The Rich Roll Podcast - What Is “Clean Meat”? Paul Shapiro On The Future of Food

Episode Date: January 22, 2018

Unbeknownst to most, animal agriculture is the number one culprit when it comes to almost every single man-made environmental ill on the planet. Untenable amounts of land, water and feed are required to raise the number of animals necessary to meet demand. Creating more greenhouse gas emissions than the entire transportation sector combined, our voracious appetite for meat and dairy products has produced the largest mass species extinction since the disappearance of the dinosaurs. Meanwhile, the primary driver of ocean acidification, water table pollution, rainforest devastation and a litany of other environmental abominations can be tracked to one primary source: our broken system of food production. Without a doubt, it's a system that's destroying human health, irreparably damaging the planet we call home and creating unspeakable suffering in the process. If we want to survive as a species, we need a new way forward. In my opinion, adopting a plant-based is the single most powerful and impactful thing you can possibly do as a conscious, compassionate consumer. It is the medicine that will prevent and reverse chronic lifestyle disease, preserve our planet's precious resources for future generations, and put an end to mass animal cruelty. Vegan has indeed gone mainstream. That's awesome. But let's not be naïve. The rate at which people are adopting a plant-based lifestyle can't begin to match population growth and its concomitant demand for cheeseburgers and milk shakes. 7.5 billion people currently share this spinning blue planet we call Earth. By 2050, that number will escalate to 9.7 billion. By 2100? 11 billion. How can we possibly feed 11 billion people sustainably? Ask my good friend Paul Shapiro, and he will give you a two-word answer: Clean meat. When Paul — a long-time vegan and mainstream voice for agricultural sustainability — took his first bite of “lab-harvested” meat in 2014, more humans had gone into space than had eaten real meat grown outside an animal. But according to Paul, the clean meat revolution is upon us — and it holds the potential to save the world. Just as we need clean energy to compete with fossil fuels, clean meat is poised to become a competitor of factory farms. Clean meat isn’t an alternative to meat; it’s real, actual meat grown (or more accurately, brewed) from animal cells, as well as other clean animal products that ditch animal cells altogether and are simply built from the molecule up. Today we talk about it. In addition to being among the worldʼs first clean meat consumers, Paul served as the vice president of policy engagement for the Humane Society of the United States, the worldʼs largest animal protection organization. Paul is also the founder of Compassion Over Killing, a TEDx speaker, and an inductee into the Animal Rights Hall of Fame. Enjoy! Rich

This is a nascent industry, this field of cellular agriculture, that has the potential to address many of the most pressing sustainability problems that we face as a species. We ought to welcome it with open arms. We ought to encourage it. We ought to tout it, and we ought to encourage those who have the capital to invest in it to help bring it to commercial reality. It's still too early to predict what's going to happen with the clean meat industry, but it's one of the most hopeful solutions we have to one of the worst problems that we are enduring. And so my hope is that anyone who is concerned about addressing climate change or animal cruelty or environmental degradation or food safety problems will look at this with an open mind and think this is a cool, promising solution that deserves my support.

That's Paul Shapiro this week on the Rich Roll Podcast. The Rich Roll Podcast. Hey, everybody. How's it going? What's the good news? How are you? My name is Rich Roll. I am the host of this thing, this podcast, my podcast. Come on in, spread out, relax, enjoy yourselves. Happy to be here with you today. Grateful to have you on board. But I will say I am a little bit melancholy today. Winter does that. It kind of puts me in this low ebb emotional energy state, the cold weather, even though I live in Los Angeles, I got nothing to complain about. I realize that, but

it is my truth and it's kind of inescapable for me. But I think in the case of how I'm feeling right now, uh, it's being contributed to by something else entirely that I wanted to share with you. So please indulge me in this little tale, this little story that I want to tell you. It's a story that begins in the fall of 2015. Julie and I were in the midst of promoting the Plant Power Away cookbook, and we were in Boston speaking at this VegFest, the Boston VegFest. And the way these things work is you get up and you give a talk. And then afterwards, they typically set up a table for you. And you sit at that table and you sell books and you sign them and align forms. And you have little

mini exchanges with the people in that line. And I always try my best to have a meaningful exchange with every single person that I can. You only get a couple minutes, a minute or two, but I really do want to connect with each and every human being that has taken time out of their life to, you know, come and share this experience with myself or with Julie and I. And it can be tough. You have to be emotionally present, especially when there's tons of people. And of course, I can't recall everybody that I meet. I meet thousands of people, even though I try, but I will say this every once

in a while, there is somebody who makes an impression on me, an impression that I just can't shake. And in the case of this experience in Boston, I vividly recall an encounter that I had with a very unique human being. This is a guy in this case, was very quirky, a long hair dude with Coke bottle glasses, who was a bit socially awkward and soft-spoken and introverted. At least it seemed to me to be that way, but who was also clearly a big fan of the podcast, a big fan of the books of Finding Ultra. And I can't recall exactly what he said, what we talked about, but I remember being impacted by it. I remember that he was unusually funny and insightful in kind of a bizarre, awkward way. And I couldn't put my finger on it at the time, but clearly I remember thinking like, this is a unique cat. Like this dude is like different than

the normal human being. There was something special for sure about him and different and perhaps even a little bit gifted. Uh, as it turns out, this guy, this guy was a guy called Mark Balmer. And after that exchange, I made a point to kind of keep tabs on him. I ended up exchanging a bunch of emails with him. We were kind of pen pals. And I started following and interacting with him on social media, where he was sharing this unique personality that he had, like all this bizarre, sometimes compulsive, but always generally provocative perspectives on culture and life, society. He would share poems that he had written, photos, videos, collages, excerpts from the books that he was reading at the time, and accounts of his environmental activism, which was something that was very important to him. And the thing about it was that it's not like he had some big following. He had a very, very small following. He had a YouTube channel with less than a thousand subscribers. I can't

remember how many people were following him on Twitter, but it really was, you know, it was like a handful. And yet I found what he was doing, like his musings, amongst the most compelling of anybody that I was following online. Where reality ends and art begins and everything's sort of blurred and all playing into this wacky performance being perpetrated by this artist. Where you're just left uncertain by intention of what is real and what is creative expression. In any event, in the fall of 2016, this guy, Mark Baumer, decides that he's going to walk across America by himself to raise awareness for global climate change. He's going to do it alone. He's going to do it with almost no possessions. And get this. Here's the thing.

He's going to do it barefoot, no shoes, which is a very Mark Baumer thing to do. And so he departs his home in Rhode Island and starts heading for California again in the fall of 2016. And he ends up chronicling this adventure with daily images of the bottom of his feet every day, taking a picture of the bottom of his feet with some kind of really, you know, insightful commentary or caption, as well as doing a daily blog. He has his blog up and a daily vlog, which was this really raw, essentially unedited, like stream of consciousness monologue thing, like a road diary. And if you watch these videos, it demonstrates very well why he made such an impression on me that time he met.

It's just so interesting and quirky. I personally found it impossible to not watch these videos. To me, Mark had become like some kind of crazy folk cult hero character, like somebody you would see in a Charlie Kaufman movie, like this rare, um, beautifully childlike, incredibly creative soul with a well-honed sense for absurdist humor. I mean, this is a guy who did all kinds of crazy shit. Like in 2012, he decided he was going to write 50 books. These things just kind of devolved. One of the book's titles was something like, the books keep getting worse and worse. I mean, this gives you a sense of this guy's personality. But I think also in a more kind of sad and tragic sense, this was somebody for whom modern society just didn't function. You know, he was just at odds with culture.

And he was a living testimony and tapestry to the pain that it can cause. In any event, I just found everything that he did so compelling. I was amazed that no one else was watching this. He had so few views on his videos. So I ended up starting to share a bunch of his stuff on my accounts on Twitter and Facebook. I think I even shared his vlog on my roll call weekly newsletter email. In any event, as the weather started to turn cold as he's doing this walk, Mark ends up altering his route. He starts heading south to Florida. And on day 100 of his walk, he reaches the panhandle. And that's when he posts this photograph

of his feet standing next to the, and it was on pavement, standing next to the word killed, painted in yellow on a highway. And what's creepy and weird and freaky and heartbreaking is that this would end up being Mark's final entry. Mark was, he was walking along the shoulder of Highway 90 in Walton County, Florida, when an SUV veered out of its lane and struck him. And Mark died at the scene. And, you know, I can't say that I knew him well. I didn't know him well. I didn't know him, but I didn't know him well. But he impacted me fairly profoundly. You know, he was like this delicate, sensitive soul at odds with and not long for this world.

And even though I can't say that I knew him well, I definitely miss him. And even though I can't say that I knew him well, I definitely miss him. In any event, there were a handful of beautiful eulogies around the time of Mark's passing and think pieces about his life. Amazingly, everywhere from the Washington Post and the LA Times and even quite astoundingly, there was a beautiful article written about Mark and his life in the New Yorker magazine, which I think kind of brings the whole thing to this beautiful, uh, conclusion in this like really wonderful poetic, um, full circle kind of way to be recognized in a magazine known for celebrating literary notables.

