This year’s Vancouver Marathon was not the best marathon I ever ran. A week before I could still hardly walk because of an injury, so I could not participate in the 10K Vancouver Sun Run. But I still decided to do the full 42.2 km marathon the weekend after that. The result was an even worse injury (but I finished, which is the only thing that counts), however, there was more.

I think our housekeeper washed my Vibram running shoes before the race, because while at the start I felt they were suddenly too small. During the race my big toe was very painful, but I continued anyway. I will spare you the details, but about 3 weeks later I lost my complete toenail because of this. I never realized how important even a toenail can be, I could not even swim for a few weeks because of that (too much pain).

But the strangest thing was that after the marathon my lower abdomen was hurting and it looked like I had suddenly grown a big tumor during the run. Kind of scary, so I went to see a doctor a few days later. He told me that it was a hernia, something that 10% of the people develop during their life, which was a bit of a relief. This marathon had been too much for my body it seems.

I did some research and managed to get an appointment with the best hernia doctor in Vancouver, Dr. Scudamore. He told me that it was an inguinal hernia. A surgery was not immediately necessary, but that not doing it could lead to potential complications such as strangulation (cutting off the blood supply to part of the body). Because the full recovery of such a surgery would be 6 weeks I decided to postpone the operation until after the summer (I wanted to go swimming and sailing in summer), and so last night I went in for my operation.

I have always been very healthy and never had an operation before. The only time I spent some time in a hospital was when Scott and Elaine were born in Shanghai. So I looked forward to it actually, I like to learn new things and this is the best way to observe how a surgery works.

While being tied to my bed in the operation room I asked the anesthesiologist a lot of questions and looked at all the monitors and other instruments surrounding me. I was put on an IV, which I had never experienced before. I was hungry and dehydrated (I had not eaten for 20 hours when I entered the hospital), but the IV makes you feel better soon. The view from the operation room was great, on the top floor of the building with windows all around and views over the city. Too bad I could not take a selfie!

Dr. Scudamore walked into the surgery room just before 7 pm (I already had a short chat with him 30 min before the operation in which I could ask him all kinds of questions) and informed the staff of the procedure. Then the anesthesiologist put a mask with 100% oxygen over my mouth and told me I would be asleep in 20-30 seconds. Breathing was kind of hard so I closed my eyes and took deep breaths. After 30 seconds I felt I was still not asleep and opened my eyes to tell the doctor that it did not seem to work. But I was surprised to see that I was suddenly in a different room and that the clock at the end of my bed showed it was an hour later! The surgery was over already and I had not noticed anything.

I felt fine and wanted to get up, but the post operation nurse told me to stay put. I was completely awake and asked her for something to read, but that was not possible. I had to lay down for at least another 45 minutes. That was very boring, because I felt great (thanks to the IV and all the medicine in my body) and I am not used to doing nothing for 45 minutes. There was a man in the bed next to me who had also had surgery and who seemed to be doing a lot worse. I could not see him because of curtains between the beds, but I understood that they had needed a lot more medicine to bring him to sleep and he was not in good shape when he had woken up right before me.

After a very boring 45 minutes in which I asked the nurse questions about the instruments, the surgery itself (the whole operation had lasted just 35 min), and post-operation procedures, and in which I was trying to come up with improvements for patients (why not put a simple muted TV screen above the bed to at least you can watch something without moving or hang some posters on the ceiling), I was finally allowed to get up. The nurse wanted to bring in a wheelchair but I said I wanted to try to walk myself. That went fairly well, but the nurse warned me that if I would fall she may not be able to catch me. After leaving the post-operation area I was told to go to the toilet (they don’t let you go until you prove you can do that!), which was kind of weird because the whole middle part of my body was completely numb.

Then another nurse came and put me in a wheelchair. I did not see the necessity for that but wanted to go home and just obeyed. She took me to Grace’ car and with some pain I managed to get in. I thought I would sleep most of the drive back home, but I was not tired and could even tell Grace how to drive (she prefers my directions over her navigation system).

At home I decided to walk around slowly instead of lie down because I felt fine. But all of a sudden my legs felt like jello and I fell backwards on the ground. I still don’t know what happened exactly, but it was a good lesson that I may feel okay but I was not yet okay just 2 hours after the surgery.

From then on I just sat down, had a lot of clear soup and then went to bed where I read some emails, wrote a couple of text messages and tried to read a book. By 11 pm I was supposed to take new painkillers, but I felt the pain was manageable so I did not take them yet.

