#83: Tom Tyrrell (Great Lakes Biomimicry)

Tom Tyrrell (Great Lakes Biomimicry) [00:00:00]:

What we do for ourselves alone dies with us. What we do for others in the world remains and is immortal. Land that's what drives me. Because if you help people, they're going to make you feel good and they're going to help somebody else and that you never leave behind. The legacy that you want to leave is exactly that.

Jeffrey Stern [00:00:20]:

Let's discover the Cleveland entrepreneurial ecosystem. We are telling the stories of its entrepreneurs land those supporting them. Welcome to the Lay of the Land podcast, where we are exploring what people are building in Cleveland. I am your host Jeffrey Stern, and today I had the pleasure of speaking with Tom Terrell, founder and Chairman of Great Lakes Biomimicry, an entrepreneurial 501 C three organization with a mission to create conditions for innovation through biomimicry. Focused on assisting organizations explore new opportunities, solve problems and drive sustainability. Recently, having merged with the Ohio Aerospace Institute, biomimicry, which is a concept we'll explore in much more detail in our conversation, seeks to drive this innovation by harnessing the intelligence found in nature's 3.8 billion years of research and development asking questions nature has already found the answers to. For example, questions like how does nature manage structural forces? How does nature sense motion and temperature? Manage temperature change? Shape, coordinate optimize material and energy? How does nature evolve to survive, adapt to changing conditions, be locally attuned and responsive, be resource efficient and employ life friendly chemistry? Prior to founding Great Lakes Biomimicry, Tom was a co founder and Chairman of Segment, a Northeast Ohio based startup and award winning provider of data analytics driven marketing technology which was recently acquired by Alchemy. In April 2022, he was a cofounder Senior Advisor and Director of Glengri, which combined a network of support services with investment capital. And Tom's 30 year career prior all in the metals industry included significant Turnaround, MNA and IPO experience with responsibility for four different startups restarts or consolidations ranging from 250,000,000 to 1.5 billion in sales partnering directly with investment firms including Primus Venture Partners, PNC Equity Management, Warburg Pinkus and The Blackstone Group. In 1988, he was awarded Inc. Magazine's Entrepreneur of the Year Award for Business and Industry and in 1989 was selected as Entreprenuership of the Year finalist for the restart and operation of the American Steel and Wire Company. Since moving to the Cleveland area in 1986, Tom has spent virtually all of his spare time engaged with education, environment, land entreprenuership, all focused on enhancing Northeast Ohio's regional economic development. He has actively supported both undergraduate land graduate level entreprenuership programs at Midwestern Colleges land universities as a trustee of Elmhurst College, Baldwin Wallace College and Lorraine County Community College where he is also a member of the Glide Innovation Fund Board and served on the Nortec Board of Trustees, the Youngstown Business Incubator. Board and the Akron Archangels. He was also a trustee of the Ohio and Erie Canalway association, the oversight board for the federally funded Ohio and Erie national heritage canalway. Tom has been involved with the canalway since 1988, is a member of the Board of Trustees of the Conservancy for Cuyahoga Valley National Park, was the founding chair of the Trails Forever Endowment Leadership Initiative for the Conservancy, and a former trustee of the Cleveland Zoological Society. This was easily one of my favorite conversations to date, covering a huge range of topics and the full breadth of Tom's experience. I hope you will enjoy my conversation with Tom Terrell. So biomimicry, I think in preparation for this conversation, which was really one that I enjoyed preparing for, I think it's one of those concepts that many of us come across pretty regularly in our day to day lives, but may not necessarily be aware of what it is. And so I think it would be great to just start with a definition of terms here, talking through what biomimicry is, so we can establish a good baseline vocabulary here for us to build on throughout the conversation. And then of course, we'll get into your background. But it's such a fascinating concept, I'd love to start with it.

Tom Tyrrell (Great Lakes Biomimicry) [00:04:47]:

Yeah, there's a lot of definitions for it. Everybody kind of has their own, but simply it's using nature to solve human problems. Nature is 3.8 billion years old and nature's learned to solve every problem that's out there. And if they didn't solve them, in many cases other than a crisis situation, they became extinct and they had to be picked up and do it some different way. So biomimicry is taking all that 3.8 billion years, including fossilization and looking at fossils for things that died in a crisis and weren't available today to see what we may be able to implement in research, development and organizational design and in product design. It's just a simple logic that tries to convince people that this is another tool to use, another arrow to have in their quiver, that it doesn't solve every single problem. But when you're trying to solve a problem, you should always ask what would nature do? And then get in there and try to figure it out. How does nature move fluids, for example? How does nature stop wind resistance or go through wind resistance? And when you do that and there's different sites that are available that you can go on the internet and get ideas in how to utilize that and what nature applications to be able to take a look at, which really help get the ball started. Once you start doing it, it becomes kind of fatal complete that you begin to do it. John Nottingham, who you've had on your program and is on our board, and we had one of our PhD fellows work with his organization for five years, when he talks about vertical innovation and you go through his shop and he has the signs of the steps, at the top of the second step, he has biomimicry. So they look at it land everything that they try to design, and it's become a part of their process. He's become a big advocate of what we do.

Jeffrey Stern [00:06:46]:

Yeah, I just feel like even just a lot of the aphorisms that we have in life, they're just drawn from nature because it's tried and it's true, and it is that simple. Nature has probably figured out most of the problems, and it would behoove us to borrow from its wisdom.

Tom Tyrrell (Great Lakes Biomimicry) [00:07:03]:

Absolutely right.

Jeffrey Stern [00:07:04]:

I'd love to understand reflecting on your own career, which is eclectic and spans many experiences across Entreprenuership from the steel industry to the technology industry to the work you're doing, most recently with biomimicry. But can you just kind of take us through your experience, how the path ebbed and flow through the many sectors that it has? Your path to Cleveland? I'm really interested in where your interest in biomimicry kind of stemmed from and at what point you arrived at it being the thing you are to pursue.

Tom Tyrrell (Great Lakes Biomimicry) [00:07:38]:

