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

(01:01) - Sacks Spikes AI EO (07:56) - America's IPO Market Wakes Up (17:47) - Starship Launch (28:28) - World's Fair Retrospective (45:46) - Dan Shipper, co-founder and CEO of Every, discusses the transformative impact of AI agents like Codex and Claude Code on knowledge work, highlighting how these tools have automated tasks in coding, writing, design, and customer service, leading to Every's growth from 4 to 30 employees since GPT-3. He emphasizes that while AI makes expert competence more accessible, it simultaneously increases the demand for human expertise to provide judgment and differentiation, as AI outputs often require human framing and evaluation to be truly valuable. Shipper also notes that AI enables small, generalist teams to accomplish tasks that previously required larger, specialized organizations, allowing for a more fulfilling and versatile work experience. (01:09:01) - James Rogers is the founder and CEO of Apeel Sciences, a company developing plant-based coatings that extend the shelf life of fresh produce and reduce food waste. He launched the company out of research funded by the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation, with a focus on improving global food distribution and sustainability through materials science. Follow TBPN: https://TBPN.com https://x.com/tbpn https://open.spotify.com/show/2L6WMqY3GUPCGBD0dX6p00?si=674252d53acf4231 https://podcasts.apple.com/us/podcast/technology-brothers/id1772360235 https://www.youtube.com/@TBPNLive

Speaker names marked ? are inferred from speaking time and the show’s known hosts — they are not voice-verified.

• 0:00John Coogan?

  You're watching TVP and today is Friday, May 22nd, 2026. We are live from the TVP and Ultra Dome, the temple of technology, the fortress of finance.

• 0:13Jordi Hays?

  The capital of capital.

• 0:17John Coogan?

  Good 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 Andorl. We're going to talk to Dan Shipper from Every. We're going to talk to James

• 0:37Jordi Hays?

  The Shipinator.

• 0:37John Coogan?

  From Appeal Sciences. We're also going to read through Brandon Gurrell's news roundup in the TVP newsletter, tbp.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.

• 0:58Jordi Hays?

  We do it again.

• 0:59John Coogan?

  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, you know, liability that happens. What's the round thing on the table? No one in the TVP audience has ever seen this. Can you describe what this is?

• 1:40Jordi Hays?

  I'm still not exactly sure what we're looking at.

• 1:43John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 1:44Jordi Hays?

  I saw them talking about this on ESPN.

• 1:47John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 1:47Jordi Hays?

  And people are always saying, you guys are like SportsCenter for business.

• 1:51John Coogan?

  You should pick one of these up, this object.

• 1:53Jordi Hays?

  I had to check it out.

• 1:53John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 1:54Jordi Hays?

  This artifact.

• 1:55John Coogan?

  Brown Oval object.

• 1:57Jordi Hays?

  Yes.

• 1:57John Coogan?

  Cool. Well, it looks fun.

• 1:59Jordi Hays?

  Anyways, I was having a little bit of fun earlier, throwing this at the gong. Drilling the gong. The production team didn't like it.

• 2:09John Coogan?

  No.

• 2:09Jordi Hays?

  Because there's this, you know, $70,000 massive flatscreen TV next to the gong, as well as multiple cameras and lights over there, but.

• 2:21John Coogan?

  No accidents. Wow, mandate of heaven over there. Yeah. Oh, 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, have you checked in with less wrong? Yeah, how are they feeling about this?

• 2:58Speaker 02

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

• 3:03John Coogan?

  Mm-hmm. Do they want more review from, from independent nonprofits? For-profit companies that are run by people with good intentions? Or the government, like democratically elected?

• 3:17Speaker 02

  I mean, I assume at some level, it's, it's gotta be the government, right? Because if you're super H I pill, these things are nuclear weapons.

• 3:23John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 3:23Speaker 02

  It, it needs to be the government.

• 3:24John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 3:25Speaker 02

  Um, but I think on the way there, people are definitely like.

• 3:28John Coogan?

  Is there anyone who's, 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 mega corp owns them, controls them.

• 3:41Speaker 02

  I don't think there's.

• 3:42John Coogan?

  I mean, if you look at the popularity, if you look at the, if you look at the, the approval rates 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? I did not. Disney World has like, you know, legacy rights because when they set up EPCOT, which is an acronym, which I should look up because what does it stand for? It stands for something really cool. This also bridges into one of our, one of our future segments. Uh, stands for, what does EPCOT stand for? Experimental Prototype Community of Tomorrow. The idea was to build an entire city. It was, uh, it was the praxis of the, of the. Of its time. Yeah.

• 4:27John Coogan?

  Uh, and so in 1966, Walt Disney conceived it as in 1966, 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 future. Community of Tomorrow, EPCOT. Yeah. Uh, 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.

• 4:58Jordi Hays?

  I trust Bob with the nuclear.

• 5:00John Coogan?

  I would trust Bob. The new guy, we gotta meet him. We gotta get to know him.

• 5:03Jordi Hays?

  That's right.

• 5:03John Coogan?

  Bob.

• 5:04Jordi Hays?

  Bob?

• 5:05John Coogan?

  He can.

• 5:05Jordi Hays?

  I've shook his hand.

• 5:07John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 5:07Jordi Hays?

  I th- I trust him.

• 5:08John Coogan?

  I trust his hand on the button. Anyway, um, what else is going on? Second story highlighted by Brandon Grell in the TVP newsletter.

• 5:16Jordi Hays?

  The Grellinator.

• 5:17John Coogan?

  The Grellinator in the TVP newsletter.

• 5:22John Coogan?

  An anon account posted yesterday.

• 5:23Jordi Hays?

  He's sitting here with, uh, with this noise cancelling headphones, so he doesn't know that we're talking about him.

• 5:29John Coogan?

  He's gonna find this out later when he watches these clips. Uh, anyway. An anon account posted yesterday that Microsoft had canceled its internal Claude code licenses. After token based billing made the cost untenable. This catalyzed a ton of commentary and discourse around X. Box CEO Aaron Levy, for example, used this post to argue that token price optimization is set to become a prevailing trend inside companies reliant on LLMs. Worth noting, though, that there's a proposed community note on the post right now that denies Microsoft made the move because of a cost issue. They have the money to spend billions on, on tokens if they want, but instead they are trying to shift the developers to use their own copilot CLI,

• 6:15John Coogan?

  which I imagine they're, they're gonna build their own harness, their fork of Claude code.

• 6:20Jordi Hays?

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

• 6:24John Coogan?

  Yes, but what's the dog food made of? It could be made of.

• 6:28Jordi Hays?

  They're dog fooding.

• 6:29John Coogan?

  GPT 5.5 tokens, it could be made of Opus 47 tokens.

• 6:32Jordi Hays?

  I do, I do think it, uh.

• 6:33John Coogan?

  I guess they will be using.

• 6:34Jordi Hays?

  Yeah, I mean, I, I, I think the reason that, that Codax 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, uh, it's one thing to use those tools to build your coding tool, but being forced to constantly use the product, uh, that you're shipping is a tried and true way to build a great product.

• 6:56John Coogan?

  Yeah. Uh, the third story from Brandon Grell in the TVP 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 L L Ms, 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.

• 7:30Jordi Hays?

  Eight hundred, almost eight hundred and fifty billion dollar market cap.

• 7:34John Coogan?

  Remarkable. It's up two percent today, three percent over the last five days and two hundred and forty six percent over the last six months. What an absolute run for Micron. It's up almost a thousand percent over the past year. Really, really incredible performance from Micron.

• 7:50Jordi Hays?

  Just wow.

• 7:51John Coogan?

  Anyway, America's going through a mini, this was such a funny article by the Wall Street Journal, America's, America, America's IPO mini boom. How is this a mini boom? You've got three of the

• 8:05Jordi Hays?

  Is this not a gigaboom?

• 8:06John Coogan?

  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 Wall, of the Financial Times. They said SpaceX, OpenAI 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 buy 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

• 8:49John Coogan?

  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 fire firing the starting gun on what US bankers will hope hope will be a blockbuster year with open AI filing its IPO paperwork as soon as this week and anthropic planning to float its shares two 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 seven because Tesla has been in the mag seven. It's been north of a trillion dollars for a long time,

• 9:31John Coogan?

  but SpaceX is going to go out at a higher valuation almost certainly. Where is Tesla trading at today in terms of market cap? It's at 1.34 hard to imagine SpaceX trading below that. So you're going to have his mag seven company will be lagging his non mag seven company. We're going to need new terms. We're going to need a bigger boat. But why did why did the Wall Street Journal call this a mini boom? I think it's just because it's it's so concentrated on these three companies, but we will dig in and see where it goes. So too bad SpaceX and others didn't go public sooner. I agree. But they are a tribute to the US capitalist system, says the Wall Street Journal. Today's AI investor

• 10:13John Coogan?

  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 amid the 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 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.

• 10:52Speaker 03

  Over 90 success.

• 10:54John Coogan?

  It is also spreading to 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'd have to imagine that the losses were not, I mean, I don't know how much Twitter was losing before they, before they take private. I know that the revenues cratered a bit, but there were also big layoffs and an 80% reduction in cost.

• 11:37John Coogan?

  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.

• 11:44Jordi Hays?

  Yeah.

• 11:44John Coogan?

  You're building a new, a new Starship rocket, which is set to launch today, 5:30 Central Time, tune in.

• 11:52Jordi Hays?

  What a critical launch.

• 11:55John Coogan?

  Is it?

• 11:57Jordi Hays?

  No, just because of the timing with the S1 and the IPO.

• 12:00John Coogan?

  I don't know.

• 12:01Jordi Hays?

  All eyes on.

• 12:02John Coogan?

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

• 12:13Jordi Hays?

  But people are going to be paying way more attention to this.

• 12:16John Coogan?

  Yeah, yeah. Obviously people will be excited about it, but, but you know, even like, I, I think even just the, you know, endless spamming Falcon 9s can get Starlink to what, $20 billion run rate or something, $10 billion run rate. You can, you can clearly build a business off of the existing capability. Lots of excitement around Starship. There was, 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.

• 13:00Jordi Hays?

  And the live stream will be, the launch is, you said 5:30?

• 13:04John Coogan?

  5:30 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?

• 13:35John Coogan?

  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.

• 13:43Jordi Hays?

  We're going to be automating workflows for the enterprise.

• 13:46John Coogan?

  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?

• 14:06Jordi Hays?

  Isn't that, isn't that one, one of the potential?

• 14:09John Coogan?

  You gotta get a million. This is why he's worried about the-

• 14:11Jordi Hays?

  Wasn't there a list of like five or six things and he just has to do like four?

• 14:15John Coogan?

  Uh, I don't know. I haven't dug into that particular one. I, I, I know for Tesla, there were a whole bunch of different milestones. Uh, the humanoid robots was, was one of the stretch goals. Um, but permanent, 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. Uh, anyway, uh, we have Matt Grimm from Andorol, the co-founder and COO, joining us. We're calling in to the Murph. We talked to him last year. Let's see how he did this here. Matt Grimm, how are you doing? Welcome to the show.

• 14:56Jordi Hays?

  You are- I can't hear them.

• 14:57John Coogan?

  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 ramble. Just rant. Tell him to rant. I'll text him. Rant, rant. We might need to come back to him, but he does look like he did in the weighted vest. He's looking very sharp and, uh, on this, uh, 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'll, we will go back to, uh, government pension funds and the SpaceX IPO. Uh, government pension funds, kvetch that the IPO will preserve Mr. Musk's control of the company by giving him more votes per share, but dual class structures are not uncommon. Berkshire Hathaway and News Corp also have them.

• 15:41John Coogan?

  And can encourage founders to take their company public since they won't lose control. If pension funds don't like SpaceX's structure, they don't have to buy shares. SpaceX could fetch a market valuation of upward of $1 trillion, a huge boon for its early private investors and employees with stock options. 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 SpaceX's early stratospheric gains. What was the market cap of Tesla at IPO? What was the market cap of Tesla at IPO?

• 16:22Jordi Hays?

  Sub 10 billion, right?

• 16:23John Coogan?

  Was it Tesla's?

• 16:26Jordi Hays?

  1.7.

• 16:27John Coogan?

  Whoa, 1.7 billion?

• 16:31Jordi Hays?

  Yep.

• 16:32John Coogan?

  Are you sure?

• 16:33Jordi Hays?

  Is that a market cap for?

• 16:35John Coogan?

  You got 1,000 X if you just were a day one IPO believer.

• 16:39Jordi Hays?

