Can a Robot Kill Fish Humanely?

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2:09My guest today is Save Khawaja. He's the co-founder and CEO of a company called Shinkay. Save's problem is this. Can we find a way for industrial fishermen to kill fish that is more humane than the way the fish are currently killed and is still economical, still works in the market. Safe didn't start out as a fish guy. He was a college student studying engineering and he happened to read an essay by the philosopher Peter Singer. The essay is called If Fish Could Scream and in the essay Singer argues that the way fish are typically killed now is slow and cruel. In particular, it's common for fish to be left to slowly suffocate after being pulled out of the water. After Save Fred Singer's essay, he started looking more deeply into the subject and he found a traditional technique used by Japanese fishermen that involves putting a spike through the fish's brain to quickly kill the fish. This is called Ikejime and many people believe that besides killing the fish more quickly,

3:12this technique also makes the fish meat last longer and taste better. Keith started his company, Shinkai, to try and figure out how to turn Ikejime into an industrial process, to use technology to build a machine that can be used on fishing boats to kill fish quickly rather than let them suffocate slowly. It's early still but the signs are promising. The company has built a machine that's currently on roughly 20 fishing boats and they're on track to sell several million pounds of fish this year to restaurants and grocery stores around the United States. To start, I asked Save about that essay, if fish could scream, that inspired him to start the company. What was it like for you to read this essay? What happened in your mind, in your heart, when you read this essay? Yeah, it's interesting. So to give to talk through my emotions a little bit, I'll take you back to the story when I was the young kid and you know, I didn't grow up on a farm but I had a lot of family members that had farms and grew up in the Middle East, grew up Muslim.

4:14One time when I was a child, I know it was two goats by the side of our home and decided to become friends with them because I love animals. So for about a week, I was feeding them lettuce and petting them and they gave them names. And then at the end of the week, they were gone and I was having lamb for dinner. I didn't really realize until I asked where the lamb went and I can't have a lamb or but once I heard I was crying and I was sad and I felt bad, I built this emotional relationship with the animals. So when I read that essay, it kind of gave me some emotions like that where I think I was jared a little bit by the lack of empathy, the fact that I'd created an emotional relationship with an animal that other people didn't have that same emotional connection with. That's how it is growing up, right? When you grow up, when you're a little kid, you understand things like, oh, I like that animal and we just killed it. Exactly. And it probably didn't want to die. But then you live in the world and there's a set of norms in the world and you kind of

5:16take the norms for the most part, right? And if everybody around you eats meat, you probably eat meat and get over the fact that you didn't want your friend the goat to die. So you read this essay and you just start thinking about this issue of fish suffering gratuitously. It's not the killing. It's the fact that it's the asphyxiation that is a slow and terrible process. And if we could kill the fish without that, that would be better for the fish just at a minimum. Well, the fish are going to be killed either way, either way, right? They're going to die. But like we can agree that how the animal dies matters, right? And so you're sort of down this rabbit hole and you find this, it's a kind of manual, very artisanal, traditional Japanese method, right? This is not what they're doing in industrial fisheries in Japan, right? This is like a guy with a metal spike putting it through one fish's head, correct? Well, there are some examples of high-lying fisheries, well, they will do this. Okay. But for the most part, no, I agree with you. It is.

6:17I just want to be for the listeners out there. They're going to be there's some counter examples, but as a whole, it's simpler. So there are some people who have tried to automate this before you. People have tried since the 1970s. No one has done it successfully, necessarily, but in the industrial cases, it's mostly, there's like a team of six to eight people, I have industrial fisheries sitting there doing this by hand. Okay. So where do you get the idea? I'm going to build a machine to kill fish more humanely. You know, for this part, I wish I had something more romantic than thinking, why not solve the problem directly? Yeah. I wish it was an engineering response and fix the recaws, which is, there's something that I can't actually do that process. Yeah. It is this interesting middle ground, right? Because one response to reading that Peter Singer essay is to stop eating fish, say, or to say, I'm going to try and get other people to stop eating fish. But there is a sort of narrow, a middle ground where you're landing, which is it's okay

