The Rich Roll Podcast - Bruce Friedrich Is Innovating The Future of Food

Episode Date: May 1, 2017

7.5 billion people currently share this spinning blue planet we call Earth. By 2050, that number will escalate to 9.7 billion. By 2100? 11 billion. How can we possibly feed 11 billion people sustainably? To answer that question we must turn our gaze to the industrialization of animal agriculture. On the surface, what we commonly call factory farming appears incredibly efficient, creating massive economies of scale. But peer just below the surface and you'll discover a vast operation of mass suffering that is irreparably polluting the environment, eviscerating our dwindling natural resources and destroying human health to boot. Beyond wasteful. Utterly unsustainable. Indefensibly cruel. Ladies and gentlemen, our food system is in dire need of innovation. So let's talk about it. This week I sit down with Bruce Friedrich, a man who has devoted his life to reforming animal agriculture and innovating the future of food and food systems. Bruce is the executive director of The Good Food Institute and founding partner of New Crop Capital, organizations focused on replacing animal products with plant and culture-based alternatives. He graduated magna cum laude from Georgetown Law and Phi Beta Kappa from Grinnell College, holds additional degrees from Johns Hopkins University and the London School of Economics and was inducted into the United States Animal Rights Hall of Fame in 2004. A popular speaker on college campuses — including Harvard, Yale, Princeton, Stanford, and MIT — Bruce has appeared on NBC's Today Show, CNN, Fox News Channel, MSNBC, and Court TV. As compelling as it gets, this is an extraordinary conversation about animal agriculture, planetary health and human well being. It's about the politics of agriculture and the subsidies, corporations, representatives and lobbyists that support it. But mostly, this is an optimistic forecast of food system innovation — how technology, urgency and popular demand are rapidly converging to create healthy, sustainable and compassionate solutions to help solve our current food, health and environmental crises. Incredibly intelligent, considerate and measured, it was an honor to sit down with Bruce. May our exchange leave you inspired to invest more deeply in where your food comes from and how it impacts the precious world we share. Peace + Plants, Rich

Yeah, times are changing, and I mean, one of the things that we're trying to do at the Good Food Institute is to help the meat industry transition away from animal-based meat and toward plant-based meat and clean meat, both of which have much less of a carbon footprint, both of which are far more exponentially more sustainable, neither of which uses antibiotics, which probably is an existential threat to humanity on par with climate change. And of course, both of which are friendly to animals. So if we can convince the meat industry, you know, through creating products that are taste competitive and price competitive to simply shift over, that certainly changes the landscape on Capitol Hill

as well. I mean, the opportunity in this space to start companies, to join companies, the opportunity for entrepreneurship for food scientists and tissue engineers and plant biologists and entrepreneurs, it's a colossal opportunity to both do a tremendous amount of good and save the world. That's Bruce Friedrich, this week on The Rich Roll Podcast. The Rich Roll Podcast. 7.5 billion. That's how many people are currently walking around on planet Earth. But consider this, by 2100, there's going to be somewhere in the range of 10 to 11 billion. That's how many people are currently walking around on planet Earth. But consider this, by 2100, there's going to be somewhere in the range of 10 to 11 billion. That's a lot of people. How are we going to sustainably support this many people? How are we going to feed this

many people? Well, historically, currently, our system for feeding the planet is based on factory farming, industrialized animal agriculture. But there's only one problem with this. It's a system that's really just broken. It's incredibly wasteful. It's inefficient. It's ecologically polluting beyond measure. Essentially, it's just unsustainable when it comes to effectively utilizing our dwindling planetary resources and our diminishing supply of available arable land.

Most people don't realize this, but industrialized animal agriculture is actually responsible for more greenhouse gas emissions than all of transportation combined. So all of this leaves us in a bit of a conundrum. How are we going to feed this escalating population without irreparably damaging the planet that supports all of us? Well, the solution lies in moving to a more plant-centric, a more plant-based approach to our plate, as well as innovating new ways, new foods, and new systems that move us beyond our current addiction to an animal foods-based diet.

I'm Rich Roll, and this week I sit down to talk about all of these issues with the amazing Bruce Friedrich. Bruce is the executive director of the Good Food Institute, GFI.org, as well as the founding partner of a venture fund called New Crop Capital. These are both organizations that are focused on replacing animal products with plant and culture-based alternatives. Bruce graduated magna cum laude from Georgetown Law, as well as Phi Beta Kappa from Grinnell College. He also holds degrees from Johns Hopkins University and the London School of Economics.

He serves on the advisory board of the Christian Vegetarian Association and is a founding member of the Society of Ethical and Religious Vegetarians. This is essentially a guy who has spent his entire life working to reform animal agriculture. He's a popular speaker on college campuses. He's spoken at Harvard, Yale, Princeton, Stanford, MIT. He's been all over television on the Today Show, CNN, Fox News, MSNBC, Court TV. And he was inducted into the United States Animal Rights Hall of Fame. I didn't know there was such a thing. That's very cool. In 2004. He's a great guy. This is an incredible conversation.

But before we get into it, a couple quick announcements. As some of you guys know, I have three online courses on MindBodyGreen, The Ultimate Guide to Plant-Based Nutrition, a course called The Art of Living with Purpose, which is all about goal setting, and also How to Build a Conscious Relationship, that course I did with Julie, as well as The Ultimate Guide to Plant-Based Nutrition. They're both, they're all, I should say, amazing, all multiple hours of instruction broken up into structured video modules with downloadable

resources, an online support community, and tons more. And the reason I'm making this announcement right now, I haven't talked about these courses in a while, is because right now through May 4th, they're offering 10% off when you use the promo code mindbodygreen at checkout. So all you got to do is go to mindbodygreen.com, click on classes or search my name, you'll find my courses there, and you'll get 10% off any course that you buy by using the promo code mindbodygreen at checkout. All right, so check that out. All right, back to Bruce. Again, this is really an extraordinary conversation

about many, many things. It's about the pitfalls of factory farming, of industrialized animal agriculture, and its deleterious impact on the environment and human health. It's about reimagining how we're going to feed the estimated 9.7 billion people that are going to be walking around by 2050. It's a conversation about the politics of agriculture, government subsidies, regulatory policy on Capitol Hill, the impact of lobbying on policy and legislation. And it's about clean meat, so- on Capitol Hill, the impact of lobbying on policy and legislation.

And it's about clean meat, so-called clean meat, quote unquote clean meat, and plant-based meat alternatives. I've been following Bruce and his work for quite a while. He is an extremely impressive individual. I truly believe that the work that he and his team and the companies that they work with are doing is truly changing the world, making the world a better place. So you guys are in for a treat. Without further ado, please enjoy my conversation with Bruce Friedrich. All right, Bruce, so nice to meet you. It's awesome to meet you, Rich. Yeah, really happy to talk to you. This has been percolating for quite some time. And finally, our paths cross. And I've been excited about this conversation for quite a while. You're into so many super interesting things at the vanguard, I think, of the plant-based movement and technology innovations and investment. And there are just so many areas to explore. So it's pretty cool. Yeah, I'm delighted to be here.

It's remarkable to me that it's taken such a long time for our paths to cross. I know. I've been a big fan for a really long time. Super excited about who you are and what you're doing and how you're doing it. It's really just such an inspiration for the vegan movement. So I'm delighted and humbled and honored to be spending time with you. That means a lot to me. I appreciate that very much. So I think maybe the best way to kind of launch into this might be to do a kind of brief synopsis of where we stand in terms of food

production, factory farming, industrialized animal agriculture, and sort of systemically, industrialized animal agriculture and sort of systemically, you know, what's happening across the planet in terms of environmental impact, et cetera. Well, it's not good. Yeah, I think we can all agree. So, I mean, we're going to need to feed 9.7 billion people by 2050. And we've got 7.3 right now, I think, last time I looked. Yeah, I think it might even be just a little bit more than that but um yeah i mean the predictions are that we're going to have

to feed 9.7 billion people by 2050 and we're simply not going to do it with the degree of inefficiency that is inherent in growing crops to feed them to animals so why why animals why is that well i mean it's just, think about you or me. We eat however much we eat. You know, you probably eat 4,000 plus calories a day. I eat like 2,500 calories a day. Is that right? It's not as high as you might think, actually.

