#13 — Cigarettes and Soylent

You are listening to problematic radio. I'm chilled. So our relationship to food is deeply meaningful to us. And we ascribe from what we eat all kinds of qualities. Refined, rustic, rich. A bunch of friends or family sitting at a table sharing a meal. That is a deeply human experience. And so it is no surprise that this link between food and identity is as powerful as it is. I think in America, especially untethered as we are from ancient history, it tends to take on even more meaning. That, in my opinion, more than anything else, is why dieting is such a fraught topic. And in conversation, especially online, the more extreme the diet, the more furious people become. We've seen this in everything from Atkins to veganism, but nothing pissed people off quite like the notion you could maybe just skip the meals completely. What if you just drank your dinner and your lunch and your breakfast? I am talking about a now infamous product called Soylent.

Yeah, so my name's John Coogan. I'm the co founder of Soylent, the meal replacement company. Started in 2012, 2013. Did that for about five years. Now I'm working on a new company that sells smoking cessation products to help people quit smoking.

John and I have been following each other on Twitter for a while now, and I brought him in to talk about Soylent. The way we all think about our diets, we how that diet gets kind of tangled up in our individual identities and the ways in which that very complicated relationship may be damaging us or I didn't really even know. Is there something about this that's maybe helping? John has since started a new company called Lucy. This is like a way cooler version of the nicotine gum you get at your local drugstore. So at the top of this interview, we kind of accidentally fell into a conversation about addiction, which I thought was super interesting and I didn't want to leave it out. John is someone who for years has worked on just like highly triggering products related to physical consumption. You know, things we put in our bodies, choices that we make for ourselves that for some reason tend to drive other people insane. So we got into it. We talked about addiction, we talked about dieting, what the studies all say, why Soylent was so completely explosive. We talked about technology you can no longer escape and marketing that fight or flight social media attention heist. What is going on there? From Nation Factory, I'm Mike Solana and this is problematic. Tell me more about this nicotine gum.

Yeah, yeah. So the product's called Lucy. This is an older version of the packaging. Yeah. So basically one of the co founders of Soylent, was a friend of mine from preschool, middle school, high school. We got involved in that company together towards the series B phase of that. He was smoking socially, didn't think it was much of an issue. Got engaged to a woman who was in the medical field. She was advising him that even the amount of smoking that he was doing could have serious health consequences. He kind of saw it as, hey, I only smoke when I go out with my friends and have drinks. She of course replied, you go out to drinks with your friends four nights a week, so you know, you're technically a smoker. And there's a lot of data that shows that even smoking just a few cigarettes a day can still have negative health consequences. So he started looking at kind of the science of what was going on. He was doing a PhD at Caltech for biology and is kind of a. Also like a germaphobe and a very health conscious person. But for some reason, you know, he'd let these cigarettes kind of creep into his life. So, so he started looking at the science, realized that what he was really smoking for was the nicotine. It wasn't the inhaled burning ash. So what's the most efficient way to get that nicotine into your brain? There's been 30, 40 years of evidence that these smoking cessation products don't cause cancer. So he started using Nicorette, but really didn't like the experience. He could only get it at drugstores. The packaging was really difficult to open. It was just kind of looked like a medicine and it didn't really feel like a consumer product in any real way. It felt like a medicine and it felt like an admission of failure as opposed to just the best possible product to solve an issue which is your brain wants nicotine. And so, you know, yeah. He set out to design a new one. We started formulating, we worked with a combination of an another friend of ours who was at Soylent, who finished the PhD at Caltech, and a couple of formulators in Europe, put together a whole new formulation of nicotine gum, brought that to market and have just been kind of growing that online, the E commerce. So the main ways that the products are different, obviously, packaging, branding, the whole way we message it, we don't sell it as a smoking cessation product. It's not designed to help you quit. It's designed to just beat cigarettes head on. It's not about reducing your nicotine.

Right.

It seems zero.

It seems like what you're actually, you have like a nicotine Product people.

Exactly. Forever.

I mean, does your co founder still use it?

Yeah, yeah, I'm using it right now. It's a very interesting industry. It's extremely controversial. Extremely.

Yes. Because you don't want nicotine at all. It's like a forbidden word. Can't even talk about.

Exactly.

This is what the baby.

I mean, that makes sense. It kills so many people that.

Well, cigarettes do.

Yeah, exactly.

Cigarettes do.

The principal agent is nicotine. So people have tied those together and there's so much tied up there.

That's an interesting question right there. Like, is there something inherently wrong with being addicted to something if it's not bad for you?

