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

11:53Dan Shipper:What a critical launch. Is it? No, it's just because of the timing with the S1 and the IPO. I don't know. All eyes on.

12:02James Rogers:I think the market is valuing the launch capabilities and SpaceX and Starship in particular is like one small piece of the puzzle. You know, it's important.

12:13Dan Shipper:But people are going to be paying way more attention to this. Yeah, yeah. Obviously, people will be excited about it.

12:19James Rogers:But, you know, even like I think even just the, you know, endless spamming Falcon 9s can get Starlink to what? $20 billion run rate or something? $10 billion run rate? You can clearly build a business off of the existing capability. Lots of excitement around Starship. There was a little bit of spice in the timeline from everyday astronaut because he was sort of rooting for a scrub. Everyone was like, oh, he's against SpaceX. He was like, no, I'm such a fan that I wanted to be there in person. I couldn't be there in person, so I was like, I hope that they scrub because I want to be there for this historic moment.

12:57James Rogers:A little bit of a misconception there.

13:00Dan Shipper:And the live stream will be, the launch is, you said, 5.30?

13:05James Rogers: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 going to make money? Enterprise software. 22 trillion of enterprise software.

13:43Dan Shipper:We're going to be automating workflows for the enterprise.

13:46James Rogers: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 one million inhabitants. Do robots count as inhabitants? Do agents count?

14:06Dan Shipper:Isn't that one of the potential?

14:09James Rogers:You got to get a million. This is why he's worried about the -

14:12Dan Shipper:Wasn't there a list of like five or six things and he just has to do like four?

14:15James Rogers:I don't know. I haven't dug into that particular one. I know for Tesla, there were a whole bunch of different milestones. The humanoid robots was one of the stretch goals. But permanent human colony on Mars with at least one million inhabitants, that's exciting. That's a good goal. Like that feels, I don't know, 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 Anderle, the co-founder and COO joining us. We're calling in to the Murph. We talked to him last year. Let's see how he did this here.

14:52James Rogers:Matt Graham, how are you doing? Welcome to the show.

14:56Dan Shipper:You are. I can't hear them.

14:57James Rogers:You can't hear us? Oh, no. Okay. If anyone can hear us, just ask him to talk. Pass it along. Just have him ramble. Just rant. Tell him to rant. Ten minute rant right now. 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.

15:35James Rogers: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 Anthropik 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.

16:08James Rogers:I appreciate that. The shame is that retail investors have missed SpaceX's early stratospheric gains. What was the market cap of Tesla at IPO? What was the market cap of Tesla at IPO?

16:22Dan Shipper:It was sub 10 billion, right?

16:24James Rogers:Was it Tesla's market? 1.7. Whoa, 1.7 billion?

16:31Dan Shipper:Yep. Are you sure? Is that a market cap for ants?

16:35James Rogers:You got 1 ,000x if you just were a day one IPO believer.

16:39Dan Shipper:I mean, that's how you build a retail army.

16:41James Rogers:So, SpaceX. I mean, million people on Mars. We could be looking at 1.7 quad. Potentially. Anything's possible. I don't know. You get a thousand X from here. If we get to Mars, that's a big, it's a big, big, big opportunity.

16:57Dan Shipper:That is so crazy that you could buy an Elon company in the public markets at less than a$2 billion market cap.

17:08James Rogers: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 a like it was never a uh like a warren buffett buy you know there were always good reasons not to buy it instead

17:24Dan Shipper:of going to high school i just bought the tesla ipo like using the money i made from mowing lawns

17:31James Rogers:Yeah, you should have just been a lawnmower who DCA'd into Tesla the whole time. Probably be pretty retired right now. I mean, there's a lot of people that did that. There's a lot of people, there's also a lot of people that put money down to buy cars and then they didn't buy the stock and they're like, ah, the car depreciated and I should have bought the stock. Anyway, let's check in with the Starship launch because SpaceX postponed the launch of the newly redesigned Starship, but hardly a headline if it's just a one day postponing because these things happen all the time. But it's completely redesigned.

18:03James Rogers: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. The test mission was set to be the first flight for Starship V3.

18:45James Rogers: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 Mechazilla tower that grabs it, the chopsticks, that's very key to being able to stack these quickly. You can't rebuild all the infrastructure. The reusability is key to flying regularly. The rocket has yet to fly any customer satellites after three years of intense tests that we know of.

19:25James Rogers: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 theories that think, oh, yeah, when they crash, they're actually deploying secret satellites. And there's more stuff in space than we think. So pick your tinfoil hat theory. We'll let you be the judge of what's really going on. 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.

19:56James Rogers:Okay, so a little bit more credit for you. Because I was like, ah, it's not that big a deal. I care more about the data centers. Yeah, I just mean the optics.

20:03Dan Shipper:Think about the optics and some investors are super, you know, a little bit.

20:09James Rogers:It is interesting. Clearly, if SpaceX is listing Starship as the first risk factor, it means like, oh, yeah, Colossus, we're going to be able to do that. That's not that hard. We can build a big data center. They have. Impossible. And there's less of a risk factor of like, we're not going to be able to monetize that. Or we're not going to, you know, because there 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 in the meantime.

20:40Dan Shipper:The main thing is like, God forbid, there's like a, you know, catastrophic, you know, explosion. It'd be dramatic. That would be, you know, potentially an omen that certain people would be looking into. Maybe. Maybe. I have full faith.

20:53James Rogers: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. They estimated in its IPO filing Wednesday that it has spent$15 billion developing Starship. Well, that makes a lot of sense why there's losses if you've been investing this. although it seems like the development costs are declining because in 2025, the expenses were$3 billion. So I don't know how many years, but if you imagine they've been working on Starship for five years, then$3 billion a year is sort of average.

21:37James Rogers:These efforts have weighed on SpaceX's bottom line with the space division reporting a$662 million loss. The interesting question that I have from the SpaceX IPO prospectus is Dan Primack had that sort of hot take saying like, oh, wow, like a lot of people were expecting SpaceX to be a bigger business than what they showed in this prospectus. Obviously, Elon is always looking to the future. Huge TAM, huge opportunity in space data centers, huge opportunity in terrestrial data centers. Like the revenue is going to grow.

22:12Dan Shipper:The$75 billion that we need is.

22:13James Rogers:He just added like$15 billion in ARR on a$20 billion company. The growth is there. Elon makes plays. But my question is, as you trickle down, it's an AI company with a data center business, with a telecom, and then the smallest section is the launch business. And so I'm wondering, what does the P &L look like? What do the financial statements look like for Blue Origin? Because Blue Origin has been operating for, I think, a longer amount of time, maybe the same amount of time, 20 years. I can't imagine that they're, you know, if they're working on a new rocket, are they gonna be -

22:51Dan Shipper:Yeah, before, September 8th, 2000.

22:53James Rogers: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 three billion trying to, you know, three billion last year alone developing Starship, like what do the costs look like for you, Glenn? And then the revenues have to be so much smaller. Here's a question for you, John.

23:13Dan Shipper:there was a PR firm reached out trying to get an early SpaceX investor on the show.

23:20James Rogers:Yeah.

23:21Dan Shipper:And they invested in 2019. Does that count as being an early investor if the company was started in 2002?

23:30James Rogers:I think so. I think pre-Starlink counts as early investor.

23:36Dan Shipper:Because it's always early. It's always early.

23:38James Rogers:Well, also, early is often defined by the ROI on the investment. And so if you got in the Decacorn rounds and now you're going out at a trillion round, that's 100x. Yeah. And so you're in a pretty good spot. Sean McGuire at Sequoia, it was a later bet. 2020, I think, was when he started building that position.

24:01Dan Shipper:Pre-Star, like Starlink, really.

24:03James Rogers:Yeah, I think Starlink was starting to work or starting to sort of be mapped out as a business, starting to be understood by the market as a potential profit center in the midst of a very difficult launch market that was not growing exponentially. And there were good margins, but the launch business alone was never going to propel SpaceX to a trillion-dollar valuation. But you add two, three, four other businesses, and all of a sudden, you get there. Other tests have ended in explosions, including one this past June that shook homes miles away. A failure early last year threatened commercial airline traffic in the Caribbean region.

24:43James Rogers: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 you know I'm doing like a little side-by-side of the silver engines he was saying that the black engines look better I kind of agree, but I haven't looked too closely at the images I don't know if it's probably purely functional, but it is fun as these things get more design You've seen those images of like the Raptor engine door the Merlin engine getting like redesigned redesigned image removing removing parts And then the final version looks pretty aesthetic like it looks pretty beautiful And the first version looks just like cables and wires and tubes everywhere looks very thrown together There's something about efficiency that is also aligned with aesthetics sometimes.

