[00:00:00] Liz Bothwell: Hi everyone, welcome to Waste360's NothingWasted! Podcast. On every episode, we invite the most interesting people in waste recycling and organics to sit down with us and chat candidly about their thoughts, their work, this unique industry and so much more. Thanks for listening and enjoy this episode.

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[00:00:25] Liz: Hi everyone. I just wanted to remind you that WasteExpo has been reimagined for 2020, it will now be digital, all online. September 14th through the 17th and registration should be live soon. We look forward to delivering the same world-class content that you're used to just from the convenience of your home, office, or anywhere else that you're working these days. Keep a lookout for registration and we'll see you online soon.

Hi everyone. This is Liz Bothwell from Waste360 with Isaac Nichelson, CEO, and Co-founder of Circular Systems. Hi, Isaac, welcome to the show today.

[00:01:06] Isaac Nichelson: Hello, thanks for having me.

[00:01:08] Liz: To start, we usually begin at the very beginning, we'd love to hear more about your background, and what sparked your passion for sustainability.

[00:01:19] Isaac: Yes. Thanks [inaudible 00:01:20]. I guess goes all the way back to the beginning. I was born into a family of back-to-the-land, hippie activist, way back in 1971. My parents, who grew up in the Bay Area, and graduated high school in the mid-'60s, of course, we're drawn into the cultural movement of the time.

Eventually, headed to the Pacific Northwest as part of the back-to-the-land movement. I was raised really with an environmental and social consciousness as a defining factor in my culture. A given, in fact, in terms of how I understood people should be relating to the world, and to one another. That has, obviously, heavily informed my worldview. As I became a young man, went out, and did every job under the sun, really fortunate to have been inspired with an incredible work ethic by my father.

I quickly realized that I really wanted to make what I was doing in life, both fun and financially rewarding. But also, somehow in service and doing good things for the world. That came up after a lot of hard jobs, doing everything that a kid does throughout high school and college, really recognizing that where you put your energy matters. In college, I was a really good athlete in terms of board riding, surfer, skater, snowboarder. Maybe, even better than my athletic ability, I could really communicate with the cultures, which at that time were quite different between those three sports, surfing, skating, snowboarding, were being bridged as a singular culture, which is really what's happened over the last 25 years, or so.

At that time, regions were quite different, we weren't all connected by the internet, youth culture hadn't been homogenized. I was a special connector for the brands in Southern California who were selling surfwear, skateboard clothing, skateboards, and all the hard goods equipment. It allowed me to get a lot of sponsors, and travel paid. I didn't realize it, but I was becoming a good marketer through that.

Ultimately, decided through my exposure to the design and manufacture of clothing in that industry, going all the way back to being a team rider for Volcom when they just started a brand called Volcom Stone, which become massive, sold to the Gucci, Puma Group a few years ago, and was sold again. These are old friends of mine. When the company first started, I saw the back end of design for the first time at that company, got really interested, and got into making snowboard outerwear with my friends from Southern Oregon where I was raised originally. This was at the very advent of snowboarding's explosive growth in the early '90s, and we decided to launch a brand.

That brand, even going all the way back to that time when it was virtually impossible to make any form of responsible, or lower impact outerwear, the brand had a full social consciousness, was rooted in the classism of the resort culture around being. The young snowboard culture that was coming up into these resorts was being treated as the beneath second class citizens, and really we were experiencing a very classist situation up on the hill at these resorts.

We decided to, actually, poke fun at the elitist mentality in the space. The brand, we named it Soup Kitchen. This was inspired by some of our friends who were so passionate about snowboarding, families of little means, they would spend all the money that they had saved during the summer on their past to get on the mountain, on their equipment, and be left with very little to survive the winter with, and their dishwashing job not helping a whole lot.

Half the time, they would be eating at the St. Vincent De Paul Soup Kitchen, there in Bend, Oregon, where we all were at the time. I thought that level of passion was so inspiring. More than anything, we wanted to really stick it in the face of the elitist resort community, and say, "Yes. These miscreants from this lower class are coming to a mountain near you to have fun, and guess what? They're not bad people". [laughs]

That was really the start of my career in fashion, and textiles. Really starting from a very technical standpoint outerwear being the most sophisticated apparel we make from materials, and technology standpoint, but also just from a pattern making, and construction standpoint. 120 plus pattern pieces in a garment and all these different components.