The night was not easy because I could only lay in one position and woke up each time I moved. I was thinking about taking painkillers at 5 AM, but in the end decided to try to get through the night without them. The result was not much sleep, but I still felt quite rested. I also had a lot of time to think about the things I experienced in the hospital and what could be improved. Especially the information flow is quite limited, if you don’t ask you just don’t hear a lot of things. Also the waiting time at the hospital before the operation was unnecessary. Why let me arrive at 3:45 pm and not start the operation until 7 PM (I was told other operations took more time than planned)? Just give me a call in advance so I could have worked 2 hours longer. A simple app could have solved this. And maybe I am different from others, but I would have liked to see pictures or video of the operation, that would be a nice memory.

It’s now 9 AM, the kids are in school and I am sitting in the living room doing emails and WeChat messages. Pain is still manageable so I still haven’t touched my painkillers. I may do so later if I want to get some sleep, but if I can handle the pain without medicine I prefer that. Actually, the pain is a lot less than I thought. Several people told me it would hurt like crazy, but it’s actually not much worse than the pain during or after a full marathon. The main difference is that after a marathon you can lie down on your bed and feel much better, here the pain is very concentrated and doesn’t really stop.

Recovery will be quite slow, it will take about 3 weeks before I can do light activities again and it will take 6 weeks for a full recovery. Biggest problem is that I can’t drive for 2 weeks (time for self-driving cars!), but I believe I should be able to beat that time if I walk around a lot instead of hang on the couch. I am in pretty decent shape, so I assume that with healthy food and drinks my body should recover a lot more quickly than the average person would. We’ll see. At least it was an interesting experience that I actually enjoyed (I realize that might sound strange), I just wish there would be a bit less pain involved.

One of the things that I enjoy most is to talk about disruptive technological trends and how they will already impact our lives 5 years from now. I use this in my investment decisions, both for start-ups and for public companies.

One of the most interesting areas for me is how quickly autonomous car technology and robotics are developing. My vision on this has evolved quite a bit since I moved to Canada in 2013, especially my view on the time line in which changes will happen (within the next 4-5 years) and the effect of robotics (more positive than I originally thought).

Robotics and autonomous cars are actually the same thing, because an autonomous car is nothing more than a robot. I have predicted for years that robots will take over most of our daily tasks and that the majority of people will lose their jobs over the next 20 years. I now believe that this will go much faster, but I also believe that this does not need to lead to mass unrest if society prepares itself well for the coming changes. This post will focus on self-driving cars, I plan to write about the effect of mass unemployment later.

Autonomous cars are a good way to explain the effects of robotics to people, because most of us use cars and can understand the changes that self-driving cars will bring. Within 5 years the first completely autonomous vehicles will hit the road (in 2013 I thought it would be in 2023, now I think it will already be by 2019-2020). Many cars already have limited self-driving features and these show how far we have come over the past years.

Last month my wife bought a new car with some of these self-driving features and it’s quite interesting to try them out. Among others her car can parallel park itself or it can back into a parking spot. It is kind of scary the first time you use it, and I even braked because I thought her new car would hit the car next to us (message from the car: “please release the brake”), but once you have done it a few times you realize the car is a much better parker than most humans.

The car also has automatic brakes in case the car in front of you suddenly slows down. When I was testing her car I drove up to a stop sign where a car was waiting in front of me of me. I saw that the car would start driving because there were no other cars at the intersection, so I drove up to him quite fast. About 15 meters before the stop sign, and right at the moment the other car started driving, Grace’ car suddenly took over the controls and started braking hard while making a beeping sound. It was very strange when it happened, but it’s actually assuring that the car forces you to drive more carefully.

For me the big take away is how quickly you get used to these features. It makes driving easier and safer, and after using them a few times it feels totally normal. I think that once cars will become more autonomous we will immediately accept it and will let the car do all the driving.

It will change the way cars look and feel. I don’t believe that fully autonomous cars will need a steering wheel and pedals. Once you have given control to your car you won’t feel the need to drive yourself anymore. That’s the mistake the big car manufacturers seem to be making, most still believe that people will want cars where you can take over from the computer if needed. It reminds me of the first cars in the late 1800’s that looked like coaches, so you could still put a horse in front of the it! Google doesn’t have this bias and its autonomous vehicle prototypes are just sit-and-go, without any controls for passengers. They redesigned the concept of a car bottom-up and that may turn out to be a very smart move.

