Fighting Climate Change with Your Investment Portfolio
Have you ever wondered what your retirement funds are actually investing in? Chances are they are invested in businesses that you’d prefer not to be supporting, such as oil and gas. In this episode we speak with Carbon Collective co-founder Zach Stein on how his business helps individuals invest with their values and fight climate change.
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Imperfect Show Notes
While these notes are not perfect (computer transcription is still a work in progress), they give you the gist of the conversation. Enjoy!
My conversation with Zach Stein:
Morgan Bailey 0:02
Hello, and welcome to the profit meets impact Podcast where we explore the intersection of doing well and doing good in the world. I'm your host, Morgan Bailey. And I'm excited to bring you the wisdom of entrepreneurs and thought leaders that are using business to create sustainable and meaningful change across the globe. Hello, and welcome back to the show. Just had a really fantastic conversation with Zack Stein, co founder of carbon collective, really excited to bring you that conversation. Zach and his organization help individuals and companies understand how they can invest their retirement savings into investments that are going to be positive, both for returns but also for long term sustainability specifically within climate change. Now, this is a really great conversation, we talked about the nuances of what it means to invest sustainably. What are the what are the returns look like? How do we balance that off other portfolios that create shorter term returns? What is all this investing stuff even really mean? What is some of the nomenclature behind it? Where's this trend headed in the future? So? And what is the role that investing plays in individuals lives when you have a myriad of other choices such as reducing your travel not taking airplanes, what you eat, versus investing your retirement savings? Like where does that fall into play in your strategy to help contribute to a more sustainable future? So this was really fantastic conversation really, illuminating really created some some thoughts for me in terms of my own investment strategy, and where I put my money, and and what that looks like moving forward. So I really think that you're gonna gain a lot out of this. So let's dive in with Zack. Zack, I've really been looking forward to this conversation of Welcome to the show.
Zach Stein 1:51
Thanks so much for having me. I've been looking forward to it as well.
Morgan Bailey 1:55
Awesome, Zach. So you work in the world of investments, which I know for many of us is a big, big, scary world. I'm kind of I'd love to hear just about how that kind of came to be. Where did this? Where did this idea come from and what laid the foundation for this sort of work you're doing?
Zach Stein 2:14
So there was a phrase I heard a while back, which I feel like really resonated for me and at least my journey thus far, which is, life is only linear in the rearview mirror. And looking backwards, I could all link it together. And it makes sense. But if I was to, like, go back to when I was 22, and plot a path of being like, Alright, where do you want to be in 11 years? Not at all look like what actually happened? So yeah, my story. I like to start all the way back when I was four, I met my co founder, our dads went to college together, or I guess grad school, when you were four, when he was four years old. Yeah, yeah. So my earliest memory with James is the two of us. I remember his mom very explicitly say the sprinklers are on in the backyard. Absolutely. Don't go running through them. And next thing we know, we're both naked running through them. Clearly, I think that was her setting us up for it. So yeah, no, James forever. When we were 10. He has one of the most interesting childhoods, his parents pulled them out of school. And they moved on to a sailboat and sail around the world for five years. So had one of the most interesting childhoods, they're definitely more we can touch on. had pretty normal Bay Area, growing up experience, went to college in upstate New York, and then returned back to the Bay Area and settled in the East Bay and Berkeley in 2011. And I did this urban farming fellowship. And it was there that my mind was kind of like totally opened to the world of sustainability, the urgency around climate change, even back in 2011, I remember being taught about this, and I, you know, seeing An Inconvenient Truth and all of that. But having a leader of the organization literally break down, he broke down in tears talking about climate change back in 2011. Sounds very pressured for now. And so started kind of within that, going down the path of sustainability. And that took me in a number of different directions that kind of ended up meandering over 10 years to the point where James and I decided to take a look at how could we build better tools for climate action.
Morgan Bailey 4:35
Amazing. So in you, this isn't your first job working in the sustainability space. I know you've you've I know you've launched another company, you've you've sold worms. At one point, tell tell us a little bit about you know, what, what was it like from that, like, I want to work in this space and starting to do some of that to lean to where you're at right now.
