Olympia Yarger filled a knowledge gap in my brain: the beauty of maggots. I never fully appreciated maggots, particularly of the black soldier fly, until I interviewed her. We also chatted about her husband's military career and the challenges of being a military family with a touching story about one of their family dogs. Olympia is helping reshape waste management as the founder and current CEO of Goterra, located in Australia. Her drive towards more efficient farming and reducing food waste has led to a new kind of insect farming using autonomous robotics. She is a determined, resilient, and larvae-loving-leader in the fight to develop a circular relationship between nature, technology, and food consumption. Something new this week on Remarkable People podcast!
Transcript of Guy Kawasaki’s Remarkable People podcast with the remarkable Olympia Yarger:
Guy Kawasaki:
I’m Guy Kawasaki, and this is Remarkable People. This episode’s guest is Olympia Yarger. Olympia filled a knowledge gap in my brain, specifically, the beauty of maggots. I never fully appreciated maggots, particularly of the black soldier fly, but now, I do.
She is helping reshape waste management as the founder and current CEO of Goterra, located in Australia. Her drive towards more efficient farming and reducing food waste has led to a new kind of insect farming using autonomous robotics.
Olympia attended Murdoch University, where she obtained a Bachelor’s degree in Sustainable Development. She also attended the Illawarra Institute, where she obtained an Associate Degree in Agricultural Business and Management.
At the 2019 Women’s Agenda Leadership Awards, she won the emerging entrepreneur of the year award. She is also the Director of the Insect Protein Association of Australia.
Olympia was also the Founder and Managing Director of Raising Raiders, a grant program that supports MARSOC, the Marines Special Operations families. This is a community that she has been a part of because she has had to deal with the PTSD of her Marine veteran spouse.
She is a determined, resilient, and larva-loving leader in the fight to develop a circular relationship between nature, technology and food consumption.
I’m Guy Kawasaki, this is Remarkable People, and now, here’s the remarkable Olympia Yarger.
Guy Kawasaki:
How is your husband?
Olympia Yarger:
We’ve had a rough couple of weeks. It’s been difficult with everything going on in Afghanistan, and he’s been trying to support some different groups of people to leave the country. That’s brought up a lot of old stuff. Yeah, it’s been a difficult couple of weeks, but otherwise, he’s his normal, amazing self.
Guy Kawasaki:
Does this fundamentally mean that he disagrees with Joe Biden’s decision? Or it was just a long time coming and it was inevitable?
Olympia Yarger:
Where he sits, particularly, is around the fact that it’s been a difficult war year across its twenty years, and how do you leave that situation with dignity when, in the end, you have to make a decision about when to stop? I think he agrees that there’s just no way for this to be anything but challenging and hard and sad because I think everybody involved in Afghanistan wanted more than where we are today.
Guy Kawasaki:
He served how many tours there?
Olympia Yarger:
He did two in Afghanistan and four in Iraq.
Guy Kawasaki:
Wow, so…
Olympia Yarger:
Yeah.
Guy Kawasaki:
… I think it’s in the wheelhouse for many people, based on books, movies, et cetera, not that they are necessarily accurate, to sort of understand the PTSD and the conditions of the combatant. You have a body of work about the impact on the family. Can you shed some light on what happens to the military spouse and family?
Olympia Yarger:
Yeah. It’s interesting living the life, particularly in the U.S. context because culturally the U.S. service members, it’s sort of a sacred cow. They’re idolized. There’s a mythology around serving in the U.S. military, and so you end up in a place where you have to find a balance between being proud and sort of enjoying the benefits of the mythology and the prestige of that status and the conflict that the fact that that life isn’t shiny, and it isn’t– the mythology is never really lived up to.
What we found difficult, and I found particularly difficult was, how do I exist as a woman, as a partner, as Olympia, in a relationship that is by the nature of the U.S. military geared to focus only on my husband? How do I make space for myself in that world? How do I generate a sense of importance about my needs, the needs of our children, within a context of the fact that the U.S. Marine Corps requires my husband’s 100% dedication?
If an entity is requiring 100% dedication from an individual, you miss out as a family. U.S. military, as many developed nation’s militaries, suffers the highest rate of divorce– just higher rates of depression, learning disabilities, depressive acts like suicidal ideation, cutting, drug use, alcohol abuse.
There’s so many social constructs that are challenged within the framework of your husband or your partner is a warrior and we are celebrating that and you must accept all of the parts that come with that being true. It’s really difficult, because you don’t want to be like, “I hate the Marine Corps. I don’t want you to do this thing that makes you so proud and makes you feel so fulfilled anymore because there’s no space for me in this discussion.” You find yourself building resentment and having really challenged relationships because of it.
My goal, when we were in the military, was to find a way to try and help other spouses and families find their place and find a sense of importance for themselves because we’re alone a lot, we’re basically single parents, particularly whilst the war was at it its sort of most engaged. Anyone whose husband or partner was being deployed, basically, parented alone and so, yeah, difficult.
Guy Kawasaki:
Just as an aside, every once in a while there’s a click, so-
Olympia Yarger:
Oh.
Guy Kawasaki:
… I don’t know if it’s from me or you. Are you doing anything that could cause a click?
Olympia Yarger:
No, no.
Guy Kawasaki:
Okay.
Olympia Yarger:
I’m like literally completely still…
Guy Kawasaki:
… okay.
Olympia Yarger:
… hands still. Yeah. I am on-
Guy Kawasaki:
It’s okay.
Olympia Yarger:
… satellite Wi-Fi. I am on satellite-
Guy Kawasaki:
You’re on-
Olympia Yarger:
… Wi-Fi.