I've done a ton of thinking about that. So that's the underlying question of like, could we sleep with the. Could we sleep while doing this? Startup was like, we know that nicotine is addictive and we are going to be selling a product that is addictive. There's going to be an addiction warning right on the product. Are we okay with that? And how do we think about that? And the way we thought about it was if this was product that we would use, product that didn't have any health consequences, that wouldn't cause, you know, you to be addicted to something that would eventually give you cancer, could live with that. And that's why we focused on NRT style products and tried to leverage as much of the science behind Nicoret and, you know, these other products in order to ensure that our products would eventually be as safe as possible. But there is a very, very interesting question on the economic addiction. Right. Because at a certain point, if you're selling a product that is addictive, there is an economic cost to that. Right. Your consumer is no longer, you know, fully willing participant in this supply and demand market that normally occurs. So the consumer is no longer fully rational. And that is something that is kind of hard to sit with. I think the way we think about it is we ultimately want to design products that can be proven to be less addictive than cigarettes. And I think that a lot of that has to do with the science of the rapidity of onset. So how fast the nicotine hits you. There's been a lot of data that shows that that links to the level of addiction. Right.

Digestion would be slower.

Exactly. Yeah.

This is the same thing with weed. I mean, the difference between edibles and smoking, you know, taking a hit of a bong.

Yeah, exactly. So, yeah, I mean, it cuts both ways. But I think the economic addiction thing is something that, you know, it is very interesting and this is something you see in other vice industries. You know, like gambling has some of the same, obviously people that get fully addicted to gambling just psychologically, even if it's not a physical addiction. So there are definitely some ethical consequences to that. And I think that they need to be really, really specifically considered. So we set some really strong ground rules for where the types of products that we would sell versus not. And where we came down to was we would never use the tobacco leaf. So there are oral products like chewing tobacco that do have the tobacco leaf in there, but there are a lot of nitrosamines in tobacco leaves that can cause cancer. And we weren't as confident about the ability to use the tobacco leaf safely. So we only use, you know, fully extracted ingredients like the nicotine. So we try and reduce it to the most singular ingredient possible and then build a new product up from that. And then the other side was on the method of administration. We said we'll never touch the lung just because there was a lot of uncertainty around obviously cigarettes, lung cancer, but then even with vapes, there were additives that might have problems with lungs. And there was a lot of uncertainty there. And we were just saying like, if we can't be a hundred percent sure and run the 40 year study necessary to be sure about this category, we don't want to be the one that's taking that risk. Of course now the companies that have some of them have been wildly successful and we'll see certainly the hope is that vapes are fine and there's no long term consequences. But until we have that longitudinal data, we said let's not take that risk.

On the question of addiction, I think it's interesting that we talk a lot about addiction when I guess the question I have is, are things considered vices because they're addictive or do we only consider things addictive when they're already a vice? For example, we have lots of things I think that we're addicted to that we don't really call addictions at all. Netflix, Twitter, you know, just being online, scrolling that, that newsfeed, right? Getting that hit of dopamine every time you get a like on Instagram conversation with people. We crave affection. I don't know if that's biology or an addiction, but like I need to be around people. That's like a sort of obviously positive, like to call that an addiction seems weird. People sort of joke about being addicted to exercise, but isn't it sort of an addiction and it seems healthy. What is going on there?

Well, I don't think that there's any quantitative scientific definition of addiction that does a good job of capturing everything. In general, we tend to define addiction as something that is correlated with a negative health outcome. So you wouldn't be addicted to water, air, food, food, sleep, the basics. Even though obviously your behavior is identical, if not more aggressive, you are the most addictive to air. You'll fight for your life to get it, but it doesn't make any sense to define it that way. So I think really there are two prongs to these definitions. One are negative health outcomes. And then there's the kind of chemical, physical, can we reproduce it in rats or mice? Will there be an endless cycle of perpetually pursuing and acquiring that particular resource or stimulant? And that's usually studied in drugs. It is a very fascinating problem to understand where we draw the line on addiction and how safe does something have to be? How good for you does something have to be? How universal does the consensus need to be before we say that it's not an addiction at all versus, you know, say exercise is not an unhealthy addiction, but it is still an addiction.

