AI transcript
0:00:01 This is an iHeart podcast.
0:00:41 So the world is basically just starting this massive shift from fossil fuels to a combination of renewable energy and battery storage.
0:00:43 This is good news.
0:00:45 I hope it happens as quickly as possible.
0:00:50 But it is going to be a massive, complicated, hard transition.
0:00:59 One of the many ways in which it is complicated and hard is building and dealing with all those batteries we’re going to need.
0:01:06 At a basic level, it takes a lot of metal, a lot of nickel, a lot of cobalt, just to make all the batteries we’re going to need.
0:01:15 And mining and refining those metals is a thing that basically doesn’t happen in the U.S. or in Europe anymore.
0:01:17 At least doesn’t happen at any significant scale.
0:01:20 And for understandable reasons, right?
0:01:24 This is an intense, often dirty industrial process.
0:01:31 And so, as you might guess, a huge share of industrial refining of these kinds of metals now happens in China.
0:01:37 And on top of getting the metal out of the ground and refined in the first place, there’s a second complication.
0:01:38 Batteries wear out.
0:01:44 What do we do with all that potentially useful metal once a battery has finished its useful life as a battery?
0:01:50 So, just to sum up, to recap, the world needs a huge new supply of batteries.
0:01:57 But, especially in the U.S. and Europe, it’s not clear how we can get the metal we need to make all those batteries.
0:02:01 And it’s also not clear what we should do with those batteries when they wear out.
0:02:10 I’m Jacob Goldstein, and this is What’s Your Problem?
0:02:13 The show where I talk to people who are trying to make technological progress.
0:02:16 My guest today is Megan O’Connor.
0:02:20 She’s the co-founder and CEO of a company called EnthCycle.
0:02:24 Like the letter N and then TH and then cycle.
0:02:26 Megan’s problem is this.
0:02:31 Can you come up with an efficient system that can both refine the raw metals we need for batteries
0:02:37 and recycle old batteries to extract that metal so it can be used again in new batteries?
0:02:45 Megan told me that she first had the idea for the company when she was getting her Ph.D. in environmental engineering.
0:02:51 Her Ph.D. is from Duke, but the idea actually came out of this meeting she went to at Yale.
0:02:55 And it was weirdly hard for her to get in the door of that meeting.
0:03:01 One of the professors there was the head of the Green Chemistry and Green Engineering School.
0:03:07 And he wanted to bring industry in to help really direct the center’s research to what industry cares about, right?
0:03:13 So that’s one of the reasons why I went to grad school is like work on something that industry really cares about and that has a real problem.
0:03:18 And I overheard him talking about this Green Electronic Summit in the hallway, you know, a couple weeks before.
0:03:20 And it was completely closed off to students.
0:03:26 And so it was supposed to be like a closed door meeting with these like, you know, large consumer electronic OEMs.
0:03:31 So like Apple, Dell, you know, Intel, folks who make our cell phones and laptops and things.
0:03:36 And I really wanted to be in this room, even though it was closed off to students and other faculty.
0:03:41 So what I had to do is bang down this professor’s door for three weeks straight.
0:03:44 And I think he finally just gave in and said, okay.
0:03:48 Badgering is an underrated strategy in certain contexts.
0:03:48 It really is.
0:03:51 I’m very determined, which I think you’ll hear a lot of entrepreneurs say.
0:03:56 But I really wanted to be in this meeting to say like, okay, does industry actually care about any of this that I’ve been researching, right?
0:03:57 Yeah.
0:03:58 And so he finally let me in as a scribe.
0:03:59 He said, all right, I need somebody to take notes.
0:04:01 Come in and take notes for nine hours.
0:04:10 So I sat there and over and over and over again in this summit, every single manufacturing company in there said the same two things.
0:04:15 One, they have no idea what to, at the time, this was 10 years ago, they didn’t know what to do with their waste, right?
0:04:20 They said, look, we’re all trying to be leaders in transparency, in the supply chain, sustainability, right?
0:04:21 Whatever you want to call it.
0:04:30 They wanted to be leaders in that space for their consumers, but they don’t know and didn’t know how they were going to deal with the growing waste management problem, right?
0:04:36 So every time you buy a new cell phone or every time you buy a new smartwatch, right, where do those things end up?
0:04:44 And so they said, look, e-waste, right, electronics waste, is already a massive problem around the world that we don’t really know how to solve.
0:04:52 Imagine when these clean energy technologies, like electric vehicles, like wind turbines, like solar panels, start to come offline.
0:04:54 Those are considered electronics waste, right?
0:04:56 It’s just going to exacerbate the problem.
0:04:57 It’s orders of magnitude.
0:05:00 Orders of magnitude larger, right, than a cell phone.
0:05:02 Electric car is just a driving battery.
0:05:03 It’s a battery.
0:05:03 Exactly.
0:05:06 And so what are we going to do with all this waste once we start generating it, right?
0:05:13 As these companies, they’ve said, you know, we want to try to figure out how to take responsibility for this in our supply chains, but we don’t know how to do that.
0:05:18 And then the second round they all said is, we don’t know what our supply chains are going to look like, right?
0:05:25 Again, a cell phone uses a couple of grams of cobalt, whereas an EV uses orders of magnitude more metal in their batteries.
0:05:31 And so you think about, you’re already having supply chain issues in accessing, you know, that cobalt.
0:05:39 What does that look like when we start to hopefully manufacture and push out all these much larger technologies, right?
0:05:40 Millions of electric vehicles.
0:05:41 Millions of electric vehicles, hopefully.
0:05:43 And then you add the wind turbines, and then you add the solar panels, right?
0:05:45 The same things I said before.
0:05:49 And it just, the supply chains just become a bigger and bigger problem.
0:05:59 And so I walked to that meeting feeling, A, like a little angry that, like, how are we barreling down this path again, generating all this waste when we have no way of dealing with it?
0:06:04 But then also feeling a little inspired and said, okay, we have all this waste.
0:06:15 Is there a way and is there a technology that exists out there to be able to take that waste and turn it back into metals so you can have a secondary supply of these materials and sort of kill two birds with one stone?
0:06:23 Okay, so you talk about it with your advisor, a professor named Desiree Plata, right?
0:06:33 And then, as I understand it, you and your advisor, you think of this technology that a Harvard professor had been working on, but not in this context, right?
0:06:35 Working on for water filtration.
0:06:38 So you go to this professor, as I understand the story.
0:06:39 His name is Chad Vesitas.
0:06:50 And is it right, like, you basically ask him if you can try and apply his technique to recycle batteries, to refine metal, and then the three of you wind up starting the company together?
0:06:51 Is that right?
0:06:51 Right.
0:06:58 So I approached Chad and I said, hey, you don’t know me, but you know Desiree a little bit, and can I use your technology for this application?
0:07:00 He said yes.
0:07:05 This was my third year of my PhD, so for folks out there, it’s typically a five- to six-year program, so I was already halfway through.
0:07:18 So it was a little crazy of me to switch my project that far in, but I felt very strongly that, you know, there was a solution that was needed here, and I went to grad school to try and find a problem and provide a technology solution.
0:07:20 So I sort of dove headfirst into it.
0:07:32 So for the next three years, Chad, Desiree, and I, you know, continued to work on this technology together, and by the end of my PhD, it worked so well that I felt, if I put the right team together, I think this technology could really change the world.
0:07:35 It could change the way that we refine metal.
0:07:40 This industry hasn’t had any type of technological change in decades, right?
0:07:42 Like, I’m talking close to 100 years, right?
0:07:46 This has been the same technology we’ve seen, and it’s clearly not working here in the U.S.
0:07:47 It hasn’t been adopted here.
0:07:52 So this is where technology can really have an impact for the clean energy economy.
0:07:58 I mean, when you say the technology, I mean, you mean specifically refining metals, basically, right?
0:08:04 You’ve got metals, whether it’s recycling and they’re mixed up with a bunch of other stuff, or they’re coming out of the ground and they’re mixed up with a bunch of other stuff.
0:08:10 The fundamental thing is, how do you separate out the metal you want, whatever, the lithium, the nickel, the cobalt?
0:08:11 That’s the fundamental thing.
0:08:19 Yeah, take from those sources, whether it’s out of the ground or out of some recycled end-of-life material and turn it back into basically something that’s usable again.
0:08:21 That’s what the chemical refining step does.
0:08:24 Why hadn’t refining changed for 100 years?
0:08:29 Most of the refining that’s done around the world is in the mining industry, right?
0:08:38 So these mining companies typically will develop an asset, a long-life asset, and an asset meaning just the mine itself, where they dig the dirt and the metals out of the ground.
0:08:43 And then they typically stand the refinery up literally right next door, right?
0:08:50 They want to eliminate as much of that transportation as possible because these metals are in such low concentration.
0:08:52 It’s a lot of dirt to a little bit of metal, right?
0:08:57 You don’t want to move 100 pounds of dirt 1,000 miles to get one pound of nickel.
0:09:03 So the refining industry was really centered around this mining space.
0:09:19 And so it was only when folks really started to look at the recycling space, and I talk battery recycling specifically right now, it was like, okay, you have this big multi-billion dollar refinery where you process 80,000 tons of material per year, which is massive.
0:09:28 And you have a recycling industry where, A, again, you don’t have a magic pile of 80,000 tons of batteries, right, in one place.
0:09:31 And batteries are changing, right?
0:09:34 There’s different types of batteries from different companies.
0:09:39 They have different chemistries, which just means it makes it really hard to recycle them all in this one facility.
0:09:43 And so just that model doesn’t match, right?
0:09:50 Some of those mining refineries will take a little bit of recycled material, but again, they’re all overseas, right?
0:09:51 So then you come to that national security challenge.
0:10:04 And so the setting aside the overseas part, the fundamental problem is they’re built to process a huge amount of some very homogenous and consistent input for a long time.