Okay. Well, either way. Maybe 3 or 35. I don't know. All right. Well, we're eating thousands of calories a day and we're not gaining weight. You know, we need those calories in order to survive. And the same sort of thing exists for farm animals so that the most efficient meat is

chicken. And it takes nine calories into a chicken to get one calorie back out in the form of that animal's flesh. They burn off most of it. They turn some of it into blood and bones and feathers and other things that aren't consumed. So most people are concerned about food waste, right? You ask people, you know, do you care about food waste? I was at a food conference just yesterday, and I said, who here cares about food waste? And everybody raised their hands. And we should be concerned about food waste.

About 40% of everything that's produced in the United States is thrown away. But think about the ratio for the chicken that we consume. You know, you're throwing away eight calories, 800% food waste, eight calories for every calorie that you consume. It's a vastly inefficient system, and it needs to change. And chicken is the most efficient of all the animals? Yeah, no, exactly. It goes to 13 to 15 if you're talking about pork. It goes to 25 if you're talking about beef. So yeah, the most efficient meat is chicken and it's 800% waste for

every, you know, eight calories thrown away for every calorie you consume. And just to kind of really paint the picture for somebody who might be brand new to these ideas, that is because of all the inputs that have to go in to raise these animals as sort of an intermediary, right? Like a clearinghouse for all these calories. So it's the land, it's the water, it's the feed. I mean, that's just the calories in, calories out. That's just that you have to grow all of this wheat or soy or alfalfa, whatever's going to go into the chicken feed. You have to put nine calories into a chicken to get that chicken to slaughter weight, to get one calorie back out in the form of that animal's food.

And the environmental consequences are quite a bit worse than that because you're growing the crops and you're shipping the crops and you're operating a feed mill and you're shipping the feed to the farm and you're operating the farm and you're shipping the animals to a slaughterhouse and you're operating the slaughterhouse. I mean, once you crunch the numbers, whether you're talking about energy inputs or climate change outputs or water use or land use or whatever else, I mean, every animal, the inefficiencies, the numbers vary. The most recent UN number in terms of climate change is one example, is that global climate change is 13.5% directly attributable to the inefficiencies of raising

animals for food. And there's a World Watch report done by a researcher from the International Finance Corporation and the World Bank that says it's over 50% because they include respiration. So what is, explain respiration. Yeah. So the World Watch, the researchers who wrote the paper for the World Watch Institute argue, and I think convincingly, that every animal, whether human or farm animal, every animal by simply existing, we breathe and we produce carbon dioxide. So in the United States, we bring nine billion land animals into the world. All of them are breathing, and they break out of the carbon cycle because we're bringing them into the world simply to eat them. And all of that respiration causes a lot of CO2. and say that actually once you factor in all of the efficiencies and all of the production inputs and respiration, you get to over half of climate change attributable to animal agriculture.

Although for me, I mean, I like to break it down meal by meal. So even if you take the UN's numbers, and so you take the really conservative numbers, 13.5%, if you break it down meal by meal, the animal who causes the least climate change, again, is the chicken. And chickens, on a per-protein calorie basis, they produce 40 times as much CO2 equivalent per protein calorie when compared to legumes like soy or wheat or, well, no, wheat's not a legume, but like soy or peas, 40 times as much, 4,000% on a per meal basis. So you eat a veggie burger from Beyond Meat and it's made out of pea protein, or you eat a bokeh burger and it's made out of soy protein, that causes 40 times less climate change than does eating a chicken burger. And of course it gets even worse

if you're talking about fish or pigs or cows. It's unbelievable. And this is something that the documentary Cowspiracy did a pretty good job of pointing out. I think they used 15 or 18% in that movie. I think they tagged both numbers. I think they talk about the Worldwatch Institute paper, and they talk about the previous UN report, Livestock's Long Shadow, which comes up with 18%. And the UN has since revised that down a little bit. And I know from Kip and Keegan that they erred on the side of being conservative, just to be sort of as buttoned down as possible. So to hear the numbers that you're throwing around, it's really quite blasphemous. And by comparison, this is trumping all of transportation combined, is that correct? Yeah, transportation's at about 13%.

So whether you're going with 14.5 or 18 or obviously 51, it's a lot more climate change that's attributable to the meat industry than that is attributable to all transport combined. Right, and we're beginning to talk about this, but Bruce, why isn't this being discussed on a broader policy level than it has been historically? Why is it so difficult to get this into mainstream consciousness and to get these ideas really debated on Capitol Hill? Yeah, I mean, I think Kip and Keegan did a really nice

job at presenting why it's difficult. I mean, they focused a lot on the environmental groups, and I'm not positive that the environmental groups taking this issue more seriously would get it more attention on Capitol Hill. You look at something as basic as PAMTA, which is the bill that Louise Slaughter has introduced every two years, and it would ban the use of dual-use sub-therapeutic antibiotics, so antibiotics that are also used in human medicine and that are used to keep animals alive through conditions that would otherwise kill them. In other words, the animals aren't sick. It's just they're dosing them both for growth promotion

and because the conditions would kill them if they weren't dosed. So sub-therapeutic, dual-use antibiotics, every two years it's proposed. It's got literally hundreds of endorsers. All of the environmental groups endorse it. All of the big health groups endorse it. And it never ever passes. And the people who handicap legislation basically give it about a 1% to 2% chance of passing every two years. And everybody thinks it should. And that's the power of animal agriculture on the Hill. I mean, another example is agricultural subsidies.

You've got bipartisan support for getting rid of agricultural subsidies. Barack Obama didn't like them. George W. Bush didn't like them. Most people in both the House and the Senate don't like them, but the House and Senate agricultural committees, those guys, they know where their bread is buttered

and it won't even get out of the Ag Committee. So it's certainly possible that even if, you know, this became priority number one for Sierra and EDF and Greenpeace and all of the other sort of environmental groups that are on the Hill, we still might not make a lot of progress. Right. I mean, I don't want to, you know, veer into being like a conspiracy theorist, but this is like the reality of, you know, real politics on Capitol Hill and kind of defending the base and the status quo. So in terms of, you know, the heads of state with respect to the big food companies, I can't imagine that, you know, they're going to kind of give up too much ground on this. Right. But times are changing.

Yeah, times are changing. And I mean, one of the things that we're trying to do at the Good Food Institute is to help the meat industry transition away from animal-based meat and toward plant-based meat and clean meat, both of which have much less of a carbon footprint, both of which are far more exponentially more sustainable, neither of which uses antibiotics, which probably is an existential threat to humanity on par with climate change. And of course, both of which are friendly to animals. So if we can convince the meat industry, you know, through creating products that are taste competitive and price competitive to simply shift over, that certainly changes the landscape on Capitol Hill as well. Right. And I want to get into all of that. But before we do, I think it's sort of worth exploring the antibiotics issue a little bit. Can you talk a little bit about how that functions and the sort

of health threat that that poses currently? Yeah. I mean, anybody who wants to really be terrified, Google the end of antibiotics, and you will read just so many stories. Even in the mainstream media, they end up on like, you know, A32 or whatever, where they belong on the front page. But basically, about 70% of all antibiotics that pharmaceuticals produce in the United States, about 70% of them are fed to farm animals. And it's not because the farm animals are sick.

