The Role of Data in Building Sustainable and Efficient Supply Chains

In this episode, I sit down with Bailey Robin, CEO and co-founder of Matium, to explore how data-driven decision-making can transform supply chains into more efficient and sustainable systems. Bailey shares the fascinating backstory of Matium, a platform focused on connecting supply and demand in material markets to reduce cost, carbon, and time per unit of consumer demand. His insights are as technical as they are practical, making this a must-listen for anyone tackling sustainability in supply chains.

We discuss some of the biggest inefficiencies in today’s supply chains, like shipping materials vast distances unnecessarily, and how addressing these inefficiencies can significantly lower carbon emissions. Bailey explains how Matium applies lean manufacturing principles and process mapping to identify value-added versus non-value-added activities. The goal? To minimise waste and maximise efficiency while making sustainability economically viable.

One of the standout moments in our chat is Bailey’s explanation of how future supply chains could evolve—featuring decentralised, micro-manufacturing hubs powered by low-cost, renewable energy. He also dives into the role automation and AI will play in shaping supply chains, not just in streamlining operations but also in driving localised production.

Bailey highlights the importance of creating systems that align sustainability goals with business incentives. His proposal for an immutable transaction ledger to track materials and carbon emissions at every step could be a game-changer for verifying Scope 3 emissions and kickstarting robust carbon markets.

Whether you’re in manufacturing, logistics, or just curious about the mechanics of sustainability, this episode offers sharp insights into the challenges and opportunities of decarbonising supply chains.

Have a listen and let me know what you think—how can your organisation take the first step in cutting carbon while improving supply chain efficiency? Share your thoughts!

 If disruption hit tomorrow, would you know where your supply chain was most exposed? In 15 minutes my free scorecard helps you assess 27 resilience statements, calculate your score, and turn the result into three priorities and a 30 day action plan. You can download the scorecard free at tomraftery.com/scorecard.

Transcript

Copy

Bailey Robin: 0:03

We can't go make a bunch of unsustainable decisions in the hope that things get sustainable, but what we can do is just the fastest way to move is information. The fastest way to change things is by simply just removing the walls that we've built and just opening things up and say, you have this and you're two miles down the road.

Tom Raftery: 0:23

Good morning, good afternoon, or good evening, wherever you are in the world. This is the Sustainable Supply Chain Podcast, the number one podcast focusing on sustainability and supply chains, and I'm your host, Tom Raftery. Hi everyone. And welcome to episode 52 of the sustainable supply chain podcast. My name is Tom Raftery, and I'm excited to share the latest in sustainable supply chains with you today. A big, thanks to this podcast's amazing supporters. You're the reason I'm here each week. And I really appreciate every single one of you. If you'd like to join this community and help keep the podcast going, it's easy. Support starts at just a few euros or dollars a month. Less than the cost of a cup of coffee. And you can find the support link in the show notes of this or any episode. or@tinyurl.com slash S S C pod. In today's episode, I'll be talking to Bailey Robin CEO at Matium. And in the upcoming episodes, I'll be talking to Seth Weisberg, CEO of ABCO Systems, Paul Megal president at CGS, Sunder Balakrishnan Director of Supply Chain Analytics at Latentview, and Juan Meisel CEO of Grip Shipping. But. Back to today's show. And as I mentioned today, I'm talking to Bailey. Bailey welcome to the podcast. Would you like to introduce yourself?

Bailey Robin: 1:44

yes, thanks, Tom, for having me on here. My name is Bailey Robin. I'm the co founder and CEO of Matium. And it's awesome to be here and just start talking about some of the reasons why data is so important in the supply chain.

Tom Raftery: 1:56

Okay. And tell us a little bit, Bailey, about Matium. What is it? What do you do? Who do you serve? That kind of thing.

