The Rich Roll Podcast - Bruce Friedrich On The Meatless Meat Moonshot

Episode Date: July 26, 2021

Imagine a day when alternative protein is no longer alternative. Welcome to the moonshot for meatless meat. When it comes to meat, the news is both good and bad. On the one hand, alternative protein innovation is at an all-time high, with ever more options stocked at grocery stores across the country. However, despite the cultural ascension and mainstreaming of all things vegan & plant-based, the unfortunate reality is that globally, meat consumption is actually the highest it’s ever been. And according to the UN, global meat production is projected to double by 2050. So what gives? To address this conundrum and bring us up to speed on the cultivated and plant-based meat state of affairs, I’m once again joined by my friend & resident expert on all things meatless meat, Bruce Friedrich—returning for his third appearance on the show (catch RRP 286 & 402 if you missed them). Graduating magna cum laude from Georgetown Law with additional graduate degrees from Johns Hopkins and the London School of Economics, Bruce is the founder & president of The Good Food Institute, an international non-profit focused on facilitating the reimagination of meat production. He is also a TED Fellow, a Y Combinator alumnus, and a popular food innovation speaker at places like Harvard, Yale, Princeton, Stanford, and MIT. Bruce has been profiled in The New York Times and many other prominent outlets and has penned op-eds for The Wall Street Journal, USA Today, Los Angeles Times, Wired, and many other publications. Today we pick up where we left off almost three years ago to assess the current state of the union on all things alternative protein. We discuss advances in both plant-based and cultivated meat. We review how the latest technological breakthroughs in fermentation, 3D printing and funghi (or mycoprotein) harvesting are changing the game. And we cover the political and regulatory landscape that frames the alternative protein movement—and the policy changes we need to realize a better food system for all. In addition we discuss the many problems solved by a global pivot to alternative proteins—including zoonotic disease, greenhouse gas emissions, resource reduction, and animal suffering. Overall, this is an optimistic forecast of food system innovation—how technology, urgency, and popular demand are rapidly converging to create healthy, sustainable, and compassionate solutions to help solve our current food, health, and environmental crises. To read more click here. You can also watch our exchange on YouTube. And as always, the podcast streams wild and free on Apple Podcasts and Spotify. As you will soon discover, Bruce is super smart. This episode is our smartest yet. Enjoy! Peace + Plants, Rich

The UN Environment Program last July released a report, Preventing the Next Pandemic, is the title of it. They listed the seven most likely causes of the next pandemic. The first one is just meat-eating, period. Because the more animals that you have, the more likely they are to have a zoonotic disease that transfers to human beings. Boom, we have the next COVID, could be more transmissible and it could be more deadly. Their second most likely cause of the next pandemic is industrial animal agriculture, because the more you are raising those animals intensively, that compromises their immune systems and makes step one even more likely. And then the way that

we are using land and encroaching on wild animals, I think is number four. And climate change is number seven. So you're literally looking at the two most likely causes, the possibility of your food causing antibiotic resistance or the next pandemic goes from significant to zero if you go with plant-based and cultivated meat. And then finally, climate change. It's a fraction of the climate change. You eliminate nitrous oxide from manure decomposition and you eliminate methane from ruminant digestion. And because it's fewer stages of production, you also eliminate a lot of the CO2. Nitrous oxide is 300 times as powerful as a greenhouse gas. Methane is 20 times

as powerful as carbon dioxide as a greenhouse gas and far less land. So those are the three things we talk about the most. And of course, for people like you and me, the fact that it eliminates the factory farming as well is also a pretty big advantage. That's Bruce Friedrich, and this is The Rich Roll Podcast. The Rich Roll Podcast. Despite the cultural ascension and mainstreaming of all things vegan and plant-based, Despite the cultural ascension and mainstreaming of all things vegan and plant-based, the unfortunate reality is that globally, meat consumption is actually the highest it's ever been. And according to the UN, global meat production is projected to double by 2050.

At the same time, however, incredible parallel advances are being made in the plant-based and cultivated meat space. Incredible parallel advances are being made in the plant-based and cultivated meat space. Very exciting developments that hold enormous potential to not only mitigate the incredibly deleterious environmental impact of our food system, but to also decrease the risk of zoonotic disease, ameliorate animal suffering, and ultimately feed more people with fewer resources. and ultimately feed more people with fewer resources. Here today to bring us up to speed on this trajectory towards re-imagining protein and modernizing meat production is my friend Bruce Friedrich,

returning for his third appearance on the show, his first being episodes 286 and 402. Graduating magna cum laude from Georgetown Law with additional graduate degrees from Johns Hopkins and the London School of Economics, Bruce is the founder and president of the Good Food Institute, an international nonprofit focused on

facilitating the re-imagination of meat production. He's also a TED fellow with two fantastic TED Talks with millions of views under his belt that you should all check out. He's a Y TED fellow with two fantastic TED Talks with millions of views under his belt that you should all check out. He's a Y Combinator alum and a popular speaker at places like Harvard, Yale, Princeton, Stanford, and MIT on food innovation. He's been profiled in the New York Times

and many other prominent outlets and penned op-eds for the Wall Street Journal, USA Today, Los Angeles Times, Wired, and many other prominent outlets, and penned op-eds for The Wall Street Journal, USA Today, Los Angeles Times, Wired, and many other publications. Bruce is super smart. This episode is, I think, our smartest yet, and it's coming right up. 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.

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So today we pick up where we left off almost three years ago in episode 402 to assess the current state of the union on all things alternative protein. We discuss advances in both plant-based and cultured meat, how technological breakthroughs and things like fermentation, 3D printing, and fungi or mycoprotein harvesting are absolutely changing the game. We also discussed the political and regulatory landscape that frames the alternative protein conversation.

And the policy changes we need to realize to facilitate a better food landscape for all. But mostly, this is a very optimistic forecast of food system innovation, how technology, urgency, and popular demand are rapidly converging to create healthy, sustainable, and compassionate solutions to help solve our current food, health, and environmental crises.

As you will soon discover, Bruce is indeed super smart. This episode, again, I think is our smartest one yet. So without further ado, let's get into it. This is me and Bruce Friedrich. All right, Bruce, good to see you. Thank you for coming out. This will be our third turn on the podcast wheel. Always good to see you, my friend. I'm delighted to be here, Rich. Thank you so much for having me. So you are on the cover of Eating Well magazine this month as one of their food heroes. Congrats. Thank you very much. It's really a nice honor for GFI and what we're up to. They picked 10. I'm one of 10. Very good. And the other nine are all doing

just spectacularly important work. So it's nice to see plant-based and cultivated meat honored in that way. It's been amazing to see the growth trajectory of GFI. Cause I think the first time that we did the podcast in a cramped hotel room in New York City, you had just launched it or it was pretty new at that time, I think, right?

Yeah, we started hiring staff other than the two of us who started it. I guess I started it and then I hired one staff member to launch a venture capital fund and then half a dozen more staff members in June of 2016. So, basically five years ago. So, I think when we first met, GFI was maybe a dozen team members. And how many people do you have now? I mean, you've got offices all over the place. Yeah, yeah, we have north of 100 all told. So there's GFI, the United States, which is about 60, 65.

And then we also have GFI affiliates in India, Israel, Brazil, Asia Pacific out of Singapore and Europe. We have offices, well in office in Brussels. And then we also have team members in London. So across our international affiliates, about 45 people. And then in the US about 65. That's amazing in about a five year period. Yeah, it's been good.

Well, because it's been a minute since the last time you were on, I can't remember. I mean, it was at least a couple of years ago, I think. Yeah, it's been good. Well, because it's been a minute since the last time you were on, I can't remember. I mean, it was at least a couple of years ago, I think. Yeah, it's been a while. Since you've last been here and the audience has grown or time has elapsed. So I think it would be good and instructive if you could just briefly talk a little bit

about the background that led you to GFI and the mission of Good Food Institute. Yeah, the mission of the Good Food Institute is to figure out how we feed close to 10 billion people by 2050 without pouring gasoline onto the planet on fire. Ideally pour some cold water on it, put the fire out is basically the mission. And GFI was based on an observation that economies that grow eat more meat, essentially.

And the United Nations has predicted that we will need to produce twice as much meat by 2050 globally as we're producing right now. Most of that is going to be in developing economies, but even in the United States, 2019 was the highest per capita meat consumption in recorded history. So we were looking at ways that we can make the meat that people apparently just really want to consume and do it from plants. So it's not veggie burgers for vegetarians and flexitarians. It's literally let's biomimic the precise meat experience, but let's do it with plants. And instead of the inefficiency of growing massive amounts of crops to feed them to animals so that we can eat animals, let's feed the cells directly, let's cultivate meat in cultivators

instead of using modern industrial farms and slaughterhouses. And in both cases, those processes require a fraction of the land, cause a fraction of the adverse climate impact and are just far more efficient. So much better way to feed 10 billion people and also huge benefits for biodiversity and climate. Right. A couple thoughts on that. First of all, it's interesting that the United States

just tracked its biggest meat consumption year ever, given the relative explosion of interest in plant-based diets and veganism at large, like that movement has really grown considerably over the last decade. And yet here we are, is that attributable to population growth? Is it attributable to an escalation in median income?

Like how do you track that? It definitely tracks with income, but it's per capita numbers. So it's not a population issue. 2019 was the highest per capita meat consumption in recorded history in the United States. And I think it's just food is systems one thinking. So the Nobel laureate in economics, Daniel Kahneman, in his book, Thinking Fast and Slow, he talks about systems one thinking and systems two thinking. And even though people want to make decisions that align with their environmental interests and concern about biodiversity and concern about animals, I mean, it's the same reason

people just keep getting heavier and heavier. We know how not to be overweight and obese. And yet you look at the maps with color coding and we need new colors because people just keep getting more overweight and obese. This is kind of the same thing. Physiology is low on Maslow's hierarchy of needs. Food is physiology. And one thing that education is phenomenal for is getting you involved and me involved. It's getting people to dedicate their lives to this. Uma Valetti started Upside Foods, formerly Memphis Meats, out of concern for this and is dedicating his vocation to it. get lots and lots of people to eat less meat, which is physiology. It's systems one thinking where vocation is systems two thinking. It just doesn't seem to be working in terms of turning the world vegetarian or vegan. And even if we could do it in the United States, the US is the

place where people are best educated about the environmental harm and the health harm and the animal harm of eating meat. And yet even the US has the highest per capita meat consumption ever. But most of the growth in meat production over the next 35 years is going to be in developing economies. And one of the great things about making meat from plants and cultivating meat directly from cells

is that it scales up. So GFI is not in Israel and Singapore because we care what people are eating in Israel and Singapore. We're in those countries because they are extremely technologically advanced. And because they're small, they have food security issues, which is motivating their governments to go all in on making meat from plants and cultivating meat from cells. So those are places where the technology there can scale globally in ways that are very exciting. Right, and you create this domino effect

by focusing on these smaller countries. I had this guy, Sergey Young here yesterday, who's a Russian venture capitalist focused on anti-aging technology. And he has a similar approach focusing on smaller countries that are more receptive in terms of, you know, government regulation to onboard some of these ideas, because once you get it up on its feet

in a place like that, and the rest of the world can notice what's happening, that sets in motion a chain of events. But trying to kind of push the bureaucracy of the United States is a much taller task. Yeah, it is unfortunately a taller task. And then someplace like Singapore or Israel or Japan or South Korea, super technologically advanced governments

that support technology and support innovation. And yeah, also more hospitable regulatory regimes in a lot of instances. Right. Well, we're going to talk about Singapore and Israel. I mean, Singapore just is now serving cultivated meat in a particular restaurant there. Israel is doing some amazing stuff with 3D printed meat, which is insane. But I want to start with this arc that you've been on and this ethos that I think is really powerful and important and worthy of spending a few moments on, which is this idea that it's easier to remake meat than to remake morality, right? Because you come from an activist background.

