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

Summary

TBPN Podcast Summary

Episode: Starship Launch, World's Fair Retrospective, Sacks Spikes AI EO
Date: May 22, 2026
Hosts: John Coogan & Jordi Hays
Guests: Dan Shipper (Every), James Rogers (Appeal Sciences)

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Overview

This lively TBPN episode covers breaking tech news and deep-dive interviews:

• The AI Executive Order drama and David Sacks' intervention
• The IPO “mini-boom” led by SpaceX, OpenAI, and Anthropic
• Starship’s pivotal launch and the economics of the new space age
• A retrospective on the World’s Fair as a showcase for American innovation
• Startup founder conversations: AI’s impact on white-collar work (Dan Shipper), and the story of battling misinformation as a food-tech pioneer (James Rogers)

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Key Segments & Takeaways

1. The AI Executive Order That Wasn’t

[00:59 – 4:58]

• Yesterday, Politico reported that David Sacks made a last-minute appeal to President Trump to spike an executive order that would have required voluntary pre-release review of new frontier AI models.
• Trump canceled the order, stating:

  “I didn’t like certain aspects of it. I think it gets in the way of— 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.” (Host quoting Trump, 02:23)

• Debate over whether government or private companies should have oversight of AGI risks. “If you’re super AGI-pilled, these things are nuclear weapons." (James Rogers, 03:22)
• Fun aside on Disney’s legacy right to build a nuclear reactor for EPCOT, linking the tech-regulation theme to utopian city-building.

2. Microsoft’s Claude/AI Cost Move & LLM Dogfooding

[05:08 – 6:56]

• News that Microsoft allegedly canceled its internal Claude code license over costs, sparking debate on enterprise LLM spending.
• "They want to make the engineers eat dog food." (Host, 06:19)
• On engineers using what they build:

  “Being forced to constantly use the product that you’re shipping is a tried and true way to build a great product.” (Tyler, 06:34)

3. American Semiconductor Surge

[06:56 – 07:51]

• Micron announces breakthrough in US-produced DRAM; surging to near $850B market cap (+1000% YoY).
• US chip “dynamism” contrasts with AI-driven industry memory shortages.

4. The Great American IPO “Mini Boom”

[07:51 – 11:53]

• Wall Street Journal and Financial Times highlight the impending public listings of SpaceX, OpenAI, and Anthropic.
• Nasdaq has changed rules so passive index funds funnel billions toward these stocks at IPO, supercharging demand.
• SpaceX expected to leapfrog even Tesla's market cap.
• Musk awarded performance shares tied to settling 1M humans on Mars:

  “That’s exciting. That's a good goal…A whole lot of enterprise software and a million people living on Mars. That’s a vision I can get behind.” (Host, 14:09)

5. Starship V3 Launch – Hopes and Hiccups

[13:00 – 26:22]

• Starship V3 launch postponed due to a hydraulic pin failure; is central to SpaceX's IPO prospectus and risk profile.
• The business has shifted from being launch-focused to a multi-pronged data center, telecom, and space infrastructure company.
• $15B spent developing Starship so far.

  “This team in due course will execute on Starship and that will unlock tremendous value.” (Portfolio manager Daniel Hanson, quoted at 20:53)

• Comparison to Blue Origin’s economics and late “early investors.”

6. Nostalgia and Lessons from World’s Fairs

[28:30 – 45:06]

• A Wall Street Journal feature on the long arc of technological progress as measured by US World’s Fairs is read and debated.
• Fun facts: Telephone and Heinz Ketchup debuted at Philly 1876; Ferris Wheel and popcorn at Chicago 1893; space race innovations in 1962 Seattle; the decline in the US with color TV and punch cards in ‘64, almost nothing in ‘84.
• Discussion on how “invention” as a vocation has faded, replaced by “founder” and “businessperson.”

“It's so sad. We don’t really hear the term inventor anymore. Like, no one is primarily an inventor.” (James Rogers, 43:48)

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Main Interviews

Dan Shipper (Every) — AI’s Impact on Work & the Rise of “Codex-Native Apps”

[45:36 – 68:12]

On AI’s Transformative Leap

• Since November, models like Opus 4.5 have resulted in a “huge step change.”
• Agentic AI escalating from a coder tool to broad knowledge work; Codex now a “daily driver” for Shipper.
• “Delegating work is starting to cross the chasm…from something that you do if you’re a coder, to all of knowledge work.” (Dan Shipper, 47:09)
• AI can now automate high-skill tasks, but “it actually increases the demand for human experts…You need 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.” (Dan Shipper, 59:10)

On Jobs vs. Tasks

• AI automates tasks more than entire jobs, requiring human “bookends."
• Inside “every,” even with widespread automation and agents, headcount grew from 4 to almost 30 since GPT-3:

  “If you’re actually on the frontier, it seems like there’s more human work to do than ever. Why is that?” (Dan Shipper, 53:24)

SaaS “Apocalypse” Overstated

• While low code/AI agents let anyone build small apps, most people won’t "vibe code" or maintain their own tools.
• The next wave: “Codex-native apps”—browser-workspaces where agents and humans share context, making SaaS stickier and more personal.

Notable Moments

• “I just try to live up to my name.” (Dan Shipper, on being ‘the Shippinator’, 46:06)
• “Chat is not a very good medium for a lot of app interactions.” (Dan Shipper, 65:36)
• “Me and Codex are going to have the best birthday ever.” (Dan Shipper, 68:07)

James Rogers (Appeal Sciences) — Inventing Fruit Preservation & Battling Organized Disinfo

[69:16 – 118:02]

Backstory

• Rogers’ graduate work in material science at UCSB led him to try “solar paint”, then the idea of edible fruit coatings.
• Fundamental insight: fruit peel longevity relies on plant oils—the same chemicals can be added to more perishable fruits.
• Early MVP supported by grant funding and on-the-ground experiments (time-lapse cameras, apples from the same tree).

Market Obstacles & Distribution

• US supply chain was resistant—distributors preferred food to spoil (repeat sales); retailer incentives were misaligned; forced international (Europe) launch.
• Avocados became the wedge—solving the classic “not ripe / overripe” problem for both suppliers and customers.

Coordinated Attack & Collapse of US Business

• Sudden, coordinated social media campaigns began to spread misinformation, linking Appeal’s product to unrelated cleaning agents and even conspiracy-laden accusations of being a “Bill Gates depopulation plot.”
• “We started mapping back the accounts…The attacks kept morphing. It’s completely coordinated.” (James Rogers, 95:13)
• Result: “That boulder that we'd rolled up the hill for 10 years just rolled all the way back down in the U.S. It was devastating. Our entire US business got destroyed.” (James Rogers, 97:29)
• Rogers describes the emotional and operational impact:

  “You go out in the world and you’re told, do the right thing, be a good person…And then this stuff happens, and you realize, the way you thought the world worked is not the way the world works.” (James Rogers, 111:36)

Lessons for Founders

• “If you’re threatening some incumbent, this is the playbook they will use against you.”
• The US food market is now cut off for Appeal, with growth continuing in Europe, South America, and Africa.
• Rogers is now publicly crowdsourcing digital forensics (offering bounties) to track misinformation networks.

Final Insights

• US food system lags in adoption: “Technology growth is happening in every single industry except for food.” (James Rogers, 102:54)
• Even the most transparent and well-intentioned companies can be derailed by suspicious, coordinated opposition.
• “The damning thing for innovators is they don’t have to change people’s minds. They just have to make them suspicious.” (James Rogers, 112:26)

Notable Quotes

• On his mother’s pride: “It was so cool…I’d go home for Christmas and my mom would collect the little Appeal stickers off the fruit…To have my mom go to the grocery store we went to growing up and be able to have our product. That was so cool.” (James Rogers, 87:32)
• “If somebody else learns from it, I’m really happy.” (James Rogers, 118:02)

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Other Memorable Moments

• Hosts riff on innovation cycles: “If we had a World's Fair today, you'd have creatine gummies and AGI next to each other.” (Host, 35:09)
• “America’s first officially sanctioned World’s Fair…celebrated telephones and ketchup. One was disrupted much faster than the other.” (Host, 32:11)
• Running “golden retriever entrepreneur” vs. “pit bull” analogies for how founders face adversity.

