Speaker 1: Pushkin. The other day, I was talking with Matt Rogers
Speaker 1: about thermostats, specifically the way home thermostats looked back around
Speaker 1: twenty ten. If folks even know what a VCR is,
Speaker 1: they had these like VCR like interfaces, like it would
Speaker 1: like just blink twelve or blink eights and you have
Speaker 1: no idea what to do. They're responsible for like some
Speaker 1: between eight and ten percent of global emissions energies controlled
Speaker 1: by this thirty nine dollars plastic box in the wall.
Speaker 1: No one cared about that product, despite it being so
Speaker 1: important to our daily lives. So I kind of just
Speaker 1: had to dig in and fix it. And that's what
Speaker 1: I spent the next nearly decade doing. And by dig
Speaker 1: in and fix it, Matt means that he co founded Nest,
Speaker 1: a smart thermostat company that Google ultimately bought for around
Speaker 1: four billion dollars. And that's the kind of stuff that
Speaker 1: gets me really interested, like, what are these things that
Speaker 1: are out there that are really important but we just
Speaker 1: kind of take for granted. Now Matt thinks he's found
Speaker 1: his next big, really important, taken for granted thing. The
Speaker 1: garbage in your kitchen. I'm Jacob Goldstein. This is what's
Speaker 1: your problem? My guest today is Matt Rogers, the co
Speaker 1: founder of a new company called Mill. This is the
Speaker 1: last episode in our series on the future of food,
Speaker 1: and appropriately enough, we're talking about what happens to food
Speaker 1: after we're done with it. Matt's problem is this, how
Speaker 1: do you turn the food you throw in the garbage
Speaker 1: back into food. When Matt describes Mill, it sounds for
Speaker 1: a while like he's just talking about a high tech
Speaker 1: garbage can. But then there is this twist. I don't
Speaker 1: want to spoil it, but I will say that it
Speaker 1: is a big twist that will be hard to pull off.
Speaker 1: You might not work, but if it works, it could
Speaker 1: be a really big deal. Mill just came out of
Speaker 1: stealth mode a few weeks ago, but Matt has been
Speaker 1: working on the project since the early days of the
Speaker 1: pandemic Spring twenty twenty. We're all stuck in our houses,
Speaker 1: locked in, kind of walling on our own filth, screaming children,
Speaker 1: you know all the things. I get a call from
Speaker 1: an old colleague from Nest, Harry Tanabaum, who someone I
Speaker 1: was very close to on the Nest team. I mentored
Speaker 1: him for a lot of years. I am pacing on
Speaker 1: the balcony in our San Francisco house. No one is
Speaker 1: allowed to leave their home. I get a call and
Speaker 1: he says, Matt, Matt, I've been reading a lot of
Speaker 1: PDFs and websites about waste and no, like seriously, it's
Speaker 1: a it's a very hairy thing that could open. That's
Speaker 1: a good lead. I'm reading DAFs about waste. It's like,
Speaker 1: this is really bad. It's much worse than we think.
Speaker 1: And waste, waste meaning garbage like waste like garbage, Yes,
Speaker 1: Like one minute something is valuable and we use it
Speaker 1: and we love it, and the next minute it's like, oh,
Speaker 1: we got to toss this away, And what's it about
Speaker 1: that minute where it transitions from like valuable and awesome
Speaker 1: to like trash? Huh? And that was intriguing to me.
Speaker 1: And so it's almost like it's almost like the philosophy
Speaker 1: of garbage, like garbage as an idea. Indeed, yes, like
Speaker 1: is trash inevitable? And we didn't discuss this on this call,
Speaker 1: but like as as Harry and I dug into it
Speaker 1: over the months, the learning was waste as an existent nature,
Speaker 1: like waste is like human construct and it is not inevitable.
Speaker 1: And that was kind of the sea crystal of this
Speaker 1: idea of like, oh, like what if we made a
Speaker 1: company that could end waste and what would that look like?
