Voiceover: Welcome to the Experts Only Podcast, sponsored by Clean Capital, where we explore the intersection of energy, innovation and finance. Our host is Clean Capital’s co-founder and former federal chief sustainability officer, Jon Powers. Learn how Clean Capital is revolutionizing clean energy finance, and find more episodes at cleancapital.com, iTunes, or wherever you get your podcasts. If you like what you hear, be sure to subscribe and leave us a five star review five star review. Jon Powers: Hi, this is Jon Powers. I’m the host of Clean Capital’s Experts Only podcast where we explore the intersection of energy, innovation, and finance. Today, we’re going to be talking to a real rockstar, Adam Gardner, who is the vocalist and guitarist for Guster, but he’s also the director and the co-founder of Reverb. I first met Adam when I was working at the White House and was really excited about the innovative things that Reverb was bringing to help green the music industry and engage fans and the important issues of sustainability and climate change. Jon Powers: Hey Adam, thank you so much for joining us at Clean Capital’s Experts Only podcast. Really excited to talk to you about some of the amazing things you guys are doing at Reverb and you’ve done throughout your career. We don’t normally get an opportunity to talk to folks in the rock and roll industry here at Clean Capital. You’ve got an amazing personal journey. Can you talk to our audience a little bit about your personal journey in music? And then we’ll talk a little bit about Reverb and the stuff you’re doing there today. And for folks that don’t know, I mentioned this in the opening, but Adam is a guitar in vocalist for Guster and actually met his band members as freshman year of college. So this is the 25th anniversary of Guster. And so tell us a little bit about that journey. Adam Gardner: Sure. Well, first of all, thanks for having me on. This is cool. I met my band mates at Tufts University, the first day of school, literally. So we’d all played in high school bands, and this wasn’t supposed to be our careers. We were just freshman in college meeting each other saying, “Oh, you played in a band? I played in a band. Maybe we should jam sometime.” It was really that casual. It was not ever intended to be what it has become, but here we are 25 years into it and still going. Adam Gardner: It was one of those things where I think honestly, it was as easy. It was just our friends showing up and saying, “Hey, you guys don’t suck. You should keep doing this. This is actually quite good.” And we were lucky that we were in Boston, because we were able to do a lot of busking in Harvard Square on the streets, and back then, we had a cassette tape that we were selling for five bucks out of our guitar case in Harvard Square. And the fact that we were going to college together helped a lot, because we were playing other friends’ colleges and playing around New England. Adam Gardner: And we got really lucky early on where again, this is back a long time, it was in ’91, ’92. Email wasn’t a thing. The internet really wasn’t a thing. Certainly digital music was not. This was way before Napster. The way you got music out, there was hard copies of cassettes and CDs, so a lot of what we developed was very grassroots marketing, where we just had to either take to literally to the streets and play in Harvard Square or going to other people’s colleges. And then just through those two things, we ended up selling quite a few tapes and CDs on our own, literally out of our backpacks and guitar cases. We sold 50,000 copies. Adam Gardner: Well I should give credit to, we also had Guster reps so there are other people that was great. They’d come home or they’d go to Head Of The Charles or whatever and see us and bring a tape back to their friends in college and they’d bring those home. And so all of a sudden word had spread literally one person at a time. And some of those people got back in touch with us and said, “Hey, I saw you guys in Boston and I went back to school in Ohio and all my friends want to have copies of your CDs, but there’s nowhere to get them.” So we just basically brought them on as a rep, whoever got in touch with us and said, “Hey, we’ll send you 10 CDs. If you sell them to your friends, give us the money that you’ve sold it for, and away we go.” Adam Gardner: And we started doing that. At one point, we had over 3000 reps across the country that were all selling 10 to 50 CDs each. So it was this whole little scheme. It was just out a necessity. It wasn’t a grand plan, it just happened really organically. But that’s how we did it. And we just started touring. So by the time we graduated from Tufts University, we had money in the bank. We financed a record, we were ready to finance our second record and we had a van and we were ready to tour. So everyone else is freaking out about what to do with their lives. We had a business in place and a tour planned and we were kind of off to the races the moment we graduated. Jon Powers: Yeah. How was that conversation? You guys are launching a startup when it comes down to it, just a different type of startup in the music industry. When you’re having this conversation graduating, people are getting ready to go become an analyst at an accounting firm or go get their first desk job. And here you guys are already with revenue coming in. Was there a sort of come to Jesus conversation with your band mates? Like, “Okay, are we really going to do this?” Or was it just happening? Adam Gardner: That really happened probably junior year, maybe even sophomore year. Because I was actually singing in an acapella group at Tufts, and believe it or not, it was very, whatever. It was an