25:34James Rogers:The engines called Raptors are expected to produce more thrust while weighing less, according to the company. Oh, that's good. Almost every part of Starship V3 is different from V2, Musk said in a social media post Sunday. The postponed test mission was set to deploy 20 Starlink simulators during the mission. I'm wondering how much a Starlink costs, because why don't you just rip a real one? Yeah, yeah. You know, you're spending$3 billion. and just put up the real ones on the case that it actually works. But I guess there's probably more like telemetry and simulation and like data collection that you can do if you send off the simulator as opposed to like the real thing.

26:09James Rogers:But I don't know. Why not just rip it? I mean, that's what you do with Suck Satellite, remember?

26:14Dan Shipper:I mean, the ultimate simulation is just doing the thing.

26:18James Rogers:Yeah.

26:19Dan Shipper:Right?

26:20James Rogers: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?

26:28Dan Shipper:DJ D. Saul.

26:30James Rogers:Yeah, what's going on with Solomon?

26:31Dan Shipper: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. uh he also says wow this is how you work for the bag at goldman sachs uh david solomon also had a

27:04James Rogers: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. He was just saying that the models went from like slop to usable, but he hasn't actually opined on whether or not that will change Citadel's hiring plans or his view of the American economy.

27:41Dan Shipper:He also specifically said he was very excited that all of his software engineers were more efficient because he said there's no cap on how much software.

27:52James Rogers:I was there. I was writing Visual Basic. It was brutal. I would have loved Codex and Cloud Code. I would have been working for one minute a day instead of an hour a day.

28:02Dan Shipper:If you could have had Codex back then, just like a private instance of it, you would be currently.

28:09James Rogers:Time traveling back in time just to become the most productive intern of all time is elite.

28:16Dan Shipper:That's something you would actually do.

28:17James Rogers:Oh, it would be so much fun. Maybe that's what the future will hold. Intern simulator. You get to go into VR and simulate being the most elite intern with time travel technology.

28:30Dan Shipper:Can we talk about the World's Fair?

28:34James Rogers:Yes, we need to talk about the World's Fair. Tyler, you gave this a read. What stuck out to you? Maybe let's read through some of it first. And a quick update.

28:42Dan Shipper:We are rescheduling with Matt Grimm due to technical issues.

28:48James Rogers:Yes, we will get him on. He's been here in person. We know Matt Grimm. We love him. Always fun to catch up with him.

28:56Dan Shipper:It's possible that a third-layer SPV lead is holding their infrastructure hostage saying, give me direct access.

29:03James Rogers:I think he might have been there, finished the MRF, and saw someone hustling an SPV, and he just had to drop the mic and run off and tackle 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. 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's 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.

29:50James Rogers:And we'll go through this one on the World's Fair right now. So among the groundbreaking innovations unveiled at U.S. hosted exhibitions were the telephone, the Ferris wheel and the electric and electric lighting. ferris really crushed it on the naming thing where you know alexander graham bell invented the telephone uh 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.

30:28James Rogers:The world showcased its latest in innovations at high-profiled world's fairs. These exhibits, held every few years, beginning in London in 1851, gave countries a public platform to showcase new technologies, products, and ideas that were going to reshape daily life. For host countries and cities, the world's fairs or expositions were an opportunity to own the world's fairs.

30:51Dan Shipper:Tyler is sharing the person that invented the Ferris wheels. Full name was George Washington Gail Ferris Jr. That's pretty elite. That's pretty good. There's nothing stopping you from naming your child George Washington and then just slapping your own last name at the end.

31:09James Rogers:Yes, yes. George Washington Cosgrove.

31:13Dan Shipper:John Tyler was the 10th president.

31:15James Rogers:Oh, true. Yeah, there you go. That's my name.

31:17Dan Shipper:There we go.

31:18James Rogers:Okay, so many of the big expos were commemorative, says Paul Greenhall, a British historian and author of two books on world's fairs and expositions. But all of them ended up doing something else. They changed the shape of cities. Much like the Olympics today, world's fairs were large-scale planning efforts and economic investments as much as cultural events. Cities competed for the right to host them. Chicago was able to redefine its image from a gritty second city to a cultural and architectural hub after defeating New York in the bid for the 1893 exposition. Here's a look at the U.S.-hosted World's Fairs that left the deepest mark.

31:57James Rogers:So Philadelphia.

31:57Dan Shipper: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.

32:11James Rogers:One was disrupted much faster than the other.

32:14Dan Shipper:Yep.

32:14James Rogers:I would say that the telephone has basically disappeared. The smartphone, text messaging. Telephone's not doing well. It's on its last leg. But barbecue sauce has not really gained ground.

32:26Dan Shipper:Real inroads. No, ketchup is still on the table. Even ranch kind of went on a run. Yeah.

32:32James Rogers:Mustard, ultimately, it's a compliment, not a substitute. There are very few people that say, oh, I don't need the ketchup at all.

32:39Dan Shipper:Just the mustard.

32:39James Rogers:Just the mustard, please. Most people, they do both. I don't know.

32:42Dan Shipper:I do think mustard is better than ketchup. Yeah. Interesting. Yeah. 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 events spread across a vast park with hundreds of structures. It was sort of like the Coachella of its time. Among the most notable exhibits were the telephone. It was initially greeted with skepticism, but the potential of the cool contraption quickly drew attention.

33:18Dan Shipper: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 like, really? Really, dude? And consumer packaged goods such as Heinz tomato ketchup. It normalized the idea that private companies, innovators, and even governments could present their work side by side. A model that amplified the country's entrepreneurial culture. I love that. Chicago, 1893.

33:57Dan Shipper:You're not going to believe it. You're not going to believe the two technologies that emerge.

34:02James Rogers:We've got to call balls and strikes here. A little bit more underwhelming.

34:06Dan Shipper:Yeah, but I don't know. Tell people what was the case. Two key inventions. Last time, remember, we created telephones and ketchup, right? And so fast following this with the next fair, we create the Ferris wheel.

34:18James Rogers:No, no, no, no. It's not fast following. 1876, the telephone.

34:23Dan Shipper:Almost 20 years later.

34:23James Rogers: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. Ketchup before popcorn. Pretty good. Pretty good. But yeah, Ferris wheel. Ferris wheel.

34:41Dan Shipper:Imagine the hundreds of people that came there to demo their inventions.

34:46James Rogers:If you're in telephones, pivot to Ferris wheels. There's a whole industry. Oh, yeah, Ferris wheel, that'll destroy the telephone. You got to get on the Ferris wheel. It's the new thing. Well, it is sort of funny. Total stagnation on the telephone.

34:57Dan Shipper:It is sort of funny that if you were to look back, if we had a World's Fair, you'd have creatine gummies and AGI.

35:08James Rogers:Exactly.

35:09Dan Shipper:So in 1893, they had the Ferris wheel and popcorn. And then you fast forward to today. It's like we found a way to put one of the micronutrients in steak into a candy-shaped supplement. And we need you to eat four or five of these a day forever. 2020.

35:30James Rogers:World's Fair. We have rockets that land. And we also have... Allbirds. Allbirds. what what else came out that was very silly uh board apes we have we've invented board apes shapewear shapewear and glp ones uh somewhat related i don't know uh buffalo new york 1901

35:53Dan Shipper: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. He was shot at the World's Fair.

36:08James Rogers:I had no idea. That's crazy. Fact check that. Buffalo's Pan American Exposition was meant to showcase America's dominance and innovation, electrical power and infrastructure. The fair featured electric lighting and electric streetcars powered by hydroelectricity generated by Niagara Falls, reflecting a moment when electricity was beginning to move from novelty towards widespread utility.

36:31Dan Shipper:Okay, so this is 1901. 1901. And remember, in 1876, we created the telephone.

36:37James Rogers:Yeah.

36:37Dan Shipper:And you fast forward to the next event in St. Louis in 1904. You're not going to believe what we remember, the 1904 World's Fair. Three years.

36:47James Rogers:We created electricity, and they're like, we got something better.

36:50Dan Shipper:We now know this World's Fair as a snack food extravaganza.

36:56James Rogers:It's really just age nine crazy and gummy.

36:59Dan Shipper:It was sort of a Cambrian explosion of snacking.

37:02James Rogers:Yeah. I mean, this is the nature of our show. It's like Cerebrus and Gruens. This is actually what happens in America broadly.

37:12Dan Shipper:The Louisiana Purchase Exposition was among the largest ever stage and nearly obliterated the city's finances. Oh, no. Still, its pop culture influence endures. The exposition popularized a host of snack foods that would become staples of American life, including ice cream cones, peanut butter. Oh my, they went on an insane run right here. Ice cream cones, peanut butter, hot dogs, hamburgers, and cotton candy. Elite. While the foods weren't all invented for the fair, their widespread availability there, like it's so funny. So people are coming there again to share their actual innovations and then like snacks had just come online.

37:52Dan Shipper:And so you can imagine like it just turns into a snack conference Yeah, everyone's just snacking like crazy. They're like wait. We have hot you can go to a hot dog stand and then you can go get cotton candy Yeah in one place. You got to be kidding me. I Mean I bet 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 summer came after can automobiles and

38:25James Rogers:And submarines. This is crazy.