This is sort of related. We're talking about what we're putting inside of our body in cigarettes and things that we're addicted to. You're talking about air and water, of course. But I think there's something really interesting about the way we feed ourselves. And that was the main reason that I reached out to you, the first reason I really wanted to talk about the human diet and the ways that people are just really emotional about it. Right. Culture to culture. The things that we eat say a lot about us, especially in America. I was surprised when I lived in Europe. I mean, people are eating things they've eaten for a really long time in Spain, in America, it's a new country. Our culture is much weirder and people tend to ascribe a lot of identity from what they're eating. Whether it's like a vegan diet, which is. I mean, it correlates what, like almost 90% with a left wing politics or Paleo, which is like. Have you ever met a Paleo person who's not a libertarian? That's like completely. They're all. It's like what they are now. Soylent is a meal replacement. Of course, it's an illusion to Soylent Green. You know, it's made of people, which is funny. We should definitely get into that. Like why you chose to lead with a sort of dystopian scientific theme for your Drink you'd like to be triggering to people. Are you looking to piss people off? But certainly whether you were looking to or not, the concept of Soylent, just that you could drink your meal and never have to eat. Right? I mean, that is the vision. It pissed people off. People are still mad about it. It still seems to be popular and successful, but people are still, it's like highly triggering to a certain kind of. Especially a sort of like neck beardy journalist person who just loves to throw eggs at tech. You got a lot of hate for this. What? Let's start with just like, did you know going into this that people were going to have an issue with the drink, the meal replacement, and then we can talk maybe a little bit more about the product and why you got.

Into it and things like this? Yeah, I think it's good to start with kind of what our mindset was at the beginning of the whole journey. So Soylent has four co founders, two pairs of co founders from previous YC companies that had kind of failed, had a little bit of money. So at this point there were a few of us living in a really rundown apartment in the Tenderloin and we were basically running out of money. But we still want it to be softw guys, because this was 2012, 2013, and that was the ticket. YC was funding a lot of consumer tech companies still. And that seemed like the place where a bunch of 22, 23 year olds could actually break in and have a breakout success would be in consumer tech, build some sort of app. So we were running out of money and food was one of the main costs behind that. So Rob started looking at his diet as more of like a computer science problem, since he has a computer science background and came up with this idea of if I see this as an input output problem, you know, my body needs to output a certain amount of calories for energy and the inputs need to be protein, carbs, fats and micronutrients. How can I optimize that and reduce the cost and time necessary? So from one perspective, it's a very rational way to solve a problem that a person has. And I think the issue was that. And I'll get into this more, but the way we talked about it online in blog posts and wound up promoting it, people really thought that it was going to be forced upon them. And I think that is kind of a scar reaction to previous technology that has broken out so widely that it has not really been opt in like Facebook. For a while, everything was great. And then for A while it was like you had to have it, right? Events, Right, right, right. Or your family is using it for events. And then all of a sudden there's all these concerns about tracking and data. And now, well, I'm so stuck into this thing and there's this network effect. I can't leave and I can't take my friend Graph anywhere else. So I'm kind of stuck. And we saw similar things with like smart homes, like try and buy a TV that doesn't have a smart function and maybe listens to. You are at all paranoid or uncomfortable with that stuff. It kind of crept up on you and was forced upon you pretty quickly. I think people were extrapolating from that fear that now that tech is looking at food and has set their sights on food and this is what they want to present us with, this is going to be the only option. Which of course doesn't match with the dynamics of the consumer packaged goods industry. Even when you bring in tech venture capital, there hasn't been a new Nestle. There's no trillion dollar food company that absorbs everything. There are no network effects in food. If anything, there's almost the opposite. You have all these little mini tribes and they all war with each other. We got a lot of comments about oh, you're trying to take away Thanksgiving. Which was the exact opposite actually to us. We were experiencing a very different relationship with Soylent than I think was portrayed in the media. Oftentimes the way Soylent was talked about was like, this is for these insane 100 hour working coder techy. All they care about is work and this helps them do that. And that was somewhat true. We were working hard on software and enjoyed the process of being able to stay in a flow state for a very long time. But a big part of Soylent was let's save up enough money so that we can actually go out to a real dinner or let's have enough time to take a break and go for a hike instead of having to cook up some ramen that we bought from Costco. The options were somewhat limited. So the way we looked at it in the early days was there's three main factors outside of flavor and taste that you generally are trading off when you're looking for food. It's convenience, healthiness and affordability. So if you want to be really affordable and really healthy, you'll grow your own food, cook your own meals. If you don't care about cost and you just care about health and convenience, you'll go out to a great restaurant. And if you don't care about health and you only care about cost and convenience, that's fast food. So how could we come up with all three? Obviously, the sacrifice you make is on the experience side. You're not going to be able to have a traditional dinner experience with Soylent, but it will satisfy the healthy, convenient and affordable metrics that we were looking for at the time. I think the root of the backlash was really the idea that this would be forced upon people and it would no longer be a consumer choice. And I think that comes from the history of tech. I think I understand it now, but then there's the whole other side of us stoking the flames and doing a lot of things on the marketing side to. Right, you named it Soylent.

Right. So what was the thinking there?