Guy Kawasaki:
Wait, wait. You’re on satellite Wi-Fi?
Olympia Yarger:
Yeah, I’m in rural Australia.
Guy Kawasaki:
What system?
Olympia Yarger:
India-
Guy Kawasaki:
Oh-
Olympia Yarger:
…Satellite, so maybe-
Guy Kawasaki:
Well, now that I know that, it’s very good.
Olympia Yarger:
Yeah, not bad.
Guy Kawasaki:
What is your advice to these military spouses based on what you’ve gone through?
Olympia Yarger:
I think going wide open on what you are hoping to achieve out of being in engaged in the military and recognize that you are part of it. You are not secondary or an add-on. You are part of being in the military and own that, so you make sure that there’s a place for you in that conversation and that you ask for the things that are important to you.
If it’s important to you to have time with your family, you can’t make it the specific time that you want, but you can say, “I’m going to need this kind of support from you,” or, “I’m going to need this much time from you.” I think as partners, we sometimes forget that we have a right to ask for that, so don’t give it all up. Remember that it’s a partnership, this relationship you have with your service member. Yeah.
Guy Kawasaki:
Do you think that– This is kind of a loaded question– but do you think that the political leaders who are primarily old white men have any concept when they decide to sell troops anywhere, declare a war, be the tough guy, kick ass, take names? Do they have any concept of the true impact…?
Olympia Yarger:
No.
Guy Kawasaki:
… on people when they squeeze the trigger, so to speak?
Olympia Yarger:
No, no they don’t, and that’s their luxury, right? They can just lean on the mythology of what it means to send their country to war and they can leverage the nostalgia and iconography around military members sacrificing for their country. That’s why we see this politicization of the flag and kneeling and not kneeling and, “Do you support the troops?”
The irony, I think, is summed up in I protested the Iraq War, 2003, 2004, 2005, and I was considered a traitor and unpatriotic to my service member because I didn’t support him in going to war and I found that such an irony because, surely, if you support the military you would be– the greatest support you could ever supply the military is to use their presence with absolute reserve and you would never send them to a war without absolute certainty on what it would mean to do that. Instead, we have to celebrate going to war.
God, we canceled The Dixie Chicks over it for crying out loud. It just felt wrong. And so if you didn’t support going to war, you automatically didn’t support the troops, and that was a narrative that lasted well into 2007. That’s just a politicization of what it means to be in the military.
Guy Kawasaki:
I understand your perspective there, but would your husband see Colin Kaepernick taking a knee saying, “He’s a traitor, he is pissing on everything I stand for?” Or is he considered a hero?
Olympia Yarger:
Well, it’s a reason why he’s my husband, I guess, your own personality type, so he believes strongly in the American right of freedom of expression. For him, the ultimate honor you could do your country is to question when you believe that it’s not being just or good.
My husband’s PTSD is directly correlated to his need for justice and goodness and his PTSD is relative to when he recognized that what he was doing was not just or good, and so for him watching the kneeling and Black Lives Matter and climate justice and all of those social issues that people going out into the streets and demanding better from their governors– governments– is the most honorable way to, yeah, the best way to honor America and what she believes because that’s what it’s all about.
Guy Kawasaki:
Is he the only person in the Marine Corps that believes that? Or is that…
Olympia Yarger:
There’s…
Guy Kawasaki:
I mean…
Olympia Yarger:
… there’s more than you realize, it’s like being liberal or progressive in the military is the new “Don’t Ask, Don’t Tell,” so you hear more from the conservative sort of constrained side, but no, I think quite a large percentage of the military actually believes these things. They’re just getting on with their day-to-day.
Really, to make your voice heard or to stand up and have a voice you need to have a grievance. If you’re happy with how things are going, you tend not to make them known, so I think you’re only really hearing right now from the dissenting voice.
Guy Kawasaki:
I want to have one happy military story, so I want you to tell the story of, I hope I got this right, Snickle Fritz.
Olympia Yarger:
The coolest dog to ever leave Afghanistan. Snickle Fritz, she was given to my husband. They found her. Their interpreter gave her to them. They found her in a trash heap. She’s this– looks like kind of a Border Collie cross dog.
For him, he was diagnosed with PTSD in his fifth deployment. He redeployed for his sixth deployment about sixteen months later and he was really not well. He didn’t speak a lot, very angry, and during that sixth deployment, he was really struggling.
This funny little dog who has this really bodacious attitude of, “I deem it fun for you to pat me,” type thing or, “I will sit with you for this small period of time, and then I must leave because this is too much.” She’s kind of a very aloof dog and he found sort of a connection with her. He talked about her so much that I was sort of like, “Hey, why don’t we try and bring her home?”
Through a charity, Puppy Rescue Mission, we got her on a plane. She’s the most traveled dog I think. She’s been Afghanistan to Kabul in a taxi to Qatar and then to the U.S., and then from the U.S. to Australia. She’s actually asleep behind me and yawning and she looks very bored.
Guy Kawasaki:
I read that, all in all, it cost about $5,000 to get her to Australia?
Olympia Yarger:
Yeah, so yeah, total cost to get her to Australia was just over five. It was like all of these doctors’ visits and vaccines because Australia doesn’t have rabies and a bunch of other stuff, and then she had to do ten days’ quarantine at like $450 a day. It was an incredibly expensive exercise.
I’m not normally frivolous in that way. We didn’t bring all of our pets when we moved to Australia, but Fritz is different. She’s just really, really different and she kind of kept our family together when he came home from that last deployment. We really sort of galvanized around her.
