33 - Eric Corey Freed

We are joined by Eric Corey Freed, who has a bio so extensive that we broke it down into bullets! He is: 

• An award-winning architect, 
  • In 2012, he was named one of the 25 "Best Green Architecture Firms" in the US, and one of the "Top 10 Most Influential Green Architects." In 2017, he was named one of Build's American Architecture Top 25. He’s one of the 2021 Environment + Energy Leaders and in 2024, he was named the Net Zero Trailblazer for Innovation. He holds a prestigious LEED Fellow award from the US Green Building Council. 
• An author and global speaker
  • 12 books, including "Green Building & Remodeling for Dummies” and "Circular Economy for Dummies." His new book, “Frictionless: Overcoming the Drags that Shutdown Innovation” will be released in 2026.
  • His work has been featured in: Time, Newsweek, Metropolis, Dwell, Fast Company, Forbes, The New York Times, The Wall Street Journal; and on-air in: Fox News, HGTV, The Sundance Channel and PBS. 
• Current Principal and Director of Sustainability for CannonDesign
• His past roles include: Founding Principal of organicARCHITECT, a visionary design leader in biophilic and regenerative design, Vice President of the International Living Future Institute, and Chief Community Officer of EcoDistricts.
• He serves on the board of Design Museum Everywhere, whose mission is to “bring the transformative power of design to all.” 

Eric shared:

•  How mentorship shaped his career 
•  Why sustainability messaging often fails 
•  The future of mass timber, AI, synthetic biology, and bio-based materials 
•  What keeps innovation from happening 
•  Why climate change is fundamentally a public health issue 
•  How humor and storytelling help change minds 

The conversation also dives into affordable housing, healthcare design, systems thinking, and how to create lasting influence through speaking, teaching, writing, and design.

Organizations & Events Mentioned:

• International Living Future Institute (ILFI) 
  • Living Future Conference
• U.S. Green Building Council (USGBC) 
  • Greenbuild Conference 
• CannonDesign
• XPRIZE

 Innovative Construction + Materials Companies

• Prometheus Materials
• BioTwin
• Glavel

Books

• Green Building and Remodeling For Dummies by Eric Corey Freed
• Circular Economy For Dummies by Eric Corey Freed, coauthor
• Frictionless: Overcoming the Drags That Shut Down Innovation (forthcoming 2026) by Eric Corey Freed
• Cradle to Cradle
• Ecotopia
• The Ministry for the Future

Transcript

[00:00:00] Kiersten: All right, pod people. We are back and our guest today is someone who is very, very hard to briefly introduce. His list of accolades is a mile long, getting started: he's an award-winning architect, author, and global speaker, Eric Corey Freed has been the principal and director of sustainability at Cannon Design, where he leads teams delivering over 30 million square feet of low carbon healthy regenerative buildings annually. He previously founded Organic Architect and has held leadership roles with the ILFI, International Living Futures Institute and Eco Districts. His work has been featured in Time, Newsweek, metropolitan 12, fast Company, Forbes, the New York Times. You know, guys, just small, small publications, the Wall Street Journal and even on air with Fox News, HDTV, the Sundance Channel, PBS, and now, I know this is a pinnacle for you, Eric, the Green Collar Pod.

[00:00:57] Eric Corey Freed: It is the highlight of my week, of my week yeah. 

[00:00:59] Kiersten: I'll take it. It's more than a day! So Eric is the author of 12 books, including Green Building and Remodeling for Dummies and Circular Economy for Dummies with a new book, Frictionless: overcoming the Drags That Shut Down Innovation forthcoming in 2026. He is a LEED fellow with the US Green Building Council, U-S-G-B-C, and he's been recognized among the nation's most influential green architects and sustainability leaders. Truly, welcome Eric. 

[00:01:27] Eric Corey Freed: Thank thank you. Thank you for having me. It's nothing more painful than listening to your own bio. I appreciate it. 

[00:01:31] Kiersten: Well, you don't look too red. No, not too many blushes. So that's more than I could say if someone's talking about me. get started with just a broad stroke. What's your journey been? As I, said, you've done a lot, but where did you start? How'd you get where you are today? And maybe touch on, have your priorities changed throughout your career?

[00:01:50] Eric Corey Freed: it depends on which way you wanna look at it. In my mind, I think of myself as hyper and impatient. if you talk to a lot of architects, which I don't recommend, but if you somehow are in a position where you talk to a lot of architects, I would say it's probably a pretty consistent normal pattern that you'll hear that many of us knew we wanted to be architects when we were really young. For me, I was drawing buildings when I was a little kid. I love the idea of getting into them. I remember when I discovered perspective and isometric and axonometric and finding different ways to draw, but there's something very deeply psychological, I think, about this idea of wanting to craft your environment, to want to shape your surroundings.

I grew up in inner city, Philadelphia in an area called Overbrook Park. It's West Philadelphia. Philadelphia, by the way, is shipped like an old lady, is the outline of the city. And I grew up on the nose, like the nose of the city, essentially. Right? And in some sense, nice fine childhood, but in the other sense. It was weird. It was blocks of row homes they're called. Right? And they're essentially wooden houses with fake brick on the outside with fake wooden shutters, and I hated them. I always used to beg my mother, could we please rip the fake shutters off? 'cause we're lying. We're lying to the neighbors.

