Who's Up For A Circular Economy

26:12So, if we're lucky. So this company, they're Dutch. They targeted carpets and mattresses. And those are two of the worst offenders as far as, at least as far as textiles go, but maybe as far as all products go. Yeah. Because they're big. They're essentially impossible to recycle. They're very, very hard to recycle. And people throw a lot of them away. I think 20 million mattresses are thrown away in the United States alone, 30 million in Europe. And we toss about 2 billion pounds of carpet away every year in the United States into landfills. Only 5 % of carpet gets recycled. I couldn't even tell you where you would recycle carpet.

27:01I don't know. Is there a place called Recarpet? Maybe. That's what it should be called, right? Or carpets again. Right. Or all of that backward. Yeah, I mean, the other reason those two, they're targeting those two, A, is because the people of the Netherlands are great. And, hey, if you live in the Netherlands and you would go see a live podcast of us there in Amsterdam, let us know. Sure. Let's go ahead and just say that. We're putting out feelers for Europe, so we'd love to hear from people about where we might get an audience. Sure. Is that okay to say that? Yeah, we should probably tell everybody it won't be for two years.

27:39Yeah, we're targeting 27, but we're going to get back on the road next year. Coming for you, Canada, in a big way. Yeah, for sure. So you better close the borders. That's a little, well, they might. I hope we'll be welcome. We'll get a pass, I hope. It's up in the air. But, long way of saying, the reason that they are targeting those specifically is not just the lifespan, but they actually have a name. They're called medium life bulky products. They, you know, this stuff lasts about 10 years and they're just full of nasty chemicals. And so all of that leads to them being two of the worst offenders.

28:16Mattresses and carpet, full of chemicals, don't last long, and they're fairly large. Yeah, especially if they're stained mattresses. Yeah, yeah, good luck recycling that. I saw 80 to 120 years for a mattress to degrade in a landfill, which actually seemed a little fast for me, but, you know, it's still not fast enough. So this company is like, okay, we're actually going to make this stuff out of recyclable materials. But even better than that, we're going to make it so that every part of the mattress is replaceable. Imagine that. Or repairable. Yes. So you're like, I got just gallons of urine staining the cover of my mattress.

28:58I need a new mattress cover. Rather than throwing out the whole mattress and waiting 120 years for it to degrade, you just call up Niagara and you say, hey, send me another mattress cover. And they say, hey, we didn't know that you could call direct from the United States to the Netherlands, but that's new for us. We'll send it to you straight away. And they send it to you. You put it back on. There's no urine whatsoever until the next time it happens. That's right. But they say, what's the magic word? And you have to go again. Right. Like a two-year-old. Again. Yeah. They do actually do that.

29:37It's great. And we'll look at other Dutch companies because they're doing the right thing, it seems like, in a lot of ways. One key to all of this is design. If you have a linear economy, which we do, like we said, it's purposeful. It's designed in such a way to make it, you know, either obsolete or just, you know, a mattress that can't be recovered or whatever. So you have to start with design. It has to start on the very conceptual phase of like, how could we make a mattress that could last you forever? And then you design it that way because it's possible. Yeah. And design doesn't just apply to products, although that's the easiest thing to do is to say, OK, how can I design this product to fit into the existing recycling infrastructure or design it to be reusable or repairable?

30:29That's the easiest one. We also, though, need to design our recycling infrastructure to make it easier to recycle products that aren't designed to be recycled. So there's a lot of design that has to go, but you're right. Like it has to be a conscious choice. And Dave points out something I think is important too. Waste is a conscious choice too. Like, Like when your little like mini bag of Lay's potato chips, when you're done with it, you throw it away. It was designed to be thrown away. Like that was a decision that was made by the package designers. They didn't do anything to try to make it recyclable.

31:08They decided that the best thing for you to do with that package is to throw it away. And as much as you hate it, you have no choice. your choice is to buy those Lay's potato chips or not buy them. And some people are starting to based on the packaging. So some companies are starting to wake up. But for the most part, people are like, I don't want to think about the packaging that my potato chips come in. I have so many more bigger pressing issues right now that if you can just make it so that the people don't have to think about recycling it, then you're onto something. Yeah, 100%. And I was talking about myself.