Mark finally got his due, and I'm happy about that. In any event, please do me a favor in Mark's honor. Have a look at those articles. Have a look at his amazing blog. It's called notgoingtomakeit.com uh, kind of amazingly named as such as well as his YouTube channel, uh, which I just checked. It still only has a thousand subscribers, but all the videos are still up there. I'll put links, uh, in the show notes on the episode page at richroll.com to all of this. And it would mean a lot to me if you would take a moment to explore Mark's life in memory of the one year since his passing.

So that's it. In any event, God bless you, Mark. I hope you're looking down. I hope you're smiling. I hope you're writing. I hope you're writing poetry. I hope you're walking. I hope you're doing your thing, man.

Being you, because you were one in eight billion, my friend. And that's a fact. All right, we got to shift gears here. Got to do it, man. The show must go on. I got my good friend Paul Shapiro on the show today. And this is a good one. I'm excited about it. Paul Shapiro is the vice president of policy engagement for the Humane Society of the United States. He is also the founder of Compassion Over Killing. He's a TEDx speaker and inductee into the Animal Rights Hall of Fame. And he just released his first book. It's an amazing book. It's called Clean Meat. It's a Washington Post bestseller. And it chronicles this crazy wild race to create and commercialize sustainable real meat, real meat without the animal so-called lab grown meat or cultured meat, which is real actual meat grown or more appropriately dubbed

brood from animal cells, as well as other clean foods and consumer products that ditch animal cells altogether and are simply built from the molecule up. This is insane, futuristic stuff. It's a great conversation about all of this. It's also an amazing book with a wonderful foreword from Yuval Noah Harari, who is the author of Sapiens, which is an extraordinary book you guys should all pick up as well. In any event, if you enjoyed my podcast with Bruce Friedrich of the Good Food Institute, that was about a year ago, then I think you guys are going to really dig this one. But before we dive into it.

Okay, Paul Shapiro. So this is a fascinating conversation. It's a conversation about the future of food, food systems, and even the consumer products landscape, which is fascinating. It's essentially a primer on the what, the how, the who, the whys, and the whens behind everything clean meat. What is clean meat? Who is behind it? How is this even possible? When is it actually going to happen? And how does it have the potential to address many of the most pressing sustainability problems that we face as a species? Now, look, I know there might be some hardcore vegans out there who might instinctively want to push back on this idea of pioneering clean meat, lab-grown meat. But look, we truly need alternative solutions to the problems that we face as a culture. And as much as we might love to see it happen, the entire world being struck vegan overnight,

that is not what's going to happen. In fact, in some countries, countries like China, meat consumption has doubled and has almost tripled with the rise of the middle class there. So we're facing this ticking clock. We really need to change the food production paradigm now, as well as mainstream habits and attitudes about meat. And this is a very interesting, compelling solution that has presented itself. It is happening and it's worth talking about.

So here's my conversation with Paul Shapiro. Long live Mark Bauer. I've been doing it now for over five years, five and a half years or something like that. So, you know, it's just been a progressive, slow, organic growth. It wasn't like there was any one thing that like blew it up. It's just kind of like been on this growth curve. So yeah, it's been amazing. I mean, everywhere I go,

I run into people who listen to the show and it's been really gratifying. You will be especially gratified to know that I, as you know, I did Neil deGrasse Tyson's show recently. Yeah. And I, so I was talking to the publisher, Simon & Schuster about whatever I've had lined up. And I was like, oh yeah, I'm doing Neil deGrasse Tyson's show. And they're like, oh, that had lined up and i was like oh yeah i'm doing

neil degrasse tyson show and they're like that's cool and i'm like yeah i'm also doing the rich roll podcast and they're like what i'm not kidding like they knew you oh the simon and schuster people yeah yeah that's great that's cool that makes me feel good yeah it's at the point now where i get emails from the publicists at all the publishing houses when they, cause they have a book that seems like it might be a good fit. And so that's great. Um, so getting guests is no longer like an issue. It's more about like, who's the right guest and like, how do you curate an experience that makes sense? Um, because if I'm doing a guest interview once a week, that's only 52 spots a year. You know what I mean?

So it's kind of, it limits who you can, like you want to have everyone on, but it's like, who's the right person to get. Yeah, there's not a lot of slots there. That's cool. Yeah, there's two people I would love to see on the show also, but I have a personal interest because they're both close friends of mine, but I'll make two recommendations for you.

One mega bestselling author, you have michael gregor on man i've had him on twice have you i never heard the episode we do it we also did one where i lost the audio in like 350 episodes of doing this i've never had like a technical glitch with the audio but we lost one but i had him on when when uh how not to die came out oh cool i was i mean i didn't talk to him about this, but his new book just came out. And this is week one. It's already on the New York Times Best Hour List,

USA Today Best Hour List. It's crazy. He's a madman. I mean, it's unbelievable. And you guys work together at HSUS. Yeah, he has now recently left just to focus full time on his authorship. Good, I was like, how do you do everything that you do?

It's unbelievable. But we did work together for about a decade at HSUS together. Cool. And who's the other person? Of much more parochial interest of mine. So do you know Plant Based on a Budget? I've heard of that. Yeah, I know what that is.

It's a brand. My girlfriend, Toni Okamoto, runs it. She is an author. Her cookbook has actually done very well. It's always on the bestsellers rank on Amazon, like between number 200 or a thousand, like out of all 8 million books. Right.

But she's basically a vegan cookbook author and she teaches people how to eat vegan on a budget. All right. But it's a very parochial interest of mine. Yeah, well, that's cool. I'll dig into it a little bit more. Yeah, man. So let's, I like that you brought up Neil deGrasse Tyson

because that's an interesting story. When that popped up on Facebook and I like that you brought up Neil deGrasse Tyson, because that's an interesting story. When that popped up on Facebook and I saw that you were with him, I was like, oh man, that's so super cool. Because I know you're like, you're kind of an astronomy Star Trek nerd also. Like that's a part of your character. And there was also that kind of kerfuffle that occurred when Neil de neil degrasse tyson tweeted something about cows and moby reacted and it became a whole controversy that you then wrote a huffington post article about so tell me about that uh i'm a big fan of neil's i follow him i read his books listen to his podcast and in 2015 i noticed he kept talking about animals not in the sense of animals like that they ought to be

protected he just kept on having things about animals like he would say oh i sometimes wonder when the cows look at the moon what they think i'm like oh that's interesting he's thinking about cows so i emailed him and i was like dude you totally ought to do a show about animals i'd love to come on and talk with you about it and uh to my great pleasure he emailed me back and said when are you going to be in New York next? That's cool. I was like, four hours from now. Whatever is good for you, man.

So I went up there, and this is back in 2015, and I did an episode with him, and it went very well, and then they asked me, they were like, hey, are you going to be in New York again a second day because we would like to do another taping with you? And I said, yeah, of course I'll be in New York another day, which I'm calling the boss up. I'm like, yeah, I got to change my ticket. So I did two. Only one of them ended up airing, but it was still fun to do. And so when I maintained communication with him and when the whole thing blew up with Moby, where Moby had called him a sociopath for this tweet that he issued. Right. Well, explain the tweet. Yeah. Moby was responding to Neil's tweet in which he said that a cow is a biological machine

invented by humans to convert grass into meat. And, you know, in Neil's mind, biological machine doesn't mean insentient. It doesn't mean they don't feel pain. He views us as biological machines, too. It's more about our relationship as humans to that animal. Yeah, I think that you're right. Moby, you know, took it in a different way. Yeah. And I talked with Moby about it, and he, to his great credit, apologized and thought he went overboard in his criticism.

And I wrote a piece for Huffington Post about it in which I said, you know, look, humans invented cows in the ways that we invented dogs. They didn't exist in nature and we domesticated animals, in this case, the auroch, which is the animal now extinct because we exterminated them, but that's the animal from whom we descended. The predecessor animal. Yeah. And we amended them in that sense that we domesticated them and created a new species of animal like dogs are to wolves but we didn't cause them to turn grass into meat that's what all ruminants do giraffes cows deer you know that's just the nature of what they do and so i thought that i thought that was a little bit um off the wall to suggest that neil's response to that was well we got them to do it more efficiently i was like well that may be true but that doesn well, we got them to do it more efficiently. I was like, well, that may be true,

but that doesn't mean we invented them to do that. So anyway, it was an interesting argument. And Neil himself only eats meat, he says, about two times per week. So 19 out of 21 meals, according to him, are vegetarian, which is pretty good. If everybody would do that, I might go find something else to do with my life.

