a16z Podcast - a16z Podcast: The Future of Food

Episode Date: November 24, 2015

Rob Rhinehart, like most startup entrepreneurs, was strapped for cash and time as developed his ideas and ultimately a company. What stood out to Rhinehart in that all-consuming and ongoing process was the contrast between all the things in his life that technology had made more convenient and cheaper -- basically everything powered by smartphones -- and what he felt was a process still trapped in our agrarian past: sitting down for a meal. Out of that observation came Soylent -- nutrition in powder or ready-to-drink form, that substituted for Rhinehart the lousy ramen or frozen corn-dog meals he was subsisting on. Better, faster, cheaper -- Soylent has all the trademarks of good tech -- but are we really going to start drinking our meals? Rhinehart joins this segment of the pod along with a16z’s Chris Dixon, who led the firm’s investment in Soylent, to talk about where Soylent might fit into our lives ... and what it means for the future of food as well as earth's resources. The views expressed here are those of the individual AH Capital Management, L.L.C. (“a16z”) personnel quoted and are not the views of a16z or its affiliates. Certain information contained in here has been obtained from third-party sources, including from portfolio companies of funds managed by a16z. While taken from sources believed to be reliable, a16z has not independently verified such information and makes no representations about the enduring accuracy of the information or its appropriateness for a given situation. This content is provided for informational purposes only, and should not be relied upon as legal, business, investment, or tax advice. You should consult your own advisers as to those matters. References to any securities or digital assets are for illustrative purposes only, and do not constitute an investment recommendation or offer to provide investment advisory services. Furthermore, this content is not directed at nor intended for use by any investors or prospective investors, and may not under any circumstances be relied upon when making a decision to invest in any fund managed by a16z. (An offering to invest in an a16z fund will be made only by the private placement memorandum, subscription agreement, and other relevant documentation of any such fund and should be read in their entirety.) Any investments or portfolio companies mentioned, referred to, or described are not representative of all investments in vehicles managed by a16z, and there can be no assurance that the investments will be profitable or that other investments made in the future will have similar characteristics or results. A list of investments made by funds managed by Andreessen Horowitz (excluding investments and certain publicly traded cryptocurrencies/ digital assets for which the issuer has not provided permission for a16z to disclose publicly) is available at https://a16z.com/investments/. Charts and graphs provided within are for informational purposes solely and should not be relied upon when making any investment decision. Past performance is not indicative of future results. The content speaks only as of the date indicated. Any projections, estimates, forecasts, targets, prospects, and/or opinions expressed in these materials are subject to change without notice and may differ or be contrary to opinions expressed by others. Please see https://a16z.com/disclosures for additional important information.

The content here is for informational purposes only, should not be taken as legal business tax or investment advice or be used to evaluate any investment or security and is not directed at any investors or potential investors in any A16Z fund. For more details, please see A16Z.com slash disclosures. Welcome to the A16Z podcast. I'm Michael Copeland. Right about now, you're pondering what to eat or maybe pondering why you ate so much. And so in that spirit, we thought it was a good time to talk about the future of food. To help us do that on the podcast, we brought in Rob Reinhardt, who is the CEO and founder of Soylent, which is an engineered food.

It's complete nutrition for people, and it comes in a powder and a bottle. And also on the podcast, we have Chris Dixon, who led the firm's investment in Soylent. So we get Rob and Chris to talk about food and what the future of food systems might look like. Bring your favorite snack under your belt, maybe, and let's talk about food. Rob, Chris, welcome. Thank you, Michael. You guys are all amped up on Soylent. I can see we have bottles.

And I like this sort of anonymous white bottle. It's very sleek and yet from the future. Thanks. I hear the word ominous sometimes. Aminous. I like the minimalism. And, you know, you can drink it, and it doesn't have to be this big advertisement.

But I like the simplicity of the design. It looks a little bit like the stormtrooper of food, I have to say. Thank you, I guess. Well, it depends which side you're on, honestly. Obviously, the dark side. So when Chris was talking up Soylent, and when we started to see sort of the uptake in, like, the Reddit world, for example, I was hugely skeptical. I'm like, why do we want this? And it turns out more and more and more people want this.