The name Soylent was actually the moment that it clicked that this could be a business. So we were living in this tiny two bedroom. I was living in the living room. Rob was technically living in a closet because it didn't have any windows. So just a very tiny apartment. And he had kind of gone off and was working on this Soylent project in his free time while developing some software. And he said, I'm on this liquid diet. I'm experimenting with my diet. And my initial reaction was like, why are you on a diet? No one cares what we look like. People only care about the quality of our products and our code. You could look like anything. And if you have a graph that's up and to the right, investors will give you money and it doesn't really matter what you look like. So I don't understand this, which is a very silly thing. Obviously, health is very important in terms of productivity, but also dating.

I mean, let's be real.

Yeah. Like another, like, week went by. And I remember we went over to a friend's and she was making homemade sushi. And it was like the biggest delicacy ever because we were normally just eating ramen and hot dogs and just like trash. So it was like something you do not pass up. But Rob was passing it up because he was on this 30 day Soylent exclusive testing, kind of, you know, running this experiment on himself. And I was like, oh, wow, like, you're really taking this seriously. Like, do you have a name for it yet? He was like, yeah, I'm calling it Soylent. And at that moment I was just like, we need to sell this. It finally clicked what was happening. And I was like, this could be something that would be really popular because it had that hook that kind of drew you in. And so obviously it was sarcastic. Obviously. I mean, the product's vegan, so it's the exact opposite of having humans. But in the book that the movie is based on, there's a little bit more utopianism. You know, Soylent is more of a product that actually could work. And the idea was still utopian, but obviously it was very kind of sardonic and ironic and just kind of like just a troll in order to put the name out there. And we got incredibly lucky with the name as well. Because back in 2013, a lot of virality on social platforms was judged by comment engagement. And it still is to some degree. But every time we would post anything like, minor update on the website, minor update on, oh, we have T shirts in stock now. Every post would get 25 comments. Soylent Greenest people. No, it's not. Why would they name it this? Fire your market marketing person. And that engagement would throw everything way, way up. And then that created this cycle where the press started talking about us and writing about us.

This really is the principal dynamic of the entire digital ecosystem. Right, the digital media ecosystem. It is just attention. And it doesn't necessarily matter how you get it, which is why you're starting to see like crazy shit on TikTok and among YouTube influencers, people, you know, just taking footage. I saw a TikTok the other day of a girl who opened up a suitcase filled with potentially a murder victim. Like, I didn't even dip in. I don't know if that was even true, if that was a scam, if it was a hoax. But like I saw that and I thought, well, that could be true. People would do something like that to get attention. Yeah, totally. And it's because there's something else happening right now with we're all aware of. It's like it is something that transcends, I guess, that maybe it's like an age old adage of there's no bad press. It's like at its simplest you could distill it to that. But it feels, in the age of social media, it feels like you can get to a point of mass attention very quickly just by hitting this weird part of our brain. This like fight or flight response. And that is just, that is the nature of the thing. And you did a thing you thought was funny and cute and it pissed people off and that made you a household name.

Yeah, I do think that there's an edge to this. I wouldn't call it a strategy because we had no idea that it was not intentional at all at the time. It was really just. Rob has a passion for writing fun and engaging pieces, and some of his other blog posts are wild and out there and just super. It starts with a very linear vision of the future, and you can track, like, okay, yeah, we'll add that. And that makes sense. And then all of a sudden, you don't know where the satire starts, but by the end, you know, it's satire, but the beginning wasn't. It's kind of like this hybrid satire piece that is designed for that. I don't think a lot of it was conscious, but there is an interesting thing. I think that if you're doing this in the context of, like, a company or a business or a career or, you know, not just like, you're literally an anonymous troll on the Internet, you do need to make sure that underlying whatever you're doing is the science or the ethics or the, you know, that dead body example is. And like, Logan Paul famously did the same thing.

Yeah, the suicide in the suicide car.

Yeah, it's clearly unethical, and, like, there is. There's a morality issue there. But with Soylent, we were able to. When pressed and like, your kind of back is against the wall. We could point to 30, 40 years of meal replacement data that had been studied. It starts with, I don't like this product. And we're like, yeah, that's fine. Don't buy it. But, yeah, please keep sharing it and talking about it, because that helps us. Right. But at a certain point, it elevates to, I don't think you should be doing this at all. I want to stop you. You are going to hurt people. And that is a legitimate question to ask, because if a company was actually putting out a poisonous product, it should be questioned and stopped. But fortunately, we were able to say, you know, actually, you know, when it comes down to it, we have a professor from Columbia on our board, and he has advised Weight Watchers and a number of health and nutrition companies. And look at this data from people that have lived on inshore in hospital environments for months at a time. It is safe. We tested this on ourselves, obviously, and, you know, we are fully compliant with all the FDA and USDA rules. We're manufacturing this in a high quality facility. So I think that you have to be able to answer the hard questions that will come from that strategy, and you have to have kind of a solid foundation to stand on.

