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

You're watching TVPN!

And today is Friday, May 22nd, 2026. We are live from the TVPN UltraDome, the temple of technology, the fortress of finance, the capital of capital. Fuck! We got a great show for you today, folks. It's Friday, Friday, May 22nd. We had our Wall Street Journal stolen from us. We only have the Financial Times today. But we're making do because we have a digital subscription as well. And we're going to take you through America's IPO boom. We're going to talk to Matt Grimm from Anderill. We're going to talk to Dan Shipper from Evry. We're going to talk to James—

the Shippernator—

from Appeal Sciences. We're also going to read through Brandon Gurel's news roundup in the TBPN newsletter, tbpn.com. You can go sign up. So 3 key stories that broke since we last spoke, Amir. 21 hours ago since we podcast for 3 hours and then we come back 21 hours later.

We do it again.

We do it again. Yesterday, Politico reported that David Sachs made an 11th-hour appeal to President Trump to spike an executive order that would have created a voluntary program, voluntary program for frontier AI companies to submit their models to the government for review 90 days before new model releases. I wonder what the benefit of that is. Obviously, it's good to have red teaming going on, good to have benchmarking, good to have other eyes on the project. There's some sort of liability that happens. What's the round thing on the table? No one in the TVPN audience has ever seen this. Can you describe what this is, this round-shaped argument?

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

Yeah.

But I saw them talking about this on ESPN.

Yeah.

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

You should pick one of these up, this object.

So I had to check it out, this artifact.

Brown oval object.

Yes. Cool.

Well, it looks fun.

Anyways, I was having a little bit of fun earlier throwing this—

Grilling the gong.

Grilling the gong. The production team didn't like it because there's this $70,000 massive flat-screen TV next to the gong, as well as multiple cameras. And lights over there, but no accidents.

Wow, mandate of heaven over there, right?

Yeah.

Oh, Tom's got the tennis ball. Get out of here with that tennis ball. Anyway, uh, 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— 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 LessWrong?

Yeah, how are they feeling about this?

Yeah, I mean, I assume they're not happy with this.

This seems to be like anti-safety.

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

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

It needs to be the government. But I think on the way there, people are definitely like—

Is there anyone who says, like, no, no, no, actually, 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. I don't think there's— I mean, if you look at the popularity, if you look at 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 future segments, stands for, what does EPCOT stand for? Experimental Prototype community of tomorrow. The idea was to build an entire city. It was the praxis of the— Of its times. Yeah. And so in 1966, Walt Disney conceived it as, in 1966, as a utopian, fully functioning city. And I believe, this might just be viral clickbait, but I've heard it said many, many times that they have the permission to build a nuclear reactor to power the The city of the future. Project Community of Tomorrow, EPCOT, yeah. And so, I don't know, maybe there's some folks out there that say, we can't trust the government, we can't trust the Democrats, we can't trust the Republicans with the nuclear weapons, give them to Disney. I don't know.

I trust Bob with the nuclear weapons.

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

That's right.

Bob.

Bob.

He can—

I've shook his hand.

Yeah.

I trust him.

I trust his hand on the button. Anyway. What else is going on? Second story highlighted by Brandon Gurel in the TVPN newsletter.

The Gurelinator.

The Gurelinator in the TVPN newsletterinator. A non-account posted yesterday.

He's sitting here with noise-canceling headphones on, so he doesn't know that we're talking about him.

He's going to find this out later when he watches these clips. Anyway, a non-account posted yesterday that Microsoft had canceled its internal cloud code license 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're trying to shift the developers to use their own Copilot CLI, which I imagine they're gonna build their own harness, their fork of Claude Code, their fork of Codex.

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

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

They're dogfooding.

GPT-5.5 tokens. It could be made of Opus 4.7 tokens.

I do think it—

I guess they will be using a mix.

Yeah, I mean, I think the reason that Codex and Claude Code and Cursor and these other tools have gotten so good is because the engineers building them are using them all day long. And it's one thing to use those tools to build your coding tool, but being forced to constantly use the product that you're shipping is a tried and true way to build a great product.

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

$800, almost $850 billion market cap.

Remarkable. It's up 2% today, 3% over the last 5 days and 246% over the last 6 months. What an absolute run for Micron. It's up almost 1,000% over the past year. Really, really incredible performance from Micron.

Just wow.

Anyway, America's going through a mini— this was such a funny article by The Wall Street Journal. America's IPO mini boom. How is this a mini boom? You got 3 of the biggest—

Is this not a giga boom?

This is a giga boom. I don't know if we have the truth on this, but it also made it to the front page of the Wall Street— 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 buying and selling. As new fast entry rules thrust the tech stocks straight into Wall Street indices. The rules implemented this month by NASDAQ mean billions of dollars of passive money will automatically flow to the 3 companies when they go public, driving their share prices higher and forcing investors to sell rival stocks. Elon Musk's SpaceX initial public offering next month is expected to be the largest on record, firing the starting gun on what US bankers will hope, hope will be a blockbuster year with OpenAI filing its IPO paperwork as soon as this week and Anthropic planning to float its shares too as well. The trio is set to raise tens of billions of dollars at a time of relentless investor appetite for companies linked to AI. SpaceX, the SpaceX listing will cement Musk's control of two of America's most valuable companies, SpaceX and Tesla. It is, it is crazy. We're gonna need a new term for the Mag Seven because Tesla has been in the Mag Seven. It's been north of a trillion dollars for a long time, but SpaceX is gonna 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 Mag7 company will be lagging his non-Mag7 company. We're gonna need new terms. We're gonna need a bigger boat. But why did the Wall Street Journal call this a mini boom? I think it's just because it's so concentrated on these 3 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 euphoria recalls the heady dot-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 eulogies written about American capitalism, the latest mini-IPO boom is a welcome tribute to the dynamism of US markets that no other country can match. SpaceX fired the starting gun. They're using the same language as the Financial Times over there. The starting gun has been fired. It's unanimous across the mainstream media. The rocket company, founded in 2002, is a global leader in space exploration. Overnight success. It has also spread into broadband, mobile, mobile satellite internet, and data center development. Anthropic recently agreed to pay SpaceX $1.25 billion a month to use its data centers to train models. That shows how competitors can enjoy symbiotic relationships. SpaceX says the company as a whole reported a $4.9 billion net loss last year, some of which stemmed from its X.com social media platform. I— 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 the take private. I know that the revenues cratered a bit, but there were also big layoffs and an 80% reduction in cost. I— the sum word there is maybe doing some of the lifting. I imagine that the losses were sort of spread over all sorts of investments.

Yeah.

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

The last one was scrubbed. What a critical launch.

Is it?

No, it's just because of the timing with the S-1 and the IPO.

I don't know.

All eyes on.

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

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

Yeah, yeah, obviously people will be excited about it. But, you know, even like, I think even just the endless spamming Falcon 9s can get Starlink to what, $20 billion run rate or something, $10 billion run rate. You can clearly build a business off of the existing capability. Lots of excitement around. Starship, there was a little bit of like spice in the timeline from 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 wanna be there for this historic moment." So a little bit of like a misconception there.

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

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. Like, you paint this massive picture, we're going to Mars, how are we gonna make money? Enterprise software, $22 trillion of enterprise software.

We're gonna be automating workflows for the enterprise.

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

Isn't that one of the potential?

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

Wasn't there a list of like 5 or 6 things and he just has to do like 4?

I don't know.

I haven't dug into that particular one. I know for Tesla there were a whole bunch of different milestones. The humanoid robots was one of the stretch goals. But permanent human colony on Mars with at least 1 million inhabitants, that's exciting. That's a good goal. Like that feels, I don't know, that like a whole lot of enterprise software and a million people living on Mars, that's a vision I can get behind.

I'm into that.

I like it. Anyway, we have Matt Grimm from Anduril, the co-founder and COO joining us. We're calling in to the MRF. We talked to him last year. Let's see how he did this year.

Matt Grimm, how are you doing?

Welcome to the show.

You are—

I can't hear them. You can't hear us? Oh no. Okay. If anyone can hear us, just ask him to talk. Pass it along. Just have him, just have him rant. Just rant. Tell him to rant. I'll text him. Rant, rant. We might need to come back to him, but he does look like he did in the weighted vest. He's looking very sharp. And on this, it looks like it's cold and rainy. This looks brutal. I'm excited to come back to that in a minute. But in the meantime, we will go back to government pension funds and the SpaceX IPO. Government pension funds kvetch that the IPO will preserve Mr. Musk's control of the company by giving him more votes per share. But dual-class structures are not uncommon. Berkshire Hathaway and News Corp also have them and can encourage founders to take their company public since they won't lose control. If pension funds don't like SpaceX's structure, they don't have to buy shares. SpaceX could fetch a market valuation of upward of $1 trillion a huge boon for its early private investors and employees with stock options. 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 did— what was the market cap of Tesla at IPO? What was the market cap of Tesla at IPO?

