Take It With A Grain Of Soil
The Dangerous Rise of Wellness Charlatans
Hey it's Mike here. Building on last week's nutrition piece and podcast, I wanted to share this chapter from my book because these troubling trends keep accelerating.
Charismatic influencers are increasingly drowning out real science with opinions packaged as breakthrough health wisdom. These modern charlatans exploit legitimate concerns about our food system, twisting scientific truths into profitable misinformation that preys on our genuine desire for better health.
This chapter from my book "Mise: On the Future of Food" presents a fictional scenario based on real trends happening today—a projection of what the near future could look like if current patterns continue unchecked, showing how wellness misinformation can spread and the human cost when people fall prey to elaborate schemes that masquerade science as salvation.
-Mike Lee
Take It With A Grain Of Soil
A chapter from Mise: On the Future of Food
David Rahi has the 12th most popular podcast in the world and the most popular in the health and wellness category. At the time of this writing, his follower count on The Socials is just under 3 million, with a total of 250 million views across all of his videos. In just four years, he has parlayed this audience into a burgeoning empire of wellness seminars and products under his Sultan of Soil (SOS) brand name, with annual sales estimated to be in the $150 million range.
Based in Venice Beach, California, the forty-six-year-old Rahi is the pinnacle of health. At six feet tall, he’s lean and muscular with a full head of salt and pepper hair and intense blue eyes contrasting his dark olive complexion. No one would ever guess that ten years ago, he weighed 310 lbs, was pre-diabetic, and subsisted mainly on fast food while working as a technology executive for an e-commerce company. That was all before he started a garden in his backyard and dedicated himself to exclusively growing and eating food raised through regenerative agriculture practices.
That home garden is lovingly cared for by a team of indigenous farmers, while Rahi runs the SOS empire. Whether in the lab compounding his own supplement formulations or on the road giving one of his many seminars on the virtues of eating a soil-centered diet, Rahi is on a mission to heal the world through regeneratively grown food.
The crux of Rahi’s ideology is encapsulated in the Five SOS Commandments...
Only eat plant-based foods grown in regenerative soil
Legumes are the sacred plant and must be the primary source of protein. They nourish the soil with nitrogen and humans with protein.
Dairy and eggs may be eaten in moderation, as long as no animal is killed, as their manure is too valuable for the soil.
Humans are of the Earth, not the sea. Therefore, all food from the sea—plant or animal—should be avoided because its life force does not come from the soil.
Healthy soil, healthy body: all food must be regeneratively grown in healthy soil. Which is defined as soil that has…
Vegetative cover at all times.
Crops grown in diverse rotations.
Never been tilled.
Been rotationally grazed by animals.
Never had any synthetic fertilizer, pesticides, or herbicides.
Been sprayed twice a year at midnight with a mixture of apple cider vinegar and ox manure that has been aged in clay pots for at least two years while the ox is still alive.
These commandments were delivered to Rahi in a dream during the summer solstice, where he lay in the soil of his garden after consuming a magnum of sacred mead. Upon receiving this wisdom, he became the Sultan of Soil and dedicated his life to protecting it. All living beings derive Prana—the primordial life force—from the Sun, which rains from the sky and flows through plant life to be stored in the soil. The soil is Earth’s bank of Sun-Prana, and it returns that life force to humans through the foods that grow in healthy soil.
But not all soil is rich with Sun-Prana. Before the Green Revolution and the rise of industrial agriculture, the world’s soil was teeming with Sun-Prana, and one could eat any food from any farm on the planet to live a long and happy life. But the world’s soil has mostly died, and eating food grown from it is akin to consuming poison. Industrial food is not nourishing or benign; it subtracts nutrition from the body and is categorized as “anti-nutritious.”
As a result, those who enter the fold and join SOS Nation must first cleanse their bodies of anti-nutrients with a 3-day SOS Regenerative Cleanse ($299.99) that consists solely of juices made from the most Sun-Prana-dense vegetables. Many advocates of the SOS Method also recommend attending an online or in-person breath work seminar ($59.99 online, $249.99 in-person) during their cleanse to learn how to draw nourishing Sun-Prana directly from the air to supplement their nutritional needs for those three crucial days. God bequeathed plants the gift of drawing nutrition from Sunlight and air, but humans may also learn to do this with Rahi’s guidance.
