The Rich Roll Podcast - Bruce Friedrich On The Clean Meat Revolution

Episode Date: November 5, 2018

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 to feed the maximum number of people possible. But in actuality, this industry is inexcusably inefficient and unsustainable long-term. It requires untold amounts of land, water and feed. It contributes more greenhouse gas emissions that the entire transportation combined. It's depleting our soil. It's polluting our water table. It's acidifying our oceans. It's making us sick. And it's driving the greatest mass species extinction in the history of mankind. In fact, 60% of all animal species have been rendered extinct in just the last 50 years. We can't continue down this path. We desperately need a better way. So let's talk about it. This week I sit down for a second conversation with Bruce Friedrich, a leading innovator in food systems and policy. 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. Picking up where we left off in April 2017 (RRP 286), Bruce brings us up to speed on the rapidly evolving frontier of food technology and plant-based innovation, including a fascinating deep dive into the cutting edge of clean meat and the revolutionary science that is making possible the production of animal foods by way of cultured cells harvested without slaughter. This is a conversation about the politics of agriculture and the subsidies, corporations, representatives and lobbyists that support it. Bust mostly, this is about current advances designed to improve food systems in the interest of human, animal and planetary well-being. Humanity currently faces an unprecedented, seemingly insurmountable environmental crisis. But Bruce casts an optimistic forecast — 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 dilemmas. Chock-a-block with incredible information, this exchange will leave you not only better informed on the aforementioned subjects, but inspired to invest more deeply in where your food comes from, how it impacts the precious world we share and how together we can forge the future of food for ourselves and generations to come. Incredibly intelligent, considerate and measured, it was an honor to sit down with Bruce. I sincerely hope you enjoy the conversation. Peace + Plants, Rich

The two big questions in food are, how do we feed 9.7 billion people by 2050? And what do we do about climate change? Raising crops to feed them to animals so that we can eat animals is just vastly inefficient. My vision of the future is people well-fed, people well-educated. Everybody has health care. It's a future where people have the capacity to take a step back and reflect on their lives. People are practicing mindfulness from the highest to the lowest echelons. And a part of that is the good food future, for sure. A part of that is if people are eating meat,

it's plant-based meat or it's clean meat. But I want everybody up at self-actualization, and I'd love to see that happen by 2050. That's Bruce Friedrich, this week on The Rich Roll Podcast. The Rich Roll Podcast. Hey, people, how you guys doing? What's happening? How are you? How is your life going? Is it headed in the proper trajectory? Are you prepared for the holiday season that is quickly descending upon us? Have you started to think about what you would like 2019 to look like? Well, I'm here to help. My name is Rich Roll. I'm your host. This is my podcast. Welcome to it. Got a great show for you guys

today. Today's guest is Bruce Friedrich. Bruce is a leading innovator in food systems and policy. He is the executive director of both the Good Food Institute as well as a founding partner of New Crop Capital, both of which are organizations focused on replacing animal products with plant and culture-based alternatives, which is what we're going to talk about here today. Bruce graduated magna cum laude from Georgetown Law and Phi Beta Kappa from Grinnell College. He holds additional degrees from Johns Hopkins University, as well as the London School of Economics, and he was inducted into the United States Animal Rights Hall of Fame in 2004.

Today marks Bruce's second appearance on the show, his first being a little over a year and a half ago. That was episode 286. And much has transpired on the frontier of food tech, food innovation, as well as clean meat. So I wanted to have him back to bring us up to speed. And I'm glad I did, as this episode is chock-a-block with incredible information that I think will leave you with a greater understanding of where we currently sit with respect to the implications of our current agricultural systems,

as well as the many changes afoot. And all of this is coming up in a couple of few, but first. We're brought to you today by recovery.com. I've been in recovery for a long time. It's not hyperbolic to say that I owe everything good in my life to sobriety. And it all began with treatment and experience that I had that quite literally saved my life. And in the many years since, I've in turn helped many suffering addicts and their loved ones find treatment. And with that, I know all too well just how confusing and how overwhelming and how

challenging it can be to find the right place and the right level of care, especially because, unfortunately, not all treatment resources adhere to ethical practices. It's a real problem. who created an online support portal designed to guide, to support, and empower you to find the ideal level of care tailored to your personal needs. They've partnered with the best global behavioral health providers to cover the full spectrum of behavioral health disorders, including substance use disorders, depression, anxiety, eating disorders, gambling addictions, and more. Navigating their site is simple. Search by insurance coverage, location, treatment type, you name it. Plus, you can read reviews from former patients to help you decide. Whether you're a busy exec, a parent of a struggling teen, or battling addiction yourself, I feel you. I empathize with you. I really do. And they have treatment options for you.

Life in recovery is wonderful. And recovery.com is your partner in starting that journey. When you or a loved one need help, go to recovery.com and take the first step towards recovery. To find the best treatment option for you or a loved one, again, go to recovery.com. Okay, Bruce Friedrich. Picking up where we left off in episode 286,

this is a deep dive into food innovation. It's a discussion as much about our currently flawed system of food production as it is about plant-based food innovation. It's a discussion as much about our currently flawed system of food production as it is about plant-based food innovation, as well as the advent of so-called clean meat, animal foods raised not through traditional means, but rather by way of cultured cells harvested without slaughter and the technology and the economics behind it. We canvass the current state of affairs. We discuss

the ethical implications of these mind-bending innovations and the opportunity that they present with respect to forging a more ethical and environmentally sustainable future. If these subjects are new to you, they just might come across a little bit like science fiction, but make no mistake, it is indeed happening. And Bruce has this really great, keen facility for painting this picture of the future and the laudable mission of Good Food Institute, GFI, in a very clear and understandable way. Final note, this show, in fact, almost all my shows these days are viewable on YouTube. For those who want to watch my conversations, go to youtube.com forward slash Rich Roll.

Subscribe if you haven't already. And the podcast is also now available on Spotify. So enough from me. Let's let Bruce do the talking. Good to see you, my friend. It's really good to be here. Thank you. I think the last time we did this was two years ago. How long ago was it? It was a while ago.

Yeah, it was a little while ago, maybe 18 months, a little more. I remember it was the dead of winter in New York. That's all I remember. It was very cold. has happened since then. So I'm excited to have you back to bring us up to speed on everything clean meat, everything that's happening in the plant-based food movement. You guys just had a big conference, right? We did, yeah.

Good food institute conference. Tell me about that. Well, it was a conference focused, day one was predominantly on plant-based meat. Day two was predominantly on clean meat. And we had kind of everybody who's anybody in the plant-based meat and the clean meat market sectors. And then we invited – we had two panels on plant-based meat and two panels on clean meat where we invited people from industry in the one case and we invited scientists in the other case where we think they have the capacity to basically move these market sectors forward in a really big way, but they're not currently involved. So for example, people who are doing extruders and people who are doing crop sciences

and people who are doing xenofree media for therapeutics. And basically the real goal of the conference, we wanted people to network. We wanted to connect investors with startups. We wanted to get scientists more excited about the space. But we really wanted the market sectors that are currently existing and the scientists who are currently active, they're not looking at plant-based meat or clean meat at the moment, but they would be essential to plant-based and clean meat accelerating. So we brought them, and it was a phenomenal success in that regard. Yeah, it seems like that's one of the, I mean, Good Food Institute takes this multi-pronged approach to, you know, developing this new way of thinking about food and how we're going to innovate for the future. But one of the more compelling prongs in your approach is trying to cultivate cooperation,

not just amongst all of the sort of major players in the clean meat and plant-based food movement, but also with the people that are outside of it that can contribute to this rapidly growing revolution that we're experiencing right now. So, what came out of that? What are some of the things that are happening right now in this world that are perhaps new since we last spoke? Well, there is a tremendous amount that's new since we last spoke. So, all of GFI's departments are ramping up, which I'm very excited about. And what you just said is true. We see ourselves certainly as helping the current players. So the

current startups and the current companies that exist in plant-based meat and clean meat to help them all to coordinate across a variety of sectors from science to policy to networking with sort of big corporations, big food corporations and meat corporations. But we also really want to create a pipeline of scientists. We really want to get the therapeutics industry that exists thinking about cross-application of what it is that they're doing to the food sector. In other words, to clean meat. We want to get people who are currently funding for the environment or sustainability or global health thinking about the value of funding plant-based meat and clean meat R&D. So we're doing a lot across our programmatic areas at GFI, and there's a tremendous amount that's happened since the last

time we talked. I think we had 13 or 14 staff. Now we have 53. We'll probably be more than 70 by the end of the year in the US and hopefully somewhere on the order of 20 internationally. So a lot happening. But the conference really worked for that. There were people who run extruder companies and people who run media companies and scientists who are working in tissue engineering and people who are doing plant biology. And they came to the conference and they learned about how much good they can do in the world while also doing very well for themselves if they refocus some of their efforts into plant-based meat and clean meat. Really excited by an email that I got from a Berkeley professor in the plant sciences department. And she said that she came to the conference just sort of to explore what was happening.

Yeah. And she walked away completely enthused and talking about how she will be educating her students about this and encouraging them to take the class we designed at Berkeley in plant-based meat and clean meat and to think about focusing their careers here. And that was just replicated over and over and over again with people at really big food companies, people who are in therapeutics, who are in crop sciences, who are thinking about chemical engineering and mechanical engineering, and they're currently in the food industry. And now they're thinking about plant-based meat and clean meat and how they can plug in. It's very exciting. That's cool. So yeah, you guys created or are behind the very first

college course on clean meat, right? And is that at Berkeley? That's where it is. It is at Berkeley. And we're launching one this semester at Stanford and another one at Penn State. We've got a MOOC that will be coming out in the next five or six weeks. Massive open online course, M-O-O-K. So it will be an 11-week sort of crash course in plant-based meat and clean meat. And it seems like it's a subject matter that really is multidisciplinary, right? Because you have to understand chemistry, you have to understand cell biology, like you have to understand engineering, you have to understand, I don't know, brewing. Like, what do you need to understand to really wrap your head around what clean meat is and what is going on and how we're going to innovate this future?