Given how much better electric cars have become over the past 3 years (Tesla cars are among the very best vehicles on the road right now) and how quickly battery technology and solar power are developing, my prediction is that the first autonomous cars will be completely electric. No more engines with moving components that need maintenance and can break down easily, but a simple but powerful battery powered car.

This will have huge implications for the car industry, because many companies are still focused on gas- or diesel-powered engines, instead of focusing all their energy on electric technology. But not just that, once autonomous vehicles become widely available, car sharing concepts will take off and the whole automotive market will collapse. Why do you need 2-3 cars per household if these cars sit in parking lots 95% of the time?

I believe that most people won’t own cars anymore but will subscribe to an Uber-like concept in which an autonomous vehicle will show up at your door whenever you need one. The number of cars will go down dramatically and if you are the operator of a parking garage you might as well start looking for a new career. Self-driving cars will park themselves outside of city centers to recharge their batteries, or more likely, immediately drive to the next person that needs a ride.

Costs will be much lower than current taxi services, because there are no human drivers involved anymore (the majority of the costs for a taxi are salaries), because cars will become much cheaper (mass-produced luxury taxis without complicated engines will probably be produced for $15-20,000, and because of their electric engines you can drive them for more kilometers than normal cars) and because they don’t need expensive gas anymore (with better solar power and batteries the variable costs of driving will go down to almost zero).

My prediction: transportation will become almost free. Hard to imagine right now what impact that will have, but for sure it will change the way we live. People might start to live further away from downtown for example. And supermarkets may disappear because ordering online will be faster and cheaper (immediate delivery, no delivery costs, and the supermarket doesn’t need expensive real estate).

Traffic jams will disappear, not necessarily because there will be less cars on the road, but mainly because autonomous cars drive more efficiently (no sudden brakes) and will communicate with each other so that traffic lights are not necessary anymore. Check out this YouTube video to understand what will happen in intersections when you only have self-driving cars: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=r7_lwq3BfkY This assumes that there are no human driven cars anymore, which will not happen 5 years from now, but it will be the case in 15 years. Possibly older cars will be have to retrofitted with autonomous systems or they will not be allowed to drive during rush hour or on certain roads.

Another big advantage is that there won’t be many accidents anymore. Driving is one of the most dangerous activities, but that will change once autonomous vehicles take over. Insurance companies should take this into account, if you are a car insurer your business may go away over the next couple of years.

I am very positive about the changes that will happen in the automotive industry over the next years and the additional freedom and free time it will give many of us. It will completely disrupt some industries but it will also create a lot of new opportunities. I look forward to these changes and hope to drive (or better: be driven in) an autonomous car by 2020.

Over the past days I have been closely following the ad blocking discussion. For those who did not pay too much attention to it, the issue is that Apple released iOS9 and that this version allows ad blocking apps. That means that by installing one of these apps you won’t see ads anymore.

Great, right? Well, maybe yes, because it makes the user experience better, but also maybe no, because ads are the main revenue driver for most websites on the Internet. Within a day the top paid apps in the app store were ad blocking apps, so there clearly was a big need for it.

I don’t want to go into too much detail, but it means that many websites will need a different business model if they want to survive. The current model where you are often bombarded with ads that you do not want to see or that load much more slowly than the site itself is not working. It’s the ad industries fault, because they assumed consumers could not avoid the ads. With more relevant ads, that are less annoying, load faster and don’t block part of the site, I believe people would be less inclined to download ad blockers.

I never put any ads on this blog (and never will), nor did I ever accept any paid posts, because I blog for fun and make my money in other ways. Indirectly this blog has earned me a lot more than I could have ever made with ads, however. That’s my business model, but obviously that doesn’t work for sites with high overheads.

Some websites charge monthly fees, which is a model I don’t believe in. The only paid subscription that I have is the New York Times, because their content is unique and far superior to that of most other newspaper websites. But I don’t want to pay a monthly fee for 10 to 20 blogs and media sites, so earlier this year I deleted all the ones that charge for content from my RSS reader.

I believe in a model like Blendle, where people pay for content on a per article basis. However, the model should be seamless (no ‘pay now’ button), ubiquitous (it should work on any paid website, not just a few) and you should pay less if you don’t finish reading the article. Next to that an article should be cheap, I think the Blendle articles (at on average $0.20 per article) are still too expensive.

