What's in the fridge? (E)

0:00In your house, running all night and all day, right near the back door, is a box, a device that is responsible, at least partly, for many of the ills and dangers in our culture. Yes, we're here to talk about the system that involves your refrigerator. Hey, it's Ajay, and this is a special archived episode of Akimbo.

0:33This is not actually a podcast about refrigerators. It's about systems and how hard they are to change and the opportunities that are in front of us if someone, if some organization finds the guts and the wherewithal and the persistence to actually make a change happen. So let's talk about your fridge. First of all, it is wasting a lot of power day in and day out. An old refrigerator is using a ton of electricity. New ones are a lot more efficient thanks to the EPA ratcheting up the standards. hopefully will return to that era of making fridges even more efficient. Number two, human beings have been pushed by the marketing industrial complex to shop more and more in the middle of the supermarket.

1:30The edges of the supermarket, where we find things like fresh fruits and vegetables, things like dairy products, things that require cooking and innovation, meats and fishes as well, those are fading compared to the pre-packaged stuff in the middle of the store. Third, we waste a lot of food. By some estimates, a third of all the food we buy in the store, we don't end up eating, either because it's left over at the bottom of the package or because it goes bad. Number four, a lot of us are fat, and one of the reasons for obesity is we are not eating at home enough, and the things that we eat out of the home, though they are more convenient, have a lot more fat and salt and sodium, and we eat them mindlessly.

2:26One of the reasons for that is we are afraid of cooking. Go hang out at a fish store if you can find one, and what you'll see, or at least what I have seen, is that people line up to buy shrimp and salmon. At my local farmer's market, they didn't sell either one because, of course, shrimp and salmon aren't local to where I live in New York. But eventually, profits won out and they gave in, and now they sell both. And people stand there believing they are buying something local, but really what they are buying is something safe. People think they know how to cook it, and so they do. And that's one of the other reasons why we buy so many things from the middle of the supermarket.

3:09Open a can, empty a box, you're not going to feel stupid. Next, we are unaware of what we are consuming. It is not unusual for a teenager or an adult to visit the fridge and visit the fridge and visit the fridge and visit the fridge. And we can't figure out how is it that suddenly we're totally stuffed and have eaten thousands more calories than we intended to. Next, the refrigerator is a symbol of the supply chain that is the miracle of food in our era. How is it possible that in January you are eating strawberries? Where did they grow? How did they get there? How is it possible that for$2.95, a quart of strawberries is in your refrigerator in January?

4:03In 1700, even the king of France wasn't eating strawberries in January at any price. But one of the costs of this supply chain that we have built is that there is a lot of waste. Not just waste by the time it gets to our house, but most of the waste happens right after the item is picked or just before where it rots somewhere between there and you being able to buy it. Part of it is a lack of coordination between growers and processors or a lack of coordination between processors and stores. One more reason why so many things are frozen or canned. But the other thing that's going on in the supply chain is that supermarket, that pristine food town just down the street from you, has all of these fruits and vegetables just waiting for you to show up so you will have a selection.

5:02All of those avocados just waiting for that one day when you decide you're ready for an avocado. small aside here i was lucky enough or crazy enough to take the great designer milton glazer's class i think the year was 1988 and you had to audition to get into the class you needed a portfolio i didn't have one i sort of presumed my way into the class anyway i lasted three or four classes before he threw me out that's a story for another time but one of the things we had to develop was design a package for the supermarket. And most of the people in the class, world-class designers all, came up with beautiful boxes for Carolina rice, etc.

5:47What I came up with was a sticker. And it was a sticker that would go on the side of an avocado that just said one word on it, ripe. Well, I am delighted to see that this idea has caught on, and I am disappointed to discover that supermarkets stick it on every avocado, which sort of defeats the purpose. But back to what we were talking about. It's super inefficient for everything in the supermarket to be sitting there hoping that one day someone in your neighborhood shows up because they want to eat rutabaga. But this is the way markets have always worked. So to recap this system, this system is broken.

