TBPN Live - Starship Launch, World's Fair Retrospective, Sacks Spikes AI EO | Dan Shipper, James Rogers

Episode Date: May 22, 2026

(01:01) - Sacks Spikes AI EO (07:56) - America's IPO Market Wakes Up (17:47) - Starship Launch (28:28) - World's Fair Retrospective (45:46) - Dan Shipper, co-founder and CEO of Every, discusses the transformative impact of AI agents like Codex and Claude Code on knowledge work, highlighting how these tools have automated tasks in coding, writing, design, and customer service, leading to Every's growth from 4 to 30 employees since GPT-3. He emphasizes that while AI makes expert competence more accessible, it simultaneously increases the demand for human expertise to provide judgment and differentiation, as AI outputs often require human framing and evaluation to be truly valuable. Shipper also notes that AI enables small, generalist teams to accomplish tasks that previously required larger, specialized organizations, allowing for a more fulfilling and versatile work experience. (01:09:01) - James Rogers is the founder and CEO of Apeel Sciences, a company developing plant-based coatings that extend the shelf life of fresh produce and reduce food waste. He launched the company out of research funded by the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation, with a focus on improving global food distribution and sustainability through materials science. Follow TBPN: https://TBPN.comhttps://x.com/tbpnhttps://open.spotify.com/show/2L6WMqY3GUPCGBD0dX6p00?si=674252d53acf4231https://podcasts.apple.com/us/podcast/technology-brothers/id1772360235https://www.youtube.com/@TBPNLive

You're watching TVPN. Today is Friday, May 22nd, 2026. We were live from the TBPN Ultradone, the Temple of Technology, the Fortress of Finance. The capital of capital. It's a big show for you today, folks. It's Friday, May 22nd. We had our Wall Street Journal stolen from us. We only have the Financial Times today.

But we're making due because we have a digital subscription as well. and we're going to take you through America's IPO, boom. We're going to talk to Matt Grimm from Anderl. We're going to talk to Dan Shipper from Evry. We're going to talk to James Rockers from Appeal Sciences. We're also going to read through Brandon Gorell's News Roundup in the TBPN newsletter. TBPN.com you can go sign up. So three key stories that broke since we last spoke a mere 21 hours ago since we podcast for three hours.

And then we come back 21 hours later. We do it again. We do it again. Yesterday, Politico reported that David Sacks made an 11th hour appeal to President Trump to spike an executive order that would have created a voluntary program, voluntary program for frontier AI companies to submit their models to the government for review 90 days before new model releases. I wonder what the benefit of that is.

Obviously, it's good to have red teaming going on, good to have benchmarking, good to have benchmarking, good to have other eyes on the project. There's some sort of, you know, liability that happens with the round thing on the table. No one in, and the TVPN audience has ever seen this. Can you describe what this is, this round shape, argument? I'm still not exactly sure what we're looking at. Yeah. I saw them talking about this on ESPN. Yeah. And people are always saying, you guys are like sports center. Yeah. Yeah. You should pick one of these up, this object. So I had to check it out. Yeah. This artifact. Brown, brown oval object. Yes. Cool. Well, it looks fun.

Anyways. I was having a little bit of fun earlier. Throwing this at the gong. Drill in the gong. The production team didn't like it. No. Because there's this, you know, $70,000 massive flat screen TV next to the gong as well as

multiple cameras and lights over there. But no accidents. Wow. Mandate of heaven over there right here. Oh, Tom's got the time of this fall? Get out of here with that. Tennis ball. Anyway, so for his part, Trump explained the last-minute cancellation by telling reporters, quote, I didn't like certain aspects of it.

I think it gets in the way of, dash, we're leading China. We're leading everybody. And I don't want to do anything that's going to get in the way of that. The presumed text of the EO was leaked today. You can read it through this link. Tyler, have you checked in with Less wrong? Yeah, how are they feeling about this? Yeah, I mean, I assume they're not happy with this.

This seems to be like anti-safety. Do they want more review from independent non-profits, for-profit companies that are run by people with good intentions or the government, like, democratically elected? I mean, I assume at some level it's got to be the government, right? Because if you're super-HI pill, these things are nuclear weapons, it needs to be the government. Yeah.

But I think on the way there, people are definitely, like, is there anyone who says, like, no, no, no, actually, like, like, nuclear weapons are super important, but they shouldn't be regulated by the government because I don't like the government. I would rather my favorite megacorp owns them controls them. I don't think there's. I mean, if you look at the popularity, if you look at the, if you look at the approval rates for different organizations, there are plenty of companies that are polling above the U.S. government. Like, people love Disney, Disney adults.

They say, give Disney a nuclear weapon. They already have the rights to build a nuclear power plant. You know this? I did not. Disney World has, like, you know, legacy rights. Because when they set up Epcot, which is an acronym, which I should look up because what does it stand for? It stands for something really cool.

This also bridges into one of our future segments. What does Epcot stand for? Experimental prototype community of tomorrow. The idea was to build an entire city. It was the praxis of the. Of the 50s. Yeah. And so in 1966, Walt Disney conceived it as in 1966 as a utopian, fully functioning

city. And I believe this might just be viral clickbait, but I've heard it said many, many times that they have the permission to build a nuclear reactor to power the product of tomorrow, Epcot. Yeah. And so, I don't know. Maybe there's some folks out there that say, we can't trust the government. We can't trust the Democrats.

We can't trust the Republicans. with the nuclear weapons, give him to Disney. I don't know. I trust Bob with the new... I would trust Bob. The new guy, we got to meet him. We got to get to know him. That's right.

Bob? He can... I've shook his hand. Yeah. I trust him. I trust his hand on the button. Anyway, what else is going on? Second story highlighted by Brandon Grell in the TBPN newsletter.

The Corellinator. The Grellinator in the TBPN newsletter an 80. A non-account posted yesterday. He's sitting here with... with the noise-cancelling headphones. He doesn't know that we're talking about him. He's going to find this out later when he watches these clubs. Anyway, on a non-account posted yesterday that Microsoft had canceled its internal

Claude code licenses after token-based billing made the cost untenable. This catalyzed a ton of commentary and discourse around X. Box CEO, Aaron Levy, for example, used this post to argue that token price optimization is set to become a prevailing trend inside companies reliant on LLMs. Worth noting, though, that there's a proposed community note on the post right now that denies Microsoft made the move because of a cost issue. They have the money to spend billions on tokens if they want. But instead, they are trying to shift the developers to use their own co-pilot CLI,

which I imagine they're going to build their own harness, their fork of clogged code, their fork of codex. They want to make the engineers eat dog food. Yes. But what's the dog food made of? They're dog fooding. GPT 5.5 tokens. It could be made of Opus 47 tokens.

I do think it, uh, I guess they will be using. Yeah. I mean, I think the reason that that Kodak's and Claudecote and cursor and these other tools have gotten so good is because the engineers building them are using them all day long. And it's one thing to use those tools to build your coding tool. But being forced to constantly use the product that you're shipping is tried and true. way to build a great product. Yeah.

The third story from Brandon Growl in the TBPN newsletter. The American semiconductor manufacturer, Micron, announced that they've begun manufacturing 1-Alpha DRAM, the most advanced memory every produced in the United States at its Manassas, Virginia headquarters or manufacturing plant. This move comes in the middle of the agent boom in AI, which requires longer context windows and thus memory than back-and-forth LLMs, which has led to an industry-wide memory shortage Micron has been on a tear. Let's see what they're doing.

800, almost $850 billion market cap. Remarkable. It's up 2% today, 3% over the last five days, and 246% over the last six months. What an absolute run for Micron. It's up almost 1,000% over the past year. Really, really incredible performance from Micron. Just wow.

Anyway, America's going through a mini, This was such a funny article by the Wall Street Journal. America's IPO mini boom. How is this a mini boom? You got three of the... Is this not a gigabom? This is a gigabomb. So I don't know if we have the truth's on this,

but it also made it to the front page of the Walls, of the Financial Times. They said, SpaceX, Open AI, and Anthropic IPOs set to ignite Wall Street trading frenzy. Nasdaq loosens rules. Pass investors could dump rival stocks. trillionaire prospect for Musk. The blockbuster listings of SpaceX Anthropic and Open AI are set to prompt an unprecedented wave of buying as new fast entry rules thrust the tech stocks straight into Wall Street indices. The rules implemented this month by NASDAQ mean billions of dollars of passive money will automatically flow to the three companies when they go public, driving their share prices higher and forcing investors to sell rival stocks. Elon Musk, SpaceX, initial public. offering next month is expected to be the largest on record, firing the starting gun on what

U.S. bankers will hope will be a blockbuster year. With Open AI filing its IPO paperwork as soon as this week, an Anthropic planning to float its shares, too, as well. The trio is set to raise tens of billions of dollars at a time of relentless investor appetite for companies linked to AI. The SpaceX listing will cement Musk's control of two of America's most valuable companies, SpaceX and Tesla. It is crazy. We're going to be. to need a new term for the mag seven because Tesla has been in the mag seven. It's been north of a trillion dollars for a long time. But SpaceX is going to go out at a higher valuation almost certainly. Where is Tesla trading at today in terms of market cap? It's at 1.34. Hard to imagine SpaceX trading

below that. So you're going to have his mag seven company will be lagging his non-mag seven company. We're going to need new terms. We're going to need a bigger boat. But why did why did the Wall Street Journal call this a mini boom. I think it's just because it's so concentrated on these three companies, but we will dig in and see where it goes. So too bad, SpaceX and others didn't go public sooner. I agree. But they are a tribute to the U.S. capitalist system, says the Wall Street Journal. Today's AI investor euphoria recalls the heady.com days of the 1990s, and it's hard to tell how these bets will shake out. SpaceX, OpenAI, Anthropic are rushing to go public to take advantage of the favorable market conditions.

But amid the eulogies written about American capitalism, the latest mini IPO boom is a welcome tribute to the dynamism of U.S. markets that no other country can match. SpaceX fired the starting gun. They're using the same language as the Financial Times over there. The starting gun has been fired. It's unanimous across the mainstream media.

The rocket company found in 2002 is a global leader in space explorers. overnight success. It is also spread into broadband, mobile satellite internet and data center development. Anthropic recently agreed to pay SpaceX, $1.25 billion a month to use its data centers to train models. That shows how competitors can enjoy symbiotic relationships. SpaceX says the company as a whole reported a $4.9 billion net loss last year, some of which stemmed from its X.com social media platform. Can that be that much? I'd have to imagine that the losses were not, I mean, I don't know how much Twitter was losing before they, before they take private.

I know that the revenues cratered a bit, but there were also big layoffs and an 80% reduction in cost. I, I, the sum word there is maybe doing some of the lifting. I imagine that the losses were sort of spread over all sorts of investments here. You're building a new, a new starship rocket, which is set to launch today. 530, central time. Tune in. The last. Last one was scrub. What a critical launch. Is it? No, just because of the timing with the S-1 and the IPO.

I don't know. I mean, all eyes on. I think, I think the market is valuing the launch capabilities in SpaceX and Starship in particular is like, one small piece of the puzzle. You know,

it's important, but, you know, people are going to be paying way more attention to this. Yeah, like the investor media is. But, but,

you know, even like, I think even just the, you know, endless spamming Falcon 9s can get Starlink to what, $20 billion run rate or something, $10 billion run rate. You can clearly build a business off of the existing capability. Lots of excitement around Starship. There was a little bit of like spice in the timeline from, you know, everyday astronaut because he was sort of like rooting for a scrub.

And everyone was like, oh, he's like against SpaceX. But he was like, no, I was like, I'm such a fan that I wanted to be there in person. And I couldn't be there in person, so I was like, I hope that they scrub because I want to be there for this historic moment. So a little bit of like a misconception there. And the live stream will be the launch is you said 530. 530 central time is like when it's scheduled. But they're already counting down because they stacked it yesterday. They were ready to go.

