside from my soft skill classes, that one was probably the most impactful maybe the most impactful course I've taken of any of my scholastic career.

Speaker 1: 26:56

That's interesting Cause go for it.

Speaker 2: 26:59

Oh, I was going to say cause. I feel like, at the end you know I joke sometimes that the two big questions that are always swirling around, um, are, you know, know, existential for people and epistemological, like hat, which is, how do we, uh, how do we identify truth, what's true, what's real and, uh, you know, is as silly as this sounds, uh, randomized control trials, that basic thing you learned in school, like if you want to learn something, go out and do a test, go out and do an experiment, and you need to have a control, you need to have something that is essentially, you know, not being manipulated by you. It's not being. You know, this is how the world works when the question you're asking isn't applied to it. And then your treatment group and it's certainly in our work here we have implemented a number of randomized control trials, or we try and make, you know, the best approximation that we can for some of the work we do.

Speaker 2: 28:15

It changed my mindset around. You know, this is another thing that came out of business school. I feel like a lot of problems that come up, I don't know the answer and I can guess, but I feel much more comfortable saying like I don't know the answer. Let's try something and see if this actually helps us understand this problem better. Or let's let's just go out and do our best guess about how we can solve this and see if it works out, and to not be so worried about knowing the answer up front.

Speaker 1: 28:46

No, I like that a lot and it kind of reminds me of kind of two things. Is one again my last job I had before I'm at now. We did so I was doing consulting, but there's also an impact investing fund. They're trying to get off the ground and we're trying to work with these entrepreneurs all around the world trying to solve all of these issues the social development goals from the United Nations, and like, the hardest thing is like like we would have to put together these memos of okay, so here's the dollar amount of impact that we're having.

Speaker 1: 29:14

And it was always this issue of like okay, so if we're, let's say, providing dialysis care to um, uh, uh, people with um, kidney failure in Mexico, how does that compare to a place in Africa that's providing natural gas via what's it called oh my God, composting? And so it's like well, how do we have a thesis where it's like one is human lives, one is like farming, agricultural and economic growth. But at the end of the day, anybody you talk to who's going to write a check wants to know what this check's going towards, and then also not only wanting to know the double bottom line but also wanting to know what their return is going to be like and if they're going to get, I mean, those green fuzzies on top of it. But then also, second, what it reminds me of is, I feel like and I'm someone who works, I mean, a lot in data always has people coming to me asking for questions, sometimes very ambiguous and like hey, I think the mature thing of a lot of things like that is to say I don't know, because we don't know everything. And if someone thinks they always have an answer, then they're probably either lying or don't know what they're talking about.

Speaker 1: 30:20

And it always takes me back to, like, the scientific method. It's so simple, but it works. In 99% of things. It's like oh well, what about this? Be like I don't know, but I have a hypothesis that this, and if we do this, then we can either accept or reject it. And if we do like it's, it's something I remember learning in like middle school science, being like well, this is stupid, what do you mean? I'm not going to be a scientist. And then now here I am just chuckling about my seventh grade science teacher and it turns out he yeah, I went to my daughter's.

Speaker 2: 30:47

It's funny. You should say that my daughter just finished fifth grade Shout out In the middle of the year.

Speaker 2: 30:53

Yeah, congrats. She finished elementary school. She had a science fair and I went to the science fair and you know all the kids, their teachers, have been working with them to say let's ask basic questions and in their case it was things like which soccer ball will bounce the highest? Which surface allows a soccer ball to travel farther? Why do avalanches happen? Just these basic questions. And they literally sat down, you know, did it just the way you described, had a hypothesis, experimented, and then they had to, you know, make their observation and say was I right? Was I wrong? If I was wrong, maybe why? And like I was so excited I was telling the kids, like this is how it really works, like this is such a good skill, remember this. And you know they're probably all thinking like you're weird, like no, none of this. You know, in the same way, it didn't sink in for us. Hopefully this younger generation it'll stay with them. But yeah, the science fair, I was very excited about the scientific method.

Speaker 1: 31:56

for them, big science fair guy. Yeah exactly Big big science fair guy. Oh, that's awesome. So you wrap up school in California I mean, do you stick around there at all, or is it kind of graduation? And load up the van. We're going back to Utah.

Speaker 2: 32:10

Came back I was trying to figure out. Again, looking back, it seems like a much more clear path, but at the time there was a lot more kind of feeling around in the dark. I did know, um, in school, that one of the big questions I was interested in and wanted and didn't feel like was being addressed. And if there was something that I wanted to create or try and work on, it was this issue of why and I would say specifically why are Republicans so bad, elected officials so bad on climate? America's in this was, and especially at the time in this unique place of of developed countries, of having like a uniquely bad major party, that most people were still you know, and some of me feels like, well, who cares? We shouldn't even ask them. You know, recognizing the reality of science and what was happening with climate change and you know a lot of that I think could be laid at the feet of the Republican Party. And there are many efforts to work on climate. There are many efforts to work politically, to pass bills Side note which I would say were incredibly successful. I mean, the landscape for climate action is so different now than when I was in school and then it was two years ago but I kept thinking why is it that Republicans are so bad and the environmental community isn't doing anything to address that? And specifically for 45% of the country where Republicans will only get elected. And you know, maybe one additional comment there is there are some groups out there saying, hey, we want to work on Republicans in the environment. I find them completely unsatisfying because basically it's saying these groups say we are Republicans who want to work on climate and what we'll cheer people on for, what we'll be happy with is if a Republican says that climate change is happening and a good example of this is here in Utah. John Curtis, representative, is kind of the poster child of this. He'll say that climate change is happening. He even formed a bipartisan climate caucus in Congress. I am not aware of and haven't seen anything that he's done or voted for meaningfully to address climate.

Speaker 2: 34:42

And that's the part that I think is so unsatisfying about these current efforts with Republicans. It's basically like here's a pat on the back for saying climate change is real, but then you can turn around and say that the way we're going to solve climate change is by developing more fossil fuels. That's literally what the Republicans in Utah say Like oh, I'm serious about climate and the way we're going to solve it is more fossil fuels, american fossil fuels. I think that's absurd. You should be left out of a room Like if there's a big problem, offer a reasonable or real solution, and none of them have.