Jon stopped reading and put his phone down just as the nurse entered the room before morning rounds to do blood work. The pain from his left shoulder was still considerable, but he was trying to resist pushing the morphine button too many times for fear of getting addicted. He exchanged pleasantries with the nurse as she looked for a vein, and within a few minutes, she was gone.
He took the next few minutes to himself before the inevitable rush of doctors came in. It was late July, and the new interns and residents had just started, so the gaggle of white coats visiting him every morning and talking about him like a dog show contestant had grown considerably. He tuned them out as they prodded him, gingerly checking his shoulder for range of motion and looking over his chart.
It was just two weeks after he had been high up on the steel in Austin working on a new high-rise apartment building when his heart stopped, which caused him to fall three stories onto a pile of scrap sheet metal. The layers of sheet metal were giving enough that they cushioned his fall and saved his life, but his left shoulder and collarbone were utterly wrecked. His heart stopped for a full minute until his foreman administered CPR and got it going long enough for the paramedics to arrive.
Everything was a blur after the fall. To him, it was like he was walking on that steel beam one second, then stepped into a portal and woke up in a hospital bed with his wife Mara and 7-year-old daughter Hailey standing over him the next. The doctors said he underwent a triple bypass surgery to fix a clog in his arteries that should have killed him. After waking up from that and seeing his family for the first time since the fall, the doctors told him he would have to go under again to reconstruct his shoulder. And here he was now, heart and shoulder mostly fixed, but with much more rehabilitation ahead of him.
Jon Toney is thirty-eight years old and has been a steelworker since graduating from high school in East Texas. He moved out to Austin during the start of the construction boom and never looked back. Gainfully employed and living a comfortable but modest life, he met his wife Mara on a plane flying out of Austin one year when he was headed home for Christmas.
Mara was a flight attendant, and his attention was immediately caught when he noticed the small crimson script “A” tattoo on her left ankle. Like the Toney family, who had deep roots in Tuscaloosa before moving to Texas, Mara was born and raised there and attended the University of Alabama, where she was a psychology major and gymnast. Jon let out a “Roll Tide!” after Mara finished the safety demonstration, and they locked eyes. She wrote her number on his cocktail napkin during beverage service; before you knew it, Hailey was born. Since Jon's accident, Mara had been off work to care for Hailey for the past two weeks. But now, with Jon’s discharge approaching, she would start taking a couple of overnight trips per week again, leaving Jon and Hailey at home to fend for themselves.
The day he was to leave the hospital, one month after the accident, Jon was leafing through the packet of discharge notes his doctor gave him outlining the physical therapy and diet guidelines he needed to follow. Jon was a talented athlete in high school, lettering in basketball and football his sophomore year, so the physical therapy didn’t daunt him. It just looked like any old workout. But doctors had become more exact with their nutritional recommendations, and he was overwhelmed by the dietary plan. Getting on a heart-healthy diet would be challenging, but he had a decent runway of time to figure it out while his disability insurance paid the bills.
Jon was never poor growing up but wasn’t middle class either. The son of a single mom who worked in an auto parts factory, he was often left to his own devices for dinner when she was either working a much-needed overtime shift or too tired to make food at home. Not that her cooking was anything special. With a regular rotation of boxed mac and cheese, Hamburger Helper, and canned tuna and mayo sandwiches on white bread, packaged food has been a big part of his diet since his youth.
On the other hand, Mara is a solid cook and cleaned up his eating a bit. She grew up blue-collar like him, but her parents owned a diner. She picked up a lot of tricks just by being around that kitchen her whole life. She would cook for Jon and Hailey the nights she wasn’t working and he would usually eat leftovers or get takeout when it was just Hailey and him. Hailey is a whip-smart 7-year-old and soaked up her mom’s kitchen lessons like a sponge, learning to make a few of her favorite dishes while her mom was away for work. Like her mom, she was worried for her dad’s health and knew deep down that something like a heart attack was destined to happen, judging from the way he ate most of his life.