esteemed acapella group in that small teeny community, which has obviously grown up quite a bit since Glee came out and since Pitch Perfect and movies like that have come out. Again before high school musical. Acapella music outside of the Boston area and New England was pretty small potatoes. Adam Gardner: But the group I was in was very popular on campus. It was super fun. These were my best friends. The year before, I had left for the band, we had won the national competition of college acapella groups, whatever that was worth. But whatever, we sang at Carnegie Hall, it was a thing. So for me, I remember having that moment with the band mates just saying, “If we’re not taking this beyond college, then I’m going to stay in this acapella group, because we’re bigger than this band.” And these are my best friends. This is fun for me, but if this is going to be something that goes beyond college, I’ll leave, because it was getting ridiculous. They were called the Beelzebubs, the Tufts Beelzebubs. Between the Beelzebubs and the band, which was then called Gus, and still trying to go to college, I was gigging four nights a week and trying to graduate. Jon Powers: What did you study in school? Adam Gardner: I was a psychology major, so it just came to a head, for sure. And that’s when we actually hinged it all on this. It was funny. Basically it’s a college circuit showcase where if you get accepted to it, you perform in front of all the student activities boards across the country that book talent onto their campus. And I hinged it on that. I said, “If we get accepted to this showcase, I’ll leave the acapella group. And if we don’t, we won’t.” Adam Gardner: And we got accepted and it was a big deal because that’s how we started. We started playing other colleges, we started actually getting paid significant money to do it, and we were able to do that all while still going to college and not really having any significant expenses ourselves. So we were able to bank all that. So as silly as it sounded at the time, and certainly now it sounds silly, it actually is what allowed us to go beyond college, because we then saw we have the ability to turn this into a business. Jon Powers: Right. You have market validation at that point, that’s what we call it in the startup space. So I could talk to you about this part of it all day, but obviously before I transition to talk about the sustainability side, where did you guys come up with the name Gus or now Guster? Adam Gardner: I wish there was an awesome, because I know you, Jon, I’m not going to tell you. We have several lies about how we got the name. The truth is so boring that it’s not even worth telling, but I’ll just say that we were originally called Gus, there were too many Guses, there was some confusion in the marketplace, including a death metal, speed metal band from Canada also named Gus. It was like, all right, we’re not that, we’re not them. There’s confusion. And when we were getting signed to a major label, we were like, we should change the name, but not too far from the original name because we had sold so many records and had a market awareness as Gus. We had fans, so we didn’t want to confuse people, so we just added -ter. That’s the end of it. Jon Powers: That’s it? The branding exercise. Adam Gardner: Yeah. We knew that we wouldn’t have any other challenges. There wasn’t another Guster out there. On a legal level, we knew that would be a safe name. Jon Powers: Well, to change topics, you and I first met when I was working at the White House and I was sort of responsible for greening the federal government. And we were doing an event around other industries, greening music, greening sports, and this sort of ties back to the work you’re doing with the organization you co-founded called Reverb. I want to talk a little bit about Reverb, also want to talk a little bit about how you and your wife started Reverb. You talked about meeting your band mates your freshman year. From previous conversations, I know you also met your wife, Lauren your freshman year. It’s a pretty exciting time. I’m not sure there’s anything from my freshman year of college that’s stuck with me. You’ve got a career and a family out of it. It’s pretty amazing, Adam Gardner: It’s amazing how crucial a decision it was to go to Tufts. And I was like, “Oh, I like Boston. I’ll go to Tufts,” and then my entire… Jon Powers: So in your own words, tell us a little bit about Reverb, about Reverb’s mission and how you guys go around implementing things. Adam Gardner: Sure. Yeah. So Reverb, just to back up a second, came out of, I think I saw what a mess the music, especially the live music and touring industry was as far as solid waste and energy use and just everybody traveling to and from shows. It was just so obvious, at the end of the night there was plastic all over the floor or all over the lawn or wherever the show was. Everything is disposable. People were commuting from all out of major city hubs out to these larger venues, and we’re just feeling badly about it. Adam Gardner: And then meanwhile, as you mentioned, I met Lauren, who’s always been an environmental activist even since her freshman year in school. So when we eventually moved in together, I was living one way with her and became an environmentalist through osmosis, really, from just doing what she did and living as she lived. And that became part of just my ethos, and I just felt the dissonance between how I lived at home and how I lived on the road. So Reverb was really born- Jon Powers: Add some color to that. Add some color to why is it that you think about these venues where they ramp up and down for a couple hours every couple nights a week, but it’s very energy intensive. It’s