Speaker 2: 35:14

That was the issue that I wanted, that I kept thinking about when I was in business school. Why is that? Because I don't think, you know, in these modern times and again I'm talking about some things that I think are very loaded and they have lots of cultural connotation, but I was thinking about them more in the way of how do we solve that? How do we address the fact that Republicans in Congress in particular are so bad on climate? By my, you know, my estimation the best way to change where they were was in how corporate America interacts with Congress. Nobody's more effective at getting the legislation they want than you know these. Like we talked about the well-lobbied corporations, maybe no better example than pharmaceutical industry that gets its way with both Republicans and Democrats. I mean, I think it's so astounding of people.

Speaker 2: 36:12

Remember these fights About a year ago. Two years ago, there were fights over President Biden was proposing, among other things, that the government should be able to negotiate with drug manufacturers over the prices of drugs. I mean, they're a huge buyer. Usually when you buy a lot of things, you come in and say like I want a deal. Yeah, us government is specifically in many cases prohibited from doing that because the pharmaceutical industry is such an effective lobbyist. You know they come up with all kinds of reasons but at the end of the day it's absurd. Every other major industrialized country allows their government to negotiate and they get way better prices on drugs.

Speaker 2: 36:57

During that time, kyrsten Sinema, senator from Arizona, was basically, by my estimation, willing to lose her seat to defend the pharmaceutical industry, to defend values that they thought were just patently absurd. You know, because I think the pharmaceutical industry was so effective at lobbying her and others. But she was the poster child for somebody who had really been persuaded by the message from the pharmaceutical industry. Again, looking at it, let's just set aside, you know, is that right or is that wrong?

Speaker 2: 37:33

I looked at that and said there's an effective way to get legislators to do what you want, and it seemed to me that the key that the environmental community had really been missing with Republicans and the way you change them is you had to participate in their elections. That's what all these corporations do. They donate money to help. The reason money is important is if you run for office, like when I ended up doing this. If you run for office, your biggest task is getting elected, and to get elected you have to raise absurd amounts of money. You really do Because there's no other way to get your name out there. There's no other way to get in front of voters, especially in today's world.

Speaker 1: 38:18

Literally. It's crazy to me, especially working in tech. There is a dollar amount to get in front of any person at any time. Obviously we think historically of this election process and getting your message out. It's like, oh yeah, let's go spend millions of dollars on TV ads. Every American in the 60s, 70s and 80s is crowding around the TV during primetime hours and that'll see it.

Speaker 1: 38:42

And then now it's like we carry on these things in our pockets, we have these screens in front of us all the time that we work from, and all of a sudden it's just like it's almost at this point, just, you can't, you don't even realize it, but you'll just see ad after ad after ad and a million of those. Later you realize like, oh wait, like I was talking to someone. I was like, oh hey, did you see that ad about this? And they're like no, I'm like, oh well, I think they just paid a million dollars for us to have this conversation. And so it's crazy to see how this kind of of corollary effect between, like technology and I mean ads and being able to put anything at any given space to this power effect that it has on legislation, and they like correlated and grown to this effect where, to your point, like this power dynamic, has just kind of ballooned up more than we ever thought it was going to happen.

Speaker 2: 39:25

Yeah, tech's let's stick with tech for a second. You know campaigns and elections are to politicians. What for your funding rounds are going and raising money. You have an idea, you have a concept, you have a technology. You've got to raise money to scale up, to let people know that that exists, to find buyers, you know, whatever it might be, it takes that funding so that you can expand to a larger audience, so that you can expand to a larger audience, so that you can actually succeed. And that's what elections are. And it is the best opportunity to actually change how a politician thinks about an issue. It's when politicians decide who their friends are, who they don't like.

Speaker 2: 40:09

And I think that for too long in the climate space, the environmental space generally, we've felt like the power of our ideas should carry the day In politics. Sometimes that works, but clearly with climate it wasn't working. With Republicans, and elections in my mind and elections in my mind were the way that we could change that. And you know not to go too far down that road. We can talk about that more because it's not just, you know, throwing somebody out, because in certain places where Republicans get elected like you see there, you know no Democrat could ever beat them. So it's not like you're going to run a Democrat against them, but you take advantage of the fact that they need help, they need assistance, that you could maybe have Republican primaries you could have one Republican beat a different Republican. But it's taking that approach that corporate America uses their engagement with fundraising, with elections, to really start a relationship and create trust and build priorities.

Speaker 2: 41:17

And that was the problem that I kept thinking about in business school and felt like I wanted to. I didn't see that being done by the environmental community. I thought that we needed to and was suspicious that if that was going to work, a place like Utah was one of the best places to go pilot that, because any environmental issue we want to make progress on the state level here means working with Republicans, and it meant that I'd have to use, I'd have to test out could a bunch of enviros, you know, could people that were saying climate change is the key problem of our time? Could we show up in these really Republican strongholds like Utah County and Davis County and work with Republican legislators to get them to do good legislation to address problems? So I had that in my mind, was thinking about it and that was part, big part of what brought me back to Utah.

Speaker 1: 42:22

Totally. And that's one thing I really do love about Utah and I think the pandemic brought it front of mind to me, because I mean flashback to 2020, 2021,. We have, I mean, the pandemic. We see politics get so much more power and how they're dealing with everything and kind of all these checks and balances and I was super grateful and I think we saw this both on a local scale and on a broad national scale but these city, these liberal cities and conservative States started to have almost like these internal checks and balances.

Speaker 1: 42:50

So you had these far right ideas and methodologies start to pull. Then you have these far left ideologies start to pull and it kind of met in the middle better than a lot of other situations. That's why you have, I mean Salt Lake, grow a ton. You had I mean Nashville, charleston, like all of these places start to have this more and see this economic growth as people can kind of grow to everywhere.

