ESG, Finance, and Technology with Matthew Sekol

Welcome back to Environmental Professionals Radio, Connecting the Environmental Professionals Community Through Conversation, with your hosts Laura Thorne and Nic Frederick! 

On today’s episode, we talk with Matthew Sekol, World Wide Sustainability Industry Advocate with Microsoft, about ESG, Finance and Investing, and Technologies.  Read his full bio below.

Showtimes:
1:31  Nic & Laura talk about Roe v. Wade
3:51  Interview with Matthew Sekol Starts
12:02  ESG
20:39  Finance & Technology
35:51  Comics

Please be sure to ✔️subscribe, ⭐rate and ✍review. 

This podcast is produced by the National Association of Environmental Professions (NAEP). Check out all the NAEP has to offer at NAEP.org.

Connect with Matthew at https://www.linkedin.com/in/matthewsekol/

Guest Full Bio:
Matt came into sustainability from the perspective of ESG in Financial Services and quickly developed a reputation at Microsoft for being ‘the guy who sees ESG everywhere.’ He guides companies across a range of industries through sustainable transformation by delivering thought leadership and innovative ideas that challenge the status quo. With a 20-year career supporting technology initiatives across financial services, energy, healthcare and life sciences, and semiconductor organizations, Matt now helps global companies understand complex sustainability and ESG concepts while aligning to market expectations.

Help us continue to create great content! If you’d like to sponsor a future episode hit the support podcast button or visit www.environmentalprofessionalsradio.com/sponsor-form

Music Credits
Intro: Givin Me Eyes by Grace Mesa
Outro: Never Ending Soul Groove by Mattijs Muller

Transcript

Transcript is auto-transcribed

[Intro]

Nic 
Hello and welcome to EPR with your favorite environmental enthusiast, Nic and Laura, on today's episode. Laura and I forego our segment today to acknowledge those impacted by Roe v. Wade and other forthcoming legislation at the Supreme Court. We talk to Matthew Sekol about ESG, technology, and comics. It's an absolutely delightful interview and we were so happy to have him on so you have to check it out. And finally, since Laura is not here, while I'm recording this, I'm actually going to tell a joke instead. Now it's a dad joke so I'm warning you in advance. Just be prepared. Here we go. What did one tectonic plate say when he bumped into the other? Sorry, my fault. Okay, now that now that I heard myself say it out loud, maybe maybe we don't do that again. Yeah, hit that music

[NAEP Event News]

Laura 
Alright, mark your calendars. Please join us May 7 through 10th in Phoenix, Arizona for the 2023 annual conference and training symposium. More information will be posted soon so make sure to check back at the website at www.naep.org. We appreciate all of our sponsors and they're what  keep the show going. If you'd like to sponsor, please head on over to environmental professionals radio.com and check out the sponsor form for details. Let's get to our segment.

[Nic & Laura Segment: Roe v. Wade]

Laura
Given the recent decision by the Supreme Court to overturn Roe v Wade, we will be foregoing our usual segment chat and using this opportunity to say that we value all of you regardless of race, gender association or other distinction. As we have discussed previously with Fred Wagner, our legal expert and repeat guests, we should all be concerned about what this could mean for women's rights and environmental rights and regulations in the future. For me, I can't like you can't tell anybody else what to do for me. I'm not going down any of those dark roads I'm not I have already read enough of them, refuted them in my head. Our guests, Matt Sekol. He even posted like I've written and deleted so many tweets already. And I'm like same oh my gosh, no. Except I haven't posted any. I just reshare a couple of things I like other people have shared but yeah, I can't bring myself to put my own words because I know that a onslaught of dark road is coming ahead and I'm like no.

Nic 
A lot of negative energy no matter what. It's just Yeah.

Laura 
Yeah, it's insane. The whole situation is unbelievable. I mean, for me, what is blowing my mind the most? So what doesn't blow my mind is that this happened because so many other things have already leading up to this. But we have just undone our justice system. The thing that was in place is not in place. And that's terrifying.

Nic  
It's very hard, but this is a partisan decision, regardless of what your politics are. It's a very partisan decision. Like we talked about in the show with Frdd before it is absolutely partisan. And, you know, there gonna be more of those cases coming. There's gonna be more environmental cases, I think, like we've talked about that may get overturned on a partisan basis. And that is not what in theory the court is supposed to be.