thousands upon thousands of people bringing in plastic water bottles and drinking beer out of plastic cups. Talk a little bit about that and what you saw. Adam Gardner: It makes sense on a certain level as to how it got to where it is now, as far as the level of intensity of it all, because every concert’s its own thing. It really becomes its own little city. If you’re talking about a larger tour, that can be 20,000 people that are all gathering from 40 miles outside of a city. So you have all these people driving to and from, a lot of these places don’t have access to public transportation in a significant way. And I think just for whatever reason, a lot of the waste creating, there’s concessions there, so people are out there and they’re buying beer or they’re buying nachos or whatever it is. And there wasn’t a lot of thought put into the consequences and the waste that’s created and where it all goes. Adam Gardner: I think when we first came into it and started thinking about it, venues were just trying to make sure that they weren’t littering. Like, “There’s no problem, we’re cleaning all this up. It’s all going in landfill. It’s not just going into the woods and washing away.” It’s like, you are filling a landfill, and a lot of that stuff does end up, all this plastic does end up in waterways or clogging landfills for hundreds, thousands of years. Here is what is happening, and here is how much fuel is being burned when people aren’t carpooling or there isn’t access to public transportation. How do we help change all that? So yeah, it was just staring us right in the face. It was just so obvious. Anyone who stuck around at the end of a festival or a concert has seen how much waste is there. And I think there’s been progress on that front. Jon Powers: Yeah. And you guys have been around for about 13 years. What have you seen change? What are some of the innovative solutions you’ve seen come into these venues? Adam Gardner: Yeah. When we started, this is a handful of years before Inconvenient Truth came out. We started in 2004, so nobody was even thinking, like, “What do you mean by biodiesel? What’s a carbon footprint?” Nobody even knew, this was all new. Green was a color. Sustainability wasn’t a word, really. Nobody really understood too much about this. Environmentalism in the music industry prior to that was about donating dollars to environmental organizations, which obviously is still really important, but nobody was really looking too close at their own footprint, except for just a small handful of artists like Neil Young, who’s using biodiesel buses and trucks, and Willie Nelson and Bonnie Ray. Actually, Bonnie Ray was really our mentor. And we were part of her foundation called ARIA Foundation, called Artist Resources in Action. We really used her model. Adam Gardner: So Lauren came out this whole idea. To back up a second, I came home one too many times complaining about what a mess the road was. And I talked to a bunch of other bands that felt similarly. I think at the time we were touring with Jon Mayer and Maroon 5 and some other bands, Dave Matthews. And I remember having conversations with them about what a shame it is that we have this negative impact on the environment when that’s not how we behave at home and it’s not part of who we are as people and what we want to do. It’s part of our business, but then we just kind of shrugged our shoulders and said, “Well, but this is what we do.” I think I told that story to Lauren and she’s like, “Well, don’t just sit around, shrugging your shoulders at each other. Let’s do something about it.” And that’s where Reverb was really born. Adam Gardner: And we were lucky in that. So the idea is to green the tour itself, but I would say more importantly from an impact perspective is to use that as a model to ask fans to engage in practices that they can take on in their own lives to make a difference and to reduce their impact and the impact around them for a more positive and sustainable future. Jon Powers: Yeah. Let’s come back to the fans. And I think some of the artists in a second, but just in terms of the venues themselves, what are some of the changes you guys have seen or helped implement that you think are getting traction? Adam Gardner: It’s moving slowly with venues. A lot of what we’ve done has been despite what venues weren’t, and that’s why I think we were needed so much on tour, to help make the tours more sustainable because venues weren’t doing much. But that being said, there definitely have been venues finally making progress. When we first came on the scene, they weren’t even really recycling in any real way. It was a low bar from the very beginning, but now we’re seeing that recycling is everywhere now and it’s actually real. It’s not just being collected and thrown in a landfill. Adam Gardner: We’re seeing composting happening in earnest now in a number of venues. We’re seeing solar power being used in earnest. There’s even some venues that are taking a look at where are the nearest waterways that we might be affecting, and where’s our runoff coming from? And let’s think about permeable pavement for buses and trucks and making sure that there’s shore power. And let’s look at where we’re at least talk to our local utility about where the power’s coming from. And at least if there’s a green power option, let’s choose that. Adam Gardner: And so there’s been a number of things like that. Of course, solid waste is something that it’s been so obvious for venues that they’re talking to concessionaires about at least recyclable, if not compostable catering items like plates and bowls and cups, et cetera. So there’s definitely been some headway there. I think a lot of it came from the fact that