Sustainable Business Practices and Ethics with Sam Berman

**SPEAKER_1** (0:04)
The Bliss Business Podcast, the show about empathy, connection and consciousness in business. Today's episode is brought to you by Zero Company, your paid search, social media, and programmatic ad experts.

**Stephen Sakach** (0:17)
Well, welcome back to the show, everyone. I'm Stephen Sakach here with my co-host, Tullio Siragusa and our special guest today who we'll introduce in a moment. I was thinking before the show today, love in the systems of logistics can often be expressed in sustainability efforts. But we're going to look through the lens of logistics today in some interesting ways and how compassion can show up.
I'm really looking forward to this conversation. Obviously, we're going to explore sustainable business practices and ethical leadership, innovation, and how businesses can use their influence and operational power to create meaningful change beyond profit alone. But Tullio, introduce our guest today.

**Tullio Siragusa** (1:04)
Absolutely. It will be my pleasure. Our guest today is Sam Berman. He's the founder and CEO of LARC, which stands for Logistics Advanced Research Center.
Sam is an entrepreneur, engineer, and logistics innovator focused on transforming how the world moves high-value technology infrastructure. Under his leadership, LARC has developed a high-performance, reusable, creating platform designed to replace outdated wood packaging with stronger, lighter, more secure, and fully sustainable solutions. His work spans hyperscale infrastructure, AI, cloud computing, semiconductors, aerospace systems, and complex global logistics challenges serving some of the world's largest technology and data center operators. Beyond innovation and sustainability, Sam is also leading Haven, an initiative of LARC dedicated to helping end human trafficking and exploitation. Through Haven, LARC commits a percentage of every sale to organizations working to abolish slavery, sex trafficking, and exploitation while helping restore hope and support survivors through action and advocacy. Sam is also the author of Militant Mind, The Psychology of Building What Doesn't Exist, where he explores the mindset required to challenge and trench systems and create entirely new categories of innovation.
Known for his bold thinking and direct perspective, Sam brings the unique voice to conversations around disruption, resilience, leadership, ethics, and sustainable innovation. Sam welcome to The Bliss Business Podcast.

**Sam Berman** (2:49)
Tullio, I'm very happy to be here. It's been a long time in coming. So excited for this conversation today, really am.

**Stephen Sakach** (2:56)
Sam, you've got this in a frame behind you for people who can't, who are listening. Yeah, right there.
Tell us a little about what's in that.

**Sam Berman** (3:06)
That is a napkin with a little sketch on it that I did about 11, 12 years ago, sitting in a restaurant with a gentleman who owned a wood creating company. And when we were there, he took a phone call to typical Silicon Valley story, happened to happen to Silicon Valley. And that phone call, he got off and he said, I've got server racks coming in every week for like eight weeks. I've got to get this created up. And I asked him, how much do those cost? He said, about $1,200, $1,400 each. And I very jokingly said to him, well, what are you doing that for? Just put a giant toilet paper tube over those things and ship them out. What are you doing? He went to the restroom. I grabbed a pen and a napkin from the waitress, sketched an idea that popped in my head about a reusable modular shipping container for moving those because why are we using one-time wood crates that didn't make any sense. I actually asked him, I was going to have him go into business with me when I had this concept and he declined and I said, all right, well, I'm going to do a little research.
Did some and realized that there's billions of dollars of crates built in the world. Every one of them has taken one to one and a half trees to build that, and that didn't make sense. Why are we shifting the world's most powerful and important technology and dead trees? That doesn't make sense in the modern world. Once I realized what was happening, I spent a couple of years developing this concept of reusable crating for mostly server racks for the data center space, which back then was big, but it wasn't even anywhere near what it is today. It's actually larger now.
But after that, I saw in California, it wasn't working out, so I moved my family to Tennessee, met my co-founder, Chris Taylor, who is a mechanical engineer out of Vanderbilt. A lot of international experience like I do, but we're very different people, so it's great. I'll keep the fires going, he keeps the common sense going. But together, we drive a pretty powerful concept out there, and paradigm-shifting company has taken on a very entrenched giants. We're getting a whole lot of traction these days, and we're becoming a standard for moving this very high-value product.