Zach Stein 4:55
Yeah. So I mean, again, it's I think my narrative is what now as being like, Ha, I'm gonna do this, and that's gonna get me to hear that I'll do that. It was more like, oh, okay, like, there's an opportunity, I guess I'll do this. And so the worms came about after that fellowship, we, a woman had a worm composting business that she was ready to be done with, and she donated it to the farm. And so myself and a few of the other fellows picked it up and ran with it. And so I was literally paying my Bay Area rent, shoveling shit for a living. By taking care of worms, I would go every week to pick up their very fancy food, we got them organic horse manure, from a very specific stable, and Apple pulp, go pick up from a juicer, a local juicer, we would process that as hot compost for six weeks, and then feed it to the worms. And we're able to take these two waste products and create a fertilizer that we could sell for $20 per gallon. With that, so and then we did sell the words, we had workshops, it was all pretty good. It got bad, though, where some of my own entrepreneurial juices were really starting to simmer. And I realized that you could sell worms on Amazon. And I didn't fully appreciate the extent to which worms at least locally, we're a seasonal business. And this was like December, and our sales were in the toilet. And like, you know, we're living off of this. And so I was like, oh, let's put our worms on Amazon, and let's undercut everyone else's pricing works really well, you can ship worms across the country, a lot of them didn't make it. So we'd have to like send it again. And we completely depleted our population with that it was totally my fault. But that it's that we just were in this cycle where we were actually buying bulk bags of worms from other farms and selling half of them and adding half of them back to our population. And it's just got really not fun. Very quickly.
Morgan Bailey 6:54
What advice would you have given to that? That younger version yourself during the visit was a lesson was take away there?
Zach Stein 7:03
I think like take a step back a little bit of look before you leap, like take a step back and ask yourself, why aren't other people doing this? In this phase, and really plotting out? How is this going to be sustainable? Spend some time on that spreadsheet here? And think about what does a sustainable place look like? For this business? versus kind of it being feeling like somewhat of a feast or famine? That no one was really watching the numbers? And and kind of putting the thought into? Is this actually sustainable? At all? Yeah, it was completely dependent upon manual labor with it, so it's spending a lot of time with a pitchfork and a shovel. And that's hard to scale. And
Morgan Bailey 7:55
absolutely, yes. And I think that's one of the challenges that purpose driven businesses have is the the purpose part can can overwhelm the business part, and where it's really truly the feeling like you want to believe so much that this is possible, that you're almost afraid to look under the hood for fear that you might see that it's not at least in its current state.
Zach Stein 8:18
Yes, I think that that is a very accurate description of it is accurate, it is fear. It's not wanting to know, I've invested so much into this, is there a fundamental flaw in that? That absolutely, it's, you know, it's sunken cost fallacy. And so it's I'm just gonna put on my blinders and keep going, regardless of the cost. So, you know, it was able to leave that, that business and some one other fellow continued with it and was able to support her for a while, and then started a kind of the intersection, you know, being in the Bay Area, the intersection of technology started coming in, and I founded a business that was focused on indoor farming, so hydroponics, aquaponics, growing things in greenhouses, and looking at better sensing technology that can help monitor the water quality specifically for fish. In these setups, very meandering path, a lot of lessons there ended up pretty on James, my co founder to help with us on it. And that path kind of eventually got us into the world of venture and eventually had us realize that the industry that we wanted, that we should be in that this technology was really meant for was not indoor farming, but fish farming and shrimp farming, which was a big kind of left turn, and ended up going and spending a lot of time shrimp farms in Ecuador and in Thailand and in Vietnam, really trying to understand this industry that's had knew nothing about as it's one of the most carbon intensive ways of producing animal protein possible, which was something really hard to wrestle with that Also, looking at trying to look at it from a pragmatic lens of this isn't likely to go away, which means that we need to make it as efficient as possible. And that's what led us to see that our technology could be very helpful, where if farmers can understand in real time what was going on in their water, then they can be much more judicious with when they turn on their aerators, which they often would use diesel generators for. And when they were adding feed, which has a lot of embedded carbon and and other chemicals, that additives, which could lead to water pollution and stuff like that. So that was kind of the progress of that business. And again, life is only linear in the rearview mirror, a big jump from a local worm farm starving nurseries in the Bay Area.
Morgan Bailey 10:45
Absolutely. Wow, that's really fascinating. So I don't know if you know, but I actually spent a time working with a nonprofit with them. And we did a lot of aquaponics. That was one of our the main things that we did. So we understand the challenges there. And also, we tried to look at the business model of selling the greens and things like that. And obviously, the fish, and we were using tilapia and looking at the business model of selling the fish, it was all really challenging. And little factors such as the water quality and things of that nature. And really honing in on that is really kind of fascinating. It's interesting, because we kind of like I actually started out in clean energy, and at one point ended up in aquaponics, you kind of flipping the other way around. So Oh, no way during those threads. Yeah.
Zach Stein 11:29
And I think Aquaponics is another great example of an industry kind of similar to the problem that we hit in the worm farm, where it's really hard to find a sustainable business model. Within it, I don't I I've stopped following the industry. But when I was in it, there was just all these examples of people starting it, and then realizing like, we are barely able to break even
Morgan Bailey 11:53
on that. Yeah, it was it was a considerable challenge. And we had the benefit of being a nonprofit. So we didn't have to worry about the margins as much. And so that even that aside, I was trying to figure out, you know, how would we turn this into a sustainable business? And looking at, you know, what it would take to sell the greens and how much you would have to do it? You know, and, and it was interesting, the greens actually were a lot easier to sell. They're a lot more of a moneymaker than the actual fish, yes, you just couldn't produce that much. Fish and you know, in the the growth rates of fish, they slow down in the winter, considerably. Right. So then you have this, you have this annual cycle. So definitely a different business model, which I think some of the larger, larger systems now like that are all their hydroponics, you know, without fish. And now there are some fairly large hydroponic farms that are acting commercially that they're quite successful.
