Making Sense with Sam Harris - #28 — Meat Without Misery

Episode Date: February 20, 2016

Sam Harris offers a few more thoughts on Clinton vs Sanders, as well as on the ethics of strong encryption. He then speaks with Uma Valeti, cardiologist and CEO of Memphis Meats, about the future of food production.  If the Making Sense podcast logo in your player is BLACK, you can SUBSCRIBE to gain access to all full-length episodes at samharris.org/subscribe.

Thank you. episodes of the Making Sense podcast, you'll need to subscribe at SamHarris.org. There you'll find our private RSS feed to add to your favorite podcatcher, along with other subscriber-only content. We don't run ads on the podcast, and therefore it's made possible entirely through the support of our subscribers. So if you enjoy what we're doing here, please consider becoming Today I'm going to give you a podcast that I really just stumbled into. I was on a phone call with a man named Uma Valeti, a cardiologist who is now running a company called Memphis Meats. And he is trying to bring to market what he calls cultured meat. This is meat that is synthesized from cells of cows or pigs or any other common food animal, but is grown by processes that do not entail whole animals to be born and to live and die

under the terrible conditions of factory farming or any other conditions. This is meat grown outside the usual biological process of being attached to a full animal. So it entails none of the animal suffering or, as you'll hear, the other environmental and health-related concerns of factory farming. So in any case, I was on the phone with Uma, and the moment we got into the conversation, I realized this is something that you guys should know more about. And so I just converted a phone call into a podcast, and that's how I'm bringing you now Uma Valetti, cardiologist turned entrepreneur and food producer. Enjoy. and food producer. Enjoy. Well, I'm here with Uma Valetti, the CEO and co-founder of Memphis Meats.

And as many of you know, I've been interested in vegetarianism and veganism and the ethics of factory farming. And I stumbled into an interest in the emerging possibility of synthesized meat, and Uma is now running what appears to be the most prominent effort in this area. So, Uma, thanks for coming on the podcast. Thank you, Sam. I'm delighted to be here. So, tell me a little bit about how you got into this and your background. You and I just got thrown together on Twitter. Maybe I should get into how we come to be talking to one another. I saw a tweet from the philosopher Peter Singer, who as many people know is a very outspoken defender of the rights of non-human animals and has been probably more influential than anyone in philosophy to sensitize people to the ethical problem of what we eat and how we get food to our table. And so he sent out a tweet that contained a link to a

Wall Street Journal article about your company, Memphis Meats. And so that's how I heard about you. And I was inspired on the basis of reading that article to put out a poll on Twitter asking people that if synthesized meat was molecularly identical to natural meat, to beef and pork and the other meats we eat, and it tasted the same, would you switch to eating it? And the results of that poll were something like 85% said they would switch. And then I asked those who said no the reasons why, and the reasons why were pretty encouraging. Some said they were switch. And then I asked those who said no, the reasons why, and the reasons why were pretty encouraging. Some said they were already vegetarian. About a quarter said they were already vegetarian and therefore weren't interested. So that's obviously not the market

you're worried about. And then we'll get into the reasons why people are worried about synthetic meat. But let's get into your background and tell us what you hope to accomplish. meat. But let's get into your background and tell us what you hope to accomplish. Sure. Sam, first of all, I want to thank you for the random sequence of events that led us to talk to each other. And I want to thank Peter Singer for tweeting out a Wall Street Journal article that came out on Monday last week. And since then, it's absolutely been a global response that has inspired us and delighted us that there's a large group of people in the world waiting for a really good meat product that they could get behind and feel good about it. And having said that, to give a little bit of my background, I grew up in India in a family

that ate meat, and I really enjoyed eating meat. And I think I had a series of experiences since, you know, from I was a 12-year-old, over five years until I was 17. And essentially, the first one was when I was 12. I went to my neighbor, who was a good friend of mine, for his birthday party. And in the front of the house, there was a, you know, well-organized party, people gathering, dancing, eating. You know, there was lots of meat out there, a, you know, well-organized party, people gathering, dancing, eating. You know, there was lots of meat out there and, you know, singing happy birthday. And I just happened to walk to the back of his house and that's where they were slaughtering the animals that were becoming meat in the front. And to me, it was one of the stark images I remember in my head that

there was a birthday and then there was a death day, all in the same span of time. And it kind of disturbed me, but I did like the taste of meat, and I continued to eat meat growing up into my teenage years. Where were you in India? In South India, in a place called Vijayawada in Andhra Pradesh. And your family was, or is, Muslim or or Christian or what's your background? So my grandfather was a freedom fighter, worked with Gandhi. And I come from a Hindu family. So you're not eating beef, I presume. Right. I never ate beef growing up.

But there was all other types of meat, chicken, lamb, shrimp, fish. But beef was not part of our daily menu. But as I went to medical school after that, I went to medical school in South India in a place called Pondicherry. And the institution was called Jipmar. And it was a group of 50 students that were selected from the 25 states. Approximately about two kids per state were selected to get into this All India Institute. And we had to run our own cafeteria. It was all a student body-led medical school for operations.

