The Grand Challengers Podcast

What if the most important infrastructure in any building is the people inside it? 

Jennifer Koster has spent more than 25 years building companies across tech, construction and regenerative development. Along the way she reached a conclusion most engineers never get to: humans are a system too, and we need our own infrastructure to function properly. In this episode we explore both sides of that coin, the built infrastructure and the human one. 

For practitioners, Jennifer explains why circularity is still what the built environment gets most wrong. Moving a light fixture into another building is not circularity. Designing a building so that none of it ends up in landfill is. She describes how WerkWell grew from an independent construction management firm (on her figures, projects run 30% over budget and schedule on average) into a building performance consultancy and an innovations group that brings market-proven European solutions into US projects. We cover low-carbon concrete, a particle board made from seaweed, power purchase agreements, aquifer recharge credits, and the (re)Building with Resilience symposium she co-organised after the January 2025 Los Angeles wildfires, where resilience started to look like the new definition of luxury. 

Underneath runs a very human story. A dot-com crash that wiped out everything overnight and sent her back to her teenage bedroom in Calgary. A chance conversation with contractors that became a construction career in Los Angeles. A growing unease at building enormous homes nobody lived in. And a family road trip through Europe that ended in a move to the Netherlands. Jennifer shares LivWell, her plan for regenerative communities inspired by blue zones, and her forthcoming book The Truth About Baggage, a journey from awareness to agency. 

Chapters:
0:00 Intro
1:59 Guest Intro & the predictable unpredictability of life's journey
5:36 How would Jennifer describe herself?
13:46 Jennifer's journey into construction
23:37 Decarbonization in construction
26:36 WerkWell - A new path in construction and the pivot
42:44 Resilience, a new definition of luxury
54:03 Human Infrastructure
1:09:59 The "Truth about Baggage”
1:22:28 Jennifer's Future Plans
1:23:55 What does the built environment miss?
1:25:41 Q&A Start
1:26:03 What does innovation mean to you?
1:27:38 Key moment, book, event, person
1:33:55 Time Management
1:36:44 Favourite childhood memory
1:37:30 Advice for young professioanls
1:37:56 What would you most like to be remembered for?
1:38:11 Where can people find you?
1:39:09 Final Message
1:40:15 Outro

Detailed shownotes over at: petermbach.com/podcast for more in-depth information about each episode.
Join the community over at: linkedin.com/company/tgcpodcast and let's connect across the world!

Subscribe and listen to the podcast (and do please leave a review/rating) on Spotify, Apple Music, YouTube or wherever you get your podcasts from.
Your subscription/follow will greatly help the show grow and reach a wider audience.

Hosted by Peter Marcus Bach (www.petermbach.com), follow me on: 

• X (fomerly Twitter): @petermbach 
• Instagram: @petermbach87 
• Subscribe to my channel on YouTube: www.youtube.com/c/PeterMarcusBach/

Rain falls on a suburb. It hits roofs, driveways and roads, and within minutes it is in the local creek, running high enough to flood the burrows where baby platypus are sheltering. They can swim, but they still need to breathe. A few dry weeks later the same creek is too shallow for an adult to move through safely. Tim Fletcher has spent his career in the space between those two extremes.

Tim is Professor of Urban Ecohydrology at the University of Melbourne and heads the Waterway Ecosystem Research Group. He was part of the team that built MUSIC, the model now used across Australia to demonstrate stormwater compliance, and he is lead author of the most-cited paper in urban water, the one that sorted out SUDS, LID, BMPs, WSUD and the rest of the alphabet soup. Its conclusion still surprises people. There is no correct term, and there should not be one.

We trace three eras. The Monash years, where six people, a dunce's hat and a very good mentor turned a research idea into software the industry now runs on. Little Stringybark Creek, a world-first attempt to retrofit an entire catchment to save the stream running through it, funded partly by asking residents to bid for tanks and rain gardens in a reverse auction. And Tanks for Platypus, where networked smart tanks release water seven days ahead of a storm and top the creek up when it runs low, working the way a solar battery works for the grid.

Along the way: why he calls himself a permeable engineer, why he cried in the bathroom on his first day in stormwater, and the meeting called to decide who to make redundant that instead lasted ten minutes.