38:28Dan Shipper:And barely remembered.

38:30James Rogers:No.

38:31Dan Shipper:Fast forward. 1962, Seattle. Space race. It's a space race.

38:36James Rogers:That's exciting.

38:37Dan Shipper:The World's Fair, by the mid-20th century, the World's Fairs had become games of one-upsmanship. I like that. And geopolitical rivalry feels like where we're at today. Seattle's Century 21 exposition took place in the shadow of the Cold War following the Soviet Union's launch of Sputnik and the world's first artificial Earth satellite The Soviets turned down an invitation. They turned down

39:04James Rogers:Turn it down turn it down

39:06Dan Shipper:The federal government became deeply involved. There was a sense that America needed to demonstrate technological leadership The Space Needle was constructed for the fair. I did not know that I

39:18James Rogers: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?

39:31Dan Shipper:He iced it out.

39:32James Rogers:Oh, he did?

39:32Dan Shipper:He made it ice blue.

39:34James Rogers:Because he's Ice Man or something? That's the name of the album. And inside you can see all of the broadcasting equipment and there's these huge radio dishes inside. It's very cool. Anyway.

39:46Dan Shipper:fast forward just a few years couple years 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 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. Systems of Records. Yeah, Systems of Records. Visitors were dazzled by color television demonstration and the picture phone, an early video calling system.

40:30James Rogers:They had FaceTime. Yeah, this is actually, this is sick. This is crazy.

40:34Dan Shipper:I can't believe. When I told Jordy, 64, they invented FaceTime,

40:37James Rogers:he was like, did it use mirrors? And he thought it was just a periscope.

40:42Dan Shipper:Just a mirror that you look at.

40:44James Rogers:No, no, no. It's like it's like a series of mirrors that bounce my image across like so you can be in the other room and you can see me and talk No No, they had full video calling I guess AT &T's picture phone which added video to telephone calls.

40:58Dan Shipper:Yes So it cost$16 to for a three-minute call. That's$121 today's in today's money.

41:04James Rogers:That's expensive

41:05Dan Shipper:Yeah,$40 token axing

41:07James Rogers:I wonder if I wonder if there were CEOs at the time who were like we need we need to be if you're not if you're making $10 a year and you're not spending$20 a year on your picture phone You're not gonna have I wonder if they were talking about Jevons paradox

41:22Dan Shipper:Yes, probably I don't know when 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 or stagnation theory undefeated brutal

41:37James Rogers:By that point it's over World's Fairs had largely migrated elsewhere to museums television theme parks and As a result, the World's Fair concept gradually faded. Putting on an expo is a lost art, the author says, but when America needed it, no one did it better. And Brandon Grell of the TBPN newsletter, Fame, shared that there was, in fact, an attempt to bring back the World's Fair by Zach Dev. He wrote on Substack, startupcities.com, in 2023. He talked to World's Fair co-founder Cam Weiss on Walt Disney, Epcot, Dubai's Museum of the Future, why the World Fair died and why big in-person events matter more than ever.

42:26James Rogers:Yeah, it's hard to push.

42:27Dan Shipper: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?

42:35James Rogers:Yeah, it is tricky. I mean, yeah, we do sort of have these, but then, I mean, we talked about this during the consumer electronics show discussion around how a lot of the big tech companies have sort of created their own 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 and the internet and leaks and journalism, I don't think it would be wise for an inventor of the next paradigm of LLMs or AGI to sit on it for a decade while they wait for the next World Fair.

43:22James Rogers:Yeah, GPT-6, Mythos-2, it's coming, but we're preparing for Paris in 2046. I don't know if that would work. Anyway, what else stuck out to you, Tyler? There was another article you put in here from the New York Times about the picture phone.

43:42Dan Shipper:That was just more details, but I was really enamored by this. I was just thinking it's so sad. We don't really hear the term inventor anymore. No one is primarily an inventor.

43:51James Rogers:Yeah, people are really kind of lost this.

43:58James Rogers:Yeah, does that have something to do with 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?

44:08Dan Shipper:you could just say that I think of you as an inventor of bits

44:11James Rogers:of bits potentially inventor did you invent TBPN? I don't know is that a thing? no founder businessman, business person these are the terms of the modern era a lot of I mean even also just the way inventions take place are so disaggregated. Like you look at the, we were doing this during the GLP one boom. We were trying to trace through like who are the key players? This is the teal take on like, we don't have ticker tape parades. Like why is there not one person? Like Dudna got credit for CRISPR. There's a book Walter Isaacson wrote about her. I think it's called the inventor. Maybe, I don't know.

44:52James Rogers:Dudna, she won the Nobel press. But yeah, I mean,

44:55Dan Shipper:it's just very hard because there's like, there's so many slices. The internet is the new World's Fair, right? Or X or any of these social platforms. It would have made sense in the 20th century, in the 19th century, to create something and think, okay, I have to travel somewhere to where I can find a big audience of people that are going to be interested in new inventions. And now people create something on the internet. Yeah, so there's a film called The Inventor, and it's about Elizabeth Holmes, right? So that just shows you how much the idea of an inventor is. It's like mocked now.

45:30James Rogers:Wow, yeah.

45:32Dan Shipper:People don't have respect for an inventor.

45:33James Rogers: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. The Shippinator. Coming back to the show. Let's bring him in to the TV band. Catch you up with Dan Shipper. How you doing? 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?

45:58Dan Shipper:I mean, I'm sure you just get this like way too much now, but the nominative determinism is like a little too on the nose with this one.

46:05James Rogers:Yeah.

46:06Dan Shipper:I just try to live up to my name.

46:08James Rogers:Yeah.

46:08Dan Shipper:You do. It's great. You're an elite ship athlete. It's great to see you. It's been too long.

46:14James Rogers:Do you think of yourself as an inventor?

46:17Dan Shipper:Do we need to bring inventor back? I feel like that term, it's like what I aspired to be when I was a kid. So there's like a little 11-year-old in me who's like, yeah, absolutely, I am an inventor. But I would never go around calling myself that. Because I feel like you have to have a garage workshop and be like making things that like have springs and make weird noises in order to be an inventor. It's very gadget related.

46:40James Rogers:Yeah.

46:40Dan Shipper:Yeah.

46:41James Rogers: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.

46:54Dan Shipper:Has it been maybe, has it been like four months, maybe more since we caught up? Too long. It's been a while. It feels like years in this era. In this era. The world's changed. Yeah, give us the update on all things Every and Dan Shipper. I mean, there 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 four months. I think the biggest thing has been there was this huge step change in models starting in November with Opus 4.5 and then GPT-5.3. And that has just continued. And I think 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.

47:46Dan Shipper: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. Everything is going to change. Am I going to have -

48:11James Rogers:I saw an interesting benchmark here where someone sort of outside of technology was sort of lamenting AI progress because the tricky prompt they had was come up with a Pokemon that ends in the two letters ER. Did you see this? And 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 R's are in strawberry. but if you hit a coding model, like you can just watch the traces of CloudCode or Codex and it's like, go to Pokemon Wiki decks, download them all, put them into a CSV, write the Python that checks the actual last two characters of the Pokemon name and it just nails it perfectly and it's traceable.

48:59James Rogers:And so you get the perfect answer. And I think people haven't realized that that's what's possible and it doesn't all need to be memorization anymore. That's like the big shift.

49:08Dan Shipper:I totally agree. and you're seeing people, I mean, Dario's out there being like, AI could wipe out half of entry-level white-collar jobs. But even people outside the industry like Citadel, Ken Griffin, he had this whole quote, and I have it in my piece. He said, these are not mid-tiered white-collar jobs. These are extraordinarily high-skilled jobs being, I'm going to pick a word, automated by agentic AI. and so you can just feel you can just smell when someone's like use an agent for the first time and they're like what the fuck um and if you've been in ai for you know we've been covering it since 2022 since the gpt three days you know that like that meme where it's like he's got the noose around his head and he's like first time you know like that's sort of how i feel um yeah i mean it's a big i mean it's just it's a big it's a big shift because the fun yeah i mean you're going from like for everyday knowledge work being like good at writing documents and good at collecting information which are valuable things but there you've never worked with someone in an organization that's like a superstar where all they did was where all they did was like gather information and like collect you know collect reports and things like that right it's like okay what can you do with that?

50:29Dan Shipper:What can you, what, what kind of, uh, actions you can take? Uh, and yeah, it's, it's, it's been even, even with how, even with how kind of close we are to the action and following, you know, not, not as long, uh, you know, we weren't doing the show in the, in the GPT-3 days, but, uh, I still find myself like operating day to day thinking like, oh, I should reach out to that person to get there, you know, to see if they can help with this thing. And then realizing like, oh, I can just ask Codex to do that. Or I can just, I can get a model to do this. And it's a really, it's a really, it's like a fundamental shift and I'm still not routing enough kind of tasks through the models versus, um, or at least as much as I could.