So when you were with him most recently to do the show again, did you guys hash this out or what was the subject of that conversation? Yeah. So he was interviewing me about the book Clean Meat, but he also wanted to talk about that too. So we went into it. And, you know, I defend Neil in the sense that I don't think his intent was to suggest that cows are just machines. That's

clearly not what is in his head. In fact, he has done videos for animal protection groups in the past talking about the intelligence of animals and how often we underestimate the mental lives of other animals in the same way that, you know, we used to think that the earth was flat or that the earth was the center of the universe. We're now starting to realize that, well, was flat or that the earth was the center of the universe, we're now starting to realize that, well, even if the earth isn't the center of the physical universe, we still really believe that humanity is the center of the moral universe. And that notion is being challenged by people, including Neil. Interesting. That's cool. Well, we are here to talk about clean meat. It's funny. Like when we were going back and forth to like schedule the podcast

i was like well send me the book you know and you're like well digital or printed and i was like printed it's just better because it'll sit on my desk i'll see it and it'll remind me that i need to read it and you know what comes in the mail like you literally printed it out on your printer i thought you were gonna send me like a galley and i was like oh man then i felt bad i didn't mind it at all but i just didn't have any galleys at the time. And I would love to get you what you need, man. Right. Well, it's cool. Yeah, I got here right away. The book is amazing. We're going to dig into it. But before we do that, perhaps we can kind of contextualize this a little bit by speaking to your background. So why don't you talk a little

bit about HSUS, how you got there, what you do for them, and kind of what led you to get interested in this clean meat movement and write this book. Sure. Well, I'm going to put it in a small nutshell to avoid boring you with the whole biography, which I know that you are already familiar with since we go back, but for the listeners. So we're both from DC. We went to the same, well, you went to, you mainly went to Georgetown Day, right? But you were at Landon for a minute? I was there for grades three through six. So Landon is where Rich went to school as well. And I had a little bit of like a trigger moment when I was reading Finding Ultra. Because when you were writing about the painted white rocks that, you know, you're driving up that driveway to the school.

And you see those painted white rocks. And you and I had similar experiences there, meaning not the best. And to read about Landon and the tough time that you had there, and then just something about those rocks. I was reading about it. I was like, oh yeah, God, I don't want to go back there. I've never heard of those rocks being described as triggers, but that's kind of what it is. It was definitely a semi-traumatic experience for me. But you got out before high school. I knew by sixth grade it wasn't for me. It was just very counter to my personality. And, you know, some people really are into it, but I was not one of them.

Yeah. So wait, so if you were there from third to sixth, we might have been there at the same time. I graduated at 85. No. You were quite a bit younger. No, sadly we were not, yeah. I'm that much older than you. I don't want to do the math for you, but.

I'm way older than you than I would like to believe. Anyway, so, all right. So here's the thing that's cool though. I just had Nathan Runkle on the show and he was talking about how, you know, he got interested in animal rights very young and started Mercy for Animals when he was like 15 or something like that. And you have a very similar story. Yeah.

And Nathan and I kind of led parallel lives in that sense. And so when I was 13 years old, a friend of mine showed me this video of what happens to animals and factory farms and slaughter plants and he wasn't showing it to me like as a form of outreach i mean you remember faces of death remember that video i do yeah i would get passed around yeah right it was like the cool thing to watch you watch people and animals dying right and it wasn't like this was horrific this was like some cool thing that boys watched and that's what my friend showed he's like dude you got to watch this it's sick and I watched it and I didn't find it like sick I found it sickening

I mean, I was like, holy shit. Like what if these were my dogs in this video? Like what if they were my dogs in that slaughter point? What if they were my dogs and in those cages and So I became a vegetarian and then, you know pretty quickly thereafter. I started reading like I sent letters This is back in 1993. So so there's no internet or anything. I just wrote snail mail letters to these groups and asked them to send me information on vegetarianism. So I got back these things from animal groups. And I started reading about it. Yeah, pamphlets, booklets.

And I'm like, what are vegans? What is a vegan? And I thought to myself, oh, you know, actually, I'm reading what's happening in the egg and dairy industries. It's really bad. But I think that you would die. I thought being one of these so-called vegans, you would be holding your breath. You can hold your breath for a certain amount of time, but if you do it too long, you die. And I thought, if you can go maybe a week or two, but you can't go to life without eating them.

So I started volunteering for these groups as a kid and i met these people who i learned were called vegans and i started talking to them about i'm like looking at them want to see if they look pale want to see if they look like they're about to waste away i'm like i couldn't believe it was like these apparitions in front of me and then one of them told me that carl lewis And, you know, back then, Carl Lewis was like, you know, the Michael Phelps or the Usain Bolt of today, like the premier Olympian athlete who everybody knew. And I was like, are you kidding me? And so I looked up this.

They gave me like an interview with Carl Lewis and how he attributed vegan eating to his success. I mean, there's obviously many other factors, but he said that was part of it. And I was like, well, if Carl Lewis is a vegan, I'm a vegan. So I became vegan. And then when I got to high school, there was no animal protection club. So I started one called Compassion Over Killing. I quickly realized I didn't want it to be a high school club anymore. And so I converted it into at first a Washington, D.C.wide organization, and then toward the end of my high school career into a national organization. Yeah, that to this day is now it's a huge organization.

They're doing great things. Yeah. And are you still involved? Like, how do you, what's your relationship with the organization that you started? I root them on. I cheer for their success. I am not involved. They're doing wonderful things. And I basically, you know, when I came to the Humane Society of the United States after 10 years of running Compassion Over Killing, the workload involved in being at HSUS was such that it wasn't possible for me to do both. And so they're doing great things. They now have offices in DC and in LA, and they just put out a new undercover investigation of a chicken, a chicken factory farm that has led to really good outcomes

and high amounts of media attention. So I love what they're doing. Right. Cool. So you find your way to HSUS. I mean, you've been there for a long time now. 13 years. Yeah. I came on when Wayne Pacelli became president. So, you know, back then, you know, HSUS was not known as an advocacy organization for the most part. A lot of people just thought it was like dogs and cats. And certainly they did advocacy for them, but mostly they weren't known for that. But when Wayne became president, first, he was the first vegan president of the organization. And second, he was this young guy, he was 39 at the time, who had a history of animal advocacy, of running political campaigns and other types of efforts for animals.

And many of us thought to ourselves, I can't believe that this guy is president of the largest animal protection group on earth. And Wayne had an interest in starting a farm animal protection campaign, which the organization hadn't had at that point, farm animal protection campaign, which the organization hadn't had at that point, and asked those of us at Compassion Over Killing if we would come on over to the new organization, this new HSUS under him, and try to do that. And 13 years later, it's still happening. Still there. So how do you distinguish the work of HSUS versus the other animal rights organizations, the PETAs, the Mercy for Animals, Compassion for Killing, like what is what's different or what is the mission statement that distinguishes the work that you guys do?

Sure. So one aspect that is different is that HSUS is focused on all animals, whereas groups like Compassion for Killing and Mercy for Animals are focused solely on farm animals. At the same time, what really distinguishes HSUS is not just that it's a rescue and direct care organization. It's got wildlife rehab centers and animal sanctuaries and so on, but that it is also the premier organization when it comes to public policy for animals. We want to create the type of organization,

like what the NRA is for gun owners, for animals. We want politicians to know that they'll be rewarded if they vote for animals and that they'll be punished if they vote for animals. We want politicians to know that they'll be rewarded if they vote for animals and that they'll be punished if they vote against animals. So HSUS has a large presence in the Congress and in nearly all 50 state legislatures and in a lot of city and county councils as well, working hard to both pass legislation to move the ball forward for animals, including farm animals, and to fight back bad legislation that's harmful to animals too. Right. And so what is your role, current role?

So I serve as the vice president of policy engagement, and I work both at the federal and state level to pass new laws to help protect animals, especially farm animals. We're working on a ballot measure here in California right now that would create the strongest farm animal protection law, both in the country and in the world that would require that any of the veal eggs or pork that are sold in California, regardless of where they were produced, have to come from animals who are not confined in cages and are given space abutments that are higher legal requirements than anywhere else on the planet. And that would be kind of, that would be leading legislation sort of nationwide, right? Without a doubt. Yeah. And what are the, what are the prospects for that passing?

Well, we have a lot of opposition from the veal industry, from the egg industry, from the pork industry. And that time will come to fight them. But right now, we have to get on the ballot, which means that we have to gather over half a million signatures. So that requires a lot of volunteers. So for people who live in California, they can go to preventcrueltyca.com and sign up to volunteer because if we don't get on the ballot, there's no chance of having that fight against the factory farming industry. But if we do get on the ballot, California will become the central front in the national debate over factory farming. And all eyes, both in the

agribusiness industry and in the animal protection community are going to be focused here on the Golden State. So like the front line of where this battle is being waged. Without a doubt, but we have to get on the ballot first. Right. So let's take a step back and kind of canvas the current sort of legislative regulatory situation with respect to factory farming, you know, with poultry, beef, and pork? Like, where do we stand right now? Where are the other battles that need to be waged? Like, what are we up against and kind of what's going on? Yeah. Well, let me just tell you a brief story then. So imagine that you're out late at dinner and under the darkness of night, a burglar comes into your home and breaks in, grabs a painting of a pig off of your wall and smashes that painting.