She just always knew. When he would be doing well, she would just sort of demand that he sat with her by like lying across the top of him. It’s not like she’s had any professional training or anything like that. She’s probably not even conscious that he’s not doing well. She just wants his attention, but he would be sitting on the couch like just angry and you could feel it emanating from him.
She would like pop up on the couch in this sort of funny, graceful way she has and then unceremoniously drape her whole body across his lap. Then, she does this funny huffing thing when she’s stressed. She just does these really deep breathing, so she’ll be like (puffing) like this and then after a while he just sort of chills out. She’s pretty amazing.
Guy Kawasaki:
Okay, enough about that. Let’s talk about something really exciting and uplifting and pleasant. How about we talk about maggots?
Olympia Yarger:
Let’s do it. Maggots.
Guy Kawasaki:
First of all, we have to start with a definition, and the definition I want is, what is sustainable food?
Olympia Yarger:
Oh, that’s a very interesting question. Sustainable food, to me, is the ability to produce food continuously without having to add external inputs from the loop. I think right now we’re using up all of the resources we create in a year in really short periods of time, in less than a year, and so that’s unsustainable because we’re going to continue to out-consume our production.
Sustainable food to me is when you can continue to produce food because you have created a supply chain that is self-fulfilling. You are using as much as you need to create as much as you need, and that loop is closed so that it is undiminishing. I think that’s a very un-succinct reply, but we’re close enough.
Guy Kawasaki:
Is there an example of any sustainable food today?
Olympia Yarger:
That’s an even better question. It’s such a unique thought around our current food consumption. I don’t think so. I think we are moving to better food systems and better philosophies around what food systems need to be, but I actually don’t think we’re there yet, and I think there’s a multitude of reasons why.
You look at the logistics of food supply, all of those sorts of things, even when you consider insects. We’ve used a new animal. We’ve domesticated a new animal, but we haven’t really changed how we found them, and so by and large, they still follow the same sort of unsustainable farming systems.
So no, I don’t think so. Not yet. We’re getting there.
Guy Kawasaki:
I want you to make the case for insects as a source of protein.
Olympia Yarger:
From my perspective, what insects deliver as a source of protein into our food supply chain is an opportunity that’s dynamic. You can feed insects a variety of substrates, so all the way from your very clean and quiet homogenous sort of grain and harvest waste through to really ugly, not great waste. That’s really stepping out of the three main insects we talk about.
Any insects we can look at all the way streams. When you think about what it’s going to take to produce more protein in the world, we have to find new inputs that are currently not allocated to our supply chain to improve and increase the amount of protein we produce.
You can’t say, “Oh, I’m going to feed these mealworms bran and that’s sustainable,” and then you go, “Well, wasn’t something eating the bran before?” I’m like, “Haven’t you removed it from a part of our supply chain and reallocated it to insects?” Whether or not insects eat that more efficiently or create more kilos per pound, it still doesn’t take away from the fact that you sort of robbed “Peter” to pay “Paul.”
Insects, because of their ability to eat such a dynamic range of things, can be really new protein in our supply chain, not what I call repurposed protein where you’re just sort of taking from what the supply chain to give to anything. I think that’s why insects have this really unique place.
Where we think about circular economy, I think they’re even a bit more of a rockstar because the idea that we must reuse each of the parts of what we’re building and creating to repurpose and recycle and upcycle, insects fit very neatly in that story because they are designed to eat the scavengers by nature. They’re designed to eat the end of things, and so we can really add and build out our supply chains in a circular economy way with insects. They kind of empower it in a way, which is kind of fun.
Guy Kawasaki:
How do we overcome the ick factor?
Olympia Yarger:
Yeah, so the ick factor may sit in two places. One is in our culture, and the second is in our privilege, and kind of I guess you could say, in a way, our privilege drives our culture. One of my favorite researchers says that the ick factor for insects is about our full-belly problem. We are satiated in our food.
We are confident we will have food, and so we have the luxury of being able to say, “We do or do not want certain types of food based on feelings.” If you’re hungry, you just ate food. You don’t really care if it was grown unsustainably or with hormones. You’re just like, “I’m hungry and then I’m going to eat.
I think two things are changing. Social cultures are changing; values around food are changing. These things are omnipresent now. Everybody’s talking using the buzzwords of sustainability and providence and transparency and all of those things.
Then, the second part is, I think, where we are truly moving away from food privilege. I think climate change is going to start to really pressure our food supply systems and they will become unbalanced and tenuous because we can’t control production in unstable climates. I think we will start to care a little less about the ick factor as we continue.
Guy Kawasaki:
I could make the case that we eat escargot, we eat various forms of fungi. We eat crabs as a delicacy and crabs are on the bottom of the ocean eating anything that falls down in the water full of cat shit from the latest rain, so what’s the problem with insects?
Olympia Yarger:
Yeah, let’s just explain this thing rather to carry over from public health from before we had fridges. “Don’t eat stuff with bugs in it because it’s gross and dirty.” For all intents and purposes, lobsters and crabs are the insects of the sea. I say the same thing.
The idea that we would happily put a bleeding piece of flesh in our mouth, right, were like, “Oh man, this is great,” but then they’re like, “Oh, I don’t know about this dehydrated cricket. The horror.” I think that it shows the lack of consciousness around the choice we’re making, and I do believe that the social consciousness is changing. I think we’re evolving.
The challenge for insect producers is that humans are boring when it comes to food. We’re not adventurous. We think we are, but we’re not. We eat the same thing week in, week out. We very rarely change our eating habits, and so adding new food that’s literally outside the realms of what we’re used to is a difficult thing to do regardless.
