this morning, meet the woman asking very tough questions of big data and getting some very interesting answers. reporter turned author ben paar tells you how to capture the market's attention without shouting. and josh tetric tells us why only a certain kind of investor should ever consider hot new start-up hampton creek foods. with reporters anna kuchler

this week on "press here." good morning, everyone i'm scott mcgrew. my first guest is trying to change the way the world feeds itself. hampton creek foods wants to create all kinds of foods, but in the age-old question of which comes first, they started with the egg. the san francisco-based company makes a kind of mayonnaise though for reasons we may get to later, the word mayonnaise is up for debate. hampton creek recently started selling a cookie dough instead of egg in the dough, hampton creek uses canadian yellow peas. now, the man who put pea in your cookies is josh tetric founder and ceo of hampton creek. he's been on the show before. here to update us on the company's progress joined by j.p. now of mashable and hanna kuchler. i'm glad you laughed at my 11-year-old joke. i couldn't resist.

that said your food is very pure. you are doing alternative foods, but you're not doing meat in a petrie dish, right? >> no. we're doing food to figure out how to get rid of food. how do we get rid of bad food and our answer is you make the thing that is better for one's body, that's better for the environment. we've got a big drought here in california uses less water. you make that food taste a lot better. and you make it a lot less expensive. and our view is the only way you get a shift is when that good thing becomes better than the bad thing. we've done that for mayo emphasis on the "o," cookies and lots of other things. >> you could do that with chemicals, though, could you not? you could do that with stuff grown in a petrie dish. it doesn't have to be canadian yellow peas. >> what we do is to say there are 400,000 plant species in the world, scott. 400,000. we got addicted for lots of different reasons that you guys

probably know, soy in corn lots of water, lots of land. we opened it up. we could canadian pea, sorghum in the midwest, navy beans. we don't need to synthesize or mess with it. we can use what nature has provided. >> i want to focus on scrambled eggs. i've had the mayo and cookie dough, but the scrambled eggs i understand are trickier to do. >> yeah we're about a year off. >> we're a year off. >> i want my team to be encouraged by your question and excitement on it. the last thing in the world we want to do is release something that is less than what is out there. we think we can make it actually better. we want to make when we put that out, we want it to be better than free-range eggs. the color, the taste, be less expensive than the not-so good way because, again, our philosophy is the only way you get shifts is if you make the good thing better. we don't want to be an alternative thing. that's not how you get the real change going. >> you know if your products

are comparably priced like the more standard -- >> less expensive. >> less expensive, does it cost less to make given all the research that's going into developing all this? >> yeah, here's why. you can look at the typical chicken/egg. 70% of the cost of every egg, whether it's in an omelette muffin or cookie regardless of how you use it 70% comes from two things, soy and corn. feed. and that feed, those prices are driven by land. they're driven by water. when there's a drought. prices go up of soy and corn. the feed is used to feed the animals. so it's a big cost issue. so what we do is try to look around the world for cost efficiencies. those also have to be better for the environment. we actually think better for our bodies too. yes, less cost. and that's just the first step. there's a lot we can continue doing across the chain to make it more affordable. the only way you make it win if it's less expensive. otherwise, just for, you know us and northern california and that's not how you really change

things. >> josh you bring up water. there was one claim. was it 1.5 million gallons of water that the company claims that it has saved in the sense that if you make a cookie that has, you know flour and egg and milk in it, there's water involved in the creation of those things. if you make a cookie that has canadian yellow pea, yes, that involves water for the pea plants as well. but far less. and you've calculated 1.5 million gallons saved. >> scott, it's actually 1.5 billion. >> billion, okay. very good. >> and here's why. so take one singular example. so today we're in walmart, we're in the dollar tree we're in target. we're also in whole foods, also in bi-rite, rainbow, walmarts in kentucky. our most impactful partnership is with a group called compass group. they do 4 billion meals a year. they run about 93% of the fortune 500 used to run their cafes. they're removing a product that uses a lot of water, land

hellmann's otis spunkmeyer cookie and they're saying let's move those products out, replace it with something that's better across the board. when you add it up with the others, that's the impact we're having. and that's just the start. >> i think we need to start to make those hard decisions. i mean i read somewhere that it takes a gallon of water to make an almond. i'm sure almond farmers are kind, decent human beings and california has a lot of almond farmers. maybe we can't grow almonds anymore. i mean maybe that's a hard decision that we need to make. maybe we need to move towards foods that are better for the environment and use less water. >> you know we've gotten so trapped in a mental model that tells us what we should be doing. you know just because we did it 20 years ago and 40 years ago doesn't mean given today's realities, that we have to do it today. we have a question we ask ourselves at hampton creek, what would it look like if we just started over? if you ejected the notions, the model, all of that stuff in our head that isn't necessarily true today, what would we do if we

