Spencer Hyman on flavor and chocolate

Would the world be a better place if we all paused to enjoy a square of sustainably-sourced craft chocolate every day? In honor of the Thanksgiving season, Reid and Aria treat Possible listeners to a discussion about chocolate, flavor, and sustainability. Joining them is Spencer Hyman, whose company, Cocoa Runners, sells craft chocolates from sustainability-minded artisan makers around the world. He gets into the difference between flavor and taste, along with the future of personalized nutrition and the art of savoring everything from chocolate to friendship. For more info on the podcast and transcripts of all the episodes, visit https://www.possible.fm/podcast/ Topics: 2:33 - Hellos and intros 4:20 - Spencer’s journey into the world of chocolate 6:25 - The language of flavor 8:01 - How AI could impact taste 10:23 - Inflection’s Pi describes flavors in creative ways 13:03 - Leading a sustainable business that combines capital and social good 15:17 - Making chocolate more social 16:08 - Why chocolate is water-intensive 18:32 - Waves of culinary trends and innovations 22:17 - Midroll ad break 22:24 - Can technology help us better savor food? 25:14 - The next potential innovations in the food industry 28:07 - Why the order you eat things in matters 30:50 - Building meaningful connection via chocolate 34:14 - A conversation with Spencer’s daughter about chocolate and relationship-building 38:18 - Rapid-fire questions

Speaker names marked ? are inferred from speaking time and the show’s known hosts — they are not voice-verified.

• 0:02Speaker 00

  One of the interesting things about flavor is that flavor is actually very similar to the way that if you walk into a room and you hear 50 different conversations, you can make no sense of it. If however you focus on just one of those conversations, you can actually start to have a really interesting experience. Even great sommeliers can only identify two or three flavor notes at any one time. And I think that's where AI will just turn all this amazing reams of data into real insight. And I think one of them will be around health and nutrition.

• 0:35Reid Hoffman?

  Hi, I'm Reid Hoffman.

• 0:46Aria Finger?

  And I'm Aria Finkler.

• 0:47Reid Hoffman?

  We want to know what happens if in the future, everything breaks humanity's way. What we can possibly get right if we leverage technology like AI and our collective effort effectively.

• 0:59Aria Finger?

  We're speaking with technologists, ambitious builders, and deep thinkers across many fields: AI, geopolitics, media, healthcare, education, and more.

• 1:10Reid Hoffman?

  These conversations showcase another kind of guest. Whether it's Inflection's Pi, OpenAI's GPT-4, or other AI tools, each episode we use AI to enhance and advance our discussion.

• 1:22Aria Finger?

  In each episode, we seek out the brightest version of the future and learn what it'll take to get there.

• 1:28Reid Hoffman?

  This is Possible.

• 1:38Aria Finger?

  Every so often on the Possible podcast, we like to give you a little treat. And so in honor of the Thanksgiving season, I'm excited about today's episode.

• 1:45Reid Hoffman?

  We're talking to Spencer Hyman, founder and chair of chocolate at Coco Runners, a sustainably-minded artisan chocolate distributor based in London. His company works directly with producers and chocolate makers to build a catalog of chocolate with fair labor practices.

• 2:02Aria Finger?

  Spencer's background is in retail and tech, but he has spent the last decade honing in on his passion for helping people enjoy chocolate, including through tastings and monthly subscriptions. Today, we'll get into the future of taste, along with what it takes to improve the sustainability and enjoyability of our favorite foods.

• 2:20Reid Hoffman?

  Here's our conversation with Spencer Hyman.

• 2:34Reid Hoffman?

  Spencer, welcome to Possible. You studied history at Oxford, so maybe it should come as no surprise that the Cocoa Runners website has a tab dedicated to the history and culture of chocolate. It includes in-depth articles like "Chocolate in the Aztec Empire" and "How Did Chocolate Spread Around the World?" Can you tell us about how your passion for history influenced the idea for Cocoa Runners? And why you share these articles with customers?

• 3:03Speaker 00

  History's changed a bit since when I was studying, when it was all about kings and queens and events and revolutions. And it's now much more about people and what's going on and looking at connections and stuff like that. And what you can enjoy and what you can really get out of it. And if you want to understand at the same time, really what's happened in the last 500 years of world's history, chocolate is a phenomenal starting point because it's part of the Columbian Exchange, which is the great changes which kicked off with Columbus. But it's also a different way of looking at things and looking at the connections and explaining what is happening. And I think the other thing about chocolate, which is quite fun, is that history is all about curation. The bits you choose to remember are really what historians tell you

• 3:48Speaker 00

  that you should be remembering. And one of the fun things about chocolate is trying to figure out which ones are you going to enjoy. You know, we worked with you to curate the Reid Hoffman selection of different chocolates, which would take you on all sorts of different journeys and teach you all sorts of different things. And I think that's part of the magic and the fun of it. And it's also something which everybody does. You know, we can all appreciate and we can all savour and enjoy it. And it's a great way of learning about a sense that we don't often think that much about.