And I was in charge of the cafeteria for three months. And I worked with lots of chefs and kind of made the cafeteria very popular because we served the best food out there. But I also went to the market to procure a lot of meats, and I actually saw large-scale animal slaughter. And I was disturbed by, you know, a couple of things. One is the inefficiency with which, you know, we were converting all the vegetables and grains into a small amount of meat. But what bothered me was the way it was done.

And I told myself on that day that if there is a major problem in the world I'd love to solve, this would be right up there at the top. And it continued along on medical science, and I became a vegetarian in medical school, but really missed the taste of meat and really struggled to stay a vegetarian. And subsequent to that, I came to the U.S. I wanted to train at the Mayo Clinic. So I ended up doing cardiology and interventional cardiology and advanced imaging. And during that process, I really got interested in understanding muscle and how muscle regenerates from a heart perspective. And I was treating patients that had cardiac arrests or heart attacks, and I was doing procedures on them and injecting stem cells into their hearts and watching that

muscle regenerate. And that kind of led to a thought of why can't we do the same process and develop a method to grow meat. And it was a very out of the box idea. And as I started talking to people about it, you know, I got very curious eyebrows lifting and saying, yeah, that's interesting. But no one really gave it much of a serious thought. And I started searching on the internet and came across this organization called New Harvest, which was founded by a brilliant thinker, philosopher named Jason Matheny in 2005, just about the time when I graduated from cardiology at the Mayo Clinic.

And I wrote to Jason and said, Jason, I really think this is something we should explore. And I used to go to Washington, D.C. on a regular basis back then. And I met Jason and he asked me to be on the board of New Harvest. And after serving on the board of New Harvest for three years, one thing that was abundantly clear to me was that there was a significant amount of interest globally, not just in the U.S., in places you traditionally call progressive, maybe a few cities on the coast, but globally people were asking, could we do this better? Could we do a more sustainable meat production methods or techniques? And there were academics writing, there were investors writing, and just

general public who were interested in this concept. And at that point, honestly, I never thought I would start a company myself. I was just trying to encourage academics or others to kind of start ventures in this area. And it was very enlightening for me because while there was a lot of interest among people, there was nobody willing to take the step and say, yes, I'm going to dedicate my career to make this a reality. There were a number of experts in tissue engineering, in academic labs who had phenomenal grants to do medical research. But for them to shift their career focus and also their labs focus into a totally new field, which did

not have any federal funding or NIH funding, was a big risk. And essentially, academics are also running their own business because they have to run their labs, pay salaries to their PhDs who came believing in them. And it was a huge risk for them to shift their priorities. And that's when I decided that, look, I've been thinking about this since I was 12. I have a phenomenal career I've been building in cardiology, but there are 35,000 cardiologists out there in the U.S. And I decided that I'm going to assemble a team myself and start a venture. And, you know, I interviewed a number of PhDs who had deep experience in skeletal muscle biology and found my co-founder, whose name is Nick Genovese, who also has been on the same mission for the last

15 years. And we teamed up together and we said, let's put an idea to the Venture Capital Group in San Francisco. And if there is interest in the private sector, that is where we should be, because we can motivate people to really help us solve this problem and it's been a surreal experience in the last six months we wrote to this venture capital group called sos ventures and within an hour of our application they were on the phone saying we want you to move down here and we believe in this idea and since then it's been a wave of interest from all kinds of people, meat eaters who love eating meat, and some who love the taste of meat but still had some guilt eating it. And then from vegetarians and vegans who were thinking if we should redefine the definition of what a vegetarian or vegan is,

if this meat comes from not slaughtering an animal. It's been a long answer for you, but I did want to walk you through the process. No, it's great. It's great to know how you came to this. This is such a pain point, and it's a pain point that I think many people are just reluctant to acknowledge given their attachment to and perceived dependence on eating meat. I am now rather famously one of these people who stumbled into a kind of self-intervention on my own podcast where I was talking to the psychologist Paul Bloom, and we each put on our short list of things that our future descendants would be scandalized by. As we are scandalized by the slaveholders in our recent past, we both

said that our descendants will be horrified to know what we did with factory farming, the way we mistreated and killed billions of animals in a way that we managed to do more or less with a clear conscience simply because we were keeping the details out of sight and out of mind. And just in that podcast, I more or less confessed my hypocrisy. I realized that I found the details morally indefensible, and I found it kind of a starkly unethical area of my life around which I wasn't really paying much of a psychological cost because, again, I wasn't thinking about it. You know, I was just, food was magically arriving on my plate every meal. And I was, you know, obviously I'm not an idiot. I know what the details are, but I managed to not pay attention to them. And many, many millions of people, I would argue most people are accomplishing the same psychological experiment in their own lives. And if they were forced to meditate on the details, both the ethical details and just the economic and environmental issues, which perhaps we'll go into. about killing animals and giving them miserable lives up until the moment of their deaths.