It was a really great hands-on design school, it allowed me to get deep inside the understanding of apparel manufacturer. It also allowed me to get deep inside the understanding of the impact of that type of material that makes waterproof breathable actually function. At the time, in the early '90s, these were PVC based waterproof breathable laminates applied to a nylon six shell fabric with a durable water repellent finish that was made of pure fluorocarbons. You couldn't ask for a worse sandwich in terms of toxicity, human health, and climate impact all wrapped up into one synthetic, beautifully functional fabric, but terribly impactful.

Really, didn't have the realization of that until one day when I went to our sewing facility in Portland, Oregon, where we had been working for a couple of years with this wonderful family who was doing amazing work for us, walked in, and they had just received all of our new fabrics from Japan what I just described. They were cutting it with the heat knife, all the patterns, and as you could imagine the off-gassing coming off of all that plastic, and synthetic chemistry being melted by the heat knife in this in this little factory there, it was enough to make you feel like you were going to blackout.

In the first few minutes I was in the space, I felt sick to my stomach, wanted to leave, and just had this realization that this family that we'd grown to really respect and love, was going to be stuck in there working all day like it was nothing, breathing these fumes. That's just standard procedure, "Wait a minute, I'm a part of this, and actually this is where I'm putting my creative energy." My subconscious started running with my upbringing, and it's like, "My mom would not like this situation. My parents would not agree with this work."

I realized that this beautiful brand that we had created, it was getting a lot of success, growing so fast, giving us all this radical experience, and growth, was actually diametrically opposed to my lifestyle, my upbringing, and my values. What we were doing from a material and manufacturing standpoint. That was really where it came home, this was 1996, in the late summer of '96. For the next year, I started looking for different fabrics, we launched a casual collection, so we could use things that were not so technical. We pulled in some of our first really terrible quality hemp and organic cotton materials, very substandard materials, but we were really proud of the impacts. This was back 1997.

I was hunting for better materials and wound up at a textile show in Portland, Oregon where I had positioned myself and our business at the time. It was, basically, an overgrown Nike vendor fair with all the most technical stuff in the universe at that time. They had allowed the other brands around the Portland area to come for the first time. Shopping around that place was more of the same terrible off-gassing, every form of PVC you could ever imagine was there in every glittery bright color possible.

As I walked the shop, I came across this one booth with a big sign that said, "Organic, linen, and hemp." Inside were the most stylistically, relevant, high-quality eco-fabrics I’d ever seen. All different types. That's where I met my current business partner, and co-founder of this company Yitzac Goldstein, who is really the mad scientist of eco textiles going back more than 25 years now.

He was there tinkering away for years already, working in China with the traditional hemp agriculture, and processing methods. Yitzac comes, originally, from a sustainable farming background. He studied permaculture and Chinese. Originally, went off to China to look at traditional Chinese agricultural practices. Came back a textile guy 10 years later. Really, somebody who's responsible for changing the game, and making a lot of the first fabrics that combined organic cotton with organic bass fibers like linen and hemp.

Nobody had ever thought to do that before, that idea of aligning organic inputs, specifically for what they mean, to agriculture, society, and the habitat. Yitzac went on to really help advance the recycled polyester space in terms of fabric applications over in China. Ultimately, he and I started trading that year. I bought all of my first good eco-fabrics from him, we've been working together for over 20 years ever since. That takes us into the beginning of how Circular Systems started.

[00:12:44] Liz: That's amazing. You were so fortunate to have an upbringing like that where your parents were so forward-thinking, obviously that helped you become who you are. Then, it sounds like it was meant to be for you to meet your partner where you did at that point in time.

[00:13:02] Isaac: It definitely was. Even in the moment, I had started to do a lot of freelance design in addition to the outerwear company we were running, I had the chance to do some really big work over in Italy with Sky's the Limit R&D budgets, and was able to utilize all those fabrics into this collection. That was when I really got addicted to the idea that you could make an apparel product, a fashion, or accessory product without creating all the terrible impact.

I made a commitment to only doing this work in fashion from here on out in 1999 after that first collection of product was put together. I signed something called the design manifesto that had come out, it was a magazine called Adbusters out of Canada at the time, that was all about protecting our mental environment, which could not be more relevant today, especially in this time. They had put out an adaptation of an original design manifesto that was created in the home furnishings and interior design space back in the '60s.