Nikki Minaj was on site talking about starships were made to fly, which I believe is one of her songs. SpaceX said in its filing that it foresees 28.5 trillion, yes, trillion in market opportunities, including data centers in space. Is anything more bullish than the future just being enterprise software? Like, you paint this massive picture, we're going to Mars, how are we going to make money? Enterprise software, 22 trillion of enterprise software. We're going to be automating workflows for the enterprise. I guess forever. Mr. Musk in January was awarded one billion performance-based restricted shares that will vast if his company, quote, establishes a permanent human colony on Mars with at least one million inhabitants.

Do robots count as inhabitants? Do agents count? Isn't that one of the potential? You got to get a million. This is why he's worried about the... Wasn't there a list of like five or six things and he just has to do like four? I don't know. I haven't dug into that particular one. I know for Tesla there were a whole bunch of different milestones. The humanoid robots was one of the stretch goals. But permanent human colony on Mars with at least one million inhabitants, that's excited. That's a good goal. Like that feels, I don't know, that like a whole lot of enterprise software and a million people living on Mars, that's a vision I can get behind. I'm into that. I like it. Anyway, we have Matt Grimm from

The Landreau, the co-founder and COO, joining us. We're calling in to the MRF. We talked to him last year. Let's see how he did this here. Matt Grimm, how are you doing? Welcome to the show. You are. You can't hear them.

You can hear us? Oh, no. Okay. If anyone can hear us, just ask him to talk. Pass it along. Just have him, just have him ram. Just rant. Just rant.

Tell him to rant. I'll text him. Rant, rant. We might need to come back to him, But he does look like he did in the weighted vest. He's looking very sharp. And on this, it looks like it's cold and rainy. This looks brutal.

I'm excited to come back to that in a minute. But in the meantime, we will go back to government pension funds and the SpaceX IPO. Government pension funds, Kvetch that the IPO will preserve Mr. Musk's control of the company by giving him more votes per share. But dual class structures are not uncommon. Berkshire Hathaway and News Corp also have them and can encourage founders to take their company public since they won't lose control. If pension funds don't like SpaceX's structure, they don't have to buy shares. SpaceX could fetch a market valuation of upward of $1 trillion,

a huge boon for its early private investors and employees with stock options. Open AI and Anthropic also have heavily compensated their employees with stock options, partially as a way to preserve capital. Stock options allow employees to share in a company's growth and success. Thanks for the context, Wall Street Journal. I appreciate that. The shame is that retail investors have missed SpaceX's early, Satisfiric gains. What did what was the market cap of Tesla at IPO? What was the market cap of Tesla at IPO? With sub 10 billion, right? Was it? Tesla's Tesla?

1.7. Whoa. 1.1.7 billion? Yep. Are you sure? Is that an open is that a market cap for? You got a thousand X if you just were a day one IPO believer. I mean, that's how you build a retail army. So, SpaceX. I mean, million people on Mars, we could be looking at 1.7 quad, potentially. Anything's possible. I don't know. You get a thousand X from here. If we get to Mars, that's a big, it's a big, big, big, big opportunity. That is so crazy that you could buy an Elon company in the public markets. Yeah. At less than a $2 billion market cap. And many people did not. I owned a little bit of Tesla at some point. But there were so many moments when it was like, so wildly disconnected from other car companies or other, like, it was never a, like a Warren Buffett buy, you know, there were always good reasons not to buy it. Instead of going to high school,

I just bought the Tesla IPO using the money I made from mowing lawn. Yeah, you should have just been a lawnmower who DCA'd into Tesla the whole time. Probably be pretty retired right now. I mean, there's a lot of people that did that. There's a lot of people, there's also a lot of people that put money down to buy cars and then they didn't buy the stock and they're like, ah, the car depreciated and I should have bought the stock. Anyway, let's check in with the Starship launch because SpaceX postponed the launch of the newly redesigned Starship, but hardly a headline if it's just a one day postponing because these things happen all the time. But it's completely redesigned. It's 400 feet tall and it stood on the launch pad at the company Starbase Complex outside Brownville,

Texas, but engineers had to troubleshoot problems that kept cropping up to the end of the countdown for the flight, according to a SpaceX live stream. SpaceX chief executive Elon Musk later said in a social media post that a hydraulic pin on part of the launch tower didn't function correctly. The company could try the flight Friday if the problem is fixed overnight. So they worked all night and they fixed the hydraulic pin on the launch tower. Wow. Talk about complex. The test mission was set to be the first flight for Starship V3. This is the third version, redesigned SpaceX vehicle intended to deploy bigger satellites and one day help the company potentially settle Mars and mine asteroid starship is bigger and more powerful than any rocket ever built.

The company has sketched out a future in which Starship flies thousands of times per year. Of course, the the Mechazilla tower that grabs it, the chopsticks. That's very, very, key to being able to stack these quickly. You can't rebuild all the infrastructure. The reusability is key to flying regularly. The rocket has yet to fly any customer satellites after three years of intense tests that we know of. The real conspiracy theorists, there's conspiracy theories that think space is fake, nothing's happening, they're not actually going. The satellites don't exist. And then there's other conspiracy theories that think, oh yeah, when they crash, they're actually deploying secret satellites and there's more stuff in space than we think. So,

Pick your tinfoil hat theory. We'll let you be the judge of what's really going on. Spaceix's growth plans depend on Starship. According to its IPO prospectus, the document filed Wednesday listed Starship first among the risk factors facing the company. Interesting. Okay, so a little bit more credit for you because I was like, ah, it's not that big a deal. I care more about the data centers. Yeah, I just mean the optic.

Think about like the optics and some investors are super, you know, a little bit. It is interesting. Like, clearly, if SpaceX is listing Starship as the first risk factor, it means, like, oh, yeah, like, Colossus, like, we're going to be able to do that. Like, that's not hard. Like, we can build a big data center. They have. They have.

And there's less of a risk factor of, like, we're not going to be able to monetize that. Or we're not going to, you know, because there is, there are a group of investors out there that are saying, like, oh, token prices will collapse, GPU depreciation. It'll get blocked. There'll be a data center ban. Like, they won't be able to ramp up there. The main thing is, God forbid. There's like a, you know, catastrophic, you know, explosion.

It'd be dramatic. That would be, you know, potentially an omen that certain people would be looking into. But maybe. I have full faith. Yeah. Their execution record is unsurpassed, but this stuff is hard to get right, said Daniel Hansen, portfolio manager at Newberger Berman, who oversees a fund that owns SpaceX shares. He's got bags.

This team in due course will execute on Starship, and that will unlock tremendous. value. They estimated in its IPO filing Wednesday that it has spent $15 billion developing Starship. Well, that makes a lot of sense why there's losses if you've been investing this. Although it seems like the development costs are declining because in 2025, the expenses were $3 billion. So I don't know how many years, but if you imagine they've been working on Starship for five years, then $3 billion a year is sort of average. These efforts have weighed on SpaceX's bottom line with the space division reporting a six hundred and sixty two million dollar loss. The interesting question that I have from the SpaceX IPO

prospectus is Dan Premack had that sort of hot take saying like oh wow like a lot of people were expecting SpaceX to be a bigger business than what they showed in the in this prospectus obviously Elon is always looking to the future huge tam huge opportunity in space data centers, huge opportunity in terrestrial data centers. Like the revenue is going to grow. The 75 billion that we need is. He just added like 15 billion in ARR on a $20 billion company. Like the growth is there.

Elon makes place. But my question is as you trickle down, it's like it's a, it's an AI company with a, you know, data center business with a telecom. And then the smallest section is the launch business. And so I'm wondering like, what does the P&L look like? What do the financial statements look like? like for Blue Origin, because Blue Origin's been operating for, I think, a longer amount of time, maybe the same amount of time, 20 years. I can't imagine that they're, you know, if they're

working on a new rocket, are they going to be... Before September 8, 2000. 2000. So, that's a 26-year story, and they're building stuff that's trying to be in this class of rocket. And if Elon's spending $3 billion trying to, you know, $3 billion last year alone developing Starship, like what of the costs look like? for you, Glenn.

And then the revenues have to be so much smaller. Here's a question for you, John. There was a PR firm reached out trying to get an early SpaceX investor on the show. Yeah. And they invested in 2019. Does that count as being an early investor if the company was started in 2002? I think so. I think pre-Starlink counts as early investor.

Because it's always early. It's always early. Well, also, early is often defined by the ROI on the investment. And so if you got in in the decadorn rounds and now you're going out of a trillion round, that's 100x. And so you're in a pretty good spot. Sean McGuire at Sequoia, like it was a later bet. 2020, I think was when he started building that position. But pre-Starlink, really.

Yeah, I think Starlink was starting to work or starting to sort of be mapped out as the business starting to be understood by the market as a potential profit center in the midst of a very difficult launch market that was not growing exponentially. And there were good margins, but the launch business alone was never going to propel SpaceX to a trillion dollar valuation. But you add two, three, four other businesses, and all of a sudden, you get there. Other tests have ended in explosions, including one this past June that shook homes miles away, a failure early last year, threatened commercial airline traffic in the Caribbean region.

The Wall Street Journal has reported. The new version of Starship includes upgrades to the fuel transfer tube that moves propellant to the booster's 33 engines, redesigned so engines can simultaneously and more quickly begin firing. And I think they, did they paint the engines black for this one? I saw it, you know, on doing like a little side by side of the silver engines. He was saying that the black engines look better. I kind of agree. but I haven't looked too closely at the images.

I don't know if it's probably purely functional, but it is fun as these things get more design. You've seen those images of like the Raptor engine or the Merlin engine getting like redesigned, redesigned and just removing, removing parts, and then the final version looks pretty aesthetic. Like it looks pretty beautiful. And the first version looks just like cables and wires

and tubes everywhere. Looks very thrown together. There's something about efficiency that is also aligned with aesthetics sometimes. The engines called Raptors are expected to produce more. more thrust while weighing less, according to the company. Oh, that's good.

Almost every part of Starship V3 is different from V2, Musk said in a social media post Sunday. The postponed test mission was set to deploy 20 Starlink simulators during the mission. I'm wondering how much a Starlink cost, because why don't you just rip a real one? You know, you're spending $3 billion, just put up the real ones on the case that it actually works.

But I guess there's probably more, like, telemetry and simulation and like data collection that you can do if you send up the simulator as opposed to like the real thing but i don't know why not just uh rib that i mean that's what you do with satellite remember i mean the ultimate simulation is just doing the thing yeah right well Elon says we'd live in a simulation potentially exactly so maybe that's maybe that's what he's doing what yeah what are the starlink simulators really simulating who knows dj dsall yeah what's going on with slid into elons DM. Oh yeah. In the bid to land lead left, the IPO with banks jockeying to get their name first on the deal for SpaceX's IPO Solomon, worked with staffers to message must directly. He's like, all right, guys, help me out here. How do I send a message on X? According to people familiar with the matter. So he's putting in the work. He also says, wow, this is how you work for the bag at Goldman Sachs.

David Solomon also had a piece in the New York Times saying that the AI Apocalypse, NYT, was overrated. AI is a job creator, David Solomon says. He says, I'm the CEO of Goldman Sachs. The AI job apocalypse is overblown. We'll see what he's saying in a couple months. Ken Griffin sort of flipped, although Ken Griffin hasn't gone as far to say that there's a job apocalypse.

He was just saying that the models went from like slop, to usable, but he hasn't actually opined on whether or not that will change Citadel's hiring plans or his view of the American economy. He also specifically said he was very excited that all of his software engineers were more efficient because he said there's no, there's no like cap on how much software. I was there. I was writing Visual Basic. It was brutal. I would have loved Codex and clock code. I would have been, I would have been working for one minute a day instead of an hour a day. You could have had Kodax back then, just like a private instance of it. Yes. You would be currently. Time traveling back in time just to become the most productive intern of all time is elite.