7:21to kill fish to eat them, but we shouldn't make them suffer gratuitously. Like, did you immediately go to that middle ground? I did. I do believe that some genetics are designed to, they co-evolved with eating meat. So okay. Now you're on the path of building the machine. Tell me about the nail and the plastic fish. Okay. So, the idea was I should show conceptually the idea that this could be automated in some form. And so, bought a plastic fish, had a 3D printer in my door room, taped a nail to the end of it, and using some open source computer vision tools, not, again, super technical enough to be able to show it, sent this video to Y Combinator of this plastic fish. And then, I sent a cold email to the general partner, Jared Friedman, and interviewed and

8:25got in, and took the company full time in early 2022. Got into Y Combinator. Yeah, that was the impetus for having the capital to really take it full time. So tell me how it works. There's a boat right now. There's boats out in the water doing this. Probably at this minute, certainly today. Like, just tell me what are those boats? Tell me what's happening. Wherever you want it to be, whatever kind of fish. But give me something specific. Yeah, let's throw out, like, our bread and butter is a trap boat that catches in black hot. And so, traps, think of them as an analog to the lobster pots, where they're either long chain of nets or cages that the fish will swim into, and then they pull them up, you know, each net might bite it. And so, the fish are then brought onto the deck of the boat. There's normally like a pool of water where they're sitting, and then they are put into the machine, today by hand, one by one. And so, each fish will go in. We have a computer vision layer that, you know, from a camera that's running constantly, that will scan the fish. Okay.

9:25If they figure out the species, and then, okay, if it's this species, then this is the cutting path for piercing the brain, for cutting the gills. And then we have mechanical systems that will do those, while holding fish down in, you know, our own method that we developed. The fish will come straight out, and then you go out into a half ice, half water slurry. And so, the heart, which is still active after brain death, will pump the blood out of the meat, and then the fish are then moved into the hold once the bleeding process is complete. What's the machine look like? So we say it's like a refrigerator, and practical reality is basically this metal box about two and a half by three feet for the bigger one, and then about 60% smaller for the ones that are going in salmon boats. And it is for all of that's the purposes of black box. You put in fish in, thaw it around, it comes out of it. The doors are on because we need the computer vision to be consistent, and so we have an internal lighting system, and so that blocks out the sun, because if you have different lighting systems, it makes the AI less reliable.

10:27Makes sense, makes sense. And then you have the fish, the fish comes straight out. So you can hear the process happening, of course, but, you know, outside that the producers and the harvesters don't receive what's happening. Does this system change the number of fish that a boat can catch and kill in a day? So the way that fishing is regulated is through the quota system for the most part. And so fishermen have a fixed amount of fish that can come out of the water, and the idea here for the reason we do this model is that the fish are going to get paid a little bit more, and so they can draw more value from the quota that they're allocated. So the amount of fish that they change, they fish does not change. That is also why we do not work with every single vessel, because there are some vessels, like these massive quantity boats, that, you know, in theory, if we were to work with them, they'd have to slow down operations, and we haven't built systems to account for the massive amount of volume. So I want to talk about a little bit about the sort of development, and in particular, there's this paper that was published earlier this year.

11:30One of your engineers, I guess, was a co-author, right? Just studying this device you built to automate killing fish in this more human way, and comparing it to this sort of manually cajime and like, estuctiation, the traditional, right? And let me say thank you for doing that paper, like it's helpful, you know, people make all these claims, and then when there's like a paper, it's like, oh great, it's like we can really talk about at least at the time you were doing this research, what worked and what didn't. And I mean, one of the clear things that they said in the paper was that, I'll just read it, ecajime, it said, should be preceded by a stunning step ensuring immediate loss of sensibility, because the fish didn't always just die as fast as you wanted them to, essentially. Like, do you do that now? Did you add the stunning step? So we did not, and this was a point of disagreement that we had with some of the philosophies around how the research came out versus that.