0:10:05 Like that’s the economic model?
0:10:06 That’s correct.
0:10:07 And that’s the fundamental problem?
0:10:09 That’s the fundamental problem.
0:10:10 So how do you do it?
0:10:14 We have developed a new technology we call electroextraction.
0:10:23 And so it’s a fancy word to say that we use the same chemicals that you see in refining today in those massive facilities I talked about.
0:10:25 And those are produced with fossil energy.
0:10:28 So they’re produced with fossil energy and then trucked to those sites.
0:10:34 What we figured out is to overcome the barrier of having to build this massive facility,
0:10:46 we could create a smaller modular facility to be able to process the smaller volumes of recycled material that we have around the Western world by producing the same chemicals with electricity.
0:10:51 So we can produce them when we need them, where we need them, and only as much as we need them.
0:11:05 And so that gives us the efficiencies that we needed, both from a cost and energy perspective, to be able to really scale down that process instead of having to do 80,000 tons, right, to justify this project per year.
0:11:09 We only need to do a minimum of 2,000 to 3,000 tons per year.
0:11:13 And so that allows us to work with all these different recycling companies.
0:11:22 And whether it’s one type of battery or nickel catalyst material, right, we process all different types of sort of scrap or end-of-life materials.
0:11:30 And so we’ve overcome some big barriers to just getting refining capacity here, both in the U.S. and in Europe.
0:11:37 And is it right that you just turned on your first real facility last second half of last year in Ohio?
0:11:38 That’s right.
0:11:40 And we just went live in September 2024.
0:11:41 So we’re very excited.
0:11:45 We have about eight months of operations under our belt now.
0:11:48 So tell me about what’s happening in Ohio.
0:11:51 So in Ohio, so it’s our refining system, which we call the Oyster for short.
0:11:55 And so our facility, it’s a big industrial warehouse.
0:12:00 And basically what my system looks like, I like to think of it as a deck of cards, right?
0:12:06 So our electrochemical filters, as I mentioned before, think of their like big plastic cards.
0:12:09 So they’re one meter wide, one meter tall.
0:12:12 And I have 140 of those sort of stacked in parallel.
0:12:14 So think of like a sideways deck of cards.
0:12:21 And sort of inside those cells is where I pull out the metals like the nickel and the cobalt that we want back out from manufacturers.
0:12:29 So when I get these shredded battery materials in, if you walked into my facility today, you’d see a giant tank on the left-hand side of the facility.
0:12:32 We dump that shredded battery material into that tank.
0:12:33 We dissolve it.
0:12:35 And so all those dissolved metals are in there.
0:12:39 So the shredded battery, which is called black mass, is that right?
0:12:40 You haven’t said black mass.
0:12:41 I’m sort of disappointed.
0:12:43 I was excited for you to say black mass.
0:12:45 Yes, it’s called black mass.
0:12:49 It just, it literally looks like black, like flour, like the flour that you bake with.
0:12:51 It just looks like a black version of that, which is very interesting.
0:12:54 So you get truckloads of black mass?
0:12:59 Or did you build your facility next to some, that of some company that shreds batteries and creates black mass?
0:13:00 Is that why you’re there?
0:13:08 The reason we chose Fairfield was because there’s a lot of just industrial scrap that finds its way to the Midwest.
0:13:11 The black mass capital of the Midwest?
0:13:14 There’s a couple of black mass companies around there that take the batteries and shred them into black mass.
0:13:20 And then we also process other types of industrial scrap, like catalysts from the oil and gas industry.
0:13:24 So that area is just rich with those types of companies.
0:13:26 So you’ve got your deck of cards.
0:13:28 I like the deck of cards as a metaphor.
0:13:30 They’re sort of stacked, a little spaced out.
0:13:32 The black mass goes in one side.
0:13:34 You dissolve it into a liquid.
0:13:35 And then what happens?
0:13:39 And then that liquid goes into our deck of cards oyster system.
0:13:44 That’s where the chemicals are being produced in those cells to pull out the cobalt, to pull out the nickel.
0:13:48 And then they come out the other side as the product that we can sell.
0:13:52 And are you actually buying the black mass and selling the nickel?
0:13:54 Are you in the nickel business?
0:13:55 For this facility, we are.
0:14:00 So we call it a merchant facility where, yes, we buy black mass from different partner facilities.
0:14:04 And then we are selling the nickel products on the other side of it.
0:14:09 This will be the only facility that we have that’s sort of, again, I call it a merchant facility for the business model.
0:14:14 And we did it for the first one, again, because it was the first time that we’ve built the system at commercial scale.
0:14:16 So we wanted, you know, full site control.
0:14:19 And then we also use it as a business development tool, right?
0:14:24 So our traditional business model moving forward will be to operate under what’s called a tolling model.
0:14:32 And so it’s really where we’ll go on site with our partners and cycle will own and operate our system on their site.
0:14:38 And we’ll charge them a fee per pound of, say, battery or black mass that we process for them.
0:14:41 So think of almost like refining as a service, if you will.
0:14:42 So they’ll own the feedstock.
0:14:45 We’ll charge them to process it.
0:14:48 And then they’ll own the nickel product coming out on the other side.
0:14:50 Because you don’t want to be in the nickel business, basically.
0:14:52 As a young company, we wanted to only take the risks we had to.
0:14:53 Yeah.
0:14:55 So we felt like, OK, we can handle the operational risks.
0:14:56 It’s our technology.
0:14:57 We’ll do what we’re good at.
0:14:59 And then we’ll let these companies do what they’re good at.
0:15:00 Because they’ve been in…
0:15:03 Remember, these companies have been in the commodity business for decades, right?
0:15:04 Or longer.
0:15:09 I mean, they’re very skilled in, like, the logistics and the collection and…
0:15:10 No, the commodity business is crazy.
0:15:11 Why would you want to do that?
0:15:14 If you have some technology you believe in, let other people solve that problem.
0:15:15 Yeah.
0:15:16 We want to be the technologist.
0:15:17 We want to be the technology provider.
0:15:19 So that’s our business model moving forward.
0:15:25 And so what we use Ohio for is really, like, a tool to show them what the technology looks like.
0:15:30 We can process their material, you know, at lower volumes there to show them what we can do with it.
0:15:35 It de-risks it on both sides as we’re going into this more partnership model with them in the future.
0:15:37 So we’ve been talking about nickel.
0:15:45 I heard you talk in earlier interviews about nickel in particular, or this nickel product, more specifically, in particular,
0:15:55 as being acutely affected by kind of legal and regulatory changes, both in the U.S. and in Europe, in a way that is good for you, right?
0:15:57 In a way that, like, those may be about to go away.
0:15:59 They are, or they may be, right?
0:15:59 We don’t know yet.
0:16:02 They seem likely to be about to go away.
0:16:03 Likely to go away.
0:16:03 That’s right.
0:16:09 But I would say this administration also prioritizes critical minerals just for other reasons, right?
0:16:13 So more on the national security side and to really onshore our supply chain.
0:16:20 So there is equally as much demand for domestically produced materials just for a different reason.
0:16:26 And so we still feel like a ton of tailwinds with the executive orders, and we’ll see how that translates into policy in the next couple of years.
0:16:30 So the end of the EV mandate is bad for you, but high tariffs are good for you?
0:16:40 I don’t know if I put it like that, but we are definitely taking advantage of the desire to have onshoring of these critical mineral supply chains and being one of the companies in the space that’s operational.
0:16:52 So I think it’s a good signal for us to scale quickly to be able to provide both the military and, again, the folks who are still pushing forward through the clean energy economy and the technology they’re building, right?
0:16:53 They both need supply of these materials.
0:16:54 They’re used for both.
0:17:00 They’re pivoting from being an energy transition company to being an American energy dominance company.
0:17:00 That’s right.
0:17:02 Same company, right?
0:17:03 Different wrapper.
0:17:04 It’s very true.
0:17:05 We need both of those things.
0:17:15 And then, you know, on the European side, where they haven’t had much change in terms of their regulatory environment, as I like to think about it, but they care about this, again, for a different reason.
0:17:22 They have something that’s called the battery passport, where they’re going to have to reduce the carbon footprint of their batteries that are being produced.
0:17:24 And it starts with the metals, right?
0:17:34 And so currently where you can source the vast majority of the nickel around the world uses a technology that is very carbon intensive.
0:17:39 It’s called HPAL, H-P-A-L is the acronym, if folks care to look that up.
0:17:44 But it’s just a very, very carbon intensive way to produce this nickel out of the nickel mining that happens in Indonesia.
0:17:48 And it’s so carbon intensive that it doesn’t meet those requirements.
0:17:53 So Europe is forced to try and find another source of these materials.
0:18:00 And on top of that, they have very strict recycling rates that they’ll have to hit over the next several years.
0:18:06 It sort of forces industry within the EU to develop recycling and refining technologies.
0:18:24 And then on top of that, if you do recycle the batteries there and you produce this black mass, they’ve also now classified this black mass as a very specific type of hazardous waste, which means that it’s very difficult and nearly impossible to ship the black mass between country borders within the EU.
0:18:29 So arguably a self-defeating regulation, but perhaps good for your business?
0:18:41 Great for N-Cycle because we are the only one of the only modular technologies that can go into each country and help them turn that black mass into a product that they can easily move across borders, right?
0:18:49 So again, this distributed modular refining approach is quickly becoming the only way that they’ll be able to solve these challenges within the EU.
0:18:52 And then I think similarly here in the U.S., right?
0:18:55 We have not been able to build sort of traditional technology here.
0:18:58 So when are you going to turn on the first oyster in Europe?
0:19:00 So the goal would be 2026.
0:19:05 So we’re working with some partners now to try and solidify what those projects will look like.
0:19:07 But starting construction in 2026 is the goal.