Well, it's not super hard to understand at sort of a basic level, but as with any sort of production scale food supply, there is a tremendous amount that you need to understand about sort of a basic level, but as with any sort of production scale food supply, there is a tremendous amount that you need to understand about sort of each sector. So, you know, for plant-based meat, we need to be doing crop optimization and we need to figure out, you know, what are the proteins that are going to be best turned into plant-based meat. And we need to figure out what that looks like. Then we need to look at, figure out, you know, how you put all these things together in order to make something that biomimics meat. And you need to figure out what that looks like. Then we need to figure out how you put all these things together in order to make something that biomimics meat. And you need to figure out what the production technology is going to be. It's really sort of fascinating to us. When we first started looking

at plant-based meat and clean meat, we sort of thought we had plant-based meat figured out because there are a bunch of companies doing it. And clean meat was going to be really complex and difficult because nobody essentially was doing it. Memphis Meats was just getting started. There was Super Meat and Mosa Meats just getting started. None of the three of them had incorporated. But what we found is that the plant-based meat is actually a lot more complex than the clean meat because clean meat, we've got cross-applicability from therapeutics, from tissue engineering. So everything happening in George Church's lab at Harvard Medical School, you could just like sort of take all of that and say, okay,

we're going to do food now and start producing clean meat. With plant-based meat, you've sort of got the pioneers beyond meat and impossible foods, but there is limitless other stuff that could be happening. And even impossible foods and beyond meat are pretty tiny when you compare them to, you know, sort of the big meat industry or self-therapeutics. So, a tremendous amount to learn. At its most basic level, though, plant-based meat is let's take plants. You know, there's nothing in meat that doesn't exist in plants. Meat is lipids and aminos and minerals and water. Let's figure out how we take those constituent parts, put them together and process them so that they biomimic

meat, so that they give people everything that they like about meat, but using plants. And because it's so much more efficient, it will be less expensive. And then clean meat is similar, except you take the products of tissue engineering. So how are we going to grow cells? How are we going to put them on scaffolds so that they can grow? How are we going to put them into a bioreactor? Like, what does this look like at food grade, which obviously has to be significantly less expensive than tissue engineering for therapeutics? Yeah, yeah, yeah. Well, I want to get into clean meat, but let's start with plant-based meat. It seems that pea protein has sort of been the protein of choice as a foundational basis for creating these foods. Are we moving in different directions now? Like, you know,

where are we sourcing those nutrients, the lipids, the proteins, and what does that future look like? Yeah, I mean, this is one of the sort of interesting aha moments for us when we were thinking about plant-based meat and clean meat. And the fact that up until Ethan Brown comes along in 2009, so Ethan was working, Ethan's the founder of Beyond Meat. Right. And he was working in clean energy. And he read the UN report about the climate change impact of the meat industry. And he pretty much simultaneously, or at about the same time, heard about some pea protein research that was going on at the University of Missouri.

And the idea of using peas to basically get you the taste, the texture, other things that people like about meat. And he jumped in and that was sort of the first time anybody had ever looked at crops with the idea of optimizing them to create something that tastes like meat. Up until that point, all of the companies were using either wheat or soy and it was the waste product of wheat and soy. So for wheat, it was the waste product of carbohydrates. For soy, it was the waste product of oil. And soy, it was the waste product of oil. And it was sort of, let's cram this stuff together and make vegetarians eat it. Right. So we can just not have to throw stuff away and maybe create an additional revenue stream.

Yeah, no, exactly. To supplement our main business. Exactly. But it was basically the waste product. So pea protein was the first of the proteins to really be optimized for plant-based meat. And other companies have jumped on board. But there's really no reason it should be pea protein. So people are looking at lupin.

They're looking at lentils. They're looking at oats. Really kind of any source that has protein. And Impossible Foods is using potato protein. Oh, I didn't know that. Yeah, and they're optimizing potato protein for the Impossible burgers. So even products that you don't generally think of as being particularly high protein, really kind of any crop. And this goes back to that Bill Gates

line when he tried Beyond Meat's plant-based chicken, and he wrote a blog called The Future of Food. And he said, what I just tasted, it's not just a clever meat substitute, it is the future of food. Hence the title of the article. He said 92% of plant proteins, plants have not been explored for their capacity to be turned into plant-based meat. And that's still true. And it's also true that most of the work that's going on in this space is protected by IP. It's going on in private universities. So one of the things we're doing at GFI is really trying hard through our science team to change that. And we're launching fellowship programs.

We're identifying the top 24 universities globally for plant-based meat and clean meat, the top 24 universities in the U.S. for plant-based meat and clean meat. Most of these universities are doing nothing now, but they have the basic agricultural sciences or the basic tissue engineering or biochemistry. They have the right departments. They have the right funding. They have the right departments, they have the right funding, they have the right research focus, and we're going to be going to them and strongly encouraging them to put some of their resources into plant-based meat and clean meat. Yeah. I would think that the universities that have strong agricultural studies programs would be obvious choices, but I'm wondering whether you get pushback from them because there's a certain

status quo and that perhaps the universities with strong engineering programs and science, you know, a science focus might be more open to, you know, the possibility of the future. I mean, have you had those kinds of conversations? Have you gotten pushback from the academic sector? Not so far. I mean, it may happen. But so far, there's uniform enthusiasm. I mean, and this goes to sort of one of the other revelations of this space is that the vast majority of people working in the meat industry are not especially excited to be working in the meat industry. They have the noble goal of supplying high-quality protein to lots of people inexpensively. I mean, if that's your goal and that's what it is for pretty much everybody at a place like Tyson or Purdue or Smithfield, if that's your goal, this is a better way to do that.

It's also generally the goal even at the land-grant universities. So, I mean, I think cattle ranching and regenerative agriculture are sort of the two exceptions to that. But the vast majority of what happens in the meat industry doesn't have to involve raising live animals, and it doesn't have to involve slaughter. And so we generally meet with enthusiasm, especially when we start talking to people about how this is like, you know, there's a lot of discomfiture in the meat industry about undercover investigations, about the link to antibiotic resistance, about the link to climate change, about animal slaughter. And this gets people past all of that while doing still what

is their fundamental goal, which is let's produce high-quality protein for people to eat. Right, right. Well, it's undeniable that this is on the rise. I mean, I was looking at some of the statistics and they're pretty staggering. I mean, it a 17% growth in the plant-based food sector, 23% growth in plant-based meats. The plant-based food sector is now a $3.7 billion industry. I mean, these are gigantic numbers. And when you see that growth curve, that portends, you know, optimism for the future. Yeah, absolutely. I mean, some of these companies beyond me grew at 70%. And if they had been able to supply more, they would have been able to grow a lot more quickly than that. That was literally

the max they could produce. Field roast was just south of that. Gardein was just south of that. And the entire plant-based meat sector, as you said, grew at a rate of more than 20%. If you stay on that trajectory, which is roughly the trajectory that plant-based milk was on, if you stay on that trajectory, you're literally at 100% by 2050. So it's a third of 1% now. If you would incorporate also restaurants, it's about 1% just at grocery. It's a third of 1% once you incorporate restaurants. You stay on that trajectory. Next year, you're only at like 0.5. In about seven years, you're at 1%. But in 35 years, you're at 100% if you're growing at about 1.2 per year.

And that's the GFI goal, is it not? That is the GFI goal. I mean, we'll be incorporating clean meat into it as well. But if X is plant-based meat and Y is clean meat, the goal is that X plus Y equals roughly 100. There will still be some regenerative agriculture in there. I'm not sure what percentage that will be. But mostly, yeah, mostly it's plant-based meat and clean meat. They're more efficient. They're better in all these myriad ways. It's just a better way of producing meat. Well, when Bill Gates made that statement, I mean, that was definitely a watershed moment. And then he's put his money behind his words. I know he's invested in Beyond Meat. I'm sure he's invested in, you would know better, like all kinds of these companies. Peter Thiel is jumping in now. He just invested in like lab-grown meat for pets. That's right.

You know, like who would have thought? So, this is happening. We have the Impossible Burger in White Castle, which is crazy. Just announced nationwide. I think that might have been White Castle's fastest from regional to national introduction. Wow. I know that for Beyond Meat and TGI Fridays, it was TGI Friday's fastest from regional to national introduction. Oh, that's amazing. And why aren't we seeing either Beyond Meat or the Impossible Burger or some variation thereof in every fast food restaurant? I'm sure these conversations are happening in boardrooms,

you know, across the world. I know McDonald's was running a pilot program like in the Netherlands or someplace like that with a veggie burger, but it would seem that the time is ripe that all of these major chains would at least be testing this at the moment. Well, I mean, they might want to be testing it, but what I encounter everywhere I go is people saying, why can't I get the Impossible Burger? Why can't I get the Beyond Burger? And they literally

are producing as fast as they can possibly produce, and they simply can't meet the demand that's there. So it's just a supply chain situation right now. We just need scale. Yeah, I mean, I don't know for sure that's why McDonald's doesn't have the Beyond Burger or the Impossible Burger. Although there were people from McDonald's and other fast food and big meat industry players at our conference who were super enthused about the experience and what they were hearing. But I don't know what's happening in the boardroom at McDonald's. But I do know that if they came to Impossible or Beyond Meat and said, we would like to have your burger nationwide, neither of those companies, at least right at the moment, it would have to be a negotiation for the future. Yeah. Well, let's take a step back and just kind of canvas the landscape in terms of, you know, the benefits of moving in

this direction from a variety of perspectives. Obviously, clean meat avoids having to kill animals for food. It's better on the climate. There's a health argument. There's all of these reasons. But I think it would be good, and we probably covered this last time we spoke, but there's a lot of new people that are listening now that might not have listened to our first conversation. Let's talk first about the climate. and how you see this new revolution in plant-based foods being a curative to the ills that we're currently facing and this dystopian future that, you know, lies in, you know, that will fall into the lap of future generations if we don't figure this out. Yeah. I mean, the two big questions in food are how do we feed 9.7 billion people by 2050? And what do we do about climate change?

And coming up, what do we do about global health? Like antibiotics is up and coming as a concern. And according to the UK government, is a bigger concern for the human race than climate change. So those are sort of the big three. And they interlink, at least the first two interlink. So raising crops to feed them to animals so that we can eat animals is just vastly inefficient. And it's the same as the vast majority of what we eat doesn't go into gaining weight. The vast majority of what we eat—sorry.

It's okay. It's a podcast, Bruce. I know. I'm very excited about that. I'm glad it's not live. The vast majority of what we eat goes into just allowing us to lead our lives. And that's true for farm animals as well. So the most efficient meat is chicken. And yet it takes nine calories into a chicken to get one calorie back out. Explain that for people that are unfamiliar with how this whole thing works.

Yeah. So, I mean, it makes intuitive sense, right? So, I weigh about 185 pounds. If I do nothing but lay in bed watching bad television, not even moving, I'm going to burn like 2,400 calories every single day. What if you watch good television? Well, if it gets me excited, I suppose my adrenaline could go a little bit up if I'm shouting at the television if it's sports and I care who's going to win or something. But, I mean, basically our metabolism or my metabolism is going to burn about 2,400 calories a day. And that's just physiologically what I need just to keep my body going. The same sort of thing is true for farm animals. The vast majority of the calories that you feed them, they need just to exist.