wanted to feed people better and maybe it's the case that we look at somebody else rather than almonds. >> why did you go after eggs then? >> so many things. if you look at our to do system and you say what is screwed up there's a list that could fill this table really high. there are whole lots of sauces and dressings, lots of baked goods. i'm really interested i spent seven years of my life in sub saharan africa. millions of people don't even have a refrigerator. the world often ignore them even though they have purchasing power, although small. what does it look like to create new categories of food that are infused with proteins and micronutrients to feed them? what does that look like? it doesn't have to be a better version of what exists today. it could be something entirely different to help people a little bit. i think that's what's next for us. >> let me ask you, you just raise a large amount of funding $90 million back in december? >> yep. >> last winter. and a big part of obviously hampton creek's success moving forward will be getting on store

shelves. that being said you've named a number of retailers already. i'm curious to hear, you know a hard sell getting these retailers on board. does it remain a hard sell to do so? >> i think the biggest surprise j.p., is when you tell a compelling story about where food is going, about making it easier for regular people to eat well, whether you're a buyer at walmart or whether you're a buyer at rainbow grocery or whether you're executives of the largest foodservice company in the world, they get it. when you make it about a deeper why. now, if you say to them listen we have something that's 40% more expensive and it's really good for those people that care about it, good night. get out of here. next. what we've done to really build up that traction with them is tell them this authentic story about where we're going. and that's led to this massive distribution. that's led to good people saying if you're going to make it easier, let's do it. >> how do you cross that last bridge, that being getting from store shelves to pitch-in shelves? >> yeah. so it's a combination of things. it's telling our story at every single opportunity.

it's bringing in really influential people whether it's russell simmons or whether it's policy leaders or whether it's influential people in food to share our story, it's a target ads on facebook it's all sorts of ways it's moms communities getting together. >> let me jump in here because we have such little time left. a quitcritical question, one of the ways to get on store shelves would be to sell to unilever. that is not unrealistic. ben & jerry's sold to unilever. secondly you do have investors who are going to want a return. are they expecting that return based on you're going to sell to some large food corporation, or that you're going to grow this thing from the ground up until you are a large food corporation? >> yeah, you know we've been really careful. we're lucky to have people like martin bennioff invest in us. one of the wealthiest people in asia, kosla, co-founders of

facebook. they know that this is -- the goal is to be a permanent thing to have an indelible mark on the world, and that's what they want. and openly if unilever called me right after this and said we want to acquire you for $2.5 billion, i would say thanks. and i would say, you know that's not our path. and part of the reason is listen. i'm a zealot about this. this is infused right in my dna, in my team's dna who's watching this. we're doing this because this is an opportunity for us to have a massive shift, and that's what we want to do. >> josh i will leave you with a josh hetrick which calls you strapping. >> that's definitely a lie. >> josh says if you're going to invest in hampton creek, you are investing in a golly darn moonshot is what he says. i think golly darn is the word you used. you're not investing in hampton creek because you're going to make a little money. you're either going to make

nothing, or you are going to make something ton. says josh tetric about his company, hampton creek. thank you for being with us this morning. and we hope you make a golly darn ton of money. >> and do some good. >> thanks josh. big data can give us all kinds of answers about all kinds of things. that we know. the problem is how do you ask the question when "press here" continues.

welcome back to "press here." i hope you will not change the channel. but if you did, that action would be recorded by the cable company. and if you hit the wrong button on the remote that too, would be recorded. and if the cable company saw a trend, they'd actually fix the remote. each click of the remote is a data point. millions of clicks each day become big data. each pitch in a baseball game is a data point in a season of pitches become big data. the more information you have the more you can learn if you ask the question properly. ann johnson may not have all the answers, but she is an expert on how to ask the question. her company in toronto helps people ask questions of their data. i think sometimes you're going to have to put it in the perspective of google for me so that i understand exactly what it is you're doing. i go on google. i ask it a question. i want a fact of some sort. it returns that sort of thing.

is that what happens in big data? people ask questions of their big data and they get answers? >> so what happens right now is that when you ask questions of the data tools people have you have to be trained. there are special languages you ask the questions in. and when you ask the question it takes minutes, hours, sometimes even days to return the answer. so imagine if you were using google and you were searching the internet. and you knew it was going to take ten minutes to return the answer. >> that would be ridiculous. >> you'd use it differently. you would ask less questions. you know you'd say oh you know, be sure you spelled it right the first time right? and it really slows you down. and now what we're offering people is a data tool that gives you back answers in seconds. you can be sloppy ask whatever you want. you can start to be really creative and take risks when you ask questions. >> one example of something i could do via that versus old school or the more confined variations? >> well lots of things. one is you could do it on your