0:19:09 So we’ve been talking about nickel.
0:19:13 Is that going to be your main output for a while?
0:19:15 I mean, can it be anything that’s, can it be lithium?
0:19:17 Can it be cobalt?
0:19:18 Like what, how’s that work?
0:19:22 Yes, the main product out of the system is like a mixture of cobalt and nickel, actually.
0:19:25 It’s called nickel MHP, which is a very industry-specific term.
0:19:27 It’s just a nickel product.
0:19:31 We also produce a lithium product out of the black mass as well.
0:19:34 And then in development, we have a new system for copper.
0:19:36 So a lot of our partners have copper scrap.
0:19:41 We’re also talking to some copper mining companies about some of the issues they’re having to deploy the technology there.
0:19:43 And then we also have one for rare earths.
0:19:51 So the rare earths are the metals in, think, like the magnets that are in your motors in the wind turbines that you might see, hopefully, in your backyard.
0:19:59 So it’s two other systems to try and, you know, produce as much of these critical minerals as we possibly can, because they all face the same challenges, right?
0:20:00 They’re all refined.
0:20:02 The vast material are refined overseas.
0:20:10 And it causes, again, a big national security issue and just limits us into how quickly we can build these technologies here in the U.S. and Europe.
0:20:14 We’ll be back in just a minute.
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0:20:55 I’m CNN tech reporter Claire Duffy.
0:20:56 Claire Duffy was one of the others.
0:21:00 I cover artificial intelligence and other new technologies for a living.
0:21:04 And even I sometimes get overwhelmed trying to keep up with it all.
0:21:12 So I’m starting a new show where, together, we can explore how to experiment with these new tools without getting played by them.
0:21:14 It’s called Terms of Service.
0:21:16 This technology is so crazy powerful.
0:21:20 Follow CNN’s Terms of Service wherever you get your podcasts.
0:21:25 What’s the rate-limiting step for you in expanding?
0:21:30 I’d say the rate-limiting step for us now is a combination of funding and just the team, right?
0:21:31 So I think we’re ready to go.
0:21:35 And we will be fundraising in the next several months to go out and do these projects.
0:21:39 And then with that funding, we’ll build the team that we need to go execute.
0:21:45 I mean, in terms of funding, if you sign a contract with some company to do refining as a service for them,
0:21:51 can you borrow against that contract to build the thing that they promised to pay you to use?
0:21:51 Yeah.
0:21:54 Like, a factory is a classic thing that it’s collateral.
0:21:55 You could borrow money against it.
0:21:59 Or is it not collateral because nobody’s ever built one before and the bank doesn’t trust that it’ll work?
0:22:00 We’re somewhere in the middle.
0:22:06 So we’re in this, for folks out there who may be building or have heard of other startups going through this phase,
0:22:08 it’s called, like, the scale gap, the missing middle.
0:22:10 You got one and you want 10.
0:22:13 And how do you get the money to build the other nine?
0:22:13 How do you get the money?
0:22:16 Because we still have some technical risk, right, of course, because it’s a second-of-a-kind,
0:22:17 not a first-of-its-kind.
0:22:18 Ohio was our first-of-a-kind.
0:22:23 So there’s a whole bunch of folks who are dealing with the same thing and trying to find, like,
0:22:26 what does that financing look like for this type of risk profile?
0:22:27 But there is money out there.
0:22:33 And I do think that, again, given the space that we’re in and where we are with Ohio and the next projects,
0:22:39 and like you said, the contracts will be everything to show that there is market pull for our technology.
0:22:41 What are you trying to figure out now?
0:22:42 What’s sort of the frontier for you?
0:22:47 So what we’re trying to figure out now is how do we translate this technology that we are expanding
0:22:51 within the scrap recycling space with into the mining space?
0:22:58 I think the whole goal of Encycle was to try and, you know, create the most robust supply
0:23:03 chains that we possibly can for these critical minerals and, you know, build a clean energy
0:23:05 economy on the cleanest source of materials.
0:23:08 You know, what really killed me at the end of the day when I was starting about thinking the
0:23:13 company is like, gosh, we are building this, like, quote-unquote, clean energy economy on
0:23:14 a dirty source of material.
0:23:18 So we continue to make the same problems in industry that we have in the past.
0:23:23 And so that was really, like, the core of why I wanted to start Encycle and the application
0:23:24 of scrap recycling came from that.
0:23:28 And then the goal and the dream is really to start to do this in the mining space because
0:23:31 that’s where you can have, like, massive, massive impact.
0:23:37 I mean, there’s just orders of magnitude more material processed per year from a mine than
0:23:37 there is from recycling.
0:23:45 And the goal is to eventually recycle enough material to have it all in circulation so that
0:23:48 you can just solely rely on recycling.
0:23:53 Even if you are recycling everything, assuming people are switching to EVs over time, you’ll
0:23:59 still need a lot of new lithium and nickel and cobalt out of the ground.
0:24:01 For the next several decades, absolutely.
0:24:04 So that’s where I think mining gets this bad rap.
0:24:10 But we have to continue to mine materials to push forward in the clean energy economy.
0:24:14 Like you said, there is not enough recycled material out there to be, even if you recycled
0:24:19 100% of it, it does not get you enough cobalt and nickel or lithium or whatever material you’re
0:24:20 looking at to be able to meet demand.
0:24:27 But what we’re really targeting is how do you turn on these existing ore bodies that haven’t
0:24:28 been developed yet, right?
0:24:31 So there is cobalt, there is nickel, there is copper here in the US.
0:24:36 There’s not a ton of mining that happens because the refining piece is so environmentally damaging,
0:24:37 right?
0:24:38 And people don’t want it in their backyards.
0:24:38 And I wouldn’t either.
0:24:41 I understand the sort of the pain with that.
0:24:46 But if you can develop a technology that overcomes and doesn’t have all the waste that’s
0:24:51 associated with the traditional refining and can have the same unit economics and justify
0:24:55 opening up these smaller mines, because they are much, much smaller than what you’d see
0:24:56 overseas, right?
0:25:00 So again, the technology is a mismatch for the source of materials.
0:25:06 That’s really where this innovation can have a major, major impact of like getting more of
0:25:10 these mines online and getting the US to have a mining industry again.
0:25:12 It’s really the technology that I think will unlock that.
0:25:17 And that’s sort of the new Frontier Front Cycle is, is I have a team of folks sort of looking
0:25:21 at what are the right applications in mining for us?
0:25:23 And, you know, does the technology need to look any different?
0:25:28 So the chemistry basis, the cells will work exactly the same.
0:25:30 It’s just the system will likely have to look different.
0:25:31 It’s refining either way.
0:25:32 It’s refining either way.
0:25:33 You’re doing refining now.
0:25:39 But instead of the input being black mass, shredded up batteries, it’ll be a lot of dirt
0:25:40 with a little bit of nickel in it or something.
0:25:40 Exactly.
0:25:40 Exactly, right.
0:25:48 So there are a few other battery recycling companies in the US, including one started by
0:25:50 the guy who actually started Tesla.
0:25:53 It’s a big company, Redwood Materials.
0:25:59 So tell me sort of how you fit in that broader context of the industry.
0:26:00 Yes, there’s many companies.
0:26:04 Redwood is one of the largest companies who works in the battery cycling space, especially
0:26:04 here in the US.
0:26:08 And their strategy is battery to battery, right?
0:26:14 They are solely battery recyclers who want to produce some type of end battery product, whether
0:26:19 it’s a chemical that goes into batteries or the cathode that goes to the batteries or the
0:26:19 battery itself.
0:26:25 And so what they’re trying to do is really build out that entire supply chain from collecting
0:26:28 the batteries, shredding those batteries into black mass.
0:26:32 They want to refine those materials, and then they want to be a manufacturer.
0:26:35 So they want to be a company that buys old batteries and sells new batteries.
0:26:38 And I think that’s very needed in this space, right?
0:26:42 There’s a lot of steps in the supply chain that need to be built here.
0:26:45 What Encycle does is just the refining piece.
0:26:50 And so these companies are using very traditional technology from the mining space.
0:26:56 And so what we’re providing, and we partner with a lot of these companies, is just a new
0:27:00 technology that is cheaper, more efficient to be able to process these batteries.
0:27:03 Maybe that’s like the wrong industry for me to be thinking about.
0:27:05 Is the right industry for me to be thinking about refining?
0:27:06 Is the right question?
0:27:09 Who else is trying to new and better ways of refining?
0:27:11 There’s not a ton of companies in this space.
0:27:15 If there are a few of us who are solely focused on the refining piece and who are trying to
0:27:20 take this modular approach, I would say we’re one of the only ones that takes more than batteries.
0:27:23 There’s a lot of refining companies focused on black mass in particular.
0:27:30 But again, we said, look, even if you recycled 100% of batteries, you’re not going to get enough
0:27:33 nickel, as we talked about earlier, or cobalt or lithium.
0:27:37 And so from the beginning, you know, we’ve tried to build a technology that could be very
0:27:41 flexible in the types of materials we can put in on the front end.
0:27:47 And so I would say we’re one of the only companies in the space that diversified.
0:27:53 But yeah, one or two others in the US and Europe that are sort of in the same exact space that
0:27:54 we are.
0:27:55 Why might you fail?
0:27:57 If you don’t make it, why wouldn’t you make it?
0:28:01 One of the reasons we couldn’t make it is if technology adoption, right?
0:28:08 If we start to have massive shifts in the regulatory environment, which some folks in the climate
0:28:12 technology space, which some people would put us in, are starting to feel that now, the
0:28:18 market really slows and startups need to move at a very fast pace and make a lot of progress
0:28:19 because we have limited cash, right?
0:28:24 Because we’re fundraising to survive until we build systems that can generate consistent
0:28:24 cash flow.
0:28:29 And so when markets slow down is when startups die.