So that it takes nine calories into a chicken to get one calorie back out in the form of that animal's flesh. Sometimes the industry will do a mass to live weight conversion. From mass to live weight,. From mass to live weight, you can get to like 2.2 or something like that. But about half of the calories in go into bones and blood and feathers and other things that we don't eat. And then you really have to like have dense calories to get that mass calorie out conversion. What really matters is energy in, energy out. If we ate those crops directly, you'd get nine calories instead of one calorie if you funnel those crops through a chicken. So that means nine times as much land,

nine times as much water, nine times as much pesticide and herbicide, nine times as much fossil fuel to power the combines. And then you're growing all of those crops. You're shipping those crops to a feed mill. You're operating the feed mill. You're shipping the feed to the farm. You're operating the farm. You're shipping the animals to the slaughterhouse, you're operating the feed mill, you're shipping the feed to the farm, you're operating the farm, you're shipping the animals to the slaughterhouse, you're operating the slaughterhouse, just a vastly inefficient system. The nine in, one out is vastly inefficient. And then you total all of the inefficiencies, all of the extra stages of production, all of the gas guzzling, pollution spewing vehicles, all of the extra factories.

And what you find is that a conservative estimate is that about 13.5%, according to the United Nations, about 13.5% of all climate change is attributable to the meat industry. It's more than all transportation combined on a- Yeah. And that's a conservative estimate from what I understand, right? I think in Cowspiracy, they said it was 15%. I think it depends on how you run the numbers. But 13.5 is pretty, you know, that's being conservative. And it's still Trump's transportation, which is what we're all focused on. Yeah, I mean, and food waste, which people are focused on. I mean, food waste is 40% of everything we grow, we throw away.

And obviously, that's bad. But this is literally 800% food waste. Literally, you're throwing away eight calories for every calorie that you consume. And then you're stacking on top of this that all of these extra factories, all of these other 18-wheelers driving around moving stuff. And, I mean, it just – environmentally, the United Nations said no matter what environmental issue you're looking at, from the smallest and most local to the largest and most global. So it's loss of biodiversity. It's water pollution. It's water use. It's soil desertification, it's chopping down the rainforest. Every single issue, the meat industry is one of the top two or three global causes of that issue,

including climate change. I mean, on a per calorie basis, somebody sits down and they eat chicken, which is the least climate change inducing meat. That's 4,000% of the climate change as if you were eating legumes like soy or peas, 40 times as much on a per-calorie basis for that meal. Yeah, it's total insanity. It is total insanity. And what does it look like with beef? Well, it's even worse. It's about 25 calories in to get one calorie back out. So, it's 2,400%. It's as though you're throwing away 24 calories for every calorie that

you consume. 330 times on a per calorie basis. I pulled that out of the recesses of my brain. It's a Lancet article from, I think, 2015. But 330 times as much climate change per calorie of protein for beef as opposed to for legumes like soy and oats. Not oats, soy and peas. So, the UN report, that was 2008? It was, yeah, the 18% one. In 2008, they said 18%. And then I think in 2013 or 2014, they said 13.5. Right, and then there was this Chatham House report as well, right?

A couple of years later? Well, there's a World Watch report that was put together. Chatham House had a really interesting report. Chatham House, the Royal Institute of International Affairs, which is the foremost think tank in Europe. And they released a report that said, unless animal product consumption goes down, every country, no country is going to be able to keep climate change under two degrees Celsius by 2050, which is the Paris Climate Agreement. Yeah, that is the Paris Climate Agreement. No country can do it unless their meat consumption goes down. And they

recommended that we educate populations about this issue. And then Worldwatch did a report from a World Bank agricultural economist and an IFC, International Finance Corporation agricultural economist, in which they basically disputed the UN numbers and they said actually climate change, more than 50% of it is attributable to animal agriculture. And that's pretty easy to find if just Google Worldwatch Institute, climate change, World Bank, it'll be like the first thing to pop up. We tend to focus on the 13.5 because it's still more than transportation. It's still awful and certainly should be motivating to people. Yeah, it's shocking. It's shocking that we're not talking about this more.

Like, what are the barriers to really being able to penetrate mainstream awareness to elevate this discussion to the highest level? everything you can at GFI, but what do you see as the biggest impediments or the challenges that you face in trying to get people to really understand this and make change? Well, Rich, we're not actually trying to get people to understand this and make change. Like, GFI's theory of change is that we have beat our head against a wall of education for decades. We have attempted to convince people to change their diets. We've educated people about climate. We've educated them about the inefficiency. I mean, Frances Moore LaPay wrote the book that turned me vegan more than 30 years ago. She wrote it almost 50 years ago now. And it makes the arguments that we're making now about the environmental impact and the inefficiency. PETA has been around since 1980 telling people

about the harm to animals. Environmental groups have been talking about the inefficiency, cow-spiracy, what the health, phenomenal films. And yet in 2017, per capita meat consumption in the US was the highest it's ever been in US history. Really? 2018 is going to be even higher. So, I mean, GFI's-

Is that US or global? It's both. Both. It's both. It's skyrocketing globally, but it's up in the US, highest it's ever been. I mean, people are generally pretty shocked by that. Sometimes people even say, well, is that because the population's bigger? And I have to say, per capita, 2017, highest it's ever been. It's interesting that that is in tandem with the growing market of plant-based foods and plant-based meats.

It is, yeah. No, it's super interesting. And I think we will see this turn as we give people what they want, but produced in a different way. So the theory of change of Impossible Foods, of Beyond Meat, of Just, of these companies, the theory of change is let's actually give people

everything that they like about meat and dairy and eggs, except let's make it less expensive. And so it will sell more and let's just replace it because every single survey that's ever been done indicates that what people make their dietary decisions on the basis of its price, its taste, its convenience. A lot of us who are having this conversations are like, well, we shop at the farmer's market or we shop at Whole Foods or we shop at our local co-op, which my wife and I do in all three cases. And we get this vision of people who are very mindful about the food that they're eating, but even watch what people are eating at Whole Foods. Like that entire sector

is less than 2%. So 98% is Albertsons and Target and Walmart and sort of that sort of grocery, like really big grocery. But even go watch what people are eating at Whole Foods. I mean, even folks at Whole Foods, it's like the price matters and the taste matters, and whether it's healthy for them is not that high on the scale, which is why obesity rates, they actually, these maps that are sort of color-coded

for obesity, they have to keep adding new colors because people are getting fatter and fatter and fatter and fatter. So you at GFI, you're like, all right, forget about trying to educate people. That's a non-starter. You use the nine calories in, one calorie out. It's like a thousand calories into trying to get people to change their habits versus what you're getting out. So instead, you have this focus on trying to leverage basically market forces to incentivize companies to innovate and to create products that people like that address these problems.

Yeah, no, it's markets and food technology, and that will be the transformation. And we do talk about how do we feed 9.7 billion people by 2050. We talk in sort of an Uber way about keeping antibiotics working because governments care about those things. And we want governments to be supporting research and development and plant-based meat and clean meat. That's a big part of what our policy department does. It's a big part of what our international engagement folks are doing in India and Israel and China and Singapore and Brazil, which is the areas where we're particularly active. And governments, you know, plant-based meat and clean meat, they are the solution. They are how governments meet their obligations under the Paris Climate Agreement. They're how governments provide safe food. Food safety is a big issue, especially in places like

China and India. They're how water is conserved. They're how resources are conserved. So we talk about these things, but we talk about them to people who are doing policy. So fund these things, roll out the regulatory red carpet for clean meat. If you are a philanthropist or an impact investor and what you care about is climate change or sustainability or global health, these are things that you should be investing in. If you're a foundation and you do grant making in these areas, you should be doing grant making on these issues. But for individual consumers, it's really go try the Impossible Burger. It tastes incredibly awesome. And then you can also talk about the impact on the climate or the impact on sustainability or whatever.

Once people are already thinking, oh, this is like an awesome new food at this hot new restaurant, it tastes amazing. Oh, and I can also feel good about the fact that I'm doing something awesome for the planet or it's healthier or whatever else. Right. Well, this approach seems to be working. I mean, there's a huge upswing in venture capital funds that are investing in this sector. We're seeing a rapidly changing regulatory landscape, which I want to get into with you. And the money is flowing, and the innovation is happening, and it's happening quickly. Yeah. And at our conference, we were just delighted to see. So, like, the biggest plant-based meat company is Morningstar Farms.

They are doing a lot of innovation internally. I mean, it was interesting to see sort of Beyond Meat and Impossible Foods come up. And they suddenly are. They're not like the old guard. Exactly, yeah. And so, sort of the legacy companies saw what happened with Impossible Foods and Beyond Meat. And, like, Google Ventures is investing in Impossible Foods. And DFJ is investing in Impossible Foods and DFJ is

investing in Memphis Meats. And so the companies that are already sort of established like Morning Star Farms and Gardein and Tofurky, they're like really upping their innovation game in response to this. I think they sort of saw their market sector as being roughly, you know, it caps at maybe $600 million. Now they're seeing their market sector as it caps at $200 billion. And they're taking that very, very seriously. All those guys sponsored the conference. They were at the conference. They're having these conversations and they're doing a lot of really exciting work internally. Yeah. And that relatively bland soy patty just ain't going to cut it anymore. You better up your game.

Yeah. I mean, unless you want to stay, I mean, even, you know, now even vegetarians aren't going to settle for that. Right. That's what I'm saying. Yeah, no, that's exactly right. But I mean, a lot of these people, like, I mean, I just love listening to like Pat Brown and Ethan Brown, no relation, but Pat Brown from Impossible and Ethan Brown from Beyond talk about their vision for their company. And both of those guys see themselves as running meat companies and their competition is the entire meat industry. Their goal is to take some significant slice of the $200 billion a year that is the U.S. meat market.

Yeah. This is the future. This is happening. The train is pulled out of the station. And I think it's a wake-up call for the industry in all of its status quo to either understand that they need to get on board or that they're going to be quickly antiquated. So you're seeing the Cargills and the Tysons investing in these companies because they realize that if they want to continue to exist, they're going to need to jump on this train. Yeah. The cover story of Business Week was about the CEO of Tyson,

a guy named Tom Hayes. So just in early September, 2018, the cover story was about him. And the final sentence of the story was, if we can make meat without the animal, why wouldn't we? Right. So second largest meat company in the world, by far the biggest meat company in the United States. And of their first, they launched a venture capital fund in 2016. Of their first four investments, two were clean meat companies, one was a plant-based meat company, and they are all in on plant-based meat and clean meat. And it just underlines the fact that like these guys, like most of the people who are executives in this company, they could have ended up at, you know, anywhere. They could have ended up selling t-shirts, right? I mean, they went to business school and they sort of worked their way up the corporate ladder and

they found themselves at Tyson and they see themselves as nobly feeding the world high quality protein at a low cost. They can feed the world higher quality protein at a lower cost with plant-based meat and clean meat. They will make more money and they won't have all the headaches of, you know, that come with farms and slaughterhouses and all of the external costs that are involved. Yeah. All right. So, let's assume there's a lot of people that are just being introduced to this idea of clean meat for the very first time. Explain to me what it is, how we create it, and why it's so exciting. Sure, so right now, if you want to get meat,

you feed an animal and the animal grows. So the animal's cells multiply and grow, and then you slaughter the animal and you eat the meat. As we've been talking about, it is a horribly inefficient process that comes with a lot of external costs that are not good. Even at its most, I mean, factory farming is one of the most efficient. I mean, if you're going to raise an animal for food, they figured out the most efficient way to do it.

