For science!
Hi, I'm Neil deGrasse Tyson and this is "Rising Stars." Today, we're
featuring Rob Rhinehart, who's founder and CEO of Soylent, a meal replacement
product that's all the rage in the tech universe. Rob, welcome.
Thank you very much for having me.
Soylent! How old were you when you started this?
24.
Your company's now valued at $100 million
That was a few years ago. We've grown substantially since then.
- That's crazy - Food is a huge market.
How did you get initial funding to do this? Were you using your savings to start this?
Was it in your garage? - We raised a small amount of capital from a startup
incubator, founded by Paul Graham, called Y Combinator and then after we
started to get off the ground a little bit, we used crowdfunding. We raised $3M
in a crowdfunding campaign.
Was it the word "Soylent" that
was getting people? - It definitely stimulated some conversation
You're too young to remember the original reference.
I'm a huge fan of the movie and the book.
"Soylent Green."
Keeping that science aspect
and that science fiction aspect is very important to me because when you think
of Soylent, Soylent Green in the book "Make Room! Make Room!" that's a very real
problem about population growth and burdening the earth's resources.
I think we need to take these problems very seriously and catch them before they start.
What are you trying to do here?
We're trying to make food better. We
wanted to see what balanced diet entails and then meet those requirements as
elementally as possible. - So elementally, you mean sort of molecular nutritional
level of the product. - Exactly. The goal was to use science to improve the food system.
Whatever you put in here, you want to say it's better than like the whole
meal I just had? I had like eggplant parmesan last night.
Well it depends what you're optimizing for.
Optimize for pleasure — how about that?
This may not be the most pleasurable meal in the galaxy.
However it is very functional.
Functional food?
Right. Ever since food fortification from a
generation ago. I mean, iodized salt, fortified rice, cereal
even macaroni and cheese has to be fortified. - Yeah it's all the grains
Nutritional deficiencies used to be just part of life and now they're
gone. - They're gone completely. This is an engineering problem.
A food engineering problem.
A food engineering problem and it's a very complex problem
I mean it's pretty astounding that we can make something like this that will
sit on a shelf without refrigeration for a year. - It's the food you want in the
zombie apocalypse. - Exactly, preppers love this stuff.
So can I try your liquid here?
You can.
So how do I know what flavor this is?
We were trying to have something kind of neutral, kind of bland
So you managed to create this and not
have much of a taste? It's really a perfunctory act
Which is very difficult
because every one of those ingredients does have a taste, so to have
something ending up neutral is much, much more difficult than to have something
that tasted strongly of, say, mint.
So this will define forevermore what Soylent
tastes like for me? - Yes.
Some of it reminds me of Kaopectate.
This doesn't have the same function.
You know what it is?
The urge to participate in this brilliant exercise in food is not
bigger than wanting this to taste awesome.
We have another flavor.
We have Coffiest. You want to try that?
OK, I'll try some.
See, that's way better.
That, I don't know what this is. Maybe I want to taste. That's what it is.
You put so much energy taking taste out of this then why am I doing... This
tastes like a coffee, a room-temperature coffee milkshake.
Because first we had to
take taste out of everything else in there so that we could add in something
So it'd be a pure thing?
And it would only taste like what we put in there — not all the previous stuff.
This tastes like a coffee milkshake. You did it.
I think he likes it.
So what's your science background because you can't just walk
into this saying I want new food and not understand chemistry and physiology.
Personally I actually studied more electrical engineering and computer science
- This in college? Are you a rare entrepreneur who actually graduated from college?
I did graduate from college. - (Jokes) I'm so disappointed
I know, I lose a lot of credit.
All it meant was that college did not homogenize your creativity?
I suppose not.
And so once you have the engineering background you just
your science geeked-out anyway then you just absorb the rest of
what you need to know.
Always loved learning. Always loved studying and I
realized that I don't need to take a class on something to learn it.
What revelation that is! That works only when you've learned how to learn.
I wish I got more educators like you.
I have it easy because I just look
at a camera lens. I'm not there with the screaming kids.