Speaker 1: And I knew from my insight days, from my family
Speaker 1: office work, I knew how big the climate, the climate
Speaker 1: part of this equation was. And what is the connect
Speaker 1: between food waste and climate change? Okay, I guess yeah,
Speaker 1: that's this is not obvious. It wasn't obvious to us either.
Speaker 1: It takes a lot of energy, water, land to grow
Speaker 1: our food. We have to drive it in trucks, often refrigerated,
Speaker 1: to get to grocery stores, get to our houses. It's
Speaker 1: like tennish percent of global emissions is the food that
Speaker 1: we've wasted. And then when food goes to landfill. This
Speaker 1: is all obviously not intuitive either. It doesn't just biodegrade,
Speaker 1: like the bid appeal of trash is actively a bad
Speaker 1: thing because it releases methane, which is like an ad
Speaker 1: x more potent greenhouse gas than CO two. Okay, so
Speaker 1: you got the call from Harry, When do you decide
Speaker 1: that you're in that you're gonna get back in started
Speaker 1: other company? Oh? Literally two hours later? Again, like this
Speaker 1: is the my instincts are pretty strong and big problem
Speaker 1: and a problem that is worth solving that I had
Speaker 1: been looking at and had not seen kind of a
Speaker 1: holistic solution yet, and also a problem that I could
Speaker 1: help on. Like when I think about what makes a
Speaker 1: great entrepreneur, it's not just that like they've got this
Speaker 1: drive to solve a problem and the problem is really big,
Speaker 1: but also like do they have the skills to actually
Speaker 1: impact that problem? And this is one really where the
Speaker 1: problem is behavior. It's like what we do in our kitchens.
Speaker 1: And that's the thing. Actually I know a lot about
Speaker 1: I spent a lot of time in people's homes helping
Speaker 1: design great products. What are you guys imagining when it's
Speaker 1: just you and Harry thinking, Okay, we're gonna do this, Like,
Speaker 1: what's the kind of vague set of thoughts you have
Speaker 1: about what to actually do? The first thought is, what
Speaker 1: if we built a new product that would go in
Speaker 1: your home to make it really easy to separate food
Speaker 1: waste at home. We're told that it's a good thing
Speaker 1: to do, but it's really hard to do it and
Speaker 1: for our household. Swathie and I are like we are
Speaker 1: climate evangelists. We spend our whole life working on climate change,
Speaker 1: and we've tried composting. We actually had one of those
Speaker 1: countertop bowls in our kitchen and there was a point
Speaker 1: where we actually had to stop because the fruit flies
Speaker 1: literally invaded our house and we had this like yellow
Speaker 1: sticky paper hang all around our kitchen. It just was
Speaker 1: way too hard. So most people don't know that it's
Speaker 1: important to separate your food waste, and for those who
Speaker 1: do know it's important, it's really hard to do it. Okay,
Speaker 1: I buy all that, And what are you imagining when
Speaker 1: you start building a bin? What do you have in
Speaker 1: your mind? What is this trash can going to do?
Speaker 1: So first and foremost, it has to not smell, And
Speaker 1: that's a crazy thing to say. You're going to put
Speaker 1: food in it and leave it there for days? Pasably
Speaker 1: it and it has week weeks weeks? Why weeks? Why weeks? Ah?