The charge for that act of vandalism would be criminal property destruction. But now imagine that at a pork factory that a farmer notices a piglet who isn't growing as fast as her siblings and picks her up and smashes her head against the concrete floor, killing her and throwing her body away. The charge for that act of violence is nothing because it's standard operating practice in the pork industry. And what I'm saying is that farm animals have so little legal protection that you can get in greater legal trouble for smashing a painting of a pig than an actual living, feeling pig. That's how bad it is. Well, you can get in even more trouble if you're somebody who's trying to pull covers on the situation because you'd be considered a domestic terrorist, right? Right. Yeah. You might get in more trouble for taking a photo or a video of somebody smashing

a pigwood against the concrete floor than the person committing the actual act of violence. So farm animals are in a dire position. They have so little legal protection that passing laws that require them to have, for example, cage-free living conditions, they certainly are modest, but they're enormously historic because they get these animals protections that they don't have. And the agribusiness industry has been so good at exempting themselves from state anti-cruelty laws and from preventing any federal legislation that really these guys can do pretty much anything they want to farm animals and get away with it for the most part. Why are they so good? Is it just money and lobbying groups?

Well, there's a couple of factors. Yes, money and their lobbying groups. But two, it's because the animal movement isn't politically organized, especially not for farm animals. I mean, the fact is that laws are created by people who show up. Most animal advocates are not politically engaged, and that is why the agribusiness lobby has been able to do all this. Think about it. Less than 1% of the American population is involved in farming of any kind, not just animal ag, of any farming.

Then think about it. Just a few percentages of us are vegetarians or vegans. And then a huge majority of people consider themselves animal lovers. So the number of people who want to protect animals is much greater than the number of people who want to abuse animals. But the animal movement has not been politically organized in the way that the agribusiness lobby or the gun lobby, for example, has been. Well, as much as it is about organization, it's about political will as well, because amongst

those animal lovers or just the average, you know, relatively compassionate consumer, they're just not engaged because they don't know what's going on and they're busy with their lives, right? Like it's just sort of the big food companies, the farming industry has done an amazing job of insulating the public from the reality of the production mechanism that puts that food into the grocery store. Yeah, I think you're hitting the nail on the head. Most people are blissfully unfamiliar with how their food is produced. But I also think that it's got to be a matter of greater priority. So look at the gun issue, for example.

Huge majorities of people think that we ought to have like basic background checks and things like that on guns, but they don't make it their number one priority issue for voting. And so politicians know they're probably not going to be penalized if they vote against these people's wishes. The same is so for animal issues. If you put it on the ballot and give people a chance to vote on it independently, overwhelmingly they tend to vote for it in the same way they would for the background checks on guns. But if a politician votes against animals, how many voters are going to punish them for that vote?

That's what we need to make sure happens. And it has happened in some cases, but there needs to be more examples. Yeah, that's interesting. And where do we currently stand with respect to the ag-gag laws? Well, there are probably been about three dozen ag-gag bills that have been introduced, and virtually all of them have been thwarted in the legislature by HSUS fighting them and making sure they don't become ag-gag laws. A few have gotten through, and groups like the Animal Legal Defense Fund have had a lot of success fighting them in the courts and nullifying them in states like Utah and in Idaho as well.

Iowa's still is in effect, and it's really important because Iowa's the biggest egg and pork production state in the country. And there has been a recent challenge to it that's now pending. So ag-gag laws are a problem, but they're in very few states. There's a lot of attention on them because they are so suggestive. They show like this is not an industry that wants to prevent abuse. They want to prevent people from finding out about abuse. But it isn't the case that most states have them. It's a tiny minority of them that do. Right. That's interesting. I mean, I would imagine the constitutional challenge to this is pretty strong. Yeah. The problem is ag-gag laws come in various flavors. They all have the same outcome, which is to prevent undercover investigations, but they are different. So you

have some that are straight up bans on photography. They have others that make it a crime to lie on a job application. If you are applying at an agricultural operation, they, so you could ask on the application, like, are you affiliated with an animal welfare group? And normally if you lie on a job application, that's cause for being fired. If they find out they want to make it a crime to do that. And I mean, if embellishing your resume as a crime, you know, there's going to be, you better invest in prisons. I would have never gotten my job without it. The prison lobby is supportive.

Yeah, right. Exactly. So but they're so shady about it that it's only at agricultural operations. If you want to lie on your resume to apply to be a banker or investor, go right ahead. But if you do it to become a farm laborer, then you can go to jail. It's really insidious. And who are the people on the Hill in Congress, in the Senate, who are kind of championing this cause? Like who are the friends of HSUS that are trying to evoke change? There's really no better champion that animals have in the Congress than somebody like Cory Booker, a Democratic senator from New Jersey. Get him on the podcast. Oh, he would come on.

Yeah, no, I'm going back and forth with his people. It's going to happen. Okay, cool. Well, I would love to listen to that. But yeah, I mean, you know, Senator Booker is a champion for animals. He's a true believer. He's a vegan himself, and he's the real deal.

But it goes across the aisle also. I mean, look in Arizona, for example, there's a Republican lawmaker, a congresswoman named Martha McSally, who is vegan herself and is the sponsor of legislation to ban the sale of cosmetics that were tested on animals in the United States. So it's not necessarily a partisan issue, but there are some people who are just real champions on animal issues. Right. Well, I would imagine it's partisan. Well, it's really geographic. on animal issues.

Well, I would imagine it's partisan. Well, it's really geographic. That often tends to be the case that urban and suburban lawmakers are often friendlier to animals, but not always, but it is often, yeah. All right, so right now it's 2017. We're mired in this institution of factory farming that is slaughtering a billion animals a year what is the number it's

so staggeringly high like i don't even know what it is sadly much more than that yeah in the u.s it's about nine billion land animals a year nine billion land animals but the human mind just doesn't comprehend like one billion nine billion to the mind it doesn't we didn't evolve to understand those type of astronomical figures and it's a system that has created tremendous economies of scale. But the flip side to that is all of the environmental havoc that is wreaked as a result of this. Everything from ocean acidification to water table pollution, ocean dead zones, species extinction, rainforest decimation. I mean, it just goes on and on and on, right? Like you can't even quantify the amount of environmental wreckage as a result of this system that we've created to be as efficient as possible. Meanwhile, slaughtering all of these

animals, many of which are tortured in the most inhumane way you can possibly conceptualize. Sure. Meanwhile, we're continuing to propagate the planet with humans and we're quickly in the most inhumane way you can possibly conceptualize. Meanwhile, we're continuing to propagate the planet with humans, and we're quickly escalating towards 10 billion people by, what, like 2050 or something like that. Right. And that leaves us with this huge question, like how are we going to feed all these people? How are we going to do it in a way that will ensure that this planet

and its precious resources are still around to be able to even provide in the first place? Yeah. Which brings us to what we're here to talk about today, this whole new emerging world of clean meat. Yeah. So, yeah, I think you're hitting the nail on the head, man. The problem is that we're going to have about 10 billion of us by 2050, most likely. And many of those people want to eat like Americans do. That is a diet that's very heavy in meat, eggs, and dairy.

While those products are extremely inhumane, but they're also among the most resource-intensive products to bring forth into the world. So how do we feed all these people? How do we feed ourselves? Meat consumption globally is projected to continue rising, not fall. Chinese meat consumption is quintupled over the last few decades, and it's continuing to rise right now. With the rise of the middle class there. That's right. That's right. As people come out of the developing world and into the developed world, one of the very first things they do is start eating more animal products.

And diets high in animal products are the diet of the wealthier nations. So this is the diet of affluence. And as soon as countries are no longer mired in poverty, they want to eat more animal products. And so countries like Brazil, Mexico, China, India, their rates of meat consumption are going up, not down. In the United States right now, meat consumption is going up. And even though we have the highest per capita rate of meat consumption pretty much in world history. So the trends aren't looking good. There are great things that are happening with the proliferation of plant-based foods in the marketplace. Plant-based milk is a great standout example of a product that has gained a lot of market share and the dairy industry has contracted because of it. But when it comes to meat, which is what most animals are raised for,

you know, things aren't looking good right now. And there needs to be some solution to this. And I'm very bullish on plant-based meats. I think companies like Beyond Meat and Gardein and Tofurky, I love them. They're great companies. I eat their products myself. But just in the way that fossil fuels are so bad, they present so many problems that we want multiple alternatives to them, wind, solar, geothermal, and so on. We need multiple alternatives to factory farms. And clean meat is one such alternative that looks very promising. And so I wrote this book, Clean Meat, because I wanted to chronicle the pioneers who are devoting their lives to making this into a commercial reality.

