American Alchemy with Jesse Michels - Why the Soylent Founder Moved to a Goat Farm | Rob Rhinehart

Episode Date: October 4, 2024

This week’s American Alchemist is Rob Rhinehart: Rob is the founder of Soylent, partner at Mars Bio, and author of the blog mostly harmless. He’s incredibly intelligent and incredibly eccentric. He lives on a secluded Malibu with goats and horses and eats homemade ice cream all day. He also dabbles in poetry. John Fiorentino, his neighbor, is the founder of gravity blanket (one of the most successful Kickstarter campaigns in history), Moonpods, birthdate candles, and now MoonPals. He’s an outspoken marketing genius with a chip on his shoulder. MUSIC: 11:50 Dream - Jesse Michels https://soundcloud.com/jnm2135/dream *** AMERICAN ALCHEMY is an original series hosted by Jesse Michels that explores the frontier of science and tech. Each week, we bring you exclusive interviews with some of the leading thinkers of our time. INSTAGRAM ➤ https://www.instagram.com/jessemichels TWITTER ➤ https://twitter.com/AlchemyAmerican EMAIL/BOOKINGS ➤ [e-mail] SUBSCRIBE TO OUR CHANNEL: https://www.youtube.com/channel/UC7eOJzNRWY4l2UTDvIquxYg?app=desktop original music: https://open.spotify.com/artist/6LlLRudDi60Uy4jcmOSEs1 Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

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sponsor job credit at Indeed.com slash podcast. That's Indeed.com slash podcast. Terms and conditions apply. Need a hiring hero? This is a job for Indeed, sponsor jobs. Horses are smart in ways that humans are not. But humans are smart in ways that horses are not. Hello, are you interested in buying some books? Meet Rob Reinhardt, founder of Soylent-turned ice cream maker. The way to make the best ice cream is to use raw dairy.

What's that sexy? How you doing? Rob is about as close as any millennial can get to Marlon Brando's character in Apocalypse Now. You have no right to judge me. His preferred form of cutlery is the machete and his weapon of choice is the fly zapper. But when he's not making examples out of trespassing flies, he's feeding horses, beautiful poetry, or goats are lovmikes. Oh, it's done. It's done. Yeah, that actually happened.

Abort, abort. I think Einstein's overrated. This is so crazy. But before we get started, if you haven't already subscribed, please, do that now. Let's back up for a second. Who is Rob Reinhart really? In 2013, Rob founded Soylent, a beverage that promises to feed the body all of the nutrients and minerals it will ever need. And it turns out it's pretty great. To drive his point home, Rob basically only had Soilent for a year straight. It's plants! The product quickly developed a cult following in the bay among hackers who

had little time for meal breaks. But Rob didn't stop at Soilent. He became a partner at Mars Bio, biotech fund and he also writes the blog mostly harmless what i love most about rob though is he's completely polymathic he can go deep on physics computer science biology he could talk about any conspiracy theory under the sun he's just an all-around delight to talk to there is a sunken continent south of india so get ready for all of that and then some with this week's american alchemist rob rindhinehart rob hey jesse what's going on Just chilling on the porch. What do you want to do today? Today is the annual Malibu chili cook-off.

No way. Maybe we could stop by. By the way, where's John? I think John might be still asleep in his room over there. Should we go wake him up? Let's go. Okay. This Malibu native is asleep.

This stuffed animal called Moon Pal. John! Wake up, buddy. That's my good friend John Fiorentino. He's the e-commerce genius behind Gravity Blanket, Moon Pods, and now moon pals. I knew if I woke him up, he would wake up approximately two and a half hours later and pop on camera to say hello.

Night, John. I do not care what you have heard. Grains are good. Bread is the word. Rob, what have you been thinking about recently? I've been thinking a lot about time. I've noticed that nobody has any. Yeah.

Which seems very strange. Abort. Abort. Bind's too long. We don't have the time. Everybody's word about time. time but I just keep that shit off my mind. Do you think the brain creates time?

I think it observes it. I mean, I think that time, oh, excellent. Would you help me build this later? Yeah, great. We can set up here on this cop car. Rob, what are you doing, bro? Hello, are you interested in ancient Egyptian secret societies? No peace. Did you know ice cream is a free Masonic symbol?

