E61: Making More Climate Resilient Chocolate with Kawa Project and CEO, Aaron Feigelman

Artwork for podcast The Keep Cool Podcast

Episode 61 • 11th March 2024 • The Keep Cool Podcast • Nick Van Osdol

Nick:

Aaron, welcome to the Keep Cool podcast. It is wonderful to have you. You and I know each other pretty well. So I think for folks listening in, they might find that this one feels a touch more informal versus past ones. But that's fundamentally an ethos I want to bring to my content more and more anyways. So excited to chat.

Aaron:

Me too, Nick, yeah. Known you for a couple of years now, so it's cool to see you on this pod and to be on the pod.

Nick:

Yeah, and I've known about Kiowa Project for a couple of years now, too, and I'm really excited about some of the progress that y'all have made. Why don't we dive right in and, you know, if you were to give listeners kind of the quick 60 or 90 or 120 seconds on what you're working on, how would you lay that out?

Aaron:

Yeah, so at a high level, what we're trying to do is really solve two issues at once. And one side is food waste or agricultural waste, which is a major methane emitter in landfills across the world. And then you also have deforestation of crops. tropical commodities like palm oil, cocoa, coffee, et cetera, that's also happening. And we're trying to figure out ways of using waste to make replacements for these tropical commodities, just to be more generally efficient with how we use commodities, right? And we're specifically targeting taking coffee waste from industrial coffee brewing factories and using it to make a substitute for industrial cocoa powder. which both of those kind of align with that fundamental sort of thesis that I outlined a second ago.

Nick:

Yeah, it makes sense. I mean, a lot of things already percolating in my mind that are probably just good context for folks. It's like, fundamentally, there's a mass amount of food waste in the world, the headline stat that folks throw out a lot, which, you know, can be decomposed a lot of different ways decomposed, pun intended. But we waste in the US. And also, I think it's pretty much consistent globally, but like approximately one third of all food is a mass amount of energy production and land use that goes into producing that food. That food could go feed people that don't have enough food, when that food waste inevitably ends up in a landfill, as you said, it decomposes into methane under certain conditions and other things too. So it's sort of like this confluence of a lot of different systemic challenges and climate challenges. And then yeah, you know, the land use change required for agriculture is also massive. So

Aaron:

Yeah, and let's not forget like these rainforests that are being deforested are major carbon sequestration mechanisms for Earth, right? So like it's just a really negative cycle that happens. That's true for a lot of climate problems, but this one too.

Nick:

Yeah. And you know, when did you first kind of start working on this and what drew you in to, you know, some of the specific stuff that you're targeting? Like what kind of attuned you to like, okay, hey, there's an opportunity here. Yeah, other folks aren't like, super quickly moving on it. So I might as well jump in.

Aaron:

a winding journey. So back in: 2014

Nick:

Yeah, transportation and power sector.

Aaron:

s and the nascent interest in: 2020

Nick:

Yeah, there's a bunch of things that I could pull out there that I want to really quickly highlight. I think A, the fact that you also broadened our conversation around deforestation to biodiversity is super integral. That's like a point that I've talked about a decent amount in my writing. I think the pharmaceutical application is readily appreciable to folks like People don't always know that there's these like billion-dollar drugs like Taxol, where the reason that drug exists is because at some point someone figured out that like the Pacific Yew tree has a specific compound in it that can be used to make this really valuable pharmaceutical. When we lose ecosystems across the world, as you said, we're not just losing a carbon sink or a beautiful aesthetic ecosystem or something that's important to the local community for their livelihoods. We're also fundamentally losing exponential potential in the biodiversity of that ecosystem. Second thing I'd say is, just to give folks a tiny bit more context on the palm oil thing, if you go to the grocery store, a lot of the peanut butter there, if it's like more of like a peanut butter spread, that'll have palm oil in it. You can find peanut butter that's like the only ingredient is peanuts and doesn't have the palm oil. And I won't make any specific advocation for whether or not that's like improved or an improvement in the grand scheme of things or not. But you know, just one reference point of what something like palm oil is used in. And I'll stop there because I could keep going all day.

