Through the Noise with J. Renay

What if the real betrayal isn't crossing enemy lines — but refusing to?
Bill Shireman is an environmentalist, coalition-builder, and rare San Francisco Republican who has spent his career doing the thing his own movement told him never to do: sit down with the other side. He's the CEO and president of Solution Citizen, the founder of the nonprofit Future 500, a co-curator of the EarthX Congress of Conferences, and the author of In This Together: How Republicans, Democrats, Capitalists, and Activists Are Uniting to Tackle Climate Change and More. Over the years he's brokered some improbable alliances — the first corporate sustainable-forestry standards between Mitsubishi and Rainforest Action Network, the California CRV container-deposit system, and a 2008 agreement in which Greenpeace and ExxonMobil each backed the same federal carbon tax.
Decades ago, fighting to pass that bottle bill in California, Bill was losing to industry money. So he stopped organizing bigger, angrier campaigns and started calling his opponents — including the head of Coors — looking for a human opening. He found one, built a coalition across the left and the right, and got the bill signed into law. And then, he tells Renay, about half his allies in the environmental community abandoned him: "You have now compromised with the devil." It was "traumatic, and damaging, and painful."
This is not a policy war story. It's about what it costs to solve a problem instead of fighting over it forever — and where you have to find your nourishment when the applause never comes. "You cannot do this for the acclaim," Bill says. "If you betray your cause in order to be popular… that is the true betrayal."
Bill and Renay cover growing up in the engineered sameness of Silicon Valley and becoming an observer of his own life; the epiphany, mid-apple, that he was "a flow" rather than a fixed self; the four phases every living system moves through, and why "our diversity is our resilience"; being raised by a "pragmatically atheist" father and finding his own faith; and why he now designs laws to adapt over time instead of commanding a fixed result.
Through the Noise is about the inner capacities that let leaders sustain themselves and the work. This one is about doing the right thing before it's popular — and learning to need no one's permission for it.

What's the difference between leading a movement and feeding an ego?
Aisha Nyandoro is the founder of Springboard to Opportunities and the creator of the Magnolia Mother's Trust — the first guaranteed income program in the country built to center Black mothers living in poverty. The model is simple and radical: a thousand dollars a month, no strings attached, so families have, in her words, the financial support they need to breathe.
But Aisha is almost always met at the level of her work — the data, the programs, the philosophy. This conversation goes underneath it. She traces her "radical audacity" back to ancestors tilling the soil in the Mississippi Delta, names the things her elders never modeled — how to say no, how to rest — and explains why she now sorts every request into a "joyful yes" or a "joyful no," with nothing in between.
This is not really an episode about guaranteed income. It's about the interior life of someone shifting systems — ego, boundaries, faith, and the trust the work actually runs on. "My work," she says, "can only go as far as trust allows."
Aisha and Renay cover the difference between a movement and an ego; the brutal first year of the Magnolia Mother's Trust — the airport-lounge breaking point where she told God she was done, and the cold call that changed everything; why she had to "fall in love with" her ego without letting it lead; the elder who told her to hold her own roots and trust that others are holding theirs; and what this moment is really asking leaders to become.
Through the Noise is about the inner capacities that let leaders sustain themselves and the work. This one is about doing the work without losing yourself in it — and about the joy she refuses to do the work without.

What if the goal was never to fix a broken system — but to find the doorway out of it?
Deepa Iyer is a writer, strategist, and lawyer who has spent decades working in and alongside Asian American, South Asian, Muslim, and Arab communities. She works at the Building Movement Project and created the Social Change Ecosystem Framework — the widely used map that helps people locate their role in collective change.
Deepa came to the U.S. from Kerala, India, at 12, and the skills she built to survive that displacement — reading a room, sensing its energy, finding the through-lines — became the way she works. She calls herself a weaver. Years later, in the Civil Rights Division of the Department of Justice after September 11th, she sat inside a contradiction she's never shaken: a government that promised to protect the same communities it was surveilling and detaining. "Systems set up with clear values," she tells Renay, "don't always practice them" when it matters most.
This is not a conversation about how broken things are. It's about where the doorways are. Deepa names the grief of watching the architecture of civil rights come apart — and refuses to stop there. "The goal is not to reform systems that were already broken," she says. "The goal is to identify these portals for a different type of society."
She and Renay cover the cognitive dissonance of doing justice work inside government; why she left for the movement sector; the "pressure cooker" inside today's nonprofits and the burnout landing hardest on women of color leaders; hope as something you practice rather than feel; and what she returns to when she's most disoriented.
Through the Noise is about the inner capacities that let leaders sustain themselves and the work. This one is about staying in relationship — to community, to grief, and to what's still possible.

