In this episode of Built Human, we sit down with Ben Katz, co-founder and CEO of HYBRD, a friend of ours from our college days and Jon's old coworker from back at Wayfair. HYBRD is an AI training app for people chasing strength and endurance at the same time, and Ben is the rare fitness-tech founder who keeps arguing the human part is what matters most.

He ran growth at WHOOP, finished a full Ironman while building the company, and started the whole thing off a spreadsheet of his own workouts.

We get into:

• What a "hybrid athlete" actually is, training strength and endurance at once, and why Ben built for it
• His own path: 12 varsity letters, D3 lacrosse, a marathon he entered on a lost bet, a 50K for his sister's charity, and a full Ironman
• Going from running growth at WHOOP to founding HYBRD, and the spreadsheet that started it
• The scrappy Y Combinator launch: a Stripe link, a TestFlight invite, and no accounts, running to their laptops to let people in
• Doing an Ironman in year one of building, stacking user calls onto stationary-bike sessions
• How the AI coach actually works, and why the best training plan is the one you'll actually follow
• The honest part: when the data starts running you, and why he still tells people to put the devices down
• Why he thinks the future of coaching stays human, with AI making the human coach better instead of replacing them
• Dual-wielding wearables, what six months of tracking teaches you, and when to leave the watch at home

It's a conversation about building technology that makes you more human, not less, from a founder who lives on both sides of that line.

Andrew & Jon

Referenced in this episode

• HYBRD: https://hybrd.com
• Ben Katz on LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/benjaminlkatz/
• Ben on Instagram and X, @hybrd_ben: https://www.instagram.com/hybrd_ben/
• HYBRD on Y Combinator (Fall 2024): https://www.ycombinator.com/companies/hybrd
• Complete Human Performance, Alex Viada, the hybrid-athlete coach HYBRD partnered with: https://completehumanperformance.com/

Social & Website

Built Human Instagram: @builthuman

Animal Base Instagram: @the.animalbase TikTok: @thenimalbase Website: Animalbase.com

Guest Ben Katz, Co-Founder & CEO, HYBRD Website: hybrd.com LinkedIn: Ben Katz Instagram / X: @hybrd_ben

In this episode of Built Human, we sit down with Alex Grant, COO of Foray Bioscience and a close friend of more than a decade. The three of us met back in college, where Alex went on to captain the swim team and later spent four years inside MIT's startup world helping scientists turn research into companies. Now he does it himself. Foray grows plants from a single cell: whole trees, seeds, and materials, to bring back species we're losing and rebuild supply chains without stripping nature to do it.

Alex even brought samples. Clusters of plant cells, lab-grown embryos, and red spruce trees started from scratch, held up to the camera.

We get into:

• What it actually means to grow a plant, or a whole tree, from a single cell
• Why so much of the global economy, about $44 trillion in value, depends on nature and the plants underneath it
• The seed shortage that quietly holds back forest restoration
• Cell-based growth versus genetic modification, explained in plain terms
• Bringing back the American chestnut, a tree that once made up a third of eastern US forests
• A UC Davis study on how much "100% avocado oil" is actually cut with seed oils
• How incentive structures and the age of information pull people onto autopilot
• Pando, Foray's AI platform, and how it collapses billions of possible experiments
• Why Alex left the investing side to go operate a company taking on a problem this big

It's a conversation about using technology to protect nature instead of replacing it, and about staying awake enough to tell the difference. Exactly the kind of thing we started Built Human to talk about.

Andrew & Jon

Referenced in this episode

• Foray Bioscience: https://foraybio.com/
• SilvaBio and Foray, American chestnut collaboration: https://www.biospace.com/press-releases/silvabio-and-foray-bioscience-announce-collaboration-to-accelerate-restoration-of-the-american-chestnut
• Can fabricated seeds restore the American chestnut? (Concord Monitor): https://www.concordmonitor.com/2026/07/06/can-fabricated-seeds-restore-the-american-chestnut-tree/
• The Engine, MIT's tough-tech accelerator: https://engine.xyz/
• SUNY ESF American chestnut project: https://www.esf.edu/chestnut/
• The Nature Conservancy, red spruce restoration: https://www.nature.org/en-us/about-us/where-we-work/priority-landscapes/appalachians/stories/red-spruce-forest-restoration/
• World Economic Forum, half of global GDP depends on nature (2020): https://www.weforum.org/press/2020/01/half-of-world-s-gdp-moderately-or-highly-dependent-on-nature-says-new-report/
• Tree seedling supply shortage (Frontiers in Forests and Global Change): https://www.frontiersin.org/journals/forests-and-global-change/articles/10.3389/ffgc.2021.629198/full
• American Chestnut Foundation, Darling line background: https://tacf.org/darling-58/
• Pando, the world's largest living organism: https://www.livescience.com/planet-earth/plants/pando-the-worlds-largest-tree-and-heaviest-living-organism
• UC Davis, avocado oil adulteration study: https://www.ucdavis.edu/food/news/avocado-oil-chip-youre-eating-may-not-be-made-pure-avocado-oil
• HigherDOSE Red Light Shower Filter: https://higherdose.com/products/red-light-showerhead-filter