They're not treating sick animals. They're feeding them, for example, to the 9 billion chickens who are slaughtered. They're crammed 50,000 in a shed. They're crammed in not just their excrement, but the excrement of generations of chickens. And the conditions are so filthy and disgusting that the animals would all be getting sick and dying if they weren't dosed with essentially prophylactic antibiotics. So that's where 70% of antibiotics go. The antibiotics go into the chickens, and then the antibiotics, the bugs that they're designed to kill, so the bacteria and the contamination that they're designed to kill, end up mutating so that they can get around the antibiotics that are being used in animal food. So then you get sick or I get sick and the pharmaceuticals that have been used in the farm animals, the bacteria have figured out how

to beat those bacteria. And it ends up that you or I get sick. We take the doses of antibiotics and they don't work because factory farms have created superbugs. And if you Google the end of antibiotics, what you'll find is an awful lot of reflection on what it means when antibiotics no longer work in human medicine. Like you get a cut, it gets infected, and it literally kills you. You know, your kid falls down on a skateboard and scrapes her knee. Penicillin's not going to work. It literally leads to death. Like, the end of working antibiotics is a true nightmare scenario, except that it's a very real possibility on the basis of the use of antibiotics in farm animals. It's insane. It's almost like this

systemic program to create superbugs that we are subsidizing. insane. It's almost like this systemic program to create superbugs that we are subsidizing. No, it's exactly like that, which is why it makes it, I mean, you know, you look at something like the PAMTA bill that Representative Slaughter keeps introducing, and you've got the American Medical Association, you've got literally billions and billions and billions of dollars in lobby money. Okay, maybe not billions, hundreds of millions of dollars in lobby money, all of the top health charities, the entire medical establishment, the entire environmental establishment, just hundreds of co-sponsors. And it would pass if it got to a House and a Senate floor vote. And yet they can't get it out of the Ag Committee, which is where it has to start. And the Ag Committee, those people,

I mean, and there are two issues with the Ag Committee. It's not just that they get an awful lot of donations. It's that when they retire, they know that they have six-figure jobs waiting for them or board seats waiting for them that are extremely lucrative. They are set forever. So a part of it is the campaign contributions, and that's substantial from both the pharmaceutical industry and the factory farming industry. And a part of it is just the revolving door that exists between these Capitol Hill offices, not even just the senators and representatives themselves, but also their chiefs of staff and so on.

It's a revolving door. Right, in between administrations and then going back into high-level executive positions at these powerful companies. Yeah, that's exactly right. It's kind of crazy when you look at, you take sort of a bird's eye view of factory farming, because on the one hand, they've created the most efficient economies of scale possible, right? But then you have to contrast that with the incredible inefficiency of just the system itself. And I think that's sort of something that bends people's noodles because they're like, look, it's so efficient. Look at how it, you know, basically they're using the least amount of time and resources possible to blow these animals up as big enough until

they can be food. It can't be done any more efficiently than it is when you're cramming all these animals into these small spaces. And yet, you know, sort of fundamentally, it's unsustainable. Yeah. I mean, it's just inherently, you know, it's impossible to raise an animal without feeding the animal. The majority of the calories fed to the animal are by necessity going to go into existing. Like you can only get an animal's physiology to operate to a certain degree of efficiency. And you can't get past the fact that you still have to grow the feed and ship the feed and ship the animals and operate the extra slaughterhouses, et cetera. Like it can only get to be so efficient. But what they've done with the genetics of these animals is really quite something. I mean, it's extraordinarily unnatural. Chickens' upper bodies now grow more than six times as quickly

as they did 75 years ago. And their hearts and their lungs and their limbs can't keep up. The genetics have done a lot with the upper bodies, but they haven't kept up with the organs and the limbs. And so the animals suffer from astronomical death losses. As a counterpoint to this, there is a very popular idea that's circulating around right now that has to do with the ideas of Allen savory and repasturization and sort of, you know, grass fed animals. And you're seeing more and more people interested in procuring their meat from these sources. And the idea behind that is this is the path forward, right? Like this is the way we're going to solve this problem. So can you like sort of comment on your perspective on that? Well, I mean, I think in a lot of ways,

the folks in the regenerative community should be our allies. I think their science is good, but it is a tiny fraction of animal agriculture, and it's expensive. So it's certainly the case that regeneratively farmed, grass-fed cattle are, if somebody is going to eat meat, the one meat that I think you can eat while still being an environmentalist. And if you're not an animal rights person, but you are an animal welfare person, the animals are generally treated quite well. But that is not, I mean, more than 99% of farms are not regenerative agriculture. And even the farms that are regenerative, oftentimes they will have pigs or chickens or other non-ruminants. And 75% of the feed is oftentimes GMO, sort of monocropped feed. So even the farms where you might be able to get a regeneratively farmed cow, those same farms are still a part of the problem through their non-regeneratively farmed animals.

There's David Bronner from Dr. Bronner's recently wrote an op-ed, or I guess it's a blog. You can find it pretty easily by Googling Regenitarians Unite. And he talks about precisely these issues, and it's extraordinarily interesting. It seems to me that ultimately, as we sort of opened this talking about the escalation of the population, that that idea becomes an elitist sort of concept in the sense that there's just not enough land, right? We're not going to be able to feed the planet in that regard. Well, if you brought meat down to 5% of what we're consuming now, and that would still be an astronomical growth in regenerative farming. I mean, it is teeny tiny at the moment. But if you cut meat to like 5% of what it is now, and you used exclusively grass

lands that can't be used to grow crops to feed them to farm animals. I mean, there could be some small percentage that is regeneratively farmed. And at the end of the day, you don't have to do that. Like for people who believe that we shouldn't eat cattle any more than we should eat dogs or cats, for people who believe that animals have interests that matter, like I do. I mean, I've been vegan for 30 years, and a big part of that is a belief in animal rights. So I'm not going to eat a cow or a, and a big part of that is a belief in animal rights. So I'm not going to eat a cow or a chicken or a pig any more than I'm going to eat a dog or a cat. But from an environmental standpoint, they do have to some degree a point,

but it would require that we cut way, way back on the amount of animal products that we're consuming. Right. So before the podcast began, I was sharing with you that I, the, the primary reason that I came to New York was to speak at Goldman Sachs, which I did yesterday, which was an amazing opportunity. Yeah.

I got a little blow back and flack. Like, how could you, you know, speak to these guys? But it's like, I relish that opportunity. I think you need to,

you know, work with everybody. And, you know, if McDonald's asked me to come and speak, I would do that as well. But it was very interesting because I had, I did discuss many of these ideas that we're talking about here today. And then we went out for a beautiful dinner afterwards and I had my, you know, vegan meal and a couple other people did. And we had a very lively, interesting, dynamic conversation and they were all very

moved by my presentation. And yet the guy to my right ordered a steak for dinner perfectly nice guy he couldn't have been a sweeter you know human being but I couldn't help but think well how persuasive was I you know I think fundamentally we can understand intellectually these ideas and yet there's a gap between the intellectualization of it and behavioral change. And this is something I think where you're living and breathing and really trying to innovate new and compelling ways to get people to move that needle. So let's talk about the Good Food Institute. I would love to.

to move that needle. So let's talk about the Good Food Institute. I would love to, but I want to start by saying it just, it makes me sad that anybody would give you or anybody else in any kind of movement flack for talking to anybody. Like the idea that you would be invited to speak at Goldman Sachs or McDonald's for that matter, and not take advantage of that opportunity. It's just like flummoxing to me that anybody would suggest that. Like we should be talking to everybody. Of course, of course. I think that's a case in which perhaps the vegan community can be its own worst enemy. I think those are old ideas.

Like the idea that we're really going to change culture fundamentally and on a mass scale by preaching to the choir or remaining in the echo chamber is a pipe dream. Yeah, we need to get out of the echo chamber and talk to everybody else. And that's one thing that you have done in a very profound way. Yeah, thanks. So the Good Food Institute, as you're nodding to, the Good Food Institute is a 501c3. We're a nonprofit organization. People can dive into what we're up to at gfi.org online. And we were formed to use markets and food technology

to transform agriculture away from the use of animals and toward plant-based alternatives and clean meat alternatives. So clean meat is simply growing cells and essentially a cell fermenter. So we envision essentially meat breweries, plant-based meat and meat breweries, and both of them are significantly better. And the idea is, you know, for the guy who was sitting next to you who was ordering the steak, if they had had a plant-based steak that was taste identical, a little bit healthier, and cost the same, maybe he would have ordered that if it was taste identical and price competitive. And certainly, after your talk, if they had had a steak that was produced through cellular agriculture, if they had had a clean meat steak, he would have absolutely chosen it if it were cost competitive. So we're attempting

to use concepts of behavioral economics. So everybody, when they're thinking about what they're going to eat, they think about taste, they think about price, and convenience is important. They might not be thinking about convenience, but if it's not on the menu and it's not in the grocery store, they're not going to buy it. But everybody's thinking about taste. Everybody's thinking about price. If we can create products that compete in those two ways, we can save a ton of animals, cut back on a lot of carbon dioxide and other global warming gases, create a much more sustainable and healthy food system. So let's talk about clean meat. At the vanguard of this super fascinating movement is your friend Uma Valetti at Memphis Meats, who's doing some truly extraordinary work in kind of finding technological advances for this problem.