And part of what I do here on the podcast is try to incite individuals to make personal changes, which is effective to a point, but at some stage you recognized the limitations of that and realize that if you really wanna level up and create systemic change across these massive systems, you have to approach it from a different perspective. Yeah, I mean, if food is systems one thinking

and it doesn't boil down exclusively to, is it delicious and is it affordable? But those are the two big factors. And if we can, I mean, meat is made up of lipids, aminos, minerals, and water. That is all meat is. Plants also have all of those macronutrients. If we can hire meat scientists and tissue engineers

and plant biologists, and we can figure out how to give consumers literally the exact same experience from plants that they get and love from animal meat. And it's less expensive because it's so much more efficient and awful lot of people will switch. And then standard tissue engineering techniques takes six, seven weeks to grow a chicken

from coming out of the shell to slaughter weight. If you cultivate the cells in a cultivator, you can get that same growth in six days. Far more efficient way to do it. And consumers just continue to go about their lives. It analogizes to renewable energy. The goal of renewable energy is to simply make this how we power our lives by making it more convenient. Same thing with plant-based and cultivated meat. Let's make products that taste the same or better and that costs the same or less.

And that science can happen anywhere, just like renewable energy and it can scale up globally. And in the same way that, I don't have my phone here, but my phone doesn't have a cord and it's still a phone. And it's also a camera, but it doesn't have analog film. We can divorce meat from the need for live animals. If somebody eats it and they say, this tastes exactly to me, like a burger or a nugget or whatever else that came from a slaughtered animal, but it didn't, it's still meat, just like my

phone's still a phone and my camera's still a camera. Yeah, sure. And it's important to remember that although these ideas are perhaps new to a lot of people and there's a period of time where we need to kind of wrestle with the notion of eating a piece of animal flesh that was cultivated from a biopsy essentially originally and grown in what can be likened to a brewery at the same time to extend your iPhone analogy. I mean, what was it 20 years ago before, when the iPhone didn't exist and we lived our lives

incredibly differently compared to how we live now. And we really don't think that much about it. Yeah, no, I mean, it was also 20 years ago that the camera phone was invented and we went from no photos being taken on your phone to probably 99.9% of photos being taken that way. Or you think about something like in vitro fertilization, that was a huge controversy. It was like a complete storm

and now it's just completely, completely normal. So, I mean, I do think there's something about meat production now that does concern pretty much everybody who learns about it. I think people eat meat despite how it's produced, not because of how it's produced. So, if you can give people meat that doesn't have the external costs, that doesn't involve factory farms and slaughterhouses, I don't think it's going to be that hard of a sell to get people thinking about meat in whole new ways. Yeah. Well, to further extend the camera phone analogy, the camera phone or consumer camcorders have played a large part in raising that awareness regarding the ills of

factory farming, despite ag-gag laws and all the measures that are in place to prevent us from really understanding what's going on. There is a much larger sense of reality with respect to how our food is made. And I think that is driving some level of consumer change, but you can't really cross the Rubicon with that

until you make it taste just as good, cost the same or cheaper and all the things that you mentioned. So maybe we should set the stage a little bit by talking about the current state of global food and animal agriculture production, what goes into that and what the kind of deleterious implications of that are.

Yeah, I mean, GFI, so our organizational battle cry globally is that governments should be funding open access research and development into plant-based and cultivated meat. And they should be incentivizing private sector activity, both research and development, as well as infrastructure and manufacturing build-out. So the things that governments care about is where we tend to focus. So we focus on antibiotic resistance, we focus on pandemic prevention, and we focus on climate. And taking those in reverse order, we're simply not going to meet our Paris Climate Agreement goals of keeping climate change below 1.5 degrees Celsius by 2050 relative to pre-industrial levels. It's literally impossible unless we address food and agriculture. And this is pretty much the only solution that scales globally. And then antibiotic resistance, something like 70 to 80% of antibiotics produced globally are fed to farm animals. The UK government says the threat from antibiotic resistance is

greater to the human race than the threat from climate change. It's literally the end of modern medicine if antibiotics stop working. So the former head of the World Health Organization, if antibiotics stop working. So the former head of the World Health Organization, she said, we are on a trajectory that eliminates modern medicine if we stay on our current path with regard to antibiotics. And this is one where people will say, especially in Europe, we're making huge progress.

We're gonna ban them in Europe. But look at China, look at developing economies. If you ban them in Europe and you don't ban them anywhere else, it's better than not banning them in Europe, but it's not a global solution. And then the last one, the third one is pandemic prevention.

And the UN Environment Program last July released a report, Preventing the Next Pandemic is the title of it. They listed the seven most likely causes of the next pandemic. The first one is just the title of it. They listed the seven most likely causes of the next pandemic. The first one is just meat eating, period. Because the more animals that you have, the more likely they are to have a zoonotic disease

that transfers to human beings, boom, we have the next COVID. And it could be more transmissible and it could be more deadly. Their second most likely cause of the next pandemic is industrial animal agriculture, because the more you are raising those animals intensively, that compromises their immune systems and makes step one even more likely. And then the way that we are using land and encroaching

on wild animals, I think is number four. And climate change is number seven. So you're literally looking at the two most likely causes, the possibility of your food causing antibiotic resistance or the next pandemic goes from significant to zero if you go with plant-based and cultivated meat. And then finally, climate change. It's a fraction of the climate change. You eliminate nitrous oxide from manure decomposition, and you eliminate methane from ruminant digestion.

And because it's fewer stages of production, you also eliminate a lot of the CO2. Nitrous oxide is 300 times as powerful as a greenhouse gas. Methane is 20 times as powerful as carbon dioxide as a greenhouse gas, and far less land. So those are the three things we talk about the most. And of course, for people like you and me, the fact that it eliminates the factory farming as well

is also a pretty big advantage. Sure. I feel like the antibiotic resistance conversation needs a publicity lift. You know what I mean? I don't feel like we talk about that enough. It is such an existential threat. So talk a little bit more about that specific issue.

I mean, what is it? 70% you said of all antibiotics are fed to livestock. Why is that the case? And how does that lead to the resistance that could make antibiotics in human use defunct? Yeah, so if you get an infection and your doctor prescribes a course of antibiotics,

you'll take those for at the outside 10 days. Farm animals are on antibiotics for their entire lives. And that's why 70% of all antibiotics produced globally are fed to farm animals. Not because they're sick, but because they would be sick given the intense proximity and the living conditions. Yeah, it's a compliment.

It does cause them to grow more quickly. So you need less feed if you're feeding the animals antibiotics. So it has that sort of ancillary benefit to the farmer. But yes, it also means that conditions that would otherwise lead to massive death losses don't lead to massive death losses because you're using antibiotics prophylactically.

And I mean, if people wanna scare, Google the end of working antibiotics. If you want an even bigger scare, add the word China to that. There was a piece on the front page of the New York Times Magazine, maybe 18 months ago called Pig Zero, which you can quickly and easily find

by Googling Pig Zero. You're literally talking about 10 million people a year dying from antibiotic resistance on our current trajectory by the year 2050. And the reason for that is that these antibiotics are dual use. They're also used in human beings. So we treat antibiotic prescriptions very, very seriously.

And at the same time- Constantly consuming them, for a lot of people three times a day. Yeah, it's less that we're consuming them. It's less that there's antibiotic resistance in the meat. Although there is in some instances's antibiotic resistance in the meat, although there is in some instances antibiotics in the meat. It's more that the bugs,

the antibiotics are designed to kill, become super bugs when they figure out how to beat the antibiotics. I see, right. And then we get infected with those bugs and you cut your leg and they need to amputate, right? I mean, antibiotics's antibiotics stop working and that's really a game over for modern medicine.

Right. And what is the current state of, or statistical landscape with respect to the climate impact of animal agriculture? Yeah, I mean, this is, there are two ways to talk about this and we're working with some folks at Climate Works Foundation and Climate Advisors. And the thing that they're really stressing is missed opportunity in terms of land use, which is also a big biodiversity issue.

So the way we have generally talked about it is direct emissions, which is huge in itself. in itself. The UN Food and Agriculture Organization says that 14.5% of all direct emissions climate change is attributable to animal agriculture. So that's significantly more than all forms of transportation combined. And the folks at Project Drawdown, their scientists put out what are the most effective ways that we can address climate. And they found that moving away from farming animals would be six times as efficient at keeping climate change under 1.5 degrees Celsius, six times as efficient as total electrification of transport, and eight times as efficient if your goal is 2.0 degrees Celsius. On a sort of per meal basis, chicken is the least climate change inducing meat and it causes 40 times as much climate change

per calorie of protein relative to legumes like soy and peas. So it's a massive direct climate impact. It's what I said a minute ago about methane and nitrous oxide, which are 20 and 300 times as potent as a climate change gas. And switching away from animal agriculture, it eliminates ruminant digestion and it eliminates manure decomposition.

So just those gases are gone. But you're also talking about massive land opportunity, both to stop burning down the Amazon rainforest. 90% of the global soy crop is fed to farm animals. It doesn't go into tofu or veggie burgers. And if you don't need all of that land to grow soy or to graze cattle, you're literally freeing up three quarters of the land that's used for agriculture. You go from needing four billion hectares of land to needing one billion hectare of land. And that freed up land, I mean, both A, you're lessening the biodiversity loss that comes and chopping down trees, which has massive adverse carbon impact. But you also free up land to do other things.

So you can free up that land for onshore wind. You can free up that land for regenerative ranching. If that's something that you're enthusiastic about, you can free up that land to stop monocropping and start cover cropping. So there's sort of two different ways that a shift to plant-based and cultivated meat is a huge benefit to the climate.