These people, many of whom came out of the animal welfare and environmental communities, to try a new tactic and see if we can produce real meat from animal cells rather than animal slaughter, and have people switch from factory farmed meat to a much cleaner more humane more sustainable type of meat yeah i think it's uh it's a very interesting time as we it's it's it's almost like it's a race right it's like we're we're we're we're in this this arms race like are we going to be able to prevail as a species before we destroy

ourselves? Well, that's a very open-ended question. And I think that as amazing as it is to see the ascendancy of this vegan plant-based movement go mainstream, I think you're ignorant to believe that it will reach a tipping point significant enough to really impact this crisis that we're in in a meaningful way before it's too late. Yeah. I mean, let's just keep it real. Less than 1% of meat that is sold in the United States comes from plant-based sources like, you know, Impossible Burgers, Beyond Meat, Gardein added all up. It's less than 1% of all meat. Even if it was at 10% and plant-based milks are now 10% of the fluid milk market in the U.S., even that means 90% of all the milk that is sold is coming from cows, virtually

all of whom are factory farmed. So if we want to actually address this problem and save animals from factory farms and slaughter plants and start reducing the amount of greenhouse gas emissions that agriculture is producing, why wouldn't we do this? This is such a promising alternative to the current system, and the benefits are manifold. Obviously, to animals, the benefits are great,

but it's much cleaner for the planet. Like clean energy, clean meat is just better for the planet, and it's also literally cleaner. So think about it. Right now, you're warned to treat raw meat in your kitchen almost like toxic waste. Why? Because it's riddled with feces. E. coli, salmonella, campylobacter, these are intestinal pathogens that can sicken you

if you don't cook the crap out of your meat, literally. You literally have to cook the crap out of it. But with clean meat, you aren't actually growing intestines, which is those are intestinal pathogens. E. coli, salmonella, campylobacter. You're just growing meat. You take a cell from an animal and make that cell believe that it is still in the animal's body by putting in a type of cultivator that tricks the cell into thinking that. And the cell grows into muscle tissue just exactly as it would in the animal's body, except outside of the animal's body with far fewer resources, because rather than creating an entire animal, you only have to grow the meat you actually want.

So it is truly cruelty-free humane meat, but it's also much cleaner, again, for the planet and for food safety. Yeah. And without the hormones and the antibiotics and everything else that gets put into this. And also, you know, a lifetime, however short that life may be, of eating GMO grain. Yeah, that's one of the more interesting things about this because, you know, obviously this is the application of biotechnology to food. And some people get nervous about that. And the same people who are concerned about GMOs might have that concern. But McKay Jenkins, who wrote a very good book called Food

Fight about the GMO debate, looking at it has a very good point. Jenkins asserts that if you really are concerned about GMOs and you want to reduce the amount of GMO crops planted, the number one thing you should be rooting for is clean meat, because 90% of GMO crops are fed to farm animals. Now, clean meat doesn't require genetic modification. You don't need to use GMO technology to produce clean meat. You could, but none of the companies are doing that who are producing the meat right now. They're not using GMO technology. But if they succeed, they will certainly be displacing a huge portion of farm animals who would otherwise be

eating GMO feed. There also is, there is engineering here. We're embarking into this new terrain that's very strange and very new because the world is changing very rapidly. And so there is a logical, rational argument to say, hey, wait a minute, like, all right, before we just dive into this, like, what are the long-term implications on human health? Has anybody really looked at that in a meaningful way? So that question needs to be asked and explored. Oh, I totally agree. It must be. And the answer is no, of course not. I mean, many will argue these are functionally the same exact thing. There's no difference.

It is just growing the same exact cells, producing the same exact meat just outside of their body. But you're right. There's not possible for there to have been long-term studies on this because the first company devoted to commercializing Queen Meat, Memphis Meats, was founded in 2016. And you're one of the few people on the planet, maybe 100 people or something like that, that have actually tried this. Yeah, it's probably a little bit more than that now, but I was one of the first,

maybe 100 or so, to eat it. And starting in 2014, I started eating some clean meat. I've now eaten clean beef, duck, fish, liver, chorizo, yogurt, all lab-grown. Two things about that. First of all, after whatever, 20 years of being vegan, that had to be weird. Yeah. And secondarily, if you can recall, what is the taste comparison and the texture comparison and all of that? Sure.

So, again, I went vegan in 1993. So, for me, I'm maybe not the best judge to say whether it tastes like meat. But to me, it tasted a lot like meat because it is meat. You know, when you eat a Beyond Burger and you're thinking, oh, does this taste like meat? Well, that's an alternative to meat that tastes very meat-like. This isn't an alternative to meat. It is meat. And that's why it tastes like meat because that's exactly what it is. And yeah, it was weird for me. I mean, as a longtime vegan, I felt like I didn't have any ethical concerns about it you had no ethical quandary about it no ethical quandary but it was an identity quandary right because when you've

been this mean like who am i now right am i still a vegetarian even and frankly i um have less concern about the personal identity issues although i do think a lot of people will be concerned about them but clean meat isn't for vegans. You know, this is intended to displace factory farms, not plant-based protein. So the goal isn't to get vegans to eat this. It's to get people who right now are buying meat from fast food companies and supermarkets to switch to this when it's commercially available. Right, which is the real issue. So were there people, though, who want to kick you off the team?

I'm sure there's creatures of wanting to be, you know, have this identity and be part of a group, whatever that group may be. That's right. There's all kinds of weirdness around that. Yeah, I think for some people, it's like they would rather have a social club than a social movement. And that's the reality. And for them, there's like orthodoxy litmus tests that if you do X, you're out at your excommunicated from the group. I have a feeling for those people, clean meat is a violation of that test. But what is the point of the group to begin with? Stimulate and advocate change and, you know, and hopefully, you know, create a mainstream shift in our relationship with these products

that are raised in a horrible way and are creating all these problems for the planet. That's what you and I want, and I think that's what a lot of vegans want, but I think some vegans really do want to be counter-cultural. For them, if it became mainstream, it would be less attractive.

It's like when your band makes it big. Yeah, yeah, you sign onto the big label. And then it's like the sellout and you're not a fan anymore. Right. That's exactly right. So I had, I had your friend and your colleague and my friend, uh, Bruce Friedrich on, it was probably a year ago and we explored clean meat, but it's been a year. There's a lot of new listeners. So, you know, it probably would be a good idea to at least define our terms and, and, you know, specifically address what we're talking about when we're talking about clean meat. Sure. So right now we have the capacity to take a tiny biopsy. Think about like a sesame seed sized biopsy from an animal. And in that biopsy from muscle tissue, there are what are known as

satellite cells. And these are the cells that create muscle when your muscle is injured, either from a workout or you get bruised. Those cells go to work and produce new muscle. We can isolate those cells and make them think that they're in the body and have them produce muscle. It's the same exact skeletal muscle that people eat when they eat meat. It's not a different type of muscle. It is literally the same muscle. And we can grow that outside of the animal's body and produce meat that is the same as regular meat, except much more sanitary, much eco-friendlier,

and of course, much more humane. And some companies are producing meat that way. Other companies are ditching the initial animal starter cells altogether and they can produce some meats, or excuse me, not meats. They can produce some products like leather, milk, egg whites, gelatin, that don't use any animal starter cells at all. So for example, there's a company called Geltor, which is producing

gelatin and collagen that they already are selling on the market. They've already commercialized their products. So the first of these cellular agriculture companies to commercialize. And they're not using any initial animal starter cells at all. How do you create this leather without an animal starter cell? Oh, it's pretty cool. So in the same way that you can have, let's say, brewer's yeast, and you feed it sugar and it produces alcohol, or you can have baker's yeast and you feed it sugar and it produces CO2 to web and bread.

They take special designer yeast and feed it the sugar and it produces the proteins that you want. So in the case of leather, which is primarily collagen, a protein in your skin, it produces that actual cattle collagen and you can produce real leather without any cow. I've held it in my hand many times. In fact, you can do the same thing. Milk, cow's milk, is about half a dozen key proteins, casein and whey and so on. And you can coax yeast to produce those milk proteins and you add water and some minerals and sugar to it

and it is the same as cow's milk without any milk at all. That's insane. Yeah, in fact- But without the hormonal component. That's right, That's right. And you can, you can tinker with it. So you can have no cholesterol. You can make it lactose free. You are in complete control because you're building it from the molecule up. Really interestingly, the people who hear this, like, oh man, that's like so science fiction. In reality,

every bite of hard cheese that people are taking in America today is made through the same process because cheese has rennet in it rennet is an enzyme that used to come from calves intestinal lining and it makes milk curdle into cheese and now they don't really use calf intestines and cheese anymore what they do is they have done with the same exact process getting little microorganisms to produce chymosin which is the enzyme in rennet that's functionally active and they produce it through what's called synthetic biology which is the same process that we're talking about here and then they add that um synthetically produced chymosin to the cheese and you get actual hard cheese same exact thing except now making

milk or egg whites or leather or gelatin and so on that is bananas yeah it, yeah. It's so like, it's just, it's crazy. It's crazy the acceleration with which we're seeing changes like this in the world from self-driving cars and Elon Musk unveiling, you know, the semi. Yeah, yeah, yeah. Watch that. The super car and like, and the idea, you know, that we're slowly acclimating to this idea that driving our own car is going to be an antiquated. Totally. It'll be illegal. You actually drove a car, but that's weird, right? And very dangerous, yeah.