While in the hospital, Jon had a lot of time to contemplate. Luckily, he hadn’t hurt his hands, so he could mindlessly scroll through The Socials on his phone for hours. Football season was fast approaching, and he was watching plenty of football podcasts on YouTube in anticipation. As a former high-school linebacker, he followed several podcasts hosted by ex-NFL players. Jon felt he could connect with them much more than some biohacker in athleisure wear who had never played a sport. On an episode of The Checkdown with Bobby McFarrelley, retired Hall of Fame quarterback for the Dallas Cowboys, he was introduced to David Rahi.
Rahi was never an athlete but was great at talking like one. He had this innate ability to understand where people were coming from, no matter if it was a washed-up quarterback on a podcast or a twenty-year-old influencer from the Bay Area. It didn’t matter what kind of content you followed; Rahi had an angle with which to speak to everyone. And it was that sense of “I see you and understand you” that made him so engaging. Those piercing blue eyes popped off the screen, looking right at you while you were watching him in bed or on the toilet. You wanted to hear what he had to say next because it felt like he was inviting you into his secret lair and giving you information that no one else had the privilege of knowing. Stuff that “The Establishment” didn’t want you to know. Jon couldn’t decipher all the jargon yet but was intrigued by SOS’s central message: everyone in this world, no matter who you are, begins and ends with soil.
After the introductory SOS Regenerative Cleanse and breathwork training, the Holyisitc Beans ($12.99/lb) and an assortment of regenerative produce were the centerpieces of the diet. Rahi had met and impressed a handful of critical buyers at leading grocer BigBuys, and they had created an entire sub-section of the produce department that housed all the SOS Vegetables. Customers could safely choose anything here and know it came from properly managed SOS regenerative soil. These produce items were the same staples in the regular section but marked with the SOS certification seal. There was a small fridge case next to the SOS vegetables that held the SOS milk, eggs, and butter. This was odd because dairy items were typically in the dairy aisle, but Rahi insisted that he have all his products in one spot. He didn’t amass this kind of following without being persuasive and detail-oriented.
To the side of the SOS produce cooler was a large shelf with a rainbow of dried beans, each in their own 1lb clear packages with the SOS label. These were the fabled Holyistic Beans (a portmanteau of “Holy” and “Holistic”) that anchored the SOS diet. There were nearly thirty bean varieties, from run-of-the-mill red kidney beans to more exotic and delicious heirlooms. These beans occupied the space from about eye level to the floor, and above that, on the top two tiers were neat rows of pill bottles bearing the orange SOS logo.
Initially, when Rahi released the beans and produce, he saw that many people needed help adhering to a diet of SOS foods that had to be prepared at home. It was even hard for him, with an aggressive travel schedule, to properly cook dried beans or keep fresh produce while on the road. Thankfully, while on a 12-day silent retreat in Patagonia, he was presented with a vision to encapsulate the essence of Sun-Prana into a convenient pill format. He would have his indigenous farm workers collect organic matter that lay on the soil floor of one of his sprawling farms, dehydrate the plant debris, and grind it into a fine powder that would be compacted with cellulose into a neat little brown pill about the size of a kidney bean. The SOS Supplements ($39.99 for 80 pills) were concentrated doses of Sun-Prana energy and quickly became their top seller.
Rahi’s vision in Patagonia told him that these Sun-Prana Supplements could cancel out the anti-nutrient qualities of conventionally grown food and still be potent enough to provide a net gain in Sun-Prana nutrition. Rahi still strongly advised that the SOS Produce and Holyistic Beans be the centerpiece of a person’s diet but allowed the supplements to be used sparingly when the everyday rhythms of life made eating SOS Certified foods difficult. Stuck in an airport? Grab a salad from the airport bar and grill and have a supplement to boost your Sun-Prana levels and cancel out the anti-nutrients in conventional produce. On a long road trip, and the only thing for miles is a fast-food burger joint? You can be granted an exception to the no-grazing-animal-consumption rule by taking a double dose of supplements with your burger. And while Rahi didn’t condone it, some of the more prominent SOS Nation influencers were sharing videos on the Socials of them eating sushi and getting around the no seafood rule with a quadruple dose of supplements. As long as you had a bottle of SOS Supplements, there was seemingly no food you couldn’t eat, grown regeneratively or otherwise.