That's something you would actually do. It would be so much fun. Maybe that's what the future will hold intern simulator. You get to go into VR and simulate being the most elite intern with time travel technology. We talk about the world's fair. Yes, we need to talk about the world's fair. Tyler, you gave this a read. What stuck out to you?

Maybe let's read through some of it first. And a quick update. We are rescheduling with Matt Grimm. Okay. Due to technical issues. Yes, we will get him on. He's been here in person. We know Matt Grim.

We love him. Always fun to catch up with him. It's possible that a third layer SPV lead is holding their infrastructure hostage saying give me direct access. I think he might have been there, finished the MRF and saw someone hustling an SPV and he just had to drop the mic and run off

and tackle him. That's probably what happened. Anyway, World's Fairs. Has someone tried to bring these back? This feels like a tech, new media. We need a World's Fair thing. I could see this being something that someone tries to revive, although

it'd probably be a lot of screens these days. But at the World's Fair of old, there were a lot of cool technologies, a lot of hardware, a lot of interesting exhibits, and we'll go through. I don't know how much you've studied the World Fair in the past, but the Wall Street Journal has been reflecting on the United States of America at 250 years with a whole bunch of articles that look back and contextualize American history. And we'll go through this one on the World's Fair right now. So among the groundbreaking innovations unveiled at U.S. hosted exhibition. were the telephone, the Ferris wheel, and the electric and electric lighting. Ferris really crushed it on the naming thing. You know, Alexander Graham Bell invented the telephone, Thomas Edison invented lighting mostly. Those guys did not bake their name into the product,

nearly as well as Ferris, because it's capital F, and I believe Ferris is the one who invented the Ferris wheel. Anyway, before Splashy Silicon Valley product launches in the annual consumer electronic show the world's showcased the its latest in innovations at high-profiled world's fairs. These exhibits held every few years beginning in London in 1851 gave countries a public platform to showcase new technologies, products and ideas that were going to reshape daily life. For host countries and cities, the world's fairs or expositions, were an opportunity to own the world stage and project. Tyler is sharing the person that invented the Ferris wheels. Full name was George Washington Gail Ferris Jr.

That's pretty elite. That's pretty good. There's nothing stopping you from naming your child George Washington and then just slapping your own last name at the end. Yes, yes. George Washington Cosgrove. John Tyler was the 10th president.

Oh, true. Yeah, there you go. That's my name. There we go. Okay, so many of the big expos were commemorative, says Paul Greenhall, a British historian and author of two books on world's fairs and expositions. But all of them ended up doing something else. They changed the shape of cities, much like the Olympics today.

World's fairs were large-scale planning efforts and economic investments as much as cultural events. Cities competed for the right to host them. Chicago was able to redefine its image from a gritty second city to a cultural and architectural hub after defeating New York in the bid for the 1893 exposition. Here's a look at the U.S. hosted World's Fairs that left the deepest mark.

So Philadelphia. Starting in Philly, 1876, you're not going to believe what was shown, what was celebrated. We had two key technologies. Telephones and catch up. One was disrupted much faster than the other. I would say that the telephone

has basically disappeared, the smartphone, text messaging. Telephone's not doing well. It's on its last night. The iPhone might be. The iPhone might be. really made gained ground. Real inroads.

No. Catchup is still. Even ranch kind of went on a run. Yeah. But really came up short. Mustard, ultimately it's a compliment, not a substitute. There are very few people that say, oh, I don't need the ketchup at all. Just the mustard.

Just the mustard. Please, most people, they don't know. I do think mustard is better than ketchup. Yeah. Interesting. Yeah. You can believe that. America's first officially sanctioned World's Fair, the Centennial International Exhibitioned

exhibition arrived when the country was still defining its place among industrial nations. Unlike earlier European fairs built around single monumental halls, the Philadelphia events spread across a vast park with hundreds of structures. It was sort of like the Coachella of its time. Among the most notable exhibits were the telephone, it was initially greeted with skepticism, but the potential of the cool contraption quickly drew attention. Once people realized what had been invented, it became clear how important it was. The fair also showcased Thomas Edison's automatic telegraph as well as machinery, such as the typewriter.

Imagine you just create the automatic telegraph and then you go to launch it and demo it and somebody invents the telephone. Which is like, really? Really, dude? And consumer package goods such as Heinz tomato ketchup. It normalized the idea that private companies, innovators, and even governments could present their work side by side, model that amplified the country's entrepreneurial culture. I love that. Chicago, 1893, you're not going to believe it. You're not going to believe the two technologies that are

We got it. We got to call balls and strikes here a little bit more underwhelming. Yeah, but I don't know. I think some people what was two key inventions. Last time, remember, we created telephones and catch up, right? And so fast following this with the next fair, we create the- No, no, no, no. It's not fast-follows. 1876 the telephone almost 20 years later almost 20 years later they're like fast takeoff it's a we're so early telephones cooking what do we got the ferris wheel and popcorn popcorn popcorn is pretty good catch up before popcorn pretty good but yeah ferris wheel Ferris wheel.

Imagine the hundreds of people that came there to demo their inventions. If you're in telephones, pivot to Ferris wheels. There's a whole industry. Oh yeah, Ferris wheel that will destroy the telephone. You got to get out on the Ferris wheel.

It's the new thing. Well, it is, it is sort of funny. It is sort of funny that like in, like, if you were to look back, if we had a World's Fair, you'd have like creatine gummies. And like AGI.

Exactly. So in 1893, they had the Ferris wheel and popcorn. And then you fast forward to today. It's like we found a way to put one of the micronutrients in steak into a candy shaped supplement. And we need you to eat four or five of these a day forever. 2020. World's Fair. We have rockets that land. And we also have all birds. What else came out? That was very silly. Board apes. We have we've invented board apes. Skims, shapeware. Shapeware and gLP ones.

It's somewhat related. I don't know. Buffalo, New York, 1901. An electric city. This seems pretty elite. This is pretty huge. 1901. Though remembered mostly as a location where President William McKinley was shot, he died a week later. Buffalo's Pan American exposition was meant to showcase. He was shot out.

He was shot at the World's Fair? I had no idea. That's crazy. Tyler. Fact check that. Buffalo's Pan American Exposition was meant to showcase America's dominance and innovation

and electrical power and infrastructure. The fair featured electric lighting and electric street cars powered by hydroelectricity generated by Niagara Falls reflecting a moment when electricity was beginning to move from novelty towards widespread utility. Okay, so this is 1901.

1901. And remember, in 1876, we created the telephone. phone. Yeah. And you fast forward to the next event in St. Louis in 1904. You're not going to believe what we remember the 1904 World's Fair. Three years. We created electricity and they're like, we got something better. What do we got? We now know this, this World's Fair as a snack food extravaganza. It's really just age-d-9, Christine Gover. It was, it was sort of a Cambrian explosion of snacking. Yeah. I mean, this is the nature of our show. It's like cerebrus and grooms. Like, this is like, this is actually what happens in America.

The Louisiana Purchase Exposition was among the largest ever stage and nearly obliterated the city's finances. Oh, no. Still, its pop culture influence endures. The exposition popularized a host of snack foods that would become staples of American life, including ice cream cones, peanut butter. Oh, my, they went on an insane run right here. Ice cream cones, peanut butter, hot dogs. hamburgers and cotton candy. Elite.

While the foods weren't all invented for the fair, their widespread availability there, like, it's so funny. So people are coming there again to share their actual innovations, and then, like, snacks had just come online, and so you can imagine, like,

it just turns into a snack conference where everyone's just snacking like crazy. They're like, wait, we have hot, you can go to a hot dog stand, and then you can go get cotton candy in one place? You've got to be kidding me. I mean, I wouldn't be surprised.

Visitors also encountered early examples of x-ray machines. So we invented X-ray vision, but history remembers it as a snack food extravaganza. Peanut butter. Early flying machines and submarines. Interesting that the hot dog came after. And automobiles. And automobiles and submarines. This is crazy.

And barely remembered. No. Fast forward. 1962. Seattle. Space race. It's a space race. That's exciting.

The World's Fair, by the mid-20th century, the World's Fairers had become games of one-upsmanship. I like that. And geopolitical rivalry feels like where we're at today. Seattle's Century 21 Exposition took place in the shadow of the Cold War following the Soviet Union's launch of Sputnik and the world's first artificial Earth satellite. The Soviets turned down an invitation. They turn it down. Turn it down. Turn it down.

The federal government became deeply involved. There was a sense that America needed to demonstrate technological leadership. The space needle was constructed for the fair. I did not know that. I recently saw the inside of the space needle because, wait, no, that's not the space needle. It's the Toronto version of the space needle because didn't Drake film a music video inside of it? He iced it out. Oh, he did?

He made it ice blue. Because he's Ice Man or something? That's the name of the album. And inside, you can see all of the broadcasting equipment. And there's these huge radio dishes inside. It's very cool. Anyway. Fast forward, just a few years, a couple years.

You're not going to believe what they created, what they announced at this World's Fair. 64. They invent 1964, more than just under 100 years since. the telephone was invented, we invented punch cards. Punch cards. Which feel like a kind of early version of enterprise software in some way. True.

World's Fair Flushing Meadows New York City. Systems of Records. Yes, System Records. Visitors were dazzled by color television demonstration and the picture phone, an early video calling system. They had FaceTime. Yeah, this is actually, this is sick. This is crazy.

I can't believe. When I told Jordy, 64, they invented FaceTime. He was like, did it use mirrors? And he thought it was just a periscope. Just a mirror that you look at. No, no, no. It's like a series of mirrors that bounce my image across, like, so you can be in the other room and you can see me and talk. No.

No, they had full video calling, I guess. AT&T's picture phone, which added video to telephone calls. Yeah, so it cost $16 for a three-minute call. That's $121 today's. today's money. That's expensive. Yeah, $40. Token maxing. I wonder if there were CEOs at the time who were like, we need to be, if you're not,

if you're making $10 a year and you're not spending $20 a year on your picture phone, you're not going to have a problem. I wonder if they were talking about Jevin's Paradox. Yes. Probably. I don't know. The last officially sanctioned World's Fair in the U.S. was hosted in New Orleans in

1984 and it produced no truly defining technological debut. Stagnation theory. We had defeated brutal. By that point, the function of World's Fairs had largely migrated elsewhere to museums, television, theme parks, and technology conference. As a result, the World's Fair concept gradually faded, putting on an expo as a lost art, the author says, but when America needed it, no one did it better.

And Brennan Grell, of the TBPN newsletter, Fame, shared that there was, in fact, an attempt to bring back the World's Fair by Zach Dev. He wrote on substack startup cities.com in 2023. He talked to World's Fair co-founder Cam Weiss on Walt Disney, Epcot, Dubai's Museum of the Future, why the World Fair died and why big in-person events matter more than ever. Yeah, it's hard to, you could bring something like this back, but I feel like it would end up being like it would just turn into a, a tech conference, you know? Yeah, it is tricky. I mean, yeah, we do sort of have these, but then,

I mean, we talked about this during the consumer electronics show discussion around how a lot of the big tech companies have sort of created their own worldsfares. Like, you walk around MetaConnect, it feels like a world's fair, although it's much more narrow because they're releasing one product and a few features. It is cool to think about bundling everything up over a decade and having a be like save, save everything up for this. Can you imagine? But with iterative releases in the internet and leaks and journalism, I don't think it would be wise for an inventor of the next paradigm of LLMs or AGI to sit on it for a decade

while they wait for the next world fair. Yeah. I'm GPD6, Mythos 2. It's coming, but we're preparing for Paris in 2046. I don't know if that would work. anyway what else stuck out to you

Tyler there was another there was another article you put in here from the New York Times about the picture phone that was just more details about it's more detail

I was really enamored yeah by this yeah I was just thinking it's so sad we don't really hear the term inventor anymore

like no one is primarily an inventor yeah people aren't really kind of lost this with the kind of the world

yeah does that have something to do with like the patent structure like patents are I have a patent, but I don't think of myself as an inventor of that thing. Why? You could just say that. I could. I think of you as an inventor of bits.