0:28:32 And in your case, is that fundamentally the EV market?
0:28:36 Like, what is the key market you’re thinking of when you say that?
0:28:38 I think capital markets in general, right?
0:28:40 It makes it hard for companies to fundraise.
0:28:44 So you mean if like there’s a recession and venture capital pulls back and people don’t
0:28:48 want to do hard tech anymore, that’s a more macro kind of hard tech winter.
0:28:49 Right.
0:28:53 The macro environment can really challenge startups being able to fundraise.
0:28:55 And then market specific, yes.
0:29:01 So if for some reason the current administration or whatever region around the world you’re working
0:29:07 in for some reason moves away or stops prioritizing that industry, EVs as an example, yes, it can
0:29:08 really tank startups, right?
0:29:10 Because we looked at that as a company.
0:29:13 And I try to tell this to as many folks who will listen who are starting to build a company
0:29:13 as well.
0:29:17 You need to think about how you diversify from the very beginning.
0:29:23 And so that’s why while we work within the battery and EV space to recycle that black mass
0:29:28 as we talked about or refine that black mass, we also refine other scrap materials like catalysts
0:29:29 from oil and gas.
0:29:34 And there’s a whole slew of industrial scrap that has nothing to do with the EV industry that
0:29:36 has been around for decades and will continue to be around for decades.
0:29:42 So if for some reason the EV market tanks and cobalt and nickel are no longer a desirable
0:29:46 material, which we don’t expect to happen, you know, we have a copper system, we have
0:29:46 the rare earth system.
0:29:53 So, you know, we try to diversify enough to be able to have a business for whatever comes
0:29:53 right.
0:29:56 Because we have no idea what the next, you know, eight years will look like, right?
0:29:59 10 years, 12 years as we’re, you know, continuing to scale the business in different
0:29:59 directions.
0:30:05 So I think macro environment and when markets change or when startups can fail.
0:30:07 What’s the happy story for you?
0:30:09 What’s the, you don’t fail story?
0:30:14 I think Encycle becomes the leader in the go-to technology for refining for both mining
0:30:15 companies and recycling companies.
0:30:23 And I think there’s a real and likely possibility that it happens because of just the way that,
0:30:27 you know, we spent a lot of time trying to figure out what are the real pain points in
0:30:27 this industry.
0:30:32 And I feel like the team that I’ve assembled and the technology that we’ve built solves those
0:30:32 problems.
0:30:34 And we’re starting to see that in real time.
0:30:39 And so I think, you know, I’m hoping in three to five to 10 years, Encycle is the go-to
0:30:43 refining technology that you see for critical minerals in the space, whether it’s again
0:30:46 on the recycling or the mining side of the world.
0:30:51 We’ll be back in a minute with the lightning round.
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0:31:33 Claire Duffy was one.
0:31:38 I cover artificial intelligence and other new technologies for a living.
0:31:42 And even I sometimes get overwhelmed trying to keep up with it all.
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0:32:02 Let’s finish with the lightning round.
0:32:03 What’s your favorite element?
0:32:05 Oh, what’s my favorite element?
0:32:10 I really like I love green and the nickel product we produce is green.
0:32:13 So I’ll say nickel, even though that’s what I’ve been talking about the whole time.
0:32:14 What what kind of green?
0:32:15 Like, is it pretty green?
0:32:21 It’s like I wish I could show a picture, but it’s like a almost like a bright emerald,
0:32:21 I would say.
0:32:27 So it’s actually like I love metal chemistry in general because you just see such beautiful
0:32:31 colors like cobalt blue, cobalt can be pink, nickels green.
0:32:34 The mix of cobalt and nickel is like a turquoise.
0:32:36 So it’s very beautiful chemistry that happens.
0:32:39 Why do PhD students make good founders?
0:32:44 So I always make the joke that PhD students make the best founders because we’re used to
0:32:48 being poor and we’re used to failing a lot.
0:32:51 And you have to fail and learn from failure as a founder.
0:32:55 And that’s like a fundamental thing that you learn during your PhD, or at least I learned
0:32:56 during my PhD.
0:32:59 And so I think that’s why a lot of us make good founders is because of those two things.
0:33:01 You know what I really want to talk about?
0:33:03 Spin class.
0:33:07 Is it true that you became a spin instructor to learn how to be a public speaker?
0:33:08 I did.
0:33:08 I did.
0:33:11 And also to make money because, again, as a grad student, I was poor.
0:33:15 I did it to push myself out of my comfort zone, right?
0:33:18 I really, really struggled with public speaking.
0:33:19 Like I would be shaking.
0:33:21 I’d be sweating everywhere.
0:33:22 I mean, it was awful.
0:33:26 And I had to get over my fear of talking in front of people because I loved communicating
0:33:28 science in a way that people understood.
0:33:30 And so I said, okay, I didn’t want to go.
0:33:34 Like I got advice to go do like a theater class, you know, improv.
0:33:36 And I was like, oh, that’s not really my jam.
0:33:37 I like working out.
0:33:40 And I said, oh, like maybe I’ll try teaching spin class.
0:33:46 And I actually didn’t use a microphone for many, many years because I forced myself to
0:33:50 speak loudly, speak clearly, and to project my voice.
0:33:54 And so my husband, who was my boyfriend at the time when I was at Duke teaching spin, if
0:33:57 anyone’s been to the Duke gym, it’s three floors.
0:33:58 And the spin was on the very bottom floor.
0:34:00 And the entrance was like three floors up.
0:34:04 And he always laughed because he could always hear me screaming in these spin classes.
0:34:06 He’s like, oh, my girlfriend is teaching.
0:34:07 I can hear her.
0:34:10 But I really tried to do that.
0:34:17 And it helped, I think, prepare me for being a CEO and a founder because you had to be a
0:34:18 leader in those rooms.
0:34:21 You had to, you know, inspire and keep people motivated.
0:34:26 And those are the same skills that you need in this position, especially when you’re a small
0:34:29 team and going through, you know, really difficult things.
0:34:32 And still, I mean, we’re eight years in and there’s still challenges every single day.
0:34:37 And so I think that’s mostly what I learned from being a spin instructor is just,
0:34:39 I love the motivational piece of it.
0:34:41 It helped me with public speaking.
0:34:45 And you just, you get to learn a different side of people, right?
0:34:49 Like you get to be there in moments where they’re not doing well and moments when they’re feeling
0:34:50 great about themselves.
0:34:52 And I thought that was very rewarding.
0:34:55 And just helping them, you know, it’s like your me time in the day.
0:34:57 That’s how I think about exercising.
0:34:59 And so I loved being part of that in their day.
0:35:01 Have you ever faked resistance?
0:35:02 Yes, of course.
0:35:03 Does everybody?
0:35:06 I don’t know if everyone does, but when you’re teaching for an hour.
0:35:06 You know what?
0:35:08 That makes me feel better.
0:35:16 I have a Peloton and I’m in reasonably good shape, but like I fall apart when I do like
0:35:16 an interval ride.
0:35:21 And when the instructor is not falling apart, I’m like, either she’s in incredible shape
0:35:23 or she’s faking it or both, I guess.
0:35:24 Yes.
0:35:28 You can usually tell when people are not faking it because it is a skill and you’re just in
0:35:34 incredible shape and it’s a shape that you quickly fall out of like talking at that volume
0:35:37 and projecting your voice while you’re breathing so heavily and exercising.
0:35:39 It’s something that you have to learn how to do.
0:35:42 And so you can hear it in people’s voices when they’re when they’re really working because
0:35:47 it’s hard to start to not like be breathing into the microphone so heavily.
0:35:48 Yeah.
0:35:48 Yeah.
0:35:52 Well, that’s actually, as I’m sure you know, when they talk about like zone two training,
0:35:57 which is just like chill cardio, the classic sort of heuristic is when you can carry on
0:35:58 a conversation, right?
0:36:02 And so if you’re doing a real interval, you shouldn’t be able to talk normally.
0:36:03 You should not.
0:36:04 Yeah.
0:36:08 At least when I was an instructor, unfortunately, I’m not anymore, or at least not right now.
0:36:08 Yeah.
0:36:13 You saw like I tried my best because I always say like I’m doing the same resistance to you
0:36:14 and I would I would be truthful in that.
0:36:17 Like if I was really doing that resistance, I would say that to try to motivate people.
0:36:20 But there are some points where like I had taught five classes that week and I was like,
0:36:21 I can’t do it.
0:36:22 I can’t do it.
0:36:24 I just have to be at a lower resistance.
0:36:30 And even if I want to climb, did you have like a favorite cliche, motivational phrase
0:36:32 as an instructor?
0:36:33 Yes.
0:36:35 You can do anything for a minute.
0:36:37 You can literally do anything for a minute.
0:36:41 And I used to say that I used to scream that at people like we’re going up a hill.
0:36:42 You can do anything for a minute.
0:36:43 Just keep going.
0:36:44 Don’t psych yourself out.
0:36:45 You can do this.
0:36:49 And so I say that even to myself now when whenever I’m doing something and you can do anything
0:36:49 for a minute.
0:37:00 Megan O’Connor is the co-founder and CEO of NthCycle.
0:37:03 Please email us at problem at Pushkin.fm.
0:37:06 We are always looking for new guests for the show.
0:37:11 Today’s show was produced by Trina Menino and Gabriel Hunter-Chang.
0:37:15 It was edited by Alexandra Gerriton and engineered by Sarah Bruguer.
0:37:19 I’m Jacob Goldstein and we’ll be back next week with another episode of What’s Your Problem?
0:37:33 This is an iHeart Podcast.
0:00:41 So the world is basically just starting this massive shift from fossil fuels to a combination of renewable energy and battery storage.
0:00:43 This is good news.
0:00:45 I hope it happens as quickly as possible.
0:00:50 But it is going to be a massive, complicated, hard transition.