And now we're just being introduced to this idea of clean meat. And there is, of course, the hairs on the back of your neck kind of go up and go, well, that's weird. And perhaps that's icky. We have this acclimation period that I think we're going to undergo that we're going to go through when we're trying to kind of become socialized to this idea, for lack of a better phrase. But I don't see any way around it becoming the thing that we're all going to be doing. Like, you know, and it's going to take, and your book did a good job of like sort of, you know,

taking us through the history of this and being very kind of conservative about the timeframe here. Like we're not looking at tomorrow. Like most likely these products aren't even going to be on the market until at the earliest, like 2020, right? Yeah, they'll be on the market in some limited senses, I think before then, but in order for like really commercially available in the same way that you can go to the supermarket and buy Gardein or something like that. Yeah, you're talking a few years out. But yeah, I tried to be conservative in the book about looking at

the potential. I'm enthusiastic about what these companies are doing, but I think we also should be cautiously and cautious in that optimism. But let me just tell a doing, but I think we also should be cautiously and cautious in that optimism. But let me just tell a quick story because I think people have that sense like, this seems unnatural. And then future generations may think, oh, it was so unnatural the way you did it before. Think about this. So in the late, like in the mid 19th century, everybody who was using ice was using natural ice. A big natural ice industry. An industry was formed around harvesting ice from lakes in northern latitudes and shipping that ice

around the world for people to have. Enter the advent of the industrial revolution and all of a sudden you have refrigeration. And now you have a way to produce ice much more efficiently just by cooling the water right in front of you down to make ice. Well, the natural ice industry was livid over this advancement in technology, and they railed

against it, calling it artificial ice, saying it was dangerous, it was unnatural. You had no idea if it could sicken you because nobody had been doing it for so long. They worried that the ammonia and the coolant might leak out and poison you, when in reality, the natural ice was actually far less safe. You had contaminants from the industrial revolution in the lakes. The horses who were being used to draw out the ice were, of course, going to the bathroom in the lake while they're dragging it out, whereas so-called artificial ice was being produced from water that had been boiled or otherwise filtered before they had

cooled it down. So the artificial ice was way safer. And now you fast forward more than a century to today, and every single one of us has an artificial ice maker in our homes. We call them freezers, and we don't think there's anything unnatural about it at all. Is it possible that clean meat will have the same thing that we're going to think now? Oh, that's unnatural to have meat without animals, to divorce meat production from livestock raising. Whereas in the future, maybe they're going to think about slaughtering animals for food as some type of a relic of a primitive society. I mean, we used to have all of our homes lit by whale oil and kerosene came along and decimated the whaling industry. What if clean meat makes a factory farm seem as antiquated as a whaling ship?

Yeah, you did that TED talk, one of your 200 TED Talks that you've given, where you actually brought the harpoon onto the stage to demonstrate this point. That's very nice of you. I don't recommend trying to fly on an airplane with a harpoon. How did you transport that? I ended up having to just ship it via UPS. It was like a real six foot long harpoon. I know, it was like a legit harpoon. Yeah, this was not like a decoration for your basement wall. This was like a vintage real harpoon that I bought for this purpose. Well, on a very academic, practical kind of intellectual plane, when you break it down, it doesn't make sense how we're producing. We're so acclimated to it.

This is the way we do it. It's the only way we've ever known how to do it. But when you really evaluate the inputs required to create that hamburger patty or that chicken breast, it's insane. Like if an alien came down to the planet and said, like, how are you creating food for everybody? And looked at, you know, how much how many resources have to go into creating these products? This is unsustainable. You can't keep doing this. They would think we were insane.

This is unsustainable. You can't keep doing this. They would think we were insane. And interestingly, about aliens, the very first research ever funded into clean meat was actually funded by NASA. Because they recognized that if we are ever to leave our planet and start doing long-distance cosmic tourism for astronauts, they're not going to be carrying Noah's Ark in tow. I mean, if they want meat, they're going to have to grow it. And, in fact, that's what they did on Star Trek, USS Enterprise. Yeah, a little slider and then there it is.

Right. I mean, Queen Mead has been the purview of science fiction for a long time, including Star Trek. And NASA at the turn of the century thought, well, what's fun to this? And they funded these researchers in New York to grow real fish flesh outside of a fish. And they succeeded in doing it. And these dudes fried it up. They couldn't get permission from the FDA to eat it, but they fried it up. They said it smelled just like fish. And then they unfortunately threw the meat they had grown out. But that was the first breakthrough that caused. It was in 2002 when this paper was published that showed that this is actually possible.

And there were some people like Jason Matheny, who was an early pioneer in the clean meat movement, who when he read that study back in 02, thought to himself, why would we do this in space? We need to do this here on earth. This is a technology that could save us from ourselves here on earth, rather than just thinking about how to feed astronauts in space. Meanwhile, we're able to cultivate human tissue in petri dishes right oh yeah for burn victims and things like that so it's like we're doing it on ourselves oh yeah there are companies now if you get a burn they can take a sample like a biopsy from your skin somewhere else on your body and grow not just human flesh but grow human skin that is your skin like literally your skin and they put it in the wound and your body accepts it thinking that it's the natural

skin because it is your actual skin. Right. It's amazing. It's really cool. And when you think about that, you can do it for medical purposes. Certainly, certainly we can do it for fashion purposes, too. Not the human skin. I'm not saying I really need a human skin coat, but you can easily make leather coats

and so on out of these types of technologies. Well, the fashion implications, the implications on consumer products and garments, that was a super fascinating aspect of your book and something I knew much less about. It didn't come up in my conversation with Bruce. And your thesis, supported by speaking with all of these entrepreneurs in the space, is that that's going to really be the first mover. It's going to be the leather products and perhaps egg whites and things like that that follow. But food isn't really the tip of the spear, the harpoon. It's possible. So there's this race of who's going to be first.

But yeah, Modern Meadow is a company that's really pioneering the weather space in terms of cellular agriculture. And the CEO, Andres Forgox, has a theory that he thinks that it's easier to get people to wear novel materials than to eat novel foods. That's a very smart, correct point. Right. So think about things like, you know, carbon fiber, Gore-Tex. Like those are people didn't have any concerns about wearing these brand new novel materials that are the product of new technologies. We welcome them. We love them. Lightweight things that keep us really warm and wick away our sweat. I mean, that's awesome. And so if you can get people accustomed to the idea of wearing leather that was grown without the cow, might it ease them into the idea of eating meat that was grown without a cow also? it ease them into the idea of eating meat that

was grown without a cow also? And is that on the same sort of time horizon, 2020? Is that further out or is that, where are we in terms of being able to create, you know, products for the marketplace? It's probably sooner. So you might have mass production by then, but you'll probably have some products on the market in a high-end fashion type of way before then. Yeah, I think that it's much needed. My experience with the faux leather, like trying to sort of be ethical in my purchasing, I've been sort of disappointed in what's available there,

especially with like shoes and things like that. It's like, it's just not there yet. Yeah, I mean, the secret is like, vegans delude ourselves into thinking that these products are all exactly identical. We think the vegan meats taste exactly like meat. We think the weather is indistinguishable. And I mean, I like them. I use them. I'm a fan.

But oftentimes people aren't fooled. and being able to have the actual so-called real thing while divorcing it from the problems of factory farming and animal agribusiness in general, I think is gonna be a major breakthrough that is gonna lead to real gains for animals and the planet. Yeah, I think what's a differentiating thing here is the true sustainability. I mean, the footprint of these products is so low

compared to not just animal-based products, but even synthetic products. Like, okay, faux leather. Like, okay, you're vegan, so you're going to buy your faux leather shoes or whatever. But let's take a look at how that was produced and what is the, you know, environmental impact of creating that and what were the dyes that were used and, you know, where was it created? and almost always from petrochemicals? Yeah, right So there's there's a lot of damage just because it perhaps didn't involve an animal doesn't mean that it's it's you know free of impact

Yeah, I often wonder about the term cruelty free because we tend to mean it as a synonym to animal free But it's pretty clear that there are lots of ways to promote cruelty, even when you're not using animal exploitation. If you're dumping artificial dyes into some waterway and it's killing a bunch of fish, you could probably still label that product as cruelty-free, when in fact it truly isn't. I remember my very first job, I worked on this organic family farm back in Maryland. And I went around and I was so psyched at this really romantic image of what it was going to be like to work on this bu family farm back in Maryland and I went around and I was so psyched at this like you know really romantic image of what it was going to be like to work on this bucolic farm and one of the tasks they gave me was to uh fertilize all of these plants with fish blood and so I'm like walking around and these are you know just for vegetables you know you

think what what could be non-vegan about vegetables, and it was just a good reminder to me that, you know, life is not black and white, that we find shades of gray and so many things that we do. And we shouldn't pretend that there is some notion of personal purity that we're going to achieve because we're not. I think the name of the game is to try to do as much good as we can try to reduce the amount of suffering that we're not. I think the name of the game is to try to do as much good as we can, try to reduce the amount of suffering that we're causing and try to increase the amount of good we're doing in the world. But we shouldn't delude ourselves into thinking that we can be 100% impact free or cruelty free or whatever you want to call it, because all of us are causing some harm and we should just try to do enough good to outweigh that harm as much as possible.