  “A golden retriever cannot imagine, like, attacking…They're just focused on the ball.” (Tyler, 110:36)

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Timestamps (HH:MM)

• 00:59 — AI EO, Sacks, Trump, regulatory debate
• 05:08 — Microsoft Claude, LLM cost, dogfooding
• 06:56 — Micron / DRAM / AI memory boom
• 07:51 — IPO “mini boom”: SpaceX, OAI, Anthropic
• 13:00 — Starship V3, IPO risk, tech pivot
• 28:30 — World’s Fair deep dive
• 45:36 — Dan Shipper interview (AI, agency, software)
• 69:16 — James Rogers interview (Appeal, misinformation wars)
• 118:10 — Wrap-up, financial news items, exoskeletons banter

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Final Thoughts

This episode is classic TBPN: a fast-paced, insightful blend of hard news (AI policy, IPOs), historical context (World’s Fair reflections), and human stories from founders at the cutting edge of technology—and controversy. Regulars and new listeners alike will find plenty of “wait, what?!” moments, actionable startup lessons, and reminders that even in 2026, being first with the science doesn’t mean you win the market.

Transcript

[Host]

Today is Friday, May 22, 2026. We are live from the TVPN Ultra Dome, the temple of technology, the fortress

[James Rogers]

of finance, the capital of capital.

[Host]

Great show for you today, folks. It's Friday, Friday, May 22nd, we had our Wall Street Journal stolen from us. We only have the Financial Times today, but we're making do 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 Anduril. We're going to talk to Dan Schipper from every. We're going to talk to James the Shippinator from Appeal Sciences. We're also going to read through Brandon Gorrell's news roundup in the TVPN newsletter, tvpn.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,

[Tyler]

we do it again.

[Host]

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 other eyes on the project. There's some sort of liability that happens. What's the round thing on the table? No one in the TVPN audience has ever seen this. Can you describe what this is? This round shaped argument?

[Tyler]

I'm not exactly sure what we're looking at, but I saw them talking about this on ESPN and people are always saying, you guys are like SportsCenter for business.

[Host]

You should pick one of these up. This object.

[Tyler]

So I had to check it out.

[Host]

This artifact, brown oval object.

[Tyler]

Yes. Cool.

[Host]

Well, it looks fun.

[Tyler]

Anyways, I was having a little bit of fun earlier throwing this grill in the gong. Grill in the gong. The production team didn't like it because there's this $70,000 massive flat screen TV next to the gong as well as multiple cameras and lights over there, but no accidents.

[Host]

Wow. Mandate of heaven over there, right? Tom's got the tennis ball. 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]

Tyler, have you checked in with Les Wrong?

[Host]

Yeah. How are they feeling about this?

[James Rogers]

Yeah, I mean, I assume they're not happy with this. This seems to be like anti safety.

[Host]

Do they want more review from independent nonprofits, for profit companies that are run by people with good intentions or the government, like democratically elected?

[Tyler]

I mean, I assume at some level

[James Rogers]

it's, it's got to be the government. Right.

[Tyler]

Because if you're super AGI pilled, these

[James Rogers]

things are nuclear weapons.

[Host]

Yeah.

[James Rogers]

It needs to be the government.

[Host]

Yeah.

[James Rogers]

But I think on the way there, people are definitely like, is there anyone

[Host]

who, 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. Some people, 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, for different organizations, there are plenty of companies that are polling above the US 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.

[Tyler]

I did not.

[Host]

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. Stands for. 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 its time. 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, the city of the tomorrow community of tomorrow. Epcot. Yeah. And so I don't know, maybe, 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 them to Disney. I don't know.

[Tyler]

I trust Bob with the new.

[Host]

I would trust Bob, the new guy. We got to meet him, we got to get to know him.

[Tyler]

That's right. Bob. Bob.

[Host]

He can.

[Tyler]

I've shook his hand. Yeah, I trust him.

[Host]

I trust his hand on the button. Anyway, what else is going on? Second story highlighted by Brandon Gorell in the TVPN newsletter the Gorilla the Gorelinator in the TVPN newsletter in eight years an A non account posted yesterday he's

[Tyler]

sitting here with noise canceling headphones so he doesn't know what he's talking about him.

[Host]

He's gonna find this out later when he watches these clips anyway. And a non account posted yesterday that Microsoft had canceled its internal Claude code license after token based billing made the cost un. 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 Copilot cli, which I imagine they're going to build their own harness their fork of clog code.

[Tyler]

I heard someone refer to it as they want to make the engineers eat dog food.

[Host]

Yes, but what's the dog food made of? It could be made they're dog fooding GPT 5.5 tokens. It could be made of Opus 4 side tokens. I guess they will be using.

[Tyler]

Yeah, I mean I think the reason that Codex and Claude code 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 a tried and true way to build a great product.

[Host]

Yeah. The third story from Brandon Grell in the TPPN newsletter, the American semiconductor manufacturer Micron announced that they've begun manufacturing one Alpha dram, the most advanced memory ever 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 an absolute has been on a tear. Let's see what they're doing.

[Tyler]

800 almost $850 billion market cap.

[Host]

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 1000% over the past year. Really, really incredible performance from Micron.

[Tyler]

Just wow.

[Host]

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 gigaboom? This is a gigaboom. So I don't know if we have the truth on this, but it also made it to the front page of the walls of the Financial Times. They said Space X Open air and anthropic IPOs set to ignite Wall street trading frenzy NASDAQ loosens rules Passive investors could dump rival stocks Trillionaire prospect for Musk the blockbuster listings of SpaceX, Anthropic and OpenAI are set to prompt an unprecedented wave of buying and selling 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 US bankers will hope hope will be blockbuster year. With OpenAI filing its IPO paperwork as soon as this week and 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 SpaceX. The SpaceX listing will cement Musk's control of two of America's most valuable companies, SpaceX and Tesla. It is. It is crazy. We're going to need a new term for the Mag 7 because Tesla has been in the Mag 7. 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 7 company will be lagging his non Mag 7 company. We're going to need new terms. We're going to need a bigger boat. But 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.

[Tyler]

Agree.

[Host]

But they are a tribute to the US 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 and Anthropic are rushing to go public to take advantage of the favorable market conditions. But. But amid the eulogies written about American capitalism, The latest mini IPO boom is a welcome tribute to the dynamism of US 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, founded in 2002, is a global leader in space exploration.

[James Rogers]

Overnight success.

[Host]

It is also spread into broadband, mobile, 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 have to imagine that the losses were not. I mean, I don't know how much Twitter was losing before they. Before the take private. I know that the revenues cratered a bit, but there were also big layoffs and an 80% reduction in cost. 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, 5:30 Central Time. Tune in the last one.

[Tyler]

A critical launch, is it? No, just because of the timing with the S1 and the IPO, I don't know. I mean, lies on.

[Host]

I think, I think the market is valuing the launch capabilities and SpaceX and Starship in particular is like one small piece of the puzzle. You know, it's important, but, you know,

[Tyler]

people are going to be paying way more attention to this. Yeah, yeah, like the.

[Host]

Obviously people will be excited about it, but, but, you know, even like, I think even just the, you know, endless spamming. Falcon Nines can get StarLink to what, $20 billion run rate or something? $10 billion run rate. You can, 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. 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.

[Tyler]

And the live stream will be the launches. You said 5, 30, 5, 30.

[Host]

Central time is like when it's scheduled, but they're already counting down because they stacked it yesterday. They were ready to go. Nicki 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.

[Tyler]

We're going to be automating workflows for

[Host]

the enterprise, I guess forever. Mr. Musk in January was awarded 1 billion performance based restricted shares that will vest if his company, quote, establishes a permanent human colony on Mars with at least 1 million inhabitants. Do robots count as inhabitants? Do agents count?

[Tyler]

Isn't that, isn't that one human quality? One of the potential.

[Host]

You got to get a million. This is why he's.

[Tyler]

Was there a list of like five or six things and he just has to do like four.

[Host]

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 1 million inhabitants. That's exciting. 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 Anduril, 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 year. Matt Grimm, how are you doing? Welcome to the show.

[Tyler]

You can't hear them.

[Host]

You can't hear us. Oh, no. Okay, if anyone can hear us, just ask him to talk. Pass it along. Just have him, Just have him rant, rant. Just rant. Tell him to rant, rant, 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 cavech 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 doll, a huge boon for its early private investors and employees with stock options. OpenAI 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 Space X's early stratospheric gains. What. What was the market cap of Tesla at IPO? What was the market cap of Tesla at?

[Tyler]

Sub 10 billion. Right.

[Host]

Was it Tesla's Tesla 1.7? Whoa, 1.1.7 billion?

[Tyler]

Yep.

[Host]

Are you sure?

[Tyler]

Is that a market cap for.

[Host]

You got 1000x if you just were a day one IPO believer.

[Tyler]

I mean, that's how you build a retail army.

[Host]

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 1000x from here. If we get to Mars, that's a big, big, big opportunity.

[Tyler]

That is so crazy that you could buy an Elon company in the public markets at less than a $2 billion market cap.

[Host]

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. Like. It was never a, like a Warren Buffett buy, you know, there were always good reasons not to buy.