12:30First of all, that paper was from early 2023, and from the studies that just didn't get published until later, and we made a lot of improvements into machine and process, and it's particularly the speed, right? That's the most important part. And so back then, you know, we were doing a fish like, I don't know, once every, like, don't quote me on, hard quote me on this, but I'd say a second round, once every 20 to 30, maybe even 40 seconds per fish. That's too long, right? Because most of you haul up a bunch of fish, and they're all just sitting there waiting to get killed in the machine. So they're essentially as fixating in the traditional way. Exactly. And so I think what was clear is that there was a potential for the process, but the speed needed to be improved, for it to really be an industrial process that was, like, humane driven, right? Yeah. And the other part to it is sometimes stunning can actually be less humane for them, because you have to die on a specific voltage for the fish, and for wild fish, it's basically impossible to do that, because you're catching fish that, you know, say a black card, the smallest you're getting is like two pounds that you can pull out the water in the largest

13:32is like 15, right? And so that breath means a very broad voltage range that you need to be, you need to be flopping between for the stunner. And so that alone means that, you know, if you go too high, you're going to damage the meat in a way that makes this process kind of redundant. If you go too low, you're going to, you're basically casing the fish, but it's still conscious and I'm going to continue to flop around. And so what we'd rather do is just like not add an extra part of the process, but improve the speed for the fish in half as we can do it. And so now it's, you know, a couple of seconds to be able to process each individual one. So again, this is just our perspective and our view on what the best way it is to handle the fish. And so the data is a necessarily reflective of like all the conversations that we're happening in the background. Sure. No, I mean, like I said, I think it's great that you published this paper or that this paper was published. I mean, the findings weren't that compelling, right? Like it seemed like for the larger fish, it didn't work particularly reliably.

14:33And I know it was a prototype. I'm just trying to figure out what to make of it, right? Like, are you going to do another study? Like, how do I know that it works better now? So we've done internal studies and external studies now. We just haven't published them yet because the publishing cycle takes a very long time. So I'm happy to send you data on, you know, the latest on what it compares to versus handy, could you make? Well, so let me ask how well does it work now? So it depends on the criteria of what you're looking at. And so we don't have the capacity to look at every single fish and put a little EEG thing on the brain. Yeah. But in terms of being able to get implied loss of consciousness, which is the fish going mint, which is destroying the brain or things like that, you know, we're hitting again, having the most, you know, like up to date information with the team from today, but I'd say about 90% is like the number that we're hitting. And that's with a, you know, five to six second cycle time for each machine. And that happens like in the ocean, in the real world.

15:34Yeah, that's in, you know, all the machines are deployed on vessels out in the ocean. Yeah. Um, so we've been talking about the, well, let's call it the ethical side or the suffering of the fish. And what we have been talking about, right. Um, I know you talk a lot about the, the quality of the fish, you know, setting aside to the fish suffer less is the fish better. I know you make the case that the fish is better and there are fancy chefs who agree with you. Um, tell me about that side. Yeah, there are a couple of things we can open up into here. Quality by itself doesn't mean much, right? Is it quality in terms of shelf life? Is it about texture? Is it about flavor? Is it about nutrient density? Yeah. Very abstract term. I mean, I've seen you mentioned shelf life before that, that's another one where like, has anyone studied that? I looked for evidence about shelf life. Is that out there? And I just didn't see it. I didn't see it. Yeah. Um, we do internal rigor mortis studies that we share with customers.

16:37We haven't released yet, but that's part of what reason we've been able to get many large retailers is they believe the data. But that when you say rigor mortis, like, that's time to rigor mortis from death? Yes. And that's very, you know, well, it's to be a proxy for the stress that the animal goes through before it passes away as well as, okay. In turn, a proxy for the shelf life and the texture after the rigor mortis peak has been reached. I'm actually more interested in this sort of outcome measures that a chef or a person cooking fish at home would care about. So chefs are going to be looking at rigor mortis. They just don't call that animal is actually beaten general goes through something that I like to draw a can to ripening in that basically, you know, people will hold fish up. And when it has an enter bigger, it's going to stay basically very limp. And so if you hold it in the middle of your palm, it's going to be bending on both sides. Chefs and, you know, buyers in retail will especially that with freshness. And so then when the fish goes into rigor, even though sitting in your palm, it should

