BONUS: Moon Juice Taste Test

Okay,

I have had minutes to think about this and I couldn't even come up with something good.

Okay, the only thing I could think of was Welcome to Maintenance Phase, the podcast that is sometimes rusty, but never dusty.

All right, I like that one.

I don't know what it means, but it rhymes.

I don't know what it means either.

I feel a little rusty.

Do you feel a little rusty?

Have you heard our other taglines?

When have we not been rusty?

We're entirely composed of rust.

I'm Aubrey Gordon.

I'm Michael Hobbs.

And you know that.

You know us.

You're here.

You know that.

Hello.

And this month, Michael, we're digging in on some updates from my old favorite, Moon Juice.

I am so excited.

We're doing a thing that I've wanted to do with you for ages, which is a moon dust taste test.

Yes.

So I received in the mail a few days ago a package with a lovely card and a bunch of little sachets that I thought were condoms.

And I was like, why is Aubrey sending me condoms?

And then I was like, oh, they're actually...

Wait, can I read the ones you sent me?

Yes, absolutely.

So, okay, so I have like, what was it, like the sampler platter or something?

It's like the flight dust, dust flight?

They call it the full moon.

Okay.

A genuinely not a terrible name.

This is literally all marketing.

So it makes sense that these people are good at marketing.

Absolutely.

Okay, so I have...

They're all in like wonderful earth tones.

I have a sachet of spirit dust.

I have beauty dust.

I have power dust.

That one's yellow.

I have dream dust.

Sex dust, obviously, and brain dust.

Listen, we haven't decided which ones of these to try.

We haven't decided like whether you and I are trying the same things or different things, any of that kind of stuff.

But I do just want to say, like, I feel like we would be under-delivering if at least one of us didn't taste sex dust.

You have to walk me through how to do this because I don't know how to consume a dust.

My prediction is that this is going to be a very disappointing taste test because they probably don't taste like anything.

It's basically just like a crushed up nutrition supplement.

Like it's just a normal thing, but they're, they basically rebranded taking like a morning multivitamin as like dust to make it, I guess, more of a ritual.

Or like, I think it's like a marketing thing because it's basically just like a pill that you swallow, but they're turning it into this like activity that you do in the morning, I guess.

Well, except it's different than a multivitamin because it does does not have vitamins added.

It is useless.

It's like a vitamin without the vitamins because it's fake.

In addition to this taste test, folks at Insider did, you know, they do their pieces that are like, let's go inside a troubled company.

Oh, yeah, yeah.

They did one on Moon Juice earlier this year, and it's a wild ride.

Okay.

I'll say there's like a lot in this piece.

We're going to skate past some of it because it's just generally messy.

As ever, we're going to do my favorite thing, which is go in sort of escalating, like it's going to get worse and worse

the further we go.

And we'll do our taste test sort of in there as we're sort of walking through.

Okay.

There is some stuff related to the ingredients that I was reading last night as I prepped for this show.

And I was like, we should talk about this before we do a taste test because there are some allegations.

There are some allegations.

Oh my God.

But first, Mike, tell me, what do you remember about Moon Juice?

I think the main thing I remember is Amanda Chantal Bacon, who is the Gwyneth of Moon Juice.

And she became infamous through this like food diary, another food diary person, again, being like, I have spirulina herbal cashews every day and like...

goji berry stevia milk for lunch and like just a kind of a list of like super food fads.

Everyone kind of made fun of her.

And then it seems like she's very successfully turned this into this brand of like health LA influencer smoothie stuff.

Totally.

In terms of food diaries, Pete Evans walked so that Amanda Chantal Bacon could run.

She really took that business over the finish line.

Impressive.

Yeah.

I would say we didn't really hear a lot in that first episode about the internal life at Moon Juice because there hadn't really been much reporting on it at that point.

But if you think about a company with really dubious marketing practices, a company with making big claims and sort of like doing this pretty aggressive whitewashing of Eastern and Indigenous like medicine and healing traditions, right?

Like it's not going to be great inside that company.

Yeah.

It follows to me that a founder who's going in L magazine to talk about her 23-minute breath set before her son Rohan wakes is probably not like the greatest, most communicative manager.

Did you make that up, or is that a real fucking thing?

That's a real thing, and I'm pretty sure I got it verbatim.

I don't know for sure,

but listen, Mike, we've talked about like this is the shit that I yell about at parties when I'm drunk.

It's like, everybody, I'm getting out the Amana Chantal Bacon Food Diary.

You're all listening to it.

So, like, the headline to know about Moon Juice is that they traffic in what are called adaptogens, which folks will have seen more and more of over the last couple of years since that episode, right?

The idea behind adaptogens are essentially that there are some kinds of substances that you can consume, that you can ingest, that will be sort of like the skeleton key to whatever your body needs to deal with whatever kind of stress it is under, right?

Okay.

Yeah.

I will say I read a piece.

uh last night from fox that called adaptogens quote the cryptocurrency of the wellness world

And I was like, wait a minute, I need you to unpack that.

And I was like, actually, I don't.

And also, cryptocurrency is like the QAnon of finance people.

So it's like the Vita transitive property.

This is the territory that we're in.

Vox summed up the research on adaptogens as, and I quote, conclusively inconclusive.

Okay.

There's just like not really anything to know here.

Almost everything has been an animal study.

The handful of human trials that have been done have been small.

They've been published in these sort of niche journals.