Of bits, potentially. Inventor. Did you invent TPPN? I don't know. Is that a thing? No, founder. businessman, business person. These are the terms of the modern era. A lot of, I mean, even, also, just the way inventions take place are so disaggregated. Like, you look at the, we were doing this during the GLP1 boom. We were trying to trace through, like,

who are the key players? This is the teal take on, like, we don't have ticker tape parades. Like, why is there not one person? Like, Doudna got credit for CRISPR. There's a book, Walter Isaacson, wrote about her. I think it's called the inventor, maybe.

I don't know. Doudna. She won the Nobel Press. But, yeah, I mean, it's just very hard because there's like, there's so many slices. The internet is the new world's fair, right? Or X or any of these social platforms, it would have made sense. Yeah. You know, in the 20th century, in the 19th century to, you know, create something and think,

okay, I have to travel somewhere with a big, to where I can find a big audience of people that are going to be interested in new inventions. and now people create something on the internet. There's a film called The Inventor and it's about Elizabeth Holmes, right? So that shows you how much the idea of an inventor is like mocked now.

Wow, yeah. Like people don't have respect for an inventor. It's the scammy grifter. It's the inventor. It truly, truly is. Well, we have someone who ships. We have Dan Shipper in the waiting room. The Shippinator.

Coming back to the show. Let's bring him in. The TV in Elmterdome. Catch you up with Dan Shipper. How you doing? Good. How are you? It's great to be back. You're founder. You're a shipper. You're an author, a writer. Do you think of yourself as an inventor?

I mean, I'm sure you just get this like way too much now, but the nominative determinism is like a little too on the nose with this one. Yeah. I just try to live up to my name. Yeah. You do. It's great. You're an elite ship athlete. It's great to see you. It's been too long. Do you think of yourself as an inventor? Do we need to bring inventor back?

I feel like that term, it's like what I aspired to be when I was a kid. So there's like a little 11 year old in me who's like, yeah, absolutely, I am an inventor, but I would never go around calling myself that because I feel like you have to have a garage workshop and be like making things that like have springs and make weird noises in order to be an inventor. It's very gadget related. Yeah. Even though, yeah, I don't know. Inventions can be patented, people that invent software.

You should give people credit for those things. but we've moved away from that term for better or worse. Anyway, take us through. It's been maybe, has it been like four months, maybe more since we caught up? Too long? It's been a while. It feels like years in this era, in this era. The world's changed.

Yeah, give us the update on all things, every and Dan Shipper. I mean, there's a lot to say. The big update is I just wrote a piece called After Automation. Yeah. Because there's so much progress has happened over the last four months. I think the biggest thing has been there was a huge step change in models starting in November with Opus 45 and then GPD 53. And that has just continued. And I think it's starting to, like, delegating work is starting to cross the chasm from something that you do if you're a coder to all of knowledge work with first cloud code, then Claude Co-work.

and now Codex, which Codex, the big shift, the biggest thing that has happened is Codex is my daily driver now, and it's fantastic. It is, like, totally changing how I work. But I think as that starts to happen, you're starting to get a lot of people who maybe have not been that clued into agentic AI, use it for the first time and go, like, holy fucking shit.

Like, everything is going to change. Am I going to have? I saw an interesting benchmark here where someone sort of out, side of technology was was sort of lamenting AI progress because the the tricky prompt they had was come up with a Pokemon that ends in the two letters ER. Did you see this? And the and the base models, the cheapest things, the older models sort of get confused by it because of the tokenization. It's sort of like a new version of how many R's are in strawberry. But if you hit a coding model, like you can just watch the traces of ClaudeCode or

codex and it's like go to Pokemon wiki decks, download them all, put them into a CSV, write the Python that checks the actual last two characters of the Pokemon name and it just nails it perfectly and it's traceable. And so you get the perfect answer. And I think people haven't realized that that's what's possible and it doesn't all need to be memorization anymore. That's like the big chef. I totally agree. And you're seeing people, you know, I mean, Dario's out there being like, AI could wipe out half of white collar entry level white collar jobs. But even people outside the industry like Citadel, like King Griffin. Yeah, he had this whole quote.

And I have it in my piece. He said, like, these are not mid-tiered white collar jobs. These are like extraordinarily high-skilled jobs being I'm going to pick a word automated by agentic AI. And so you can just feel, you can just smell when someone's like, use an agent for the first time. And they're like, what the fuck? And if you've been in AI for, you know, we've been covering it since 2022, since the GPT3 days, you know, that, like, that meme where it's like he's got the noose around his head and he's like first time, you know? Yeah. That's sort of how I feel.

Yeah. I mean, it's a big, I mean, it's just, it's a big, it's a big shift because the fun, yeah, you're going from, like, for everyday knowledge work being like good at writing documents and good at collecting information, which. which are valuable things, but you've never worked with someone in an organization that's like a superstar where all they did was, where all they did was like gather information and like collect, you know, collect reports and things like that, right? It's like, okay, what can you do with that? What can you, what kind of actions you can take? And yeah, it's been even with how, even with how kind of close we are to the action and following, you know, not as long, you know, we weren't doing the show in the GPT3 days. But I still find myself, like, operating day to day thinking like, oh, I should reach out to that person to get there, you know, to see if they can help with this thing. and then realizing, like, oh, I can just ask Codex to do that, or I can just, I can get a model to do this.

And it's a really, it's a really, it's like a fundamental shift, and I'm still not routing enough kind of tasks through the models versus, or at least as much as I could. The other thing, I wanted to get your update on, like, how you feel like memory is evolving. I've had some, like, pretty pleasant experiences recently. where I will do, you know, I'll go to chat ChbT and ask for something. And it's like actually able to pull in a bunch of really relevant kind of like context

and memories in a way that is like helpful and not, not, not just kind of like distraction or annoying. And specifically, like, wanted to get your update because like, let's call it eight, probably a year, ago, 18 months ago, I think everyone was saying, like, memory, memory is the moat. And then, and then people just, like, kind of stopped talking about it for, call it six or nine months or something like that. But it feels like it might be having a moment, too. So, I mean, whether or not it's memory specifically, the thing that has changed dramatically is that codex, and also cloud code or co-work to some extent, but codex, the reason it's so powerful for me is it

has access to everything on my computer. Yeah. And so, you know, I, when I published this article after automation yesterday, I was like, who should I send this to? And I was going to go through my texts and go through my emails and then, you know, whatever. And I literally just said to codex, hey, can you go figure out like a couple people I should send this to? And it came up with like a bunch of investors, a bunch of journalists, a bunch of founders,

all people who I've talked to in the last like three months, but just going through my text messages, going through my emails. and it's just like a complete change in what is possible because it has access all that stuff, which includes memories. And one of the things I'm trying to do with this piece is to say, as a company, we've automated everything that we can.

Every single person has access to an agent. They have access to them as many tokens as they possibly can use. And yet, we've grown from four to almost 30 people since GPT3. So, like, what the fuck is that about? It's very counter to the narrative, I think, especially like the popular narrative right now with like meta is laying people off and Block is laying people off and the clickup guys like I'm going to fire everyone. It's only going to be 100 X employees. So there's, I think there's a really interesting question here about if you're actually on the frontier like we are, it seems like there's more human work to do than ever. Why is that? So I did a bunch of work. And the other thing is Ken Griffin, in the quote you pulled earlier, in that talk, he was saying, my software engineers are more efficient than ever, but there's no limit to how much software we need to build or that we want to build. And so he's not sitting there being like, okay, like a lot of this work is automated.

Like we can become a lot more efficient here and reduce headcount. He's saying like, great, we can do a lot more as a team. And I think that's like universally what companies that like have momentum are saying. It's a companies that like don't have meaningful momentum or don't have clear narratives that are having to, you know, do these layoffs. And again, there's still, you know, there's still a lot of the, there's just still a lot of blaming, you know, sort of like crediting AI for layoffs that that would have needed to happen even if we weren't in. in this technology cycle. Yeah, it's interesting because it's very popular now to say AI in the life announcement, but it's also very popular to say, and our business is better than it's ever been.

What do you guys think about that? I just feel like that's such a weird strategy or weird meme to be going around. Well, I think they're saying, you can say our business is better than it's ever been, but that doesn't mean it's being valued better than it ever has, right? You can say like better than it's ever been. What does that mean? Revenue is up, right? But the example that I know you're thinking of, I can't imagine that that company is trading

anywhere near it was trading, you know, a year ago, two years ago. And so when you have a massive correction in the sort of valuation of your company, like you're going to try to make moves to change that. or free up resources to invest in new product areas and get that momentum again. So I would say like when I see, or the business is bigger than it's ever been or better than it's ever been, I just don't necessarily buy that because you have to understand like what metric are they using to sort of like qualify that. Yeah, I think that that's a reasonable frame.

and I wish that they would say that more because it gives it's just such a bad look for all of technology for CEOs to be doing that. Did you see the standard chartered CEO got in hot water? So CEO of Standard Charter came out and said like AI is working so much, we're going to reduce our workforce. And he used a really spicy phrase. He said, like, low value human work and we're going to replace it with capital that we're investing. It was a very quantitative analysis of something that's deeply human. But I dug into his actual projection, and he said 15% headcount reduction by 2030, which is like, I would assume that attrition would get you there. Like, is this like the most retentive company in history?

Like, I feel like 4% of the workforce probably turns over annually anyway. You can just slow your hiring plan and get there if you want to shrink. And that's what a lot of companies have done in previous eras where there's been hiccups or disconnects between valuation. There were some big private companies that during the COVID era or ZERP era, they just sort of froze hiring and grew into their valuations because the business model was sound. They didn't need to hire as much. They refocused, raised the hiring standard, allowed attrition to play its part. And they got to become more lean, like more lean and mean organizations without like actually doing a layoff, which at that time would have been optically very bad. Because if you were doing a layoff during ZERP or COVID, it was like an indictment of you because it was like, oh, well, you're a victim of COVID or you're a victim of ZERP like you.

Your business doesn't work in a high interest rate environment. Your business doesn't work in a remote, in a more remote world. Whereas now the vibe is, oh, if you're doing a layoff. out, that's a sign that your business is ready for AI, ready for automation, ready for more efficiency. And so I think people are sort of playing both sides. It's very, very, how are you, how are you thinking about, you know, this has been said, you know, talked about plenty at this point, but I'm curious in the context of after automation, this difference between like a job and like a task, right? So like AI right now, very, very,

clearly can do a lot of tasks, but it cannot do very many jobs or really any jobs. Or like there's a subsection of jobs that AI can do well 90% of the time, but even that is not enough to replace the role or function entirely. Yeah. And I think this all changes and the lines between those terms are all going to change because they're all sort of relative to the capabilities of technology and that's all changing too. But I can tell you that what we find internally at every, and, you know, again, we're one of those places. If you add someone in Slack, it's like toss up whether or not it's a bot, you know?

And everyone's using Codex and Cloud Code to doing, do all their work every day in the engineering work and, like, for writing, for editing, for design, all that kind of stuff. And I can tell you that every agent needs a human. The further away an agent is from a human who's managing it, the worse it does. And you see this too, even in the scaled AI companies, like inside of Open AI or inside of Anthropic, they do have company-wide bots that you can at, but they're run by teams of people. And I think that that's actually a really interesting and pretty stable phenomena based on how these agents work. Obviously, they do more and more complex work, but what we see is that someone on our team, Kieran Kasten, calls it the, the, the, the, the, the, the, the, the, the, the, the, the, the, the, the, the, the, the, the, the, the, the, the, the, the, the. human sandwich is AI collapses tasks that used to take hours into like, you know, a few minutes. But the human is still kind of like the sandwich on either end or the bookend on either end who's

framing the task or evaluating it when it's done. And what's really interesting is even though it can do expert, even though AI can do expert human work, my experience internally every and I think you find this across the like AI industry, is it actually, even though AI can do expert human work, it actually increases the demand for human experts. Because what happens is you can get expert human work out of an AI, you can get pretty good writing or pretty good images or pretty good code. But it's all based on yesterday's competence. It's all based on what is in the training data from yesterday. And what that does is it floods the market with PRs or images.

or writing that's like kind of good but not quite right for the situation. And what you need are human experts to come in and take the cheap competence that AI enables anyone to have and turn it into actual really, really good, valuable, differentiated work because otherwise it's just the same thing as everybody else is doing and it's not valuable. And I think that's a dynamic inside of how the models work and how they function in the economy. that is kind of lost when people are worried about, oh yeah, I can do all this great stuff. It can't.