51:17Dan Shipper:Um, the other, the other thing, um, I wanted to get your update on like how, how you feel like memory is evolving. I've had had some like pretty pleasant experiences recently where I will, I will do, you know, I'll, I'll go to chat GBT and, and ask for something. And it's like actually able to pull in a bunch of really relevant kind of like context and memories in a way that is like helpful and, and not, not, not just kind of like distraction or annoying and And specifically wanted to get your update because let's call it probably a year ago, 18 months ago, I think everyone was saying memory is the moat.

52:04Dan Shipper:And then people just kind of stopped talking about it for, call it, six or nine months or something like that. But it feels like it might be having a moment too. So, I mean, whether or not it's memory specifically, the thing that has changed dramatically is that Codex, and also Cloud Code or Co-Work to some extent, but Codex, the reason it's so powerful for me is it has access to everything on my computer. And so, you know, when I published this article after automation yesterday, I was like, who should I send this to? And I was going to go through my texts and go through my emails and then, you know, whatever.

52:41Dan Shipper:and I literally just said to Codex, hey, can you go figure out a couple people I should send this to? And it came up with a bunch of investors, a bunch of journalists, a bunch of founders, all people who I've talked to in the last three months, but just going through my text messages, going through my emails. And it's just a complete change in what is possible because it has access to all that stuff, which includes memories. And one of the things I'm trying to do with this piece is to say, as a company, we've automated everything that we can. Every single person has access to an agent, they have access to them, as many tokens as they possibly can use.

53:17Dan Shipper:And yet, we've grown from four 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. 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.

54:04and so he's not sitting there being like okay like a lot of this work is automated like we can we can

54:11Dan Shipper:become a lot more efficient here and reduce head count 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 do these layoffs. And again, there's still a lot of blaming, sort of like crediting AI for layoffs that would have 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.

54:58Dan Shipper:Um, what, what do you guys think about that? I just feel like that's such a weird strategy or weird meme to be going around. Well, I think, I think they're saying, you can say our business is better than it's ever been, but that doesn't mean it's being valued better than it ever has. Right. Like you can say like better than it's ever been. What does that mean? Revenue is up. Right. Uh, but, 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, two a year ago, two years ago. And so when you have a massive correction in the sort of valuation of your company, like you're going to try to make moves to change that or free up resources to invest in new product areas and get that momentum again.

55:50So I would say like when I see, or the business is bigger than it's ever been or better than it's ever been, I just don't necessarily buy that because you have to understand like what metric are they using to

56:06Dan Shipper: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's just such a bad look for all of technology for CEOs to be doing that.

56:26James Rogers: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 probably turns over annually anyway.

57:10James Rogers:You can just slow your hiring plan and get there if you want to shrink. And that's what a lot of companies have done in previous eras where there's been hiccups or disconnects between valuation. There were some big private companies that during the COVID era or ZERP era, they just sort of froze hiring and grew into their valuations because the business model was sound. They didn't need to hire as much. They refocused, raised the hiring standard, allowed attrition to play its part. And they got to become more lean and mean organizations without actually doing a layoff, which at that time would have been optically very bad.

57:49James Rogers:Because if you were doing a layoff during ZERP or COVID, it was like an indictment of you because it was like, oh, well, you're a victim of COVID or you're a victim of ZERP. Like your business doesn't work in a high interest rate environment. Your business doesn't work in a more remote world. Whereas now the vibe is, oh, if you're doing layoff, that's a sign that your business is ready for AI, ready for automation, ready for more efficiency. And so I think people are sort of playing both sides. It's very, very...

58:21Dan Shipper: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 going to change because they're all sort of relative to the capabilities of technology, and that's all changing too.

59:09But I can tell you that what we find internally at Every,

59:12Dan Shipper:and, you know, again, we're one of those places, if you add someone in Slack, it's like toss-up whether or not it's a bot, you know, and everyone's using Codex and Cloud Code to do all their work every day in the engineering org, and, like, for writing, for editing, for design, all that kind of stuff. And I can tell you that every agent needs a human. The further away an agent is from a human who's managing it, the worse it does. And you see this too, even in the scaled AI companies, like inside of OpenAI or inside of Anthropic, they do have company-wide bots that you can add, but they're run by teams of people.

59:51Dan Shipper: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 Klassen, calls it the human sandwich. AI collapses tasks that used to take hours into a few minutes, but the human is still kind of like the sandwich on either end or the bookend on either end who's framing the task or evaluating it when it's done. And what's really interesting is even though it can do expert, even though AI can do expert human work, my experience internally, and I think you find this across the like AI industry, is it actually, even though AI can do expert human work, it actually increases the demand for human experts.

1:00:47because what happens is you can get expert human work out of an AI.

1:00:53Dan Shipper:You can get pretty good writing or pretty good images or pretty good code, but it's all based on yesterday's competence. It's all based on what is in the training data from yesterday. And what that does is it floods the market with PRs or images or writing that's kind of good but not quite right for the situation. and what you need are human experts to come in and take the cheap competence that AI enables anyone to have and turn it into actual really, really good, valuable, differentiated work because otherwise it's just the same thing as everybody else is doing and it's not valuable. And I think that's a dynamic inside of how the models work and how they function in the economy that is kind of lost when people are worried about, oh, yeah, I can do all this great stuff.

1:01:42Dan Shipper:It can. And in order for that great stuff to be valuable, it needs to be done by a human. That makes a lot of sense.

1:02:18James Rogers:direction that this goes, like more niche software instead of needing, you used to need to raise a whole series A from a venture capital firm to rack servers. Then with AWS, you needed to, you know, go through YC, be technical, hire a couple engineers. Now a few people can sort of get something off the ground. Are you actually seeing any movement towards that, do you think?

1:02:40Dan Shipper: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 SaaSpocalypse 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.

1:03:23Dan Shipper: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. 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. I like like another way to put it is a lot of people that are outside of tech that have been vibe coding are sharing apps apps with me that they've built that like the LLMs can just do natively like pretty well already and so that's been that's that's the kind of the the potential bear case for this sort of like super super long tail of software is like as agents get get more competent and people learn how to, they're sort of like unhobbled, there's a lot of this long tail that can just be like a thread effectively.

1:04:35Dan Shipper:Oh, you're saying you don't need an app. You just need to talk to them. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. It's basically like you're talking to an agent. It's like, Hey, I want to get my, let's use the most bro-y example possible. I want to get my bench press to two plates by eight weeks from now. I'm currently at, you know, a plate and give me a plan to get there. Right. So instead of needing like a fitness app, yeah, you could do like the,

1:05:05James Rogers:yeah, distribution or you could, or the customer could just wind up going to any.

1:05:10Dan Shipper:And they're like, cool. And, and they, they generate your workout. You're saying, great, I did it. I was failing after three sets or whatever. And then it learns that and it gives you a new workout and it just goes and goes and goes. And you functionally get what a vertical product could do. So I just think there is an opportunity right now for this long tail of apps, but part of it is that people don't realize what the models themselves. I have a few thoughts there. The first thought is I actually look at that as training a customer and a customer that's going to really stick around with that is going to end up wanting things that just the bare thread in Codex is not going to do for them very well.

1:05:51Dan Shipper:Actually, chat is not a very good medium for a lot of app interactions. So in the same way that Excel was, you don't get the SaaS boom without Excel. Excel is like teaching people how to use computers in a way that then becomes enterprise SaaS. I really think a lot of these codecs or chattypt or cloud use cases are actually training potential customers who are power users to encounter problems that they want to buy software to fix. But I have a very specific prediction for what that's going to look like. And I'm currently obsessed with what I'm calling codecs 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 the agents in there with you you can look at your app in localhost and the agents in there and you're going back and forth and it's a very good collaboration environment for a developer I think that is incredible for any kind of knowledge work.

1:07:06Dan Shipper: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?

1:07:44James Rogers:Oh, happy birthday. Do we hit the gong?

1:07:49Dan Shipper:Yeah, we're hitting the gong. We're hitting the early gong for your birthday. A little birdie named John in the chat said it's tomorrow. Great timing for the three-day weekend. Great timing for you to just lock in at your computer and just grind all weekend. Absolutely. Me and Codex are going to have the best birthday ever. Awesome. What can people expect from every over the next, call it, month? Because that's like a year in AI years. we've got a lot of good stuff there's 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 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.

1:08:48Dan Shipper:Enjoy your birthday with Codex and we'll talk soon.

1:08:52James Rogers:Thank you so much for coming on the show. We'll talk to you soon. Goodbye. Up next, we have James Rogers from Appeal Sciences. He is the founder here with us live in the TBP and Ultradone. Maybe we move these objects out of the way so we give you a proper entrance. Thank you so much for coming on down. How are you doing? Please introduce yourself for everyone who might not be familiar. Introduce yourself and we'll go through the story of the company and talk about the news.