Speaker 1: 43:14

And I think to your point where, when these places where there's been this gridlock, where it's like, hey, if you're not a Republican, then we're not going to do any, I mean nothing's going to get done, nothing's going to get by, especially in these topics that are so relevant, but especially in Salt Lake, where we see this population of Salt Lake growing so much compared to these other areas and all of a sudden, this like quote liberal voice is starting to become so much more of a voice and people have to start paying attention and give more credence to that. And so so you come. So you're in California business school. You see these, these issues that you want to solve. Um, is this when you started out to Utah, are you still still in your, your development stage?

Speaker 2: 43:55

No. So I had been thinking about that and and felt like that was a problem I wanted to work on. But then there was a little deviation. First I decided while I was in school that I also wanted to come back and run for mayor of Salt Lake city. Uh yeah, so the I knew at the time two things.

Speaker 2: 44:11

One, we had a mayor who was, who seemed to be unpopular, just because anytime I talked to somebody from back home they would bring that up, not prompted by me, like people just kept saying like ugh, this mayor. And I thought that's interesting. Clearly there's some high level of dissatisfaction. And then, second, while I was in California, trump was elected and one of the first things he did was pull us out of the Paris Climate Accords. So it felt like super low time for climate work. And I was reading these stories while I was in California in national media about how the states and cities were picking up the slack, and routinely they kept mentioning Salt Lake as one of the places doing that. And I again thought that was interesting. Salt Lake had this national platform to show that it was working on climate change. Now, the specific policies that Salt Lake was pursuing I didn't think were very. I didn't think it was real climate action.

Speaker 2: 45:13

I thought they were getting credit for it, but it wasn't a very adventurous policy well, no, it was that the city had said that it wanted 100 clean electricity by 2032. But my time at uh in california, at stanford, which was really kind of the center for clean energy and for climate work, it became apparent to me that clean energy would be achievable way before that, that this was. I think people are now starting to understand that clean energy, once when the sun's available and when the wind is blowing it is now uh here in our area, the cheapest way to produce electricity. It's cheaper than coal.

Speaker 1: 45:51

It's like down to the dollar per kilowatt.

Speaker 2: 45:53

Yeah, cheaper than natural gas, and I didn't think people understood that and so just saw like things are really going to change on this front. Somebody could run for mayor of Salt Lake and have a platform to talk about climate, to push bolder policies and actually have that disseminated to a much larger audience than just the city, than just Utah, so decided that I wanted to run for mayor. I also felt like, hey, this will be a good. In the same way we were talking about the scientific method and just experimenting. I thought it'll be interesting. I probably won't win, but I'll get an opportunity to raise an issue and I will also likely learn a lot from the experience, which definitely turned out to be the case on both fronts.

Speaker 1: 46:40

What were some of the takeaways from that election process that then fueled, I mean, what you did down the road?

Speaker 2: 46:47

Oh, it was so formative. You know, I, like I we talked about, I had the suspicion that elections were important. Then, when I ran as a candidate, I realized like, oh, this is absurd, how important elections are.

Speaker 2: 47:04

Talk about validating a hypothesis. In the state of Utah I was eliminated at the primary stage and here in the state, our race for mayor of Salt Lake is probably, you know, outside of the governor's race, outside of federal races. So Congress, you know, the House of Representatives or Senate, the county mayor's race here. Now some of the Salt Lake County-wide races are becoming a bit more expensive, but beyond that, this is probably, you know, this is right there as one of the most expensive races in the state. What did that mean? That meant I had to spend all of my day on the phone pestering people, asking them if they they donate to my campaign, which was such an eye-opening experience one, I mean, super uncomfortable to just call up random people and strangers and say, hey, you don't know me or you barely know me, give me money. I mean it was uncomfortable. Call good friends and family and say like, hey, give me money. That you know that.

Speaker 2: 48:15

But seeing how critical that was, and this in particular was, you know the huge thing for me, seeing that when you're just watching politics as a hobby, when you're armchairing politics, it's easy to say like, nah, I don't like these people or I do like those people, or that's a dumb issue or that's a dumb idea. When you're running and you need to raise absurd amounts of money and you encounter someone like that that before you would have, just, you know, not given the time of day, all of a sudden you find yourself listening a lot more than you would, because you need something from them and you can't. You can't get elected, you can't, especially in a competitive race like that, being kind of uh, an elitist snob. Frankly, yeah, um, you have to build coalitions, you have to, you have to engage people outside of your immediate circle, and I found myself being way more intellectually flexible with issues. I found myself, you know, having conversations with people that I probably wouldn't normally and that, to me, was really a key takeaway from this Like, oh yes, here's the time when I need to go out and get something. I need people's votes, I need their support, I need their money. So, yeah, I'm going to do things, I'm going to accommodate them so that I can ultimately get into office and do the things that I want. And that was such an eye-opening experience to me from running for office, I mean, in addition to my.

Speaker 2: 49:48

The other thing I'd say is, before that I came from a policy background. Policy background is like thinking deeply about a problem and trying to figure out different ways to solve it. Elections aren't. That's not elections. Elections are show. Elections are conveying information to people in a really quick fashion about what you'd like to do, what your disposition is, why they should come to your side and you know, trying to convey on a campaign the very nitty-gritty way that you'd go about trying to get clean energy for Salt Lake, that's not necessarily a campaign issue.

Speaker 1: 50:28

And not a hot button issue.

Speaker 2: 50:29

Yeah, campaigns you have to convey to people quickly. I want to tackle climate change this is a key issue for me. I want to tackle homelessness this is a key issue for me and you have to figure out ways to convey that information quickly. And so that was also a big learning experience. I felt like maybe the last week of my campaign I started to get a hang of it a little bit more, but of course, by then way too late, right. But that's another thing. People that run for the first time usually mess it up. They usually do it wrong. Probably most of the time they lose, and I knew that going in. But it was a huge learning experience to do that.

Speaker 1: 51:06

That's awesome Because I always I mean, there's one thing I've learned like recently in life is very few things are taught and usually have to be learned, and I feel like that's a great example of it. You could sit down with anybody and they could say oh yeah, elections are tough, you have to meet with a lot of different people, you have to be able to convey different messages to different people and essentially get a check from them. But until you are in that seat and understanding it, it's a whole different perspective and an experience that I'm sure just only I mean no so like fueled kind of what you're doing now and and gave you that comfortability and that experience to help you be more successful where you are now.