31:46I don't want to think about what I'm supposed to do with a potato chip package. And I'm not being judgy. Like, I'm including myself in this. Like, I mean, I like to think I'm more conscientious than, say, the average person, but I'm certainly, I'm not at, like, Chuck level. I'm not like Emily level. You know me. I'm on her coattails. Right. I mean, when I was a kid, we had the Charles Chips driver come around. Yeah, I remember that. And we would give them our, I mean, if you're of a certain age, you might remember this. There was a literal potato chip delivery company. They were called Charles Chips, and they came in a big metal tin.

32:22And you would finish with that tin, and your chip person would come by, and you would give them the tin of empty chips, and they would give you a full tin of chips. Yeah, they'd reach in with the cuff of their shirt, wipe the tin out, put the chips in the tin, sometimes I saw. Yeah. And obviously, again, there's there's still waste with the delivery truck and stuff. So save the emails. But we're talking about, you know, we're not idealizing it as perfect. We're just saying, like, it's a better thing than what we're doing now, which is those little foil bags sitting in landfills. For sure. And yeah, that's another thing, too, is because this is kind of conceptual and not every issue is being tackled right out of the gate with it.

33:03like energy use is a big part of it. So they obviously are like, well, we need more renewables. That's kind of a no-brainer. But it's important because not everything can be done with renewable resources. Some stuff just requires fossil fuels. Some stuff, say, requires nuclear. So you have to be able to design those power plants or those industrial smokestacks so that that stuff's being captured and reused as an input somehow. Right, exactly. And, you know, you talked about educating the consumer, but and it's not educating the the corporation because they know this stuff. They do it on purpose for a reason, like you like you said.

33:45But it's more about like companies coming along where the end user isn't the single focus. They take a more macro view and say, well, there's something bigger at work with these products we sell. and that's planet earth and mother nature and while the consumer is important and we want to give them a good product we can start from the beginning and design something that has less of an environmental impact uh designed to fit within these recycling networks like you know aluminum like you were talking about like once those are up and running and and a big one that i didn't think of that day pointed out was like do you need this new product does does the consumer need it Or is it just like, hey, I think we could boost sales in Q3 if we released a slightly different version of this dumb same thing?

34:34Right. So you kind of mentioned something where like using something like leasing or renting something can also be applied to things we don't normally think of as is what we lease or rent. Right. Right. One of the again, a Dutch company called Bundles is basically they they come to your house. They'll bring you your dishwasher or your washing machine or your dryer or your coffee maker. Or you can bundle it all together. That's the name. And they're going to bring you a really high end Miele sustainably manufactured appliance. And you're going to have this thing in your house and you don't have to lift a finger other than to use it.

35:18this company brings it they install it they come by and maintain it when it's done when you're done with it say you're moving and you can't use it anymore they're going to come pick it up they're going to refurbish it they're going to bring it to somebody else it's like really circular and the way that you are charged for it is by the number of washes you you I guess carry out I guess that's how you talk about laundry you carry out a wash it is called a paper wash model and the whole basis of it is Wi-Fi. Like your washing machine is connected to their servers. So they're tracking how many times you're washing.

35:55And then from what I can tell, you get a monthly bill based on the amount of washes you did, the amount of use you did for that or you use for the washer or the dryer or whatever. You know what my takeaway here is? What? You've never washed your own clothes, have you? That is not true. I'm actually kind of good at my own clothes. I had to get good because I don't know how I do it, but there's not a day that goes by that I don't get a spot on one of my t-shirts. So I've gotten good at salvaging t-shirts. Same, same. It's incredible how stained my t-shirt gets on a regular basis. And I do believe you, you can carry out a wash like nobody's business.

36:33Do you use shout? That's what I use. I shout it out. It works really well. I use, and I hate having to use it, but my friend that has been working in wardrobe departments in Hollywood for 30 years said Zout is the one. I've not heard of Zout. Why do you hate to use it? Is it made from coal? It's just one of those disgustingly smelly products. Is it naphtha? I don't know, but no. I mean, they mask it. It smells like, you know, just really, really, really, really heavily fragranced stuff. I gotcha, yeah. And, you know, we're not down with that. So it gets out of spot, but it'll taint. You got to wash it by itself.

37:12It'll taint your whole load. Should we take a break? Yeah. All right. We'll take a break and be right back.