• 4:21Aria Finger?

  I was lucky enough to taste the Reid Hoffman chocolates and do taste tests, actually, with my kids. And I'm surprised that I'm not a chocolate entrepreneur because I am obsessed with chocolate. But you, you were a tech entrepreneur. You worked at global juggernauts, Amazon, Hasbro. What made you take the leap into the world of chocolate?

• 4:41Speaker 00

  Part of it is that I helped launch Amazon over here in the UK many, many, many moons ago. And also did stuff like music. And one of the great things about chocolate is not only do we spend more on chocolate in the UK and the US than we do on books, but unlike books, it's actually quite difficult to figure out which ones you would like. So the secret of most things in e-commerce has always been search. You know, the equivalent of physical retail has been location, location, location. And it's categorically quite tough to beat Amazon at that game. But there are certain categories where actually you need a different form of discovery. And, uh, you know, so music, for example, in many ways probably had the best form of discovery anybody's ever come up with. In my generation, it was called DJs.

• 5:25Speaker 00

  And, you know, you sort of have the top 40 and stuff like that. And now you've got playlists, which, you know, and in a way, chocolate lends itself brilliantly to playlists, um, to helping people discover what they would like. But it also, I think, the other thing that as I got into chocolate, the more and more I discovered is this amazing world of flavor, which is a unique human attribute where we, it's, it's something really strange. We do something three or four times a day. We eat and we drink. And we have this amazing skill that, you know, unlike, for example, reading a book or learning to ride a bike when you can cycle, we don't really, at least in the US and the UK, spend that much time thinking about how to articulate flavor. But once you've got that language, it becomes just so much more fun.

• 6:10Speaker 00

  And it just, you know, gives you a whole new set of experiences. So it, it's a bit like sort of, you know, before you go on holiday, if you've got a guidebook and learn a few words of the language, you're going to get so much more out of it. And, and chocolate is a great way of sort of, you know, giving you something on flavor.

• 6:25Reid Hoffman?

  You know, one of the things that I love about Cocoa Runners is they, you know, fun and educational tastings you offer. So what is the difference between taste and flavor? And expand our vocabulary a little bit and give us some sense of a, of, of the language of flavor.

• 6:42Speaker 00

  Yeah, well, I think the first thing I'm going to do is is sort of, you know, basically blame all of your predecessors, Reed, who were the philosophers, for basically confusing us about taste and flavor, because, you know, the likes of Aristotle and Kant and everybody else have really confused it all there, because most people sort of, you know, think about taste and flavor as being, as you sort of said, synonymous almost, but they're actually very, very different. So taste is something which almost all animals can do. You basically sense with various detectors in your mouth, to be very simple, and also a couple of other places, things like sweetness, sourness, saltiness, bitterness, umami and fat. So there are things that we all readily recognize and you get really, really fast. But flavor is A, quite unique to humans, and B, it's something which we confuse a bit,

• 7:27Speaker 00

  because even though we detect it in our mouths, it's actually our sense of smell. So the weird thing about humans is that we smell not just with our noses, but also when we put food or drink in our mouth. And it's that which creates all those other sensations, you know, as you're having your cup of tea and I'm having my cup of tea as we try a piece of chocolate. What we're getting out of it are actually the volatiles which are sort of going through our, you know, sense of smell, for want of a better word. And other animals can't do this, which is the reason why we should savor, and they can just gobble down and scarf and scoff all their food.

• 8:01Aria Finger?

  I mean, it reminds me so much, my brother was a sommelier for 20 years, and it's, you know, you have a glass of wine with dinner and he's always like, "No, no, no, take the bite of steak and then swish it around and then eat it, and then tell me what you're feeling, and then that's different, the mouth feel, and before you know the vocabulary, you're like, okay, you're a crazy person." But then, once you learn it, it just enhances all of these, you know, human experiences, which is so lovely. And so we were, you know, one of the things we talk about with AI is enhancing human experience, and people are usually talking about sight and hear and what we're feeling, and they often overlook smell and taste. And you said that you actually think that like taste is going to be one of the

• 8:45Aria Finger?

  the last senses that's impacted by AI. So tell us about that, why you think that, and is there some way that AI is going to impact this?