I'm sure you listened to Sam Harris's conversation with Uma, which was absolutely fascinating. So before we even get into that, maybe explain in a little bit more in depth what you mean by clean meat. It's sort of anecdotally known as lab-grown meat. I know language is important. You're going to avoid that term, but that's sort of colloquially like what people understand it to be. And I think there's going to be a learning curve here in getting people acclimated to understand exactly what this is. Yeah, I mean, let me start by saying the reason that we don't call it lab meat is the same

reason that we don't call Cheerios lab Cheerios or Budweiser lab Budweiser. Like every processed food starts in a food lab. So technically every processed food is created in a lab. But at scale, this will be created in a factory, just like every other food that starts in a food lab is created in a factory. And what it will look like is it will look like a meat brewery. So you picture a beer brewery, those vats, instead of creating beer, they will be creating meat. And that has some huge advantages over the current system. It's three times more efficient than chicken, which is the most efficient meat, causes 95% less climate change, doesn't include all of the extra stages of production, it's exponentially

cleaner, doesn't require antibiotics. I mean, according to the Centers for Disease Control, there are tens of millions of cases of meat contamination foodborne illness. There are more than 100,000 hospitalizations. There are thousands of deaths every single year. All of that goes away because the process is cleaner. It's also clean meat as sort of a nod to clean energy, the environmental benefits. So just like clean energy is more environmentally sustainable energy, clean meat is more environmentally sustainable meat. And the two sort of pioneers of this movement, one is this guy Mark Post, who is a former medical school professor at Harvard Medical School. And now he's a tissue

engineer. He's a PhD in tissue engineering and an MD. And now he's teaching tissue engineering at Maastricht University in the Netherlands, which is one of the top medical schools in Europe. And previously, he was, I think, about a decade at Harvard Medical School. The other one is also a medical doctor, Dr. Valetti, who was on Sam Harris's podcast, which I highly recommend. Really just a fascinating conversation. And Valetti is a cardiologist. He was trained at the Mayo Clinic. He was a professor of medicine at the University of Minnesota.

He was the president of both the American College of Cardiology and the American Heart Association, the Twin Cities chapter. Like, you know, these guys are brilliant. Yeah, they could be doing anything, and they have put their entire lives into creating a more sustainable, healthier alternative that is exactly the same thing. So if you're eating a clean meat chicken nugget, or you're eating a clean meat hamburger, or a clean meat pork chop, whatever, it is literally the exact same thing. But instead of putting feed into an animal and causing the animal's cells to grow and wasting most of the inputs, instead, you're just taking similar nutrients, you're bathing the cells, you're causing them to multiply and grow. But instead of in an animal, you're doing it in a meat fermenter. And it takes away a lot of the problems of the meat industry.

So essentially, the process is extracting cells from live animals that are raised in a very healthy way and then culturing them, correct? In these brewery vats? I'm trying to understand the logistical process of how this whole thing works. A sesame seed biopsy can feed the world. So you don't need a herd of cattle for the clean meat industry. You need a sesame seed biopsy from one cow. What does that mean, a sesame seed biopsy? So basically, you take a teeny little bit of meat oh sesame seeds sized yeah sorry i got you okay sorry sorry yes all right yeah so you need a

biopsy from the animal the size of a sesame seed and that can create literally billions of pounds of meat so it's not like you need a herd of donor animals you just need a tiny little bit and you can certainly take the biopsy from a live animal, or you can take the biopsy from not a live animal, but it's a very little bit of meat that you then use standard cell tissue engineering techniques. So it's common in all aspects of this are common in medicine. The problem is nobody's going to haggle over the price of a liver, you know, or an ear or whatever. So we need to improve the processes so that we can get the cost down. But the cost is down more than 99% over just two and a half years. Right. It first started off as like $3,000 a burger or something like that?

Well, it was $300,000 for a quarter pound burger. Yeah. Okay. So some shake in UAE could order it and that was about it. So some sheik in UAE could order it, and that was about it? Well, yeah. I mean, so it was $1.2 million for the first pound, and it was $9,000 a pound last week. And, I mean, you think about the first iPhone. The first iPhone R&D cost, I think, $2.4 billion. And iPhones are a lot less expensive than that. Sequencing the human genome, like the cost of that came down, I think, a million times over the course of a decade. So these processes are so much more efficient. It's inconceivable

to me that we won't get to a place where because the processes are so much more efficient, as we get economies of scale from where they are now, which is just a couple of people, not that many labs working on this, not that many companies working on this, as it scales up, the price is going to come down. It will be cost competitive. I mean, Dr. Valetti and Dr. Post think that they will be cost competitive with expensive meat in about four years and cost competitive with cheap meat in about a decade. And that requires that the venture capital and the investments are there, but we think

they will be. From an environmental point of view, it's indisputable that this is a path forward and an incredibly powerful solution to sort of, you know, render obsolete the way that we've been raising animals for food. It's, you know, it's just, it's indisputably a better way. I think ethically, we get into some very interesting terrain in terms of how this whole thing can work. Because on the one hand, you have the very powerful argument that you're now going to be sparing all of these factory farmed animals' lives. We're not going to have

to raise animals, which will significantly reduce not just greenhouse gas emissions and everything that's built into that, but just not having to kill animals. Unbelievable. And yet at the same time, on the other hand, we have this sort of tricky new terrain that sort of raises the hair on the back of people's necks and the sort of acclimation to that idea that I think is analogous to the concept that we're going to be in self-driving cars, right? We have to sort of adjust to this new world. And I think Sam did a good job of trying to kind of illuminate this. And he did that poll on Twitter, like who would eat this stuff? And he called it like the ick factor, right? Because this is like, wait a minute, like this was grown, you know, in a, in a, in a, in a, in a lab with quotes around it, um, or in a, a new and innovative way. And it's,

it's a new and perhaps uncomfortable idea for people. So how do you put people at ease about this? Well, I mean, I think once people see it, the production method will become a huge selling point. I mean, right now you've got people eating meat, not because of how it's produced. People are eating meat despite how it's produced. There appears to be something deep in the human psyche that wants to eat meat, which is why that very sweet guy from Goldman Sachs sits next to you after hearing everything that you had to say and eats a steak. All of us in the vegan movement and the animal movement have experienced exactly that. Super nice people, really engaged. We go out to dinner and they order meat. It's like, have you not been

listening to me for the last two hours? It's flabbergasting. And this is the solution for those people. And that guy didn't eat that meat because he likes what happens on factory farms, because he likes what happens in slaughterhouses. People don't even want to think about how meat is made, right? They don't want to see it. Psychologically, we just don't want to know. And this allows them to know, right? Because once there are two products, and one of them is, like if you go out on the street and you say, would you want to eat chickens who grow seven times as quickly as they would naturally? Everybody goes, no. And they have the ick reaction. You say, look at this slaughterhouse video. Everybody's horrified.

And they have a visceral negative reaction. Or they say, I don't, I'm not going to watch it. Well, right. But this allows them to watch. This allows them to know. So you've got something like Dr. Valetti or Dr. Post live streaming the production on the web and saying, come one, come all, see how this is produced. And on the other side, you've got the sort of factory farming industry literally passing laws to make it illegal to find out what happens on farms and in slaughterhouses. So I think if you sort of put this in a vacuum and say, what do you think of this? Some people go, I don't know about that. But if you say, here are your two choices, which do you prefer? I think vast numbers of people go for the clean meat.

It's going to be really interesting to see how it plays out. And now they're more recently getting into chicken, right? So it started with the burger, and now there's chicken being produced. It's everything. It's the burger, it's the meatball, and now they did, just last week, they did chicken and duck. It's unbelievable. It's very exciting. The plant-based stuff is very exciting, too. I mean, Eric Schmidt, the CEO of Alphabet at the Milken Global Summit just last year,

he was asked to talk about six technological innovations that he thinks are going to transform life for humanity for the good by a factor of at least tenfold in the fairly near future. And he talked about six things. And the first one he talked about was plant-based meat. I mean, he's the CEO of Alphabet. So he's also talking about self-driving cars and watches that alert the hospital that you're sick before you even know you're sick and 3D printing for infrastructure. But the first thing he talked about was plant-based meat. And Bill Gates wrote his blog, The Future of Food, about plant-based meat. So, I mean, the clean meat is extremely exciting. The plant-based meat is probably equally exciting.