Recorded in person in Lausanne, eighteen years after we met on a dark bike path with a puncture and no repair kit.

Chapters:
0:00 Intro
1:59 Guest Intro & Remembering our first encounter
6:42 Reminiscing about undergraduate times and education
10:39 How would Tim describe himself?
13:10 The WSUD Terminology Debate
21:28 The key barrier to scaling up WSUD
27:09 Tim's Monash Era
31:33 The MUSIC Model
40:40 A 101 on Ecohydrology & the Urban Stream Syndrome
43:32 The Little Stringybark Ck Living Lab
1:03:57 Tim's Tanks for Platypus Project & Real-time Control
1:22:21 What is Tim's biggest lessons learnt so far?
1:25:04 Q&A Start
1:25:12 What does innovation mean to you?
1:28:02 Key moment, book, person, event
1:31:52 If you had a magic wand?
1:33:34 Time Management
1:36:10 Favourite childhood memory
1:38:13 Biggest challenge to date?
1:43:04 Advice for young professionals
1:46:34 What is something you'll regret not doing?
1:47:50 What would you most like to be remembered for?
1:49:57 Where can people find you?
1:52:48 Final Message
1:53:23 Outro

Detailed shownotes over at: petermbach.com/podcast for more in-depth information about each episode.
Join the community over at: linkedin.com/company/tgcpodcast and let's connect across the world!

Subscribe and listen to the podcast (and do please leave a review/rating) on Spotify, Apple Music, YouTube or wherever you get your podcasts from.
Your subscription/follow will greatly help the show grow and reach a wider audience.

Hosted by Peter Marcus Bach (www.petermbach.com), follow me on: 

• X (fomerly Twitter): @petermbach 
• Instagram: @petermbach87 
• Subscribe to my channel on YouTube: www.youtube.com/c/PeterMarcusBach/

Ask ten people what a "sponge city" is and you will get ten different answers. Silvia Oppliger knows this better than most, because asking that question is how she opens almost every conversation she has. It is a good word for catching attention, she says, and a really spongy one for everything after that.

Silvia is an environmental engineer and the coordinator of the Swiss Water Association's National Sponge City Network. Over three years she has pulled federal offices, cantons, municipalities, universities, engineering and architecture associations, spatial planners, landscape architects and even the insurance sector into the same rooms. More than 800 experts across exchange events, six webinars, 80 presentations, a national information platform and a professional certification course.

We get into the parts that rarely make the conference slides. Why Article 7 of the Swiss Water Protection Act arrives too late in a project to change much. Why 26 cantons means 26 water regulations, and what happened when a working group tried to agree on one table. Why some cantonal street laws make it questionable to send rainwater from your own garden onto the road. Why the municipalities moving fastest are not the big cities.

Silvia also tells the story underneath the job. Three mother tongues before she started school. A suit bought at 27 out of nerves, and a room with 70 men in it. And the idea she keeps returning to now, which is that water professionals have to learn "architect" as a language if they want to be heard at all.

Her definition of innovation is worth the listen on its own. Ninety-five per cent of it, she argues, is not technology.

Chapters:
0:00 Intro 
1:59 Guest Intro & The Polyglot 
8:19 An environmental engineer who connects people 
13:54 Regulations and unifying 26 Cantons in Switzerland 
15:50 The road to National Sponge Cities Coordinator 
21:03 Terminology Discussion and Swiss Sponge City History 
26:05 The Swiss Sponge Cities Network 
33:46 Swiss Public and Private Water Management 
37:16 National differences in priorities and silos 
45:38 Communication and Knowledge Exchange Strategies 
50:57 Reflecting on the outputs of the first three years 
1:00:32 Where the Sponge Cities Network is heading 
1:06:35 Silvia's Future Plans 
1:07:42 Q&A Start 
1:08:05 What does innovation mean to you? 
1:09:12 Key moment, event, person 
1:12:31 Time Management 
1:15:59 Favourite childhood memory 
1:17:10 Biggest challenge to date 
1:20:42 Advice for young professionals 
1:22:27 What would you most like to be remembered for? 
1:23:24 Where can people find you? 
1:24:13 Final Message 
1:24:37 Outro 

Detailed shownotes over at: petermbach.com/podcast for more in-depth information about each episode.
Join the community over at: linkedin.com/company/tgcpodcast and let's connect across the world!