It was sub $10 billion, right?

Was it Tesla's—

$1.7.

Whoa, $1.7 billion? Yep. Are you sure?

Is that a market cap for—

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

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

So SpaceX, I mean, million people on Mars, we could be looking at $1.7 quad. Potentially, anything's possible. I don't know, you get 1,000x from here. If we get to Mars, that's a big, big, big opportunity.

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

Yeah.

At less than a $2 billion market cap.

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

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

Yeah, you should have just been a lawn mower who DCA'd into Tesla the whole time. Probably be pretty retired right now. I mean, there's a lot of people that did that. There's a lot of people, There's also a lot of people that put money down to buy cars and then they didn't buy the stock and they're like, "Ah, the car depreciated and I should have bought the stock." Anyway, let's check in with the Starship launch because SpaceX postponed the launch of the newly redesigned Starship, but hardly a headline if it's just a one-day postponing because these things happen all the time, but it's completely redesigned. It's 400 feet tall and it stood on the launch pad at the company's Starbase complex outside Brownville, Texas, but engineers had to troubleshoot problems that kept cropping up to the end of the countdown for the flight, according to a SpaceX livestream. SpaceX Chief Executive Elon Musk later said in a social media post that a hydraulic pin on part of the launch tower didn't function correctly. The company could try the flight Friday if the problem is fixed overnight. So they worked all night and they fixed the hydraulic pin on the launch tower. Wow, talk about complex. Uh, the test mission was set to be the first flight for Starship V3. This is the third version, redesigned SpaceX vehicle intended to deploy bigger satellites and one day help the company potentially settle Mars and mine asteroids. Starship is bigger and more powerful than any rocket ever built. The company has sketched out a future in which Starship flies thousands of times per year. Of course, the The Mechazilla tower that grabs it, the chopsticks, that's very key to being able to stack these quickly. You can't rebuild all the infrastructure. The reusability is key to flying regularly. The rocket has yet to fly any customer satellites after 3 years of intense tests that we know of. The real conspiracy theorists, there's conspiracy theorists that think space is fake, nothing's happening, they're not actually going. The satellites don't exist. And then there's other conspiracy theorists that think, oh yeah, when they crash, they're actually deploying secret satellites and there's more stuff in space than we think. So pick your tinfoil hat theory. 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, so a little bit more credit for you. 'Cause I was like, "Ah, it's not that big a deal.

I care more about the data centers." Yeah, just being the optic, think about like the optics and some investors are super, you know, a little bit—

It is interesting. Like clearly if SpaceX is listing Starship as the first risk factor, it means like, "Oh yeah, like Colossus, like we're gonna be able to do that. Like that's not that hard. Like we can build a big data center." They have.

They did the impossible.

And there's less of a risk factor of like, we're not gonna be able to monetize that, or we're not gonna, you know, because there are a group of investors out there that are saying like, oh, token prices will collapse, GPU depreciation, it'll get blocked, there'll be a data center ban, like they won't be able to ramp up their terrestrial efforts.

The main reason, God forbid, there's like a catastrophic explosion.

It'd be dramatic.

That would be potentially an omen that certain people would be looking into.

Maybe.

Maybe.

Have full faith.

Yeah, their execution record is unsurpassed, but this stuff is hard to get right, said Daniel Hansen, 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. Uh, they estimated in its IPO filing Wednesday that it has spent $15 billion developing Starship, Well, that makes a lot of sense why there's losses if you've been investing this. Although it seems like the development costs are declining because in 2025, the expenses were $3 billion. So I don't know how many years, but if you imagine they've been working on Starship for 5 years, then $3 billion a year is sort of average. These efforts have weighed on SpaceX's bottom line with its space division reporting a $662 million loss. 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 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's gonna grow. The $75 billion that we need is, He just added like $15 billion in ARR on a $20 billion company. Like the growth is there, Elon makes plays. But my question is, as you trickle down, it's like, it's an AI company with a data center business, with a telecom, and then the smallest section is the launch business. And so I'm wondering like, what does the P&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—

Yeah, 24, September 8th, 2000.

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

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

Yeah.

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

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

Because it's always early.

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

That's, I think—

Sean Maguire at Sequoia, like it was a later bet, 2020, I think was when he started building that position.

But pre-Starlink, really.

Yeah, I think Starlink was starting to work or starting to sort of be mapped out as a business, starting to be understood by the market as a potential profit center in the midst of a very difficult launch market that was, you know, not growing exponentially. And there were good margins, but the launch business alone was never going to propel SpaceX to a trillion-dollar valuation. You add 2, 3, 4 other businesses and all of a sudden you get there. Other tests have ended in explosions, including one this past June that shook homes miles away. A failure early last year threatened commercial airline traffic in the Caribbean region. The Wall Street Journal has reported the new version of Starship includes upgrades to the fuel transfer tube that moves propellant to the booster's 33 engines, redesigned so engines can simultaneously and more quickly begin firing. And I think they, did they paint the engines black for this one? I saw 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 like redesigned, redesigned, and then just removed moving, removing parts, and then the final version looks pretty aesthetic. Like, it looks pretty beautiful, and the first version looks just like cables and wires and tubes everywhere. Looks very thrown together. There's something about efficiency that is also aligned with aesthetics sometimes. The engines called Raptors are expected to produce more thrust while weighing less, according to the company. Oh, that's good. Every, 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, 'cause why don't you just rip a real one? Wait, yeah, yeah. You know, you're spending $3 billion, just put up the real ones on the case that it actually works. But I guess there's probably more like telemetry and simulation and like data collection that you can do if you send up the simulator as opposed to like the real thing. But I don't know, why not just, Ribbit, that's what he did with the satellite, remember?

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

Mm, yeah.

Right?

Well, Elon says we live in a simulation potentially.

Exactly.

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

Who knows? DJ DeSaul.

Yeah, what's going on with DeSaul?

Slid into Elon's DM.

Oh yeah.

In the bid to land lead left, the IPO. With banks jockeying to get their name first on the deal for SpaceX's IPO. Solomon worked with staffers to message Musk directly. He's like, all right guys, help me out here. How do I send a message on X? According to people familiar with the matter. So he's putting in the work. He also says, wow, this is how you work for the bag at Goldman Sachs.

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 months. Ken Griffin sort of flipped, although Ken Griffin hasn't gone as far to say that there's a job apocalypse. Clips. He was just saying that the models went from like slop to usable, but he hasn't actually opined on whether or not that will change Citadel's hiring plans or his view of the American economy.

He also specifically said he was very excited that all of his software engineers were more efficient because he said there's no—

Yeah.

There's no like cap on how much software.

I was there. I was writing Visual Basic. It was brutal. I would have loved Codex and Clock Code. I would have been working for 1 minute a day instead of an hour a day.

If you could have had Codex back then, just like a private instance of it, you would be currently—

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

That's something you would actually do.

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

Can we talk about the World's Fair?

Yes, we need to talk about the World's Fair. Tyler, you gave this a read. What stuck out to you? Maybe let's read through some of it first.

And quick update, we are rescheduling with Matt Grimm. Matt Grimm?

Okay.

Due to technical issues.

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

It's possible that a third layer SPV lead is holding their information hostage. Yeah, that might have been it. Give me direct access.

I think he might have been there finishing 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, 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 with a whole bunch of articles that look back and contextualize American history, and we'll go through this one on the World's Fair right now. So, among the groundbreaking innovations unveiled at US-hosted exhibitions were the telephone, the Ferris wheel, and the electric— and electric lighting. Ferris really crushed it on the naming thing. You know, Alexander Graham Bell invented the telephone. Thomas Edison 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 showcased its latest innovations at high-profiled World's Fairs. These exhibits held every few years beginning in London in 1851 gave countries a public platform to showcase new technologies, products, and ideas that were going to reshape daily life. For host countries and cities, the World's Fairs or expositions were an opportunity to own the world's—

Tyler is sharing the person that invented the Ferris wheel's full name was George Washington Gale Ferris Jr. That's pretty elite.

That's an elite George Washington.

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

Yes. Yes.

I mean, my George Washington Cosgrove.

My John Tyler was the 10th president.

Oh, true. Yeah. There you go.

That's my name. There we go.

Okay. So many of the big expos were commemorative, says Paul Greenhalgh, 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 mark. So, fill it out.

Starting in Philly.

Philly.

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

This is crazy.

We had two key technologies, telephones and ketchup.

One was disrupted much faster than the other.

Yep.

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

The iPhone might make it.

The barbecue sauce has not really gained ground.

