Jacob Goldstein
Jacob Goldstein spent more than a decade as co-host of the Planet Money podcast. He's also the author of the book Money: The True Story of a Made-Up Thing, which the New…
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The fish we eat usually die slowly, suffocating after they’re pulled out of the water. Saif Khawaja is the co-founder and CEO of a company called Shinkei. Saif’s problem is this: Can he build a machine to efficiently kill fish in a way that is more humane?
In this episode, Saif explains:
- How he came to believe that our current fishing practices are inhumane
- How he adapted the Japanese technique of ikijime for use at scale
- Why Shinkei’s process results in better texture and longer shelf life than commodity fish.
- Why Shinkei is doing its own technology development, fish processing, and consumer branding.
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Pushkin. I'm Jacob Goldstein, and this is What's Your Problem? My guest today is Saif Khawaja. He's the co-founder and CEO of a company called Shinkai. Saif's problem is this. Can we find a way for industrial fishermen to kill fish and that is more humane than the way the fish are currently killed, and is still economical, still works in the market. Saif 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 Safe Red 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, this technique also makes the fish meat last longer and taste better. Saif 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 Saif 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?
02:15
Speaker 2
Yeah, it's interesting. So to talk through my emotions a little bit, I'll take you back to a story when I was a 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. One time when I was a child, I noticed two goats by the side of our home and decided to become friends with them because I love animals. And so for about a week, I was feeding them lettuce and petting them, and I gave them names. And then at the end of the week, they were gone, and I was having lamb for dinner. And I didn't really realize until I asked where the lamb went, and, hey, here's a lamb or a goat. But, you know, 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, you know, I think I was jarred a little bit by the, like, 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.
03:15
Speaker 1
That's how it is growing up, right? When you grow up, you... When you're a little kid, you understand things like, oh, I like that animal, and we just killed it. And it probably didn't want to die. But then you're sort of, you live in the world, and there's a set of norms in the world, and you kind of take the norms for the most part, right? And you, 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, right? It's not the killing. It's the fact that it's the asphyxiation that is a slow, terrible process. And if we could kill the fish without that, that would be better for the fish, just at a minimum.
04:00
Speaker 2
Well, the fish are going to be killed either way, right?
04:02
Speaker 1
They're going to die, but 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?
04:24
Speaker 2
Well, there are some examples of high-volume fisheries where they will do this, but for farms. But for the most part, no. I agree with you. I just want to be, for the listeners out there, there are some counterexamples, but as a whole, it's simpler.
04:38
Speaker 1
So there are some people who have tried to automate this before you.
04:42
Speaker 2
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 an industrial fishery sitting there doing this by hand.
04:55
Speaker 1
Okay. So where do you get the idea, I'm going to build a machine to kill fish more humanely?
05:03
Speaker 2
You know, for this part, I wish I had something more romantic than thinking, why not solve the problem directly? Yeah. Again, which is an engineering response and fix the root cause, which is build something that can actually do that process.
05:16
Speaker 1
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's a sort of narrow, a middle ground where you're landing, which is, it's okay to kill fish to eat them, but we shouldn't make them suffer gratuitously. Like, did you immediately go to that middle ground?
05:44
Speaker 2
I did. I do believe that some genetics are designed to, they've co-evolved with eating meat.
05:52
Speaker 1
So, okay. Now you're on the path of building the machine.
05:57
Speaker 2
Yeah.
05:59
Speaker 1
Tell me about the nail and the plastic fish. Yeah.
06:04
Speaker 2
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 dorm room, taped a nail to the end of it, and using some open source computer vision tools, not, again, super technical, but 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 got in and took the company full time in early 2022.
06:43
Speaker 1
Got into Y Combinator.
06:45
Speaker 2
Yeah, that was the impetus for halving the capital to really take it full-time.
06:50
Speaker 1
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. Just tell me what are those boats. Tell me what's happening. Like, wherever you want it to be, whatever kind of fish. But give me something specific.