17:40be limp over. It's actually completely parallel to the ground. And so it's very rigid. Basically once that starts, that process happens, the body has realized that the animal has passed away. And so after that, the deterioration, the kind of enzyme breakdown of the animal, the biological breakdown, the animals begins. So it's not really a proxy for whether the fish is better or not. It's like kind of like the start of the time. And so we both delay that time as well delay the, in turn, the biological breakdown time. The suffocated fish will go into peak rigor a couple of hours after passing away, call two to four hours. Hour process is like a 35 to 38 hour time to rigor. Compared to two to four for standard commercial fisheries. Exactly. So that's a big difference. The difference between four hours and 35 hours is quite large. Exactly. What does that mean for people eating that fish? So we suggest to retailers that they get anywhere from twice the price of the usual shelf life. How much they pass on to the consumer is not necessarily on control and how much we know

18:40about. But we know that that possibility is there for the consumers to have better shelf life. It is also a proxy for texture. And so generally if you're buying a fish's process this way and it's given to you early enough, you will have better texture. That's more rigid. There's some, obviously this is subjective, but there's some improvement in flavor as well. And so these are some of the things that when you think about a fish that's been processed on our method, that you can look for benefits. We'll be back in just a minute. This is Jacob Goldstein from Business History. Imagine Henry Ford trying to create the assembly line. He had factory plans, production schedules, supply information, research, and ideas coming from all directions. His team spent years studying how to make the process work. Now imagine having chat GPT work.

19:43Chat GPT work can help with big projects that have lots of steps. You give it the goal along with real information like notes, files, reports, feedback and project plans. It can use approved apps, connected tools and files to help turn all of that into something useful. A plan, an analysis, a tracker, a presentation outline, or a workflow you can keep improving. And you stay in control. You give direction, review the work, approve actions, and choose the final result. Would Henry Ford have built the assembly line faster with chat GPT? We'll never know. Ford didn't have chat GPT. You do. Put chat GPT to work on your most ambitious ideas and projects. Get started at chatgpt.com by selecting work mode, available on plus and pro plans. This is Malcolm Gladwell from Medal of Honor Stories of Courage. This episode is sponsored by Navy Federal Credit Union. Buying a car can be like a long road trip. There's negotiating prices, lots of fees, and a difficult process.

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22:47we need spares and test units and so on and so on. And where are they and what kind of fish are they? Humanely kill, hopefully humanely kill. So they're deployed across the country from Alaska down to California. Most of them being the Pacific Northwest or Alaska. And then Texas up to Boston, but mostly in the Gulf. What kind of fish? Black cod is our bread and butter. We do mostly black cod. We're going to do, you know, a couple of million pounds of fish total this year. Most of that will be black cod. We also do harvest some sake I said and we just announced that recently. We have a Pacific cod rock fish, rebellion rock fish, red snapper, a couple other bycatch species in the Gulf and black sea bass and Northeas. And what's the business model? So we give the machines to fish men for free. It's structured as a lease, but they pay zero dollars per the payments. And then we buy the fish. We have right to first refusal on other fish that they process with it.

23:49And then we sell that fish under our brand, you know, the parent company being shinkie, the technology company that develops all the IP, the long pluries are underneath. We have a subsidiary called the ceremony fish and we called it fish ceremony grade as of not the ceremony grade match up. And the kind of idea there is, I should say ceremony has an S at the beginning and an I. Yes, exactly. Yes, yes, yes. And vaguely Japanese. Yeah. I think that's the way that you angle size how the Japanese say ceremony in Japanese, but so that's kind of the way we chose to spell that way. We came up with ceremony grade as this kind of marker for quality and, you know, something that we believe we can stand for it because when you go and buy fish at the grocery store, you know, for the most part, you'll be told it's for that species. It's wild or it's farmed. Never necessarily that the exact geography that has been cut in or the type of gear or or so on. And when you look at cattle or poultry, like in beef, you have grass fed, USD choice, USD