So that 15%, quote, doesn't comprehend the massive inefficiencies in the land being free. Like if you were to really take a comprehensive view of this the impact of making the switch is much broader and more massive than simply reducing that 15% down to 1% or whatever. Yeah. The opportunities for carbon sequestration and repurposing land on behalf of climate are absolutely colossal in and of themselves, even if you don't include the direct adverse climate impact. So, I mean, this is why GFI's organizational battle cry is governments should be funding this

transition. Governments put money, you know, hundreds of billions of dollars into global health initiatives. COVID costs the global economy. I don't know, but it's in the trillions of dollars. So governments should be stopping the next pandemic. They should be keeping antibiotics working. And as a part of their climate strategy, they're already putting tens of billions of dollars into renewable energy. As a part of their climate strategy, they should be funding open access science

and they should be incentivizing this transition. Right, and it's that battle cry and that mission of GFI that prompted Ezra Klein to write that op-ed piece, right? The moonshot for meatless meat, which caused quite a kerfuffle among certain people because I think it was an accurate reflection of what you just said.

And I was so happy that he wrote that piece, but there was a sort of misinterpretation of that, a kind of bad faith construal of it to mean that, you know, governments are going to comply or they're going to, you know, compel people to only eat plant-based meat and they're going to take away people's cheeseburgers. And it became this political talking point that wasn't really rooted in anything real. Yeah, too. I mean, Ezra was a little disappointed that the piece came out right then because it was actually two different things.

Ezra was a little disappointed that the piece came out right then because it was actually two different things. The Biden is going to take your burger was separate from the Ezra Klein piece, which was sort of interesting. The Biden is going to- They seem like they came around the same time though. They came at almost exactly the same time,

but the Biden's gonna take your burger came from some science into the climate impact. I mean, it basically was based in a tabloid in the UK called the Daily Mail, claiming Biden was going to take your burger on the basis of a scientific advisor to the Biden administration, writing for a peer review journal about the adverse impact of climate change, of meat production on climate climate change at the same time that Biden was rolling out his infrastructure package. And it came right before the Climate Leaders Summit on Earth Day with John Kerry. But they were separated, but conflated in some people's minds.

It became quite an interesting thing on Twitter when that was exploding. It became quite an interesting thing on Twitter when that was exploding. Yeah, yeah, it was very, it was unfortunate because I mean, one of the things that we do at GFI is stay very far away from anybody's gonna try to take your burger. So we see, I mean, again, analogizing to renewable energy

and electrification of transport. In both of those cases, the idea is not to convince anybody to put solar panels. The big idea is not I'm going to convince you to put solar panels on your car. And it's not I'm going to convince you to pay more for an electric car and it's going to be inconvenient if you want to go a long distance. The reason solar is less than 2% of energy and the reason electric cars are less than 1% of cars is that there is still a green premium. And the real trick is to make the lithium ion batteries

more effective and affordable. And the real trick is to make the solar panels more efficient and less expensive. In the same way, GFI is focused on the supply side of this. We want plant-based meat and cultivated meat, as we've been talking about, to simply be the way meat of this. We want plant-based meat and cultivated meat, as we've been talking about, to simply be the way meat is produced. So we're not the people going door to door, telling people to put solar panels on their houses or to drive electric vehicles. We're

the people behind the scene pushing to make sure that the solar panels and the lithium ion batteries are more efficient and less expensive. That's what we see as our role. So we stay out of the trying to convince people to eat less or no meat because we are laser focused on what feels like it's going to be a lot more politically palatable, especially if we can frame it in terms of international cooperation and innovation and farmers and jobs, which is a very easy framing to do, especially the out innovate China aspect of it. Yeah. So if we can focus there,

we're hoping we can do something bipartisan and focused on American ingenuity or Chinese ingenuity for that matter as sort of the framing. They call it attraction rather than promotion in AA. That's a big slogan. And that's exactly what you're talking about. I mean, it should be a bipartisan issue. It should be something that everybody's on board with. And as we reckon with

how to compete with China and recognizing that China basically has monopolized the battery market and outpaced us in that regard, which puts us you know, in a deficiency, we have an opportunity with plant-based meat and cultivated meat to lead the charge and be, you know, the sort of leader in this space. And that should be something that Washington should get behind. And I think, you know, we'd all be well-advised

to put together some kind of Manhattan project, moonshot type, wonky brain trust in Washington, which is part of what you're doing to really pioneer all of this. Yeah, no, that's exactly right. And I mean, we look at solar panels in the United States, 80% of them are made in China, or you look at lithium ion batteries

for electrification of transport, and the Chinese have 93 gigafactories for lithium-ion batteries. The U.S. has four. In 10 years, China's going to have 140. We're going to have 10. So the American jobs plan from Joe Biden, it has three focuses. The first is jobs. The second is infrastructure. focuses. The first is jobs. The second is infrastructure. And the third is out-innovate China, which seems like the sort of one super bipartisan aspect of it. It's not really a trick

to say, look at China winning on solar panels, let's make solar panels. And look at China winning on lithium-ion batteries, let's make lithium-ion batteries. Right now, we are the global uncontested leader on private sector innovation in plant-based and cultivated meat, but we're not very far into the race yet. It would not take a significant investment for China to be way ahead very, very quickly. And our hope is that we can learn the lessons of solar panels and lithium ion batteries. Because we don't think the decision is between let's have conventional agriculture and let's have plant-based and cultivated meat.

Plant-based and cultivated meat, assuming it works out and we can in fact make these products less expensive and indistinguishable, which we're optimistic about. Do we want that stuff made in the United States or do we want to import it like we are with solar panels and lithium ion batteries? And that argument is, you know, should resonate, you know, in a bipartisan way and framing in terms

of, you know, jobs and American ingenuity. And what we're looking for is something like the Manhattan Project focused on meat or a space race, a global space race focused on shifting in this direction. Right, and you're contending with a regime in China that when they set their mind to doing something, they're able to execute on that pretty efficiently because it's not a democratic society. So we have that layered on top of this.

And then there's this campaign to win hearts and minds because the politicization of this is that it could be perceived as a threat to the American way. We're about like barbecuing in the backyards and the cheeseburger is what it is to be American, right? The T-bone steak and all of that. And for those whose constituents

are cattle ranchers and the like, they're gonna get up in front of Congress and shout to the balcony about how we can't be doing this. We need to protect this idea that we have about what an American farmer is that actually is detached from the reality of what it is to be an American farmer. Yeah, and one of our pitches, and I think Ezra in his piece put it really nicely,

he said something like, surely if we can incentivize farming practices that are bad for the land, we can shift to incentivizing farming practices that are good for the land. Farmers understand what is good for the land and what is not good for the land. And if you talk to farmers, they're not excited about monocropping. Even cattle ranchers are not excited about shipping their cattle to feedlots. They're not excited about shipping those animals to these sort of massive slaughterhouses. I think we could, in GFI's vision, move to the sort of less meat, better meat scenario for people who want regeneratively farmed animals or heritage breeds.

And for cattle ranchers, what it would mean is they could actually be incentivized to do regenerative ranching like the folks at Carbon 180 are advocating or Alan Savory or that film Kiss the Ground, like what they are advocating. That could be the only form of meat production and commodity meat,

which is right now basically 100% of pork and chicken and turkey and commodity beef, which is sort of if it's grazed for half, if the animal's grazed for half of their life and then in a feedlot for half of their life, like how do you grapple with that exactly? Right.

We could shift away from the feedlots, which are so environmentally damaging. And if regenerative ranching has promise, and I think done right, it probably does have promise, that could be the exclusive way that meat is produced. And it ends up being really good for farmers and not bad for farmers. That's the vision that we're working on.

Most farmers would prefer to be able to do it that way if they can make it economically viable. And I think that goes to the heart of a counter argument to the GFI mission, which is, why do we have to do all this plant-based meat and cultured meat? Why don't we just eat grass-fed beef from these regenerative farms? But the truth is, there's not enough land to feed this many people doing it that way. And as of right now, not only is it more expensive to purchase meat that way, it only accounts for something like

one half of 1% of the market. So we have this romantic idea of the viability of that, but the truth is it's not a solution to feeding the planet. Yeah, and I mean, this works as a pretty nice compliment to that because it requires so much less land. There is less land stress. So it makes regenerative ranching easier. So the really great thing about plant-based and cultivated meat from a global solutions standpoint is that it doesn't require a ton of coordination and it doesn't require

that consumers pay more. So regenerative ranching, assuming that it is viable and based on people I'm talking to, I think it's viable, but it does require oversight. It does require a fair amount of effort and the products are going to cost more. Some people will pay more. Maybe we go up from where we are now at one half of 1% to two or 3% or something like that. And as we replace all of the commodity products, all of the lowest common denominator products, then you end up with the vast majority of meat is produced from plants or cultivation. But there's still a market for people who want to do regenerative ranching and heritage breeds and consumers who want to pay more for those sorts

of systems. Talk a little bit about the inefficiencies and the food waste that's caused by our current system. I mean, you alluded to it in terms of the amount of land required to raise animals for food, for human consumption. But when we think about food waste, we think about the food that we're tossing out in the garbage or the food that goes down the garbage disposal or into the compost,

but food waste is actually a much larger, broader issue. Yeah, this was actually what turned me plant-based 33 years ago. I read Diet for a Small Planet by Frances Moore LaPay. And she makes an argument that just like had not occurred to me somehow growing up in Oklahoma, eating basically nothing but meat. And that is that animals need to eat too. So according to the World Resources Institute, the most efficient animal at turning the crops that you grow into meat by feeding those crops to the animal, the most efficient animal is the chicken.

And it takes nine calories of soy or wheat or oats or whatever you're growing, takes nine calories into a chicken to get one calorie back out from the chicken. So that means nine times as much land, nine times as much water, nine times the pesticides and herbicides. And then you're growing all of those crops and you're shipping them to a feed mill, and that is pollution, spewing, and energy intensive. And you're operating the feed mill and you're shipping the feed to the

modern industrial farm on gas guzzling 18 wheelers that are pollution spewing and energy intensive and you're operating the farm. And then you're shipping the animals to the slaughterhouse and you're operating the slaughterhouse. So it's both the rank inefficiency of nine calories in to get one calorie back out, as well as all these other stages of production. And with cattle, it's 40 calories in to get one calorie back out.

It's horribly inefficient. And you have to deal with all the refuse that that causes as well. Yeah, it's a massive amount of water. It's a massive amount of manure. The manure is destroying aquatic ecosystems. It's destroying soil. It's rendering soil barren, essentially.

And yeah, I mean, it's basically cities and cities and cities of untreated waste. Like, you know, we're in Los Angeles, like the waste is treated, but there's, you know, Harris Ranch just up the road and the waste is not treated. You can't drive by that without knowing what's going on there. It's quite a sight and quite a smell when you pass it.

And, you know, and also as this accelerant to climate change, I mean, it becomes a social justice issue at the same time because the communities that are gonna be most heavily impacted by these seismic shifts in climate are going to be the sort of underprivileged communities or the sort of seabaring cities that are on low-lying lands that are just gonna get devastated by this.