And in order for that great stuff to be valuable, it needs to be done by a human. That makes a lot of. What do you think about the idea of like the YouTubeification of software? Like Hollywood has been on a decline as creation and content creation has been commoditized and democratized.

But you've seen a lot, like many more small creators pop up, many more lifestyle businesses many more small businesses, get off the ground. And it feels like that is one possible direction that this goes. Like more niche software instead of needing, you used to need to raise a whole Series A from a venture capital firm to rack servers. Then with AWS, you needed to go through YC,

be technical, hire a couple of engineers. Now a few people can sort of get something off the ground. Are you actually seeing any movement towards that, do you think? I think that's definitely a thing. And it's actually one of the things that makes working at a place like every really appealing because if you're someone who wants to make software, everybody else can make software now. So having some sort of distribution and trusted brand makes a lot more sense than it used to. I think that I'm very bullish on people, like a person or a small group of people making software for a niche.

I think that's totally happening. but I'm very, I think the SaaS apocalypse is like totally overblown. 99% of people are not going to be vibe coding their own apps. They might do it once, but actually maintaining software is really, really hard, and it's a particular skill set that most people don't want to have. And I would be buying SaaS stocks because I actually, you know, if you look at every, we buy, we can vibe code whatever we want to pay for a lot of legislation.

It is a negative violation. The only thing I think, the only thing I think about is oftentimes you're buying software for a certain group of people to sort of manage work. And as certain workflows become agents, then I do, like, another way to put it is a lot of people that are outside of tech that have been vibe coding are sharing apps with me that they've built. that like the LLMs can just do natively, like pretty well already. And so that's been, that's, that's the kind of the, the potential bear case for this sort of like super, super long tail of software is like as agents get, get more competent and people learn how to, they're sort of like unhobbled. There's a lot of this long tail that can just be like a thread effectively.

Oh, you're saying you don't need an app. You just need to talk to this. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah, it's basically like you're talking to an agent. It's like, hey, I want to get my, let's use the most bro-y example possible. I want to get my bench press to two plates by eight weeks from now.

I'm currently at, you know, a plate and give me a plan to get there, right? So instead of needing like a fitness app. You could vibe code bench press app. Yeah, you could do like the, yeah. Get distribution or you could, or the. the customer could just wind up going to any. And they're like, cool. And they generate your workout.

You're saying, great, I did it. I was failing after three sets or whatever. And then it learns that and it gives you new workout. And it just goes and goes and goes. And you functionally get what a vertical product could do. So I just think, like, there is an opportunity right now for this, like, long tail of apps. But part of it is that people don't realize what the models themselves. I have a few thoughts there.

The first thought is I actually look at that as training a customer. And a customer that's going to really stick around with that is going to end up wanting things that just the bare thread in Codex is not going to do for them very well. Actually, chat is not a very good medium for a lot of app interactions. So in the same way that Excel was, you don't get the SaaS boom without Excel. Excel is like teaching people how to use computers in a way that then becomes enterprise SaaS. I really think a lot of these codex or chatGBT or cloud use cases are actually training potential customers who are power users to encounter problems that they want to buy software to fix. But I have a very specific prediction for what that's going to look like. And I'm currently obsessed with what I'm calling codex native apps.

and the basic insight is for all of these tools, so like CloudCode Desktop and Codex, they're built primarily for developers for now. And when developers are working in them, if you're changing your app, it has an in-app browser that you can use to like, you know, the agents in there with you, you can look at your app in local hosts

and the agents in there and you're going back and forth and it's a very good collaboration environment for developer, I think that is, it's incredible. for any kind of knowledge work. I spend all day just in Codex, and when I open up a thread, I just open up a browser tab, and I'm in my documents, I'm in my emails,

and it's me and Codex going back and forth on a SaaS app that's running inside of the browser of Codex, and it is the most powerful thing I've ever used, and I really think that is going to be a significant user experience type thing that we're going to see across all of these, providers of agent orchestration platforms for knowledge work. Love it.

Do you think your agents are planning a surprise birthday party for you? Happy birthday. Do we hit the gong? Yeah, we're hitting the gong. We're doing an early gong for your birthday. Wow. A little dirty named John in the chat said it's tomorrow. Great timing for the three-day weekend.

Great timing for you to just lock in at your. computer and just grind all weekend. Absolutely. Me and Codex are going to have the best birthday ever. Awesome. What can people expect from every over the next call it month? Because that's like a year in AI years. We've got a lot of good stuff. There's some interesting stuff coming on the vibe check front. Every time a new model comes out, we do some good vibe check. So there's going to be some really good stuff happening in the next couple weeks. And then we've got, we have our agent product plus one and that should be in beta probably by the end of June and I think that's

going to be really, really cool for people. Amazing. Great to catch up. Have a wonderful weekend. Enjoy your birthday with Codex and we will talk soon. Thank you so much for coming on the show. We'll talk to you soon. Goodbye. Up next we have James Rogers from Appeal Sciences. He is the founder here with us live in the TBPN Ultrodome, maybe move these objects out of the way, so we give you a proper entrance. Thank you so much for coming on down. How are you doing? Please introduce yourself for everyone who might not be familiar. Introduce yourself and we'll go through the story of the company and talk about the news. Yeah, James Rogers. Thanks for having me down here, guys, based up in Santa Barbara, so it's pretty easy to get down. Why Santa Barbara? I remember finding this out and it being an

interesting tidbit. There's some cool companies over there. Sonos and isn't Dyson up there? a little bit or something. Decker's, Decker's. Okay, yeah. I went out there for graduate school. Got it. So, UC Santa Barbara. Oh, cool.

Did my PhD in material science. Okay. Turns out that's the place to go for that. Yeah. Didn't know. I was in Pittsburgh before that. Got out to Santa Barbara and I was doing my PhD in material science. Yeah.

Studying solar paint. Okay. Kind of weird. Solar paint. What is that too? Pretty cool. You paint it and absorbs. You paint something and it dries into a solar cell.

Okay. Where did that technology go? Is that still? It's too expensive. It's too expensive. That was actually where appeal came from was, hey. Power's expensive now, though. Maybe the economics work in the data center era.

You just paint the data center. What was your, I'm a gaucho as well. What was your reaction to touring UCSB for the first time? Unbelievable. I came out to do. Because from the air, my favorite thing is like if you show someone a picture of the university from the air, it looks like it should be like a four seasons or something. It has no, a university has no business being that close.

Do an incredible beach. It doesn't make any sense. It was ranked like, yeah, it was crazy. I flew out in March. I was in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania, and they were de-icing us on the runway. And then I land in Santa Barbara, and it's like, I'm not going back. It's too nice here. So you study material sciences?

Like, where did the original idea for appeal come from? I thought the paint thing was so amazing. You know, wow, you can mix up a bucket of this paint and then it will build itself where you ship it. And but then I realized how expensive that was going to be and went, okay, well, that, maybe the solar paint thing doesn't work, but this, there's something about this idea that you could. Technology and build something that builds itself. Yeah. Somewhere else. Okay.

And I started, I just kind of had that in the back of my mind and I learned about how many people were, not learned about, we all learn. We all know or heard people are going hungry. Yeah. But I never, I never understood why. I originally I thought, oh, we're not growing enough food. We need to grow more food. Nope. We're actually growing twice as much food as we need to feed everybody already.

Yeah. And the reason is we're, people are going hungry because we throw it away. Yeah. And so why do we throw it away? Well, we throw it away because it spoils. It goes bad. So the initial product, are you in the lab? Are you in a pitch deck?

Are you raising money and then going and doing R&D? It was all, and it was just an idea on a sheet of paper. Cool. You know, I didn't know, because I called my mom to tell her. about this idea and she's like, sweetie, that sounds nice, but you don't know anything about fruits and vegetables. That is true. That's the easy part. That is true. But I'm like, well, I just learned all this, I learned all the material science stuff, so I could probably learn the fruits and vegetables. So I made a list, right? Because I didn't know it would work. I didn't know that this

idea would work, but I made a list of the fruits and vegetables and just in terms of how long they lasted. And the shortest ones are like raspberries, blackberries, strawberries. But What's at the bottom of the list? The longest lasting stuff is like mandarin, oranges, great fruits. I don't need to know a lot about fruits and vegetables to know that the ones with appeal lasts a lot longer than the ones without it. Just put those words together. Yeah, yeah, yeah.

Now we've got to figure out how to make it. Yeah. And that was the hard part. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. So what, like, specific founder journey, you have this idea. You tell your mom about it.

She's like, good. That's nice, sweetie. But you don't know anything about fruits and vegetables. And then what do you do next? I actually didn't know what fruits and vegetables were made. So I'm a material scientist, so I'm kind of obsessed with what stuff is made out of. And so the first question was, well, if you've got this strategy to allow fruit to last longer by strengthening the peel that's there, what's there now? So I was starting to do, you know, I'd been trained for this, started to do research.

What are the skins of fruits and vegetables made out of? And totally blew my mind because, you know, I'd been working on these solar. cells. So then to pivot and start looking at, we don't think about fruits and vegetables is made out of stuff. We think of them as fruits and vegetables. But they're, they're mixtures of really specific molecules. And so it was, what's the skin made out of? And turns out they're made out of these plant oils. And it was, huh. So these skins are made of the plant oils. And then it wasn't just that the strawberries, it wasn't just that the orange skin was made out of these plant oils. It was the strawberry skin was made out of the same thing.

And that was like a big, like that was like a mind blower because it was, well, wait, if lemons last a really long time and they've got the same thing as a strawberry. Why can't you apply? Can we just do more of that? Yeah. And it's so simple. Yeah, it's so simple at one level, but we were so addicted to refrigeration and pesticides and plastic wrap to try to address this stuff. of using something plant-based was, like, at the time, it was kind of crazy. Yeah. So, uh, grant money early on. When does the business?

New venture competition. New venture competition. New venture competition. No way. No way. UCSB. Yeah, I remember. And wasn't that, wasn't that like, didn't you get like 25 grand or something?

Yeah. We got like, we got like 10 grand. No, for, for a rat student. No, I remember, I remember, I remember this, this program. And, uh, yeah, it was like, it was really like venture funding for ants. I mean, my first company was 17K. He'd be at least twice this size. 17K, first company for me.

Yes. It's enough. If you're eating ramen and just paying rent. I mean, my yearly salary was $24,000. Yeah. So this was like a 50% bonus. Yeah. It was enough to incorporate the business.

Yep. First business address was on Del Playa. No way. That is crazy. That's like probably the most enterprise value created from an incorporation on Del Plya. You'll probably get some. Del Pliya is like, yeah, just a very notorious street. It's the street that runs.

It's the street that runs in Ila Vista, which is where the university is. It's a street that runs along basically as close to the water as possible. So you want to be on the... So you're usually surfing if you're on that street. Maybe a little bit. Maybe a little bit. Yeah, we were at the end of the street, you know. I was in grad school.