Finally, for the true SOS Nation believers, those who purchased at least $11,999 of SOS products in a 12-month period were invited to buy soil directly from one of SOS’s regenerative farms. This was the ultimate solution for the people most dedicated to optimizing their Sun-Prana levels. For $49,999, an officially licensed SOS team would arrive at your home and deliver a 1-ton supply of pre-regenerated soil. The SOS home gardener was entirely responsible for maintaining the regenerative condition of the soil, with crop rotations and at least one grazing animal that would reside on the premises at all times. Participants in this program would be growing their SOS-certified food in their backyard but would still need to maintain an $11,999 annual spending level. If your spending level fell below that threshold, SOS would stop sending a soil healer to your home for the twice-yearly spraying of apple cider vinegar and aged ox manure mixture. Without that crucial spray, even pre-regenerated SOS soil would lose its SOS certification status, and the crops coming out of that soil would revert to anti-nutrition status.
Jon was almost nine months into his recovery after the accident and feeling great. He had regained a lot of range back in his shoulder, and his follow-up appointments with his cardiologist were positive. His three weekly physical therapy visits were a piece of cake, and the most challenging thing about his recovery was the SOS Regenerative Cleanse that he put himself on, to his doctor’s chagrin. He had never done anything like that in his life, and the benefits of the breathwork training didn’t kick in until the third and final day of the cleanse, when the Sun-Prana would accumulate in the body and trigger photosynthetic ketosis.
But he still performed his breath work every morning in his backyard to refill the Sun-Prana he emitted from his body as he slept (moonlight draws Sun-Prana out of you, which is also why Jon installed blackout shades to keep moonlight–not sunlight–out of his bedroom). The breath work would typically fill him until lunch, so he’d hop in the shower, take Hailey to school, and then stop at BigBuys for one of his weekly resupply runs of SOS Produce. Save for the regenerative SOS eggs, butter, and milk he ate daily, Jon had cut all meat and seafood out of his diet. He dropped 30 pounds since leaving the hospital, and his cholesterol and blood pressure levels dramatically improved due to his new food lifestyle. He even started uploading some short vlogs to The Socials showing his daily SOS routine and sharing his health journey, which people were beginning to notice. He had never spent much time on The Socials, but he had plenty of downtime in the hospital and discovered that sharing his story felt good. If his experience helped even just one other person, it’d be a worthwhile use of time. Sharing on The Socials was part of his healing process.
Mara and Hailey’s enthusiasm for going full-on SOS with Jon was waning. The urgency of Jon’s accident brought the family together in ways they had never imagined. That enhanced camaraderie got them to go along with Jon’s wish to adopt the SOS lifestyle. They loved him and wanted to be supportive, but they started to miss some of the decadent Southern classics like chicken fried steak or biscuits and gravy that Mara would make on the Sundays she was home.
Jon sensed this tension, and one day, on a lark, he splurged and picked up a bottle of SOS Sun-Prana Supplements. He’d see these pills every week when he went to restock on Holyistic Beans, but he had lasted all these months without touching them. Maybe it’d be easier for Mara and Hailey to do SOS with him if they could take a pill now and then to have one of Mara’s Sunday suppers. The morale boost would be just what they needed to stick with SOS him.
And Jon was right; it did work for a while. But 80 pills went far faster than he expected, and he confronted Mara about where all the pills went. Mara’s job, by definition, required her to travel, and while airport food had come a long way, it was not SOS diet-friendly. Mara said she felt better on an SOS diet and would take several SOS pills while traveling to keep her Sun-Prana up while away from home. Jon understood and didn’t get angry, but he reminded her of how expensive they were and that, as good as his disability insurance was, it wasn’t paying the bills as much as his steelworking job did.
Nevertheless, he bought a second bottle on his next trip to BigBuys, thinking he would surprise Mara with it to show how much he cared and appreciated her coming on the SOS journey with him. While packing his groceries into his pickup truck that same trip, he ran into two old friends, Edgar and Jamie, from work. He had kept in touch with them sporadically on The Socials while he was off the job, but they hadn’t seen each other in almost a year. The three of them were catching up in the parking lot when Edgar suggested they grab a beer and a burger at a new spot that just opened up next to BigBuys.