That’s why all of the plant-based people are making things that look like plants. They’re trying to replicate things that look like meat so people can imagine it belonging in their culinary sort of repertoire, but what do you do with a cricket? How do I add that to a lasagna? Like what’s… That’s like, “Where does it go?” It’s difficult.
Guy Kawasaki:
Are you intellectually offended when you hear about companies make– there’s three or four companies that are making plant-based meat– so is that offensive to you? That’s intellectually dishonest? Or-
Olympia Yarger:
No…
Guy Kawasaki:
… or “hallelujah”?
Olympia Yarger:
No, I think it’s great. I think what any of us in the new food category have to be a bit more conscious of is what this language means and why we feel like we have to use it.
Plant-based meat is looking at trying to leverage known and understandings around food so that they can introduce a new category. I think the challenge is what you end up with is sort of arguments from A) red meat producers and red meat industry, and then secondly, it’s kind of a lazy marketing ploy.
Chick peas are great. Sell them for what they are, and I say that a lot, same as the insects. Stop grinding them up and sticking them in a muffin. Hiding insect protein is not the way to get it commercially adopted.
Yeah, I think there’s obviously market entry points and ways to create excitement around a brand or a food, but I think not owning what we are producing and celebrating it for its uniqueness is a missed opportunity. It’s just amazing.
Guy Kawasaki:
It seems to me that my audience should learn about the black soldier fly, so tell us about this insect.
Olympia Yarger:
Talk about a glow up. The black soldier fly is, like, suddenly become the darling of the insect protein production industry and was largely unknown, like, twenty years ago, ten years ago.
It’s a non-vector naturalized species of fly, so it exists all over the world even though it technically doesn’t come from all over the world. It’s an interesting fly in so far as its life cycle is a little upside down compared to other flies, so you have a really short fly life cycle and a really long pupa and larva life cycle.
It eats aerobically as a larva, and so from the perspective of managing it as a domesticated species, you’ve got a reduction of the pathogens that normally happen with managing food waste. It’s not as smelly because you’re not sort of getting this rotted, putrescent smell when you’re processing waste using those insects.
As a fly, the argument continues about whether or not it eats or doesn’t eat. It can absorb moisture, but it doesn’t technically eat or forage as a fly, and so it’s a non-vector species for humans, so it makes it quite a safe species of fly. They’re kind of cute, too, which is nice and handy. I think there are cute maggots.
Guy Kawasaki:
Beauty being in the eye of the beholder.
Olympia Yarger:
Yeah.
Guy Kawasaki:
You’re not suggesting we eat the fly in the fly stage, you’re suggesting in the larvae stage?
Olympia Yarger:
Yes, so that’s right, so yeah. Most insect consumption happens at the larval stage, and so when it comes to fly larvae, that would be the highest protein, the most nutritious. Same with beetles. The larval stages are the highest protein and the most nutritious.
If you’re going to consume maggots, which is if we talk about ick factor, eating a cricket is still probably ranking streets ahead of eating a maggot because maggots are just that one more step into the void, I think, on ick factor, but yes, if you’re going to eat, you would eat the larvae itself, the maggot.
Guy Kawasaki:
Okay. Now, when we’re going to go into areas that Guy’s totally ignorant, but it seems to me that if these larvae are eating bad stuff and you eat the larvae, aren’t you getting bad stuff, too? Does the form of nutrition in the substrate affect what you can do with the insect?
Olympia Yarger:
A hundred percent, so when you look across the substrate, if you’re feeding them for human consumption, you would want to use more controlled better inputs, so you would use what’s called cleaner organic, so usually harvest or manufacturing waste like fruit pulp or things like that. We focus predominantly on nasty stuff, and so then you have to really think about what’s in those substrates and how they work.
The insect itself, and this will sound a little bit like a late-night commercial, “Just wait, there’s more!” They do have antibacterial qualities in their gut, and so they do have the ability to diminish pathogen load and remove bacteria from substrate and also through their own gut.
In creating any food, you need to be conscious of your inputs to create a clean product, for sure, but again, to the dynamic nature of insects, if they’re only for food, then we’ve missed out on the opportunity to manage some of the most difficult waste streams we have today. Let’s not lock them into a box. They’re all things to all people, Guy, maggots.
Guy Kawasaki:
When you say your black soldier flies are eating the nasty stuff, what’s the nasty stuff?
Olympia Yarger:
We manage food waste all the way down to the lowest end, so household waste, and the reason why household and food waste is really nasty is because people, they don’t care. “It’s my bin. I’ll just throw it in. It doesn’t matter.” You’ll find cat litter, you’ll find fecal waste, nappies. You’ll find pesticides, poisons, rodent poisons, stuff like that. You don’t want to look at that input and then say you’re largely going to be okay as a protein import.
We’ve done a lot of testing and you can’t get them to eat that kind of waste and then have that protein be suitable for livestock or human consumption, but human and household food waste is the largest volume of food waste of all of the food waste segments. Most of the food waste happens in ten-kilo loads once a week out of every house across the world, and so why would we not try to manage that in the most efficient way possible?
Then, yes, you’ve still got insects at the end, but there are a variety of different uses you can turn those insects into something that isn’t consumable for either livestock or humans, but you can make…It’s a biofuel in the oil, there’s keratin, there’s melanin, there’s all of these sorts of fabulous things that we need in our supply chain to create sustainability. It’s a lost opportunity to say, “Oh, because I can’t use these insects to make a consumable food, I just won’t manage that substrate.”
Guy Kawasaki:
If consuming insects becomes mainstream, at some point, Whole Food’s label will say, “Black soldier flies are fed on non-grotesque substrates so you can safely eat ours?” It’s like the equivalent of non-GMO organic, all of the stuff now that there’s labels on other foods?