Yeah, I mean, COVID-19, we had 700 million people in abject poverty globally. Before COVID-19, we have 900 million people in abject poverty. Now, after COVID-19, it's probably even worse considering what's happening in India and Brazil at the moment. And we're probably, you know, like we're sort of out of it in the United States and not paying that close attention to what's happening in places like India or Brazil,

but they're very much not out of it yet. So when you're talking about climate change or antibiotic resistance or pandemic prevention and pandemic adaptation, it's absolutely true that globally, the people who can least adapt are the people who are going to be most adversely affected. And they're also the folks who contributed the least to the problems. So, from a sort of global social justice perspective, the planet is on fire in multiple different ways, not just climate change, also pandemic risk, also the end of modern medicine through antibiotic resistance. And it is an absolute moral imperative that we move in this direction as quickly as possible. And back to the idea of something like regenerative agriculture or unionizing slaughterhouses

or getting rid of agricultural subsidies. Like those are all really good things to do, but they take a lot of work. They take a lot of coordination and we succeed on all three of those in the United States. And the 95% of the globe that is not the United States has not changed at all. So something, the real sort of wonderful thing about shifting to plant-based meat and cultivated meat, and the reason that it analogizes to electrification of transport and renewable energy, is that if we can get the numbers right, if we can make the product that people like at a lower cost, it simply takes over and becomes how meat is made with all of these massive benefits. Right. Well, speaking of products that people like, let's talk about the current state of plant-based meat, like focusing on that. At this point, I would say the majority of the people

who are watching or listening to this have probably tried a Beyond Burger, Beyond Meat, or an Impossible Burger at this point. It's quite something, the extent to which this has become ubiquitous and can be found in most of the fast food chains at this point. And I've started traveling again and there's Beyond Burgers on the menu at most restaurants that serve hamburgers now. It's crazy. So where are we at and what's to come? Yeah, it has been extraordinarily gratifying to see the success of both the Beyond Burger and the Impossible Burger and also the success of those companies.

So I remember when Beyond got into GGI Fridays like three or four years ago and everybody was so excited. And like you said, you said, right after that, White Castle had the Impossible Burger and then Carl's Jr. had the Beyond Burger and then Burger King had the Impossible Burger. And yeah, it's really, really great. And there has been significant displacement even at higher price points, but you're not gonna see massive displacement.

You're not gonna see the benefits that could come until we get the price down, the taste identical or better, and all of the products. So, Ethan Brown at Beyond Meat in his most recent quarterly call, because now they've IPO'd, so you can get a lot more public information. And he said they expect to reach price parity with at least one product by the end of 2024. So two and a half years from now, right now at grocery, you're paying something like 80% more. On menus, you're paying like 20 to 30% more. Impossible is a little more than twice the cost. Yeah, it's more expensive. And people are still doing it though. Yeah, no, and that proves the point I made a second ago that people right now

eat meat despite how it's produced, not because of how it's produced. And these are very new products as well. So people are sort of very, very excited about them. Their margins in terms of sales are just skyrocketing. We saw in 2020, 45% more plant-based meat consumed in 2020 as opposed to 2019. But they're starting from a pretty low place. So you can have that happen in 2020, even with conventional meat consumption going up a few percentage points, and it's still going to be more than ever before. and Tyson and Cargill and Smithfield and BRF, those are the five biggest meat companies in the world, about them going into plant-based meat, both because if they see it as opportunity, they can mainstream it. And then also if they see it as threat, they will do things to fight against it. And we would love for them to mainstream it.

They also have massive distribution channels. They have massive capacity to scale up. But the reason that people like Pat Brown, who runs Impossible, and Ethan Brown, who runs Beyond, no relation, the reason they are excited about this sort of competition is they are creating a market sector. So right now, success for Beyond is success for Impossible and vice versa, because it puts into people's brains the idea that meat can come from plants. And similarly, when actual meat companies start making meat from plants, it really does help the general public to understand this and it socializes it and it moves it in the right direction. Yeah, that's amazing. I mean, first of all, to reach price parity when you're competing with a huge amount of subsidies

that are underwriting the cattle industry that are driving that price point down and to be able to meet that nonetheless is an amazing thing. Secondly, yeah, you gotta work within the system. If you wanna create systemic change at the highest level, it's easy and perhaps even lazy to just point your finger at the bad guys

and claim that they should go away, but they're not going away. So how do you get them to change? You go to them and you convince them that it is in their long-term self-interest and economic interest to make this pivot. I've heard you say this before, like they're not in the business of necessarily slaughtering animals. They're in the business of providing protein to humans. So if you provide them with a better way to do that, that's cost-effective that people like

where they can make money, they will make that shift. Yeah, no, that is exactly right. If they can make more money making meat from plants and where they can make money, they will make that shift. Yeah, no, that is exactly right. If they can make more money making meat from plants and if they can satisfy their consumer base, cultivating meat from cells, that is the direction that they will go in. And it has been extremely gratifying to see all of the top. Have you gone to these companies

and sat at their conference room tables and talk to these guys? Like, what is that like? It's just like sitting and talking with anybody else. honestly. I mean, this is one of the things that I just absolutely believe to be true about human beings. Everybody is sort of, you know, in the Dale Carnegie way, everybody is the hero of their own story. But folks have families and they want their families to be proud of them. And everybody wants their life to be meaningful. And if your current story is my life is meaningful because I provide high quality protein to lots and lots of people at reasonable prices, that's a pretty good story. there are all these ancillary harms that you're partly responsible for. And it's not that hard to sort of say, yes, this is an ancillary harm, but life is imperfect. And what I'm doing is a net

really, really good. But if you can improve on that, you know, everybody wants their kids to be proud of them. Everybody wants their spouse to be proud of them. Everybody wants to be proud of themselves. So having conversations with people at these companies and saying, look, your product is not super sustainable. Your product causes animals to suffer. Your product has these risks where global health is concerned. And here's a solution. And that's why all five of the biggest meat companies in the world are investing in plant. They all have plant-based products.

Two of them have invested in multiple cultivated meat companies. One of them has signed a joint venture agreement to bring cultivated meat to Brazil. And it makes a ton of sense. But I mean, one thing is the meat companies are not, and just capitalism in general, doesn't incentivize the sort of forward thinking that is required for them to prioritize these products. And the degree to which they all have, I see as just maybe the most surprising and also the best thing that I've seen that I would not have predicted since starting GFI five years ago. So when you look at these various offerings at Burger King and Carl's Jr. and White Castle, and now like Yum Foods with Taco Bell and Pizza Hut,

what is the success level? Like my sense is that these things are selling really well and people are enjoying them. Is there, are there statistics on like how often people are opting for the plant-based burger versus the regular burger? I mean, it's pretty remarkable that the numbers are good. They don't have to share the numbers

and a lot of them they're not sharing, but they're good enough to keep them on the menus. I mean, the thing about fast food menus is it's no longer you just punch in the price. Like you need to sell well enough to have one of the buttons on the register. And they're all, you know, the TGF Friday burger is still there, the Beyond Burger. Yeah, they're all still there and they seem to be selling. And I go in, like I go in and purchase these things and I will just ask the person behind the counter, you know, how's this selling? And inevitably they'll say it's selling really well. So, I mean, there were some sort of hilarious early false starts. My wife is Canadian, so we're in Canada and A&W

very, you know, sort of to much fanfare announced that they were going to be launching the Beyond Burger and Canadian A&W. And literally all of the people had Beyond Burger aprons and Beyond Burger hats. And for most of the promotion, there were no Beyond Burgers because they sold out so quickly. But it's nice to see, you know, Beyond is scaling up and getting, you know,

better and more secure distribution. Impossible has signed with OSI, which is McDonald's global distributor. So they should not have any trouble. But McDonald's is the final like pin to drop here in terms of the big players. They have yet to really onboard this, but didn't they, they struck a deal with Beyond, right? They did, they struck a deal with Beyond.

It's very exciting and they've tested it in a few places and we're hearing very good things about the test marketing. So yeah, it's exciting. Perhaps this is an obvious point, but I think it's important to say that this product in these fast food restaurants is not a reaction to vegan demand.

They're not offering these things because there's so many vegans who want it. They're creating a viable alternative to meat. And this is really a vehicle to provide an alternative to the meat eater, right? I mean, most of these burgers come with cheese on them. They're not vegan products

and they're not trying to be vegan products. Yeah, the default is inevitably not vegan. And yeah, I mean, it's disheartening for somebody who's been vegan for 33 years to- And they're cooking it on the same grill as the meat, you know, generally. That doesn't bother me. But so if you're the super hardcore, you know,

this is not for you. Like that's not, this is not the product. This wasn't designed for you. This is designed to placate, not placate, that's the wrong word, but to please the meat eater who's just looking for a different option. And the fact that it's not only viable,

but like working and successful, I think bodes well for the future expansion of these types of products. Yeah, and the thing I was gonna say is disheartening is just that the numbers of vegetarians and vegans have not changed very much since I went vegan 33 years ago. You've been doing this for a long time, Bruce. I know.

And yeah, I mean, and what that means is exactly what you just said. McDonald's and Burger King and all the folks who are looking in this direction, they would not do this for vegetarians and vegans because when the polls are done, even though saying you are a vegetarian or a vegan is a little bit more popular than it's been in past years,

when they actually do the, which of these products have you consumed in the last month? Uh, the numbers are, are not higher than they were 10 or 20 years ago or not much higher, uh, within the range of statistical insignificance. And then back to what I said a minute ago, 2019 was the highest per capita meat consumption, uh, in recorded history, even in the United States. So, um, the, the companies that are launching these products are launching these products for meat eaters who are looking for something different, which is very heartening, very exciting.

There's so much intense science that goes into the crafting of these products. There are all these crazy engineers and people who are experts in flavor and all of this. It's like, it's wild to see the brain trust that comes together to try to craft these products. Yeah. I mean, it's pretty fascinating to like tour beyond meat and they actually have all of these meat scientists because they're making meat. So all of these people who, you know, they went to Texas A&M or they went to Georgia

Tech or they went wherever and they thought they were going to be working in a Tyson lab, doing something with chicken nuggets. And now they're at Beyond Meat doing something with plant-based nuggets, which is pretty cool. But that underlines the degree to which the theory is super simple, right? It's super simple to say, let's just grow cells and then market the cells and it's a better way of producing meat. Or it's super simple to say, let's just grow cells and then market the cells and it's a better way of producing meat. Or it's super simple to say, meat is lipids, aminos, minerals, and water. Plants have all of those things. Let's just put them together and they will be a burger. It's not that easy. We've got the Impossible Burger and the Beyond Burger. And in terms of products that satisfy meat eaters, in terms of products that satisfy meat eaters.

So far, that's it. And they cost a lot more. So we do need to hire tissue engineers and meat scientists and chemical engineers and mechanical engineers. And we need all of the products. Like so far, we've got burgers, but we need nuggets and we need fish sticks. And those things are like super cheap.