Well, I'm from Chicago. My dad had a 9th grade education. His father got diabetes and he had to go work. And after the war he moved like many people did back home, and maybe five or six years later decided to build a house. And we built a house, and I was three years old. We built a house in a suburb that there was nothing there, and so we were the first house, and all around us they were building other houses. And I was eleven, but I always liked having money. I was the oldest of six kids and we didn't have much, so I always tried to figure out so I would go around and collect coke bottles from the workers in the evening and take them back and get to the bottle deposits and made some money to buy baseball cards. Well, then I started thinking about it and I thought, these guys drink stuff and they don't really have coolers at that time. So I put together a little company that started selling soft drinks to bricklayers and construction workers. And I would go to the store in the morning and I would buy 50 bottles of coke, and I had one cooler, I'd bring it home, and at 1012 and three I would go out land, sell the workers soft drinks. I bought them at that time sounds crazy, but I bought them for a nickel with two cent deposit. So I bought them for seven cents and I sold them for ten and $0.02 deposit. And then at 06:00 I'd go collect the so I made 100% profit on every bottle that I sold. Next morning I would go back there and I'd also buy with my profit a box of baseball cards, which I would take all my doubles out of, rewrap it land. There was one rich kid in the neighborhood and I would sell him a box of baseball cards every day for the same price. I bought it for. So that was my first entrepreneurial venture. I went to high school, went to college, played a lot of sports, was involved in a lot of activities, ended up being president of the senior class in college, although I was a commuter. And I got offered a job with Bethlehem Steel in Bethlehem, Pennsylvania, which they interviewed 16,000 people for 30 jobs. My grades didn't really say they wanted me, but I was able to sell them land talking to them, and I went, and I did that for ten years, five years in one specific area to start land. When I was 22, I developed a five year plan model. So I put my life in five year segments, and I would drop five years of what I wanted to accomplish. And every year I would evaluate myself, and if I wasn't where I wanted to be, then I would go ahead and I would change it, and I would be more aggressive in the process. And so when I took the Bethem job, I went back to Greensboro, North Carolina, which was a heavenly place to sell steel. And I made up my mind that I wanted to be the youngest salesperson that Bethlehem ever had as a product specialist. And through some luck and a lot of hard work, I ended up doing just that. I beat the previous guy by two months. So I got back to Bethlehem, and my next target for the five years I wanted to become the youngest assistant manager at Bethlehem ever had. In the interim, I found out I was working on a project to justify a new rolling mill, and a company out of Canada announced in the paper in about 1977 that they were going to build this kind of a mill in New Jersey, which was very close by. And I knew that at that time we weren't going to build a mill if you had somebody brand new coming in. And I went in every morning at six to get a head start on the day. And one day I had this article that talked about this company, and I took it and I ripped it up and I threw it in the basket. And, you know, I'm really sad. This is going to ruin everything. The next day I had a New Jersey paper, and the next day I had a New York paper. And I thought, who the hell is putting these on my desk? But when I got the third one, I said, okay, God, I think what you're telling me is I ought to talk to them because I have these ideas for changing the steel industry. One of them was getting women into the steel industry. There was one woman in the steel industry prior to 1980. So I sat down and I wrote a letter. It took me five weeks to write it, to get every word correct to the president of this company that was to be telling him that I would change the industry. I would go from minimal to quality product. I would bring with me professional salespeople. I would bring all the customer base that we had. I got back from a week's fishing and I had this little envelope. It was like a college rejection, real small envelope. I opened it up and I thought, well, it's just going to be a rejection. And it said, thank you for your letter. I agree totally with what you're saying. I want to meet you next week. Please call my secretary. So I called her, set up an appointment at Newark Airport, met him at 10:00 in the morning with the person that was going to be VP of operations. We spent the entire day together, finished up with dinner at 09:00. He offered me the job. I called my wife and I took it. I went back into Bethlehem to give my two weeks notice, and my boss there said I was on vacation. I would have told you you got exactly what you wanted. The assistant manager's job in the office you wanted, working for the guy you wanted to, beating the earliest manager. And I said, It's too late, I've already done this. I got a 50% increase. Land I went out there and it was four guys that went and took a brownfield site and built $150,000,000 rolling mill and took it from startup to $250,000,000 in eight years. So that was the first startup venture that I did while I was there. I got very frustrated because I was very focused on quality and they wanted to get more volume, more volume. And that wasn't my style, and that wasn't the way I sold or my team that I put together. And I decided that I had to do something else. So I had been looking at a rolling mill in Pennsylvania with another entrepreneur. And I was working with the president of the real estate division of US Steel, who had been my competitor in the Rod business. And this fellow that was looking to buy, he had a hobby of Short Line railroads. He wanted to buy Short Line railroad in Cuyahoga Heights area. And he was buying it from US Steel, had it shut down a plant. I went in and got this call from an investment banker in New York. And he said, this is who I am. This is what I'm looking to do. It would be really nice if we could start up the steel mill that's been shut down. And I said, I'm interested. So the day before Thanksgiving in 1985, we flew out there. It was an amazing situation in that US Steel had shut it down for labor relation problems, but the power company, CEI, wouldn't let them out of their take or pay power contract. So US Steel turned up the energy, put every piece of their equipment in the plant in plastic bags, left all the lights on, all the heat on. So the plant was like there, ready to go. It looked like it was humming. The motors are running and there's nobody in the place. So it didn't have any of that deterioration. I said, we can do this, and I went in, we took the job. I resigned from my other job in February of 86 and two of us went in to a 400 person plant and I stayed in working to raise capital. Land I brought one of my sales guys with me and he went out to the field to be able to start working with our customer base to tell the what we were going to be. And through thick and thin and 159 days strike with our only supplier of steel when we had a 60 day supply in the ground and we were able to get $100 million letter of credit from global providers without a single I mean, $100 million worth of steel. Australia, Spain, Sweden. We got $100 million of steel without a single letter of credit because of the guys that had brought in the process. And we went from having that problem the day we started to in month twelve making 259,000. Land I had built a whole philosophy. Our employees, we built teams, they hired the employees, we got the spouses involved in the process. We had some of the most unbelievable employee involvement incentive programs that there were and I took the 200 land 59,000 and divided it up among the 137 employees that were there. Land passed out the entire thing and that started us down the road and we went from startup to eight years. Land at the end of eight years we were doing $350,000,000 in sales. We needed to build a new mill. We didn't have the money. We went out to get some suitors to buy us partner we got one of them to come up and guarantee a new $135,000,000 rolling mill in Cuyahoga Heights. We did the deal. I went down as vice chairman to Birmingham Steel. That mill is still there today. It's owned by Charter Steel. It's still the newest mill in the country. The came along and they built an electric furnace melt shop. They're still involving 400 employees, probably 300 of which are employees that we gave jobs to. I went and worked at Birmingham as vice chair for two years. I did not like the environment. David Stockman from Blackstone had a headhunter come to me and they were looking at putting together a steel consortium. And I went and interviewed with him and we hit it off and we start to build that, starting with the Johnstown Steel Mill and then buying Republic Steel and then buying the US steel plant in Lorraine, the Rod Mill. And that ended up being about a billion and a half dollar operation and I did that for two years and then I quite frankly just got tired of steel. And in 2000 I said people make the same mistakes in this business. They all cut each other's prices. When the market goes down, an investment banker comes in, buys a meal for $0.10 in the dollar, thinks he can go ahead and reduce prices and get all the business. And what happens is everybody suffers. And I said, I've been through one too many times. So I got out of it, stayed out of it two years. And then we started with Steve Haynes. I started Glenn Gary from an early stage investment organization. I started Business Volunteers Unlimited while we were doing the American Steel Wire deal because I was very focused on nonprofit, the need of the community to have people to take care of the people that were aging. I then worked and started Segment, which was a digital analytics company, which we just sold in 2008. And then I started Biomimicry in 2010 to get finally to what you were asking. And the way that that started is I was always involved in nature. I was always outside. I always had animals and pets and everything else, and I never came in the house. And what happened was that I was asked to be on a task force that the Gun Foundation and the Cuyahoga County Planning Commission put together called the Cuyahoga Valley Initiative, which in 2006 went and did a year long assessment on the Cuyahoga River Valley to determine the sustainability and environmental status of that region of the river between those two points and the valley. And while I was in there, the person who was the commissioner of the planning commission, Paul Alcinas, we were having a meeting. We met once a month, and he mentioned this word Biomimicry to me, and I had never heard the word land. This was 2000, land six. So being an entrepreneur, I went home. I got everything I could get on it. I looked at it, I thought, this is going to be a really big thing someday. And I looked at our region with the incredible green space we have, the startup mentalities of the people that are here, the strong environmental pitch that we had been involved with in changing the