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

• 16:41John Coogan?

  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 1,000 X from here. If we get to Mars, that's a big, it's a big, big, big opportunity.

• 16:57Jordi Hays?

  That is so crazy that you could buy an Elon company in the public markets.

• 17:03John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 17:03Jordi Hays?

  At less than a $2 billion market cap.

• 17:08John Coogan?

  And many people did not. I owned a little bit of Tesla at some point, but there were so many moments when it was like so wildly disconnected from other car companies or other, like, it was never a, like a Warren Buffett buy, you know? There were always good reasons not to buy it.

• 17:24Jordi Hays?

  Instead of going to high school, I just bought the Tesla IPO, like, using the money I made from mowing lawns?

• 17:31John Coogan?

  Yeah, you should have just been a lawnmower who DCA'd into Tesla the whole time. Probably be pretty retired right now. I mean, there's a lot of people that did that. There's a lot of people, there's also a lot of people that put money down to buy cars and then they didn't buy the stock and they're like, ah, the card 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, 400 feet tall, and it stood on the launch pad at the company's Starbase complex outside Brownville, Texas.

• 18:11John Coogan?

  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.

• 18:55John Coogan?

  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 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 theories, there's conspiracy theories that think space is fake, nothing's happening, they're not actually going, the satellites don't exist. And then there's other conspiracy theories that think, oh yeah, when they crash, they're actually deploying secret satellites and there's more stuff in space than we think.

• 19:40John Coogan?

  So pick your tinfoil hat theory, we'll 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.

• 20:01Jordi Hays?

  Yeah, just mean the optic, the, think about like the optics and some investors are super, you know, a little bit.

• 20:09John Coogan?

  It is interesting. 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, we can build a big data center. They have.

• 20:22Jordi Hays?

  Impossible.

• 20:23John Coogan?

  And, and, and there's less of a risk factor of like, we're not going to be able to monetize that, or we're not, 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, it'll get blocked, there'll be a data center ban, like they won't be able to ramp up their terrestrial efforts.

• 20:39Jordi Hays?

  God forbid, there's like a, you know, catastrophic, you know, explosion.

• 20:44John Coogan?

  Be dramatic.

• 20:44Jordi Hays?

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

• 20:53John Coogan?

  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, 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

• 21:36John Coogan?

  a year is, is sort of average. These efforts have weighed on SpaceX's bottom line with its 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, like a lot of people were expecting SpaceX to be a bigger business than what they showed in the, in this prospectus. Obviously, Elon is always looking to the future. Huge TAM, huge opportunity in space data centers, huge opportunity in terrestrial data centers. Like, the revenue is going to grow.

• 22:12Jordi Hays?

  The 75 billion that we need is.

• 22:14John Coogan?

  He just added like 15 billion in ARR on a $20 billion company. Like, the growth is there. Elon makes. But my question is, as you trickle down, it's like it's a, it's a, it's an AI company with a, you know, data center business with a telecom and then the smallest section is the launch business. And so I'm wondering like, what does the P and L look like? What do the financial statements look like for Blue Origin? Because Blue Origin's been operating for, I think, a longer amount of time, maybe the same amount of time, 20 years. I can't imagine that they're, you know, if they're working on a new rocket, are they gonna be?

• 22:51Jordi Hays?

  Before, September 8th, 2000.

• 22:53John Coogan?

  2000, so that's 26 year story and they're building stuff that's trying to be in this class of rocket. And if Elon's spending $3 billion trying to, you know, $3 billion last year alone developing Starship, like what are the costs look like for New Glenn? And then the revenues have to be so much smaller.

• 23:11Jordi Hays?

  Here's a question for you, John. There was a PR firm reached out trying to get an early SpaceX investor on the show.

• 23:20John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 23:21Jordi Hays?

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

• 23:30John Coogan?

  I think so. I think pre-Starlink counts as early investor.

• 23:36Jordi Hays?

  Because it's always early.

• 23:37John Coogan?

  It's always early. Well, also, early is often, is often defined by the ROI on the investment. And so if you got in, in the, in the Decacorn rounds and now you're going out at a trillion round, that's 100x.

• 23:52Jordi Hays?

  Yeah.

• 23:52John Coogan?

  And so you're in a pretty good spot. Sean McGuire at Sequoia, like it was a later bet, 2020, I think was when he started building that position, but.

• 24:01Jordi Hays?

  Pre-Star, like Starlink really.

• 24:04John Coogan?

  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, a very difficult launch market that was, you know, not growing exponentially. And there were good margins, but it was, but the, 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

• 24:48John Coogan?

  to the fuel transfer tube that moves propellant to the booster's 33 engines redesigned so engines can simultaneously and more quickly begin firing." And I think they, did they paint the engines black for this one? I saw 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 like the Raptor engine or the Merlin engine getting redesigned, redesigned and just removing, removing parts. And then the final version looks pretty aesthetic, like it looks pretty beautiful. And the first version looks just like cables and wires and tubes everywhere. Looks very thrown together.

• 25:29John Coogan?

  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. "The postponed test mission was set to deploy 20 Starlink simulators during the mission." I'm wondering how much a Starlink costs, because why don't you just rip a real one? You know, you're spending $3 billion, just put up the real ones on the case that it actually works. But I guess there's probably more like telemetry and simulation and like data collection that you can do if you send off the simulator as opposed to like the real thing. But I don't know. Why not just rip it? Why not satellite, remember?

• 26:14Jordi Hays?

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

• 26:18John Coogan?

  Hmm, yeah.

• 26:19Jordi Hays?

  Right?

• 26:20John Coogan?

  Well, Elon says we'd live in a simulation potentially.

• 26:22Jordi Hays?

  Exactly.

• 26:23John Coogan?

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

• 26:28Jordi Hays?

  DJ, D-Saul.

• 26:30John Coogan?

  Yeah, what's going on with?

• 26:31Jordi Hays?

  Slid into Elon's DM.

• 26:33John Coogan?

  Oh, yeah.

• 26:34Jordi Hays?

  In the bid to land lead left the IPO with banks jockeying to get their name first on the deal for SpaceX's IPO. Solomon worked with staffers to message 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.

• 26:56Jordi Hays?

  He also says, wow, this is how you work for the bag at Goldman Sachs.

• 27:03John Coogan?

  David Solomon also had a piece in the New York Times saying that the AI apocalypse, uh, NYT, was overrated. AI is a job creator, David Solomon says. He says, I'm the CEO of Goldman Sachs. The AI job apocalypse is overblown. We'll see what he's saying in a couple 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.

• 27:41Jordi Hays?

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

• 27:52John Coogan?

  I was there. I was writing Visual Basic. It was brutal. I would have loved Codex and Claude Code. I would have been, I would have been working for one minute a day instead of an hour a day.

• 28:02Jordi Hays?

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

• 28:07John Coogan?

  Yes.

• 28:08Jordi Hays?

  You would be currently.

• 28:09John Coogan?

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

• 28:16Jordi Hays?

  That's something you would actually do.

• 28:17John Coogan?

  It would be so, so much fun. Maybe that's what the, the future will hold. Uh, intern simulator. You get to, you get to go into VR and simulate being the most elite intern with, uh, with time travel technology. Uh, anyway.

• 28:30Jordi Hays?

  Can we talk about the world's fair?

• 28:34John Coogan?

  Uh, yes, we need to talk about the world's fair. Tyler, you gave this a read. What stuck out to you? Maybe, maybe let's read through some of it first.

• 28:41Jordi Hays?

  And a quick update, we are rescheduling with Matt Graham.

• 28:45John Coogan?

  Okay.

• 28:46Jordi Hays?

  Due to technical issues.

• 28:48John Coogan?

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

• 28:56Jordi Hays?

  It's possible that, uh, that a third layer SPV lead is holding their infrastructure hostage. Saying, give me direct access.

• 29:03John Coogan?

  I think, I think he might've been there, finished the Murph and saw someone hustling an SPV and he just had to drop the mic and run off and tackle them. That's probably what happened. Anyway, uh, world's fairs. Has someone tried to bring these back? This feels like a tech new media. We need a World's Fair thing. Like, 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

• 29:47John Coogan?

  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 lighting. Ferris really crushed it on the naming thing. You know, Alexander Graham Bell invented the telephone. Thomas Edison invented lighting mostly. Those guys did not bake their name into the product nearly as well as Ferris, because it's capital F. And I believe Ferris is the one who invented the Ferris wheel. Anyway, before splashy Silicon Valley product launches in the annual Consumer Electronics Show, the World's showcased its latest innovations

• 30:32John Coogan?

  at high-profiled World's Fairs. These exhibits, held every few years, beginning in London in 1851, gave countries a public platform to showcase new technologies, products, and ideas that were going to reshape daily life. For host countries and cities, the World's Fairs or Expositions were an opportunity to own the World's Fair project.

• 30:53Jordi Hays?

  Tyler is sharing, the person that invented the Ferris wheels, full name was George Washington Gale Ferris Jr.

• 31:00Speaker 02

  That's pretty elite.

• 31:01Jordi Hays?

  That's an elite name. There's nothing stopping you from naming your child George Washington and then just slapping your own last name at the end.

• 31:09John Coogan?

  Yes, yes.

• 31:10Jordi Hays?

  George Washington Cosgrove.

• 31:13Speaker 02

  John Tyler was the 10th president.

• 31:15John Coogan?

  Oh, true. Yeah, there you go. It's my name.

• 31:17Jordi Hays?

  There we go.

• 31:18John Coogan?

  Okay, so, many of the big expos were commemorative, says Paul Greenhall, a British historian and author of two books on world's fairs and expositions. But all of them ended up doing something else. They changed the shape of cities. Much like the Olympics today, world's fairs were large-scale planning efforts and economic investments, as much as cultural events. Cities competed for the right to host them. Chicago was able to redefine its image from a gritty second city to a cultural and architectural hub after defeating New York in the bid for the 1893 exposition. Here's a look at the US-hosted world's fairs that left the deepest marks.

• 31:57Jordi Hays?

  So, Philadelphia. Starting in Philly.

• 31:59John Coogan?

  Philly.

• 31:59Jordi Hays?

  1876, you're not going to believe what was, what was shown, what was celebrated.

• 32:05John Coogan?

  This is crazy.

• 32:05Jordi Hays?

  We had two key technologies: telephones and ketchup.

• 32:11John Coogan?

  One was disrupted much faster than the other.

• 32:14Jordi Hays?

  Yep.

• 32:14John Coogan?

  I would say that the telephone has basically disappeared. Smartphone, text messaging, telephone's not doing well. It's on its last leg.

• 32:22Jordi Hays?

  The iPhone might, the iPhone might beg to differ.

• 32:24John Coogan?

  But barbecue sauce has not really made, gained ground.

• 32:26Jordi Hays?

  Real inroads.

• 32:27John Coogan?

  No. Ketchup is still.

• 32:28Jordi Hays?

  Even ranch kind of went on a run.

• 32:30John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 32:31Jordi Hays?

  Really.

• 32:32John Coogan?

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

• 32:39Jordi Hays?

  Just the mustard.

• 32:39John Coogan?

  Just the mustard, please. Most people, they'd.

• 32:41Jordi Hays?

  I don't know. I do think mustard is, is better than ketchup.

• 32:45John Coogan?

  Than ketchup.

• 32:45Jordi Hays?

  Yeah.

• 32:46John Coogan?

  Interesting.

• 32:46Jordi Hays?

  Yeah. You can believe that.

• 32:48John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 32:48Jordi Hays?

  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

• 33:32Jordi Hays?

  launch it and demo it, and somebody invents the telephone. It's like, really? Really dude?

• 33:41Jordi Hays?

  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. 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.

• 34:02John Coogan?

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

• 34:06Jordi Hays?

  Yeah, but I don't know. I think.

• 34:08John Coogan?

  Tell people what was, tell people was.

• 34:09Jordi Hays?

  Two key inventions. Last time, remember, we created telephones and ketchup, right? And so fast following this with the next fair, we create the.

• 34:18John Coogan?

  We're no, no, no, no. It's not fast following. 1876, the telephone.

• 34:22Jordi Hays?

  20 years later.

• 34:23John Coogan?

  Almost 20 years later, they're like fast takeoff. It's a, we're so early. Telephone's cooking. What do we got?

• 34:30Jordi Hays?

  The Ferris wheel. And popcorn.

• 34:34John Coogan?

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

• 34:41Jordi Hays?

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

• 34:46John Coogan?