They updated it, basically to reach out to all creatives who are designing things, whether it be information design, pure art or commercial expressions, and product design. They said, "Hey, you young creatives, commit now to only designing sustainable things whether that be messaging, or products. Resist and refuse when your boss tells you to do otherwise. If all we do is design sustainable things, that's all that will exist in 20 years in the market".

That was something I was really a big believer in, signing that in 1999 was my commitment to this work. I wish a whole lot of other people had been exposed to that and signed on to that as passionately 20 years ago. That's really what's informed the path that's led to this moment, and the formation of Circular Systems in 2017.

[00:15:26] Liz: Can you tell us more about Circular Systems?

[00:15:29] Isaac: Absolutely. Circular Systems is a material science company. Ultimately, we design solutions. We like to say that together, meaning together with our global community, we are the solution. The idea is really about creating resource efficiency, and regenerative impacts. This is really striving for something that's well beyond zero impact, which has been the high bar of our sustainability movement around product at least. This striving for zero impact is absolutely critical, but in fact, it's just a milestone in route to beneficial impact, which is really what we need to be achieving as a species in our habitat. It's what almost every other species does, it contributes rather than detract.

Homeostasis zero might be fine for us if we hadn't caused so much damage already, but we're at a point now where we have to actually fix things for quite a while before zero impact is enough. We're about regenerative impact, beneficial impact with the systems that we design, that's the ultimate goal. We've been really fostering that as a concept within our movement in the industry, as well with all of our colleagues in this space, raising the bar on what we think about sustainability today, taking it beyond zero all the way to beneficial and regenerative.

Circular Systems was formed to enable that for the textile and fashion industry. We do it with three technology platforms that are specifically designed to work together, synergistic technologies. The first being the Agraloop, which is a closed-loop biorefinery that's designed to convert food crop waste, or the biomass leftover in fields after harvest into high-value textile, and other industrial products while creating regenerative impacts in that same community where it operates. I'll tell you a little bit more about that, we can go more deeply into that.

There's Texloop, which is the circularity of textile waste, pre and post-consumer garment waste. Taking those textile waste streams, breaking them back down to fiber and building them back up again into new yarns, fabrics, and useful products for the same manufacturers who generated that waste to begin with, or the same customers who turn that old garment in, can receive a new one made from that fiber. Texloop is really enabling that resource efficiency, the true circularity, the cycling of textile raw materials.

Then, we have Orbital Hybrid Yarn. Orbital Hybrid Yarn is a noble, new spinning technology that allows us to use shorter, or lower quality recycled fibers into higher quality, and higher-performing materials. I'm talking materials that actually meet, or exceed the performance of the most technical, virgin materials that produce a lot of the biggest impacts.

Now, with Orbital we can actually produce materials that function as good, or better than a Nike Dri-FIT yet with only recycled and organic ingredients, and zero chemical finishing required. That moisture management that keeps you dry, and cool while you're working out can be achieved actually, without all the impact that's normally associated with those fabrics, which are some of the worst.

With these three platforms Agraloop, Texloop, and Orbital, we go into the industry to be facilitators of change, to be collaborative solution providers with the biggest and best brands on earth, as well as the coolest and most niche startup brands. That's really what we're doing as a company, we're replicating, and rolling out these technologies on a global basis. We're doing that through regional partnership with an eye toward distributed economics, and really focused on decentralization for all its efficiencies, including its social and environmental efficiencies, first and foremost.

Really, working toward a moment in the not so distant future when these technologies have become the gold standard around the world, the fiber processing, yarn, and fabric formation, really a priority achieving great success with the uptake of our products at an early stage with some very big and important labels. Very grateful for that, we can see on the horizon truly beneficial impact Circular System-

[00:21:12] Liz: I love how, obviously, you're focused on the regenerative impact and raising that bar, but at the same time you're not sacrificing function, fashion, or look. I really hope that more brands catch on, and really take this to the next level for you. What types of brands are you're working with now?

[00:21:37] Isaac: Currently, our biggest customers are Converse and the H&M Group. H&M being the mega fast-fashion retailer, but really one of the most committed companies in our industry to social, and environmental change in the space, really putting a ton of support into the sector. They have a number of smaller brands that have launched in Europe, very interesting new products just now coming to the U.S. Brands like ARKET, COS, C-O-S, are already here in the market. 

Other brands like Weekday. These are a lot of really cool young Scandinavian kids that have started these brands and work with H&M to get the support to take them global.