24:53prime for chicken, you have pastures or similar, right? And there wasn't, there's not really an analog to process for fish, only for genetics. And so that was where, you know, we have, we saw that there's an opportunity that's alternative from the sustainability certification that exists, you know, ASE and SC, which all do a great job, but are really focused on sustainability. So I am your customer, I think, depending on how much more it costs than regular fish. Like I buy pasture raised chicken. And I don't even, I don't even know if it tastes better. I don't think it doesn't taste different to me, but I like, I land, I think more or less where you land on the moral question of like the killing is not the fundamental problem to me. It's the like raising the animals in hell, essentially, it seems quite bad. So, I mean, as a potential customer, like the obvious questions to me are, what, how much more expensive is it?

25:53So I don't want to deflect the question, but it's very dependent on skew. I'll give you some numbers as an example, but salmon. So are salmon's probably 15% more than commodity? Oh, that's not so much more. I feel like pasture raised chicken is the gap is bigger than that. Of course, the absolute numbers are higher for the fish, so 15%. But 15% more is not that much more. Do you, do you make money at that level? Like, did the unit economics work for you there? Yeah. So we've gone to an economy of the scale. We have our infrastructure, we've vertically integrated more. We can actually offer a price set. It's not quite a part with commodity, but for the process and running into it and the brand and the quality that, you know, we stand forward and having all those things do need a little bit more premium to cover. Sure. Is that a scale where we can do millions of pounds and still find homes for the fish? Honestly, that's a lower premium than I expected. Do you find people are willing to pay it? I do find that people want to pay it. I think retailers need a lot of evidence before they expand programs.

26:58So we started small scale. Most of our revenue today is probably 85 to 95%. Depending on the week is food service. So we wholesale to distributors who will then sell to local restaurants. Is it like fancy restaurants? Initially yes, although now, you know, it's kind of like white table cloth, but not super expensive. So we're not focused on the Michelin 3 star. That was very much at a time, you know, 2024, 2025, wherever we were focused. But today, you know, we're hoping for the kind of, you know, there's this difference I call for between the premium and luxury, where luxury you're paying for more of an experience and an emotion, then necessarily for utility versus premium, you pay more, but you get more utility per dollar. And so we were a luxury product, whether you're selling, you know, quadruple the price of the commodity. But today with a small markup, you get more utility per dollar because you're more likely to use your fish because of the shelf life or the quality or so on. And so in that way, you know, we do charge a premium, but again, the utility is better.

28:02So the one other thing that I feel like would be useful for me is some kind of third party certification. Like I'm more or less believe you, but like, you know, when I buy whatever vitamins, like I always buy the ones where there's third party certification because like, well, a lot of times the vitamins aren't what they say they are, you know, and the same exists for meat. Is that a possibility for your fish? The question I'd ask is who's a third party. And so we, that's part of why we have to design or unstandard. Well, sure, but right now there is no third party, right? Like, it's, your incentives are not aligned economically. They're just not. You know what I mean? Like third, a third party is economically a nice structure. And I know there are problems who's paying them and they're always problems. But it does seem useful. There's a reason we have them in many domains like yours.

29:06You know, we've definitely explored alternative business models for the company where like longer term, there might be an opportunity for us to, you know, rent the machines, the robotics and services, and then we become that there. But yeah, you know, in each individual retailer does have their own audits where any clients we make, they have to back up. So, you know, for a major initial wide retailer, you know, we would be submitting lots of paperwork across where the fish is coming from, what traceability data that we have, what's the shelf life, we'll give them samples, we'll do the studies, we'll back up the claims, and only after all jumping through all the soups, then we get approved to be a vendor and so on. Yeah. So in that universe, the retailer is the third party. Exactly. Yeah. But if chefs don't like the fish, they'll get back. Yeah. That's the other part to it. Yeah. And that's separating the, like, how does the fish taste versus how much do the fish suffer? Right? And the thing I'm thinking about is how much do the fish suffer? And I understand your claim that those two are related, but like they could be weekly