Bailey Robin: 2:04

I'll back up a little bit to just how I got into the supply chain, because I think that that, story is really what formed the idea. And it was one of those. experiences where I kind of looked at the life that I had led, whether it was on accident or not. I looked at some of the things that I had spent my time doing and realised that I was just in a position where I felt obligated to, create Matium. So, I'd gone to University of Michigan first for software engineering, and then eventually got my degree in Industrial and Operations Engineering. And then from there I moved around a lot as a kid. And as I left college, I ended up calling one of the more successful people that I had met during those travels and asked him for some advice on getting a sales job. And the next thing you knew, I I was brokering plastics with a company called Bach polymers down in Annapolis, Maryland. And so, I didn't really know what that was. All about or what that entailed. I just walked into an office where there was a good amount of money moving. And I immediately was infatuated with the idea of the supply chain. And my background is I was always very math and science focused. I really just like to think numbers. And and so when I got into the supply chain, I started to see what's going on. I was just shocked at the lack of market infrastructure. And I started to kind of notice that all of the value that I was giving to the industry, I was then pulling out of in margin, and then never reinvesting it back into the industry. And so when I looked at kind of my life broadly as a 25 year old kid who was moving about 120 million pounds of plastic a year, I realised that I was either going to be, showing up to work and play my best game every single day of my life in order to do it either at that level or better, or I could just dedicate myself to building tools for the industry that would move us forward and create a better experience for the industry. And so I went that route. And so in 2021 I founded Matium to be the most efficient material medium If you go back to my schooling as an industrial and operations engineer at Michigan, one of the classes that I took was lean manufacturing engineering, and what they talked about was process mapping. So you would start at the first piece of the process. And then the final piece of the process you would then standardise that entire process and basically notate what how much time things take, what energy is involved and so on, what the costs are. And then you'd look at that entire process and then start to identify value add and non value add. And so value add is something that the customer is willing to pay for and value add is basically overhead expense that the customer is not willing to pay for, but it might be required to do it. And so, my teacher Deborah, who's very skilled and experienced. She told stories about how like, at a Ford plant, they would take a turnover that would typically would typically have cost the plant 3 million dollars and a week of uptime. They would take it. They would figure out how to get rid of all the non value add work. And all of a sudden now it costs the plant 200,000 dollars in a few hours. And so I was thinking about those principles and so on, and applying those principles to the material world. And that's just where we came up with the idea of there's all this material supply, whether it's waste, whether it's virgin material, whether it's intermediately processed material, there's all this material that has specifications. And it has a packaging and a price and an owner and a GPS location. All that material exists somewhere in the world. And then let's call that the first concept of supply. So there's the first concept of supply. And then you have the final concept of demand. The final concept of demand says that there's some consumer in the world that needs a product that has these characteristics such that it can hold this water for me so that the waters and fall out that it doesn't become brittle in cold temperatures. That doesn't this this this this this. So all the demand in the world has some specification parameters, it has some pricing parameter has some GPS coordination parameter has some packaging parameter. That was the final concept of demand. And so what Matium is designed to do is to be the material Matium between those 2, that most efficiently moves material And our optimization function that we try to solve is how do we minimise cost, carbon and time for unit of consumer demand. So really what Matium is just this entire interface and supply chain network that connects all companies together such that we can move materials through the supply chain efficiently so that the least amount of energy is expended per unit of consumer demand. And so through that, my goal is that we provide a better experience for industry, but providing a better experience for industry than we are then capturing and standardising data that is extremely valuable to then take that data to determine where capital should be invested within the supply chain, such that it increases the efficiency of moving to that goal, which that goal I think for everybody should be how to minimise energy per unit of consumer demand. So that's a, I'd say, very technical way to describe Matium. At the end of the day, it's a supply chain network and material exchange. We help people buy and sell material. Our focus is to be the best experience for buying, selling and shipping commodities in the world. Yeah, so we started, we started with plastics and I think plastics is really interesting. The idea started with, I was looking at all of the biggest problems in the world and you just consistently heard the plastics problem and I consistently heard we need to do this. We need to do this. We need to do this. Everybody has this opinion. Everybody has this opinion. They all contradict each other. I had seen firsthand investments into the sustainability sector of plastics go wrong and turn belly up because the legislation that people were hoping for, it didn't happen. And so there's this plastic problem that just seemed like a total mess. And I was watching these different media outlets say certain things and this is what needs to happen. And just, that's really what sparked the entire idea about getting the data. I mean, it was really. It sounds like nobody knows what the solution is. So we're just throwing out as many solutions as possible. And then, and then they're trying to test them. My concern about that was that my children, my grandchildren are going to end up having to undo all the things that we do because they're, they're not based in data. They're based in opinion. And so just as much as we want to solve the plastics problem, we can't solve the plastics problem by creating a carbon problem. We can't solve the plastics problem by creating an economic problem. And so that was where, again, just. I felt lucky that I randomly walked into a plastics brokerage job and then I, I had just, back in college, I chose to study industrial and operations engineering because it was a little bit easier than computer science. There were a few things that luckily happened in my life that, kind of set me up to, to focus on plastics So, we focus on plastics, but then we'll open up into papers and, and, and fibers in Q1. Matium is a material agnostic platform. So, the vision is to, really be the Matium for all materials to move through. But plastics give gives us that nice first market to deal with because plastics kind of has already its own verticals and its own horizontals. So, plastics are already is broken up between polypropylene, polyethylene, PT, and PEC, and and ABS and so on. And it's already broken up into scrap and regrind and resin and, and so it's this own really dynamic market that we're able to and, and it also has probably the largest technical complication of the markets, because, I mean polypropylene what matters is melt and, izod, and flex and tensile, but then on, on, on PET, what matters is IV and L value and A value and B value. And so all of them have such these, like, complicated, the way that we say is like. Plastics is its own Chinese language that not many people know. So we try to figure out how to kind of standardise that for everybody. So plastics, plastics was kind of just a lucky first start. But the vision is, is to really use it, use everything.