Laura  
Right? So what I thought we should do today is really not do anything so we don't leave a dark road of our own. We will continue to have these conversations with our legal experts and other people who can help us speak intelligently and since you are in the great state of Texas, you're on one of those dark roads of your own. For me, now anyway.

Nic 
Yeah, It's best I don't say anything out loud or too loud. Yeah,

Laura 
Exactly. Exactly. So for all those reasons, and because our interview with Matt is so amazing and so long. Let's just get to it.

[Interview with Matthew Sekol Starts]

Laura
Alright, welcome back to EPR. Today we have Matthew Sekol on the show Matthew was recently promoted to the worldwide sustainability advocate with Microsoft. Super cool. Welcome, Matthew.

Matthew Sekol 
Hi. So glad to be here.

Laura
I think it's super exciting to have companies like Microsoft stepping up to do ESG and not just practicing themselves, but also creating products and services to help others implement their strategies. So first off, just tell us a little bit about the work that you do.

Matthew Sekol 
Sure. So, as a sustainability industry advocate, I kind of have a horizontal view across all of our customers, no matter what industry vertical they're in, and I'm really meant to be like a sustainability subject matter expert that goes in, kind of swoops in whether it's retail or CPG, or financial services or whatever it is, brings that sustainability context and like one of the regulations what do they need think about from a scope one, two and three perspective and then kind of help them and help their Microsoft team get enabled quickly. And really, my goal is to try to get them to do something meaningful, right? We often talk about measuring, especially Microsoft, we have products that help you measure and manage like your carbon emissions. I think those are super important because you can't manage what you can't measure but I really want them to get moving on making improvements in in their value chain and their ecosystem. So that's kind of my day to day.

Laura 
Alright, so could you just give us a little bit of an overview of how Microsoft is, is being the leader of being a role model in this space for other companies in the industry, or just other companies in general?

Matthew Sekol 
Sure. So Microsoft has been reporting on these things for a while, but just in the past two years, we've really gotten deep with our environmental sustainability reporting. And I kind of look at those reports really as a framework for how customers can think about their own business. Now we approach sustainability through technology, which should surprise nobody. There are really, there are four key ways from an environmental sustainability perspective that we believe technology can help and its carbon, its water, its waste, and its ecosystem or what some people call biodiversity. And so we've set goals along all of those. And when you read our report, you'll see things like how we're being responsible in our product manufacturing, because we make Xboxes, we make Surfaces, we build servers that go into our cloud. Like we want to make sure that from a supplier perspective as well as our own operations that we're operating as effectively as possible, but we also help our customers do that, which is what that's exactly what my job is, right? We have a whole team now of people. I'm on a newly formed team, just to help with this. And we really try to bring some of that expertise over the decades plus that we've been working on this to our customers so that we can all like we can lift the entire economy up to help support the way that the environment improvements really need to go.

Laura 
Awesome. Okay, I love that. We need our big companies to be leading the way in the spaces. So that's great. Well, I'm glad you touched on that this was a new arena, a new group that you're working in because I was kind of wondering that but my next question has to do with the career path and Podcat is really interested in now also. Podcat, as well as a large portion of our listeners are into navigating their career paths. And it seems like everyone I talked to is either wanting to get into something that fights climate change or sustainability, which are very closely related. And you have a bachelor's degree in English. So for inspiration for those people who are who have gotten their environmental degrees and think they can't do what they want to do. Tell us how you got from where you were to ESG at Microsoft.

Matthew Sekol 
Yeah, absolutely. So first off, I want to say you have amazing people on this thing. So I feel a little bit like an imposter. I do not swim off the coast of anywhere and, and dive into anything, and do any of that. But here's here's how I got there. So I graduated before I graduated with an English degree. The internet started booming, it was late 90s I was down the path of getting my English degree. And I started learning HTML, which is web code if you like old, old school web code, self taught, went to the head of the computer science department and said hey, what would it take for me to switch to English to computer science I, Hey, I've tutored calculus , can I just get a computer science degree? He literally laughed me out of his office, which I've never had happen in my life or career. And so I decided, You know what, I'm just gonna graduate with an English degree at the time, computer science really was more akin to electrical engineering. So I'm glad I didn't switch. And I got a whole bunch of soft skills or what I like to call now adaptable skills for like critical thinking and communication. And I took those skills layered on some Microsoft certifications early on and went right into IT. Most of my career has been focused on IT or technologies. So it's been 20 plus years career mostly focused on that.