But let's start with where it began and then where the community has taken it. It began because I really wanted it. I noticed that it's something that I had a very strong personal need for. I was very passionate about technology and development and using science and tech to improve people's lives, but I figured I could start with my own. And what I was really struggling with was not a lot of digital apps and sites and services, but I was eating very poorly. It just seemed very impractical for me to have to do this balance of cost and time and and nutrition for every single meal. I was eating very poorly, and I was still spending a lot of time. The classic ramen diet? A lot of ramen. I still like ramen, but, you know, frozen corn dogs and pasta and, you know, chicken. It was okay.

You know, I wasn't like, I certainly wasn't starving, but I was just, I felt tired. I didn't, it was affecting my work, and it just seemed that I was repeating the same work every day over and over again. And it just seemed wasteful that I had to do this errand. I had to go all the way to the store and I had to park. And then I had to pick everything from tens of thousands of different options and check out. And it just seemed weird. You know, all these other things are getting so much more convenient. I buy everything else online.

There's reviews. I can get quality products. I can get something that is, you know, really fulfills my needs. Why am I, like, basically a DIY food maker? Why is everyone expected to be a nutritionist and a cook and a logistics manager? Okay. Look, I like cooking, but a DIY food engineer, it's called cooking, you know, you buy things and you cook it. And it's not that complicated. I mean, you make it sound like it's this 5,000-step process and that nobody's gone to a grocery store and nobody knows where everything is at Trader Joe's. Some of the criticism of what Soyland does is like you take the joy out of food. But how do you respond to that? I think it's hard to enjoy something if it's forced on you. And we do have to eat or else we're going to die.

Cooking makes a lot of sense. It can be a lot of fun. I absolutely see the appeal as a form of art and expression and a hobby. I think that's the beauty of it. I think that's how cooking should be seen as an important part of life and culture. But practically speaking, you know, sometimes we romanticize it a little bit. And I think a lot of times it really is more manufacturing that a lot of stuff that is coming out of our kitchens, you know, especially for someone like me who's, you know, just moved to a new city. It's really not that great and it's really not getting the job done. And I think it makes a lot of sense to use tools like, you know, manufacturing and industry to make products that fulfill our needs for, you know, different lifestyles. Lifestyles are changing. You know, we don't live on farms anymore. We don't cook all of our meals from scratch anymore. I mean, the industrialization of the food system has been happening steadily for over a century. That's true. I mean, the 50s promised us, you know, all sorts of magic food convenience. And, well, the trend has been to go away. from that, honestly.

But also to Rob's point, if you just look at the data, there's, you know, certainly people, there's some portion of meals are people going and buying food and cooking it. And some portion, especially in wealthier places like the coastal areas where, you know, where we live, they're buying organic food and cooking it. And that's great. And no one's against that. But the reality is a lot of meals are, you know, people are fast food, you know, McDonald's, things like that. They are frozen dinners. They are people going to a convenience store. If you go to

a typical convenience store, almost every single product in there is loaded with sugar and really bad for you. So, you know, I think the, my view would be that the, you know, compare, like, Soilent is not meant to replace the organic, home-cooked meal with friends. It's meant to replace the, you know, the hamburger at McDonald's, which is just terrible for you. I mean, this is why we have an epidemic of diabetes and obesity is that people eat, you know, they go and they have these like these terrible like breakfast meals at McDonald's. They have, you know, fast food. They have sugary stuff from a convenience store. You know, this is, we literally have an epidemic of this. I mean, sugar is the new smoking. It's going to, you know, kill. It's going to be by far the biggest killer

of, of, of this generation. And to Rob's point is, you know, sort of, To compare it to the organic, home-cooked meal is to romanticize it. Like, no one is saying we should, I don't think, Rob, you're saying, we should get rid of those meals. I think what you're saying is take your worst meal and instead of having something, you know, and typically the worst meal is driven by the fact that people are, you know, cost and time constrained, right? So they go in and they get some fast food. Take your worst meal and replace it with something that's actually healthy. Soylent, if you saw the movie Soilent Green is not people, your Soylent.

but what is soylent? What's in the bottle or what's in the powder? It's nutrition. It's everything the body needs that we know of. Protein, fat, carbohydrates, but you know you want the right forms of them. You need proteins with certain amino acid profile. You need, you know, certain types of fats that are healthier than others. You want carbohydrates that are low glycemic index. You'd like to avoid cholesterol. You need electrolytes. And you need vitamins and minerals, but you need ones that are going to be absorbed and bioavailable. And you need a good experience, too. I mean, user experience in food is very complicated.