0:00:59 One of the many ways in which it is complicated and hard is building and dealing with all those batteries we’re going to need.
0:01:06 At a basic level, it takes a lot of metal, a lot of nickel, a lot of cobalt, just to make all the batteries we’re going to need.
0:01:15 And mining and refining those metals is a thing that basically doesn’t happen in the U.S. or in Europe anymore.
0:01:17 At least doesn’t happen at any significant scale.
0:01:20 And for understandable reasons, right?
0:01:24 This is an intense, often dirty industrial process.
0:01:31 And so, as you might guess, a huge share of industrial refining of these kinds of metals now happens in China.
0:01:37 And on top of getting the metal out of the ground and refined in the first place, there’s a second complication.
0:01:38 Batteries wear out.
0:01:44 What do we do with all that potentially useful metal once a battery has finished its useful life as a battery?
0:01:50 So, just to sum up, to recap, the world needs a huge new supply of batteries.
0:01:57 But, especially in the U.S. and Europe, it’s not clear how we can get the metal we need to make all those batteries.
0:02:01 And it’s also not clear what we should do with those batteries when they wear out.
0:02:10 I’m Jacob Goldstein, and this is What’s Your Problem?
0:02:13 The show where I talk to people who are trying to make technological progress.
0:02:16 My guest today is Megan O’Connor.
0:02:20 She’s the co-founder and CEO of a company called EnthCycle.
0:02:24 Like the letter N and then TH and then cycle.
0:02:26 Megan’s problem is this.
0:02:31 Can you come up with an efficient system that can both refine the raw metals we need for batteries
0:02:37 and recycle old batteries to extract that metal so it can be used again in new batteries?
0:02:45 Megan told me that she first had the idea for the company when she was getting her Ph.D. in environmental engineering.
0:02:51 Her Ph.D. is from Duke, but the idea actually came out of this meeting she went to at Yale.
0:02:55 And it was weirdly hard for her to get in the door of that meeting.
0:03:01 One of the professors there was the head of the Green Chemistry and Green Engineering School.
0:03:07 And he wanted to bring industry in to help really direct the center’s research to what industry cares about, right?
0:03:13 So that’s one of the reasons why I went to grad school is like work on something that industry really cares about and that has a real problem.
0:03:18 And I overheard him talking about this Green Electronic Summit in the hallway, you know, a couple weeks before.
0:03:20 And it was completely closed off to students.
0:03:26 And so it was supposed to be like a closed door meeting with these like, you know, large consumer electronic OEMs.
0:03:31 So like Apple, Dell, you know, Intel, folks who make our cell phones and laptops and things.
0:03:36 And I really wanted to be in this room, even though it was closed off to students and other faculty.
0:03:41 So what I had to do is bang down this professor’s door for three weeks straight.
0:03:44 And I think he finally just gave in and said, okay.
0:03:48 Badgering is an underrated strategy in certain contexts.
0:03:48 It really is.
0:03:51 I’m very determined, which I think you’ll hear a lot of entrepreneurs say.
0:03:56 But I really wanted to be in this meeting to say like, okay, does industry actually care about any of this that I’ve been researching, right?
0:03:57 Yeah.
0:03:58 And so he finally let me in as a scribe.
0:03:59 He said, all right, I need somebody to take notes.
0:04:01 Come in and take notes for nine hours.
0:04:10 So I sat there and over and over and over again in this summit, every single manufacturing company in there said the same two things.
0:04:15 One, they have no idea what to, at the time, this was 10 years ago, they didn’t know what to do with their waste, right?
0:04:20 They said, look, we’re all trying to be leaders in transparency, in the supply chain, sustainability, right?
0:04:21 Whatever you want to call it.
0:04:30 They wanted to be leaders in that space for their consumers, but they don’t know and didn’t know how they were going to deal with the growing waste management problem, right?
0:04:36 So every time you buy a new cell phone or every time you buy a new smartwatch, right, where do those things end up?
0:04:44 And so they said, look, e-waste, right, electronics waste, is already a massive problem around the world that we don’t really know how to solve.
0:04:52 Imagine when these clean energy technologies, like electric vehicles, like wind turbines, like solar panels, start to come offline.
0:04:54 Those are considered electronics waste, right?
0:04:56 It’s just going to exacerbate the problem.
0:04:57 It’s orders of magnitude.
0:05:00 Orders of magnitude larger, right, than a cell phone.
0:05:02 Electric car is just a driving battery.
0:05:03 It’s a battery.
0:05:03 Exactly.
0:05:06 And so what are we going to do with all this waste once we start generating it, right?
0:05:13 As these companies, they’ve said, you know, we want to try to figure out how to take responsibility for this in our supply chains, but we don’t know how to do that.
0:05:18 And then the second round they all said is, we don’t know what our supply chains are going to look like, right?
0:05:25 Again, a cell phone uses a couple of grams of cobalt, whereas an EV uses orders of magnitude more metal in their batteries.
0:05:31 And so you think about, you’re already having supply chain issues in accessing, you know, that cobalt.
0:05:39 What does that look like when we start to hopefully manufacture and push out all these much larger technologies, right?
0:05:40 Millions of electric vehicles.
0:05:41 Millions of electric vehicles, hopefully.
0:05:43 And then you add the wind turbines, and then you add the solar panels, right?
0:05:45 The same things I said before.
0:05:49 And it just, the supply chains just become a bigger and bigger problem.
0:05:59 And so I walked to that meeting feeling, A, like a little angry that, like, how are we barreling down this path again, generating all this waste when we have no way of dealing with it?
0:06:04 But then also feeling a little inspired and said, okay, we have all this waste.
0:06:15 Is there a way and is there a technology that exists out there to be able to take that waste and turn it back into metals so you can have a secondary supply of these materials and sort of kill two birds with one stone?
0:06:23 Okay, so you talk about it with your advisor, a professor named Desiree Plata, right?
0:06:33 And then, as I understand it, you and your advisor, you think of this technology that a Harvard professor had been working on, but not in this context, right?
0:06:35 Working on for water filtration.
0:06:38 So you go to this professor, as I understand the story.
0:06:39 His name is Chad Vesitas.
0:06:50 And is it right, like, you basically ask him if you can try and apply his technique to recycle batteries, to refine metal, and then the three of you wind up starting the company together?
0:06:51 Is that right?
0:06:51 Right.
0:06:58 So I approached Chad and I said, hey, you don’t know me, but you know Desiree a little bit, and can I use your technology for this application?
0:07:00 He said yes.
0:07:05 This was my third year of my PhD, so for folks out there, it’s typically a five- to six-year program, so I was already halfway through.
0:07:18 So it was a little crazy of me to switch my project that far in, but I felt very strongly that, you know, there was a solution that was needed here, and I went to grad school to try and find a problem and provide a technology solution.
0:07:20 So I sort of dove headfirst into it.
0:07:32 So for the next three years, Chad, Desiree, and I, you know, continued to work on this technology together, and by the end of my PhD, it worked so well that I felt, if I put the right team together, I think this technology could really change the world.
0:07:35 It could change the way that we refine metal.
0:07:40 This industry hasn’t had any type of technological change in decades, right?
0:07:42 Like, I’m talking close to 100 years, right?
0:07:46 This has been the same technology we’ve seen, and it’s clearly not working here in the U.S.
0:07:47 It hasn’t been adopted here.
0:07:52 So this is where technology can really have an impact for the clean energy economy.
0:07:58 I mean, when you say the technology, I mean, you mean specifically refining metals, basically, right?
0:08:04 You’ve got metals, whether it’s recycling and they’re mixed up with a bunch of other stuff, or they’re coming out of the ground and they’re mixed up with a bunch of other stuff.
0:08:10 The fundamental thing is, how do you separate out the metal you want, whatever, the lithium, the nickel, the cobalt?
0:08:11 That’s the fundamental thing.
0:08:19 Yeah, take from those sources, whether it’s out of the ground or out of some recycled end-of-life material and turn it back into basically something that’s usable again.
0:08:21 That’s what the chemical refining step does.
0:08:24 Why hadn’t refining changed for 100 years?
0:08:29 Most of the refining that’s done around the world is in the mining industry, right?
0:08:38 So these mining companies typically will develop an asset, a long-life asset, and an asset meaning just the mine itself, where they dig the dirt and the metals out of the ground.
0:08:43 And then they typically stand the refinery up literally right next door, right?
0:08:50 They want to eliminate as much of that transportation as possible because these metals are in such low concentration.
0:08:52 It’s a lot of dirt to a little bit of metal, right?
0:08:57 You don’t want to move 100 pounds of dirt 1,000 miles to get one pound of nickel.
0:09:03 So the refining industry was really centered around this mining space.
0:09:19 And so it was only when folks really started to look at the recycling space, and I talk battery recycling specifically right now, it was like, okay, you have this big multi-billion dollar refinery where you process 80,000 tons of material per year, which is massive.
0:09:28 And you have a recycling industry where, A, again, you don’t have a magic pile of 80,000 tons of batteries, right, in one place.
0:09:31 And batteries are changing, right?
0:09:34 There’s different types of batteries from different companies.
0:09:39 They have different chemistries, which just means it makes it really hard to recycle them all in this one facility.
0:09:43 And so just that model doesn’t match, right?
0:09:50 Some of those mining refineries will take a little bit of recycled material, but again, they’re all overseas, right?
0:09:51 So then you come to that national security challenge.
0:10:04 And so the setting aside the overseas part, the fundamental problem is they’re built to process a huge amount of some very homogenous and consistent input for a long time.
0:10:05 Like that’s the economic model?
0:10:06 That’s correct.
0:10:07 And that’s the fundamental problem?
0:10:09 That’s the fundamental problem.
0:10:10 So how do you do it?
0:10:14 We have developed a new technology we call electroextraction.