We don't really, real shutters. They don't actually move, they're not even big enough to cover the windows, to me, they just looked appalling. And of course my mother's " no, they're beautiful." That kind of thing.

So, designers are, were born, not made. And so if you have an eye for wanting to shape the environment around you, then design is a perfect profession for you. And that's what I grew up with. Just this idea of, wanting to shape the environment. What came very quickly later when I was in high school was this idea of what kind of designer do I want to be? I think for me it was very much, I wanted to be one that was pushing, the envelope, pushing the boundaries of what's possible.

It was not really about sustainability per se, as much as just what, what makes logical sense? What would help the most people? What would have the most positive impact? I'm old, so this was in the late 19 hundreds sustainability was not a word that we used, it was still very obscure and niche, and I just got lucky that I stumbled upon a series of mentors that were working in this. I just saw it as an opportunity to really make the world a better place. In hindsight, now at my old age, now, it's easy to look back and say, I think it's, I think it's almost the duty of every designer to work toward making the world a better place. but yeah, that's how I ended up here. 

[00:04:15] Aparna: Thanks for that backstory. Just to drill in a little bit more, can you talk to us about those mentors and really what it was that made you pivot into this space? What were they doing? What inspired you?

[00:04:26] Eric Corey Freed: The, the act of construction is damaging, right? It just creates a lot of waste. It uses massive amounts of energy. Expels massive amounts of carbon emissions. If you're really gonna work on or think about making the world better, one of the things that needs to be fixed is how we build buildings and how we build shelter for people. Not to mention the fact that they're largely unaffordable for the majority of folks and all that other stuff. So I, I started just asking questions ' cause I was frustrated and I was asking questions of my professors and the answers they were giving me were pretty mundane. They were like that's the way we've always done it.

That kind of thing and that's, it's infuriating, especially when you're in college, And remember by college at that point, in my mind, I was thinking, I've wanted to be an architect for 10 years now. So by the time I got to college, I was impatient and busting and even more hyper than I am now.

That was not an acceptable answer. Just 'cause we've always done it that way. That's stupid, you know? And I didn't like that answer. So I just started looking around and I found this kind of subset of architects, many of whom had worked for Frank Lloyd Wright. Mr. Wright had already died at that point, but, his kind of work lived on I was learning just so much from them.

So I started writing, it was before the internet, so I started, writing them letters. On paper with stamps and stuff, and then sending them copies of my drawings and then having phone calls with them. And then eventually I started working for them. But it came at a very critical time and that to me really showed the value of mentorship.

And since then I'd like to think I've mentored hundreds of people, but at least I've spent time with hundreds of people trying to mentor them in a way just to pay back that debt of how mentors had helped me. 

[00:06:02] Kiersten: Passing it on is always admirable. Glad you had those mentors and that you've taken it on yourself to mentor others. Perhaps part of what I'm about to ask you is mentoring, but I'm curious if you could describe a little bit about what your day to day looks like. I feel like we rattled off 10 to 20 things that you're doing regularly between being an architect, speaking as a pundit, writing books. So how do you balance it all? What recurring tasks does Eric Corey Freed do regularly? 

[00:06:31] Eric Corey Freed: My, my life is rather boring and rather predictable. I run it like a German train schedule essentially. So I have everything kind of back to back to back. I wake up at the same time every day, seven days a week. I, go to bed at the same time most days unless I'm traveling. And it's really just about organization.

I'm director of sustainability at a very large firm. Cannon Design is what we call a top 10 firm. There's 1500 people. Essentially I'm in service to 1500 people, is how I see it. And my team and I are really, we're their sustainability team. Today was this typical day of, as any. First it started with conversations with my editor, right? I do that once a week. I do it first thing. So I posted the last bits of chapter last night, and he's reviewing them now. We're finishing up the final draft of the book. Next month will be all revisions for me, and then the book will come out subsequently. After that I lead an internal cohort , within Cannon design on licensing, like trying to get people to get their architectural license. Today happened to be the day that we did that, that was scheduled. Then immediately went in and met with my team. I have three lieutenants that co-lead sustainability with me, and I really insist on a lot of communication. So I talk with them once a week just to make sure we're on track and we have a very clear mission and goal of what we're after. Our goal is to touch a hundred percent of the projects to make every project a green project. So our entire meeting every week is are we doing that?

And just keeps going from there. And then, sometimes I'll go have coffee with people and sometimes I'll write and some, but it's very boringly regimented. Yeah.

[00:08:05] Aparna: I feel like you have to schedule in time if you're actually trying to get things done. We were just recording another episode last night and talking about how you schedule your free time to say okay, here's my hour and a half of thinking. Here's my hour and a half of chatting with students.

Here's my hour and a half of like actually writing this piece that I've been procrastinating for weeks. I think the scheduling does lend itself nicely to getting done what you want to get done, even if it's like scheduled in social time. I am curious though, just since you are so scheduled, do you also meal prep?

[00:08:35] Eric Corey Freed: I love the idea. I love the idea of it and I, and certainly it aligns with my weird personality, but no one in my family cooks. My wife and I don't cook our teenager she doesn't really cook. We end up going out to eat a lot because of that.