river, the status of the river, the largest urban national park in the country, 33,000 acres. And I said, I think this is going to work, and I think we're going to go ahead and start this. So I built kind of a model that I wanted to do, started as a nonprofit. I went and got a good friend of mine, Don Connectus, who had started the Glide Innovation Fund out at LCC. And I said, this is what I want to do. You want to join me? Because he could be the operations end of the guy, because that's what he is. Civil engineer. We began to work on the game plan, and then I was down at University of Akron with Segment and the Archangels, interviewing a couple of the professors that were putting out products that they wanted to market and get funding for. And one of them was an environmental biologist who was working on an adhesive that was made to mimic gecko feet which can stick and can climb up walls. And I was really intrigued by it. And here is biomimicry. And right in front of me, the thing I've been working on from 2006 to 2000, land Ten, Paul Osinis and I tried to work with E for us entrepreneurs, and we got it in there, but it was too minor, and we just decided we had to pull it out and do it ourselves. So I went to the professor and I said, this is a really fascinating idea. Now, I've been on five college boards. I was chair at two of them. I'm really close with a lot of professors, and they don't think like entrepreneurs. This guy was totally different. He was creative, innovative, and we started talking about it. And then I met with the head of the University of Reese Fire Foundation and then with the president of the university. And we designed and role played a PhD program to be able to bring biomimicry into the integrated biosciences program, which was one of four in the country. The integrated biosciences, one of four in the country. And we went ahead and designed a PhD program. We worked with the Cleveland Institute of Art and UA, and we, in between the two, put a program on for five months to fund it. I went to see Rob Briggs, who founded the Fund for Economic Future. At the time, he was chair of a couple of major foundations, jr foundation being one of them. I said, look, you are important in this region. All the funds kind of go through you. I'm going to pitch you this idea. If you like it, I'm going to do it. If you don't like it, I'm not. So he liked it. He gave us $20,000 to go out and build a program. We ran it for six months. It worked beautifully. We then began to put the PhD program together in that two year time frame. I put together a task force of about 20 people, with lawyers, doctors, the person who was the executive at the zoo, people from all areas of life, environmental law. And I brought them all together and I said, I've got this idea, I think it can work here, but I don't want to do it unless we really together. Look at how we can build this thing and is it going to be viable. And we spent one half day, a month, for twelve months knocking it apart, putting it together, and at the end of it made up our minds that it could be done. Then we had two seminars of about 100 people apiece to introduce them to biomimicry and then began going out and getting funding. There were two prime elements that we wanted to bring because the main reason I wanted to start it was that I wanted to get to young kids. I wanted to get to women in education in early stages because of the dearth of females that were in the Stem fields. And I felt that we could go ahead and really convince them of something exciting using nature. We could steer them into that area which they tend to drop out of when they're in the fifth or the 6th grade. We went out and got funding to put together educational programs and to get into schools to prototype it. And then the other side of it was our professional education, which was working with companies that we would go ahead and teach how to use biomimicry in the development of R D, product design, et cetera. The way we did that is we built this PhD program at the University of Akron, and we recruited the students from all over the world who wanted to have that background. They did not require a master's, but they had to have an environmental sustainability, a background that showed that the enjoyed that, or they studied that and we brought them in. And then my partner and I don connected. We went out to major corporations, at least 20 corporations, and we got them to agree that this was something they wanted to try to integrate in their businesses. And we got the University of Akron to pay for the tuition for the students that were coming in. And we got the corporations to take those students in the five year PhD program land, pay them a stipend that would allow them to work. So they paid approximately $135,000 over five years. That all but 25,000 went to the student for that. The student worked 20 hours a week for five years in their plants and 20 hours a week working on their thesis. And as they learned biomimicry, they broadened biomimicry into those companies and in many cases got it to become a tool like at Gojo and at Nottingham Spurk that they use on a normal basis. We got into schools, and we were in schools in Cleveland, we were at the Interventors school in Akron, we were out at Lake Ridge Academy, we were out at several schools in Lorraine County, and we had fellows in those schools doing the same thing, bringing it to students. But what we found as we ran and grew this, and my partner and I, we've run it for twelve years. We paid ourselves one year, a very small amount. The other eleven years we worked for free. It was a nonprofit. We needed to hire several people, which we did, several wonderfully people that could help us execute into schools and into corporations, and we divided up that way. What we found, however, is that it was extremely difficult to get the school systems to be able to back off the way that they had been doing things, which was so much the same as it had been done in the past. And to realize that this could change what's happening in the two years ago in colleges in Ohio of all the Engineer graduates, 17% of engineering graduates were female. But 61% of biology graduates were female. So the thought was, if we could get those to combine, to get biologists, begin thinking, using nature to get involved in an engineering con, so we could overlap those two and get many more females to get involved and stay involved in stem areas, and so that's what we went after. But we couldn't convince the schools of that. So slowly but surely, we lost that power and we were funding it with what we made from corporations. So we ultimately had to put it in a hybrid basis, land, put it away for a while, hibernate it, and work exclusively on the corporations. Where we began to do programs, where we would do a one day program, a three day program, sometimes it would be a month, sometimes it would be six months. And what we would do is we would go in and educate them in one. What biomimicry is, how you can use it and teach them how to use it in the future. Not every time they have an idea on how they want to involve biomimicry have to call on us because we wanted to go out and spread it to other companies. And we weren't that big to do it, but during that time frame, we were the only ones in the world doing this. So we had four people working there in this little office space that we got for free. We were at LCC. First Land, then at Ohio Aerospace Institute. Everybody in the world would call us and ask us for help and how to do these things. And we would do our best to give them something, some ideas, because the more it spread, the better was going to be from a world standpoint. But we began to grow the overall business. We put together what we called a corporate innovation council, where the CEO or COO or head of research and development, every one of the corporations that we had would get together every quarter as a group, along with all the PhD students and our team. And we would go to one of their plants, and they would present how they're using bomb memory cree in their operation. And then everybody would get together and compare notes. And what you found was a very open environment to sharing ideas that you didn't have these confines of everybody worrying about patents and coverage. And we had some agreements, and it really worked extremely well. And we still do that today. And we're still doing that today. When COVID hit, we were really starting to grow. And when the COVID hit, it really caught us by our throats. And all the companies that were using it big time went to survival mode. And that. Dropped down the list. So all of our revenue went from one extreme to the other in just a short period of time. So we battened down the hatches. At that time, we had space at the Ohio Aerospace Institute, but uniquely, as God would have it, one of our partners, NASA and the fellow was the chief Innovation officer at NASA, who had embraced biomimicry incredibly. And we put a fellow in there that worked there and at the Natural History Museum on propulsion. He retired at a young age from NASA, and he took over as the CEO of the Ohio Aerospace Institute, which is the largest aerospace institute in the country. And not many people know this, but Northeast Ohio is the largest producer in the United States to aerospace on a global basis, and the largest suppliers to Airbus and Boeing. So it's an industry here that a lot of people don't know exists. And we've got incredible numbers of companies that are involved. He was going to take OAI and grow it, not only from a big regional standpoint, but they're in Dayton. It was going to become a big state function. And then he wanted to grow internationally. Well, as he began to grow internationally, he found out that the places he wanted to go to, australia, Europe primarily, and Canada, weren't dealing with any partners that weren't practicing significant sustainability practices, and I don't mean recycling. So he knowing biomimicry and realizing that biomimicry is being utilized by companies every day in Europe. He said, Why don't we merge together? We can really take this, we can grow it with the people that we have as our clients and partners. And I can use this to be able to go out land, access, global world involvement with these companies that are in aerospace and really help to grow in the region and the state. So last August, last August, we merged, the two of us together. We're now located there, doing great, everything is moving along the way. We felt we're getting recognized again for what's going on. And he just got back from spending ten days at the largest air show in the world, which this year was in London. And he took pictures of different aircraft and aerospace equipment manufacturers sites. Nothing but sustainability on them. How can you fly? How can you use less fuel? How can you get less wind resistance? What can you do to your cockpits to make them more comfortable? And they're all using bomb inquiry and they're all employing biologists. And you're going to see, I think, a major change. So the whole idea was to be able to take something that we knew would take a long time to grow. But we felt this region was peak for it, that it would be a great exemplar for that situation and put together a unique program that nobody in the world replicates. Nobody's working with companies the way that we work with them today.