What do you do when the story that falls apart is your own?
Lance Gould is the CEO of Brooklyn Story Lab, a media strategy firm that helps purpose-driven organizations tell their stories. Before that came thirty years in journalism, ending with an executive editor's chair at HuffPost and a layoff one week after the 2016 US Presidential election.
What set in, he tells Renay, was "sheer panic." He was 51, with two daughters, in a field that was shrinking under him, and he had never wanted to be an entrepreneur in the first place — he liked insurance and a paycheck. 
This is not an episode about losing a job. It's about what a storyteller does when his own story comes apart, and what he learns about hope on the other side of it. Not hope as a feeling that arrives, but hope as something you generate and protect: "the more that we prop that up and don't let it dissipate and don't let it disappear, the more hope that we have."
Lance and Renay cover the layoff and the panic underneath it; the 270 elephants he helped move a thousand miles from one reserve to another and what a matriarchal species has to teach a moment shaped by male ego; why storytelling is part art and part science — "without the artful delivery, it's just an abacus," and "without data, it's just conjecture"; and how to wear blinders and take them off at the same time.
Through the Noise is about the inner capacities that let leaders sustain themselves and the work. This one is about treating hope as something you generate — and refusing to let it disappear.

What does it cost to be so good at surviving that no one — not even you, at first — notices what it's taking?
Aman Singh is, by trade, a translator of complexity — she leads global sustainability communications, shaping narrative for some of the biggest names in retail and consumer brands. She is very good at telling other people's stories. This episode is about what happened when she tried to tell her own. After their first conversation, Aman wrote back to Renay: she felt rattled and unsatisfied, like she'd stayed in the safety of talking about work instead of life. So they sat down again. 
What follows traces survival as a discipline Aman learned early — growing up in Delhi, where a billion people compete for the same resources and falling short of the best isn't an option — and how that instinct followed her into corporate America, through eleven years of a New Jersey Transit commute with a breast pump in her bag, through the quiet arithmetic of trying to be a full-time mother and a full-time contributor on the same twenty-four hours everyone else gets. 
Aman talks about the moment the math stopped working, the permission she eventually gave herself to make different choices, and the small daily practices — Pilates, an hour of fiction, a good cry when she needs one — that keep her from constantly digging for why. 
She and Renay talk about what it means to be "well" even when you feel overwhelmed. As Aman puts it, the cost is all internal — no one outside sees it. She closes with what she wants to be remembered for: not a title, but usefulness. 
This isn't a conversation about work-life balance. It's about what it costs to remember who you are underneath the role.
 

What does it actually take to stay in the work of changing systems — not for a season, but for a life?
Shawna Wakefield has spent twenty-five years building frameworks for transformative feminist leadership at Oxfam, Gender at Work, and the UN. She is also a practitioner of somatics, meditation, and embodied leadership — a woman who learned, long before she had language for it, that the body holds knowledge the thinking mind cannot reach on its own. She is a mother who lost a child in Cambodia. A Black and mixed-race kid who moved from New York City to rural Vermont in fourth grade and met "othering" before she had a word for it. A daughter of Alan and Pat Wakefield who now meditates with her ancestors every morning.
In this conversation, Renay and Shawna sit with what it actually takes to stay in justice work over the long haul — not as career, but as life. They talk about Afghanistan after September 11, Cambodia after profound loss, and the turning point when Shawna realized that being well in her own body was the prerequisite to staying in the work. They talk about the difference between guilt and responsibility, and why guilt is not a good motivation. They talk about what changes when a leader stops trying to lead from the neck up.

How do you stay true to your convictions when they set you apart?
Renay sits down with Leonard E. Robinson — over forty-five years in environmental management, appointee under four California governors, former Acting Director and Chief Deputy Director of California's Department of Toxic Substances Control, Partner and Chief Sustainability Strategist at SEMCO, Sustainability Coordinator for the Catholic Archdiocese of Atlanta, and host of the Faith and Sustainability podcast — for a conversation about what it takes to lead from faith inside institutions that were not built to hear it.
This is the second conversation Renay and Leonard recorded for the show. The first was, in Renay's own words, the conversation any host could have had. So she asked him for another one. What you hear in this episode is a man who stopped trying to fit in a long time ago, walking us through the inner architecture that let him do that — and what it cost, and what it gave him. 
This episode is not a sermon. It is not a debate about whether faith belongs in business. It is a working leader — an engineer by training — describing the discipline of following something he cannot prove. And the difference, as he draws it, between faith and resilience: "Resilience is how we react to things. Faith is how we respond to things."
Leonard and Renay cover: why language like climate change and faith triggers the same defensive posture, and what to do with that noise instead of around it; the silos we build between profession and belief, and what happens when we stop maintaining them; the difference between confidence and faith for leaders who don't subscribe to a higher authority; Laudato Si' and what it has unlocked inside the Archdiocese of Atlanta; and the leaders Leonard watched cut through — from Greta Thunberg to Charles Lee, the EPA veteran who helped launch the environmental justice movement alongside Dr. Ben Chavis Jr. and whose name most people in this work still don't know.
This episode is also a tribute. Leonard passed away after recording. He gave us this conversation. We are honored to share it.