Subscribe and listen to the podcast (and do please leave a review/rating) on Spotify, Apple Music, YouTube or wherever you get your podcasts from.
Your subscription/follow will greatly help the show grow and reach a wider audience.

Hosted by Peter Marcus Bach (www.petermbach.com), follow me on: 

• X (fomerly Twitter): @petermbach 
• Instagram: @petermbach87 
• Subscribe to my channel on YouTube: www.youtube.com/c/PeterMarcusBach/

Billions in international money poured into Sarajevo after the siege ended. What got built was a city with more shopping malls and less public green space than the one that had been destroyed. Money was never the constraint. Coordination was.

Haris Piplas is Director of Integrated Urban Solutions International at Drees & Sommer and a lecturer at ETH Zürich. He trained as a landscape architect in Sarajevo, an urban designer in Berlin, and took his doctorate in architecture in Zürich. His argument is that the way the built environment carved itself into separate professions last century has left none of them able to do the actual job. Transforming a place means understanding law, media, budgets, referenda and human psychology, and no architecture school teaches any of it.

We get into what urban regeneration should and should not be, why both neighbours in an argument about one parking space have a legitimate case, how the Commit to Green project is bringing blue-green infrastructure back into a contaminated former landfill in Milan and a landslide-prone site on the edge of Barcelona, and why the recovery of Ukrainian cities cannot wait for a perfect moment that may never arrive.

Haris also talks about the two cities that raised him. Sarajevo, which lost almost everything when the Cold War ended, and Berlin, which gained almost everything. He explains why the "smart city" buzzword is more useful than its critics allow, why architectural competitions bin most of the knowledge they generate, and why the single-name genius architect is a marketing fiction worth retiring. Plus central midfield as a theory of project management, moustaches as a theory of fashion cycles, and a childhood memory from a refugee camp that he still describes as beautiful.

Chapters:
0:00 Intro
1:59 Guest Intro and The Urban Forum
4:23 Drees & Sommer & a little bit of Zurich history
9:44 The fallacy of 20th century hyperspecialization
14:37 Growing up in Sarajevo shaped Haris' drive
18:48 Urban Regeneration: what it should and shouldn't be
25:56 Geopolitics, stakeholders and scaling up urban regeneration
35:10 Baukultur, Inclusivity and the Blue-Green Infrastructure
43:15 Co-op-e-tition and horizontalizing authorship
49:54 AI and the Smart Cities Movement
54:59 A collage of Haris' project work and "bridges”
1:06:23 Heading in the right direction?
1:08:34 What excites Haris about the future?
1:10:40 Q&A Start
1:10:50 What does innovation mean to you?
1:12:45 Key Moment, Book, Person
1:17:08 Time Management
1:20:52 Favourite childhood memory
1:24:31 What would you most like to be remembered for?
1:28:17 Where can people find you?
1:29:54 Final Message
1:31:33 Outro

Detailed shownotes over at: petermbach.com/podcast for more in-depth information about each episode.
Join the community over at: linkedin.com/company/tgcpodcast and let's connect across the world!

Subscribe and listen to the podcast (and do please leave a review/rating) on Spotify, Apple Music, YouTube or wherever you get your podcasts from.
Your subscription/follow will greatly help the show grow and reach a wider audience.

Hosted by Peter Marcus Bach (www.petermbach.com), follow me on: 

• X (fomerly Twitter): @petermbach 
• Instagram: @petermbach87 
• Subscribe to my channel on YouTube: www.youtube.com/c/PeterMarcusBach/

Most of us now use AI every day. Very few of us could explain what it is actually doing.

Anastassia Lauterbach thinks that gap is the most dangerous thing about this technology, and she has built a company to close it. She is a linguist, a trained clinical psychologist, a former senior executive at Qualcomm and Deutsche Telekom, a former non-executive director at easyJet, Dun & Bradstreet and Wirecard, and now founder and CEO of AI Edutainment in Basel.

In this episode she draws a line most companies and governments have quietly erased. AI literacy is not AI fluency. Fluency is knowing how to prompt. Literacy is understanding why every large language model hallucinates, where your data goes when you upload it, and when the honest answer is to not use AI at all. Invest only in fluency, she argues, and what you scale is mediocrity.