It's, you know, food is one of our only products that interacts with all five of our senses. So, you know, texture is very complicated. Taste is very complicated. Flavor is extremely complicated. There's a lot of science and a lot of engineering that goes into food product design. So how did you end up with this sort of formulation that, you know, from where you come from? And how is that verified that it meets nutritional requirements? So we did that by basically working backwards from all that we know.

We don't know everything about nutrition, certainly. But I think we do know plenty to make something that's far healthier than what most people are eating. So we go off of data that's been gathered by the Institute of Medicine, the World Health Organization. A lot of studies have been run. A lot of science has been done over the past century. and it looks like, you know, the body is really made of parts. It's made of chemicals. And there's only so many things that we need that we deplete that need to be replenished.

There's basically energy, you know, that's stored in, you know, atomic bonds from things like the lipids and the carbohydrates. And there's things that are more structure like the amino acids that become proteins. I mean, our body is continually undergoing a state of change. And we need to replenish its parts and its energy. and I mean to a large extent you are what you eat I mean your body becomes you know is built out of the food that you eat so I think we need to be way more careful about what we're putting in our bodies all right I have to ask this Chris you you you drink soylent on a regular basis

and it like you say it's I have half my calories how much about half my calories which is about the I think it's about the average so I think that's the average I mean we have we have some hardcore users but you know most people are about half calories most people around half the time it's like my worst meal, so breakfast and maybe like afternoon snack or something. Okay, and so we're looking at the ready to drink bottle, the Stormtrooper bottle. What does it taste like?

Describe it for me. Well, everyone's calling the ready to drink Cheerio milk. So it tastes very similar to, you know, we eat Cheerios and then the milk leftover, you know, which is a kid or whatever, you'd always, at least I would always like drink that and think it tasted really good and it tastes like that. People, it's been, you know, because the, the. caricatures of Soilent in the press. People have said it's, you know, have caricatured it is not tasting good.

People are just are universally shocked at how good it tastes. I mean, I'll be honest. Like, again, I'm relatively skeptical about all this and I tried it. Chris is a good salesman for Soylent. And it actually does taste pretty good. I have a big. I have a giant fridge of it and everyone loves it. Yeah, it actually does taste pretty good.

I have yet to meet somebody who does not like they're ready to drink. I've given it to everyone who comes to my office, including. I describe it a little. entrepreneurs and reporters. And a good way. Like, you know, when you get to like wipe your finger on the ball. I think the powder tasted more pancake pancake batter, especially like 1.0. Yeah, the powder, we had some issues with the texture.

I mean, the way that the drink is processed, which, you know, is in a huge, very, very complex, automated facility. You know, it's very difficult to have something that is so nutritious, to have it not spoil, to have it sit on the shelf, to have a shelf life of over a year. and not require refrigeration. It's a very complicated process. You know, there's a lot of science and technology that goes into our food system that people, one, don't even know about, and I think don't appreciate as much as they should. Well, but a big, a big, one thing that's a big goal of soil is not just to make something that's affordable and nutritious. It's also to have less environmental impact in the production of it. You know, so the current system is just, I mean, it's just completely, I think, barbaric.