Olympia Yarger:
I think when you look at it, it’ll actually end up being a little even more segmented than that. The Australian feed regulation sort of spaces it out, so as it goes to human consumption they have to eat pre-consumer waste stream, so agricultural…
Guy Kawasaki:
Wow.
Olympia Yarger:
… yep. If it goes to livestock feed, you can feed sort of all the way down to post-consumer about only… so stopping at back-of-house restaurant, like you couldn’t do front-of-house…
Guy Kawasaki:
Okay.
Olympia Yarger:
… restaurant, and so that’s a pretty wide variety of food waste. Then, of course, the last bit’s not suited, but I think it’ll end up being, “These maggots were fed organic food waste that came from the organic types of waste,” and, “These insects were fed on post-consumer food waste,” which that would be your fast food version, I think. Yeah, it’ll come down to that, for sure.
Guy Kawasaki:
Taylor Swift will…
Olympia Yarger:
Yeah.
Guy Kawasaki:
… endorse a particular form of…
Olympia Yarger:
A hundred percent, yeah.
Guy Kawasaki:
… black soldier fly larvae?
Olympia Yarger:
That’s right, yeah. “Choose green larvae. They have been fed all of the best organics wastes from across San Francisco.” Maybe you can even create like a wealthy post-code waste substrate that made people feel better, so it’s like, “These maggots only ate rich people waste,” and then-
Guy Kawasaki:
Or how about free-range waste?
Olympia Yarger:
Oh, yeah, like where you could just dump it in as you go, yeah. There’s a whole… It’s an untapped market opportunities here.
Guy Kawasaki:
Let’s say that you are producing the kind of protein that’s fed to livestock. Now, can’t someone make the case that you are contributing to global warming because you’re making it more possible to raise livestock who fart methane into the atmosphere and you are increasing methane and global warming gases, so you are contributing to the problem?
Olympia Yarger:
Sure, and you could. I think you could absolutely make that case, and my case back would be, “Can we first deal with Exxon and Shell and BP and the fossil fuel industry as a whole? Once we’ve dealt with that, yes, I’m more than happy to come back to the table on burping cows.”
I think humans need to eat. Mass animal production, I think, is going to change as CSI wrote here in Australia, who has already solved the burping cow problem with seaweed. I’m more interested in removing the things that don’t need to be true, so we do not need to run our vehicles with petrol, we do not need to run our electricity with coal. Remove that global emission first and fast, and then let’s come back to the issue of agriculture.
I think agriculture returns as much carbon to the world as it does– there’s a balance in agriculture because of the nature of what it is. Whereas, there’s no balance with fossil fuels. It just takes, so…
Guy Kawasaki:
Would you describe what your company does?
Olympia Yarger:
Sure. So Goterra manufactures and deploys autonomous modular infrastructure to manage waste using insects. We have maggot robots, which are large waste management sort of units. They look like a crash compactor, so commercial-sized trash compactor, and the larvae live inside and their environment’s managed.
They’re fed autonomously by the machine, and our customer can just walk up to the machine, put the wheelie bin against the bin lifter and the machine accepts the waste, macerates and treats the waste, and then manages the insects.
What we’ve done is we’ve created infrastructure that’s modular and autonomous in so far as it can stand on its own. You can stack them together to make more capacity, and then we’ve upended waste logistics entirely by instead of saying, “Oh, I’m going to have to come and collect this bin and take it back to this central facility every day or every other day, I can collect and bring back to a more logistics opportunistic decentralized location, or I can deploy this unit to the location.”
You’ve got this, like, complete shift in how we think about the logistics of waste, which has a bottom line return to our clients, so it’s cheaper because the units are serviced every twelve days instead of every day or every second day. You’ve completely removed a lot of the components of how that works.
Then, of course, at the end of twelve days you get a couple of tons of maggots and you get some maggot poo, which is a fabulous soil conditioner and carbon additive for agriculture and vermiculture. You’ve completed reduced the impact of waste management down to a very small CO2 profile, so yeah, maggot robots. That’s what we do.
Guy Kawasaki:
Is heat generated?
Olympia Yarger:
Lots, actually, because the insects see it at ten degrees hotter than their ambient temperature, and our larvae feed at thirty-two degrees Celsius, and so sometimes in their trays they can be upwards of forty-two degrees Celsius in the tray. The Australian strain is a little bit different to the European and American strains because there was just something I found out really early because I was reading all of the European research, and like twenty-seven degrees is the temperature. Then, I would start trying to get them to stuff and I remember that I’d watched them on the wall of not mating and it was twenty-seven degrees and like. “I’m following the literature.”
Then, one day, one of our interns came to me and she goes, “It’s thirty-five degrees in the aviary.” I’m like, “Oh my God.” We ran down because it was a really hot day and we opened the door and there was just like mating pairs dropping all over the thing and I’m like, “Oh, they like it hot, okay.”
Guy Kawasaki:
Maggot humor.
Olympia Yarger:
Yeah, nothing but the best scientific discoveries here, yeah, so…
Guy Kawasaki:
You know, is there a concept that you could have a consumer version of this little maggot robot factory that Russell Crowe could order and put in his house in Wollomollo or Wallamalla or wherever he lives in Sydney. I mean, or is it purely a restaurant institutional level kind of thing?
Olympia Yarger:
We’ve kind of done it for a few different species now, so if a black soldier fly because of the type of unit we’ve designed, it’s mostly an enterprise function, so it’s good for the city councils to put on their landfill. It’s good for large manufacturing to manage their waste, but we’ve also built one for mealworms, which is a farming machine, and so the business model is a much different situation where you would actually use it as the technology to farm mealworms for human consumption.