Social & Website

Built Human Instagram: @builthuman

Animal Base Instagram: @the.animalbase TikTok: @thenimalbase Website: Animalbase.com

Guest Alex Grant, COO, Foray Bioscience Website: foraybio.com LinkedIn: Alex Grant and Ashley Beckwith

Losing the weight is one story. Keeping it off, through three pregnancies in under three years, is a different one. Kylie Stafford is still living the second one out loud.

In this episode of Built Human, Andrew and Jon talk with digital creator Kylie Stafford, who lost 120 lbs naturally after years of yo-yo dieting. She's a rare kind of guest: someone still moving through it, not teaching from a finished stance. They get into her story, then widen out to the GLP-1 weight-regain problem, the electrolyte labels that pass and the ones that don't, and why extremes market so much better than moderation.

If you've lost the weight before and watched it come back, or you're in the middle of the fight right now, Kylie's honesty about what actually held is worth your time.

What we cover:

→ Kylie's story, from 279.4 lbs to 120 lbs down in 13 months, with three babies in 32 months
→ What yo-yo dieting actually does, and what finally broke the cycle
→ The GLP-1 and Ozempic question: how fast the weight comes back, and why
→ Electrolytes on trial: the labels that pass and the mainstream ones that don't
→ Why extremes are easy to market and moderation isn't, and what that costs people
→ Food addiction versus nutrition, and where the real line sits

Mentioned in this episode:

Washington Post, GLP-1 weight regain, Jan 2026: https://www.washingtonpost.com/wellness/2026/01/08/ozempic-wegovy-weight-regain-glp1/

Women's Health, "Why Wellness Went Carnivore," May 2026: https://www.womenshealthmag.com/food/a71075620/wellness-industry-carnivore-eating-shift/

Hall et al., ultra-processed food study, Cell Metabolism 2019: https://www.cell.com/cell-metabolism/fulltext/S1550-4131(19)30248-7

Follow Built Human at @builthuman for the most thought-provoking moments from the show and the small reminders worth carrying into your week.

Your guest and hosts: Kylie Stafford is a digital creator who lost 120 lbs naturally, at @kyliejocarnivore. Andrew Coca is the CEO of Evolved Technologies, a pro-human technologist building technology that keeps people's health intact, at @andrew__coca. Jon Marchetti is the Director of Animal Base, documenting his own journey at @jon__marchetti.

For more on Animal Base, the curated marketplace built around what you eat, how you live, and how you rest, visit animalbase.com.

Most of what we eat, we eat without deciding. Tatiana Timofeyev decided a long time ago, and she can tell you exactly why every choice earns its place on the plate.

In this episode of Built Human, Andrew and Jon sit down with nutrition coach Tatiana Timofeyev to get into the decision-making framework behind how she eats, what she took from trading notes with the real-food community at Meatstock, and the conversation she rarely gets to have in public: what real nutrition looks like through pregnancy, when the stakes stop being about you alone.

If you've ever eaten something you knew wasn't serving you and couldn't quite say why, this one gets into the why.

What we cover:

→ How Tati actually decides what to eat, and the framework underneath it
→ What she took away from Meatstock, and the voices shaping the real-food conversation
→ Nervousness around the stage and speaking, and the reframes that changed it
→ Pregnancy nutrition most people never hear laid out: protein, heme iron, B12, DHA and EPA, choline, folate, and the honest gap on vitamin C
→ What she's testing right now, from organ meats to raw dairy to electrolytes
→ Why the guest's own psychology often isn't most people's, and what to do about that

Mentioned in this episode:

Mayo Clinic, Pregnancy Nutrition: https://www.mayoclinic.org/healthy-lifestyle/pregnancy-week-by-week/in-depth/pregnancy-nutrition/art-20045082

British Nutrition Foundation briefing paper, Hart et al., July 2025: https://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/10.1111/nbu.70016

Follow Built Human at @builthuman for the most thought-provoking moments from the show and the small reminders worth carrying into your week.

Your guest and hosts: Tatiana Timofeyev is a nutrition coach at @meatbasedtati. Andrew Coca is the CEO of Evolved Technologies, a pro-human technologist building technology that keeps people's health intact, at @andrew__coca. Jon Marchetti is the Director of Animal Base, documenting his own journey at @jon__marchetti.