0:10:23 And so it’s a fancy word to say that we use the same chemicals that you see in refining today in those massive facilities I talked about.
0:10:25 And those are produced with fossil energy.
0:10:28 So they’re produced with fossil energy and then trucked to those sites.
0:10:34 What we figured out is to overcome the barrier of having to build this massive facility,
0:10:46 we could create a smaller modular facility to be able to process the smaller volumes of recycled material that we have around the Western world by producing the same chemicals with electricity.
0:10:51 So we can produce them when we need them, where we need them, and only as much as we need them.
0:11:05 And so that gives us the efficiencies that we needed, both from a cost and energy perspective, to be able to really scale down that process instead of having to do 80,000 tons, right, to justify this project per year.
0:11:09 We only need to do a minimum of 2,000 to 3,000 tons per year.
0:11:13 And so that allows us to work with all these different recycling companies.
0:11:22 And whether it’s one type of battery or nickel catalyst material, right, we process all different types of sort of scrap or end-of-life materials.
0:11:30 And so we’ve overcome some big barriers to just getting refining capacity here, both in the U.S. and in Europe.
0:11:37 And is it right that you just turned on your first real facility last second half of last year in Ohio?
0:11:38 That’s right.
0:11:40 And we just went live in September 2024.
0:11:41 So we’re very excited.
0:11:45 We have about eight months of operations under our belt now.
0:11:48 So tell me about what’s happening in Ohio.
0:11:51 So in Ohio, so it’s our refining system, which we call the Oyster for short.
0:11:55 And so our facility, it’s a big industrial warehouse.
0:12:00 And basically what my system looks like, I like to think of it as a deck of cards, right?
0:12:06 So our electrochemical filters, as I mentioned before, think of their like big plastic cards.
0:12:09 So they’re one meter wide, one meter tall.
0:12:12 And I have 140 of those sort of stacked in parallel.
0:12:14 So think of like a sideways deck of cards.
0:12:21 And sort of inside those cells is where I pull out the metals like the nickel and the cobalt that we want back out from manufacturers.
0:12:29 So when I get these shredded battery materials in, if you walked into my facility today, you’d see a giant tank on the left-hand side of the facility.
0:12:32 We dump that shredded battery material into that tank.
0:12:33 We dissolve it.
0:12:35 And so all those dissolved metals are in there.
0:12:39 So the shredded battery, which is called black mass, is that right?
0:12:40 You haven’t said black mass.
0:12:41 I’m sort of disappointed.
0:12:43 I was excited for you to say black mass.
0:12:45 Yes, it’s called black mass.
0:12:49 It just, it literally looks like black, like flour, like the flour that you bake with.
0:12:51 It just looks like a black version of that, which is very interesting.
0:12:54 So you get truckloads of black mass?
0:12:59 Or did you build your facility next to some, that of some company that shreds batteries and creates black mass?
0:13:00 Is that why you’re there?
0:13:08 The reason we chose Fairfield was because there’s a lot of just industrial scrap that finds its way to the Midwest.
0:13:11 The black mass capital of the Midwest?
0:13:14 There’s a couple of black mass companies around there that take the batteries and shred them into black mass.
0:13:20 And then we also process other types of industrial scrap, like catalysts from the oil and gas industry.
0:13:24 So that area is just rich with those types of companies.
0:13:26 So you’ve got your deck of cards.
0:13:28 I like the deck of cards as a metaphor.
0:13:30 They’re sort of stacked, a little spaced out.
0:13:32 The black mass goes in one side.
0:13:34 You dissolve it into a liquid.
0:13:35 And then what happens?
0:13:39 And then that liquid goes into our deck of cards oyster system.
0:13:44 That’s where the chemicals are being produced in those cells to pull out the cobalt, to pull out the nickel.
0:13:48 And then they come out the other side as the product that we can sell.
0:13:52 And are you actually buying the black mass and selling the nickel?
0:13:54 Are you in the nickel business?
0:13:55 For this facility, we are.
0:14:00 So we call it a merchant facility where, yes, we buy black mass from different partner facilities.
0:14:04 And then we are selling the nickel products on the other side of it.
0:14:09 This will be the only facility that we have that’s sort of, again, I call it a merchant facility for the business model.
0:14:14 And we did it for the first one, again, because it was the first time that we’ve built the system at commercial scale.
0:14:16 So we wanted, you know, full site control.
0:14:19 And then we also use it as a business development tool, right?
0:14:24 So our traditional business model moving forward will be to operate under what’s called a tolling model.
0:14:32 And so it’s really where we’ll go on site with our partners and cycle will own and operate our system on their site.
0:14:38 And we’ll charge them a fee per pound of, say, battery or black mass that we process for them.
0:14:41 So think of almost like refining as a service, if you will.
0:14:42 So they’ll own the feedstock.
0:14:45 We’ll charge them to process it.
0:14:48 And then they’ll own the nickel product coming out on the other side.
0:14:50 Because you don’t want to be in the nickel business, basically.
0:14:52 As a young company, we wanted to only take the risks we had to.
0:14:53 Yeah.
0:14:55 So we felt like, OK, we can handle the operational risks.
0:14:56 It’s our technology.
0:14:57 We’ll do what we’re good at.
0:14:59 And then we’ll let these companies do what they’re good at.
0:15:00 Because they’ve been in…
0:15:03 Remember, these companies have been in the commodity business for decades, right?
0:15:04 Or longer.
0:15:09 I mean, they’re very skilled in, like, the logistics and the collection and…
0:15:10 No, the commodity business is crazy.
0:15:11 Why would you want to do that?
0:15:14 If you have some technology you believe in, let other people solve that problem.
0:15:15 Yeah.
0:15:16 We want to be the technologist.
0:15:17 We want to be the technology provider.
0:15:19 So that’s our business model moving forward.
0:15:25 And so what we use Ohio for is really, like, a tool to show them what the technology looks like.
0:15:30 We can process their material, you know, at lower volumes there to show them what we can do with it.
0:15:35 It de-risks it on both sides as we’re going into this more partnership model with them in the future.
0:15:37 So we’ve been talking about nickel.
0:15:45 I heard you talk in earlier interviews about nickel in particular, or this nickel product, more specifically, in particular,
0:15:55 as being acutely affected by kind of legal and regulatory changes, both in the U.S. and in Europe, in a way that is good for you, right?
0:15:57 In a way that, like, those may be about to go away.
0:15:59 They are, or they may be, right?
0:15:59 We don’t know yet.
0:16:02 They seem likely to be about to go away.
0:16:03 Likely to go away.
0:16:03 That’s right.
0:16:09 But I would say this administration also prioritizes critical minerals just for other reasons, right?
0:16:13 So more on the national security side and to really onshore our supply chain.
0:16:20 So there is equally as much demand for domestically produced materials just for a different reason.
0:16:26 And so we still feel like a ton of tailwinds with the executive orders, and we’ll see how that translates into policy in the next couple of years.
0:16:30 So the end of the EV mandate is bad for you, but high tariffs are good for you?
0:16:40 I don’t know if I put it like that, but we are definitely taking advantage of the desire to have onshoring of these critical mineral supply chains and being one of the companies in the space that’s operational.
0:16:52 So I think it’s a good signal for us to scale quickly to be able to provide both the military and, again, the folks who are still pushing forward through the clean energy economy and the technology they’re building, right?
0:16:53 They both need supply of these materials.
0:16:54 They’re used for both.
0:17:00 They’re pivoting from being an energy transition company to being an American energy dominance company.
0:17:00 That’s right.
0:17:02 Same company, right?
0:17:03 Different wrapper.
0:17:04 It’s very true.
0:17:05 We need both of those things.
0:17:15 And then, you know, on the European side, where they haven’t had much change in terms of their regulatory environment, as I like to think about it, but they care about this, again, for a different reason.
0:17:22 They have something that’s called the battery passport, where they’re going to have to reduce the carbon footprint of their batteries that are being produced.
0:17:24 And it starts with the metals, right?
0:17:34 And so currently where you can source the vast majority of the nickel around the world uses a technology that is very carbon intensive.
0:17:39 It’s called HPAL, H-P-A-L is the acronym, if folks care to look that up.
0:17:44 But it’s just a very, very carbon intensive way to produce this nickel out of the nickel mining that happens in Indonesia.
0:17:48 And it’s so carbon intensive that it doesn’t meet those requirements.
0:17:53 So Europe is forced to try and find another source of these materials.
0:18:00 And on top of that, they have very strict recycling rates that they’ll have to hit over the next several years.
0:18:06 It sort of forces industry within the EU to develop recycling and refining technologies.
0:18:24 And then on top of that, if you do recycle the batteries there and you produce this black mass, they’ve also now classified this black mass as a very specific type of hazardous waste, which means that it’s very difficult and nearly impossible to ship the black mass between country borders within the EU.
0:18:29 So arguably a self-defeating regulation, but perhaps good for your business?
0:18:41 Great for N-Cycle because we are the only one of the only modular technologies that can go into each country and help them turn that black mass into a product that they can easily move across borders, right?
0:18:49 So again, this distributed modular refining approach is quickly becoming the only way that they’ll be able to solve these challenges within the EU.
0:18:52 And then I think similarly here in the U.S., right?
0:18:55 We have not been able to build sort of traditional technology here.
0:18:58 So when are you going to turn on the first oyster in Europe?
0:19:00 So the goal would be 2026.
0:19:05 So we’re working with some partners now to try and solidify what those projects will look like.
0:19:07 But starting construction in 2026 is the goal.
0:19:09 So we’ve been talking about nickel.
0:19:13 Is that going to be your main output for a while?
0:19:15 I mean, can it be anything that’s, can it be lithium?
0:19:17 Can it be cobalt?
0:19:18 Like what, how’s that work?
0:19:22 Yes, the main product out of the system is like a mixture of cobalt and nickel, actually.