We just like generally don't really know at any kind of reliable level what the impact on humans is.

But also, okay, but the, I feel like the way that you can tell this is because if there actually were decent studies and good information indicating that there was like a magical ingredient in some foods and not other foods, it would be a really big deal.

Yeah.

It's like self-negating the idea that we would discover something that like, oh, it reverses the aging process and like the entire public health and academic institutional infrastructure of America is just like, eh, let's let people sell it online does not make any sense.

Well, I mean, I think it's also like worth noting that.

Moon juice and sort of adaptogens are moving into a similar kind of space as like really a lot of wellness trends right now.

I mean, I think probiotics sort of go in this camp.

We know that your gut microbiome matters and what kind of bacteria you have in your digestive tract matters we know that there are quote-unquote good kinds of bacteria and by the way when people talk about good kinds of bacteria the other way that folks refer to that is skinny bacteria oh it's genuine when they're talking about good and bad gut bacteria they're straight up talking about like these are the ones that make you fat and these are the ones that are associated with thin people Yeah, what we don't know is how to change the gut bacteria that you have.

So basically what's happening right now is people are like, kombucha has a bunch of the quote-unquote good, skinny bacteria in it so i'm just gonna chug kombucha or whatever

but we don't really know if that actually meaningfully changes anything in the long term or even midterm right like we don't actually know what the health effects are of that in any sort of meaningful way just yet right so i will say just as a starting point as a little on-ramp to our moon juice updates there was quite a bit in the insider piece that totally reminded me of messy non-profit dynamics yeah i was thinking that too because you've you've got a charismatic founder and then the entire company is made in their image.

This often happens around figures in development who get a lot of media attention and then they form NGOs around like their personal story or whatever.

And they hire a bunch of people.

But then it turns out that like managing organizations is actually really hard.

And then you've got all these people that are like, oh, I go to work every day.

And like, we're just this weird kind of shadow organization that's run by someone who's like kind of a little nuts or like has these weird ideas, but they are the only reason we get funding.

They are the only reason our organization exists.

So it's like we have to keep propping up this person.

Yes, I have had many friends who have been trapped in organizations like this.

100%.

In org development world, you call that founder syndrome.

Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah.

So a thing that felt sort of symptomatic of that kind of thing is

one of the things that they reported in the Insider piece is that Amanda Chantal Bacon moved to Montecito.

Wait, what's that?

Where's Montecito?

Is that California?

Oh, Mike, we're getting into it.

Montecito is just outside of Santa Barbara.

It is one of the wealthiest towns in the United States.

Oprah lives there, and Prince Harry and Megan Markle live there.

I only know the names of the rich places when they do shows with Real Housewives of in the title, and then I learn the nature boxes.

Or like a prestige vehicle for Laura Dern.

So this is one of the messy nonprofit things where I was like, uh-huh, this tracks.

Amanda Chantal Bacon

moved to Montecito.

She gave a quote at one point that was like, something just happens to my ions when I'm out here.

You're just in a famously lush and beautiful and staggeringly wealthy place.

It just does something to my ions when I go to the country club.

and sit and smoke cigars with other titans of industry.

I don't know what it is.

So it does something to her ions.

She moved to Montecito and like staff at the company found out like through the grapevine that she like moved to another town.

And I was like, oh, this is non-profit garbage.

This is full non-profit garbage.

I know so many people at nonprofits who like another thing in founder syndrome is that oftentimes the person who founded the organization like whose existence the entire organization depends on gets real fucking bored.

Yeah.

And so a lot of these people mentally and sometimes physically, clearly, just totally check out.

Yeah.

So the other one that felt like extremely non-profit-y to me was there were

a ton of rumors internally that she's thinking of selling the company.

Okay.

Oh, that also seems like deep non-profit nonsense.

That, like, you would have like six months of rumors with no statement from management.

Yeah, yeah.

Are we going to merge?

Are we, did we just lose like an organizational life-sustaining grant?

Yeah.

And then, and then you would merge or get scooped up by some bigger NGO and they're like, nothing's going to change.

Everything's going to be exactly the same.

And then you get laid off like two weeks later.

Everyone's fired.

Yeah.

Total bloodbath.

Everybody's fired.

So this was the last one that I was like, oh, this is, this is chef's kiss.

This is the pinnacle of non-profitiness of these updates.

They decided at the end of 2020 that they should thank their employees for continuing to work through the pandemic.

And their thank you for a year of working through a global pandemic was that every employee got one frozen pizza.

But the frozen pizza was from Erewhon.

So that's like a $70 frozen pizza, guys.

A fucking frozen pizza?

It's not even fresh pizza.

It's so

conceptually insulting.

Oh my God.

That's like the stories.

That's like the stories that went around Seattle after our WNBA team, The Storm, won the national championships.

Howard Schultz, the owner of Starbucks and also who owned that team at the time, he gave every player on the team a Starbucks gift card.

This is the rumor.

I don't know if it's true, but apparently one of the actual like team members, like a WNBA player, took her mom to Starbucks and ordered like two lattes or whatever and gave them the gift card.

And they're like, oh, you still owe me like $1.30 over the value of the card.

Oh my God.

So it was like a $10 gift card or something?

It was $5.

Holy fucking shit.

Meanwhile, like dudes who finished 10th are like being invited to the White House.

You're like, what the fuck, man?