When I came over to Microsoft, about four and a half years ago, I was segmented into financial services which I did not have any experience with Well, I can say that my dad is an actuary and my stepdad is an insurance adjuster. So I had some experience, but not any sort of practical experience. So I joined financial services, listen to podcasts on Fintech, I quickly ramped up and then I became the capital markets industry advocate very similar to what I'm doing now, but focused on capital markets, which if you notice my story, I do not have a background in capital markets either. I did the same thing and I kind of ramped up and I came across right before this role, that capital markets role I came across ESG from the perspective of the financial markets, and I was looking at this trend, and it's so much more than a trend but I was looking at it and I'll say, there is something fundamental here that I don't think companies understand. And so I started talking to customers across our other industries and I would say to them, like, do you really understand what financial markets are doing with ESG and how they're looking at you? And their answer was, what is ESG? So, I had this like epiphany that there's something here and then of course, COVID hit ESG just accelerated you know, COP26 happened in really both climate change ESG sustainability, all of these things suddenly came to the fore. And I found Microsoft had this new team coming up. So I ended up taking two classes at NYU Stern one on corporate sustainability one on more ESG investing in sustainable finance. I wrote white papers about it. I joined working groups on sustainability from a data perspective, from a regulatory perspective just started like, like a sponge. I would just kind of grab everything I could. And I applied for this job here and I ended up getting it. So what I'd say the takeaway is, is because I know you have obviously a lot of people with environmental sciences as their background, there's such a unique opportunity right now to take your skills and apply it to business to drive an impact from the financial markets to their investments, which are the companies that I talked to every day, they don't have environmental science expertise, just like they used to not have technology expertise, and they're all trying to ramp up on what is their impact. Like it's really two things. One is what is their impact? And then the other thing is, what is the impact of what's happening out there on me? And so this gets into things like where am I facilities located? Am I subject to wildfires and flooding? How do I we do the land responsibly around and considering things like biodiversity but also like wildfire avoidance this expertise does not exist in corporate America today. So I'm a huge fan of like taking the skills that you have, because I was an English major and applying them in a completely different way.

[ESG]

Laura  
No, I'm trying to process everything you just said because there's like six different directions I could go right now instead of the questions I'm ready to ask you. I love it. I think I've had this in my brain for quite a while too. And we need role models in larger companies spaces so that because the other ones who's to start you kick it off, right? Microsoft, Google Apple, they're the ones who kick off these practices and then others follow. And so this needs to happen. Before we get too much further in case people listening don't know, but just if anyone else listening to has this problem, too. How do you describe ESG to people who don't understand it?

Matthew Sekol 
ESG or the environmental, social and corporate governance, non traditional factors that play into the risks and opportunities for you and your ecosystem. And it's a little bit different from sustainability. And what we're seeing out there right now is this. There's kind of an artificial conflation happening. So sustainability is more of a table stakes. This is I should be operating at low carbon. Water Management should be a priority. Waste Management should be a priority. And everybody should be doing that. ESG is more like, Well, I'm a clothing manufacturer and where do I get the water for my dyes? And is that water replenishable or am I gonna run out in 10 years and then have to move my entire factory should I be looking at dry dyes like and then what are the chemical side effects may be from those dry dyes like it's more of those ESG is really more on those risks that exist and the opportunities that exist as well. But that conflation still happening and that's what I tried to really get people to call out like sometimes I see companies starting with one and then going into the other which is great because they'll often start with ESG and they'll think about the risks. And then they'll be like, oh I really need to lower my carbon. I didn't realize this was such a problem. So it can it can start kind of in both ways, but it can also intersect like if I'm, and this came up I won't name names, but there was a proxy vote at a global construction retailer about sourcing from sustainable lumber places and like for that it is an intersection of sustainability because you're trying to find sustainable lumber, and then it's a risk because if you don't source from a sustainable lumber supplier, you're probably going to run out of lumber eventually, right. So like there are also intersections as well. So it's I try to start off with like, it's the risks and opportunities that exist but it quickly goes into while there are a lot of nuances all over the place. And yeah, it can become a hot mess really fast.

Laura 
Right. Makes sense. And related to that I read your article titled, Not everybody wants to save the world. We're in you talked about the intersection of social justice and sustainability. So what is the relationship between those two seemingly unrelated issues?