1:09:16Dan Shipper:Yeah, James Rogers. Thanks for having me down here, guys. Yeah, of course. Based up in Santa Barbara, so it's pretty easy to get down. Awesome.

1:09:22James Rogers:Wait, why Santa Barbara? I remember finding this out and it being an interesting tidbit. There's some cool companies over there. Sonos and isn't Dyson up there a little bit? Deckers.

1:09:32Dan Shipper:I went out there for graduate school to UC Santa Barbara. I did my PhD in material science. Turns out that's the place to go for that. I didn't know. I was in Pittsburgh before that. Got out to Santa Barbara and was doing my PhD in material science studying solar paint. Okay. Kind of weird. Solar paint. Pretty cool. What does that do? You paint it and absorbs? You paint something and it dries into a solar cell.

1:09:55James Rogers:Okay.

1:09:55Dan Shipper:Where did that technology go?

1:09:57James Rogers:It's too expensive.

1:09:59Dan Shipper:That was actually where appeal came from.

1:10:02James Rogers:Hey, power's expensive now, though. Maybe the economics work in the data center era. You just paint the data center.

1:10:08Dan Shipper:I'm a gaucho as well. What was your reaction to touring UCSB for the first time? Unbelievable. I came out because from the air, my favorite thing is like if you show someone a picture of the university from the air, it looks like it should be like a four seasons or something. It has no 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. I was in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania, and they were deicing us on the runway. And I land in Santa Barbara and it's like, I'm not going back. It's too nice here.

1:10:45James Rogers:To study material sciences, where did the original idea for appeal come from?

1:10:50Dan Shipper: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, okay, well, maybe the solar paint thing doesn't work, but there's something about this idea that you could 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 are not learned about. We all learn. We all know or heard people are going hungry. Yeah. But I never, I never understood why. Originally I thought, oh, we're not growing enough food.

1:11:28Dan Shipper:We need to grow more food. Nope. We're actually growing twice as much food as we need to feed everybody already.

1:11:34James Rogers:Yeah.

1:11:35Dan Shipper:Wow. And the reason is we're, people are going hungry because we throw it away.

1:11:38James Rogers:Yeah.

1:11:38Dan Shipper:And so why do we throw it away? Well, we throw it away because it spoils. It goes bad.

1:11:43James Rogers: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?

1:11:50Dan Shipper:It was all an idea. It was just an idea on a sheet of paper. I called my mom to tell her about this idea, and she's like, sweetie, that sounds nice, but you don't know anything about fruits and vegetables. That is true. That's the easy part. That is true. But I'm like, well, I just learned all this. I learned all the material science stuff, so I could probably learn the fruits and vegetables. So I made a list, right? Because I didn't know it would work. I didn't know that this idea would work, but I made a list of the fruits and vegetables just in terms of how long they lasted. And the shortest ones are like raspberries, blackberries, strawberries.

1:12:25Dan Shipper: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 appeal last a lot longer than the ones without appeal. Just put those words together. Now we've got to figure out how to make it. And that was the hard part. Yeah. Yeah. So what what like specific founder journey? You have this idea. You tell your mom about it. She's like, good. That's that's nice, sweetie. But you don't know anything about fruits and vegetables. And then what do you what do you do next? I actually didn't know what fruits and vegetables were made.

1:13:00Dan Shipper: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, you know, I've been working on these solar cells. So then to pivot and start looking at, we don't think about fruits and vegetables as made out of stuff. We think of them as fruits and vegetables, but they're, they're mixtures of really specific molecules.

1:13:38Dan Shipper:And so it was, what's the skin made out of? And it turns out they're made out of these plant oils and was, huh? So these skins are made of the plant oils. And then And it wasn't just that the strawberries, it wasn't just that the orange skin was made out of these plant oils. It was the strawberry skin was made out of the same thing. And that was like a big, 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 the strawberries. 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.

1:14:23Dan Shipper:This idea of using something plant-based was, at the time, it was kind of crazy.

1:14:29James Rogers:So grant money early on. When does the business – New venture competition.

1:14:34Dan Shipper:New venture competition. We were like a UCSB. No way, UCSB, I remember. But wasn't that like, didn't you get like 25 grand or something? Yeah, we got like 10 grand. You know, for a grad student. No, I remember this program. And yeah, it was really like venture funding for ants.

1:14:53James Rogers:My first company was 17K. You could be at least twice this size. 17K first company for me. Yes. It's enough if you're eating ramen and just paying rent.

1:15:00Dan Shipper:I mean, my yearly salary was$24 ,000. So this was like a 50 % bonus. It was enough to incorporate the business. First business address was on Del Playa. No way. That is crazy. That's probably the most enterprise value created from an incorporation on Del Playa. You'll probably get some comments. Del Playa is just a very notorious street. 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 yeah

1:15:38James Rogers:on the uh usually surfing if you're on that street not necessarily maybe a little bit maybe a little

1:15:43Dan Shipper:bit yeah yeah we were at the end of the street you know i was in grad school good no that's actually good that means you're way more locked in basically like the middle zone is a nightmare i don't think any enterprise value is being created there uh closer because it's basically One, you're farthest from the university, but it's like much more kind of you're closer to nature. It's a little bit quieter there, but you go two blocks down.

1:16:06James Rogers:Yeah.

1:16:06Dan Shipper:Negative enterprise value. Yeah. Okay. So you kind of have this insight. You have a little grant funding. Are you able to make MVPs with that grant? 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 was kind of the, well, the lemon lasts longer than the strawberry, but will it work if we actually build a business around this? And so it was research, research, measure, measure, measure. But, you know, okay, at some point I couldn't figure out, I couldn't find a reason it wouldn't work.

1:16:52Dan Shipper:But I also, there was no word written that it would work. And so it came to the point. But how hard could it be? You just spray, you just put some stuff on an apple and leave it out, right? Well, that's what's wild is there was when we. And I'm joking when I say. No, no, no, but kind of. I mean, that was how simple it was supposed to be. But how do you tell whether or not it's working? Actually, it's kind of hard because normally if you were going to apply it to an apple, you'd have to wait a month to see what happened. And that's just a really long product iteration cycle. And so we actually developed these time-lapse camera systems, was kind of our first product, so we could see tiny changes.

1:17:31Dan Shipper:And so would you effectively go buy two apples, hopefully from the same orchard? Same tree you had to do. Oh, same tree. That was a big problem in the beginning. We were going to the grocery store and buying fruit and going like why does this one rot faster than this one? They came out of the same bin. Well turns out those could be potentially from completely different countries Let alone different orchards or different trees and most of them have gone through this supply chain You know apples, you know 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

1:18:08James Rogers:Wow. Yeah, that's crazy.

1:18:10Dan Shipper:Yeah I would have thought that if it would be more globalized, we'd be growing them in the stock. I grew up in Northern California. I grew up in Northern California, so the average apple that I would eat as a kid, I picked off the tree. Yeah, and we can get back to that. You know, you keep hearing about this farm two table thing, but the two is obscuring everything that's happening.

1:18:30James Rogers:Okay.

1:18:30Dan Shipper:Right? You hear about what's going on the farm.

1:18:32James Rogers:Yeah.

1:18:33Dan Shipper:You know what's happening on the table or in the restaurant, but the two is like, well, that apple might have been grown in Chile. Yeah, yeah. And gone through a refrigerated supply chain with pesticides sprayed all over it and then fumigated it when it came into the country before it sat in storage somewhere. And then, you know, you picked it up at the grocery store thinking it was fresh off the tree. And of course it's not.

1:18:55James Rogers:Yeah, talk about the early business model, the farm side, the table side, distributors, supermarkets. Like there's a lot of different players in the supply chain that might be interested in the business. How did you think about cracking it?

1:19:09Dan Shipper:Well, we were so naive. We thought, well, hey, if food lasted longer, more of it could get to people. And so we'd be able to feed people and that'd be amazing. But it turns out that actually the early feedback that we got from customers was, I don't want food to last longer. The garbage can is my best customer. 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.

1:19:46Dan Shipper: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. 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.

1:20:21Dan Shipper:They look like caviar pearls inside. You put them on oysters and salads and this kind of stuff. But they only last for five days. And he lived right up the street. So we started working with this small farmer on these caviar limes because his thing was he had to air freight these caviar limes to places like Chicago and New York because they only lasted for five days 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 five days. Everybody's happy. But then we started going and saying, okay, well, let's do this again with other suppliers in other categories.

1:21:02and this is when we got the feedback from them saying we don't need it we don't need it you

1:21:07Dan Shipper:know actually maybe maybe you guys should just stop stop doing this interesting um and what but what we did find did you ever get a visit from big fruit coming in saying hey buddy it's like the guy the guy they were they were you know you guys probably have some of their masks around here I've seen. Yeah. Under different under in different clothing. Yeah. You know, actually, our first work that we did in the industry, we were working with that we were doing a demonstration with a huge citrus company. And we were high fiving because we're looking at the data going this, like we just won contracts with the biggest, you know, suppliers in the US.