Jon didn’t know the restaurant, but from the looks of it, it was one of those joints where he often hung out with the guys after work, knocking back beers and wings. He was caught up in the moment and didn’t want to say no, so he went along with them, cracking open the bottle of SOS Supplements he got for Mara and grabbing a few pills to take with him.
Three hours later, they were still there, having a great time, shooting the shit and busting each other’s balls like old friends do. Jon abstained from the beer but got a burger with an iceberg lettuce wrap instead of a bun and popped two SOS pills. He hadn’t eaten meat in a long time, and it felt great. He compartmentalized the guilt and shame and decided to worry about it later. After a long, hard year of challenges, he was too excited to see his pals and thought he deserved a treat. Besides, the two SOS Supplements in his body were busy neutralizing the anti-nutrients in the burger and keeping his Sun-Prana levels up, so what was the harm?
Jamie mentioned how his friend sent him a video on The Socials the other day, which happened to be one of Jon’s vlogs. His friend didn’t know who Jon was or that Jamie was friends with him, but he thought it was inspiring and wanted him to see it. Jon was astonished that his videos were making the rounds like that on The Socials. He started doing the vlogs just for himself, as a personal journal, so it was a pleasant surprise to see that people were watching them.
The friends wrapped up, promised to reunite again soon, and went their separate ways. Jon picked up Hailey from school and cooked dinner for her at home. Mara was out on a flight to the West Coast and wouldn’t be back until tomorrow. Later that night, after Hailey had gone to bed and Jon was relaxing on the couch, his phone buzzed as a notification popped up from The Socials from a name he didn’t recognize. Maddie Pittman, a junior marketing coordinator for a Socials marketing agency in Los Angeles called Vyraliti Media, had sent him a DM. Jon clicked open the message and discovered that SOS had hired Vyraliti Media to extend its influencer campaigns and that he was on a short list of micro-influencers they wanted to partner with.
The deal would be small to start, with the potential for more if things went well. Vyraliti Media would send Jon a half dozen bottles of SOS Sun-Prana Supplements. Jon would need to upload six videos next month about how the supplements have helped him and they’d wire him $2,500. Maddie said they would then look at all the analytics and hop on a video call with him to discuss more marketing opportunities if the videos got a good amount of eyeballs. Before he could process his excitement, Jon immediately replied, “YES! 😁”
When the hit piece came out, Rahi was on his jet returning from a weekend at his vacation house in Sonoma County. He was overseeing a project to convert a 102-year-old barn into a modern event center where he could host in-person breath work seminars and SOS intensives, which involved six days of SOS juice cleansing, thrice daily cold plunges, and intermittent sleep-fasting. His assistant pulled out her laptop, placed it on the table, and hit play on a Socials video. In the foreground of the opening shot was a face he recognized: Lucy Diaz, one of his earliest SOS Healers who left the company two years ago with little notice or explanation. Flanking her were what appeared to be about a dozen farmer-looking types wearing flannel shirts with the iconic black and white Regenerative Association Certification logo embroidered onto the upper left breast.
After twenty-six minutes of intense silence on the private jet—twenty-four for the video, two for the awkward moment after it ended where no one dared speak before Rahi did—Rahi stopped staring off into space, turned his head toward his assistant and calmly said, “It’s fucking bullshit.” He gently closed the laptop shut, reclined in his chair, and closed his eyes for the duration of the flight. Fifteen minutes before landing, he called his videographer and asked him to meet him at the airport when they landed. They would film a response on the car ride home. Rahi landed, deplaned, and was escorted into the backseat of a white Tesla X, where his video guy was sitting in the passenger seat and turned around with the camera running. The driver pressed the accelerator, and they sped off the runway toward Rahi’s primary home in Venice.
Rahi’s response was an unnerving rant, admonishing the validity of the claims thrown against him, punctuated by explosive outbursts denouncing this as the work of a jealous ex-employee. According to Rahi, Diaz worked as a machine learning developer before quitting her cushy, lucrative tech job and joining SOS as a Healer In Training ($39,999 one-time tuition fee). Rahi accused her of AI-generating the hit piece video to ruin the SOS business.