Zach Stein 12:48
Yes, yes. And they especially have brought in a lot of automation. So this is one of those areas where kind of it is the promise of indoor farming. It's like, Hey, you could do it anywhere, and then be by having so much more control. And you can, you know, eliminate variability, weather, things like that contaminants. So you look at a company like plenty, which is, you know, fully automated in indoor farms. I think they're still working on automating the harvesting of it, but especially once they get that, that's where you could really see the margins come in.
Morgan Bailey 13:21
Yeah, absolutely. Now, so you went from this, where did all of a sudden you start to land on sustainable investing, to what was a carnal thought that kind of led to that.
Zach Stein 13:35
So the beauty of kind of making a bunch of mistakes in my 20s. And our 20s, is that we actually had a lot of lessons of what not to do, going into our 30s. And James and I, this was at Gen one of 2020, we set out to look at we didn't set out to build an investment company, we set out with a thesis and a problem. And we wanted to build better tools that could enable individuals to collectivise their climate actions. As an entrepreneur, you're always looking for a pain point that you want to try and address. And for us, what we saw is one of the greatest pain points is climate change, and the what to do, but you face it as an individual. So many of us get left at the top of that emotional hurdle. And many of us get impacted physically as well. And so you're just left at this place of being like, Oh, shit, this is terrifying. Ah, there isn't. We don't close the emotional loop. And then and here's what we can do about it. Here's what you can do about it with it. There's a lot of different ways of trying to address that. Well, we think it's still very much in its infancy. And so that was the problem that we set out with. We were looking at any possible solution with that. We ended up conducting 120 interviews of people in In and around our network. This resulted from a survey of 700 people trying to understand what climate actions they had taken and where they got stuck. We wanted to see where people got stuck. And again, and again, it was investing that this place where people got stuck, they looked at what was available today, what Wall Street was labeling as sustainable. And they saw, it was using a metric called ESG. And which is generally just less bad than the world today. And they saw, hmm, I don't get why these companies are in here. I don't get how this was built. And I don't get how this actually leads to any tangible impact. So we're like, Okay, this is not actually meeting the emotional journey, the needs of what people are looking for, in making this action and looking to make that switch. So that was a big aha moment for us, especially as we saw it again and again, and got to the point, we could predict it. Now, at the same time, we looked at that, from the top down of, you know, we're reading what is it going to take to solve climate change the number one issue within sustainability by far. And it's investment, we cannot solve climate change, without dramatically changing how we invest, the scientists really clear about that, we need to stop investing in new fossil fuel expansion, and then invest something like 10 to 20 times more per year than we are today. In to climate solutions. If we do that we can solve climate change, we can reach a world of where emissions stop, and we can start deploying massive carbon sequestration, to bring us back down to pre industrial levels of greenhouse gases, we can get there, but we can't do it without investment. It's just, it's going to take a lot of solar panels. And that takes money and innovation to do. So it was kind of that bottom up and top down that we saw, Oh, there is this place, there is a need for a company at this space that is not focused broadly on ethical issues, but is specifically focused on climate. And how can we drive as much impact as we can here, especially with so much of us as I'm 33, my retirement savings is, you know, for 30 years from now, if we, if I'm retiring into a world of out of control, climate change, it's kind of all moot with it. So there's really this aligning of incentives. And that led us to start saying, Okay, we know we want to iterate and build at the space of sustainable investing, and that we actually really need to redefine the space, if we can have as much impact as we can.