I have talked about this for about 8 years already, but so far I have not found the business model that I am looking for. Partly because big companies like Apple (iTunes for News?) and Microsoft (Skype with its pre-paid credit would be a perfect candidate) didn’t see the market or did not want to enter it, or in the case of Google because it would hurt their main business: advertising.

But the main reason the model does not exist yet is that there was no good machine-to-machine payment tool that can automatically send and receive money. Until now that is, because yesterday 21 Inc. released the data for its upcoming “21 bitcoin computer“. This Raspberry Pi with an added black box is the first tool that can make machines talk to each other and exchange value (=bitcoin) between them. Each 21 bitcoin computer contains the full blockchain and mines bitcoin as well when you use it.

The 21 bitcoin computer is 21 Inc.’s first product, but there will be many more products to come. Their vision is that everybody will in the future own one of their devices and will automatically mine small amounts of bitcoin every day. This money can then be spent automatically on products developed with the 21 bitcoin computer.

The first use case I see for this right now is automatically paying for web content. You read an article on say The Wall Street Journal and automatically a few cents are deducted from your bitcoin wallet. You don’t need to approve it (you probably don’t even realize that you are paying) and you can never spend more than you mine, unless you add bitcoin to your wallet yourself. In case you don’t like the content and stop reading after a few seconds or if you don’t scroll to the end of the article, you’ll get a partial or full refund – all done automatically.

This will solve a big part of the current ad blocking problem, because it gives content owners a new business model. 21 Inc. could be the ad blocker of the future: turn it on and you don’t see ads, turn it off and you’ll be served ads. Anybody can monetize their own content in the future and there is a huge opportunity here for a start-up.

Although lots of people dismiss 21 Inc.’s bitcoin computer (too expensive, ugly, just a Raspberry Pi, you can’t earn money with their chip, etc.), I think they are missing the bigger picture: we finally have an Internet protocol for payments! Automatic machine-to-machine payments will lead to new business models which will change the web as we know it. It’s hard to predict the future of the Internet, but I believe automatic payments are almost as disruptive as the first webbrowser was. Changing the online ads business model will just be a first step.

Today is our 10-year wedding anniversary (time flies, we were still so young during our wedding…) so I decided to take the day off and spend time with my wife. She wanted to do some shopping after bringing the kids to school, so we drove to the Metrotown mall in Burnaby, mainly because we had never been there.

We walked around inside the mall for a few minutes when we heard a loud scream behind us. My initial reaction was to ignore it, but the screaming continued. I turned around and saw an older Chinese woman laying on the ground outside the BMO bank. She seemed to be in shock and could only scream, but I noticed she was pointing in my direction.

I looked around and at that moment a big well dressed black guy with a panama hat walked by me. He carried a woman’s hand bag and walked a bit faster than normal.  I looked at him and then noticed he was the only one not paying attention to the screams. At that same moment he suddenly started running away from me, and I realized that he must have just robbed the woman and pushed her onto the ground.

I didn’t hesitate and immediately ran after him. He was quite fast but I am a decent runner so he did not manage to run far away from me. Within moments several other people followed me as well (Grace later told me about 20 people were running behind me and the thief). I shouted “stop the thief, stop the thief” and that scared the black guy, and he threw away the bag.

He probably hoped that I would stop running after him, but he was wrong. I knew that I would eventually catch up with him, these guys are generally fast at first but because I am a long distance runner I can run at a high speed much longer than they can. So I kept following him.

Problem was, the other people were not as fast as we were, so it was just me and him and some other people at least 20 meters behind us. He ran into Sears, which was virtually empty, so I screamed to the staff to stop the guy. But because he looked like a decent guy people did not immediately realize he was the criminal and let him pass.

He went around a corner, but when I rounded the corner he was suddenly gone. I first thought he may be hiding behind some racks, but then a shop assistant told me that a black guy just ran out the emergency exit. The emergency door had a sign saying that an alarm would go off if you opened it, but that was not the case so he managed to get away.

There was no point in going after him anymore, because I had no idea where he had run to, but at least the Chinese lady got her bag back. Grace was happy that I was not hurt, she had seen me running after the guy and saw from a distance that I was the only one close to him. She was quite worried that he would have a knife and stab me if I would have come too close, so seeing me safe made her quite relieved.