We work through the four principles of her Responsible AI white paper: changing the architecture itself, radical transparency about failure, literacy as understanding rather than tool training, and the fusion of STEM with the humanities. Along the way we discuss the elevation of AI into a religion complete with its own popes and heretics, why cognitive capital deserves a place next to human capital on the balance sheet, and what an "Ozempic for the brain" would even look like.

There is also a grand piano, absolute pitch, a childhood in Moscow spent hanging oranges on a Christmas tree, the collapse of Wirecard, and a ginger cat who serves as Chief Marketing Officer.

Chapters:
0:00 Intro
1:59 Guest Intro, Basel and Piano
15:15 Anastassia's early journey
21:43 The Brain and critique on today's AI and society
35:49 Anastassia's Mission in AI Literacy
42:34 AI Literacy vs. AI Fluency
48:08 The cognitive challenge and appetite for understanding
51:52 Mediocrity and the need to celebrate human effort
55:18 Education reforms and re-exercising our brain
1:09:37 Reaching the four pillars of Responsible AI
1:19:17 Anastassia's Vision
1:24:05 Q&A Start
1:24:32 What does innovation mean to you?
1:27:14 Key moment, event, person
1:28:22 Time Management
1:32:49 Favourite childhood memory
1:35:16 Biggest challenge to date
1:41:34 Advice for young professionals
1:43:38 What would you most like to be remembered for?
1:43:52 Where can people find you?
1:46:39 Final Message
1:46:58 Outro

Find Anastassia at https://aiedutainment.ai and https://romyandroby.ai

Detailed shownotes over at: petermbach.com/podcast for more in-depth information about each episode.
Join the community over at: linkedin.com/company/tgcpodcast and let's connect across the world!

Subscribe and listen to the podcast (and do please leave a review/rating) on Spotify, Apple Music, YouTube or wherever you get your podcasts from.
Your subscription/follow will greatly help the show grow and reach a wider audience.

Hosted by Peter Marcus Bach (www.petermbach.com), follow me on: 

• X (fomerly Twitter): @petermbach 
• Instagram: @petermbach87 
• Subscribe to my channel on YouTube: www.youtube.com/c/PeterMarcusBach/

What if the kitchen knife you have used your whole life was designed for a fight, not for cooking? Douglas Katz thinks we can do better. "If you designed a knife for a robot, it wouldn't look like the linear knife that we have today," he says, and that single reframe sits at the heart of this episode.

Douglas is a West Point graduate, a disabled US Army veteran and a lifelong inventor who tells his story in three acts. From the leadership lab of the military, through a long and often grim chapter in corporate America, to the workshop where he forged a new kind of blade, his journey is one of reframing what looks fixed until something better becomes possible.

After upper body injuries made an ordinary knife painful to hold, Douglas refused to give up cooking and redesigned the tool instead. The result is NULU, an adaptive kitchen knife inspired by the traditional Inuit ulu and built around a concept his team calls force transfer geometry. From there grew a bigger idea. Ability and disability, he argues, are not a switch you flip. They are task-based and they move along a curve we all travel. We will all age into disability, and designing for that reality makes life better for everyone.

Along the way Peter and Douglas get into Aikido and softness, barrier-free, universal and inclusive design, ADHD as a feature set rather than a bug, and why AI might be the infinite assistant that lets more of us think like Tony Stark. It is honest, funny and quietly profound.

Chapters:
0:00 Intro
1:59 Guest Intro & Aikido
9:12 Douglas' Story in Three Acts: The Military
16:29 A precursor to the second Act - Leadership
19:39 The second Act - Corporate America
25:56 The third Act and Doug's current innovation
36:36 Reframing ability and disability and design for it
41:39 A 101 on Disability Design Theories
48:03 The NULU Knife - an example of adaptive design
51:27 Helping incubate adaptive design ideas
53:30 A discussion on "ADHD wiring”
1:02:09 Intelligence, pattern recognition and AI
1:08:20 AI in work and education
1:14:41 Doug's Future Plans
1:18:34 Q&A Start
1:18:53 What does innovation mean to you?
1:19:17 Key Moment, Event, Person
1:21:59 Time Management
1:24:43 Favourite childhood memory
1:27:02 Biggest challenge to date
1:30:41 Advice for young professionals
1:33:55 What would you most like to be remembered for?
1:35:31 Where can people find you?
1:37:07 Final Message
1:37:41 Outro

Detailed shownotes over at: petermbach.com/podcast for more in-depth information about each episode.
Join the community over at: linkedin.com/company/tgcpodcast and let's connect across the world!