  If you're in telephones, pivot to Ferris wheels. There's a whole, there's a whole industry. Oh yeah, Ferris wheel, that'll destroy the telephone. You gotta get on the Ferris wheel. It's the new thing like.

• 34:55Jordi Hays?

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

• 35:09Jordi Hays?

  So in 1893, they had the Ferris wheel and popcorn. And then you fast forward to today. It's like we, we found a way to put one of the micronutrients in steak.

• 35:22John Coogan?

  Yes.

• 35:22Jordi Hays?

  Into a candy shaped supplement. And we need you to eat four or five of these a day forever.

• 35:28John Coogan?

  2020, world's fair. We have rockets that land. And we also. Have.

• 35:36Jordi Hays?

  All birds.

• 35:37John Coogan?

  All birds. What, what else came out that was very silly? Uh, bored apes. We have, we've invented bored apes.

• 35:44Jordi Hays?

  Skims, shapewear.

• 35:46John Coogan?

  Shapewear and GLP ones. Uh, somewhat related. I don't know.

• 35:50Jordi Hays?

  Uh, Buffalo, New York, 1901.

• 35:53John Coogan?

  Okay.

• 35:54Jordi Hays?

  An electric city.

• 35:55John Coogan?

  This seems pretty elite. This is pretty huge. 1901.

• 35:58Jordi Hays?

  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.

• 36:06John Coogan?

  He was shot.

• 36:06Jordi Hays?

  He was shot at the World's Fair.

• 36:08John Coogan?

  I had no idea. That's crazy. Fact check that. Buffalo's Pan American exposition was meant to showcase America's dominance and innovation in 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.

• 36:32Jordi Hays?

  Okay. So this is 1901.

• 36:33John Coogan?

  1901.

• 36:34Jordi Hays?

  And remember in 1876, we created the telephone.

• 36:37John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 36:38Jordi Hays?

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

• 36:47John Coogan?

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

• 36:50Jordi Hays?

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

• 36:56John Coogan?

  It's really just AGI increasing government.

• 36:59Jordi Hays?

  It was, it was a sort of a Cambrian explosion of snacking.

• 37:02John Coogan?

  Yeah. I mean, this is the nature of our show. It's like cerebrus and groons. Like this is, this is like, this is actually what, what happens in America.

• 37:11Jordi Hays?

  The Louisiana Purchase Exposition was among the largest ever stage and nearly obliterated the city's finances.

• 37:18John Coogan?

  No.

• 37:19Jordi Hays?

  Still, its pop culture influence endures. The exposition popularized a host of snack foods that would become staples of American life, including ice cream cones, peanut butter. Oh my, they went on an insane run right here. Ice cream cones, peanut butter, hot dogs, hamburgers and cotton candy.

• 37:38John Coogan?

  Mm hmm.

• 37:39Jordi Hays?

  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.

• 38:03John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 38:03Jordi Hays?

  In one place.

• 38:04John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 38:05Jordi Hays?

  You gotta be kidding me.

• 38:06John Coogan?

  I mean, I, I wouldn't be surprised.

• 38:08Jordi Hays?

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

• 38:18John Coogan?

  Peanut butter.

• 38:19Jordi Hays?

  Early flying machines and submarines.

• 38:21John Coogan?

  Came after.

• 38:22Jordi Hays?

  And automobiles.

• 38:23John Coogan?

  And automobiles and submarines. This is crazy.

• 38:28Jordi Hays?

  And, and barely remembered.

• 38:30John Coogan?

  No.

• 38:31Jordi Hays?

  Uh, fast forward 1962, Seattle.

• 38:34John Coogan?

  Space race.

• 38:35Jordi Hays?

  Space race.

• 38:36John Coogan?

  That's exciting.

• 38:37Jordi Hays?

  The world's fair, uh, by the mid 20th century, the world's fairs had become games of one upsmanship. I like that. And geopolitical rivalry.

• 38:47Jordi Hays?

  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 in the world's first artificial earth satellite. The Soviets turned down an invitation. They turned it down.

• 39:04John Coogan?

  Turn it down.

• 39:05Jordi Hays?

  Turn it down. Uh, 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.

• 39:18John Coogan?

  I, I recently saw the inside of the Space Needle because, wait, no, that's, uh, not the Space Needle. It's the Toronto version of the Space Needle because didn't Drake film a music video inside of it?

• 39:31Jordi Hays?

  He iced it out.

• 39:32John Coogan?

  Oh, he did?

• 39:33Jordi Hays?

  He made it, he made it ice blue.

• 39:34John Coogan?

  Because he's Iceman or something. That's the name of the album. Um, and inside you can see all of the broadcasting equipment. And there's these huge, uh, radio dishes inside. It's very cool. Anyway.

• 39:47Jordi Hays?

  Fast forward just a few years, couple of years.

• 39:50John Coogan?

  This one.

• 39:50Jordi Hays?

  We got, you're not gonna believe what, you're not gonna believe what they created. What they, what they announced at this world's fair.

• 39:56John Coogan?

  64.

• 39:57Jordi Hays?

  They invent 1964, more than, just under a hundred years since the telephone was invented. We invented punch cards.

• 40:09John Coogan?

  Punch cards.

• 40:10Jordi Hays?

  Uh, which, which.

• 40:13Jordi Hays?

  Feel like a kind of early version of enterprise software in some way.

• 40:17John Coogan?

  True.

• 40:18Jordi Hays?

  World's Fair at Flushing Meadows, New York City.

• 40:20John Coogan?

  Systems Records.

• 40:21Jordi Hays?

  Yes, Systems Records. Visitors were dazzled by color television demonstration and the picture phone, an early video calling system.

• 40:30John Coogan?

  They had FaceTime.

• 40:31Jordi Hays?

  Yeah.

• 40:32Speaker 02

  This is actually.

• 40:32Jordi Hays?

  This is sick.

• 40:33John Coogan?

  This is crazy.

• 40:34Speaker 02

  I can't believe.

• 40:34John Coogan?

  When I told Jordy, 64, they invented FaceTime, he was like, did it use mirrors? And he thought it was just a periscope.

• 40:42Jordi Hays?

  Just a mirror that you look at.

• 40:44John Coogan?

  No, no, no, it's like, it's like a series of mirrors that bounce my image across like, so you can be in the other room and you can see me and talk. No, no, they had full video calling, I guess. AT&T's picture phone, which added video to telephone calls.

• 40:58Speaker 02

  Yes, so it cost $16 for a three-minute call.

• 41:02John Coogan?

  Ooh.

• 41:02Speaker 02

  That's $121 today's, in today's money.

• 41:05John Coogan?

  That's expensive.

• 41:05Speaker 02

  Yeah, $40.

• 41:06John Coogan?

  Token maxing. I wonder if, 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 gonna have.

• 41:19Jordi Hays?

  I wonder if they were talking about Jevon's paradox.

• 41:21John Coogan?

  Yes, probably. I don't know.

• 41:23Jordi Hays?

  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.

• 41:32John Coogan?

  Wow, stagnation theory undefeated. Brutal. By that point.

• 41:38Jordi Hays?

  It's over.

• 41:38John Coogan?

  A function of World's Fairs had largely migrated elsewhere to museums, television, theme parks, and technology conference. As a result, the World's Fair concept gradually faded. Putting on an expo is a lost art, the author says, but when America needed it, no one did it better. And, and Brendan Gurrell of the TVPN newsletter Fame shared that, 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.

• 42:13John Coogan?

  He talked to World's Fair co-founder Cam Wies 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.

• 42:26Jordi Hays?

  Yeah, it's hard to, you could bring something like this back, but I feel like it would end up being like, it would just turn into a tech conference.

• 42:35Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 42:35John Coogan?

  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 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, save everything up for this, can you imagine? But with 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 L L Ms

• 43:17John Coogan?

  or or A G I to to sit on it for a decade while they wait for the next world fair. Yeah. I'm G P T six, Mythos two, it's coming, but we're preparing for Paris in 2046. I don't know if that would work. Anyway.

• 43:36John Coogan?

  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?

• 43:42Speaker 02

  That was just more details, but I was really enamored.

• 43:45John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 43:45Speaker 02

  By this, yeah. I was just thinking, it's it's so sad. We don't really hear the term inventor anymore. Like, no one is primarily an inventor.

• 43:51John Coogan?

  Yeah, people aren't really.

• 43:53Speaker 02

  Kind of lost this.

• 43:57John Coogan?

  Yeah. Does that have something to do with like the patent structure? Like, like patents are, like I have a patent, but I don't think of myself as like an inventor of that thing.

• 44:07Speaker 02

  Why? You could just say that. I think of you as an inventor of bits.

• 44:11John Coogan?

  Of bits, potentially. Inventor, like, in, did you invent T B P N? 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 G L P one 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 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. But

• 44:55Jordi Hays?

  Yeah, I mean, it's just very

• 44:55John Coogan?

  It's really hard because there's like

• 44:56Jordi Hays?

  Internet

• 44:57John Coogan?

  There's so many slices.

• 44:58Jordi Hays?

  The internet is the new World's Fair, right? Or X or any of these social platforms. It would have made sense.

• 45:05John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 45:06Jordi Hays?

  You know, in the 20th century.

• 45:08John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 45:09Jordi Hays?

  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

• 45:21John Coogan?

  Delirious.

• 45:22Jordi Hays?

  On the internet.

• 45:23Speaker 02

  Yes. There's a film called The Inventor and it's about Elizabeth Holmes, right? So that shows you how much the idea of an inventor is

• 45:30John Coogan?

  Wow, yeah.

• 45:31Speaker 02

  Like people don't have respect for

• 45:33John Coogan?

  It's the scammy grifter. Yes. It truly, truly is. Well, we have someone who ships. We have Dan Shipper in the waiting room.

• 45:43Jordi Hays?

  Shipinator.

• 45:44John Coogan?

  The Shipinator, coming back to the show. Let's bring him in. The TV dinner, catch up with Dan Shipper. How you doing?

• 45:51Dan Shipper?

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

• 45:53John Coogan?

  You're a founder, you're a shipper, you're an author, a writer.

• 45:57Jordi Hays?

  Dude.

• 45:57John Coogan?

  Do you think of yourself as an inventor?

• 45:58Jordi Hays?

  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.

• 46:05John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 46:05Dan Shipper?

  I just try to live up to my name.

• 46:08John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 46:08Jordi Hays?

  You do.

• 46:09John Coogan?

  It's great.

• 46:10Jordi Hays?

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

• 46:14John Coogan?

  Do you think of yourself as an inventor?

• 46:18Jordi Hays?

  Do we need to bring inventor back?

• 46:20Dan 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. Cause 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.

• 46:38John Coogan?

  Yeah, it's very gadget related.

• 46:40Dan Shipper?

  Yeah.

• 46:40Jordi Hays?

  Yeah.

• 46:41John Coogan?

  Even though, yeah, I don't know. Inventions can be patented. People that invent software. You should give people credit for those things, but we've moved away from that term for better or worse. Anyway.

• 46:52Jordi Hays?

  Uh, it's been maybe, has it been like four months, maybe more since we caught up?

• 46:58John Coogan?

  Too long.

• 46:58Jordi Hays?

  Been a while. It feels like years in this era, in this era.

• 47:02John Coogan?

  Yeah. The world's changed.

• 47:03Jordi Hays?

  Yeah. Give us, give us the update on, on all things every and, and Dan Shipper.

• 47:09Dan Shipper?

  I mean, there's, there's, there is a lot to say. The, the big update is I just wrote a piece called After Automation.

• 47:16John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 47:16Dan Shipper?

  Because there's so much, there's so much progress has happened over the last four months. I think the biggest thing has been, there's a hu- there was this huge step change in models, um, starting in November with Opus 4.5 and then, uh, 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, uh, first Claude, Claude Code, then Claude Co-Work, and now Codex, which Codex, the big shift. The biggest thing that's happened is Codex is my daily driver now, and it's fantastic. It is like totally changing how I work.

• 47:55Dan Shipper?

  But I think as that starts to happen, you're starting to get a lot of people, um, who maybe have not been that clued into Agentic AI, use it for the first time and go like, holy fucking shit. Like, everything is gonna change. Am I gonna have-

• 48:10John Coogan?

  I saw, I saw an interesting benchmark here where someone is sort of outside of technology was, was sort of, uh, lamenting AI progress because the, the tricky prompt they had was, uh, was, uh, come up with a Pokemon that ends in the two letters ER. Did you see this?

• 48:29Dan Shipper?

  No.