Speaker 2: 51:44

Yeah, yeah, no, I'm. I'm really grateful that I did it, because it was one of my. I would describe it as one of my most successful failures.

Speaker 1: 51:52

I love that term successful failures, because that's one thing that even me, like I know that in order to succeed you have to fail and fail and fail and fail and fail and fail and learn and learn and learn and learn. But very few people talk about be like, oh, this failure is what gave me my success or gave me what I needed to learn in order to do so. And sometimes we think so like myopically about it, that we just look at this failure that's on our lap at the moment and can't process that or get through it to the point of force forward into kind of what we're more called to be or what we do need to learn in order to take those next steps forward. So I like that successful failure, most successful failure. So so you have this quote, successful failure from being a mayor.

Speaker 1: 52:34

You have this experience. I mean talking with, I mean important people, powerful people, I mean having success in getting checks from these people. That seems so daunting at the time. Um, and then you took that experience from running for mayor and pivoted into kind of an adjacent way with, I would assume, o2 Utah.

Speaker 2: 52:54

At this point, yeah, so after that took a little time to decompress, but it was clear to me there was a lot of promise behind my idea that elections meant something.

Speaker 2: 53:07

And now I had gone through the experience of running for office and I felt like I saw okay, not only is this an incredible leverage point, but I've learned some of the issues that we, or some of the realities of running a campaign and how, if there were an organization that came in and started working with politicians when they were running for office, how we could add value to their campaigns, how we could take advantage of campaigns to push the issues that we wanted to push. And at that point decided to start out to Utah and the whole goal was to make an impact on, specifically, air quality and climate issues here at the state level, working with the legislature. But what we were going to do different was show up during elections both in Republican districts, democratic districts, swing districts and take advantage of that time period to start building relationships, cultivate those relationships and then give policymakers specific policy that we wanted them to implement.

Speaker 1: 54:12

Yeah, and before your mayor experience would you have, I would have started with elections, but I wouldn't have understood why elections mattered.

Speaker 2: 54:38

I wouldn't have understood how to effectively push in elections, how to effectively work, um, to try and persuade people that were running to work on our issues. Uh, had I not done that? But that's a great question because, yeah, it really that learning experience from running and failing was so valuable in creating O2. Utah really had shaped. You know how I do this now. It just would not be the same had I not, had I not gone through that.

Speaker 1: 55:12

Awesome. No, I love that. And I mean I guess let's kind of focus on kind of OT, Utah what you're working on today, and kind of the current landscape of what you're doing in Utah, Because I mean, only within the past couple of years have there gotten a ton of national exposure to I mean Salt Lake and Utah and some of the threats of climate, and I think there's a lot more ears perked up to it. But unfortunately, at the same time, I feel like we're so plagued by all of these things trying to get our attention of almost existential crises or this is the biggest issue that we almost grow numb to it. So I mean, if I see someone say, oh my gosh, did you hear about this? I'd be like oh, aliens, Like we got to the point now where we are like unfazed that the government has said aliens are real and we have evidence, and we're like cool, Anyway, do you see this real?

Speaker 1: 56:00

Do you see this TikTok? And it's, it's wild to me Cause, like I don't know, I'll never forget when, um, I think I was in Washington actually and I read the New York times article that they had about the great salt lake levels going down listening to the podcast that they put out and it's a lot of very strong language and like.

Speaker 1: 56:17

Not only that, but there's I mean examples and receipts of I can't remember the name of the lake that essentially happened to in California, where their lake went dry those same sort of heavy metals at the riverbed and the dust came up and all of a sudden the city's gone because no one can live there, and now it's almost paints this picture of oh, we love Salt Lake, but how much do you love wearing a gas mask every time you go out because these winds will blow up? And here's all these metals. And I mean we see these solutions, but they're kind of I mean quote solutions unquote, but kind of would love to hear a little bit more about just some of maybe the more tactical things that you're working on and key priorities that you're focused on.

Speaker 2: 56:57

Just because making pushing legislation, making change, is difficult and we're young, we've really tried to stay focused on pushing ambitious air quality legislation. The great thing about air is that you get kind of two for one with that. Most of the things we do to improve our air quality have a similar impact on our carbon emissions, so we've stayed focused on that. You know, certainly I'm watching what's happening with the Great Salt Lake and where we can, we try and talk to policymakers about that. But what I've seen is that to get good policy, the policy itself is about 5% of your work. 5%. 95% is building relationships with policymakers. It's, you know, frankly. I talked about money for politicians, but I have a team here that is doing this full time. They don't. That doesn't happen unless I raise money and pay them a salary and, as I think unromantic as it sounds, that's really a key part of advocacy and making change is money, again, fundraising.

Speaker 2: 58:17

You know we're dealing with a collective action problem. This is what we had talked about. Everybody benefits from clean air, but who's paying money so that we can have our own lobbyists, so that we can show up and compete in that same space as all these corporations that don't want the state to do anything about our pollution problem. So that's a key part of it. It just takes a lot of work. That's a key part of it. It just takes a lot of work.

Speaker 2: 58:48

You know, there's so much that the policy itself is that little tip of the iceberg above water. The body of the iceberg is are things like that the time that we've spent in elections, the time that we've spent raising money, the time that we've spent going through the channels that legislators want for you to be able to come in and talk to them about issues, and it's just, it's. There's a lot behind it, you know, with O2, maybe to give you make that more concrete. Essentially, for our first two years, I felt like our main task was just to be consequential enough in elections that we'd even matter. When I say showing up and helping in elections, you have to bring time, you have to bring resources, you have to bring knowledge, you have to bring money to help, and that doesn't happen overnight. And really before we could work on any policy, we really had to be showing up in elections helping people when they were running for office. Really for two years before we could even turn to pushing any policy.

Speaker 1: 59:50

No, I like that and it's like it kind of reminds me of really sports. I guess the first place my brain went to is like I mean, you've watched the jazz play? I mean a game itself? Is that 5%? But showing up every day in the gym and shooting free throws and running drills, that is that 95%. And for you it's like okay, well, if I'm going to pay my staff, if I'm going to make an impact, I got to go hit the phones, I got to go talk to all these people, I got to develop these relationships During that process, when and obviously it dovetails well with your mayoral experience, or mayoral race experience of what were some of those popular talk tracks, or I mean issues that you would bring up that would give you the most success.