Aaron:

But yeah, really in everything, right? I mean, it's a fantastic fat. Yeah.

Nick:

u know, we're sitting here in: 2024

Aaron:

So when we, when we made the pivot to the food space with the cocoa, you know, focus the, it was really, it was really focused on cosmetics and personal care. So with that pivot, we had to kind of look at new customers completely. And If you look at the cocoa market, about 50% of it is bought purely by Mars, Mondelez, Nestle. Candy manufacturers, other types of products, yeah. Like Nutella. I mean, the majority is really bought by a couple companies. So basically, you can play by selling to them directly or selling to the middlemen who are really Cargill, Olam, and then Barry Calabo. So you kind of have to get in with these guys to really penetrate the market. So, we ended up joining an incubator out in Thailand that was a total trip for us. It was sponsored by Nestle. And another Thai beverage was another large sort of a conglomerate in Asia. And we ended up spending, I ended up spending about three months last year out there connecting to, connecting with these corporates, the ones I mentioned earlier, all these kind of corporates are out there as well. And they got us into these proof of concept projects with all those companies. And mainly in Singapore, mainly their Singaporean divisions and their Thai divisions. So we kind of, interestingly enough, found like the most interest in Southeast Asia and Asia. And you're actually kind of seeing now that Asia is starting to do the most investments into these alt cocoa, alt coffee, alt, you know. Interesting. There's a couple of investors in Japan, corporates that are beginning to invest, lead these rounds of like Atomo Coffee recently had a round led by a large Asian coffee related company in Japan. And you're seeing it also in other Japanese companies.

Nick:

Yeah, and I guess that makes there's also, you know, like, some of the deforestation problems we're talking about are also very, like, fundamentally directed at Southeast Asia, you know, like a lot of the palm oil trade is in Indonesia, stuff like that.

Aaron:

So also, I mean, I don't even know this. I didn't know this. But Japan is like one of the leaders have always been the leaders in food innovation. I mean, they a lot of knowledge that's used for industrial food manufacturing has come from Japan.

Nick:

Interesting.

Aaron:

Totally new news to me. Yeah, I know. The Japanese are just super advanced when it comes to food manufacturing.

Nick:

And let's talk about sort of like the input side, and maybe we can like slowly kind of create this like visualization in folks' mind's eye of like, where, you know, where you source inputs from, then what's the process to transform that into something that's valuable to the person that you might sell it to? And we can kind of chart like the various levers of impact as we go through that process.

Aaron:

Certainly. So it all starts for us at this coffee factory. So, you know, you have these companies that make bottled coffee drinks, names that you'd be familiar with in America or La Cologne. They're a big, they just got bought for a bunch of money. So they're on people's headlines, right?

Nick:

I drank one like three days ago.

Aaron:

There you go. They're big. I mean, they're one of the largest bottle coffee companies in the US right now. I mean, of course, Starbucks has their own bottle drinks. But pretty much any company you see in the grocery store that has a bottle drink or an instant coffee is somewhere along those lines that that's coming from a factory that produces coffee drinks. And those coffee factories are producing this coffee ground waste after they brew it industrially. So what they'll do is they'll usually either in the United States, composting is not that I'm not all that great. So I mean, a couple of them actually are able to find composting companies that will take it from them for free. But majority of them are just paying landfill, landfill to take it. Damn. You noticed in things like beer waste, and things that are, you know, also kind of somewhat hot topics, they will, they will sell to farmers, because farmers are always looking for ways of getting cheap deals on calories for their farm animals. Yep. But coffee has caffeine in it. So you know, you don't want to do the appetite suppressant for a for an animal for farming.

Nick:

Yeah, you want to give it to someone like me that needs it to get the juice to get up for these podcast recordings.