And it's here now. I mean, you look at Beyond Meat and Impossible. It's like really exciting stuff. Yeah, it's great. I mean, it's amazing what Impossible is doing right now. I mean, you look at Beyond Meat and Impossible, it's like really exciting stuff. Yeah, it's great. I mean, it's amazing what Impossible is doing right now. I mean, at Crossroads in Los Angeles, like, you know, they just, they were, I think they're offering it around the clock now, but they had a limited supply of Impossible burgers and it was first come first serve. And there would be a line at the door at 10 a.m. for people to try this and

get their hands on it. So that's pretty interesting. So maybe explain what Impossible is doing. Yeah, so both Impossible Foods and Beyond Meat, both of which were founded by guys with the last name Brown, interestingly. I've had Ethan on the podcast. Okay, yeah. He shared his story with Beyond Meat, and it's pretty cool.

Yeah, yeah. So Beyond Meat and Impossible Foods, you know, Beyond Meat, and it's pretty cool. Yeah, yeah. So Beyond Meat and Impossible Foods, Beyond Meat, he's explicitly saying we want to be the next great American meat company. Impossible Foods, Pat Brown is this former biochemist professor at Stanford University, extraordinarily successful, much like Valetian Post. And he took a year sabbatical. He wanted to look at what are the big causes of climate change and what can be done to fix them. He decided that it was, you know, the big cause of climate change is animal agriculture. He didn't decide, he discovered. And he decided he wanted to tackle it by replicating,

basically biomimicking meat, but doing it with plants to really challenge the meat industry. And his first product is the Impossible Burger. And I think he did extraordinarily well with it. He's, I mean, it's mostly plant-based. Well, it's all plant-based, although one of the ingredients is heme that he produced through synthetic biology. So you take a yeast and you program, basically,

what are the genes of heme proteins and the yeast instead of producing other things the genes of heme proteins and the yeast instead of producing other things, it produces heme. And so anybody who's read about the veggie burger that bleeds, that could be either the Impossible Burger or it could be the Beyond Burger, which Beyond Meat is making. They're both fantastic. Right. My understanding was that he began with the premise of trying to understand what is it about beef or a hamburger that makes it taste like a hamburger? And how come these veggie burgers can't really approximate it? And it boiled down to the heme, right?

Like it giving it that like juicy, you know, for lack of a better word, like, you know, it's the blood, right? It's the blood that it's the heme iron in the blood that is giving it that special something that makes it taste like a burger. Yeah. I mean, for both Beyond Meat and for Impossible Burger, like their idea is meat is made of amino acids, lipids, minerals, water, like the constituent parts we can replicate with plants. And that's the thing that Eric Schmidt and Bill Gates are incredibly excited about for

the capacity. I mean, for Schmidt, like the reasons that he discussed this as so groundbreaking is there are hundreds of millions of people who are living in nutritional deficit right now getting high quality proteins to them. This is a way to do it. And it's a way to do it that doesn't tax the planet in the same way that raising animals for food taxes the planet. Yeah, it's not utopian to say like, what if we could, all these crops that we're currently

growing for animals, what if we could suddenly feed them to people? We're already growing them, and we just switch the way that we're allocating and distributing these food products, that would almost, I mean, if you could flick a switch and do it overnight, you could solve world hunger almost immediately. Yeah. A number of years ago, the global envoy on food to the United Nations, this guy, John Ziegler, he said that biofuels are a crime against humanity because they take 100 million metric tons of corn and wheat and turn them into biofuels, put them into gas tanks, that causes the price of those crops to go up, and it prices out those crops for people who are starving. But that same Food and Agriculture Organization report from the UN noted that 756 million metric tons of corn and wheat in the same year were turned into feed for

chickens and pigs and other farm animals in that vastly inefficient relationship. And more than 85% of the global soy crop, so that's another 200 billion metric tons of soy, are fed to farm animals. So it's 10 times as much as went into biofuels. Biofuels, he called a crime against humanity. I mean, you know, what to make of that? But it does conjure up the idea that this is a human rights issue as much as it is an environmental issue. Yeah. I mean, I went vegan actually 30 years ago this year. This is my 30 year veganversary. Congratulations. And after I read a book called Diet for a Small Planet, and in Diet for a Small Planet, Frances Moore LePay lays it out. She says this is an inefficient system. And the areas of the world that are plagued by starvation are growing feed crops for the

first world. It makes absolutely no sense. And whether you're talking about global poverty, or you're talking about food security, or you're talking about the treatment of slaughterhouse workers and contract laborers in the chicken farms and the pig farms in the United States, I mean, it's absolutely a human rights issue. It's a human rights issue for the global poor, and it's a human rights issue for workers who are treated basically as serfs here in the United States. And it's absolutely a human rights issue. It's a human rights issue for the global poor, and it's a human rights issue for workers who are treated basically as serfs here in the United States. There's a former AP agriculture reporter, I'm blanking on his name, but he wrote a book called The Meat Racket. And it's just a devastating indictment of the way that contract

growers are treated. Wow, that's amazing. And it's interesting to kind of canvas how ideas work. Like this is an idea that had been posited 30 years ago through this book that was obviously super impactful on you and how long it takes for these ideas to gestate and kind of percolate into public consciousness and then to kind of provoke change. So why now? Is it that the technology is catching up? Is it that we're at a crisis point with the environments? Why do you think all of these things are suddenly finally occurring when this is something you've been working on for your entire career? I do think that there's a lot to be said for the idea that people

are looking at market solutions to global problems. And there are all of these impact investors and they're saying, you know, what do we do about climate change? What do we do about food security? Like the big questions in impact investing focused on food are how do we feed 9.7 billion people by 2050? And what do we do about climate change? So for example, how do we feed 9.7 billion people by 2050? And what do we do about climate change? So for example, how do we meet our obligations under the Paris Agreement to keep climate change under two degrees Celsius by 2050? Well, the foremost think tank in Europe is Chatham House, and they said it isn't going to be a literal impossibility for the governments of the world to do it unless they address climate change. So at least with plant-based meat and with clean

meat, we look at what happened with plant-based milk and we say there is a colossal market opportunity. There's a lot of good that can be done there. There's also a ton of money that can be made there. So it's sort of that confluence of factors. I mean, plant-based milk is 10% of the milk market now. Plant-based meat is a quarter of 1%. It's within the margin of error of not existing. But the market cap for plant-based meat has got to be even higher than plant-based milks. Oh, yeah, absolutely. And in fact, there's something called Lux Research, which is the former research arm of a VC called Lux Investing. And they think that plant-based meat will be a third of the entire meat market by 2054. I actually think we can do quite a bit

better than that. But even if it's that, that's a $70 billion a year market in the United States that is less than $500 million right now. I mean, the opportunity in this space to start companies, to join companies, the opportunity for entrepreneurship for food scientists and tissue engineers and plant biologists and entrepreneurs. It's a colossal opportunity to both do a tremendous amount of good and save the world. It's interesting to see these venture capital firms popping up that are solely focused on this space, right? Just investing in basically plant-based alternatives or plant-based businesses to innovate. Yeah. I mean, there are a bunch that are popping up that are just focused on plant-based businesses. And then there are some of the really big ones that are thinking, yeah, I mean, I think there's like a billion dollar VC that Bill Gates and some others formed, and it's focused

exclusively on climate solutions. And Gates was talking about the first time he was talking about it, he was talking about plant-based meat as one of the innovations that he thinks should be supported. And yet this is not without a little bit of pushback. You know, we famously saw the Unilever case with Hampton Creek pushing back against the use of mayo and that kind of blew up in their faces. But now we're facing kind of a new iteration of that with this proposed dairy law,, uh, with this proposed dairy law, right? Saying that you can't call soy milk, soy milk, or you can't use the word milk. Can you kind of explain what's going on with that? Yeah, this is, so the Good Food Institute, we're, we're extremely

gratified by the amount of support that we've gotten. And, uh, we've had the capacity. We were, um, we launched last February with two people. Um, we 15 people. By the end of the year, we'll probably be close to 40. And we have a policy department, which includes a policy director who is a food lawyer. She was teaching food law at Valparaiso Law School for the last five years. And we also have a lobbyist. And one of the things that they're working on is the standards of identity and the fact that some people in the dairy industry, as well as some of their friends in Congress, are trying to stop soy milk from calling itself soy milk and