Yeah. I mean, to blow this animal up in the shortest period of time to create the most food out of it. And yet it's still inherently, systemically completely inefficient. Yeah. I mean, it's a basic systemically completely inefficient. Yeah, I mean, it's a basic physiology that we just talked about. I mean, they now have chickens growing seven times as quickly as they would naturally. So chickens, as opposed to like the 1920s and 30s, they're now growing seven times as quickly

as they would naturally. They are fed massive doses of antibiotics. They barely move so that their caloric conversion is as good as it can possibly be. And it's just the nature of physiology that you can't do much better than nine in for one out. That's just, that's what you can do. And they might be able to get a little bit more efficient, but not a lot more efficient. And pigs are worse, farmed fish are worse, cattle are worse, lambs are worse. So it's just, it is a bad system if your goal is to convert food into protein. If your goal is to convert, you know, one food into meat, it's a really bad way of doing that.

So with clean meat, what you do is you take, you can take a biopsy from an animal. You take a couple of cells, very limited number of cells. You bathe those cells in nutrients, which is basically the equivalent of feeding the animal, except that all of the energy goes into causing those cells to multiply and grow. You don't have the 50% waste that comes with farm animals, 50% of the farm animal we don't eat. And it's just a far more efficient way of causing the cells to multiply and grow. You can do it on a scaffold or not on a scaffold. If you want like a chicken breast, you need a scaffold. You do it in basically a- A scaffold being like a sort of simulated skeleton to grow these cells around? Yeah, exactly. It's basically a simulated skeleton, except the scaffolds that they use,

you can either have them biodegrade or you can have them be edible. So, either of those work. So, you don't end up with something you have to throw away at the end, like the bones, or you have to turn into dog food or cat food or whatever they're going to do with the bones. And so, then you put it in basically a giant sort of meat fermenter. At end stage, it looks like a brewery. So, you could literally have a meat and beer brewery and both of the vats, both of the sort of meat fermenter and the beer fermenter, I think folks are now calling the meat one a cultivator. So you've got the cultivator, you've got the fermenter, and out is coming beer through sort of a chemical process, and out is coming meat through essentially a chemical process.

The food is a lot purer. I mean, it takes far fewer resources, but it also, because there's no intestinal tract, it doesn't have the salmonella or the campylobacter or the E. coli or the other food poisoning concerns. Or the antibiotics. Doesn't require any antibiotics, which, I mean, you know, we haven't talked that much about that. But at GFI, we're talking a lot more about antibiotics. You want to scare. Google antibiotic, the end of working antibiotics.

You know, a real scare punch in the word China. China is using antibiotics that are banned in the U.S. And the U.S. is pretty liberal about which antibiotics they will allow to be used in food. Seventy percent of antibiotics that pharmaceuticals are producing in the United States, 70 percent of them are being fed to farm animals, not because the animals are sick, but because the animals are in awful conditions in which they would get sick if they weren't fed prophylactic antibiotics. Yeah. And not to kill the lily, but we're ingesting those antibiotics and we're basically, you know, paving the way for the cultivation of some kind of superbug that could create a pandemic or an epidemic. Yeah, I mean, we are consuming the antibiotics. That's not the real health risk, although it is certainly concerning. Nicholas Kristof wrote a piece for the New York Times a few years ago about some research out of Johns Hopkins University

where Hopkins analyzed chicken flesh and found that there was like the active ingredient in Benadryl and Prozac and aspirin and antibiotics like in the meat. So that's bad enough. But the real risk factor is the superbugs. What happens is you're feeding the animals the antibiotics and the Campylobacter tries to infect the animal and it fails because of the antibiotic. And then that bug mutates so that it can get around the antibiotics. And then you scrape your

knee or you cut your finger or whatever happens and you're given antibiotics. And the antibiotics don't work because now there are these superbugs. And what used to be a routine infection ends up, you have to lop off your arm. I mean, according to the UK government, the end of working antibiotics is a greater threat to the human race than climate change. Right now, about 10,000 people in North America and Europe are dying from superbugs. They're saying it will be 10 million people per year if we stay on this trajectory. And it's slated to cost the global economy $100 trillion by 2050. Bigger threat than climate change. That's unbelievable. And solvable. I mean, it's unbelievable and it's solvable.

So like- And we're not talking about that either. I know. Yeah. No, that one isn't even being talked about. Like, folks are talking at sort of government levels and foundation levels. Like, a lot of people are talking about how do we solve climate change. Yeah, think tank culture. Well, yes, but we need think tank culture talking a lot more about antibiotics as well. So, this is the one, I mean, like at GFI, we're doing a ton of work. We have more than 50 staff.

We're trying to raise $7.5 million this year. Like, we're doing a lot of stuff. But this isn't big. We're not thinking, well, I mean, we're thinking big enough, but like the real solution is the philanthropists who care about climate change, the governments who care about these issues, they should be sinking clean energy level resources into this. We shouldn't be thinking in terms of, you know, $7.5 million, look at how big GFI is. We should be thinking in terms of $750 billion. This is a solvable issue. We can knock out the antibiotic. Well, we can significantly ameliorate the main

cause of antibiotic resistance. We can significantly ameliorate one of the principal causes of climate change, water pollution, antibiotic resistance, food poisoning, like all of these issues. There should be, like Harvard Medical School should have a $60 million clean meat research institute. Cornell should have a $60 million per year. Right. No, $60 million to get it going. Plant-based meat research institute. Government should be funding this.

Foundations should be funding this. is doing. A big part of what our science department is doing is trying to, you know, reach people like Mark Benioff and, you know, people who are, like, interested in these issues and say, this deserves really significant resources. Yeah, we need an interdisciplinary Manhattan Project. We need a whole bunch of them, right? Yeah, we need an interdisciplinary Manhattan Project for sure. But just like, you know, Georgetown Law School has a climate center, which most people haven't heard of because it's not one of the 10 best climate centers, or maybe it is. I hope I didn't just defame them. But there are tons of climate institutes at like every major university in the country. There should be institutes focused on plant-based meat and clean meat, at least for a start at the 24 global universities that we've just identified. People can check them out at gfi.org. It's on our blog. We're about to

be releasing the top, I think, 13 or 14 in the United States for plant-based meat and clean meat. Like all of these universities, none of them have it now. All of them should have institutes. All of them should have disciplines. Berkeley had the first plant-based meat and clean meat class that we designed last year. Now we've got one at Stanford and Penn State. Every university that has a sciences department should have, how do we apply science to food? Plant-based meat and clean meat. Right. So, clean meat sort of comes online, what was it, like five years ago? Oh, less than that. Less than that? Yeah, 2015, Uma Valetti starts working on

Memphis Meats. 2015, Mark Postetti starts working on Memphis Meats. 2015, Mark Post starts working on Mosa Meats, and the guys at Super Meat start working on Super Meat. Memphis Meats is incorporated in April 2016. That's the first company ever to incorporate on clean meat is April 2016. I thought there was the one in Japan, though. Wasn't that a little earlier? No, Intrica Culture. They actually just incorporated as a company. They might have started working on it in 2014 or 2015. I mean,

the first clean meat conference at Maastricht University in the Netherlands was in October of 2015. New Harvests, which is a nonprofit organization in cellular agriculture, their first conference was in November of 2015. So, this is all really, really new. And there are now 30 companies, 30 clean meat companies around the world, and probably about 20 of them have raised $500,000 or more. So, still super nascent, but it's optimistic. It's an interesting thing because we're talking about it. It is happening. It's going to happen. We're going to figure out how to scale this whole thing. But much like the automation of cars, nobody's tried this yet. It's like it's something we're talking about that's very academic

and kind of ephemeral and theoretical in most people's minds. People that even know the slightest bit about it, all they know is, okay, they're growing cells. It's a $300,000 burger. You know, this is not, I'm grossed out and it's too expensive. How is this going to solve anybody's problems? And just to step back, I mean, we wish it were more academic. Like this is one of the things we're trying to solve for is there are 30 companies. And what that means is there are 30 different companies trying to solve from the ground up, how do we grow meat from cells? What does it look like to get immortalized cells? What should the scaffolding look like? What should the bioreactors look like? What should the media look like that feeds the cells? It's 30 different companies all protecting their own IP

working in this sector. So one of the things that absolutely needs to happen is a serious infusion of cash into the academy that basically says, okay, here's how we're working on media. All of you companies can use this. Here's what bioreactor scale-up looks like. All of you companies can use that. So at GFI, we published the cover story in Food Technology, which is the professional journal of the Institute of Food Technologists. We published a peer-reviewed journal article in Biochemical Engineering Journal, and we're doing a lot more peer-reviewed research. We also just got a $2 million grant from a philanthropist in New Jersey. No, $1 million grant from a philanthropist in New Jersey and $2 million grant from a philanthropist in Massachusetts.

And we are announcing a call for proposals, and we will be going to all of the 1R research institutions in the United States, and we will also be going to all of the universities we've identified as being most promising for plant-based meat and clean meat. So, we have $3 million dedicated to this. It doesn't come out of our general operating budget. It's just for this. But it should be tens of millions of dollars, And it should be George Church and other top tissue engineering poobahs and top crop biology and plant sciences. These folks should be spearheading this. And it shouldn't even be tens of millions of dollars. It should be billions of dollars because this is the solution to really big problems.

But we are excited about what we're going to be able to do with the $3 million. We will at least be able to put this onto the agenda at people at all of these schools. We're also launching fellowship programs at about 25 science schools. We have six fellows at six of the top 10 business schools. And the focus is basically, if you are a tissue engineer, we want you to be thinking about this as possibly your vocation and applying to work at some of these companies. If you are a business person and you're going to come out of business school and maybe you're going to end up, you know, who knows where you're going to end up. We want to make sure those folks know about plant-based

meat and clean meat as a place that they could apply their talents, do a ton of good in the world while simultaneously doing really well for their families. But this just needs a huge injection of cash and it needs a huge injection of talent. And that's one of the things that we're trying to catalyze at GFI. That's a huge, that's a lot of progress since the last time we talked. I don't think you were doing really any of that two years ago, right? Yeah. I mean, we were, I think we were about 12 staff members then. We're 53 staff members now. I think we had maybe three or four of our directors at that point. Now we have all nine of our directors. Everybody is thinking super strategically. We have quarterly goals. We have sort of everything tied. We've got a strategic plan that anybody wants to see it can see and kind of everything down. But we do have a lot of job openings. The last time I was on,

I was talking about job openings. And I think we got at least four or five of our current 53-person staff, people who listen to me on the podcast. So I hope people will check out GFI.org. Or if you don't see job openings there that are interesting to you, feel free to email me directly. Yeah, make sure you dial up that resume, though. Yes. Bruce only wants good people. It's true, yeah.