And then, I don't eat breakfast. And then lunch is not meal prepped, but it's very standardized. Like it's essentially a powdery smoothie thing.

[00:08:56] Aparna: I gotcha. Are you one of those people that takes their containers out to the restaurants with you? 

[00:09:01] Eric Corey Freed: You know, It's funny because I, when you work in sustainability, this happens a lot, everybody assumes that you're like gluten-free and vegan and stuff.

And so when I go and speak at a conference somewhere in the world, they always wanna take me out to dinner to some gluten-free vegan place. I'm like, can we go any, can we go anywhere else? Do we, can we like get a pizza or something? And they're like, oh, we just assumed you would want this thing.

And on the walk back to the hotel, I end up like stopping to get a, chicken sandwich or something. Something with some substance.

And then when I visit, our other offices, we've got 20 offices within Cannon design, and I like to just show up at them at times. One of the first things people will say is, they'll complain to me about why aren't we buying fair trade coffee? Or why are we buying bottled water? I'm like, dude, that is not what your sustainability team's working on. We're working on lessening the impact of the buildings. Talk to your office administrator.

Just 'em to buy the good stuff, so it's funny how people's perception of sustainability. Is is that, but what's funny is to me, that's also why sustainability, I think has largely failed over the last 50 years is because you're supposed to have those kind of, that, those feelings of austerity, you're supposed to do more with less.

You should be taking three minute showers bring a bag with you everywhere you go. Don't use straws, like all that. That whole mindset, making people feel guilty and putting the burden on individuals rather than on the companies that are, subsidizing this whole process. That, that's part of the game that's been played. That's been, fooling most people. It's really it's not your fault if you order a drink and they give it to you in a plastic cup, the company's fault for buying the cups in the first place. 

[00:10:32] Kiersten: We've definitely touched on the individual responsibility versus kind of industrial, for lack of a better word, commercial responsibility and how to straddle that line. I will say I often, I've, I think said on previous episodes, the most common misconception about me is that I am vegetarian, but I was raised in the south.

I love a good like sausage and eggs, breakfast with cheese, so definitely not vegan, but I will also say, I do exploring that and seeing, you know, I know it's not gonna solve all of the climate change problems, but like mitigating the impact does make me feel a little bit better when looking around at some of the bigger decisions and like, oh my God, we're doing all the wrong stuff. So on both fronts, right? But having that personal control is nice to take back. And one day I hope to be like, yeah, I regularly eat vegetarian, but it's a learning journey for me. 

[00:11:21] Eric Corey Freed: Yeah, and for all of us really. But know it's such a weird thing that, so there, there's something like 18,000 Starbucks locations worldwide and somehow all those millions of cups that they produce every year, it's your fault. It's your, you're the one, you're the one.

It's strange to me, but that's the game that's been played. This, we call it predatory delay. Is the official title for it. And fossil fuel companies and cigarette companies started it, right? It's your fault for taking up smoking. Not our fault. We're just trying to make a buck.

That whole mindset, it's evil and it's crazy. And they know that every quarter they can keep producing record profits and externalizing their da damage on the rest of the world, the better it is for them and the fact that they actually succeeded in blaming everybody else is mind boggling.

[00:12:05] Aparna: I feel like there's so much agency we people have, but you're totally right. Like companies could be doing more or should be doing more as well. So both sides working towards our same little problem. I am curious, Eric, about your prolific writing career. Can you walk us through what inspired you to write your first book? What was the thought? How'd you get started?

[00:12:23] Eric Corey Freed: I, I absolutely hate writing. I don't think I'm good at it. It is painful and torturous, and I was just talking to another author friend of mine saying, " I'm in the middle of book number 13 now", and how, what an awful experience is thinking that she was gonna say, "oh, it's easy for me 'cause I'm a writer." I don't think of myself as a writer. I think of myself as a designer, I'm much more comfortable sketching on paper and napkins and things like that. and so I was going on and on about how awful it is and her response was, "yeah, we all feel that way" and I'm just, shut me down with nobody likes writing.

It's just painful and torturous. It really started. Let's see I started my own firm in 1997. You get to this point where you're like, okay, I'm I get how this works. I get how to get clients. I get how to deliver these projects. You get pretty comfortable. And for me, I would immediately get very bored and wanting what is the next thing? And I have a lot of trouble enjoying my success as my wife and friends tell me all the time, right? That I, if some, if I win an award, my next thought is, what am I gonna win next? Or if I, or if we get published in a magazine why didn't they publish this one? There's part of me that's broken for lack of a better word. So I'm always onto the next thing and my favorite project is always whatever I'm working on next. And so it's an illness I think that I have, but I'm working on it and. Right around 2000, 2001, I, I was very frustrated and I started thinking, how could I scale my impact? I was one person, I had an eight person firm. I couldn't grow it fast enough. I didn't know how to grow it faster than we were growing. I felt very stuck and I remember taking just a blank sheet of paper and starting like sketching out ideas of how I could scale my impact. And this is what I do often is I'll just start brainstorming, right?