almond milk from calling itself almond milk. And if you're making nut cheese, you can't use the word cheese. If you're making plant-based mayonnaise, you can't use the word mayonnaise and so on. And their reason for that is that in the 1930s, under the Food, Drug, and Cosmetic Act, Congress gave the FDA the power to make what were called standards of identity. And so the FDA says, this is what cheese is. And if you make something that doesn't include exactly what they say, this is what cheese is, under some interpretations, you're not allowed to use the word cheese on your label. is, under some interpretations, you're not allowed to use the word cheese on your label. So one of the things that we did just at the beginning of March was we filed a 40-page rulemaking petition that says, as long as you've got a modifier, so just like bread has a standard of identity, but you can have gluten-free bread, which violates the standard

of identity, and noodles have a standard of identity, but you can have rice noodles that violate the standard of identity. And exactly the same way, you should be able to have almond milk and soy milk and nut cheese and all of these things. So we're asking FDA for a clarification. At the same time, there's actually legislation that's been introduced that would go beyond the standards of identity, and it would codify into law the interpretation of the dairy industry. It's clearly unconstitutional. So even if it passes, I mean, we're going to work very hard to stop it from passing, because that would be a big hit to the plant-based makers of these alternative dairy products.

But even if it passes, we will immediately sue to have it overturned. On First Amendment grounds, it's censorship toward no useful government purpose. But anyway, that's the battle. It makes absolutely no sense. It is the nanny state on steroids. And we've been really, we've been pleased to see the people on the far right laughing at this. So, you know, you look at the people who are sort of libertarians and the people who are anti-regulatory. They are holding to their anti-regulatory guns on this and saying this is just absurd. It's a conservative ideal at its core, really. And it seems like a sort of desperate last-ditch attempt to kind of hold down the old guard. Yeah.

I mean, it is sort of an industry in its death throes. This is definitely a desperation move. And it's not something that a healthy industry that was doing robust business would be trying. And we think they'll fail in Congress. But even if they don't, we think they'll fail in the courts. And as somebody who lives in Washington, you know, sort of inside the Beltway with your eye on what's happening on Capitol Hill, you know, what's your take on the impact of the new administration on the regulatory bodies and quasi-regulatory bodies like the FDA and the EPA? Like, you know, we're hearing about the dismantling of these and, you know, the impact that that's going to have, the sort of trickle-down effect of that.

Like, what are you seeing and, you know, what's your prognosis for how this is going to play out? Depends a lot on the issue. You know, you look at somebody like Scott Pruitt in charge of the EPA or, I mean, a lot of the deregulatory nature of the current administration and an awful lot of the Congress is going to be bad for things like humane slaughter and clean water and climate change. On the other hand, if what your goal is, is to use markets and food technology, I mean, that's got bipartisan support. So we don't need a deregulatory tone in Washington in order to be successful with plant-based and clean meat alternatives. But it's not going to hurt.

You know, the deregulation, it's hard to imagine a Congress and an administration that are making all of these noises about the nanny state, then going ahead and passing legislation that says you can't call almond milk almond milk. And that's the sort of thing that everybody should be laughing out of any hearing room. So on the one hand, we have, it seems to me that there's two fronts here. We have a population of people that are kind of in our collective space who are trying to modify behavior through kind of understanding the ethical and environmental and health implications of an animal-based diet. And then on the other side, we have technology trying to innovate out of this.

And in terms of how those two things impact behavior, you're somebody who kind of went from one and is now more in the other. Because I think the idea that suddenly everybody's going to get struck vegan and this is how we're going to solve this, at least the environmental problem is, you know, it's, it's not, it's probably not going to happen, you know, as much as I would like that to happen. Um, and yet at the same time, I, I find myself feeling like, uh, you know, the idea that as human beings, we want to just, we create, I guess the way I think about this is as human beings, we get ourselves into these huge mess, I guess the way I think about this is,

as human beings, we get ourselves into these huge messes. And then we're like, all right, well, don't worry about it, because we're going to innovate our way out of it. We always do, right? Create a mess, innovate our way out of it. And so how can we avoid getting into these messes going forward is kind of how I try to think about it. And I understand like, look, you know, as much as I go around and give talks and do what I do, that only a small fraction of people are actually going to modify their behavior in a really significant way. And we do need the technological innovation to really shift culture on a mass scale. So how do you like think about those two ideas as somebody who, you know, you began your career at PETA, which is a very different type of organization than the organization that you're involved in now? I mean, I think they work in complement. So we certainly need to be explaining to people the environmental consequences. We need to be explaining the global health consequences,

the antibiotic issue, the animal protection consequences. But our work doing that is going to be a heck of a lot easier if we're giving that guy who ate the steak something else to choose that doesn't require that he deny whatever deep-seated desire caused him to order the steak, despite the fact that you were sitting right there. So we have, as a movement, been putting a ton of effort. And as you noted, I was 15 years at PETA. I've been vegan for 30 years. I spent 29 years of my veganism talking about the health and environmental and animal protection and global poverty reasons to be vegan. And a lot of people change as a result, but not enough is part one.

A lot of people who don't change, don't change because it's difficult. There are social pressures when you're out to eat meat because that's what everybody else is eating. If we are creating the products that are taste competitive and price competitive and making them convenient, it makes it so much easier for the folks who are raising awareness and encouraging people to change for the reasons that it makes sense to change. And at the Good Food Institute, we don't see ourselves as primarily consumer-facing. So we really are trying to create the products that will just make it easy,

make the default choice, basically, the choice that's good for animals and the environment and sustainability and global health. But a big part of what we do, we have four program areas. And the first one is fostering innovation. And half of fostering innovation is actually starting new companies.

So last year, we started two companies from scratch. And we encourage people to reach out to us. And we look for people who are entrepreneurs and scientists to help us make these companies that fill white space. And then the other half of it is going to top schools for entrepreneurship and tissue engineering and synthetic biology and plant biology, going to these schools. And that's where we do play the moral card because people want their lives to mean something. I mean, people want to do well by their families and they want their lives to mean something. And so we go to the MIT School of Management or Harvard Business

School or the Stanford School of Business and we go and we say, look at this colossal market opportunity. And if you take advantage of it, if you fill it say, you know, look at this colossal market opportunity. And if you take advantage of it, if you fill it, if you join one of these companies or start one of these companies, you'll do very well for yourself and your life will have meaning. You'll be on the cutting edge of solving these really big problems, climate change and food security and the end of antibiotics and animal protection. So that's a big part of what we do. And that's where the moral card comes in for us. But for the people, for the consumer on the street, you know, we need to make

it as easy as possible for them. Because what we found is you tell them, they resonate with it. You know, we're talking about the fact that people don't want to see how meat is made. Like nobody wants to support that cruelty. But we need to give them an easy option that in the sort of cacophony that is our daily lives, we need to give them an option that's easy to choose. And that's what we're focused on. Right. I think that with the millennial generation and even the generation below it, you see tremendous receptivity to all of these ideas and actually a demand for that kind of transparency. You know, they're so much more conscious about how they spend their consumer dollars than people from my generation. And I think that

bodes really well and makes me optimistic for the future. The trickier demographic are, you know, people in their 40s and their 50s who've just been doing what they've been doing their whole life. And I think in that, you know, when you look at that sector of the population, it's going to have to be about convenience and price and taste. Yeah. I mean, I think convenience, price and taste are going to be a pretty big deal for everybody. Right. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. But I think, you know, you do see, you know, there is a there is a different sensibility with a young person where they are thinking about these things in different kinds of ways than older people are. Yeah. I mean, I spend a fair bit of my time right now on college campuses.

So we're hiring a couple people to sort of do that. We're hiring two people to just be like full-time focused on schools to like just create the next generation of innovators and scientists who are dedicated to this. But it's been me for the first year of our organization. So I spend a lot of time on these campuses. And on the one hand, you have a lot of awareness and you have a lot of people talking about these issues. On the other hand, if you go to the cafeteria and look at what people are eating, it's the same stuff. So I see, you read in the news and it's like you ask people, how much do you care about the environmental consequences of your food? How much do you care about this, that, and the other thing? And the numbers are really high and encouraging.