Jon gazed intensely into his screen as Lucy Diaz’s voice narrated over shaky smartphone footage of farm workers harvesting lettuce in an endlessly large field, romaine stretching into the horizon. The soil was dry and lifeless. The lettuce is loaded onto a tractor, and the video cuts to a packing facility where more workers pack it into plastic bags with the Sultans of Soil brand name and the SOS Certification logo on the front. Diaz talked about how the SOS Certification was a meaningless credential created by Rahi and only used on his products. Multiple farmers from the Regenerative Association testified about how true Regenerative Agriculture did believe in the importance of soil health, but Rahi’s claims about how you shouldn’t eat grazing animals or avoid seafood because it doesn’t come from the soil were preposterous.
Diaz pointed out that most snake oil had a small kernel of truth that got twisted into something untrue. Is healthy soil important? Yes. Did food grown in unhealthy soil have so called, “anti-nutrients?” No. Charlatans who took the foundations of the regenerative agriculture movement and misrepresented them for personal gain were ruining the reputation of the honest regenerative movement.
The scene changed to a beautifully manicured plot of land where intercropped rows of garbanzos and wheat grew side by side. The footage is now very well-lit and sharp, looking like a more professionally filmed production. It was a clip from an SOS healer training video. In slow motion, a farm worker in impossibly clean overalls and a red plaid flannel shirt walks up to a wheat plant and examines it thoughtfully while gentle bluegrass music plays. Diaz describes this as a show farm where they properly perform regenerative agriculture. But it’s only a five-acre plot on a larger industrial farm where most of the SOS produce was grown.
Cut to a warehouse interior where workers pack beans into cellophane bags. To the left sit pallets of bulk beans in burlap sacks stamped with “PRODUCT OF MEXICO.” To the right are smaller burlap bags of beans bearing the SOS logo. A worker mixed four big bags of Mexican beans with one bag of SOS beans into a large steel container while another stirred the mixture with a long paddle. Diaz explains how the Holyistic Beans are mostly conventionally grown commodity beans with a small portion of SOS beans mixed in.
The video cuts to another scene in a dimly lit dining room. A nicely dressed middle-aged woman sits at a table across from whoever is filming her, holding a glass of wine, pretending to pose for a photo. The camera zooms in over her left shoulder and focuses on a man with salt-and-pepper hair sitting at another table eating steak and lobster with a young woman beside him—David Rahi.
Crestfallen, Jon stood at his kitchen counter in front of his laptop and stared at the video's end screen, not believing what he had just seen. He took a sip of SOS Solar Water ($9.99 per 24 oz glass bottle). The house was quiet. Mara was working a flight, and Hailey was with her grandparents this weekend. He trained his eyes on the half-full bottle of SOS Sun-Prana Pills next to his water bottle as the bitter anger of betrayal enveloped him. Was the man he looked up to a fraud? David had so many credible studies that backed his work. He partnered with the biggest grocery chain in America. He had so many followers. SOS made Jon feel something. How could this all be fake?
Jon had just completed the final sponsored SOS video and received great feedback. His follower count on The Socials was approaching 20,000, a milestone that would open up more opportunities with brands. What if this whistleblower video kills SOS’s reputation, and his newfound influence becomes worthless? He checked the comments on his most recent video but hasn’t seen anything yet referring to the SOS hit piece. He knew he’d be a target eventually and took that personally since he staked his reputation going to bat for SOS. Most of all, he was terrified of looking like a fool to Mara and Hailey.
He snaps. In a fit of rage, he grabbed the thick glass SOS water bottle and used its heavy bottom to smash his glass bottle of SOS pills into tiny pieces. Fuck David Rahi. The pill bottle shattered as Jon violently smashed the pills into a powder until the water bottle broke, covering the counter with water, SOS pill powder, and broken glass. Jon raked his arm across the counter, scraping the wet mess into the dirty dish-laden kitchen sink, cutting his arm on broken glass in the process. He ignored the bloody wound and grabbed his phone, keys, and wallet and stormed out the back door.
Rahi sat in a cold tub full of ice water, speaking excitedly with arms gesturing above the water for emphasis. Next to him, in another cold tub, was Avery Spade, the billionaire cryptocurrency trader spending his fortune to hack his body into living until he’s 200 years old. The two tubs sat on a patio surrounded by perfectly manicured landscaping with the warm glow of golden hour Sunlight on their faces. Two black stands next to each tub held microphones in front of them. Rahi was a guest on Spade’s podcast, The Healthy Truth, and he came on the show to respond to the recent SOS hit piece and to promote his products.