Tom Raftery: 10:10

Okay, and what would you say has surprised you most in your journey from plastics brokerage to now founder of Matium?

Bailey Robin: 10:21

Oh I will say, I don't know if this surprised me. I just think that my optimistic nature caused me to have more pain than I probably should have had. But I founded a freight company as well called Tomorrow Made. And I'll just, I just, freight's a tough business. It's, it's hard. So I, I founded that for the purpose of providing some optionality in terms of how we can deliver a good customer experience because the, the entire thing that I want to do is I want, I was sitting on my couch and I was ordering stuff on Amazon. And the next thing, you know, I'm getting up from the couch to go work on my, on my actual job and shipping things from point A to point B on Amazon was the click of a button and I trusted it and it showed up in two days and it was great. And then I walked over and set up my office and I'm spending 30 minutes to make a PO and then send that over and then talk to a bunch of different freight brokers. And then, and then they all give me different answers. And then I'm, and then when there's a problem, I got to call that guy who calls the dispatcher, who calls the carrier, who then calls that. And then by the time that I get the answer, then it's already done. So I was thinking through that and I'm like technology is just by default, a democratised thing, and so why haven't we built infrastructure for everybody to use so that the people who actually deliver the good, like, who actually make and deliver the goods for consumers, why is it so much harder for them to do their jobs when it's so much easier for consumers to just consume it. So really, the thought was, all right, I'll, build this freight company. I'll make it, it'll be the easy, it'll be an easy, it'll be an easy add on. I'll spend 10 percent of my effort on doing that. And then it'll fit in really nicely. I mean, so it ended up working, but I would say hats off to anybody who runs a freight brokerage or to anybody who runs a freight company. That is, that is a much harder thing than I, had expected. Again, luckily I pushed through it, made, some late calls that, got it up and running and got it to do what we needed to do. I think that what's really interesting to me. On having that optionality moving forward at Matium is that there's a good chance that that trucking is automated within the next decade. I think it's, I think there's a certainty that it's automated within the next 2 decades. So to have the ability, both from a regulatory purpose and from a credit purpose to be able to extend that service into assets like that is a really interesting possibility for the, for the customers that are on Matium.

Tom Raftery: 13:17

And you talked a little bit about sustainability and this is the Sustainable Supply Chain podcast. What, what, what do you personally define as sustainability? You know, is it a goal? Is it a process? Is it a combination of the two? Or is it something else entirely? You know, talk to me about that.

