Going Direct Conversations

I sit down with Mariano Alvarez and Brendan Collins, co-founders of Avalo, to talk about how they are using their plant breeding technology to rebuild the US cotton supply chain from the seed up. We get into how they’re able to sell seeds to farmers at half the market price, why they contract with them to buy the cotton back before a single seed goes into the ground, and the long-term goal of brin...

I sat down with Kat Scott, Developer Relations Engineer at Intrinsic AI (a Google company), who’s spent her entire 20+ year career in robotics. Kat is the developer advocate for the Robot Operating System (ROS), the open-source, “Linux for robots” that’s quietly been downloaded nearly a billion times. We get into why she believes open source has already won in robotics, the game theory behind why...

I sit down with Fabien Cros, who runs the AI practice at Ducker Carlisle, to talk about how he is seeing decentralized AI models inside organizations work much better than a top-down, centralized approach. He has found the key is giving employees a platform to build their own agents, letting the best use cases bubble up, and using a central engineering team for creating resiliency and managing ris...

I sit down with Roya Amini-Naieni, co-founder and CEO of Trilo Bio, to talk about why 77% of biologists fail to reproduce their own experiments — and why affordable lab automation is the unlock for everything we can build with biology. The Trilo team is fixing this by building modular robots, software, and tooling from the ground up. We get into the rise of self-driving biology labs and why automa...

I sit down with Tom Chi, founder and general partner of At One Ventures, a venture capital firm that invests in early-stage, deep tech companies focused on cleaning up industry. Tom is an engineer by training and was a founding member of Google X team, where he helped lead early work on self-driving cars and augmented reality. In this episode, we dig into why centralized production is so fragile,...

I sat down with Jay Acunzo, author, speaker, and storytelling consultant, to discuss how to matter more and make people care in a world drowning in mediocre content. Jay shares his core philosophy of, “resonance over reach,” storytelling in the age of AI, how to escape the commodity trap, and how to become irreplaceable by developing a real point of view. This was one of my favorite episodes to da...

I sit down with Simon Owens, an independent media industry journalist and specialist on the business of content. Simon breaks down the “Ozempic Effect” in AI-Generated content, why the “creator economy” is just the economy, middlemen in online advertising, and the future of monetizing content. If you want to understand how to build a media business today, you will enjoy this episode. Enjoy. Record...

I sit down with Duncan Young to discuss an essay he recently published on Substack that went a bit viral: “Jobs are dead, long live the $10 million niche.” Duncan explains why AI is coming for repetitive tasks rather than the work itself, why mid-career professionals are facing an existential crisis, and why building your own ladder is now a far better bet than climbing a corporate one. Enjoy. Rec...

I sit down with Brian Morrissey, and independent journalist and the founder of The Rebooting, to discuss a recent piece he wrote called, “New Media Energy” and our transition to a truly decentralized media landscape where the legacy media gatekeeper is no longer relevant. Among the topics we discuss are: • “New Media Energy” vs the unearned authority of legacy media • Why VCs are building their ow...

I sit down with Rafik Kheffache, founder of Heliosand, for our first-ever in-person episode in Paris. This was a different kind of episode where Rafik asks me to pull back the curtain on Going Direct - why I started it, what I actually believe, and where it’s all going. Over the past year, I’ve had 50+ conversations with founders, engineers, and builders working on decentralized production, AI inf...

I sit back down with Aleks Gampel, the co-founder and COO of Cuby, to talk about why construction has become less productive over time, why skilled labor shortages are getting worse, and why the current system still relies on fragmented crews and outdated methods. Cuby’s answer is to build mobile micro-factories that produce home components close to where the homes are actually being built. Among...

I sat down with Will Fry, founder and CEO of American Operator, to talk about one of the biggest questions in the U.S. economy: who will own the next generation of small businesses? Among the topics we discuss are: * Why allowing Private Equity to buy up Main Street is a disaster for local communities. * The Great Ownership Transfer (6 million businesses for sale). * The fatal flaw in most small b...

I sit down with Aaron Feigelman, the head of food systems at Cultured Supply, to discuss the hidden monopoly of broadline food distributors and the need to reimagine wholesale food distribution from the ground up. We discuss why the current supply chain forces suppliers to kill the nutrients in our food, High Pressure Processing (HPP) technology, and how the company we’ve been incubating, CS Juice...