Matthew Sekol 
Yeah, so you know, as I'm sure your listeners are aware, there are a lot of marginalized communities in emerging markets globally, that are disproportionately impacted by things like climate change versus the like countries like the US that are really the main polluters, right are contributors to carbon growth. Certainly an issue. One of the ways that this is exacerbated just came up recently, where it looks like there's a little bit of a misunderstanding on ESG. So here's one of the other problems. The social justice aspect is getting exacerbated when the markets are looking at ESG risks and that materiality In other words, what matters to that company with its intersection along ESG? One of the things that's emerging is sometimes working in emerging markets can be a risk, because they're far flung away places, getting the goods from there to where I need them could be a climate risk. And the supply chain could be disrupted. Maybe I should onshore, all that stuff. When things like that happen. You've suddenly intersect with a different aspect of ESG, which is something called externality where you're talking about the company's impact on the world. And so if you start the financial markets have already started pulling a little bit out of emerging markets because of the the risk but if companies and their supplier and they start pulling their supply chains out, now you're double whammy these these marginalized communities in a way that you really need to think about. This is something that I think if I'm on a procurement team, of a major manufacturer or retailer, I, this again, this is such a huge complex issue. You could easily switch one dial down on your risk and turn up somebody else's dial on their risk. So you have to kind of look at the entire ecosystem in which you operate in order to try to get it right. And you might not get it right, but really try to get it right is what I tell everybody

Nic 
Which is, it's honestly a good segue to our next question like, because you know, whenever we have new trends like ESG coming through, companies can latch on to the idea of doing something more than what the idea actually represents what would be actual progress. So what are those current challenges with greenwashing and businesses and how can we help companies avoid that?

Matthew Sekol 
Right, so this is a big challenge, and it comes back to that conflation a little bit. So as an investor or as a company, you have to be clear on what your goals are. If you're an investor, and you want to help save the planet, there's a whole investing methodology called socially responsible investing that you can follow and you can find funds that do that again, it's on the fund managers to explicitly state those goals. If you're a company, and you want to address your material risk, you might do something like what's called the materiality assessment where you sit down probably with a consulting firm of some kind where you could do it internally and say, Where are my E, S and G risks? And then you map it out and you prioritize which one you think hit your business the hardest. Now, what we're seeing from a financial markets perspective, is that conflation of socially responsible investing with ESG investing so people are getting confused about am I saving the world? Or am I identifying my risks and managing them well? Because it's two very different things. And sometimes they can intersect, but they don't always do. Then we're also seeing other more harmful trends or extreme trends that are leading cause of greenwashing which are, you know, there are companies that are misstating their impact both on their risk management, as well as their climate change impact. There are financial services firms who have done not so great things like rename what was previously called the growth equity fund, for example, into an ESG fund. Now, there are regulations like the EU has a regulation called SFDR, which is focused on mitigating that exact issue. And what they do is they said you as a financial services firm, it's great that you want to be green or sustainable or ESG. You really need to describe to your investors what that means. And we're going to be watching you so, I'm a huge fan of that regulation for that exact reason, because it tries to mitigate what's happening out there today.

Nic  
Right? So it's kind of like certified organic when like, if it's in the ground, it's organic. It's

Matthew Sekol 
Exactly.

Nic
Okay. Yeah. And so is there a law like that in the US?

Matthew Sekol  
There is not a law like that in the US. So currently there are three draft proposals out there for companies in order to get investors the information they need. One is the SEC has one out, the EU Commission has one out on something called the corporate sustainability reporting directive, if I got that acronym, right, and then coming out of COP26, the group that's responsible for accounting standards, which is the IFRS launched a subgroup called the ISSB, which is international sustainability standards board. All three groups are kind of doing different things I've heard they're starting to work together, but ultimately what they're trying to do is get companies to report on two things. One is kind of their, what are they doing to meet their commitments? So if they made all these commitments, what are they actually doing and how can they prove that? And then the second thing is how does climate risk impact their operations? Now, this is all going to come together in their 10-K filing, hopefully, so when a company does their their finances and their balance sheet in the here in the US when they found their 10-K, there will be a little line for sustainability that says, here's how we're meeting our commitments. Here's how we're meeting our climate risk. Something like that is where things are heading.

[Finance & Technology]

Nic 
And we talked about your work at Microsoft, we can't ask you, we have to ask you a couple of technology questions right like Sure. So integrating technologies have kind of been our environmental projects has become a point of emphasis for environmental policy. And we kind of want we want to know like, how do we use technology? How can we use it to improve sustainability. To improve ESG to help these companies do their reporting?

