TBPN
Starship Launch, World's Fair Retrospective, Sacks Spikes AI EO | Dan Shipper, James Rogers
22 May 2026
Chapter 1: What is discussed at the start of this section?
You're watching TBPN. Today is Friday, May 22nd, 2026. We are live from the TBPN Ultra Dome. The Temple of Technology. Another one. The Fortress of Finance.
The Capital of Capital.
Good show for you today, folks. It's Friday, Friday, May 22nd. We had our Wall Street Journal stolen from us. We only have the Financial Times today. But we're making do because we have a digital subscription as well. And we're going to take you through America's IPO boom. We're going to talk to Matt Grimm from Anduril. We're going to talk to Dan Shipper from Every.
We're going to talk to James Rodgers. The Shippinator. from appeal sciences. Uh, we're also going to read through, uh, Brandon growls news roundup in the TBPN newsletter, tbpn.com. You can go sign up. Uh, so three key stories that broke since we last spoke a mere 21 hours ago since we podcast for three hours and then we come back 21 hours later.
We do it again.
We do it again. Um, Yesterday, Politico reported that David Sachs made an 11th hour appeal to President Trump to spike an executive order that would have created a voluntary program, voluntary program, for frontier AI companies to submit their models to the government for review 90 days before new model releases. I wonder what the benefit of that is.
Obviously, it's good to have red teaming going on, good to have benchmarking, good to have other eyes on the project. There's some sort of liability that happens with the round thing on the table. No one in the TVP audience has ever seen this. Can you describe what this is, this round-shaped argument?
I'm still not exactly sure what we're looking at. But I saw them talking about this on ESPN, and people are always saying, you guys are like SportsCenter for business.
You should pick one of these up, this object.
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Chapter 2: What are the implications of David Sachs' appeal regarding AI regulation?
for-profit companies that are run by people with good intentions or the government like democratically elected?
I mean, I assume at some level, it's got to be the government, right? Because if you're super HCI-pilled, these things are nuclear weapons. It needs to be the government. But I think on the way there, people are definitely like meters.
Is there anyone who says, like, no, no, no, actually, like, nuclear weapons are super important, but they shouldn't be regulated by the government because I don't like the government. I would rather my favorite megacorp owns them, controls them.
I don't think there's any people in this.
I mean, if you look at the popularity, if you look at the approval rates for different organizations, there are plenty of companies that are polling above the U.S. government. Like, people love Disney, Disney adults. They say, give Disney a nuclear weapon. They already have the rights to build a nuclear power plant. You know this?
I did not.
Disney World has, like, you know, legacy rights because when they set up EPCOT, which is an acronym, which I should look up because what does it stand for? It stands for something really cool. This also bridges into one of our future segments. What does Epcot stand for? Experimental Prototype Community of Tomorrow. The idea was to build an entire city. It was the praxis of the...
Of its time.
50s, yeah. And so in 1966, Walt Disney conceived it as, in 1966, as a utopian, fully functioning city. And I believe, this might just be viral clickbait, but I've heard it said many, many times that they have the permission to build a nuclear reactor to power the prototype community of tomorrow. Epcot, yeah. And so... I don't know.
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Chapter 3: How does the Starship launch impact SpaceX's future?
Fast forward just a few years, a couple years. This one blew Tyler's mind. You're not going to believe what they created, what they announced at this World's Fair. 64. They invented 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 favorite flushing meta in New York City. System of records. Uh, visitors were dazzled by color television demonstration and the picture phone, an early video calling system.
They had FaceTime. Yeah. This is crazy. I can't believe when I told Jordy 64, they invented FaceTime. He was like, did it use mirrors?
Just a mirror that you look at.
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, uh, no, they had full video calling, I guess. AT&T's picture phone, which added video to telephone calls, uh,
Yeah, so it cost $16 for a three-minute call. That's $121 in today's money.
That's expensive.
Yeah, $40.
Token maxing. I wonder if there were CEOs at the time who were like, we need to be... If you're making $10 a year and you're not spending $20 a year on your picture phone, you're not going to have... I wonder if they were talking about Jevin's paradox. Yes, probably. I don't know.
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Chapter 4: What insights does Dan Shipper share about AI's impact on knowledge work?
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 LMS 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,
uh they're sort of like unhobbled there's a lot of this long tail that can just be like a thread effectively oh you're saying you don't need an app you just need to talk to yeah yeah yeah it's basically like you're talking to an agent it's like hey i want to get my let's use the most bro-y example possible i want to get my bench press to uh two plates by uh
eight weeks from now, I'm currently at, you know, a plate and give me a plan to get there. Right. So instead of needing like a vibe, you could do like the, yeah, the distribution or you could, or the customer could just wind up going to any 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, and it, 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. Actually, chat is not a very good medium for a lot of app interactions.