Aaron:

Exactly right. So yeah, basically, it starts there, we work with them. And there's different, there's different sort of scales and size of these companies, the biggest ones are Nestle. And of course, Nestle, Nestle has a factory in Mexico that produces like 3% of all the coffee on earth. So they have these just ginormous, I mean, we're not really working too much on that skill right now, because it's not necessary. And it's also just crazy to work at that scale. Yeah, we're working with more players. But yeah, I mean, we're basically just taking their waste. And then you have to basically do some processing to it. We're doing We have a couple different products we're starting with. We're targeting a sub-market in the cocoa market to go to market with, which is a more processed form of cocoa. It's darkened, you see it in things like Oreos. And what we're doing is basically leveraging various extraction technologies to try to create similar flavor profiles that are already inherent in coffee waste. keep those and then sort of modify them a bit to get to the one that we're kind of trying to go after. Yeah. So that does not require any fermentation or anything. We're choosing that market because it's very scalable and we already have like the supply chain to do it in the United States.

Nick:

Yeah. And it sounds like the processing is a little less energy intensive than trying to produce other types of products. Is that true or false?

Aaron:

I mean, I guess what do you mean by other types of products?

Nick:

I guess like just by virtue of the fact that you said like it doesn't require fermentation as an example.

Aaron:

Right. Yeah, it doesn't require fermentation. I mean, the truth is that even if you mean, I mean, you look at the life cycle analysis of these companies, they do a lot of fermentation. I mean, even they are like, oh, it's like 90% less greenhouse gas or 90% less greenhouse gas emitting than the thing they're trying to replace such as. Sure. whatever the meat is or whatever. But energy wise, I mean, it's not like nothing, but it's it's it's it's sufficient. It's significantly less than, you know, going through the roasting process, the all the different steps of making cocoa, you know, from a from a from a. But really, if you look at the emissions of cocoa or even a lot of these tropical things, including palm oil, the majority of the emissions are just coming from the deforestation. Of course, it's not really energy emissions that are happening in this industry, it's just deforestation. So yeah, but I will say fermentation, I mean, fermentation ideally shouldn't be that energy intensive because you're not doing high pressure with fermentation. You're just kind of mixing microorganisms with feedstock and mixing it around and keeping it at a certain temperature. It shouldn't be that energy intensive. So even for our next step, which is fermentation for the later product that allows us to get other flavors, it shouldn't be that crazy energy intensive.

Nick:

Good to know. I'm learning things as we go. I guess, you know, for me to step back now and reflect back to you and also kind of iteratively crystallize for our listeners, the impact layers, you know, we already started to move into sort of the processing component of the conversation, but really just like at the at a very basic level, like keeping the waste out of the landfill and using it to make something else like that is in and of itself quite impactful. As we said at the outset, like if it goes to a landfill, which most of it does. And there's other ways to avoid that, as we talked about composting, but that's not really what we're getting into here. Like, that is not the ideal outcome.

Aaron:

Going to a landfill?

Nick:

Yeah.

Aaron:

Yeah, no, it's not. I mean, it's not it's but the nice thing about it is it's, it's not an ideal outcome for anybody in the supply chain, including the waste producer, the coffee factory, because they're paying a bunch of money for it. So right. For them, it's a pain point as well.

Nick:

Right? Yeah. And that's an important part because like sustainability isn't just you know, is it green sustainability is also like, how do we all make more money?

Aaron:

Yeah, exactly. I mean, so you see some of these guys are definitely like, some of them want to make money, like they're really the kind of capitalistic and their approach and how they want to deal with it. Some of them are more like, all right, just do whatever with it. You know, it's not our

Nick:

really care much about it, right? Especially if you'll take it off our hands for free as compared to us having to pay to put it in a landfill.

Aaron:

And some of them are paying millions of dollars on waste hauling fees per year. So it's an expense. It's an expense. No question about it. In other countries, though, I didn't mention this. Outside of the US and Europe, other countries will burn it. So in Asia, you see a lot of companies burning it. So there is, there's other ways to dispose of it in other places, but not here.

Nick:

Yeah. And that's not always ideal either for other reasons. Like there's probably all kinds of crazy life cycle analyses around, like if it's better in a landfill burned, but what have you, we won't get too deep into it.

Aaron:

The reason we can't do it here, right. It's air quality regulation. Yeah.