Speaker 2: 1:00:36

Now or when I was running for mayor, maybe both. When I was running for mayor, there were a few different issues that I was talking about and highlighting, but I think the one that tended to resonate the most with my supporters was how I approached air quality, and you know, this was here's a great learning experience for me, again coming from a policy background on air quality. When I was running for mayor I talked about kind of three steps I thought that the city should take. The least consequential in terms of actually reducing air pollution was that I wanted the city to start a process to try and move the refinery on the north end of town.

Speaker 2: 1:01:19

It's a big polluter, but moving any one company- and we're talking specifically about like Beck Street, yeah, okay, but moving any one company and we're talking specifically about like backstreet, yeah, okay. Yeah, exactly, I wanted to. I thought the city should work to get that out of, uh, salt lake city and it's and I still feel that way. I think it's a terrible idea. In terms of actual pollution reduction, though that's uh, you know, that's a drop in the bucket. That's one thing that has to happen. It's not the biggest thing, but out on the campaign trail, when I would say I think we should move the refinery, there was nothing that spoke to people more strongly than that, even though I felt like the impact was limited. And that's kind of where I learned about the difference between elections and policy, and I think a lot of that came because everybody can understand that. I mean, the refinery is in your face. People see it, people understand that here's a business that's making money by just dumping its waste on residents, and that's not right. It's not. And you know the rest of our system operates as like oh, you're okay, you got this permit, you can dump it, but like what if you, at your house, you decided that you, when you went to throw your garbage out every day, you were going to throw half of it in your garbage can and the other half into your neighbor's yard, you'd feel ashamed of yourself. Anyone should, but for that refinery. That's what they do on a daily basis and that's what it communicated to people. They weren't so, you know, people weren't taking the time to sit down and, like, measure out every ounce of pollution that was coming out of the refinery and say, well, you know, that will get us some some part of the way. But boy, what you should be proposing is everyone have an electric car. What you should be proposing is this that spoke to people and that issue.

Speaker 2: 1:03:05

That was an eye-opener to me to see that, like communicating important ideas to people through what you talk to them about. And so air quality was the one that I saw resonated the most with people, because I was also talking about things like I wanted the city to get to 100% clean electricity by 2023. And that was the one that I was the most energized by. I thought that that was the one that we could accomplish most quickly. That would have the biggest impact on our carbon emissions, but I don't think it resonated with people as strongly as my proposal that we move the refinery. So there you know, on communication I learned about, I saw that air quality tended to land well with the people who who were my supporters and who voted for me, um, and I think that also helped them to understand how serious I was about air quality. And um, because, you know, running in Salt Lake city, every mayoral candidate is going to talk about air quality. Everybody's going to say like I want to do something about this.

Speaker 1: 1:04:11

Because I feel like it's one of those things where I mean going back to our example of risk. I mean, one of the prime ways to calculate risk is exposure times, impact. And if you think about every Utah, especially in the Wasatch Front, like if you bring up air quality in the winter, everybody has an opinion, Everybody rolls their eyes, everybody wants a solution, and so I feel like that is something that resonates so much compared to I mean, let's keep using the example of the refineries on Beck Street. I mean, I grew up, so my parents sorry, we grew up in the avenues. My grandparents lived in North Salt Lake, so we would always do that drive around 11th Ave, around City Creek, down Beck Street and over, and every single time we'd be like oh, that's kind of like. It's just very like the strong juxtaposition of this neighborhood literally right there, one of the most populous in Salt Lake proper, and then all of a sudden there's this refinery right here.

Speaker 1: 1:05:00

I remember there was one time where so my mom's a big runner and I don't remember why she did this in hindsight it was kind of dumb, but she's like, I'm gonna run to our grandparents house today when we go to this, like family dinner and like I was I mean, I had been younger than 10 so I was like, okay, mom, like you run every day, who cares? And she called us because I guess she had a cell phone then because that's the only way. But she's like I'm on phone, man, you have a collect call from mom. And she's like come pick me up, my lungs are dying. I can't do this. And that was like the first real, like contextual experience that I can put my finger on of like bad air person I know who can run very well and shouldn't have an issue, is having an issue. I don't think this is good. Well, and shouldn't have an issue, is having an issue. I don't think this is good, yeah. And so I think yeah to that point. I mean it's, it's something that resonates with so many people and people want a solution. But then it's you like start throwing them.

Speaker 1: 1:05:52

Like some of the solutions, like I think one thing that in particular, that's keeping us from being this like middle ground, like tertiary city, secondary city in the U S, to really like growing to be a primary hub, is public transportation, like I mean tracks is fine, um, I mean if you use it, it being the time it takes to take tracks between driving is so big that there's no way. I mean I had a for a lot of the beginning of 2022 and in late 2021. Um, I mean, I lived across the street from a tracks I mean a front runner station, and I was working down in lehigh and I was like, hey, if I just get an electric scooter, I can hop on the train, work on the train, get off the train, have a fun little scooter ride where I'm jamming out to music for 10 minutes, go to the office and then do the same. So I, like net, was wasting 40 minutes less a day. It was being productive because I work on the train and, at the same time, like I felt like I was actually doing like my own part to fix it, but at the same time, that doesn't work for a lot of people.

Speaker 1: 1:06:47

Bus system here is not as reliable as we'd like, Tracks isn't as fast as we'd like and a lot of I mean just things that would keep people from that and if you pull people today of like, their propensity to use public transportation be very low. However, I do think there is a huge opportunity in utah for like e-bikes, because I mean, I've lived in seattle for a time where I mean very walkable city, especially if you're living in the city, and then they have their train system which works pretty well, they have a really good bus system, so it's easy to get around um, but then like here I mean it's salt lake is spread out enough where I mean obviously you can't walk um, especially even just thinking about salt lake proper and like kind of the main hubs of like sugar house and downtown and I think it's like even like the rising like maven districts and over in um, uh, marmalade districts, like that's still very far apart and like there's no easy way publicly to do so.