• 8:54Speaker 00

  So I think that's a great question. I love your point about sommelier too, because I think it is that. I mean, everyone is very frightened about wine, that a good sommelier, you know, is going to be able to explain it to you, make you feel much more comfortable and more confident, and just you will enjoy it so much more. But I think one of the strange things about flavour in particular, and taste to an extent, is we don't have a great vocabulary for it. We don't have a great sort of set of descriptions. It's not like, for example, colour, which has got the Pantone system. It's not like sort of music, which, you know, as we launched things like Last of Them and Spotify, the digitisation of music meant that you could break it down as the pitch, the rhythm, the frequency, and you can sort of build digital fingerprints and you could get it understood.

• 9:38Speaker 00

  And similarly with music and with art, you can also, you know, we've got, we can understand how colours work, and we can understand how you can sort of put images together. And, you know, now that we know how cats fall apart, we're much better at actually doing image recognition. So we've got these amazing databases. And with a few exceptions, there aren't really databases of flavour in the world which we've got. It's a unique human sense. It's not something we've been working on for that long. You know, Linda Buck and Richard Axel, who won the Nobel Prize for how the olfactory system works, only won it in 2004. There isn't sort of, if you like, an IMDB or an ISMN of flavour. And so, you know, back on you as the experts on AI, I think the question is, where's the dataset? How are you going to train it? And what can you do about it?

• 10:23Aria Finger?

  Well, all right. We tried to see what, if AI could help us, because as you said, like, what is the dataset? Where are we going to come up with the words and the data to be able to sort of match flavours? So we asked Inflection's Pi to come up with a few ways to describe flavour through some ultra-specific filters. So first, we asked for a Renaissance-era approach to find flavour, to which Pi said, "A sumptuous medley, or a veritable feast for the senses." And then we asked for a more British way, and you can get on Pi for this. Pi said, "Taste like a proper cuppa and positively scrumptious."

• 11:05Aria Finger?

  When we asked for a botanical lens, Pi said a blossoming sensation and a verdant burst. And then lastly, we asked Pi how to describe the flavor of chocolate. And a few answers were a creamy and luscious mouth feel, a rich and velvety aroma, and then notes of earthiness and fruitiness. So how did Pi do? Are these horrifying or are these words that you ever use to describe chocolate?

• 11:32Speaker 00

  No, I think they're great words. And I think that Pi has picked up on one of the great secrets of chocolate, which is that that mouth feel, which it's talking about, is due to this unique attribute of chocolate, which is the wonderful cocoa butter. So the way that flavor gets released in your mouth is basically through heat, releasing volatiles. And the amazing thing about chocolate is it's literally the only thing which when it's properly tempered, is solid at room temperature and then melts when you put it in your mouth. And it's that lovely, what Pi was sort of describing as the creamy feel, which gives rise to also what I was talking about, which is sometimes the verdant notes, or sometimes the earthy notes, or sometimes the fruity notes.

• 12:15Speaker 00

  And then the fun part actually gets to be to sort of, you know, dive down to the next level. Okay, well, which fruit do you mean? Because the fun thing is, is that it's all about association. You know, there are very, very, very few words which just describe an aroma. They're almost all based on stuff that we think about, we've tasted. So, you know, they're like a fruit, or they're like a vegetable, or they're like, you know, a nut or something like that. There are very, very, very few words which are just about aromas and flavor. And so it's bringing those out and just getting comfortable with them because we hardly ever use them. I mean, you know, we automatically as kids get shown how colors work. We get shown how to read. But unless, you know, you're Italian or French and you're trying to basically compliment the chef, you will learn, or the cook, you will basically learn

• 12:59Speaker 00

  the words to appreciate what you're doing. And it sort of becomes a wonderful virtuous circle.

• 13:03Reid Hoffman?

  Another thing that's important about Cocoa Runners is, you know, kind of selling a variety of craft chocolate from independent farms and a massive appreciation for commitment to the ensuring that all the chocolate is sustainably sourced, ethically made. So how do you lead a sustainable business that combines, you know, capitalism and social good?

• 13:24Speaker 00

  So I think that's, you know, you sort of, as ever, hit the $64 billion sort of question there. And I think part of it is around getting people to sit back and think a little bit more because as you're sort of hinting at, it is very difficult to figure out how to scale a business which is trying to pay farmers fairly and trying to get people to, you know, be conscious and trying to eat more healthily when they're basically having their taste buds basically abused and played against them. And I think the way to try and do it is to get people to learn that this stuff is not just healthier for them, but it's also going to give them a set of different experiences.