because we had been working with so many artists and fans, I think enough artists started asking venues to do these things, and then some of those asks actually turned into prerequisites. Like with Jack Johnson before even this last tour and actually just started in 2008, when the asks turned into prerequisites for booking the date, we would send over basically an environmental contract rider saying, you need to agree to X, Y, Z. Adam Gardner: It was actually a lot more than X, Y, Z. It was A through Z. It was a long number of things that we collectively wanted to see them change, and they had to agree to those things before the date was booked. The book would happen at booking, so the booking agent. And so if they wanted Jack Johnson to play their venue, they had to agree to these things. And so that was a game changer, as far as seeing the venues really shift. So for example, Live Nation recently, they’re no longer ordering more plastic straws, because they’re realizing these straws end up in the oceans, waterways and landfills. So that’s a small step, but actually when you’re talking about a huge company like Live Nation. Jon Powers: Yeah. Thousands and thousands of straws. Adam Gardner: Oh, millions and millions. Yeah. It’s not nothing. Jon Powers: So you mentioned Jack, what are some of the other artists that you guys are working with? Adam Gardner: Geez, so many. This summer, and we’ve been very fortunate in that a lot of the bands that we started working with when we first formed 13 years ago, it’s actually our 14th season now, we still work with. So Dave Matthews Band we’ve been working with from the beginning, Maroon 5 from the beginning. We’re working newly with Zac Brown Band. We’ve been working with Jack Johnson for a long time, Phish a long time, Barenaked Ladies a long time, been working with Dead and Company. There’s a large number of artists, and it’s been neat to move into some different genres as well. So from population with Maroon 5 and Walk the Moon and Alabama Shakes to country with Zac Brown Band and Willie Nelson and Kasey Musgraves to even some hip hop with Drake and Wiz Khalifa, and a little bit with electronic music with Bassnectar. Jon Powers: It’s interesting. You talked about those different genres. What is it about music that sort of occupies this unique place and encourages people to adopt a type of lifestyle or can help drive culture change and really help us move forward to develop a more sustainable economy and lifestyle? Adam Gardner: This is, to me, the heart of what Reverb really does. Of course, we’re greening the music industry up and we’re getting people to make small changes at concerts directly and in their lives later. It definitely adds up to real impact, but I think the largest impact is that we’re actually exactly what you’re suggesting, we’re shifting, especially the younger generation. We’re shifting their culture into a culture of activism where yes, it’s important that they took the action, what those actions add up to as far as impact, but the fact that they’re even getting used to being an active participant in solving these crises that we’re facing. And climate change is upon us. Now is the time. It’s past the time, frankly. So getting that folded into the DNA of our culture is such a huge part of what Reverb does, and we’re lucky that we partner with these major musicians that have such reach, but also depth of connection with their fans. Adam Gardner: I think unlike any other, it’s not just celebrity. I think Leonardo DiCaprio is an incredible environmental activist and the work he does is so important, but the connection he has to his fans is not the same as Dave Matthews or Jack Johnson’s connection. These fans are tattooing lyrics from these artists on their bodies. It’s a different level of relationship when an artist that size rolls through a major city in a biodiesel fuel bus and the concert’s offset by renewable energy, and they’re composting backstage and we’re offering free water to fans to reduce plastic waste. And they’re supporting local and national nonprofit groups and their campaigns, and they’re asking their fans to participate directly in their efforts. It’s just a different conversation altogether when it’s coming from them. And they’re not only setting the example by having their tour be green, but they’re also showing their passion and letting their passion ignite the passion of their fans. Jon Powers: Yeah. So I’m a fan, I’m walking into a Zac Brown Band show or I’m walking into a Phish concert or Jack Johnson show, and I walk into Reverb’s eco village. Help add some color to what that means for a fan and what your team out there is doing to engage them as they walk in. Adam Gardner: Yeah, that’s a good point. So I’ll tell you a little bit about exactly what that looks like. So we actually have staff folded into, let’s say it’s Dave Matthews Band on their tour. So we had most recently, Dave and Tim did a tour together. Dave Matthews and Tim Reynolds. We had two staff that were part of his crew, just like they were a guitar tech or a sound man, but their jobs were to green the tour itself behind the scenes and then set up the eco village in the front of house where the fans are coming in the Concourse. So where you would see merchandise or where you would buy a beer or wherever, the concourse area of the venue, we have a number of tents that are set up with local nonprofit groups, national environmental campaigns. Adam Gardner: We’ll have a water station there where people can fill up right there with filtered water. Dave actually drew a rhino. Every tour and every artist has a different focus to what they want to have fans participate in, so this particular Dave tour that we just finished