Good. No, that's actually good. That means you're way more locked in. Basically, like, the middle zone is a night. I don't think any enterprise values being created there closer because it's basically one you're farthest from the university But it's like much more kind of you're closer to nature It's a little bit quieter there but you go two blocks down Yeah negative enterprise value yeah yeah yeah

Yeah, okay so you kind of have this insight you you have a little grant funding Are you able to make MVP's with that grant? No was able to do the research, and it got to the point where it was, you know, I couldn't, there was no proof that it would work. This idea that we could add, we could strengthen the peel and it would last longer. It was kind of the, well, the lemon lasts longer than the strawberry, but will it work if we actually build a business around this? And so it was research, research, you know, measure, measure, but, you know, okay, at some

point, I couldn't figure out, I couldn't find a reason it wouldn't work. but I also there was nowhere written that it would work and so it came to the point but how hard could it be you just spray you just put some stuff on on an apple and leave it out right well that's that's what's wild is there was when we I'm joking when I said no no but but kind of that I mean that was how simple it was supposed to be but how do you tell whether or not it's working actually it's kind of hard because normally if you were gonna you know apply it to an apple you'd have to wait a month to see what happened and that's just a

really long iteration product iteration cycle and so we actually developed these time lapse camera systems was kind of our first product

so we could see tiny changes and so would you effectively like go by two apples hopefully from the same orchard put same tree you had to do yeah same tree

that was a big problem in the beginning we were going to the grocery store and buying fruit and going like why does this one rot faster than this one they came out of the same bin well turns out those could be potentially

from completely different countries, let alone different orchards or different trees. And most of them have gone through this supply chain. You know, the average apple that's eaten in the U.S. is a year old. No way. Yeah. No way. If you're eating an apple in July, it's hitting its first birthday, basically. Wow.

Yeah. That's crazy. Yeah. I grew up in, uh, globalized. We'd be growing in the stock. I grew up in northern California or something. I grew up in northern California. So the average apple that I would eat as a lot of,

kid. I picked off the tree. Yeah, and we can get back to that. Yeah. You know, you keep hearing about this farm two table thing, but the two is obscuring everything that's happening. Okay. Right. You hear about what's going on the farm. Yeah. You hear about, you know, you know what's happening on the table or in the restaurant, but the two is like, well, that apple might have been grown in Chile. Yeah. Yeah. And gone through a refrigerated supply chain with pesticides sprayed all over it. And then fumigate it. Yeah. When it came into the country before it sat in storage somewhere and then, you know, you picked it up at the grocery store thinking it was fresh off the tree. Yeah.

And of course it's, of course it's not. Yeah, talk about the early business model, the farm side, the table side, distributors, supermarkets. Like there's a lot of different players in the supply chain that might be interested in the business. How did you think about cracking it? Well, we were so naive. We thought, you know, well, hey, if food lasted longer, more of it could get to people. And so we'd be able to feed people and that'd be a,

amazing. But it turns out that actually the early feedback that we got from customers was, I don't want food to last longer. The garbage can is my best customer. Every piece of food that you throw away is another piece of food that I get to sell. So there's this crazy mismatch and incentive where you want to buy something that's better quality and longer lasting. Somebody earlier in the supply chain might not have any sort of interest in that. So we actually, Our first customer was right up the street from us. We make our product out of plant material. So we were looking for plant material.

And this guy was growing coffee cherries. I didn't know coffee beans. Like they're inside of a coffee cherry. Okay. This was news to me. Yeah. So you got all these coffee cherries after you get the beans. We met this guy.

We're telling him about what we're doing. He said, this sounds really amazing. Can you do anything for my finger limes? Okay. And we're like, what the hell is a finger lime? I mean, I've never heard of one of these things. and they're these little micro-citrous. You cut them open, they look like caviar pearls inside.

You put them on oysters and salads and this kind of stuff, but they only last for five days. They lived right at the street. So we started working with this small farmer on these caviar limes, because his thing was he had to air freight these caviar limes to places like Chicago and York because they only lasted for five days,

these fancy restaurants. And so we started working with these caviar limes and gave them the ability to put them on trucks, basically saves them a ton of money. Now they last 20 days instead of five days. Like everybody's happy. But then we started going and saying, okay, well, let's do this again with other suppliers and other categories.

And this is when we got the feedback from them saying, we don't need it. We don't need it. Actually, maybe you guys should just stop doing this. Interesting. And what we did find... Did you ever get a visit from Big Four? fruit coming in saying, hey, buddy. It's like the guy, the guy. They were, they were, you know,

you guys probably have some of their masks around here. I've seen. Yeah, under different, under, in different clothing. Yeah. You know, actually our first work that we did in the industry, we were working with, we were doing a demonstration with a huge citrus company. And we were high-fiving because we're looking at the data going this, like, we just won contracts with the biggest suppliers in the U.S. And the data they came back with didn't look anything like our data. What does that mean? They

said, hey, your product doesn't work. Okay, interesting. And we were totally knocked backwards because we've got the exact same fruit that we bring back, hold, and make the same measurements on. They say, no, it doesn't look anything. Your product doesn't work. It almost completely blocked us out of

the U.S. market. It's such a small industry when somebody starts spreading rumors that, oh, so you think they were, you think they were, they were just, they were just basically lying to you. They're, they didn't match our data. Interesting. Interesting. Didn't match our data. And it's such a tightly controlled industry that, you know, we were locked out.

So we actually had to go to market originally in Europe. Oh, interesting. Inact us all the way over to Europe. It's that tightly, that tightly controlled. But what we found was, was that in Europe, people were looking for that. Okay. People were looking for a way to have access to healthier fruits and vegetables that that were in waste. They had huge initiatives around this. Even like companies, like the retailers were actually talking about this kind of stuff. And we started with, we started with

avocados because of the joke with the avocado. Not now, not now, not now. Oh, yeah. Now. Too late? Yeah. And it solved this, the, you know, this challenge that we had where the supply chain wasn't so interested in having food last longer, but the retailer was. Okay. Yeah. Because if they bought an avocado and didn't sell the avocado, that was a waste of money. Dude, my use my UCSB days, avocado was such an extreme luxury that the joke of like not now, not now, not now, now, it's bad or whatever. Like that was so real. I was like monitoring my avocado as being like, I can't, I cannot let this go. Yeah. And it's because they're breathing. You don't think about it. But Fruit is still alive when you pick it.

At least you want to be eating it while it's still alive. Yeah. And it has a certain number of breaths. So at the end, it's breathing, breathing, breathing. It eats up all the energy it's got inside. And then if you eat it afterwards, you're eating dead food. Yeah. And most people in the U.S. are eating dead food.

Right. They don't even know. Yeah. Because it's dressed up in wax and all this. So retailers would actually acquire produce from a distributor and then apply appeal to the product. Here was what was so problematic was the rethinking. was the retailers loved it. Because now they're able to buy food

that they can actually sell and they were actually telling their shoppers about this. But that meant they had to, they're not growing the food. So they have to tell the suppliers, hey, we want you to use this product. The suppliers hated this. Absolutely hated this because they had pretty much shut it down.

And so the retailer starts telling the suppliers about what they need to do in their business. And don't get me wrong, we were a headache in their operations because we were this, you know, we were this new thing that they had to do. And these things have been operating the way they've been operating for, you know, 100 years. Yeah. So, but that's the way that it had to, that's the way that it had to happen in the U.S. was, was from the retail side, you know, pushing back into the supply chain. Sure. And so what year is this when this starts working in Europe?

2019, 2020. Oh, wow. Yeah, it took a while. I mean, and you had already raised at that point, like hundreds of millions of dollars, right? I think probably we had raised a hundred million about by then. You know, when we raised some money from the Indrice and Horowitz guys, we used the entire world's supply of our plant extract to treat the avocados that we shipped up to them beforehand as a demo.

We shipped up like a case of avocados and said, hey, put these out. on your desk so that when we sat down in the meeting with Mark was what happened what happened that was the world supply yeah that's higher right bet at all that was it yeah bet at all burn the ships you raise some money what would it look like actually scaling up your supply chain oh man uh you know when we first started like I said you know the the we were when we first started we were getting you know these coffee cherries for this local farm and then we were We were extracting these materials, basically. But it was super expensive to do because it wasn't a scaled up process.

And so we started with extracting these things ourselves in the lab, just using like laboratory procedures. It wasn't really for any sort of commercial purpose other than, hey, this can work. We had to show that this could work. And so in the beginning, it cost us something like, you know, 100 bucks to treat an avocado, which that's not going to work. That's not going to work. but once we figured out the mixtures of these plant oils, then we could figure out, okay, how do you optimize the process to be able to isolate these things?

And it turns out there's a really efficient way to isolate oils. Distillation. Yeah. It's the same way that they get alcohol out of... Boil it off. You boil it off. And you can do this thing called precision distillation,

which basically allows you to separate out, really specific, really specific oils. Yeah. And that turned out to be a super scalable, super cheap. Because you can do it in a bigger and bigger VAT. You can do it in a bigger flame, bigger centrifuge if you need that. And you just, you pull vacuum, you heat it up a little bit, and you're able to separate it out. By this point, did your mom think that you could figure it out fruit?

It was so cool. I would go home for Christmas and, you know, my mom would like collect the little appeal stickers. like off the fruit that she bought. And that was just like, man, like, that was so cool. Yeah. To just have, you know, like to have my mom go to the grocery store we went to growing up and be able to like have our product. Because growing up in Michigan, I grew up in Michigan.

I'm not a California guy. I love it out here, but I didn't grow up here. And it was just night and day. You know, I'd go back to Michigan and go, oh, yeah, most people, I mean, I didn't experience what good produce, good produce was. living in the Midwest. Yeah, I mean, I've spent basically my whole life in California, and so always had access to farmers markets.

And sometimes the farmers markets are selling product that isn't actually, that's not really, like the farmer is not present and maybe not even in the state. But oftentimes, oftentimes it's, you know, it is hyper local. So you get super spoiled living here. You get super spoiled living here. And, you know, I, one thing I've come to realize is if you don't know the person growing your food, they don't have a lot of incentive to do the right thing for you. Yeah.

You know, it's just people sell food based on price. And if I have a lemon that's coated in pesticides and a lemon that's not coated in pesticides, you can't tell that by looking at it. And this one's cheaper. The one coated in pesticides is cheaper because they have less rot. So you buy the cheaper one and the person who's doing the right thing doesn't get rewarded for it. So there's just this horrible incentive in these supply chains to cut corners and do stuff that is horrifying. What did you learn about the organic, the like just organic as a certification and the issues that we had Brian Johnson on the show recently?

And he was saying like he actually oftentimes will assume that organic, food is going to be more contaminated and worse for you than the non-organic just because there's all these like workarounds and and and it's that it's it's it's marketing organic is is marketing and yeah there's a whole agency there's agencies set up just to certify products to be allowed for use on organic produce and there's this kind of I don't know where this idea came from that organic produce, no pesticides or no coatings or better for you. But look at their actual marketing.

They never say that stuff. Oh, interesting. They never say that stuff because it's false advertising. They can't say that. But the brand is, you know, oh, this apple was picked right off the tree and is now in the grocery store.

It's just absolutely not true. What is an inorganic apple? Just like computer chips and aluminum or something? Aren't they all organic? Yeah. They are literally organisms. right? Yes.

Yeah. So definitionally. You got to jump on the marketing. Yeah. You got to put your marketing hat on to understand what they mean. But I mean, that's ultimately, like, part of the problem is that, like, you were sort of attacked with, like, aggressive marketing campaign against your product, right? And kind of cuts both ways.

Like, take us through that part of the journey. Like, did it start, like, a low rumble and then turn into, like, a firestorm? We, yeah. Oh, man. PTSD, just even thinking about that. I'm sorry. No, it's all right. We should talk.

about it because if you're building something right now this is the playbook okay they will use against you okay if you're going out if you're if you're threatening some incumbent yeah so set the table for us because you've raised some money the business is working the product is working you're in enough stores at this point yeah your mom is buying hundreds of hundreds of employees or stores the stickers are the stairs are on right now exactly you have distribution you have distribution she has to go to some special store no one of one like 60% of the avocados yeah

that are being sold in the United States are with our product. Yep. And we are announcing a kind of a first of its kind of partnership with a supplier, a supplier of lemons. And he goes out in the media and does a press release and says, this product is amazing. I want this product on ever, I'm going to treat every lemon in the world with this product.