Speaker 1: 1:07:39

But then we have this like idea of e-bikes where it's like, oh cool, it's kind of like a bike, well, it's like you can cover about the same distance as you can as a car with minimal effort, pretty easily, yeah, and without having that huge sacrifice of time and so. But it's like that. I mean the consumer behavior you would have to change to get people to buy e-bikes would be wild. Compared to again like these narratives like hey, here's this refinery that's blowing all of this smoke into here. It's very contextual for people and doesn't necessarily cause a huge personal habit change.

Speaker 2: 1:08:14

Compared to moving a factory, yeah, I mean you gave me this heads up beforehand. You want to talk about what are some things that I thought the city could do better, what would make salt lake better? And I think you've hit the nail on the head, for one of the key issues is the way that we get around, and I just don't think a community that's based on uh, cars is ever as good as a community that you can get out and move around by public transportation, especially by walking or being on a bike. Everywhere that I've visited, everywhere that I've lived, that issue is, I feel, like one of the closest connectors to how much I enjoy living there. Like, am I dependent on a car? Is the only way that I can go see a friend to get in a car, the only way that I can get to the grocery store? A car I just don't. I've found I don't like those communities. I can go see a friend to get in a car. The only way that I can get to the grocery store? A car I just don't. I've found I don't like those communities as much as the ones that you feel like you have a neighborhood and you can get around, and I do think, yeah, salt Lake City, one of the key issues we need is better being able to get around the city in a better fashion than in a car, and I actually, on this one, I think in particular it's about infrastructure. One of the keys is infrastructure.

Speaker 2: 1:09:30

I ride my bike a lot and when I was working at SUA, typically got to work I was living in Sugarhouse, got to work by bike, just a standard bike and I was out there. But it's, you know, I guess, for me, the thing I realized is I recently got an e-bike to transport my girls to two girls. When I was riding around on a bike, you know I was worried about cars, I was worried about traffic, but I'd ride pretty much any road in the city. Now that I have my kids on my back, oh, I'm very aware, much more aware, of what's going on with cars. What routes I will take?

Speaker 2: 1:10:07

Most of our streets are not friendly for bikes. They're not safe for bikes. I mean sure, if you're you're a dude in your 30s and you're willing to like ride in and out of traffic, yeah, you can ride anywhere. That's not how we're going to get people on the streets like you.

Speaker 2: 1:10:22

Need streets that are safe for kids to ride on and we don don't have that in many places and it's really about we've invested and prioritized our infrastructure, is investing in and designed to move people around in cars, and that's so. That's how people move around. I think if you spend time on things like the S line or now some of these new bike trails that have popped up all of a sudden, you see, oh, they get used, like once you have a place that anybody can go and feel comfortable moving along, it's actually really pleasant, they get used, and we don't have that in many places of the city and I think that's probably, you know, one of the key things we need to add because, especially bikes, to prioritize bikes, prioritize walking, prioritize methods of getting around the city that aren't individual cars.

Speaker 1: 1:11:31

Totally and it's like and I think it's so primed for it as well Cause I mean over in the past I mean let's throw out a number of 10 years at least. In my experience I feel like people have become a lot more bike friendly in general. I mean road biking, I feel like, has become a lot more popular. A lot more people are getting into mountain biking. So it's like, hey, well, you have this bike as a I mean, a hobby, a recreation.

Speaker 1: 1:11:53

Now let's kind of pivot a little bit and also be this way of commuting um in such a way and like into your point of like cities you've lived in, where it makes you enjoy more and happiness of life. I mean like, hey, you're getting more exercise, which I mean we don't get into details of the correlation of exercise and happiness, but then you get to experience your community more, cause, instead of being in this box where you probably have something playing in the background, you're actually hearing the people talk, you're hearing the wind blow and the trees and seeing all of the actual things, which gives us a better experience in general as well. And so, yeah, I love the way that you hit that Cause, like when I was in Seattle I didn't have a car. I just, I mean, walked most places. I mean, they had a lot of really good bike and scooter rentals, so I would do that.

Speaker 1: 1:12:31

Worst case scenario, I'm taking an Uber, um, but yeah, I like that and I mean I think that's a kind of theme in general that I Lake in general of how we're thinking about communities and how people want to have a community, and I think the more opportunity we have to be exposed to people and that community, the better off everyone will be. And what better way for a cause is cleaning up our air, which, again, everybody has some sort of experience with and a pretty strong opinion too. So, on top of kind of like the way we get around and the way our infrastructure works, I mean, what are some of these other key things that you think need to change in order to get our air quality or get our city environmentally where we need to be?

Speaker 2: 1:13:14

I think three of the key issues for Salt Lake City to be a better city in the future. One is, yes, transportation how we get around having it be safe for people on foot and on bike, even more public transportation options. That's a key. Air quality is another one, because it's one of the biggest detriments about living here. I think a third is the cost of housing. I mean, the city is unaffordable and I think there are a lot of things that go along with housing areas that become more and more expensive.

Speaker 2: 1:13:45

Um, you know, I think about I was recently living in South Salt Lake for a little while which is much less expensive. Uh, there is so much more. Uh, you know, a place where you, where a wider array of people can live, a wider array of people can afford to open new businesses. Just take, you know, I think a good measure on this front is restaurants. Salt Lake has some great restaurants. We've got, you know, the really high-end restaurants we don't have as compared to South Salt Lake. You know, in the neighborhood I'm in now in Marmalade, we don't have anywhere near the availability and diversity of ethnic food that South Salt Lake did, because it's really expensive to try If you're going to take a flyer and open a restaurant like South Salt Lake is a much cheaper option than Salt Lake and we miss out on a lot of things because we've become so unaffordable. It is also something that you know.

Speaker 2: 1:14:44

Salt Lake essentially chases away people who are looking, who are younger, starting families, looking to buy their first home. You can't do that in Salt Lake and we have. I remember this when I was running for mayor. We had this big gap in population. My estimation, you'd see, essentially this huge crowd of 20 year olds, early 30 year olds, people who are coming here after school, could afford an apartment because they were living there with three other people right, you're splitting rent that way and so we had a relatively big population and we had this big population of people in their late fifties and older and this gap in between, like people really couldn't start families here, and this was before things got especially bad. So we're missing out. We're chasing people out of our city, missing out on opportunities because it's so expensive.