37:39new year new goals and in this economy a better money plan is more necessary than ever i am matt And I'm Joel. We are from the How to Money podcast. And every week we help you to spend smarter, save more and make sense of what's going on out there. If you want 2026 to be the year you finally feel in control of your money, we're here to give you the tools and advice to help you make it happen. Listen to How to Money on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts or wherever you get your podcasts. Hi, I'm Dr. Priyanka Wally. And I'm Hurricane DeBolu. It's a new year and on the podcast Health Stuff, we're resetting the way we talk about our health.

38:15Which means being honest about what we know, what we don't know, and how messy it can all be. I like to sleep in late and sleep early. Is there a chronotype for that or am I just depressed? We talk to experts who share real experiences and insight. You just really need to find where it is that you can have an impact in your own life and just start doing that. We break down the topics you want to know more about. sleep, stress, mental health, and how the world around us affects our overall health. We talk about all the ways to keep your body and mind inside and out healthy. We human beings, all we want is connection.

38:54We just want to connect with each other. Health stuff is about learning, laughing, and feeling a little less alone. Listen on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts. Hey there, this is Dr. Jesse Mills, director of the Men's Clinic at UCLA Health and host of the Mailroom Podcast. Each January, guys everywhere make the same resolutions. Get stronger, work harder, fix what's broken. But what if the real work isn't physical at all? To kick off the new year, I sat down with Dr. Steve Poulter, a psychologist with over 30 years experience helping men unpack shame, anxiety, and emotional pain they were never taught to name.

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40:18Alright, we're back. I did want to mention one thing. We had to take a quicker break. We were laughing too hard, but on bundles and renting appliances, You have to do a lot of education in the United States to overcome the perception of what the rented appliances means. Yeah, for sure. Because we grew up in a, you know, it's probably still the same way as Gen Xers where, you know, appliance rental was something like you did if you couldn't afford to buy stuff. Like you rented your TV or whatever. Right. You're like, oh, man, that means you don't have much money to buy a TV. But there is a better way.

40:57and I wish they had this here, man, because we've had some really bad appliance luck and it makes me so mad because this stuff's expensive. I would love to rent a washer and dryer. Well, I'll rent you mine. I've heard they can carry out a heck of a wash. Yeah, it's part of the American dream to own your own washer and dryer. Not me, man. I hate those things. The government can take it from your cold, dead hand if they try. Yeah, that's definitely part of American culture is you own your stuff. It's yours. Let's talk about food, though. Okay. You own that, too. If you buy that, you own it here in the United States.

41:38Not sure what it's like in other countries. But food is a huge problem. We've done an entire episode, I think, on food waste before. I know we've talked about it extensively because I remember. And what's sad is we've been talking about this for decades now. And the stat remains the same. A third of all of the food grown in the world gets thrown away every year, about a trillion dollars worth. And mindless amounts of water and fertilizer and labor inputs just wasted, not just in the face of all that loss of like money or resources, but it doesn't even get diverted to the poorest people in the world who are starving.

42:21Yeah, for sure. And that's a great episode. So I encourage you to go listen to those. But one thing I don't know that we've covered on any of these shows while we were, you know, beating those horses. What? Dead horses. Skinning those cats. No. Is the nutrient cycle. And, you know, obviously, you know, wasting food is a moral problem and ethical problem. But one thing we haven't talked much about is that it disrupts that nutrient cycle. If you look at nature, the system they have is a closed-loop system. They're, you know, things grow naturally out in the woods, and it is from soil that is being, you know, if it's just literally out in the forest, just being treated naturally by the natural processes of Mother Earth.

43:07And then an animal eats that thing and then poops it out, and that poop goes back into the soil and feeds the soil. That animal falls over dead one day, hopefully a very old age. Then their bodies decompose and release those nutrients back into the earth. And it is a, dare I say, elegant system that humans have come along and completely disrupted. Yeah, we make food part of our linear economy where the food waste doesn't just get tossed on the ground and, you know, biodegrade into it. You don't want to do that anyway. Just an annual PSA, don't throw apple cores and banana peels on the ground because that's not a good thing to do.

43:45what's the best thing to do is to compost them to some degree or some way. The worst thing you can do, though, is to throw them in a trash can and have them taken to the landfill. Because then those nutrients that were put into that food have been taken out of the nutrient cycle for Earth, at least for however long it's going to take for that entire landfill to degrade, which I can't even imagine how long it takes an entire landfill to just turn back into nutrients and stuff. So it's disrupted in that way. Then we also disrupt it because we don't tend to collect our waste for reuse. It's an output, pure and simple.