Nick:

Yeah. Um, what's the, you know, appetite that you're seeing on the buyer side for the product that you're currently producing?

Aaron:

Yeah, it's interesting. I think it's two sides. I think it's a couple different ways of looking at it. One, it's These big corporates, they plan their supply chains really far out, years. I mean, it's crazy how long out they plan. Groups like Mars and some of the oldest companies on Earth, really, Cargill and the like. The way they're looking at it right now, in my opinion, is they're beginning to dabble in it and they're waking up to the issue because they're starting to feel the pain themselves. Look at the price of cocoa. If you could show it, I don't know if you can show it to somebody, but if you can look at the price of cocoa, you know, 2x over the last couple of years. A lot of the commodities did spike during COVID, but this is sort of a delayed spike and has nothing to do with monetary supply chain disruptions, monetary, you know, macro, federal bank decisions, it's more about there's actual fungus that is destroying crops in the growing countries because of changes in climate that are occurring. So you're starting to see new kinds of fungi come around and basically start attacking the cocoa crops, and the farmers just cannot adapt. The business of cocoa is not built to give farmers very much money.

Nick:

It's probably inherently not very resilient to begin with. And then if you inject like all the layers of climate change, it just, yeah.

Aaron:

I don't even know Peter. I don't even know Peter Zeihan. People have these.

Nick:

Yeah. I've got, I've got one of his books on my list.

Aaron:

So there's a book that I read recently and he talked about supply chains. Um, he came out of the last year, two years ago. It talks about supply chains and he says, like, the most centralized supply chain in the world is semiconductors, or at least that was the case two years ago. It was almost like our top one. And then cocoa, because it's almost all coming from West Africa, and like, just a super, super centralized production. And that's, and it just so happens that these farmers are dirt poor. So just, It's a real problem. So really, the issue, the number one issue that companies that are these big players that I mentioned before looking at is really just supply chain security. I mean, the ESG sustainability goals, they say it matters, and I'm sure it does, but it's not going to like push the needle. What's most important is they can buy the ingredients they need to make the products that people love.

Nick:

Yeah, and at a price that they can still ingest.

Aaron:

Yes, that's the other thing, right? I mean, a couple cents more can break a business model for these guys. Because, you know, their margins are so, so low. If you're looking at these, some of them. Oreos are actually incredibly, incredibly high quality products. Very good, really good product.

Nick:

That's a good pull out.

Aaron:

That's funny. But yes, these companies are looking to save money. They're looking to secure their supply chains. And then it's environment. That's kind of how it's looked at.

Nick:

Yeah. And so, you know, probably can't get too deep on specifics that you might have under lock and key. But I'd just be curious for, you know, a little more specifics on like, scale of production, who you're talking to, what's going well, effectively, in the present moment.

Aaron:

Yeah, for sure. So we're basically the scale that we're operating at is And the way it sort of works with these, with, if you're trying to sell B2B ingredients is it's almost like pharma in some ways. It's not nearly as, it's not nearly as expensive as doing a pharmaceutical. Right. But it's, it's sort of, you go in these phases, right? You go to the, you go to phases over like four or five years to do an ingredient sale. You do, you know, you start at a really small amount. It's like Lily Grant, like 10, you know, a hundred grams. And then you get to pounds and then hundreds of pounds and thousands of pounds. And then, of course, industrial scale, if everything, all those things go well. Right. And we're kind of in the middle of like the first half. We're like in the middle of the first half with these guys like they have identified with about half of them. I mean, I can't it's hard for me to name names because we have NDAs and stuff. But basically, some of them, some of the players are like very like they're very they recognize is a serious, serious issue. And they're looking to really make some changes over the next couple of years. And they're beginning to really invest money internally and externally on innovations in this cocoa alternative space. And we're working with some of these guys, we're working with these guys at an earlier stage, again, with like, they're primarily with the food scientists and some of their innovations people. Sure. Then there's also the other players who are basically basically just denying it. And they want to try to, they want to try to deny it as long as they can. Sure. It's hard to interact with those kind of players because there's not they're not first movers, you know, so One of the, one of the things that we're also working on is, is we did a collaboration with, uh, Netflix, you know, three or four years ago on trying to figure out ways of, of kind of reducing the sales cycle in this business and kind of making almost like simulations of what we want to do at a large scale with a small scale. So we basically took some of the coffee waste at their fact at their, uh, uh, offices, corporate headquarters. Yeah. And we're based in San Mateo down in Silicon Valley. So there's a lot of them around there. So we're piloting this right now as well, actually taking some of the coffee waste from these offices and then turning it into some of these end chocolate products for their customers, for their actual end users, as a way of profitably generating revenue and showing that the thing works at a smaller scale with much shorter timelines of sales. makes sense. And also, like we're leveraging this the area that we're in, right? You can't do that. Yeah, no, that makes a ton of sense. They also, you know, they care about an environmental thing a lot more than other companies. True.