Subscribe and listen to the podcast (and do please leave a review/rating) on Spotify, Apple Music, YouTube or wherever you get your podcasts from.
Your subscription/follow will greatly help the show grow and reach a wider audience.

Hosted by Peter Marcus Bach (www.petermbach.com), follow me on: 

• X (fomerly Twitter): @petermbach 
• Instagram: @petermbach87 
• Subscribe to my channel on YouTube: www.youtube.com/c/PeterMarcusBach/

What if the system you spent four decades building turned out to not be enough?

David Gottfried is the father of the global green building movement. He founded the U.S. Green Building Council and the World Green Building Council, and helped create LEED, the rating system now used across more than 180 countries and tied to a trillion-dollar green economy. And yet he is the first to say it has not bent the curve far enough. Carbon keeps climbing. The ship is still heading for the iceberg, and we are busy bolting solar panels to the deck.

In this wide-ranging conversation, David takes Peter through the whole arc. A quick 101 on what actually makes a building green, from orientation and glazing to greywater and healthy materials. How LEED grew from a white paper into a global standard. And why he now argues we need to move from sustainability to regeneration, from human to humane, and build a new scoreboard he calls HOPE (Health On Planet Earth).

It is also a deeply personal story. A Stanford engineer who read Siddhartha every birthday and came to see himself as the ferryman. A developer who lost a building in the crash and went looking for purpose. A man who took up kung fu in his late fifties, fly fishes alone in cold creeks, and used AI as a thinking partner to turn 2,400 pages of dog-walk voice notes into his fourth book.

Chapters:
0:00 Intro
1:59 Guest Intro, Kung Fu & Fly Fishing
9:34 A 101 on Green Buildings…
16:11 ...and a 101 on the LEED System
18:45 Why study engineering?
20:40 Siddartha's Influence on David
26:43 Origins of the Green Building Movement
42:06 Green Buildings aren't enough
50:57 Pushing the needle and finding the correct metrics
1:01:37 A true Human-AI collaboration
1:10:07 David's Hope and Future Vision
1:12:14 Q&A Start
1:12:28 What does innovation mean to you?
1:15:28 Key Event, Book, Person
1:20:13 Time Management
1:24:58 Favourite childhood memory
1:27:57 Greatest Challenge to Date
1:33:04 Advice for young professionals
1:36:16 What would you most like to be remembered for?
1:37:01 Where can people find you?
1:38:42 Final Message
1:39:29 Outro

Detailed shownotes over at: petermbach.com/podcast for more in-depth information about each episode.
Join the community over at: linkedin.com/company/tgcpodcast and let's connect across the world!

Subscribe and listen to the podcast (and do please leave a review/rating) on Spotify, Apple Music, YouTube or wherever you get your podcasts from.
Your subscription/follow will greatly help the show grow and reach a wider audience.

Hosted by Peter Marcus Bach (www.petermbach.com), follow me on: 

• X (fomerly Twitter): @petermbach 
• Instagram: @petermbach87 
• Subscribe to my channel on YouTube: www.youtube.com/c/PeterMarcusBach/

"Why is our architecture not as diverse as our culture is progressive?" That's the question Toronto-based architect Alexander Josephson keeps asking. On this episode, he doesn't pull punches. 

Alex is the co-founder and creative director of PARTISANS, the studio behind the Grotto Sauna, the masterplan to resurrect Toronto's gargantuan Hearn power plant into a cultural district, and The Orbit, a radial reinvention of the Garden City for a transit-oriented future. He's also founder and CEO of Cumulus, an immersive digital memorialisation platform born from his father's brush with death during COVID. Across two decades, Alex has staked out a position that's part critique, part call to arms: that the condo towers crashing into Toronto's skyline are "spreadsheets in the sky", that greenwashed sustainability mandates have made architects pawns of capital, and that buildings should be "thousand-year worthy". 