And people didn't like, boom. He gets doxed by these, like, video campaigns, like put his phone number up there. He's getting death threats from saying that he's going to do this. And this, what we thought, because the original, I mean, we saw, I remember one of our guys coming to me and saying, you know, hey, we're, you know, someone's saying our product. is this cleaning agent that's being marketed in the UK. Yeah. And it was, oh. It was a similar name?

Exact same name. Exactly same name. So it's not even a shared ingredient. No. Okay. Because sometimes there's precursors like, you know, I can drink dihydrogen monoxide. That sounds very scary. Yeah.

That's of course H2O. That's water. Dihydrogen monoxide is the scary version. You might find dihydrogen monoxide in bleach. You might find it in cleaning products. That's not even what's going on. Totally separate company. Okay.

Totally separate company. So it's a cleaning product. Okay. Also with the company's name. Two posts at the exact same time go live on Facebook. This is a toxic product with a link to this. This other company, which is a cleaning product, which of course, you know, is not something you should be eating. Right.

Exactly. And it just. And they don't want to put their cleaning product on your food either. Like two separate companies. Yeah, right, exactly. Different solutions for different products, like specific ones for food. Yeah, of course. And this thing just goes crazy.

Yeah. And then, you know, and then, you know, the attacks morphed into, you know, so we thought we cleared this up. Hey, look, this is a cleaning product. This is our product made from plants. and they morphed the attack into, they couldn't find anything wrong with our product itself. So they morphed the attack into, this is a Bill Gates thing because of the nonprofit donation.

We got 100 grand in 2012 to research Casava route, which we don't even have a product for today. And then we got a follow-on grant for this Casava project for a million bucks. I mean, we've raised $800 million. Yeah. And, and, but that, and, but if you go online and you look up our name, you'll see. It's not board seat. It's not.

Nothing. I've never even met this guy. Zero involvement. Zero involvement whatsoever. We got to check from, from a foundation that he, that he donates to. By the way, like, let's talk about all the other people. Yeah. Who donate to this foundation.

Yeah. We get, we get these, these donations. Okay. To work on Kasava route, which you probably never even heard of. Yeah. It's a starch source and subsist. in Africa. It's kind of like an equivalent of... Sure. But you have scientists, you have researchers that could potentially dig that up.

Like the coffee chair thing. You didn't know about it. We're in the business of, hey, if you're growing food and it's going bad. Yeah. Figure out what's going on. Can we figure out how to fix this? And the result of that might not be a business, might be more of like a research paper or a study. Exactly. Where you took the cassava route, ran it through some lab tests, tried to figure out what was wrong. Does your product work? Do other products work? Yeah, just understand what's going on. Try to figure this out. And we do. And we do. we actually did figure it out. It's a totally different way that you solve the problem.

But, I mean, that's what the money was for to figure that out. So absolutely no involvement. But if you search our company's name online today, it's like Bill Gates' appeal. And I'm like, how did that happen? And for a while, we thought this is, people are just confused. Until we started, until it didn't stop. You know, and it didn't stop. And it just kept morphing slightly and new photos would come.

out and the charge would change. And we started mapping it. And we started mapping back the accounts. And we started looking at the timestamps. And we started looking at the accounts that were quickly reposting this stuff. And it's completely coordinated. Interesting. Wow. Yeah, because people, I feel like when, when like there's an organt. There's plenty of like controversies that are entirely organic. Or entirely organic. Right. There's, there's a bunch of stuff online this week from a certain, from a certain sort of like health platform. Oh, yeah. You mentioned this.

That, uh, that a lot of companies have had problems with that, um, and that is like genuinely organic. There's a guy running a platform that rates foods and he has his own, but yeah. Well, he has his own, he has his own. But it's an individual. It's not, it's one individual. It's not like funded by a specific group. It's just kind of like one guy running a business.

Yeah. seems to be at odds with a bunch of companies. But yeah, like at first you're probably like, am I going crazy? Like, why does this keep like? People are just confused, you know, like the truth is a powerful thing. You know, obviously the truth will kind of come out about this. Sure, sure, sure. And it didn't.

It just didn't. It just didn't. And they started activating real, real people. Okay. Some of which were real. I'm not sure, like what was the long term? What do you think their goal was? It got to that point.

But they started activating them to call our retail customers in the United States. And one by one, we got dropped by every single retail partner that we had in the United States. That Boulder that we'd rolled up the hill for 10 years just rolled all the way back down. That's insane. In the U.S. It was devastating. I mean, I had to let go hundreds of people that I cared about. Our entire U.S. business got destroyed.

What was in the tool to us? What year is that 2024? Yeah, it was like starting to happen in 2023. We started to lose some accounts. And in 2024 was really when, you know, it started to go just like, it just went to zero in the U.S. Wow. And it was doubled down in, you know, South America, doubled down in Africa, double down in Europe. What else was in the tool, the tool chest at that point?

Like, did you consider just a full rebrand? Yeah. maybe tucking the brand further up the supply chain so that the sticker is not there? Absolutely. What did you consider what you wind up doing? Yeah. I mean, it was pretty existential for us because, you know, when we first started talking to retailers, we were saying, hey, you should put a sticker on this food because it's better for your customer.

Yeah. And the pushback that we got was, well, if we start telling people that your stuff is better for them, what are they going to think about the other stuff? And so, you know, the joke's on us now, right? Yeah. But so it was, it was really existential for us to say, well, let's not tell people about this. Because our whole ethos was, hey, people should know what's on their food. If they knew it was on their food, they were going to prefer this.

This is going to be something that they buy. Yeah. But the conversation was, well, these attacks aren't organic attacks. You know, organic people are, some people are getting roped into this thing. That's kind of how they work. Yeah. You know, they're like, there's somebody kind of behind it, you know. planting the seeds, there's machinery, and then they're just trying to find vulnerable people.

Yeah. And, you know, yeah, yeah. And make it their personal mission. And make it their personal mission. And they were really successful at that. But, you know, when it's a deliberate attack on the business, it's not a confused thing, you change your brand. It's just going to follow you to whatever you, you know, whatever you shift your brand over to. It almost looks, you know, it even looks like you're running. It looks like you're running. And so, I mean, we've been building this, this playbook. from scratch. And if there's other founders out there that are building stuff that is, that is

threatening someone in an incumbency position like this, I would love to talk to them and share what we've learned because the beginning is just completely disorienting. Nothing makes sense. Stuff's getting said that just has no basis whatsoever. And you're trying to, you just think the whole world's against you. You know, you kind of shut down a little bit. And it's not until you really get your bearings and you start to see, you know, see the kind of systematized nature of these things that you realize, actually, there is someone behind this and you can start to figure out who they are. It just takes a really deliberate effort. And now you're a fruit company learning how to do digital forensics. Yeah. And, you know, and you think of the timing with all this,

there's so much mistrust of the health system and the food system. And the food. system and, you know, billionaires, and you combine all those things at once. It's like there's so much kind of... It's also something where... The perfect story. The buyer is almost everyone. Everyone has an opinion about food. Whereas there have been somewhat even like more...

Like your scandal doesn't seem legitimate at all. There's been legitimate scandals in like enterprise software, for example. But there are like 10,000 buyers or 100,000 buyers. And so it's not something. that goes viral again and again and again. And even if you're a consumer of that piece of technology, but it's white label and it's under the hood, and that particular buyer was able to sit down

and understand the deeper context, you have to win over like this mass of humanity, basically. All the food buyers, which is everyone, the Tam is everyone, which is the beauty, but it cuts both ways. It cuts both ways. And what we find is that, you know, most, actually majority people haven't heard about this.

but a small percent of people have heard about it and they're activated. Who writes the reviews online? Sure, sure, sure. People. Yeah, yeah. It's the, you know, it's the, it's the not happy people. Yeah, of course, of course. And it's the people who are part of a system that's trying to stop something from happening.

That's so interesting. What, where are you at today? So the business is going strong outside of the United States. It's, it's dystopian for me to walk into a grocery store. in South America and find our products and to walk into a U.S. grocery store and see everything still treated with wax and pesticides and go, how is this possible? There are better options that actually help people are better for the world, eliminate plastic, eliminate pesticides, and we don't have access to them in the U.S. because a small group of people want to bury

these options. And technology is happening. Technology growth is happening in every single. single industry except for food. How is this? Which is insane given how much, how much of, you know, consumer wallet goes towards this category, how much, you know, that is the human experience. It's like, do you eat? And then you're waiting around to eat again. Like, that's life.

It's often the best part of my day. So I get that. I resonate with that. Yeah. Yeah, it is, it's truly mind-blowing. And just how disconnected we've gotten from food, you know, like. like most people's connection to food is they go to the grocery store and they pick up a piece of food. Yeah. I started growing, you know, a lot of food, you know, tomatoes, you know, peppers, this kind of stuff.

There is something amazing about growing food. And we've gotten totally disconnected with that. So I'm optimistic about this future where we actually are able to, you know, people are starting to feed each other. Again, people are, you know, you're growing tomatoes, you're growing carrots. You know, we have the opportunity to trade. those with each other because that can actually happen at a smaller scale if you're able to match the, match the supply and demand. And so that's one of the things that we're talking about a lot. How do we help small producers, community production in the United States where we can actually empower people to grow their own food, trade it with each other so that they're able to feed each other, feed communities, and not be so dependent on this monolith where we're growing

food halfway around the world. Yeah, big fruit that tried to kill you in the cradle. Yeah, yeah. Yeah. Other lessons for entrepreneurs, I mean, you mentioned, like, if someone is going to war with a major industry that's allied, it's allied against them, there's worries there. Do you, is there any, not to put, like, you know, like, dig up potential, like, Monday morning quarterbacking. But is there anything where, like, trademark searches could have avoided that? this. Is there something where like if you could play back and think five steps forward, is any of this predictable? Is any of this like, you know, preventable? So when we started the business, we were, I think we were in a different, we were a different era. Yeah. We started the business in

2011, 2012. Sure. Social media was not what it is. Yeah. And I've experienced, you are just vulnerable to a different set of attack vectors. Yeah. In, in the modern era. Yeah. And, you know, if I could, you know, go back and talk to myself, you know, five years ago, it would have been to acknowledge, hey, we're in a different era now in terms of where the vulnerability can come from. Yeah. On my list, you know, on my list never would have been, you know, someone's going to say that Bill Gates owns your company and it's part of a global depopulation agenda. Like, that would not have been on my list. You're like, make a list of a thousand things.

Yeah, yeah. It would now. And it should be on, would now. And it should be on everybody's list. Slot three of the deck. Like, actually, maybe make your, maybe make your Thanksgiving dinner productive and that, you know, that relative who's got all these theories. Yeah.

Tell them about what you're building. And just say, hey, what? Finds applause. Finds applause. My business plan. And let's talk about that. And actually, like, maybe it's like a write-off now because you got some good advice from that, that, that, that's very funny.

Yeah, I mean, I, I think it's a. there was someone who had a, like a regional, like, sauce business, and they bumped into another regional sauce business, like, halfway across the world that, like, the two companies never would have ever competed in the same name space, but because of social media and the way things fly around, that both of these, like, sort of storied brands in their local communities are now, like, budding heads and suing each other. And so that stuff happens all the time. It's very hard to predict.

Yeah, in confusion. What was I going to say? I, yeah, it's also the mentality when, like, your mentality as a founder, you discover this problem, you discover an innovative solution that's aligned with nature's own approach. And you come out and you're like, I'm trying to fix like a systemic problem. And so you're coming in with the attitude of, of, um, as like a good actor. Like operating as like, I'm a good actor. I'm trying to solve a global problem for humanity.