I did not know that. I just made that up. The variable of times does not show up in quantum theory. in quantum theory and I think a lot of the universe is subjective. And quantum physics was this interesting era because it kind of bridged those. We could show more or less scientifically that consciousness was involved in the process of the universe.

Nobody's paying attention to the fact that you're on a cop car. We created a system of understanding time. We, to this day, do not know the origin of the calendar. Is there a connection between violence, and time? I mean, once time is seen as this limited resource, which it is increasingly, then, yeah, you're going to have a resource conflict.

And you see it every day. Nobody has any time. Yeah. Nobody's free. Do you have the time? No, I don't have the time. I think the Navy has it. They let out a little of it each day.

You know, you're spending time, you're taking time, you're giving time. People literally say time is money, which really bothers me because it's not. These are two completely different things. Would any of you guys like some books? Would you like to buy some stuck animals? That looks like you have an abundance. You know, Philip K. Dick used to talk about when we killed Jesus, time froze, and we were doomed to repeat cycles where we scapegoat innocent victims.

Yeah, trapped in the cycle. Trapped in the cycle. That is present in essentially every mythology. The fall of man. That, you know, we are divine beings, we have fallen and we are trapped in this body, we are trapped on this earth, and we have to somehow get back to the divine state, which is the opposite of this rhetoric around science and progress and technology, which is that we used to be these primitive savages and everything was horrible.

And now, thanks to progress and technology, we live in this advanced civilization with bridges. Going from a by default balance between mythology and science, most cultures in most timelines, they had the sacred and they had science. You know, take agriculture, for example. You know, they controlled when to put the seed in the ground. They didn't control the rain. So the rain was sacred. So they had religious rituals around things that they couldn't control.

And so there was this balance between, you know, myth and science. And I think we've lost that because science has become our myth. Hey, Bold, come over. It is important to have good teachers. You can teach them as well. Humble yourself and listen. You have nothing to sell. The first time, it's okay to do things by the book.

But then you should experiment. Ideas everywhere you look. I got it like two or three months ago. So like, do you get Delta or regular? Regular. Yeah. It also wasn't bad at all. I don't have my taste and smell, though.

Still. Still. It's been like six months. Does that not? I love it. What? I love it. You would say some weird shit like that.

I eat less. I eat better. And now it's just a salad with chicken every day. Talking about COVID or the vaccine makes people afraid. On either side. If you get the vaccine, like it's hard to talk about. If you don't want to get the vaccine, it's hard to talk about. So we have this.

you know, kind of standardized culture of fear. And the way that was implemented was by dividing people into these different discrete camps. Yeah. And like losing the storytelling. Yeah. And like losing the nuance of these issues. And the complete inability for anyone to think for themselves. Like there's zero nuance.

Like either has to be fully fine. And everybody who doesn't think it's fully fine is a tinfoil hat wearing coop. Or on the other side, it's like it's just like the evil wetware that Bill Gates is putting inside of you to control your brain. And like both are clearly fucking wrong. But nobody can even, the problem is... But the story is, you know, this absolution of individualism or personal responsibility. Yeah. You know, and this is a big part of conspiracy lore.

Yeah. Is that there's this shadowy secret society that is like causing all of our problems. Right. You know, and like, if only they would go away. Right. We need to like keep talking about these conspiracies and the whoever's really pulling the strings. There's no personal responsibility. And on the other side, it's if only the conspiracy theorists would go away.

Like, they're idiots and they're fucking up society. But none of it is like, let me think for myself. Like, what's the best decision for me? There's no personal responsibility there. There's no like, how can I help my society? How can I be a good person myself? No. It's all that owe them.

It's Bill Gates's fault. It's the banker's fault. You know, it's this absolution of personal responsibility that I think is very damaging. And I think a lot of the people that are glorified today have sort of a global conscientiousness, but they locally lack conscientiousness. So they're like, you know, it's just like people like Bill Gates or Warren Buffett. They've completely run trains over, like they have like a wake of like people like who are like angry at them in the past. And then it's just these PR makeover jobs or it's like, I'm a utilitarian billionaire and I'm going to help everybody on earth now.

And then they're glorified. And then they go on Ellen and Allen's a bad person actually as well. She's a great example of this. And then there and then there are these people. people who like, you know, everybody around them loves them, but they don't really pay attention to PR. Well, it's just confusing when it changes, you know, because for a while we were supposed to be this ambitious tech, like the tech billionaire was this hero, right? And then it's now, it's shameful. Yes.