Matthew Sekol 
This is also a very complicated question. So ultimately, ESG is about data. And I'm not sure how many folks in your audience are going to be familiar with this. But as a technologist, we've been talking about this thing called digital transformation for like, I don't know eight years now since 2014. And what it really meant at the time was kind of leveraging cloud technologies to modernize your business operations. Well, a lot of some companies took that on some companies didn't. What we're seeing with sustainability is like a renewing of that digital transformation because you can't measure these things unless they're digitized or at least you can't measure them easily. So like the first step is kind of like getting digital transformation up and running and starting to migrate. Or it's starting to modernize past that though it becomes like how do you modernize your business operations in order to get the sustainability signals out, you need to make some sort of good decision. And that could be things like IoT sensors. It could be analytics from planetary datasets like Sunny Fleming is one of my close friends now, and I love talking to her about this because I don't get that part and I help her with ESG.

Laura
She's a big fangirl of yours.

Matthew Sekol 
We talk pretty regularly now. So it's about the application of technology onto your company in order to help solve these challenges, whether again, it's whether whether it's a risk, or whether it's just trying to do the right thing and lower your carbon. But it's going to be I'd say specific to that company, like the technologies that would go into a manufacturer might be like IoT, because you're going to want to measure each piece of equipment to make sure you're eking out efficiency for a retailer. It might be some sort of climate risk data against your suppliers to show where's my risk coming from? Like, am I going to be able to get my delivery of widgets to my store in time or do I need to reroute them through some other place for financial services firm? It's a massive data challenge because they're kind of sitting on top of everybody looking at all of these things happening. And they got to pull it all together in order to make investment decisions. So different pieces of technology for kind of different industries, but it all starts with digital transformation.

Laura 
Okay. So digital transformation has been has been going for a while and I think you know, for me, I think a lot of people, you know, I don't save documents on my computer anymore. They're in the cloud. What's next? So, you know, I think we are getting close to most people understanding and you know, people know what the cloud is now, I think for a long time, it's like, what's that? What is next or what is next that's coming out that people should be looking at and saying, Okay, I've gone paperless. I've done the digital transformation part. What do I do next?

Matthew Sekol 
Yeah, I can answer this in a number of ways because there's so much activity right now. What I would encourage people listening there's a lot of passion out there. And I've seen a marked shift in the amount of employees that want to engage on this topic. So the first thing I would say is, get ready for a deluge of people coming to you asking you for what your company is doing about this topic because it is real. And what's amazing is the best leaders, I think, are capturing that momentum and they're really trying to drive change, because when you have somebody passionate about sustainability and who understands your business, coincidently amazing things can happen. Long term I think, you know, this is going to remain a data challenge, I think over the long term. The biggest problem right now is pulling together information. And the reason is, it's hard right now, most of this data exists either inside the company and it's considered like competitive data, so they won't share it. Or it's published out in something like a CSR or sustainability or ESG report in a PDF where you can't get to that data. And so it's very hard for companies who are managing supply chains to kind of understand their impact. And it's hard for governments to understand what the companies and utilities are doing to really put the company where they need to be or put the countries that they operate in where they need to be. I think long term we're going to see kind of a democratization of sustainability data across economies across markets, so that everybody can make the most responsible decision possible. I think it's probably five to seven to ten years out, but in the conversations I've been having, especially with financial services customers, it's in need in order to address risk in order to stop what's happening and lower risk. It's something that we're just going to have to keep driving towards.

Laura 
Yeah, and I think we see that we've had some guests on Chelle Gentemann talked about her project with TOPS and NASA and a lot of Environmental Consultants and nonprofits are collecting their data and putting it together and trying to come up with their regional solution. So it makes sense that we now have access globally or in the cloud. Now, let's collaborate on that information. So, right, that's awesome. And you mentioned investments a couple of times we've had Ted Janulis on the show when he talked about investing in oceans. What advice do you have for ESG investing and sustainable impact investing? Is there a difference between the two of those?

Matthew Sekol 
Oh, yeah. Oh, totally. So then there's a third thing. So let's start with the third thing,

Laura
Which is the third thing?