Speaker 1: So why weeks? If you're going to change a daily ritual,
Speaker 1: it's got to be really easy. It's got to be
Speaker 1: the easiest thing in the world. And today, the easiest
Speaker 1: thing to do with your food waste is throw it
Speaker 1: in the trash And the side effect of that is
Speaker 1: you're taking out the trash almost every day. So part
Speaker 1: of building a better system is not only can it
Speaker 1: not smell, but like, can we drop that chore? Could
Speaker 1: you take out the trash like once or twice a month? Okay,
Speaker 1: that is a very tall task if you can think
Speaker 1: about that way, right, I mean, like even in one day,
Speaker 1: that countertop bin is thinking I know I have one,
Speaker 1: and it's true. So that was kind of the task
Speaker 1: we set out for ourselves. So how do you figure
Speaker 1: out that part? Yes, okay, we spent honestly months on experimentation,
Speaker 1: and tell me some of the things you tried that
Speaker 1: didn't work. Oh okay, I think my favorite experiment that
Speaker 1: didn't work is we try this kind of microbial technology
Speaker 1: and are there bugs or fun guy that can kind
Speaker 1: of break down food and eat it. And that's kind
Speaker 1: of some of the essence of how composting works. It
Speaker 1: turns out actually a lot of those mechanisms are actually
Speaker 1: inherently stinky. I mean, presumably we evolved to be a
Speaker 1: verse to rotting food basically, right, Like it smells bad
Speaker 1: to us for a reason. It smells bad because if
Speaker 1: danger danger, you will get sick. So okay, so the
Speaker 1: microbes don't work so what happens Our chief scientist who
Speaker 1: kind of leads our Seattle team, doctor Jeff Hill, was
Speaker 1: burning some food scraps in his lab like literally like
Speaker 1: like one of these like pyrolyzing ovens was laying them
Speaker 1: on fire and yeah, scientists, two fun stuff. I gotta
Speaker 1: get one of those ovens. And he's like, Matt Harry,
Speaker 1: food waste has more energy than wood, and we're like,
Speaker 1: what I mean? It has more energy than wood? And
Speaker 1: a guess this this makes sense, Like our food has calories.
Speaker 1: Calories is energy. So like we start digging in to
Speaker 1: like what he's learning, and he's like, wait a second, here,
Speaker 1: if we dry the food a kins like drying out wood,
Speaker 1: like it preserves the energy, and like, oh, this is cool.
Speaker 1: And then he also has his next Aha, he's looking
Speaker 1: at the materials and he's like, if we dry out,
Speaker 1: it preserves the nutrients, so like preserve the calories, preserved
Speaker 1: the nutrients. Like oh, and like in hindsight, this is
Speaker 1: like a no brainer, like oh, like we just invented
Speaker 1: drying things out. That's like a dehydration. Like we've been
Speaker 1: in We've been in this for astronaut food for decades, right,
Speaker 1: like or like beef jerky. It's like this has existed
Speaker 1: for really thousands of year old technology. That's why this
Speaker 1: is cool. So what we land is like if we
Speaker 1: dehydrate the food, it doesn't smell because it's preserved basically.
Speaker 1: So now you still have the problem if you want
Speaker 1: it to be there for weeks. You know, people throw
Speaker 1: away too much food, right, the trash can is gonna
Speaker 1: get full, correct exactly, So uh, like beef jerky is
Speaker 1: still pretty big. So it's cool is we have this
Speaker 1: kind of notion of like you dry it and you
Speaker 1: grind it at the same time. So and these things
Speaker 1: actually work synergistically because as you grow ended up, it
Speaker 1: makes it easier to get the water out. And food
Speaker 1: is about eighty percent water, so as you're grinding and
Speaker 1: drying it out, it gets really really small, really really small,
Speaker 1: like eighty percent size reduction. So if you can imagine,
Speaker 1: you know, you've got a big dinner party and you
Speaker 1: filled up the bin. You wake up the next morning
Speaker 1: and there's like this brown powder at the bottom. You're like, oh,
Speaker 1: where did all the food go? It's because there's mostly water,
Speaker 1: so okay, So like that is a really elegant plan
Speaker 1: I imagine it's hard to actually make all that happen
Speaker 1: inside a trash can that somebody can just put in
Speaker 1: their kitchen and plug in. Incredibly difficult, Yes, incredibly difficult. One.