It seems to me that very few people can be sanguine about the environmental and health and economic implications of what factory farming is doing to our world. So it doesn't surprise me at all that there is or will be a huge market for this if you can accomplish your aim. So let's talk a little bit about just what is entailed. What are the roadblocks between where you are now and what you would hope to accomplish? Yes. So let me explain to you the process at a very high level. What we're doing is instead of growing a full animal over 12 to 24 months and then slaughtering it and just taking the meat we like and throwing away the bones and the skin and the hair, what we're doing is we're growing the

same meat from the fundamental building blocks of life, which are the meat cells. So we identify the best meat cells possible from whether it's a cow or a pig, let's say from a pork shoulder or a topsoil loin. And from these cells, we identify those that are capable of self-renewing themselves, and we cultivate them in a very safe and clean environment so that they can grow just like a small plant grows into a larger plant, using nutrients, amino acids, peptides, minerals, vitamins, oxygen, sugars. And once we get the meat to a consistency that we like for the product, we harvest the meat. And once we get the meat to a consistency that we like for the product, we harvest the meat. And if we harvest the meat early on in the process of growing the meat, then it's more like tender cuts of meat. And if we wait a little bit longer, it's more texturized.

So that's a very high level picture of what we're trying to do. And we feel pretty confident that the science has been worked out in our minds and in our experiments so far, as well as the prototypes we've been able to make. And as you know from the Wall Street Journal article, we've completely grown, cooked, and tasted meatballs as well as fajitas. And that was a watershed moment in our company's life because while we knew we could do it, we just did not know how it was going to taste. And once we put that in our mouths and also some of the investors and tasters, it was abundantly clear within a few seconds that it had a very distinct meat flavor that I completely forgot about for the last several years because I was eating meat analogs, whether they were made from plant proteins or texturized vegetable protein.

And that was a watershed moment. And we knew, okay, good, we've got the taste issues solved. And we have to continue to work on the types of products, texture, formulations. So to come back to your original question, what are our hurdles? I think the biggest hurdle for us to get to market as fast as possible is funding and the rate at which we could raise funding. Then the second one is the ability to scale up to a level where we can manufacture this in large quantities and basically align or integrate with the current distribution systems. Because what we're trying to do is to make the upstream processing that's really filthy or not very clean or inhumane be replaced by this new system of growing meat. But we can still continue to use all the distribution, meat distribution, meat formulation, packaging, consumer packaging, goods, and the usual route

that current meat industry uses. The third hurdle I would say is perceptions. And this is where your poll and our coincidence of our paths really helped. Because that 15,000 members that you polled, about 83% of them who said they'll absolutely switch. And a few other polls we've seen so far tell us that perception may not be such a big hurdle, but I'm sure we will have some issues with that where we have to explain why our meat is just as natural as in fact more natural than what we're eating now because we are growing it in safe, clean environments using natural substances. So for example, there are no antibiotics, there are no contaminants. And I would say this, and maybe other people would also

agree with me, that there is nothing natural about the conventional meats we are eating now, because the chickens that we eat now grow six to seven times faster than what they would in the natural environment. The cows give about 10 times more milk than what they would naturally give. And the turkeys are so top-heavy that they can't even stand up to breed. And there is nothing natural about that. That's just the state of how modified genetically or environmentally they've been by the current meat production techniques. And to top that off, because they're grown in such intense confined conditions, let's say a thousand pigs in a small barn that's filled with feces or waste material, they have to pump these animals with antibiotics, which leads to antibiotic resistance

and superbugs, and also sets up the stage for really bad zoonotic diseases like the bird flu or the swine flu we hear about every year. Now, none of that is there in our process. So I would argue, instead of calling this synthesized meat or synthetic meat, this is more a naturally cultured meat, because we're letting these cells grow naturally and providing them with a naturally safe environment. And I think our work, and I'm hoping lots of other people follow us, is going to define a new kind of agriculture that will change the way we approach food in the future. I want to get on to the perception issue because I think that's a fascinating one. And the response to the poll was, I think, very useful there.

But I don't want people to ignore the very condensed litany of concerns, health concerns mostly, that you just went through because, and we don't have to get into it at length, but when you talked about the level of antibiotic use or the emerging epidemics and even feared pandemics based on our proximity to livestock and the mingling of livestock, for instance, you've got these open-air poultry markets in Asia where wild waterfowl drop their droppings or even are caught and sold in confinement with chickens. I mean, this is the reservoir of bird flu and

all of the subsequent mutations in these viruses that, you know, we are wisely worried about, which would very likely kill, in the worst case, hundreds of millions of people if we had a proper pandemic, analogous to the flu of 1918. That's just one reason why living in proximity to livestock or the indefinite future is a problem. If you'd like to continue listening to this conversation, you'll need to subscribe at SamHarris.org. Once you do, you'll get access to all full-length episodes of the Making Sense Podcast, along with other subscriber-only content, including bonus episodes and AMAs and the conversations I've been having on the Waking Up app. The Making Sense Podcast is ad-free and relies entirely on listener support,

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