Just squeezing my thoughts on paper and seeing what happens and just getting it outta my head. And I talked to a lot of friends about this when I do this. And so I mapped out this sketch and it looked like a hand, and in the palm of the hand was design of the design of innovative green buildings is what I wrote. And then these fingers were coming off of the palm and one finger said speaking, and then one said writing, teaching, and consulting. So those are the four main fingers, speaking, writing, teaching, and consulting. And then there was this kind of stubby part that came off that I guess was the thumb that also said, nonprofit boards. And I realized that there were a lot of things that I was doing that I wasn't even thinking about. I was already sitting on certain nonprofit boards. Friend had started nonprofits, or I had helped start nonprofits with them. And there was something that was pulling me to do that. I was already doing some speaking, some writing, some teaching. It really came down to why was I doing that? I'm already busy. What is it that's drawing me to do those things? And it was really about this idea of scaling. If you think about it if you're lucky, you get 4,000 weeks of life. Everyone of us gets 4,000 weeks of life, more or less. That does not sound like a lot. So then it becomes, are you gonna do with those 4,000 weeks? And how do you make the most of them? Where do you throw your stones? So they have the most ripples in the pond? That idea was, okay, I'm going to, I'm gonna design this, but it's gonna, I'm gonna reach out the fingers coming off the palm, so to speak, or speaking, writing, teaching, and consulting.

I did not know if I would be good at those things. I did not know if I would like doing those things. I just felt drawn to do them. And by the way, while I was doing this, my staff was saying, what are you doing that for? We need you here. It was, they were already yelling at me about outta the office even more. But what I discovered was something magical, something wonderful, which is not only did like my architecture feed those ideas, right? 'cause I would go out and speak, write, teach, and consult about architecture. But those things would also bring things back to me. That's how I started making friends and finding new clients and finding new opportunities. So it, it was very much this like back and forth with with the universe in a way. And there were certain things that I loved, like I love speaking I think I'm good at it and I, and every year I try to get better at it. I don't like the writing, but I do a lot of it. I love the teaching. And, so it's interesting what you put out there, but it was all on this idea of how do I get the most outta my 4,000 weeks? How do I have the most impact? And that's where the impatience comes in. Right? This my buddies and I went to the Montreal Jazz Fest one year and Montreal is beautiful and the jazz fest is beautiful and I love jazz, but I can't sit still.

Like I'm there, I'm like sitting there and I'm like running around in circles and they're like, dude, just sit down, relax. And I'm like, I can't. I have I need to go. And again, it's some, there's something wrong with me, but that's the, I, so it's, there's something inside me that I just need to constantly be pushing. 

[00:16:49] Kiersten: I love that you're at least doing it intentionally, right? 

[00:16:52] Eric Corey Freed: Yeah. Very intentionally. I.

[00:16:52] Kiersten: It all seems very intentional. You've got your five fingers of impact areas, so that's great. It feels very encouraging as someone that hates writing, but wants to, I don't know, have a bigger impact that maybe a book is in my future, but if not, Aparna and I have this podcast so I get to speak to people and not have to write nearly as much.

We do write some notes, obviously, but. 

[00:17:13] Eric Corey Freed: So here's how I would approach it if I were you. I'm not giving you advice, but i'm gonna, I guess I'm gonna give you advice anyway. don't need to repeat your efforts here. Part of the reason what, why this works for me is that they're all connected. For example, I'd already, I already finished writing my first book, the Green Building for Dummies One.

The publisher, Wiley said do you have any idea, any ideas for another book? And by the way, if anybody ever asks you if you have any ideas about something, your answer should always be yes. Don't be so damn humble. Just always, yes, of course. I've got a million ideas. I'm a creative person. Yeah.

Gimme a minute. Let me think about it. And I have a million ideas for you. So my publisher was basically saying, "Hey, you got any ideas for something else?" And I said, "yeah!" And one of the ideas was a book about green schools. Now this is why it works. I already knew that as an architect I'd wanted to just start working on more schools.

I wasn't working on them at the time, but I knew that was an area I wanted to move into. I knew that I had something to say about green schools having worked on them, in my earlier life. And so as you're writing that book, every time I'd finish a chapter, I would spin it off and turn it into a thousand word article and then go publish it. So I'm writing the book and then producing articles. Then I'm speaking about green schools, and as I'm speaking about it, I say a lot of this came from my forthcoming book, sustainable School Architecture. This is how you do it, right? You don't write a book about one topic and then lecture about a separate topic and then write articles about a third topic.

They're all basically the same thing. So in the year that the Green Schools book came out, I produced, I don't know, 18 articles that all were a bridge from the book. The book came out, I was the keynote speaker at the Green Schools conference. The reason it works is 'cause it's all in alignment. And then I realized, I could do that every year. I could pick a different topic and or obsession and build that out every year. So if I were you, I'd say, okay, you've got all these great guests, you're having great conversations. What were the kind of consistent themes that were coming up in all of them? And then you could take partial transcripts 'cause those are things you've already done. And there's software that helps you do that, and so you could easily produce a book just capturing the zeitgeist of what you two observed in these conversations. The mistake I think a lot of my friends make is they're trying to do everything at once and and it burns them out.