For more on Animal Base, the curated marketplace built around what you eat, how you live, and how you rest, visit animalbase.com.

Luke Larson, President of Modern.tech, sits down with Andrew and Jon for a grounded conversation on pro-human technology. Where AI is actually going. What fast adoption means for normal jobs. Why some of the people closest to this work are the ones being most careful about how they use it.

Three technologists, talking honestly about the tools they help build and the tools they choose not to use.

What we cover:

→ What "pro-human technology" actually means, and what it looks like in practice → Where AI is actually heading, and what it changes day to day → Screen time and sleep, and the data nobody talks about → AI companions and the teen loneliness problem → How three working technologists draw the line at home → What building a company really cost Luke, and what he changed

Mentioned in this episode:

Zhong et al., screen time and sleep (JAMA Network Open): https://pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/articles/PMC11950897/

OpenAI and MIT Media Lab on AI emotional connection (APA writeup): https://www.apa.org/monitor/2026/01-02/trends-digital-ai-relationships-emotional-connection

Follow Built Human at @builthuman for the most thought-provoking moments from the show and the small reminders worth carrying into your week.

Your guest and hosts: Luke Larson is President of Modern.tech and has built and sold software companies alongside Andrew. Andrew Coca is the CEO of Evolved Technologies, a pro-human technologist building technology that keeps people's health intact, at @andrew__coca. Jon Marchetti is the Director of Animal Base, documenting his own journey at @jon__marchetti.

For more on Animal Base, the curated marketplace built around what you eat, how you live, and how you rest, visit animalbase.com.

Andrew Coca is still in the middle of his story. A pro-human technologist building Animal Base, running Modern.tech, and rebuilding his own health, all at once. In this episode Andrew walks Jon through where he came from, what almost cost him, where he is now, and what it actually looks like to do all three of those at the same time.

His story is personal, but it points at something structural. From there, Andrew and Jon turn to research showing only about 14% of packaged foods qualify as "healthy" under the FDA's own updated standard, and what that says about the system most people are trying to be good inside.

What we cover:

→ What "high performance" actually looked like behind the scenes
→ The symptoms Andrew dismissed for years and what they were really telling him
→ The moment that forced the change
→ Where Andrew is now, and what's still hard about doing this alongside the companies
→ What it looks like to build, train, and pursue health at the same time
→ What only 14% of packaged food clearing the FDA's own bar actually means
→ What Andrew would say to another founder running the same playbook

Mentioned in this episode:
"Only 14% of food qualifies as healthy by the FDA's own standard," published paper (Current Developments in Nutrition): https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S2475299125030070

Follow Built Human at @builthuman for the most thought-provoking moments from the show and the small reminders worth carrying into your week.

Your hosts: Andrew Coca is the founder of Animal Base and President of Modern.tech, a pro-human technologist building technology that keeps people's health intact, at @andrew__coca. Jon Marchetti is the Director of Animal Base, documenting his own journey at @jon__marchetti.

For more on Animal Base, the curated marketplace built around what you eat, how you live, and how you rest, visit animalbase.com.

Modern food, modern medicine, and the way we work were built for productivity. Your biology paid the bill. The data has been sitting in plain view the whole time.

This is the opening episode of Built Human, the show where Andrew Coca works one question in the open: can we build modern life, the technology and the food and the medicine, without it costing us our health? Andrew is a technologist by trade, and he's spent years watching the systems we're told to trust quietly work against the people inside them. Alongside him is Jon Marchetti, Director of Animal Base, who brings the on-the-ground view.

They start with the conversation most health shows avoid: why standard advice keeps failing the people following it most carefully. From there they get into the bigger stories shaping the modern food fight, including the food dye bans rolling out state by state, and what that policy shift looks like at the grocery store.

If you've spent years following the rules on food, fitness, sleep, and stress and still feel worse than you did ten years ago, start here.

What we cover:

→ Why standard health advice keeps failing the people following it most carefully
→ The question at the center of the show: what happens when modern life is built for output and our biology absorbs the cost
→ What Animal Base is, and how it organizes a real-food life around what you eat, how you live, and how you rest, bringing us back to what was actually built for humans
→ The latest protein-bar controversy and what it actually reveals
→ The food dye bans and the risk of relying on policy changes to drive behavioral ones

Follow Built Human at @builthuman for the most thought-provoking moments from the show and the small reminders worth carrying into your week.

Your hosts: Andrew Coca is the founder of Animal Base and President of Modern.tech, building technology that keeps people's health intact and sharing his work as a pro-human technologist at @andrew__coca.
Jon Marchetti is the Director of Animal Base, documenting his own journey at @jon__marchetti

For more on Animal Base, the curated marketplace built around what you eat, how you live, and how you rest, visit animalbase.com.