But yeah,

it's more insulting to just not get anything in situations like that than to get something that stingy.

I think the only thing more conceptually insulting would be like pizza rolls or like bagel bites.

So those are the non-profity updates.

Okay.

The first one that we're going to do sort of in earnest, we've got, I think, three sort of escalating concerns of up

to talk about.

The headline about this one, I would say, is it's off-brand and it's like not great, but it doesn't go much further than that, right?

Okay.

So Moon Juice talks a good game sort of on their website in their packaging, all kinds of stuff about climate change and environmentalism, right?

They offer compostable flatware cups and plates at all their locations.

One of their locations had a compost bin for customers for quite some time.

So you can eat at Moon Juice?

I thought it was like a store.

It's like a juice place.

So they put their juice in cups that you can compost.

They even say on their website, quote, we invest in a future filled with more composting facilities than garbage dumps.

But oops, in this insider piece, staff are now saying that even at the locations that had compost bins, there was no composting available.

So employees were just told to throw it in the trash.

Oh, nice.

It wasn't because of any kind of like external, like we're renting in a building and they don't have a composting service or whatever.

It was just straight up Moon Juice wasn't going to pay for a composting service.

Metaphorically meaningful, not a great look, but not like a crime.

Right.

It's a funny thing to like criticize a company for because plenty of companies don't compost.

Right.

So it's like ultimately at the end of the day, it's just like a company that doesn't compost.

Yeah.

What gives them the criticism is the hypocrisy.

Right.

Like no one's picketing 7-Eleven for not composting because you don't expect 7-Eleven to compost.

Like, that's sure.

Yeah.

So, like, that's not great, but mostly it's just sort of off-brand.

Yeah.

But then things get more off-brand.

Before we started, I told you we should not start with the taste test because I wanted to have a moment of informed consent.

Okay.

Oh, no.

Like, I want you to know what you're getting into.

Man, how, how many shocks from the biocharger am I going to need to recover from this taste test?

Moonjuice has been telling people this sort of extremely precious story about how their ingredients are harvested, they're wild crafted, which is a very fancy term for basically like foraging, right?

They're picked.

They're picked.

Yes, no one's talking about farm workers wildcrafted.

Yeah,

right.

Like that's not what's happening there.

So this is a quote directly from this insider piece.

It's so good.

I'm going to link it in the post on Patreon so that folks can read this whole piece because it's bonkers.

Quote, store employees said that they were taught to say that all of Moonjuice's products were sustainably and ethically sourced and that Moon Juice set itself apart by importing whole plants that are, quote, custom extracted at a wind-powered facility in the Pacific Northwest using low-cost spring water.

Fuck off, Amanda.

You didn't need to throw in like wind-powered.

You know what this sounds like?

This sounds like a partner lying about where they've been.

Well, I was out getting you flowers, but the florist was closed.

So I had to go to a different florist.

Like, where you're like, none of those things happened.

You are gilding the lily.

I was receiving my Nobel Prize at the time, and I was not able to attend.

So, given that story that employees are trained to tell customers, those employees were very surprised when a dude showed up in one of their stores saying that he was the CEO of one of Moon Juice's biggest suppliers.

So, like, Moon Juice is built considerably around Ayurvedic principles, right?

Ayurveda, a system of sort of medicine and healing that is mostly born of what is now called India, right?

This supplier says that he is providing Moon Juice with all of its ashwagandha, which is one of its most used ingredients.

It's in almost all of the dusts, it's in many of the juices, it's in a lot, a lot, a lot of things.

This dude said that all of their stuff was extracted and powdered, like turned into a powder in India and then shipped to the U.S.

as a powder.

Yeah.

No Pacific Northwest facility, no wind powered, no local spring water, no nothing.

He was just like, no, it's just from India.

It's an Indian ingredient from an Indian healing tradition that is being shipped to you from India.

Right.

The thing that feels wild to me about this is like

the incredible commitment.

to whitewashing.

Yeah, it's interesting.

Yeah.

We're going to take this thing.

We're going to give you this sort of like broad sense of Eastern healing, but we're going to make sure that every face of that that you see is associated with whiteness and western-ness and like conventional beauty, all of that kind of stuff.

Right.

So like, that's the thing that's wild to me here is not that they would like have a supplier in India.

Like, yeah, man, great, sure.

But that they would make up this extremely sort of Baroque story, like fairy tale about like everything's extracted in the Pacific Northwest, the beating heart of whiteness, the Pacific Northwest, right?

Like, Jesus Christ.

Well, also, like, progressiveness, and like, it also has this thing of like, and nothing is tainted by any kind of moral compromise, right?

Because if it was like a facility in Alabama, then it's like, well, what about the abortion rights of the workers?

Like, there's some, there's some complication that is presented by like basically every story, except for fucking wind-powered spring-water Pacific Northwest, right?

You never have to deal with any moral complexity.

Right.

And you just imagine like a slightly crunchier version of Amanda Chantal Bacon up in like some sort of like woodsy Northwest city, right?

Like it doesn't interrupt your deeply whitewashed imagination.

Yeah, it's a bunch of white people in like Twin Peaks, like putting stuff in boxes and like going out in the woods in galoshes and like picking mushrooms.

Now that you've mentioned Twin Peaks, I'm like, I like imagining that the wind-powered, spring-water-powered facility is run just by like log lady zombies.

So, this is the point at which I'm like, oh, this doesn't seem great.