Real inroads.

No. Ketchup is still on top.

Even ranch kind of went on a run. Yeah.

But really, pretty short. Mustard, ultimately, it's a complement, not a substitute. There are very few people that say, ah, I don't need the ketchup at all.

Just the mustard.

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

I don't know. I do think mustard is— Better? Better than ketchup.

Than ketchup?

Yeah.

Interesting. Yeah.

If you can believe that.

Yeah.

America's first officially sanctioned World's Fair, the Centennial International Exhibition arrived when the country was still defining its place among industrial nations. Unlike earlier European fairs built around single monumental halls, the Philadelphia event spread across a vast park with hundreds of structures. It was sort of like the Coachella of its time. Among the most notable exhibits were the telephone. It was initially greeted with skepticism, but the potential of the cool contraption quickly drew attention. Once people realized what had been invented, it became clear how important it was. The fair also showcased Thomas Edison's automatic telegraph, as well as machinery such as the typewriter. Imagine you just create the automatic telegraph. and then you go to launch it and demo it, and somebody invents the telephone. It's just like, really? Really, dude? Um, and consumer packaged goods such as Heinz tomato ketchup. It normalized the idea that private companies, innovators, and even governments could present their work side by side, a model that amplified the country's entrepreneurial culture. I love that. Um, Chicago, 1893. You're not gonna believe it. You're not gonna believe the two technologies that I'm gonna—

We gotta call balls and strikes here. A little bit more underwhelming.

Yeah, but I don't know.

Tell people what was— Tell people what was—

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

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

Almost 20 years later.

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

The Ferris wheel and popcorn.

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

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

If you're in telephones, pivot to Ferris wheels. There's a whole industry. Oh yeah, Ferris wheel, that'll distract. Throw the telephone, you gotta get on the Ferris wheel, it's the new thing.

Like, we're at total stagnation on the top level. It is sort of funny that like, if you were to look back, if we had a World's Fair, you'd have like creatine gummies and like AGI, right? Exactly. So in 1893, they had the Ferris wheel and popcorn, and then you fast forward to today, it's like— It'd be like, we found a way to put one of the micronutrients in steak into a candy-shaped supplement. And we need you to eat 4 or 5 of these a day forever.

2020 World's Fair. We have rockets that land and we also have Allbirds. Allbirds. What else came out that was very silly? Bored Apes. We have, we've invented Bored Apes.

Skims shapewear.

Shapewear. And GLP-1s. Somewhat related, I don't know.

Buffalo, New York, 1901.

Okay.

An electric city.

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

Though remembered mostly as the location where President William McKinley was shot, he died a week later, Buffalo's Pan-American Exposition was meant to showcase—

He was shot at?

He was shot at the World's Fair.

I had no idea. That's crazy. Tyler, fact check that. Buffalo's Pan-American Exposition was meant to showcase America's dominance in innovation, electrical power, and infrastructure. The fair featured electric lighting and electric streetcars powered by hydroelectricity generated by Niagara Falls, reflecting a moment when electricity was beginning to move from novelty towards widespread utility.

Okay, so this is 1901.

1901.

And remember, in 1876, we created the telephone.

Yeah.

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

3 years, we created electricity, and they're like, we got something better.

What do we got? We now know this World's Fair as a snack food extravaganza.

It's really just AGI and protein gummies.

It was sort of a Cambrian explosion of snacking.

Yeah, I mean, this is the nature of our show. It's like Cerebris and Groot. This is actually what happens in America, bro.

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

Oh no.

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

Mm-hmm.

Elite.

While the foods weren't all invented for the fair, their widespread availability there— like, it's so funny. So people are coming there, again, to share their actual innovations. And then snacks had just come online. And so you can imagine, it just turns into a snack conference, where everyone's just snacking like crazy. Wait, we have hot, you can go to a hot dog stand and then you can go get cotton candy?

Yeah.

In one place? Yeah. You gotta be kidding me.

I mean, I wouldn't be surprised.

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

Peanut butter.

Early flying machines and submarines.

Hot dogs came after.

And automobiles.

And automobiles. And submarines, this is crazy.

And barely remembered.

No.

Fast forward, 1962, Seattle.

Space race.

The space race.

That's exciting.

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

Turn it down.

Turn it down. The federal government became deeply involved. There was a sense that America needed to demonstrate technological leadership.

Mm-hmm.

The Space Needle was constructed for the fair. I did not know that.

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

He iced it out.

Oh, he did?

He made it ice blue.

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

Anyway, uh, fast forward just a few years, couple years.

This one we got—

you're not going to believe what— you're not going to believe what they created, what they announced at this World's Fair.

'64.

They invent— 1964, more than just under 100 years since the telephone was invented, we invented punch cards.

Punch cards.

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

True.

World's Fair at Flushing Meadows, New York City. Just for the record. Yes, just for the record. Visitors were dazzled by color television demonstration and the Picturephone, an early video calling system.

They had FaceTime.

Yeah, they created FaceTime. This is crazy.

I can't believe—

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

Just a mirror that you look at.

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

Yeah, so it cost $16 for a 3-minute call.

That's $121 today. In today's money.

That's expensive.

Yeah, $40.

Token maxing. I wonder if there were CEOs at the time who were like, we need to be— if you're making $10 a year and you're not spending $20 a year on your picture phone, you're not going to have a job.

I wonder if they were talking about Jevons' paradox.

Yes, probably.

I don't know.

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.

Stagnation theory undefeated. Brutal. By that point, the function of World's Fairs had largely migrated elsewhere to museums, television, theme parks, and technology conferences. 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, uh, and, uh, Brandon Gurrell of the TVPN newsletter fame shared that there was in fact an attempt to bring back the World's Fair by Zach Dev. He wrote on Substack startupcities.com in 2023. He talked to World's Fair co-founder Cam Weiss on Walt Disney, EPCOT, Dubai's Museum of the Future, why the World's Fair died. And why big in-person events matter more than ever. Yeah, it's hard to—

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

Yeah, it is tricky. I mean, yeah, we do sort of have these, but then, I mean, we talked about this during the Consumer Electronics Show discussion around how a lot of the big tech companies companies have sort of created their own World's Fairs. Like, you walk around MetaConnect, it feels like a World's Fair, although it's much more narrow because they're releasing one product and a few features. It is cool to think about bundling everything up over a decade and having it be like, "Save everything up for this." Can you imagine? But with iterative releases in the Internet and leaks and journalism, I don't think it would be wise for an inventor of the next paradigm of LLMs or AGI to sit on it for a decade while they wait for the next World Fair. Yeah, I'm GPT-6, Mythos 2, it's coming, but we're preparing for Paris in 2046. I don't know if that would work. Anyway, what else stuck out to you, Tyler? There was another There was another article you put in here from the New York Times about the picture phone.

That was just more details about— I was really enamored by this. Yeah.

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

Yeah.

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

Why? You could just say that.

I think of you as an inventor of bits.

Of bits, potentially. Inventor, like, did you invent TBPn?

I don't know.

Is that a thing? No, founder, businessman, businessperson. These are the terms of the modern era. A lot of, I mean, even also just the way inventions take in place are so disaggregated. Like, you look at the— we were doing this during the GLP-1 boom. We were trying to trace through, like, who are the key players? This is the Thiel take on, like, we don't have ticker tape parades. Like, why is there not one person? Like, Doudna got credit for CRISPR. There's a book Walter Isaacson wrote about her. I think it's called The Inventor, maybe. I don't know. Doudna. She won the Nobel Prize. But—

Yeah, I mean, it's just very—

It's really hard because there's, like— There's so many slices.

The internet is the new World's Fair, right? Or X or any of these social platforms. It would've made sense, you know, in the 20th century, in the 19th century to 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 gonna be interested in new inventions. And now people create something.

Go viral.

Yeah. On the internet. There's a film called The Inventor and it's about Elizabeth Holmes, right?

So that actually shows you how much the idea of an inventor is like mocked now.

Wow, yeah. That's like people don't have respect for an inventor.

It's the scammy grifter who's the inventor.

It truly, truly is. Well, we have someone who ships. We have Dan Shipper in the waiting room.

Shipinator.

The Shipinator coming back to the show. Let's bring him in to the TV van. I'll turn down. Catch up with Dan Shipper. How you doing? Founder.

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

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

I mean, I'm sure you just get this like way too much now, but the nominative determinism is like a little too on the nose with this one.

Yeah, I just try to live up to my name.

Yeah, you do.

It's great.

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

Do you think of yourself as an inventor?

Do we need to bring inventor back?

I feel like that term, it's like what I aspired to be when I was a kid.

Yeah.

So there's like a little 11-year-old in me who's like, yeah, absolutely, I am an inventor, but I would never go around calling myself that because I feel like you have to have a garage workshop and be like making things that like have springs and make weird noises in order to be an inventor.