I think about technology a lot, and like the true definition of technology is this craft or skill and this ability, you know, a technique. And we have this story that we have this high tech. I mean, high, you know, is this like religious rhetoric right sure above us so we have this in it's big yeah if you really look most individuals are far less skilled than their grandparents were 100% you know it used to be the defaults to like know how to run a farm the default to know yeah how to build a house people would build their own house not only that they would build beautiful houses yeah yeah and we just lost that skill i don't think big tech makes us at all more self-sufficient it's definitely it makes us less i mean we depend on our screens for

for everything yeah so i've been toying with this idea that, you know, maybe the Nick Bostrom, Elon Musk, you know, killer robots are going to develop from artificial general intelligence and kill us one day. That's wrong. And in fact, AI has already been killing us. The internet is the AI. The internet is the AI. Computer science is AI. We use these consumer apps every day. And we're developing a lower latency, higher bandwidth relationship with the AI. That's part of the story of progress, that we have more transistors and more bits flowing right so we've progressed and that's happening are our what really matters like our culture has has regressed a hundred and the individual is impoverished you know people have no time

they have no money they have no property and they're told this story that this is like the best things have ever been we're given this kind of noble lie that we're living in peak enlightenment you know right before COVID hit now I don't think you can really argue this well it's part of a larger trends I'm getting really into the work Paul Varylio and he wrote that about this culture of speed. The culture is moving faster and faster and becoming more and more consolidated. And so this will lead to this culture where nobody has any time, everybody's chasing things. And he also predicted that money will start to eat itself and that money is going to want,

in technology, they both want to move faster. And money is going to want to go faster and faster and invest in things that are faster and faster. And he said eventually there will be nothing fast enough for money to invest in except for money itself. Yes. That's what's happening. That's what's happening. When did he write this?

Is the 70s? That's pretty amazing. But he also says that reality will eat itself, that people will spend more and more times in these simulated realities and have more and more experiences that are simulations of the real thing instead of experiencing the real thing. I think you see that in just the time people spend on the Internet. Yeah.

Things people use the Internet for. It's this. Ambition comes in all shapes and sizes. At First Citizens Bank, We roll with your goals because we're built for what you're building. Fit for your ambition for Citizens Bank. It's this alternative world. It's this simulation. So let's talk about consciousness for a second.

I think the modern understanding of consciousness, all people like Sam Harris or Daniel Dennett, is that your mind is just physics. It's atoms bouncing off of one another. Consciousness, as we experience it, is purely phenomenological and is just an emergent property of that physics. Yeah. What do you think?

I mean, I think consciousness is just another word for the soul. Obviously, the soul exists. We did not discover consciousness 60 years ago. The most isolated cultures, they basically trend toward this animistic worldview, which includes the persistence of the soul, which includes this birth and death life cycle. And so I think these sacred stories are, you know, implicit in the world around us. And it's interesting that we got, by studying the world around us,

we somehow got to this point to where we stopped seeing all that. And all we saw was this kind of like relativistic worldview that were these billiard balls bouncing around and everything is an accident. And you just, it's like phenomenological consciousness. That's pretty hand-wavy. You know, like how do synapses firing lead to, not only my experience, but like my emotions. Yeah.

That is not explained. There are synapsis firing. Yes. There are chemicals. There are these neurotransmitters. But it's a leap to say that that's the whole picture. Because like what causes the firings to begin with? The most basic questions of neuroscience are, you know, they're not getting to the cause.

Well, a good way to maybe think about the brain that could beget useful findings in the future is maybe the brain is more like a radio than, you know, it is a local computer. And so... Yeah, I'd say something like that. We're more like transmuting or receiving... Yes. ...consciousness than... Like, the brain is filtering...

Yes. ...and communicating consciousness, not creating it. I think that the brain receives consciousness from the spiritual realm somehow. Mm-hmm. Just like the radio. You know, if the radio is playing music and you're just looking at the parts,

it doesn't make sense. You know, you can see... You could... some things would make sense. You know, oh, this signal goes from there and this is consuming power and that has resistance, but where's the music coming from? You know, it's coming from this other source. It's coming from this other transmitter.