I'm taking very much a kind of this intentional, how do I use everything at least twice kind of thing. So if I'm writing the book, those also become articles and also become fodder for talks, and also could become a class that I teach, right? Reuse every, you know, it's, it's principle number one of sustainability, reuse everything. 

[00:19:33] Kiersten: Yes, I was going to make that comment. I love it. Sustainability applied to your work ethic.

Listeners, please ponder that great career roadmap that Eric's just laid out while we cut to our break.

[break]

Kiersten: All right. We are back and we're gonna do a fun lightning round with Eric. So what we're gonna do is we're gonna start our technical session with nine questions and we're gonna have nine minutes on the clock. I don't know, are you, do you, are you ready? Aparna has the timer up and I'm gonna start the first question.

Eric Corey Freed: Do I need like a blindfold or a hat or anything? 

Kiersten: We didn't think of those props, but maybe next time. Alright, so we'll do, yeah. 3, 2, 1 first question, what is one way 3D printing and automation change affordable housing in the next decade? 

Eric Corey Freed: I dunno if you could see, but over my shoulders, a 3D printer. I'm a big fan of this idea of 3D printing and additive manufacturing. My promise, my hope with 3D printing is that it brings radical affordability to everybody that we could bring the power of design through mass customization to everyone. 

Aparna: Fantastic. So how many years away are we from seeing synthetic biology and bio-based materials in everyday buildings? 

Eric Corey Freed: We're not there yet but, the idea that we could grow materials the way nature grows, materials on the surface seems science fictiony, but, if you think about it, it's actually pretty normal. Nature's creating incredible forms heat, burning anything, without destruction. In many cases, nature's growing incredible things at room temperature. That's wild. What's backwards is how we do it, right? Where we have to kill things and burn them in order to make stuff happen. So we're closer than we think. For the last 10 years now, I've been working on what I call pro-struction. This idea of growing building materials and growing whole buildings.

And we're getting closer, but we're not quite there yet. I don't wanna just give a just say it's 20 years away. Here's the wild part. It is now possible for us to use synthetic biology to manipulate the DNA of some sort of living thing, plant-based or algae based or something, and grow it to meet our specifications.

What's not yet possible is where I can just plant a seed and a building pops out. And between those two visions, there's a lot of work to be done, but I love the promise of it. 

Kiersten: Yeah, that sounds super cool. And funny enough, the next one is about growing buildings, not exactly building material. But there's a lot of buzz around mass timber. What excites you most about mass timber? 

Eric Corey Freed: Was that a bee joke that you just made or a saw joke that you like a buzz of mass timber. 

Kiersten: I didn't even think about the saw application. It was a pollinator joke. I'm not gonna lie. 

Eric Corey Freed: So ma mass timber is cut on this thing called a five five dimensional mill and it's, so these blades that like turn and move and they do buzz like a bee, but also they make like a buzz saw thing and they're really cool, but you can cut any shape you want. The majority of buildings are built out of three materials, concrete, steel, and wood. The majority of tall buildings are built out of two of those materials, concrete and steel. Those two materials have a massive environmental footprint. Incredible amounts of resources and carbon emissions associated with just harvesting those things. Now, the building code is really geared towards those three materials and just those three materials. Which means that if you, even if tomorrow you discovered some new other material fossilized rice cakes or whatever that you thought was, oh, this is great.

I could build buildings out of it. The code won't allow you ' cause it's only geared towards these three stupid materials, concrete, steel, and wood. Think about what mass timber is. Mass timber is wood, first of all, so there's a code pathway for it. It's zero carbon because as we grow wood, it sequesters, we're taking the wood and engineering it to make it even stronger than it was on its own. And so to me, mass timber is the only scalable pathway to build tall buildings that are zero carbon. It becomes very straightforward in that way. And the best part is that there is of course a giant community of fabricators and installers and manufacturers and forestry experts wanting to see this succeed. And so for the first time in my life I've seen the concrete industry and the steel industry actually scared because they've been pretty arrogant up until now and pretty confident, 'cause they had this great monopoly on big buildings and now that's shrinking. And so I love that mass timber is also modular, 'cause it comes all pre-cut, so it speeds construction and it's also beautiful. It's what we call biophilic because if you leave it exposed, you can see the wood grain. Who wants to look at ugly, dark gray, concrete when you can look at wood, right? So for many reasons, I love it. Now it's not perfect. Oddly enough, it's lighter than steel and concrete, and that creates other issues for us as architects, but we know how to deal with it. It's also not entirely fireproof, but it's more fireproof than you might think. there's some code limitations, but otherwise it's, fantastic. We do a lot of mass timber buildings.

I keep trying to do more, I'm trying to do a mass timber parking garage now for a client, because I hate concrete that much. One step at a time.

Aparna: You are speaking to a lover of concrete one who has written a couple poems about the materials, so we'll agree to disagree here, Eric, but I will say check out episode 10 on our show. It's with Justin Den Herder and he is such a good speaker about mass timber and I think you guys will have a lot of similarities.

As a quick time check, we have three and a half minutes left. So next up in our rapid fire, what is the craziest idea that was once considered unimaginable in the built environment space That's now real.