And then it gets real bad.

Okay.

It looks like in the past, according to some previous employees, Amanda Chantel Bacon has tried to use contaminated ingredients.

Moon Juice had a director of operations

for a couple of years named Manuel Alvarado.

He told Insider that they had received a batch at one point from one of their suppliers of pearl powder, which is also very commonly used.

And that batch of pearl powder from that supplier was contaminated with E.

coli.

What?

Wait, how is that even possible?

Okay, so this is the informed consent part.

I was like, I gotta tell Mike about this before we try anything.

I didn't,

I thought it was like raw meat E.

coli.

Me too, me too.

But here's where it comes in.

So I'm going to send you a quote from the insider piece.

It says, Alvarado said that rather than throw out the batch, Bacon initially tried to save it.

Someone told her that we could freeze it for like six months, and that kills the E.

coli, Alvarado said.

We literally sent, I don't know how many pallets of this stuff to a cold storage unit and we actually froze it for a couple months.

And then we brought it back to test it and it still tested the same.

And she was so mad when we couldn't salvage it right

okay so she she tried to hedge and was like okay it's gonna cost us a lot of money

so let's do like a little workaround and then that didn't work and she was mad so that's not great the thing that is not greater is that Manuela Alvarado and a number of former senior staff say that moon juice didn't test its ingredients at all until 2017.

So the idea is there could have been much wider contamination.

Right.

Manuel Alvarado's quote to Insider is, we could easily have been selling E.

coli-infested pearl without even knowing it.

Oh, wow.

Because they were operating for six years without testing anything that they got from their suppliers.

They were just like, our suppliers test it.

They say it's fine.

We trust them.

We move on.

Yeah.

So this was just after they started testing.

ingredients.

Oh, wow.

And they found a batch like fairly quickly.

Man, it's very easy to forget with these companies that like, yeah, they're selling a consumable product, which does require various quality assurance processes.

What you're doing with all of this marketing of it's pure and it's from the earth and all this, all this rhetoric that goes along with these kinds of companies, you trust that like on top of all this marketing, there's a huge iceberg of like work.

that they're doing underneath, right?

To like find the right suppliers.

But then oftentimes with these companies, it turns out that it's just, it's just like the carnival medicine show people that we talked about in the snake oil episode.

It's just like, you're just saying stuff.

There's nothing underneath this.

I think the parallel between Amanda Chantal Bacon and a snake oil salesman is especially apt

because

what she's doing is so fucking similar to what a bunch of those like white supervisors were doing in the building of the railroad, which was like watching a bunch of like Chinese immigrants use a Chinese medicinal sort of therapy, which was snake oil, which worked.

And then they were just like, oh man, all you got to do is boil a snake.

I got snakes, man.

Yeah.

Oh, it's mushrooms.

All right, cool.

I could find some mushrooms.

Right.

She's straight up just like yoinking a couple of things from their sort of like list of ingredients, basically, and then sort of mashing it all up in a dust and being like, look, it's good for you.

It's sort of Eastern, but you're buying it from me, a conventionally attractive thin white woman.

Right, for like $24 or whatever.

Oh, my God.

Mike, I would love for you to guess this before we get into taste test.

The full moon is their sampler packet of moondusts, and there's two of each kind of moondust.

So there are 14 little packets, 14 doses.

So you could do two weeks of moondust if you do it every day.

Would you like to guess how much the little box with 14 sachets costs?

Was it like $40 or like something absurd?

It was $35.

Mike, you are so close.

I love it.

Oh my God.

So Mike, we have one more update after this, but I thought right after the contamination update might be the highest stakes time to try a taste test.

Do you want to try a taste test?

Right after I know I'm going to die.

Yeah.

What is our plan for doing this?

Because how do you eat a fucking dust?

What am I going to do?

I don't either.

So I spent a...

an inordinate amount of time on their website last night trying to figure out what their serving suggestions are and all that sort of stuff.

Here is a thing that makes me suspicious.

There are two things that make me suspicious.

Well, three things.

The third thing is the name dust makes me suspicious of the taste of these things.

Yeah, it's not, it's not going to be good.

The next thing that makes me suspicious is that many of their sort of quote-unquote recipes for, you know, what to do with your dusts involve putting them in a blender with whatever drink.

Like,

put your coffee in a blender and then put in the dust and then blend it on high for for like three minutes and then drink it that makes me suspicious about texture okay and the third thing is that they tell you

when they give you their serving suggestions they're not just like mix it into some hot water with lemon right or anything like that it's all like put it in a smoothie or some espresso or hot chocolate or like they want you to put it with extremely already flavorful beverages, which makes me suspicious.

right there are other ones that are like just mix it with some hot water well let's do that one because then we'll actually taste the dusts so i have a cup i have like a cup of coffee here and i also have some hot water wait okay i i i have some i have some coffee left over from this morning i can also get some coffee perfect let's do it let's do sex dust as the one we try in hot water because that's the one i want yeah i want to taste i want to taste the sex um okay go grab your coffee okay yes let me know when you're ready and i'll turn on my little electric kettle to heat up some water wait am i I'm heating up water.

I'm boiling water.

I think so, yeah.

All right, coffee and boil water.

Thank you.

Okay.

All right.

What do you think we should put in the coffee?

Uh, okay, we got brain, dream, power, spirit, and beauty.

Uh,

maybe dream, because it'll counteract the coffee?