Smart people. We have a bit of a reputation for having a rigorous application process. So if you make it into the application process, it is multiple stages. I mean, if you look at GFI.org and click on our team, you can see the caliber of people who we have hired to work for us. And all of those people are working. I said the thing that was somewhat disparaging about the idea of people changing their diet on behalf of these factors. But people do want their vocations to be meaningful. And at GFI, Daniel Pink, in his book Drive, he says the things people want out of their vocation, they want self-actualization, they want something that's meaningful, they want to be challenged, but not too challenged. Every six months, we do an internal anonymous staff survey, and we are knocking it out of the charts on those things. It's a phenomenal place to work, but a hard place to get a job. Yeah. Well, I think that's, we're seeing more and more of that purpose-driven young people who really prioritize that, perhaps even more than salary. And I think that gives me hope for

the new generation, the next generation, Gen Z or whatever it is, whatever we're calling it. Yeah, I know. The cover letters that we read are just so inspiring. People, you know, A, they think they can change the world, and B, they want to change the world. It is really, yeah, it's really, really good. Yeah. All right. So, give me an estimate of how long it's going to be before clean meat is going to be commercially available

to consumers? I mean, I think commercially available. At a price point that is somewhat reasonable. Commercially available at a price point that is similar to like grass-fed beef, probably three or four, maybe five years, commercially available at really low price points, probably 10 years, I would guess. But, you know, like China wants to be the global leader on climate change. Singapore is looking in a big way at food tech to feed its population. And, you know, it's this tiny little country. If Israel or Singapore or China or the U.S., if they decide they're going to sink billions of dollars into advancing this

technology, it could happen a lot more quickly. I mean, you know, it shouldn't be Sand Hill Road venture capitalists with, you know, a bit of VC money from Tyson Foods and Cargill and, you know, other companies like that that are seeding plant-based meat and clean meat. It is the solution to really big problems that governments care about. Governments should be sinking a lot of money into this if we convince them to do that. And that's one of the key things that we're doing in our overseas offices, and it's a key aspect of what our policy department is doing in the U.S. If we convince them to do that, if we find people with ties into government who are really excited about this, it could happen a lot more quickly.

Right. So, the bottlenecks aren't – the bottlenecks in terms of the timeline aren't necessarily technological breakthroughs. No. It's just sort of supply chain economics. It's talent and money. I mean, it's talent and money. So, I mean, even beyond meat and impossible foods, like, they're scaling up as fast as they can, but they can't meet demand. Right.

The other plant-based meat companies, multiple of them are having trouble meeting demand. And, you know, as I mentioned, Beyond Meat, they sold 70% year-on-year growth in terms of sales last year. Field Roast, which has been around for a little while, they sold, I think, like 65% more. Gardein was like 60% more, actually a little more, like 64% more. So they're scaling up kind of as fast as they can. And with CleanMeat, there are some technological hurdles. Like we need to take what we know about tissue engineering, and we need to figure out how to make food-grade media, how to scale up the bioreactors. So we have 20,000 liter bioreactors instead of five liter bioreactors. So there are some questions to answer. There isn't anybody who's like really deep in this who thinks these are going to be insurmountable obstacles, but they're going to take, you know, really smart scientists and they're going to take money. And if we're continuing to

rely on Silicon Valley and, you know, 20 to $150 million investments. It's going to take a lot longer than if we have multi-billion dollar government, you know, a Manhattan project from China or the U.S. or whoever. Assuming or presuming that we will resolve these, you know, economic dilemmas, that there will be an adequate cash infusion and all of this stuff is going to happen, we're still looking at kind of a cultural revolution in the way that people have difficulty wrapping their heads around the fact that their cars are going to drive themselves. It's undeniable that there is this, it's been called the ick factor, of people trying to wrap their heads around the idea of eating something that's called meat that didn't come from an animal

in the way that they understand it. So this is a hurdle that we're addressing. We talked about this last time a little bit, but I think it's worth kind of walking us through this aspect of culture change. Yeah, I mean, people don't eat meat because of how it's produced. They eat meat despite how it's produced. So a researcher at Oklahoma State University in early

2018, what happened was a group called the Sentience Institute, which is a sort of animal protection think tank, they released numbers and they said, according to our numbers, more than 45% of people would ban slaughterhouses. So they want slaughterhouses banned. And so the meat industry said, you know, this cannot be true. Look at the source. So they went to one of their handpicked researchers, an ag researcher at Oklahoma State University,

and he did the research. And he was like, sure enough, in our poll, 47% of people want to ban slaughterhouses. Two thirds of people are uncomfortable with the way that animals are raised today. So I think people like driving their cars. Like, you know, what they like about driving is not necessarily and only getting from point A to point B. I think there's also a control issue of like sort of sitting in the back of the car where the car is driving around that is a little harder for people to wrap their minds around. I would say this is more like going from the horse and buggy to a car or going from a standard camera to a digital camera or going from a dial phone with a cord to go into your cell phone. Like

what you like about taking pictures or talking on the phone or eating meat, what you like about it. With meat, it's taste, it's texture, it's experience, it's culture, it's whatever it is. But for almost nobody, it's, I really want animals to be raised and slaughtered for this. So if we can give people the taste, the texture, the things that they like about meat, and we can get it at a lower price point, I mean, I really have just absolutely no doubt that it takes off. And early polling is super good. Early polling on this is super, super good. Yeah, I think there was, I saw a stat 20 to 30% of people are willing to make the switch. 20 to 30% of people are willing to pay more for clean meat. Oh, is that what it was? People who are willing to try it is somewhere on the consistently on the order of 70%. People are

willing to make the switch like permanently or on the order of 50%. And this is programming against human physiology, which has forever told us don't eat something unfamiliar until like lots of other people have eaten it first, or it might kill you. Like you just basically say, if we could grow meat directly from cells without animal slaughter, you know, what would you think of that? And most people are excited about it. And as we were talking about a minute ago, especially younger people are super excited about it. And bear in mind, right now, plant-based meat is a third of 1% of the meat market. And we're talking 70% of people who would eat clean meat, which is, you know, three times, 210 times as many people before we even have a product. Like once we actually have these products on sale on shelves, and we're saying, do you want the product that might have a whole bunch of bacteria and might kill your family and maybe laced with antibiotics and here's how the animals were raised and slaughtered? Or do you want this other safer, cleaner product that doesn't have all of those ancillary costs?

I don't think – like you're not going to have to be a Madison Avenue genius to sell the clean meat. Right. Well, if I was a venture capitalist, you just gave me the pitch of all time, right? I'd be like, take all my money. But it also, I think there is a little bit of a fear button with people too. They're like, well, is this genetically engineered? And I heard that might not be so good.

And what's the long-term, you know, we don't know what this is doing to our bodies long-term. Like, you know, in fairness, like I think we have to have those conversations. Oh yeah, absolutely. To, you know, really make sure that we're doing all of this right. But you made an interesting analogy

in an article you wrote between this movement and kind of what went down with the in vitro fertilization movement, which I thought was apt. Can you explain that? So 40 years ago, I mean, ethicists and lots of other people were screaming bloody murder at the idea of in vitro fertilization.

They were saying it's unnatural and just like real absolute freak out, super controversy. And now we're 40 years later and there's no controversy at all. It's how I think like 2% of babies now are born through in vitro fertilization. And there may be some Jesuit academics who are still raising concerns or some very conservative old bioethicists. But for the most part, this is like completely non-controversial, super common. Most people know, have family members or friends who have had babies through in vitro fertilization. It's just, that's what it is.

In the same way, it was controversial originally when we were going to make ice in ice makers instead of pulling ice out of, you know, cold lakes and rivers. And there was an uproar. And now there's, you know, obviously no uproar at all. It's a safer, better, cheaper product. What if like ice was controversial? Ice was controversial, yeah. I didn't know that. Yeah, Paul Shapiro talks about it in his book, Clean Meat. I think he did talk about that, yeah.

Other things in the same sort of vein. But yeah, this will, I mean, there will be certain people who are concerned about this early on. And there will be some interests that try to drum up even more concern about this early on. But it is just a much better product. It's perfectly safe. And it's worth noting that all of the people who have started companies so far, like most of them are in this because they want their lives to be meaningful. So Uma Valetti, who started Memphis Meats, he said, I calculated that as a cardiologist, which is what he was doing before he was a professor of cardiology at the University of Minnesota, trained in cardiology at the Mayo Clinic, which is where he got the idea for growing cells for meat. He was the head of both the American College of Cardiology and the American Heart Association for the Twin Cities.

So, like, really, you know, he could do kind of anything. And this is what he decided to do. And he decided to do it because he realized he could save even more lives and do more good in the world by accelerating the advancement of clean meat than he could do as a cardiologist. And that's kind of the way that most people in plant-based meat and clean meat are thinking about this for Pat Brown and Ethan Brown. Yeah, Ethan for sure, Josh Tetrick, the same thing. Yeah, and so they all want to be completely transparent. Like they are consumer-focused, you know, maybe even slightly to a fault if you're an old-school food marketing person. But they want to be completely transparent. And I think probably

even from an old-school food marketing with a new technology, for all the reasons you just enumerated, you really do want to make sure that people are super comfortable and have a complete understanding of the technology and how it works. And, you know, everybody's talking about, we're going to be live streaming meat production on the internet. You want to see Memphis Meats, you don't want to see the meat that you are going to be eating being made, you know, log into memphismeats.com and click on the live stream. It gets boring in about 30 seconds, but it makes a point. But the fact that it exists, I mean, this is super important. You know, people want to be connected to how their food is made.

Yeah. How their products are made, how everything they purchase is made. And transparency is no longer, you know, something to be dismissed. I think it needs to be front and center. And the fact that they're doing that, I think, is amazing. And it stands, of course, in stark contrast to the way meat and dairy products have been produced historically and how they're protected through ag-gag laws and all kinds of regulations that insulate the consumer from the very truth of how these things are created. Yeah, I mean, for people who don't know what an ag-gag law is, Mark Bittman from the New York Times coined the term ag-gag. And states have been passing these laws to make it illegal to find out how meat is made.