Nick:

uestion around, you know, for: 2024

Aaron:

I think the The biggest challenge for me right now is taking the feedback from these companies that they're giving us and making the improvements on it. I mean, that's obvious that we have to do this, but then figuring out ways of sort of making it happen. And right now, we're really focused on raising money to make these improvements on the product. That's like where my main focus is right now. Cool. I mean, we have the fermentation scientists working on it in the background. But for the V1 product, which we want to go to market with like, you know, as soon as possible, we want to basically have to do is like tweak our we have to tweak some of our of our parameters on our extraction systems that we're using, the drying systems, the milling systems, and do some scale up runs. So like right now, when we do produce, we can produce about, you know, one ton per day, if we want to. But you know, we've got to do a bunch more runs of that to make sure it's can repetitively work. But for these customers, we're more on the, you know, the B2B ingredient sales side. So that's my main focus right now is just figuring out how to really figuring out the ways, best ways to finance that. Makes sense.

Nick:

Yeah. And it sounds like it is a pretty iterative process where it's like, you tweak, you produce, then, you know, the scientists and folks that you're working at some of these big companies take another look, maybe they have more feedback. I can definitely appreciate how that that can be challenging.

Aaron:

Yeah, it is. I mean, one of the cool things now, though, is that we're located in a food incubation facility called Kitchen Town, which is based over in San Mateo. We're actually, our office is there. And they have, it's a great place for early stage agriculture well, food, food focused technology companies to be because they have food scientists on staff. Yeah, they have all these, you know, people on staff who can help help me, you know, perfect the product. So you know, super, super good place to sort of beat it to get that kind of help that we're having. Shout out. Yeah, shout out to kitchen town. I mean, everyone knows, I think everybody really knows that if you're in the space and you're in, you know, because they're one of the only ones that can kind of do this kind of work for such an early stage company.

Nick:

Yeah, well, much love to them. Talk to me a little bit about the team. Obviously, there's you. Who else is full time on it? Who else is helping?

Aaron:

the ad tech space back in the: 2000

Nick:

o you is super interesting in: 2024

Aaron:

Interesting question. What else is interesting to me in general? I mean, it's I mean, I think my last five years of working on this pretty much full four years full time has been a kind of a a spiritual experience for me in that like, I mean, I'm really basically what we're doing when we try to start a climate company is you're kind of banging your head against the wall. over and over and over again, trying to figure out like what the market wants and also like what's good for the earth ideally. I don't really, my opinion in the food industry, I mean, again, it depends what industry you're in and what the tailwinds are. I mean, in the food industry, I think, you know, the product and just food and chemicals in general have to be like, it has to be a business win first and then the climate win second. I think, I think with the carbon credits game, the thing that's going on, you know, with companies buying carbon credits, it can maybe be a little different in that situation, but I don't know how sustainable that really is. But I guess to really answer your question, what's most exciting? I mean, I think I'm excited by, in the food industry, I'm excited by innovations that are happening in fermentation, because that's really going to be the future of like ways of figuring out ways to make flavors and colors and all these kind of things that we're really relying on petroleum as a platform.

Nick:

Yeah, things that most folks don't think about.

