Earth’s Tom Harries: “Turning people into soil”

The Times Tech Podcast

Will Morley

Business, Unknown, Technology

4.9 • 654 Ratings

🗓️ 10 March 2023

⏱️ 43 minutes

🔗️ Recording | iTunes | RSS

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Summary

The Sunday Times’ tech correspondent Danny Fortson brings on Tom Harries to talk about his previous cremation startup (3:20), how he got into human composting (5:00), the problems with burial and cremation (8:20), society’s changing attitude toward funerals (13:50), perfecting the microbial breakdown process (14:50), controlling temperature (21:10), using human remains to reforest land (24:20), raising $10m (27:15), why it takes 45 days to compost a body (33:05), building a household death brand (34:40), and how he got into the death business (36:50).

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Transcript

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0:00.0	Yo, technology.
0:02.9	What is it all about?
0:04.4	I think if you scratch the name off the top of a paper, if you will, and put it in front of a business school class, it is the most perfect industry to disrupt.
0:16.4	But because it's the funeral industry, people don't want to do it.
0:19.7	And it's not necessarily unwarranted.
0:21.2	Like it is a taxing industry.
0:23.4	It's emotionally taxing.
0:24.9	So it's overlooked for understandable reasons.
0:28.2	Yeah.
0:28.5	Yeah, exactly. Hello and welcome to Danny in the Valley
0:45.2	Your Weekly Dispatch from behind the scenes and inside the minds of the top people in tech this week.
0:51.0	We're going to break up AI month a little bit with a little bit of fun, something different.
0:56.1	And then next week, we'll return to the AI theme with another brilliant guest to talk about
1:02.0	the race for AI supremacy, what it means for war, and in particular, our relationship to and
1:07.7	competition against China. So stay tuned for that. That's a really good one.
1:13.1	But this week, let's talk about death. Let's talk about composting. Let's talk about death and
1:19.4	composting. Let's talk about human composting. You heard that right on the program. We have a
1:25.6	repeat guest, the one and only funeral entrepreneur we
1:30.4	have ever had on Danny in the Valley. And he is Tom Harry's. You may recall we had Tom on back
1:37.8	in a couple of years ago to talk about his last startup, Tulip, Tulip Cremation, which was an app-based
1:44.1	no frills cremation service
1:46.3	that he sold.
	...

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