Morgan Bailey 17:21
Absolutely, I mean, and I'm sure many of the listeners can can probably relate to that journey of I want to do something. I know my money should be going into a place that's generative. But the step past that is significant. Like Well, what does that look like, in the investment space is is tricky. I mean, it's tricky, even for investors. So I can definitely resonate that because even with my own finances, when I start to dig, it's complicated, even funds that say they're sustainable. When you dig into it, it's there's it's so unclear. And I think one of the things that's really important here is, you know, when we look at Wall Street, you know, to solve this problem that largely was created by businesses on Wall Street. You know, it's like you're, you're asking the murderer to also do the surgery to repair. And it's like, Wait, can you really trust that? Because we got ourselves in here because of strong financial incentives for returns? And are they just using the same playbook and just putting a different label on
Zach Stein 18:31
it? Yeah, that is exactly the problem, like what we saw again, and again, and it's part of what's really challenging for incumbents to fully embrace this space. It's also a pattern of the polarization of our society. Using an example of Blackrock, the largest asset holder in the world, they're the head of Blackrock, he, Larry Fang, he in 2020, and 2021 put forward some of the most forward looking clear statements on investing in climate, it really kind of took that the investing world by surprise, saying that this was an existential risk and that all investing should be looking at this issue. Okay, that's great. That's really positive. In 2022, This began with the Texas Teachers pension, you know, a state that has a lot of oil and gas money in it, say, hey, BlackRock, you gotta cut this divestment talk, or else we're going to find a new asset manager for our pension. Immediately Blackrock issued a statement declaring their long term commitment to oil and gas in those industries, and that's part of the challenge that those companies find themselves in is that as our world increasingly polarized us with it as our especially our country does, these countries are fine. These companies are finding themselves unable to please anyone with it, and so they'll go nearly far enough for those of us who want to push climate action as far as we can. and they don't go they go too far, way too far. For those on the right. Yeah. And so that's one of the big challenges where we see oh, it has to be an outsider, that's got to come in and change these definitions.
Morgan Bailey 20:15
Now, one of the things you're touching on three has really touched me this idea of trust and credibility, we, we have a somewhat, you know, at least Wall Street has a somewhat proven way of how they create returns. Now, that's not sustainable long term, we see that. But there's also this other narrative that we talked like that we talked sustainable investing and things like that. It's more of a novelty, or it's more of a thing of privilege that may or may not turn out. So I feel like in the market people like, well, is this actually going to it's maybe it's the right thing to do. But is it the thing that's actually going to create financial returns? So I mean, how do you address that
Zach Stein 20:57
piece? Yes, this was one of the big tests for us carbon collective, one of the big early tests, we had seen some green investing platforms come up in the past, but they would like have you invest in 50, renewable energy stocks are kind of identified as Greenstock. So is this very narrow investment into us that broke the rules of how you and I have been taught to invest intelligently, which is, it's passive investing. So at Vanguard put forward, invest with as much of the market as you can, with as low fees as you can, and take a step back and let it go. Index Based Investing. So that's what all of us have been invested to do. And so we saw that in order for us to be successful, we could not break that mold, we had to find a way within that mold to develop portfolios, where you could feel assured that you would be getting exposure to similar levels of risk and return as you would for a generic index based portfolio with similar levels of fees for it, but something that has a clear theory of change around climate, where you could look at it and say there's a reason for everything in here, even companies that you would say this is how is this a sustainable company with it. That is what we ended up realizing what this industry needed, because otherwise, you're asking people to choose, and it's an impossible position, you're saying, you can be a smart investor, or you could be smart on climate, you can be smart on sustainability. It's an either or, in this case, and for the US to scale the level of sustainable investing that we need, we need both. And there's really strong arguments for us to tell that sustainable investing, which is I think, what you're alluding to, still has the aura of being charity, that if you do it, you are accepting a percent worse returns year over year than you would get investing in the overall broader market. That is one of the biggest myths that actually holds back sustainable Investing. Investing is just a collection of what we all think is going to happen in the future. That's basically it. We ingest new publicly available information in it. But part of that publicly available information is these broad underlying myths, these narratives. One myth is that fossil fuels, regardless of what you think, are a necessary evil for performance in a portfolio. That's, that's false. And another one, as we touched on, is that green investing is reserved for those who are bleeding hearts, who are saying, I don't care about returns, all I want is to feel good about this. We're in the middle of an energy transformation. Right now, when we look at and when we get this question a lot is What should I expect about returns, as we say, we built our portfolios, especially our core portfolios to have a similar exposure to a similar level of risk reward as you get for a generic US based index portfolio. Okay, it does deviate from the market, because we make changes from it. And so that's going to mean in the near term, you're going to have some ones that are better and some months that are worse. Where things get interesting is when we look at the long term. This is where we can point to things like that, like the growth of electric vehicles. 50% of the oil that we use in the US goes to power cars and trucks are always 50%. That's a lot of the oil of the US.
In 20 10.01% of the cars that were sold in the world were electric in 2021. It was 8.6%. In 2022, it's going to be over 10%. We are in the middle of a technological transformation. And it is not because people like me who are really concerned about climate change are just switching to electric cars. It's because electric cars are a better technology than gas powered cars. They do think this every part of what you like about a car they do better. They are safer, they are faster. They You can tell borrow, they are far roomier, they're much more convenient you can you can charge them at home, they cost a quarter of as much to maintain, you can literally drive a Tesla for 1 million miles before it breaks down. There's all these myriad of advantages, yes, we don't have all the supporting infrastructure in place. But nor did we, when we switched from horse and buggy to the automobile, there wasn't a gas station at every block, these things catch up with the industry. So when we look at that, we say, Oh, we just have a fundamentally better technology that's here that happens to not use oil. But that 50 That's 50% of oils market share in the US that is fundamentally threatened by this. And then we look at things like the recent legislation that is passing. And while there's some complications with it, it bodes very well for the electric car industry. And it's just further accelerating that transformation. So when we talk about the long term for sustainable investing, the question we posed is, would you rather over the course of decades be invested in industries that are fundamentally being out competed, oil grew up with the car industry, it was when Standard Oil switched from kerosene to make light to making petroleum gasoline, that's when things started booming for Rockefeller. It was the auto industry that it grew up on with that going away, and also being then threatened in an electricity where solar wind and batteries are cheaper to generate electricity than coal and natural gas in most places in the world already. And it's only going to get more cheaper, as those industries continue to scale. Would you rather be invested in the industries who are in decline, or those that are replacing them? That I think is the fundamental question and sustainable investing?