own. >> okay. >> so intron is a self-service analytics tool. you don't need to find an expert, have a data scientist sitting right next to you. and then you'd start asking lots of questions. you could ask really broad questions. and then you could start to narrow it down until you get just the right answer that's right for your company and your product. >> so you and your co-founder both came from facebook right? so what did you learn there about data? because they of course have tons and tons of data on us. >> yes. i didn't come from facebook. there's three co-founders. my two other co-founders came from facebook. and facebook is actually a really interesting data problem. they pull data from all over the world from all of your friends to load your web page in under a second. and that is a giant performance problem. and facebook came up with a lot of really innovative ways to make that work. and my cto and co-founder ran the whole back end team of facebook from when they scaled

from a million to a billion users. he's taking that same kind of performance mindset and applying it to what we're doing. >> is it possible that we're just getting too much data? i mean i understand this idea there's data coming in from all kinds of things. and we're going to get to the internet of things. is maybe the answer at some point going to be that as a corporation, i say, listen we've got to have a filter before we have a ridiculous amount of data. i understand big data gets you good answers on things. but there has got to be at some point a storage problem where it's gotten to be too much. >> oh it's a great question. so when a lot of the data tools people are using today were invented, it was in the '70s. in the '70s, data cost $200,000 a gigabyte. to store, and you know people stored a snapshot. >> the critical stuff. >> the critical stuff. your inventory, customer list. and then you know as storage got cheaper, it went from $200,000 a gigabyte to 2 cents a gigabyte today.

and as that change happened people started saving more and more snapshots. and today people are -- the snapshots have turned into a movie, into continuous time data. and that continuous time data gives you so much richer information, richer insights about how things are behaving machines, products sensors. you have a fitbit or apple watch and you want to know how many steps you're taking. people -- fitbit has maybe a million users. and they're taking a million steps. that's a trillion lines of data. >> and it is somehow usable? at some point doesn't it become noise? there's got to be some point in which we're getting so much data or is it all someday usable if you ask the right questions? >> depending on what question you're asking, all of that is usable. and the cool thing, if you save it all, you can look back and find things you never even thought to ask about. >> do you think that we might become too data dependent and stop being quite so creative though? if all we do is sort of a, b

test every decision? >> that's another great question. you could be. and so our tool is really meant as a person plus machine. like you're sitting there thinking about what your question might want to be. some people -- the data seems so big, some people just say can't an a.i. machine, come and decide these answers? we believe that before you get to that, you really need to have that human machine kind of cooperation where you're adding the creativity and the insight. >> do you think there's a point in which your system right now can handle "x" amount of data? i would assume there's some top end, isn't there? >> trillions of lines of data. >> trillions. but i could see in ten years that we have 10x as many data. are you going to be able to scale, to handle that? in other words i'm depending on you to manage my data but i'm going to have ten times as much data in five years? >> i think that's what makes our company really unique is we came out of that very large, you know, facebook mindset. and yes, we've actually built

this to scale. and people don't realize how fast data is growing. >> it's amazing. yes. >> it really is amazing. so we have a lot of different ways of dealing with that. an important one is that we allow you to choose how much you want to sample it. when you're sitting at your computer, you're, like, this is a lot of data. i don't need all of it right now, but i might need it all later. you might decide on your interface how much you want to query. >> ann johnson is ceo and founder of interana. up next the first person and for that matter the last person to ever wear google glass on this television show returns. our friend ben paar when "press here" continues.

welcome back to "press here." i hope that you are a longtime viewer but if you're new to us you should understand one of the selling points of this show is our reporters. yes, our guests are smart. but our reporters are just as smart. hanna to my right, oxford educated, and an expert on french history. many of our reporters have written books. matt leads the pack i think, with three books. sara lacey, two books. across the top there, joe in the corner of reuters, he's written one. "the times," john schwartz of "usa today." raef needleman of cnet all have

one book under their belt. to now we can add ben parr. he's been a regular here as well as a reporter at mashable. his book is "captivology." ben joins us now. as long as i'm handing out compliments, let's point out while hanna went to oxford, you were an eagle scout. >> that's true. >> which is a huge achievement, and i compliment you on that. all right. well, let me ask an easy question what's captivology? >> captivology is the science and psychology of attention and it's about how we pay attention to certain people and products. the real science behind it. and most of all how do you utilize that science to capture attention for your ideas promptsprompt projects and attention. >> how do you keep it? >> yeah. why do you want to write a book like this when we've got thousands of books on public speaking and making friends and influencing people. what's different about captivology? >> the biggest difference is the science. a lot of these books -- i didn't

want to write a marketing book. i went through thousands of research studies and interviewed dozens of ph.d.s on psychology neurology to understand it and created a new model for attention and how it get as plied to the daily world. it's a completely different understanding of how it works. >> bear with me, you break it down to seven sort of key aspects, right? >> yes. >> can you briefly run those by? >> the first one is auto authenticity. how you react to automatic sounds and sensations. >> can i point out the last time you were on the show you wore going glass. and this time you have covered me in confetti. yes, there is you with google glass and now confetti. ben parr if you weren't such a nice guy, i would -- continue your point. >> did i capture your attention? >> you captured my attention. >> but that's the first thing. just immediate attention. so we were talking about there's these seven different triggers that capture attention across