[Tyler]

Instead of going to high school, I just bought the Tesla IPO using the money I made from mowing lawn.

[Host]

Yeah, you should have just been a lawnmower who DCA 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, 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 400ft 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 livestream. 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 asteroids. 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 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 theorists that think space is fake. Nothing's happening. They're not actually going. The satellites don't exist. And then there's other conspiracy theorists 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 will let you be the judge of what's really going on. SpaceX'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.

[Tyler]

Yeah, think about like the optics and some investors are super. You know,

[Host]

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 that hard. We can build a big data center 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, 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 their terrestrial efforts.

[Tyler]

Like a, you know, catastrophic, you know, explosion.

[Host]

Be dramatic.

[Tyler]

There would. That would be, you know, potentially an omen that certain people would look into. But maybe I have full faith.

[Host]

Yeah, their execution record is unsurpassed, but this stuff is hard to get right, said Daniel Hanson, portfolio manager at Neuberger 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, 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 Space division reporting a $662 million loss. The interesting question that I have from the SpaceX IPO prospectus is Dan Primack had that sort of hot take, saying like, oh, wow, a lot of people were expecting SpaceX to be a bigger business than what they showed 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.

[Tyler]

The 75 billion that we need is.

[Host]

He just added like 15 billion in ARR on a $20 billion company. The growth is there. Elon makes place. But my question is, as you trickle down, it's like it's an AI company with a data center business, with a telecom, and then the smallest section is the launch business. And so I'm wondering, what does the P and L look like? What do the financial statements look like for Blue Origin? Because Blue Origin has 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,

[Tyler]

are they going to be for September 8, 2000, 2000.

[Host]

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 spending 3 billion trying to, you know, 3 billion last year alone developing Starship, like what are the costs look like for Glenn? And then the revenues have to be.

[Tyler]

So here's a question for you.

[Host]

Yeah.

[Tyler]

There was a PR firm reached out trying to get an early Space X investor on the show.

[Host]

Yeah.

[Tyler]

And they invested in 2019. Does that count as being an early investor if the company was started in 2002?

[Host]

I think so. I think pre.

[Tyler]

Because it's always.

[Host]

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 the Dec corn rounds and now you're going out at a trillion round, that's 100x. So you're in a pretty good spot. Sean McGuire at Sequoia, it was a later bet. 2020 I think was when he started building that position.

[Tyler]

But pre. Starlink, really?

[Host]

Yeah, I think Starlink was starting to work or starting to sort of be mapped out as a 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 can simultaneously and more quickly begin firing. And I think they did they paint the engines black for this one. I saw Elon 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 designed. You've seen those images of the Raptor engine or the Merlin engine getting redesigned, redesigned and then just remove, 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 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 Post. 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?

[Tyler]

Yeah, yeah.

[Host]

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 off the simulator as opposed to, like, the real thing. But I don't know why not just. But I mean, that's what he did with the FOX satellite, remember?

[Tyler]

I mean, the ultimate simulation is just doing the thing.

[Host]

Yeah, right. Well, Elon says we live in a simulation.

[Tyler]

Potentially. Exactly.

[Host]

So maybe that's what he's doing. Yeah. What are the Starlink simulators really simulating? Who knows?

[Tyler]

DJ D? Sol.

[Host]

Yeah.

[Tyler]

What's going on with sliding to Elon's dm?

[Host]

Oh, yeah.

[Tyler]

In the bid 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 Musk 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.

[Host]

David Solomon also had a piece in the New York Times saying that the AI apocalypse and White 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 of 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.

[Tyler]

He also specifically said he was very excited that all of his software engineers were more efficient because he said, there's no cap on how Much software.

[Host]

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.

[Tyler]

If you could have had Codex back then, just like a private. A private instance of it.

[Host]

Yes.

[Tyler]

You would be currently time traveling back

[Host]

in time just to become the most productive intern of all time is elite.

[Tyler]

That's something you would actually do.

[Host]

It would be so, 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.

[Tyler]

Can we talk about the World's Fair?

[Host]

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.

[Tyler]

And quick update. We are rescheduling Matt Grimm due to technical issues.

[Host]

Yes, we will get him on. He's been here in person. We know Matt Grimm. We love him. Always fun to catch up with him.

[Tyler]

It's possible that a third layer SPV lead is holding their impression hostage. Give me direct access.

[Host]

I think he might have been there, finished the Murph 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 US hosted exhibitions 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 vented 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 Electronics show, the world worlds Showcased its latest in innovations at high profile 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 where an opportunity to own the World's fairs.

[Tyler]

Tyler is sharing project. The person that invented the Ferris wheels full name was George Washington Gale Ferris Jr. That's pretty elite. That's an elite George Washington. There's nothing stopping you from naming your child George Washington and then just slapping your own last name at the end.

[Host]

Yes, yes.

[Tyler]

I mean my George Washington Cosgrove.

[James Rogers]

John Tyler was the 10th president.

[Host]

Oh, true. Yeah, There you go.

[Tyler]

That's my name. There we go.

[Host]

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 high. After defeating New York in the bid for the 1893 exposition. Here's a look at the US hosted World's Fairs that left the deepest mark.

[Tyler]

So fill it up starting in Philly. Philly 1876. You're not going to believe what was shown, what was celebrated. We had two key technologies. Telephones and catch up.

[Host]

One was disrupted much faster than the other.

[Tyler]

Yep.

[Host]

I would say that the telephone has basically disappeared. The smartphone, text messaging, telephone's not doing well.

[Tyler]

It's on its last iPhone might really made gained grounds.

[Host]

No, ketchup is still even ranch kind

[Tyler]

of went on a run. Yeah. Really mustard.

[Host]

Ultimately it's a compliment, not a substitute. There are very few people that say, oh, I don't need the ketchup at all.

[Tyler]

Just the mustard.

[Host]

Just the mustard, please. Most people I don't know, I do

[Tyler]

think mustard is better. Better than ketchup? Yeah.

[Host]

Interesting.

[Tyler]

Yeah, you can believe that.

[Host]

Yeah.

[Tyler]

America's first officially sanctioned World's Fair, the Centennial International Exhibition arrived when the country was still defining its place among industrial nations. Unlike earlier European fairs built around single monumental halls, the Philadelphia event 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. Like really, really, dude. And consumer packaged goods such as Heinz tomato ketchup. It normalized the idea that private companies, innovators, and even governments could present their work side by side. A 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.

[Host]

We got to call balls and strikes here a little bit more underwhelming.

[Tyler]

Yeah, but I don't know, I think

[Host]

tell people what was. Tell people what was.

[Tyler]

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.

[Host]

No, no, no, no, no. It's not. Fast following. 1876, the telephone.

[Tyler]

Almost 20 years later.

[Host]

Almost 20 years later, they're like, take off. We're so early. Telephone's cooking. What do we got?

[Tyler]

The Ferris wheel and popcorn.

[Host]

Popcorn is good. Ketchup before popcorn. Pretty good. Pretty good. But yeah, Ferris wheel. Ferris wheel.

[Tyler]

Imagine the hundreds of people that came there to demo their inventions.

[Host]

If you're in telephones, pivot to Ferris wheels. There's a whole. There's a whole industry. Oh, yeah, Ferris wheel. That'll distribute of the telephone. You got to get out on the Ferris wheel. It's the new thing.

[Tyler]

Like, well, it is total stagnation. 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.

[Host]

Exactly.

[Tyler]

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.

[Host]

2020 World's Fair. We have rockets that land and we also have all birds. All birds. What else came out? That was very silly. Bored apes. We've invented bored apes. Skims.

[Tyler]

Skims. Shapewear.

[Host]

Shapewear and GLP1s. Somewhat related. I don't know.

[Tyler]

Buffalo, New York, 1901. An electric city.

[Host]

This seems pretty elite. This is pretty huge.

[Tyler]

1901, though remembered mostly as the location where President William McKinley was shot. He died a week later. Buffalo's Pan American Exposition was meant to showcase.

[Host]

He was shot.

[Tyler]

He was shot at the World Fair.

[Host]

I had no idea.

[Tyler]

That's crazy, Tyler.

[Host]

Crazy. Fact check that. Buffalo's Pan American Exposition was. Was meant to showcase America's dominance and innovation. Electrical power and infrastructure. The fair featured electric lighting and electric streetcars powered by hydroelectricity generated by Niagara Falls, reflecting a moment when electricity was beginning to move from novelty towards widespread utility.

[Tyler]

Okay, so this is 1901.

[Host]

1901.

[Tyler]

And remember in 1876, we created the telephone.

[Host]

Yeah.

[Tyler]

And you fast forward to the next event in the. In St. Louis in 1904, you're not gonna believe what we remember. The 1904 World's Fair.

[Host]

We created electricity. And they're like, we got something better. What do we got?