Speaker 1: It's like in the getting to from the wetness to
Speaker 1: the dryness, there's still some wetness to get there. So
Speaker 1: what do you do with any odors that are created
Speaker 1: in that that twenty four hour period of the twelve
Speaker 1: hour period. And our engineers kind of scoured the world
Speaker 1: for like the most effective, the highest surface area activating
Speaker 1: charcoal in the world, and we found this really cool
Speaker 1: coconut core based product that has like a square mile
Speaker 1: of surface area in our little can. It is pretty wild.
Speaker 1: So so you you put all this together and you
Speaker 1: make a thing. You make a high tech trash can
Speaker 1: that will grind up and dry out your food waste.
Speaker 1: Tell me about the thing you landed on. What's it
Speaker 1: look like? How does it work? Yes? So what we
Speaker 1: what we built is a new kind of bin that
Speaker 1: it's about two feet tall, looks like a kitchen trash bin,
Speaker 1: beautiful like white white steel wood vinear top, like a
Speaker 1: beautiful steel pedal, and is effectively a bottomless pit so
Speaker 1: two feet tall, normal size of trash bin. But because
Speaker 1: it's drying things out automatically, every night, you fill it
Speaker 1: up and during the day and you wake up the
Speaker 1: next morning and it's basically empty. It takes three ish
Speaker 1: weeks to fill up. What does it look like after
Speaker 1: it's ground up and dry. It's like looks a coffee grounds.
Speaker 1: It's actually we call it food ground coffe ground because
Speaker 1: it literally looks a coffee grounds. Okay, and it's a
Speaker 1: very familiar thing, like, oh, like brown's dry, it's kind
Speaker 1: of fluffy. Yeah, it's coffee grounds, but it's food. But
Speaker 1: it's cool. Because this material is dry and small and
Speaker 1: shelf stable, we don't need to get it out of
Speaker 1: the house in a garbage truck anymore. You could put
Speaker 1: it in the mail. So we did a partnership with
Speaker 1: the US Postal Service to put this material in the
Speaker 1: mail back to us. Wait, that's a that is a
Speaker 1: major twist putting it in the mail. It is indeed
Speaker 1: it was for us too. Why the mail? Why the mail?
Speaker 1: And also what is Matt and Mill gonna do with
Speaker 1: all of the food garbage that people are starting even
Speaker 1: now to send back to Mill in the mail? That
Speaker 1: we'll explain everything in a minute. Okay, let's get back
Speaker 1: to the show. Matt is explaining how he and his
Speaker 1: colleagues decided to have customers mail their garbage back to Mill,
Speaker 1: and also how Mill is going to try and turn
Speaker 1: that garbage into food for chickens. Why the mail, Like
Speaker 1: like I feel like you've sort of solved the problem already,
Speaker 1: Like I don't know what's what's going on with the mail?
Speaker 1: Why the mail? Well, as I mentioned, like, our lead
Speaker 1: scientists had spent months then analyzing this material and it
Speaker 1: has energy, it has calories as nutrition, and he had
Speaker 1: this moment where he's feeding it to his chickens in
Speaker 1: his backyard and they love it. And we talked, we
Speaker 1: talked to some more scientific advisors, we talked to some
Speaker 1: experts and they're like, yeah, this is this is a thing.
Speaker 1: Like we used to do this as a society back
Speaker 1: in the day. Whatever food we didn't eat went into
Speaker 1: the backyard to feed the chickens of the picks. That's
Speaker 1: how humans used to live. And as society has gotten
Speaker 1: more and more industrialized, we've kind of gone away for
Speaker 1: that and we don't farm in our backyards anymore. That's
Speaker 1: just not how we live. Most of us don't live
Speaker 1: that way. So just that you know, it would be
Speaker 1: a shame to compost this stuff. It's rocket fuel. Like
Speaker 1: we got to preserve the food. We need to get
Speaker 1: it back to us so we can get it to farms.