Eric Corey Freed: On a typical hospital project, like a, not a, not even a radical one, but on a typical one, we will be looking at micro nuclear as an option, desalinization as an option full electrification and avoiding any sort of steam or, fossil fuel burning as an option.

Just those three alone. 10 years ago, I would've gotten, I feel like I would've been booed out of the meeting room just for even suggesting it or had, tomatoes thrown at me and now that's pretty commonplace. It's amazing how much can happen in a very short period of time. And I expect with climate change, you're gonna see more of this as our normal way of life has been changing and we've been redefining normal. What was once considered nuts is gonna be on the menu. 

Kiersten: Fantastic. Next one. What are the top three companies doing the most disruptive things in construction industry? Listeners, that's probably where you wanna look for some jobs. 

Eric Corey Freed: Let's see. I love, there's a company called Prometheus Materials that's growing concrete using algae and sand. I'm a big fan of those. There's another one called Bio Twin, which is, a hemp based stud. So instead of metal studs, it's hemp based. And then, my third one is it's it's very unsexy vertical, but I love it.

And it's a company called Glavel, which is really glass gravel, and it's recycled glass aggregate instead of using real stone. And it drains better than stone. It's carbon neutral. It's a waste product, like I, it just fits so many boxes for me and I think it should frankly be on every project.

Yeah. There you go. 

Aparna: Fantastic. Take some notes and we will definitely link them in our show notes. Folks, are there any industry tools that you're excited about?

Eric Corey Freed: Well, It'd be weird to not talk about AI and how we've been trying to use it. I'm using ai, at first, it was once a month and then once a week, and then every day, and now every hour, and basically every minute we're using it for everything from conceptual design, renderings to data processing. I built an AI tool that looks at social determinants of health, where I literally just type in a zip code and it gives me all the poor community health indicators, environmental indicators, and likely symptoms people will experience in that ZIP code. To me, it's changed the conversation, right? 'cause I can just run this quick report, what would've been hours of researching is just done in seconds.

And then I can have a conversation with the client in ways that wouldn't have been possible even two years ago. So AI a big one, but it's gonna be a bigger one. It's a pretty wild time to be a designer. 

Kiersten: Indeed. It's also a wild time to be timed. We only have about 30 seconds left, three questions, so we'll see if we can do it. What is the one question you wish that interviewers would ask you, and what's the answer to it? 

Eric Corey Freed: I wish somebody who had asked me who cuts my hair, and the answer is, I do. I cut my own hair and always have, but nobody ever asked me that. So thanks for letting me ask myself. 

Aparna: Tell us more. What inspired this? 

Eric Corey Freed: Scheduling. So it started in college, 

Aparna: Yeah.

Eric Corey Freed: just staying up all night working and then I started cutting guy's hair in, in school. They all got the same haircut that I had 'cause that's the only one I knew how to do. So short on the sides, long on the top, but they, that's what they got. And, I just do it now because I can, I don't need to go anywhere to do it. So I just do it in my bathroom and get hair everywhere and, my wife yells at me. 

Aparna: That's incredible. My friends and I during COVID, we had our little haircut pod as well. So we'd pay this one girl in beers and she'd cut all of her hair and we call it a day. So I feel you there man. Hair is hair. 

Kiersten: We are out of time, but we set the rules, so we're gonna bend our own rules to get to the last two questions. The next one is what's the biggest way you would say architecture has changed in the last 200 years?

Are we building buildings the exact same way?

Eric Corey Freed: In many ways we are, I used to have a joke where I would show a picture of a building from 1926 compare it to 2026. And the joke was they're identical. 'cause they looked identical. And then the other followup of the joke was, I would show you one from 1826, but cameras hadn't been invented yet.

Yeah. We're still building most buildings out of little sticks of wood. It's weird. And we've gotten better at waterproofing them and a little better at insulating them, but not really. We still cool buildings using a principle called Boyle's Law, which dates back to the 16 hundreds. Like it's crazy how an innovation can take hold and then have staying power and go unquestioned forever. So in many ways, yes, we're building buildings the same way, but in, in the other sense we're using techniques and ideas that were unheard of. I've been in practice for 35 years. there are tools that I'm working with now that didn't exist five years ago that certainly didn't exist when I was in school in the eighties.

So if I'm optimistic, I get excited about it. If I'm pessimistic, if it's one of those days and I'm grumpy, then I get, complaining about it but, a weird time to be alive. I feel like in many ways humanity's in a transition something greater. 

Aparna: and I feel like with transitions comes a change of speech, a change of like how we talk about certain topics. And since you do have to interact with so many different groups of people, how do you approach talking to all these different stakeholders about climate change?

And if you could, what's one thing that you would recommend? All of our listeners, even us, to take away and adjust in our speech patterns too.

