What if the real betrayal isn't crossing enemy lines — but refusing to?

Bill Shireman is an environmentalist, coalition-builder, and rare San Francisco Republican who has spent his career doing the thing his own movement told him never to do: sit down with the other side. He's the CEO and president of Solution Citizen, the founder of the nonprofit Future 500, a co-curator of the EarthX Congress of Conferences, and the author of In This Together: How Republicans, Democrats, Capitalists, and Activists Are Uniting to Tackle Climate Change and More. Over the years he's brokered some improbable alliances — the first corporate sustainable-forestry standards between Mitsubishi and Rainforest Action Network, the California CRV container-deposit system, and a 2008 agreement in which Greenpeace and ExxonMobil each backed the same federal carbon tax.

Decades ago, fighting to pass that bottle bill in California, Bill was losing to industry money. So he stopped organizing bigger, angrier campaigns and started calling his opponents — including the head of Coors — looking for a human opening. He found one, built a coalition across the left and the right, and got the bill signed into law. And then, he tells Renay, about half his allies in the environmental community abandoned him: "You have now compromised with the devil." It was "traumatic, and damaging, and painful."

This is not a policy war story. It's about what it costs to solve a problem instead of fighting over it forever — and where you have to find your nourishment when the applause never comes. "You cannot do this for the acclaim," Bill says. "If you betray your cause in order to be popular… that is the true betrayal."

Bill and Renay cover growing up in the engineered sameness of Silicon Valley and becoming an observer of his own life; the epiphany, mid-apple, that he was "a flow" rather than a fixed self; the four phases every living system moves through, and why "our diversity is our resilience"; being raised by a "pragmatically atheist" father and finding his own faith; and why he now designs laws to adapt over time instead of commanding a fixed result.

Through the Noise is about the inner capacities that let leaders sustain themselves and the work. This one is about doing the right thing before it's popular — and learning to need no one's permission for it.