Jeffrey Stern [00:31:31]:

First off. That's an incredible story and journey. Thank you for sharing. A lot of follow ups I have with that. Just staying on the topic of aviation and aerospace, I think you find, just looking back at the history there, that the Wright brothers, inspired by the shape and movement of the wings of birds, were inspired in their application of biomimicry. Thinking about this stuff, I'm curious, though, when you are working with companies who are interested in biomimicry, what is the playbook? I guess, to figure out where there is a useful application of nature in the nature of the work that any given organization is doing. Because it seems like and the examples are endless. Land I'd love to, and I'm sure we'll talk through some of them in application, but how do you parse the signal from the noise when you look at nature in its enormity?

Tom Tyrrell (Great Lakes Biomimicry) [00:32:32]:

There's two ways that you can utilize nature from a biometric standpoint. One way is you see something in nature land you say, I really like that. I want to find a place where we can utilize that. The second way is you have a problem in something that you're doing and you say, is there anything in nature that would allow me to go out? Land solve this problem. So when you get involved with a business, the first thing you want to find out after they learn about what it is, is where are they at? Most of them have a problem that they want to solve. And so what you do is you teach them ways to be able to identify and break down that need. What is the real need? If you want to make a better pump for soap dispenser or hand sanitizer, you look at ways nature moves fluids. And nature moves fluids by an aerofish, a spitting cobra, a tree, water going up a tree, a heart pump. There's 50 ways you can find that nature moves fluids. And you begin to narrow those down to see how many of those could be applicable to what you're trying to accomplish. And then you put groups together that will take each of those. Maybe you narrow down to three or four and take those and dissect those with the product that you're trying to solve. And then you get back together with those groups. And generally what you do is you settle on one, maybe two, but usually it's one, and then you attack it with your research people and your engineering people to go ahead and design something that works to be able to solve the problem that was bred from nature. So that's the way it works. Land once you get in to a company, some it doesn't go as far. Some we've had ten or twelve that we've done six month operations to that we've showed them how to use it, and they've made products going ahead and doing it, and it's very gratifying. And you see that all over the world. There are companies that have done it on their own just because they have biologists on staff. They have people that think that way naturalists. And it's uniquely situated more to other countries than it is to companies in the United States, although you're seeing that change.

Jeffrey Stern [00:34:49]:

Why is that?

Tom Tyrrell (Great Lakes Biomimicry) [00:34:50]:

Because I think the makeup of the people that work in the organizations in Europe, for example, are different. I mentioned the lack of biologists. You'd be shocked at the number of large companies that have no biologists. When we put a fellow into Sherman Williams to work with them on paint, on designing special paints, they had just hired their first biologist. This is a paint company that makes paint, designs paint, and they didn't have a biologist to be able to ever think about how they could use it. That biologist has played a significant role, and you're finding more and more biologists being hired now. You're finding more applications or requests for biologists. You're beginning to find requests for people who have biomimetic backgrounds now coming into organizations. So the more they learn, it becomes a competitive thing. Somebody solves a problem with it and publicizes it. If they are willing to do that, somebody else sees it and says, this is interesting. I want to go take a look at it. So you get follow ups from other people who are talking about it. The key is to get people to realize what this means to their company versus what it means to the world. And the best thing that can happen is for them to talk about what they're doing so other people can learn from that and go out and try to utilize that same solution process. I think it might be helpful to.

Jeffrey Stern [00:36:10]:

Just talk through a few examples, actually. When we think about the questions you can ask of nature in a business environment, what are some of those questions that you ask? You mentioned kind of fluid dynamics, but what are those questions? And maybe take us through a few examples of practical things that you have seen taken from nature and applied to the human world.

Tom Tyrrell (Great Lakes Biomimicry) [00:36:37]:

There's so many of them. I'll give you three or four that are I'll give you the ones that are really interesting to me, the one that I have always loved the most. When I was working in the steel industry, I visited Japan over a dozen times, and I drove on the Shinkansen, the bullet train, many times, and that thing travels at 200 miles an hour. But when they designed it, they designed it as a bullet, so it had a rounded nose on it. And they found out that when they put it out on the tracks at the speeds it was supposed to go at, it made a sonic boom. So they had to slow it down to prevent the boom from being caused, which defeats the whole purpose of the train.

Jeffrey Stern [00:37:21]:

Right?