• 48:29John Coogan?

  And, and, and the, and like the, 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 Rs are in strawberry. But if you hit a coding model, like, you, you can just watch the traces of Claude Code or Codex, and it's like, go to Pokemon Wiki Decks, download them all, put them into a CSV, write the Python that checks the actual last two characters of the Pokemon name, and it just nails it perfectly, and it's traceable. And so you get the perfect answer. And I think people haven't realized that that's what's possible, and it doesn't all need to be memorization anymore. That's like the big shift.

• 49:08Dan Shipper?

  I totally agree and and you're seeing people, you know, I mean, Dario is out there being like, uh, you know, uh, AI could warn, could wipe out half of white collar, entry level, white collar jobs.

• 49:20John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 49:20Dan Shipper?

  Uh, but even even people outside the industry like Citadel, like

• 49:24John Coogan?

  Yeah, Ken Griffin.

• 49:25Dan Shipper?

  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.

• 49:36John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 49:37Dan Shipper?

  And so you can just feel, you can just smell when someone's like using an agent for the first time and they're like, what the fuck?

• 49:43John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 49:43Dan Shipper?

  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 news around his head and he's like, first time, you know?

• 49:53John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 49:53Dan Shipper?

  Like, that's that's sort of how I feel.

• 49:57Jordi Hays?

  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, I mean, 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, uh, actions you can take? Uh, and yeah, it's, it's, it's been even, even with how, even with how kind of close we are to the

• 50:41Jordi Hays?

  action and following, you know, not, not as long, uh, you know, we weren't doing the show in, in the GPT three days, but I still find myself like operating day to day, thinking like, oh, I should reach out to that person to get their, you know, to see if they can help with this thing and then realizing like, oh, I can just ask. Codex to do that, or I can just, I can get a model to do this. And it's a really, it's a really, it's like a fundamental shift and I'm still not routing enough kind of tasks through the models versus, or at least as much as I could. The other, the other thing, I wanted to get your update on like how, how you feel like memory is evolving. I've had some like

• 51:26Jordi Hays?

  pretty pleasant experiences recently where I will, I will do, you know, I'll, I'll go to ChatGPT and, 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, and not, not, uh, 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, like memory, and then, and then people just like kind of stopped

• 52:07Jordi Hays?

  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.

• 52:14Dan Shipper?

  So I, I mean, whether or not it's memory specifically, the, the thing that has changed dramatically is that Codex and, and also Claude Code or Co-Work to some extent, but Codex, the reason it's so powerful for me is it has access to everything on my computer.

• 52:27Jordi Hays?

  Yeah.

• 52:29Dan Shipper?

  And so, you know, I, when I published this article, um, after automation yesterday, I was like, who should I send this to? And I was gonna go through, go through my texts and go through my emails and then, you know, whatever. And I literally just said to Codex, hey, can you go figure out like a couple of people I should, I should send this to? And it came up with like a bunch of investors, a bunch of journalists, a bunch of founders, all people who I've talked to in the last like three months, but just going through my text messages, going through my emails. And it's just like a complete change in what is possible because it has access to all that stuff, which includes memories.

• 53:02Jordi Hays?

  Yeah.

• 53:03Dan Shipper?

  And, and one of the things I'm trying to do with this piece, Is is to say, as a company, we've automated everything that we can. Every single person has access to an agent, they have access to them as many tokens as they possibly can use. And yet, we've grown from four to almost thirty people since GPT three. So like, what the fuck is that about?

• 53:23Jordi Hays?

  Yeah.

• 53:23Dan Shipper?

  It it's very counter to the narrative, I think, especially like the popular narrative right now with like, Meta's laying people off and Block is laying people off and the Click ClickUp guys, like, I'm gonna fire everyone, it's only gonna be a hundred X employees. So there's, I think there's a really interesting question here about if you're actually on the frontier like we are.

• 53:42Dan Shipper?

  It seems like there's more human work to do than ever. Why is that? So I did a bunch of work.

• 53:48Jordi Hays?

  And the other thing is, Ken Ken Griffin, in the the quote you pulled earlier from 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 a companies that like don't have meaningful momentum or don't have clear narratives that are having to, you know, do these layoffs. And and again, there's still, you know,

• 54:35Jordi Hays?

  there's still a lot of the, there's just still a lot of blaming, you know, sort of like crediting AI for layoffs that that would have needed to happen even if we weren't in this technology cycle.

• 54:49Dan 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.

• 54:59Dan Shipper?

  What what do you guys think about that? I just feel like that's such a weird strategy or weird meme to be going around.

• 55:05Jordi Hays?

  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? Revenue's 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, you know, two, a year ago, two years ago. And so when you have a massive correction in, in the sort of valuation of your company, like, you're gonna try to make moves to change that or free up resources to invest in new,

• 55:48Jordi Hays?

  in new product areas and get that momentum again. So I would say like, when I see, or the business is bigger than it's ever been or better than it's ever been, I just don't necessarily, 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?

• 56:10Dan 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, all of technology for CEOs to be doing that.

• 56:25John Coogan?

  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 gonna reduce our workforce. And he used a really spicy phrase. He said like, low value human work and we're gonna replace it with capital that we're investing. It was a very quantitative analysis of something that's deeply human. But I dug into his actual projection and he said 15% headcount reduction by 2030, which is like, I would assume that attrition would get you there. Like, is this like the most retentive company in history? Like, I feel like 4% of the workforce probably turns over annually anyway.

• 57:10John Coogan?

  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. Mean valuation, like there were some, there were some big private companies that during the COVID era or Zerp era, they just sort of froze hiring and grew into their valuations because the business model was sound. They didn't need to hire as much. They refocused, raised the hiring standard, allowed attrition to play its part. And they got to become more lean, like more lean and mean organizations without like actually doing a layoff, which at that time would have been optically very bad because if you were doing a layoff during Zerp or COVID,

• 57:52John Coogan?

  it was like an indictment of you because it was like, oh, well, you're a victim of COVID or you're a victim of Zerp. Like you, your business doesn't work in a high interest rate environment. Your business doesn't work in a remote, in a more remote world. Whereas now, the vibe is, oh, if you're doing a layoff, that's a sign that your business is ready for AI, ready for automation, ready for more, for more efficiency. And so I think people are sort of playing both sides. It's very, very.

• 58:21Jordi Hays?

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

• 58:59Dan Shipper?

  Yeah, and I think this, I think this all changes and the, and the lines between those terms are all going to change because they're all sort of relative to the capabilities and technology and that's all changing too. But I can tell you that what we find internally at Everian and, you know, again, we're one of those places, if you add someone in Slack, it's like toss up whether or not it's a bot, you know?

• 59:20Dan Shipper?

  And everyone's using Codex and Claude Code to doing, 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 of Anthropic, they do, they do have company-wide bots that you can, you can add, 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, how these agents work. Obviously, they do like more and more complex work, but what we see is that one of the,

• 1:00:06Dan Shipper?

  someone on our team, Kieran Claussen, calls it the, the human sandwich is, is AI collapses, 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, every now, and I think you find this across the like AI industry, is it actually, even though AI can do expert human work, it actually increases the demand for human experts.

• 1:00:48Dan Shipper?

  Because what happens is you can get expert human work out of an AI, you can get like 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, and, and take, take the, 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.

• 1:01:30Dan Shipper?

  And I think that's a, I think that's a dynamic inside of how the models work and, and how they, 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.

• 1:01:49John Coogan?

  What do you think about the idea of like the YouTube-ification 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 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, you know, go through YC, be technical, hire a couple of engineers.

• 1:02:34John Coogan?

  Now, a few people can sort of get something off the ground. Are you actually seeing any movement towards that, do you think?

• 1:02:39Dan Shipper?

  I think that's definitely a thing. And it's actually one of the, one of the things that makes working at a place like Every really appealing, because if you're someone who wants to make, make software, everybody else can make software now, so having, having some sort of distribution and trusted brand makes a lot more sense than it used to. I think that I'm, 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, the SaaS apocalypse is like totally overblown. Ninety-nine percent 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

• 1:03:23Dan Shipper?

  a particular skill set that most people don't want to have. And I would be buying SaaS stocks because I, I actually, you know, if you look at Every, we buy, we can vibe go whatever we want.

• 1:03:34Speaker 02

  Meritorial violation.

• 1:03:35Jordi Hays?

  Yeah, the only thing I think, the only thing I think about is oftentimes you're buying software for a certain group of people to sort of manage work. And as certain workflows become agents, then I, I do, I like, like another way to put it is. A lot of people that are outside of tech that have been vibe coding are sharing apps with me that they've built that like the LLMs can just do natively like pretty well already. And so that's been, that's, that's the kind of the, the potential bear

• 1:04:19Jordi Hays?

  case for this sort of like, super, super long tail of software is like as agents get, get more competent and people learn how to, they're sort of like unhobbled. There's a lot of this long tail that can just be like a thread effectively.

• 1:04:35Dan Shipper?

  Oh, you're saying you don't need an app. You just need to talk to them.

• 1:04:37Jordi Hays?

  Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. It's basically like you're talking to an agent. It's like, hey, I want to get my, let's use the most bro-y example possible. I want to get my bench press to, uh, two plates by, uh, eight weeks from now. I'm currently at, you know, a plate. And give me a plan to get there. Right? So instead of needing like a

• 1:05:02John Coogan?

  You could vibe code bench press.

• 1:05:04Jordi Hays?

  Yeah. You could do like the, yeah.

• 1:05:06John Coogan?

  The distribution or you could, or the customer could just wind up going to any

• 1:05:10Jordi Hays?

  And they're like, cool. And, and they, they generate your workout. You're saying, great. I did it. I, I was failing after three sets or whatever. And then it learns that and it gives you a new workout and it, and it, uh, 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 like long tail of apps, but part of it is that people don't realize what the models themselves.

• 1:05:36Dan Shipper?

  I have a few thoughts there. The first, 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, um, medium for, for a lot of app interactions. So in the same way that Excel was, you don't get the SaaS boom without Excel. Uh, 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 Codex or ChatGPT or Claude use cases are actually training potential customers

• 1:06:17Dan Shipper?

  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 Claude 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, you know, the agent's in there with you, you can like look at your app in local hosts and the agents in there and you're going back and forth. And it's very good, a very good collaboration environment for developer.

• 1:07:02Dan Shipper?

  I think that is, it's incredible for any kind of knowledge work. I spend all day just in Codex. And when I open up a thread, I just open up a browser tab and I'm in my documents, I'm in my emails, and it's me and Codex going back and forth on a SaaS app that's running inside of the browser of Codex. And it is the most powerful thing I've ever used. And I really think that is going to be a significant user experience type thing that we're going to see across all of the, all of these providers of agent orchestration platforms for knowledge work.

• 1:07:39John Coogan?

  Love it.

• 1:07:40Jordi Hays?

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

• 1:07:44John Coogan?

  Oh.

• 1:07:47John Coogan?

  Happy birthday. Did we hit the gong?

• 1:07:49Jordi Hays?

  Yeah, we're hitting the gong. We're hitting the, doing an early gong for your birthday. Wow. A little birdie, Nick John, in the chat, said that, said it's tomorrow. Great, great timing with a three-day weekend. Great timing for you to just lock in at your computer and just grind all weekend.

• 1:08:07Dan Shipper?

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

• 1:08:11Jordi Hays?

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

• 1:08:21Dan Shipper?

  We've got a lot of good stuff. There's some interesting stuff coming on the vibe check front. Every time a new model comes out, we do some, we do some good vibe checks. So there's going to be some really good stuff happening in the next couple of 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.

• 1:08:42Jordi Hays?

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

• 1:08:52John Coogan?

  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 TBP in UltraDome. Maybe we 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.

• 1:09:16Speaker 03

  Yeah, James Rogers. Thanks for having me down here, guys. Based up in Santa Barbara, so it's easy to get down.

• 1:09:22John Coogan?

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

• 1:09:30Speaker 03

  Deckers.

• 1:09:32John Coogan?

  Okay, yeah.

• 1:09:33Speaker 03

  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. Didn't know. I was in Pittsburgh before that. Got out to Santa Barbara, and was doing my PhD in material science, studying solar paint. Kind of weird.

• 1:09:50John Coogan?

  Solar paint. What does that do? You painted and absorbs?

• 1:09:53Speaker 03

  You paint something, and it dries into a solar cell.

• 1:09:55John Coogan?

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

• 1:09:58Speaker 03

  It's too expensive. That was actually where Appeal came from, was, hey...