• 14:07Speaker 00

  I mean, it's a little bit sort of similar to the way that, you know, luxury goods companies can somehow get you to pay a little bit more for something which has been made with more care and made with more respect and maybe, you know, paying the workers, they can afford to pay the workers more because that's the trick. The trick in chocolate is basically how do we pay the farmers a little bit more? We're all used to paying very little, but if you pay the farmers very little money, unfortunately you get massive environmental destruction. So, you know, people don't necessarily realize that actually, you know, everyone's worried about almonds and how much water they absorb, but chocolate bars are way worse. So, you know, a handful of almonds is 500, 700 liters of water. One chocolate bar is 1500 to 2000 liters of water. So it's a lot.

• 14:52Speaker 00

  Now, that's fine if you're basically encouraging the farmers to replant the rainforest, but if they're basically desperate for money and the only way they can get more money is by cutting down the rainforest to plant more chocolate, then you've got a real problem. So I think in some ways chocolate is harder than coffee because it's less social and it's more of a solitary pursuit. So I think it is trickier and candidly, it's also. In some ways, it's not as obvious an upgrade.

• 15:18Reid Hoffman?

  But one of the things you're actually trying to do is make chocolate more social.

• 15:21Speaker 00

  Yes, so I think you have to change the occasion. You have to, you have to make it something which you want to share. So what you do is absolutely brilliant. You know, the Reid Hoffman Chocolate Collection is just fantastic at, you know, showing people how to share it because you want to have it together. I mean, food should be for sharing. I mean, food is the basis of civilization, you know. We became civilized by learning to cooperate and cook together. And then by basically sharing food with one another, and it's the basis to all of that. And so, you know, if we can go back to that and not just sort of, you know, having it as a guilty secret on your own at work or, you know, up on the sort of sofa on your own there. But I mean, I think the secret is to turning into a social and sharing activity.

• 15:59Reid Hoffman?

  Yeah, maybe in addition to the word companion, which is, you know, breaking bread together, we mean like, like co-chocolating.

• 16:05Speaker 00

  Yeah, something like that, some, some way to sort of do it.

• 16:08Reid Hoffman?

  One particular thing that was kind of stunning is, why does it take so much water to make a chocolate bar? And that's not actually, obviously, the consumption of water because that presumably recycles. But what makes it so water intensive?

• 16:24Speaker 00

  So the reason why chocolate is so water intensive is that it only grows in the rainforest. And it needs a huge amount of water to basically, I mean, one pot, which is the equivalent of one chocolate bar, more or less, or one good quality chocolate bar, requires a huge amount of water to basically turn this tiny little flower into this thing the size of an American football or a British rugby football. And it is a huge amount. And it's used to all the humidity of the rainforest. You can't grow cocoa outside of a very, very narrow band around the equator. Now, the good news is you do recycle, as you sort of say, unless you've destroyed the rainforest and the canopy.

• 17:06Speaker 00

  And when that happened, which is what's happened in West Africa, because it used to be the West Africa, you know, KwaZulu-Arapangana was largely. Virgin rainforest, but because the farmers there get paid less than eighty cents a day and they need two or three dollars to live on, their only way to get more money is literally to destroy the rainforest. And when you destroy it, then you have massive problems, not just more global warming and changing the weather patterns, but you change basically the where the water comes from. Because if it doesn't, you know, rain, normally in a rainforest it will rain, you know, ten, eleven months of the year. If you destroy the rainforest, you get much more concentrated rain down to six to eight weeks. So you get floods and you get droughts. And you basically are pulling the water often out of the aquifers. So that's

• 17:49Speaker 00

  the reason why it's such a disaster environmentally. I mean, it's similar to the way that, in a way, that California sucks the water to grow pomegranates and to grow almonds. You know, you could grow them in a proper way, but the problem is, is that you're sucking water out of the aquifers rather than recycling it. That's where the problem really comes from. It is interesting, though, that everybody assumes that, you know, almonds and now avocado is terrible. But actually, you know, chocolate is way, way, way worse. I mean, it's much more of a problem. In terms of, you've got to pick one food to basically improve your global environmental footprint, outside of, you know, giving up beef, it is definitely upgrading to craft chocolate.

• 18:32Reid Hoffman?

  Actually, quite cognizant about the, you know, how wine changed from generic calorie consumption to, to, you know, kind of the language of experience and flavor and participation and sharing. What is the kind of history of these things? And what's the hope for how chocolate becomes the next of these culinary waves? And what are the things that, that you do to try to help that? And what's the, the hope for the kind of human experience?