Tom Tyrrell (Great Lakes Biomimicry) [00:37:22]:

So they had a birder on their engineering team. And he said, you know, there are things in nature like a kingfisher that can go from one element air into another element water without making a splash. Why don't we take a look at reconstructing the engine and the train as the way the kingfisher goes into the water. So they did that, they went back to the construction area, they built the train, the test model of the shinkansen. They tested it out the first time it ran. It ran without a sonic boom. It ran at 115% of the speed that they intended it for and it ran at 85% of fuel consumption. So the designs that they have today are very, very similar. Same long prolonged nose. And if you take a look at a kingfisher and the shinconsin side by side, you can see the comparisons. That's one, and that's always been my favorite because I was there and experienced it. Another one that's easy to understand, that everybody has touched is Velcro. In the late forty s, the early fifty s, a guy by the name of Demestral in, I believe it was England, but it was in Europe. He walked his dog and he walked his dog into the fields because he was an outdoorsman and he was an engineering land designer. And he would get these burrs in his dog like a golden retriever and he'd have to go home and he'd have to take all the burrs out of his dog from his dog with a brush. But being an engineer, he decided to see what was causing a problem. So he put one of these burrs underneath the microscope. And these burrs had thousands of little strands on it and each one was hooked at the end. And this came from the burdock plant. And the reason they hooked is this is the way they spread. So they didn't have anything to carry them. No birds they got in the dogs. The dogs took the another mile away when it was walking and the burdock land spread all over the country. So he said there's got to be a way to do this. So he started working with the opposite material, female material, and he found one finally that stuck. And then he took it and tried to sell it to a bunch of people who wouldn't listen to him land. Then finally he sold them on it. And of course it's become one of the most used products in the world today, but that was one of the very early stage ones. And then I'll give you a third one and then one that was developed locally. The third one is what we call bird glass. And it's been determined that birds in flight avoid flying into spider webs because of the ultraviolet light that spider webs give off. So a company designed glass that had the pattern of spider's web in it on an infrared basis, so you as a human, couldn't see through it, but the bird could. And since that time, other companies have come along with vegetation in there, land stranding in there, and it's reported to reduce birds flying into high rise buildings by 97%. So the issues, when you hear things like Sherman Williams saying, we're going to do everything in our power, you can turn off the lights, you can do all kinds of things that are environmentally stable to be able to help it, but this is another way that you can really change what happens. And then the fourth one is a success story for the region. Gojo was the first place that we put one of our PhD students, and she came from a background and she had gone to Australia for her semester abroad and she took class in biomimicry. So when she came back, she heard about this class. She applied for it out of Maryland, and we brought her in. She was terrific. She had an international business and this six month biomimicry program. So we put her in there and she worked very diligently. It took her a while because they had twelve groups, I believe, if I remember the number, and she had to work with each one of them to try and find where it might fit. And she had some bombing background, but she was still relatively new, so she couldn't teach them. We helped to do that. And they had a major problem, and it was before the pandemic. The problem was that people were afraid to touch dispensers, to dispense soap and hand sanitizer because of the spread of things like Ebola land, things like that. So they had developed a hands free dispenser that used 4D cell batteries. Well, to environmentalists D, cell batteries are anathema. They're terrible for the environment, they're impossible to get rid of. So they decided they wanted to find a way to reduce or replace using that. So they talked with her. They called in a team. We went in there and we helped them to look at how nature moves fluids. And that's where we came up with all these things that I mentioned, like the aerofish, et cetera. And they put a group of people, it was like twelve people on it. And they spent, and I'm guessing because this is about eight years ago, they would get together for a couple of weeks and then they'd break apart into individual groups that would go back and do their own stuff to make sure they don't get too far behind, because they were intense on doing this. It was a major focus of the company. They would get back together for two weeks and then it would go out again. They did this four times. So the first time they learned a process, the second time they learned to identify things in nature that move fluids. The third time they went in and they narrowed that down. The fourth time they came back and they narrowed down to two that were there. And we, with the University Hospital Innovation, put together a group of 40 people that got together for an afternoon session, an evening session at the hospital to be able to talk about one of those two things, which was the heart. Because the heart is a fantastic mover of fluids. What happened was, as you went working with, uh, hospital, you find out that the heart reserves a little bit of energy each time it pumps out and pumps in. So when it pumps in, it reserves a little bit of the energy that it pumps out to have a little bit more to pump it in. So what they did is they worked to produce a vessel which has been patented, which matched what the heart does. And it took them a while to do that, but they developed a piece of equipment that went down to two cell batteries, to two flashlight batteries, which 50% cut down what they were using, which was an incredible number. And they believe that they're going to be able to take it down with other technologies that are being put out there to ambient lighting and not have to use any D cell batteries at all. And if they had not had that person there to teach them biomimicry, and they had not have our team to go in and help them, and we didn't have, uh, that said, I want to get involved in that process because we had presented to them about what biomimicry was, you wouldn't have that product today. And we have that environmental issue that would be there. And that's just one, but that's one of our favorites, because we help them to do that. Yeah.

Jeffrey Stern [00:44:33]:

No, it's incredibly fascinating because it really is. Like all of these organizations, the questions that they're asking of themselves, what do we need to do to survive? How do we adapt to changing environments? How do we be efficient with the resources that we have? How do we do so in a sustainable way? These are the questions that nature has forced upon itself and has fine tuned and optimizing all these things. They really do borrow from nature. It's like not even asking what we can learn from nature. It's just we are trying to catch up in some ways.

Tom Tyrrell (Great Lakes Biomimicry) [00:45:13]:

I'll give you one other quick one that's a fun one, then I'll shut up. But you're familiar with the shark skin bathing suits that the Olympic contestants used some eight years ago? That they set all kinds of records and they banned it because it emulated a shark which has small teeth on its skin that allow the water to move off the skin to be able to allow it to move through the water at very fast speeds. A mako shark, for example, has been clocked at 37 miles an hour, and they believe it can go up to 50 miles an hour. So Airbus in Europe, which is a major user of biomimicry. They have mimicked the tail. If you look at the wings on planes, they used it and were the first ones to mimic the peregrine falcon, which is the fastest bird in the world, 200 miles an hour to be able to cut down on the wind resistance. But they are now in the process of designing a coating for their planes on the outside, in the upper outside, not the bottom that uses mimics the shark things to be able to do airflow oh, laser enhanced airflow technology. It's called Leaf and two companies have designed it or working with Airbus and they've put these little fissures on, they call them riblets on the whole fuselage, upper fuselage of the plane. And they've tested it and they believe that it will reduce fuel consumption by one and a half billion dollars in just that little change that's taking place in the fuselage itself. But that's neat when I'm a diver and I love sharks and I watch them all the time. So I got a kick out of that one. That's kind of other than the sinconsan train, that's my favorite.

Jeffrey Stern [00:46:56]:

Yeah, it's fascinating. In your time working on the proliferation of biomimicry, have you found, I guess, what has changed in the last decade? Are people more receptive to this idea? Has there ever been any pushback? What has been the process of how the narrative, maybe around biomimicry has changed or maybe it hasn't?