Rahi announced a week-long flash sale of 50% off the entire SOS product line online and in all BigBuys stores. He says it’s a thank you to his loyal fans in SOS Nation for sticking with him and supporting the company through this ordeal. Spade talked about how when people like them discover truths that don’t align with the mainstream narrative, people always come out of the woodwork to discredit them. He thanked Rahi for being on the show and closed with his signature catchphrase: “DO YOUR OWN RESEARCH FOLKS!”
They did not, however, talk about the class action lawsuit that was about to be made public against Sultan of Soil Incorporated related to deceptive and fraudulent advertising. Rahi and his lawyers had been aware that this suit was coming their way and already began preliminary preparations to try the case in court. He also didn’t mention that the flash sale was a ploy to liquidate inventory and quickly raise funds for his mounting legal costs. But product margins were so generous that even after slashing retail prices in half, he’d still be making a decent profit, especially on the supplements.
He didn’t realize it yet, but Rahi would be out of a job in six months. His company would declare bankruptcy after losing the lawsuit and incurring a massive fine. The move to liquidate everything was smart, as it was his last chance to sell off his product inventory before a judge officially declared SOS a fraud. Any remaining product inventory after the fraud charge would be worthless. The Sultan of Soil would be no more. Rahi would be fine, though. Despite the fall of SOS, his personal wealth was protected, and he had more than enough money to maintain his lifestyle for decades. Or to fund a new venture that would be bigger than the last.
Jon returns home late that night, around 2:45 a.m., very drunk. He has a sack full of burgers and a six-pack of beer in his hands, which he clumsily tosses on the kitchen table. He begins to tear into the first burger. He feels the warm cushion of the bun dotted with sesame seeds in his hands right before he takes a huge bite, squirting warm, salty red meat juice into his mouth. He devours three cheeseburgers in under six minutes.
He flicks the cap off a cold beer with his car key and pours the contents down his throat, chugging half the bottle in one go. He leans back in his chair, eyes closed, now calm. His veins are coursing with serotonin and lipids. He feels crazed and euphoric. The house is quiet. His labored breathing fills the room. Tiny strands of spit fly off his lips with each exhale. He opens his eyes and looks around at the stillness of his kitchen, just as he left it that morning. Guilt creeps in as he becomes aware of his racing heartbeat and begins to feel his fingers swell from the massive dose of sodium and fat he just ingested.
Still intoxicated and thinking in slow motion, his temporary euphoria turns to dread as he realizes his Sun-Prana levels are shot. He can feel the cortisol flooding his system as he turns flush and hot in the face. Jon stands up from his chair, drunk legs still wobbly and head dizzy from getting up so abruptly, and he rushes to the sink to make himself throw up. He shoves two fingers into the back of his throat as he lowers his head over the garbage disposal hole. A vile mess of undigested cheeseburger, beer, and gastric juices streams out of his mouth and into the drain. He repeats this twice more, then turns on the water to rinse his mouth between fits of wet coughing.
Jon hovers over the sink as he tries to pull it together. He rinses off stray bits of vomit from the bottom of the sink and notices the murky water collected in his earlier dishes. His crushed SOS pills must have steeped in the bottled SOS water from his rage fit and turned it brown. Jon’s dirty cereal bowl and coffee mug from breakfast were filled with an earthy-smelling liquid.
The realization that about $20 worth of pills had dissolved in his dirty dishes instantly cuts through his mental fog. Without thinking, he grabs the bowl with two hands and eagerly drinks the dirt water like a kid draining milk from a cereal bowl. The liquid is bitter and smells like wet leaves after an autumn rainstorm. He slurps the bowl dry and then chugs the brown water that collected in his coffee mug. He wipes his mouth with his sleeve as his breathing slows down and his head clears up. He can see straight again. It feels like he went to confession and absolved his sinful bender with Holy Water. Except it was Sun-Prana water. About 40 pills worth.