Speaker 1: And as you can imagine, like that's a pretty tall task,
Speaker 1: Like how do you get like hundreds of pounds of
Speaker 1: material per household? How do you collect that? Suddenly you're
Speaker 1: in a super different business, right, Like sure, selling people
Speaker 1: a fancy trash can, like I get that, but like
Speaker 1: having them mail back to you the dried out food
Speaker 1: garbage way, It's like that's like a huge change in
Speaker 1: what I'm imagining you doing. And it seems like a
Speaker 1: huge change in complexity. It seems borderline absurd that I'm
Speaker 1: gonna be mailing back my garbage to you. This is
Speaker 1: our journey. I would say. There's a combination of skill
Speaker 1: and luck in all entrepreneurship. Yeah. One of our founding
Speaker 1: team members, Alissa Pollock, was one of the first people
Speaker 1: at uber eats. She was one of the founding team
Speaker 1: members of uber Eats and ran business operations for them,
Speaker 1: and so she had looked at all sorts of different
Speaker 1: logistics models that exist, and you know, she's super creative.
Speaker 1: And one of the things that she pushed us on
Speaker 1: is like, hey, like we don't need to drive trucks
Speaker 1: around to pick this stuff up. Like it's small and light, Like,
Speaker 1: let's put in a package and ship it. So, like,
Speaker 1: we made some calls and we talked to some folks
Speaker 1: at the postal Service and a few folks that were
Speaker 1: retired from the postal service. We talked to some of
Speaker 1: the people who do package collection and I was like, yeah,
Speaker 1: that seems doable, Like you could mail a whole tree.
Speaker 1: These days, you put all sorts of stuff in the mail,
Speaker 1: and especially because it's shelf stable, like, yeah, we could
Speaker 1: pick this up. And one of the first kind of
Speaker 1: thoughts we have is like, oh, like this can't be
Speaker 1: good for the environment, like mailing boxes of dried food.
Speaker 1: That can't be a good thing. Right, So a lot
Speaker 1: of you you got a lot of moving stuff around
Speaker 1: driving it, that's right, I think that this can't be
Speaker 1: a good thing, right. So, being an environmentally conscious team,
Speaker 1: we actually did the analysis. We built a full life
Speaker 1: cycle analysis of this, and we realize actually, like it's diminimous. Okay,
Speaker 1: the methane generating power of this food waste is so high.
Speaker 1: And actually the trucks from the mail are already come
Speaker 1: in your house anyway. Yeah, like they're dropping off packages,
Speaker 1: the dropping of letters every single day, and the trucks
Speaker 1: usually go back empty. I buy the carbon footprint, that
Speaker 1: sort of climate change piece. It's more the operational part
Speaker 1: of this, like, well, we haven't even gotten to the
Speaker 1: point like sure, let's say I can get the food
Speaker 1: waste back to you. Let's say it's convenient for me.
Speaker 1: Let's say the environmental footprint is fine, you still gotta
Speaker 1: get it to a chicken. And by the way, you
Speaker 1: might be feeding that chicken the chicken that I ate
Speaker 1: and dried out, which feels a little weird. Is it?
Speaker 1: Is there a sort of health risk there for like
Speaker 1: any kind of human consumption of cons eating chicken, Like
Speaker 1: is that a piece one is concerned about? So the
Speaker 1: key is we get the material back to us, we
Speaker 1: filter out any contaminants, We pasteurize the material again, so
Speaker 1: kill any pathogens those kind of things, and we blend
Speaker 1: it all together. So let's say, like if you only pizza,
Speaker 1: we're gonna blend your pizza scrap household with everybody else.
Speaker 1: So you have a factory now that to do this,
Speaker 1: Like have you built this in advance? Yep, of course,
Speaker 1: we gotta build the whole end to end. This is
Speaker 1: so much harder than tell it a fancy trash can.
Speaker 1: This is this is so much harder the nest and
Speaker 1: it seems like a huge amount of the sort of
Speaker 1: operational challenge. Slash risk is the back end, right, Like
Speaker 1: it seems like in a weird way, drying out the
Speaker 1: trash is the easy part, and like getting it from
Speaker 1: my house to a chicken, that part seems like I can't.