So we are optimistic with both plant-based and cultivated meat that especially with economies of scale, these practices are so much more efficient that we should be able to get to taste the same or better and cost the same or less all the way up to chicken breasts and fish sticks and filet-o-fish and T-bone steaks. But it is a moral imperative that we get there for all of these products for the reasons that we've been talking about. So it really does warrant an all hands on deck mentality. And it really does warrant governments seeing this as an imperative within their global health and their climate mitigation strategies. Setting aside the moral imperative for a moment to play a little bit of devil's advocate,

when you describe what you just described, it's hard for me not to conjure this notion that this is all crazy Franken food and it's very processed. And what are the long-term implications on human health by eating these foods that are made in a lab versus, you know, grown at a farm? I mean, on the cultivated side, it's the exact same product, but without any antibiotic residues, without the E.coli or salmonella.

Right, we'll get into the cultivated meat part of it in a minute, but just with respect to the plant-based foods, meat and dairy analogs. I mean, Google processing and chicken or processing and pork or processing and beef. There are all kinds of chemical baths and other things that go into meat processing now. At the end of the day, do the macronutrient analysis.

And you're looking at plant-based meat. It has complex carbohydrates. It has fiber. It has no cholesterol. It has significantly less fat. It has the same or less saturated fat. The macronutrient analysis is significantly better. We're all supposed to eat more fiber. 97% of Americans are not consuming enough fiber. This helps with that. We're all supposed to eat more fiber. 97% of Americans are not consuming enough fiber. This helps with that. We're all supposed to eat more complex carbohydrates. We're supposed to eat less cholesterol. We're supposed to eat no trans fats.

Animal meat naturally has trans fats. Plant-based meat has no trans fats. And this is why when the Stanford School of Medicine did a study called SWAP Meat, and they took a variety of organic animal meats and they compared it to Beyond Meat's versions of those organic animal meats. And in just eight weeks,

people's heart disease markers got better and they lost weight, which the researchers didn't expect. And they published this in the American Journal of Clinical Nutrition. And it's pretty predictable from a straight macronutrient analysis. And then for people who are concerned about people in developing economies, actually, you know, tofu is processed and hummus is processed. The processing of the plant proteins makes them more bioavailable

for athletes and more bioavailable, much more importantly and significantly, for people in developing economies. The protein for people who are protein deficient is actually a higher quality protein. In the US, we're not protein deficient, so it probably doesn't matter that much. But plant-based meat is a sort of solution globally. It's a more bioavailable and consequently a better protein source. Sure, beyond beyond and beyond impossible, like these big players that we have, there are so many startups that are doing interesting things

and it's been cool to kind of, you know, pay attention to these new companies that are percolating up and things that are happening with like fungi, like they're making plant-based meat out of mushrooms essentially, and they're making leather out of it. And it's really a product of like these amazing scientists

who are figuring out how to use these things that we've always had in our lives and discover new purposes for them that solve these big problems that we have. Yeah, GFI had been putting mycoprotein and whole biomass fermentation into the plant-based camp just because people get confused when you start talking about fermented meat.

But yeah, I mean, corn has been around since 1985 doing whole biomass fermentation. Q-U-O-R-N, right? Q-U-O-R-N, right? Q-U-O-R-N, yeah. They're the biggest of the alternative meat companies in the world still. I didn't know that. I didn't know they were that big.

Largely European. So they're omnipresent in Europe, a little less omnipresent here. But yeah, they've been doing whole biomass fermentation since 1985. But there are a small army of whole biomass fermentations coming along in just the last couple of years. And it's pretty exciting.

And then there's also precision fermentation, which is basically programming a yeast or a plant to create the actual animal proteins, dairy proteins or egg proteins, or in the case of Impossible Foods, heme proteins. So they use precision fermentation to create the heme that goes into their burgers. But yeah, just an overwhelming amount of exciting stuff

happening in the startup world. Right. What's the angle that our mutual friend, Paul Shapiro has taken with his Better Meat Company? That is very exciting, what Better Meat Company and Paul are doing. They're actually, they're doing mycoproteins. So they're doing whole biomass fermentation and they're doing it as ingredients for actual animal meat and for plant-based meat. So they are a business to

business supplier. And Purdue has a, I think they call it chicken plus nuggets that are 50% Better Meat Company and 15% Purdue actual chicken. And they win in taste tests against the alternative. And the thing that is most exciting to me about Better Meat Company's production process is it is already less expensive than conventional beef. And especially as a blend, it can already taste the same or better and cost the same or less. So this could be a really great way for both the plant-based companies, as well as the conventional animal-based companies to get some high quality protein and some fiber, lower the cholesterol

and trans fat numbers in their products and massively increase their sustainability metrics. Explain mycoprotein, it's M-Y-C-O, it's not micro, it's myco, right? It's myco, it just means mushroom. I see, yeah, so it is a fungal thing. It's a fungal protein, just like corn. It's the fungal thing. It's a fungal protein, just like corn. It's the same basic thing.

They're calling their protein RISE, R-H-I-Z-E is what the protein is called, but it's a mycoprotein, it's a fungi. And it uses whole biomass fermentation, which is the environmental metrics are superb. The protein digestibility is superb. And Purdue and Johnsonville Saville sausage are already using it and their customers are loving it.

And it's already less expensive than beef as it scales up. He didn't start this, I mean, this is all really fast too. Three years ago, yeah. Yeah. Started it three years ago. They just had the ribbon cutting. Wow, very cool.

The mayor of Sacramento was there. I know you were just there, right? I was, yeah. It's wild. Well, let's talk about cultivated meat. I mean, first of all, this has gone through some nomenclature changes. It was lab grown meat and cell-based meat.

I guess we're calling it cultured meat now. What is the appropriate vernacular? We call it cultivated. Cultivated meat. You can cultivate your cultivated meat in a cultivator. I think cultivated will probably become the nomenclature of choice. Some people are calling it cell-based

because they did differentiation studies. And that's the thing that consumers most quickly and easily understand is not industrial animal meat, that it's produced in a different way. Cultivated has pretty consistently been fine for differentiation and won across the various metrics of would you consume it. So basically what they do is they show consumers two packages and one will say cultivated and the other will say, well, yeah, cultivated and they've tested it against cultured and cell-based and cell cultured. You add the word cell and people think science. Yeah, it immediately gets weird. And yeah, the metrics go down. So cultivated, you know, from a nomenclature standpoint is what we are using more and more

companies are using it. And that's what we're hoping will become the nomenclature. Cultured does almost as well, but has some, you know, petri dish implications. And also there is, you know, cultured fish generally means aquaculture. So we're going with cultivated. All right. And explain for the people who are brand new to this idea, what exactly this is. And explain for the people who are brand new to this idea, what exactly this is. Yeah. And I guess I should just tack on to the end of that. When consumer surveys are done, even if you call it in vitro meat, even if you call it lab grown meat, both of which do worse than cell-based, something like a third of people are excited to replace their meat with cultivated meat once it costs less, assuming it tastes the same or better and costs less. Like a third are already excited about that.

Two-thirds are willing and excited to try it. And then you ask people, why wouldn't you replace it? And they just deny the premise of the question. So like most people say, well, I don't believe it's going to cost less, or I don't believe it's going to taste better. So especially now, so early on when nobody has had the capacity to even try it, we feel like the consumer acceptance metrics are pretty spectacular. Even if they're like the like worst nomenclature is used. Well, there's been this long ramp up because we're all waiting for this stuff to become available. And while we're sitting here waiting, we're getting used to the idea. not because of its production.

And when you have two products and one of them is safer for you and your family, and if you wanna go see what Upside Food is doing, they'll stream it on the internet, get boring like that. The transparency piece is huge. Exactly, yeah. And like you said earlier, they're literally passing laws to make it illegal

to find out what's happening on modern farms and in modern slaughterhouses. Whereas the production process for plant-based and cultivated meat, they will stream live on the internet. We're here, we're live streaming every aspect of this. Exactly. So essentially, the idea here is

you take a cell culture from an animal biopsy and you grow that cell culture or you protect it or you create these cell banks and you use those to then create these meat products that you essentially brew in these breweries. Yeah, you bathe the cells. And they grow on like a scaffold. Yeah, that's exactly right.

So you take a biopsy the size of a sesame seed from a live animal, or you could do it from a slaughtered animal either way. You bathe the cells in nutrients. You do that in a live animal, or you could do it from a slaughtered animal, either way. You bathe the cells in nutrients. You do that in a cultivator, which looks like a beer brewer. You can do it on scaffolds, or if you just need the cells for nuggets

or burgers or something, you don't have to do it on a scaffold. And then you harvest the meat. It's a super simple process, which was sort of fascinating for GFI. When we started working on GFI five years ago, we assumed that we know everything we need to know about plant-based meat because we've all been eating veggie burgers for decades. And with cultivated meat, there was like all kinds of stuff

we had to figure out. And it turned out the reverse of that was true because with cultivated meat, you just take standard tissue engineering techniques and scale it way up and use food grade ingredients. And that's basically what you're doing. And we know how in therapeutics and medicine, we know how to do that at high price points. That's why the two sort of fathers of cultivated meat, Mark Post, who grew the first cultivated meat burger with a million dollars from Sergey Brin,

is a medical doctor. He was teaching medicine at both Harvard Medical School and Dartmouth Medical School. And then he went to teach tissue engineering and medicine in the Netherlands. And then Uma Valeti from Upside Foods trained at Mayo and was a professor of cardiology at the University of Minnesota. And he started Upside Foods, formerly Memphis Meats, they're medical doctors. And so they know how to do this.

And then with plant-based meat, it's kind of, it's not exactly a different product, but it's a whole different way of thinking about the endeavor. If you're sort of taking soy waste products or wheat waste products, fashioning it into something that looks like a burger or a nugget or whatever, and charging higher price points for it. So really figuring out how to take plant proteins and create the entire meat experience

is a very different way of thinking about that endeavor. And we've been using twin screw extrusion literally for decades, which is what's made for pet food and snack food and that sort of thing. It's almost certainly not the best way to produce plant-based meat. So it really has been sort of an interesting shift because cultivated meat, very, very simple. Plant-based meat, like a gazillion different ways of thinking about it and a gazillion different ways of thinking about the inputs. Right, and there's this battle about which one

is the more viable path to take, right? Where should we be placing our bets? I mean, GFI is placing its bets on both, but what's your sense of how this will play out over the next decade? One thing that we have been surprised by is the number of plant-based companies that are coming along and they're sort of thinking about the endeavor in the older way. So one of the things that we challenge, especially the plant-based companies, to do is to remember that Beyond Meat was started on the back of university research from the University of Missouri.

They started working on it in 2012. I'm sorry, in 2009. They didn't have a product for three years. Impossible Foods, Pat started working on that in 2011. He's one of the foremost chemical engineers in the world. Very accomplished scientist. And it took him five years to have the first product, the Impossible Burger.

