This transcript is generated with the help of AI and is lightly edited for clarity.
SPENCER HYMAN:
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. But I think that’s where AI will just turn all these amazing reams of data into real insight. And I think one of them will be around health and nutrition.
REID:
Hi, I’m Reid Hoffman.
ARIA:
And I’m Aria Finger.
REID:
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.
ARIA:
We’re speaking with technologists, ambitious builders, and deep thinkers across many fields—AI, geopolitics, media, healthcare, education, and more.
REID:
These conversations showcase another kind of guest. Whether it’s Inflection’s Pi or OpenAI’s GPT or other AI tools, each episode we use AI to enhance and advance our discussion.
ARIA:
In each episode, we seek out the brightest version of the future and learn what it’ll take to get there.
REID:
This is Possible.
ARIA:
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.
REID:
We’re talking to Spencer Hyman, founder and Chair of Chocolate at Cocoa Runners— a sustainably-minded artisan chocolate distributor. His company works directly with producers and chocolate makers to build and distribute a global catalog of chocolate with fair labor practices.
ARIA:
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 flavor and taste, along with what it takes to improve the sustainability and enjoyability of our favorite foods.
REID:
Here’s our conversation with Spencer Hyman.
REID:
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?
SPENCER HYMAN:
History has changed a bit since when I was studying, when it was all about sort of 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 sort of get out of it. And if you want to understand, at the same time, sort of really what’s happened in the last 500 years of world history, chocolate is a phenomenal starting point, because it’s part of the Columbian Exchange, which is, you know, 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 sort of quite fun, is that history is all about curation.
SPENCER HYMAN:
The bits you choose to remember are really what historians tell you 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 will take you on all sorts of different journeys and teach you all sorts of different things. And I think that’s part of the sort of magic and the fun of it. And it’s also something which everybody does, you know, we can all appreciate and we can all savor and enjoy it. And it’s a great way of sort of learning about a sense that we don’t often think that much about.
ARIA:
I was lucky enough to taste the Reid Hoffman chocolates and do taste tests, actually, with my kids. And I’m sort of 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 and Hasbro. What made you take the leap into the—into the world of chocolate?
SPENCER HYMAN:
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 candidly quite tough to beat Amazon at that game. But there are certain categories where actually you need a different form of discovery. And 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. And you know, you used to 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, to helping people discover what they would like.
SPENCER HYMAN:
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 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 and it just, you know, gives you a whole new set of experiences. So 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 chocolate is a great way of sort of, you know, giving you something on flavor.
REID:
You know, one of the things that I love about Cocoa Runners is the, 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 the language of flavor?
SPENCER HYMAN:
Yeah. Well, I think the first thing I’m going to do is, is sort of, you know, basically blame all of your predecessors, Reid, who are 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 in all that. 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 other places — things like sweetness, sourness, saltiness, bitterness, umami and fat. So they’re 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, because even though we detect it in our mouths, it’s actually our sense of smell.
SPENCER HYMAN:
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, or I’m having my cup of tea, or 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. And other animals can’t do this, which is the reason why we should savor, and they can just gobble down and scarf all their food.
ARIA:
I mean, it’s, it reminds me so much of 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’d 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, 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’ve said that you actually think that taste is going to be one of the last senses that’s impacted by AI. So tell us about that. Why do you think that, and is there some way that AI is going to impact this?
SPENCER HYMAN:
So I think that’s a great question. I love your point about the sommelier too, because I think it is that. I mean, everyone is very frightened about wine, but 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 flavor 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, color, which has got the Pantone system. It’s not like sort of music, which, you know, as we launched things like Last.fm and Spotify, the digitization of music meant that you could break it down — it’s the pitch, the rhythm, the frequency — and you could sort of build digital fingerprints and you could get it understood.
SPENCER HYMAN:
And similarly with music and with art, you can also, you know, we’ve got, we can understand how colors work and we can understand how you can sort of put images together. And you know, now that we know how cats fall, 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 flavor 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, the—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 flavor. 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?
ARIA:
Well, all right, we tried to see if AI could help us, because as you said, like what is the dataset? Where are we going to come up with the, the words and the and the data to be able to sort of match flavors? So we asked Inflection’s Pi to come up with a few ways to describe flavor through some ultra-specific filters. So first we asked for a Renaissance era approach to define flavor, 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: “Tastes like a proper cuppa!” and “positively scrumptious!” 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 mouthfeel,” “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?
SPENCER HYMAN:
No, I think they’re, they’re great words and I think that Pi has picked up on one of the great secrets of chocolate, which is that that mouthfeel, 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, that 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, is the creamy feel. Which gives rise to also what Pi was talking about, which is sometimes the velvet notes or sometimes the earthy notes or sometimes the fruity notes. And then the fun part actually gets to be to sort of, you know, dive down to the next level.