It operates on the same premise. It accepts the substrate, it feeds the mealworms, it manages the mealworms, but what it means is, for six weeks, you can see the unit and for six weeks nobody has to really do much because the machine’s feeding them and reporting data. Aside from poking your head in there to make sure everybody’s still okay, you really can just leave that be.
We think a lot about, “What other robots can we make to empower the opportunities that insects provide? What other insects can we use to deliver on waste management?” That’s kind of what we consider our superpower, building robots to get insects to do a job.
Guy Kawasaki:
The end result is kind of ultimate composting material, no?
Olympia Yarger:
Yeah, it’s great stuff. Yeah, you could grow babies in it.
Guy Kawasaki:
Babies?!
Olympia Yarger:
You haven’t heard that agriculture?
Guy Kawasaki:
Human…?
Olympia Yarger:
Why not?
Guy Kawasaki:
Like, what? That one went right over my head. What?
Olympia Yarger:
Well, that’s a North Carolina saying that, “This country’s so good you could grow babies in it.”
Guy Kawasaki:
Well, that sounds like something Lindsay Graham would say about…Okay, we won’t go there.
Your company is fundamentally a food-tech combined with robotics combined with maggots. I must say, that is a unique positioning statement. I have never heard a pitch that included those particular words together. What was it like raising money for maggot 2.0 here?
Olympia Yarger:
Yeah. It is hard if you stand in front of venture capital and you say, “So hear me out. We’ve got maggots and we’ve got robots. It’s like biotech meets hardware, which are two things that you guys are really scared about, but I think it’s a thing, so just give us some cash.” It was hard, right?
Guy Kawasaki:
And you’re a woman.
Olympia Yarger:
Yeah, and I’m a single founder. I’m forty-five, so many things that made it hard.
I think anyone doing hardware or biotech, so the D-tech stuff to describe your idea, your story, your business model in the pattern that venture needs to see to make it work. Venture has a pattern and it’s because you’ve got the slides, and I used your slides. The ten Kawasaki Slides, and I tried…
Guy Kawasaki:
I did not anticipate maggot farming as a use of it, but okay.
Olympia Yarger:
Well, no offense, but you can tell because I tried to shove maggot farming into those ten slides and I could not get it to work.
Guy Kawasaki:
I guess we were destined to meet so…
Olympia Yarger:
If you could do an update to the slides sitting for the last…
Guy Kawasaki:
Ah, shit, I feel so bad. This is a niche I completely missed.
Olympia Yarger:
Yeah.
Guy Kawasaki:
… the maggot niche. If I could just get one percent of the maggot companies…
Olympia Yarger:
Using the slides. It would make a big difference.
Yeah, that’s difficult, and I think, honestly, I was just fortunate that I met a venture capitalist who could look at what we did and go, “If you were a software business, you would be here.” They had the ability to do that because, yeah, and I think even more so, it’s sort of difficult to sort of go, “Hey, come on this journey with us because for the next five years, we’re probably going to own six verticals in this business because it needs so much R&D.” That’s something venture definitely doesn’t want to do.
Yeah, there’s a few parts where that just was really, really difficult, but I have been fortunate. I’ve met really inspiring and creative investors who backed us earlier, and thankfully one of them had a brand that was big enough that everyone else got [inaudible 00:43:31] because that’s all it’s about. If you can get one penguin to jump off the ice and they’ve got a big enough brand, they’re [inaudible 00:43:37] like, “Oh, this must be the thing. Let’s get on the maggot train.”
Guy Kawasaki:
I don’t know if it’s true, but the story goes that American-Indians used to harvest buffalo by starting a stamped towards a cliff because buffalo have their eyes on the side of their heads and they run with their heads down, so basically, they just follow whatever’s in front of them. The way to harvest buffalo was to start a stamped towards the cliff and the whole herd would jump off the cliff because that’s how buffaloes operate-
Olympia Yarger:
Yeah.
Guy Kawasaki:
… which is very similar to venture capitalists.
Olympia Yarger:
I would concur, and I mean that without malice, but yes, I think that’s true. I really do.
Guy Kawasaki:
It’s hard to take that without malice, but go ahead.
Olympia Yarger:
You can give that to me, because if you’re trying to follow a pattern and you can’t really see it for yourself but somebody else does, I think it’s reasonable to be, “Do you get this?” “Yeah, I get it. Here’s how you can understand it.” “Okay, I’ll follow you. Let’s Go.”
I have seen the more or the less discerning side of that, the sort of, “Bob told me about you at golf and I thought, ‘why not,’” which is sort of uninspiring, but yeah, I think whatever works, man. I’m a founder. I’ll take money, you know? I’m all but basking in the street here.
Guy Kawasaki:
All money is green, as we say in Silicon Valley.
Olympia Yarger:
That’s right.
Guy Kawasaki:
I read this very interesting story that at the close of your fundraising, you locked one venture capitalist out, but he pried his way back in.
Olympia Yarger:
Yeah, so I was having a really hard time to deciding. We were oversubscribed. I didn’t want to take any more money in the seed stage. We’d raised 1.2 million and I was at 1.7 and I had to make a decision.
I liked both of the two firms that were sort of in the over side, and then I couldn’t make a decision. I did pros and cons lists. I was like, “Who’s the most strategic?” I could not find a leverage to go, “Someone’s in or someone’s out.”
Finally, we had a thing where one of them called me up and they were, “Hey, we’ve just found out that one of our staff members has a conflict. It’s a very small conflict and here’s what it was.” They’d invested as an angel in another black soldier fly company. I kind of was just like, “Oh, there it is.”