I want to talk about health for a little bit. Health and diet and the interplay there, because I Mean, it seems like we're just always wrong about this. What sounds like a good diet changes in my own life. I mean, I'm 34. I think it's changed sort of seismically two or three times. First of all, growing up, we still had the food pyramid. That was a legit thing that I learned about in school. That was like a real thing that they taught us. We're talking like tons of carbs, low healthy fats and meats that sort of faded away before the next enormous. I don't know if it's a lie, but it certainly is being called into question now. Breakfast is the most important meal of the day. You don't actually need to eat breakfast. In fact, there's tons of studies about narrowing your, your window, your feeding window. Excluding breakfast completely can put your body into ketosis and it's good for you. We've heard about, you know, the, the benefits of the vegetarian's lifestyle. We've heard about, you know, veganism that is still in vogue among some people, but now we're hearing about Paleo and increasingly, I mean, there are carnivores walking around literally just talking about a pure meat diet and the benefits of that. It seems like now, recently, certainly in the context of, you know, veganism and carnivory and the Paleo diet, all three. I've noticed everyone comes at you with data. They all have it. They're like, here are, you know, 17 studies that support my diet. It's like, this is science, you know, facts, not feelings. But all of these diets are completely up. They're contradictory. And, I don't know, I step back and I'm like, I actually just have no idea whatsoever what is true. Generally, I kind of roughly know what makes me feel good when I'm eating, and even that, I sort of tweak it and I change it. But how do you navigate this? You were talking about data before, about meal replacement, things like this. You know, how do you tell what's, what's real and what's not when, you know we're wrong so often?

Yeah, there's a bunch of interesting things in there. So with Soylent specifically, we focused on the consensus standards for dietary requirements of kind of an average American male. It's, you know, the 2,000 calorie mark was what we benchmarked against. There are recommendations for vitamins and minerals and protein, carb and fat ratios. I don't think those are in line with more modern diets. So we started adjusting after that. I think there's a Few things was one interesting strategy that we had was to embrace the Silicon Valley concept of continuous iteration and continuous improvement and versioning. And we pulled a lot of terminology from software development and used that to give us the flexibility to iterate on our formula and on our product so that we could bake into the brand. The idea that this is an ongoing project, this is something where the formula will be updated, that stood in contrast to a lot of people that ride kind of trend waves. And that's not to say that Soylent isn't in certain trends, but I do think that there are a lot of people that come out and say, I'm Dr. Atkins, this diet is the end all, be all. I have the data to support it. And then they build a company and it stays that way forever. We kind of knew that as soon as more data comes out, we want to incorporate that into the formulation. That was something that we tried to build in order to kind of future proof our ability to always deliver the best product to the customer. Then so much talk of diet leaves out what is at least 50%, if not more, which is exercise. The calorie in point of view is only half of the equation. Are the calories coming out in some way? Are you expelling that energy in the form of exercise? So I think it's very important that you kind of combine those views. And that's why, you see, I think, isn't Arnold Schwarzenegger doing a vegetarian video or. There are a number of bodybuilders that are incredibly in shape and they're vegetarian. And there are incredibly in shape people that are carnivorous. And obviously the thing that is really driving both of those behaviors is the exercise. I think the body is.

Is it just watching more resilient? Is it just actually being aware of what you're eating? Because I mean, all of these diets, it seems like once you go on any sort of extreme. And by dieting, I don't mean just eating less, though that is a form of diet now. Like literally. I mean, that's like the big trend right now is just eating less, just narrowing your window and consuming fewer calories.

Yeah, exactly.

But all of them, you know, vegan, vegetarian, carnivory, paleo, keto, everyone seems healthier in those first two, three, four weeks. Of course, that seems to be. I mean, something is happening there.

Yeah, I mean, I, I think you hit the nail on the head. It's definitely about just making yourself aware of what you're eating, being more thoughtful, and at the end of the day, really just keeping that caloric balance correct is going to do a lot for you. And then I think there's another issue with a lot of these diets is just like, I don't know what you'd call it, but like compliance, simplicity. I really liked how Paleo made low carb. Really simple to understand. Would a caveman have access to this? Yes or no? It's a question that you can ask yourself anywhere and have a really obvious intuitive answer. And now is that going to get you the best optimized diet? Maybe not, but it's going to take out 90% of the overhead, the mental overhead of categorizing, well, what are the sub ingredients of this? And is this okay? And how did the data change this week? You know, all that and the same thing with vegetarian veganism. You can just ask and immediately know. Whereas if you, unless you have a private chef or a trainer or a dietitian or someone who's really working with you to customize a diet and cook for you and make sure that you're compliant, it's going to be a lot harder to have kind of an optimized diet if you're using a model that is more complex than I don't eat X and X is clearly defined.