Yeah, it's very gadget related.

Yeah.

Yeah.

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

It's been maybe, has it been like 4 months, maybe more since we caught up?

Too long.

It's been a while. It feels like years.

Feels like too long.

In this era, in this era. Yeah, the world's changed. Yeah, give us the update on all things Every and and Dan Shipper?

I mean, there is a lot to say. The big update is I just wrote a piece called After Automation. Yeah. Because there's so much progress has happened over the last 4 months. I think the biggest thing has been there was this huge step change in models starting in November with Opus 4.5 and then GPT-5.3. And that has just continued. And I think it's starting to delegating work is starting to cross the chasm from something that you do if you're a coder to all of knowledge work with first Cloud Code, then Cloud Cowork, and now Codex, which Codex, the big shift, the biggest thing that has happened is Codex is my daily driver now, and it's fantastic. It is totally changing how I work. But I think as that starts to happen, you're starting to get a lot of people who maybe have not been that clued into agentic AI use it for the first time and go like, holy fucking shit. Like everything is gonna change.

Am I gonna have to? I saw an interesting benchmark here where someone sort of outside of technology was sort of lamenting AI progress because the tricky prompt they had was come up with a Pokémon that ends in the two letters E-R. Did you see this? No. And like the base models, the cheapest things, the older models sort of get confused by it because of the tokenization. It's sort of like a new version of how many Rs are in strawberry. But if you hit a coding model, like you can just watch the traces of Claude Code or Codex and it's like, go to Pokémon Wiki Dex, download them all, put them into a CSV, write the Python that checks the actual, last 2 characters of the Pokémon 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.

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

Yeah.

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

Ken Griffin.

Yeah, he had this whole quote, and I have it in my piece. He said, like, these are not mid-tier white-collar jobs. These are, like, extraordinarily high-skilled jobs being— I'm going to pick a word— automated by agentic AI. And so you can just feel— you can just smell when someone's, like, used an agent for the first time, and they're like, what the fuck? And if you've been in AI for— we've been covering it since 2022, since the GPT-3 days. You know that meme where it's like he's got the noose around his head and he's like, first time? That's sort of how I feel.

Yeah, I mean, it's a big shift because the fun— yeah, you're going from, for everyday knowledge work, being good at writing documents and good at collecting information, which are valuable things, but You've never worked with someone in an organization that's like a superstar where all they did was gather information. Facts. And collect reports and things like that, right? It's like, okay, what can you do with that? What kind of actions you can take? And yeah, it's been, even with how, Even with how kind of close we are to the action and following, you know, not as long, you know, we weren't doing the show in the GPT-3 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 thing, I wanted to get your update on like how you feel like memory is evolving. I've had some like pretty pleasant experiences recently where I will, I will do, you know, I'll go to ChatGPT and ask for something and it's like actually able to pull in a bunch of really relevant kind of like context and memories in a way that is like helpful and not just kind of like distraction or annoying. And specifically like wanted to get your update because like, let's call it, 8, probably a year ago, 18 months ago, I think everyone was saying like memory, memory is the moat, like memory. And then people just like kind of stopped talking about it for call it 6 or 9 months or something like that. But it feels like it might be having a moment too.

So I mean, whether or not it's memory specifically, the thing that has changed dramatically is that Codex and also Cloud Code or Cowork to some extent, but Codex, The reason it's so powerful for me is it has access to everything on my computer. Yeah. And so, you know, when I published this article after Automation yesterday, I was like, who should I send this to? And I was gonna go through my texts and go through my emails and then, you know, whatever. And I literally just said to Codex, hey, can you go figure out like a couple people I should send this to? And it came up with like a bunch of investors, a bunch of journalists, a bunch of founders. All people who I've talked to in the last 3 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. Yeah. And one of the things I'm trying to do with this piece is to say, as a company, we've automated everything that we can. Every single person has access to an agent. They have access to as many tokens as they possibly can use, and yet we've grown from 4 to almost 30 people since GPT-3. So what the fuck is that about? It's very counter to the narrative, I think, especially the popular narrative right now with Meta's laying people off and Block is laying people off and the ClickUp guy is like, I'm going to fire everyone. It's only going to be 100x employees. So I think there's a really interesting question here about if you're actually on the frontier like we are, It seems like there's more human work to do than ever. Why is that? So I did a bunch of work.

Yeah, and the other thing is Ken Griffin, in 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 the companies that like don't have meaningful momentum or don't have clear narratives that are having to, you know, do these layoffs. And again, there's still there's still a lot of the, there's just still a lot of blaming, sort of like crediting AI for layoffs that would've needed to happen even if we weren't in this technology cycle.

Yeah, it's interesting because it's very popular now to say AI in the layoff announcement, but it's also very popular to say, and our business is better than it's ever been. What do you guys think about that? I just feel like that's such a weird strategy or weird meme to be going around.

Well, I think they're saying, you can say our business is better than it's ever been, but that doesn't mean it's being valued better than it ever has, right? Like you can say like better than it's ever been. What does that mean? Revenue's up, right? But the example that I know you're thinking of I can't imagine that that company is trading anywhere near it was trading, you know, a year ago, 2 years ago. And so when you have a massive correction in the sort of valuation of your company, like, you're going to try to make moves to change that or free up resources to invest in new product areas and get that momentum them again. So I would say, like, when I see, oh, the business is bigger than it's ever been or better than it's ever been, I just don't necessarily buy that because you have to understand, like, what metric are they using to sort of, like, qualify that?

Yeah, I think that that's a reasonable frame. And I wish that they would say that more because it gives— it's just such a bad look for all of technology for CEOs to be doing that.

Did you see the Standard Chartered CEO got in hot water? So CEO of Standard Chartered came out and said like, AI is working so much, we're going to reduce our workforce. And he used a really spicy phrase. He said like low value human work and we're going to replace it with capital that we're investing. It was a very quantitative analysis of something that's deeply human. But I dug into his actual projection and he said 15% headcount reduction by 2030, which is like— I would assume that attrition would get you there. Like, is this like the most retentive company in history? Like, I feel like 4% of the workforce force probably turns over annually anyway. You can just slow your hiring plan and get there if you want to shrink. And that's what a lot of companies have done in previous eras where there's been hiccups or disconnects between valuation. There were some big private companies that during the COVID era or ZIRP era, they just sort of froze hiring and grew into their valuations because the business model was sound. They didn't need to hire as much. They refocused, raised the hiring standard, allowed attrition to play its part, and they got to become more lean, like more lean and mean organizations without actually doing a layoff, which at that time would have been optically very bad. Because if you were doing a layoff during ZIRP or COVID, it was like an indictment of you because it was like, oh, well, you're a victim of COVID or you're a victim of ZIRP. Like, your business doesn't work 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 layoffs, that's a sign that your business is ready for AI, ready for automation, ready for more efficiency. And so I think people are sort of playing both sides. It's very, very—

How are you 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 subsection of jobs that AI can do well 90% of the time, but even that is not enough to replace the role or function entirely.

Yeah, and I think this all changes and the lines between those terms are all gonna change 'cause they're all sort of relative to the capabilities of technology and that's all changing too. But I can tell you that what we find internally at Evergreen, and 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, um, and, uh, 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, um, every agent needs a human. The further away an agent is from a human who's managing it, the worse it does. Uh, and you see this too in like even in this— even in the scaled AI companies like inside of OpenAI or outside of Anthropic, they do have company-wide bots that you can but they're run by teams of people. And I think that that's actually a really interesting and pretty stable phenomena based on how these agents work. Obviously, they do more and more complex work. But what we see is that someone on our team, Kieran Claassen, calls it the human sandwich. Is AI collapses, collapses tasks that used to take hours into like a few minutes. But the human is still kind of like the sandwich on either end or the bookend on either end who's like framing the task or evaluating it when it's done. And what's really interesting is even though it can do expert, even though AI can do expert human work, my experience internally at Evernote, and I think you find this across the AI industry is it actually, even though AI can do expert human work, it actually increases the demand for human experts. Because what happens is you can get expert human work out of an AI, you can get pretty good writing or pretty good images or pretty good code, but it's all based on yesterday's competence. It's all based on what is in the training data from from yesterday. And what that does is it floods the market with PRs or images or writing that's like kind of good but not quite right for the situation. And what you need are human experts to come in and take the cheap competence that AI enables anyone to have and turn it into actual really, really good valuable differentiated work. 'Cause otherwise it's, it's just the same thing as everybody else is doing and it's not valuable. And I think that's a dynamic inside of how the models work and how they function in the economy that is kind of lost when people are worried about, oh yeah, 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.

That makes a lot of sense.