Bailey Robin: 13:34

Yeah. So I, I thought about that question a lot when I was first creating Matium, because I, I was making more money than I knew what to do with trading plastics. I felt crazy to think that I was going to leave it all. And I thought I need to do something with my life that is going to give me purpose. And that's going to do something like, it's going to leave the world a better place. And so, when I was thinking about the definition of sustainability, because again, that was the thing that the plastics problem and just sustainability as a very loosely. I was seeing it used differently by everybody. I thought about that. I was trying to figure out, okay, I need to build something that I'm willing to work on for the next 40 years of my life. And so if I'm going to do that, of course, I want it to be sustainable, but like, let's figure out what that means and let's put that in writing so that we can actually just like, start doing something about it. The, the first mission statement that I wrote down for Matium was to help humanity create a sustainable future. And so that was the whole focus. And what that meant to me was that my children and their children and their children can live a better life than I do today. And so that was the very simple way that I looked at it was just, how do we make decisions today, and how do we set up systems and infrastructure today that creates a better world for everybody once we're gone. And so that was really that's the holistic view of sustainability that I have. Now I got we've gotten granular. So, I mean, our mission statement now says to help help humanity create a sustainable future by minimising costs, carbon and time per unit of consumer demand, because I believe that that is the math behind that goal. And I think it gets, I think it pulls all the emotions out. And I can, I mean, calling something a plastics problem, for instance, is short sighted because plastics may be the the substrate that is the most sustainable, but like, until we all agree that there is a mathematical formula that we can say, is it sustainable or not? It's a, it's, it's a really hard thing to say. And I can say that there's a huge paper problem or I can say there's a huge coconut problem. But it's, it's hard to, it's hard for anyone to argue that with me without just having all of the data. So I think that when I looked at, when I looked at sustainability I mean, one, that's how I defined it, but two, I wanted to, build something that would provide the circuitry or catalyst or entry point or maybe even off ramp. Provide optionality to industry such that if I need materials to perform in this way, and they're currently plastic. Well, let's, let's make a material agnostic platform that doesn't look at what the thing is called, but let's look at where it comes from. Let's look at how much it costs and let's look at how it performs. And therefore all of a sudden now, like there's no world where we say plastics has gone by 2030 and then that all happens. Like, like what really has to happen is that we start to say, all right, well, this really cool group out of Nebraska just made, made this really cool corn starch polymer that is super cost effective and they can make a ton of it. And then all of a sudden that starts to take this market and it starts to take this market. And then, and then the folks that are making the seaweed, the seaweed plastic down in the, in the Dominican say, Oh, like, like all of a sudden this is replacing all the biopolymer that goes into all the, the mulch film for farmers And so there's, this doesn't happen all at once. This is not a, like a Bolean yes or no. This is a, over time you start to have economic advantages. You start to have carbon advantages and so on. But like they're always in, it has to be an a motivation from the person making the decision. The person who's buying the material to stick it into a machine. There has to be a motivation at that person's level to say, I'm going to choose this versus this. And I've, participated in a good amount of the, the industry conversations. And I think that we often think that it's all up to the brands or that it's all up to the recyclers and it's all that everybody likes to say, no, you got to solve our problem or legislators, you got to solve a problem or recyclers, you're not, you're, you're not making enough. You got to solve our problem. Well, like. it's, it's nobody's fault. None of us were born in the 1800s. Like we didn't create, we didn't create this problem. We just, we're part of it now. And so how do we just take a step back and say, okay, this isn't going to happen tomorrow. This isn't going to happen in five years when this is not going to happen in 10 years. But how can we start to snip away at this? And so I think that that's, that's where I want to head is that we just help as many people as possible, make better decisions for their wallet, for the world and for their business themselves.

Tom Raftery: 18:41

And I mean, a lot of companies are currently doing things like setting ambitious carbon reduction targets. Where do you think they should start if they're looking at their supply chains in that?