SPENCER HYMAN:
Okay, well, which fruits do you mean? Because the fun thing 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, 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, or the cook, you will basically learn the words to appreciate what you’re doing and it sort of becomes a wonderful virtuous circle.
REID:
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 ensuring that all the chocolate is sustainably sourced and ethically made. So how do you lead a sustainable business that combines, you know, capitalism and social good?
SPENCER HYMAN:
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. 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 would be, you know, paying the workers—they can afford to pay the workers more.
SPENCER HYMAN:
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. 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. 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.
REID:
But one of the things you’re actually trying to do is make chocolate more social.
SPENCER HYMAN:
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. 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, on the sort of sofa on your own there—but I mean, I think the secret is to turn into a social and sharing activity.
REID:
Yeah, maybe in addition to the word companion, which is, you know, breaking bread together, we need, like, “co-chocolating”.
SPENCER HYMAN:
Yeah. Something like that. Some, some way to sort of do it.
REID:
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 ’cause that presumably recycles, but what makes it so water intensive?
SPENCER HYMAN:
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 bridge 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 it, as you sort of say—unless you’ve destroyed the rainforest and the canopy. And when that’s happened, which is what’s happened in West Africa—as it used to be that West Africa, you know, Côte d’Ivoire and Ghana, was largely virgin rainforest. But because the farmers there get paid less than 80 cents a day and they need $2 or $3 to live on, their only way to get more money is literally to destroy the rainforest.
SPENCER HYMAN:
And when you destroy it, then you have massive problems. Not just more global warming and changing the weather patterns, but you change basically where the water comes from. Because if it doesn’t, you know, rain it — normally in a rainforest, it’ll rain, you know, 10, 11 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 the reason why it’s such a disaster environmentally. I mean it’s similar to the way that, that in a way that California, you know, sucks the water to grow pomegranates and to grow almonds. You know, you could grow them in a proper way, but the problem 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 avocados are terrible, but actually, you know, chocolate is way, way, way worse. I mean, it’s much more of a problem in terms of—you’re going 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.
REID:
Actually quite cognizant about the, you know, how wine changed from generic calorie consumption to, you know, kind of the language of experience and flavor and participation and sharing. What is the kind of the 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 you do to try to help that? And what’s the hope for the kind of human experience?
SPENCER HYMAN:
I think that 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 Borlaug through to, you know, sort of recent innovation sites 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 savor food. So what I mean by that is that we’ve almost commoditized food. We’ve 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 at how to hack our taste buds.
SPENCER HYMAN:
So, 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 Moskowitz doing some work for the US Army. And he basically worked out that to get soldiers to eat more, all he needs to do is to add lots of sugar, salt, fat, and a bit of umami. And it’s basically — you guys call it the Dorito Effect, we call it the Pringle Effect: Once you pop, you can’t stop. Now there is some other tricks which you can also play. There’s another very famous one, which is British in this case, 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.”
SPENCER HYMAN:
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 root of playing with taste as opposed to flavor. And what’s happened in most other industries is that if you want a premium product, which really appeals to people’s creativity and 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 different. You have it at the beginning of a meal as a sort of way to get your appetite wetted, but you’ve got an occasion for it. And so I think the secret is what’s the occasion and what’s the appreciation that you can go for?
ARIA:
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 sort of 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?
SPENCER HYMAN:
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.
SPENCER HYMAN:
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 we, 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, it’s 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.
SPENCER HYMAN:
And you know, one of the great mantras of the, the food community is just 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 they’re 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.
REID:
So let’s zoom out to the kind of the scope of the food industry since we’re talking on 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 have kitchen robots and all these other things. So what do you see as the, the next technological developments in the food industry? Whether it’s sourcing and providing, whether it’s creating and serving, whether it’s experience — what are, 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?
SPENCER HYMAN:
So I, I think that it’s a great question and I think I’m going to try and answer it 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. Overreliance 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. 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 challenges 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 gotten much longer, which in, in and of themselves are a problem.
SPENCER HYMAN:
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 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?
ARIA:
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 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 really trying. I’m really trying.
SPENCER HYMAN:
Yeah, but I think that’s exactly right and I think that’s where—what loosely is called personalized nutrition—just the order you eat your foods in makes a huge difference. You know, there is a reason why in, you know, Massimo Bottura’s kitchen in—in France and in Italy you start with a salad because it basically puts some fiber in and it basically will help you digest everything else. You know, the, 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 to help us appreciate that.