What do you think about the idea of like 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 go through YC, be technical, hire a couple engineers. Now a few people can sort of get something off the ground. Are you actually seeing any movement towards that, do you think?

I think that's definitely a thing. And it's actually one of the things that makes working at a place like Every really appealing because if you're someone who wants to make software, everybody else can make software now. So having some sort of distribution and trusted brand makes a lot more sense than it used to. I think that I'm very bullish on people, like a person or a small group of people making software for a niche. I think that's totally happening, but I'm very, I think the SaaS-pocalypse is like totally overblown. 99% of people are not going to be vibe coding their own apps. They might do it once, but actually maintaining software is really, really hard, and it's a particular skill set that most people don't want to have. And I would be buying SaaS stocks because I actually, you know, if you look at every— we can vibe code whatever we want.

Narrative violation. It is a narrative violation.

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

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

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 2 plates by 8 weeks from now. I'm currently at a plate. And give me a plan to get there, right? So instead of needing like a fitness app—

You could vibecode bench press app.

Yeah, you could do like the— Yeah.

A distribution, or you could— or the customer could just wind up going to any of these apps.

And they're like, cool. And they generate your workout. You're saying, great, I did it. I was failing after 3 sets or whatever. And then it learns that, and it gives you a new workout, and it just goes and goes and goes. And you functionally get the— what a vertical product could do. So I just think like there is an opportunity right now for this like long tail of apps, but part of it is that people don't realize what the models themselves—

I have a few thoughts there. The first, the first thought is I actually look at that as training a customer, and a customer that's going to really stick around with that is going to end up wanting things that just the bare thread in Codex is not going to do for them very well. Actually, chat is not a very good medium for a lot of app interactions. So in the same way that Excel was— you don't get the SaaS boom without Excel. Excel is teaching people how to use computers in a way that then becomes enterprise SaaS. I really think a lot of these Codex or ChatGPT or Claude use cases are actually training potential customers who are power users to want to encounter problems that they want to buy software to fix. But I have a very specific prediction for what that's going to look like. And I'm currently obsessed with what I'm calling Codex native apps. And the basic insight is for all of these tools, so like Cloud Code Desktop, and Codex, they're built primarily for developers for now. And when developers are working in them, if you're changing your app, it has an in-app browser that you can use to like, you know, the agent's in there with you. You can like look at your app in localhost and the agent's in there and you're going back and forth and it's a very good collaboration environment for developer. I think that is, it's incredible for any kind of knowledge work. I spend all day, just in Codex. And when I open up a thread, I just open up a browser tab and I'm in my documents, I'm in my emails, and it's me and Codex going back and forth on a SaaS app that's running inside of the browser of Codex. And it is the most powerful thing I've ever used. And I really think that is going to be a significant user experience type thing that we're going to see across all of the— all of these providers of agent orchestration platforms for knowledge work.

Love it.

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

Oh, happy birthday. Do we hit the gong?

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

Wow.

A little birdie named John Coogan in the chat said that it's tomorrow. Great, great timing with a 3-day weekend. Great timing for you to just lock in at your computer and just grind all weekend.

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

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

We've got a lot of good stuff. There's, there's some interesting, uh, 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. Uh, and then we've got, we have our agent product Plus One, and that should be in beta probably by the end of June. And I think that's going to be really, really cool for people.

Amazing. Uh, great to catch up. Uh, have a wonderful weekend. Enjoy your birthday with Codex. And, uh, we will, uh, we'll talk soon.

Thank you so much for coming on the show. We'll talk to you soon. Goodbye. Up next, we have James Rogers from Appeal Sciences. He is the founder here with us live in the TVP and UltraDome. Maybe move these— get 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? Uh, 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.

Uh, yeah, James Rogers, uh, thanks for having me down here.

Yeah, of course.

Based up in Santa Barbara, so it's pretty easy to get down.

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

Decker's. Decker's.

Okay. Yeah.

Uh, I went out there for graduate school to UC Santa Barbara. Uh, 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, uh, was doing my PhD in material science, studying solar paint. Kind of weird.

Solar paint. Solar paint.

What does that do?

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

OK. Where did that technology go? Is that still—

It's too expensive.

Oh, it's too expensive still.

That was actually where Appeal came from, was, hey—

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

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

Unbelievable. I came out to visit.

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

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

So you study material sciences. Where did the original idea for Apeel come from?

I thought the paint thing was so amazing. Wow, you can mix up a bucket of this paint, and then it will build itself where you ship it? But then I realized how expensive that was going to be and went, OK, well— that maybe the solar paint thing doesn't work, but there's something about this idea that you would—

Technology in a liquid form factor.

—build something that builds itself somewhere else. 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 know where people are going hungry. But I never understood why. Originally, I thought, oh, we're not growing enough. We need to grow more food. Nope, we're actually growing twice as much food as we need to feed everybody already. And the reason is people are going hungry because we throw it away. And so why do we throw it away? Well, we throw it away because it spoils.

It goes bad. So the initial product, are you in the lab? Are you in a pitch deck? Are you raising money and then going and doing R&D?

It was all an idea. It was just an idea on a sheet of paper. 'Cause I called my mom to tell her about this idea and she's like, "Sweetie, that sounds nice, but you don't know anything about fruits and vegetables." That is true.

That's the easy part.

That is true. But I'm like, "Well, I just learned all this. I learned all the material science stuff, so I could probably learn the fruits and vegetables." So I made a list, right? 'Cause 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. 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. Specific founder journey? You have this idea, you tell your mom about it, she's like, "Good, that's nice, sweetie, but you don't know anything about fruits and vegetables," and then what do you do next?

You know, I actually didn't know what fruits and vegetables were made out of. So I'm a material scientist, so I'm kind of obsessed with what stuff is made out of. And so, the first question was, well, if you've got this strategy to allow fruit to last longer by strengthening the peel that's there, what's there now? So I'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 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 mixtures of really specific molecules. And so it was, what's the skin made out of? And it turns out they're made out of these plant oils. And it was, huh. So these skins are made of plant oils. And then it wasn't just that the strawberries— it wasn't just that the orange skin was made out of these plant oils. The strawberry skin was made out of the same thing. And that was like a big— 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 is.

Why can't you apply?

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

Yeah. So grant money early on. —when does the business— New Venture Competition. We were like a UCSD—

No way. UCSD. I remember. But wasn't that like— didn't you get like $25,000 or something? Yeah, we got like $10,000.

You know, for a grad student, that was good.

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

I started my first company with $17,000.

You could be at least twice this size.

Yeah, $17,000, first company. For me. Yes, yeah, it's enough if you're eating ramen and just paying rent.

I mean, my yearly salary was $24,000, so this was like a 50% bonus. Yeah, no, it was enough to incorporate the business. First, uh, uh, business address was on Del Playa. That is crazy.

That's like probably the, the most enterprise value created from a, from an incorporation on Del Playa. Who knows, you'll probably get some Del Playa. Playa is like, yeah, just a very notorious street. It's the street that runs— I can't imagine. It's the street that runs in Isla Vista, which is where the university is. It's a street that runs along basically as close to the water as possible. So you want to be on the—

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

Not necessarily. Maybe a little bit. Maybe a little bit.

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

No, that's actually good. That means you're— way more locked in, basically. The middle zone is a nightmare. I don't think any enterprise value is being created there. Closer to— basically, you're farthest from the university, but it's like much more kind of— you're closer to nature. It's a little bit quieter there. But you go 2 blocks down, negative enterprise value creation. Yeah. OK, so you kind of have this insight. You have a little grant funding. Are you able to make MVPs with that grant?

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

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

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

And I'm joking when I say how hard could it be.

No, no, no, but kind of. I mean, that was how simple it was supposed to be. But how do you tell whether or not it's working? Actually, it's kind of hard, because normally if you were going to apply it to an apple, you'd have to wait a month to see what happened. And that's just a really long— Iteration. —product iteration cycle. And so we actually developed these time-lapse camera systems. It was kind of our first product, so we could see tiny changes.

And so would you effectively go buy 2 apples hopefully from the same orchard. Same tree you had to do. Same tree.

That was a big problem in the beginning. We were going to the grocery store and buying fruit and going, why does this one rot faster than this one? They came out of the same bin. Well, it turns out those could be potentially from completely different countries, let alone different orchards or different trees. And most of them have gone through this supply chain. You know, apples, the average apple that's eaten in the US is a year old. No way.

Yeah, no way.

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

Yeah, that's what I thought. I grew up in—

uh, we'd be growing them.

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

Yeah, yeah. And we can get back to that. Yeah, you know, we— you keep hearing about this farm-to-table thing, but the "to" is obscuring everything that's happening. Okay. Right? You hear about what's going on the farm.

Yeah.