In this conversation we trace Alex's nonlinear journey into architecture (the University of Waterloo, Rome with Massimiliano Fuksas, the AA in London which he dropped out of), the founding of PARTISANS in a Toronto storage locker, his master's thesis redesigning Mecca around a singularity, the Grotto Sauna's pre-fabricated arrival by barge, the disco ball that helped ignite the Hearn's cultural revival, and what it takes to design a "complete community" amid Canada's worst real estate downturn in a century. We also wrestle with AI in design ("it's just a tool, like a pencil"), the case for interfaith architecture as a path to peace, and how personal grief gave rise to Cumulus, his "digital tomb" for the family memories trapped on our devices. A spirited, irreverent and sometimes uncomfortable episode for anyone who builds, designs, or simply lives among buildings.

Chapters:
0:00 Intro
1:59 Guest Intro, Toronto & Tim Hortons
3:59 "Spreadsheets in the Sky”
9:40 A radical redesign of Mecca
15:01 Interfaith architecture for peace
17:59 Origins of the "Rebel Archtiect”
31:49 PARTISANS - the "Apple" story of Architecture?
37:25 The Grotto Sauna
38:57 Urban Regeneration - The Hearn
50:37 Building on the Garden City - The Orbit
57:15 Receptivity to radical ideas from the client's side
1:01:41 Real issues with 'sustainability' in architecture
1:12:12 Reflecting back on the why of pursuing architecture
1:19:43 The impact of AI in Architecture
1:23:04 The story of Cumulus - digital memorialization
1:43:00 Q&A Start
1:43:22 What does innovation mean to you?
1:44:24 Key event, book, person
1:47:19 Time Management
1:49:55 Favourite childhood memory
1:50:47 Biggest challenge to date
1:53:33 Advice for young professionals
1:55:19 What would you most like to be remembered for?
1:57:03 Where can people find you?
1:58:32 Final message
1:58:45 Outro

Detailed shownotes over at: petermbach.com/podcast for more in-depth information about each episode.
Join the community over at: linkedin.com/company/tgcpodcast and let's connect across the world!

Subscribe and listen to the podcast (and do please leave a review/rating) on Spotify, Apple Music, YouTube or wherever you get your podcasts from.
Your subscription/follow will greatly help the show grow and reach a wider audience.

Hosted by Peter Marcus Bach (www.petermbach.com), follow me on: 

• X (fomerly Twitter): @petermbach 
• Instagram: @petermbach87 
• Subscribe to my channel on YouTube: www.youtube.com/c/PeterMarcusBach/

Why does profit feel a lot like breathing... necessary to stay alive, but never the actual reason you're here?

In Episode 63, entrepreneur and business expert Jean-Christian Rindoni argues that businesses, like human beings, need profit to live, but their purpose has to be more than just breathing. Recording from his new home on Portugal's Algarve coast, recently ranked among the world's best seaside destinations, Jean-Christian shares the story behind Symbiosis Infinity Group, a consultancy he founded after spending more than two decades doing business in 30+ countries. After a year of looking inwards instead of outwards, he made a career pivot in his late forties to combine his international expertise with somatic breathwork practice and a model he calls Conscious Business Growth.

We unpack his trademarked Symbiosis Infinity Loop, a four-stakeholder framework inspired by symbiotic ecosystems in nature, designed to move companies beyond ESG box-ticking into hands-on circular supply chains. The conversation goes deep on a working case study from Cameroon, where Jean-Christian and his partners are helping cocoa cooperatives turn discarded cocoa husks (roughly 70-75% of the plant's weight) into nutrient sources, sustainable packaging materials, and biofuel feedstock, opening new revenue streams for farmers stuck with unsold beans amid a market crisis.

Beyond the business, we explore the daily practices that keep Jean-Christian grounded: somatic breathwork, box breathing, Stoic philosophy, an unwavering morning routine that begins with making the bed, and the kind of stillness that lets imagination return. He shares why "innovation at source" gives companies a competitive edge no R&D lab can replicate, why scaling a purpose-driven business sometimes means saying no to clients who only want to make money, and why, as he puts it, "your inner world dictates your outer world, not the opposite."

If you're interested in conscious business, the circular economy, breathwork, or finding your calling at any age, this one is worth your full attention.