Tom Tyrrell (Great Lakes Biomimicry) [00:47:19]:

Well, a woman named Janine Benius, who I know well, and she's a terrific person, in 1997, she decided that the world was killing itself and she wanted to look to nature to be able to see what she could do to help change it. So she looked for the most natural place she could do. And she went to the Bitter Root Mountains in Montana and she founded an organization called Biomimicry Institute. She wrote a book that came out in about 99 that went through what biomimicry is. She coined the word and it just kind of plugged along for a long time, was a nonprofit. It didn't get a lot of traction. And ultimately she hooked onto a few people that began to pick up on it. One of those is Interface Carpet down in Atlanta, Georgia. And she got involved with them and they looked at nature and carpet is not disposable. I mean, it goes into landfills and it's a mess. And they wanted to do something that would allow carpet to be more natural land, to allow to last longer and be able to be degradable. So they studied it and they looked at carpet squares and they designed in three foot squares and they designed it in different colors, which mimic the leaf floor of a forest in the early fall. And so you could go ahead and change those if one of them wore out and you didn't have to worry about it being faded or a different color than the blue next to it. But what they really did is they designed a carpet line that was made out of plastic bottles, reclaimed plastic bottles. And they produce are the major producer of that in the country today. So that's one of the ones that she's worked with. She's worked with several companies on organizational design. But their philosophy is a little different. They go in to solve a problem. They don't go in to teach you. It's kind of like you can teach them, feed them fish, or teach them to fish. And our philosophy was it's going to get spread faster if we teach them to fish. And so it began to grow. It began to grow and other companies started to pick up on it. And you would see bits and pieces of success stories. But then I would say probably five years ago, it started to hear a lot more about it. When we began in 2010, there were like eight other organizations in the world. They were all real tiny. The were coming to us to ask us how we were doing, what we were doing. We had a great website. They thought we was a big organization, fooled the, but we tried to help them because we wanted to spread the word. But more people got involved, more companies got involved. It really spread to environmentalists land. People who could see this as sustainability is not just recycling, it's getting involved to really make a change on how the world thinks. And companies have prospered on doing that. And they're sending messages and they're learning from each other with Airbus. Airbus is basically saying, and Canada's, the same way, is saying, if you supplier, and keep in mind here's, northeast Ohio, the largest supplier to Airbus of any place in the United States, they're saying to their suppliers, unless you come up with major changes to your sustainability practices, you will not be a supplier of ours. And we don't mean recycling cans. And so because they practice biomimicry, people who use biomimicry are going to have an edge. And now Boeing is following them in their footsteps. And more and more companies, especially in Europe, are demanding that people follow those practices. So it used to be in the early phases, you had crotchety old engineers that were at companies that wanted to do same old, same old. And they really didn't want to do it. They didn't talk about it, they just pushed it down. You never got up to the CEO to be able to reach it. All of a sudden, when other companies, successful companies, started practicing and using it, they don't have any choice. They're being told to put it in land, start using it as a guide. It's spreading. It's got a long way to go, but there's a lot more people who are interested in it and a lot more people who are listening to it. Which is why we are ahead of ourselves. But we're in the right place at the right time.

Jeffrey Stern [00:51:45]:

Yeah, no, it seems quite objectively to me, like a good thing, but maybe it's more subjective than that. That is a perfect segue to the next kind of area that I wanted to ask you about, which is how do you gauge your own success, I guess, as an organization? What is the impact ultimately that you hope to have in retrospect, looking back.

Tom Tyrrell (Great Lakes Biomimicry) [00:52:07]:

On this work, when somebody comes to you and asks you information and then they use it and they come back and let you know that they've used it, you feel good because you're making a dent someplace. We used to hold a three day conference called Biocene, which was not held the two years of the Pandemic. We held it this year out at OAI, Ohio Aerospace Institute, and it was a global conference. We had over 100 people that were involved. We had speakers that flew in from overseas to talk. We had a lot of virtual people that were there. The major premise on it was aerospace was the future of transportation using biomimicry. But we were able to branch off into many areas of biomimicry that could be applied to that. We had incredible speakers and you could see the effect that it's taking place. People were sit there, they sat there, they were mesmerized. They asked incredible questions. It was very different from the one we ran five years ago, where it was a much greater learning process and people were asking learning questions. Now people were making contributions and suggestions. And this is something that we're going to do every year. We're going to do it likely here, one year, and then down in Dayton, because Ohio Aerospace is down there as well. And we've got to work with the Air Force Research Institute. And so that's really helped to spread the word. So now the matter is being able to facilitate the learning process. We're looking at a project in the Aero Zone, which is the land around the airport, which we've had available for some time, to be able to attract companies who want to get deeper into aerospace research and production. So a lot of the companies who are producing it that are going to grow if they practice biomimicry and get in with the Airbuses and the Boeings, have a place to go, a beautiful park that's out there near NASA, near OAI, near the airport, that they can go ahead. And it's just a natural evolution of that process. So there's a lot of things that we're working on today. John's leadership, john Sankovic's leadership at OAI is key to making this happen. And transportation is just one area. He's putting back into effect. The educational programs we're putting back involved our K through twelve programs. We're going to get back involved with schools. Right now we've done an MoU with the Akron Zoo who wants to put together for Northeast Ohio a really unusual learning, virtual learning experience. That utilizes the zoo animals and nature biomimicry to be able to put it out in the field and be one of the first to do that. We're working with the Girl Scouts of Northeast Ohio who have 18,000 girls who are dead set on getting those girls into stem, and Jane Christensen, who's the CEO there, is in the process now raising funds to build a Stem center. And she's embraced biomimicry internally in the center, on the outside, in the area and the foliage that's around there. And she's brought in the design architect to be able to do it, has done other projects that involve biomimicry. So now we have 18,000 girls are going to have access to it. They're going to do that on the weekends and in the summer camps and during the week she's going to open it up to Northeast Ohio schools to get those kids in to be able to use what's happening. That's the kind of thing you get that age group learning it. They're going to go out and demand it. They'll demand their schools to get them involved in more of that process. And it's got to start like a snowball land, pick up speed land. We feel we're just at that cusp right now.

Jeffrey Stern [00:55:42]:

No, it is real exciting, I think, to hear about all this work at the convergence of your interests in education, land, environment and entreprenuership through this mechanism of biomimicry. It's very cool.

Tom Tyrrell (Great Lakes Biomimicry) [00:55:59]:

And you know what? It's going to be your age group. What is it? Gen z. Is that the one you're in?

Jeffrey Stern [00:56:07]:

Not quite.

Tom Tyrrell (Great Lakes Biomimicry) [00:56:08]:

Well, it's going to take the last two groups who are much more focused on climate change, on the environment, on nature, on green spaces. They're the ones who are going to be getting leadership roles in the world, in politics, in companies in the next 20 years, and they're going to take their demands for using biomimicry and nature with them. And it's going to change more rapidly all the time.

Jeffrey Stern [00:56:35]:

Yeah, I hope so.

Tom Tyrrell (Great Lakes Biomimicry) [00:56:37]:

Me too.

Jeffrey Stern [00:56:38]:

Yeah, I'm an optimist about it. And I think I'm an optimist because of biomimicry in some ways, right. If you just look at nature like we were talking about earlier, they have figured out nature has figured out most of the problems. And I think if you think about the biggest problems we have today, just energy itself, it's not really that scarce. We haven't unlocked the knowledge required to harness it and channel it as effectively as nature can and does on its own.

Tom Tyrrell (Great Lakes Biomimicry) [00:57:12]:

Nature works in collaboration. Nature never works in isolation. Everything is based on something else and generally nothing goes to waste. You don't see any dump sites for know. Everything is either eaten or used another way. And that's the way we have to think, right?

Jeffrey Stern [00:57:32]:

Because otherwise it's unsustainable. And unsustainable by definition means it's not going to survive evolution.

Tom Tyrrell (Great Lakes Biomimicry) [00:57:38]:

You're exactly right, Jeff.