Those are a lot of our first customers. Here in California, we are working closely with a brand called Outerknown, which is a very sustainable focused brand in the surf industry launched by 11-time world champion surfer Kelly Slater. Additionally, of course, the usual suspects in our space, Patagonia, and Levi's, and these brands as well, we're on the long arc of development with them and with a whole host of other leadership and niche brands in the space.

[00:23:02] Liz: That's awesome. Good for you. Do you think that more brands are catching on? Do you think that there is a race to find more sustainable solutions in fashion?

[00:23:12] Isaac: Yes, at this point it's undeniable that the transformation of this industry is in full effect. It’s really being driven now by the big management consultancies in the world. BCG and McKenzie have done extensive reporting on the dismal state of the industry from an impact standpoint and from an economic standpoint.

I would urge people to check out The Pulse of the Fashion Industry report from Boston Consulting Group. The first 2017 report really framed up what the future of the industry looks like, and it's not so good. If we don't change as an industry, the whole space will collapse, and this has already been mapped in great detail. What that means is by 2030 -and this was a few years ago now that they forecasted this and it's likely been greatly accelerated by the COVID era here- they said by 2030 the entire space would have no ability to continue growth, and the EBITDA would be down by as much as 4% across the boards and that, ultimately, the space would be collapsing on itself due to resource scarcity and regulatory pressure.

This is because, as you know, fashion is considered the world's second-largest polluter right after the petrochemical industry. This is something that really finally got the leadership, the c-suite of all the major brands, and the manufacturers that serve them finally sitting up to take notice. We saw a catalytic move forward in that year after this information came out, so that's really been part of the tailwinds driving this moment. It's become now even more clear through the last four months of COVID reality and the upturning of every market under the sun that coming out of this fashion is going to be moving toward a sustainable imperative. It's no longer an option, it's a condition of doing business in the space.

The companies will no longer be relevant if they're not doing very real and relevant work with the impact of their product. We've seen this in the form of orders, actually, for our business. Entering March and looking at what was happening in the world it was quite scary, we didn't know if it was going to take out our young business as we were just leaving start-up mode and going commercial. Quite dangerous what was happening.

While a lot of people we know all around the industry were suffering order cancellation after order cancellation, in the manufacturing sector, we were getting bigger and bigger orders week over week starting in March and have been all the way till now. In fact, our pre-COVID sales projections are still right on track. For this year we'll grow 400%, and that is indicative of a world that's changing. While all the conventional goods were getting cancelled, the same brands were doubling down on the products that we make and it was a pretty remarkable validation. We feel very fortunate and grateful for this movement that now appears to be unstoppable in our space.

[00:26:57] Liz: Definitely. I think one thing that will come out of this pandemic, like you're saying, is that everyone wants transparency of the supply chain now. Everyone is going to be informed in a different way, and I'm so glad that you're benefiting from that. I didn't know if that was happening now or something down the road, but I thought a company like yours would benefit for sure.

[00:27:21] Isaac: Yes, we're already seeing the biggest brands in the world making these decisions and headed in this direction, putting increased emphasis on it every day, so it is quite encouraging.

[00:27:36] Liz: That's fantastic. I was watching a MasterClass Q&A with Anna Wintour, and it was interesting to hear how much she now thinks fashion will be focused on sustainability and reuse going forward. Do you think the real fashionistas of the world are really on board now beyond the marketing spin and greenwashing?

[00:28:01] Isaac: I think they know now that they're about to be really uncool if they're not, and fashion is all about being cool. You can't buck a major global trend that actually rides a top fashion in every other industry in the world and think you're fashionable. This is the biggest social movement of our time. To be left behind by that would be like being a white supremacist brand right now, totally irrelevant. Beyond irrelevant. Negative.

There's nobody in business that wants a negative image. Thankfully, whether these folks in the more premium, luxury, and couture spaces like it or not, whether it's really their passion and whether they really care about the environment or humanity, or not, they have to do it because it's a social imperative. It's just not cool to make things the old way when we know it's killing people or subjecting them to slavery-level working conditions. That change is happening now, and you're seeing even the old guard, who were quite resistant for a long time, its fashion's version of climate change deniers, are now falling in line. They don't have a choice.

[00:29:29] Liz: It's a great way to look at it. The consumers are demanding it as well. To your point about the consulting firms, they're proving it's good business as well, too. I think when those things come together you really have the ultimate impact to make real change.