You hear about, you know, you know what's happening on the table 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 when it came into the country before it sat in storage somewhere, and then, you know, you picked it up at the grocery store thinking it was fresh off the tree. And of course, it's—

So yeah, talk about the early business model, the farm side, the table side, distributors, supermarkets. There's a lot of different players in the supply chain that might be interested in the business. How did you think about cracking it?

Well, we were so naive. We thought, well, hey, if food lasted longer, more of it could get to people. We'd be able to feed people, and that'd be amazing. But it turns out that actually the early feedback that we got from customers was, I don't want food to last longer. The garbage can is my best customer. Every piece of food that you throw away is another piece of food that I get to sell. So there's this crazy mismatch 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 our first customer was right up the street from us. We make our product out of plant material, so we were looking for plant material. And this guy was growing coffee cherries. I didn't know coffee beans, like they're inside of a coffee cherry. This was news to me. So you got all these coffee cherries after you get the beans. We met this guy. We're telling him about what we're doing. He said, this sounds really amazing. "Can you do anything for my finger limes?" And we're like, what the hell is a finger lime? I've never heard of one of these things. And they're these little micro citrus. You cut them open, they look like caviar pearls inside. You put them on oysters and salads and this kind of stuff. But they only last for 5 days. And they lived right up the street. So we started working with this small farmer on these caviar limes, because his thing was he had to air freight these caviar limes to places like Chicago and New York, because they only lasted for 5 days in these fancy restaurants. And so we started working with these caviar limes and gave them the ability to put them on— —trucks, basically. Saves them a ton of money. Now they last 20 days instead of 5 days. Everybody's happy. But then we started going and saying, OK, well, let's do this again with other suppliers in other categories. Stories. And this is when we got the feedback from them saying, we don't need it. Actually, maybe you guys should just stop doing this. Interesting. But what we did find—

Did you ever get a visit from Big Fruit coming in saying, hey, buddy? It's like the guy—

You guys probably have some of their masks around here. I've seen them. In different clothing. Actually, our first work that we did in the industry, we were doing a demonstration with a huge citrus company. And we were high-fiving because we're looking at the data going, we just won contracts with the biggest suppliers in the US. And the data they came back with didn't look anything like our data. Data. What does that mean? They said, hey, your product doesn't work.

OK, interesting.

And we were totally knocked backwards, because we've got the exact same fruit that we bring back, hold, and make the same measurements on. They say, no, it doesn't look anything— your product doesn't work. It almost completely blocked us out of the US market. Wow. It's such a small industry. When somebody starts spreading rumors that, oh, this thing—

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

Their data didn't match our data. Interesting. Interesting. Didn't match our data. And it's such a tightly controlled industry that we were locked out. So we actually had to go to market originally in Europe. Oh, interesting. It knocked us all the way over to Europe. It's that tightly controlled. But what we found was that in Europe, people People were looking for this. People were looking for a way to have access to healthier fruits and vegetables that didn't waste. They had huge initiatives around this. Even companies, like the retailers, were actually talking about this kind of stuff. And we started with avocados because of the joke with the avocado. Not now, not now, not now.

Now.

Too late. And it solved that. This challenge that we had where the supply chain wasn't so interested in having food last longer, but the retailer was. Because if they bought an avocado and didn't sell the avocado, that was a waste of money for them.

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

And it's because they're breathing. You don't think about it, but fruit is still alive when you pick it. At least you want to be eating it while it's still alive. And it has a certain number of breaths. So at the end, it's breathing, breathing, breathing. It eats up all the energy it's got inside. And then if you eat it afterwards, you're eating dead food. And most people in the US are eating dead food. They don't even know, because it's dressed up in wax and all this.

Actually acquire produce from a distributor and then apply Apeel to the product?

Here was what was so problematic, was the retailers loved it. Because now they're able to buy food that they can actually sell. And they were actually telling their shoppers about this. But that meant they had to— they're not growing the food, so they have to tell the suppliers, hey, we want you to use this product. The suppliers hate that. Hated this, absolutely hated this, because they had pretty much shut it down. And so the retailer starts telling the suppliers about what they need to do in their business. And don't get me wrong, we were a headache in their operations, because we were this new thing that they had to do, and these things have been operating the way they've been operating for 100 years. Yeah. that's the way that it had to happen in the US, was from the retail side pushing back into the supply chain.

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

2019, 2020. Oh, wow. Yeah, it took a while.

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

I think probably we had raised $100 million about by then. You know, when we raised some money from the Andreessen Horowitz guys, we used the entire world's supply of our plant extract to treat the avocados that we shipped up to them beforehand as a demo. We shipped up a case of avocados and said, hey, put these out on your desk so that when we sat down in the meeting with Mark was, what happened? What happened here?

That was the world's supply.

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

You raised some money. What did it look like actually scaling up your supply chain?

Oh, man. You know, when we first started, like I said, when we first started, we were getting these coffee cherries from this local farm, and then we were extracting these material— we were extracting these these oils, basically, but it was super expensive to do because it wasn't a scaled-up process. And so, we started with extracting these things ourselves in the lab, just using like laboratory procedures. It wasn't really for any sort of commercial purpose other than, hey, this can work. We had to show that this could work. And so, in the beginning, it cost us something like, you know, $100 to treat an avocado, which— it's not gonna work. That's not going to work. But once we figured out the mixtures of these plant oils, then we could figure out, OK, how do you optimize the process to be able to isolate these things? And it turns out there's a really efficient way to isolate oils— distillation. It's the same way that they get alcohol out of— Boil it off. You boil it off. and you can do this thing called precision distillation, which basically allows you to separate out really specific, really specific oils. And that turned out to be a super scalable, super cheap process.

Because you can do it in a bigger and bigger vat. You can do it in a bigger flame, bigger centrifuge if you need that.

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

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

It was so cool. I would go home for Christmas, and my mom would collect the little peel stickers off the fruit that she bought. And that was just like, man, that was so cool to just have my mom go to the grocery store we went to growing up and be able to have our product. Because growing up in Michigan— I grew up I'm not a California guy. I love it out here, but I didn't grow up here. And it was just night and day. I'd go back to Michigan and go, oh yeah, most people— I mean, I didn't experience what good produce was living in the Midwest.

Yeah, I mean, I've spent basically my whole life in California, and so always had access to farmers markets. And sometimes the farmers markets are selling product that isn't actually— that's it's not really, like the farmer is not present and maybe not even in the state. But oftentimes, oftentimes it is hyper-local. So you get super spoiled living here.

You get super spoiled living here. And one thing I've come to realize is if you don't know the person growing your food, they don't have a lot of incentive to do the right thing for you. Yeah. People sell food based on price. And if I have a lemon that's coated in pesticides and a lemon that's not coated in pesticides, you can't tell that by looking at it. And this one's cheaper. The one coated in pesticides is cheaper, because they have less rot. So you buy the cheaper one, and the person who's doing the right thing doesn't get rewarded for it. So there's just— this horrible incentive in these supply chains to cut corners and do stuff that is horrifying, frankly.

What did you learn about the organic, the like just organic as a certification and the issues of that? We had Bryan Johnson on the show recently and he was saying like, he actually oftentimes will assume that organic food is gonna be more contaminated and worse for you than the non-organic, just because there's all these workarounds.

And it's marketing. Organic is marketing. And there's a whole agency. There's agencies set up just to certify products to be allowed for use on organic produce. And there's this kind of— I don't know where this idea came from that organic produce meant no pesticides. Or no coatings or better for you, but look at their actual marketing. They never say that stuff. Oh, interesting. They never say that stuff because it's false advertising. They can't say that. Yeah. So, but the brand is, you know, oh, this apple was picked right off the tree and is now in the grocery store. It's just absolutely not true.

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

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

But I mean, that's ultimately part of the problem is that you were sort of attacked with an aggressive marketing campaign against your product, right? And it kind of cuts both ways. Take us through that part of the journey. Did it start like a low rumble and then turn into like a firestorm? We, yeah, oh man, PTSD just even thinking about it. I'm sorry. No, it's all right.

We should talk about it, because if you're building something right now, this is the playbook they will use against you if you're going after, if you're threatening some incumbent.

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

You're in enough stores at this point. You have thousands of employees, hundreds of them.

Hundreds of employees working.

Hundreds of employees are in the stores, the stickers are— The stickers are on the fruit.

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

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

No, it's like 60% of the avocados that are being sold in the United States are with our product now. And we are announcing a kind of a first of its kind partnership with a supplier, a supplier of lemons. and he goes out in the media and does a press release and says, this product is amazing, I want this product on every, I'm gonna treat every lemon in the world with this product. And— People didn't like it.

Boom!