I sit down with Scott Porter, founder of Dynamic Green Products (DGP), to unpack an overlooked, unsexy corner of the real economy that literally keeps everything moving: industrial lubricants. Nearly 99% of lubricants today are petroleum-based. They’re part of an old, centralized system built on commodity inputs, distributor choke points, and entrenched incumbent brands. DGP is building high-perfo...

I sit down with Andra Keay, a researcher on human-robot culture and head of Silicon Valley Robotics. We discuss the importance of ethical design in robotics, why humans form deep emotional bonds with physical machines, her 5 ethical laws of robotics, and how we can design robots that are actually good for humans. Enjoy! Recording date: March 10, 2026 Watch on YouTube; listen on Spotify or Apple Po...

I sit down with Toby Shorin, a researcher, writer, and technologist, to discuss his popular essay “Life After Lifestyle.” We dig into why the lifestyle brand era has ended, how culture is being “eaten” by financialization, and why Toby is starting to abandon culture as the main lens for understanding what’s happening now. Enjoy! Recording Date: February 18, 2026 Watch on YouTube ; listen on Spotif...

I sit down with Saman Farid, founder of Formic, to get real about what it takes to deploy industrial robots in practice. We go deep into robotics-as-a-service, how we can make manufacturing more productive, and the labor reality for small/medium-sized manufacturers in the United States. If you want a dose of robot reality beyond flashy demo videos, you will enjoy this episode. Among the topics we...

I sit down with Jan Liphardt, founder of OpenMind and Stanford professor, to discuss an important question that will shape the future: who should control intelligent robots? As AI and robotics converge, our economic and societal trajectory may hinge on whether robots become closed, black-box systems or open platforms that anyone can build on, audit, and deploy locally. Jan and the team at OpenMind...

I sit down with Meta Prime, a writer and online network builder whose work I discovered on Substack. Meta Prime and I do a deep dive into a recent essay he wrote titled, “The Necessity of Rebuilding the Social Structure in America.” We explore how and why America’s social fabric broke down, what rebuilding it looks like in practice, and how the Going Direct economy can play a central role in resto...

I sit down with Sam Lessin, Cofounder and General Partner at Slow Ventures, to unpack why he believes decentralization is inevitable. Sam is an original thinker and really fun to talk to. He and the Slow team have built an impressive track record of being early and right. They’ve made early investments in Robinhood, Pinterest, Nextdoor, Solana, Airtable, and more. In this wide-ranging and entertai...

I sit down with Onye Ahanotu, founder of Ikenga Wines, to unpack his wild idea of creating an entirely new beverage category in the U.S. Onye has invented a way to make palm wine, one of the oldest beverages on earth and a staple across the global South, without the palm tree. By bio-designing a “molecular palm sap” from different plant sources, Onye produces palm wine locally in Berkeley, Califor...

I sit down with Oren Falkowitz, co-founder and CEO of Area 2 Farms, to discuss how he’s working to fix America’s food system by building hyper-local, soil-based, automated indoor farms that bring food production back to where people live. Oren has a very unique approach that combines local production and local distribution under one roof. We explore why moving the farm, not the food, is the future...

I sit down with Brett Bivens, an active angel investor and Research Partner at July Fund , a venture capital firm focused on backing new technologies that improve the real world. We unpack a recent essay Brett wrote titled The Production Capital Mosaic , where he outlines 11 emerging financing models purpose-built for industrial technology. We explore why traditional venture and infrastructure cap...

I sit down with Andy Hunter, founder and CEO of Bookshop.org , to unpack how their e-commerce platform operates as one big affiliate network to support independent bookstores. It’s the classic “David vs. Goliath” story where the company is giving small retail businesses a way to compete directly with Amazon. Against all odds, Bookshop.org is working. They’ve already raised over $43 million for ind...

I sit down with my co-host Reiss to break down different decentralized production models - 3D printing, mini-mills, upcycling, and bio-manufacturing - and dive deeper into the world of bio-manufacturing. We explore how biology can create much more decentralized, cleaner forms of production and discuss the following topics: * Decentralized production methods: 3D Printing, Mini Mills, Upcycling, & B...