Speaker 1: 1:15:39

Yeah, especially when you think about the future. I mean I don't know why Japan comes to mind the most, but like they're having. I mean, their birth rates are so low and the biggest thing for them is like, oh well, we won't be able to take care of our elderly because we don't have this population to support it. And in the same way, when we, if we want to continue this economic growth in this continual forge of, like Salt Lake, being more of a bigger dot on the map than it was, we have to continually try to draw people of all sorts of ages and backgrounds and especially priming the beginning of the funnel of the youth and getting there as well and supporting those families. Because I mean, obviously there's the build that passed that gave $20,000 to first-time homeowners for new builds. But at the same time, to your point, it's like, oh so you want me to go all the way to Harriman, you want me to go essentially away from anywhere that I I mean it's probably more of a personal opinion than most but I don't want to go live in a place that I don't necessarily want to live in just because there's a financial incentive. I want to be able to be where I want to be and have an option to be there and I totally, and I think my experience in Seattle has done something similar and it kind of correlates the two, between public transportation and affordable housing.

Speaker 1: 1:16:48

Because, like in Utah, I mean, like up until four years ago you could buy a house in Salt Lake pretty reasonably, most places, and then now it's gotten so ridiculous.

Speaker 1: 1:16:56

And then interest rates now, even if prices do come down a little bit, still doesn't make any sense.

Speaker 1: 1:17:00

And with Seattle I mean, like obviously with Salt Lake we're geographically restrained by the mountains, by the lake, et cetera, and it's very similar to Seattle where I mean Seattle itself is formed on a peninsula and then kind of another peninsula, and so I mean obviously you can't build houses in water. Actually you can. There In the South Lake Union there's literally houseboats you can buy, but the only way to solve that is better transportation. So if you are living outside, a better way to get in, which I feel like front runner and some of those things do a better job about, but at the same time intercity stuff is a lot more difficult. So it's it's funny how like you start pulling on one thread of one issue and it starts to correlate to the other and it all ends up being this kind of giant tangled ball of yarn, that's, I mean, complicated, but at the same time we're motivated, and getting more motivated, to tackle some of these issues more and be a little bit more aggressive.

Speaker 2: 1:17:46

See, higher costs there than other places. But I'm also suspicious that the way we go about permitting new construction, the restrictions that we place, we are a big part of the problem. We're making things be more expensive than they have to be. And you know again I would point to political dynamics and especially I'd think about how elections happen.

Speaker 2: 1:18:23

You know the fact that Salt Lake City one very small part I don't this is certainly not the key thing that we need to do accessory dwelling units, these little mother-in-law apartments that people can add in the back or, you know, build in a garage or above a garage. It's still really hard to do in Salt Lake and I think at the city level they've gotten hung up on issues like well, we need to. You know, people are worried about having to compete for parking out on their street and so because of that we're not going to do in certain neighborhoods we're not going to add accessory dwelling units. I think that's kind of an excuse, but the fact that it's more important that we have super convenience for our cars than that we have affordable housing for people and we've decided that that's a more important issue than adding as much housing as quickly as we can to address the lack of affordability here in the city.

Speaker 1: 1:19:20

Cool Talk about the bill that you recently passed to help with the bromine levels and how it's going to make an impact on Salt Lake citizens. Yeah, talk about the bill that you recently passed to help with the bromine levels and how it's going to make an impact on Salt Lake citizens.

Speaker 2: 1:19:28

Yeah. So we had in our legislation a proposal that the state of Utah should start regulating bromine pollution because and I said this was a really unique Utah problem Federally there isn't a standard for bromine emissions in the air. There isn't a standard at the state level because people didn't know that this was such an issue for pollution and also it's really not likely to be a problem in many other places than here on the Wasatch Front, where we happen to have this company that's processing saltwater, so one of the few places you'd find bromine. Combined with this, these meteorological conditions where you know, as we know, in the winter you get these conditions where we don't have storms coming in or out. You just have this massive air that kind of parks itself over the Wasatch Front and doesn't really let anything out because of that super unique situation.

Speaker 2: 1:20:30

So nobody was regulating bromine. We had new research saying it was really impactful for our pollution levels. So our legislation basically said this is something we should limit and work to reduce. Because that wasn't no, it's not. The state wasn't doing anything about it and the bill we passed does that. Creates a pathway for the state of Utah to create a standard. Start limiting this pollutant, start reducing it. So that you know we're tackling something that at some, in worst case scenario, like I said, is making our wintertime pollution spikes 10 to 25% worse than they would be.

Speaker 1: 1:21:13

Yeah, and it's like you said, like the Beck Street I mean doing removing that refinery like maybe 5% impact. But this, especially when you think about again the risk calculation of being impact versus exposure, when you have these high levels of bromine in a place where it's going to sit there for a long amount of time, based on how the city sits in the mountains and the weather patterns, it's a pretty bad situation for us, especially in our quality of life and our health. Corley's told that. So, thinking about the line between either your middle school self of dreaming to work at SUA and work on these environmental processes and starting, or being in the mayoral race and starting O2 Utah to getting to this place where you passed legislation, I mean, what was that feeling like? Kind of feeling like you were one step in making your dreams come true. It's still kind of.

Speaker 2: 1:22:02

I mean it's really changed how I've thought about whether, or talking about again, a pollutant that's making air quality here 10 to 25% worse. I don't think there's anything that I've seen from the legislature in the last few decades that even comes close to such a potential for significant reduction a potential for significant reduction. So there's a little bit of shock, like, oh yeah, it actually worked. Actually, we got something through and all that hard work paid off. I think we moved on to very much an idea of like, how do we build on this? What's next? We've got a lot of ideas. Now we've got to start implementing.