Matthew Sekol 
There's always a third thing. So let's start with philanthropy. Philanthropy is a clear way for companies to have an impact with people and try to funnel people who are doing the impactful projects the money that they need in order to get some sort of thing done, could be related to their business, but likely isn't right. Microsoft, for example. It's a little bit less philanthropic, but we run this thing called the climate Innovation Fund, where we're trying to invest in startup companies that need funds to get over kind of that valley of death, specifically, mostly around carbon removal projects, but also water and waste projects. But from a sustainable investment perspective, those projects are largely on the greening of things, right. Those are the projects where a company is trying to greenify their campus or make the transition from dirty fossil fuels to green energy with the solar or wind farm or something. When a company makes an investment in an ESG project downstream it's usually to address some kind of risk, or create a new opportunity. Like always think risks whenever I say ESG think risks and opportunities because it could go either way. So it could for a company making investments. It could go along any of those paths. If you're talking about like, you know, I'm a retail investor and I want to make some sort of, you know, investment decision. Again, you have to read what the fund manager or what the financial product is offering and if it's not clear, I'd say probably the best and then because you might not get what you're what you think you're getting. In fact, on that perspective, it is conflated so badly. I'm on Twitter and there was an author I follow and he'd said I will never invest in ESG again, because he thought he was investing in something that was helping to solve climate change. But that's not necessarily what ESG investing is about. It's about those risks and opportunities for the company. So actually, another way to think about it is sustainability is the impact of the company on the world. ESG is the impact of the world on the company. So be sure be clear what you want to get into before you make any sort of investment.

Laura 
 A very big distinction.

Matthew Sekol 
Yeah, right. Right.

Nic 
Well said though,

Laura 
yeah. And then along the lines of investing, I saw that you're on the on your LinkedIn that you're on the advisory committee of Morgan Stanley's index level Fund, which invests in female and diverse lead founded startups. Which sounds really cool. What kind of businesses are they funding?

Matthew Sekol 
Oh, it's usually tech lead. So Admittedly, I tend to see ESG and everything. So whenever I see a company, I'm like, they're solving an ESG problem. But really, you know, this was something interesting. I have a capital markets background. Morgan Stanley was one of my customers. And they kind of came to me and somebody else at Microsoft, who's my close friend and said, Hey, we, we have this fund. It's going to be investing in early stage female and diverse-led and founded startups. It's called The Next Level fund. It's spun out of this really interesting group at Morgan Stanley called the multicultural Innovation Lab, which focuses on even earlier stage startups and helping them and so we went to our treasury group and got funding for it and now I sit on the LP advisory committee so once a month it's I told them on the call, I'm like, This is my favorite call every month, I have 90 minutes to talk about amazing companies. And then what's interesting is, there are a lot of technology first companies as you would expect with startups, you know, I take a look at them and I try to see how I can help them do technology better because we're a technology company. So I'll get them integrated, you know, into our different product groups or different people who might be able to help help them succeed. So yeah, it's definitely one of the most favorite things I do.

Nic 
That's really great. I'm glad you get to do that. And I Yeah, best call of your week. Obviously, it didn't happen this week, hopefully. And, you know, because I won't take it personally, I promise. No, I'm kidding. I'm kidding.

Matthew Sekol 
I'm trying to think. This week has been so crazy. I honestly can't remember Monday.

Nic 
I know. I know. Yeah. We were talking about that a little earlier. But you also you said earlier you know like you there's lots of people on the show. They have all these crazy stories about the environment. And I think actually we I want to talk about one of the stories you have with the environment, your experience with it, because everybody does have some experience with the environment no matter what, right no matter what your job is. The earth is here and it does let it make its presence known. What is your story with Hurricane as Isaias and how does it inform us about the environmental impacts we're seeing all over the world.