Eric Corey Freed: If you look at the typical environmentalist, like if you go to the Green Build Conference, which I go every year or the Living Future Conference where I go every year and I'm speaking at you, you'd think that our job was to get everybody to speak our language. To use our words, right? You'd think that let's get everybody as excited about lifecycle assessment as we are! That I think is part of the problem. What we should have been doing is we should have taken a much more human centered approach to design. Much more empathetic approach. We should have been listening more and really trying to learn the language of our clients. And I think that would've accelerated the adoption of sustainability much faster. I got this question this week I was in, I was at our office in Charlotte, North Carolina, and one of the staff said, how do I deal with clients that don't believe in climate change? How would I argue with them? my short answer was I don't, I'm not gonna argue with somebody who doesn't believe in gravity. I'm not gonna argue with somebody who doesn't believe in climate change. But also, it's not about me winning the argument. I, for me I commonly walk into rooms and they, I get introduced as, oh, we've brought our sustainability director here. This is Freed, Freed meet our client. The client will look me in the eye and say to me, just so you know, I hate sustainability. That's how people say hi to me when I walk in a room. So you go from there? And I never know what to say. So what I usually say to them is yeah, me too. I don't know. And, forget about me.

Forget about sustainability. Let's talk about you. What are you struggling with? What's keeping you up at night? What are you worried about? And that becomes the point of the conversation of finding common ground. Really what I'm doing is I'm doing what's called pain point mapping, right? Pain is the gateway to innovation.

The things that are driving them crazy, the things that are keeping them up at night, the things that they're struggling with, that is the thing that they're gonna be most open to talking about in changing, right? So if I hear that they're struggling with this, then I know that they're open to changing that, I can then propose a better solution. So very quickly I've learned how to like just start interviewing them and then listening and trying to find those pain points. And then pulling on those threads. I'll just use the Socratic method. We're spending a fortune heating water. Yeah. What's wrong with that? I just play dumb.

What's wrong with that? Are you kidding? It cools down. We gotta heat it up again. It's driving me nuts. Is there a better way? Yeah, we could do heat recovery. Why don't we do that? So I'm making them think it's their idea, manipulating them a little bit, but, for the greater good

All of you can do the same thing. Our firm designs lot of everything but that there are two building types in particular we design. One is cancer centers and the other one is children's hospitals. And I found that two building types, especially, I, not only do they hit very close to home, I've lost my mother to cancer and I have a child. you meet the doctors that work in those places and it's they're, they're doing amazing things. The thing that really strikes me about those two project types in particular is coming there is terrified. They're about to receive a diagnosis that could change their life, or they're about to embark on treatment that will hopefully save their life, but they're all terrified.

And so then the question becomes, how can we, as designers and architects, could we then design it reduce their cortisol levels and make them feel calm, boost their dopamine levels to make them feel home at home? Release some endorphins to make them feel happy, boost their immune response. there's a lot of potential here that gets me very excited. 

Kiersten: I think that actually aligns really perfectly. We know a lot of experts are talking about the climate crisis as a public health crisis. So interesting that you do mention hospitals and healthcare spaces. What are your thoughts on that overlap or intersection? 

Eric Corey Freed: lately. We've been pushing for electrification of all the buildings that we do, right? Let's not burn fossil fuels in our buildings. That makes a lot of sense. And I'm, I was arguing with a healthcare system about why we should be doing this, and they were like, we're not really that interested. Our state grid is already pretty green. We don't really need electrification. I couldn't convince them and finally, out of frustration, I yelled at them. You're burning pollution here and there's sick kids here. Here's the burning pollution and here are the sick kids that might as well have open windows right next to it.

Are you nuts? I was just frustrated as I tend to be. And and they're like, oh, well when you put it like that. Yeah. Okay. Did that make sense? It moved the conversation from electrification being around energy and carbon, which they weren't that interested in into the health of their community, which they were very interested in. And so the climate crisis is a health crisis, but it also means that we could decarbonize the entire grid, not for energy reasons. We could decarbonize the entire grid just based on the health benefits alone to reduce the 7 million people a year that die from climate related pollution. Once you do that, you realize, oh, we get a tunnel vision, right?

We just get so obsessed with one thing of we have to decarbonize for the energy and we're fighting all those arguments when we realize, no, it just makes total sense to not put all these pollutants in the air that we all breathe and that's killing us. Essentially 7 million people a year dying from air pollution. That's more people than died in the Civil War, isn't it? But it never gets talked about. IT's weird. It's just, let's just start talking about it. Let's change the conversation. 

Aparna: Totally, and I feel like by just bringing it up, even in this space, we're planting new ideas and we're telling everyone who even touches air quality, who touches healthcare, that's a way to make your job more sustainable, more green, and it all really is interconnected. So I think you make a great point about everything is related and you just have to give it a critical lens and then voila, you are working in a sustainability job and having a positive impact on the climate. 

Eric Corey Freed: Either I am going to convince them that this is a good idea, 'cause it is, or I'm gonna fail to convince them and they're gonna convince me that we shouldn't do it either way. Somebody's gonna win that argument. I'm gonna come armed with all the information and all the tools and tricks and techniques that I have. There's a reason why this new book is really about arguing because for 35 years I've just been arguing for innovation. So that's the topic of the book. It's not, it's not a far leap for me to do that. And it's really just what I've observed in Hey, here's a great idea and everybody agrees it's a great idea and we're all in agreement, and then suddenly it gets shut down because of fear. what, that's what I wanted to focus on was like, where's that fear coming from? That kind of fear of change that, you know, that, I guess reasonable, understandable, " that sounds risky to us, so let's just not do it." What if we didn't do that? What if I essentially the equivalent of I have a tiger by the tail and the tiger's fighting me and I just refused to let go for a minute.