0:19:25 It’s called nickel MHP, which is a very industry-specific term.
0:19:27 It’s just a nickel product.
0:19:31 We also produce a lithium product out of the black mass as well.
0:19:34 And then in development, we have a new system for copper.
0:19:36 So a lot of our partners have copper scrap.
0:19:41 We’re also talking to some copper mining companies about some of the issues they’re having to deploy the technology there.
0:19:43 And then we also have one for rare earths.
0:19:51 So the rare earths are the metals in, think, like the magnets that are in your motors in the wind turbines that you might see, hopefully, in your backyard.
0:19:59 So it’s two other systems to try and, you know, produce as much of these critical minerals as we possibly can, because they all face the same challenges, right?
0:20:00 They’re all refined.
0:20:02 The vast material are refined overseas.
0:20:10 And it causes, again, a big national security issue and just limits us into how quickly we can build these technologies here in the U.S. and Europe.
0:20:14 We’ll be back in just a minute.
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0:20:55 I’m CNN tech reporter Claire Duffy.
0:20:56 Claire Duffy was one of the others.
0:21:00 I cover artificial intelligence and other new technologies for a living.
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0:21:25 What’s the rate-limiting step for you in expanding?
0:21:30 I’d say the rate-limiting step for us now is a combination of funding and just the team, right?
0:21:31 So I think we’re ready to go.
0:21:35 And we will be fundraising in the next several months to go out and do these projects.
0:21:39 And then with that funding, we’ll build the team that we need to go execute.
0:21:45 I mean, in terms of funding, if you sign a contract with some company to do refining as a service for them,
0:21:51 can you borrow against that contract to build the thing that they promised to pay you to use?
0:21:51 Yeah.
0:21:54 Like, a factory is a classic thing that it’s collateral.
0:21:55 You could borrow money against it.
0:21:59 Or is it not collateral because nobody’s ever built one before and the bank doesn’t trust that it’ll work?
0:22:00 We’re somewhere in the middle.
0:22:06 So we’re in this, for folks out there who may be building or have heard of other startups going through this phase,
0:22:08 it’s called, like, the scale gap, the missing middle.
0:22:10 You got one and you want 10.
0:22:13 And how do you get the money to build the other nine?
0:22:13 How do you get the money?
0:22:16 Because we still have some technical risk, right, of course, because it’s a second-of-a-kind,
0:22:17 not a first-of-its-kind.
0:22:18 Ohio was our first-of-a-kind.
0:22:23 So there’s a whole bunch of folks who are dealing with the same thing and trying to find, like,
0:22:26 what does that financing look like for this type of risk profile?
0:22:27 But there is money out there.
0:22:33 And I do think that, again, given the space that we’re in and where we are with Ohio and the next projects,
0:22:39 and like you said, the contracts will be everything to show that there is market pull for our technology.
0:22:41 What are you trying to figure out now?
0:22:42 What’s sort of the frontier for you?
0:22:47 So what we’re trying to figure out now is how do we translate this technology that we are expanding
0:22:51 within the scrap recycling space with into the mining space?
0:22:58 I think the whole goal of Encycle was to try and, you know, create the most robust supply
0:23:03 chains that we possibly can for these critical minerals and, you know, build a clean energy
0:23:05 economy on the cleanest source of materials.
0:23:08 You know, what really killed me at the end of the day when I was starting about thinking the
0:23:13 company is like, gosh, we are building this, like, quote-unquote, clean energy economy on
0:23:14 a dirty source of material.
0:23:18 So we continue to make the same problems in industry that we have in the past.
0:23:23 And so that was really, like, the core of why I wanted to start Encycle and the application
0:23:24 of scrap recycling came from that.
0:23:28 And then the goal and the dream is really to start to do this in the mining space because
0:23:31 that’s where you can have, like, massive, massive impact.
0:23:37 I mean, there’s just orders of magnitude more material processed per year from a mine than
0:23:37 there is from recycling.
0:23:45 And the goal is to eventually recycle enough material to have it all in circulation so that
0:23:48 you can just solely rely on recycling.
0:23:53 Even if you are recycling everything, assuming people are switching to EVs over time, you’ll
0:23:59 still need a lot of new lithium and nickel and cobalt out of the ground.
0:24:01 For the next several decades, absolutely.
0:24:04 So that’s where I think mining gets this bad rap.
0:24:10 But we have to continue to mine materials to push forward in the clean energy economy.
0:24:14 Like you said, there is not enough recycled material out there to be, even if you recycled
0:24:19 100% of it, it does not get you enough cobalt and nickel or lithium or whatever material you’re
0:24:20 looking at to be able to meet demand.
0:24:27 But what we’re really targeting is how do you turn on these existing ore bodies that haven’t
0:24:28 been developed yet, right?
0:24:31 So there is cobalt, there is nickel, there is copper here in the US.
0:24:36 There’s not a ton of mining that happens because the refining piece is so environmentally damaging,
0:24:37 right?
0:24:38 And people don’t want it in their backyards.
0:24:38 And I wouldn’t either.
0:24:41 I understand the sort of the pain with that.
0:24:46 But if you can develop a technology that overcomes and doesn’t have all the waste that’s
0:24:51 associated with the traditional refining and can have the same unit economics and justify
0:24:55 opening up these smaller mines, because they are much, much smaller than what you’d see
0:24:56 overseas, right?
0:25:00 So again, the technology is a mismatch for the source of materials.
0:25:06 That’s really where this innovation can have a major, major impact of like getting more of
0:25:10 these mines online and getting the US to have a mining industry again.
0:25:12 It’s really the technology that I think will unlock that.
0:25:17 And that’s sort of the new Frontier Front Cycle is, is I have a team of folks sort of looking
0:25:21 at what are the right applications in mining for us?
0:25:23 And, you know, does the technology need to look any different?
0:25:28 So the chemistry basis, the cells will work exactly the same.
0:25:30 It’s just the system will likely have to look different.
0:25:31 It’s refining either way.
0:25:32 It’s refining either way.
0:25:33 You’re doing refining now.
0:25:39 But instead of the input being black mass, shredded up batteries, it’ll be a lot of dirt
0:25:40 with a little bit of nickel in it or something.
0:25:40 Exactly.
0:25:40 Exactly, right.
0:25:48 So there are a few other battery recycling companies in the US, including one started by
0:25:50 the guy who actually started Tesla.
0:25:53 It’s a big company, Redwood Materials.
0:25:59 So tell me sort of how you fit in that broader context of the industry.
0:26:00 Yes, there’s many companies.
0:26:04 Redwood is one of the largest companies who works in the battery cycling space, especially
0:26:04 here in the US.
0:26:08 And their strategy is battery to battery, right?
0:26:14 They are solely battery recyclers who want to produce some type of end battery product, whether
0:26:19 it’s a chemical that goes into batteries or the cathode that goes to the batteries or the
0:26:19 battery itself.
0:26:25 And so what they’re trying to do is really build out that entire supply chain from collecting
0:26:28 the batteries, shredding those batteries into black mass.
0:26:32 They want to refine those materials, and then they want to be a manufacturer.
0:26:35 So they want to be a company that buys old batteries and sells new batteries.
0:26:38 And I think that’s very needed in this space, right?
0:26:42 There’s a lot of steps in the supply chain that need to be built here.
0:26:45 What Encycle does is just the refining piece.
0:26:50 And so these companies are using very traditional technology from the mining space.
0:26:56 And so what we’re providing, and we partner with a lot of these companies, is just a new
0:27:00 technology that is cheaper, more efficient to be able to process these batteries.
0:27:03 Maybe that’s like the wrong industry for me to be thinking about.
0:27:05 Is the right industry for me to be thinking about refining?
0:27:06 Is the right question?
0:27:09 Who else is trying to new and better ways of refining?
0:27:11 There’s not a ton of companies in this space.
0:27:15 If there are a few of us who are solely focused on the refining piece and who are trying to
0:27:20 take this modular approach, I would say we’re one of the only ones that takes more than batteries.
0:27:23 There’s a lot of refining companies focused on black mass in particular.
0:27:30 But again, we said, look, even if you recycled 100% of batteries, you’re not going to get enough
0:27:33 nickel, as we talked about earlier, or cobalt or lithium.
0:27:37 And so from the beginning, you know, we’ve tried to build a technology that could be very
0:27:41 flexible in the types of materials we can put in on the front end.
0:27:47 And so I would say we’re one of the only companies in the space that diversified.
0:27:53 But yeah, one or two others in the US and Europe that are sort of in the same exact space that
0:27:54 we are.
0:27:55 Why might you fail?
0:27:57 If you don’t make it, why wouldn’t you make it?
0:28:01 One of the reasons we couldn’t make it is if technology adoption, right?
0:28:08 If we start to have massive shifts in the regulatory environment, which some folks in the climate
0:28:12 technology space, which some people would put us in, are starting to feel that now, the
0:28:18 market really slows and startups need to move at a very fast pace and make a lot of progress
0:28:19 because we have limited cash, right?
0:28:24 Because we’re fundraising to survive until we build systems that can generate consistent
0:28:24 cash flow.
0:28:29 And so when markets slow down is when startups die.
0:28:32 And in your case, is that fundamentally the EV market?
0:28:36 Like, what is the key market you’re thinking of when you say that?
0:28:38 I think capital markets in general, right?
0:28:40 It makes it hard for companies to fundraise.
0:28:44 So you mean if like there’s a recession and venture capital pulls back and people don’t
0:28:48 want to do hard tech anymore, that’s a more macro kind of hard tech winter.
0:28:49 Right.
0:28:53 The macro environment can really challenge startups being able to fundraise.
0:28:55 And then market specific, yes.
0:29:01 So if for some reason the current administration or whatever region around the world you’re working
0:29:07 in for some reason moves away or stops prioritizing that industry, EVs as an example, yes, it can
0:29:08 really tank startups, right?