Speaker 1: That part seems very hard and like it might not work. Yeah,
Speaker 1: this is the double black Diamond of startups. Yeah, it's
Speaker 1: like just building hardware is hard, Like most hardware startups
Speaker 1: fail because of execution, right, like that, A, you have
Speaker 1: a marginal costs that you don't have in software, and
Speaker 1: you have to get lots of people to buy it,
Speaker 1: and you have scale problems, like it's hard to sell
Speaker 1: a fancy trash can. And this is so much harder
Speaker 1: than selling a fancy trash can. Right, that's right, but
Speaker 1: we've got to solve it. End to end again, like, okay,
Speaker 1: if there's any friction for people, they're going to not
Speaker 1: do it. And what are you going to do with
Speaker 1: hundreds of pounds of dried food? So we had to
Speaker 1: get it back. Where is your processing facility? You have this?
Speaker 1: It exists now are first ones outside Seattle, and over
Speaker 1: time we see us building more and more around the country. Like,
Speaker 1: as we have more customers, we have more density, we
Speaker 1: should build facilities in every city. So you process it
Speaker 1: and then you sell it to chicken farmers as chicken food.
Speaker 1: We sell it to farmers as chicken foods, as an
Speaker 1: ingredient to chicken food. It won't be the exclusive thing
Speaker 1: a chicken will eat, but it's like it's called twenty
Speaker 1: twenty five percent of a chicken's diet. Is there any
Speaker 1: kind of regulatory hurdle you have to clear for this
Speaker 1: to work? We actually are actively going through this today,
Speaker 1: Like we are deep in the scientific and regulatory process
Speaker 1: and review for this new feed ingredient. Okay, so you
Speaker 1: have to get approval from what USDA or something. It's
Speaker 1: kind of a blend of USDA and FDA. We are
Speaker 1: still working through their process. So if your product is
Speaker 1: a hit. Are you going to have a warehouse full
Speaker 1: of prime chicken food ingredient that you can't sell yet?
Speaker 1: Is that a risk at this moment? Not yet. We're
Speaker 1: gonna need to use a lot of the feed we
Speaker 1: create for R and D and for the you know,
Speaker 1: for the first several weeks months, we're probably gonna use
Speaker 1: most of this material for R and D. Wow, Okay,
Speaker 1: so I think I've got the whole arc. We've got
Speaker 1: the whole arc. Well, let me ask you one more question.
Speaker 1: What's the business model? Ah? So the business model is
Speaker 1: we've built this all, this, this full loop from your
Speaker 1: kitchen table all the way back to the farm, and
Speaker 1: we've built it as a membership. So you don't buy
Speaker 1: the bin okay, like you don't buy new charcoal filters
Speaker 1: when they run out. You don't pay for the mail.
Speaker 1: It's all included for about a dollar a day a dolt,
Speaker 1: So like thirty bucks a month, thirty three dollars a month.
Speaker 1: Thirty three dollars a month is kind of a lot
Speaker 1: for garbage, right, it's whatever of four hundred bucks a year,
Speaker 1: certainly if you're not paying for the kind of marginal
Speaker 1: garbage bag. Right, if it's if it's a true incremental cost,
Speaker 1: certainly most people aren't going to pay that. You don't
Speaker 1: need most people. So like who is your who is
Speaker 1: your target audience? Who are you starting with target customer?
Speaker 1: I should say yeah. So the way we think about
Speaker 1: it today is for folks who have felt the pain.
Speaker 1: And when I say the pain like the pain that
Speaker 1: my family had, they had the fruit flies and made
Speaker 1: Maybe they've got rats, Yeah, maybe they've they've tried composting
Speaker 1: and they just don't have the time, order the space
Speaker 1: to do it. A dollar a day for a less
Speaker 1: stinky kitchen sounds like a great idea to me and
Speaker 1: for me like a dollar a day for one less
Speaker 1: choice are I'm in? Yes, Although to be clear, you
Speaker 1: still have to take out all your other garbage all
Speaker 1: the time. I mean, I recognize that if food is
Speaker 1: most of your garbage, you take it out less. But still,
Speaker 1: if you know you still got to take out everything else.