1:21:48Dan Shipper:And the data they came back with didn't look anything like our data.

1:21:52James Rogers:What does that mean?

1:21:54Dan Shipper:They said, hey, your product doesn't work.

1:21:56James Rogers:Okay, interesting.

1:21:57Dan Shipper:And we were totally knocked backwards because we've got the exact same fruit that we bring back, hold, and make the same measurements on. They say, no, it doesn't look anything. Your product doesn't work. It almost completely blocked us out of the U.S. market. Wow. It's such a small industry when somebody starts spreading rumors that, oh, this new. Oh, so 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.

1:22:30James Rogers:Yeah.

1:22:31Dan Shipper:We were locked out, so we actually had to go to market originally in Europe.

1:22:35James Rogers:Oh, interesting.

1:22:36Dan Shipper:It knocked us all the way over to Europe. It's that tightly controlled. But what we found was that in Europe, people were looking for this.

1:22:45James Rogers:Okay.

1:22:45Dan Shipper:People were looking for a way to have access to healthier fruits and vegetables that are in waste. They had huge initiatives around this. Even companies, the retailers were actually talking about this kind of stuff. And we started with avocados because of the joke with the avocado. Not now, not now, not now, now, too late. And it solved this challenge that we had where the supply chain wasn't so interested in having food last longer. But the retailer was. Okay. Yeah. Because if they bought an avocado and didn't sell the avocado, that was a waste of money. Dude, my 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.

1:23:32Dan Shipper: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. Most people in the U.S. are eating dead food. They don't even know because it's dressed up in wax.

1:24:02James Rogers:So retailers would actually acquire produce from a distributor and then apply a peel to the product?

1:24:08Dan Shipper:Here was what was so problematic was the retailers loved it.

1:24:14James Rogers:Okay.

1:24:14Dan Shipper: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're not growing the food. So they have to tell the suppliers, hey, we want you to use this product. The suppliers hated this. Absolutely hated this because they had pretty much shut it down. And so the retailer starts telling the suppliers about what they need to do in their business. And don't get me wrong. we were a headache in their operations because we were this, you know, we were this new thing that they had to do. And these things have been operating the way they've been operating for, you know, a hundred years.

1:24:52Dan Shipper:Yeah. So, uh, but that's the way that it had to, that's the way that it had to happen, uh, in the U S was, was from the retail side, you know, pushing back into the supply chain. Sure. And so what year is this when this starts working in Europe? 2019, 2020. Oh, wow. Yeah. It took a while. I mean, And you had already raised at that point like hundreds of millions of dollars, right? I think probably we had raised$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.

1:25:35Dan Shipper:We shipped up like a case of avocados and said, hey, put these out. on your desk so that when we sat down in the meeting with Mark was, what happened? What happened? That was the world's supply. Bet it all.

1:25:50James Rogers: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?

1:25:58Dan Shipper: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 oils basically, but it was super expensive to do because it wasn't a scaled up process. And so we started with extracting these things ourselves in the lab, just using like laboratory procedures. It wasn't really for any sort of commercial purpose other than, Hey, this can work. We had to show that this could work. And so in the beginning, it cost us something like, you know, a hundred bucks to treat an avocado, which that's not going to work.

1:26:38Dan Shipper:That's not going to work. But once we, once we figured out the mixtures of these plant oils, then we could figure out, okay, how do you optimize the process to be able to isolate these things? And it turns out there's a really efficient way to isolate oils, distillation. Yeah. You, you, it's, it's the same way that they, you know, get alcohol out of, They 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 oils.

1:27:13James Rogers:Yeah.

1:27:13Dan Shipper:And that turned out to be a super scalable, super cheap process.

1:27:18James Rogers: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.

1:27:23Dan Shipper:And you pull vacuum, you heat it up a little bit, and you're able to separate it out. By this point, did your mom think that you could figure it out fruit? uh it was so cool i would go home for christmas and you know my my mom would like collect the little appeal stickers like off the fruit that she bought and that was just like man like that was so cool yeah to to just have you know like to have my mom go to the grocery store we went to growing up and be able to like have our have our product because growing up in michigan i grew up in Michigan. I'm not a California guy. I love it out here, but I didn't grow up here.

1:28:00Dan Shipper: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 farmer's markets. And sometimes the farmer's markets are selling product that isn't actually, that's not really, like the farmer is not present and maybe not even in the state. But oftentimes 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.

1:28:44Dan Shipper:Yeah. It's just people sell food based on price. and if I have a lemon that's coated in pesticides and a lemon that's not coated in pesticides you can't tell that by looking at it and this one's cheaper the one coated in pesticides is cheaper because they have less you know less less rot so you buy the cheaper one and the person who's doing the right thing doesn't get rewarded for it so there's just this horrible incentive in these supply chains to cut corners and do stuff that is horrifying. What did you learn about the organic, the like just organic as a certification and the issues that we had Brian Johnson on the show recently and he was saying like he actually oftentimes will assume that organic food is going to be more contaminated and worse for you than the non-organic just because there's all these like workarounds.

1:29:43And it's marketing.

1:29:48Dan Shipper: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.

1:30:12James Rogers:Oh, interesting. They never say that stuff because it's false advertising.

1:30:16Dan Shipper:They can't say that. But the brand is, oh, this apple was picked right off the tree and is now in the grocery store. It's just absolutely not true.

1:30:26James Rogers:What is an inorganic apple? Just like computer chips and a loophole or something? Aren't they all organic? Yeah. They're literally organisms, right? Yes. Yeah. Definitionally.

1:30:37Dan Shipper:You got to jump on the marketing. You got to put your marketing hat on to understand what they mean by it.

1:30:43James Rogers: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?

1:30:59Dan Shipper:Yeah. Oh, man. PTSD just even thinking about that. I'm sorry. No, it's all right. We should talk about it because if you're building something right now, this is the playbook. Okay. They will use against you if you're threatening some incumbent.

1:31:12James Rogers:Yeah. So set the table for us because you've raised some money. The business is working. The product is working.

1:31:18Dan Shipper:You're in enough stores at this point. You have dozens of employees. Hundreds of employees.

1:31:22James Rogers:Hundreds of employees. Hundreds of employees. You're in stores. The stickers are where your mom can find them. Exactly. My mom's pulling off the stickers.

1:31:29Dan Shipper:We've got distribution.

1:31:29James Rogers:It's not like she has to go to some special store. No. One of one.

1:31:32Dan Shipper:It's like 60 % of the avocados that are being sold in the United States are with our product now. And we are announcing 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 going to treat every lemon in the world with this product. and people didn't like it. Boom! He gets doxed by these video campaigns, put his phone number up there. He's getting death threats from saying that he's going to do this. And this, what we thought, because the original, I 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.

1:32:39Dan Shipper:And it was a similar name? Exact same name. Exact same name.

1:32:44James Rogers:So it's not even a shared ingredient? No. Okay. Because sometimes there's precursors. Like, you know, I can drink dihydrogen monoxide. That sounds very scary. That's, of course, H2O. That's water. Dihydrogen monoxide is the scary version. You might find dihydrogen monoxide in bleach. You might find it in cleaning products. That's not even what's going on.

1:33:04Dan Shipper:Totally separate company. Okay. Totally separate company. So as a cleaning product. Okay. Also with the company's name to Two posts at the exact same time go live on Facebook This is a toxic product Wow link to this this other come this other company

1:33:22James Rogers:Which is a cleaning product, which of course, yeah, you know, is not you don't actually want to eat

1:33:27Dan Shipper:Yeah, exactly.

1:33:29James Rogers:And it just they don't want to put their cleaning product on your food either Like two separate companies.

1:33:34Dan Shipper:Yeah, right, exactly. Different solutions for different products, like 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 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 company.

1:34:10James Rogers:Bill Gates thing because of the nonprofit donation.

1:34:13Dan Shipper: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-on grant for this cassava project for a million bucks. I mean, we've raised$800 million. But if you go online and you look up our name, you'll see. It's not Board Seed. It's not. Nothing. I've never even met this guy. Zero involvement. 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 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

1:35:02James Rogers:but you have scientists, you have researchers that could potentially dig that up like the coffee chair 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 a research paper or a study Exactly. Where you took the cassava route, ran through some lab tests, tried to figure out what was wrong. Does your product work? Do other products work? Exactly. Yeah.

1:35:28Dan Shipper: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, it's like Bill Gates's appeal. And I'm like, yeah, how did that happen? And for a while, we thought people are just confused until it didn't stop. And it didn't stop. And it just kept morphing slightly and new photos would come out and the charts would change. And we started mapping it. And we started mapping back the accounts. And we started looking at the timestamps.

1:36:06Dan Shipper:And we started looking at the accounts that were quickly reposting this stuff. And it's completely coordinated. Interesting. Wow.