Aaron:

Yeah, that's exciting to me. Beyond that, I mean, I'm quite excited to see, you know, it's kind of funny, I started and I started really being focused on renewables and solar and that stuff. And I'm actually not really excited about that as much as I used to be. Yeah, because I don't know, I just like, I think I read an article the other day that like the US has produced like more oil than ever last year.

Nick:

I mean, like, US is number one oil and natural gas producer in the world by a wide margin and we continue to produce more every year. Yeah. It's funny, we talk about like petrostates with like that word where it's like, oh, yeah, like these petrostates in the Middle East. And I'm like, don't forget, we produce more oil than they do.

Aaron:

Exactly. I mean, we are. I mean, there's no marketing toward that, right? It's the opposite marketing that's occurring. So I just feel like the energy space, we're seeing when push comes to shove, and we need inflation to come down, and these sort of really, really important things for, you know, for really everything, we'll do what it has to do, we'll have to do what we have to do to make things cheaper, which might be using petroleum or natural gas, because, I mean, it seems to be actually, you know, it seems to be the best way for us to scale cheap energy as of today. So like, those kind of things make me kind of like, I don't know, it just doesn't seem very convincing that the renewable stuff is really, I don't know, is it really working that well to solve the problem?

Nick:

It's a fair question to ask, yeah.

Aaron:

I don't know, I just think it sounds great. And if there's some sort of technological revolution that's occurring, I'm not aware of, then great. But I've just not seen it actually happening. And it makes me question, is it working? And is the US right in putting so much money, really doubling down primarily on on, it seems like renewable energy as the bed that the United States wants to take to mitigate climate change.

Nick:

Yeah, and not even just the US, like Europe is, some countries in Europe are obviously like going, trying to go even harder on renewables. And in some cases it's even harder for the math to pencil, because like, I'm a German citizen, and Germany's gone super hard on solar. It's like capacity factors for solar in Germany are like a third of what they might be in Arizona.

Aaron:

Germany's handicapping itself by doing some of this stuff. I mean, it's, I don't know, at the end of the day, countries, at the end of the day, push comes to shove, well, especially the United States. If humans aren't, if our GDP per capita is not somehow going up or staying the same, if it's going down, we're in trouble. And that's really what will push come to shove, really make the difference in voters and what people want at the end of the day, even for me and you.

Nick:

u know, GDP in the US grew in: 2023

Aaron:

Yeah, I mean, for me, I like, I mean, I really like here's, here's the reason I like we're going after the market I'm going after from from what I'm from, I'm able to tell with energy, you always have this petroleum thing to go back on. And there's so much left still to work with natural gas, that it's like always there. And we will kick in, we will use it to push them to shove. Yeah, look at this cocoa issue. And these things with like the rainforest, there's no other thing to really rely on. Like there's there's not like a petroleum you can then use instead of whatever I'm making, right? There's this thing that climate change is seeming to actually hurt, whereas petroleum is not going to go away because of climate change.

Nick:

Yeah. No, you did a fantastic job of bringing it back home. Really good storytelling. I admire that.

Aaron:

Thanks. I mean, I've thought about this for really like, I mean, you know, a lot for quite a long time, just been trying to kind of figure out like, how do we, how do we do this and issues that were, you know, when it comes to climate change mitigation, and it's freaking complicated. Yeah. And I'm just sort of figure out how do I like one, build a life around this, and to try to solve the problem. And when I say build life, I mean, like, you know, make money.

Nick:

Sure. Yeah, still have a life outside of work.

Aaron:

Yeah. So I'm trying to figure out, okay, where can you, you know, attack, that seems like like long-term, like a real, an actual, like a sustainable sort of thing to go after that doesn't, that's not going to be, that's not going to be obfuscated by geopolitical or not going to be obfuscated by government policies and subsidies. I mean, this space I'm going after is like a pretty, pretty much a free market kind of thing. Yeah.

Nick:

Yeah. Very compelling. And you know, you've got an ally in me as someone who's wrestling with all of the same meta questions of like, How do I, as you said, build a life that has some high leverage impact on trying to unfurl all of these different nested climate and economic challenges and also still just exist as a person and have a good time on the weekend?