• 19:05Speaker 00

  I think there's, there's two different sort of tracks to the answer here. So I think there's one track, which is that Part of the last hundred years in food has been basically an amazing series of technologies which have basically made it possible for most humans to be able to have enough calories. And this is everything from the Green Revolution and Norman Volg through to, you know, sort of recent innovations like sort of vertical farming. And at the same time, the other problem has been that we've basically not respected not just the planet, but also how humans can best savour food. So what I mean by that is that we've almost commoditized food. We've

• 19:50Speaker 00

  almost sort of turned it into another input in the sort of massive industrial complex. So what really happened was back in the 1960s and 70s, what made ultra-processed food possible was not just the commodification of everything from wheat and corn and maize and soya and everything else. It was actually that a bunch of very clever food scientists worked out how to hack our taste buds. So if you sort of think about them as being the sort of social media equivalents, they basically worked out how to use broadly two very clever technologies. One is called the bliss point, which was invented or innovated by a guy called Howard Moscovitz, doing some work for the US Army. And he basically worked out that to get soldiers to eat more,

• 20:34Speaker 00

  all you need to do is to add lots of sugar, salt, fat and a bit of your milk. And it's basically, you guys call it the Dorito effect, we call it the Pringle effect. Once you pot, you can't stop. Now, there are some other tricks which you can also play. There's another very famous one, which is British in this case, Eric Barber Roll, which is basically sensory-specific satiety, which is the polite way of basically saying, if you give people lots of different senses in their mouth, they don't get bored, so they eat more of it. And these two, combined with the fact we could get more calories on people, and the fact that basically the best way for a big food company to make lots of money is to brand it, pushes people down the sort of route of playing with taste as opposed to flavour. And what's happened in most other industries is that if you want a premium product which really appeals to people's creativity and

• 21:20Speaker 00

  Sort of appreciation, you actually want to get them to be able to understand and appreciate flavor. And the ways to do that are to turn it into a social experience, to find a place that it works really, really well. It's sort of, you know, it's the skating to the puck. And cheese has sort of done something similar. I mean, in the UK, we used to eat cheese out of, you know, tubes and cans and it was something you had as a high tea. And then people realized that actually it made a lovely ending to the meal and we sort of, you know, have this great idea about having cheese boards at the end of a meal. And, and, you know, in America, you do it slightly differently. You have it at the beginning of a meal as a sort of way to get your appetite whetted, but you've got an occasion for it.

• 22:02Speaker 00

  And so I think the secret is what's the occasion and what's the appreciation that you can go for.

• 22:11Aria Finger?

  We'll be back right after this break.

• 22:20Aria Finger?

  And now, back to the show.

• 22:24Aria Finger?

  I mean, it's so obvious, but also so easy to forget because you just think like food is food is food. It'll taste the same wherever you are. And it's like, nope, that's just not how it works. Like, where are you? Who are you with? How long are you do? Like, all of those things like matter so much. And, you know, it, it is so critical that we get to this savoring moment. And, you know, this, this is a podcast about what's possible about the future. We were sort of talking about what, what happened in the past or throughout history. Like, what is possible for our future? Is there a way that we could use technology to get us to this point of savoring more or, you know, change our relationship with food? Like, what do you think we can do in the future with it?

• 23:07Speaker 00

  There's almost some orthogonal thinking which, which may help us. So rather than just thinking about building a database of flavor, I think that actually the more interesting stuff is to sort of, you know, try and figure out. Why is it, for example, that you can have a chocolate bar one day and absolutely love it and another day not enjoy it the same way? And what is it which is happening? Why does that happen? And that sort of, sort of, you know, loose mass data, I think you can gather in a very different way than we've ever been able to sort of gather before. I think another thing which is really interesting is the way that technology can be used to sort of enhance the growth of food, which I think is already starting to happen a bit. Some of that isn't always for the good, but I think it can be.

• 23:52Speaker 00

  But I think the other angle, which is going to be really interesting is flavor is so complicated that it's not obvious that we're going to be able to sort of crack it by just looking at that as an input. But if you want people to eat better food, what they will be able to do is to understand a little bit more about the consequences of what you eat personally through all sorts of new technologies which are coming about. So, you know, we already can wear glucose monitors and figure out that for me, like if I drink a cup of coffee, it really causes me to spike, but a dark chocolate bar is just great. Similarly, bananas aren't great for me, but eggs are, you know, and, and everybody is slightly different. And you can teach people a lot about how food interacts with them, and that will get people to savor.

• 24:34Speaker 00

  And, you know, one of the great mantras of the, the, the food community is look at the quality of the ingredients. So I think that it's, it's going to be orthogonal ways. I think it's going to be things like personalized nutrition will play a huge role in this. I think that there will be a lot more advances in technologies about how you grow food, you know, I mean, so, you know, vertical farming for tomatoes is, is a great example. I mean, I hope there'll be more of those. And then I also think that just asking some difficult questions, which we've always known are there, like, why does the same bottle of wine be different in different areas? If we can sort of gather that data and start to show people what's happening, then I think we're going to learn some amazing stuff.

• 25:14Reid Hoffman?