Yeah, there you go.

We have to do, we have to, we have to take in the marketing here.

Yeah.

So mine says on the back adaptogens for sleep asterisk target stress for relief of tension to promote deep tranquil rest asterisk sweet and floral pairs well with tea milk and hot water blend one sachet per serving okay

and then there's the most abysmally small font Please consult your healthcare provider prior to use if you're pregnant nursing, keep better each children.

Okay, sort of boilerplate.

And then it has the legend for the asterisk.

These statements have not been evaluated by the Food and Drug Administration.

This product is not intended to diagnose, treat, cure, or prevent any disease.

There it is.

So again, this is fake.

This is fake.

Enjoy.

But this is.

Please enjoy.

We don't intend to substantiate any of our claims.

Yeah.

Thanks.

Nothing.

Nothing is real.

All right, great.

Ooh.

All right.

All right.

I'm stirring it in.

God.

It smells kind of like pepper.

Oh, it does.

It's kind of spy.

It's kind of nice.

It's like kind of spicy.

Oh, Mike.

Yeah, it's going to taste fucking terrible in coffee, though.

It's Clump City over here.

I don't know about you.

Oh, yeah.

Mine's.

Yeah.

Mine's pretty funny.

It's a little bit like when you're a kid and you're like mixing up like a packet of hot cocoa.

Yeah, yeah.

And it sort of develops those little balls of powder that are sort of wet on the outside, but...

dry as a bone inside.

That looks like what's happening.

So I put it in my coffee.

It looks like chicken stock, basically.

It's like that kind of color.

Bouillon.

Yeah.

Yeah.

And it's not.

It's really not dissolving.

It really doesn't want to dissolve.

It doesn't want to dissolve.

I have a lot of little specks on the inside of my coffee cup.

It looks, it looks so gross, Aubrey.

It looks like ashes.

It looks like sediment.

Oh my god.

Do you know what I mean?

It looks like sediment at the bottom of a bottle of wine or something.

I'm questioning my commitment to sparkle motion.

I don't know if I can go through with this.

Mike, listen, let me just sweeten the pot for you.

Don't forget, there might also be E.

coli.

This might harm you physically.

Hey, man, chill up.

It might be terrible for you for days to come.

Aubrey, I'm scared.

I don't want to do this anymore.

Listen, I genuinely don't want to make you do anything you're uncomfortable with doing.

No,

I'm not worried about E.

coli.

I just, I feel like

I'm worried about

tasting something really bad.

That's my main worry here.

It's just like, okay, this is going to taste bad.

I'm also, frankly, a tiny bit worried that it's going to taste good and that I'm going to be like, god damn it.

I know.

And then 40 bucks every two weeks, then you're in.

So next time you see me, I'll be wearing only white linen.

I know.

The show's different since you moved to Montecito.

Yeah.

How's yours?

How's yours?

What's your dissolving dissolvular situation?

I think it has dissolved as much as it's going to, which is not much.

I think, so basically, the texture of the powder, I would say, is part of it was a really fine powder, and then there were chunks of something

in it, like little dried leaves, maybe or something, something.

Those things have not dissolved because they wouldn't, but the finer powder appears to have dissolved.

Yeah.

But also, I feel like there's a good chance that I get to the end of this cup of coffee, and then there's just like a thick sludge at the bottom.

Yeah,

I think that's what's happening because I'm getting sludge.

It's giving sludge on the bottom.

All right, Mike, I feel like you and I are now just vamping to avoid tasting this thing.

Yeah, I know.

That's 100% what's happening right now.

All right, let's do it.

All right, you're right.

All right.

Three, two, one.

Dream dust.

Oh, it definitely tastes different.

It tastes really different.

Part of it doesn't taste bad, and then part of it tastes real bad.

Like there's like a sour element.

The way that it tastes to me is as if the milk in my latte has gone sour.

It does, yes.

It tastes like that in mine, even though there's no milk in mine.

Yeah, it's not like immediately unpleasant.

It's not like celery juice.

God-awful.

Yeah, it tastes like, um, you know, it has like a vaguely sort of like ghost of chocolate past kind of taste, like carom style, like dust, dusty chocolate.

But then the finish is really sour.

It kind of tastes like a cleaning product smells.

It has like a weird floral thing.

I didn't think you were going to come up with sicker burns for the one that you kind of like

than for like celery juice.

Top note, dusty chocolate.

Heart note,

cinnamon.

And base note, sour milk.

I don't, I mean, okay, wait, wait, wait.

How much is each sachet?

So it's 35 bucks divided by 14.

So it's 250.

Yeah, for 250 every day, I'm not doing this.

That's, that's almost what a cup of coffee costs.

You know how sometimes you'll have like a fucking diet bar or like energy bar, like one of the meal replacement things.

And you're like, God damn, why does anybody eat or drink this?

Yeah.

I don't have that feeling about this, but I do have the feeling of, I won't be doing this again.

Thanks.

No, actually not.

No, I'm not going to finish it.

My coffee's sitting there like three quarters full.

I'm not going to be finishing it.

All right.

Are you ready to go in on sex dust?

Let's do sex dust.

Are we doing boiling water for this one?

I'm doing boiling water.

I just heated up water while you were grabbing your coffee.

Okay, I'll be right back.

Okay.

Oh.

Oh.

Oh my God.

Okay.

I just poured the rest of the coffee.

down the sink and there was so much sludge in the glass operation.