Jeffrey Stern [00:57:40]:

Yeah, it's fascinating stuff. This is very cool. I want to do a quick detour before we kind of close out. One of the kind of chapters I think that we didn't really get to unpack but I'd be very interested to hear about is the work you did at Segment. Really a lot of questions about that and I'm sure we could do an entire episode just on that startup itself. But one of the things I think I've been most interested to understand is a lot of the nature of the work that you have done is in the physical world, the world of atoms and Segment is very much a tech startup, software, data company. What was the kind of transition, the thinking that went into? I understood maybe it was just too much of steel. How do you make that jump between those two worlds?

Tom Tyrrell (Great Lakes Biomimicry) [00:58:31]:

I had it with Steel and honestly when I left in 2000, as deeply as I was involved, I never went back, never paid attention, I never did a single thing because I thought it was a mistake the way they run the industry and I wanted to change something. So I laid out two years and I got involved with Steve Haynes, who started Glen Gary. And the idea of Glenn Gary was to be a venture capitalist, but to be a venture catalyst where we brought on people from outside that had time CEOs, CFOs, CIOs. And we would go and we go and work with companies where we would invest in those companies, but we would also put our people in where they needed help running them. And they didn't have the key sets because most companies fail because of who's operating those companies to give them a start. And I did that for Glenn Gary. Ran from 2000 land Two through 2022. We just closed out our last account. We invested in probably 1518 companies, all of them Early Stage and we utilized a lot of the team players that we had to go in and help run those companies. Well, I did that. And in 2000, land three. I was asked by Al Ratner and Jamie Arnold from early stage partners and Bill Sanford from Stern. They had invested in a startup and they were having trouble with it. And so they asked me to go in and help run it and get it back on track. And so I said we had just started Glen Gary, and I said, I'll do it if we do it as Glen Gary. And they said, no, we just want you to do it. And I said, I'm not doing it. So they said, OK, we'll do glengarry. So we went in and Steve went in and worked on the finances and I worked in and it was a just there were five people, they were all great people but they all had titles of president or EVP and there were only four other people in the company. It was just not the way you work but they had one guy that they had brought on who was their It person, guy by the name of Rob Heiser. That when I sat with him, there was something really special about him. He got it. He was entrepreneurial. He had been in one major startup. He had come in because of the startup phase. He was disenchanted, having been there three months with the way it was being run. And I basically latched onto him and I said, we're going to change this company through you. Land we went out and developed a structure that would help small companies to be able to get suppliers from China to be able to bring back materials here for them to either manufacture or to sell. But they didn't have feet on the street. So we developed resources metallurgists, 400 metallurgists in China that could visit people and could go ahead and figure out what they had. And then when we had something, we would go through them and they would find it and they would bring it back and we'd market it to the people. What happened with that is it didn't grow fast enough. So I said, we can win this or we're going to lose. And the way to win it is go after some big fish. So we got a quote from Walmart and we ended up narrowing it down with everything that Rob Heiser was building. We narrowed it down to two people, walmart and this company from Oklahoma that had an eight story office building. We were in the 13th floor of the Halle Building. You had to take two elevators to get there. The roof leaked. We had pots on the desk. We were getting it for free from Al. And I went after Walmart and we got down to the last two and then they came in and they said, we'll come down there to see you. Said we know. We want to come in and see you. I couldn't get a place to fake it fast enough. They came in, they went back, they did their study. They gave us a test, 30 days to go out and take some product tests to be able to get it back. We came back, we blew the out of the water. Everything we did was better than what the other person did. They came back to us and said, and what's amazing about Rob is they came back and said, you have ten days to do this. And in ten days, he went from having nothing to having a complete software package to allow them to do it themselves. And they came back a week later and said, you were the best, you had the best product. We can't take the risk on you not staying in business. So we lost that. But we got a call from a company down in Georgia who saw what we were doing as a perfect fit for a much broader piece that they were doing. Boom. To tomb. We went there, we negotiated. We were able to sell the company. They wanted Rob Heiser to go with them. Rob said, I'm not leaving up here. We were able to contract it that way. They ultimately sold to Ariba. We got shares. Not we, but Al Ratner and Bill Sanford and Jamie Ireland. Their investment was covered and they were able to get out of it and make a tidy profit. We did not go to common stock, so we lost out on that. But we got a great deal of experience. And I met Rob Heiser. And when we separated that company, I took Rob out and I said, I'm a serial entrepreneur. I've started all kinds of companies. You think like I do, you are going to be a huge entrepreneur, so I want to work with you. I'll mentor you. Anything you do, get me involved in the process. So he went out and he started a website company that's a really successful one today. That was the first thing the did. But then he and a couple of partners came up with this idea on being able to get bank data digitally and to be able to get data from banks on people that were using banking to be able to digitally identify needs and uses of those people before the bank could and what was happening. And we built the model. We were working on it with National City. Bill McDonald got me into seeing National City top people in It and marketing. And we took a disk in. They had given us data, we took the disk in. And that's the day that the crash hit. Exactly that day. And so they all said, Something's going wrong. We can't do anything. Land they backed out of the deal, and we had to go out and limp, and we raised a lot of money. We ended up raising about $34 million overall, but most of it came from acronym investors, from friends and family. We had to go out and fight for every dollar. Luckily, we didn't get that deal because they redesigned around it. They developed a product called Key Lifestyle Indicators with a partner in Denver who Segment now owns, which would identify nearly a million attributes of you and what you're going to do with your money. And you know how when you get on a computer, if you're looking at knitting needles, you get 25 ads for knitting needles? Sure. Exactly. That's easy to do. We take data that the banks give us anonymously. It's totally protected. All we have is a number. And we take that number and we identify what that person is doing, what are their likes and dislikes to an incredible significant number of those likes. Land dislikes. And when those pop up on their credit cards, on their buying patterns, on their investment patterns, we give the in a matter of nanoseconds, a product that that customer needs from the bank. So if we see there's a purchase at Home Depot. They're going in with a home equity loan. If there's a purchase of a baby crib, they're going with a 509 from the state to be able to invest in it. And they've taken it out, and we got all the patents on it, so we're the only ones who are doing it. And we began working. Land started to grow rapidly once we got out of that Doldrum situation. And they did a phenomenal job. We got really very tight. In 2000, Land 18, we were on the cusp of making it. We had bled our investors dry. We got one person through a board member, to come in, make an investment in a company, a company from an independent investor from Florida. Within three months, the thing took off. It started growing rapidly. We started getting bank after bank because during COVID the banks couldn't see their customers and they were closing branches. And the people who were behind those things used to know if you lost your job, if you had a baby, and they could report that. So the banks could really gear themselves to put advertising out there. So what we did with them is be able to say, we can replace what you used to get. And especially with online banking taking such a share of what they had, they had to find a way to get more personable with their clients than they were doing. And we gave them that vehicle and began to build it with credit unions, with smaller banks all over the country, all over the world. And we had a person come to us, a couple of companies come to us, a major stock exchange company, and they worked on a deal and made the deal. And we closed the deal in April this past year. And we're able to sell Segment for $135,000,000. Every person at Segment is there except Rob. Part of the deal was Rob. Heiser does not go with. He's going to go off, take some time off. Randy Meyer off, both from Cohen, was on the board. Both suggested he's got to take time to get back together with his family, but he'll start something else up. But Segment now has grown. They're up to 50 people. They're doing fantastically. And it's just everything worked together. But there were some really tough times in getting to there. That's how I got it. And then right after that, I started working on biomimicry. So there's really never been a point in my life other than that two year period where I had to get steel out of my system, where I did. And I spend a lot of my time mentoring entrepreneurs. I find people. One of the things that I always disliked I came here in 86 is you get an entrepreneur who's got an idea and somebody refers you to them and you go ahead and meet with them. I find that most people who do the referrals. When they meet with an entrepreneur, they give them a list of names and phone numbers, land emails and say, call these people and let them know I told you to call them. I don't think that's fair. So if I get somebody that I really believe in what they're doing, my deal with them is here's names. This is why I need to see them. I will call them. I will introduce you. I will get them set to be able to accept your email or your phone call. That gives them an acceleration. People helped me building around you. The reason I'm where I'm at is I built the best people around me that I possibly could. Every single venture. I always got people that knew more than I did about what I knew the least. Let me do what I do well, build a trust relationship. You tell me what I need to know, and together we make this a success. And that's what's and I want to pay it forward. And my focus to Rob was he's got to do the same damn thing.