But if you go to- It doesn't translate into the behavior, right? Right. If you go to a grocery store and you ask people, why did you buy the stuff that you buy? Or you go to a restaurant and you ask people why they ordered the stuff that they ordered, it's price, it's taste, and it's the fact that it's there. So there is a growing awareness among millennials. And to some degree, there's a growing change in consumer habits. But it's not as great as the consciousness would indicate. I mean, we still need to make it easier for those people. I mean, one thing that's deeply encouraging is they do legitimately care in a way that

the previous generation didn't care as much. And our hope is that that will translate into more and more of the sort of best and the brightest actually taking these jobs and being part of the transformation. I know you did a debate at Stanford a while back with John Mackey where you had to, who was the counterpoint in that discussion? Yeah, we did that at Stanford and then we also did it at Harvard a little bit more recently, and we're going to be doing it at Yale next semester. But yeah, the debate topic is eating meat is unhealthy and unethical, so it's sort of a negative affirmative, which is a little odd for a debate resolution. But the opposition in both cases was the debate team, so it was two

people selected by the debate team to argue that eating meat is ethical and healthy. How did that go? Oh, I mean, it was... I mean, you're vetted in this subject matter for 30 years, right? I can't imagine... They're elite debaters from the top schools in the world. It went very well. I think probably both of them are available online for anybody who wants to watch. They were definitely both recorded. But I mean, you know, on the one hand, I mean, they're elite debaters. So they did as well as you can do with their side and the resolution. But it's a pretty indefensible position.

Like, it is just physiologically true that eating animals is environmentally harmful. All of the evidence, as you know, you discussed with, I'm forgetting Kip's, Kip's... Oh, Keegan? Yeah, Kip and Keegan, you know, they're what the health movie, they point out like the science is overwhelming that it's unhealthy to eat meat.

Environmentally, it's an environmental nightmare from an animal welfare standpoint. In the best case scenario, it's causing animals to die for no useful purpose other than, you know, sort of human, you know, we like the taste of flesh and therefore animals are going to sacrifice their lives. So it's a pretty easy position for us to take. Obviously, it's a position that through the way that they lead their lives, 98% of Americans, you know, appear on the basis of the way that they're living to disagree with it. But once you're actually having a sort of intellectual discussion of ideas, you know, we have sort of the winning

side. But it's a lot of fun to do. And I appreciate debate teams taking us up on it. And the crowds are fantastic. So it's really good. What are the biggest challenges that you're facing in the near future with respect to, you know, winning the hearts and minds and getting these new innovative products, you know products into the marketplace in a mainstream way? There's some pretty serious scientific hurdles. So, I mean, it was remarkable to us to realize how much we didn't know that we didn't know about plant-based meat innovation. So, I kind of had it in the back of my mind. Bill Gates has this line in his Future of Food blog in which he says 92% of plant proteins have not yet been explored for their capacity to turn them into

plant-based meat. Oh, wow. I didn't, I didn't know that. That's, well, that's, that's encouraging actually to me. It's deeply encouraging, but it's, it, no, it's incredibly encouraging and it's really interesting. But when we jumped in, so one of the things that our scientists are working on, we have a team of scientists at the Good Food Institute, and one of the things that they're working on is technological readiness assessments for both the clean meat space and the plant-based meat space. And what that means is we're here wherever we are, so basically no industry to speak of for plant-based meat or clean meat. Where we want to get is price competitiveness and taste competitiveness. What do we need to do to get from here to there? With the clean meat field, we went into it thinking, okay, there are going to be four

principal hurdles, and we need to figure out how to clear them. And that turned out to be true. That is, in fact, what we discovered to be the case. With plant-based meat, the number of things that we didn't know about plant-based meat innovation is really quite remarkable. So plant-based meat up until five years ago, it was wheat and it was soy. Now it's wheat and it's soy and it's pea. But there are tons of other options. And we're really, even with the wheat and the soy and the pea, we're not using crops that have been optimized to be turned into plant-based meat.

We're sort of using not exactly waste products, but just about waste products. And we're using ancient extrusion technology. And the innovation just basically has not really existed until Beyond Meat and Impossible Foods. And that's because these are tiny industries. They're a quarter of 1% of the meat industry. Nobody has really dived in until these two companies to try to figure out how to compete with the meat industry. It's all of the competition has been sort of for the vegetarian market. So there is just overwhelming innovation that needs to happen and we need to do the science.

What are some of the other plants that the industry is looking at? Well, I mean, the industry at this point for plant-based meat innovation. Four companies. Yeah, exactly. Exactly. I mean, you know, it's so right now, it's just those, it's just beyond meat and possible foods and Hampton Creek that are really diving in to figure out how you turn plant proteins into alternatives to animal products. Although at GFI, we're doing a ton of that and we're doing it in the public domain. So the stuff that's happening with those companies tends to be proprietary. Whereas with GFI, we're going to do everything and just put everything online in the resources section of

our website. But we're hiring a lot of people. So if you have listeners who are scientists or entrepreneurs, I mean, look at our website. We have 18 job openings at the moment at gfi.org upslash jobs. And we are attempting to pair money with scientists. Like that's one of the key things that we're doing. But we need the talent. We need people at these universities. We need people at these universities. We need entrepreneurs starting these companies. We need people working for GFI. And then we need significant resources from the government level and the foundation level and scientific research universities all working in concert. And then these companies, it's pretty easy to get

the companies that were excited about their initial sort of seed funding. But once they're at series A, series B, series C, nobody has failed for lack of funding yet. But finding the money, the sort of impact money to make sure that these companies are successful. That's another thing that we're focused on. I am absolutely convinced that clean meat meets the goals that Mark Post and Uma Valetti have set for it in the 10-year timeframe that they have laid out, assuming the VC money is there to hire the scientists and support the research. And, you know, that's an untested hypothesis so far, although considering how much impact-based money is currently going into solving food security and climate change issues, I think it will be. Right. And in the short run, it's about getting Impossible Foods,

the Impossible Burger, into a bunch of restaurants and getting consumers sort of acclimated to it and testing it and excited about it, right? So I know it's at Crossroads. Is it being rolled out in other restaurants across the country or what's going on on that front? With both Impossible Foods and Beyond Meat, right? Well, Beyond Meat seems like it's everywhere now. They can't meet the demand yet.

Like they don't have the production capacity to meet demand. But Impossible just open this Oakland plant, right? I think maybe like today. Oh, today. Oh, wow. Maybe not even quite today. They haven't opened the Oakland. They're doing groundbreaking on the Oakland plant, I think next week, actually. But yeah, I mean, they're about to open their plant, and they will produce as quickly as they can produce produce and they will have orders for all of it. I mean, Beyond Meat is not yet actually, the Beyond Burger is not available even in Whole Foods nationwide yet.

And they already have other bigger chain grocery stores lining up to buy it. We also have, so we're doing a lot of stuff with sort of import export and there is overwhelming demand for both the Impossible Burger and the Beyond Meat Burger. I mean, this really is a market sector that borderline doesn't exist yet, which makes it the perfect time for people who have a lot of energy and an entrepreneurial spirit for really smart, dedicated, hardworking people. It's the perfect time to get involved. perfect time to get involved. It's exciting. I mean, all of these, you know, plant versions of animal products, we're now at this tipping point where they taste good, they're healthier, they're more readily available. And it becomes harder and harder to kind of defend the old way of doing it.

Right. I mean, once you have the alternatives, once you, I mean, like right now, and it's, you know, we've sort of talked about this a little bit repeatedly, but I mean, people are living in cognitive dissonance. 100% of people don't want animals to be gratuitously, I mean, Gallup actually, so maybe it's 97%. Gallup in 2008 and in 2013, they did this poll and they asked people, do you think animals should be legally protected from abuse? And 97% of people said yes. I mean, even the libertarians think animals should be legally protected from abuse. Those laws are okay. People are opposed to cruelty to animals, and yet 98% of Americans are still eating meat. So they're living in cognitive dissonance. This allows people to actually live according to their values. And it sounds like a utopian pipe dream, but this is actually happening.

It is. It's very, very exciting. I mean, both the clean meat stuff, which is the exact same thing, and the plant-based meat stuff that is basically biomimicry, it is very exciting. It is absolutely happening. It's almost like an arms race, though, because we are, you know, the sort of environmental issues that we're facing are escalating so rapidly and we are getting sicker and sicker. Like, you know, and so these two things are butting up against each other. Like, it's almost like who's going to who's going to win?