We were not in the mood for shopping anymore after that and left the building about 10 minutes later. By that time police cars had surrounded the mall, but I doubt that they were able to catch the guy. He was probably the only black guy in the mall, so he would have been an easy catch, but he was likely already off the premises before the police even got the call. It’s a pity, but it was a good reminder to be careful, even in shopping malls.

Lots of wildlife around our house these days: 2 weeks ago we saw 2 whales while sailing close to our home, last week a black bear visited our garden, on the weekend I had a close encounter with a deer, and tonight a family of 4 raccoons walked around our pool!

After dinner Elaine walked to the window to look at the sunset and suddenly started screaming: “Daddy, daddy, look, look, look!”. I had no idea what was going on but because she sounded shocked, I immediately ran towards her and saw a raccoon family walking on the deck next to our pool.

Two of them started eating some of the plants and 2 others jumped on the pool cover (I am glad we closed it!). We took a few pictures through the window, because I thought they would run away when they would hear or see us.

But when 3 of them had left the garden I opened the door to the garden and the last raccoon did not run at all, but turned around to look at me! I made some hissing sounds and pretended to throw something at the animal to scare it away, but instead it took a step towards me. That actually scared me a bit. The raccoon then slowly walked into the bushes and kept on observing me from there.

It’s not the first time I see a raccoon and it’s also not the first time that raccoons don’t run away when I encounter them. I once saw a huge one at dusk while running in the woods in Stanley Park, it just looked at me like I did not belong there (probably true!). I was more scared to see him than he was to see me running by.

I had assumed that if you see raccoons at home and try to scare them, they would at least have the natural reaction to flee. But that seems to be a wrong assumption. Maybe they are too used to human beings? Luckily raccoons are generally not dangerous to people, although they can attack pets or damage your garden. Let’s see what wild animals will visit us next week – I heard there are coyotes on the golf course behind our house!

 

Egmont, Sunshine Coast, BC

On Tuesday Scott and Elaine’s summer holiday will be over after more than 2 months of vacation. They are very excited to go back to school after such a long period of time. I think they had a great holiday in which they not only had some fun trips and summer camps but during which they also learned a lot.

Anchoring at Galbraith Beach (Bowen Island)

We didn’t have time for a long holiday this summer, mainly because I was too busy with work related activities, but we made a few short trips to the wineries in Kelowna, the Rocky Mountains (Banff & Lake Louise), Southern California (LA & San Diego, incl. Legoland and Sea World), and in British Columbia (a trip to the Sunshine Coast and several sailing trips).

Visiting a winery in Kelowna

When their holiday started in late June I made a list of things that I wanted to teach the kids during their summer break. For Elaine I put learning to swim and learning how to ride a bicycle on top of the list, for Scott it was sailing and learning a first computer language. Next to that they would practice piano every day, write their journals on a weekly basis and read books for an hour per day.

Rockwater Resorts, Sunshine Coast, BC

Looking back most of these goals were met. Elaine is now a great swimmer, she can do breaststroke, crawl and backstroke and she has no fear at all of water. Before June she mainly swam with one inflatable armband, but now she won’t need that anymore. She hang out in our pool on most days during the holiday, next year I’ll also let her swim in the sea with me.

Learning how to ride a bike with daddy

Biking took her a bit more time, but once she got the hang of it she immediately wanted to ride up and down hills! Just like with swimming she not only has no fear, but she also doesn’t see any danger. So she had a few crashes, but that’s the only way to learn.

Scott at his sailing camp

Scott took a sailing camp early in the holiday and there he learned to sail an Optimist on his own. He now knows the basic concepts of sailing, so when I took him out on my yacht a couple of times he enjoyed it a lot more. I even let him steer my boat sometimes, he loves it!

Captain Scott!

For Scott I had decided to teach him Python as his first computer language. Python is not that hard to learn (we only did the basics of course) and is a good basis for other languages. I realized soon that most of the key concepts are still quite hard for someone who just finished 1st grade (e.g. things like Boolean operators and expressions, variables, loop functions), but after several weeks of working with them he understands what they are and can work with them to write simple code. My plan is to do one lesson a week with him during the school year, and eventually to build a simple computer game with him.

Playing on the shores of Bow Lake

The kids also loved to play piano, they normally practiced without us telling them to do so. Elaine even played at some public pianos in Vancouver during the holiday, attracting a small crowd of onlookers. Because she memorizes all her songs she can play without sheet music, which is helpful when giving a mini concert in the open air.