6:31It is inefficient. It wastes energy. It wastes time. It lets us fall into so many traps of being manipulated by the marketing industrial complex, of being manipulated into emotional eating, mindless eating. The whole idea of the food chain comes to a single point in the refrigerator in our home. But now, for the first time ever, we could change it if we wanted to. If someone showed up and said, wait a minute, we now know a ton of stuff. We have learned an enormous amount from your activity in Chrome and the way you use your smartphone. And marketers have manipulated people all over the web constantly, every single day, to change their behavior.

7:21Swipe right, swipe left, do this, do that. It's like a giant game of Simon Says, manipulating our money, taking our time. What would happen if we reinvented the fridge? So let's think about it this way. Number one, we're going to put two scanners in the fridge. The first one scans the barcode for anything that's got one. The second one is a camera. And that camera is capable of recognizing most anything. After all, we've got cameras that can recognize faces. It's not that hard to recognize cabbage. The refrigerator knows when you put it in the fridge. It knows how long it's been in the fridge.

8:02It knows what the item is. It can make a really good guess as to how much is in it, how much it weighs. So we can begin by having a refrigerator that's really smart about what's in it. It can also be really smart about the connections between and among the things that are in it. It can learn what you take out at the same time often. in, it can make a guess as to what's going to expire soon. It can make a guess as to what's in balance and out of balance. Too much cereal, not enough milk. It should know that. After all, computers are surveilling us every day. We have no privacy in our personal life.

8:44We probably don't need privacy in our refrigerator. Now, since we're rebuilding the fridge, we can make it super efficient. The fridge in my house uses as much electricity as a 100-watt light bulb. We can probably do even better than that. On top of that, why on earth isn't the door of the fridge a high-efficiency screen? A screen that lists the inventory of every single thing that's in the fridge in order, from the most used to the least used, from the most likely to expire to the stuff we don't have to worry about? What if that screen on the fridge is linked to my phone? And when it knows I'm in the supermarket, because it does know I'm in the supermarket, why doesn't it tell me what needs to be replenished?

9:37Wait, we can go a lot further than that. Because remember how people are afraid of fish? Why they're buying just shrimp and salmon, even though that's probably not such a good idea? Well, the answer is, now that you know what's in my fridge and you know what I like, why doesn't the fridge start suggesting to me what might be for dinner tonight? Why doesn't it come up with efficient ways to use things that need to be used up? Why doesn't it find new combinations of items that will surprise and delight based on who I am and what I eat? Why doesn't it come up with recipes that match my preferences in terms of how much time I have, how much of a leap I'm willing to make, who's coming over, how many calories I've eaten today, and how many I want to eat?

10:29And what if the fridge got really focused on convenience for people who care about convenience? Because it might be that making something with ingredients that came from the edges of the store is just as fast and just as easy as making something out of a box. Okay, but we can go even further than that. Because we're all connected, Foodtown deserves to know about what I'm about to buy. And in fact, instead of Foodtown waiting for customers to come buy its food, it could find food for its customers. Maybe I don't even need to make the trip to the store. We can leave out that last mile conversation for now.

11:13But wouldn't it be really cool if the supermarket was the coordinator of our consumption? Because we are each consuming tens of thousands of dollars worth of food a year. What happens when an institution knows what's to come? How does the buying get more efficient? You don't need 400 cans of something just waiting when you know who's going to need it this week. And those avocados? Those avocados will always be ripe when you need them. Because a week before you need them, Foodtown knows that you need them. And so the avocados are waiting for you. Well, with that information at hand, we can go one step further.