Speaker 2: 1:23:03

We have to take what we learned in that process lot of ideas. Now we've got to start implementing. We have to take what we learned in that process, which was how we engage with legislators, how you start working on legislation and build on that to do even more. So that's how we've moved forward on this thought. You know thinking let's take advantage of what we've learned to do even more, and certainly let's take this out to people and say, hey, come help us with your support, with your donations, with you showing up, with you reaching out to policymakers. Look, we've seen promise, we've seen potential. Come join us, help us continue to make a difference. That's awesome.

Speaker 1: 1:23:40

Yeah, I mean kudos to you for getting that done.

Speaker 1: 1:23:42

Um, I mean we're all going to benefit from it, and especially, like you said when, before you went to business school, you now had this daughter and like, wanted the future for her to be brighter and is so much more relevant for you, cause, I mean your life is your life.

Speaker 1: 1:23:56

But to pass it on to someone you love, um, and hand them this I mean burning house and say enjoy your inheritance, compared to saying, hey, like we're, we're going to take care of this house, that we have this city that we love and move forward. So so, congrats to all your success you're having and love that you're happy with the success you've had, but really motivated to keep moving forward and keep, I mean, pushing for these issues that you're so passionate about and a lot of people around here are so thinking about. I mean the future, I mean what keeps you here. I mean I know if there's something I know about david, it's if I ask him what are you up to this weekend or you have any travel plans? I will soon, within the next 10 minutes, learn about an obscure part of utah that I didn't even know existed. So I know outdoors is a big part of that for you and and forming those experiences with your family um yeah, I mean my, my family and friends here.

Speaker 2: 1:24:49

Such an important part of my life and that's one of the great things about being here is having that network. Uh, you know, brings me a lot of happiness and a lot of joy, so that's a that's a key thing. The people that I know and love here, uh, part of what keeps me here. Another part, big part, is the outdoors and being in one of the most incredible places really in the world, both for an impressive geography but also the amazing thing we have, is that so close to us are just vast amounts of public lands, lands we all own, lands that you can essentially go anywhere, explore anything, go visit these places, and it's such so few people have that have such an incredible ability to get out here. That is one of the key things that keeps me here and, yeah, I'd love to go out and just explore public lands, go camp, visit random corners of the state, especially, you know, the less visited, the less I know about it, the better, because it's an opportunity to go to see something new.

Speaker 2: 1:25:57

I have continued skiing mainly resort skiing to to mostly backcountry skiing and split boarding my opinion, the best activity, uh, ever invented by humans, I will say, uh, split boarding and backcountry skiing, yeah, backcountry skiing, split boarding, it's the pinnacle, it's the gold standard. There's nothing better. It is the pinnacle of of human movement and human recreation. Um, that in the winter, yeah, it's that the the. There's nothing I would rather do than be out exploring a new place in the back country. Um, we have some of the best snow in the world, some of the best access in the world, so it's a great place to be for that. Uh, that kind of takes all of my focus in the winter. Um, dabble a little bit in climbing. Uh, you know, also love backpacking. Uh, rafting, like taking my girls out to some of the rivers here in the States. So that wealth of outdoor access and opportunities in Utah is pretty tough to beat.

Speaker 1: 1:27:08

What are maybe your favorite three or four places that you've been in Utah? Bonus points if it's more obscure.

Speaker 2: 1:27:17

Boy, that's hard to answer. I have so many favorite places. Just, I would say the last year, some places that I've visited that I've really enjoyed some skiing in um, both the Stansberry range and the pilot range, uh, have been great. I've I've really tried to and loved getting out to more of Utah's great basin and West desert, because there's so many spaces there that just don't get visited at all and it's got its own beauty, its own unique environments. I don't want to give away all my secrets.

Speaker 1: 1:27:56

You can't give away your spots but that's it.

Speaker 2: 1:27:58

Yeah, at a high level. Those are two places I'll flag. You know, southern Utah, the Colorado plateau, is absolutely incredible. There's so many incredible places. Hard to you know name just one.

Speaker 1: 1:28:15

Totally so. We'll wrap up with two questions. First question is if you could invite someone to be on the Small Lake City podcast to interview and hear their story, who would you want to hear from?

Speaker 2: 1:28:28

Boy, that's a good question. You know, I think, someone worth talking to who's pretty interesting Dustin Buckthall. He started and has been building his empire at the front climbing gym and pretty incredible I mean. I went from a grad student who kind of on the side went in on a small little bouldering gym and now has built these incredible climbing gyms, is expanding, is building climbing walls now around the country building climbing holds, is kind of creating a construction company as well on the side. So pretty dynamic story that I've watched a lot of like way back in the day had a pass to the front when it was just this little bouldering gym. Now it's a madhouse. Yeah, and multiple and you know this. He's built this whole empire and it's pretty impressive.

Speaker 1: 1:29:35

No, I love that. And then, lastly, if people want to find out more about O2 Utah or donate or follow you on social media, where do they find you?

Speaker 2: 1:29:43

Yeah, the website o2utahorg. We're on the socials. You know how to do that again, O2 Utah. But sure Love people to come get involved. They really do make a difference. I know these problems that we've talked about, like air quality and climate. I know that's on a lot of people's minds right now, watching this record heat across the world and can be pretty depressing, and I hear you, I felt it the same thing. I think an antidote to that is get involved and you do make a difference. Again, I've seen firsthand so few legislators are hearing from people that they need to do something about air, they need to do something about climate. So if you're concerned about those things, get involved. We'll help you make a difference.

Speaker 1: 1:30:31

Yeah, check out the website. I mean, donate if you can, volunteer if you can. I know it's a lot of things that we all are passionate about is protecting this valley and protecting our health at the same time, and making sure it's here for generations to come and our kids and our kids' kids continue to be the place that we want it to be, but we have to protect it and maintain it in order to do so. Yeah, so thanks, david, for coming on and excited to keep watching all the fun work that you're doing.

Speaker 2: 1:30:56

Eric, thanks for having me. I had a great conversation. I've enjoyed this.

Speaker 1: 1:31:00

Absolutely Likewise. Thank you so much for listening to this week's episode of small lake city podcast. Don't forget to like, follow, review, subscribe and share this episode with your friends and we'll catch you next week. We'll see you there.