Bailey Robin: 18:53

Yeah, so the fastest way to decarbonise the supply chain is to stop shipping material from British Columbia to Virginia when that same material exists in North Carolina. So that's the, that's the biggest piece. I've had some conversations with some sustainability investors, and they always come back and say, well, how's this helping sustainability? I mean, unless you want to go spend hundreds of billions of dollars on new infrastructure to put, and then guess where it should go. And move all of that concrete and spend all of those people's hours of their lives and spend all of that money. We can't go make a bunch of unsustainable decisions in the hope that things get sustainable, but what we can do is just the, the, the fastest way to move is information. The fastest way to change things is by simply just removing the, the walls that we've built and just open, just opening things up and say, you have this and you're two miles down the road. When I used to broker, we used to think. Oh my God, this, this plant is 500 feet from the other plant. I'm going to buy this material at 20 cents a pound and sell it at 30 cents a pound. Do you think that they're going to, do you think that they're going to meet up at lunch and realise that they just, that they just lost all that money? Like, and it's just the information gap and the industry is what's such it's the reason why we sit here and talk about all of these problems, and if we don't know how to solve them because nobody, nobody knows what's going on. So I think that again, when you look at decarbonisation decarbonisation there's a lot of great work going on with decarbonised materials. I mean, those are 100 percent going to have markets forever I think. The fast again, the fastest way that we solve that problem is by becoming a little bit more efficient in terms of market infrastructure, market information decreasing the length of supply chains. I mean, carbon is a derivative of energy expenditure. So, I mean, every single time that you burn gas, you were anytime that you're generating energy, unless it's completely carbon neutral, that is causing you to emit carbon. So, if we just, and I'm gonna get super physics minded, like if we just look at just just the equation of work, which is work equals force times distance. And so that you just have mass times acceleration, acceleration times distance. So there are 2 ways that we solve this problem. You either minimise mass or you minimise distance. And so if we want to minimise mass, that means, okay, let's find the substrates that are the that are the lightest, that's all, that's all of our problem of containing things in the world that, that we need to be contained. I mean, that, that's why carbon fiber became such, such a huge thing. Once, once it was created, it's lightweight, it's, it gives the lower weight that people want without sacrificing the performance that they need. And so how do we do that with as many products in the world as possible? And then distance that's really where again, information comes in. How do we get connected and how do we expand the accessibility and the liquidity of these markets? So all of a sudden I'm not, I'm not restricted to buying my PTG from, China or back and forth. Like the most unsustainable thing that we can do is be buying material and buying products. Well, let's just go from an American standpoint. The most unsustainable thing that we can do is buy all of our products from China. Because when I was a kid, we used to talk about digging, digging down and hitting China. So we're, we're buying 80 plus percent of our products from a country that's across the world. And then thinking that we should, that we should address all the brands. I think that we should probably address the systematic problem, which is that we can't produce products effectively domestically. It's like if, if we can produce things effectively domestically, all of a sudden you remove 85% of that problem of, of carbon. So yeah, it's, it's minimising mass and mass and distance within the equation of from supply to consumer.

Tom Raftery: 22:59

Okay, very good. And in terms of energy, then energy costs are obviously on people's mind at the moment. Lots of things impacting those, you know, where do you see their impact on supply chains in the, in the coming years? And what do you think AI might factor into making supply chains more resilient?