11:58And that next step is to connect the farmers. because now the farmer who's engaging with Mother Nature until it goes indoors, more on that in a second, can send a message to the processor and the processor can send a message to the market. The market can send a message to the consumer. And instead of a stupid FSI coupon in the Sunday paper that people don't read anymore, instead, the refrigerator is getting smart. And the refrigerator can realize that, no, The tomatoes aren't coming from New Zealand. They are coming from 10 miles away. And if it can organize all the people within 10 miles of that tomato grower's plot, suddenly the tomato grower is a lot happier because nothing's going to rot.

12:48And you, the consumer, you're a lot happier because the tomatoes are delicious. And yes, I know, don't put tomatoes in the fridge. But that doesn't mean you can't tell the fridge you have tomatoes. Anyway, what we end up with is bringing the magic of connection out of the smartphone, where it is ruining our day, and into the fridge, where it can make our day better. So I want to argue that there are four things that are going on. They're all connected, and they could all be brought into our fridge and our consumption. One is the idea of being connected, that the smartphone, which now consumes much of our day, works because it connects us to the others.

13:33But this fridge, this fridge could be all about connection. Number two, as we've discussed before, status roles. How do you compare to the others? Who's moving up? Who's moving down? Peloton is now a billion dollar company selling exercise bikes that ordinarily would just be a clothes hanger in someone's bedroom, but they are working because you use Peloton because you're comparing yourself to the others. Your status matters. Scores are a key part of both status and convenience. What happens when we give you a metric? What happens when we turn your fridge into a game? What happens when you feel satisfied because you won at the fridge?

14:20How do you win? You win by being more efficient. You win by using the food you've got properly. You win by cutting your food bill. You win by spending less time cooking things that are even better. And if we give you a score, then you're probably going to try to make that score go up. And the fourth one is convenience, because we are now hooked officially and forever on convenience. We want to do the thing that's faster and easier. Well, if your fridge finally wakes up, smartens up, and acts the way it could, it's now more convenient to cook than it is to go to McDonald's. Because the help it will offer you, the coordination, the coaching, the insight, the information, means that it's just not worth the hassle to get in the car and drive to McDonald's.

15:13It might not even be worth the hassle to press a button and wait for a delivery person. The thing about food and the business of food is that people eat every day. It is one of the only industries where you don't have to create demand. Every single day, people are going to eat something. The question is what and how. How will they eat? What will they eat? Can we coordinate that? Because the opportunities are huge. However, However, it's not easy. It's not as easy as building Twitter. It's not as easy as putting an app into a phone. It's not as easy as building surveillance into one social network or another.

15:55But the real wins that this connected age are going to bring us are still in the future. The real wins are going to happen when we rewire the systems that are so ubiquitous, we think they're invisible and permanent, but they're not. Years ago, I heard Guy Kawasaki talk about the evolution of cold. That for centuries, the only way things were cold in the summer is because people harvested ice. I know this is hard to believe, but it's true. They went out to the lakes of New Hampshire and carved giant blocks of ice out of the lakes, covered them with sawdust, which apparently keeps them from melting, put the sawdust-covered ice into the holds of ships and brought them to places like Jamaica.

16:45And this idea of ice harvesting made a few people a lot of money. But then technology, because it always moves on, created giant ice houses where they could manufacture ice to order. Once you were manufacturing ice to order, whole industries changed. That whole nonsense about don't eat oysters in months with or without R that no one can ever remember, that's not about oysters. That's about refrigeration. Refrigeration changed the way stuff got to us, when we ate and what we ate. Of course, that was replaced by the PC, as Guy called it, the personal chiller, the box in our house that could keep things cold after we bought them.

17:32That's less than 100 years old. Your great-grandmother probably didn't depend on a refrigerator when she was 25 years old. You bought what you bought, and you ate it before it spoiled, and it sat on the counter or it sat in a dark corner, but that was it. That's all we had in terms of food storage. So the system has changed. And now it is changing again. It is changing to delivery services, to seamless, to food boxes, to the purple carrot and others. But that's not going to be a long-term, large-scale solution because it's too expensive per meal. So the system is going to keep changing. And the purpose for this podcast today was to help you see that there's a system in everything that you do and that some systems seem ingrained forever until they're not, until someone steps up and says, here's a new way to do it.