When I see an actual teacher, it's like "ahhhh"
"I'm not worthy."
No but you were like the world's coolest teacher — you know that?
You must know that?
No, I got good material. The universe is good material.
Is this the future of food or is this, say, something to get us thinking new
ways about food?
The process by which this was designed is a big component
of the future of food. That we need to start thinking really seriously about
what the body needs and how food is produced.
Until now, we just thought about
what the body needs and we just combed the earth to put this stuff in here.
Now you've got this but I used 10 acres of land, 3 cows, 4 quarts of milk, whatever
and you got the full, would you say, the vertical integration of the
production of this in mind. - Exactly - You think that's the future?
Absolutely. Eventually, I'd like to get to the point, and I'm focusing on protein
right now, to produce everything with single-celled organisms. Calories come
from from the sun at some point. Plants take the sun's energy, then if you feed
those plants to an animal, then you get the energy that ends up in its meat or fat.
- Right a cow is just a machine to turn sunlight into steak.
That's the only point of a cow.
But a lot of energy is lost along the way.
So the more directly you can extract that energy from the sun, the better.
Is this one meal or one whole day's worth of.. - We're not quite there yet
- Eventually we'd like to get to a pill - There's a limit to how many calories
you can cram in a certain volume of the space-time continuum.
There is, but maybe if
we had some sort of radioactive isotope that in an engineered strain of
gut bacteria to extract the energy from that and then that therein synthesizes
the carbohydrate and fat and protein that you need.
So you're actually thinking about this?
Oh absolutely.
So we would since we currently and we evolved to be
100% chemical energy-driven, in this model, part of us would be tapping
nuclear energy.
It's certainly possible. Maybe you wouldn't even need to swallow
the pill. You could fit enough energy in a tiny seed that maybe you could implant
the isotope and then the bacteria could feed off of that for a century.
Presumably, you wouldn't otherwise get cancer from it?
You could shield it.
Holding aside that minor complication — you're dead from cancer in a week
but you're otherwise really healthy. - And you're very well fed.
I imagine a day, as long as
we're making stuff up here, where we understand the genome of every species.
Recognize the commonality among us all and figure out a way to turn some
patches of our skin into photosynthetic surfaces. If you had an ideal surface on
your skin to absorb sunlight, it should be completely black and somewhere under
there you put in - Well, I guess you'd need a few photosensitive proteins like you have
blue-green algae which not just uses the chlorophyll but also phycocyanin.
I didn't know that. OK. They had their run of Earth 4 billion years ago.
Still going strong. Not what they used to be.
They used to be in charge. They gave us all our oxygen. We are not the biggest
changers of the Earth's climate. Those bacteria were.
Another thing, speaking of the genome, is that you could, in theory
we could synthesize our own vitamins.
How come we can't grow limbs but newts can?
And and why do we need
some amino acids we can't make?
Or we can't digest cellulose and most
of the plant life in the world is cellulose.
Yeah you can either have
cellulitic gut bacteria...
Then we'd have way more methane flatulence...
And then cook it on your stove. (Laughs)
The future of food!
You got the whole, the whole closed loop.
Well it sounds like you have just the right kind of background to think that creatively.
If you had only a pure biology background maybe you wouldn't have come to some of
these revelations. - Maybe not.
The engineer thinks about a problem and how to solve it.
And I think a great engineer or a scientist sees that the boundaries
between the fields are not absolute.
Right and you just cross them over
whenever you need to.
Yeah, that chemical energy, electrical energy.
- Just energy - It's the same.
So what's next?
You just gonna keep growing the company. Be a zillionaire and then help the UN?
Absolutely. We can help feed the world and in time I think we'll
invest in science and technology, vertically integrate food production
such that you can have an at-home bioreactor that will print nutritious
food directly from sunlight, air, and water.
At-home bioreactor?!
Oh, yeah.
Oh, yeah. You gotta drop an octave. Like George Takei.
"Oh my."
Oh, yeah.
Yeah! (Laughs)
So that's fascinating. The future of food. $2 — under $3.
That's a little over $3. This is under $3.
You're out of control.
Best is yet to come.