30:06related, right? Are other people doing anything like what you're doing? Is there an industry of sort of humanly killed fish? There are mechanical companies that focus on industrial automation, but it's mostly for fact-reforming, right? And the context there, the fish are like 18, 20 generations of the same genetics and because of that, they are very much bred to size and bred to morphology, which means that geometry you can use a mechanical machine to process. But in the wild environment, different diets, the same fish can be the same weight, but have different shapes and sizes. And so because of that, you do need something that can handle that variation and that's why we have a computer vision layer that will scan each fish and pick out where is the brain, where is the gills and so on. There are alternative methods as well rather than actually like, euthanizing or exaggerating the animal. Instead, you can, like we mentioned earlier, stand out with electricity. We just found that, you know, it doesn't necessarily match the industrial throughput that you need.

31:08So you're saying nobody else is doing it for wild fish because it's hard and you've figured it out and nobody else has. I wouldn't say we have 100% figured out. We can't do like massive commodity boats just yet, right? Because even that volume is really high, right? We're going on our first very large vessel this year. It's 180 feet and, you know, we're expecting success and we've done a couple of trials, but like, you know, it's our first time going on for a full season where the boats not coming back for a couple of months. So that's a good thing. So you're worried that the machine is going to break. You could have to like send an engineer out on a helicopter or something to fix it. So because it's the first time we are sending an engineer out there, but it's one of those opportunities that, you know, if we win that, and that's a great precedent to set for trying larger and larger boats as well. And so, yeah, I'm not saying that, you know, I'm going to be the first person to say, we have conquered this problem and no one else has solved it. It's no like we're, it's all like an industry effort. At the same time, we have for the specific use case of the gear types, the fishermen, the species.

32:09And we believe that we have a product that can handle the fish really effectively, can generate the quality, shelf life benefits that reclaim under, you know, the theoretical underpinnings of which come from this, you know, inspiration from this artisanal process in Japan. How much fish are you going to sell this year? Can't give you a hard numbers. I can give you an indicated amount, which is a couple of million counts. I don't know. I don't know if that's a lot or a little. How many pounds of fish does like America buy in a year? Yeah, so I think last, the day that I can recall, it's about nine billion pounds of fish a year. And so for us to do, you know, call it a couple of million pounds is great proof of concept, but there's a long way to go for us to be a major player, you know? Yeah, yeah, yeah. What, what do you think might go wrong? Like I'm sure there's a lot of things to be worried about. It seems quite complicated what you're trying to do on many, many dimensions.

33:10Like, what's at the top of the list of things you're worried about right now? Well, we have a hard business to build, which is we're building a industrial robotics company in a very demanding environment, we're also building a consumer brand and a perishable year six flagship. So like in each one of those probably have many risks. So, you know, I'll be the first to say it's hard, but, you know, follow the hard problems to get bigger works, right? That's the opposite of play, stupid games, wins, stupid prizes. Exactly. Yeah, hard, interesting games. Yeah. Yeah. So, I'd say first of all, making the machines work for an increasingly larger number of vessel types and operator types so that fishermen feel not just excited, but confident that this is a program that they'd stick with longer term. That's kind of the main engineering focus right now. And then you know, the perishable just excite, you know, that's very much an economy to scale business. You should just buy a big fish processing plant factory in Washington. Is that part of this story that you're talking about right now?