And yes, there's some mechanisms and you can have theories and you can have laws and the, you know, material of the brain will follow these laws, but they still don't know where the music is coming from. William James used to write about this. It's called Transmission Theory of Consciousness. Aldous Huxley was also into this idea. The brain has an electromagnetic field, right? Clearly. So maybe the body is actually more.

like a prism and Plato would talk about this too, our lower sensory organs are actually misleading or reductive upon a default state of omniscience. Yeah. And maybe that default state of omniscience is being ported in through an electromagnetic frequency. Yeah. And that's why when you experience near-death experiences, you become a little more psychic because you glitch into that kind of default omniscient state. Or Aldous Huxley when he lost his eyesight. he gains kind of greater perceptive powers in terms of, you know, the doors of his perception. This extrasensory perception. Psychics often report being sick a lot of the time.

They're sort of the most infirmed. And maybe it's because there's leakage in that prism of the body, if that makes sense. Well, again, the Greek atomists, like Lucretius, he was very interested in this psychic sense. You know, this ESP, that's not a new idea. No. Very, very old. Yeah. Well, you have the idea, the muse and the etymology of the word genius.

as attendant spirit. And so if our consciousness, our soul is kind of contained or filtered by our body, by our brain, that would be consistent with a lot of these mythological stories, that the body is kind of like a container, almost like a prison. Like our soul has like fallen from this like very rich dynamic, extra multidimensional world and we're kind of like stuck here in this like limited fallen world of death. A lot of, like, you know, religious writings traditionally were in Sanskrit or Latin, which when you study these languages have very, very rich vocabularies

around talking about these high-minded concepts. You know, that's one reason that translating the Bible into the commoner's tongue. It's it wasn't that they didn't want people to experience it. It's that they didn't want people to have the wrong experience. They didn't want people to misunderstand it. Do you think words themselves are just very limited? So the beginning of, like, Nietzsche's Beyond Good and Evil, he talks about my love is probably not your love.

And that it filters through all past connotations of my experience of love. And you have the same thing. Emerson saying words are finite organs of the infinite mind. Absolutely. It's like an analog to digital conversion. Yes. You know, you're only seeing a shadow. You're losing a lot.

Is true knowledge not sublinguistic? And per the Greek word, Nosis, G-N-O-S-I-S-I-S, known on a visceral, inexplicable level. It's subjective. Yeah, that maybe only poetry. And you think about, this is a good, actually, example. So, like, poetry, it's almost like the energy with which it's written is how, that's how it affects you. It's not the level of precision of description, because it's inherently sort of subjective.

Right. It's the emotion itself. So everything kind of carries a packet of energy with it, as does language. Communication is really sublinguistic. If you want to truly know anything, it's a hermetic energy transfer. for bread loves you and so does god so does the earth their love is broad you need bread and dough needs us transforms our soul feeds our dust respect the bread and you will live long you will be happy you will be strong what are you sort of books do you read i don't read books i don't know how to

who would you compare yourself to he actually copied you Picasso copied you. So you have lived for like over a hundred years or something? You're a vampire. I think it was cool. Yeah, he was cool. Nobody cares. It's so funny. So Rob, this summer the Pentagon just came out with a report on unidentified aerial phenomena, UFOs. I read the report. You're not talking about the Office of Naval Intelligence one. I am, yes.

Okay. So the Office of Naval Intelligence is the Older. intelligence organization. So I think it's interesting that it came out of that. But anyways, for the report, I read the report, and you're right, it was pretty anti-comactic. Let's explore the whole possibility space of why this narrative is becoming mainstream, why Leslie Kane of the New York Times is pushing for disclosure. But it feels sort of like a coordinated drip campaign, and why is this coming out now? If it is a coordinated drip, it would, you know, they would probably know that this very idea people would be very afraid of.

Look at the character of aliens in film. There were all these space monsters, right? They were scary. And then more recently than that, you know, the movie Alien, the Alien is the villain. Yes. And then over time, aliens became more, became friendlier. Yes. And so maybe they just got in front of that and had the scariest aliens possible.