So if you're starting a plant-based company and you say, I'm the next Impossible Foods or I'm the next Beyond Meat, and you also say for $10 million, I can have a product on the market in eight or 10 months, like those things don't compute. For plant-based meat, we really need to challenge the plant-based meat companies to forget, go the short-term competition with one another on behalf of the longer-term competition

with the entire meat industry. And with cultivated meat, that's in stark relief. Like everybody knows if you are a cultivated meat company, it is going to take you three to 10 years. And when you come out of the gate, you better have it super dialed or you're gonna be dead in the water. I mean, I know Ethan, didn't he pull the first iteration of Beyond off the shelves?

He's like, it's not good enough. Like it has to be just as good or better when we introduce it to the public or it's not gonna work. Yeah, and the thing about plant-based meat though is that you can have a successful plant-based company that just sells to flexitarians and vegetarians and competes with the rest of the plant-based companies.

And that is alluring for investors. You can have a successful company that makes a fair amount of money and delaying gratification to really hire all of the scientists that are going to be required to have a plant-based meat company that competes with conventional animal meat on taste and price metrics is harder. So they're further out of the gate with Impossible and Beyond there. And now we think the conventional meat companies are thinking in this way as well, but it's tough.

It's kind of anybody's guess. Yeah. And then there's also the, I mean, we are, the more our scientists dive into this and we have 20 something scientists all over the world looking at this, and the more they dive into it, and we have networks of scientists at all of the companies like Benson Hill Biosystems and Merck and all of these other companies, the more we dive into this, the more enthusiastic we get about its prospects on both the plant-based and the cultivated meat side. But nobody's done it yet. Nobody has produced a plant-based or a cultivated meat product that tastes the same or better and that costs the same or less. And that's where we need to get to. So we don't know with absolute certainty that it's possible. We do know with plant-based and cultivated that it's going to take a while, especially for like chicken nuggets and fish

sticks. And so which one wins is probably gonna be to some degree a product of resources. And then there's also the sort of billionaire that wants to change the world factor. Like if Jeff Bezos or Elon Musk said, okay, I've got Mars and I've got Amazon or I've got Mars and I've got Tesla. Like if they were to say, gosh,

the way that we're producing meat right now is incredibly antiquated. And I am going to relegate this harmful way of producing meat to the dustbin of history and put the resources that are necessary into, you know, then they can pick plant-based or cultivated. And suddenly that, you know, that becomes the one that wins.

That will be the accelerant. Yeah, but I feel like either way, it's an inevitability. Like we're headed in that direction. It's going to happen. Cultivated meat's gonna take longer. It is interesting that, I'm sure you know this, like Pat Brown is less sanguine about cultivated meat.

Like he told me, like he's, I mean, he's all in on plant-based meat, not so certain about where we're headed with cultivated meat. Yeah, I mean, I think, I don't think Pat has looked at the science in a while on cultivated meat, which is perfectly understandable. He's running a multi-billion dollar plant-based meat company.

I will say, so GFI hired our first scientists in June of 2016. And when I first started working on it at the end of 2015, I assumed that cultivated meat was going to be the province of university researchers for quite a while. And Uma Valetti convinced me that it was ready for commercialization, but not completely. So the first thing I said to our scientists when we hired them in June of 2016 was figure out whether cultivated meat can work because GFI is agnostic. We can go all in on plant-based meat if we don't think cultivated meat will work.

And the more we have dived in, the more optimistic we have become. And we produced the first ever lifecycle analysis and more to our point, techno-economic analysis that included NDA information from companies. We had 15 companies and the government of Singapore, their agency for science, technology, and research, all participated with a company called CE Delft. So we didn't get any of the proprietary information. CE Delft got proprietary information from 15 companies and worked with ASTAR, the government science agency of Singapore, to map the path forward. And the more people dive in, the more enthusiastic they get about the possibility of cultivated meat. And it's going to require some government support,

just like electrification of transport and solar have required government support. I mean, it might be inevitable over sort of the longish timeframe if we, you know, relegated exclusively to startup companies. But with government support, our scientists become more and more convinced that it's doable. And if that changed, you know, we'd stop doing it. So right now, Josh Tetrick's company, Just, is serving cultivated meat in this fancy restaurant in Singapore. Interestingly, Just, which was Hampton Creek, began as a plant-based company.

Yeah, and then pivoted to the cultured meat. Like that came- They do both now. They do both, right? They just raised $200 million each. They didn't start in the cultivated space though. Right, they started as a plant-based ag company. Yeah, yeah.

And that's kind of proof of concept. Slowly these things are gonna get onboarded and we'll reach a pivot moment in terms of scale when it will all become affordable. Yeah, I think that's right. I mean, our techno-economic analysis names sort of three areas of significant requisite scientific inquiry on the cultivated side, as well as some areas where governments need to provide support, similar to what they did with

Tesla in 2009, in terms of super low interest loans for factories, as one example. Some of the ingredients, especially albumin in the media, either getting a synthetic version or a much lower cost version, those sorts of things. But yeah, I think it is eminently, eminently doable. I also think there's an absolute moral imperative to do it. So this is why at GFI, our global battle cry is convincing all of the governments where we operate that this needs to be a part of their theory of change and programs around both global health and climate change, meeting their obligations under the Paris Agreement. And then also just getting the global NGO community. So Breakthrough Energy, Bill Gates, he launched his NGO in February. It was a spinoff of Breakthrough Energy Ventures.

We worked with them on their policy plan around this issue. And they are saying, and more and more environmental groups, but we need all of them. I mean, most environmental groups have been somewhat AWOL on ag and land solutions because they couldn't come up with something that analogized to renewable energy and electrification of transport. All of the solutions either required individuals to change, which just hasn't been working for 50 years as

like a grand plan, or it required massive amounts of collaboration and cooperation across governments, which is also super hard. Renewable energy, electrification of transport, you use markets, you use technology, that is clear. So now the organizations that see those as a solution to fossil fuels and yeah, to fossil fuels need to see this as the ag and land solution. So that's really what we're focused on. Yeah, that's interesting. I hadn't really thought about that.

You can't just say, stop doing that. You have to provide an alternative where you can direct funding and interest. Yeah. And now this is that thing. Yeah, and I do just wanna underline like, Pat Brown and Ethan Brown and Uma Valeti and you and me and lots and lots of people. Like we are here dedicating our lives to this on the basis of education.

And GFI doesn't do direct to consumer. We do outreach to governments and outreach to NGOs and other policymakers and corporate executives and entrepreneurs and scientists. And we are focused on educating people, the people to change their lives in this direction. But education as a way to get lots and lots of people to change their diets, just it hasn't worked yet, even in the United States

where we're sort of most advanced in education. The idea that it will work in rural China just seems not likely. So this is the solution from a sort of grand vision way of thinking about the problems. Both Browns, Pat and Ethan, and they come into this not as entrepreneurs or I have this great idea

and I'm gonna make a bunch of money or I'm in the world of food. They were looking at it from a perspective of this is a big problem and I perhaps might have a solution to this. Yeah. It's solution oriented. Yeah. No, that's absolutely right. I will take this opportunity to say like the foundation of GFI was looking at people like Pat and Ethan and Uma and Josh and saying,

all of these guys have the solution and then they have a company and all of their science is protected by IP law, which is great for them. You have to do that, but you want to open source this stuff. Yeah. So our first of our first six hires, two of them were scientists and nobody before GFI had said, what is the technological readiness of these technologies? What are the critical technology elements? What do we know? What do we not know? Where are the areas of exploration where we don't even know what we don't know? And let's start filling those gaps. So the first thing we did in science and technology was produced the technological readiness assessments. And we are methodically publishing peer review research, as well as partnering with Food journal, which is the largest journal for food technologists in the world.

We have 16 university programs. We call it the Alt Protein Project. So anybody who has the relevant experience to transform the world using food science across the full scope and pretty much everything in STEM is applicable here. We want to make sure all of these people, everyone knows that they can save antibiotics, that they can lessen pandemic risk, that they can address climate, that they can help animals with their expertise by going into this space. And we are open accessing everything and we are inviting everybody to the table. So we have a monthly, the science of alt protein seminars. We have monthly, the business of alt protein seminars.

And somebody the other day said, gfi.org is the Wikipedia of alt proteins. And it absolutely is. It's hard to imagine any question anybody could ask that's not answered on our website. You recently revamped the website, which looks great by the way, but it's an incredibly robust resource

for everything you wanna know about this world. Yeah, that's exactly right. And then we have massive amounts of webinars. So yeah, we have- Are you getting the conference back up on its feet? We're not doing it in person this year. So the Good Food Conference, we're doing a virtual version. And I can't remember what the slogan is,

but the slogan that we scrapped was not your grandmother's alt-protein conference. And a whole bunch of people didn't like that. But it's basically- I don't think my grandmother, I don't think there was an alt-protein conference in my grandmother's era. So that may have been the fatal flaw.

But the idea of the conference, we did a full day on fermentation and it was super sciencey. Well, it was sort of fermentation 301. So the science and the entrepreneurship and the policy panels and presentations were all like for people who are in fermentation and want to take it to the next level across whole biomass fermentation and precision fermentation. This conference, I was looking at the schedule that

folks have put together and it's all like sort of policy, corporate engagement, innovation, all like sort of policy, corporate engagement, innovation, and science 301. So it's sort of next level and for people who really want to dive in. And then we go out and we go to Cargill and ADM and Nestle and all of the sort of people who are working in fields where their expertise would be applicable here, but aren't here yet. And say, hey, come learn about what it means that you're a fermentation scientist or a meat scientist or whatever else, and how you can apply those skills here and all of the opportunities that exist here. So our 2018 and 2019 conferences were phenomenal for getting people involved and interested and excited.

This is sort of a step up in terms of the intricacy of the plants. Wow, that's cool. That's cool. One of the other things that I didn't realize and never had thought about until I heard you talking about it with Simon Hill on his Plant Proof podcast is the fact that once you perfect this or not even perfect,

but once you get cultured meat up on its feet, it's not just about steaks and chicken breasts. Like you can literally do all these crazy delicacies like foie gras or like, you know, just imagine the aperture opening up to, I mean, our choice of animals that we eat is driven by the history of domestication, right? But then suddenly you could culture any type of meat,

which is freaky and weird. Or like- Incredibly exciting and awesome. I mean, it's like, I'm, you know, look, you've been vegan forever and I have for a long time. So it's not my, it's not something that like I find myself looking forward to,

but just thinking about that is super interesting. Yeah, no, it's insanely interesting. And I mean, this is one where Pat Brown talks about how if you're making beef, I mean, all the climate numbers also, like this goes back to like, these are the climate numbers now when the industry is like teeny tiny, as it scales up, the climate numbers get better, the efficiency numbers get better,

like everything gets better. In the same vein, if you're like producing beef, you're pretty limited, like you can feed the cows, you know, slightly different things and sort of tweak it a little bit, but you're pretty limited to beef and chicken and pork and lamb. And like, as you said, the limited number of species who we have successfully domesticated with cultivated meat. Yeah, you're not limited by, you know, who is domesticatable. Right, so it's gonna get weird.