34:11Exactly. So we feasibly could have bought one four or five times the size and tried to fill it out, but we decided to find one that's on a smaller end. In fact, a company that's upgrading because they really hit a large scale. They were selling this plant because this is what they eat. This was their very first plant. And so we're kind of following it and it fits that's in that way. So the 16,000 square feet, it's in Tacoma, which is just outside of Seattle. The great benefit of having that vertical degradation is we have a lot of it more control versus partnering with third parties with how the fish are packed. And eventually, you know, we just bought a retail packing machine. So we're hoping to get these nice little trays for get seamers to go to buy frozen, you know, versions of the fish. So what's the, what's the like happy story of where you are in five years? Like if it works, what will it look like? To put this simply, you know, middle class Americans can go into their grocery store and buy fish that tastes better and lasts longer, but are handled more humanely for the same

35:13price. I don't think you need to complicate more than that. It's ultimately the game of we want to use technology to bring down the marginal cost of doing this process so that it can be applied through. Basically, every single fish, the same way that cattle and poultry have legal handling, you know, to be killed in a somewhat method. Yeah. Do you imagine, I mean, I feel like if you get there, other people will be trying to do what you're doing. And I'm sure you have some intellectual property, but I don't know, I don't know how much it in people are, whatever, things happen, right? Like for you, is that a good world or a bad world? Like lots of people are out there developing their own systems that say they do in fact kill fish in a more humane way than they're killed today. Does that make you happier, sad? Makes me happy. I think we obviously we have economic outcome that we're trying to underwrite for investors. And so ideally, you know, what we end up doing is just move very quickly and partner to

36:16the big companies and all of them are working with our technology and we may be adjusted to this model, you know, but we originally actually tried to sell the technology. We didn't really have that as like we didn't get the response we wanted. You wanted to sell the robots, sell the machines. Exactly. That was your first model. Uh-huh. Seems way easier to build that business, right? Like by my machine is way easier than like we're going to create a fish brand and by a fish processing plant and sell it to restaurants. Like it seems like a way harder business. Yeah, but it just came out of the point of view that unless we did it ourselves, people would just not understand the value for what we were recreating. And so we had to put our money where our mouth was, which is doing this vertical integration to be able to actually go to these retailers, earn the credibility and show them what we could do. And now, you know, we're starting to get some traction. And so the hope is over the next, you know, one to two years, these big processors, these big dock buyers, you know, the big fish, you know, fishing unions.

37:17People come to us and potentially partner with us. And that's, you know, it's a little bit of a roundabout way to get to the end goal, but, you know, as long as we get to the end goal. We'll be back in a minute with the lightning round. This is Jacob Goldstein from Business History. Imagine Henry Ford trying to create the assembly line. He had factory plans, production schedules, supply information, research, and ideas coming from all directions. His team spent years studying how to make the process work. Now imagine having chat GPT work. Chat GPT work can help with big projects that have lots of steps. You give it the goal, along with real information like notes, files, reports, feedback, and project plans. It can use approved apps, connected tools, and files to help turn all of that into something

38:18useful. A plan, an analysis, a tracker, a presentation outline, or a workflow you can keep improving. And you stay in control. You give direction, review the work, approve actions, and choose the final result. Would Henry Ford have built the assembly line faster with chat GPT? We'll never know. Ford didn't have chat GPT. You do. Put chat GPT to work on your most ambitious ideas and projects. Get started at chatgpt.com by selecting work mode, available on plus and pro plans. This is Malcolm Gladwell from Medal of Honor Stories of Courage. This episode is sponsored by Navy Federal Credit Union. Buying a car can be like a long road trip. There's negotiating prices, lots of fees, and a difficult process. But with an auto loan from Navy Federal, you're on the highway to hire savings. They want the members to save more on their next auto purchase. That's why they offer great rates, military discounts, and pre-approvals that are good for 90 days.

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40:23So even as the way we shop changes, the moment that matters most still feels familiar and deeply dependable. Painted for payments, growth and agentic. PayPal open, built for all business. Visit PayPalOpen.com to get started. The ads are over. Now we're going to do the lightning round. Is it true that you and your grandfather have matching tattoos? So same theme tattoo, they're both anchors. I just have a different style of anchor. Mine is an American traditional cellular tattoo to say a Jerry one. He just has like a gray or had, now he's passed. And he has a gray, like a normal line tattoo. Tell me about your grandfather having a tattoo. It's unusual for a grandfather in Mike's career. Yeah, it's a funny story. So he loves sailing, loves fishing. The story goes, you know, he went to this carnival where they were doing tattoos and you know, his dad told him not to get one and he just decided to walk in and get one.