Aaron:

Exactly. I mean, that's it. That's it. At the end of the day, we're humans. We, we, humans are, we consume, we, we waste. And like at the end of the day, we need to feed ourselves and make lives that are good for ourselves. And we have to figure out a way of doing that. That's okay. And it's good enough for the earth.

Nick:

Yeah, good for every other living being on earth, ideally.

Aaron:

That's the fight that we're after. I think ultimately, to truly make a sustainable transition from petroleum and whatnot, it has to be some sort of technological revolution. It's not going to be some kind of, I just don't think it's gonna be some kind of social change. I just, as humans, we don't have it in ourselves to just sort of change.

Nick:

Yeah, I think meat is a good crystallization of that. It's like it would be a really high impact thing for everyone to eat less meat, but it's just fundamentally not happening. Yeah. Tastes great. Full stop.

Aaron:

I promise it tastes great. Most people love it. And they're not going to stop eating because of some social reason. It's going to be because some better product is generated. Yeah, I mean, unless there's a generational change. There's also the generational theory.

Nick:

Yeah, it can help like it. I wouldn't want folks to leave this conversation feeling like like their individual sacrifice for lifestyle change can't help. I definitely think it does help. And at the most basic level, if it empowers you as a person and makes you feel better about the way that you live your life, by all means, hammer that. But I agree with you that we need to marry it with really systematic business and technological change.

Aaron:

Yeah, that's true for all human history. That's the truth. Things change because of new technological innovation. You go from, you know, I mean, you used to, I mean, just looking at my industry, right? You used to use, oh, even just energy too. You used to use whale oil for a ton of stuff.

Nick:

And for thousands of years before that, people just burned wood. And then they realized that by burning coal, they unlock a lot more energy. And then, you know, global GDP skyrocketed in 300 years since.

Aaron:

I think believing social good is—I do agree with the Gen Z, which I'm on the cusp of. I do believe that there are—I look around my generation, I see a lot of people who really care about social good and they kind of view ourselves as global citizens, not so much, oh, I'm a United States citizen, I'm a global citizen, I care about everybody. But push comes to shove, if you can't get food on the table and your life, if your energy grid is getting worse because of decisions that are supposed to help the climate, ultimately you're going to turn. Because if your life starts going down, you're going to be like, okay, this is not actually right. My life is not as good as it was before. there's no, there's just not going to happen. So that's ultimately, you know, we got a win-win there. And, you know, that's a whole other conversation of energy systems. But I, you know, I think eventually we will find it. It's just gonna take some pain. And, you know, my bet is on, I believe in, I'm more of a nuclear guy. And I think that's, that's kind of where I land. But, but yeah, I, because that stuff's so complicated, I'm just sticking to this, these sort of market problems.

Nick:

Yeah, no, and I appreciate the work that you're doing, because, you know, at the end of the day, there are so many different, you could take any product in the world, and it'd be like, we need to figure out some better ways to do this. And so I'm glad that you're working on the problem that you're working on, and wishing you lots of success. Just to make it abundantly clear to folks that have stuck around with us for this long. Let's close on calls to action. Obviously, you know, I'll do my work to try to put you in front of the right folks that might be able to help on the financing side, anyone that's listening in that's compelled, what are the right places for them to reach out and then, you know, keep up with the story too.

Aaron:

Yeah. So best ways to reach out. Um, we have a website, you can reach out to me there, uh, collar project.com. I'm also on Twitter, just my name, Aaron Feigelman or the company, uh, car projects. Uh, those are probably the most active on Twitter when it comes to the social media stuff or LinkedIn, but it's all Aaron or, or Carla. That's the best way of reaching out to me. And yeah, we are in the process of raising our seed round. So we're really playing that game right now as well.

Nick:

Yep. Well, Aaron, I trust that we'll be in touch. We always have great conversations. I've really enjoyed this one. And yeah, stoked to chat more soon and wishing you lots of success this year.

Aaron:

Me too, Nick. Loving the pod. And yeah, excited to see you going off on your own with this platform. Appreciate it.

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