07:05
Speaker 2
Yeah, let's throw out, like, our bread and butter is a trap boat that's catching black cod. 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'll pull them up, you know, each net by net. 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. Okay. We have a computer vision layer that, you know, from a camera that's running constantly that will scan the fish. Okay. figure out the species and then, okay, if it's this species, then this is a 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 they 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.
08:07
Speaker 1
What's the machine look like?
08:09
Speaker 2
So we say it's like a refrigerator. In practical reality, it's 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. Okay. And it is, for all intents and purposes, a black box. We put fish in, flop it around, it comes out limp. 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.
08:37
Speaker 1
Okay.
08:37
Speaker 2
Because if you have different lighting systems, it makes the AI less reliable.
08:42
Speaker 1
Makes sense. Makes sense.
08:43
Speaker 2
And then, yeah, the fish comes straight out. So you can hear the process happening, of course. But outside that, the producers and the harvesters don't see what's happening.
08:54
Speaker 1
Does this system change the number of fish that a boat can catch and kill in a day?
08:59
Speaker 2
So the way that fishing is regulated is through a 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 fishermen 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 fish does not change. That is also why we do not work with every single vessel, because there are some vessels, like these massive commodity boats, that 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 volume.
09:32
Speaker 1
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. One of your engineers, I guess, was a co-author, right, of studying this device you built to automate killing fish in this more human way and comparing it to the sort of manual Ikejime and, like, asphyxiation, the tradition.
10:00
Speaker 2
Right?
10:01
Speaker 1
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. Ikejime had 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?
10:36
Speaker 2
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. First of all, that paper was from early 2023 and from the studies that just didn't get published till later. And we've made a lot of improvements into the machine and process and 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, don't quote me, hard quote me on this, but I'd say it's like around once every 20 to 30, maybe even 40 seconds per fish. That's too long, right? Yeah.
11:10
Speaker 1
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 asphyxiating in the traditional way.
11:17
Speaker 2
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 dial in 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 cod, the smallest you're getting is like two pounds that you can pull out the water, and the largest is like 15, right? And so that breadth means a very broad voltage range that 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 basically tasing the fish, but it's still conscious and going to continue to flop around. And so what we'd rather do is just not add an extra part of the process, but improve the speed for the fish and how fast we can do it. And so now it's 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 is to handle the fish. And so the data isn't necessarily reflective of all the conversations that were happening in the background.
12:32
Speaker 1
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. And 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?
12:59
Speaker 2
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 the latest on what it compares to versus handy Kijime.
13:10
Speaker 1
So let me ask, how well does it work now?
13:13
Speaker 2
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 their brain. But in terms of being able to get implied loss of consciousness, which is the fish going limp, which is destroying the brain or things like that. You know, we're hitting, again, not 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.
13:46
Speaker 1
And that happens like in the ocean, in the real world?
13:49
Speaker 2
Yeah, that's in, you know, all the machines are deployed on vessels out in the ocean.
13:54
Speaker 1
Yeah.
13:56
Speaker 2
Um.
13:57
Speaker 1
So we've been talking about the, let's call it the ethical side or the suffering of the fish. That is what we have been talking about. I know you talk a lot about the quality of the fish, you know, setting aside, do 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. Tell me about that side.
14:20
Speaker 2
Yeah, there are a couple of things we can open up into here. Quality by itself doesn't mean anything. Much, right? Is it quality in terms of shelf life? Is it about texture? Is it about flavor? Is it about nutrient density? Right? It's a very abstract term.
14:34
Speaker 1
I mean, I've seen you mention shelf life before. 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.
14:46
Speaker 2
Yeah. We do internal rigor mortis studies that we share with customers. We haven't released it yet, but that's part of the reason we've been able to get Many large retailers as they believe the data.
14:59
Speaker 1
But when you say rigor mortis, like that's time to rigor mortis from death?