It'll get nutty, right? I don't know if weird and nutty are exactly, I guess it depends on how you think about it. Well, it could be like, imagine any animal, like who knows there's some animal that has a certain taste to it that consumers might cotton onto. It's gonna get-

That we never thought of eating before. Yeah, significantly different from what's happening now. George Church, the famed tissue engineer from Harvard Medical School, has talked about ancient and extinct species. Who, if we have their- Oh, he's a mastodon guy. Exactly.

So we could be. It's Jurassic park, like getting cells out of the Amber and then cultivating them and creating meat out of them for us to eat. Yeah, one of my scientists is gonna email me after this podcast drops. And so these are the like nine things that you got just absolutely wrong, but.

I don't know what I'm talking about, so I'm okay. Yeah, well, I can give that disclaimer. I'm a bit, yeah, I'll make the disclaimer too. Now I'm pretty sure I haven't said anything wrong, but on this one, I'm feeling a little out of my depths, but I think so, yeah. I mean, if you can find the requisite DNA to bring those species back,

I assume you can also find whatever you need as a starter to cultivate, you know, cells from Tyrannosaurus Rex or whatever. That is wild. It is wild. I mean, you know, it's also like exciting and awesome and interesting and fun and cool. A close cousin being the 3D printing

that's going on right now with this company in Israel, right? Yeah, Israel Redefined Meat is one of them. But yeah, there are a bunch of companies looking at 3D printing, which is a nice compliment to the idea with both plant-based and cultivated meat. I mean, that's probably how we get to T-bone steaks

and pork chops is 3D printing. But if you perfect that and you create a situation where that's expedient and cost-effective, that also eliminates a lot of distribution issues and transportation issues that are contributing to climate change, because all you would need are the ingredients and the computer and the printer.

Yeah, I mean, one of the climate battle cries is electrify everything. So that's climate battle cries is electrify everything. So that's across climate activists, electrify everything. That's why electrify transport, even in countries where they're relying on fossil fuels, because you will get to renewable energy and then you electrify transport. Similarly, if you concentrate production, even if it's not the localized that you're talking about. But if you eliminate multiple stages of production and you concentrate production in a factory and then you use renewable energy to power that factory, this is how we make agriculture net zero emissions. you start taking advantage of all the freed up land and using that for cover cropping and all of the other things

that you can repurpose that land for, or even just stop chopping down the rainforest because the land is less in demand, even more positive climate benefits for sure. It is a very energy intensive thing right now, right? It is, but it is energy intensive. But if you're using renewable energy, then it's like, it's not a problem that it's energy intensive. So that's where you go back to electrify everything. It requires a fraction of the land and a fraction

of the water and doesn't contribute to air pollution and sort of all of these benefits. It is electricity intensive, but nevertheless, you're still talking about huge gains even there because of all of the extra stages of production that are involved in conventional agriculture. But to realize the big gains, you do need to be using renewable energy in the factories. Another criticism that gets hurled in the direction

of this field is the monocropping thing, right? Cause we're talking about basically pea and soy. What else are the core ingredients in these products for the plant-based? See, but that is a pretty fundamental misunderstanding of plant-based meat. So it's pea and soy now, because pea and soy is what's available. And we're at very small scale. But there are people who would like to be growing oats in North Dakota and Wisconsin and other places. And oats can help to revitalize the soil. They can help to decrease runoff. There are all kinds of crops. And it's kind of protein is protein is protein, which is what we saw with Impossible version 1.0, moving to Impossible version 2.0. And they just changed their protein because they needed,

they're using soy because that's what they could get in big supply. But one of the great things about this transition is it requires so much less land, which means you don't have to monocrop. Again, 90% of soy is fed to chickens and other farm animals right now. You can stop monocropping. You can produce crops that do a better job of sequestering carbon. You can rotate your crops. You can produce different proteins. It will need to scale up so that the supply chain is there

and we're not in that place yet except with peas and soy. But this is a solution to that problem in a really big way because monocropping happens right now because corn and soy and wheat are the primary crops in animal feed. You remove the animal and you make a much more efficient process, which decreases stress on the land

and allows for much greater diversity. Yeah, and as we continue to iterate and find more diverse plant products to use for these alternatives, you create a more biodiverse situation where you can rotate those crops. Yeah, no, that's exactly right. That is exactly right.

And I mean, you know, speaking again, I mean, thinking again on a global scale, going from needing 4 billion hectares of land to 1 billion hectare of land, that's good for the issue of monocropping in the United States, which is where most food activists are thinking about it, but it's really good for people,

for subsistence farmers in rainforests that are no longer gonna be burned down to grow soy for farm animals. It's really good in the entire developing world where land is being taken over in order to grow crops to feed the animals or to graze animals because more

and more people are eating meat. From a biodiversity standpoint, both ocean biodiversity and land biodiversity, decreasing the inefficiency of production is just such a boon to the natural world. I'd like to see this move towards organic production as well. I mean, I talked to Pat about this. I'd like to see this move towards organic production as well. I mean, I talked to Pat about this and he was like,

look, I would have loved to, I'd love to have organic soy for the Impossible Burger. There isn't enough. It's not being produced at the scale that he required. But if we could create that incentivization or as new companies come online who wanna have a premium product and are sourcing their ingredients from organic farms. I think we're gonna see that.

I think we will absolutely see that. I think if you go back to anything that increases the price, decreases the penetration. So at least from GFI's standpoint, like people will say, well, you should be encouraging these companies to do organic or you should be encouraging these companies to do a wide range of things that would be good for these companies to do. Or you should, when you're meeting with JBS or Tyson or Cargill, you should talk with them about treatment of slaughterhouse workers or whatever. The analogy that our general counsel used in a slightly different context is the five-year-olds playing soccer and the professional soccer team. And one of the things that I think holds back progressives

sometimes is everybody feels like they have to do everything and everything has to be thoroughly integrated. And it's like, we're all charging the soccer ball and we don't move the soccer ball forward. So for GFI, we're playing professional soccer and our focus is let's make sure these products taste the same or better and cost the same or less. And if you are somebody who is in a community that is gonna be hyper screwed by climate change, you want plant-based meat and cultivated meat to taste the same or better and cost the same or less as soon as possible

so that it can reap its maximum advantage. And one of the things, like one of our team members said, when you're talking with JBS, can we also talk about slaughterhouse workers? And the question is, do you think that will actually do some good? No, there are lots of people talking to them about slaughterhouse workers. And the question is, do you think that will actually do some good? No, there are lots of people talking to them about slaughterhouse workers. Do you think that will sever our relationship with them and make it really hard for our scientists to meet with their scientists? Well, yeah, it will sever our relationship with them.

So there are lots of organizations working on a full range of super worthy, awesome work across the full spectrum of food justice. But in the same way that we're not gonna go to people who are working on slaughterhouse minimum wage or worker justice or whatever and say, hey, can you integrate plant-based and cultivated meat into your thinking about this issue? Because look at all the great things it does

for climate and antibiotic resistance and pandemic risk, and you should be thinking more about that. We don't want them to do that. They've got their lane and they're focused on something super worthy and important. And we've got our lane and we're focused on something super worthy and important. On the policy front,

where are the battlegrounds being drawn right now? Like what are the wars that you're fighting? I mean, we're kind of aware of the labeling laws and all the kind of shenanigans that's going on around what you can and can't call products. But from your perspective, being immersed in this and being in Washington, what's the biggest fight that we're facing right now or that you're trying to win? We haven't hit Newton's third law

in a really big way yet. So there hasn't been much in the way of equal and opposite reaction. So when we're talking about like, what are the obstacles? It's mostly inertia. It's mostly that people are doing a gazillion things and nobody is looking for one more thing to be put on their plates. So the stuff I am most excited about all has to do with convincing the global climate community to take food and agriculture seriously and to put alternative proteins into how they think about that. So working with the World Economic Forum on the UN Food Systems Summit with a view of getting alternative proteins into how the global community on climate is thinking about solving climate problems using ag, using alternative proteins,

and then moving from the UN Food Systems Summit to COP26 and really making sure folks are talking about ag and are talking about solutions that scale globally. And then, hey, this is the one solution that scales globally. But it's really, it's inertia. Like you go to environmental groups, they've set their strategic plans. They know what they're doing for the next five years. They don't have all of this side budget waiting for some new initiative. Similarly on Capitol Hill, we have been super gratified by how many members of Congress,

like once you go and you meet with them and you say, hey, nobody's talking with you about a solution that scales in agriculture. Here's a solution that scales in agriculture. We organized 61, including GFI. We organized 61 organizations to write to the relevant House and Senate committees for the National Science Foundation and USDA, asking for $50 million each for open access plant-based and cultivated meat research. And we got the Mushroom

Institute and the Pean Lentil Council. We got Unilever. We got Merck. We got Greenpeace. We got a consumer's union and a bunch of different groups. And they all signed on, which is a great sign, but none of them were like, oh, I really need one new project to spend a bunch of time on. So it's really that nobody was looking for something else to do and we need partners. So, so excited to be working with the World Economic Forum. So excited to be working with the World Economic Forum. So excited to be meeting with so many members of Congress who are enthusiastic about this. Rosa DeLauro is probably the most important person in the House of Representatives for what we're trying to do. She has been talking about incentivizing plant-based and cultivated meat R&D.

So making significant inroads in Congress is very exciting. Beginning to meet, make inroads with environmental nonprofits is exciting. The university program with 16 campuses around the world, top universities for agriculture and food service is exciting. The work with the big corporations as well as startups and investors is exciting.

the work with the big corporations as well as startups and investors is exciting. And really there isn't a lot of difficult pushback, but there is, everybody is insanely busy all the time with really good stuff. And adding one more thing to agendas is just hard. I love the idea of creating university curriculums in these agricultural schools specifically. Are there some great professors who are like teaching this stuff? I mean, it seems like,

look, this is going to be a trillion dollar business, right? Like this is the future. How are we training or getting young people thinking about this and up to speed for this, you know, emerging market? Yeah, it's very exciting. And we've got an entire program at Berkeley. We've got an entire program at UC Davis, which is the number two ag university in the world. We've been working with Wageningen University in the Netherlands, which is the number one ag university in the world,

working with them on proposals to the government to fund even more of it. Worked with Davis and got them applying to National Science Foundation, and they got $3.5 million to do cultivated meat research, and now they have a cultivated meat modeling consortium. Our alternative protein project, the 16 university chapters, is just on fire, these students. It is students who like, they wanna save the world. They're excited about STEM. And for example, they got two Stanford professors to apply.