44:24We don't put it back into the system. So there's two ways that we disrupt the nutrient cycle with the way that we treat our food. Yeah, totally. This may be part of a suite, like a playlist one day, because I just realized we've done things on sewage recycling or sewage treatment plants. We've done them on landfills. So maybe we should do like a little green playlist one day. Yeah, we got one on permaculture that was pretty great. Yeah, totally. Before we move on, I should say some of that, those what are called biosolids, treated sewage, it does get reused in some cases. Have you ever used milorganite?

45:03Why do I know that word? I think we've talked about that. It's a miracle fertilizer. It does wonders for your grass, especially if you pair it with an inch of water flooding your grass. But it's these little particles, and they smell, but not smell the way you would think because they actually are treated sewage from Milwaukee's municipal sewage system. But it's like a nitrogen boost. It's fertilizer for your lawn. It's insane how well it works. It's cheap, and you're reusing waste from the good people of Milwaukee. Well, that's great. And you can get it almost anywhere. It's very abundant and easy to get, and I highly recommend it.

45:46I'm down to zero grass now. Oh, you could use it on basically any plants. So if you have plants that like nitrogen, you can toss a little milorganite on there. I'll pass it along to Emily. I'm sure she knows about it. Zero grass. Is your entire lawn just, or your entire yard just covered with high-end antique screen doors? That's right. it's a good look i'll bet it is i'll bet they it's a little wobbly though right walking around yeah or are they just for looking uh no no you walk on okay uh so ellen mccarthur's foundation is is looking to correct this uh and making um like basically investing in the biological cycle of the circular economy like making this a part of it too and composting is an obvious one but One of the things that is pretty amazing is called cascading.

46:38That is reusing food waste to make other things. And there's a, what? A Dutch company called Peel Pioneers because, you know, in those, in fruit peels, like orange and lemon and stuff like that, that's the best stuff is in that peel. The zest of those things and the essential oils that you get from those peels, like that's the gold, man. and people are throwing that away or composting it, which is okay. But how about taking those essential oils and actually making other products out of them? And that is what Peel Pioneers out of the Netherlands is doing. Yeah. And that's, I mean, you can find cascading in a lot of different food companies, but that's a great example because those, that is orange essential oils in particular used in a lot of different other products.

47:24So you can have a pretty successful business just harvesting the scraps off the floor of an orange juice processor, you know? Yeah. Converting stuff to biofuel is another pretty obvious one. Yeah. And then anaerobic digesters. I'm putting a lot of hope on anaerobic digesters in the future where we just figure out the microbes that eat this stuff or these microbes eat this kind of plastic. These microbes eat this kind of oil and just unleash them on all sorts of stuff and then reuse their byproducts as inputs. I really hope we reach that future. That to me is like the greenest of green. Yeah, we've talked about that too.

48:04I can't remember what episode. I can't either. We'll have to use that Stuff You Should Know transcript search tool to find it. I feel like it was like someone was using worms to do something. Doesn't that ring a bell? It might have been a biofuel app. Yeah, maybe so. We'll look it up. Can we talk about fashion? Yeah, this is just crazy to me. I think we should do an entire episode on fast fashion, but we can hit some high points, I think. Yeah, fast fashion is sort of an environmental nightmare and a humanitarian nightmare because they're made in sweatshops for very little pay by people making very little pay.

48:44They are sold very cheaply. Cheap synthetic materials are used, so all the inputs are bad. They don't last long. And it's an environmental nightmare, basically. I think the fashion industry is the second largest consumer of water. That has to be behind the factory farming, right? Yeah. And it produces 10 percent. The fashion industry produces 10 percent of the global CO2 emissions total. Yeah. And 85 percent of all the stuff that the fashion industry makes ends up in landfills, not recycled landfills. 85 percent of all the clothes made in the entire world. There's another issue with it, too. when you wash, just washing, just using these things, washing them in your bundle's least washing machine.

49:32You're releasing microplastics into the ocean because a lot of clothes, even recycled clothes, are made from plastics or contain plastics. And those things get flushed out. And it's a huge plastic pollution problem too, which is, I mean, it's ironic. Like Patagonia is always held up as a great example of a company that tries to make sustainable, circular clothing. And one of the things that they do is their, I think their line of responsibility T-shirts, super cute. They're made from fabric scraps, cool, but also plastic bottles. Also cool because we want to recycle plastic bottles, but the problem is that plastic gets transferred to the ocean.