[00:29:44] Isaac: Yes, it's absolutely true and it's quite simple to understand. This is what business leadership needs to understand across every sector. When you're using your own waste or the waste of your industry as your base raw material, your costs are always going to be lower. If you couple that with the fact that your product is going to be relevant, not just more relevant, this is the only relevance going forward in very near-term. A more profitable business that's relevant? That's all any business person wants.

We are hoping that we can take this example in fashion, this example in renewable energy, this example in organic food, and catapult that effort across all sectors of manufacture and all sectors of consumer goods. It's doable, yes.

[00:30:45] Liz: That's great. Do you believe in a circular system?

[00:30:48] Isaac: Yes, hence the name. We really do believe in a circular economy and in circular materials flows. It's just biomimicry, ultimately, when you look at these materials flows. But circularity is not enough on its own, circularity can also be greenwashed. Circularity can have bad things revolving within it. Circularity can provide justification for overproduction and overconsumption, so circularity also needs to be engaged consciously, and with ethics and values driving it.

Circularity should be patterned after nature, not patterned after a globalist, industrialist, perspective. It should be about producing enough for our markets, and having these cycles of materials and capital flow in fair and equitable ways that ultimately regenerate things. Fix things. Circularity should not enable a perpetual state of negative impact, much less zero impact right now. We've got to take it further.

We are the circular movement. When I say we I mean all of us. But as we engage this movement that will become everything in economic modeling, in the way we produce things, we have to be mindful that circularity alone is not enough. It has to be engaged effectively from the standpoint of values and ethics.

[00:32:36] Liz: Definitely. Outside of what you're doing, are there any brands inspiring you right now?

[00:32:42] Isaac: Absolutely. We see a ton of inspiration in the realm of vintage and upcycling. Companies like The RealReal really showing what luxury retail should look like. These incredibly valuable products continuing to cycle through use and be valued, and presented in a beautiful sexy way. Really loving to see that and to understand that the fastest growing sector of fashion is vintage is also quite encouraging. We're really big fans of that.

We're also really big fans of the work that's happening around some of the more progressive brands. Obviously, companies like Outerknown and Patagonia, but lesser known is the really massive shift that's happening inside companies like H&M and Nike. They're are truly committed. It's not that that's all altruistic or environmental concern, the business leadership there knows that their companies are doomed if they don't change, so now the move is really quite ardent and swift. 

We are fans of what those brands are doing, not just because they're our customers, but because they're really genuine in their motive. They're trying their hardest to go as quickly as possible down this road. Maybe that's 90% for the sake of their business survival, who cares the motivation? It's working and we're seeing a shift toward really improved impact. Ultimately, the adoption of the concept of the Agraloop by these brands means they're banking on a future of regenerative impact with Agraloo BioFibre replacing a whole lot of conventional cotton and polyester. We're excited to be engaging that work with these brands that we are pretty enamored of for their commitments.

[00:34:54] Liz: That's fantastic. Speaking of Agraloop, what is your feedstock? What type of food waste are you using?

[00:35:01] Isaac: Right now we're focused a lot on the oil-seed flax and oil-seed hemp that we know so well how to manage. This is really the history of the founders of the company, including our COO and one of our other co-founders, Geof Kime, who is the person largely responsible for ending industrial hemp prohibition in North America. Geof worked with the Canadian government back in 1994 and grew the first legal test plot of industrial hemp in North America since prohibition.

A 10-acre test that they did, he and his father, and ultimately got the rules overturned there, which started a cascading effect throughout North America. Now we see industrial hemp legalized across the entire lower 48 as well. Geof work around the utilization of the waste straw from oil-seed flax and oil-seed hemp in Canada really unlocked all of the materials handling and mechanical processing first steps of the Agraloop.

We're largely focused on those waste streams right now because we know them very well, we know the farming syndicates and how to engage those sectors quite well; and because those are very sexy fibers for the global market right now. Linen has really been hitting a gigantic moment of trend for the last couple of years, and now hemp is becoming, finally, the coolest new thing in fashion. Or we should say, the coolest old thing in fashion as the original textile fiber.