Guy Kawasaki:
It’s a crowded market.
Olympia Yarger:
Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah. They might have used your slides!
Guy Kawasaki:
There’s going to be a shakeout someday in the black soldier fly market.
Olympia Yarger:
Yeah. It’s this whole thing, and so I was like, “This is it. Thank God and this is the reason.” I was like, “Oh, I couldn’t possibly– I am not going to proceed. You guys should have told me earlier. This is the reason why I’m not going to let you invest and you’re not joining the round.”
I got off the phone and I felt a bit weird about it because it was that knowing where you’re like, “You just did. That was a cop-out, Olympia. That was just you just ran away, essentially.”
Then, I had talked to one of the analysts, and then, Will, who is the head of that fund, he called me back and he’s like, “Hey, I appreciate it if you don’t want us on the journey, but that can’t be the reason. That’s not the reason.” He’s like, “We really pride ourselves on integrity. We’re here for the right reasons and, yeah, I’m not going to let you use that reason.” I was like, “Oh, whoa.”
I was feeling really vulnerable and so tired. At that time, I had no staff, just two interns that walked part time and made some fundraising and maggot farming and robot building. I just sort of said to him, I said, “I have found it difficult to make this decision and I don’t know what to do.”
He had this, like, amazing conversation. We had this amazing conversation where he just talked me through it, but he had literally divorced himself from being an interested party and help me work through it myself, and in a way where you could honestly say, “This is not clouded by bias or he’s not trying to move me one way or the other.”
Then I cried, lots of ugly crying and I said, “Let me call you back. I need a minute.” I got off the phone. I pulled over because I’m driving. I was always driving and I was just like, “All right,” and I got myself resorted out and called him back.
I was like, “Let’s do this,” because, to me, it was, “I’m alone,” right? “As an only founder, I can’t go down the mountain to have these conversations with my team.” They kind of need me to stay inspiring and stay okay, and if I was going to go on this journey of mine, investors truly needed to be a little bit different to this sort of standard.
Imagine you get to have an investor that doesn’t care if you cry and cares about making good decisions in that way. How good, so I was like, “Yeah, let’s do it.” I have not regretted that decision once because they’re such an incredible firm.
Will will call me randomly and be like, “Hey, I had you in my orb,” and I’m like, “Really?” How cool is that? Like he just, “Had you on my mind. Wanted to check in, see how you’re doing.” That’s a beautiful thing.
Guy Kawasaki:
Did you throw the other VC out? Or you took it all off?
Olympia Yarger:
No, I threw out the other VC.
Guy Kawasaki:
You should have asked me what to do, and you know what I would have told you?
Olympia Yarger:
What?
Guy Kawasaki:
… I would have said, “Take it all. Don’t worry about dilution.”
Olympia Yarger:
Really?
Guy Kawasaki:
“Take the money.”
Olympia Yarger:
Interesting.
Guy Kawasaki:
Yeah, there’s an old saying in Silicon Valley, “You eat when served.”
Olympia Yarger:
Oh!
Guy Kawasaki:
So I’ve never heard of a company who said, “Oh, shit, I took too much money.” I’ve never heard that story.
Anyway, so let’s pretend that I am a restaurant owner. Maybe I’m the CEO of McDonald’s. Let’s take the best case. He said, “Wow, this I intriguing. It reduces food waste,” blah, blah, blah, blah, blah, “but at the end of the day, does it save money for a restaurant? Does it make money for a restaurant? Or is it just feeling better about your impact on the globe that should motivate a restaurant owner to do this?”
Olympia Yarger:
No, so with us, it legitimately saves the money, so the process where I would have provide means that the source segregation can be a little less– we can handle a little bit more contamination than composting. We require less logistics, and so the cost of trucking is reduced.
The cost of waste total is two things, the managing of the waste and the transporting of the waste, and so the cost of managing the waste is one piece, and then how much it costs for the truck to get your waste to the place to be managed is the other. If you can shorten that drive, you are immediately cheaper, and so we see it anywhere generally between twenty-five to fifty percent less than landfill on collection and management costs.
The second part is if you pull your food waste out of your general waste bin, then usually, particularly for restaurants, you can reduce the amount of collections for your general waste and the size of your general waste bin, which also saves you money. You’ve got this sort of double whammy on benefit and it is completely financial.
The green washing around like doing better for the planet and things, some people value it, some people don’t. With that comparable, people will choose an option that’s better for the environment over another, and so if we can stay at parity on pricing or a little below, then we’re in a good place.
Guy Kawasaki:
Is there any revenue streams from selling the protein as feed or as fertilizer or something? Or is it all cost savings?
Olympia Yarger:
No, the offtake has a value as well, so your protein can be sold and your frass can absolutely be sold. We do make money on both ends.
Again, for us, where we really have to sort of dig deep is what this looks like in the conversation around where these insects go after they’ve eaten whatever they’ve eaten. Our job is to build out new supply chains, make sure that we’re managing the types of wastes that are going to different insects and those sorts of things.
We treat insect protein not as a product but a commodity. Most of my peers, the other way around. In the insect industry, they treat insect protein as a product and they hold the processing of that product all the way through to the end of life, and then they give it a name and sell it out. We treat it as a commodity and sell it specifically to its use case based on what it’s eaten.
Guy Kawasaki:
Are you saying that every couple of weeks you pick up the little maggot farm and take it back and harvest it and then empty it and send it back? It’s like a dumpster?
Olympia Yarger:
Yeah, so we just vacuum them out.