Speaker 1: When you take food out of the trash, dream your
Speaker 1: garbage can fills up pretty slowly. Yeah, and it doesn't smell.
Speaker 1: So Actually, like for our house, we take out the
Speaker 1: garbage now like every three four days. It's a big
Speaker 1: difference for us we talked about the emotional side, Let's
Speaker 1: talk about the rational side of it. The rational side
Speaker 1: is in most cities in the country, you pay per
Speaker 1: month to your waist your waist bill based on the
Speaker 1: size of your trash cart at the curb. So in
Speaker 1: San Francisco, I have a sixty four gallon cart, I
Speaker 1: pay like seventy bucks a month for it. If I
Speaker 1: downsize to a thirty two or a sixteen gallon cart,
Speaker 1: I'm gonna save like twenty or thirty bucks a month.
Speaker 1: And this exists around the country. People have no idea,
Speaker 1: and most people are on the big big bins. So
Speaker 1: people are paying by how much trash they put out now.
Speaker 1: And this might, if not pay for itself, pay for
Speaker 1: part of itself, just by people paying less for their
Speaker 1: traditional garbage collection. Exactly. You got it, exactly similar story
Speaker 1: that we had a nest. So yes, you're buying this
Speaker 1: premium thermostat, but over time it's going to help you
Speaker 1: save money by using less energy. It's a very similar analogy. Yes,
Speaker 1: I know that in a lot of rural places there
Speaker 1: is not garbage collection, and you have to pay to
Speaker 1: go to the dump, and often you pay by the bag,
Speaker 1: like when I was thinking, who's going to use this
Speaker 1: thing that you're selling? That's what I thought of. I mean,
Speaker 1: is that is that part of your target audience? Absolutely,
Speaker 1: And actually for folks that live in rural areas that
Speaker 1: don't have pick up, they may even often have uses
Speaker 1: for the material themselves and they don't even need to
Speaker 1: send it back to us. If they want to use
Speaker 1: this material themselves, they can absolutely use it themselves, like
Speaker 1: if they have backyard chickens, if they compost and have
Speaker 1: a garden, awesome. Yeah, we think it's really helpful for
Speaker 1: them too. So you're just about to launch, we're talking
Speaker 1: the week before your big public announcement of this. As
Speaker 1: you you know, I'm sure that as a founder you
Speaker 1: have to be a wildly optimistic person at some level, right,
Speaker 1: you have to have some set of hope. But when
Speaker 1: you think about the things that might go wrong next week,
Speaker 1: next month, do you what do you think about? What
Speaker 1: are you worrying about right now? Oh? Man, there's a
Speaker 1: lot actually, and there's probably a list of forty five
Speaker 1: things or fifty things, and I'm worried about these days,
Speaker 1: from the operational to like will the parts get to
Speaker 1: the manufacturing facility on time, and are we clear to
Speaker 1: build and one of the things that we don't know
Speaker 1: and are people gonna like it? We've been using it
Speaker 1: for months. I've been using at my house for about
Speaker 1: six months. We've got a couple hundred people I've been
Speaker 1: feel testing it and we've getten some really good feedback.
Speaker 1: People like it, But like, are people gonna love it?
Speaker 1: It's too soon to answer that question on the show today.
Speaker 1: Neil just came out of stealth mode a few weeks ago.
Speaker 1: But if it's any consolation, we do have a garbage
Speaker 1: themed lightning round up in just a minute. That's the
Speaker 1: end of the ads. Now we're going back to the show.