It was so much.

It was just like sand at the bottom.

I'll tell you what.

I stayed recording while you were going to get your

hot water and such.

And while you did that, I poured my hot water over the little emptied-out sachet of sex dust.

Okay.

I did not intend to get a first impression, but I absolutely did, which was just like a wave of smell, like the smell of the hot water sex dust.

Wait, wait, I got it it now.

Oh,

fuck.

Oh, wait, what is this shit?

Wait, we didn't even read the back of the label.

Yeah, we didn't even read the description.

So let's read the description because it's going to sound nicer than how I feel about the smell.

You read this one because mine's all torn up.

Oh, God, it really smells.

It reeks, Aubrey.

It smells

extremely much like a porta potty.

Like it really.

Shocking.

There is an old pee smell.

It smells like a fraternity.

Old pea in the summer.

Oh my God.

This one says.

This one's going to be rough.

Targets stress to support healthy hormonal balance, igniting creative energy in and out of the bedroom.

Asterisk.

A smoky cacao flavor.

Pairs well with coffee, chocolate, tea, and milk, or add to any smoothie.

So the last one, Dream Dust was like, hey, you can put this in hot water.

And I buy that.

This one is specifically like,

try not to taste it Really feels like the serving recommendation here.

It is like bad sex, and that it's just like something you never want to think about again.

And you want to cover it up with something else.

I don't want to drink this.

I, okay, we both put this in like bright, clean, clear water.

And then it immediately turned fucking brown.

It's like the thickest brown color now.

It looks like coffee.

It looks terrible.

Can we go cameras on for one second?

Yeah.

Here's my situation.

Yeah, that's what I want.

It looks not good, Mike.

The combination, the combination of

the color and the smell, Aubrey.

It's that.

That's what's doing it.

The combination.

It is the smell of a parking garage stairwell in like a major U.S.

city on like the hottest day of the year.

Like, that's the smell.

Oh, no, Michael.

All right.

Are we doing it?

I hate this show.

Yeah.

I hate my job.

Why do we do this?

I told us to do this, and I'm filled with the most profound dread I have felt in a very long time.

Okay, let's do it.

All right.

Okay.

Three, two, one, go.

Oh,

it's not good.

Oh, the aftertaste.

Oh, the aftertaste.

Oh, it's getting worse.

I would say the heart note for this one is I would say swamp water.

Yeah, it's, I mean, the nice thing is it tastes diluted.

It tastes like really diluted, like Nescafe or something, that sort of watery taste.

But then it also just has a like old sock.

It's totally old sock.

Oh no, it's old sock.

And then the aftertaste is just, it's not, I would like to go back to the sour.

I will say this, the taste is bad.

I think the smell is worse.

Yeah, I think so too.

It was not as bad as I thought it was going to be.

Totally.

That's the advertising copy they're going to put on their website.

The smell is worse than the taste.

And then just you and me giving the thumbs up.

That's the maintenance phase endorsement right there.

This is one of the ones where they pick like a critic's quote for a movie and it's like seven ellipsis.

I used to work for a book publisher and a reviewer once called one of our books lavishly illustrated and utterly unreadable.

And on the book, we put lavishly illustrated.

All right, I gotta get this taste out of my mouth.

That was terrible.

I'm going cameras back off.

Yeah, cameras off.

Let's drink something normal.

We should do at least one more.

Which one do we think is going to be?

Do you want to do a third moon dust?

Yeah.

I feel like we have to, like, we have to give moon juice a chance to redeem itself.

Okay, so we have the remaining ones that we have are spirit dust, beauty dust, brain dust, and power dust.

Braindust is described as malty and bitter.

Great.

Power dust is described as earthy and bright.

Okay, that's in the running.

Beauty dust is described as a tart berry flavor.

Okay.

And spirit dust is described as sweet and nutty.

Which one do you prefer?

I would go beauty dust or spirit dust.

Okay, so we've got tart, berry, or sweet and nutty.

I'd say tart berry.

That's the highest likelihood of success.

Let's do it.

Beauty dust.

Okay, number three.

I am pouring the water over the beauty dust, is what I'm doing right now.

So mine is semi-dissolved, and it's a lighter shade of brown than the sex dust.

Yeah, it's sort of a cognac.

Yeah, yeah, yeah.

Wow, there are serious chunks happening.

Oh, yeah.

Oh, God.

Okay.

This one says, adaptogens for skin.

Target stress and accelerated aging.

Improve skin clarity and help protect from free radicals.

A tart berry flavor.

Pairs well with matcho, water, and lemonade or add to any smoothie.

Okay.

So we're about to get glowing skin.

Okay.

Glowy skin.

All right.

It smells like tea.

It does smell more floral, but also kind of like a charcoal-y.

floral like a burnt floral.

Yes, and there's, it's like kind of musty.

Yeah.

You know what it has?

It has the smell of an antique store.

Yeah, I was gonna say, flowers that have been left in a funeral home

for like a while, like that kind of draftiness, the chill, draftiness, chill, musty.

All right, we have to stir it up and then immediately drink it so we get as much sediment as possible.

We want the full experience.

You can really see the sediment sort of gathering at the bottom, like immediately.

You got to stir this one pretty constantly.

All right, on three, two, one, we'll stop stirring and immediately drink.

All right, okay.

Three, two,

one, one.

Beauty dust.

Oh, fuck.