It's a really important point. And I think about that a lot, especially when I hear people getting super righteous. It's like, listen, we all have an impact. We're all creating some damage. As Gene Bauer would say, it's like it's an aspiration, like you're doing the best that you can. But I think it is important to telescope out and really try to understand as best you can the implications of, of all of these choices that we make with respect to whatever companies we're patronizing and products that we're buying. Yeah. For me, it's progress, not perfection. I love Jean's line that being vegan is more aspirational. It's not all or nothing. It's just trying to aspire to do the best that you can.

And I think there's a tendency of some people to become self-righteous over it. But most of us are living in glass houses, and it's not a good idea to start throwing stands. So this whole clean meat thing was preconceived. That's probably the wrong word, was sort of conceptualized by Winston Churchill. Yeah, yeah. What is the quote exactly that he said? That was amazing. Yeah, in 1931, Churchill, before becoming prime minister of the UK, wrote this essay,

50 Years Hence. It's the name of the UK wrote this essay, 50 Years Hence. It's the name of the essay. And he said that we shall escape the absurdity of growing an entire animal when you could simply grow the parts that you just wanted to eat. And he was foreshadowing this idea of growing meat without animals. And he was a few decades off, admittedly, but the revolution that he foresaw is now in full swing. And you have these startups like Memphis Meats and Hampton Creek and Jeltor and Perfect Day and Clara Foods and so many others who are now working to make real that vision. And not just in a proof of concept type of way, which they've all already done, but actually to start commercializing. The companies I just

named have already raised millions of dollars each. With Memphis Meats, Cargill, the big agribusiness giant, invested in them, showing that even the meat industry thinks this is promising. And so I think for that reason, you know, what Churchill envisioned might have seemed very science fiction back then, but now it's pretty much science fact. The most science fiction thing that I read in your book was this idea that one day we wouldn't be purchasing these products created by these clean meat organizations, but that we would actually have our own like in-home brewery or whatever it is, like a toaster where we're actually,

like in Star Trek, where we're able to just make it at home, which is like insane. Yeah. I mean, it's certainly not possible today. You would need to know what you're going to eat many weeks in advance. But think about it. Like Moore's Law, you can see that happening.

One would hope. I mean, we'll see. I would say this. Right now, nobody thinks of it as remarkable to have a bread maker in their home or an ice cream maker in their home. It's a cool gadget to have. Maybe we will one day have meat makers in our homes and you can order a little tea bags of stem cells and you drop them in and you can make your meat right there. I mean, that's not in the foreseeable future, but it doesn't seem that crazy that it would be completely physically impossible to envision it.

Right. That's so wild. On this subject of, you know, talking about how active this space is, we have all these billionaires that are investing, everyone from Bill Gates to Richard Branson and, you know, Sergey Brin, you know, plays a large role in the kind of early stages of conceptualizing this industry, it's kind of painted in this Silicon Valley picture because these are tech companies. This is the latest in tech and that's very exciting. But another thing that was interesting about your book is, in addition to the fact that perhaps garments

like leather goods are gonna be the first mover in this space, the United States isn't necessarily the first market or audience for these products. It's really China and Brazil and Mexico, right? I think was the third one that you mentioned. Yeah. Well, nobody knows what will happen, but I do think that it's very plausible that those countries that you named and maybe India as well are going to be some of the first early adopters of these products because these are countries that have food security concerns, really rapidly growing populations, food safety concerns, especially in China. especially in China. And to the extent that you have a technology that can address all of those, I suspect that it would be welcomed. And already a lot of Chinese meat companies are talking about this. China just inked a deal with Israel for $300 million on clean tech. And the hope is that the clean meat companies in Israel, and there are a couple of them now already,

will be part of that and get to hopefully sell clean meat in China. But other companies like Hampton Creek certainly have their eyes on China. Li Ka-shing, who's one of the wealthiest billionaires in all of Asia and a major investor in companies like Hampton Creek and in others like Modern Meadow, the leather producers, people like him certainly want to see this in China. And so I think it's possible that is what happens, that those countries come first. And what is the regulatory landscape going to look like? When and where and how do the FDA and the USDA begin to insert themselves into this and try to exert a little control over what's happening? Yeah, well, right now these companies are meeting with the agencies. I mean, as we speak,

these companies are already in communication with the agencies about this because nobody really even knows who will regulate them. Right now, USDA regulates meat production, whereas FDA does fish. However, the USDA's regulatory framework assumes that there is going to be a USDA inspector in a slaughter plant monitoring the slaughter and seeing what happens to the butchering process. Needless to say, none of that is relevant in clean meat. Yeah, that's very different from walking into what is essentially a biotech firm, right? Where there's going to be clean rooms and things that have nothing, bear zero resemblance to what they're sort of trained to

understand and regulate yeah so that's why a lot of people think it's going to be fda and that's probably what will happen i will say though right now it certainly is produced in clean rooms and people in white lab coats but what will happen is that when it's time to for commercialization clean meat will be produced in breweries i mean it, it's going to look like a Sam Adams brewery, not like a factory, excuse me, not like a lab. It'll look more like a food factory than a lab. And then what do these folks do? I guess they can ensure there's not contamination in the actual brewery, but it's completely irrelevant to the current system of meat inspection that you have with USDA inspectors looking at how animals are slaughtered and if their intestines are being spilled out onto the

meat and so on. Getting over the kind of quote unquote ick factor for the general public, I would imagine is going to be a hurdle. And, you know, there's some interesting stuff in your book about, you know, how it's being presented and marketed to the public. And there's this whole thing about like, what are we calling it? You know, cultured meat. And it was Bruce who came up with the phrase clean meat, right? And then you did all these studies, like how does that land with people?

And, you know, what are people thinking about this? How are we going to get them to acclimate to, you know, the idea of this as a palatable alternative? Yeah. Good pun. Palatable alternative. So Bruce popularized the term clean meat. He did not invent it, but he did.

He did. He did popularize it with the Good Food Institute and with good reason. They did consumer surveys and they found that clean meat performed the best. But as far back as 2008, this dude, a professor, wrote a letter to the editor to the New York Times that they published in which he bristled at a New York Times article that had called this fake meat. And he said, this is not fake meat any more than how, you know, cloning a sheep would create a fake sheep. It's a real sheep. Dowie was a real sheep. And so he suggested that because of the food safety benefits, if you want to call it anything, you should call it clean meat.

And that idea really didn't go that far until Bruce resurrected it. And he's done a very good job. And admittedly, I was a little bit of a skeptic at first. I was one of the users of cultured meat. And Bruce persuaded me through the evidence that he and GFI and eventually other organizations and researchers found as well, that clean meat really is the best in terms of names to call it. Now, admittedly, the best name to call it is just meat, because that's exactly what it is. It really doesn't need a specific descriptor. But in order to have a conversation that is intelligible, you need to have some descriptor for it right now, at least. Maybe in the future, it will just be meat. But for

right now, at least of all the options that have been pulled, clean meat seems to do the best. And my understanding is that, we touched on this a minute ago, that it can be, you know, pretty robustly manipulated in terms of what you want it to, you know, the, the, the composition of these meats, like how many, you know, like what, what is the amount of saturated fat that we want to have in here? Or do we want it lean? Do we want it more marble? Do we want it this? And you can sort of dial these things up and down as desired. Is that the future of what this is going to look like? So you could specifically get exactly, you know, the healthiest version or the tastiest version. Yeah. So there's a little

bit of a divide in the clean meat community over this. So there are some people who argue we ought to just be producing meat that is identical to the meat that we have now and have, because that's what people want. That's what people are eating. Others argue, well, it should be identical, but better. Now, of course, it's better for all the reasons we've already noted, but they want it to, for example, have instead of saturated fat, you can imagine putting an omega-3 fatty acid. So you could have a hamburger that instead of causing heart attacks prevents that. No saturated fat. Right. Now, saturated fat probably has a mouthfeel that is important for the burger. That's why, for example, the Impossible Burger has a lot of saturated fat probably has a mouth feel that is important for the burger that's why

for example the impossible burger has a lot of saturated fat as one example um but uh we'll see what they do i think at first we're probably going to be looking at products that are nutritionally equivalent to conventional meat but safer from a food safety perspective but in the future yeah i suspect that you will have meats that are marketed as healthier or have some type of uh have some type of claim that they're going to be uh made of foods that would be healthier than just a regular slab of meat well certainly healthier from the just from the gate because it's not going to have the antibiotics it's not going to have you know it's not going to be have been ingesting pesticides and GMO grain

and all these other things that are, you know, it's not going to have bird flu, things like that. You know, that's one of the big, one of the big reasons I think to support this is to reduce the limit of the chance of a big flu pandemic. A lot of us don't think about it.