We're also working with cereal straws, like wheat and rice. Or corn. These are incredibly massive opportunities that will be next on our agenda as we scale the Agraloop to hundreds of thousands of tons a year over the next decade. In the tropics our emphasis is really around pineapple, sugarcane, banana, so many different tropical inputs. We're actually also processing the waste of cotton cultivation, the woody stalks of the cotton plant, and able to produce a beautiful bass fiber from that as well. All of this delivering those regenerative impacts back to the farms where we get the biomass.

[00:37:34] Liz: That's amazing. You have no shortage of inputs or ideas for the feedstock, that's for sure.

[00:37:40] Isaac: No, it's pretty limitless. In fact, just scratching the surface of our top five or six favorite inputs we realize we're accessing three to five times the global fiber demand all in within these waste streams. The opportunity for pulp paper applications and nonwovens building materials, everything even beyond textiles is just massive.

There's a growing movement around productizing these waste streams, and if you can do that in a way where you're creating a beneficial impact in that community with those farms. I'm talking about carbon drawdown and sequestration, and soil building. That's what the Agraloop does through its process, and we want to challenge all other big systems thinkers and industrialists to come with us on this journey for the new regenerative industrial revolution. That's really what we're kicking off with Circular Systems.

[00:38:48] Liz: That's amazing. I know you mentioned there is opportunity beyond the applications you're using it for, but how about for you, will you expand beyond fashion?

[00:38:58] Isaac: Well, it's not the part of our business plan that we talk a lot about, but our business model actually also depends on all the co-products that we derive along the way to a textile fiber. That puts us in the space of building materials, and paper, and packaging, and biochemicals, and all of the various product iterations that can be produced through those co-products.

It's pretty vast and we are moving one step at a time, but the really huge opportunities around things like safe biochemistry for the responsible and regenerative upgrading of natural fiber products or for the responsible production of dissolving pulp for viscose, this is something that Circular Systems will be also responsible for bringing to the world and popularizing. That's just one of the co-products of our systems.

[00:40:00] Liz: That's fantastic. I can't wait to watch that too. Isaac, what do you think the waste and recycling industry's role in all of this is?

[00:40:11] Isaac: Well, waste haulers and recyclers are absolutely the essential enablers of this movement. If within those models the true opportunity can be recognized for the future, we're going to see those businesses become not only more profitable but more relevant and more powerful in the global industrial scene. To be a waste hauler forever has been seen as, "You guys take out the trash", and people happily do because it's a very lucrative industry to turn garbage into gold.

If you can really be cycling those waste streams up into value-added goods, can you imagine your business model now, Waste Management? That's the kind of conversation that we're beginning to engage with the waste haulers like Waste Management. How can we take these massive textile waste streams that makeup as much as 20% of your landfill and get extreme value out of them for your business and for society, and prevent all the methane production that would have gone on in the eventual breaking down of those goods?

It's an extreme opportunity, and the players in this space are absolutely fundamental to its success. We look forward to engaging this industry more and more around waste hauling and collections. We have huge solutions to put together, working together my friends, so let's go.

[00:42:01] Liz: I love that. Your timing is perfect because we're at a place in the industry where you need to view waste as a resource, and not just the talent of products, or textiles, or anything else. I really hope that everyone's listening and can work with you.

[00:42:20] Isaac: Thank you, and thank you for the opportunity to share. You're absolutely right, it's really the end of waste as a concept. There is no such thing. If you're wasting things, you're actually being stupid. Let's move beyond that as a species. Thank you so much for this opportunity, we look forward to engaging the sector. Thanks for putting the word out, is very important.

[00:42:52] Liz: No, this is great. I really look forward to seeing what happens in the future with you and the industry. Is there anything else you want to share, Isaac, before I let you go?

[00:43:06] Isaac: I just would like to share that let's check back in for a progress report next year this time. We're going to be delighted to share with you the work we're doing to draw down a gigaton of carbon with the Agraloop and the work that we're doing to really start to create resource efficiency within municipalities and the textile and fashion space around the management of textile waste and agricultural waste.

The evolution will be extreme when I talk to you again next year, so we'll look forward to that. Hope everybody out there is staying safe and keeping their mind open to what the world can be on the other side of all this craziness that has been 2020 thus far. Let's use this moment everybody to not return to business as usual, let's innovate together and create the world that we all want and need. Thank you.

[00:44:09] Liz: Thanks, Isaac. Thanks for all of your time today, it's been so insightful. We will check back in with you next year.

[00:44:18] Isaac: Thank you so much, it's been a great opportunity. Take care.

[00:44:23] Liz: You too, stay well.

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