Bailey Robin: 23:17

Yeah, so I think you're going to end up having a graph that looks like this and then back down. I mean, we've got a few friends in the nuclear world. I think nuclear has, a good chance of being the next big energy wave. I think that that's also, there's a, there's a weird kind of underlying connection of and why I believe anybody who wants the plastics problem to be solved needs to back nuclear because the issue is that if you want to back petrochemicals, you are then going to decrease the, the, the marginal carbon footprint of plastics. So if you want to back petrochemicals, well, petrochemicals are creating that byproduct, which is polymer grade taking that monomer and turning it into polymer. So you're decreasing the cost of plastics by generating more, petrochemicals. If we have an energy shortage, you need to think of other ways to make energy. If you want to also get rid of plastics. And so I think that's an interest just an interesting kind of note is that we just as much as we want to solve the plastic problem, we have to figure out how to get off of petrochemicals for that to even be a possibility. I mean, with the data centers that are being put up right now, AI is going to generate more electricity demand than we've ever seen. Again, I think that that's going to be a short term problem. Energy, like the nice thing about AI is that it solves the majority of our engineering and technological problems at a speed that we've never even had before. So I believe that what we've seen, what we've seen in terms of technological advancement since I was, since I was born, which is in the mid nineties. What just the speed that we've seen that happen where electric cars weren't a thing, cell phones weren't a thing. I mean, everything that is now just ubiquitous that the speed that happened is going to be one fourth roughly of what the speed is going to be for AI just due to the fact that it's that it's exponential. And so, although we will say huge spike due to all the data center demand. We will see new forms of energy, I mean, I think we'll see fusion's been talked about for a long time. I think that we're, we're on the cusp of solving that. And so what I'm building Matium for is actually the future in which energy costs are nearing zero. I believe that by the time I'm. By the time we're 20 years in, I think that that's that's more accurate than energy costs being higher than they are today. I think it's closer to zero than it is closer to where they are today. And so what that really paints as a future is that again everything all of a sudden becomes just minimising the distance of supply chains and then maximising the ability to access that information between supply and demand. The vision that I have for how this all looks again 20, 30 years from now, is you've got micro factories throughout the entire country. You got micro factories throughout the world that are powered with very low cost energy, and you've got more advanced manufacturing systems that are more agile in terms of how they produce produce products. And so I would see more of a like, just in time model across the board for again, more micro factory style production because if you have, if you can automate the entire process and then you can get the energy costs down, now all of a sudden you can create small batches. You can do a lot of the things that are that you're restricted from doing today because of labor costs and because of energy costs. I mean, the biggest concern right now with running maybe a short run. If you're a, you're a compound or you're a manufacturer is that once you run a short run, you have that entire turnover problem. So every single time that you have downtime, that's, that's cost to your books and you can't afford that. And so as we get into automation, that's really where we end up having localised supply chains. We have localised societies. We get back to a world that I think is a lot better. I think the biggest risk that I see with that new feature is that if one, and this is a huge piece of how Matium was designed, was that I fear the world where there's one company that owns the majority of those assets. Because wealth does compound in this, in this instance once you want, once you have one, that one makes four and so on and so on and so on. And then it becomes a race that you can never win. I grew up as a poor kid out of Flint, Michigan. I didn't know what wealth was like knew it for about a year until I dumped it all back into Matium. Now I look at what the world is going to be like in the future. And I, I, I, we need to again, democratise, this is what I, we have in a lot of our marketing materials, we need to democratise the access to enterprise grade infrastructure. Such that everyone has a level playing field in this new world and that it does become more of a relationship game in localised supply chains rather than just this company is so big and has so many assets across the entire country that just their costs are so low that they just crush everybody. I think that there's a way where we get a mix of both worlds where everybody has access to that. There's, there's more access to financing. All of these supply chains start to turn over a little bit faster. And the folks that are really ambitious and really motivated within these supply chains are the ones that are planting up a spot here and a spot here and a spot there. And so I, that's what I hope we can get to as a world. I think that none of us have ever seen what's going on before. I think there's a lot of unknowns in the world today. So, yeah we'll see what, what happens, but that's my thought.

Tom Raftery: 28:56

Yeah, and if you could fast forward 10 years, 15 years, 20 years, you know, what would you hope to see is kind of the standard for sustainability in supply chains?