41:23And then, you know, it was just like a spur of the moment when he was 17 and it kind of just marked his passion for that. My reason for why he got it in contrast was a little more intentional, which is, you know, I moved to the US when I was 18 and you know, me having grown up in the Middle East and kind of adjusting to culture. I wanted to have some mark to commemorate the fact that I was like embracing a new culture and taking what you would spin on it. And so the one that I have is the say the Jerry one, which you know, say the Jerry, he was in the Navy, stayed in Japan, took inspiration from the art style and mixed it with traditional American tattoos to come up with this new version for each of them. So it's funny enough, I guess now saying it out loud, it kind of has a bit of a nod to Shinkie. Give me one piece of fisherman wisdom. Don't bring a banana on a boat. Tell me more. Yeah, it's an old sailor story for a bad luck. And I think it comes from the fact that bananas carry fruit flies at a higher percentage and so people would bring bananas and the flies would like lay larvae eggs and that would

42:28basically eat all the food and supplies. And so if you run out of them for a certain amount and think of rotten, you have to turn around. It's a bad luck. I thought it was, I thought it was slipping on the peel when you said that. This probably there too. Exactly. Oh, I guess in contrast, you should definitely bring oranges so you can stave off scurvy if you're going to go for a long, long trip. It's good fruit tips from fishermen. Tell me about your house plant game. Why did you research? That's great. Yeah. So I actually have a bunch of Ella there. This kind of inspiration for my mom that I used for skin and I also make into tea once in a while. I have a snake plant that I keep in my room. I've never quite cracked the code for why American AC feels stuffy. And so having a bunch of snake plants helps my room stay clean. Outside that, I just love to be with the plants. I love other people having, you know, whenever I go into someone's home feeling a little

43:29bit more zen, it feels just that extra bit of antiquated into nature. Do you think plants are sentient? I actually do. I love your asking these questions. Yeah, I don't know if it's the same density of sentience that I would call an animal would have or similar. They exhibit paper, right? You shine light and they'll grow to where to light. They have been able to communicate in long distances. And so again, it's hard to kind of prescribe. Is that sentience or not? It's hard to describe, but would that really mean? Yeah. They definitely have preferences. They definitely have preferences. If you weren't doing the job that you're doing, if you weren't in fish, what would you be doing? You know, someone just asked me this question. I'll tell you the answer. Probably run a dairy farm in New Zealand.

44:29Decent quiet. Is that true or is that just like your escape fantasy when your job seems really hard? I mean, there's many other things I would do. I have so many hobbies. But that's probably the one that came to mind most recently. Well, is the hardest thing about working as a deckhand? I think the feeling that you can go out for hours and not have anything to show for it while working very hard and trying again and again, it's difficult to predict how good the catch is going to be on this part of the excitement and also part of the disappointment when things do or don't go well. Thank you for your time. I really appreciate it. For sure. Thank you. Safe Khawaja is the co-founder and CEO of Shinkay. Please email us at problematpushkin.fm. Tell us what kinds of shows we should do more of.

45:29Less of, or particular people you think would be good on the show. You can also find me on X and on LinkedIn. The show is produced by Gabriel Hunter Chang and Trina Manino, our editor is Lydia Jean Cot and our engineer is Sarah Brueger. I'm Jacob Goldstein and we'll be back next week with another episode of What's Your Problem. Before you sign off, you tuned in for ways to help teams move faster, make sharper decisions, and turn scattered contexts into work they can use. ChatGPT for business can help. ChatGPT for business gives teams a shared workspace with admin controls, permissions, and access to work and codecs in ChatGPT. This means your business can move from question to answer and code to roll out quicker. Join over 10 million business and enterprise users worldwide already using ChatGPT for work. Download the ChatGPT desktop app or contact sales to learn more.

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47:34This is an I Heart Podcast. Guaranteed Human.