• 1:10:03John Coogan?

  Power's expensive now, though. Maybe the economics work in the data center era, you just paint the data center.

• 1:10:07Jordi Hays?

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

• 1:10:15Speaker 03

  Unbelievable. I came out to...

• 1:10:17Jordi Hays?

  Because from the air, my favorite thing is I give you, show someone a picture... Of the university from the air. It looks like it should be like a Four Seasons or something. A university has no business being that close to an incredible beach.

• 1:10:31Speaker 03

  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 I land in Santa Barbara and it's like, I'm not going back. It's too, it's too nice here.

• 1:10:45John Coogan?

  To study material sciences, like where did the original idea for appeal come from?

• 1:10:50Speaker 03

  I thought the paint thing was so amazing, you know, wow, you can mix up a bucket of this paint and then it will build itself. Where you ship it and but then I realized how expensive that was going to be and went, okay, well, that. Maybe the solar paint thing doesn't work, but this, there's something about this idea that you could.

• 1:11:07Jordi Hays?

  Technology.

• 1:11:08Speaker 03

  Build something that builds itself.

• 1:11:11John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 1:11:11Speaker 03

  Somewhere else.

• 1:11:12John Coogan?

  Okay.

• 1:11:12Speaker 03

  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.

• 1:11:22John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 1:11:23Speaker 03

  But I never, 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.

• 1:11:34John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 1:11:35Speaker 03

  And the reason is we're, people are hungry because we throw it away.

• 1:11:38John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 1:11:38Speaker 03

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

• 1:11:43John Coogan?

  So the, 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?

• 1:11:50Speaker 03

  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.

• 1:12:02John Coogan?

  That's the easy part.

• 1:12:03Speaker 03

  That is true. But I'm like, well, I just learned all this, I know, I learned all the material science stuff. So I could probably learn, 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 a peel. Just put those words together. Now we gotta figure out how to make it. And that was the hard part.

• 1:12:43Jordi Hays?

  Yeah, so what like specific founder journey? You have this idea, you tell your mom about it. She's like, good, that's, that's nice, sweetie.

• 1:12:53Jordi Hays?

  You don't know anything about fruits and vegetables. And then what do you, what do you do next?

• 1:12:57Speaker 03

  You know, 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're, 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'd 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, 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.

• 1:13:43Speaker 03

  And was huh. So these skins are made of the plant oils. And then it wasn't just that the strawberries, it wasn't just that the orange skin was made out of these plant oils. It was the strawberry skin was made out of the same thing. And that was like a, a big, like, that was like a mind blower. Because it was, well, wait, if lemons last a really long time and they've got the same thing as a strawberry.

• 1:14:07Jordi Hays?

  Why can't you apply?

• 1:14:08Speaker 03

  Can we just do more of that?

• 1:14:11Speaker 03

  And it's so, it's so simple at one level, but we were so addicted to refrigeration and pesticides and, and plastic wrap to try to address this stuff. This idea of using something plant-based was, at the time, it was kinda, kinda crazy.

• 1:14:27John Coogan?

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

• 1:14:33Speaker 03

  New venture competition.

• 1:14:34John Coogan?

  New venture?

• 1:14:35Speaker 03

  We were like a UCSB.

• 1:14:36Jordi Hays?

  No way, UCSB, I remember. But wasn't that, wasn't that like, didn't you get like 25 grand or something?

• 1:14:41Speaker 03

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

• 1:14:45Jordi Hays?

  No, I remember, I remember, I remember this, this program and, uh, yeah, it was like, it was really like venture funding for ants.

• 1:14:53Speaker 03

  He's been at least twice this size.

• 1:14:55John Coogan?

  17K, first company for me.

• 1:14:57Speaker 03

  Yes, yeah.

• 1:14:58John Coogan?

  It's enough. If you're eating ramen and just paying rent.

• 1:15:00Speaker 03

  I mean, my yearly salary was $24,000. So this was like a 50% bonus.

• 1:15:05John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 1:15:05Speaker 03

  It was enough to incorporate the business.

• 1:15:07John Coogan?

  Yep.

• 1:15:08Speaker 03

  First, uh, uh, business address was on Del Plaia.

• 1:15:13Jordi Hays?

  That is crazy. That's like probably the, the most enterprise value created from, uh, from an incorporation on Del Plaia. Del Plaia, Del Plaia is like, uh, yeah, just a very notorious street. It's the street that runs.

• 1:15:27John Coogan?

  I can imagine.

• 1:15:27Jordi Hays?

  It's the street that runs, uh, in Isla Vista, which is where the university is. Uh, it's a street that runs along, uh, basically as close to the water as possible. So you wanna be

• 1:15:38John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 1:15:38Jordi Hays?

  on the, uh,

• 1:15:39John Coogan?

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

• 1:15:41Jordi Hays?

  Maybe a little bit, maybe a little bit.

• 1:15:45Speaker 03

  Yeah, we were at the end of the street, you know, I was in grad school.

• 1:15:47Jordi Hays?

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

• 1:16:10Speaker 03

  Yeah.

• 1:16:11Jordi Hays?

  Um, okay, so, uh, you kind of have this insight, you, you have a little grant funding. Are you able to make MVPs with that grant?

• 1:16:21Speaker 03

  Not was able to do the, do the research and I got, it got to the point where it was, you know, I, I couldn't. There was no proof that it would work, this idea that we could add. We could, we could strengthen the peel and it would last longer. It's kind of the, will the lemon last longer than a strawberry? But that will it work if we actually build a business around this? And so it was research, research, you know, measure, measure, measure, but you know, okay, at some point I couldn't figure out, I couldn't find a reason it wouldn't work. But I also, there was no word written that it would work. And so it came to the point.

• 1:16:56Jordi Hays?

  But how hard could it be? You spray, you just put some stuff on, on an apple and leave it out, right?

• 1:17:01Speaker 03

  Well, that's, that's what's wild is there was when we.

• 1:17:05Jordi Hays?

  And I'm joking when I say.

• 1:17:06Speaker 03

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

• 1:17:21Jordi Hays?

  Iteration.

• 1:17:22Speaker 03

  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.

• 1:17:31Jordi Hays?

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

• 1:17:37Speaker 03

  Same tree you had to do.

• 1:17:39Jordi Hays?

  Same tree.

• 1:17:39Speaker 03

  That was a big problem in the beginning. We were going to the grocery store and buying fruit and going like, why does this one?

• 1:17:44Jordi Hays?

  Rot faster.

• 1:17:45Speaker 03

  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, or different trees. And most of them have gone through this supply chain, you know, apples. You know, the average apple that's eaten in the U S is a year old.

• 1:18:01Jordi Hays?

  No way.

• 1:18:01Speaker 03

  Yeah.

• 1:18:03John Coogan?

  No way.

• 1:18:03Speaker 03

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

• 1:18:08John Coogan?

  Wow.

• 1:18:08Speaker 03

  Yeah.

• 1:18:09John Coogan?

  That's crazy.

• 1:18:09Speaker 03

  Yeah.

• 1:18:11John Coogan?

  I would have thought that we'd be more globalized, we'd be growing them in the

• 1:18:14Jordi Hays?

  I grew up in Northern California.

• 1:18:15John Coogan?

  Something.

• 1:18:16Jordi Hays?

  I grew up in Northern California, so the average apple that I would eat as a kid, I picked off the tree.

• 1:18:22Speaker 03

  Yeah, and we can get back to that.

• 1:18:24John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 1:18:24Speaker 03

  You know, you keep hearing about this farm-to-table thing, but the "to" is obscuring everything that's happening.

• 1:18:30John Coogan?

  Okay.

• 1:18:30Speaker 03

  Right? You hear about what's going on the farm.

• 1:18:32John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 1:18:33Speaker 03

  You hear, you know, you know what's happening on the table in the restaurant, but the "to" 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 fumigated it 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."

• 1:18:53John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 1:18:53Speaker 03

  And of course, it's, of course it's not.

• 1:18:55John Coogan?

  Yeah, talk about the early business model, the farm side, the table side, distributors, supermarkets, like, there's a lot of different players in the supply chain that might be interested in the business.

• 1:19:05Speaker 03

  Yeah.

• 1:19:06John Coogan?

  How did you think about cracking it?

• 1:19:09Speaker 03

  Well, we were so naive. We thought, you know, "Well, hey, if food lasted longer, more of it could get to people, and so we'd be able to feed people and that'd be 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."

• 1:19:29John Coogan?

  Hmm.

• 1:19:30Speaker 03

  Every piece of food that you throw away is another piece of food that I get to sell. So there's this crazy mismatch in 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 we actually, our first customer was right up the street from us. We make our product out of plant material, so we were looking for plant material, and this guy was growing. Coffee cherries. I didn't know coffee beans, like they're inside of a coffee cherry. Okay. This was news to me. Yeah. So you got all these coffee cherries after you get the beans. We met this guy, we're telling him about what we're doing. He said, "This sounds really amazing. Can you do anything for my finger limes?" Okay.

• 1:20:13Speaker 03

  And we're like, "What the hell is a finger lime?" You know, I've never heard of one of these things. And they're these little, uh, 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. And he lived right at the street. So we started working with this small farmer on these caviar limes. Cause his thing was, he had to air freight these caviar limes to places like Chicago and New York. Oh. Cause 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, on Trains. On trucks, basically. Saves, saves them a ton of money. The, you know, now they last 20 days instead of five days. Like, everybody's happy. Sure.

• 1:20:54Speaker 03

  Um, but then we started going and saying, "Okay, well, let's do this again with, you know, other suppliers and other categories." And this is when we got the feedback from them saying, We don't need it. We don't need it. And actually, maybe, maybe you guys should just stop, stop doing this. Interesting. Um, and what, but what we did find-

• 1:21:15Jordi Hays?

  Did you ever get a visit from Big Fruit coming in saying, "Hey buddy"? It's like the guy that got-

• 1:21:20Speaker 03

  They were, they were, you know, you guys probably have some of their masks around here. I've seen them. Uh, yeah, under different, under, uh, in different clothing. Um, yeah. You know, actually, our, our first work that we did in the industry, uh, we were working with, we were doing a demonstration with a huge citrus company. And we were high-fiving, cause 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. What does that mean? It, they said, "Hey, your product doesn't work." Okay, interesting. And we, we were Yeah.

• 1:21:59Speaker 03

  Totally knocked backwards because we've got the exact same fruit that we bring back whole to 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. Wow. You know, it's such a small industry. When somebody starts spreading rumors that, oh-

• 1:22:17Jordi Hays?

  Oh, so you think they were, you think they were, they were just, they were just basically lying to you?

• 1:22:22Speaker 03

  Their, their data didn't match our data.

• 1:22:24Jordi Hays?

  Interesting. Interesting.

• 1:22:26Speaker 03

  Didn't match our data and it's such a tightly controlled industry. You know, we were locked out, so we actually had to go to market originally in Europe.

• 1:22:35John Coogan?

  Oh, interesting.

• 1:22:36Speaker 03

  It hacked us all the way over to Europe. It's that tightly, that tightly controlled. But what we found was that in Europe, people were looking for this.

• 1:22:45John Coogan?

  Okay.

• 1:22:45Speaker 03

  People were looking for a way to have access to healthier fruits and vegetables that that they don't waste. They had huge initiatives around this, even like companies, like the retailers were actually talking about this kind of stuff. And we started with, we started with avocados because of the joke with the avocado. Not now, not now, not now.

• 1:23:06Jordi Hays?

  Oh, yeah.

• 1:23:07Speaker 03

  Too late.

• 1:23:08Jordi Hays?

  Yeah.

• 1:23:08Speaker 03

  And it solved this, the, you know, this challenge that we had where the supply chain wasn't so interested in having food last longer, but the retailer was.

• 1:23:17John Coogan?

  Okay.

• 1:23:17Jordi Hays?

  Yeah.

• 1:23:18Speaker 03

  Because if they bought an avocado and didn't sell the avocado, that was a waste of money.

• 1:23:22Jordi Hays?

  My UCSB days avocado was such an extreme luxury that the joke of like, not now, not now, not now, now it's bad or whatever. Like that was so real. I was like monitoring my avocado, being like, I can't, I cannot let this go.

• 1:23:39Speaker 03

  Yeah. And it's because they're breathing. You don't think about it, but fruit is still alive when you pick it. At least you want to be eating it while it, while it's still alive.

• 1:23:48Jordi Hays?

  Yeah.

• 1:23:49Speaker 03

  And it, 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.