50:17So it's one of those things where it's like we're so far from figuring this stuff out that even the people who are trying to do something are still having inadvertent effects that, you know, I'm sure keeps them up at night. Yeah, for sure. And you can also, man, you can send a 10-year-old pullover to Patagonia that had a collar that ripped or something, and they'll fix that thing for you, probably for nothing. And you can buy, you can send stuff back to them that they will resell. And you can buy, like, you know, gently used things from Patagonia online. They are also working with a startup called Infinitid Fiber.

50:56And what they're doing is they're working on the waste on the front end. It's a process to recycle that textile waste because, you know, it's not like, all right, we've got this much cotton and every single fiber goes into making that T-shirt and there's zero waste. Or that car. Yeah. Sorry about that. That car. There's, you know, there's going to be some textile waste on the front end. And so what they're doing is they're taking that stuff and they're recycling that textile waste into a new fiber called Infina. Yeah. And that stuff is 100 percent recyclable. So eventually, over time, if this loop were allowed to really kind of take hold, eventually all the cotton would be put into or transferred into the Infina circle.

51:41and since it's 100 % recyclable, you could conceivably never have to put new cotton in again. Yeah, for sure. I don't think it's going to happen anytime soon. I'm just saying conceptually, that's kind of how this stuff works. Yeah, it's even compostable. It is. So you would have to put some new cotton in once in a while because Gary would go compost it just to be a jerk. Right. But yeah, for the most part, you could, once it really kind of took hold and got going, It could overtake the existing cotton stocks and make them 100 % recyclable, and then you wouldn't need more cotton stocks, which is, again, an issue we'd have to deal with because then all the cotton farmers are out of work.

52:23That's right. And we have no more new cotton cars on the road. But one other thing that I found that really got to me, Chuck, I found a stat that said that most of the returns, like if you try something on, like clothing, especially if it's mailed to you and you try it on and send it back. Right. Yeah. Most of those things are thrown away into landfills. Yes. What? What? 9.5 billion pounds of just clothing returns alone were put into landfills in 2022. Unconscionable. Yeah. And the reason why is because companies are like, I'm not going to pay somebody to fold this thing back up, put the pins back in it, put it in the plastic and make it new again so that I can sell it.

53:08It's cheaper for me to just throw it away. And there are programs that divert that stuff to developing countries so that those clothes are donated. But I guarantee that's not as cheap for the company as it is to just throw it away. That's a huge impact that the fast fashion industry has on the planet. That's crazy to me. Yeah, I haven't been this upset about something I've heard from you in a long time. Oh, and I say some upsetting stuff. I know. You usually text them to me. Those are upsetting pictures. All right. One last thing we can talk about is the right to repair movement, which we talked about in the planned obsolescence episode.

53:51But, you know, it's exactly what you think. It's, hey, we need to be able to repair our whatevers, our small appliances. That's a big offender. A lot of companies are saying, because, you know, I don't know if we covered this part, but because I don't remember why companies didn't do it or at least why they say they don't do it. one thing they'll say is like, oh, you know what, with electronics, if we publish how other people can fix these things and basically give repair companies repair manuals, it leaves people vulnerable to hackers if they can get information from that electronic device. And I just call foul on that.

54:32That sounds like a bunch of BS to me. They're like, don't forget hackers. Hackers are going to get you. Yeah, because you want your whatever, your iPhone fixed. Right. And I have an Acer Swift laptop that I love, but I've tried to replace the battery before, and it's designed to not replace the battery. You cannot replace the battery. And obviously the battery is the first thing that goes out. It's infuriating. It is infuriating because it's like he made it so that you have to get rid of your laptop and get another one. It drives me nuts. So if you put all this together, Chuck, like electronics companies successfully lobbying against right to repair laws, companies using planned obsolescence left and right, people like Gary just throwing their stuff away to be jerks.

55:26Like how can this even be implemented? I can't see it happening, at least in the United States. I know the EU is really taking some strides toward this stuff and hats off to them. But in the United States, I can't in the foreseeable future, like as far as I can think out, I can't see this being implemented. No, I mean, certainly not now with what's going on in our country. And I'm not trying to get too political, but that's just a fact. It's not only not a priority for our current administration to invest at all in something like a circular economy, but it's not even on the radar. Right. Or it's outright being squashed.