Where would that go? And I started doing that about 10 years ago, it led to some really remarkable places with the client. 

Aparna: That's a great imagery that I think we can pass along to all of the listeners, and it's a really remarkable legacy that you've already been able to have in those 10 years of trying to shift attitudes. And I am now going to add your book to my TBR on good read. So excited to do that at the end of this day.

But thinking about legacy, you have been able to influence so many people's opinions, shape their minds, get them to start thinking about questions they hadn't even considered before, and just also promote being bold and asking a question. So those are huge legacies in and of themselves. But I'd love to ask you, what are you hoping to leave behind through this work?

Eric Corey Freed: You know it is funny when I go to, when I go to a conference, people will come up to me and say, oh, I heard you speak 15 years ago. Do you remember me? Stuff like that. I'm like, oh, yeah, man, of course. How have you been? Did you change your hair? And I don't remember them at all, but but having spoken to so many people, and it's like in all 50 states and eight countries and I think 350,000 people now that I've lectured to and counting. It's taught me some amazing things. Number one is we're not all that different much as the media and companies want you to believe, right? Everywhere I go, pretty much basically people just wanna be left alone and live their life and breathe clean air and clean water.

And but the other thing is I use a lot of humor and comedy to do that and it really started just in, when I'm on stage and people are watching me, people forget that I'm on stage looking back at them and watching so I can see their faces. Like typically the lights are high enough that I can see their reaction. And so I know what's working, like what's getting through and what they're paying attention to and what they're not. And so it gives me this instant feedback me mechanism. And what's amazing is when people come up and say, I heard you speak 15 years ago. I'll often say what do you remember about that?

And they'll say, you told a joke about concrete that I still use to this day. I, every time we talk about concrete, I tell that joke. And I found that very interesting, right? That, the humor, the comedy part, made the message somehow memorable and also transferable that they could pass it on. And I think that's pretty interesting, interesting right?

If I just told 'em a bunch of facts and figures. I doubt they'd remember, but by telling them the joke and they could repeat the joke it goes on and on that's how you start to change perception. So why I started doing it. I saw the audience getting bored when I was going through my technical stuff, my normal sarcasm popped up and I saw their reaction. And now, what I hear when I present, what I hear people say is, I couldn't look away. I didn't wanna miss anything. It was the best presentation I've ever seen. I'm like, yeah, that was the kind of the point I was trying to make.

Something that would be memorable. That you would take with you, that you would tell other people. That's how we transform society. 

Kiersten: That reminds me I saw you speak five years ago. Do you remember me?

Eric Corey Freed: I do, yeah. You've, you're wearing the same sweater now that wearing then. 

Kiersten: actually change my hair. It's funny you mentioned it. started cutting it myself actually. Uh, Kidding. Not the last question. Not do you remember me? But actually our last question is, you've shared so many good pieces of advice and a lot of things that we'll be linking in the show notes, but one last request for resources.

If our listeners wanted to follow in your footsteps or just begin to get involved in the sustainability shifts, what books, documentaries, or other resources would you recommend? 

Eric Corey Freed: Oh my gosh, there's so many. I think a good one to start with for anybody would be Cradle To Cradle by McDonough is a great one just to understand the scope of what we're up against and how to change the old paradigms, the old thinking. Like it, shows that the concept of waste is artificial nature doesn't have waste. So that's a good one to start with. But there are so many books that I just love My, one of my favorites is a book called Ecotopia, which is a fiction book, and. I, and I got to meet Ernie Callback before he passed away.

He was living in Berkeley. When I was in San Francisco. I had him on the, I think it was the 25th anniversary of the book. I had him present in San Francisco at the Commonwealth Club. And he was a lovely man. And he wrote that book in the seventies and it was, it just eerily how prescient it was.

It is, it was. A great one too that I love. And then. 

Kiersten: to cut in and say I love that book so much. And actually speaking of how language changes over time, I know that is an older one, but now I think there's a genre, that to me is a recently named genre, called Cli Fi, and I solidly put Ecotopia within it. It's become a favorite genre of mine.

I can give you some recs when we stop recording of 

Eric Corey Freed: Oh, great. And then the other one, Kim Stanley Robinson's Ministry of the Future is incredible. And I got to meet him when I was at xprize and also super nice and brilliant guy. And yeah. I don't know. I've got a million. I've got a million of them. But Ministry of the Future would be that's, that'll change your life, yeah. 

Aparna: We read that for the book club that we're a part of, and me and Kiersten both were like, we're drilling in. This is crazy. This is our work. He sees us. Definitely the resident nerds in the group, but it was great. I think everyone definitely took a lot of learnings from it. Awesome. Well, we'll Be sure to link all of your books as well for all the listeners to check out all 12 of those soon to be 13.

But yeah, thank you so much Eric, for your time on the show. There have been so many good nuggets here and a lot of actionable takeaways for both ourselves and the listeners. So folks listening in, I hope you can take some time to reflect. And Eric, thank you so much. You've shared so much wisdom with us.

Eric Corey Freed: No, thank you both for doing this and for just supporting and giving space to these conversations. So it was my pleasure.