Oh, that's, oh, that's the worst one.

Holy shit.

Oh, oh, the aftertaste is rough.

Oh, it's so bitter.

Oh my God.

Oh, now there's like sand in my throat.

It's like living through the eruption outside Helens.

There's just like little particles in my throat.

Wow.

I rate that snuck up on me.

There's a moment when I'm like, oh, it's like you mixed potpourri in with hot water and then it takes a real wild turn.

Oh.

Did you take another sip?

Yeah, I don't know what.

I keep doing that to be like, give it a fair shake.

I took three sips of our first two.

Why did I do that?

Oh, and then, yeah, the sediment in my throat is so foul.

It just separates instantaneously, too.

You know, it reminds me of as a kid, you know, you like struggle to understand that like smells and tastes are not necessarily the same thing.

So I remember there was like a vanilla-scented shampoo in our house.

Oh, no.

Did you eat shampoo?

I was like eight years old and I didn't like fully understand that concept or like my parents told me that.

They're like, don't drink it because it doesn't taste how it smells.

I was like, that's fake.

It's like future podcaster.

And then

I fucking drank some.

It was so gross.

And I just like puked puked all over the bathroom immediately.

Oh my God.

But like, this has the same kind of feel where it's like the smell is kind of floral, whatever, but then the taste is just totally different and just like a chimney.

And now I just have like little bits in my mouth forever.

God damn it.

But at least it costs more than a cup of coffee to have this experience.

On the bright side.

At least you're paying a huge premium for this.

It's expensive and it might give you E.

coli.

So I would say my least bad was Dream Dust, but that was also the one we mixed into coffee.

So that might not be fair.

Yeah, I feel like they got worse as they went along.

I would switch for me, beauty dust was my second worst and sex dust was my worst worst.

The level of evocativeness of the smell

of sex dust.

It's really unreal.

Like I am very glad to be burning a scented candle right now because I don't want that covered up like yesterday, thank.

I'm going to have to make a frozen pizza after this.

Okay.

Okay.

So, we have one more set of updates.

Okay.

Uh, on Moon Juice.

And this is where I think it gets worse.

Okay.

In the summer of 2020, Moonjuice did what a lot of corporations did in response to the murder of George Floyd and the subsequent uprisings, right?

They posted a black square with like a sort of corporate statement in it about holding themselves accountable and blah, blah, blah.

So I just sent you the link to their statement.

Oh no, we're back in like tone-death

corporate summer of 2020 statements.

Well, just like, what do you think a company run by Amanda Chantal Bacon has to say about race?

Okay, so it's the black square and then in white text, it says, Black Lives Matter.

Our eyes are open.

We take responsibility for helping to build an industry that is painfully in need of diversity and inclusion.

We are holding ourselves accountable by bringing in an equity consultant and scheduling anti-racism workshops.

On this platform, we are making space for meaningful information in solidarity.

We are putting our energy into marching, donating, calling, writing, and unlearning.

And then the comments.

The first listed comment on this post on my end is, where is your apology to all the former black and POC employees who Moonjuice management and culture has harmed during their employment?

Yeah.

Again, like this post goes up.

Current and former BIPOC staff are like, uh, record scratch, excuse me?

They start collaborating on a Google Doc of the many, many experiences of racism that they had had while working for Moon Juice.

One black employee who was the only black employee at one of their stores said that the regional manager who was white regularly asked her to do her hair differently.

Oh.

Similarly, at one point, Moon Juice runs a booth at the Echo Park Craft Fair in LA.

And at the end of the fair, it started to rain and two of the black employees who were working at the fair covered their hair.

And according to the Insider piece, quote, the same regional manager who was their direct boss laughed and said, Black girls in your hair.

Okay.

Right.

So they couldn't report this regional manager to anyone because Moon Juice does not have HR.

Oh, what?

Yeah.

What?

Well.

I have some suggestions on how to hold themselves accountable.

Genuinely.

So it goes from that, which is not great to like real gross, which is another black employee was asked to participate in a marketing photo photo shoot.

She worked in one of the stores and for that two-day photo shoot, she was paid her usual hourly wage.

Oh.

Yeah, that's really bad.

Afterward, she found out that the other models, none of whom were store employees and all of whom were white, were paid with a $1,000 Moon Juice gift card.

Okay.

And that's also, that's also pretty exploitative.

It's shitty.

It's shitty for everyone, but also like somebody got the equivalent of $1,000 and somebody got the equivalent of like $100 and that's fucked, right?

So here is the quote from this employee, Imana, is her name.

It says, when she asked her manager and other members of leadership why she didn't receive a gift card, she said she was reminded that she got a discount at the store.

I'm like, this isn't about whether or not I get a discount, Imana said.

This is about I got paid $100 for this campaign that's going to be everywhere.

Yeah.

Like you're a model, like you're doing modeling work like for a company that is promoting itself and making a shitload of money.

You are entitled to like modeling ass wages.

Yes, which also should not be a $1,000 gift card to Moonjuice, right?

Like three frozen pizzas.

It's double bad for Moonjuice to do this because if you work at Target or something and they give you a gift card, at least you can like buy groceries with it, presumably.

Like it's also bad for them to do it, but it moons you're like, what are you even gonna fucking buy with your thousand dollars?

It's like a bunch of dumb like mushroom powders and shit.

Pay people in actual money, not a fucking IOU for dust.

Future dust.