So in the same way that Excel was... You don't get the SaaS boom without Excel. Excel is teaching people how to use computers in a way that then becomes enterprise SaaS. I really think a lot of these... a lot of these Codex or ChachiBT or Cloud use cases are actually training potential customers who are power users to encounter problems that they want to buy software to fix.
But I have a very specific prediction for what that's going to look like. And I'm currently obsessed with what I'm calling Codex native apps. And the basic insight is For all of these tools, so like Cloud Code Desktop and Codex, they're built primarily for developers for now.
And when developers are working in them, if you're changing your app, it has an in-app browser that you can use to like, you know, the agent's in there with you. You can like look at your app in local hosts and the agent's in there and you're going back and forth. And it's a very good collaboration environment for a developer. I think that it's incredible for any kind of knowledge work. I spend...
all day just in Codex and when I open up a thread, I just open up a browser tab and I'm in my documents, I'm in my emails, And it's me and Codex going back and forth on a SaaS app that's running inside of the browser of Codex. And it is the most powerful thing I've ever used.
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Chapter 5: How does the discussion transition to the challenges faced by Apeel Sciences?
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 some interesting stuff coming on the vibe check front. Every time a new model comes out, we do some good vibe checks, so there's going to be some really good stuff happening in the next couple weeks. And then we have our agent product plus one, and that should be...
in beta probably by the end of June, and I think that's going to be really, really cool for people.
Amazing. Great to catch up. Have a wonderful weekend. Enjoy your birthday with Codex, and we'll talk soon.
Thank you so much for coming on the show. We'll talk to you soon. Goodbye. Up next, we have James Rogers from Appeal Sciences. He is the founder. Here with us live in the TBP and Ultradome. Maybe we move these objects out of the way so we give you a proper entrance. Thank you so much for coming on down. How are you doing? Please introduce yourself for everyone who might not be familiar.
Introduce yourself and we'll go through the story of the company and talk about the news.
Yeah, James Rogers. Thanks for having me down here, guys. Yeah, of course. Based up in Santa Barbara, so super easy to get down.
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Chapter 6: What lessons does James Rogers share about navigating industry attacks?
OK. Where did that technology go? It's too expensive. Oh, it's too expensive.
That was actually where appeal came from was, hey. Power's expensive now, though.
Maybe the economics work in the data center era. You just paint the data center.
I'm a gaucho as well. What was your reaction to touring UCSB for the first time? Unbelievable. 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. A university has no business being that close to an incredible beach.
It doesn't make any sense. It was, like, ranked, like, yeah. It was crazy. I flew out in March. I was in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania, and they were de-icing us on the runway. And then I land in Santa Barbara, and it's... I'm not going back. It's too nice here.
To study material sciences, where did the original idea for Appeal come from?
I thought the paint thing was so amazing. Wow, you can mix up a bucket of this paint and then it will build itself where you ship it. But then I realized how expensive that was going to be and went, okay, well, that... 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 just kind of had that in the back of my mind, and I learned about how many people are not learned about. We all know or heard people are going hungry. Yeah. I never understood why. Originally, I thought, oh, we're not growing enough food. We need to grow more food. Nope. We're actually growing twice as much food as we need to feed everybody already.
And the reason is people are going hungry because we throw it away. And so why do we throw it away? We throw it away because it spoils. It goes bad.
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Chapter 7: How does James envision the future of food sustainability and community production?
Are you raising money and then going and doing R&D?
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. And so I made a list, right? Because I didn't know it would work. I didn't know that this idea would work, but I made a list of the fruits and vegetables, and just in terms of how long they lasted.
And the shortest ones are like raspberries, blackberries, strawberries. But what's at the bottom of the list, the longest lasting stuff is like mandarins, oranges, grapefruits. I don't need to know a lot about fruits and vegetables to know that the ones with a peel last a lot longer than the ones without a peel. Just put those words together. Now we've got to figure out how to make it.
And that was the hard part. Yeah, so what specific founder journey? You have this idea. You tell your mom about it. She's like, good. That's nice, sweetie. But you don't know anything about fruits and vegetables. And then what do you do next?
I actually didn't know what fruits and vegetables were made. So I'm a material scientist. So I'm kind of obsessed with what stuff is made out of. And so the first question was, well, if you've got this strategy to allow fruit to last longer by strengthening the peel that's there, what's there now? Yeah. So I'd been trained for this, started to do research.
What are the skins of fruits and vegetables made out of? And totally blew my mind because I'd been working on these solar cells. So then to pivot and start looking at, we don't think about fruits and vegetables as made out of stuff. We think of them as fruits and vegetables. But they're mixtures of really specific things. molecules. And so it was, what's the skin made out of?
And it turns out they're made out of these plant oils. And it was, huh. So these skins are made of plant oils. And then it wasn't just that the strawberries, it wasn't just that the orange skin was made out of these plant oils. It was the strawberry skin was made out of the same thing. And that was like a big, that was like a mind blower.
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