Chapters:
0:00 Intro
1:59 Guest Intro, The Algarve & Breathwork
13:38 Jean-Christian's early career
19:56 Symbiosis Inifnity Group
21:59 What is Conscious Business Growth?
23:29 The supply chain of cocoa
33:28 The symbiosis infinity loop concept
40:21 Challenges for circularity and symbiosis
47:17 Learning and walking with the big players
51:57 A precautionary tale about scaling
1:00:16 Upcoming exciting projects for Jean-Christian
1:03:44 Q&A Start
1:04:03 What does innovation mean to you?
1:08:11 Key moment, book, person
1:13:08 Time Management
1:20:32 Favourite childhood memory
1:24:59 What would you most like to be remembered for?
1:26:41 Where can people find you?
1:28:30 Final Message
1:29:46 Outro

Detailed shownotes over at: petermbach.com/podcast for more in-depth information about each episode.
Join the community over at: linkedin.com/company/tgcpodcast and let's connect across the world!

Subscribe and listen to the podcast (and do please leave a review/rating) on Spotify, Apple Music, YouTube or wherever you get your podcasts from.
Your subscription/follow will greatly help the show grow and reach a wider audience.

Hosted by Peter Marcus Bach (www.petermbach.com), follow me on: 

• X (fomerly Twitter): @petermbach 
• Instagram: @petermbach87 
• Subscribe to my channel on YouTube: www.youtube.com/c/PeterMarcusBach/

What does a horror-game-loving Italian engineer have to do with cleaning your wastewater? More than you'd think... and the journey starts in a paddy rice field.

In Episode 62 of The Grand Challengers Podcast, host Peter Marcus Bach welcomes Dr Anacleto Rizzo, Partner at IRIDRA Srl in Florence, President of Global Wetland Technology, and one of Europe's most active voices on nature-based solutions (NBS) for the water sector. They begin where two self-confessed geeks should: David Lynch films, Resident Evil vs Silent Hill, and the perils of playing first-person horror games in bed next to a sleeping spouse.

From there, the conversation winds through Anacleto's serendipitous journey into engineering, a randomly chosen civil degree at Politecnico di Torino that ended, unexpectedly, in a PhD on methane emissions from paddy rice fields. He explains why Italy's rice country in Piedmont is a methane hotspot (with a vivid biological analogy you won't forget), and how a single review paper on treatment wetland modelling, read at the right moment, redirected his career toward nature-based wastewater treatment.

Treatment wetlands are the through-line of this episode: a quietly revolutionary technology that's been working for 30+ years, treats up to tens of thousands of population equivalent, and remains chronically misunderstood. We unpack what they actually are, why a few "Wild West" early failures in Italy still haunt the field.

The deeper thread is the academic-practitioner bridge. Treatment wetlands matured because practitioners went out and monitored real, full-scale systems, generating the unglamorous journal papers that lab-scale studies could never produce. He shares why "throwing your heart beyond the fence" (a wonderful Italian idiom for taking calculated risks) is the only way to escape the technological-readiness-level trap.

Recommended for anyone, whether engineer, researcher or nature enthusiast, curious about how nature does the dirty work better than concrete ever did.

Chapters:
0:00 Intro
1:59 Guest Intro, Cult Movies & Horror Games
7:47 Why Civil Engineering?
10:16 A PhD on "rice flatulence”
14:48 Adding treatment wetlands to the mix
19:06 A 101 on Treatment Wetlands
37:17 The terminology discussion and IRIDRA
51:42 IRIDRA's Projects & Global Wetland Technology
56:46 General receptivity of NbS in Italy
1:03:08 Some exciting things Anacleto is embarking on
1:07:15 Q&A Start
1:07:26 What does innovation mean to you?
1:08:30 Key event, book, person
1:09:51 Time Management
1:12:46 Favourite childhood memory
1:13:45 Greatest challenge to date
1:15:25 Advice for young professionals
1:18:03 What would you most like to be remembered for?
1:20:11 Where can people find you?
1:20:58 Final message
1:21:19 Outro

Detailed shownotes over at: petermbach.com/podcast for more in-depth information about each episode.
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Hosted by Peter Marcus Bach (www.petermbach.com), follow me on: 

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