  So let's zoom out to the kind of the scope of the food industry since we're talking technological thread right now. And, you know, there's been various technological innovations for food, you know, starts with fire, but, you know, we now kitchen robots and all these other things. So what do you see as the, the next technological developments?

• 25:40Reid Hoffman?

  And the food industry, whether it's sourcing and providing, whether it's creating and serving, whether it's experience, what are some of the technological trends we should anticipate? And which one should we kind of lean into and which one should we try to steer, you know, kind of more carefully?

• 26:02Speaker 00

  So I think that it's a great question. And I think I'm going to try and answer by saying, which ones do I think we need to really focus on for the future and the best of humanity? Because there are a couple of things which have made a lot of the food industry possible, which are not great, you know, for example, over reliance on antibiotics to grow lots of meat, over reliance on fertilizers and pesticides. And I think that it should be, and it, you know, we've already seen some relatively good examples of people actually using technology to use a lot less water, use a lot less fertilizer, use a lot less pesticides to grow different foods.

• 26:42Speaker 00

  So I think for the benefit of humanity, there is a lot of really relatively simple technology that can be applied. But to do this, the biggest challenge is that food really hasn't had the same attention of technology as lots of other industries have over the last couple of decades. You know, food has been really about getting it for as cheap as you possibly can. Because supply chains have gone much longer, which in and of itself is a problem. This is a euphemism for we basically managed to get lower, basically by paying farmers less and less and less, more and more and more. And that's not a very good solution for the long term, from everything, from immigration

• 27:27Speaker 00

  through to global, you know, deforestation and global warming. So I think thinking a little bit more about how to decommoditize food and get people to think more about flavor are some of the elements that we need to get into. So I'm not really answering your question about like, you know, on the front end of it, what can we do? It's more about what is it that we can basically persuade? The supply chain to look at and how do we get people more to just be aware of the fact that not only is ultra-processed food really, really bad for our health, it's really, really bad for the health of the planet and for the farmers.

• 28:07Aria Finger?

  I mean, this isn't, this isn't science and data, but it's, as we like to say, anecdata. I feel like you can't go on Twitter without someone saying like, I just went to Europe, I ate pizza every day and I lost 25 pounds because they were walking or they were eating non-processed food or they were having these like amazing meals that were four hours long as opposed to just like 20 minutes they were enjoying. Like, there is something about the joy of it that extends all the way through. It's like the beautiful ingredients, it's the caring about the sustainability of it, it's the, you know, not Kraft macaroni and cheese. I'm not totally doing it in my own life, but I'm, I'm really trying, I'm really trying.

• 28:47Speaker 00

  Yeah, but I think that's exactly right. And I think that's where what loosely is called personalized nutrition will play such role. Just the order you eat your foods in makes a huge difference. You know, there is a reason why in, you know, Massimo Vitto's kitchen in, in France and in Italy, you start with a salad because it basically puts some fibre in and it basically will help you digest everything else. You know, there is, if you, I mean, you know, actually, other animals are pretty smart about this. If you look at the way in which cows and goats will basically eat in a field, they have a certain order because they know what's best nutritionally. And, and, you know, over time, we've developed the same skill, but we've lost that and we've forgotten about it in many cultures, including the UK. And, you know, the good news is, is that technology, I think, will be able

• 29:29Speaker 00

  to help us appreciate that. So, you know, another example is, you know, when should you have some Kraft chocolate? So to me, the ideal time to have some Kraft chocolate is at the end of a meal. And the reason for this is that you do literally have a second stomach. It is well known that you have taste sensors, not just in your mouth, but also, for example, in your stomach and your heart and other places. And if you see something sweet at the end of a meal, that's the reason why at the end of a meal, you know, you think you've had a really great meal and you feel very, very full, and then out comes the dessert choy. And suddenly, wow, I've suddenly got room for a bit more food. Now, the trick there is not necessarily to eat everything that's on the dessert choy.

• 30:11Speaker 00

  But if you have a little bit of something sweet, that will basically satisfy the senses in your stomach, your second stomach, speed up digestion, and you will feel happier and you will basically have had a great opportunity to chat to your friends and partners and family about what sensations you got there. So yeah, I mean, I think there is a lot that you can sort of do. The anecdotal stuff I think is right. And I think that that's what you need to be focusing on more on. But I think that you will be able to learn from that, too. I think once you've got the, it's quite easy to turn some of that anecdotal stuff with the right tools into real data.

• 30:51Reid Hoffman?

  You know, one of the things that, you know, in, in sharing chocolate with you over the dinner table, that has always, you know, kind of engaged and delighted me, was this notion of, of chocolate becoming a shared experience, a shared vocabulary, a way of building human connection. Say a little bit more about, you know, kind of this humanist view, this social view of the future of chocolate experience.

