Alcohol does one job well and charges far too much for it. I want to build the thing that does the job without the bill, and then the thing after that.
There is a story about how we started drinking that I choose to believe. Somewhere in our past our ancestors came down from the trees and lost easy access to fresh fruit. What they found on the ground instead was fruit a few days past ripe, slightly fermented, carrying a little alcohol. The ones who ate it were, for an evening, a bit less aggressive with each other, a bit less anxious, a bit more inclined to sit close and call it a group.
The science version is drier and much older. Robert Dudley calls it the drunken monkey hypothesis: about ten million years ago a mutation in one enzyme, ADH4, made our ancestors forty times better at breaking down ethanol, around the time they started spending more of their lives on the forest floor, where fallen fruit ferments. That story is about calories and smell, not about friendship. The friendship part is mine, and I know it. Learning even the dry version changed something for me: I stopped having a blanket aversion to alcohol and started looking at what it actually does.
Most people either glamorise alcohol or moralise about it, and both are a way of not looking. Many of the closest friendships I have were built at least partly over drinks. So were a lot of the adventures, the memories I kept and the ones I did not. Alcohol takes the edge off. It lowers the anxiety of being with other people, turns strangers into a table, and lets people who cannot say what they feel about each other say it anyway. My most health-conscious friends, the ones who barely drink anymore, still admit this when pressed. It is the most accepted drug on the planet for a reason, and the reason is that it works.
The price is not acceptable, and I say that as someone who has paid it happily many times.
Sleep goes first. A few drinks and the night is shallower, the second half fragmented, the recovery gone, and everything the next day is done by a worse version of you. Then the organs, slowly, and the research on that has only gotten less forgiving. Then the hangover, which is a productivity tax and a training tax at the same time. There is no world where I do a weekend bachelor party bender and then run a marathon. There are plenty of weekends where a routine workout gets postponed because of a Friday.
My generation is already voting on this. Every survey finds us drinking less than the generations before us did at our age, and the alcohol-free shelf in the supermarket has gone from one dusty beer to half an aisle. But the alcohol-free drinks only removed the bill. They also removed the job. Nobody’s anxiety at a party drops because of a Heineken 0.0.
So the problem is clear: something that does the job, most of it or some of it, and charges far less for it. A new substance, a new combination, a new way of delivering an old one, I do not know yet. I am not a biochemist, and the first step is finding the right one.
I am also not the first to want this. David Nutt, the pharmacologist the UK government dismissed as its drugs adviser for saying alcohol was more harmful than several illegal drugs, has been working on exactly this for about a decade under the name Alcarelle, and Sentia, his botanical stopgap, is already on shelves. His timelines have slipped more than once, because a new molecule that changes how people feel meets a regulator that treats it as a drug, which is right. Doing this properly means years, money, and a partner who has taken a molecule through that process before. I am writing it down anyway. I would rather be one of the people trying than one of the people ordering the 0.0 and resenting it.
The second project is the one I actually cannot stop thinking about, and it is more ambitious.
You have started seeing a small sensor on the back of people’s arms: diabetics first, and lately athletes who want to know what a meal does to them. It reads blood glucose continuously and sends it to a phone. Closed-loop insulin pumps already exist that read that number and dose in response, without the person deciding anything.
I want that for mood. A device that reads what is going on in your body, and an app where you say what you want the next hours to be: sharper, calmer, warmer, less afraid of the room. The device nudges you there, with the right combination of chemicals, in the right amounts, at the right time.
The premise underneath is one I hold strongly: what we call an emotion is the body’s chemistry plus the story the brain tells about it. Psychologists have known this since the sixties. Give people adrenaline in a cheerful room and they report feeling happy; give them the same adrenaline in an angry room and they report anger. Run a fever on a mediocre date and your brain will tell you the person across the table is making you hot and bothered, not that you are getting sick. If the emotion is chemistry plus interpretation, then the chemistry is an input, and inputs can be managed.
I am aware of how this reads. It is a medical device that doses psychoactives on a schedule set by an app, and every word of that sentence is a regulatory and ethical wall. Insulin pumps went through the same walls and came out the other side.
I am putting three problems forward for the next year, each more ambitious than the last. The collaboration layer for engineering teams that run on agents, which I can build now and am running discovery on. This one, which needs a biochemist before it needs me. And Foundation Zero, a machine that reads crowds, which is still science fiction with a real first step.
I have no evidence for this one beyond my own body and my friends’ admissions. If you are a biochemist, a pharmacologist, or someone who has taken a substance or a device past a regulator and lived to tell it, I would love to talk.