Jeffrey Stern [01:09:47]:

It's a beautiful mentality. I want to wrap it up here know we'll bring it to our closing question, but I also want to leave a little space just for any closing thoughts you have. Perhaps the lessons that you've gleaned from nature that you've taken with you. A little bit of an open field.

Tom Tyrrell (Great Lakes Biomimicry) [01:10:09]:

Here, I think nature, even though you've got enemies in nature, nature is grateful. Grateful. You see the celebrations in nature all the time that are out there, and they celebrate what they do. They celebrate successes, building a bird's net, I mean, all the things that they do. And there's competitive situations. You talked about hummingbird, and you get the situation where things happen. But nature works in balance. We're not in balance. I mean, we're certainly not in balance now. And if we get back to nature and we learn lessons from nature, I really do think intrinsically, it's going to permeate people who are willing to be open to it and begin to think a different way, and it'll broaden the way that they think, and they'll at least make that a part of the thought process. And ideally, they'll teach their kids about that, and they'll put their kids in programs that learn. I've had a motto I have always found in every organization I've started, the most exciting thing for me is when somebody comes up to me five years, ten years later and gives me a hug and say, that was the best time of my life, I just glow the whole time because that's what I do it for. I never did it for the money. I mean, I got my baseball cards with the Coke bottles, but just gave me the ability to do something else. There's a quote that I have picked up on years ago when I started that really directed my life, and it's a quote by Albert Pine, who's middle 18 hundreds, professor from England, a poet, and that's go, what we do for ourselves alone dies with us. What we do for others in the world remains and is immortal. And that's what drives me, because if you help people, they're going to make you feel good and they're going to help somebody else and that you never leave behind the legacy that you want to leave is exactly that. That's awesome. I love that quote.

Jeffrey Stern [01:12:12]:

Well, we'll close it out here then with the classic clay of the land closing question, which is not necessarily for your favorite thing in Cleveland, but for something that other folks may not necessarily know about. Hidden gem, if you will.

Tom Tyrrell (Great Lakes Biomimicry) [01:12:28]:

Well, I'll give you two of them, if that's okay.

Jeffrey Stern [01:12:30]:

Absolutely.

Tom Tyrrell (Great Lakes Biomimicry) [01:12:31]:

I've always been a zoo aficionado and that's where I got my nature back. I visited most of the zoos in the country. I would take my kids out to the zoo when it was raining because nobody was there and they could get up close and see things. And when I came to Cleveland, I love the zoo here. I got on the zoo board. I got very involved in strategic planning on the zoo. I'm still deeply involved in it and it's a wonderful zoo, but it's a big zoo and it takes a long time to go through. In Akron, we also have a zoo and it's a smaller zoo and they have different animals and it's beautifully laid out and they've done three major expansions in the last five years. The person that runs it, Doug Picaraz, is a CEO and he's an incredible person. And they've got animals you can't see at the Cleveland Zoo, but you can get through that zoo with a little stroller and a baby in an hour and a half. You don't have to spend 5 hours. So my gem is for families with young kids that they're going to get tired and fall asleep. Take them to the Akron Zoo first and let them see that and get used to that. And then as you expand and the get older, you can take them to the Cleveland Zoo where they have the time to really enjoy the animals. That's the first one. The second one is I've been involved with the trail system since I came here in 1986. I dedicated land from American steel wire plant to the canal where we used it for alternate water source. And then I got together with the superintendent of the Metro parks and the national park to get the 6 miles there to get people who had land on it to dedicate it. And today there's a trail connector built with two beautiful bridges that gets us all the way downtown. I've been involved with the conservative national park. I'm on the board now. And this is the most incredible national park you ever want to go to because it's an urban national park. In the middle of two major cities, 33,000 acres, people come from all over the world. It was the 7th visited, most visited national park in the country last year. There is one place in this park called the Ledges. It's near Peninsula. It's on Akron Peninsula Road, right where the Brandywine Golf Course used to be, which the conservancy has now bought to turn into parkland. And if you go there, it's an overlook, a rock crop overlook that you can see probably 50 miles into the west. And then if you go down on it, down to take the trail down, there's a trail that takes about an hour that's got caves and beautiful rock formations, it's got stairs that were built in the 30s by the Civilian Conservation Corps. The buildings are phenomenal. Actually, my daughter just went and got engaged there. It's just kind of unique, but to me there are some nice waterfalls, but everybody goes to there. Most people haven't been to the Ledges or the Ledges Trail. And I recommend everybody go there, bring a picnic lunch, go out land, look at it, take the walk and the sit down in that park like setting and enjoy it. Those are the two places that I would highly recommend to people that they probably haven't visited.

Jeffrey Stern [01:15:42]:

Wow, sounds incredible. That's such a great one. Well, Tom, I really appreciate you coming on land, taking the time and sharing your story here. I think the whole biomimicry concept has expanded my mind a bit, so I appreciate you coming on.

Tom Tyrrell (Great Lakes Biomimicry) [01:16:00]:

My pleasure, Jeff. I really enjoyed it. Thanks for the opportunity.

Jeffrey Stern [01:16:04]:

If folks had anything that they wanted to follow up with you about, what would be the best way for them.

Tom Tyrrell (Great Lakes Biomimicry) [01:16:09]:

To do so, email me at ttirrell ttyrrell@glbiomimicry.org.

Jeffrey Stern [01:16:21]:

That's all for this week. Thank you for listening. We'd love to hear your thoughts on today's show, so if you have any feedback, please send over an email to Jeffrey at layoftheland FM or find us on Twitter at @podlayoftheland or at @sternjefe J-E-F-E. If you or someone you know would make a good guest for our show, please reach out as well and let us know. And if you enjoy the podcast, please subscribe and leave a review on itunes or on your preferred podcast player. Your support goes a long way to help us spread the word and continue to bring the Cleveland founders and builders we love having on the show. We'll be back here next week at the same time to map more of the land.