[Tyler]

We now know this World's Fair as a snack food extravaganza.

[Host]

It's really just AGI and creatine gummies.

[Tyler]

It was sort of a Cambrian explosion of snacking.

[Host]

Yeah. I mean, this is the nature of our show. It's like cerebras and grooms. Like, this is. This is like. This is actually what happens in America. Brown.

[Tyler]

The Louisiana Purchase Exposition was among the largest ever staged and nearly obliterated the city's finances. 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 butt. Oh, my. They went on an insane, 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. So people are coming there again to share their. Their. Their. 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 gotta be kidding me.

[Host]

I mean, I wouldn't be surprised.

[Tyler]

Visitors also encountered early examples of X ray machines. So we invented X ray vision, but history remembers it as a snack food extravaganza.

[Host]

Peanut butter.

[Tyler]

Early flying machines and submarines came after.

[James Rogers]

And automobiles.

[Host]

And automobiles and submarines. This is crazy.

[Tyler]

And barely remembered.

[Host]

No.

[Tyler]

Fast forward. 1962 Seattle Space Race. The space race.

[Host]

That's exciting.

[Tyler]

The World's Fair. By the mid 20th century, the world's Fairs 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 turned down.

[Host]

Turn it down.

[Tyler]

Turned 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.

[Host]

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?

[Tyler]

He iced it out.

[Host]

Oh, he did.

[Tyler]

He made it ice blue because he's Iceman or something.

[Host]

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 side. It's very cool.

[Tyler]

Anyway, fast forward just a few years. Couple years.

[Host]

This one.

[Tyler]

You're not going to believe what. 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 a hundred 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 in New York City. Yes, it's records. Visitors were dazzled by color television demonstration and the PicturePhone, an early video calling system.

[Host]

They had FaceTime. Yeah.

[Tyler]

This is FaceTime.

[James Rogers]

This is sick.

[Tyler]

This is crazy.

[James Rogers]

I can't believe.

[Host]

When I told Jordy64 they invented FaceTime, he. He was like, did it use mirrors? And he thought it was just a periscope.

[Tyler]

Just a mirror that you look at.

[Host]

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 and T's PicturePhone, which added video to telephone calls.

[James Rogers]

Yeah. So it cost $16 for a three minute call. That's $121.

[Tyler]

Today's in today's money.

[Host]

That's expensive.

[Tyler]

Yeah.

[Host]

$40 token maxing. I wonder if there were CEOs at the time who were like, we need. 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.

[Tyler]

I wonder if they were talking about Jevons Paradox.

[Host]

Yes, probably. I Don't know. When does that happen?

[Tyler]

The last officially sanctioned World's fair in the US was hosted in New Orleans in 1984. And it produced no truly defining technological debut.

[Host]

Stagnation theory. Undefeated. Brutal. By that point 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 is a lost art, the author says, but when America needed it, no one did it better. And Brandon Grell of the TVPN newsletter fame shared that there was in fact an attempt to bring back the World's Fair by Zach Dev. He wrote on substack startupcities.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.

[James Rogers]

Yeah.

[Host]

So hard to push.

[Tyler]

You could bring something like this back, but I feel like it would end up being like it would just turn into a tech conference, you know?

[Host]

Yeah, it is tricky. I mean, yeah, we do sort of have these. But then, I mean, we talked about this during the. The Consumer Electronics show discussion around how a lot of the big tech companies have sort of created their own World's Fairs. Like, you walk around Meta Connect, 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 it be like, save everything up for this. Can you imagine? But with iterative releases and 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. GPT 6 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.

[Tyler]

That was just more details about. I was really enamored by this. Yeah. I was just thinking, it's so sad.

[James Rogers]

We don't really hear the term inventor anymore. Like, no one is primarily an inventor.

[Tyler]

Yeah.

[Host]

People aren't really kind of lost this with the design of the world. Yeah. Does that have something to do with like, the patent structure? Like, patents are like, I have a patent, but I don't think of myself as like an Inventor of that thing.

[James Rogers]

Why? You could just say that.

[Tyler]

I think of you as an inventor of bits.

[Host]

Of bits, essentially. 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 Dudna 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. Dudna, she won the Nobel Prize.

[Tyler]

Yeah. I mean, it's just very. It's really hard because there's, like, Internet.

[Host]

There's so many slices.

[Tyler]

The Internet is the new World's Fair. Right. Or X or any of these social platforms. It would have made sense.

[Host]

Yeah.

[Tyler]

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. Go where else on the Internet?

[James Rogers]

Yes. There's a film called the Inventor, and

[Tyler]

it's about Elizabeth Holm.

[James Rogers]

Right. So that just shows you how much the idea of an inventor is, like, mocked now. Wow.

[Host]

Yeah. That's like.

[James Rogers]

People don't have respect for an inventor.

[Dan Shipper]

It's the scammy grifter.

[Host]

Who'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 Amsterdam. Catch up with Dan Shipper. Shipper, how you doing? Good.

[Dan Shipper]

How are you? It's great to be back.

[Host]

You're a founder, you're a shipper, you're an author, a writer. Do you think of yourselves?

[Tyler]

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.

[Host]

Yeah.

[Dan Shipper]

I just try to live up to my name.

[Tyler]

Yeah, you do. It's great you're an elite ship athlete. It's great to see you. It's been too long.

[Host]

Do you think of yourself as an inventor?

[Tyler]

Do we need to bring inventor back?

[Dan Shipper]

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.

[Host]

You know, it's very gadget related.

[Tyler]

Yeah, yeah.

[Host]

Even though.

[James Rogers]

Yeah.

[Host]

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.

[Tyler]

Anyway, take us through maybe. Has it been like four months, maybe more, since we caught.

[Host]

Too long.

[Tyler]

It's been a while. It feels like years. In this era. In this era, yeah. The world's changed. Yeah. Give us, give us the update on all things every and. And Dan Shipper.

[Dan Shipper]

I mean there is a lot to say. The big update is I just wrote a piece called After Automation because there's so much progress has happened over the last four months. I think the biggest thing has been there was this huge step change in models starting in November with Opus 4.5 and then GPT 5.3 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, cloud code, then cloud, cowork 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, everything is going to change. Am I going to have to.

[Host]

I saw an interesting benchmark here where someone sort of outside of technology was sort of lamenting AI progress because 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 like 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 hours are in Strawberry. But if you hit a coding model, like you can just watch the traces of cloud code or codecs and it's like go to Pokemon Wikidex, 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 shift.

[Dan Shipper]

I totally agree. And you're seeing people, you know, I mean, Dario's out there being like, you know, AI could warrant. Could wipe out half of white collar, entry level white collar jobs.

[Host]

Yeah.

[Dan Shipper]

But even, even people outside the industry, like Citadel.

[Host]

Ken Griffin.

[Dan Shipper]

Ken Griffin, Citadel. Like, 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, high skilled jobs. Being. I'm going to pick a word. Automated by agentic AI.

[Host]

Yeah.

[Dan Shipper]

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 GPT, three 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, like, that's, that's sort of how I feel.

[Tyler]

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 are valuable things. But there, 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. What kind of actions you can take. And yeah, it's, it's, it's been even. Even with how, even with how kind of close we are to the action and following. Not as long we weren't doing the show in the GPT three days. But I still find myself operating day to day thinking like, oh, I should reach out to that person to get there to see if they can help with this thing. And then realizing, oh, I can just ask Codex to do that or I can get a model to do this. And 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, how you feel like memory is evolving. I've had some like pretty pleasant experiences recently where I will, I will do, you know, I'll go to ChatGPT 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 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 people just 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.

[Dan Shipper]

So I mean, whether or not it's memory specifically, the thing that has changed dramatically is that Codex and also Claude code or cowork to some extent. But Codex, the reason it's so powerful for me is it has access to everything on my computer. And so 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 whatever, and I literally just said to Codex, hey, can you go figure out a couple people I should send this to? And it came up with a bunch of investors, a bunch of journalists, a bunch of founders, all people who I've talked to in the last 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 to 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 as many tokens as they possibly can use. And yet we've grown from four to almost 30 people since GPT 3. 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 100x 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

[Tyler]

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. 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 the 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 would have needed to happen even if we weren't in this technology cycle.

[Dan Shipper]

Yeah, it's interesting because it's very popular now to say AI in the layoff 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.

[Tyler]

Well, I think. 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. Like, you can say, like, better than it's ever been. What does that mean? Revenues up. Right. But, but the example I know you're thinking of, I can't imagine that that company is trading anywhere near it was trading a year ago, two years ago. And so when you have a massive correction in the valuation of your company, 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 the businesses bigger than it's ever been or better than it's ever been, I just don't necessarily. I don't necessarily buy that because you have to understand, like, what. What metric are they using to. To. To sort of, like, qualify that?