Morgan Bailey 26:43
So I want to dive into that. I mean, this new this new legislation, right, which, which offers a lot of room for investment in sustainable technologies, you know, primarily around climate. Now, the Business Roundtable came out against that, that legislation. Right. So and and, you know, like, as you mentioned, Larry Fink, BlackRock, you know, part of that group, right? So how do you reconcile this great potential for, you know, to create sustainable investing, that's going to have long term returns and benefit the planet with the fact that there's a large part of the business community that that's still resistant to it.
Zach Stein 27:22
Frankly, I would need to dig in more, a lot of what I've seen has been very positive, even some players in the oil and gas industry have been positive with it, because of the investments into carbon sequestration. And the tax credits that will come from that. There are areas where there's was kind of added wrinkles into this space, where in order to qualify for the tax credit, the batteries for the cars have to some percentage has to be manufactured in the US. And it's a lot higher than what capacities are now. So it might take a while to get up with that. But we look at this type of legislation, and say, especially when we look at things like inflation, which is very bad for business, it's bad for our overall economy. With that, that renewable energy, and the electrification of our economy is one of the best things that we could be doing when it comes to inflation. Let me explain how that works. One of the biggest drivers of inflation is fossil fuels, it's energy. And the reason is it continually gets more expensive to extract them. Fossil fuels is a tree, and we keep picking the lowest hanging fruit because it's the cheapest to pick with that. So that means we're just going up and up. And which means over time, the cost to extract oil is just continually going up. Some analysts have estimated that 1/3 of all historic inflation has been due to rising energy prices. And that trickles throughout the entire economy. With that, you know, you both you have to extract the fossil fuels, but then transported transporting from the food from the farm to the grocery store paying for the refrigeration, if the energy costs are higher, all of that gets rolled up into the end price there, because everyone kind of wants to preserve their margins for it. When we look at renewable energy, it has a deflationary impact as these things like solar power and wind power, as their manufacturing grows, they hit economies of scale, with the cost to deploy that has gone down enough and that it is continuing to go down that it actually gets cheaper and cheaper to produce energy. Which means that the cost to run those refrigerators, for example, is gonna get cheaper instead of more expensive over time with it. And so when we look at from just a pure kind of macro economic perspective, is this time this type of investment that we are quite bullish on of being just fundamentally smart in addition for climate for fighting exactly what the name says in the bill of inflation?
Morgan Bailey 29:55
So how do we get over that hurdle? Ben, I mean, you know, because I think you over the hurdle of I guess the perception of what these are, how do we actually get more money into the, into these markets? And what is your organization doing to help on that pathway?
Zach Stein 30:13
Yeah, so that is kind of the fundamental Hashem is the question of the divestment movement has been asking for a long time and the Bill McKibben 's of the world have been asking for a long time. How do we solve the climate investment gap? Again, science is really clear, we need to be investing 2010 to 20 times more per year and the climate solutions, we can build our way out of this problem, it is the only realistic path forward for doing that. So carbon Collective, we try to make it really easy to invest either as an individual or as a business. In aligning your investments with solving climate change, we take a really simple approach, we look at the entire stock market, and we take three steps. It's a pretty cheesy ride, we divest reinvest pressure, the rest, we divest from the industries, whose core business cannot exist using today's technology. In a zero carbon world. They just like oil and gas, obviously, and coal, but also petrochemicals, airlines, airline manufacturers due to dirty utilities, cement, and steel, and more. Some of that is hopefully going to change in which case, we'll break them back in, but all of them are requiring some level of miracle breakthrough. And so we cut them out to about 20% of the market, we then give their share to the companies that are building solutions to climate change those that are replacing them. And we do all of them for trying to apply those passive investing principles, where we're not trying to pick winners and losers and think we're really smart and this, but say, hey, let's just pick those sectors, and then let the market decide how valuable each company is we weighted by market cap, and then broadly hold the remainder of the stock market, because they're the inverse of that first one. These companies while they might not be sustainable today, their business there's no reason it can't exist in a zero carbon world, which means it's upon us as shareholders to use our voices and our votes to pressure them to switch to things like 100%, renewable energy, and 100%. Electrified fleet as quickly as possible. We reduce fossil fuel supply by reducing demand with it, that is very much our approach. So we enable folks like you and me to invest our personal retirement accounts, we have a robo advisor with that, it costs the same as you'd pay for a similar account on something like Betterment or Wealthfront. With it, so we're trying to remove every barrier to say yes to sustainable investing. So you're not paying more than you would we also help businesses, those that are have a sustainable vision, have 401k portfolios that are going to align with that mission. I know that was one of the reasons we started talking was at your work your say, hey, my 401k my retirement money is being invested in things that I'm really uncomfortable with that don't meet fit my personal mission. I'll say kind of broadly, what where I think we're playing and where I think that this space needs to go, is that in order for us, and what is the goal of the divestment movement is not to get people like me to divest that that is a precursor. But the end goal is to prove to capital c capital that is on the unethical capital that is just chasing returns, that it is smarter for them to align their investments with solving climate change, than to not at that point, that is where we start seeing the tipping points. And that's why it's so critical for you to ask these types of questions. And for us to spread these messages, because it's those underlying narratives that are so powerful. And still, the underlying narrative that sustainable investing is charitable is holding back that industry. If we flip it, where sustainable investing becomes a necessary part of every portfolio, that's when we start putting the pedal down on that electric vehicle.