• 1:23:59Jordi Hays?

  Right.

• 1:24:00Speaker 03

  They don't even know.

• 1:24:00John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 1:24:01Speaker 03

  Because it's dressed up in wax.

• 1:24:02John Coogan?

  So retailers would actually acquire produce from a distributor and then apply appeal to the product?

• 1:24:08Speaker 03

  Here was, here was what was so problematic was the retailers loved it.

• 1:24:13John Coogan?

  Okay.

• 1:24:14Speaker 03

  Because now they're able to buy food that they can actually sell and they were actually telling their shoppers about this.

• 1:24:20John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 1:24:21Speaker 03

  But that mean, that meant they had to, you know, they're, they're not growing the food. So they have to tell the suppliers, hey, we want you to use this product. The suppliers hated this.

• 1:24:29John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 1:24:30Speaker 03

  Absolutely hated this because they don't, they had pretty much shut it down.

• 1:24:33John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 1:24:34Speaker 03

  And so the retailer starts telling the suppliers about what they need to do in their business and don't get me wrong, we were a headache in their operations because we were this, you know, we were this new thing that they had to do. And these things have been operating the way they've been operating for. You know, 100 years.

• 1:24:52John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 1:24:52Speaker 03

  So, uh, but that's the way that it had to, that's the way that it had to happen, uh, in the U.S. Was, was from the retail side, you know, pushing back into the supply chain.

• 1:25:01John Coogan?

  Sure.

• 1:25:01Jordi Hays?

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

• 1:25:06Speaker 03

  2019, 2020.

• 1:25:08Jordi Hays?

  Oh, wow.

• 1:25:08Speaker 03

  Yeah, it took a while. I mean.

• 1:25:10Jordi Hays?

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

• 1:25:13Speaker 03

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

• 1:25:32John Coogan?

  Wow.

• 1:25:33Speaker 03

  Beforehand as a, as a demo, we shipped up like a, a, a case of avocados and said, hey, put these out on your desk so that when we got, you know, sat down in the meeting with Mark was, what happened? What happened?

• 1:25:45Jordi Hays?

  That's a unique demo.

• 1:25:47Speaker 03

  Yeah, right?

• 1:25:48Jordi Hays?

  Bet it all.

• 1:25:49Speaker 03

  Yeah, bet it all. That was it. Yeah, bet it all. Burn the ships.

• 1:25:52John Coogan?

  Do you raise some money? What, what did it look like actually scaling up, uh, your supply chain?

• 1:25:58Speaker 03

  Oh, man. Uh, you know, when we first started, like I said, you know, the, the, we were, when we first started, we were getting, you know, these coffee cherries 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, a hundred bucks to treat an avocado, which that's not going to work.

• 1:26:38Jordi Hays?

  Yeah.

• 1:26:38Speaker 03

  That's not going to work. But once we, 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.

• 1:26:55John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 1:26:56Speaker 03

  You, you, it's, it's the same way that they, you know, get alcohol out of.

• 1:27:01John Coogan?

  Boil it off.

• 1:27:02Speaker 03

  They boil it off.

• 1:27:03John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 1:27:03Speaker 03

  And, and you can do this thing called precision distillation, which basically allows you to separate out really specific. Really specific oils.

• 1:27:13John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 1:27:13Speaker 03

  And that turned out to be a super scalable.

• 1:27:17John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 1:27:17Speaker 03

  Super cheap.

• 1:27:18John Coogan?

  Cause you can do it in a bigger and bigger vat.

• 1:27:20Speaker 03

  You can do it in a big.

• 1:27:20John Coogan?

  Bigger flame, bigger centrifuge, if you need that.

• 1:27:23Speaker 03

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

• 1:27:27Jordi Hays?

  By this point, did your mom think that you could figure it out fruit?

• 1:27:30Speaker 03

  Uh, it was so cool. I would go home for Christmas and, you know, my, 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.

• 1:27:45John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 1:27:45Speaker 03

  To, 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, have our product. Cause growing up in Michigan, I grew up in Michigan. I'm not a California guy, but I, I, I love it out here, but I didn't grow up here. And I, it was just night and day, you know, I'd go back to Michigan and go, oh yeah, most people, I mean, I didn't experience what good produce, good produce was, living in the Midwest.

• 1:28:10Jordi Hays?

  Yeah. I mean, I, I've spent basically my whole life in California and so always had access to farmer's markets. And sometimes the farmer's markets are selling product that isn't actually, that's not really like the, the farmer is not present and maybe not even in the state, but oftentimes, oftentimes it's, you know, it is hyper local.

• 1:28:30Speaker 03

  Yeah.

• 1:28:30Jordi Hays?

  So you get super spoiled living here.

• 1:28:32Speaker 03

  You get super spoiled living here and, and, you know, I, I, I, one thing I've come to realize is if you don't know the person growing your food, they don't have a lot of incentive to do the right thing for you.

• 1:28:44Jordi Hays?

  Yeah.

• 1:28:46Speaker 03

  It, you know, it, 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, the one coated in pesticides is cheaper because they have less, you know, less, less rot. So you buy the cheaper one and the person who's doing the right thing doesn't get rewarded for it. So there's just this horrible incentive.

• 1:29:16Speaker 03

  In these supply chains to cut corners and do stuff that is horrifying.

• 1:29:21Jordi Hays?

  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.

• 1:29:44Speaker 03

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

• 1:30:12John Coogan?

  Oh, interesting.

• 1:30:13Speaker 03

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

• 1:30:26John Coogan?

  What is an inorganic apple? Just like computer chips in a room or something? Aren't they all organic?

• 1:30:32Speaker 03

  Yeah.

• 1:30:33John Coogan?

  They're literally organisms, right?

• 1:30:35Speaker 03

  Yes, yeah.

• 1:30:35John Coogan?

  Definitionally.

• 1:30:36Speaker 03

  You gotta, you gotta go, you gotta jump on the marketing.

• 1:30:39John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 1:30:40Speaker 03

  You gotta, gotta put your marketing hat on to understand what they mean.

• 1:30:42John Coogan?

  But I mean, that's ultimately like, part of the problem is that like, you were sort of attacked with like, like a aggressive marketing campaign against your product, right? And it 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?

• 1:30:59Speaker 03

  We, yeah, oh man, PTSD just even thinking about it. No, it's all right. We should talk about it because if you're building something right now, this is the playbook.

• 1:31:07John Coogan?

  Okay.

• 1:31:08Speaker 03

  They will use against you.

• 1:31:09John Coogan?

  Okay.

• 1:31:10Speaker 03

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

• 1:31:12John Coogan?

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

• 1:31:18Jordi Hays?

  You're in enough stores at this point.

• 1:31:19John Coogan?

  You have dozens of employees, hundreds of.

• 1:31:21Speaker 03

  Hundreds of employees.

• 1:31:23John Coogan?

  You're in stores, the stickers are, where your mom can find them.

• 1:31:26Speaker 03

  Exactly. My mom's pulling off the stickers. We got distribution.

• 1:31:29John Coogan?

  It's not like she has to go to some special store, one of one.

• 1:31:32Speaker 03

  It's like 60% of the avocados that are being sold in the United States are with our product now.

• 1:31:36John Coogan?

  Yep.

• 1:31:37Speaker 03

  And we are.

• 1:31:42Speaker 03

  We are announcing a kind of a first of its kind partnership with a with a supplier, a supplier of lemons. And he goes out in the media and does a press release and says, this product is amazing. I want this product on every, I'm gonna, I'm gonna treat every lemon in the world with this product. And

• 1:32:05John Coogan?

  People didn't like it?

• 1:32:06Speaker 03

  Boom. He gets doxxed by these like video campaigns, like put his phone number up there. Uh, he's getting death threats from, from, uh, from saying that he's gonna do this. Um, and this, what we thought, you know, cause the original, I mean, we, we saw, I remember, I remember one of our guys coming to me and saying, you know, hey, we're, you know, someone's saying our product is, uh, is this, uh, cleaning agent that's being marketed in the UK.

• 1:32:39John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 1:32:40Speaker 03

  And it was

• 1:32:41John Coogan?

  It was a similar name?

• 1:32:42Speaker 03

  Exact same name. Exact same name.

• 1:32:44John Coogan?

  So it's not even a shared ingredient?

• 1:32:45Speaker 03

  No.

• 1:32:46John Coogan?

  Okay. Because sometimes there's, there's precursors, like, you know, I, I can drink dihydrogen monoxide. That sounds very scary.

• 1:32:53Speaker 03

  Yeah.

• 1:32:54John Coogan?

  That's of course H2O, that's water.

• 1:32:55Speaker 03

  Right.

• 1:32:56John Coogan?

  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.

• 1:33:04Speaker 03

  Totally separate company.

• 1:33:05John Coogan?

  Okay.

• 1:33:06Speaker 03

  Totally separate company, sells a cleaning product.

• 1:33:08John Coogan?

  Okay.

• 1:33:09Speaker 03

  Also with the company's name. Two, two posts at the exact same time go live on Facebook. This is a toxic product with a link to this

• 1:33:20John Coogan?

  This other company.

• 1:33:21Speaker 03

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

• 1:33:25John Coogan?

  Yeah, yeah.

• 1:33:26Speaker 03

  You know, is not something you should be eating. Right, exactly. And it just

• 1:33:30John Coogan?

  And they don't want to put their cleaning product on your food either. Like, there's two separate companies.

• 1:33:34Speaker 03

  Yeah, there's, yeah, right, exactly. Different, different solutions for different products. Like specific ones for food, you know?

• 1:33:40John Coogan?

  Yeah, of course.

• 1:33:41Speaker 03

  Uh, and this, this thing, and this thing just goes, goes crazy.

• 1:33:45John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 1:33:46Speaker 03

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

• 1:34:10John Coogan?

  Bill Gates thing because of the nonprofit donation.

• 1:34:13Speaker 03

  We got a hundred grand in 2012 to research cassava root.

• 1:34:20John Coogan?

  Okay.

• 1:34:21Speaker 03

  Which we don't even have a product for today. And then we got a follow on grant for this cassava project for a million bucks. I mean, we've raised eight hundred million dollars.

• 1:34:30John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 1:34:30Speaker 03

  And, and, but that, and, but if you go online, you look up our name, you'll see.

• 1:34:35John Coogan?

  It's not board seed. It's not.

• 1:34:36Speaker 03

  Nothing. I've never even met this guy.

• 1:34:40Speaker 03

  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.

• 1:34:49John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 1:34:49Speaker 03

  Who donate to this foundation.

• 1:34:51John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 1:34:52Speaker 03

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

• 1:34:58John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 1:34:58Speaker 03

  It's a starch source in Sub-Saharan Africa. It's kind of like an equivalent of.

• 1:35:02John Coogan?

  Sure.

• 1:35:02Speaker 03

  Yeah.

• 1:35:03John Coogan?

  But you have scientists, you have researchers that could potentially.

• 1:35:06Speaker 03

  Yeah.

• 1:35:06John Coogan?

  Dig that up, like the coffee cherry thing.

• 1:35:08Speaker 03

  We're, we're in the, we're in the business of, hey, if you're growing food and it's going bad.

• 1:35:12John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 1:35:12Speaker 03

  Can we, can we figure out how to fix this?

• 1:35:15John Coogan?

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

• 1:35:20Speaker 03

  Exactly.

• 1:35:20John Coogan?

  Where you took the cassava root, ran it through some lab tests, tried to.

• 1:35:24Speaker 03

  Figure out what was wrong.

• 1:35:25John Coogan?

  Does your product work? Do other products work?

• 1:35:26Speaker 03

  Exactly.

• 1:35:27John Coogan?

  Just understand what's going on.

• 1:35:27Speaker 03

  Do, try to figure this out. And we, we actually did figure it out. It's a totally different way that you solve.

• 1:35:33John Coogan?

  Sure.

• 1:35:34Speaker 03

  The problem, but I mean, that's what the money was for, to, to figure that out. So absolutely no involvement, but if you search our company's name online today, it's like, Bill Gates's appeal. And I'm like.

• 1:35:44John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 1:35:45Speaker 03

  How did that happen?

• 1:35:46John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 1:35:47Speaker 03

  And and for a while, we thought this is, people are just confused.

• 1:35:51John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 1:35:52Speaker 03

  Until we started, until it didn't stop.

• 1:35:54John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 1:35:55Speaker 03

  And it didn't stop.

• 1:35:56John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 1:35:56Speaker 03

  And and it just kept morphing slightly and new photos would come out and the charge would change. 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.