[Dan Shipper]

Yeah, I think that that's a reasonable frame. And I wish that. 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.

[Host]

Did you see the Standard Chartered CEO got in hot water? So CEO of Standard Chartered 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 work force probably turns over annually anyway. You can just like 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. Like there were some, there were some big private companies that during the COVID era or ZIRP 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 ZIRP 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 zirp. Like, your business doesn't work, work in a high interest rate environment, your business doesn't work in a more remote world. Whereas now the vibe is, oh, if you're doing layoff, 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.

[Tyler]

How are you thinking about this has been said, talked about plenty at this point. But I'm curious in the context of after automation, this difference between a job and a task. AI right now very clearly can do a lot of tasks, but it cannot do very many jobs or really any jobs, or there's a subsection of jobs that AI can do well and 90% of the time, but even that is not enough to replace the role or function entirely.

[Dan Shipper]

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 again we're one of those places if you at someone in Slack it's like toss up whether or not it's a bottle, you know. And everyone's using codecs and cloud code to do all their work every day in the engineering Org 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 in like even in this. Even in the scaled AI companies like inside of OpenAI or inside outside 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 like more and more complex work but what we see is that one of the someone on our team, Kieran Classen calls it the human sandwich is, 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 like 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 at every and I think you find this across the 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, it's just the same thing as everybody else is doing and it's not valuable. 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, it 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

[Host]

that makes A lot of sense. What do you think about the idea of the YouTubification 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 that is one possible direction that, 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 engineers, now a few people can sort of get something off the ground. Are you actually seeing any movement towards that, do you think?

[Dan Shipper]

I think that's definitely a thing. And it's actually one of the things that makes 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.

[Host]

A violation.

[Tyler]

Violation, yeah. 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. Another way to put it is

[Host]

a

[Tyler]

lot of people that are outside of tech that have been Vibe coding are sharing apps with me that they've built that the LLMs can just do natively pretty well already. And so that's the kind of the potential bear case for this sort of like super, super long tail of software is like as agents 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.

[Dan Shipper]

Oh, you're saying you don't need an app, you just need to talk to people?

[Tyler]

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 a plate and give me a plan to get there. Right. So instead of needing like a you

[Host]

could vibe code bench press app.

[Tyler]

Yeah. You could do like the distribution or you could.

[Host]

Or the customer could just wind up

[Tyler]

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 a new workout and it just goes and goes and goes and you functionally get the what a vertical product could do. So I just think like there is an opportunity right now for this long tail of apps, but part of it is that people don't realize what the models themselves.

[Dan Shipper]

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 like 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, a lot of These codecs or ChatGPT or cloud use cases are actually training people, 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 cloud code, 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 the agent's in there with you, you can look at your app in local host and the agent's in there and you're going back and forth. And it's a very good collaboration environment for a developer. I think that is 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 the these providers of agent orchestration platforms for knowledge work.

[Host]

Love it.

[Tyler]

Do you think your agents are planning a surprise birthday party for you?

[Host]

Happy birthday. Do we hit the gong?

[Tyler]

Yeah, we're hitting the gong. We're hitting the. Doing an early gong for your birthday.

[James Rogers]

Wow.

[Tyler]

A little birdie named Jug in the chat said it's tomorrow. Great, great timing for the three day weekend. Great timing for you to just lock in at your computer and just grind all weekend.

[Dan Shipper]

Absolutely. Me and Codex are going to have the best birthday ever.

[Tyler]

Awesome. What can people expect from every over the next call it month because that's like a year in AI years.

[Dan Shipper]

We've got a lot of good stuff. There's some interesting stuff coming on the vibe check for every time a new model comes out. We do some good vibe checks. 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.

[Tyler]

Amazing. Great to catch up. Have a wonderful weekend. Enjoy your birthday with Codex and we'll talk soon.

[Host]

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 TVP in ultradome. 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.

[James Rogers]

Yeah. James Rogers. Thanks for having me down.

[Host]

Yeah, of course.

[James Rogers]

Based upon Santa Barbara, so it's easy to get down.

[Host]

Why Santa Barbara? I remember finding this out and it being an interesting tidbit. There's some cool companies up there. Sonos and. Isn't Dyson up there a little bit?

[James Rogers]

Deckers. Deckers.

[Host]

Okay.

[James Rogers]

Yeah, I went out there for graduate school to UC Santa Barbara. Did my PhD in material science. Turns out that's the place to go for that. Yeah. No, I was in Pittsburgh before that got out to Santa Barbara and I was doing my, my PhD in material science studying solar paint.

[Tyler]

Okay.

[James Rogers]

Kind of weird. Pretty cool.

[Host]

What does that do? Pretty cool.

[James Rogers]

You painted Something and it dries into a solar cell.

[Host]

Okay. Where did that technology go? Is that still.

[James Rogers]

It's too expensive.

[Host]

Oh, it's too expensive.

[James Rogers]

That was actually where appeal came from,

[Host]

was, hey, power's expensive now, though. Maybe the economics work. In the data center era, you just paint the data center.

[Tyler]

What was your. I'm a gaucho as well. What was your reaction to touring UCSB for the first time?

[James Rogers]

Unbelievable. I came out to be because from

[Tyler]

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. Like, it has no. A university has no business being that close to an incredible beach.

[James Rogers]

It doesn't make any sense. It was, like, 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. Too nice here.

[Host]

So you study material sciences. Like, where did the original idea for appeal come from?

[James Rogers]

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. I. There's something about this idea that you

[Tyler]

could build technology and build something that builds itself. Yeah.

[James Rogers]

Somewhere else.

[Host]

Okay.

[James Rogers]

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 people are going hungry.

[Host]

Yeah.

[James Rogers]

But I never understood why. 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. And the reason is people are hungry

[Host]

because we throw it away.

[James Rogers]

And so why do we throw it away? Well, we throw it away because it spoils. It goes bad.

[Host]

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 and D?

[James Rogers]

It was all. It was just an idea on a sheet of paper. You know, I didn't. 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.

[Host]

That's the easiest. True.

[James Rogers]

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 mandarins, oranges, grapefruits. I don't need to know a lot about fruits and vegetables to know that the ones with a peel last a lot longer than the ones without. Just put those words together. Now we gotta figure out how to make it. And that was the hard part.

[Tyler]

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?

[James Rogers]

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 it was starting to, 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've been working on these solar cells. So then to pivot and start looking at. We don't think about fruits and vegetables as made out of stuff. We think of them as fruits and vegetables, but they're mixtures of really specific molecules. And so it was, what's the skin made out of? And it turns out they're made out of these plant oils. And was. Huh. So these skins are made out of 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.

[Tyler]

Yeah.

[James Rogers]

As a strawberry.

[Tyler]

Why can't you apply.

[James Rogers]

Can we just do more of that? 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. This idea of using something plant based was at the time it was kind of. Kind of crazy.

[Host]

Yeah. So grant money early on, when does the business.

[James Rogers]

New venture. Competition.

[Host]

New venture.

[James Rogers]

We were like a uc.

[Tyler]

No way. Ucsb. I remember, but wasn't that. Wasn't that like. Didn't you get like 25 grand or something?

[James Rogers]

Yeah, we got like. We got like 10 grand.

[Tyler]

No, I remember, I remember. I remember this. This program. And yeah, it was like. It was really like venture funding for ants.

[James Rogers]

At least twice the size.

[Host]

17K. First company. First for me.

[James Rogers]

Yes.

[Host]

Yeah, it's enough if you're eating ramen and just paying rice.

[James Rogers]

I mean, my yearly salary was $24,000, so this was like a 50% bonus. It was enough to incorporate the business. First business address was on Del Playa.

[Tyler]

That is crazy. That's like probably the. The most enterprise value created from a. From an incorporation on Del Playa.

[James Rogers]

Who knows? You'll probably get some.

[Tyler]

Playa is like. Yeah, just a very notorious street. It's the street that runs.

[Host]

I can imagine.

[Tyler]

It's the street that runs in Isla 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.

[Host]

So you're usually surfing if you're on that street.

[Tyler]

Maybe a little bit. Maybe a little bit,

[Host]

yeah.

[James Rogers]

We were at the end of the street. You know, I was in grad school.

[Tyler]

Good. No, that's actually good. That means you're more. Way more locked in, basically. Like, the middle zone is a nightmare. I don't think any enterprise value is being created there. Closer, 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. Negative enterprise value creation.

[James Rogers]

Yeah.

[Tyler]

Okay. So you kind of have this insight. You have a little grant funding. Are you able to make MVPs with that grant?