I mean, we, you know, we're slaughtering animals, treating them in an awful way. We were consuming, you know, 80% of fresh water on earth is used by agriculture. You know, we have a drought in California, like the amount of it's like, you know, thousands of gallons of water end up going into the production of, you know, a few pounds of meat. It's an incredibly inefficient system. It's a wasteful system. It's destroying the earth. It's, you know, it's incredibly wasteful. And I don't think there's, I don't think we really.

really need to rely on it that much anymore. I mean, because you don't need, you know, cow meat itself, although, you know, it has attractive properties like taste and texture, but those can be, you know, generated in different ways. And the proteins themselves can be generated in different ways far more efficiently. So part of the goal here is to, yes, make the production of this product and more agricultural products far more efficient by just cutting out a lot of these intermediate steps that are really unnecessary.

one example of this is the algae oil that is present in the product so it's not it's not grown like a traditional crop in a field it's grown in a large tank in a in a bioreactor with single cells and so since you're growing it out of these individual cells you don't need you know the whole animal you don't need all this energy going to keeping the organism itself alive and you don't have you know plants soaking up metals from soil you don't have to water things and the water you know leaves the water table so are you guys um producing, swollen it yourselves, or are you sourcing algae oil, for example? How is that working? I mean, it's a physical product. You know, we have a vast and complex supply chain. The goal is total vertical integration. I think in theory we could make everything, including the bottle, out of, you know, out of microorganisms that have been engineered to produce these components far, far more efficiently than traditional processes. So when you step back, and there's a lot of discussion about food systems and

Chris, you bring up the drought and just the use of resources, you know, how does soil and end things like that? When you think of a food system of the future, what does that start to look like for you? I think it's very, it's something that would work just as well in space or on Mars as on Earth. I mean, the inputs are the same. You know, you need CO2 and you need energy which can come from light and you need water, which you can recycle. I would like to be able to make food without burdening the earth's resources whatsoever. And I think it's totally possible. So what does that start to look like? Are we talking about like growing things in test tubes and vats and, you know? I'm glad you asked. Yeah, bioreactors. These are beautiful, big

photo bioreactors. You know, spheres or columns. Big blue glowing or. Yes. We're going to have a bunch of them in downtown L.A. and you can go tour and see these beautiful blue. Exactly. Yeah. Going to the Soilent factory in L.A. in a few years is going, people are going to come from all over the world to see these giant blue glowing gloating orbs so uh and the orbs are growing or producing what um uh anything so the uh but mostly the uh components of uh of the other product you know um staples macronutrients proteins fats amino acids but they don't look like it's not like there's an ear of corn growing in a glowing blue you know beaker tub or tank no it's it's going to look like uh exactly you cut that out it's going to look like just

a cloudy drop of water and you're going to see like you know it needs CO2 it needs gas and it needs nitrogen so you'll see bubbles of gas going up through it and you'll see a strong light source at the center which provides the energy that the algae can feed on and then they get harvested and processed dried or membrane extracted the components that you need individually so imagining a modular system where instead of, you know, one huge tank that could fail, you have many, many smaller ones. In fact, in the future, I think it may be efficient enough that anyone could have their own. Yeah, I mean, I was going to say, we just had back to the future day, and it sounds like you could just put this in your home, right?

Yeah, like the Mr. Fusion. I think we could have the Mr. Soylent sits on your counter or you put it on your porch and it gets sunlight or you have your solar panel, which powers the LEDs. And, you know, the fundamentals, there's certainly no physical limit that would make this impossible. You mentioned space. Have you been approached by, you know, NASA, by the European Space Agency? Are, I mean, are people starting to think that, like, hey, we know, we all just read the Martian or watched the movie. If we're going to go to Mars, we're going to do. I think that would have been a great product placement.

Yeah. What the hell are you doing? Yeah. We actually have heard from, from people that place like SpaceX and orbital sciences, I think, stocks the food for the ISS. One really, one of the most popular use cases for soilants is people hiking and doing other kinds of things like this. Because it turns out, the powder, carrying the powder in a backpack, it's the most efficient way to carry. It's the lightest weight per calorie, most nutritious way to carry. Yeah, exactly. So no more freeze-dried chili, just bring soilin powder. I see.