SPENCER HYMAN:
So you know, another example is, you know, when should you have some craft chocolate? So to me the ideal time to have some craft 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, in 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 trolley and suddenly, well I’ve suddenly got room for some bit more food. Now the trick there is not necessarily to eat everything that’s on the dessert trolley, but if you have a little bit of something sweet that will basically satisfy the, the sensors 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.
SPENCER HYMAN:
So yeah, I mean I think there’s a lot that you can sort of do. The anecdatal stuff I think is right and I think that that’s what you need to be focusing on more. But I think that you will be able to learn from that too. I think once you’ve got the the — it’s quite easy to turn some of that anecdatal stuff, with the right tools, into real data.
REID:
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 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.
SPENCER HYMAN:
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 the 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. There’s a bit like, you know, if you’re in a bus you can have—or in an airplane—you get this great time just to sort of sit with somebody and really talk with them. And it’s not like in a drinks party where there’s loads of different people, lots of different conversations.
SPENCER HYMAN:
And in a way, actually 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. And actually that is the way flavor works. There’s this weird thing, which we don’t really understand quite how and why it works, but actually even great sommelier can only identify two or three flavor 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 the friendships and great conversations should go too. You don’t want to be having loads of cacophonous different conversations going on at the dinner 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.
SPENCER HYMAN:
You want to be able to exchange it. And the great thing about flavor is if you tell somebody what you are getting, they may also suddenly, “well yeah, I actually do get that note of hazelnut that you’re describing.” And you know, if they don’t get it, that’s absolutely fine. It’s just because their oral microbiome, you know, that the yeast and bacteria they’ve got in their mouth don’t release that flavor nut. 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 just 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.
SPENCER HYMAN:
I mean it’s a bit like, you know, if you want to thank somebody for a great piece of music, you would try and say what you enjoyed in it. Or if you want to describe a book and say you’ve really enjoyed it, you’ll focus on what it is in there that you liked. And I think that the great thing about chocolate is—unlike, 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 88—in fact four to, you know, 104—can really appreciate and, you know, engage with and discuss. And it’s very, very democratizing.
REID:
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 it was 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.
MIKA HYMAN:
So I had a pretty lucky upbringing. Spencer has been doing this for 10 years. Most of the time I — 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?
MIKA HYMAN:
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 has 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 [laugh] 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.
ARIA:
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?
MIKA HYMAN:
I mean, the way that we would do it was often it was an after dinner kind of instead of having a dessert that was cake or cookies or — although I’m partial to a lot of ice cream, so ice cream would often be involved. But often he, 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 sometimes you would have a pen and paper there. It depended on how official we were doing it, but I would really recommend kind of choosing two bars every evening or every other evening.
MIKA HYMAN:
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 have this moment to reconnect with my family. And asking questions like, “oh, do you like that? Do you not like that? 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.”
MIKA:
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. 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 [laugh]. but yeah, I think I would always use the bar as the starting point.
ARIA:
Thanks so much for the tip. We’ll, we’ll we’ll do it tonight. That sounds amazing.
MIKA HYMAN:
Amazing. Let us know how it goes. [Laugh]
REID:
So shall we move to rapid fire? Is there a movie, song or book that fills you with optimism for the future?
SPENCER HYMAN:
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 environments and everything. And it’s a slightly strange book, but 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 Vogt 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 — he’s a great historian — 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.
ARIA:
So Spencer, what is a question that you wish people would ask you more often?
SPENCER HYMAN:
Can I cheat and have two?
ARIA:
Sure.
SPENCER HYMAN:
So one is: what’s the best way to end a meal? Which, the obvious answer is craft chocolate. And then the second one of which is: Do you ship internationally? And the answer is obviously yes.
ARIA:
I love it. I love it.
REID:
So where do you see progress or momentum outside of your industry that inspires you?
SPENCER HYMAN:
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, ZOE 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 will just turn all this amazing reams of data into real insight. And I think one of them will be around health and nutrition.
ARIA:
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?
SPENCER HYMAN:
So, I mean, the first step is obviously to learn to savor craft chocolate. But 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 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. And the health of the planet is super important on that.
REID:
Possible is produced by Wonder Media Network. It’s hosted by Aria Finger and me, Reid Hoffman. Our showrunner is Shaun Young. Possible is produced by Katie Sanders, Edie Allard, Sara Schleede, and Paloma Moreno Jiménez. Jenny Kaplan is our executive producer and editor.
ARIA:
Special thanks to Surya Yalamanchili, Saida Sapieva, Ian Alas, Greg Beato, Parth Patil, and Ben Relles. And a big thanks to Mika Hyman, Maia Chelfan, Genevieve Lazar, Karrie Huang, and Little Monster Media Company.