[James Rogers]

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's kind of the will the lemon lasts longer than the strawberry, but will it work if we actually build a beer business around this? And so it was research, research, measure, measure, measure. But okay, at some point, I couldn't figure out. I couldn't find a reason it wouldn't work. But also there was nowhere written that it would work. And so it came to the point.

[Tyler]

But how hard could it be? You just Put some stuff on an apple and leave it out. Right.

[James Rogers]

Well, that's what's wild is there was

[Tyler]

when we, and I'm joking, when I

[James Rogers]

said, no, no, no, but kind of, 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 going to apply it to an apple, you'd have to wait a month to see what happened. And that's just a really long 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.

[Tyler]

And so would you effectively, like go buy two apples, hopefully from the same orchard, same tree?

[James Rogers]

You had to do.

[Tyler]

Yeah, same tree.

[James Rogers]

That was a big problem in the beginning. We were going to the grocery store and buying fruit and going, why does this one rot faster? Rot faster than this one? They came out of the same bin. Well, it 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. Apples. The average apple that's eaten in the US Is a year old.

[Tyler]

No way.

[James Rogers]

Yeah.

[Tyler]

No way.

[James Rogers]

If you're eating an apple in July, it's hitting its first birthday, basically.

[Host]

Wow.

[James Rogers]

Yeah.

[Host]

That's crazy. Yeah.

[Tyler]

I grew up in.

[Host]

We'd be growing them in the.

[Tyler]

I grew up in Northern California or something. I grew up in Northern California. So the average apple that I would eat as a kid, I picked up the tree.

[James Rogers]

Yeah. Yeah. And we can get back to that.

[Host]

Yeah.

[James Rogers]

You know, we. You keep hearing about this farm two table thing, but the two is obscuring everything that's happening.

[Tyler]

Okay, right.

[James Rogers]

You hear about what's going on the farm.

[Host]

Yeah.

[James Rogers]

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 and gone through a refrigerated supply chain with pesticides sprayed all over it and then fumigate it.

[Host]

Yeah.

[James Rogers]

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. And of course it's.

[Host]

So, yeah. Talk about the early business model. The farm side, the table side, distributors, supermarkets. 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?

[James Rogers]

Well, we were so naive. We thought, well, hey, if food lasted longer, more of it could get to people. So we'd be Able to feed people, and that'd be 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. But somebody earlier in the supply chain might not have any sort of interest in that. So 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. This was news to me. 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?

[Tyler]

Okay.

[James Rogers]

And we're like, what the hell is a finger lime? I've never heard of one of these things. And they're these little micro citrus. 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 up 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 New 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. Everybody's happy. But then we started going and saying, okay, well, let's do this again with other suppliers in 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. Maybe you guys should just stop doing this.

[Host]

Interesting.

[James Rogers]

And what. But what we did find.

[Tyler]

Did you ever get a visit from big fruit coming in saying, hey, buddy, it's like the guy, the guy, you

[James Rogers]

know, you guys probably have some of their masks around here. I've seen them. Yeah. Under different. Under in different clothing. You know, actually our first work that we did in the industry, we were working with that 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, you know, suppliers in the US and the data they came back with didn't look anything like our data. Data.

[Host]

What does that mean?

[James Rogers]

They said, hey, your product doesn't work.

[Host]

Okay, interesting.

[James Rogers]

And we. 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. You know, your product doesn't work. It almost completely blocked us out of the US Market.

[Tyler]

Wow.

[James Rogers]

It's such a small industry when somebody starts spreading rumors that, oh, so you

[Tyler]

think they were, you know, you think they were just basically lying to you.

[James Rogers]

Their data didn't match our data.

[Tyler]

Interesting, interesting.

[James Rogers]

Didn't match our data. And it's such a tightly controlled industry that we were locked out. So we actually had to go to market originally in Europe.

[Host]

Oh, interesting.

[James Rogers]

It knocked us all the way over to Europe. That tightly controlled. But what we found was that in Europe, people were looking for this. People were looking for a way to have access to healthier fruits and vegetables that didn't waste. They had huge initiatives around this. Even companies, the retailers were actually talking about this kind of stuff. And we started with avocados because of the joke with the avocado. Not now, not now, not now, Too late. And it solved the. This challenge that we had where the supply chain wasn't so interested in having food last longer, but the retailer was, because if they bought an avocado and didn't sell the avocado, that was a waste of money for them.

[Tyler]

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 avocados being like, I can't. I cannot let this go. Yeah.

[James Rogers]

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. 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. And most people in the US are eating dead food. They don't even know because it's dressed up in wax.

[Host]

Retailers actually acquire produce from a distributor and then apply appeal to the product.

[James Rogers]

Here was. What was so problematic 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 hate.

[Host]

Hated this.

[James Rogers]

Absolutely hated this, because they don't. 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, hundred years.

[Tyler]

Yeah.

[James Rogers]

So but that's the way that it had to. That's the way that it had to happen in the US Was from the retail side pushing back into the supply chain.

[Tyler]

And so what year is this when this starts working in Europe?

[James Rogers]

2019. 2020.

[Tyler]

Oh, wow. Yeah.

[James Rogers]

It took a while.

[Tyler]

And you had already raised at that point, like hundreds of millions of dollars, right?

[James Rogers]

I think probably we had raised 100 million about by then. You know, when we raised some money from the Andreessen Horowitz guys, we used the entire world's supply of our plant extract to treat the avocados that we shipped up to him 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.

[Tyler]

Yeah, right. Bet it all.

[James Rogers]

Bet it all. That was it. Yeah, bet it all.

[Host]

Burn the ships, you raise some money. What did it look like actually scaling up your supply chain?

[James Rogers]

Oh, man. 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 from this local farm, and then we were extracting these material. We were extracting these, these oils, 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. It's the same way that they get alcohol out of.

[Host]

Boil it off.

[James Rogers]

You boil it off and. And you can do this thing called precision distillation, which basically allows you to separate out really specific, really specific oils. And that turned out to be a super scalable, super cheap process because you

[Host]

can do it in a bigger and bigger vat. You can do it in big vat, you can bigger flame, bigger centrifuge if

[James Rogers]

you need that, and you just pull vacuum, you heat it up a little bit and you're able to separate it out.

[Tyler]

By this point, did your mom think that you had figured out fruit?

[James Rogers]

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 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. Cause 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. 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.

[Tyler]

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 is hyperlocal. So you get super spoiled living here.

[James Rogers]

You get super spoiled living here. And 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. 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 the. This horrible incentive in these supply chains to cut corners and do stuff that is horrifying.

[Tyler]

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

[James Rogers]

it's marketing. Organic is marketing. And 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 meant no pesticide or no coatings or better for you, but look at their actual marketing. They never say that stuff.

[Host]

Oh, interesting.

[James Rogers]

They never say that stuff because it's false advertising. They can't say that. But the brand is, oh, this apple was picked right off the tree and is now in the grocery store. It's just absolutely not true.

[Host]

What is an inorganic apple? Just like, computer chips and aluminum or something? Aren't they all organic? Yeah. They're literally organisms, right?

[Tyler]

Yes.

[Host]

Yeah.

[James Rogers]

Definitionally, you got to jump on the marketing. You got to put your marketing hat on to understand what they mean by that.

[Host]

But, I mean, that's ultimately, like, part of the problem is that 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?

[James Rogers]

We. Yeah. Oh, man. Ptsd. Just even thinking about.

[Host]

Sorry.

[James Rogers]

We should talk about it, because if you're building something right now, this is the playbook.

[Host]

Okay.

[James Rogers]

They will use against you.

[Host]

Okay.

[James Rogers]

If you're going out, if you're. If you're threatening some incumbent.

[Host]

Yeah. So set the table for us, because you've raised some money. The business is working. The product is working.

[Tyler]

You're in enough stores at this point. Your mom is buying hundreds of employees.

[James Rogers]

Hundreds of employees.

[Host]

Stores. The stickers are. The stickers. Where's mom can find them.

[James Rogers]

Exactly. You have. Pulling off the stickers. We got distribution.

[Host]

Not like she has to go to some special store.

[James Rogers]

1 of 1. Like, 60% of the avocados that are being sold in the United States are with our product.

[Host]

Yeah.

[James Rogers]

And we are. We are announcing a kind of a first of its kind partnership with a. With a supplier. 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 every. I'm gonna treat every lemon in the world with this product.

[Host]

And people didn't like it.

[James Rogers]

Boom. He gets Doxxed by these video campaigns, like put his phone number up there. He's getting do death threats from saying that he's gonna 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, hey, someone's saying our product is this cleaning agent that's being marketed in the uk and it

[Tyler]

was, it was a similar name.

[James Rogers]

Exact same same name. Exact same name.

[Host]

So it's not even a shared ingredient.

[James Rogers]

No.

[Host]

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.

[James Rogers]

Totally separate company.