• 1:36:10John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 1:36:11Speaker 03

  This stuff and it's completely coordinated.

• 1:36:13John Coogan?

  Interesting.

• 1:36:14Jordi Hays?

  Wow.

• 1:36:15John Coogan?

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

• 1:36:18Jordi Hays?

  Is there are there, there's plenty of like controversies that are.

• 1:36:21John Coogan?

  Come and go.

• 1:36:22Jordi Hays?

  Entirely organ and well, or entirely organic.

• 1:36:25John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 1:36:25Jordi Hays?

  Right? Uh, there's, there's a bunch of stuff, uh, online this week from a certain, uh, from a certain sort of like health platform.

• 1:36:35John Coogan?

  Oh, yeah.

• 1:36:35Jordi Hays?

  You mentioned this. That, uh, that a lot of companies have had problems with that, um, and that is like genuinely organic. There's a guy running a platform that rates foods and he has his own.

• 1:36:47John Coogan?

  Scheme, but yeah.

• 1:36:48Jordi Hays?

  Well, he has his, he has his own.

• 1:36:49John Coogan?

  But it's an individual.

• 1:36:51Jordi Hays?

  It's one individual. It's not like funded by a specific group. It's just kind of like one guy running a business.

• 1:36:57John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 1:36:58Jordi Hays?

  Seems to be at odds with a bunch of companies. But, uh, but yeah, like at first you're probably like, are, am I going crazy? Like, why does this keep like?

• 1:37:07Speaker 03

  People are just confused, you know, that like the truth is a powerful thing, you know? Obviously the truth will.

• 1:37:12John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 1:37:13Speaker 03

  Kind of come out about this.

• 1:37:14John Coogan?

  Sure, sure, sure.

• 1:37:15Speaker 03

  And it it didn't.

• 1:37:17John Coogan?

  Didn't.

• 1:37:17Speaker 03

  It just, it just didn't.

• 1:37:18John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 1:37:19Speaker 03

  And they, they started activating real, real people.

• 1:37:24John Coogan?

  Okay.

• 1:37:25Speaker 03

  Some of which were real.

• 1:37:26John Coogan?

  Pressure, like what was the long term? What do you think their goal was?

• 1:37:29Speaker 03

  It got to that point, but they started activating to call our retail customers, the United States.

• 1:37:34John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 1:37:35Speaker 03

  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, it's rolled all the way back down.

• 1:37:43John Coogan?

  That's insane.

• 1:37:44Speaker 03

  In the U S.

• 1:37:44John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 1:37:45Speaker 03

  It was devastating. I mean.

• 1:37:46John Coogan?

  It is.

• 1:37:47Speaker 03

  I had, I had to let go hundreds of people.

• 1:37:50John Coogan?

  Wow.

• 1:37:50Speaker 03

  That I cared about, our entire U S business got, got destroyed.

• 1:37:53John Coogan?

  Destroyed.

• 1:37:54Jordi Hays?

  What was in the tool? What, what year is that? Twenty twenty four?

• 1:37:58Speaker 03

  Twenty, yeah, it was about, it was like starting to happen in twenty twenty three. We started to lose some accounts and in twenty twenty four was really when, you know, it started to go just like. It just went to zero in the US.

• 1:38:11John Coogan?

  Wow.

• 1:38:11Speaker 03

  And it was doubled down in, you know, South America, doubled down in, in, in Africa, doubled down in, in Europe.

• 1:38:18John Coogan?

  What else was in the tool, the tool chest at that point? Like, did you consider just a full rebrand?

• 1:38:23Speaker 03

  Yeah.

• 1:38:23John Coogan?

  Maybe tucking the brand further up the supply chain so that the sticker's not there? Like,

• 1:38:28Speaker 03

  Absolutely, yeah.

• 1:38:29John Coogan?

  What did you consider what you wound up doing?

• 1:38:31Speaker 03

  Yeah, I mean, it was, it was, 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.

• 1:38:43John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 1:38:43Speaker 03

  And the pushback that we got was, well, if we start telling people that your stuff is better for them, what are they going to think about the other stuff? And so, you know, the joke's on us now, right?

• 1:38:56John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 1:38:56Speaker 03

  Um, but, so, it was, it was really existential for us to say, well, let's not tell people about this because our whole ethos was, hey, people should know what's on their food. If they knew it was on their food, they're going to prefer this. It's going to be something that they, that they buy.

• 1:39:09John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 1:39:09Speaker 03

  But the conversation was, well, these, these attacks aren't organic attacks. You know, organic people are, some people are getting roped into this thing. That's kind of how they work.

• 1:39:19John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 1:39:19Speaker 03

  You know, they, they're like, there, there's somebody kind of behind it, you know,

• 1:39:23John Coogan?

  It's like machinery.

• 1:39:23Speaker 03

  Planting the seeds, there's machinery. And then they're just trying to find vulnerable people.

• 1:39:27John Coogan?

  Mm-hmm. Yeah.

• 1:39:28Speaker 03

  And, you know,

• 1:39:29John Coogan?

  Who make it their personal mission.

• 1:39:30Speaker 03

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

• 1:39:47John Coogan?

  Looks like you're running.

• 1:39:47Speaker 03

  It looks like you're, it looks like you're running. And so, I mean, we've been building this, this playbook, um, 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'd, 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, you just think the whole world's against you, you know? You, you, and a little, you kind of shut down a little bit. And it's not till you really get your bearings and you start to see. You know, see the kind of systematized nature of these things that you realize actually

• 1:40:31Speaker 03

  there is, 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, a fruit company.

• 1:40:40John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 1:40:41Speaker 03

  Learning how to do digital forensics.

• 1:40:44John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 1:40:44Speaker 03

  And you know.

• 1:40:45Jordi Hays?

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

• 1:41:01John Coogan?

  It's also something where.

• 1:41:02Speaker 03

  Perfect story.

• 1:41:03John Coogan?

  The, there, the buyer is almost everyone. Everyone has an opinion about food, whereas there, there have been somewhat even like more, like your scandal doesn't seem legitimate at all. There's been legitimate scandals in like enterprise software, for example, but there are like 10,000 buyers or 100,000 buyers. And so it's not something that goes viral again and again and again. And if you're, even if you're a consumer of that piece of technology, but it's white labeled and it's under the hood and that particular buyer was able to sit down and understand the more, the, 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.

• 1:41:46Speaker 03

  It cuts both ways. And, and what we find is that, you know, most, actually majority of people haven't heard about this.

• 1:41:52John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 1:41:52Speaker 03

  But a small percent of people have heard about it.

• 1:41:55John Coogan?

  And they're activated.

• 1:41:56Speaker 03

  And who writes the reviews online?

• 1:41:57John Coogan?

  Sure, sure, sure.

• 1:41:58Speaker 03

  It's not the happy people.

• 1:41:59John Coogan?

  Yeah, yeah, yeah.

• 1:41:59Speaker 03

  It's the, you know, it's, it's the, it's the not happy people.

• 1:42:02John Coogan?

  Yeah, of course, of course.

• 1:42:02Speaker 03

  And it's the people who are part of a system.

• 1:42:05John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 1:42:05Speaker 03

  That's trying to stop something.

• 1:42:06John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 1:42:07Speaker 03

  From, from happening.

• 1:42:08John Coogan?

  That's so interesting.

• 1:42:09Jordi Hays?

  Uh, what, where are you at today?

• 1:42:12Speaker 03

  Uh, so the businesses, the business is going strong outside of the United States. It's, it's dystopian for me to walk into a grocery store in South America and find our products and to walk into a 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 or 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 want to bury these options and technology is happening. Technology growth is happening in every single industry except for food. How is how is this?

• 1:42:55Jordi Hays?

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

• 1:43:11Jordi Hays?

  That's like.

• 1:43:11Speaker 03

  It's often the best part of my day. So I get that. I resonate with that. Yeah. Yeah, it is. It's truly mind blowing and 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. You know, I I started growing, you know, a lot of food, you know, tomatoes, you know, peppers, this kind of stuff. There is something amazing about growing food and we've gotten totally disconnected with that. So I'm optimistic about this future where we actually are able to, you know, people are starting to feed each other. Again, people are, you know, you're growing tomatoes, you're growing carrots, you know, we have the opportunity to trade those

• 1:43:52Speaker 03

  with each other because that can actually happen at a smaller scale if you're able to match the match the supply and demand. And so that's one of the things that we're talking about a lot. How do we, 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 to feed each other, feed communities and not be so dependent on this monolith where we're growing food halfway around the world.

• 1:44:17Jordi Hays?

  Big fruit that tried to kill you in the cradle.

• 1:44:20Speaker 03

  Yeah, yeah, yeah.

• 1:44:22John Coogan?

  Other lessons for entrepreneurs, I mean, you mentioned like if if someone is going to war with a major industry that's allied against them, there's there's worries there. Do you, is there any, not to put like, you know, like dig up potential like Monday morning quarterbacking? But is there anything where like trademark searches could have avoided 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?

• 1:45:01Speaker 03

  So when we started the business, we were, I think we were in a different, we were a different era. Yeah, we started the business in 2011, 2012.

• 1:45:10John Coogan?

  Sure.

• 1:45:10Speaker 03

  Social media was not what it is.

• 1:45:12John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 1:45:13Speaker 03

  And I've experienced, you are just vulnerable to a different set of attack vectors

• 1:45:19John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 1:45:19Speaker 03

  in the modern era.

• 1:45:21John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 1:45:22Speaker 03

  And you know, if I could, you know, go back and talk to myself, you know, 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.

• 1:45:34John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 1:45:35Speaker 03

  On my list, you know, on my list never would have been, you know, someone's going to say that Bill Gates owns your company and it's part of a global depopulation agenda. Like, that would not have been on my list. You're like, make a list of a thousand.

• 1:45:48John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 1:45:48Speaker 03

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

• 1:45:55John Coogan?

  Three of the deck.

• 1:45:56Speaker 03

  It's like, actually, maybe make your, maybe make your Thanksgiving dinner productive and that, you know, that relative who's got all these theories.

• 1:46:03John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 1:46:04Speaker 03

  Tell them about what you're building.

• 1:46:05John Coogan?

  Well, huh.

• 1:46:05Speaker 03

  And just say, hey, what?

• 1:46:07John Coogan?

  What's, what's, find some flaws.

• 1:46:08Speaker 03

  Find some flaws in my business plan. And let's talk about that. And actually, like, maybe it's like a write-off now because you got some good advice from that, that inner uncle.

• 1:46:17John Coogan?

  Yeah, that's very funny.

• 1:46:18Speaker 03

  Yeah, I mean, I, I think it's a.

• 1:46:20John Coogan?

  There was someone who had a, like a regional, like sauce business, and they bumped into another regional sauce business, like halfway across the world, that like the two companies never would have ever competed in the same 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.

• 1:46:48Speaker 03

  Yeah, confusion.

• 1:46:49Jordi Hays?

  Uh, what was I gonna say? I, yeah, it's also the mentality when, like, your mentality as a founder, you discover this problem, you discover an innovative solution that's aligned with, uh, nature's own approach.

• 1:47:09Speaker 03

  Yeah.

• 1:47:09Jordi Hays?

  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, of.

• 1:47:20Jordi Hays?

  As like a good actor, like operating is 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. Yeah. The way those, the way those, and I've just seen this with, I've seen this with a bunch of companies, specifically in the, in the, any, for some reason, like health, anything like health, supplements, like food. Yeah. Is just like, becomes like, hyper, hyper political really quickly. It becomes super emotional. Yeah. What starts as being like, you know, concepts grounded in science quickly becomes something else. And I've been shocked because I know, you know, I know a bunch of like,

• 1:48:03Jordi Hays?

  health podcasters that have gotten into controversies over, you know, and, and, and health brands. And it is, it's been wild to see so many people that I know personally that I believe are waking up every day, trying to create the best possible product for humanity in a category, or create the best possible information for people. And then they become, 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. It's a real challenge. I, I'm the co-founder of a, of a water filter company. And my journey into that

• 1:48:45Jordi Hays?

  business was realizing that there were so many companies in that category that were selling water filters, which you, you, you're 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 was, I found, I tested a filter early on, and the filter was adding heavy metals to the water. It was like, it was like, I found a filter. It was like a very popular. You gotta turn it around. 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. Yeah. And multiple, multiple of them were adding heavy metals to the water. So you

• 1:49:29Jordi Hays?