Like, you've got to innovate faster because these problems are ramping up so quickly and reaching their own tipping point. are ramping up so quickly and reaching their own tipping point. So are you optimistic that we're going to be able to solve this problem? Or are we going to reach that 2% number that we fear so much with greenhouse gases? I'm extraordinarily optimistic. I mean, I think two things. I think one is I am extraordinarily optimistic. And I'm mostly extraordinarily optimistic because there are an awful lot of people who are a heck of a lot smarter than I am who are extraordinarily optimistic. And I'm willing extraordinarily optimistic because there are an awful lot of people who are a heck of a lot smarter than I am who are extraordinarily

optimistic. And I'm willing to just follow their lead and go, I'll be optimistic too. And then two is, even if the pessimistic scenarios come to pass, we still need to mitigate. Like even if a really bad stuff, I mean, we're sort of past the tipping point on climate change, bad stuff is going to happen on climate change. And now, like, how do we mitigate the negative consequences? So this is a way to mitigate the negative consequences, like humanity is going to persist in some form, kind of no matter what happens. So there is still overwhelming cause to sort of stop pouring fuel on the fire. And this is, you know, this is stop pouring fuel and it's taken out the garden hose and, you know, spraying it on the fire. So there

is already some damage. There is going to continue to be some damage, but I think we can probably stave off the worst effects and mitigate a lot of the ill effects through these sorts of technologies. So if somebody's listening to this and they're getting excited, these are brand new ideas, they didn't know anything about this, and they're ready to go. They're ready to put their dollar where it counts most. What kind of action points can you give that person given the fact that they can't get the Impossible Burger yet? I mean, perhaps a lot of people can get Beyond Meat and Hampton Creek products. I'm sure there's places where you still can't. But what should people be doing or thinking about

in terms of how they're spending their hard-earned consumer dollars? Well, I think Hampton Creek products are available everywhere. Are they? Yeah. Is it international too or just in the United States? I'm not sure. I know it's, I mean, they've hit every nook and cranny of the United States. They're in Walmart, they're in Target, they're in, I think, everything. And Beyond Meat does have products in every Whole Foods and most other grocery stores as well. The Beyond Burger isn't everywhere, but their chicken strips and the Beast Burger and other

things I think are everywhere. I mean, for individual consumers, the whole foods plant-based diet is certainly going to be the healthiest and the best and the most environmentally sustainable. But for friends and family who are not yet vegetarian or vegan, this is a fantastic transition food, these plant-based alternatives. Not as good as the Beyond Burger or the Impossible Burger, but really, I mean, Tofurky is great. Field Roast is great. Boca burgers are great. There are a lot of plant-based options that meat eaters have never tried and that they will try if you encourage them to. I mean, these are what I've been leaning on for 30 years. Right.

They're not perfect, but they work well. So you're celebrating your 30-year vegan anniversary. Yeah. Right? So I got to ask you, have you tried the Memphis meats? I have. You have? I have.

So you still consider yourself vegan? This is like getting into an interesting terrain, right? So you've eaten this, quote-unquote, clean meat. You still consider yourself vegan. Yeah. So then it goes back to language, right? terrain right so you've you've eaten this quote-unquote clean meat it's still you still consider yourself vegan yeah then it goes back to language right like how are we defining vegan uh and what does that mean like for me i don't like i'm not somebody like i feel like i've kind of moved past that and so i don't know you know like i've had beyond meat i've had all these products um i haven't had the memphis meat uh clean meat yet um but i don't know, you know, like I've had Beyond Meat. I've had all these products. I haven't had the Memphis Meat, clean meat yet.

But I don't know, like I'm thinking like, do I want to try that? Do I not make, I don't know that I want, I don't know that I want, like I don't crave it. I don't need it. And I understand the power of it for somebody transitioning. But it's an interesting dilemma for me. Like, I don't know, maybe, like what would that mean if I suddenly started eating that, that meat? Yeah, no, it's true.

It's, it's a conundrum for sure. And people say, well, is it vegetarian? Well, no, it's meat. It's not vegetarian. Yeah, it's meat. It just doesn't involve a sentient animal. Yeah. I actually, I actually wrote something.

We haven't, we haven't figured out where we're going to submit it yet, but I wrote something about the fact that I've been vegan for 30 years. And a couple of times at Taco Bell, they put beef in my taco and I bit into it and I was like, ah! And once at an animal rights gala, the people who were working the gala had meat pizzas. And those of us who are animal rights activists just assume this is an animal rights gala. Everything's vegan. And it turned out that the pizza wasn't. So, I think I've had three or four times when I accidentally ate meat. This is the only time I've intentionally eaten meat in 30 years. And, you know, I mean, veganism can't just be about an ingredient list. Like, veganism is an ethic. And there is no animal suffering in this.

And the potential positive consequences are just overwhelmingly good. I suppose if I were eating meat on a regular basis, I mean, eating clean meat on a regular basis, I probably wouldn't call myself vegetarian or vegan, but I tried it once and I still consider myself to be vegan. And I still counted at 30 years, even though it's actually been a couple months. Right. Amazing. Well, it was great talking to you, man. It was awesome to talk to you, Rich.

Really just such a pleasure. I'm a huge fan. All of us at GFI are such a huge fan of your work and everything that you're doing and love the podcast and just who you are and what you are and how you are in the world. It's really inspirational. I really appreciate that. But you're the one who's out there in the trenches really provoking change in a very profound way. And I applaud your work.

And I appreciate your advocacy and everything that you're doing. It really is changing the world. And I can't wait to see how this continues to unfold and shape culture, consumer habits. It's really exciting. And, uh, I like you share that optimism and, uh, it's going to be, it's a cool time. Really, really cool time.

It's a really cool time. It's awesome to be a part of this movement with people like you. It's really, uh, it's just so many, so many beautiful people doing so many beautiful things. Awesome. So if you're, uh, excited about Bruce and his work, the best way to learn more is to go to Good Food Institute's website, which is gfi.org. Gfi.org. Yep. And if you go to the Our Team page, there are links for everybody's emails right there. Cool. And you're at Bruce G. Friedrich on Twitter. That's right. Friedrich, I-E and C-H. Exactly.

All right, cool. Awesome, man. Thank you. Thank you. Peace. Plants. All right, I hope you guys dug that. Blew my mind a little bit.

I hope it did the same for you. Please share your thoughts on this episode with not only me, but also with Bruce. You can find him on Twitter. Again, he's at Bruce G. Friedrich. Friedrich is I-E-D-R-I-C-H. And also, again, all three of my online courses, The Ultimate Guide to Plant-Based Nutrition, The Art of Living with Purpose,

and How to Build a Conscious Relationship, all three of these are available at mindbodygreen.com, and they're on sale through May 4th, 10% off. You can find them by just going to that website, mindbodygreen.com, clicking on classes or searching my name. And when you use the promo code mindbodygreen at checkout, you'll earn that 10% off. So check that out.

Again, only through May 4th. Also, Plant Power Ireland. It's coming up July 24th through 31. We're going to Ballyvalane, which is this amazing James Bond-like manor that sits on 90 acres in the Irish countryside. Seven days of transformation with Julie and I, as well as special appearances by the Happy Pear guys.

We're going to cook. We're going to eat. We're going to run. We're going to meditate. We're going to do tea ceremony. We're going to have intense, incredible workshops on a variety of subjects, Ayurvedic treatments. It's going to be intense. It's going to be fun. It's going to be amazing. All designed to really help you unlock that best self and transform your life wholesale. So if that sounds like something

you would be into, you can learn more at ourplantpowerworld.com. Still some spaces available. If you'd like to support this show and my work, share it with your friends on social media, leave a review on iTunes, click that subscribe button on iTunes. If you're going to buy something on Amazon, click through the banner ad at richroll.com or just type in richroll.com forward slash Amazon, buy whatever you're going to buy on Amazon. Amazon throws us some commission change, doesn't cost you anything extra. Also, you can support my work on Patreon through a financial contribution, which is amazing. People are doing that. I'm so touched and honored and really appreciate that tremendously. If you would like to receive a free short weekly email from me, I send one out every

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