Guy Kawasaki:
Ah.
Olympia Yarger:
We suck them all out and we then take just the insects back. That’s even better because you’re feeding them all of this food waste, but then you’re only transporting a really low-valued and volume amount.
Guy Kawasaki:
Who knew there was so much to maggots. My God.
Olympia Yarger:
I know. They’re so good. They’re so good.
Guy Kawasaki:
Not so much for the maggot entrepreneur, but for the entrepreneur who is in a segment that, let’s just say, this is not social media or CyberCash or security or enterprise software, but someone who’s off the beaten path, what’s your advice to this non-tech startup ag startup? Particularly, one led by a woman?
Olympia Yarger:
The first part is being a woman is going to be your challenge and your weapon, and so women think about things differently and we have a different approach. Because we’ve never been allowed a seat at the table, we problem-solve in different ways and that is a superpower and we should see it and understand it, but it will also be your greatest challenge.
If I had a dollar for every man who’s said to me after I’ve tried to order a large piece of hardware, “Does your husband know you’re buying this?”
Guy Kawasaki:
Now, this is twenty years ago? Or this is recently?
Olympia Yarger:
No, this is like– I have a story literally from six months ago where we were trying to get some stuff fabricated and I went in to buy a couple of different types of steel for the team and the guy goes, “These are some different type of steel.” I’m like, “Yeah, great. I’ll take them. Thanks.” He’s like, “Well, does your husband know that this is what you’re buying? Do you want to check with him?” I’m like, “My husband doesn’t know non-grade steel from stainless steel because he has one skill set and none of it’s to deal with handiwork.” The guy’s like, “Well, you know, different types of steel,” like, “…welding,” and he’s trying to give me a lecture. I’m like, “You don’t even know what I’m using it for. Just sell me the product. Thank you.”
Yeah, that stuff can be hard. I think what we don’t recognize as women is that we buy into it, so be more conscious in your own subjugation. There aren’t but a whole… “Sorry, but I can ask a question?” Why did you just apologize before you asked a question? Or, “Can I just ask a dumb question?” Or, “This is probably a dumb question.” Be more conscious of the language we’ve been taught to use so that we are less in the room and get rid of it because you have a right to be there. It will just feel a little uncomfortable sometimes because people will be shocked that you’re there.
Those two things, particularly as a woman, are important to be more conscious of so that you can deploy them as a superpower or curb them when you are hurting yourself with this sort of learned language that we’re given.
I think the second part is when it comes to AG, conventional agriculture has a really bad rap, but they will help you if you actually go out into the world and ask questions from a place of learning. Don’t go out and do like all entrepreneurs, like, “Call all of the customers you can and blah, blah, blah.” That’s not trying to learn. You’re just trying to get an outcome for your product. You’re trying to get them to confirm that you have solved their problem.
Go instead from a place of learning. One of the things that I figured out by accident but have used for years now is, what don’t you like about what I do? When I tell you what I do, what do you think the problem will be?
The customer will tell you all sorts of things, and even if it’s stuff you don’t want to hear, it’s so interesting to get honest feedback because once you’ve given someone permission to critique what you’re doing, they will love that opportunity. Lots of people love that opportunity. “Let me tell you about this thing you’re trying to do. Let me explain to you why this might not work.”
Sure, their intentions may not be empowering, but the language and the information they will provide is profoundly useful because your customer is telling you their fears, their concerns, and you can use that information to make your product better and make your service delivery better, make your innovation iteration better because you’re hearing their actual problems, not telling them.
The question we normally ask is, “If I could create this gate-opening system that would reduce the number of times you’d have to open a gate, would you want that?” They’re like, “I don’t know, I guess.” It’s a different line of questioning, right? So yeah.
Guy Kawasaki:
The Remarkable People Podcast is sponsored by The reMarkable Tablet Company. This tablet helps you focus.
No interruptions with social media, email, and web browsing. As part of each episode, I ask my guests how they do their best and deepest thinking. That’s because the folks at The reMarkable Tablet Company want you to do your best and deepest thinking, too.
Guy Kawasaki:
How do you, the Maggot Queen of the World, the Melanie Perkins of maggots, how do you do your best and deepest thinking?
Olympia Yarger:
I walk, with a dog, generally. I have a farm. I’m very fortunate to live in a beautiful part of Australia and I walk perfectly at night when there’s nothing out and it’s quiet.
I just sort of trudge along. It’s kind of this funny walk. It’s not a purposeful walk. I just trudge, and yet if I’ve got a dog with me, there’s something lovely about that because they come back to you and they go away from you and they break you out of that reverie and then you can readjust your thought process, but yeah, right now it’s walking with the dog, yeah.
Guy Kawasaki:
Okay, okay. I am enlightened and I’ll never look at a maggot the same way again. I hope you never look at a maggot the same way again, too.
I’m Guy Kawasaki. This is Remarkable People, bringing you the latest news in the world of maggots. My thanks to Sarah Nolet, who suggested Olympia Yarger. I would have never sought out The Maggot Queen of Australia were it not for Sarah.
My thanks to Jeff Sieh and Peg Fitzpatrick, who helped me create another remarkable episode of The Remarkable People Podcast. My thanks to Luis Magana who has transcribed this so that in case you’re deaf, you can read this interview.
Finally, to a newcomer to the team, Madisun, M-A-D-I-S-U-N, not O-N, Nuismer, who did the background research for the intro and helped me with the questions. That’s the Remarkable People Team.
Between now and the next episode, please, if you haven’t been vaccinated, get vaccinated. Wear a mask when you’re indoors and wash your hands constantly.
All the best to you. Mahalo and aloha.