[Host]

Okay.

[James Rogers]

Totally separate company sold as a cleaning product.

[Host]

Okay.

[James Rogers]

Also with the company's name. 2, 2 posts at the exact same time, go live on Facebook. This is a toxic product with a

[Host]

link to this, this other company.

[James Rogers]

This other company, which is a cleaning product, which of course.

[Host]

Yeah, yeah.

[James Rogers]

You know, is not something you don't actually eat. Right, exactly. And it just.

[Host]

And they don't want to put their cleaning product on your food either. Like separate company.

[James Rogers]

Yeah, right, exactly. Different solutions for different products. Specific ones for food.

[Host]

Yeah, of course.

[James Rogers]

And this thing just goes crazy. And then the attacks morphed into. So we thought we cleared this up. Hey, look, this is a cleaning product. This is our product made from compliance. 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.

[Host]

Bill Gates thing. Because of the nonprofit donation, we got

[James Rogers]

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

[Host]

It's not nothing.

[James Rogers]

I've never even met this guy. Zero involvement. Zero involvement whatsoever. We got a check from, from a foundation that he, that he donates to, by the way. Like, let's talk about all the other people.

[Host]

Yeah.

[James Rogers]

Who donate to, to this foundation.

[Host]

Yeah.

[James Rogers]

We get, we get these, these donations to work on cassava root, which you probably never even heard of.

[Host]

Yeah.

[James Rogers]

It's a starch source in sub Saharan Africa. It's kind of like an equivalent of, sure, yeah.

[Host]

But you have scientists, you have researchers that could potentially dig that up. Like the coffee chair thing.

[James Rogers]

We're in the business of, hey, if you're growing food and it's going bad. Yeah, can we figure out how to fix this?

[Host]

And then. And then. And the result of that might not be a business, might be more of like a research paper or a study.

[James Rogers]

Exactly.

[Host]

Where you took the cassava route, ran through some lab tests, tried to figure

[James Rogers]

out what was wrong.

[Host]

Does your product work? Do other products work?

[James Rogers]

Just understand what's going on, try to figure this out. And 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, and it's like, Bill Gates appeal. And I'm like, how did that happen? And for a while we thought, people are just confused. Until we started. Until it didn't stop. 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. The accounts that were quickly reposting this stuff. And it's completely coordinated.

[Host]

Interesting.

[Tyler]

Wow.

[Host]

Yeah, because people, I feel like, when. When, like there's an.

[Tyler]

Or there are. There. There's plenty of, like, controversies that are coming. Entirely organic and. 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 were mentioning this that a lot of companies have had problems with, and that is, like, genuinely organic. There's a guy running a platform that rates foods, and he has his own. Well, he has his own.

[Host]

But it's an individual. It's not.

[Tyler]

It's one individual. It's not like, funded by a specific group. It's just kind of like one guy running a business that seems to be at odds with. With a bunch of companies. But yeah, like, at first you're probably like, am I going crazy? Like, why does this keep.

[James Rogers]

Like, people are just confused, you know, that, like, the truth is a powerful thing. You know, obviously the truth will kind of come out about this.

[Host]

Sure, sure, sure.

[James Rogers]

And it didn't. It just didn't. And they started activating real, real people.

[Tyler]

Okay.

[James Rogers]

Some of which were real pressure.

[Host]

What was the long Term. What do you think their goal was?

[James Rogers]

It got to that point, but they started activating 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 in the U.S. it was devastating. I mean, I had to let go hundreds of people that acre about our entire US Business got. Got destroyed.

[Host]

Destroyed. What was in the tool?

[Tyler]

What. What year is that? 2024.

[James Rogers]

20. Yeah, it was about. It was, like, starting to happen in 2023. We started to lose some accounts, and in 2024 was really when, you know, started to go just like, it just went to zero in the US and it was double down in, you know, South America, double down in Africa, doubled down in Europe.

[Host]

What else was in the tool? The tool chest at that point? Like, did you consider just a full rebrand, maybe tucking the brand further up the supply chain so that the sticker is not there? Like, what did you consider what you wind up doing?

[James Rogers]

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. 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 the joke's on us now. Right? So 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're going to prefer this as going to be something that they. That they buy. But the conversation was, well, these. These attacks aren't organic attacks. People, you know, organic people are. Some people are getting roped into this thing. That's kind of how they work. 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.

[Tyler]

Yeah. And make it their personal mission.

[James Rogers]

And make it their personal mission. And they were really successful. But that. But, you know, when. When it's a deliberate attack on the business. Not a confused. It's not a confused thing. You change your brand, they're just going to follow you to whatever you, you know, whatever you shift your brand over to. It almost looks, you know, it even

[Tyler]

looks like you're running it Looks like you're.

[James Rogers]

It looks like you're running. And so, I mean, we've been building this, this playbook from scratch. And if there's other, you know, 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, 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.

[Tyler]

Well, and you think of the timing with all this. There's so much mistrust of the health system system and the food system and billionaires, and you combine all those things at once. It's like there's so much kind of.

[Host]

It's also something where perfect story. The buyer is almost everyone. Everyone has an opinion about food. Whereas there have been somewhat. Even 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 if you're. 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.

[James Rogers]

It cuts both ways. And what we find is that most, actually majority of people haven't heard about this, but a small percent of people have heard about it and they're activated. And who writes the reviews online?

[Host]

Sure.

[James Rogers]

Happy people. It's the not happy people.

[Host]

Yeah, of course. Of course.

[James Rogers]

And it's the people who are part of a system that's trying to stop something from happening.

[Host]

That's so interesting.

[Tyler]

Where are you at today?

[James Rogers]

So the business is going strong outside

[Tyler]

of the United States.

[James Rogers]

It's dystopian for me to walk into a grocery store in South America and find our products and to Walk into a US 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 US Because a small group of people want to bury these options. And technology is happening. Technology growth is happening in every single industry except for food.

[Tyler]

How is this, which is insane given how much of consumer wallet goes towards this category, how it. How much of you know that is the human experience. It's like you eat and then you're waiting around to eat again. That's lie.

[James Rogers]

It's often the best part of my day. So I get that. I resonate with that. Yeah, yeah. It's truly mind blowing and just how disconnected we've gotten from food. You know, like most people's connection to food is they go to the grocery store and they pick up a piece of food. I started growing a lot of food. Tomatoes, 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. People are starting to feed each other again. You're growing tomatoes, you're growing carrots. 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 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.

[Host]

Yeah.

[Tyler]

Big fruit that tried to kill you in the cradle.

[James Rogers]

Yeah, yeah, yeah.

[Host]

Other lessons for entrepreneurs. I mean, you mentioned like, if someone is going to war with a major industry, that's a lot that'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 any thing where like trademark searches could have avoided 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?

[James Rogers]

So when we started the business, we were, I think we were in a different. We were a different era.

[Host]

Yeah.

[James Rogers]

We started the business in 2011, 2012.

[Host]

Sure.

[James Rogers]

Social media was not what it is today. And I'VE experienced. You are just vulnerable to a different set of attack vectors in the modern era. And if I could go back and talk to myself five years ago would have been to acknowledge, hey, we're in a different era now in terms of where the vulnerability can come from. On my list never would have been, you know, someone's gonna 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.

[Host]

Very hard to predict.

[James Rogers]

It would now and it should be on it would now and it should be on everybody's list.

[Host]

Three of the deck.

[James Rogers]

Like actually maybe make your Thanksgiving dinner productive and that you know, that relative who's got all these theories, tell them about what you're building and just say, hey, what's what?

[Host]

Finds applause.

[James Rogers]

Find some flaws in my business 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 aunt or uncle.

[Host]

Yeah, that's very funny.

[Tyler]

Yeah, I mean I think it's a.

[Host]

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. World that like the two companies never would have ever competed in the same namespace. 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 butting heads and suing each other. And so that stuff happens all the time. It's very hard to predict confusion.

[Tyler]

What was I going to say? 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, and you're like, I'm trying to fix like a systemic problem. And so you're coming in with the attitude of 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 any for some reason like health, anything like health supplements, like food is just like becomes like hyper, hyper political really quickly it becomes super emotional. What starts as being like concepts grounded in science quickly becomes something else. And I've been shocked because I know A bunch of health podcasters that have gotten into controversies over and health brands. And 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. They become the enemy because of some other force in the world. And it's. It's a real. Yeah, 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 very popular.

[James Rogers]

You had to turn it around.

[Tyler]

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, 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, the company's done quite well in part by trying to over test, over share all these things. But there's still, again, immediately after launch, there was legacy brands that were trying to say, oh, they didn't. Trying to discredit the lab or all these different things. And it's like. And again, it does get. You have to just go through it and continue to lead with transparency and science and all these things. But there are. It's not an approach that I can ever think about doing right. Of like, I never would go out and try to mislead a bunch of people about.