And then over time made them more common and friendlier. They have access to infinite time and space, but they're not bound. If you look at the first alien abduction that really became kind of popularized in the U.S. It was 1961, Betty and Barney Hill, and they see these aliens with eyes around the rim of their entire head. And there was a show that was very popular at the time aired on CBS 11 days before the abduction called Outer Limits. And the aliens looked exactly like the aliens. that they described in their experience. So the kind of easy explanation way to write that off

is they are hallucinating something that they saw on TV. But maybe we've been seeing these things for thousands of years. They're sort of interdimensional. And that some higher platonic thing that we can't describe is happening. And we have like these lower level memes and we're attaching the closest available one too. it right now it happens to be aliens, but pre-1947 and Roswell, we can't attach anything to it, or we're attaching past local lore to it, so angels and demons. I mean, I think there's a lot to

that. The stories of seeing fairies and leprechauns and spirits, they're very similar to these UFO events. You know, somebody or a small group of people saw something, mystical, supernatural, and other people don't really believe them, and they have trouble reconciling this experience with their day-to-day reality. I personally know people that claim to have had children with extraterrestrials and that they are on like inside the moon or like on these alien craft and they get to see them every couple years. And it's so hard for them to talk about it, right? Because it's just they immediately get written off as as crazy. Even though we don't know what they went through. We don't know their subjective experience. And I think it's interesting. We're kind of trained to just use this word

crazy. You know, we're trained to just be, this is outside my reality. And so it must, be untrue. But why would this person, you know, risk being called crazy? And I think the truth is a lot of establishment thinkers, scientists, creative people get their ideas in really unconventional weird ways. So whether it's Dirac staring into the fire or Wolfgang Paley had a dream and dreamt up the architecture of an atom. And he actually wrote in a letter to Young, you know, I feel like I can't tell the world about the fact that I I dreamed the architecture of an atom up, and that's how I know this. Same with Descartes. Same with Descartes.

He had a dream and these spiritual beings. Yes. Introduced themselves, talked with him, and not only told him, but showed him the Cartesian plane and explained to him this concept that later became Cartesian duality. A lot of these scientific inspirations happened in these relatively mystical contexts. And in Descartes' example, it was the advent of the 30s. years war. Do you think that these experiences happen more in times of social breakdown? You stop trusting institutions and you look for the celestial. And people have always looked at the celestial,

you know, comets, you know, signifying war or, you know, great historical changes. You have a lot of weird conspiracy theories about Antarctica. You want to talk about those? I mean, my interest started in the Kerguelen Islands, the desolation islands. So there's a sunken continent essentially south of India. The indigenous people of India claimed that was their origin. And if you look, there is a sunken continent south of India. Pretty big too, right? It's the third of the size of Japan.

It's huge. The Nazis seem to be very interested in this landmass. You know, a U-boat was found near the Kurgwellyn islands carrying mercury. Hitler was very interested in Antarctica. The head of the German Navy went on record saying that they built an impregnable fortress in a faraway land. Then there's the bird. expedition. Operation High Jump is incredibly mysterious. Admiral Bird, who was a highly decorated naval general. I mean, he was the guy if you were going to do a big expedition. And they did.

The United States assembled an armada of ships, planes, soldiers, a lot. It was an invasion force. And they told the media and they told the public that it was a training exercise. And it was supposed to last for six months. And they turned around maybe the day they got to Antarctica, multiple planes went down, multiple people died, a battleship was sunk, and Admiral Bird goes on record saying that he had witnessed craft that could travel from the South Pole to the North Pole in a matter of hours. And Admiral Bird was then essentially silenced, put into a hospital room forbidden for giving any other interviews, and then he died. His boss, James Forrestall, also met an untimely death, jumped out of a window at Bethesda Naval Hospital. But you know, I mean, a lot of this stuff, it's like these historical narratives and stuff you read on the internet, which I just, you can't. How much stock can you really put in these things? I don't know. With the bird thing, I'm also not sure how true it is.

Who knows? So I'm a big believer in primary sources. And as it happens, my neighbor who lives here on this ranch is an extreme weather doctor and has spent over two years in Antarctica. And I just asked her, have you ever seen anything strange in Antarctica? And she's like, well, you know, a lot of rich and powerful people come there, like Bill Gates comes to Antarctica a lot. I thought that was interesting, and I just traded fast. I was like, you ever hear of any aliens in Antarctica? And she was like, well, when I was at McMurdo base, yeah, there was this guy that was like drawing pictures of these aliens and, you know, telling us about them. And I just thought he was crazy. Clearly, there's a lot of things we don't know. And I don't think we should be so quick to write things off that don't fit within our existing framework. Why do I have a machete for security?

Why do you need security? Why do you feel like you need security? Never be too careful. Rob and I decided to host an AMA in the comments, so please feel free to have at it. Ask us any questions. There are no dumb questions. Just trolls.

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