Elaine learns how to play golf

The kids both wrote long journals about their holidays, describing the trips we took and the things we saw. Elaine wrote that her highlight was her visit to Legoland California in late July, she especially loved the rollercoasters (Scott not so much). Scott’s highlight was an overnight sailing trip that he took with me and my dad. We sailed in the Strait of Georgia where we saw 2 whales close to our boat (very impressive!) and then anchored for the night in a bay at Gambier Island. Nice to spend quality time withy my dad and son, and even nicer that Scott liked it so much as well.

Scott’s amazing reading results for August

Scott’s main activity this summer was reading. It’s unbelievable how much he reads. He has his own Kindle with an unlimited Amazon subscription and that was the best present ever for him. I just checked the statistics on his Kindle for August and it turns out he read 122 books this month, for a total of over 10,000 pages! I used to read a lot as a kid, but this beats everything. He is an extremely fast reader and already reads books for grade 4, so he will likely have an easy time in school this year.

It has been extremely dry in British Columbia this summer, I can’t even remember the last time it rained here. The downside is that there are a lot of water restrictions now (you can’t even water your garden or wash your car anymore) and there have been many forest fires because of the drought. Also animals are affected, because there is not enough food for them high up in the mountains, and so they come down to look for it.

And that’s what happened today at our house. Our neighbour was walking her dog when she suddenly saw a bear in front of our driveway! We do get a bit of wildlife in our area, such as cougars and coyotes, but bears are very rare. Since we moved here we had not seen any, and neighours later told us that the last time a bear was spotted in our street was in 2009. 

The black bear is hardly visible below the bushes

The bear was standing below some bushes when a car drove by, and because of that it walked up our driveway. Luckily the kids were not playing outside! Or more likely, if the kids would have been playing outside the bear might not have entered our garden.

Coincidentally our housekeeper just arrived in her car and she drove up to the bear to scare it away. That didn’t really work and the bear decided to sit next to our house before walking into our neighbour’s garden.

From there the bear managed to climb over a fence onto the golf course. A woman playing golf got a good scare when she suddenly saw a bear jump onto the fairway in front of her. The bear then ran away and we have not seen it since. 

Living in Vancouver’s suburbs is certainly interesting!

Many of my investments are in companies that make products or services that have the potential to change the world. It’s therefore a real pity that I never had the chance to invest in Soylent, a product that may redefine what food is. (Note: If shares should become available on secondary markets please let me know!)

Never heard of Soylent? It’s a powder that you mix with water to get a drink that has all the nutrition and vitamins you need to live healthy. It takes less than 5 minutes to make Soylent and it costs less than $10 per day! Soylent saves you time and money and makes it easy to get all the right nutrition elements that you need for a healthy life. 

I first heard about Soylent 2 years ago and found the idea intriguing. However, you could not buy the product yet at the time (it only started shipping in the US around April 2014), so I could not try it out and therefore sort of forgot about it. Every now and then I read an article (either very postive or very negative: disruptive technologies are always quite controversial and lead to lots of online discussions. Just like Bitcoin!) and I decided to order Soylent if it would become available in Canada. And indeed, a few weeks ago I read that Soylent was now for sale in my new home country, so I ordered a batch of the product.

My first shipment of Soylent arrived earlier this week and the past 3 days I lived mainly on this product. To be honest, I was a bit skeptical when I started this food experiment, mainly because I like to eat good food and I spend quite a lot of money on it. I could not imagine that a cheap powder-based drink would change the way I would eat for more than a day.

Preparing Soylent is very easy. With your first shipment comes a big jug in which you put half a bag of Soylent powder, then you fill half the jug with water and you shake the mix for 30 seconds. You then add the remaining powder, fill up the jug with water and shake again for 30 seconds. Done! It’s best to drink Soylent chilled, so I put it in the fridge and started my new ‘diet’ the next morning during breakfast. In October bottles of Soylent will go on sale as well, meaning that you don’t need to prepare it yourself anymore.

I live fairly healthy, with lots of exercise, not too much stress, and good food (plus several vitamins and mineral supplements, based on the results of my human genome sequencing). So I assumed Soylent would not make me more healthy, it would merely make eating faster and cheaper.

I got up a bit too late and had an early meeting in my office, so I did not have a lot of time for breakfast. Normally I would have a large glass of water (I start every day with a large glass of warm water), make some yoghurt with fruit and eat some bread with jam or cheese. Now I had my glass of water as usual and then I drank a smaller glass of Soylent. I finished breakfast in less than 2 minutes and jumped in my car to drive to downtown Vancouver.