You could flavor your soiling with the chili. Well, so I want to get to that community because there's this big community. And Chris, I also want to, let's back up a, how did you? you come across this? I think like a lot of people I saw their crowdfunding campaign and was intrigued by it and then was introduced to Rob and, you know, and then we ended up investing. I think an interesting question to ask is why do we have the food system that we have? And why do we have these problems like obesity and, you know, why are people continuing to

buy food that's so bad for them? And I think, I mean, the answer is partly, for example, the district. distribution system is the fact that if you live you know i grew up in springfield ohio which is a small town in ohio which i just went back to and visited my parents and um it's just basically i mean your choices are just everywhere you go every street every store is a fast food restaurant um that's what people do there you go get fast food um and you know people i think in the west coast you know these are the organic movement they sort of have this romanticized view that people are out there you know i don't know plucking corn and cooking it or something it's just not it's just not how the non-coast

parts of the United States work. They go and they get, you know, whatever, Arby's and McDonald's and this kind of stuff. And so the reason, a lot of it is just simply that this is what's there. I mean, this is what's convenient, right? And then you're, and then you're bombarded with these very confusing messages about nutrition, right? Which is, you know, one week it's, it's, you know, fat is good for you, then it's bad for you. It turns out most of these things, we know most of, like you go, if you're in the hospital, they'll give you, you, you know, you, you know, and you get in an accident, they'll give you a feeding tube with a bunch of nutrients that will keep you alive and keep you healthy. Like science knows how to, what is

nutrition? It's not a mystery. And by the way, the stuff they're giving feeding tube has a lot of the same stuff as soil and has. We know the answer to these questions, right? The problem is there's these giant industries whose incentive it is to go and sort of obfuscate this and confuse people. And, you know, things like the, you know, the FDA food pyramid is a heavily politicized document. I come from this perspective of, like, how do you do something about that? And I think, unfortunately, the people that are trying to do something about the food problem have, you know, for the most part, taking this organic approach, which I think is well-intentioned, and I think is sort of directionally correct in that, you know, pesticides and other things

are not good for you, and it's good to avoid them. And if you can afford it, you should, you know, go to the stuff you buy at Whole Foods is generally more expensive and the stuff you buy at a regular grocery store. But the problem is in that movement, there's also a very anti-science trend, which is, for example, they're anti-GMOs. So GMO, I mean, it's just very confused. I mean, because we've been doing genetic engineering, you know, for hundreds of years, thousands of years. And we just now have better ways to do it more precisely.

And science will be, the only way out of this mess, in my opinion, both for this and for climate change and for other kinds of big issues is science. We need to embrace science. And so, you know, part of what was intrigued me about Rob is that he and Soylent is that they are taking a pro-science approach to trying to do something, you know, about our food issues and provide an alternative for people that believe in science. I think you're right, but I think fortunately or unfortunately, there's this, you know, it's two ends of the spectrum. So, you know, the feeding tube in a hospital, you know, we sort of equate with Soilent. So it's either that or it's, I'm running through a organic cornfield picking my own corn. How can we meet in the middle? And Rob, how do you suggest that people meet in the middle in terms of food and food systems?

Or is it like all-soilent or nothing? Certainly not. It's certainly a spectrum and I see soilant as not oppositional to this, you know, romantic viewpoint. Because I think that there are some amazing aspects of food that we should enjoy more. And a lot of this organic movement is, you know, the has noble intention. about simpler living and respecting and understanding nature and understanding more about the food system. I think that's great. But most times, a lot of times you just got to eat. You just got to need your calories. You need to be full. You know, you're trying to do something with your life.

You're trying to do something with your time besides, you know, you don't want to be a farmer. Most people in the United States are not farmers anymore. Because they don't want to have to put in all that work. You know, we can use automation. So that's why I see that it's very complimentary that if you have this default staple nutritious meal that makes a lot of sense. It just gets the job done. It's there when you need it. You don't have to worry about it. And then when you have the time and the desire, then you can really enjoy all of these wonderful cultural, traditional aspects of food. Chris, you mentioned the Kickstarter campaign. And Rob, I want to ask you about this because typically, you know, Kickstarter campaigns are the really hardcore supporters and they're really

excited about it. How is the community of Soylent users, eaters, drinkers, changed from that Kickstarter day to today. And how do you see it sort of spreading out in the community? And what are people doing with Soylent, you know, in the community? Because I know there's an open source aspect to that. And so I want to talk about that as well. Certainly. Well, I think the open source aspect is very important to me. I wanted to be as transparent as possible about this from the beginning, because that was one of my biggest issues with the food system, is that it is transparent, is that a lot of these vested interests seem to obfuscate the science

and the messaging around trying to get people to behave a certain way, and that really bothered me. So I wanted to cut through that by being very, very transparent and open source about the formula and encourage people, you know, even in advance of when we were able to ship, to try out some sort of implementation of the idea. So in the early days, the community was largely DIYers, people trying to make some, you know, soil-esque product on their own.