He gets doxxed by these video campaigns, like put his phone number up there, he's getting doxxed, death threats from saying that he's going to do this. And this— what we thought— because the original, I remember one of our guys coming to me and saying, hey, someone's saying our product is this cleaning agent that's being marketed in the UK. And it was—

It was a similar name? Exact same.

Same name, exact same name.

So it's not even a shared ingredient? No. Okay, it's because sometimes there's precursors, like, you know, I, I can drink dihydrogen monoxide. That sounds very scary. Yeah, that's of course H2O, that's water, right? Dihydrogen monoxide is the scary version. You might find dihydrogen monoxide in bleach, you might find it in cleaning products.

That's not even what's going on. Totally separate company. Okay, totally separate company. So as a cleaning product, also with the company's name. Two posts at the exact same time go live on Facebook. This is a toxic product with a link to this—

This other company. This other company, which is a cleaning product, which of course, you know, is not something you should be eating.

Right, exactly. And it just—

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

—Yeah, right, exactly. Different solutions for different products, specific ones for food. Yeah, of course. And this thing just goes crazy. And then the attacks morphed into— so we thought we cleared this up. Hey, look, this is a cleaning product. This is our product made from different plants. And they morphed the attack into— they couldn't find anything wrong with our product itself, so they morphed the attack into, this is a Bill Gates thing.

Bill Gates thing because of the nonprofit donation?

We got $100 grand in 2012 to research cassava root, which we don't even have a product for today. And then we got a follow-up. Grant for this cassava project for $1 million. I mean, we've raised $800 million. But if you go online and you look up our name, you'll see—

It's not Ford seed. It's not—

Nothing. I've never even met this guy. Zero involvement whatsoever. We got a check from a foundation that he donates to, by the way. Let's talk about all the other people who donate to to this foundation, we get these donations to work on cassava root, which you probably never even heard of. It's a starch source in Sub-Saharan Africa. It's kind of like an equivalent of—

Sure, but you have scientists, you have researchers that could potentially dig that up, like the coffee cherry thing.

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

—And the result of that might not be a business. It might be more of like a research paper or a study where you took the cassava root, ran it through some lab tests, tried to come up with—

—Figured out what was wrong.

—Does your product work? Do other products work?

Just understand what's going on. —Try to figure this out. And we actually did figure it out. It's a totally different way that you solve the problem. But I mean, that's what the money was for, to figure that out. So absolutely no involvement. But if you search our company's name online today, —Bill Gates's appeal. And I'm like, how did that happen? And for a while, we thought, people are just confused. Until we started— until it didn't stop. And it didn't stop. And it just kept morphing slightly. And new photos would come out. And the charge would change. And we started mapping it. And we started mapping back the accounts. And we started looking at the timestamps. And we started looking at the— the accounts that were quickly reposting this stuff, and it's completely coordinated.

Interesting. Wow. Yeah, because people— I feel like when, when like there's an organization—

There's plenty of like controversies that are entirely organic, right? There's a bunch of stuff online this week from a certain, uh, from a certain sort of like health platform.

Oh, yeah.

You were mentioning this. That a lot of companies have had problems with. And that is like genuinely organic. There's a guy running a platform that rates foods, and he has his own— Well, it's a gross scheme, but yeah.

Well, he has his own. But it's an individual. It's not like a corporation.

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

People are just confused. The truth is a powerful thing. Obviously, the truth will kind of come out about this. Sure, sure, sure. And it didn't. It didn't. It just didn't. And they started activating real, real people. OK.

—some of which were real, some were not. Political pressure? What was the long term? What do you think their goal was?

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

What was in the tool chest?

What year is that? 2024?

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

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

Yeah, I mean, it was pretty existential for us, because when we first started talking to retailers, we were saying, hey, you should put a sticker on this food because it's better for your customer. And the pushback that we got was, well, if we start telling people that your stuff is better for them, what are they going to think about the other stuff? And so the joke's on us now, right? So it was really existential for us to say, well, let's not tell people about this, because our whole ethos was, hey, people should know what's on their food. If they knew what was on their food, they're going to prefer this. Is gonna be something that they buy. But the conversation was, well, these attacks aren't organic attacks. Organic people, some people are getting roped into this thing. That's kinda how they work. They're like, there's somebody kinda behind it, planting the seeds, there's machinery, and then they're just trying to find vulnerable people. Yeah.

And make it their personal mission.

And make it their personal mission. And they were really successful that. But when it's a deliberate attack on the business, it's not a confused thing, you change your brand. They're just going to follow you to whatever you shift your brand over to. It almost looks— It looks like you're running. It looks like you're running. And so, I mean, we've been building this playbook from scratch. And if there's other founders out there that are building stuff that is— threatening someone in an incumbency position like this, I'd love— I would love to talk to them and share what we've learned, because the beginning is just completely disorienting. Nothing makes sense. Stuff's getting said that just has no basis whatsoever. And you're trying to— you just think the whole world's against you, you know. You, you, in a little, you kind of shut down a little bit. And it's not until you really get your bearings and you start to see see the kind of systematized nature of these things that you realize, actually, there is someone behind this, and you can start to figure out who they are. It just takes a really deliberate effort. And now you're a fruit company learning how to do digital forensics.

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

Perfect story. The buyer is almost everyone. Everyone has an opinion about food, whereas there have been somewhat even like more— like your scandal doesn't seem legitimate at all. There's been legitimate scandals in like enterprise software, for example, 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 inside of the hood and that particular buyer was able to sit down and understand the deeper context, you have to win over like this mass of humanity basically. All the food buyers, which is everyone, the Tam is everyone, which is the beauty. But it cuts both ways.

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

It's the not happy people. Yeah, of course, of course.

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

That's so interesting. —where are you at today?

So the business is going strong outside of the United States. 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 are better for the world, eliminate plastic, eliminate pesticides. And we don't have access to them in the US because a small group of people want to bury these options. And technology's happening. Technology growth is happening in every single industry except for food. How is this—?

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

It's often the best part of my day, so I get that. I resonate with that, yeah. Yeah, it's truly mind-blowing, and just how disconnected we've gotten from food. Most people's connection to food is they go to the grocery store, and they pick up a piece of food. I started growing. a lot of food, tomatoes, peppers, this kind of stuff. There is something amazing about growing food. And we've gotten totally disconnected with that. So I'm optimistic about this future where we actually are able to— people are starting to feed each other again. You're growing tomatoes, you're growing carrots, we have the opportunity to trade those with each other, because that can actually happen at a smaller scale if you're able to match the supply and demand. And so that's one of the things that we're talking about a lot. How do we help small producers, community production, in the United States where we can actually empower people to grow their own food, trade it with each other, so that they're able to feed each other, feed communities, and not be so dependent on this monolith where we're growing food halfway around the world.

That tried to kill you in the cradle.

Yeah, yeah, yeah. Other lessons for entrepreneurs? I mean, you mentioned like if someone is going to war with a major industry that's allied against them, there's worries there. Do you— is there any— not to dig up potential Monday morning quarterbacking, but is there any thing where like trademark searches could have avoided this? Is there something where like, if you could play back and think 5 steps forward, is any of this predictable? Is any of this like, you know, preventable?

So when we started the business, I think we were in a different era. We started the business in 2011, 2012. Social media was not what it is today. —and I've experienced, you are just vulnerable to a different set of attack vectors in the modern era. And if I could go back and talk to myself 5 years ago, it would have been to acknowledge, hey, we're in a different era now in terms of where the vulnerability can come from. On my list never would have been, Someone's gonna say that Bill Gates owns your company and it's part of a global depopulation agenda. Like that would not have been on my list. You're like, make a list of 1,000 things. It wouldn't have been. It would now, and it should be on, it would now, and it should be on everybody's list. Slot 3 of the deck. Like actually maybe make your Thanksgiving dinner productive and that relative who's got all these theories, tell them about what you're building. And just say, hey, what—

find some flaws in my business plan.

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

Yeah, that's very funny. I think it's a— there was someone who had a regional sauce business. And they bumped into another regional sauce business halfway across the world. In 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. Sorry for the confusion.

What was I going to say? I— yeah, it's also the mentality. —when your mentality as a founder, you discover this problem, you discover an innovative solution that's aligned with nature's own approach, and you come out and you're like, I'm trying to fix a systemic problem. And so you're coming in with the attitude of— as a good actor, operating as like, I'm a good actor, I'm trying to solve a— global problem for humanity, but when your solution becomes misaligned with someone else's business model, the way those— and I've just seen this with a bunch of companies, specifically in the— any, for some reason, like health, anything like health supplements, like food, is just like, becomes like hyper, hyper political really quickly. It becomes super emotional. What starts as being like concepts grounded in science quickly becomes something else. And I've been shocked because I know a bunch of health podcasters that have gotten into controversies over, and health brands. And it's been wild to see so many people that I know personally that I believe are, waking up every day trying to create the best possible product for humanity in a category, or create the best possible information for people, and then they become the enemy because of some other force in the world, and it's a real challenge. It's a real challenge. I'm the co-founder of a water filter company, and my journey into that business was realizing that there were so many companies in that category that were selling water filters, which you are relying on this device to provide clean water for yourself, something that you're consuming all day long. And I was looking around the category and I found, I tested a filter early on and the filter was adding heavy metals to the water. So it was like, I found a filter that was like a very popular filter.