[James Rogers]

You can't even imagine someone doing that.

[Tyler]

Like, you're like a golden retriever. We talk about great dogs.

[James Rogers]

I don't think that is a compliment.

[Tyler]

No, no, no. We talked about. We have a bit. We're 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 golden retriever. A golden retriever cannot imagine, like attacking, you know, like some kid running by. Right. They're just focused on the ball.

[James Rogers]

Focus on the ball.

[Tyler]

And so as a golden retriever entrepreneur. Right. You're just focus on chasing the ball. Right? Chasing the Dream trying to solving the problem. And there are pit bulls out there that are not.

[Host]

They're focused on overthink things. And it's like, in this case, maybe to the point of 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.

[James Rogers]

You know, that's who I am. That's what happened to me. When I said kind of, it really was despondent for a while. That's what happened. You go out in the world and. And you're told, do the right thing. Be a good person.

[Host]

Work hard.

[James Rogers]

You know, find good people. Work with them. Build, like, you know, create something good that helps us. That.

[Tyler]

Your mom is gonna be proud of that.

[James Rogers]

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.

[Tyler]

It's a golden retriever going to the dog park for the first time.

[James Rogers]

Yes.

[Tyler]

Running into. There's a pit bull at the dog park, and you're jumping around chasing the ball, the pit bull. It's like, welcome to the park.

[James Rogers]

Welcome to the park.

[Tyler]

Yeah.

[James Rogers]

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 that way. But then eventually you go, well, I can either complain about the world, 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 change people's minds about what your product is. They just have to make them suspicious.

[Host]

Yeah. Like the US fda. They just have to make them suspicious.

[James Rogers]

And not only the FDA, the European

[Tyler]

Union, which is like. Which is like 100 times more hard to.

[James Rogers]

They're the most strict, like, regulatory agency in the world.

[Tyler]

Yeah.

[James Rogers]

And.

[Tyler]

Yeah. What is their problem? 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.

[James Rogers]

That can't be sold. There's, like 4,000 approved, I think, in the US and there's, like 400 in Europe. Ours is one of them. There's literally no upper daily intake limit of our product. You. You could just eat it as food.

[Host]

You're not on the Prop 65 list.

[Dan Shipper]

California.

[James Rogers]

No.

[Host]

That's insane. Everything's on the Prop 65.

[James Rogers]

We would definitely not want to be on that list. These are of course,

[Host]

there's a lot of list. Remarkably low. Like you walk into Starbucks. I don't have a problem with Starbucks. It's on Prop 65. And I'm like, yeah, okay. Like they're being extra safe.

[Tyler]

Yeah. And that's the thing. There's supplements. There's like health supplements that people take

[Host]

that are on that list. Right.

[James Rogers]

Which they're. They're probably unaware of.

[Host]

Yeah.

[James Rogers]

Or they just like, you know, it's

[Host]

sort of like the most conservative. But to not even bet on that is crazy.

[James Rogers]

Exactly.

[Tyler]

Yeah.

[James Rogers]

It's plant oil.

[Host]

Yeah.

[James Rogers]

Like, if you've eaten avocado oil, coconut oil, like that, our product is in. Is an ingredient in those oils.

[Host]

Sure, sure.

[James Rogers]

Like you don't think about. Again, like you don't think about fruit as having ingredients.

[Host]

Yeah, it's a.

[James Rogers]

It's a mixture of different molecules.

[Host]

Like you're not even. You're not even eating it.

[James Rogers]

You're not even eating the skin.

[Host]

You're not even.

[James Rogers]

Which is 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.

[Host]

Yeah.

[James Rogers]

And second of all, even if really,

[Host]

for an avocado, such an incredible level. So crazy. Yeah. Walk out sucks. So what.

[Tyler]

What is the. You know, you don't strike me as someone who's just gonna. Who's gonna give up? Like, what's the path back? What's the path back to?

[James Rogers]

You know, the Internet kicks our ass. And so I've been. It took me a while to think about it, but I started flipping around and asked the Internet for help. I've been offering bounties to people to

[Host]

help track back, figure out what happened.

[James Rogers]

Figure out what happened. And I've just been posting them on Fridays. I haven't figured out what today's is gonna be. Cause I submitted one, I put one out last week and I just. It blew up the number of people who are sending stuff in. So I'm really bullish that. The same way, you know, right now there's no incent, there's no cost to somebody perpetrating an attack on you online.

[Host]

Sure, sure.

[James Rogers]

The bots do their thing. They repost stuff they like, they. 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.

[Tyler]

Yeah, no one is clicking through.

[James Rogers]

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, especially with AI. So, I mean, that's the vector that I'm going with right now. I, you know, I think we're in the.

[Tyler]

You got to go all the way to Joe Rogan. This is the start.

[James Rogers]

Let's go.

[Tyler]

Mentioned this a couple of times, but he seems like somebody who would be naturally skeptical of, you would think technology with food. Because he's like, I like steak.

[James Rogers]

Yeah, right. Like, which our product is also in, by the way.

[Tyler]

Right.

[James Rogers]

So he should be down with this. But yeah, no, he's, he's had a

[Host]

couple of guests pull that up, click five links deeper, get to the. And you don't have to go, you go, one, two. See the real story.

[James Rogers]

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. They just, they just control the comments.

[Host]

They control.

[Tyler]

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. 3 Comments. Getting a 10% like, rate is like not a thing. Especially on X. Like, there's a handful. And so you're like, okay, well, who's actually engaging with it? It's clearly getting a lot of views, but it's not necessarily reflecting, you know, it's not real.

[James Rogers]

Yeah, it's manufactured.

[Host]

Last question from. For me, have you been keeping tabs on the other appeal, the clearance company? Like, wait, because it's their business

[Dan Shipper]

now.

[James Rogers]

We are those Guys, we gotta have that CEO on now. We keep your floors clean and we

[Host]

keep your fruit fresh. Because 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. You're doing.

[James Rogers]

Wait, your floor cleaners healthy now?

[Host]

Yeah, yeah, yeah. Do they have a knock on effect?

[Tyler]

I don't know.

[Host]

That's an interesting thing to dig into.

[James Rogers]

But I'll follow up with you on that one.

[Host]

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.

[James Rogers]

If somebody else learns from it, I'm really happy.

[Host]

Thank you for coming with us. This is fantastic. Have a great rest of your day. It was a great time.

[Tyler]

We'll catch up.

[Host]

Yeah. What do you want to wrap up with Jordi? 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. What else? The Washingator warsh is in.

[Tyler]

Sworn in today.

[Host]

Sworn in.

[Tyler]

Frank says, good luck, bro.

[Host]

And the prediction there will be a rate hike or something like that, I saw, I saw both, both. 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 knock on effects from this. I wanted to. 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.

[Tyler]

Thousand watt hips.

[Host]

Thousand watt hips. You wear these and they help you hike and run up hills. I listen to too many shows with Paul Merlachi where he talks about the capability of an iron man suit potentially just ripping you apart. And so I would be a little afraid.

[Tyler]

But also imagine, you know, bad actor. Remember all the DJI drones had like a backdoor.

[Host]

Ooh, yeah.

[Tyler]

Bad actor takes over your start dancing and then it makes you Michael Jackson badly in front of your peers?

[Host]

Potentially.

[Tyler]

Potentially could be wildly embarrassing.

[Host]

I guess I'm unclear on the goal because couldn't you just go on a shorter, 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?

[Tyler]

Yes.

[Host]

These are sick. Yes. Your answer is, couldn't you just go

[James Rogers]

on a shorter hike?

[Host]

Yes. Like, couldn't you climb? If this allows me to go on a six mile hike, can you achieve. Couldn't I just do a one mile hike? You can take a car.

[Tyler]

Can you just stay home and you

[Host]

can take a car or a house helicopter like you don't like. This is sort of an in between thing. 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. I don't think you can just drive

[Tyler]

up like a massive mountain.

[Host]

We're getting you these. They're two grand, but we're getting you some and we're going to see if it transforms you into Ironman. Also Catl. Catl, the Chinese EV battery giant is investing in deep, seeking some big rounds going on. Also byd.

[Tyler]

I was waking up, remember? Remember? Oh, yeah.

[Host]

This is what AI 2020. They predicted that BYD would get an F1 team.

[Tyler]

That's right.

[Host]

Which is what's 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.

[Tyler]

They're about to.

[Host]

They're about to. Who knows what else Gone.

[Tyler]

Folks, it's Memorial Day weekend.

[Host]

Yeah. Go have 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 tvpn.com it's been an honor and we will see you tomorrow Tuesday.

[James Rogers]

We love you.

[Host]

Goodbye.