18:30I hope you'll go make that ruckus. Hey Seth, it's Maria. Hey Seth, my name's Kyle. Greetings Seth. This is Stephen out in Madison, Wisconsin. Hi Seth, Alicia from Charleston here. Hi Seth, this is Anupam. Hi, this is Caitlin. Hi Seth, warm greetings from Curacao. Hey Seth, my name is Nick Ryan from Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania. Hey Seth, this is Rex. Hey Seth. Hi, this is Vasilis from Greece. Hi, this is Roberta Perry. My question is... And that completes my question. Thanks, as always, for listening. We got a really juicy question about social media grooming. I thought we'd get right into it. But first, a reminder, we'd love to hear from you.

19:10Just visit akimbo.link, that's A-K-I-M-B-O dot L-I-N-K, and press the appropriate button. While you're there, you'll also see the show notes. On to the question. Hi, Seth. This is Ben Hutchison from Cincinnati, Ohio. And my question is about social media. You often talk about how you don't use social media and how much time that gives you to do other work. and I'm wondering for those of us who are trying to find that smallest viable audience, if you feel it's a necessity to use things like Instagram and Facebook or Twitter or whatever is out there in order to find that small audience. Thanks for everything you do.

20:01Yeah, the social media people are really good at pressing this button for folks who are doing good work and important work, and who can be persuaded that social media grooming is not only an important skill, but an infinite way to spend your time. That if you could just get better and better at it, answering more of the comments, posting more things that people will share, the next thing you know, you'll be a Kardashian. A, as you know, we don't need any more Kardashians. We already have plenty. But B, you probably don't even want to be a Kardashian. The goal of bringing your work to the world is not to appeal to the masses.

20:46It's to appeal to a specific group of people. And there is a ton of conventional wisdom about how to do social media grooming, how to show up in just the right way for every person who wants to interact with you. And most of this mythology is based on what is good for the social media channels. But you don't have to use it the way they tell you to use it. I've mentioned before that the Mona Lisa is really big on Instagram. People are constantly posting pictures and commenting on pictures of the Mona Lisa. But of course, the Mona Lisa is dead. So she's not on Instagram. People are talking about her on Instagram.

21:34Back when I started my writing career in earnest, I was a columnist for Fast Company. I probably wrote more words for Fast Company than any other writer they had at the time. And when I wrote my column, I only had one thing in mind. And that was this. The person who's reading it, will they cut it out, run it through the copy machine, and hand it to people via the inter-office mail system? Will people read my column and share it saying to other people, see, this is what I've been saying all along. I learned to write a column that was designed to be shared. And that is the real work of being on social media.

22:20I am being disingenuous when I say I don't use Twitter or Instagram or Facebook. What I'm really saying is I don't use it the way I'm supposed to. I don't spend any time using it. I use those platforms to spread ideas I built my way on my system in a way that I think will help folks who receive it and will want to share it with others. that the hard work in a world where there are no real gatekeepers, in a world where you are not on CBS at 830, is not social media grooming. You cannot groom your way to success. You just can't. The hard work is making something worth sharing. Kevin Kelly famously talked about 1 ,000 true fans.

23:07One of my favorite blog posts of mine is called First Ten. Ten people. Do you know 10 people if you sent them your content, your idea, your work? 10 people who would look at it. The answer for everyone I know is yes. Now, if you put it in front of those 10 people, what do they do with it? If they share it, you're on your way. If they don't, you need to either go back to what your work is, or you need to find a different, better, more aligned group of 10. because if 10 people share it, that's 100. And if 100 people share it, that's 10 ,000. And if 10 ,000 people engage with your work, you win. It's that simple.

23:52That social media has created an environment where ideas that spread win. That's the hard work. Thanks for listening. We'll see you next time.