There are a variety of these laws. The early ones were you can't tape inside a factory farm or a slaughterhouse or any sort of facility that goes toward raising animals for food. So you've got the plant-based meat and the clean meat companies saying, come one, come all, and good luck getting into a modern farm or a modern slaughterhouse. And that goes back to people eat meat despite that, not because of that. So these technologies, I think, once the price is competitive and once it is taste identical or better, I don't see many people not switching. switching. Well, that's a perfect segue into a certain sector of the economy that is somewhat resistant to this, which is the meat and dairy producers themselves. For every Cargill or Tyson, there's a whole variety of other ongoing concerns that would prefer to not have this succeed.

And we're seeing this battle taking place in the front lines of it right now are over labeling, right? Yeah. So, tell me about what's going on with the meat labeling thing. I know you guys have jumped in. There's an injunction. Like, this is super fascinating to me. Yeah, it's been surprising to me. And I should just say, there aren't really,

there isn't a company that's similar to Tyson or Cargill that is not on our side here. The cattle ranchers and the dairy producers are pretty much the only folks who are not excited about plant-based meat. Directly threatening their livelihood. So you almost can't blame them. Like this is how they make a living.

Yeah, no, I think that's exactly right. But I guess it just to sort of underline, people who work in slaughterhouses, like it threatens their livelihoods, but those are just the worst jobs. Human Rights Watch said that the way that slaughterhouse workers are treated in the US is the US's human rights crime.

The people who are working in chicken farms and pig farms, like those folks are not excited to be working in chicken farms and pig farms. So kind of the only people with a vested interest who care about this stuff are the dairy producers. There are still tens of thousands of small dairy farms and cattle ranchers. There are still, I don't know how many, but lots of cattle ranchers. So that's kind of the only folks in the resistance to this sort of move in this direction technologically. And it's our position that they shouldn't be. It's our position that plant-based meat, clean meat, and these alternative products, they actually will create better livelihoods for farmers. It's been go big or go home for such a long time. And so we've gone from what, more than 50% of people in farming to fewer than 2% of people in farming. And they all have to

be for the most part, really, really massive. This allows us to open up all kinds of different crops to cultivation. You can have smaller farms, you can have farms that you actually are able to do crop rotation. Like this is sort of a new agricultural renaissance that will be good for farmers. But are there programs underway to help train these people so that they can segue into a new way of using their land? This is one of the things that there is some really interesting stuff happening in this regard. I was actually just chatting with Kathy Freston, my co-author in the book, Clean Protein, and she was just out in Arkansas. She got an email from somebody who read one of her books and emailed her and apparently emailed four people, and Kathy was the only one who replied. And it's a chicken farmer from Arkansas. They have more than 100,000 chickens supplying one of the biggest chicken companies in the United

States. And Sean Monson, the filmmaker, was out there with Kathy filming them as they are basically moving out and they're going to go to hemp. And there are other farmers who are going to mushrooms and other farmers who are going to other crops. So this is a transition that we think is going to have to happen. Our hope is that governments, as they fund plant-based meat and clean meat research, will also fund programs to help people who are currently in the current industry to transition into these new jobs that are actually absolutely coming that are also just, you know, better for the soil, which is something that farmers care about. Like, farmers are not monocropping because they're excited about monocropping. They're monocropping to stay alive, essentially.

But to the labeling issue, the dairy industry has for decades been trying to convince the government that soy milk should not be called soy milk and almond milk shouldn't be called almond milk. There have been class action suits, which are really fun to read the judicial opinions on the class action suits. Like the judges get very, very creative and it begs credulity that somebody would be buying almond milk and think they're getting, you know, milk that comes from cows. Right. Do these almonds lactate? Like, it gets really weird, right? It gets really, really weird. And that is all just because, you know, these sorts of endeavors don't pass the smell test. They're Hail Marys. They are absolute Hail Marys. But, I mean, they did pass a law in Missouri that says that you can't use meat terminology on the packaging of products unless those products come from raised and slaughtered animals. And so we, along with the Animal Legal Defense Fund and the ACLU of Missouri and the plant-based meat company Tofurky and then GFI, GFI is both one of the lawyers and one of the plaintiffs in the case. We're suing the state of Missouri to overturn that law.

And the main argument is that it's unconstitutional unless the labels are false or misleading. Missouri can't censor speech. We also have a dormant commerce clause argument in there as well as a due process clause in there. What's the dormant commerce clause argument? The dormant commerce clause argument is essentially that it was very clear when the legislation was being passed. It was passed by the cattle industry. So, it is to protect Missouri cattle interests against competition from other states. So, that's the dormant commerce clause argument. And then the due process is void for vagueness. You read the law and it's very unclear. The only way you know

what it is actually supposed to do is if you read the legislative history. And so due process demands that if you're going to be convicted of a crime, you have to know what it looks like to violate the crime. And that's become even into starker relief in sort of the conversations that have been had after the law passed. But so we're suing. We're about to be asking for a preliminary injunction to enjoin the government against actually enforcing the law until our lawsuit is over. And the defendant's argument, curiously, is that they do not want consumers to be confused, right?

They want to make sure that these consumers know where their food came from. And the inherent irony, of course, in all of that goes back to what we were just talking about. They have enacted all of these laws, these protectionist measures to prevent that very thing. They actually don't want consumers to know how those products are produced.

So it feels like this bizarre straw man, it's almost laughable that that's their argument. It is darkly ironic, for sure. Yes, I know. And we saw this, of course, Hampton Creek, which is now called Just, went through this in the mayonnaise sector, right? That the word mayonnaise must, by its very definition, means eggs. And that was a lawsuit that was pursued by Unilever. Correct?

Yeah. And that turned into a PR nightmare. I mean, Unilever turned into a PR nightmare. Unilever not only dropped their lawsuit, but subsequently introduced their own vegan mayonnaise. That's what I was gonna say. So yeah, they've jumped on board, you know, which I think is, that's a beautiful thing.

Yeah. They bought like Sir Kensington, right? They did buy Sir Kensington. Yeah, you're in tune with this stuff. Not as much as you. I try to pay attention from the sidelines. But yeah, one of GFI's four programmatic departments is our corporate engagement department. And we have really good relationships with Tyson and Cargill and Smithfield and Unilever and all of these big food companies.

Like when GFI started, we were talking about disrupting the food industry disrupting the meat dairy and egg industries now we're talking about transforming because the more we have conversations with these people the more we realize that they you know they're in this for whatever reason they're in this but if they can do what they want to do which has nothing to do with raising and slaughtering animals if they can like provide high quality food to people in a more efficient way that is more profitable without all of the external costs, they're all in on that. So, that was sort of an interesting scenario. And yeah, Unilever, they dropped the lawsuit, but then the FDA got involved. And it's all based on standards of identity from the early

1930s. And they don't make a lot of sense. And as applied in some cases, they're not constitutional. They can't pass First Amendment scrutiny. And they would also make things like gluten-free bread. You know, bread has a standard of identity, so you can't have gluten-free bread. You can't have rice noodles. There are tons of things that, according to the dairy industry's interpretation of things, wouldn't be on shelves. And I mean, their position is just literally indefensible. It's so important and powerful, this idea of disrupting within, if you want to use that word, or finding a way to collaborate and cooperate with what is to try to improve it. We had a panel at this Kellogg School of Business, and we had the senior VP for

sustainability at Tyson Foods, Justin Whitmore. And he was just so awesome on this panel. But one of the things he said has really stuck with me. He said at Tyson, we don't want to be disrupted. We want to be the disruptor. And that is absolutely the way that the entire food industry should be thinking about this. And we've been super encouraged that a lot of them really are. I mean, one of the biggest plant-based meat companies in the U.S. is called Light Life. And if you go to Light Life's website, lightlife.com, I'm sure, it says meat without the middleman. So, like, the largest meat company in Canada, Maple Leaf, owns Light Life. And they are all in on this is meat. It's just

meat made from plants. They're also the owners of Field Roast, which had the second highest growth in the last year at almost 70%, just behind Beyond Meat. Yeah, that's amazing. I mean, I feel like as amazing as the vegan movement is, there are factions within the vegan movement that get in their own way. Like, you know, for example, somebody who would say, how dare you talk to Tyson? How do you know, these are the bad guys. This is the enemy. We're trying to tear these people down, but they exist.

They're not necessarily going away. So what is the best strategy? Like, what is the battle that you're trying to, are you trying to win the battle or the war? Right? Exactly. And you're fighting the war. You're fighting this long-term, you have a long-term view on how to succeed,

and it requires collaboration and cooperation and some level of humanity, right? Seeing these people as people who want to do the right thing. And they are. I mean, it's not even, you know, it's sort of like Martin Luther King, Jr. talks about how he adopted nonviolence in the 50s as a tactic. You know, he read about Gandhi, and he adopted nonviolence, and he just sort of thought, they're way more powerful than we are.

There's no way we're going to win with violence. So, he adopted nonviolence as a tactic. And then by the early 60s, he's like, no, nonviolence is just, you know, deontological. Nonviolence is the only way to victory and success. It's not a tactic. It's just an absolute moral imperative. And I think similarly, some people may see let's work with Tyson as a tactic. I see it as a moral imperative. I mean, it certainly is the most, the way that we are most likely to be successful. But it's also true. Like. I know the people at Tyson and Cargill and Unilever and these companies, and we go in and we spend an entire day with

these folks talking about plant-based meat and clean meat. They are good people, just like the people in the vegan movement are good people. Everybody who is vegan knows lots of people who they love who are not vegan. And hopefully we don't think they're bad people because they're not vegan. So the fact that somebody has found themselves, you know, in the upper echelons as one of these corporations allows them to do a lot more good than 99.9999% of vegans because they can be a part of the transformation in the inside. And if we look at them as, you know, human beings, which they, who they are trying to do good in the world, which they are, rather than sort of any sense of enemy. I mean, A, that's just true. And B, it's also going to be tactically a lot smarter.

Yeah. They have their hands on the Archimedes lever that can create seismic major shifts in, you know, how we think about food, how we produce food, how we eat food, how we innovate a brighter future that is protective of our planet for future generations to come that spares all of these animals, that improves our health. I mean, it checks all the boxes. Yeah. And anybody can see that, right? I mean, you don't have to be vegan. You don't have to be an activist. Like most of these people have families. They want the best for their children and their grandchildren and themselves and the world. So, that's, like, also just a nicer conversation to have, you know, than you are bad.

And I started learning this. I was at People for the Ethical Treatment of Animals. Yeah, you were at PETA for a long time. So, you've had your own personal kind of journey and exploration to this place as well. Yeah. I remember in the early 2000s at PETA, we started launching corporate campaigns to reform industrial animal agriculture. And we got a professional business consultant who taught business, I think, at University of Illinois, if memory serves, a guy named Steve Gross. And the first thing he said to me, and we couldn't have afforded him, but he was doing it pro bono. He now is, I think, chair of the

board of a group called Farm Forward. And so he was our negotiator with McDonald's, with KFC, with Wendy's, with Safeway, and calling up sort of all of the big fast food and grocery outlets. And he said, we are absolutely going to get nowhere if we go in with confrontation. We have to go in with, you know, let me tell you about my son and my daughter, and here's what my son and my daughter are doing. Tell me about your son and your daughter. You know, what do you want for the future of the world? These sort of highfalutin things. And this is another example.