But, you know, since we've been shipping, the community has exploded in number and diversity. And it's incredibly exciting and rewarding for me to go on places like the subreddit or the discourse or social media and see the way people talk about it and share it and the way it's received and how much people love using it and all the different. things people do with it. So describe some of those. Like how is the Soylent, you know, formula being tweaked by others out there and to what end? To this, today it's mostly in terms of cooking and flavoring, which I think is great. You know, what I'm saying from the beginning is that this isn't, you know, this is food itself. This is not the end of food.

This is not anti-food. This is another option for food. And I think what, you know, as a Christmas point a little bit earlier, a lot of people just do not have that many good options for food. they just don't. I really felt that way. And I feel like this is an additional option that makes a lot of sense. And there's also this whole DIY soiling community where people are taking the formulation, which is open, and creating alternatives, right? So, I don't know, maybe you can describe some.

Yeah, there's a degree of that. On the DIY people are trying to make, you know, use a different protein source or use a different carbohydrate source or go low carb or go high protein for bodybuilding or low carb. Different nutrition profiles. Recently, though, I think I've seen a lot more around. just flavoring it and in cooking it you can bake with it people cook it into different forms

and I think that's very interesting people make it into ice cream yogurt a lot of flavoring stuff too and we're working on ways that we can actually encourage this sort of behavior because it is this standard base but you know a lot of people it's rare that you'll eat just

an egg or just flour you know a lot of people you'll mix it into a bunch of different foods and I certainly see that that's probably always going to be a part of being human is that people are going going to crave a variety of different food stuffs. So what we as a company, if we want to make people healthier and make food production more efficient, we need to fit into this behavior. And, you know, I think this is a great start. But in the future, that, you know, we're going to take this same sort of mentality and make food very healthy, convenient, affordable, but encourage

people to make it their own. You keep saying affordable. How affordable is it? I mean, if I'm buying either the ready to drink or the powder or making it, I guess at home, I could make it for as little as I possibly could, but on average, what are we talking about? So with shipping, the powder is lower cost. The powder is less than $2 per meal. This is a full meal, 500 calories. The bottle is $2.50 for 400 calories. So including shipping, you could live on $8 a day on the powder, and eventually that will go down. Yes, that's $8 a day on the powder, and I'm trying to get that down to $5 a day. Is there an opportunity? I mean, you know, within, I don't know, it could be non-profits, it could even be hospitals for that matter, it could be community

organizations to kind of distribute this. And are you seeing people, you know, we talked about space, but are other organizations reaching out to you? Soilent is, you know, could fulfill a very strong need in a lot of these areas. That's something that has been on my mind and been a focus from the beginning. And from the beginning, we have heard from a lot of these organizations. And it's just wonderful to talk to these people that are so passionate and see the potential of this product to help a lot of people. A lot of the issues there are just logistics. You know, it's very difficult to move such as, you know, so much product to these remote areas.

And the distribution is really the issue. So I think we can really attack that from a product side. One thing we are working on is what's called an RUTF, ready to use therapeutic food, which is kind of like a paste. So it's between the powder and the drinks so that it is ready to consume, but it's cheaper to ship because it doesn't have as high moisture content. and the World Health Organization has a nutrition standard around this that we can just meet. And from there, we try to make it as low cost as possible. And for that, we're trying to get it down to $1 per day. Right.

There's enough food on earth to feed everyone, right? I mean, the problem is distribution, which really means shipping costs. Right. That just basically the shipping costs are prohibitive for, you know, unless you, you know, the people who need the food cannot afford the shipping costs. Right. It needs to be made either more efficient or you need to subsidize it. Or you can make the food more stable. I mean, so, yeah, there's plenty of food that is produced to feed the world twice over.