Right.

That was, that was a big part of Soylent was like, don't eat anything except for. It's the easiest. Just drink this and you're good.

How, how long did you live on just Soylent or have you ever.

I've probably done like a couple weeks. Just 100%. But it's, I mean it's not designed like it is designed with that in mind. But that is not the best use case.

What are the best use cases? Give me the romantic view.

Yeah, I mean I still have Soylents.

Which is literally named after eating people.

Yeah, I still have it for breakfast. Wake up, it's 400 calories, pretty high in protein. Just kind of like super simple. Don't need to clean any dishes or go out for coffee in a bagel that costs maybe 10 bucks. So that's usually my breakfast. I think in general it's good for those meals where you would otherwise be sacrificing or compromising. You would otherwise be having like a high carb cereal or stopping for some French fries at McDonald's. Right.

Cereal is like, I mean, what is. That is the craziest shit ever. How did that ever become a thing in the morning that you should wake up and have a bowl of cereal? Not even the sugary, even just Cheerios. That is not good for you.

Yeah, I mean, I think a lot of it comes down to economics. It's, you know, it is a very affordable product in terms of.

Well, is it economics? I think it's also the marketing. I mean, Cheerios famously has that giant heart on the COVID You know, this.

Is your heart, health.

And breakfast is the most important meal of the day. Like all of this stuff.

Yeah.

Like, it is very confusing sometimes to know where the. The science ends in the marketing begins.

Sure, yeah. 100%. 100%. But when we were designing Soylent, we would often look at cost per calorie benchmarks. So if you look at a Big Mac, it's incredibly cheap and incredibly calorically dense. And you. And I might look at that and say, well, that's a bad value because I paid X dollars and I got something that was unhealthy. But to someone who is trying to meet a basic caloric need, it is an incredible value because for $2, you can go and get half a day's worth of calories. And that is very, I agree, completely problematic.

Well, it's problematic because people are overeating. But the fact of the matter is we don't understand diet perfectly. But what it does seem like what you were saying earlier is that we need a certain amount of calories to survive a day, and we burn through a certain amount per day. And everybody's sort of resting body weight is based on that. Height comes in, gender comes in, muscle mass comes in, and all affected to some degree. But roughly, there's a certain amount of calories we need per day just to live. And if you're getting your calories from a Big Mac or you're getting your calories from, I don't know, like a nice chicken dinner with a baked potato and a side of vegetables, it doesn't really matter, actually. What matters is it's like fat content, protein content, carbohydrate content, and how many calories you're consuming. And a Big Mac isn't that much worse than the other stuff. It's just. It's denser. So you're consuming more calories than. Than maybe you even realize. But in a weird way, that's an incredible gift to the world.

You know, in some ways, yes, it's.

So easy for people in America to complain about this. And it's like, this is the biggest rich man problem I've ever heard of in my entire life. We have too many calories for too few dollars. That's crazy. That's an incredible gift. There's probably never been another time in the history of the world where we had a problem like that. Probably not even ancient Rome. Ancient Rome, Would we hear about the emperors? I'm sure they were all, you know, fat and gorging themselves in the vomitarium or whatever. But what was the. What was the average person in Rome? What was their diet like? Aces. A good problem to have, it would.

Be, except for the fact that we've added a lot of somewhat addictive additives to the food, right? Msg, msg, but even salt, even sugar. There is sugar in the bun of a Big Mac, for example, and that does add to the flavor profile, but you do get a glucose spike. There is some evidence that that can be addictive and that can contribute to overeating. And if you're a company that is optimizing for the consumption of your product, you will naturally evolve towards the most consumable product, which is sometimes addictive. Sugar is interesting to me to over consumption.

Sugar is interesting to me because I often think the most insidious things are the things that we're all addicted to to some degree. And that's why, I mean, I think about social media a lot. We're all on it now and we can't stop. Sugar is right up there. Why are we not talking about sugar the way that we're talking about, for example, nicotine really, like, is a bowl of ice cream not as bad for you as a stick of nicotine gum? Come on, let's be real about this.

No, I agree with you completely. I mean, I think it's difficult because, you know, everything in biochemistry is about concentrations. Obviously, you know, you can survive the most poisonous thing possible at a low enough concentration. And anything at a high enough concentration will kill you, even water. So it's very difficult to have a nuanced conversation because people want to know, is sugar bad or not? Is nicotine bad or not? And really the answer is probably, well, it depends on your consumption level relative to a lot of things, relative to your genetics, relative to your height, your weight, your physical activity, what other stimulants or products you're putting in your body. There's no way to boil that down to good, bad. And that's what we want to see.