Bailey Robin: 29:07

Yeah, I mean, I think that, and this is what we're trying to do. I think that there needs to be an immutable transaction ledger that not only has verified transaction information around materials, but also verified transaction information around the carbon that was generated. The issues that you're having right now is that scope 3 is nearly impossible to track because there's no network transaction layer anywhere. That's the thing that we are trying to solve just kind of as a stage 3 of our business. People talk about blockchain people. I mean, we can be somewhat technology agnostic. Blockchain is just another way to do it. What really needs to happen is that everybody needs to have, again, just some sort of source of truth that everyone agrees on. That this is, this is what happened. Buyer approved seller approved. This was the financial transaction and that financial transaction then owns a material movement of location to location and then and then also then like the carbon that was generated from that. I think that once we have those 2 things, it becomes really easy to just tie that to financing. So I don't think that I don't think that you really need to do a whole lot. You just need to Like carbon markets aren't going to move until that happens. Carbon markets have been kind of sitting around being a thing that maybe will happen, maybe it won't happen, but there's just not been enough adoption from the big players. And so once you have a transaction ledger where there's a comparative nature and there's some, some secondaries where, where you can start to kind of trade on it. That's where things get really interesting. That's where we don't have to create a new wheel. Like the capital system is already very efficient. Like it, it does work. You can look at the markets. I mean, we have systems in place to incentivise really big problems. And so we just need, we just need to get to the point where there, where there is a market. I think that, yeah, that's, that's my big bet is that if, that if you make a market and you provide a transaction ledger, then at that point, the markets will handle themselves. And so we're just, we're completely focused on just build it, building the power lines and building the system and trying to support the industries as, as fast as possible. Cause I do think that it's I don't think we have enough urgency as a, as a society to get it done.

Tom Raftery: 31:23

Sure, sure, sure. Well with that in mind, the left field question, if you could have any person or character or dead, real or fictional as a spokesperson for sustainability in supply chains, who would it be and why?

Bailey Robin: 31:40

This is this is this is the answer that we that we've actually talked about in our office, but it's more but more from a standpoint of being funny. But I would love to have Matthew McConaughey do. All right. All right. Around around the material markets. So, yeah, I got a good buddy who's living down in Austin. I think he's connected with him a couple times, but he's more for this for the standpoint of just the good vibes. It'd be nice to have him around. So I I would if he's If he if he's around then we'll take him when he's not busy

Tom Raftery: 32:22

Fair enough, fair enough. And talk to me as well about work life balance. I mean, a startup like Matium must be intense. How do you stay grounded and what kind of hobbies keep you energised?

Bailey Robin: 32:34

Yeah, i've always enjoyed traveling. I've always enjoyed playing music I play a good amount of guitar. I think that learning, spending your time doing something that's creative is extremely important. I think that the biggest thing for anybody who knows me on LinkedIn, like I've got a, I've got a picture of me and a llama on rainbow mountain and in Peru as my profile picture. So, I try to do that on purpose just because this is, again, there's, this is the this is a very big math problem to me. And trying to figure out how to solve it in a way that that supports people is, I would say a thing of things. Right. And so, in a world of of things I definitely long for the ability to be creative and just kind of live more in outward rather than just kind of like processing right? And so just like letting letting go a little bit and doing that from whether it's I've got my two best friends are very big into content creation and we've made movies and doing acting and stuff like that. I mean, that's always fun. And then just playing songs and yeah, just, just try, try, try to find some time to, to be creative or the other route is just going and sitting in, in the woods and remembering that, we all used to just sit around fires and relax and fishing and hunting. And some of the stuff that again, just, just pulls me out of this rat race that I think can sometimes feel a little, a little overwhelming. There's, there's something to do about working on the system. And that system being such a big thing that I think runs a lot of our lives that it's always super valuable just to, just to get out of it every now and then,

Tom Raftery: 34:18

We're coming towards the end of the podcast. Now, Bailey, is there any question I haven't asked that you wish I had or any aspect of this we haven't touched on that you think it's important for people to be aware of?