Morgan Bailey 33:53
Absolutely. And I think it makes a lot of sense to really start and hone in on on retirement funds. Because you're automatically that you're looking at the long term. And so whereas you know, you others may be looking for the short term returns, obviously, when you're investing for your retirement, you're often looking 1020 30 years out. And also you want to make sure that there's a habitable environment, 2030 years, you know, so there's that double, that Double Peace of both wanting to have a sustainable investment that's going to create returns, but also is going to create the best chances for fundamentally our survival.
Zach Stein 34:30
Exactly. That is was kind of one of the early insights that we had was that these things were two things were very much aligned with that. One of the taglines we saw really resonated in some ads that we ran early was invest in the world you actually want to retire into that kind of duality. We hadn't we have another one too, that we're starting to roll out and experiment with. I'll be interested in your thoughts. It's safe today. Safe tomorrow.
Morgan Bailey 35:00
Yeah, I mean, I love that to get that the double meaning obviously. Yeah. Yeah, I mean, it makes me think,
Zach Stein 35:08
exactly, which is part of that goal there. So that's very much, we try to shy away as much as possible from getting into the day to day of what is going on in the market. And is it kind of very attractive siren song of it's interesting, trying to predict that near term future, but it's very much over the long term. And that's how we build our investment strategies. That's how we approach it. And how we try to communicate all of it to our members and beyond.
Morgan Bailey 35:37
So I'm wondering if you know, for our listeners, we do a little bit of a, just investing one on one. So So you know, you can invest in a singular company, you can invest in a fund, like talk to us a little bit, like when they when you say like you can invest with us? What are people actually investing in?
Zach Stein 35:55
Yeah, so there's two types of in public markets, there's kind of two broad things, you can invest in stocks and bonds, both of them are things that companies issue, stock is a piece of ownership of that company, you often would invest in a stock for two reasons. One, the value of that company can go up over time, and to a company will pay a part of its profit to its shareholders, this is called the dividend with it, stocks tend to have a lot higher upside. But they also could be way more volatile. You know, stocks this year have declined something like 20%, although they're starting to come back. Bonds are debt, its debt that accompany issues, it says, Hey, if you give me $10,000, now, I will give you 5% interest for the next 10 years and then pay back that $10,000, at the end of the 10 years, it has tends to have a much lower volatility. So it's lower risk, but it's also lower return with it. Generally, in Smart Investing, you're gonna have a portfolio, that's going to be a mix of stocks and bonds, as you get closer to your goal of say retiring, that portfolio is going to be a lot more in bonds, because you want to protect that those assets from like the stock market crashing, for example, because you might you know, you're gonna depend upon that money to retire into. So those are kind of the mix, then you can choose. The next question is diversification, how many stocks and how many bonds are you going to be is it going to be you're going to be hold just Apple stock and debt from just apple. The upside of that is probably really high, because it's just one company. But the downside of it is also really high. It's really volatile. It you know, instead that this is where you put the eggs in many baskets approach that has what's been proven to be one of the smartest ways to invest over time is saying, Okay, I want to hold as much of the stock market as possible, because that entire basket has a strong history of going up over time, and be exposed to as much of the bond market as possible, as well. So that's kind of Smart Investing 101, where it gets tricky, is when you try to add in sustainable investing into that. What about the fossil fuel industry? For example, what about the fact that we need to dramatically increase investment into climate solutions, rather than just invest with them in the way that they are in the market today. So those are some of the areas that we play with. But Smart Investing one to one, invest with as much of the market as possible with as low fees as possible, and set up a set and forget strategy with it. Don't mess with it, if you can contribute the same amount every month, to it.