was about wildlife conservation; in particular, the rhino. So he drew this rhino, we put it on a Nalgene water bottle, We have this program called Rock and Refill. Fans can donate 15 bucks to get a Nalgene bottle and fill it with free water all night and then have this incredible limited edition merchandise item from Dave Matthews, something he drew himself. So that’s one piece of it, then right next to it would be a wildlife conservation organization. Adam Gardner: There’ll be a local nonprofit group that’s doing work within that particular area of the concert that night, so fans can plug in and they can participate. They can volunteer, they can take action right there on site. They can charge their cell phone with the solar charging station. So there’s a number of different things. We’re showing technology, we’re connecting them to local and national environmental groups. They can take action right there that has direct impact. They can commit to doing action later and connect with their organizations in their own hometowns. Adam Gardner: So there’s a lot of different things. And again, for us, we recognize that it’s a concert. People are not necessarily there to learn anything or do anything. When it comes from the band and the band shows that they care and what they’re doing and ask them to participate, and again, we make it fun. Like, “Hey, there’s this eco-friendly guitar that Dave signed. You can win that if you participate in this or Jack Johnson, you can win best seats in the house if you participate in this.” Jon Powers: You guys have a great video sort of outlining this. We’re going to try to host it when we host the podcast on our website. And if not, you can go to Reverb.org, R-E-V-E-R-B.org to see it and outline some of the amazing things that the team is doing on tour. So lastly, for folks that are listening, most likely, they’re not listening, sitting in a parking lot, heading to a show. What’s their call to action? How can they get involved? How can they support the work you’re doing? Adam Gardner: Well, definitely you just mentioned our website, Reverb.org. They can see what we’re up to there, and there’s a number of different campaigns that we run through different artists, so they can see what we’re doing with various bands. And we also have some venue based programs and we also work with festivals. So they can start there just to see what’s happening and plug in a number of different campaigns we have running with our artists. And outside of that, it’s simple things like thinking about what is your impact? What’s happening with your workplace? How much disposable junk is going in the landfill because of single use plastic water bottles or because of the waste that’s just happening at your commissary, your workplace or wherever it is? Your school, your religious institutions. Adam Gardner: For me, I would start looking at my own impact. All right, what am I doing in my house? What am I doing? Okay, now what’s happening at work, and what’s happening among my friends or my communities? And just starting to look at how I can influence the people around me. And that’s exactly how we’ve started. My own band’s doing, now wait, I know other bands, how do we start influencing our peers? And I think that holds true for anybody. You don’t have to be a rock star to make a difference. Adam Gardner: And I think that’s a really important factor, is that any individual has their own sphere of influence. And that could be a kid influencing his parents, that could be parents influencing the school system, that could be college kids influencing their entire university’s campus, and that’s its own ecosystem. And it could be so many different things. And at the end of the day, we have to shift our culture to a place where we don’t only agree. We need more than the majority of people to agree that not just to agree, an overwhelming majority to agree that there’s a problem, but now feel moved to do something about it. Jon Powers: Yeah. I challenge folks who are listening to go to Reverb.org if you get a chance. Watch some of the videos, see what they’re doing, even donate, help them expand their ability to influence and help get more folks on board. And Adam, I always leave and end with the final question for everyone, as someone who’s so established with an amazing career, if you could go back and sit down with yourself coming out of high school or even college, what advice would you give yourself? Adam Gardner: Hmm. That’s an interesting one. Jon Powers: Obviously, go to Tufts. Meet my wife and my band. Adam Gardner: Yeah. Definitely leave the acapella group and do the band thing was a good call. On the environmental front, that you can make a difference. It sounds corny, but it’s true. And I think it’s kind of proven itself out, at least in my life, that an individual can make a difference. If you start thinking about how you can start with yourself, start small, take baby steps, but how can you influence the other people around you, either directly or by example? That’s how it’s going to work. It’s the only way it’s going to work. Jon Powers: Yeah. Well, thank you so much for joining us on Clean Capital’s Experts Only Podcast. It was great talking to you. Adam Gardner: Thanks, Jon. Thanks for having me. Jon Powers: Thank you so much to Adam Gardner, the founder and director of Reverb for joining us today, you can learn more at Reverb.org. And I’d also like to thank our producers, Emily Connor and Lauren Glickman for the hard work they’re put into this podcast. If you have ideas, folks that you’d like to have on this show, please email us. You can reach us at www.cleancapital.com, and just look for Experts Only podcast. Thanks so much, and talk to you next time.