Matthew Sekol 
Oh, my gosh, so I live in a little bit of a rural area in Pennsylvania, and I'm up on a hill it's about I think it's about, I don't know 500 feet above sea level maybe but it kind of slopes down into a valley and the behind me are like very small Appalachian mountains which are not mountains if you've ever seen the Rocky Mountains, but they're there. So this is like my backyard. And I've lived here my wife and I've lived here. Oh my gosh, 16-17 years now. We're on a hill never had any sort of issue with any sort of severe weather. Now, because we're on the hill we do get severe winds. There's a gap in the mountains out that way and like the wind just whips through here. So we've lost siding in the past but like that's always been a thing. But when when Hurricane Isaias came through in August of 2020 We ended up for the first time in I think at the time it was let's see that would have been 15 years into our house. We got water in the basement and it was coming in everywhere from the backside of our house. And so what was happening was the wind was so high and the rain was so intense it was pushing the siding above the patio door. There were two problems, this is one it was pushing the siding above the patio door like in in and water was just pouring in right now on our first floor. And then the second problem was we have like French drains all over the like the house. There's two of them, and then the rain gutters like some of them go straight down into the French drain and then out. And the second problem was it was such a high volume in such a short time which is something that has started happening more often that the water just started coming up from the ground into the basement. Again I'm on a hill so, all of this is happening. It's pouring rain. It's maybe like 50 ish degrees was really cool. I'm outside in the rain with a ladder on like these paver patio steps that we have. Nobody's holding the ladder. I'm trying to like duct tape plastic on the watery side of the house. Tried to get it to stop to come in. Then my daughter comes running up from the basement she's like we got water in the basement now it's so the kid, we we went through every tile we had we my parents ran up some sump pumps. Luckily the damage wasn't that bad. But it happened again, not as bad. A year later. It wasn't coming in the same spots, but it started coming in like the window wells of the basement. I said to my wife, I'm like we've been here for so long, but we've never had winds like that and the volume of rain at once which it's that particular the volume of area at once is becoming an issue in Pennsylvania because when that happens as I'm sure many of your listeners know it doesn't contribute to the groundwater just kind of it sits in areas all over the place and it's just a mess. It is a complete mess. So what amazes me is, what amazes me most about stories like that is I'm hearing the more often from people who don't work in this space. Like my mother in law told me like they just had flooding up at her house this past spring and it moved like a big railroad tie like five feet up against this tree and she's eighty-something. She couldn't move it. And then like along the edge of her road, the gravel like all washed away and now she has to refill it. And I'm hearing more and more stories like that as I get out into the community. And I think it's, what I'm hoping is it's starting to change people's minds about climate change. Like there's it's not just a freak weather event anymore. They're like, this is starting to happen more and more often. And maybe maybe there's something all that climate change I keep hearing about.

Nic 
Yeah, it's funny how. Yeah, it doesn't seem to care very much about our thoughts and opinions are it just does what it does, you know, right.

Laura  
We can thrown it a DC quote there about people needing dramatic examples to shake them out of their apathy.

[Comics]

Nic 
Yes. And now, we're getting consistent examples on on a daily basis. It seems.

Matthew Sekol
It's frightening.

Nic
Yeah. I mean, yeah. And there's certain parts of the country that the drought we have in the Southwest is a great example of that. And it's there is no end in sight for any of that. So, yeah, it is a wild time, but okay. All right. Well, we did clear out a little bit here because now we're going to talk comics. This is very important, because I don't think we've done that on the show yet. So I'm gonna nerd out a little bit. But my first big question for you is DC or Marvel? And then the incredibly unfair who's your favorite?

Matthew Sekol 
Oh my gosh, so I am a DC guy for comic books. Total Marvel fan for content that like movies and TV, which Yeah, is interesting in the house. As a matter of fact, you can't see it over here, I have a whole bunch of Batman stuff on my left. Oh, my gosh. And your second question, who's the? Oh, my gosh, who's the my favorite?

Nic 
I know it's an impossible question. I know it is. I mean,

Matthew Sekol 
it is it's it's probably Batman. Now. I mean, I got Yes, yeah, it's Batman.

Nic  
If you said Superman that call would have ended. Good that you said that. Okay, so did you see the you see the most recent Batman movie?

Matthew Sekol 
I did not. I haven't. I have mostly because of COVID and we have three kids. So we never got out but I need to pick it up.

Nic 
Now. It's good and it's long Yeah, that's I think that's the consensus. It's good and long. No, it was an Emo Batman. And so that's, that's my kind of Batman.

Laura
I have a confession. I couldn't finish it. I couldn't do it.

Nic
Really? Wow.

Laura
And I love Batman. Love, love. Love.

Nic 
It is about 35 minutes too long. But okay, so So where did the love of comics come from? What is the background?

Matthew Sekol 
I was, so I'm a huge Snoopy fan. So I always grew up reading comics. Yeah, comics. But then it wasn't to my wife's detriment. It wasn't until after we got married, that I got into comic books. And so what happened was, oh my gosh, I don't know if it was image or somebody started publishing like, a Transformers comics, and I'm Gen X. So I'm like, Oh my gosh, I gotta get Transformers comics. Are you kidding me? So I went out and bought Transformer comics so like, this is actually not that I was an English major. I'm like, I love to read. Yeah, because I can pick it up. I can read it for five minutes and you know, move on. And then quickly I found DC's Vertical Line at the time was publishing I think, Why the Last Man? And then Fables and then I was just like, this is the whole thing now. That was that was probably almost 20 years ago. Yeah.

Nic 
Yeah.I love that. Your wife's detriment?