So why are so many people malnourished? Because it's spoils. And, you know, it's expensive to ship because the moisture content is so high. And we should mention one important feature. So does it last at least, what is it, a year, un-refrigerated? Yeah. And doesn't require, it doesn't need to be chilled. It says not part of the chill chain.

So, like, a lot of food needs to be chilled all the way through, including in the trucks and things, which adds a lot. to the expense and the energy consumption? Yeah. In the United States, the amount of energy spent on refrigeration is just unconscionable. Right. It's insane. So it was very important to me that we had a product that did not require refrigeration.

That, you know, it's nice. It tastes nice chilled, but it's not required. And I personally don't own a refrigerator. I think it tastes just fine. How do you answer? Because you mentioned paste, and I want to get back to the notion of what food is. You know, I can see chefs and, you know, the likes of Mark Bittman and Michael Pollan rolling their eyes, like, okay, now it's,

we're getting to paste. First, it's in a bottle, now it's paste. You know, what are people most skeptical of and what behaviors do you desoilent need to sort of get past for it to get out there more widely? I think, you know, routines can be very sticky. And if someone is in a certain food routine, which most people are for their staples, it can be a little hard to reevaluate it, even if it's not doing, working very well for you, which clearly it's not, given the state of health in the United States and elsewhere. So I think we just need a little bit of perspective. You know, we need to a little bit to, it's just really hard to pin down a certain definition.

You know, obviously food means a lot of different things to a lot of different people. But, you know, genetically and physiologically, there's a lot of overlap between different people. And we just need these same parts. We need these same chemicals. You know, everything is made of chemicals. It's not something we need to be afraid of, including natural plants. So there's no fundamental disconnect. I think, between a engineered food and one that is naturally grown.

In fact, it makes a lot of sense to me to really understand the scientific basis of a natural food product and how it works. And then we think about, you know, how is it meeting our needs and what can we do to make, what can we do to produce it so that it uses fewer of the earth's resources or fulfills our needs? needs better. And, you know, that's going to solve a lot of issues, you know, resource conflicts and hunger. You know, these things have been declining pretty steadily, I think largely because of investment in industrialization. And, you know, if you look at the crops we have today, I mean, calling them natural is just, you know, a misunderstanding. I mean, corn is not supposed to be yellow. You know, pumpkins are supposed to be this big. Watermelons aren't supposed to be this big. You know, soy has been changed.

But again, I'm just curious, and I know you've seen it multiple, multiple times, but getting past that, you know, entrenched behavior, where food is the way I imagine it in my head, it's this kind of Norman Rockwell Thanksgiving meal or something. How do you get people past that to even try soilant? And then where do they typically go from there? Well, I think that everyone, the value proposition is clearly very strong given the response of this. So its price is one of the things, right? Price and function. Right. I think that's, you know, a lot of people are already frustrated with their health.

A lot of people are already frustrated with their routine. And so it's up to us to explain that this can, you know, it gets the job done. It's very effective. It's very usable. It's very accessible. and just lower the barrier for people to try it. And what would you say to the likes of, you know, Michael Pollan and or, you know, all these people in Brooklyn who are leaving Brooklyn and starting farms in upstate New York, like in the Hudson River Valley? Like, how do you talk them down from their sort of bully pulpit?

Again, I think a lot of the intentions are noble and positive. You know, I think there's a lot that I would agree with about understanding more about where our food comes from and how it's produced. and, you know, simpler living, and a lot of people are really stressed, and, you know, maybe they think that if we go back to being farmers, things are going to be easier, but our ancestors didn't have it very easy. And I think it's largely a romanticization of the past, and that we have, we live in a very beautiful, more peaceful world than we had in the past, and I think a lot of it is because of technological development. A lot of things have gone wrong, too. You know, I think that has a very valid point that there's a lot of anxiety that comes with modern behaviors, and a lot of it

is caused by technology, but I think technology, if used correctly, is going to be a huge part of the solution as well, and that a lot of people's source of stress is their food and their health, and that's what we should be fixating on. And I don't think the solution is to just return to the way our ancestors had it. Rob, I want to thank you, Chris, you as well. What's for lunch? I don't know. I want to get some sushi. Thanks, guys. Thank you.