That's funny, there is this weird. It's like almost a contradiction in the way we talk about our diet. In some ways it's like, you know, well, it's this ancient, mysterious thing and you can't really know it. And I've had it for generations. And everyone's diet is different and we should have a varied diet. And it's all about balance. The word balance is employed, but then also we talk about it in almost moral terms where like, it's either good or it's bad. This is a good food. This is a chicken nugget is a bad. Capital B, bad food. You know, an apple, that's amazing. Which is why people lost their fucking minds when Atkin was like, don't eat an apple. You shouldn't do that. The sugar's bad for you.

That's good marketing right there.

What do you, what do you do with, with that weird tension? What is the truth of the diet?

I mean, the. I think the truth is that the human body is incredibly resilient and you can throw a lot of stuff at it and usually you're feeling fine. And that's the opposite of what people want to hear, is that. And there's another question of what are we optimizing for here? Is it absolute life years? Is it quality adjusted life years? What are we going for here? Is it better to live a short, glorious life or a long and glorious one?

Yep. This reminds me of what you were just saying. We could throw a lot at the human body. It's resilient of the concept of antifa fragility. Have you read Nassim Taleb? You know, our body is anti fragile. So you know, you go and you lift weights, you're actually breaking down muscle fiber, you're doing damage to your body and then it grows back stronger. There is a sort of similar case with the way that we can ingest poisons in small doses and become tolerant to those poisons depending on the poison we see. This is sort of like almost like a biological law. Biology is extremely antifragile. You do some damage to it and it grows back. If you don't destroy it, it tends to come back a little bit stronger. That's maybe a little bit too broad, but we see this, this pattern again and again and again. What's weird is that we didn't until very recently have a word for it at all, which was to me the most fascinating part of Nassim Taleb's book. But this is sort of the truth. I, I think that must be the truth with diet as well. And it got me thinking. We started this conversation talking about nicotine. I started thinking like, I mean, what is the most forbidden what if. What if smoking a cigarette just once in a while, you know, once. It's totally random. Once every. You Know, who knows? A few weeks, a month, month and a half. One cigarette doing a small amount of damage to your lungs. Is it possible that your lungs would grow back stronger? Is it possible that you could be healthy, happier? And there's no data on this, right? We never see it. We always see the data on, like, what happens when you put a mouse in a vat and, like, give them insane concentrations of smoke. And it's like, well, it tends to kill them because, like you said, at a sufficient concentration, like, everything tends to kill you. And this one's, you know, particularly toxic. Like, it seems like lower concentrations will kill you than, for example, I don't know, concentrations of, like, perfumed gas or something. But I. I don't think we have a lot of. We don't have a lot of interesting studies on this stuff. All of our studies tend to be pretty narrow and they tend to be pretty ideologically motivated. I wish there were ways to just study weird shit like this.

Totally. I mean, for. For something like that, it's such a small input amongst many. It would be very, very difficult to study even if you had the clarity to do it objectively. Fortunately, I mean, we're all getting about a cigarette a month just from living in cities with cars. So I think our lungs are resilient and they do grow back very, very quickly. But, yeah, I mean, I wonder if the problem is so tricky because is it.

That's steady. That's steady damage. It's not like random and immediate, and then it grows, right? It's like, it's. That consistent damage is the worst.

Yeah, maybe, maybe.

I mean, so what if actually living in a city was worse for you than being a light smoker?

I have no idea. And I think the. I think the underlying issue here is something that we've struggled with for a long time, which is oftentimes moderation is the best policy and the best strategy, but moderation is the least sexy and least marketable thing. So if somebody was to start an influencer Instagram account talking about how they live their life with moderation, it's like, yeah, they meditate, but not all the time. And they journal every once in a while. And they eat healthy, but they also have cheat meals. It's like, that would be a very balanced life and the person would probably be very happy, but it's just not. It's not a rule that I can follow.

Yeah, no one cares. We want extremes. We want extremes.

Extremes.

We want polarizing. We want that. That, like, reptilian part of our brain on Fire at 24. 7. We want it to be like, you know, electricity pulsing through it. Fight or flight. Fight or flight. God, that sucks. I wish that you could do. I wish that we could turn that off. I don't know. I live in the extremes myself to a certain extent. Certainly the emotional extremes. I feel an emotional extreme almost every day on Twitter. I mean, it's constant ups and downs. How do you navigate that, that impulse?