three different stages. for example, disruption trigger which is how we pay attention to things that violate our expectations of the world. >> such as letting off -- >> yes. >> -- confetti. >> i talk a lot in the book about how long-term interest is the real key because it's not just about getting people to turn their heads. it's about how do you get people to become fans and customers. so i talk about things like acknowledgment. it's one of the most powerful triggers in my book and how we pay attention to the things that validate us and provide us with acknowledgment and empathy. >> there's one in the color. did you pick the color of your shirt? it's a lovely color. did you pick that based on the intention of the psychology of color? >> you got me. there's so much interesting science on color alone. i could have written a whole book on just that. >> give me an example. what's a good color for our logo? we're having a start-up. we've got to choose a color for our logo. >> i'll ask a question, see if you know this. if you're a hitchhiker on the side of the road and you want the best chance of being picked

what color shirt should you wear? >> red. >> blue. >> yellow. >> everyone says a different color until someone says naked. >> good point. >> the answer is it's gender specific. if you're a man, most dark colors will work because of the contrast. if you're a woman and there is literally a french scientist who did a study, he found on average women with six different color shirts would be picked up 13% of the time except the color red 21% of the time. it's because of a romantic association we have with red. you put a cigarette border around a person's face, it's several points more attractive. >> so do we make our start-up color red? youtube is red. by the way, a little trivia youtube is the exact same color red as caltrain. did you know that? yes, it was on purpose. yes, no it really was. chad hurley picked it because he liked the caltrain logo. >> it depends on the associations you want. for example, black is the highest correlation at least in u.s. culture with luxury. while orange and yellow are highly correlated with excitement. but low correlation with competence. it's about which color choice

makes sense. more importantly is the associations we have long term with a logo. in fact, there was a study that found that if you put the disney logo and ibm logo in front of somebody, people will be more creative when they're exposed to just the disney logo for a fraction of a second. >> wow. you learned some of this at mashable, too. j.p. was with fortune, has a fine new job at mashable. you were co-editor at mashable until you went on to write books and also become a venture capitalist as well. mashable is excellent. at grabbing attention. you know and as are several others buzzfeed et cetera. you know the one thing doctors don't want you to know. you must have learned some of the science at mashable. >> absolutely. first of all, congratulation. you joined one of the greatest media organizations ever. i'm biased. for example, you know when we first really started out with mashable, a lot of it was actually the teaching aspect of social media. i literally wrote a blog post. you can find this. 20 ways to share a blog post.

and talk about things like myspace which was the biggest one at the time. but when we started teaching our audience providing real value guess what the first thing they shared was? was mashable. i learned a lot of things about what kind of start-ups succeeded and what kind failed. why certain products really kept in the press and others didn't. it was definitely the basis of the beginnings of how i got to be able to write this book. >> ben parr is the author of "captivology." we always are interested in having you on the show because you constantly get our attention. thanks for being with us this morning. "press here" will be back in just a moment.

it's back! xfinity watchathon week. the biggest week in television history. it's your all-access binge-watching pass to tv's hottest shows free with xfinity on demand. xfinity watchathon week. now through april 12th. perfect for people who really love tv. that's our show for this week. my thanks to my guests. before we go, i do want to acknowledge our rather irregular schedule lately. it's one of the down sides of working in california. our pacific time zone means sporting events that start at noon on the east coast preempt us from time to time. and that's going to happen again

one more time next week. and after that we're back to a reasonably regular schedule. i'm scott mcgrew. thank you for making us part of your sunday morning. ♪ "press here" is sponsored in part by barracuda. security and storage solutions that simplify i.t. city national bank. providing loans and lines of credit to help northern california businesses grow.

damian trujillo: hello, and welcome to comunidad del valle. i am damian trujillo and today on the show, moises "the hawk" benitez, a local boxer, is here, plus dr. francisco jimenez on your comunidad del valle. [music] male announcer: nbc bay area presents "comunidad del valle" with damian trujillo. damian: we begin today with the monthly visit of the office of the mexican consulate in san jose. jorge agraz is the cónsul de asuntos economicos. jorge agraz: right. damian: y políticos at the mexican consulate office here in san jose. bienvnenido al programa otra vez. jorge: muchas gracias. damian: now, there are a lot of things that are happening at the consulate. you're kind of in charge of, one of the things you're in charge of is making sure that people who might want to start their own business kind of gets the help, and you get them started in that process, is that correct? jorge: yes, exactly, damian. right now we have a workshop for entrepreneurs, for hispanics and with low income families who want