15:04
Speaker 2
Yes. And that's very well understood to be a proxy for the stress that the animal goes through before it passes away, as well as in turn a proxy for the shelf life and the texture after the rigor mortis peak has been reached.
15:21
Speaker 1
I'm actually more interested in the sort of outcome measures that a chef or a person cooking fish at home would care about?
15:28
Speaker 2
Well, so chefs are going to be looking at rigor mortis. They just don't call it that. Animals, you know, and actually meat in general, goes through something that I like to draw akin to ripening, in that basically, you know, people will hold fish up, and when it has entered rigor, 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 and retail will associate that with freshness. And so then when the fish goes into rigor... Even though it's sitting in your palm, it should be limp over. It's actually completely parallel to the ground. And so it's very rigid. Basically, once that starts, when 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 of the animal begins. So it's not really a proxy for whether the fish is bad or not. It's kind of like the start of the time. And so we both delay that time as well as delay, in turn, the biological breakdown time. So a suffocated fish will go into peak rigor a couple of hours after passing away, called two to four hours. Hour process is like a 35 to 38 hour time to rigor.
16:31
Speaker 1
Compared to two to four for a standard commercial fishery.
16:34
Speaker 2
Exactly.
16:35
Speaker 1
So that's a big difference. The difference between four hours and 35 hours is quite large.
16:39
Speaker 2
Exactly.
16:40
Speaker 1
What does that mean for people eating that fish?
16:43
Speaker 2
So we suggest to retailers that they get anywhere from twice to thrice the use of shelf lives. How much they pass on to the consumer is not necessarily under control and how much we know about, 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 that's processed 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 in our method that you can look for benefits.
17:26
Speaker 1
We'll be back in just a minute. Let's talk about where you are now. Um, How many of your machines are out in boats today or this week or this month?
17:54
Speaker 2
Yeah, I'd probably say about 20 vessels, you know, with a couple of them having two. And then we're expecting to get to 25 peak this year with other robots being built because we need spares and test units and so.
18:09
Speaker 1
On and so on. And where are they and what kind of fish are they? Humanely killed, hopefully humanely killed.
18:17
Speaker 2
So they're deployed across the country from Alaska down to California. Most of them being the Pacific Northwest or Alaska. And then, um, Texas up to Boston, but mostly in the Gulf.
18:28
Speaker 1
And what kind of fish?
18:30
Speaker 2
Black cod is our bread and butter. Um, 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 sockeye salmon. We just announced that recently. We have Pacific cod, rockfish, vermilion rockfish, red snapper, a couple other bycatch species in the Gulf, and black sea bass in the Northeast.
18:53
Speaker 1
And what's the business model?
18:55
Speaker 2
So we give the machines to fishermen for free. It's structured as a lease, but they pay $ 0 per the payments. And then we buy the fish. We have right of first refusal on all the fish that they process with it. And then we sell that fish under our brand. you know, the parent company being Shinkie, the technology company that develops all the IP, that all employees are underneath. We have a subsidiary called the Ceremony Fish, and we call the fish Ceremony Grade, as a nod to, like, Ceremony Grade Matcha. And the kind of idea there is... I.
19:27
Speaker 1
Should say Ceremony has an S at the beginning and an I at the end.
19:31
Speaker 2
Yes, exactly.
19:31
Speaker 1
Yes, yes, yes. Kind of vaguely Japanese, yeah.
19:34
Speaker 2
I think that's the way that you anglicize how the Japanese say Ceremony in Japanese, but so that's kind of the way we chose to spell that way. And we came up with ceremony grade as this kind of marker for quality and, you know, something that we believe we can stand for because, you know, 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 caught in or the type of gear or so on. And, When you look at cattle or poultry, like in beef, you have grass-fed, USD choice, USD prime. For chicken, you have pasture-raised or similar, right? And there's not really an analog to process for fish, only for genetics. And so that was where we saw that there was an opportunity. That's alternative from the sustainability certification that exists, ASC, MSC, which all do a great job but are really focused on sustainability.