I don't know. Personally, I feel like I've done a good job living a life of moderation. I don't know if there's a way to profit off of it or create a brand around it. I don't know if that's what people want to hear or if it's something that can be packaged and sold in a product. And I think that you'd just be at such a disadvantage to someone who's giving a clear answer. It's almost like the difference between, I don't know, psychotherapy and public speaker. What do they call them? Like a Tony Robbins type? Like a motivational speaker. Motivational speaker will tell you exactly what to do. Therapist will sit there and ask you, how do you feel about that? Very different. When you do go to a doctor and you do talk to a doctor, usually you get the moderation answer. But when you go into the public realm and you talk to the people that are running companies and influencer accounts, et cetera, then you get the extremes, because that's what's really marketable and can be sold.

Is it because that's what's marketable, or is it because that's what made them successful?

I mean, yeah, it's the controversiality, but also it's the idea that it. I don't. I don't know what it is, but something about having a clear answer just is more alluring to a customer, I think, or to a person. It's not reassuring when someone tells you, yeah, it doesn't really matter what you do here.

You sort of have been working, I mean, for years now between your nicotine product and, you know, where you came up with Soylent. All of your work seems to be sort of swimming in the, like, controversy surrounding what we can and cannot or should and should not put in our bodies. One, what is it about all that that you clearly find attractive? The idea of different approaches to, you know, health. And why do you think this is important?

I think a lot of it comes down to finding areas where the scientific consensus does not match the public consensus. You look at the data behind, insure you look at the data behind smokeless tobacco use in Sweden, where that product was not allowed to be imported into Europe. Smoking rates fell in Sweden, they did not in Europe. Sweden now has one of the lowest incidences of lung cancer. The product clearly works, but that has not been accepted widely. So I think anytime that there is a divergence between the public consensus and the scientific consensus, there's an opportunity to bring that scientific consensus to the public. But it needs to be done in a very careful way. It needs to be done in a way that grabs attention but isn't off putting. And it needs to, you know, again, it goes back to having that backstop of when people start pushing you really hard on certain issues. I mean, in the case of our nicotine company, we're working with the FDA to get our products approved and we are going through approval processes and that's. It is incredibly important that we be able to supply real hard data on our products and stand up to rigorous assessment. And I think that it's easy to grab a single study and run with it and build a lot of hype around something. But it's much more important to have kind of like the corpus, the 30 years of data that's been kind of overlooked, although that sometimes does create more of an uphill battle in terms of getting true mass adoption. But that doesn't always need to happen for consumer packaging. It's to going companies.

What is the future of this stuff?

I don't think we're going to see some sort of network effect emerge in this industry. I don't think we're going to see a food company, one food company to rule them all. That becomes a trillion dollar company or whatever the equivalent is. Unless it's just a corporate roll up conglomerate with lots of different brands and products. I don't think that there will just be one product that everyone's consuming. Although there were lots of commenters who were worried about that. I do think that people will continue to want different things that speak to them based on their prior experiences and biases. And I think that that's not the end of the world. I think that that's probably fine. I think at the end of the day with the diet stuff, a lot of people find it's whatever story that they want to believe that will motivate them to become healthy in the broadest sense can have an impact on them and that can be good. I just hope people don't go too crazy with it and wind up going down a path that is truly problematic. But fortunately people are pretty quick to dig into these diets when they start to go viral and really speak out against them. And then we do have some regulatory backstops. On the nicotine side, it's interesting. In general, I feel like the best solution politically is not one that's feasible, but I would like to see cigarettes banned based on your date of birth. So let's call it if you're born in 2021 or later, you can never buy cigarettes. And if you're born before 2020, you can always buy cigarettes. So every year the age gets older and older and eventually the fake IDs and everything stop working. Because how is a 20 year old going to pose as a 40 year old? I think that might be an interesting way to phase that product out. Now, prohibition rarely works. It creates black markets. There's a lot of concerns there. So maybe that's just a pipe dream. The other interesting policy recommendation that's been talked about is reducing the level of nicotine in cigarettes, which I find very fascinating. Basically forcing cigarette companies to reduce the amount of nicotine. Some cigarettes have added nicotine. Some cigarettes, like American Spirits, just have a lot of tobacco that's compressed into a smaller space. So it has more nicotine, but it creates a denser smoke. But putting a limit on the amount of nicotine and then reducing that limit over time would be something that the consumer, consumer would feel and eventually respond to. Because eventually the nicotine level would reach non addictive levels. You wouldn't be getting a buzz from them anymore and people would stop buying them and move to alternatives. And then those alternatives, hopefully they can just have a lot of studies supporting that they're safe. And I hope that looks like, you know, a wide suite of products, our products being some of them. But I hope that there is still consideration, consumer choice there and that we basically get to a place where nicotine is as safe as caffeine and as understood as caffeine. Like, yes, you can build a dependency on it. If you drink two cups of coffee every morning, you're probably not going to be getting a buzz after a while. And I think the same is true of nicotine. I'd like to see the FDA basically just create enough of a culture of safety that products that can give you cancer are not really viable in the market.

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