We might not change people's diets necessarily with these sorts of conversations, or at least not as many as we want to change. Some people change. I changed. You changed. But if we really want to bond with people and create transformation, we need to do it at a human level. So, that's been sort of my philosophy since then, and I think it's, you know... It's correct. It's correct. And I think it applies to how we're having conversations about everything right now. You know, the dialogue that we're seeing online, especially in the political sphere, even in the health and nutrition sphere is pretty toxic. You know, it's pretty toxic. And I think we need to take a step back and really try to understand how to better communicate our point of view. And I think it begins with some level of humility and compassion for other people and the inherent humanity that we all share.

I just, I was at a conference this past weekend in Nantucket, this thing called the Nantucket Project. And that was kind of a theme of this event. The theme for this year was neighborhood. cultivate like this conversation around how to really communicate effectively so that we can come together and make positive change in the world. So, there were polarizing figures. There was Sean Spicer, there was George W. Bush, there was Lance Armstrong, there was Valerie Plame, like a very interesting mix of individuals who in their own worlds are polarizing for a lot of people. And all of the conversations that took place were about like, let me see if I can see this from this person's point of view. Like, what is it like for that person as a human being? And I left that

experience a better person because I really did force myself to set aside my preconceived ideas and whatever projections I'm putting on all of these people. And I left with a greater sense of compassion. And I think that we need more of that. We need that in the vegan movement. We need that in these conversations that we're having about politics. And certainly with respect to what you do,

which is interfacing with these titans of industry who are in, you know, organizations that when you were at PETA, you know, you had a very different perspective on, right? Sure. So, it's really interesting that you're now creating the most change that you've ever had in your entire career by taking a very different psychological and communicative approach. Yeah. Well, it helps a tremendous amount that, I mean, I had the same basic attitude at PETA, but what we were asking them to do was a lot harder. And so you're asking them to be the industry leader and it is going to adversely affect their profitability. So they were harder conversations. They were still good conversations. But now we're actually, you know, we're saying this is why this will be more profitable for you. And it's simultaneously, you know, you should do it for all these very human

reasons. But it's in your best interest. But it's in your best interest, which makes you want to get rich. Yeah, it makes it a much easier conversation. So what's going on on the regulatory landscape right now with the FDA, the USDA? Are there hurdles there? Is this smooth sailing? Like, what does that look like? I mean, the sort of prefatory thing to say in response to that question is that there are, you know, 190-something countries, and every country has the capacity to introduce clean meat. So plant-based meat, you know, obviously it's plant-based meat. So it's all foods that are already in the food supply.

So there are some regulatory questions. They mostly have to do with labeling and safety testing for new ingredients. But the really interesting question has to do with clean meat. And in the United States, there's a bit of a battle. In July, FDA asserted its unalloyed authority and said, essentially, they had a whole day meeting at which the commissioner and the woman who runs the Center for Food and Nutrition and their chief scientist just said, we got this, we got this, we got this, which is kind of what GFI thought should happen and we still think should happen. The current regulatory regime is up to the task, and it makes the most sense for FDA to do it because these are the sorts of products

that they have been regulating for decades. But USDA also wants in on it and the cattle ranchers want USDA to be in on it. So there's a little bit of a battle in the United States. I mean, it looks like everybody thinks that the current regulatory regime is up to the task. If I were a betting person, I would bet that there will be some sort of dual authority from USDA and FDA. So maybe FDA will do safety testing pre-market, and then USDA will actually regulate the production and the labeling. But it's hard to say for sure. actually regulate the production and the labeling, but it's hard to say for sure. And obviously, Congress could jump in and just sort of dictate, in which case, you know, whatever FDA or USDA wants would be irrelevant, Congress would just say. But we're optimistic. The National Academies of Sciences released a report about two years ago in which they said this is a very promising

technology and the government should do everything that it can to make sure that the current regulatory regime is used, no new regulatory promulgation, and also that it is smooth and quick. And since, again, this is something, I mean, this is not sort of your average regulatory discussion of food. This is a regulatory discussion of a food that solves a lot of problems that the government wants solved. So hopefully those sort of normative considerations will also be worked in. But we're simultaneously, like in our overseas offices, the focus is policy and science. So the focus is A, convince the governments on the policy side. One side of policy is convince these governments to fund open source plant-based and clean meat research. And then the other side is roll out

the regulatory red carpet for clean meat. So And then the other side is roll out the regulatory red carpet for clean meat. So we're doing analysis in all of these countries. Then the other side is if you're, they're going to fund the science, we need the scientists. So we're doing a lot of outreach to scientists in these countries to get them excited about it. Yeah. I would think in the, in the U S it would be

advisable to bring the EPA in as well. Like, because it impacts, it's not just food, right? This is a bigger, this is a bigger subject matter with more profound implications beyond, like, what are the ingredients and, you know, is it healthy for human consumption? Yeah. I mean, I think there are many other agencies, which especially if you're talking about funding, EPA has a research and development budget. It used to go significantly to climate change initiatives, and now it's going to a variety of other environmental things. But some of that money could certainly be made available to plant-based meat and clean

meat research and development. But if what you're talking about is regulatory oversight, you've got the Food and Drug Administration under the Food, Drug, and Cosmetics Act. They oversee about 80% of food. Then you've got the USDA, the Federal Meat Inspection Act, and they oversee the vast majority of meat oversight. And so this is meat, but it also uses a lot of the sort of food technologies that have generally been the province of FDA. So at least for regulatory oversight, it'll either be FDA or USDA or some combination of FDA and USDA. Right. Yeah, it's confusing. It's a little confusing. A little turf war over that. Yeah, the food system in the United States is definitely confusing.

Well, I think most people think that the USDA is this government organization that functions like a consumer watchdog that has our best interests at heart. And I think a lot of people would be surprised to learn that it's only a quasi-government organization that functions in many ways like a lobbying arm for the dairy industry. Well, yeah, meat and dairy. I mean, yeah, USDA was set up to promote U.S. agriculture. Yeah, meat and dairy. I mean, yeah, USDA was set up to promote U.S. agriculture. And I think it was the 1960s that it became also focused on food safety. But it definitely appears to be more promote U.S. agriculture than it does food safety. And we have the only Department of Agriculture in the world that doesn't have mandatory recall powers. Like, you will always see the meat industry, a voluntary recall, and it's, oh, it's a voluntary recall. You know, this must not be that toxic. 100% of recalls are voluntary recalls because USDA is not empowered with the authority to issue a mandatory recall. That's really quite remarkable.

And it's the checkoff program, right? Yeah. I spoke with Neil Bernard about that, but explain what that is, because that's just a mind blower that that even is a thing. Well, there are a bunch of different checkoff programs. So, of course, again, USDA was set up to promote U.S. agriculture. So there's a beef checkoff and a dairy checkoff and a cheese checkoff. And basically a percentage of all cheese, dairy and beef sales in the United States go into government-administered checkoff programs that then do general promotion of those products. And they're pretty controversial because the small producers uniformly feel like what's true, which is it's a sort of lowest common denominator

promotion for the entire industry. And then you get into sort of weird legal ramifications as well, where the laws that affect the general population generally don't also affect the federal government. So the federal government can do things that if it were a private corporation, it would be illegal to do, which happened when there was this lawsuit in California. This happened in California over those Happy Cows commercials. Happy Cows come from California. And so PETA and I think the Animal

Legal Defense Fund and some other folks sued. And the defense was not, these commercials are true. The defense was the government does not have to abide by the consumer protection laws that apply to corporations. And that was the reason that that lawsuit ended up being ejected, despite the fact that even people on the board who are watching the commercials and the focus groups were saying, I don't think all of the cows in California are out on fields in Sonoma. And isn't it true, like, I know that when dairy products find their way into television commercials, like when Pizza Hut introduces its cheesy crust pizza, that there is government funding going into those ad budgets. Yeah, no, it's fascinating.

I mean, that's, yeah, it's the American Egg Board and the American Dairy Council and the Beef Council and the Pork Board. Like those are quasi-governmental agencies. I mean, in part, that's why Hampton Creek, when they, there was this crazy thing where the American Egg Board was laughing about killing Josh Tetrick and was trying to keep- Those emails came out.

Yeah, and they were trying to keep Hampton Creek products off the shelves of Whole Foods and all kinds of anti-competitive stuff that is illegal for these groups to do because they are government funded. And the reason those emails came out is that because they are government funded, they're also subject to FOIA. Yeah, they're on FOIA requests. Yeah, so all that stuff came back in a Freedom of Information Act request. And it was interesting. What happened in response to that was that the meat industry tried to pass a law to make FOIA more restrictive. So their response was not, oh, my God, this is an awful thing, joking about killing a competitor and all this anti-competitive stuff. The response was, let's see if we can make the next FOIA, not actually

get the records. And fortunately, FOIA is something that the far right, the far left, and the center all agree on. So, that legislation went absolutely nowhere. But that was the response of the sort of meat industry at large, which was too bad. All right. So the players, I'm familiar with Memphis Meats. I know what Beyond Meat and Possible are doing in the plant-based sector. Just and Josh Chetrick, they're getting into clean meat now. They are. Who are the other players? What's going on now that's new? What, you know, what are some of the products that are being developed and who are some of the other active members of this movement? There's a lot of really exciting stuff happening across plant-based meat and clean meat. So,

as you know, the 12 months that ended early September, there was 23% growth in plant-based meat at the grocery sector. And Beyond Meat was number one at 70%, and it would have been a lot higher if they could have met demand. But number two was Field Roast, which is sort of a legacy producer that's owned by a meat company in Canada. Number three was Gardein. Number four was Dr. Prager's. So, we are seeing a lot of the sort of old school plant-based meat companies significantly upping their game, improving their products, improving their marketing, and recognizing that they too can get really, really big. So, that's exciting. The Sarnos are getting into fish too, right?