20:34
Speaker 1
So... I am your customer, I think, depending on how much more it costs than regular fish. Like, I buy pasture-raised chicken. Great. And I don't even know if it tastes better. It doesn't taste different to me. But 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.
21:00
Speaker 2
Right.
21:01
Speaker 1
It seems quite bad.
21:02
Speaker 2
So....
21:06
Speaker 1
I mean, as a potential customer, like the obvious questions to me are, one, how much more expensive is it?
21:13
Speaker 2
So I don't want to deflect the question, but it's very dependent on SKU. I'll give you some numbers as an example.
21:19
Speaker 1
Salmon.
21:20
Speaker 2
So our salmon is probably 15% more than commodity.
21:24
Speaker 1
Oh. That's not so much more. I feel like pasteurized chicken, 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 make money at that level? Did the unit economics work.
21:39
Speaker 2
For you there? Yeah. So we've gone from economy to scale. We have our own infrastructure. We vertically integrated more. We can actually offer a price that is not quite at par with commodity, but for the process and rolling into it, and the brand and the quality that we stand for in handling. All those things do need a little bit more of a premium to cover. But is that a scale where we can do millions of pounds and still find homes for the fish?
22:03
Speaker 1
Honestly, that's a lower premium than I expected. Do you find people are willing to pay it?
22:11
Speaker 2
I do find that people want to pay it. I think retailers need a lot of evidence before they expand programs. So we start at a 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.
22:29
Speaker 1
Is it like fancy restaurants?
22:32
Speaker 2
Initially, yes. Although now, you know, it's kind of like white tablecloth, but not super expensive, you know? So we're not focused on the Michelin three star, you know, that was very much at a time, you know, 2024, 2025, where we were focused. But today, you know, we're hoping for the kind of You know, there's this difference I call for between premium and luxury, where luxury you're paying for more of an experience and an emotion than 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, fish 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.
23:21
Speaker 1
So the one other thing that I feel like would be useful for me is some kind of third-party certification. Like, I 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.
23:49
Speaker 2
Meat.
23:50
Speaker 1
Is that a possibility for your fish?
23:55
Speaker 2
The question I'd ask is who's a third party? And so that's part of why we have to design our own standard.
24:01
Speaker 1
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 a third party is economically a nice structure. And I know there are problems who's paying them and there are always problems. But it does seem useful. There's a reason we have them in many domains like yours.
24:26
Speaker 2
You 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, robotics as a service, as many people do, and then we become that third party. But, you know, and each individual retailer does have their own audits where any clients that we make, they have to back up. So, you know, for a major nationwide retailer, you know, we would be submitting lots of paperwork across where the fish is coming from, what traceability data do we have, what's the shelf life, we'll give them samples, I'll do the studies, I'll back up the claims. And only after all jumping through all those hoops, then we get approved to be a vendor and so on.
25:03
Speaker 1
Yeah, so in that universe, the retailer is the third party.
25:06
Speaker 2
Exactly. But if chefs don't like the fish, they wouldn't buy it. That's the other part to it.
25:11
Speaker 1
Well, so, I mean, that's separating the, like, how does the fish taste versus how much did the fish suffer, right? And the thing I'm thinking about is how much did the fish suffer? And I understand your claim that those two are related, but, like, they could be weakly related, right? Are other people doing anything like what you're doing? Is there an industry of sort of humanely killed fish?
25:36
Speaker 2
There are mechanical companies that focus on industrial automation, but it's mostly for factory farming, right? In the context there, the fish are like 18, 20 generations of the same genetics. And because of that, they're very much bred to size and bred to morphology, which means that 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 exsanguinating the animal. Instead, you can, like we mentioned earlier, stun it with electricity. We just found that, you know, It doesn't necessarily match the industrial throughput that you need.
26:27
Speaker 1
So you're saying nobody else is doing it for wild fish because it's hard and you figured it out and nobody else has.