1:36:14James Rogers:Yeah, because people, I feel like when there's an organic thing.

1:36:18Dan Shipper:Because there's plenty of controversies that are entirely organic. Or entirely organic, right? There's a bunch of stuff online this week from a certain sort of like health platform. Oh, yeah.

1:36:35James Rogers:You mentioned this.

1:36:36Dan Shipper: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.

1:36:47James Rogers:Well, he has his own. But it's an individual. It's one individual.

1:36:52Dan Shipper: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, like at first you're probably like, am I going crazy? Like why does this keep like. People are just confused, you know, that like the truth is a powerful thing. You know, obviously the truth will kind of come out about this.

1:37:14James Rogers:Sure, sure, sure.

1:37:15Dan Shipper:And it didn't.

1:37:17James Rogers:It just didn't.

1:37:17Dan Shipper:It just didn't. And they started activating real people.

1:37:24James Rogers:Okay.

1:37:25Dan Shipper:Some of which were real, some of which were not. Like what was the long term? What do you think their goal was? It got to that point. But they started activating to call our retail customers in the United States. Yeah. And one by one, we got dropped by every single retail partner that we had in the United States. That's crazy. that we'd rolled up the hill for 10 years just rolled all the way back down that's insane in the u.s yeah it was devastating i mean it is i had i had to let go hundreds of people wow that i cared about our entire u.s business got got destroyed destroyed what was in the tool what what year is that 2024 20 yeah it was about it was like starting to happen in 2023 we started to lose some accounts and 2024 was really when you know started to go just like it just went to zero in the u.s and it was doubled down in you know south america doubled down in in africa doubled

1:38:17James Rogers:down in in europe what else was in the tool the tool chest at that point like did you consider just a full rebrand yeah maybe tucking the brand further up the supply chain so that the sticker's not there? Like, what did you consider what you wind up doing? Yeah, I mean, it was it was it was

1:38:33Dan Shipper:pretty existential for us. Because, you know, when we first started talking to retailers, we were saying, hey, you should put a sticker on this food because it's better for your customer. Yeah. And the pushback that we got was, well, if we start telling people that your stuff is better for them, what are they going to think about the other stuff? And so, you know, the jokes on us now, right? Yeah. But so it was, it was really existential for us to say, well, let's not tell people about this. Cause our whole ethos was, Hey, people should know what's on their food. If they knew it was on their food, they're going to prefer this is going to be something that they, that they buy.

1:39:09Dan Shipper:But the conversation was, well, these, these attacks aren't organic attacks. People, you know, organic people are, some people are getting roped into this thing. That's kind of how they work. You know, they, they're like, there's somebody kind of behind it, you know, So planting the seeds as 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 at 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.

1:39:45It almost looks like you're running.

1:39:47Dan Shipper: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 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 kind of shut down a little bit. And it's not until you really get your bearings and you start to see the kind of systematized nature of these things that you realize, actually, there is someone behind this.

1:40:33Dan Shipper:And you can start to figure out who they are. It just takes a really deliberate effort.

1:40:38James Rogers:And now you're a prude company learning how to do digital forensics.

1:40:45Dan Shipper:Well, and you think of the timing with all this. There's so much mistrust of the health system and the food system and, you know, billionaires. And you combine all those things at once. It's like there's so much kind of perfect story.

1:41:03James Rogers: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 enterprise software, for example. But there are like 10 ,000 buyers or 100 ,000 buyers. And so it's not something that goes viral again and again and again. And even if you're a consumer of that piece of technology, but it's white labeled and it's under the hood, and that particular buyer was able to sit down and understand the deeper context, you have to win over this mass of humanity, basically.

1:41:42James Rogers:all the food buyers, which is everyone. The TAM is everyone, which is the beauty, but it cuts both ways.

1:41:46Dan Shipper:It cuts both ways. And what we find is that, you know, most, actually majority of people haven't heard about this, but a small percent of people have heard about it and who writes the reviews online? It's not the happy people. It's the, you know, it's the, it's the, it's the not happy people. And it's the people who are part of a system that's trying to stop something from happening. That's so interesting. Uh, what, 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

1:42:25James Rogers:walk into a U.S.

1:42:27Dan Shipper:grocery store and see everything still treated with wax and pesticides and go, how is this possible? There are better options that actually help people or better for the world, eliminate plastic, eliminate pesticides, and we don't have access to them in the U.S. because a small group of people want to bury these options. And 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 much of, you know, that is the human experience. It's like you eat and then you're waiting around to eat again.

1:43:11Dan Shipper:That's why it's often the best part of my day. So I get that. I resonate with that. Yeah. Yeah. It is. It's truly mind blowing. And, and just how disconnected we've gotten from food, you know, like most people's connection to food is they go to the grocery store and they pick up a piece of food. You know, I, I, I started growing, you know, a lot of food, you know, tomatoes, um, you know, peppers, this kind of stuff. there is something amazing about growing food and we've gotten totally this disconnected with that so i'm optimistic about this future where we actually are able to you know people are starting to feed each other again people are you know you're growing tomatoes you're growing carrots you know we have the opportunity to trade those with each other because that can actually happen at a smaller scale if you're able to match the match the supply and demand and so that's one of the things that we're talking about a lot how do we yeah 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.

1:44:18Dan Shipper:Big fruit that tried to kill you in the cradle. Yeah. Yeah.

1:44:21James Rogers:Yeah. Yeah. Other lessons for entrepreneurs. I mean, you mentioned like if if someone is going to war with a major industry that's allied against them. There's worries there. Do you, is there any, not to put like, you know, like dig up potential like Monday morning quarterbacking, but is there anything where like trademark searches could have avoided this? Is there something where like, if you could play back and think five steps forward, is any of this predictable? Is any of this like, you know, preventable?

1:45:01Dan Shipper:So when we started the business, I think we were in a different era. Yeah. We started the business in 2011, 2012. Sure. Social media was not what it is today. Yeah. And I've experienced you are just vulnerable to a different set of attack vectors in the modern era. Yeah. And, you know, if I could, you know, go back and talk to myself, you know, five years ago, it would have been to acknowledge, hey, we're in a different era now. in terms of where the vulnerability can come from, on my list never would have been, you know, someone's going to say that Bill Gates owns your company and it's part of a global depopulation agenda.

1:45:45Dan Shipper:Like that would not have been on my list. You're like, make a list of a thousand things. It wouldn't have been.

1:45:49James Rogers:Yeah, very hard to predict.

1:45:49Dan Shipper:It would now. And it should be on, it would now. And it should be on everybody's list. Slot is three of the deck. It's like, actually, maybe make your, maybe make your Thanksgiving dinner productive and that relative who's got all these theories, tell them about what you're building

1:46:05James Rogers:and just say, hey, what? Find some flaws in my business plan.

1:46:08Dan Shipper: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.

1:46:18James Rogers:I think it's a... There was someone who had a regional sauce business and they bumped into another regional sauce business like halfway across the world that like the two companies never would have ever competed in the same namespace, but because of social media and the way things fly around that both of these like sort of storied brands in their local communities are now like butting heads and suing each other. And so that stuff happens all the time. It's very hard to predict.

1:46:48Dan Shipper:Yeah, name confusion. What was I going to say? I, yeah, it's, it's also the mentality when like your mentality as a founder, you discover this problem, you discover an innovative solution that's aligned with, uh, uh, nature's own approach and you come out and you're, and, and you're like, I'm trying to fix like a systemic problem. And so you're coming in with the attitude of, of, um, uh, as like a good actor, like operating is like, I'm a good actor. I'm trying to solve a global problem for humanity. But when your solution becomes misaligned with someone else's business model, um, the way those, uh, the way those, and I've just seen this with, um, I've seen this with a bunch of companies specifically in the, in the, um, any, for some reason, like health, anything like health supplements like food yeah is just like becomes like hyper hyper political really quickly it becomes super emotional yeah uh what starts as being like you know concepts grounded and science quickly becomes um something else and i've been shocked because i know you know i know a bunch of uh like health podcasters that have gotten into controversies over um you know and health brands.

1:48:11Dan Shipper: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. Yeah, 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.

1:49:00Dan Shipper:And I was looking around the category and I found I tested a filter early on. and the filter was adding heavy metals to the water. It was like I found a filter that was like a very popular filter. You've got to turn it around. Yeah, 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.

1:49:38Dan Shipper:And then as that company, you know, the company's done quite well in part by trying to, you know, over test, over share all these things. But there's still, again, immediately after launch, there was legacy brands that were trying to say like, oh, they didn't, you know, trying to discredit like the lab or all these different things. And it's like, uh, and again, it does get, um, you have to just, you have to just like go through it and, and continue to lead with transparency and science and all these things. But there are, uh, it's a, it's not a, it's not an approach that, that, that I can ever think about doing right.