GFI has a grant program. So we have three funders that give us a total of $5 million every year to basically do a call for proposals and fund white space research. And that is a great opportunity for our affiliate organizations to go to scientists like Embrapa, which is basically the ag research service of Brazil, is coming to seminars with GFI scientists. The National Institute of Food and Agriculture at

USDA is coming to seminars with GFI scientists to like learn about these issues and then pairing scientists with money and also having a pool of money ourselves really sort of shifts the way that people look at GFI and shifts the way that people think about science in this space. And it gives our protein projects on these 16 university campuses something to go speak with the relevant professors about, there's this money and you're doing this tissue engineering work, or you're doing this plant biology work.

What do you think about putting a proposal together for this pool of money is pretty exciting and awesome. Wow, what efforts are underway to facilitate the transition of these ranchers and other farmers into, you know, new way of doing things? Cause that's a big part of this, right? That is- You can create that opportunity.

There are a bunch of organizations focused on that specifically. We have co-sponsored some legislation in California that incentivizes transition to plant-based production. GFI's main focus, honestly, is funding the research into the transition on that side of things. But we are certainly, and we expect just transitions at the policy level to come alongside this. But right now we are early enough and there is little enough government money that then figuring out

what you do in terms of just transition on the other side is probably a step or two beyond. But it's certainly something that we're super enthusiastic about. And we've got the pilot legislation in California that we're enthusiastic about. I look at GFI and I see it as sort of this organization that is helping all of these budding entrepreneurs and scientists and people who I look at GFI and I see it as sort of this organization that is helping all of these budding entrepreneurs and scientists and people who are interested in this field turn red lights into green lights. Like how can we be over here making sure that your path can unfold more smoothly than it would otherwise.

Is that fair? Yeah, we see ourselves, we call it field catalyst. We call ourselves a field catalyst. Field catalyst. Which is sort of a think tank. So, you know, back to gfi.org is the Wikipedia of alternative proteins. We have a startup guide that won an award from Fast Company and we have investor resources and we have an overwhelming amount of open access science and lots of stuff for corporations to get up to speed and investors to get up to speed. So yeah, it's about massive facilitation for anybody who could be a key part of this transition. And what are the other white spaces that you're seeing right now where you

think here's where this is going or here's something that we're not paying attention to that we should be paying more attention to? So we have something called Advancing Solutions and Alternative Proteins, which is at gfi.org slash ASAP, which is focused on specifically answering that question. The two big ones are scale up. So what does it look like to even have the infrastructure if plant-based meat continues to grow at 45%

every single year. And then government funding to basically, if you take out a loan to buy a $450 million factory on conventional terms, the CapEx costs are sort of through the roof. Elon Musk credits Tesla not going bankrupt in 2009 with a government incentive program that allowed him to take out a really low cost loan. So incentivizing that sort of thing at the government level is a pretty big one. On cultivated meat, our techno-economic analysis

identified albumin and figuring out how to markedly decrease the cost of albumin as being something that would be pretty critically important. And back to working with universities. So the Wageningen University Research, which is the top ag university in the world, they looked at our ASAP advancing solutions and alternative proteins, which is exactly the question you just asked. And there's pages and pages of white space opportunities on the website. They looked at that and in a funding proposal to the Dutch government, picked four of the white spaces that we have identified as white spaces that they would like to fill, which at GFI just elates us beyond, beyond.

spaces that they would like to fill, which at GFI just elates us beyond, beyond. Because our goal is to get as much activity happening in this space as possible. And as a field catalyst, we think in terms of 100x, you know, not just 10x, but 100x. So if the Dutch government can solve four of these problems through Wageningen University research on the basis of the work that we did on ASAP, which was about a year's worth of work for a small team of people at GFI, like that is just a massive, massive benefit. And similarly, if we can incentivize governments to put billions of dollars into open access R&D or to incentivize private sector activity in this space. It's way beyond just GFI's resources. It opens up a massive and entire field. And that's how we think about our corporate work,

our innovation investor work, our science work and our policy work. So casting your gaze forward, I don't know, 20 years, 50 years, what does the world look like if you are able to accomplish all of these goals that you've set for yourself and for GFI? What does the world look like? Yeah, imagine all the lights are green all the way

and all these things that you're working on and all these companies that you're babys on and all these companies that you're babysitting and helping facilitate and the next generation of scientists that you're trying to birth into the world are able to go off and do the thing. Yeah, I mean, even just on the plant-based and cultivated meat side, when somebody says, how quickly could we replace commodity meat?

So lowest common denominator meat, how quickly could we replace that with plant-based and cultivated meat? Further to what you said a little bit ago, if like somebody in China gets the fire lit under them and they say, you know, we are as a country going to have bragging rights until the end of time for being the country that made meat from plants

and cultivated meat from cells and eliminated the pandemic risk and antibiotic use and various other global health and environmental scorches slashed the climate impact of meat. Like China could make all of this happen pretty quickly. They have world-class universities. I mean, if you read about why solar panels are the cost that they are now or why lithium ion batteries are the cost and

are as efficient as they are now, like that's China. And we shouldn't let that happen with meat. So we should be able to incentivize something similar in the United States. And right now the US is the uncontested global leader in alternative proteins, but Israel and Singapore are coming along and their governments are the uncontested governments that are taking it most seriously, but we've got Beyond and Impossible and Just and Memphis and Blue Net Lou. That aspect of what we're talking about,

replacing lowest common denominator meat with meat made from plants and meat cultivated from cells is really a question of will, incentivization, and funding, and could happen pretty quickly. And then our hope is that alongside that, you know, back further to the professional soccer team, our hope is that you would see, I mean, by definition, the jobs are better. By definition, there is less stress on land. By definition, most of the things that would make for a truly just food system.

And we could replace commodity meat with plant-based and cultivated meat and change kind of none of the structures that exist right now. And that would still be- Still treat the workers terribly, still do all these other things that we need to change. And that's still, I mean, that's still,

if you're, you know, somebody, if you're one of the 700 million people who are living in abject poverty globally, or one of the 200 million that are, you know, just sent there by COVID-19, like that's better. That's a lot better than the current system. But my ideal is that we, you know, the professional soccer team,

we make progress across all of these issues. And as there is less stress on the land, we do move toward organic. We do completely abandon monocropping and other things that destroy the soil. We do take what we learned in Kiss the Earth seriously about soil regeneration and beating back the toxins and everything else. And we take worker concerns seriously and we incorporate environmental justice into our thinking across all of these issues, both

factories and where the factories are placed and how farmland is distributed and who gets incentivized. And I think all of that gets easier if we're not incentivized to monocrop and if we're making meat from plants and cultivating meat from cells. I also think that we can completely rethink our relationship with animals if the vast majority of people are not in a relationship

that is supporting industrial animal agriculture, I think we can think in whole new and more open ways about who animals are and how they are, et cetera. So I think this can be a part of creating just a much better world across the full range of issues where the world is broken right now. Beautifully put. I think that's a good place to wrap it up.

Can I say one last thing? Of course. GFI is hiring. Yeah, I was gonna get to that. I wasn't gonna end this. I was gonna culminate it with a big monologue about GFI. Oh, that's very nice. I know that you're, I mean,

you've been hiring like crazy since I met you and this has gone on unabated. So if people wanna get involved, in addition to just going to gfi.org and spending time on the website and reading all of the literature that you have available there, there are also multiple opportunities

and avenues to get involved, but perhaps you could even get hired by Brews to work there. That's exactly right. We have a whole bunch of openings and people can find them at gfi.org slash careers. And like you said, we are often and somewhat constantly hiring. So we keep growing and we do have openings,

not just in the United States, but also India, Israel, Brazil, Asia Pacific, out of Singapore, and all over Europe, but our policy offices in Brussels. Yeah. And anything else that I didn't address or left out? I mean, my hiring pitch is that GFI takes mindfulness very, very seriously. We have incorporated Daniel Pink's theory of vocational self-actualization and how we think about working at GFI. So everybody gets a Headspace account if you work at GFI. We start our leadership team meetings as well as our staff meetings with two minutes of breathing in all things good and breathing out all things bad. And we really take seriously the idea that what people want from their vocations is a high degree of figuring out how to do your work, not being told

how to do it. So we were calling it autonomy and we had some sort of misperceptions of what autonomy means. You're still hired to do your specific job. To do whatever I want. Yes, that was the pitfall a little bit. But I don't think there is a better place to vocationally self-actualize than GFI. And especially for people who are scientists or policy advocates.

And if you're at an environmental organization, don't come to GFI, get your environmental organization to go all in on this. But this is how we stop the next pandemic. It's how we keep antibiotics working. It's how we address climate change and we really do need all hands on deck on this.

So check out our website, get involved, come to our webinars, come to our conferences and yeah, I think that's basically it. Yeah, and be a meaningful participant in change, positive change. And that's a beautiful thing, man. Thank you, my friend. I love you. If there's anything I can do to support your work,

we live in crazy, amazing, fantastical times. It's gonna be very interesting to observe how all of this plays out over the next couple of years. And you're certainly welcome back here anytime to share what you find out in the world. Thank you so much, Rich. I love you too. And just absolutely who you are in the world

and how you exist in the world and how you use your podcast to raise consciousness about everything good is just truly inspiring. So it's an honor to be on the podcast and an honor to be friends and compatriots and making the world better and more just. I appreciate that very much. And now I'm gonna have to start our day here

with two minutes of breathing in good and breathing out bad. It is so good. It is so good. Breathing in, we are breathing in peace, equanimity and all things good. Breathing out, we are breathing in peace, equanimity and all things good. Breathing out, we are breathing out strife, consternation and all things bad starting now.

Amen, brother. Amen. Peace. Plants. Peace plants. That's it for today. Thank you for listening. I truly hope you enjoyed the conversation. To learn more about today's guest, including links and resources related to everything discussed today, visit the episode page at richroll.com, where you can find the entire podcast archive, as well as podcast merch, my books, Finding Ultra, Voicing Change in the

Plant Power Way, as well as the Plant Power Meal Planner at meals.richroll.com. If you'd like to support the podcast, the easiest and most impactful thing you can do is to subscribe to the show on Apple Podcasts, on Spotify, and on YouTube, and leave a review and or comment. Supporting the sponsors who support the show is also important and appreciated. And sharing the show or your favorite episode with friends or on social media is of course awesome and very helpful.

And finally, for podcast updates, special offers on books, the meal planner, and other subjects, please subscribe to our newsletter, which you can find on the footer of any page at richroll.com. Today's show was produced and engineered by Jason Camiolo with additional audio engineering by Cale Curtis. The video edition of the podcast was created by Blake Curtis with assistance by our creative director, Dan Drake. Portraits by Davey Greenberg, graphic and social media assets

courtesy of Daniel Solis, Dan Drake, and AJ Akpodiete. Thank you, Georgia Whaley, for copywriting and website management. And of course, our theme music was created by Tyler Pyatt, Trapper Pyatt, and Harry Mathis. Appreciate the love, love the support. See you back here soon.

Peace. Plants. Namaste. Thank you.