26:32
Speaker 2
I wouldn't say we've a hundred percent figured out. Like we can't do like massive commodity boats just yet. Right. Because even that volume is really high.
26:42
Speaker 1
Right.
26:42
Speaker 2
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 it's our first time going on for a full season where the boat's not coming back for a couple of months.
26:55
Speaker 1
So you're worried that the machine is going to break? You're going to have to send an engineer out on a helicopter or something to fix it?
27:02
Speaker 2
Because it's the first time we are sending an engineer out there, but it's one of those opportunities that if we win that, then that's a great precedent to set for trying larger and larger boats as well. And so I'm not saying that I'm going to be the first person to say, We have conquered this problem and no one else has solved it. 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, we believe that we have a product that can handle the fish really effectively, can generate the quality shelf life benefits that we claim under the theoretical underpinnings of which come from this inspiration from this artisanal process in Japan.
27:44
Speaker 1
How much fish are you going to sell this year?
27:46
Speaker 2
I can't give you a hard number, so I can give you an indicative amount, which is a couple million pounds.
27:53
Speaker 1
I don't know if that's a lot or a little. How many pounds of fish does America buy in a year?
27:59
Speaker 2
I think the data I can recall is about 9 billion pounds of fish a year. For us to call it a couple million pounds is a great proof of concept, but there's a long way to go for us to be a major player, you know?
28:19
Speaker 1
Yeah, yeah. Yeah, yeah. 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. Like, what's at the top of the list of things you're worried about right now?
28:34
Speaker 2
Well, we have a hard business to build, which is we're building an industrial robotics company in a very demanding environment while also building a consumer brand, and a perishable logistics supply chain. So, like, in each one of those, you probably have many risks. So, you know, I'll be the first to say it's hard, but, you know, solve hard problems and get big rewards, right?
28:55
Speaker 1
That's the opposite of play stupid games, win stupid prizes.
28:58
Speaker 2
Exactly.
28:59
Speaker 1
Play hard, interesting games. Yeah.
29:01
Speaker 2
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 could stick with longer term. That's kind of the main engineering focus right now. And then, you know, on the perishable logistics side, you know, that's very much an economies of scale business.
29:23
Speaker 1
Didn't you just buy a big fish processing plant factory in Washington? Is that part of this story that you're talking about right now?
29:30
Speaker 2
Exactly, yeah. So we feasibly could have bought one four or five times the size and try to fill it out. But we decided to find one that's on the smaller end. In fact, a company that's up because they really hit a large scale they were selling this plant because this is what they this was their very first plant and so we're kind of following in their footsteps in that way so that's 16,000 square feet it's in Tacoma which is just outside of Seattle the great benefit of Having that vertical integration is we have a little bit 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 consumers to be able to buy the frozen versions of the fish.
30:12
Speaker 1
So what's the what's the like happy story of where you are in five years? Like if it if it works, what will it look like?
30:23
Speaker 2
Put it simply, 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 price. I don't think you need to complicate it more than that. It's ultimately a 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 similar method. Yeah.
30:57
Speaker 1
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.
31:06
Speaker 2
I don't know.
31:07
Speaker 1
I don't know how much, and people are, whatever, things happen, right? Like, for you, is that a good world or a bad world? If, 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. Mm-hmm. Does that make you happy or sad?
31:23
Speaker 2
It 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 with a lot of big companies. And all of them are working with our technology. And we maybe adjust the business 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.
31:49
Speaker 1
You wanted to sell the robots, sell the machines.
31:51
Speaker 2
Exactly.
31:52
Speaker 1
That was your first model. Seems way easier to build that business, right? Like, buy my machine is way easier than, like, we're going to create a fish brand and buy a fish processing plant and sell it to restaurants. Like, that seems like a way harder business.
32:07
Speaker 2
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 creating. 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 we're starting to get some traction. And so the hope is over the next one to two years, these big processors, these big dock buyers, the big fishing unions will come to us and potentially partner with us. And that's a little bit of a roundabout way to get to the end goal, but as long as we get to the end goal.