Speaker 1: Let's finish with the Lightning round. Just a bunch of
Speaker 1: fast questions. Fun, fun, fun, indeed, fun is what we're
Speaker 1: going for here. So I understand you're a Star Wars fan,
Speaker 1: and I'm curious of all the Star Wars movies, what's
Speaker 1: your favorite scene? Favorite scene. I'm gonna go with Luke
Speaker 1: Skywalker on hoff in Empire Strikes Back when he's like
Speaker 1: and Ben, you will go to Yoda my favorite scene
Speaker 1: at all Star Wars. It's just beautifully done. I really
Speaker 1: thought you were going to say the trash compactor. Oh, man,
Speaker 1: that's a good one. I feel like that's the that's
Speaker 1: the mill scene. Man, they're in a trash compactor and
Speaker 1: it's even feeding the weird animal. Oh my god, there's
Speaker 1: a weird animal in there. Yeah, that's hilarious. Let's talk
Speaker 1: about garbage a little bit. What is the smelliest thing
Speaker 1: that people put into the garbage in a typical household. Oh,
Speaker 1: we've actually created a stink bomb for the office. It's
Speaker 1: kind of a mix of garlic, shrimp, kimchi. It is
Speaker 1: some stinky stuff. Like one of the things our engineers
Speaker 1: have challenged us with is they put our bins in
Speaker 1: our conference rooms in the office and they load them
Speaker 1: up with these stink bomb recipes and just let them
Speaker 1: run and we'll be in the room having our meetings,
Speaker 1: doing our discussions and not smelling anything. And that is
Speaker 1: the bar like stink bomb recipe, no smell. Who's your
Speaker 1: favorite Backstreet Boy? Ooh? AJ? And the reason why is
Speaker 1: he's carrying the team now Like AJ is really like
Speaker 1: coming to his own and actually like twenty twenties Backstreet
Speaker 1: Boys is unbelievable. Like, thank you, AJ. We appreciate you.
Speaker 1: If you weren't working on food, what would you be
Speaker 1: working on poop? Poop? Maybe diapers? Like, what are all
Speaker 1: these other stinky garbage ee things in the house? Methane bomb?
Speaker 1: Super gross? Does it have to be? So you've done thermostats,
Speaker 1: you're doing garbage. You think you might do diapers next? Look,
Speaker 1: poop is not out of the question. Strong, what's the
Speaker 1: most surprising thing you've learned about garbage? I think I'm
Speaker 1: still surprised by how much of the economy is to
Speaker 1: handle and dispose of the stuff that we're done with.
Speaker 1: It's like a multi hundred billion dollar industry that we've
Speaker 1: effectively taken for granted. It doesn't have to exist and
Speaker 1: it's really really really big. Well, that's good for you
Speaker 1: as a founder. If we can have some efficiency gains,
Speaker 1: the money is there, we can get some of the
Speaker 1: how money to make our business work. Yeah, that's actually
Speaker 1: one of our theses behind the company is we're building
Speaker 1: something new, but people pay for waste today. We pay
Speaker 1: a lot for waste today. So yes, Like, is there
Speaker 1: a better way of doing things that we can shift
Speaker 1: over time? Absolutely anything else we should talk about. I
Speaker 1: think stepping back like, this is attractable problem. And as
Speaker 1: someone who's spent twenty plus years looking at climate solutions
Speaker 1: and the things we gotta do, there's some areas that
Speaker 1: are really hard and we have to invent, like nuclear
Speaker 1: fusion to solve this is attractable, solvable problem. We have
Speaker 1: to keep food out of landfill, and like that is solvable,
Speaker 1: like we could do that. So the taglight is solving
Speaker 1: food waste easier than nuclear fusion, Easier than nuclear fusion.
Speaker 1: Matt Rogers is the co founder and CEO of NIL.
Speaker 1: Today's show was produced by Edith Russolo. It was edited
Speaker 1: by Sarah Knicks and Robert Smith and engineered by Amanda
Speaker 1: k Loong. I'm Jacob Goldstein. You can find me on
Speaker 1: Twitter at Jacob Goldstein, or you can email us at
Speaker 1: problem at Cushkin dot We'll be back next week with
Speaker 1: another episode of What's Your Problem