0:29:10 Because we looked at that as a company.
0:29:13 And I try to tell this to as many folks who will listen who are starting to build a company
0:29:13 as well.
0:29:17 You need to think about how you diversify from the very beginning.
0:29:23 And so that’s why while we work within the battery and EV space to recycle that black mass
0:29:28 as we talked about or refine that black mass, we also refine other scrap materials like catalysts
0:29:29 from oil and gas.
0:29:34 And there’s a whole slew of industrial scrap that has nothing to do with the EV industry that
0:29:36 has been around for decades and will continue to be around for decades.
0:29:42 So if for some reason the EV market tanks and cobalt and nickel are no longer a desirable
0:29:46 material, which we don’t expect to happen, you know, we have a copper system, we have
0:29:46 the rare earth system.
0:29:53 So, you know, we try to diversify enough to be able to have a business for whatever comes
0:29:53 right.
0:29:56 Because we have no idea what the next, you know, eight years will look like, right?
0:29:59 10 years, 12 years as we’re, you know, continuing to scale the business in different
0:29:59 directions.
0:30:05 So I think macro environment and when markets change or when startups can fail.
0:30:07 What’s the happy story for you?
0:30:09 What’s the, you don’t fail story?
0:30:14 I think Encycle becomes the leader in the go-to technology for refining for both mining
0:30:15 companies and recycling companies.
0:30:23 And I think there’s a real and likely possibility that it happens because of just the way that,
0:30:27 you know, we spent a lot of time trying to figure out what are the real pain points in
0:30:27 this industry.
0:30:32 And I feel like the team that I’ve assembled and the technology that we’ve built solves those
0:30:32 problems.
0:30:34 And we’re starting to see that in real time.
0:30:39 And so I think, you know, I’m hoping in three to five to 10 years, Encycle is the go-to
0:30:43 refining technology that you see for critical minerals in the space, whether it’s again
0:30:46 on the recycling or the mining side of the world.
0:30:51 We’ll be back in a minute with the lightning round.
0:31:02 run a business and not thinking about podcasting.
0:31:02 Think again.
0:31:07 More Americans listen to podcasts than ad supported streaming music from Spotify and Pandora.
0:31:11 And as the number one podcaster, I heart’s twice as large as the next two combined.
0:31:14 So whatever your customers listen to, they’ll hear your message.
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0:31:32 I’m CNN tech reporter Claire Duffy.
0:31:33 Claire Duffy was one.
0:31:38 I cover artificial intelligence and other new technologies for a living.
0:31:42 And even I sometimes get overwhelmed trying to keep up with it all.
0:31:47 So I’m starting a new show where together we can explore how to experiment with these new
0:31:49 tools without getting played by them.
0:31:51 It’s called Terms of Service.
0:31:54 This technology is so crazy powerful.
0:31:58 Follow CNN’s Terms of Service wherever you get your podcasts.
0:32:02 Let’s finish with the lightning round.
0:32:03 What’s your favorite element?
0:32:05 Oh, what’s my favorite element?
0:32:10 I really like I love green and the nickel product we produce is green.
0:32:13 So I’ll say nickel, even though that’s what I’ve been talking about the whole time.
0:32:14 What what kind of green?
0:32:15 Like, is it pretty green?
0:32:21 It’s like I wish I could show a picture, but it’s like a almost like a bright emerald,
0:32:21 I would say.
0:32:27 So it’s actually like I love metal chemistry in general because you just see such beautiful
0:32:31 colors like cobalt blue, cobalt can be pink, nickels green.
0:32:34 The mix of cobalt and nickel is like a turquoise.
0:32:36 So it’s very beautiful chemistry that happens.
0:32:39 Why do PhD students make good founders?
0:32:44 So I always make the joke that PhD students make the best founders because we’re used to
0:32:48 being poor and we’re used to failing a lot.
0:32:51 And you have to fail and learn from failure as a founder.
0:32:55 And that’s like a fundamental thing that you learn during your PhD, or at least I learned
0:32:56 during my PhD.
0:32:59 And so I think that’s why a lot of us make good founders is because of those two things.
0:33:01 You know what I really want to talk about?
0:33:03 Spin class.
0:33:07 Is it true that you became a spin instructor to learn how to be a public speaker?
0:33:08 I did.
0:33:08 I did.
0:33:11 And also to make money because, again, as a grad student, I was poor.
0:33:15 I did it to push myself out of my comfort zone, right?
0:33:18 I really, really struggled with public speaking.
0:33:19 Like I would be shaking.
0:33:21 I’d be sweating everywhere.
0:33:22 I mean, it was awful.
0:33:26 And I had to get over my fear of talking in front of people because I loved communicating
0:33:28 science in a way that people understood.
0:33:30 And so I said, okay, I didn’t want to go.
0:33:34 Like I got advice to go do like a theater class, you know, improv.
0:33:36 And I was like, oh, that’s not really my jam.
0:33:37 I like working out.
0:33:40 And I said, oh, like maybe I’ll try teaching spin class.
0:33:46 And I actually didn’t use a microphone for many, many years because I forced myself to
0:33:50 speak loudly, speak clearly, and to project my voice.
0:33:54 And so my husband, who was my boyfriend at the time when I was at Duke teaching spin, if
0:33:57 anyone’s been to the Duke gym, it’s three floors.
0:33:58 And the spin was on the very bottom floor.
0:34:00 And the entrance was like three floors up.
0:34:04 And he always laughed because he could always hear me screaming in these spin classes.
0:34:06 He’s like, oh, my girlfriend is teaching.
0:34:07 I can hear her.
0:34:10 But I really tried to do that.
0:34:17 And it helped, I think, prepare me for being a CEO and a founder because you had to be a
0:34:18 leader in those rooms.
0:34:21 You had to, you know, inspire and keep people motivated.
0:34:26 And those are the same skills that you need in this position, especially when you’re a small
0:34:29 team and going through, you know, really difficult things.
0:34:32 And still, I mean, we’re eight years in and there’s still challenges every single day.
0:34:37 And so I think that’s mostly what I learned from being a spin instructor is just,
0:34:39 I love the motivational piece of it.
0:34:41 It helped me with public speaking.
0:34:45 And you just, you get to learn a different side of people, right?
0:34:49 Like you get to be there in moments where they’re not doing well and moments when they’re feeling
0:34:50 great about themselves.
0:34:52 And I thought that was very rewarding.
0:34:55 And just helping them, you know, it’s like your me time in the day.
0:34:57 That’s how I think about exercising.
0:34:59 And so I loved being part of that in their day.
0:35:01 Have you ever faked resistance?
0:35:02 Yes, of course.
0:35:03 Does everybody?
0:35:06 I don’t know if everyone does, but when you’re teaching for an hour.
0:35:06 You know what?
0:35:08 That makes me feel better.
0:35:16 I have a Peloton and I’m in reasonably good shape, but like I fall apart when I do like
0:35:16 an interval ride.
0:35:21 And when the instructor is not falling apart, I’m like, either she’s in incredible shape
0:35:23 or she’s faking it or both, I guess.
0:35:24 Yes.
0:35:28 You can usually tell when people are not faking it because it is a skill and you’re just in
0:35:34 incredible shape and it’s a shape that you quickly fall out of like talking at that volume
0:35:37 and projecting your voice while you’re breathing so heavily and exercising.
0:35:39 It’s something that you have to learn how to do.
0:35:42 And so you can hear it in people’s voices when they’re when they’re really working because
0:35:47 it’s hard to start to not like be breathing into the microphone so heavily.
0:35:48 Yeah.
0:35:48 Yeah.
0:35:52 Well, that’s actually, as I’m sure you know, when they talk about like zone two training,
0:35:57 which is just like chill cardio, the classic sort of heuristic is when you can carry on
0:35:58 a conversation, right?
0:36:02 And so if you’re doing a real interval, you shouldn’t be able to talk normally.
0:36:03 You should not.
0:36:04 Yeah.
0:36:08 At least when I was an instructor, unfortunately, I’m not anymore, or at least not right now.
0:36:08 Yeah.
0:36:13 You saw like I tried my best because I always say like I’m doing the same resistance to you
0:36:14 and I would I would be truthful in that.
0:36:17 Like if I was really doing that resistance, I would say that to try to motivate people.
0:36:20 But there are some points where like I had taught five classes that week and I was like,
0:36:21 I can’t do it.
0:36:22 I can’t do it.
0:36:24 I just have to be at a lower resistance.
0:36:30 And even if I want to climb, did you have like a favorite cliche, motivational phrase
0:36:32 as an instructor?
0:36:33 Yes.
0:36:35 You can do anything for a minute.
0:36:37 You can literally do anything for a minute.
0:36:41 And I used to say that I used to scream that at people like we’re going up a hill.
0:36:42 You can do anything for a minute.
0:36:43 Just keep going.
0:36:44 Don’t psych yourself out.
0:36:45 You can do this.
0:36:49 And so I say that even to myself now when whenever I’m doing something and you can do anything
0:36:49 for a minute.
0:37:00 Megan O’Connor is the co-founder and CEO of NthCycle.
0:37:03 Please email us at problem at Pushkin.fm.
0:37:06 We are always looking for new guests for the show.
0:37:11 Today’s show was produced by Trina Menino and Gabriel Hunter-Chang.
0:37:15 It was edited by Alexandra Gerriton and engineered by Sarah Bruguer.
0:37:19 I’m Jacob Goldstein and we’ll be back next week with another episode of What’s Your Problem?
0:37:33 This is an iHeart Podcast.
Megan O’Connor is the co-founder and CEO of Nth Cycle. Megan’s problem is this: How do you create a new system that can both refine the raw metals we need for new batteries and recycle metal from old batteries?
See omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.