32:50
Speaker 1
We'll be back in a minute with the lightning round. The ads are over. Now we're going to do the lightning round. Is it true that you and your grandfather have matching tattoos?
33:11
Speaker 2
So same theme tattoo. They're both anchors. Um, I just have a different style of anchor. Mine is an American traditional sailor tattoo, it's a Sailor Jerry one. He just has like a gray, or had, now that he's passed, but he has a gray, like a normal line tattoo.
33:26
Speaker 1
Tell me about your grandfather having a tattoo. It's unusual for a grandfather, in my experience.
33:32
Speaker 2
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 had told him not to get one, and he just decided to walk in and get one. And 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 I got it, in contrast, was a little more intentional, which is, you know, I moved to the U.S. 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 my own spin on it. And so... The one that I have is the Sailor Jerry one, which, you know, Sailor 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, funnily enough, I guess now saying it out loud, it kind of has a bit of a nod to Shinkei.
34:30
Speaker 1
Give me one piece of fisherman wisdom.
34:33
Speaker 2
Don't bring a banana on a boat.
34:37
Speaker 1
Tell me more.
34:38
Speaker 2
Yeah, it's an old sailor. story for bad luck and I think it comes from the fact that bananas carry fruit flies with a higher percentage and so people would bring bananas and the flies would like lay larvae eggs and they would basically eat all the food and supplies and so if you run out of them for a certain amount and they go rotten you have to turn around.
35:00
Speaker 1
It's a bad luck I thought it was I thought it was slipping on the peel when you said that it's.
35:05
Speaker 2
Probably there too exactly I guess in contrast, you should definitely bring oranges so you can stave off scurvy if you're going to go for a long trip.
35:14
Speaker 1
Good fruit tips from fishermen. Tell me about your houseplant game.
35:21
Speaker 2
Wow, you did your research.
35:23
Speaker 1
That's great.
35:25
Speaker 2
Yeah. So I actually have a bunch of aloe vera. That's kind of inspiration for my mom that I use 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. Um, and I love other people having, you know, whenever I go into someone's home, feeling a little bit more Zen, it feels just that extra bit of integrated into nature.
35:58
Speaker 1
Do you think plants are sentient?
36:02
Speaker 2
I actually do. I love you asking these questions. Um, Yeah, I don't know if it's the same density of sentience that I would call, you know, an animal would have or something similar. You know, they exhibit behavior, right? You shine light, you know, and they'll grow towards the light. They have been able to communicate in long distances. And so, again, it's hard to kind of prescribe, you know, is that sentience or not? Yeah, it's hard to describe what that really means. Yeah.
36:33
Speaker 1
They definitely have preferences. They definitely have preferences.
36:37
Speaker 2
Yeah.
36:38
Speaker 1
If you weren't doing the job that you're doing, if you weren't in fish, what would you be doing?
36:46
Speaker 2
You know, if someone just asked me this question, I'll tell you the answer. Probably run a dairy farm in New Zealand. Peace and quiet.
36:55
Speaker 1
Is that true or is that just like your escape fantasy when your job seems really hard?
36:59
Speaker 2
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.
37:09
Speaker 1
What was the hardest thing about working as a deckhand?
37:12
Speaker 2
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, and that's part of the excitement and also part of the disappointment when things do or don't go well.
37:33
Speaker 1
Thank you for your time. I really appreciate it. For sure.
37:35
Speaker 2
Thank you.
37:43
Speaker 1
Fave Khawaja is the co-founder and CEO of Shinkai. Please email us at problem at pushkin.fm. Tell us what kinds of shows we should do more of or less of or particular people you think would be good on the show. You can also find me on X and on LinkedIn at Our show is produced by Gabriel Hunter Chang and Trina Menino. Our editor is Lydia Jean Cott, and our engineer is Sarah Bruguier. I'm Jacob Goldstein, and we'll be back next week with another episode of What's Your Problem?
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