Soylent tastes a bit like pancake batter or possibly a kind of oatmeal, not a bad taste actually. It was not something I needed to get used to, and over the past days I started to like it more and more. It was very easy to drink, it reminded me of having a milk shake, partly because it has the same texture and it came straight out of the fridge so it was very cold.

When I arrive in the office normally the first thing I do is to make myself a strong coffee. But now I did not really feel like drinking coffee, which is very strange for me. I normally drink at least 2 cups of coffee in the morning and on average about 4 cups of coffee per day. A workday does not really start until I finish my first coffee. But today I was a bit thirsty and decided to have a glass of water instead.

2 hours later I made my first coffee, and that was actually the only coffee I had that day. I wasn’t sure whether not drinking coffee was related to Soylent, but after 3 days I recognize the pattern: I only drink 1-2 cups of coffee per day now instead of 3-4, and I don’t miss it at all. I actually prefer an extra sip of Soylent instead of a coffee and the main reason I drink coffee is because I am so used to making one that I don’t really think about it.

After 2 meetings, around 11 AM, I normally get hungry and start looking for a cookie or a banana. But instead I decided to have half a glass of Soylent and my craving for other food was gone right away. And I started to really like the taste of Soylent!

Lunch was simple as well. Just a big glass of Soylent followed by a glass of water. For some reason Soylent makes me more thirsty, despite the fact that a jug of Soylent contains 1.6 liters of water. I drank my lunch while doing emails, so I did not have to stop working, saving me at least 30-45 minutes (if I don’t have a biz lunch I normally I walk out to a restaurant, buy some take-away food and eat it in my office).

I had a bit more Soylent during the afternoon and had no craving for other food at all. And even better, I felt a lot more energetic. Normally I start to get a bit sleepy after lunch, but with Soylent there was no dip at all. The next day was exactly the same, so it seems Soylent is at least part of the reason for it.

When I came home I had a normal dinner. I decided not to go cold turkey and completely stop eating food, but to just replace breakfast and lunch with Soylent (except for business lunches). At home we try to have breakfast and dinner together every day, so I don’t want to change our daily schedule by suddenly just drinking Soylent. Dinner is more than just eating to me, it’s a good time to talk about the day with the family and to listen to Scott and Elaine’s stories. That ritual won’t be changed by Soylent.

I actually realized that because dinner is now the only ‘real food’ meal of the day, I tend to enjoy the food more than I would normally. It also feels like I eat more slowly. After not chewing for most of the day it feels good to eat some solid food.

I have now been drinking most of my meals for 3 days and I am very positive. There were no side effects for me because of Soylent. If you search the Internet lots of people say that their bodies and digestive systems have to get used to Soylent during the first days, but for me that was not the case. I felt at least as healthy as usual and slept very well. I suspect that not drinking as much coffee and not eating any sugary products are important reasons for this.

As a bonus I seem to be losing weight as well. Likely because I eat less calories, especially during lunch. Also there are no snacks in between, I totally lost my cravings for something sweet or some carbs in the late morning or mid-afternoon. When I want to eat something I just take a sip of soylent.

Based on my very limited observations and based on my personal taste, I do believe there could be a huge market for Soylent. The food seems to be healthy, at least more healthy than the food that most people in the (Western) world eat. It is also relatively cheap compared to buying fresh foods: for about $10 per day you can have the equivalent of 3 meals and some snacks per day, and this price may come down further if the soylent production scales up.

And not only that, the food can also save you at least 2 hours per day, assuming you only eat Soylent. No more grocery shopping for fresh food, no more cooking dinner (and cleaning up afterward) and not spending more than a few minutes on eating the food.

I have only tried Soylent for 3 days now, but I am convinced that I will keep eating it on a semi-regular basis. Not for all my meals, but possibly a few days per week for breakfast and/or lunch. Although many hardcore Soylent users have been eating just Soylent for weeks or even months, I won’t give up good ‘real’ food for Soylent. But I could imagine that when I should be alone at home for a few days that I would eat just Soylent to save time.

Soylent is certainly not for everyone, and most people will be very skeptical at first. But over time I think more people will try it out and will realize that it can be a good partial alternative for their normal diets. It saves time, is healthy and cheap. It may even help to solve the problem of hunger in the world. Soylent is disrupting the food industry, it could very well be the future of food!