Bailey Robin: 34:30

I would just say, I think that the one area we didn't cover and I mentioned it briefly. I think that the economic issues that we have today are so large and it's all connected. I think that we, I think that there's often this separation between sustainability and economics and marketing and all it's we, we kind of, we kind of silo it. And I, it's, it's probably because people have their own specialisations and they have their own interests and they have their own lives and, and you're a marketing person. So you see it from a marketing light and you're at your economics major and you see it from an economic light. So, I would just say that with problems as big as this, where it touches everything that we look at when you look around your life. And it, I mean, it's this table that I'm sitting on. It's part of the computer. It's, I mean, it's, it's in my clothes when we think about these big problems, it gets so complicated and we think so much about everything that we forget that there are, that we can break it down into really simple things. And I always look at it from an intention perspective and, and this is where I get back to economics is that everybody at the end of the day really needs to put food on their, on their table and they really need to take care of their family. Like, when, when I was mentioning the, the, the camping, like, when you leave the, when you leave the woods after just sitting around a fire and not having your phone and not having anything besides the fish that you're catching on the river and a couple snacks, you remember that we just need friends, family, and food and shelter unless you're in a nice place. Yeah, yeah. And so we need to figure out how to meet people's basic needs at a reasonable level so that they can have a quality life. And I think that from the perspective of the US like we are the consumption pit for the world. We have been trained to buy things and to eat things and to do things as much as possible so that there's as much monetary movement as possible. I think that that is hurting ourselves. It's hurting the world. It's hurting the chance that we have at a sustainable future. And so, I would say that when we look at the economic problems that we have today, we can get rid of a lot of the noise and just think about what matters first. And if there's, if there's kind of yeah. ancillary or if there's discretionary kind of things in the world that we can think about. Great. Like, let's figure that out once we figure out, okay, How can we sustainably meet the needs of as many people as possible, first in our country and then in our continent and then in the world, but how can we just. How can we make that an economically sustainable process? Because until we do that, there's no world where we ever get to stage 2, stage 3, stage 4, stage 5. And so I would just say that when we look at, again, the economics of, for instance, the US, or when we look at the economics of many countries that are typically importing a lot of their goods when energy costs go to zero, the most efficient Economic and sustainable way to meet the physical needs of people is to produce products as close to the demand as possible with as much circular, circular material as possible. As long as that circular material, circular material came from a location that was close to that demand. And so I would just say that we need to go back to 1st principles. We need to simplify the problem. We need to agree on step 1 before we ever think about step 5 step 6 steps seven. Because I think that that would just we're looking at big problems. And I think we all have megaphones and I think the noise is drowning out the things that we probably said on day one that we got away from.

Tom Raftery: 38:48

Bailey, if people would like to know more about yourself or any of the things we discussed on the podcast here today, where would you have me direct them?

Bailey Robin: 38:56

For anybody who would like to check out Matium, our website is Matium. com. For anybody who'd like to see more about what I'm doing my LinkedIn is Bailey Robin, I believe it's LinkedIn slash Bailey Robin one. And then if you'd like to take a look at what, what, what tomorrow made is, tomorrow made is tomorrow made. io. If you want to follow Matium on LinkedIn, that would just be Matium. And it should pop up right there. Just a note for for anybody who is who is in the supply chain and interested in Matium. We are only accepting right now companies who are in the north in North America. For any company who does want to market their materials into the North American continent on Matium, you can talk with us and we will pair you up with a verified distributor who will take that that ownership of managing the cross border transactions and marketing and also that that relationship All accounts are free. If you'd like to learn more about the premium subscriptions, that's where it gets into some costs, but our goal is just to connect as many people as possible that move, make, and trade commodities.

Tom Raftery: 39:55

Fantastic. Great. That's been fascinating Bailey. Thanks a million for coming to the podcast today.

Bailey Robin: 40:00

Awesome. Thank you, Tom.

Tom Raftery: 40:02

Okay. Thank you all for tuning into this episode of the Sustainable Supply Chain Podcast with me, Tom Raftery. Each week, thousands of supply chain professionals listen to this show. If you or your organization want to connect with this dedicated audience, consider becoming a sponsor. You can opt for exclusive episode branding where you choose the guests or a personalized 30 second ad roll. It's a unique opportunity to reach industry experts and influencers. For more details, hit me up on Twitter or LinkedIn, or drop me an email to tomraftery at outlook. com. Together, let's shape the future of sustainable supply chains. Thanks. Catch you all next time.