Matthew Sekol 
Very much.

Nic 
Oh, that's so fun. Is she a Marvel fan. Is that what's happening now?

Matthew Sekol 
No, no, that is that is me. And that is me and the kids. Yeah, yes. We're very much opposite.

Nic 
Oh, that's so great. And we also had Dawn Wright on the show from Esri, and she has a similar love of Legos that you do. And she does the preset builds, which is what I did as well. And I don't know So are you a preset guy? Or are you a build your own guy?

Matthew Sekol 
I have to do presets. So let me tell you the story of The Lego Movie, right? I'm sitting there in the theater with my family and I'm on one end. We have three kids. They were in the middle my wife's on the other end, and like I have models. You know your listeners can't see it. But I have models all over my this room. And we're sitting there watching The Lego Movie, and I don't want to spoil it. So stop listening, I suppose a bad movie, go see it.

Nic
Spoiler alert.

Matthew Sekol 
So I'm sitting there and we're watching it and when they reveal who President Business is, I just see my wife lean forward in the seat and kind of looked up the aisle and look at me. So that is that is the type of builder that I am.

Nic 
Oh my gosh, that is. That's incredible for lots of reasons, especially considering the message of the movie.

Matthew Sekol 
Right? I've been open the kids have their own Legos, dad has his Legos. I don't use glue though admittedly, but I do enjoy. You know what to be honest on the COVID when I have to sit and focus on calls, I will pull out a Lego and start building it because it helps otherwise I'm clicking everywhere. Yeah. It helps me kind of focus.

Nic 
Yeah, that's incredible, it's I mean, like say that to do it. The joy of Lego just one of those things that I never thought in a million years. You do it as a kid and then you know, two things happen either you start you know going to IKEA, and that's your new Legos, or you you just keep Legos. Right? That's kind of just the joy of it. So we only have a couple of questions left and so you, you and your wife do have something that's something in common, gardening in particular. So what's in your garden?

Matthew Sekol  
So we actually don't have that in common.

Nic
Laura! You're killing me.

Laura 
Listen, I saw this on your on your social media, there's a garden and it has to I don't know You looked like you were having fun doing it.

Matthew Sekol  
I do. I am the I Am the construction person for the garden. So I am the one who ran the water line down I built the beds I help rototill oh my gosh, which I know releases carbon and is bad, but I didn't have a choice. And we also get to like a shovel. I do all the like prep and then it's her one hobby. So like I'm into Legos and I've done other hobbies like comics. Gardening is really her one hobby and I think we have a eight, four by eight raised beds plus two, two by four raised beds. Oh my gosh, we have everything down. So we're in Pennsylvania, but somehow we grow watermelons here which I didn't realize we could grow we have potatoes down there getting tons of lettuce, tomatoes. They're not ready yet, but they're coming out just tons of different vegetables. She got some zucchini out this week. And it's it's always great. She'll go down the morning and pick it up and then we'll have it for dinner with the kids.

Nic
That's so cool.

Matthew Sekol 
Yeah, it is really cool.

Nic 
Yeah, So a practical hobbies, unlike your Legos.

Matthew Sekol 
Right, right?

Laura 
Legos for dinner.

Matthew Sekol 
You can't do that. No.

Nic 
Not advised. No we are running out of time and I hate to say it because we've we've had a lot of fun with you today. But is there anything else you'd like to talk about before we let you go?

Matthew Sekol 
The only thing I think out of everything I've said, if you can figure out a way to take your skills no matter what they are and and apply it to the challenges that businesses are facing. Maybe a little bit outside your comfort zone. I think you'll find a lot of success. I certainly had that applying like my English degree to my technology and then applying technology to sustainability. I think a lot of people kind of miss that. It's okay. And I know I've heard somebody talk about this on your podcasts before. It's okay to pivot careers. Like don't be afraid to especially its if it's in the service of sustainability.

Nic 
Yeah, that's a great message. And I'm glad that you get to share it again. So before we let you go tell people where they can find you.

Matthew Sekol 
Sure. So I'm on LinkedIn and Twitter. I believe the only Matthew Sekol out there, so you should be able to search me up.

Nic 
Thank you Matthew. We appreciate your time.

Laura 
Yeah Thanks

[Outro]

Laura
That's our show. Thank you, Matthew for taking time out of your busy schedule to join us today. Please be sure to check us out each and every Friday. Don't forget to subscribe, rate and review. Bye

Transcribed by https://otter.ai