Morgan Bailey 38:40
So so when the role that you're playing within your organization, obviously, so people come in with with finances that they want to invest? Maybe they're rolling over a 401 K or an IRA or something like that. And you have are you choosing the companies that that are kind of that are kind of clumped together into a portfolio? And then they're investing in that? How does that all look for for those of us who are trying to get clarity on? Where's that money actually going? Totally.
Zach Stein 39:07
So it's first we will have you fill out a series of questions to try to understand what is your goal for this money? Are you trying to buy a house in three years are you saving for retirement in 30 years, that's really going to differ upon the suggestion we give of what should be the balance of stocks and bonds, and that the near term should be more bonds. So the other one more stocks with it. Then we have two portfolio types that we have, we have our core which follows that divest reinvest pressure, the rest approach, which is going to expose you to over 80% of the US stock market. So we're kind of with that we're checking that box of invest with a much as much of the market as possible out of those Smart Investing principles there. We also have our climate only portfolio which is much narrower, so it's going to have higher risk and high reward, it's more volatile, we make that very clear. But it's only investing in companies that are building solutions to climate change, and only holding bonds that are green bonds, so that they are debt that is being used to build climate solutions for it. So those are those two options. If you choose a core portfolio, you'd be invested in that 80% of stocks in the US stock market. And then a mix of green bonds and US Treasury bonds with it from kind of long term, those that are 30 years out to ones that are very near term and inflation protected as well. So those we try, you know, sometimes have too much choice is a bad thing. Having a menu with 100 items can be really overwhelming. So our goal is to give you options where everything is going to fit those Smart Investing principles, you can go outside of it, and go into the climate only portfolios to accept that higher level of risk and reward. But that's going to be up to you.
Morgan Bailey 40:58
Where are you seeing the demand fall between those two portfolios, those two pathways,
Zach Stein 41:03
it's about 5050. At this point, as of what we're seeing, and we see a lot of people that, you know, they'll move over multiple accounts over to us, and they'll keep one IRA at core and maybe keep their Roth and climate only. And so it can also really depend within a given household. They're where they're looking for in terms of risk and reward. And how are
Morgan Bailey 41:25
people coming to you like, what is the, you know, how are you? How are you driving demand?
Zach Stein 41:31
So, but in a lot of different ways, this is part of the challenge of starting a new investment advisory firm is how do you get the word out? How do you share what you're doing. So partly, it's the conversations like this podcast is a really good format for us, we have pretty strong search engine optimization. So if you search for something like green 401k, will pop up really quickly with that, we do paid advertising, we've been finding, there's a search engine on the big network called e cozia. Where if for every search, part of the ad money will go towards planting trees. So that is a very, you know, the people who use it cozia are already kind of our people at carbon collective. So we've had really great success, doing some marketing on that platform, then, you know, things like social media, a lot of word of mouth, and that getting into green businesses for their 401k is we then find that we can help their employees with their personal retirement funds as well.
Morgan Bailey 42:31
So I you know, I love that, you know, in a curious, right, because right now you're playing in the field, you know, that, you know, with that all your friends are in, right, but what I'm hearing is like, we need to expand this broadly, right? This, this needs to not just be like, Oh, this is the right thing to do. This is the smart thing to do. Right? So what does that look like taking that from from those who consider this themselves, you know, conscious on sustainability and green matters into the broader investing world?
Zach Stein 43:02
Absolutely. This is came as a part of our research. And we realized that there's two spectrums that we're working on, there is what is your spectrum of financial knowledge. If you're really like investing, our product is actually probably not great for you, maybe some of our upcoming funds where you could do it yourself. But those type of people tend to want a much more hands on approach, that they can do it themselves. So you actually find okay, if you kind of like medium are comfortable with investing or low, we're actually a good fit with that. The other spectrum is what is your knowledge of climate change there? How much do you understand the core underlying mechanics of it, and what's being done to solve that. And what we found is that there's kind of two camps in there. There's the people who are kind of medium or high within that. And then there are people who are relatively low, and then a sample of people who are relatively low. And I hope this doesn't sound pejorative in any way. But there are people who say, Oh, I'm solving climate change by limiting my plastic use. Plastic is a huge problem in this world. It is a major problem and ocean pollution and things like that. But when it in terms of solving climate change, there are much more important things to be doing in that. Plastic is very tangible, though. And so what we find is that those who have kind of medium or higher climate knowledge, they really are able to lead be seen as the leaders in their networks to get those who maybe have lower or aren't, don't feel as confident in making that action. And if we get the the higher folks which are a lot harder to get. We are entering a space where I say we are guilty until proven innocent, because of the level of greenwashing here. And just being new investment advisors, we have to overcome two hurdles and that but once we get them once we get the people that have that they really start to bring their networks on and that we've seen be really powerful.