• 31:23Speaker 00

  So I think one of the things I've learned from you, Reid, and I love talking to you about is friendship. And I think one of the great themes of friendship is about having the opportunity in a space to be able to talk. And some of that should be as unconstrained as possible. So, you know, to me, and I think to you, you can sort of split the world into people who like dinner parties and people who like drinks parties. And I think dinner parties are great because you can have really good conversations. It's a bit like, you know, if you're on a bus, you can have, or in an aeroplane, you get this great time to sort of sit with somebody and really talk with them. And it's not like in a drinks

• 32:05Speaker 00

  party where there's loads of different people, lots of different conversations. And in a way, actually, one of the interesting things about flavour is that flavour is actually very similar to

• 32:18Speaker 00

  The way that if you walk into a room and you hear fifty different conversations, you can make no sense of it.

• 32:25Speaker 00

  If however you focus on just one of those conversations, you can actually start to have a really interesting experience. And actually, that is the way flavour works. There's this weird thing called the lang limit, which we don't really understand quite how and why it works, but actually even great sommeliers can only identify two or three flavour notes at any one time. So what you want to try and do is basically look at the wave and how the journey works. And that's, I think, the way that friendships and great conversations should go to. You don't want to be having loads of cacophonous, different conversations going on at the day party at the same time. You want to be having one theme, you don't necessarily want to control where it's going to go, you want to be able to exchange it. And the great thing about flavour is if you tell somebody what you're getting, they

• 33:06Speaker 00

  may also suddenly go, yeah, I actually did get that note of hazelnut that you described. And if they don't get it, that's absolutely fine, it's just because their oral microbiome, you know, the yeast and bacteria they've got in their mouth, they release that flavour in it. But it gives you a chance to do it. So I think that the social lessons you can get from chocolate are quite important. And it's the same social lessons you get with food. I mean, I think one of the reasons why the Italians and the French are so much more articulate is that if somebody's gone to the effort of cooking a meal rather than just sort of microwaving it, you want to thank them. And you do that by basically showing your appreciation, by articulating what's gone into it. I mean, it's a bit like, you know, if you want to thank somebody for a great piece of music, you will try and say what you enjoyed in it.

• 33:49Speaker 00

  Or if you want to describe a book, say you really enjoyed it, you will focus on what it is in there that you liked. And I think that the great thing about chocolate is, I like, for example, coffee or wine, which are actually quite adult tastes. Chocolate is something which anybody from the age of like, you know, eight to eighty-eight, in fact, four to, you know, one hundred and four, can really appreciate and engage with and discuss. And it's very, very democratising.

• 34:16Reid Hoffman?

  So one of the things that was part of this delightful conversation with Spencer was how important the social experience of chocolate is. And so as a surprise to Spencer, we have a guest appearance from his awesome daughter, Mika. And so we'll talk a little bit about the social experience and how that plays into a family environment with chocolate.

• 34:41Speaker 03

  So I had a pretty lucky upbringing. Spencer's been doing this for 10 years. Most of the time before going to college, I was at home and we would spend our evenings tasting chocolate, which is a pretty good way to spend an evening. And he would pull out a couple of bars of chocolate because he really believes in trying a few at a time, which is good in general. And he would ask me to describe them and to engage with them and we would talk about them together. And doing that every evening or kind of at random times in the day, I'm thinking of when I came home during COVID and would kind of be studying and suddenly find a few bars of chocolate in front of me and set of questions going, what do you think of this? What do you think of that?

• 35:25Speaker 03

  And talking about that with a family member really keeps you close. Like that's a point of conversation. You're talking about what it reminds you of. Oh, it reminds me of that time that we went and had ice cream in New Jersey and all of these memories that come up when you're talking about taste and smell, because as Spencer's probably been talking about, it's really hard to talk about your sense of smell and taste. And so you rely a lot on memory and personal connection and bouncing ideas off one another. And so I really can't think of a better way than spending that time at the dinner table or at a random time in the afternoon or morning, getting to try a few chocolates with my dad.

• 36:05Aria Finger?

  And so what would your advice be? I love this. You know, I am a mom. I have three kids. What is the way that I should integrate, you know, chocolate into, into the family so that, you know, we can have these great conversations and memories?