Inspired, he goes into his stockpile of Sun-Prana Supplements, opens a fresh bottle, and dumps all 80 pills into his coffee grinder. He has an idea. He flips the switch, and the grinder turns Sun-Prana tablets into fine sand. Jon transfers the grounds into a half-gallon mason jar and fills it to the brim with cold tap water. He places it in the fridge and goes to sleep.
The next morning, he opened the mason jar to discover a half gallon of the same brackish water he had drunk the night before. Head aching from his hangover, he poured another glass of the supplement water and chugged it purposefully while standing at the kitchen counter, waiting to feel something. And he does—big time. A wave of energy comes over him, and his headache disappears. He sees the debris from his ill-advised late-night burger binge but doesn’t feel the residual effects of the anti-nutrients. He erased it with Sun-Prana water.
Jon goes into his garage and grabs his white cooler. He washes it out with the garden hose and sets it upside down to dry on a plastic lawn chair. Jon returns to the house, gathers four more SOS supplement cases ($479.88, Case Count: 12 x 80 Tablet Bottles), and unboxes them onto his kitchen counter. He grabs a large mixing bowl from the cupboard below him and opens bottle after bottle of supplements, piercing the safety seal, removing the cotton, and emptying all 48 bottles worth of pills into the bowl. He inserts his headphones in his ears, turns on noise cancellation and flips through his phone to find the latest episode of The Checkdown with Bobby McFarrelley and presses play.
Using a coffee mug as a scoop, he fills his grinder with as many pills as it’ll hold and flips the switch. After a minute or so, he empties the contents of the coffee grinder into another mixing bowl, and he repeats this for about an hour. The countertop is covered in dark brown dust, and he takes the bowl of powdered supplements out to the garage and empties it into the cooler. He fills the cooler with garden hose water, closes the lid, and leaves it in the garage until the following day.
In the meantime, Jon cleans up the kitchen and then starts sketching out logos at the kitchen table. He draws a few rough ideas involving a Sun and soil to get a general idea of what he wants on paper. He takes a photo of it, uploads it to his image generator, and fiddles with the prompts until he gets a workable logo for the label. Once that’s good, he starts prompting his chatbot to build a basic e-commerce website. Within an hour, everything was ready to go. The website is bare bones for now but has a shopping page with a single product: Cold Brew Prana Water ($8.99 / 12 oz). Save 15% with a 6-month subscription and 10% off the first order if you submit your phone number to receive text message marketing. He checks everything over and saves the website as a draft. He gets a much-needed night of rest.
The next morning, he briskly gets out of bed, uses the toilet, and then makes a beeline for the cooler that sat out overnight in his garage. He grabs a cup and ladle from the kitchen as he walks out the door and into the garage. Jon flips open the lid, and a rush of earthiness hits him in the face, activating his nostrils. It’s intense and brown. He stirs the mix with the ladle and scoops some liquid into his cup. He takes a sip and feels the Sun-Prana coating his insides. Bingo. This is it.
Over the next 24 hours, Jon prints labels and orders 500 glass jars with lids to his home. He spends his entire Sunday in the garage, spooning Cold Brew Prana Water into 12 oz. glass jars, sealing them, and labeling them. He placed all 500 filled jars on shelving in his garage where many tools had been. This will do for now, but he thinks he can get some semi-opaque 50-gallon plastic barrels and do the brewing in those. They can even sit outside and absorb more Sun-Prana. He’ll call around to some regenerative farms and ask if they have any cover crops he can take. He can then dry it, grind it in a bigger grinder, and throw it all in the barrels. Yeah, this could work. He walks back into the house and heads directly to his computer.
Jon is ready to hit “publish” on his site and has already outlined a script for a Socials post announcing the launch of his Cold Brew Prana Water and linking to the site. He gathers his thoughts for a few minutes at his desk and takes a nourishing breath. Jon flips on his camera, stares into it with a giant smile, clicks the record button, and begins to speak:
“Hey what up to all my Sun-Prana Peoples! I hope this day has blessed you with joy and energy. So, a lot of people have been asking me about how I keep my Prana levels up so consistently. Well, today I’m going to reveal a new product from my personal toolkit, a product that came to me in a vision on the summer solstice, a product that will absolutely change your life…”
This chapter is from "Mise: On the Future of Food."