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 different filters that were popular on Amazon. And multiple of them were adding heavy metals to the water. So you take water that is like maybe not clean, and then you come out with water that's certainly not clean. And that was this crazy moment. as that company, you know, the company's done quite well, in part by trying to, you know, overtest, overshare all these things. But there's still, again, immediately after launch, there was legacy brands that were trying to say, like, oh, they didn't, you know, trying to discredit, like, the lab, or all these different things. And it's like, and again, it does get— you have to just, like, go through it and continue to lead with transparency and science and all these things. But there are, it's not an approach that I can ever think about doing, right? Of like, I never, you know, I never would go out and try to mislead a bunch of people about a product. You can't even imagine someone doing that. You're like a golden retriever. We talk about, we talk about. Great dogs.

I don't take that as a compliment.

No, no, no. 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 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— Solving the problem. Solving the problem.

And there are pit bulls out there, there's Rottweilers that are not— They're focused on— People overthink things. And it's like, in this case, maybe, like, to the point of, like, what's on the third slide of the deck, it's like, maybe you should have been overthinking. But that's not good advice.

I don't know. You know, that's who I am. That's what happened to me. When I said, kind of, I, you know, it really, like, I was despondent for a while, that's what happened. You know, you go out into the world, and— And you're told, do the right thing, be a good person, work hard, find good people, work with them, build, like create something good that helps us.

That your mom is going to be proud of.

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

It's a golden retriever going to the dog park for the first time. Yes! Running into— there's a pit bull at the dog park. And you're jumping around chasing the ball. It's like, welcome to the park, man.

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

Yeah, like the US FDA gave you a clean belt buckle.

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

Which is like 100 times more hardcore.

They're the most strict regulatory agency in the world. Yeah.

And it's like, our product is literally— There's like a million products that are in our grocery stores that can't be sold there. That can't be sold.

There's like 4,000 approved, I think, in the US, and there's like 400 in Europe. Ours is one of them. There's literally no upper daily intake limit of our product. You could just eat it as food.

And that's okay. You're not on the Prop 65 list, California? No. That's insane. Everything's on the Prop 65 list.

We would definitely not wanna be on that list. These are of course like, yeah, yeah, yeah.

And I know there's a lot of supplements.

It was remarkably low. Like you walk into Starbucks, I don't have a problem with Starbucks. It's on Prop 65 and I'm like, yeah, okay. Like they're being extra safe. And that's the thing.

There's supplements. There's supplements. —there's like health supplements that people take that are on that Prop 65 list, right?

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

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

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

Like, you're not even eating it.

You're not even eating the skin. You're not even— which is even crazier. So these attacks, like, these comments come up, and it's like, this is like poison. And you're going, well, first of all, no. Yeah. And second of all, even if it really— for an avocado, such an incredible level.

It's so crazy. Yeah, it's—

walk outside. So what is the, uh, You don't strike me as someone who's just going to give up. Like, what's the path back to America? You know, the internet kicked our ass.

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

Figure out what happened. Figure out what happened.

I've just been posting them on Fridays. I haven't figured out what today's is going to be, because I submitted one— I put one out last week, and I just— —blew up the number of people who were sending stuff in. So I'm really bullish that the same way— right now there's no cost to somebody perpetrating an attack on you online. The bots do their thing. They repost stuff. They like. Whatever they share, they manufacture engagement, and it goes. But they're kind of doing it with impunity, because nobody's taking the time to be like, OK, who's this user that commented this thing? Oh, weird, they normally just talk about anime. And today they started talking about— Yeah, no one is clicking through.

Nobody's clicking through.

They're just seeing the headlines. And actually, if you just give a little bit of— well, this is the experiment I'm running right now. If you give them a little bit of financial incentive, turns out there's tens of thousands of people who will spend an hour going into this stuff, especially with AI. So I mean, that's the vector that I'm going with right now. I think we're in the—

You got to go all the way to Joe Rogan. This is the start. I think so. You gotta go straight to the top. Let's go.

He's mentioned this a couple of times.

But he seems like somebody who would be naturally skeptical of technology with food because he's like, I like steak. Yeah, right.

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

Pull that up, click 5 Live at I love it. Links deeper, get to the— and you don't have to go— you go one or two links and you can see the real story.

And like, you just see how people work on social media. Like, I hate to say this, but like, I'm sitting on an airplane, I can't not see what this person's doing one seat over to the right. Like, and this is the move: scroll, see something, click comments. Scroll, see something, click comments. So it doesn't matter what's posted. Yeah, I don't— I'm not— people don't form their opinion until they see the first couple comments. And so that's how they hijack. That's how they hijack what's going on in your brain. They just control the comments.

They control the comments. No, there's going to be some truly insane documentaries in about 10 years about this era of the internet and how people started. I've seen this in— AI is so hypercompetitive, and there's this insane horse race. And I've seen earlier this year, I was starting to see posts that would have, 20,000 likes on 200,000 views, 3 comments. Getting a 10% like rate is not a thing, especially on X. Exactly. There's a handful. And so, you're like, okay, well, who's actually engaging with it? It's clearly getting a lot of views, but it's not necessarily reflecting— It's not real. Yeah. It's manufactured.

Last question for for me. Have you been keeping tabs on the other appeal, the cleaning company? Because it's their business. You guys hear something?

We should actually. Now we are those guys. We gotta have that CEO on next time. Now we keep your floors clean and we keep your fruit fresh.

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

Wait, your floor cleaner's healthy now?

Yeah, yeah, yeah. Do they have a knock-on effect? I don't know. That's an interesting thing to dig into. But I'll follow up with you on that one. Thanks so much for coming on and breaking it down for us. This is a fascinating story. I know it's obviously a really hard journey, but I'm extremely optimistic.

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

Thank you for coming on and sharing it with us. This is fantastic. Have a great rest of your day. It was a great time. We'll catch up. Yeah. What do you want to wrap up with, Jordy? I mean, we could go into the Warren Buffett of London. But it's a long, 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 5th 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. What else? The Warshinator.

Warsh is in. Sworn into it. Sworn in. Frank says, good luck, bro.

He's gonna need it. 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. 1,000-watt hips. 1,000-watt hips. You wear these and they help you hike and run up hills. I listen to too many shows with, with Palmer Luckey 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.

Yeah, also imagine, you know, a bad actor, remember all the DJI drones had like a backdoor. Ooh, yeah. Bad actor takes over your suit. Start dancing. And then it makes you do Michael Jackson badly in front of your peers.

Potentially, potentially.

Could be wildly embarrassing.

I guess I'm, unclear on the goal, 'cause couldn't you just go on a shorter hike or a less steep hike to make it easier? I guess if you wanna see the top of a big mountain, but you can't make it in a certain amount of time, explain the market. Are you in the market for these? Yes, these are sick. Yes? Wait, so your answer is, couldn't you just go on a shorter hike? Yes, like, if this allows me to go on a 6-mile hike, couldn't I just do a 1-mile hike? You can take a car.

Couldn't you just stay home and watch TV?

You can take a car or a helicopter. Helicopter. Like, you don't— like, this is sort of an in-between thing. When, when are you actually deploying this? I bet you if you get these— maybe we have to order these. I think we have to order these for Tyler and see if you can just drive up like a massive mountain. We're getting you these. They're, they're $2,000, but we're getting you some, and we're gonna see if it transforms you into Iron Man. Uh, also, uh, CATL, C-A-T-L, the Chinese EV battery giant, is investing in Deepseek. Some big rounds going on. Also BYD.

China's waking up. Remember? Remember?

Oh yeah. This is what AI 2020, they predicted that BYD would get an F1 team. That's right. Which is what happening, which is what's happening. At least they're in talks. BYD is in talks with Christian Horner over entering F1. That would be pretty crazy. Does BYD have any gas-powered ICE engines? I don't know. They're about to.

They're about to. Who knows? Well, folks, it's Memorial Day weekend.

Yeah. Go have fun. We'll see you Tuesday. Have a good rest of your day. Have a great weekend. Leave us 5 stars on Apple Podcasts and Spotify. Sign up for our newsletter at tbpn.com. It's been an honor. And we will see you tomorrow.

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