Oh, enjoy.

So like that's not great.

Here's what's fucking worse.

Two weeks after the shoot, Imana was fired.

Oh, what?

Yeah, she did this photo shoot.

The photos, by the way, ended up being used on fucking Sephora's website.

Oh my gosh.

She was like, hey, why didn't I get paid the same as everybody else?

And two weeks later, she got fired.

That's extremely bad.

Imana's direct manager said that she was pressured by higher-up managers to fire Imana.

What?

That sounds like a big story.

There may be more to this story.

Moon Juice isn't fucking telling it, and it looks terrible to me.

I also think on a very like basic level in their post, when they say that, you know, we're holding ourselves accountable by bringing in like an equity consultant.

God damn it.

That's also a red flag.

That's the most bargain basement bullshit.

Companies don't do corporate trainings because they want to change something.

Companies do corporate trainings because they want to protect themselves from liability in the case of lawsuits.

Well, and like there has been much, much discussion out in the world and criticism, rightly so, of a like diversity director kind of model, right?

Where companies will hire someone internally whose job it is to do all of the thinking about like race and gender and all of that sort of stuff, right?

And this isn't even that.

This isn't even the tokenism approach.

This is, we're going to temporarily hire someone who does not work for the company for a half day gig of giving a workshop, probably over Zoom.

They do talk in the insider piece about like, it was real fucking awkward because they didn't tear it out by management levels at all.

So like store employees were on and so was Amanda Chantal Bacon.

So no one was saying shit fuck all anything.

Oh, that's a terrible idea.

So you're in there with your boss.

So a bunch of people were just like, it was really fucking weird.

It was really awkward.

Nobody said anything.

And then we never talked about it again.

And I was like, boy, again.

She was like, non-profit world.

Yeah, that's another one.

Yeah.

On top of all of that, there are just so many more stories of like really explicit racism.

in Moon Juice stores and at Moon Juice Corporate.

The manager of the Silver Lake store, according to this insider piece, quote, would often mock the accents of customers she said were from Saudi Arabia.

Also in the Silver Lake store, there was a story in which two customers of color walked in and a white employee started burning Palo Santo in their faces.

And when they asked her why she was doing that, she said she, quote, didn't like their vibes.

Yeah.

Both of those instances from the Silver Lake store were reported.

But because Moon Juice doesn't have HR, would you like to guess who investigated those claims?

Oh, is it Amanda?

No, it's the white regional manager who said a bunch of racist shit.

Oh, okay.

There's no real process.

Yep, and I'm going to send you the sort of concluding quote about this chapter from the Insider piece.

It says, After concluding our investigation, we were not able to substantiate your allegations.

The regional retail manager who left Moonjuice in early 2019 wrote in an email viewed by Insider.

The Silver Lake store manager was later promoted.

The person who was making fun of people's accents was first investigated and then promoted.

So basically, this company just has like no actual control systems in place for this stuff.

No, and that's, again, that's the part that feels so non-profit-y to me.

Oh, my God, I know.

God.

Everything is scrappy, which means it's shitty.

Right.

And nothing is written down.

Nothing is formalized.

There's no formal grievance mechanism.

No policies.

Yup.

When I used to work in corporate human rights violations, we would sort of consult with companies on like how to avoid human rights violations and their operations.

The first sign of wanting to avoid human rights violations, because like some companies do and some companies don't, is like you need to have extremely basic systems in place of just like, how does an employee file a complaint?

Who looks at the complaint?

Who investigates the complaint?

Because like, yeah, whatever.

In a big company, you're going to get like a racist employee sometimes, right?

That's not really the issue.

The issue is what happens when that racist employee is like discovered.

Like, how do workers who are not white people tell management about it?

How does management respond?

It's all this like structural stuff that is like so 101 to have in place if you take these issues remotely seriously.

Yeah, and like there is sort of a genuine tricky fucking thing that happens in nonprofits, which is, look, man, you got to have an employee handbook.

You got to have a board of directors that like understands the employee handbook and understands their role, not only as fiduciaries, but also as, you know, accountability to an executive director.

You got to have all of these things in place that absolutely no funder will fund you to do.

I know, my God, Jesus.

I know.

Like, hey, man, get your HR stuff set up.

Hey, why don't you focus on staff retention and leadership development?

Right.

Hey, what if you built a pipeline of staff so that like there were sort of more opportunities for advancement and so that you were getting more in different kinds of people in management than just like white cis people who are middle class?

Right.

Nonprofits are shitty for not doing it and also philanthropy is shitty for not fucking funding that.

It's layered.

It's like a bad, it's a perfect storm of bad stuff.

I'm also,

I'm much more forgiving of this kind of stuff at NGOs because the idea is sort of the money should go to the mission and there's there's just so little money in NGOs, right?

And so you do skip this kind of stuff.

Whereas at Moon Juice, this is a company that's charging $35 for 14 teaspoons of bullshit.

Yes.

Yes.

In NGOs, sometimes it's literally like we physically do not have the money.

And yes, funders don't fund this stuff.

At Moon Juice, it's like, well, what's your excuse?

Right.

We know that Amanda Chantal Bacon is making enough money to fucking live in Montecito.

The ingredients are not being produced the way that they're saying they're being produced.

Right.

Oops, they got a bunch of racism and like major internal management issues specifically around racism.

But hey guys, it's okay.

We got you a frozen pizza from Erewhon.