What if telling positive stories — at a moment when negativity sells — is its own act of resistance?
Renay sits down with Larry Confino — independent documentary director, producer, and the filmmaker behind 50 States of Sustainability, currently airing nationally on PBS in its second season — for a conversation about what it takes to spend twenty-plus years pointing a camera at people who don't make headlines.
Larry has been an independent filmmaker for over twenty-five years. He has made feature documentaries about a lost Sephardic Jewish community in Greece and a legendary East Village nightclub. He has done client work for HBO, PBS, Disney, and Canon. But the project that drives him now is one he built from scratch during the pandemic: a documentary series traveling state by state, sitting with engineers, miners, tribal leaders, farmers, and CEOs working on some piece of the climate puzzle from where they stand. He calls it a personal search for optimism. He has filmed in more than twenty states.
This conversation is not about climate solutions. It is about what a storyteller does when the attention economy is built to reward what scares us — and how Larry made the deliberate, costly choice to tell stories that don't sell. He calls the inner capacity he keeps finding in the people he interviews "positive stubbornness" — the willingness to keep going at a problem too big for any one person to solve, because the alternative is to give up. 
They cover the West Virginia coal miners Larry refuses to villainize, and what it costs to hold reverence for hard-working people while telling a renewable-energy story. The Chippewa engineer in northern Minnesota who is replacing energy poverty with energy sovereignty by building solar on Red Lake Nation. The deep geothermal technology that could cut global emissions by twenty-five percent if its engineers can perfect it. And why Larry believes the people doing this work are not driven by obligation but by something stranger and more durable — the intellectual challenge of refusing to give up.
Larry's measure of this work isn't audience size. It is the woman who watched a clip at a community screening, walked up to him, and told him she was changing jobs. This is a conversation about narrative as a tool, collaboration over extraction, and what hope looks like when you treat it as a discipline.

What if the planet doesn't need saving — and we do?
Renay sits down with David Biello — TED's science curator, longtime Scientific American editor, and author of The Unnatural World: The Race to Remake Civilization in Earth's Newest Age — for a conversation that quietly dismantles almost everything we assume the climate conversation is about.
David has been on the environment and energy beat since 1999 — long enough, in his words, to be cynical but not long enough to be depressed. He'll tell you the planet doesn't need saving. We do. Our cities, our food systems, the entire architecture of a life built for a climate that no longer exists — that's what's at stake. And what stands between us and a livable future isn't a missing technology. It's a way of thinking.
This conversation is not a tour of climate solutions. It is about attention — what David chooses to notice, what he refuses to, and how he keeps his footing in a world where every message is weaponized and every source needs a second look. The throughline is short-term thinking: the quarterly result, the daily metric, the next outrage in the feed. David names it as the one thing he wishes leaders would unlearn — the same answer Andrew Winston gave in our first episode, arrived at from a completely different room.
They cover why David cuts through the noise not with a system but with a network. Why the last 10,000 years of climate stability are the narrow band that all of human civilization was built inside, and what it means that we've already stepped out of it. And why "check the sources" applies hardest to the things you already believe.
This is a conversation about responsibility, the long view, and what it takes to keep noticing the world while you're trying to change it.
 

What does it take to sustain leadership across decades of struggle? Dr. Benjamin F. Chavis, Jr. has been a political prisoner, a denominational executive, the CEO of the NAACP, a Nation of Islam minister, co-founder of the Hip-Hop Summit Action Network, president and CEO of the Black Press of America, and host of The Chavis Chronicles on PBS. He coined the term environmental racism — from a jail cell — at a time when neither the civil rights movement nor the environmental movement had language for what they were both circling.
This conversation is not about the highlight reel. It is about what it costs to hold moral clarity across six decades of struggle, reinvention, and contradiction — and what this moment is still asking of him.
Dr. Chavis reflects on what has remained constant through every organization, ideology, and storm he has weathered: a commitment to freedom, justice, and equality for all people. He shares how faith carried him through a 34-year prison sentence as one of the Wilmington Ten, how he learned to transform contradiction into fuel rather than paralysis, and why the current moment demands intergenerational organizing rather than overwhelm.
They cover why preparation — not just skills or capacity — is what carries leaders through a polycrisis. How a jail cell became the birthplace of a paradigm-shifting concept. What the African liberation movements of the 1970s reveal about the same extractive forces driving environmental and economic injustice today. And why truth cannot simply coexist next to falsehood — it has to remove it from the dialogue.
At a moment when the historical record is being actively narrowed, Dr. Chavis is a reminder of what it looks like to stay in the work — not despite the noise, but through it.