• 36:19Speaker 03

  I mean, the way that we would do it was often it was an off to dinner, kind of instead of having. A dessert that was cake or cookies, although I'm partial to a lot of ice cream, so ice cream would often be involved. But often we would just kind of put a few bars out on the table. We would often actually break them up and not have any of the packaging nearby, so that it was really just focused on like what we were sensing through smell and taste, sometimes touch. And kind of sometimes you would have a pen and paper there, but depending on how official we were doing it. But I would really recommend kind of choosing two bars every evening or every other evening. And you could do it after dinner, you could do it after lunch, or even kind of in the middle of the day when you feel like, oh, I really want to just

• 37:04Speaker 03

  have this moment to reconnect with my family. And asking questions like, oh, do you like that? Do you not like that?

• 37:15Speaker 03

  What do you smell? What do you taste? You can try eating it really quickly and seeing what that does. Try eating it slowly, just like playing around with it. It's a bit of a game. But I think also encouraging them to ask you questions back as well is such an important aspect of it, of getting them to think about what questions they might want to know about the chocolate. Oh, I really like this. Can we have a look at the package now so that I can find out where it's from? And then it kind of also becomes a little bit of a journey into who the chocolate maker is. Like, the amazing thing is these bars come from all around the world. They have beans that come from so many different countries and there are so many different stories. And each of those bars, like you start the conversation by trying it and tasting it.

• 37:58Speaker 03

  And then after that, there's like a whole set of stories and questions to uncover through just a little bit of Googling research, maybe the help of AI. But yeah, I think I would always use the bar as the starting point. Thanks so much for the tip. We'll do it tonight. That sounds amazing. Amazing. Melissa, how it goes?

• 38:26Reid Hoffman?

  So shall we move to rapid fire? Is there a movie, song, or book that fills you with optimism for the future?

• 38:34Speaker 00

  Loads of movies, loads of music. I love listening to music, as you know. Yes, there is a book which I love recommending to anybody who's into thinking about food and the environment and everything, and it's a slightly strange book. It's called The Wizard and the Prophet by a guy called Charles C. Mann, who also wrote 1491 and 1493. But it's an amazing story about both sides of the Green Revolution. Norman Borlaug on the one hand, William Voight on the other. And it presents both sides, you know, the technical optimism and the sort of, you know, the slightly Malthusian fear of technology with a very nuanced approach, which shows you that if you think in a balanced way and you are realistic and structured and you look at what's going on, so he's a great historian.

• 39:18Speaker 00

  It gives you a real sense of optimism that we can deal with a lot of the challenges we've been discussing and seize the opportunity.

• 39:25Aria Finger?

  So Spencer, what is a question that you wish people would ask you more often?

• 39:29Speaker 00

  Can I cheat and have two?

• 39:31Aria Finger?

  Sure.

• 39:31Speaker 00

  So one is, what's the best way to end a meal? Which the obvious answer is scrap chocolate. And then the second one of which is, do you ship internationally? And the answer is obviously yes.

• 39:41Reid Hoffman?

  Excellent.

• 39:42Aria Finger?

  I love it, I love it.

• 39:43Reid Hoffman?

  So where do you see progress or momentum outside of your industry that inspires you?

• 39:50Speaker 00

  So on the grounds that we aren't really about nutrition and health, although eating chocolate is very good for you, it is very healthy. I think that personalized nutrition is one of the intriguing areas which we will see more and more on because that will help us with health in no end of way. So I think that, you know, all of those amazing new initiatives, the Zoys and everything else are, anything you can measure, anything you can start tracking will start to really help. And I think that's where AI would just...

• 40:25Speaker 00

  Turn all this amazing reams of data into real insight. And I think one of them will be around health and nutrition.

• 40:31Aria Finger?

  Can you leave us with a final thought on what is possible over the next 15 years? If everything breaks humanity's way? And what's the first step to get there?

• 40:41Speaker 00

  So, I mean, the first step is obviously to learn to savor craft chocolate. But I, I do think that we are on the path to recognizing and appreciating the way that our own personal health, the health of the planet, the future are all intimately linked. And a large part of that is by being much more conscious about what we consume, how we savor it and with whom we enjoy it. And I think we're, we're, we're, we're starting to sort of get more insight that food is not just fuel. It's not just a sort of, you know, scarf. It is much more something which links everybody together.

• 41:25Speaker 00

  And the health of the planet is super important on that.

• 41:31Reid Hoffman?

  Possible is produced by Wonder Media Network. It's hosted by Ari Finger and me, Reid Hoffman. Our showrunner is Sean Young. Possible is produced by Katie Sanders, Edie Allard, Sarah Schlied, Adrian Bain and Paloma Moreno Jimenez. Jenny Kaplan is our executive producer and editor.

• 41:51Aria Finger?

  Special thanks to Soraya Yalamanchili, Saigita Sabieva, Ian Alice, Greg Beato, Parth Patel and Ben Relis. And a big thanks to Mika Hyman, Genevieve Blazar, Carrie Wang and Little Monster Media Company.