1:50:19Of like, I never, you know, I never would go out and try to mislead a bunch of people

1:50:26Dan Shipper:about, you can't even imagine someone doing that. Like, 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. Great dogs.

1:50:37James Rogers:We talk about...

1:50:38Dan Shipper: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. Solving the problem. Solving the problem. And there are pit bulls out there.

1:51:09James Rogers:Yeah, it's like the golden retriever doesn't 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.

1:51:20Dan Shipper: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 was despondent for a while. that's what happened. You know, you go out in the world and you're told, do the right thing, be a good person, work hard, you know, find good people, work with them, build, like, you know, like create something good that helps us. That your mom's 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.

1:51:53Dan Shipper: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 at pit bulls. It's like, welcome to the park, buddy. Welcome to the park. Yeah. And you just go, okay. So for a while you just go, no, that's, you know, I don't want the world to work the way, but then eventually you go, well, I can either complain about the world working this way, or I can acknowledge that's the way the world works and go from there. And the damning thing about this for innovators is they don't have to, they don't have to change people's minds about what your product is.

1:52:26James Rogers:They The US FDA gave you a clean belt help.

1:52:30Dan Shipper:And not only the FDA, the European Union. Which is like 100 times more hardcore. It's like they're the most strict regulatory agency in the world. Yeah, what is their life? Our product is literally food. There's like a million products that are in our grocery stores that can't be sold there. That can't be sold. It'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.

1:52:59James Rogers:You're not on the Prop 65 list, California? No. That's insane. Everything's on the Prop 65 list.

1:53:05Dan Shipper:We would definitely not want to be on that list. No, no, no, of course. Yeah, yeah, yeah. And I know what else. There's a lot of supplements. I think the Prop 65 list is remarkably low.

1:53:13James Rogers:Like, you walk into Starbucks. I don't have a problem with Starbucks. It's on Prop 65, and I'm like, yeah, okay, they're being extra safe. But yeah, that's the thing. So not being on that is crazy.

1:53:23Dan Shipper:There's health supplements that people take that are on that. Prop 65. Less, right? Which they're probably unaware of at some level. Or they just like, you know.

1:53:32James Rogers:It's sort of like the most conservative, but to not even bet on that is crazy.

1:53:37Dan Shipper: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 having ingredients.

1:53:51James Rogers:Yeah.

1:53:52Dan Shipper:It's a mixture of different molecules. Like you don't think about oils having greens.

1:53:56James Rogers:And with an avocado, you're not even eating it. You're not even eating the skin? You're not even eating the skin.

1:53:59Dan Shipper: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. And second of all, really? For an avocado?

1:54:11James Rogers:Even if it was, you would eat like such an incredible level. It's so crazy. Yeah. Walk outside.

1:54:15Dan Shipper:So what is the, you don't strike me as someone who's just gonna, he's gonna give up. like what's the path back what's the path back to you know the internet America our ass and so I've been it took me a while to think about it but I've started flipping around and asked the internet for help I've been offering bounties to people to help track back figure out what happened figure out what happened 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 yeah blew it blew up the number of people who are sending stuff in so I'm really bullish that the same way you know right Right now, there's no cost to somebody perpetrating an attack on you online.

1:54:56Dan Shipper:The bots do their thing, they repost stuff, they like whatever they share, they manufacture engagement and it goes. But they're kind of doing it with impunity because nobody's taking the time to be like, okay, who's this user that commented this thing? Oh, weird, they normally just talk about anime. And today they started talking about... Yeah, no one is clicking through. Nobody's clicking through, they're just seeing the headlines. And actually, if you just give a little bit of, well, this is the experiment I'm running right now. If you give them a little bit of financial incentive, turns out there's tens of thousands of people who will spend an hour, you know, going into this stuff, especially with, especially with AI.

1:55:31Dan Shipper:So, I mean, that's the vector that I'm going with right now. I, you know, I think we're in the, I think we're. You got to go all the way to Joe Rogan. This is a start. I think so. You got to go straight to the top. Let's go. You got to go straight to the top. He's mentioned us 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. Yeah, no, he's had a couple of gifts on there.

1:56:02James Rogers:Jamie, pull that up, click five links deeper. And you don't have to go. You go one or two links. You don't have to go far at all. And you don't see the real story.

1:56:09Dan Shipper:And you just see how people work on social media. I hate to say this, but I'm sitting on an airplane. I can't not see what this person's doing one seat over to the right. And this is the move. Scroll, see something, click comments. Scroll, see something, click comments. So it doesn't matter what's posted. People don't form their opinion until they see the first couple comments. And so 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.

1:56:46Dan Shipper:I've seen this in, you know, AI is so hyper competitive and there's like this insane, you know, horse race. And I've seen earlier this year, I was starting to see posts that would have like 20 ,000 likes on 200 ,000 views, three comments. getting a 10 % like rate is like not a thing, especially on X. Like there's a handful. And so you're like, okay, well, who's actually engaging with it is clearly getting a lot of views, but it's not necessarily reflecting, you know. It's not real. Yeah.

1:57:20James Rogers:It's manufactured. Last question for me. Have you been keeping tabs on the other appeal? The cleaning company. Like, because it's their business. You guys should buy it and shut it down. Now we are those guys. We've got to have that CEO on.

1:57:36Dan Shipper:Now we keep your floors clean and we keep your fruit fresh.

1:57:40James Rogers: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 is healthy now? Yeah, yeah, yeah. Do they have a knock-on effect? I don't know. That's an interesting thing to dig into. We'll follow up with you on that one. Thanks so much for coming on and breaking it down for us. This is a fascinating story. I know it was obviously a really hard journey, but I'm extremely optimistic. If somebody else learns from it, I'm really happy. Thank you for coming out.

1:58:06James Rogers:This is fantastic. Have a great rest of your day.

1:58:09Dan Shipper:This is a great time. We'll catch up.

1:58:11James Rogers:Yeah. What do you want to wrap up with, Jordy? I mean, we could go into the Warren Buffett of London, but it's a long story in the Financial Times. We can save this for another one. I did think this was interesting. His children's investment fund has become the fifth most profitable hedge fund of all time. What a good name for a hedge fund. Children's investment fund. Doing it for the children. Beating the benchmarks. Chris Hone. He's been honing his skills. What else? The Warshinator. Warsh is in.

1:58:40Dan Shipper:Sworn in today. Sworn in. Frank says, good luck, bro.

1:58:45James Rogers:He's going to need it. And the prediction is that there will be a rate hike or something like that. I saw both a cut and a hike predicted, kicking off with good vibes, potential for a hike. But I think the market is pricing in a rate increase, not a rate decrease, which, of course, is what a lot of folks have been hoping for. But with the economy heating up, maybe a hike is in order. But there will be a whole bunch of knock-on effects from this. I wanted to talk about the robotic legs, the exoskeletons. Would you rock these or would you be sitting it out? The Hypershell X Ultra S is an exoskeleton that the Wall Street Journal demoed.

1:59:31James Rogers:Thousand watt hips. Thousand watt hips. You wear these and they help you hike and run up hills. I listen to too many shows 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.

1:59:50Dan Shipper: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.

2:00:07James Rogers:I guess I'm unclear on the goal because couldn't you just go on a shorter hike or a less steep hike to make it easier? I guess if you want to see the top of a big mountain, But you can't make it in a certain amount of time Explain the market. Are you in the market for these?

2:00:23Dan Shipper:Yes, these are sick.

2:00:24James Rogers:Yes Wait, so your answer is couldn't you just go on a shorter hike?

2:00:27Dan Shipper:Yes, like couldn't you climb a shorter hike?

2:00:28James Rogers:If this allows me to go on a six mile hike, couldn't I just do a one mile hike? But you can take a car.

2:00:33Dan Shipper:Couldn't you just stay home and watch TV?

2:00:34James Rogers:You can take a car or a helicopter. Like you don't like this is sort of an in-between thing When when are you actually deploying this? I bet you if you get these maybe we have to order these I think we have to order these for Tyler and see if it turns.

2:00:45Dan Shipper:Drive up like a massive mountain.

2:00:47James Rogers:We're getting you these. They're two grand, but we're getting you some. And we're going to see if it transforms you into Iron Man. Also, Cattle, C-A-T-L, the Chinese EV battery giant, is investing in Deep Seek. Some big rounds going on. Also, BYD. China is waking up.

2:01:05Dan Shipper:Remember? Oh, yeah. This is what AI-2020 said.

2:01:08James Rogers:They predicted that BYD would get an F1 team. That's right. 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 uh gas powered ice engines i don't know they're about to they're about who knows well folks

2:01:30Dan Shipper:It's Memorial Day weekend.

2:01:32James Rogers:Yeah, go have fun. We'll see you Tuesday. Have a good rest of your day. Have a great weekend. Leave us five stars on Apple Podcasts and Spotify. Sign up for our newsletter, tbpn.com. It's been an honor. And we will see you tomorrow. Slash Tuesday. We love you. Goodbye. Bye.