Yeah, that company is exciting. It's called Good Catch. It's actually one of GFI's three success stories. So in our innovation department, in addition to helping startups to be successful and publishing all kinds of documents to help, we've got a startup guide, which is a kind of everything and anything you've ever wanted to know about starting a plant-based or clean meat food business. And we help companies with whatever they want, but we have also started three companies. One of those companies that we started with a marketing company called Beyond Brands and a venture capital fund called New Crop Capital is Good Catch. And Good Catch, they sponsored our conference and also did the reception on Thursday evening, so the first night

of the conference. And people who eat tuna were eating their tuna and were just blown away. Yeah. And they've also got crab cakes and they're going to be rolling out a bunch of other fish alternatives. And two of the chefs behind that are Derek Sarno and Chad Sarno, who have also been GFI advisors from when we were first conceived. Super cool. Good catch products should be on the market, certainly by the end of the year. So people should look out for them. Yeah. And they have a line of products in the UK too. Like I was just in London and you can go into their version of 7-Eleven or whatever, and they have pre-packaged healthy sandwiches and things like that that are all totally plant-based. Yeah, Wicked Healthy is the brand. And they're going to be launching in the US a brand called

Wicked Meaty, which is also something that New Crop Capital and the Good Food Institute started working on together. Cool. So, if you can grow meat products in this fashion from these cells, in this fashion from these cells, I would presume that you could also create cheese and dairy products as well. Is that true? What's going on there? So those are acellular products, of course. So you go straight to the proteins rather than the cells. And that's actually quite a bit easier. So you just isolate the proteins. You do need to use genetic modification. So the final product is not GMO, but there is a GMO process. So you can take a GMO yeast or a GMO bacteria and you get whatever the proteins are that you want the yeast or the bacteria to grow. And you program that directly into the yeast and out it comes.

And it's a genetically identical thing. So you can create cheese or milk or egg proteins. Eggs and milk and cheese are pretty complex, but once you actually have the key proteins that give it the binding or that give it the flavor or that give it the, you know, whatever it is that you like about cheese or milk or eggs, it's probably going to be an easier process than meat. Although it is the case that there are far fewer companies doing it. So the absolute leader in dairy is a company called Perfect Day, which is being funded by the richest guy in Asia, a guy named Li Ka-Shing, who has a venture capital fund called Horizons Ventures. And he's the money behind Horizons Ventures.

The main egg company is a company called Clara Foods. And then there's also a gelatin company called Geltor. The world is getting crazy, Bruce. It is getting crazy. I mean, we really think there should be a lot more plant-based meat innovation. So, plant-based meat companies that are focused on biomimicry, that are focused on food tech, like Good Catch is a phenomenal company, and they're doing a great job with tuna. They're mostly focused on culinary. I think their slogan is something like chef mastered.

I can't remember exactly, but I mean, they really focus on sort of the chef side of things and that's exciting. But there is a tremendous amount that could be done with food tech. And some people I think maybe have the idea that Impossible and Beyond Meat have that cornered. They absolutely don't.

It's still a third of 1% of the market. So we would like to see a lot more companies saying, let's see what happens if we use lupin. Let's see what happens if we use chickpeas. Let's see what happens if we use millet and all of these underexplored proteins and turn that into plant-based meat. Yeah, and the plant-based dairy market cap is massive. Oh, yeah. No, I mean, it's interesting. Plant-based dairy has just surpassed 13% of the dairy market. It was 10%, I think, two years ago. So, it is continuing to grow in a way that is very exciting. More and more companies, more and more market share. And I think we're only going to continue to see that, especially as the price comes down. I mean, it's at 13% despite being more expensive. Once it gets to price parity, I think it's really going to shoot up.

expensive. Once it gets to price parity, I think it's really going to shoot up. So the biggest barriers from what I gather from our conversation are really capital, like making sure that all of these ventures are properly funded, training the brightest minds to enter into this sector to continue to innovate. I mean, what are some of the other hurdles that you're trying to overcome right now? Those are really the two big hurdles. I mean, if you go ask Ethan Brown or Pat Brown from Beyond Meat and Impossible Foods, or you ask Uma Valetti or Mike Seldon from Finless or Luke Cooper House from Blue Nulu or sort of any of these companies, right now, they're not having funding issues. Like every time they go to get the amount of money that they think they can effectively incorporate, the money is there so far. But what they're not having funding issues. Like, every time they go to get the amount of money that they think they can effectively incorporate, the money is there so far.

But what they're not finding is the crackerjack scientists, the tissue engineers, the biochemists, the meat scientists, the mechanical engineers, the people to design these technologies to make this market sector thrive. So far, they have the money. When I talk about needing money, I'm talking about governments should be putting billions of dollars in creating research institutes. That hasn't happened yet, and it should. But so far, no startup in this space has failed due to lack of money, although the most money that's been raised is Memphis Meats at $21 million. So that thesis has not been thoroughly tested. They're going to have to raise hundreds of millions of dollars to be successful. And we're super optimistic that they'll be able to do that, but that money is going to have to be there. But the talent gap is number

one and number two and number three, really, in terms of obstacles at the moment, which is why GFI is excited to be launching fellowship programs at top universities internationally, where we have identified huge opportunity for plant-based meat and clean meat, even if it's not there quite yet. We just really need to create a talent pool of people who are excited to staff these companies. Right. So, all you super geniuses out there, what are you doing? I know, exactly. Come on, look at this. Look at this expanding universe. The world is your oyster. The world is your plant-based clean meat oyster waiting for you.

If people are wondering how they get involved, I mean, especially if you're in college, science, science, science. If you're in high school, science. If you're beyond that, I mean, think about other ways that you can dedicate your talent to that. I mean, obviously philanthropists, the GFI. GFI, we have to raise $7.5 million this year. So, we'd love your help if you have access to even more money than that, or you have access to people who you could connect us with who would help us raise tens of millions of dollars to create institutes. If you have access to governments, raise these issues with governments, they should be putting even more money into this. But we do have a lot of job openings in GFI. You know, GFI needs scientific

and other help. We need lawyers. We need people in our corporate engagement department. We need people in our policy department. We need, you know, kind of across the organization. Yeah, you're growing. So, all you other super geniuses out there, get in touch with Bruce, man. He wants to hire you. And if you're extroverted and can do sort of marketing stuff and meeting with corporations, we need that too. Yeah, all kinds of people. All right, well, we got to wrap this up. But I think a good place to kind of leave people with is your version of the future. Like, paint me the picture of the future that you're working

towards that you would like to see. Boy, you can go very, very big with that. I mean, before I got involved in this space, I ran a homeless shelter and a soup kitchen in inner city Washington, D.C. for about six years. I also taught through Teach for America for a couple of years. So, my vision of the future is people well-fed, people well-educated. Everybody has health care. It's a future where people have the capacity to take a step back and reflect on their lives. People are practicing mindfulness from the highest to the lowest echelons. And a part of that is the good food future, for sure.

A part of that is if people are eating meat, it's plant-based meat or it's clean meat. But it's also just a world where, I mean, we are going to knock out global poverty probably in the next 20 or 30 years. We need to go from knocking out global poverty to like real health and healthcare and prosperity and spirituality and mindfulness. And I think plant-based meat and clean meat, it's sort of on Maslow's pyramid, the plant-based meat and clean meat, it's sort of on Maslow's pyramid, the plant-based meat and clean meat are part of the base. It's like we need to, people need to have their-

First, we gotta feed everybody. Yeah. Right. Yeah, global health needs to be taken care of. The environment needs to be taken care of, our basic physiological needs. But I want everybody up at self-actualization. And I'd love to see that happen by 2050. You and me both, Bruce. You and me both.

Well, you're doing a tremendous amount to get us there, Rich. I think your podcast, I mean, the podcast with Yuval Harari really blew me away. The podcast with the religious figure talking about the human need for spirituality. You know, just raising these issues with your listeners, I think is just so exciting and doing such a service. Yeah, well, I appreciate that. The work you're doing at GFI is incredible. You really are reshaping the world.

I commend you. I wish you well. And if there's anything I can do to continue to support your mission, please don't hesitate to reach out. Having me on, as I mentioned, it's just such an honor and also such a help. So, thank you. You're a gift, my friend. Quite often, when people listen to podcasts, they have an option on their phone. They can speed it up to one and a half times or two times so they can listen to a two-hour podcast in an hour. But you're firing off so much information, I feel like people

are going to have to go the other direction and play it at half speed just so they can process everything that you have said. That's hilarious. Cool. If you want to connect with Bruce, gfi.org. Indeed. And Bruce Friedrich on Twitter. Yes, Bruce G. Friedrich.

Bruce G. Friedrich. On Twitter and LinkedIn. Yeah, there you go, man. And are you given any speeches, public appearances or anything like that? I am kind of always giving speeches and public appearances. If people sign up for the GFI newsletter, you'll find out about them. There you go. All right. Pleasure, my friend. Thanks, Rich. Peace.

Peace. Plants. Clean meat. Amen. Amen. Yeah. He's so rapid fire with all the facts on this innovation and this technology that I think that one might require a second listen and a pad of paper and a pen to take notes. In any event, I really love that guy.

I appreciate the work that he and everybody at GFI are doing. If you are looking for a job, they are hiring, as he mentioned. So go to GFI.org to learn more about that if you feel like you are a qualified candidate and you're looking for a new career path. Also, give Bruce a shout out on the social media channels and let him know how you felt about today's conversation. You can find him on Twitter at Bruce G. Friedrich, F-R-I-E-D-R-I-C-H. And you can find the Good Food Institute on those channels as well, at goodfoodinst on Twitter.

And on Instagram, it's thegoodfoodinstitute. As always, check the show notes on the episode page at richroll.com to expand your experience of this conversation beyond the earbuds. And if you are looking to take your plate, your healthy lifestyle to the next level, I cannot recommend enough our Plant Power Meal Planner. Go to meals.richroll.com and there you

will find thousands of plant-based recipes, totally customized based on your personal preferences. They are delicious. They are nutritious. They will fortify you. They will sate you and they will delight you. You also get unlimited grocery lists, amazing customer support, seven days a week from people who really know what they're talking about. And even grocery delivery is integrated into the whole system if you live in a metropolitan area. It's all available to you for just $1.90 a week when you sign up for a year. So again, to learn more and sign up, go to meals.richroll.com or click on Meal Planner on the top menu on my website. If you would like to support the work that we do here on the podcast, there are a couple simple ways to do just that. You can tell your friends about your

favorite episode. You can share the show on social media. You can subscribe to the show on Apple Podcasts, on Spotify, on YouTube, on Google Podcasts. We really appreciate that. That's very helpful. Leave a review on Apple Podcasts, and you can also support the show on Patreon at richroll.com forward slash donate. I want to thank everybody who helped put on the show today. Jason Camiello for production work, audio engineering, show notes, interstitial music, Blake Curtis and Margo Lubin for videoing the whole conversation, editing it together beautifully and putting it up on YouTube. They also put together all the beautiful graphics that I share on social media and theme music as always by Analema. Oh yeah, DK, David Kahn for

sponsor outreach and relationships. Thanks for the love you guys. See you back here next week for my third conversation with my boy, Josh Lajani. A lot of anticipation for that one. One of my favorite all-time transformation stories. Amazing human being. Good friend. And until then, peace, plants, good food. Namaste. Thank you.