56:11Right. Even more disturbing is that even outside of the United States, globally speaking, recycling or secondary materials being put back in as inputs is actually on the decline by significant numbers. Yeah, we're headed in the wrong direction. Right. Even though Dave points out that, like, social media posts and articles about circular economy have tripled in the last five years. So there's more awareness. But we're going in the wrong direction as far as actual, you know, feet on the floor kind of stuff. Yeah, and consumption keeps growing and growing and growing. Apparently, from 2018 to 2024, we consumed 500 gigatons of material.

56:52That's everything, raw material, finished material, fossil fuels. And that is 28 % of the total amount we consumed in the last 125 years. So it's just growing exponentially. So, yeah, there's a lot of stuff to overcome. You might say it would take like an authoritarian government to implement this kind of thing. And it turns out China has committed to creating a circular economy for themselves back in the 2000s. And apparently they're focused right now on automotive remanufacturing, which is essentially taking old cars and refurbishing them. And their parts selling them like new at a discounted price because they're refurbished.

57:34Oh, OK. So I guess keep an eye on China and the EU to see where things go. Chuck laughed a little bit, but his laugh was dripping with, okay, let's go to listener mail. So he just unlocked listener mail. This is a correction on a correction. So we heard from quite a few people about the most famous Brantfordian. People wrote in and said, Alexander Graham Bell, forget Gretzky and Phil Hartman. Alexander Graham Bell was not born in Brantford. So this is from Joel. Hey, guys, probably not the first person to say this, but I'm correcting your email correction that claimed Alexander Graham Bell was born in Branford.

58:12He certainly lived in Branford. So they claim him. He was born in Scotland and moved to Branford as a young man. I guess at one point in his life, he would definitely say he was from Branford. But that's not where he's from. Love the show. That is from Joel Dawson. Very nice. So I guess Phil Hartman moves back up to number two. I guess so. And you know what? Whenever someone sends in their business or something and it seems pretty cool. We like to tout them. Yes. And Joel signed his with freespirittours.ca. So I'm looking now. It looks like paddling and stand-up paddleboarding, caving, forest therapy.

58:51Awesome. Wine tastings, woodness, wellness. Wow. Also, I want to shout out Witch Bolt again. Did you see Witch Bolt got in touch with us to say thanks for the mention on the alchemy episode? I did not see that. They did. He did, I should say. he got in touch to say, hey, you guys want some t-shirts? Thanks a lot. He's been listening for 15 years. His name's Nick. He's been a listener for 15 years. Witch Bolt has. Remember the Dungeon Synth guy? Yeah, yeah, yeah. So he wrote in and I was like, I'm actually a little starstruck right now. So there's like this big circular love fest going on. Not a circular economy, but a circular love fest going on between Stuff You Should Know and Witch Bolt right now.

59:31Yeah. All right. Well, if you want to get in touch with us like Joel or which bolt, you can send us an email too. Send it off to stuffpodcast at iheartradio.com. Stuff You Should Know is a production of iHeartRadio. For more podcasts from iHeartRadio, visit the iHeartRadio app. Apple Podcasts are wherever you listen to your favorite shows.

1:00:00This is Dr. Jesse Mills, host of the Mailroom Podcast. Each January, men promise to get stronger, work harder, and fix what's broken. But what if the real work isn't physical at all? I sat down with psychologist Dr. Steve Poulter to unpack shame, anxiety, and the emotional pain men were never taught how to name. Part of the way through the valley of despair is realizing this has happened, and you have to make a choice whether you're going to stay in it or move forward. Our two-part conversation is available now. Listen to The Mailroom on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your favorite shows.

1:00:32Hey, it's Joel and Matt from HowToMoney. If your New Year's resolution is to finally get your finances in shape, we've got your back. Prices, they're still high, and the economy is all over the place. But 2026 is the year for you to get intentional and make real progress. That's right. Each week, we break down what's happening with your money, the most important issues to focus on, and the small moves that make a big difference. Kick off the year with confidence. Listen to How to Money on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts. I'm John Polk. For years, I was the poster boy of the conversion therapy movement, the ex-gay who married an ex-lesbian and traveled the world telling my story of how I changed my sexuality from gay to straight.

1:01:18You might have heard my story, but you've never heard the real story. John has never been anything but gay, but he really tried hard not to be. Listen to Atonement, the John Palk story on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts. This is an iHeart Podcast. Guaranteed human.