But when your solution becomes misaligned with someone else's business model, the way those, the way those. And I've just seen this with, I've seen this with a bunch of companies, specifically in the, in the, any, for some reason, like health, anything like health, supplements, like food. Yeah. It's just like becomes like hyper, hyper,

political really quickly. It becomes super emotional. What starts as being like, you know, concepts grounded and science quickly becomes something else. And I've been shocked because I know, you know, I know a bunch of like health podcasters that have gotten into controversies over, you know, and health brands. And it is, it's been wild to see so many people that I know personally, that I believe are waking up every day, trying to create the best possible product for humanity in a category or create the best possible information for people.

And then they become the enemy because of some other force in the world. And it's a real challenge. I'm the co-founder of a water filter company. And my journey into that business was realizing that there were so many companies in that category that were selling water filters, which you are relying on this device to provide clean water for yourself, something that you're consuming all day long. And I was looking around the category,

and I found, I tested a filter early on, and the filter was adding heavy metals to the water. It was like, I found a filter that was like very popular. You're going to turn it around. Yeah, yeah, exactly, exactly. But I found this filter that was like a very popular filter. I got independent testing done on it. I tested like 10 different filters that were popular on Amazon. And multiple of them were adding heavy metals to the water.

So you take water that is like maybe not clean. And then you come out with water that's certainly not clean. And that was this crazy moment. And then as that company, you know, the company's done quite well in part by trying to, you know, over-test, over-share all these things. But there's still, again, immediately after launch, there was legacy brands that were trying to say, like, oh, they didn't, you know, trying to discredit like the lab or all these different things. And it's like, and again, it does get, you have to just, you have to just, like, go through it and continue to lead with transparency and science and all these things.

but there are, it's a, it's not a, it's not an approach that, that, that, that I can ever think about doing, right, of like, I never, you know, I never would go out and try to mislead a bunch of people. Right. You can't even imagine someone doing that. Like, you're like a gold retriever. We, we talk about, we talk about, we talk about, great dogs. I don't think that as a guy. No, no, no, we talk about, we talk about, we have a bit.

We have a bit where like golden retriever mode. It's like you should just be like, you know, you should be like friendly, happy and high energy. And like a golden retriever, a golden retriever cannot imagine like attacking, you know, like some kid running by. Right? They're just focused on the ball. Right. Focus on the ball. And so as a golden retriever entrepreneur, right?

You're just focused on chasing the ball, right? Chasing the dream. Solving the problem. Solving the problem. And there are. There are pit bulls out there. It's like, that are not,

they're focused on. Think things. And it's like, in this case, maybe like, like to the point of like, what's on the third slide of the deck, it's like,

maybe you should have been overthinking, but that's not good advice. I don't know. You know, that's who I, that's what happened to me. When I said kind of, I, you know,

it really, like, uh, was despondent for a while. That's what happened. You know, you go out in the world and you're told, do the right thing. Be a good person.

Work hard. You know, find good people. work with them, builds, like, you know, create something, like, good that helps us. Yeah. That your mom's gonna be proud of. That your mom's proud of that your mom is buying in the grocery store.

And then this stuff happens and you realize that the way that you thought the world worked is not the way that the world worked. It's a golden retriever going to the dog park for the first time. And it's running and there's a pit bull at the dog park. And you're jumping around chasing the ball,

the pit bulls. It's like, welcome to the park. Welcome to the park. Yeah. And you just go, okay, so, for a while you just go, no, that's, you know, I don't want the world to work the way, but then eventually you go, well, I can either complain about the world working this way, or I can acknowledge that's the way the world works and go from there.

And the damning thing about this for innovators is they don't have to, they don't have to change people's minds about what your product is. They just have to make them suspicious. Yeah. Like the U.S. They just have to make them suspicious. And not only the FDA, the European Union. Which is like, 10, 100 times more hardcore.

It's like they're the most strict, like, regulatory. agency in the world. Yeah. And it's like, our product is literally food. There's like a million. There's like a million products that we, that are in our grocery stores that can't be sold there. It can't be sold. It's like 4,000 approved, I think, in the U.S., and it's like 400 in Europe.

Ours is one of them. There's literally no upper daily intake limit of our product. You could just eat it as food. And that's okay. You're not on the Prop 65 list, California? No. That's insane. Everything's on the Prop 65 list.

We would definitely not want to be on that list. No, no, no, of course. But, yeah, yeah, yeah. And there's a lot of supplements. It's remarkably low. Like, you walk into Starbucks. I don't have a problem with Starbucks. Yeah. It's on Prop 65.

And I'm like, yeah, okay, like, they're being an extra safe. Yeah. And, yeah, that's the thing. There's, there's, like, health supplements that people take that are on that list, right? Which they're probably unaware of at some level. Or are they just, like, you know. It's sort of like the most conservative, but to not even bet on that is crazy.

Exactly. Wild, yeah. It's plant oil. Yeah, yeah. Like, if you've eaten avocado oil, coconut oil, like, that, our product is in, is an ingredient in those oils. Sure, sure. Like, you don't think about, again, like, you don't think about fruit as having ingredients.

Yeah. It's a mixture of different molecules. Like, you don't think about oils. You're not even eating it. You're not even eating the skin. You're not even, which is even crazier. So these attacks, like these comments come up and it's like, this is like poison. And you're going, well,

First of all, no. Yeah. And second of all, really for an avocado? Like such an incredible level. It's so crazy. Yeah. Walk outside. So what is the, you don't strike me as someone who's just going to, he's going to give up.

Like, what's the path back? What's the path back to America? You know, the internet kicked our ass. And so I've been, it took me a while to think about it. But I've started flipping around and asked the internet for help. I've been offering bounties to people to help track back. Figure out what happened. Figure out what happened.

And I've just been posting them on Fridays. I haven't figured out what today's is going to be because I submitted one. I put one out last week and I just blew it blew up the number of people who were sending stuff in. So I'm really bullish that the same way, you know, right now there's no incentive. There's no cost to somebody perpetrating an attack on you online. Sure, sure, sure. The bots do their thing. They repost stuff.

They like whatever they share. They manufacture engagement and it goes. But they're kind of doing it with impunity because, nobody's taking the time to be like, okay, who's this user that commented this thing? Oh, weird. They normally just talk about anime. And today they started talking about... Yeah, no one is clicking through.

Nobody's clicking through. They're just seeing the headlines. And actually, if you just give a little bit of... Well, this is the experiment I'm running right now. If you give them a little bit of financial incentive, turns out there's tens of thousands of people who will spend an hour, you know, going into this stuff, especially with AI. So, I mean, that's the vector that I'm going with right now.

I think we're in the, I think we're, you got to go all the way to Joe Rogan. This is the start. I think so. You got to go straight to the top. Let's go. He's mentioned us a couple of times. No, but he seems like somebody who would be naturally skeptical of technology with food. You would think.

Technology with food because he's like, I like steak. Yeah, right. Which our product is also in, by the way, right? So he should be down with this. Yeah. Yeah, no, he's had a couple of guests on it. Pull that up. Click five live.

Links deeper. get to the, and you don't have to go, you go one or two links and you don't have to go far at all. See the real story. And like you just see how people work on social media. Like I hate to say this, but like I'm sitting on an airplane. I can't not see what this person's doing one seat over to the right. Like, and this is the move. Scroll, see something, click comments.

Scroll, see something, click comments. So doesn't matter what's posted. Yeah. I don't, I'm not, people don't form their opinion until they see the first couple comments. And so that's how they hijack. Yeah. That's how they hijack what's going on in your brain. Yeah.

They just control the comments. They control the... No, there's going to be... There's going to be some truly insane documentaries in about 10 years about this era of the internet and how people started... I've seen this in, you know, AI is so hyper-competitive and there's like this insane, you know, horse race. And I've seen... Earlier this year, I was starting to see posts that would have like 20,000 likes on 200,000 views, three comments. getting a 10% like rate is like not a thing, especially on X.

Exactly. Like there's a handful. And so you're like, okay, well, who's actually engaging with? It's clearly getting a lot of views, but it's not necessarily reflecting, you know. It's not real. Yeah. It's manufactured. Last question for me.

Have you been keeping tabs on the other appeal, the clean company? Like, wait, because it's their business. You guys could buy it and shut it down. Now we are. those guys. We're going to have that CEO on. Now we keep your floors clean and we keep your fruit fresh.

I'm just wondering because obviously they would be probably unaffected, but at the same time, they probably have some confusion. People are like, I thought you were a cleaning company. Wait,

your floor cleaners healthy now? Yeah, yeah, yeah, do they have a knock on effect? I don't know. That's an interesting thing to dig into. We'll follow up with you on. Thanks so much for coming on and breaking it down for us.

This is a fascinating story. I know it's obviously a really hard journey, but I'm extremely optimistic. If somebody else learns from it, I'm really happy. Thank you for coming out. This is fantastic. Have a great rest of your day. This is a great time.

We'll catch up. Yeah. What do you want to wrap up with, Jordy? I mean, we could go into the Warren Buffett of London, but it's a long story in the financial times. We can save this for another one. I did think this was interesting. His children's investment fund has become the fifth most profitable hedge fund of all time. What a good name for a hedge fund.

Children's investment fund. Doing it for the children. Beating the benchmarks. Chris Hone, he's been honing his skills. The Warshinator. Warsh is in. Sworn in. Frank says,

good luck, bro. And the prediction is that there will be a rate hike or something like that. I saw both a cut and a hike predicted kicking off with good vibes potential for a hike. But I think the market is pricing in a rate increase, not a rate decrease, which of course is what a lot of folks have been hoping for, but with the economy heating up, maybe a hike is in order, but there will be a whole bunch of a knock-on effects from this. I wanted to talk about the robotic legs, the exoskeletons. Would you rock these, or would you be sitting it out? The HyperShell X Ultra S is an exoskeleton that the Wall Street Journal demoed. Thousand-watt-wit-watt hips.

Thousand-watt hips. You wear these, and they help you hike and run up hills. I listen to too many shows with Paul Murlucky, where he talks about the capability of an Iron Man suit potentially just ripping you apart, and so I would be a little afraid. But I might give it a try. Also imagine, you know, bad actor.

Remember all the DGI drones had like a backdoor. Oh, yeah. Bad actor takes over your suit. Start dancing. And then it makes you do Michael Jackson. and badly in front of your peers? Potentially. It could be wildly embarrassing.

I guess I'm unclear on the goal, because couldn't you just go on a shorter hike or a less steep hike to make it easier? I guess if you want to see the top of a big mountain, but you can't make it in a certain amount of time. Explain the market. Are you in the market for these? Yes.

Yes. Wait, your answer is couldn't you just go on a shorter hike? Yes. If this allows me to go on a six-mile hike, couldn't you achieve last in your life? Couldn't I just do a one-mile hike? You can take a car. Can you just stay home and watch TV?

You can take a car or a helicopter. Like, you don't, like, this is sort of an in-between thing. When, when are you actually deploying this? I bet you if you get these, maybe we have to order these. I think we have to order these for Tyler and see if insurance. I don't think you can just drive up like a massive mountain. We're getting you these. They're, they're two grand, but we're getting you some.

And we're going to see if it transforms you into Iron Man. Also, uh, cattle, CATL, the Chinese EV battery giant is investing in deep seek. Some big rounds going on. Also, BYD. Remember? Remember? Oh, yeah. This is what AI 2020.

They predicted that BYD would get an F1 team. That's right. Which is what happening, which is what's happening. At least they're in talks. BYD is in talks with Christian Horner over entering F1. That would be pretty crazy. Does BYD have any gas powered ice engines? I don't know.

They're about to. They're about to. Who knows? Well, folks, it's Memorial Day weekend. Yeah, go out fun. We'll see you Tuesday. Have a good rest of your day. Have a great weekend.

Leave us five stars on Apple Podcasts and Spotify. Sign up for our newsletter at tbPN.com. It's been an honor. And we will see you tomorrow. Slash Tuesday. We love you. Goodbye.