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

• 1:50:13Jordi Hays?

  it's not a, it's not an approach that, that, that I can ever think about doing, right? Of like, I never, you know, I never would go out and try to mislead a bunch of people.

• 1:50:26Speaker 03

  Right. You can't even imagine someone doing that.

• 1:50:29Jordi Hays?

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

• 1:50:34Jordi Hays?

  Great dogs. I don't think that is a good one. No, no, no. We talk about, we talk about, we have a bit where like golden retriever mode. It's like, you should just be like, you know, you should be like friendly, happy, and high energy. And like a golden retriever, a golden retriever cannot imagine like attacking, you know, like some kid running by, right? They're just focused on the ball, right? They're focused on the ball. And so as a golden retriever entrepreneur, right? You're just focused on chasing the ball, right? Chasing the dream, trying to

• 1:51:05John Coogan?

  Solving the problem.

• 1:51:05Jordi Hays?

  Solving the problem. And there are, there are pitfalls out there.

• 1:51:09John Coogan?

  Yeah, it's like

• 1:51:10Jordi Hays?

  that are not, they're focused on

• 1:51:12John Coogan?

  Overthink things. And it's like, in this case, maybe like, like to the point of like, what's on the third slide of the deck? It's like, maybe you should have been overthinking, but that's not good advice. I don't know.

• 1:51:20Speaker 03

  You know, that's, that's who I am. That's what happened to me. When I said kind of, I, you know, it really like was despondent for a while. That's what happened. You know, you go out in the world and you're told, do the right thing, be a good person, work hard, you know, find good people, work with them, build like, like, you know, like create something like good that helps us.

• 1:51:42Jordi Hays?

  That your mom is gonna be proud of.

• 1:51:43Speaker 03

  That your mom's proud of, that your mom is buying in the grocery store. And then this stuff happens and you realize that the way that you thought the world worked is not the way that the world worked.

• 1:51:53Jordi Hays?

  It's a golden retriever going to the dog park for the first time. Yes. And it's running into, there's a pit bull at the dog park, and you're jumping around chasing the ball of pit bulls. It's like, welcome to the park.

• 1:52:04Speaker 03

  Welcome to the park. Yeah. And you just go, okay, so for a while you just go, no, that's, you know, I don't want the world to work the way. But then eventually you go, well, I can either complain about the doggy dog. Or I can acknowledge that's the way the world works and go from there. And the damning thing about this for innovators is they don't have to, they don't have to change people's minds about what your product is. They just have to make them suspicious.

• 1:52:26John Coogan?

  Yeah, like the US FDA.

• 1:52:28Speaker 03

  They just have to make them suspicious. And not only the FDA, the European Union.

• 1:52:32Jordi Hays?

  Which is like.

• 1:52:33Speaker 03

  Which is like.

• 1:52:34Jordi Hays?

  A hundred times more hardcore.

• 1:52:35Speaker 03

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

• 1:52:40Jordi Hays?

  Yeah.

• 1:52:40Speaker 03

  And it's like.

• 1:52:41Jordi Hays?

  What is there like?

• 1:52:41Speaker 03

  Our product is literally food.

• 1:52:43Jordi Hays?

  There's like a million products that we, that are in our grocery stores that can't be sold there.

• 1:52:47Speaker 03

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

• 1:52:59John Coogan?

  You're not on the Prop 65 list, California?

• 1:53:01Speaker 03

  No.

• 1:53:01John Coogan?

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

• 1:53:05Speaker 03

  We would definitely not want to be on that list. No, these are, these are of course.

• 1:53:08Jordi Hays?

  Yeah, yeah, yeah. And I know what, but there's a lot of supplements.

• 1:53:11John Coogan?

  It was remarkably low, like you walk into Starbucks, I don't have a problem with Starbucks.

• 1:53:15Speaker 03

  Yeah.

• 1:53:16John Coogan?

  Uh, it's on Prop 65 and I'm like, yeah, okay, like they're being extra safe.

• 1:53:19Speaker 03

  Yeah.

• 1:53:19Jordi Hays?

  And yeah, that's the thing, there's, there's supplement, there's supplement, there's like health supplements that people take that are on that.

• 1:53:25John Coogan?

  Prop 65.

• 1:53:26Jordi Hays?

  List, right?

• 1:53:27Speaker 03

  Which they're, they're probably unaware of at some level, or they just like, you know.

• 1:53:32John Coogan?

  It's sort of like the most conservative, but to not even bet on that is crazy.

• 1:53:36Speaker 03

  Exactly.

• 1:53:37John Coogan?

  Wild, yeah.

• 1:53:38Speaker 03

  Yeah, it, it, it's plant oil.

• 1:53:40John Coogan?

  Yeah, yeah.

• 1:53:40Speaker 03

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

• 1:53:48John Coogan?

  Sure, sure.

• 1:53:48Speaker 03

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

• 1:53:51John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 1:53:52Jordi Hays?

  It's a, it's a mixture of different molecules, like.

• 1:53:55John Coogan?

  And with an avocado, you're not even, you're not even eating it.

• 1:53:57Speaker 03

  You're not even eating the skin.

• 1:53:58John Coogan?

  You're not even.

• 1:53:59Speaker 03

  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.

• 1:54:07John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 1:54:08Speaker 03

  And second of all.

• 1:54:09John Coogan?

  Even if it was.

• 1:54:10Speaker 03

  Really? For an avocado?

• 1:54:11John Coogan?

  Like such an incredible level. It's so crazy. Yeah.

• 1:54:14Speaker 03

  It's.

• 1:54:14John Coogan?

  Walk outside.

• 1:54:15Jordi Hays?

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

• 1:54:24Speaker 03

  You know, the internet.

• 1:54:25Jordi Hays?

  America.

• 1:54:25Speaker 03

  Our ass. And so I've been, it took me a while to think about it, but I've started flipping around and asking the internet for help. I've been offering bounties to people to help track back.

• 1:54:34John Coogan?

  Figure out what happened.

• 1:54:35Speaker 03

  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.

• 1:54:43John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 1:54:43Speaker 03

  Blew, 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 incentive. There's no cost to somebody perpetrating an attack on you online.

• 1:54:56John Coogan?

  Sure, sure.

• 1:54:56Speaker 03

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

• 1:55:15Jordi Hays?

  Yeah, no one is clicking through.

• 1:55:16Speaker 03

  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.

• 1:55:28John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 1:55:29Speaker 03

  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, I, you know, I think we're in the, I think.

• 1:55:36Jordi Hays?

  You gotta go all the way to Joe Rogan. This is the start. You gotta go straight to the top.

• 1:55:41Speaker 03

  Let's go. He's mentioned us a couple of times.

• 1:55:43Jordi Hays?

  No, but he's, but he seems like somebody who would, uh, uh, be naturally skeptical of.

• 1:55:51Speaker 03

  You would think.

• 1:55:52Jordi Hays?

  Technology with food because he's like, I like steak.

• 1:55:55Speaker 03

  Yeah, right.

• 1:55:56Jordi Hays?

  Like.

• 1:55:56Speaker 03

  Which our product is also in, by the way, right? So he should be down with this. But yeah, no, he's, he's had a couple of guests on.

• 1:56:02John Coogan?

  Pull that up, click five, live, love it, links deeper, get to the, and you don't have to go, you go one, two links.

• 1:56:06Speaker 03

  You don't have to go far at all.

• 1:56:08John Coogan?

  See the real story.

• 1:56:09Speaker 03

  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 it doesn't matter what's posted.

• 1:56:26John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 1:56:27Speaker 03

  I don't, I'm not, people don't form their opinion until they see the first couple of comments. And so that's how they hijack, that's how they hijack what's going on in your brain. They just, they just control the comments. They, they control.

• 1:56:37Jordi Hays?

  No, there's gonna be, there's gonna 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,

• 1:56:54Jordi Hays?

  earlier this year, I was starting to see posts that would have like 20,000 likes on 200,000 views, three comments. Getting a 10% like rate is like not a thing, especially on X. Like, there's a handful. And so you're like, okay, well, who's actually engaging with it is clearly getting a lot of views, but it's not necessarily reflecting, you know.

• 1:57:19Speaker 03

  It's not real.

• 1:57:20Jordi Hays?

  Yeah.

• 1:57:20Speaker 03

  It's manufactured.

• 1:57:21John Coogan?

  Last question for me. Have you been keeping tabs on the other appeal? The cleaning company? Because it's their business?

• 1:57:30Jordi Hays?

  You guys should buy it, buy it and shut it down.

• 1:57:33Speaker 03

  Now we are those guys.

• 1:57:36Speaker 03

  Now, yeah, now we keep your floors clean and we keep your fruit fresh.

• 1:57:40John Coogan?

  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.

• 1:57:49Speaker 03

  Wait, your floor cleaner's healthy now?

• 1:57:50John Coogan?

  Yeah, yeah, yeah. Do they have a knock on effect? I don't know. That's an interesting thing to dig into, but.

• 1:57:55Speaker 03

  We'll follow up with that one.

• 1:57:56John Coogan?

  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.

• 1:58:02Speaker 03

  If somebody else learns from it.

• 1:58:04John Coogan?

  I'm really happy. Thank you for coming on with us. This is fantastic. Have a great rest of your day. This is a great time.

• 1:58:10Jordi Hays?

  We'll, we'll catch up.

• 1:58:11John Coogan?

  Yeah. What do you want to wrap up with, Jordy? I mean, we could, we could go into the, the Warren Buffett of London, but it's a long, 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 Hohn, he's been honing his skills.

• 1:58:39Jordi Hays?

  The Warchinator.

• 1:58:40John Coogan?

  Warch is in.

• 1:58:40Jordi Hays?

  Sworn in today. Frank says, good luck, bro.

• 1:58:45John Coogan?

  And the prediction is that 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 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.

• 1:59:31Jordi Hays?

  Thousand watt hips.

• 1:59:32John Coogan?

  Thousand watt hips. You wear these and they help you hike and run up hills.

• 1:59:39John Coogan?

  I listened to too many shows with Paul Merlaki where he talks about the capability of an Iron Man suit potentially just ripping you apart. And so I would be a little afraid. But I might give it a try.

• 1:59:50Jordi Hays?

  Imagine, you know, bad actor. Remember all the DJI drones had like a backdoor.

• 1:59:55John Coogan?

  Oh, yeah.

• 1:59:56Jordi Hays?

  Bad actor takes over your, your, your.

• 1:59:58John Coogan?

  Start dancing.

• 1:59:59Jordi Hays?

  And then it makes you like Michael Jackson and it badly in front of your peers.

• 2:00:04John Coogan?

  Potentially, potentially.

• 2:00:05Jordi Hays?

  It'd be wildly embarrassing.

• 2:00:07John Coogan?

  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. I will explain the market. Are you in the market for these?

• 2:00:22Jordi Hays?

  Yes, these are sick.

• 2:00:24John Coogan?

  Yes.

• 2:00:24Jordi Hays?

  Wait, so your answer is couldn't you just go on a shorter hike?

• 2:00:26John Coogan?

  Yes, like, like if this allows me to go on a six mile hike, couldn't I just do a one mile hike? Could you just take a car?

• 2:00:33Jordi Hays?

  Couldn't you just stay home and?

• 2:00:33John Coogan?

  You can take a car or a helicopter. Like, you know, like, this is sort of an in between thing. When, when are you actually deploying this? I bet you if you get these, maybe we have to order these. I think we have to order these for Tyler.

• 2:00:44Jordi Hays?

  I don't think you can just drive up like a massive mountain.

• 2:00:47John Coogan?

  We're getting you these. They're, they're two grand, but we're getting you some and we're going to see if it transforms you into Iron Man. Also, Cattle, C A T L, the Chinese EV battery giant is investing in DeepSeek. Some big rounds going on. Also BYD.

• 2:01:04Jordi Hays?

  Waking up, remember, remember?

• 2:01:06John Coogan?

  Oh, yeah. This is what AI 2020, they predicted that BYD would get an F1 team.

• 2:01:10Jordi Hays?

  That's right.

• 2:01:11John Coogan?

  Which is what happening, which is what's happening. At least they're in talks. BYD is in talks with Christian Horner over entering F1. That would be pretty crazy. Does BYD have any gas-powered ice engines? I don't know. They're about to. They're about to. Who knows? Well, folks,

• 2:01:31John Coogan?

  it's Memorial Day weekend. 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, tbpn.com. It's been an honor. And we will see you tomorrow. Slash Tuesday. Weekend, we love you. Goodbye.