Morgan Bailey 44:54
You brought up a question for me that I think is a lot of people are going to say well what is my role? Like, how do I make a difference? Investing is one piece of it, but they have a myriad of options. You know, they try to limit practice. They try to limit plastics. They try limit driving focus on eating less meat, they're all these different options. So in terms of like, impact areas, right, if if someone is going to spend their time trying to figure out where to reduce, where does investing fall into that? Is it like this is one of the highest impact areas? Where does it fall in that spectrum?
Zach Stein 45:29
Absolutely. So there's some ways that we can look at it from a metrics perspective. But we think the way that we liked the most is decision fatigue, Israel, there's only so much we can ask of people saying, Can you please be pescatarian on Mondays is really hard, it's hard to make that decision in the grocery store, should I bike to work today, it's a little cold, I might have to be on the other side, those decisions just start to match up. Instead, where we say and where we encourage folks to do is say, pick up the really hard big decisions of your life, that once you make them, you're just living in a far more climate aligned way. So investing is one of these, it is no small thing to change where your retirement fund is, this is really important money for you, it's money that you've set aside, it's money that you're going to be depending upon, it should not be a decision that's taken lightly. Pick it up, look at it, look at it from all different angles, shake the box of it. But once you make that decision, once you make it to align more, you're not thinking about it anymore. You're just Marguerite with it. Same thing with where you bank, same thing with how you source your electricity. Same thing with our you drive it same thing with your job, the number of climate jobs and across industries is exploding. Once you make the switch to it, you're you're just working, you're just go into work. So that is the philosophy that we very much take is before really starting to drill into, well, how am I just always having this thought in my mind that I need to do this last? I need to do that more. Being like, okay, change the gears, the mechanics behind your life, then find what gets you really excited. Maybe it's political action. With that, maybe it's animal rights within that maybe it's plastic reduction within that climate is a yes, and space. And the more of us that can change the mechanics that really influences the supply chain. But then beyond that, let it be a really personal choice, because I think there's so much guilt and shame in this of just feeling bad in it. And that is destructive. And that's alright as well.
Morgan Bailey 47:37
Yeah, obviously, I really appreciate you how you're framing that because it's really like, it's choose the systems that that we're living in. Yes. And then be in that system, as opposed to having to having to constantly choose every, you know, every decision within within a system that that's incongruent with us, because that's hard. You go to the grocery store, it's like, what do I do this? Or I'm buying clothes? Oh, what? Right? Like every decision is on that. But if you realize, hey, the big decision, the big buckets, where my money is, you know, who I'm working for all these sorts of things. Like, it's almost like once you make those decisions, it's a passive decision that you're making every day, as long as you don't change opt out of that system. Exactly. Wow. Yeah, I'm appreciating that, you know, this is, this has been a really eye opening conversation. For me, I know, this is a this is a topic I've struggled around as I'm trying to figure out what the where my finances should go. So I'm just truly appreciative of the work that that you and your team is doing to help shift this narrative to be able to offer these opportunities and to help empower us to do something with our finances, that's going to have, you know, not just longer term financial returns, but longer term returns and in terms of the world that we want to live in. So if people want to know more about about your organization, where can they go?
Zach Stein 49:02
Carbon collective dot C O, carbon collaborative.co. If you want to talk to us, there's a button on it that says talk to a human part of what we do is we were real people who care about this a lot. And we really show that we love our members, we I think treat you all really well. So come check us out. Call if you want to talk about for your 401 K at work. We always love chatting about that.
Morgan Bailey 49:30
Really appreciate that. So what's exciting what's next few what's what's looking on the horizon for you all.
Zach Stein 49:35
So September, we're coming up to one of our biggest campaigns which is green retirement month. So we've run this really successfully in the past and it's where we try to add a bunch of sweeteners to doing things like taking that big decision, you know, the shaking the box question of it. So we add bonuses for moving an old 401 K or we add bonuses for introducing us to you or employer. And if they work with us, we had bonuses for reaching out and sharing this with your network. So that's what's coming up for us. It was a really fun campaign to run last year. We've got some good press lined up with it. So that's something we're looking forward to in September.
Morgan Bailey 50:17
Amazing. Well, Zack, I truly appreciate it. I'm really curious to see how this continually unfolds. And just grateful for the work that you're doing and look forward to having you on a future episode to see how this is all blossoming.
Zach Stein 50:30
Amazing. Can't wait to come back. All right. Thanks
Morgan Bailey 50:32
so much, Zach. Thanks, Barbara. Thanks for listening to another episode of the Prophet meets impact podcast. If you've enjoyed this experience, please subscribe wherever you find your podcasts and leave a positive review. You can also find out more about the podcast at www.profitmeetsimpact.com
Transcribed by https://otter.ai