We're not that concerned about things like bird flu or swine flu, but keep in mind the Spanish flu of 1918, which decimated tens of millions of people at a time when there were only a billion humans on the planet with far less global travel. That was from that type of a mix from bird flu. Imagine if that happened today, where we have 7.4 billion of us on the planet with people flying around the globe all the time. You could imagine it could be civilizationally threatening. And in fact, the American Public Health Association even editorialized on this issue, saying that

the biggest way that we could reduce the risk of such a pandemic again would be to dramatically reduce the number of animals who were raising for food. They envision it as a way for people to eat less meat because they published that several years ago. That would obviously be a great thing. But with the advent of clean meat, perhaps we can accomplish the same thing without having to change so many people's diets in the process. Most of us have heard of Hampton Creek. We know about, you know, Beyond Meat. We're hearing more and more about Impossible Burger and Memphis Meats.

But who are the other players? Who are the movers and shakers in this space? Because it's not just burgers and chicken breasts. We're talking about duck and foie gras and the leather products, et cetera. There's a whole plethora of companies and you kind of do these case histories of how they came into being throughout the book. Super interesting. Thank you. I agree. It is really interesting. So a lot of these people are just young idealists who saw the problem of factory farming and they wanted to address it in a way that they thought would actually be effective and efficient. You know, keep in mind, let's just back up and think about even in the anti-slavery days, the anti-slavery activists, many of them, if not most of them, were still purchasing slave-produced cotton, sugar, and tea.

Even though they were for the abolition of slavery, they still felt like they, for whatever reason, had a hard time buying freely produced products. In California, 10 years ago, when we passed Proposition 2 to ban battery cages, two-thirds of Californians voted to ban battery cages, yet at that time, 90% of eggs were battery eggs being sold in the state. So it's very difficult for us often to align our values with our actions. Many times we act differently as consumers as we would as citizens. And so there's a theory that if you are going to address this problem, what's the best way to do it? To try to persuade millions of people to individually change their diets voluntarily or to create a new system that renders the old system obsolete and that appeals to people on the factors that they're actually making their purchasing decisions are price, taste, and convenience.

So these companies, like for example, let's take Clara Foods as one example. Arturo Elizondo is the CEO, and he founded the company as a guy straight out of college in his early 20s, and he founded it with two other folks, and they basically realized that egg whites are just a few key egg proteins. And they could, in the same way where we were talking about creating leather and milk from this process of synthetic biology, that they could create those types of egg white proteins and add water to it and you basically have egg whites. And they had this idea.

It's so crazy. And they went and they pitched it to an accelerator called indie bio run by a great guy by the name of ryan bethencourt and they talked to ryan and he was very interested in it and he gave them some free lab space and some startup money um i don't think it was much it was like fifty thousand dollars which of course is a lot of money in the real world but for starting a company it's not that much money. And they proved that they could do it. And now they've attracted millions of dollars of investment and they want to be producing clean egg whites,

perhaps starting for the egg protein market at first, like for protein bars and shakes and so on. And they haven't yet commercialized, but they hope to be commercialized in the near future. And these are just these people, again, who are in their 20s, who are thinking to themselves, how can I make a positive impact on the world? Think about how horrible the egg industry is to chickens so often and for the environment and so on. And they have come up with a promising solution that doesn't rely on millions of individuals to voluntarily change their diets. They've come up with a

solution that if they could succeed, would solve the problem without people having to make consciously different decisions. Yeah, change the environment, you know? Yeah, that's right. I mean, think about like, most people don't have any idea what source of energy they use. They don't know if it comes from coal or gas or wind or solar. But if you create a situation where your energy for renewables costs less than energy from fossil fuels, lots of people or the company, the power companies themselves will just switch to that and people will just go for that option. It's not that different than the idea that if you grew up in Amsterdam, you're probably going to ride your bike around all over the place. That's just what they do there.

You know what I mean? As opposed to living out here in the middle of the country where that would be not feasible. Like, you know, just updating the environment. And, you know, the... Yeah, that's a good point. The idea that this is supplanting outdated tech, you know, back to the harpoon example, that we're going to look back on this and consider past practices as barbaric. But we're in the, you know, we're in the midst of this shift. And with that

comes resistance, because there's always resistance, right? And the idea that this is going to be literally replacing something that is part and parcel of our history. Like farming is America, the heartland. Like what does that say about who we are as a country and this kind of pastoral perspective we have on that occupation and all the people that are involved in that? Yeah, I think that we've had a situation in the country where the number of people involved in farming has declined basically every year for the most part. Because it's just consolidating and consolidating. Yeah, food production has gotten a lot more efficient. You need far fewer people to grow the food. That's

just the reality of it. And clean meat will make it even more efficient. You still have to farm. I mean, you still need farmed ingredients to feed the cells, but you need fewer. It's one of the big benefits is that it's less resource efficient. What are you feeding them? Well, right now it is like a cocktail of various plant-based ingredients and sometimes even animal-based ingredients that would never be used in the commercial sense because both for ethical and financial reasons, it's just really expensive. But we've been culturing cells for over a century,

and a lot of the time they're cultured with animal ingredients. So many of the companies have already moved beyond that. In fact, the companies that are doing egg whites and milk and leather and gelatin aren't doing that at all. But the other companies are basically trying to find plant-based ingredients that are really cheap that will help the cells grow. And that's the real race is to figure out what are the best plant-based nutrients for these cells that causes them to grow quickly and cheaply. Right. So there will be farming for that. And perhaps the farming that exists can go towards

feeding humans as opposed to feeding livestock. Yeah, and a lot of the land will hopefully be rewilded. So you could have a return to forests or to wetlands or other types of conservation purposes that you can capture carbon from the atmosphere in the way that these lands did prior to deforestation. On that note, right now there's an interesting movement afoot. I think it's called the ethical omnivore movement. And perhaps it's an outgrowth of the paleo movement. But the idea behind it, as I understand it, and you probably know more, is that as opposed to kind of the the cowspiracy, what the health approach of,

look, we need to just transcend animal agriculture because it's destroying the planet. It's this argument that actually the way forward is to conceptualize new ways of raising animals for food in a way that is actually improving the planet. I don't know if I got that right, but maybe you can speak to this a little bit because there's a lot of people who are interested in this as a counterpoint to cowspiracy, for example. What is your sense of the truth behind this? Well, let's just keep it real. More than, probably about 99% of farm animals in our country are don't go outside.

I mean, they're in factory farms. They don't see the sunlight. They don't step foot on a blade of grass. The first time they smell fresh air is when they're in the back of a truck to slaughter. And clean meat is the antidote to that type of meat. To the extent that we give farm animals better lives and let them live outdoors in a type of what you're referring to as regenerative agriculture, I think it's a big step in the right direction. I would welcome animals being treated better, no doubt about it. I don't

think that that's a competitor of clean meat. And I just think that there are certain limitations to that, just scaling it up. You're not going to have 9 billion animals all walking around on pasture. You just don't have enough land to do that. Yeah, my big question is, like, if we do hit 10 billion people or at 7.5, wherever we are right now, is it even a possibility that you could achieve that? Yeah, I don't think that you can scale it up to the point where you could have current levels of meat consumption being adopted. And the proponents of regenerative agriculture usually would say, yeah, we ought to eat less meat, which is great. However, my own experience is that many of the people who like this idea in theory are still just eating meat, you know, just conventional meat. And so do they say

that somebody is only eating that type of meat? Of course, I think that's a better option than what most people do. But I don't think that it enables the trends that we see continuing in China, India, Brazil, and so on, where meat consumption is skyrocketing. I don't think that you satiate that demand for meat without factory farms or with something like plant-based meats or clean meats or some combination thereof. What about the ethical conundrum, or perhaps it's more accurately described as a thought experiment, the idea that as things currently stand, we have all of these billions of animals walking around.

If we fast forward to a time where clean meat is what everybody's doing and we've reduced these animals, have we deprived these animals the right to a life? It's a serious argument. I mean, there's lots of- It's an interesting question. I don't know that there's an answer to it, but it's interesting to kind of think about that. Like, okay, as bad as the system is right now, we're providing lives to these animals. If we create a system that's more ethically balanced, is it better to have those animals have a life that then gets ended as opposed to them not having a life at all?

Well, I certainly would prefer for them to have lives that are not miserable, which is what they have for the most part now. the same time we have to remember that these animals don't live in a vacuum every domesticated animal like a chicken or a pig or a cow displaces wildlife feed is raised is grown for them to feed them that was once wild land and if you want more wild free living animals and fewer owned animals who are raising for food, then that's not necessarily the right tradeoff. If, however, you want more farm animals who have good lives and you want them to displace wild animals, then, yeah, actually, that would be your solution. You would want something like pasture based systems where, excuse me, where farm animals are outdoors and you don't have a lot of wildlife space around, but you have farmed animals there. And, you know, it just depends on whether you want more wild animals or you want more domesticated animals.

Right. Yeah, it's interesting. I will say I'm not persuaded by the argument that we're depriving anybody from coming into existence. I mean, you know, think about it like this. So you have four kids, presumably you could have had a fifth. Like, did you commit some moral crime? Or I could have had none. Right. I mean, did you commit some moral crime? If I really wanted to be more sustainable, right, I would have had no children. Well, that's a separate argument, but let's just say that you think that more is merrier, right? So the argument that more farm animals have good lives because your kids i presume have great lives so uh you know if you have a ask that yeah right yeah all right we'll see what they say about you when they're adults

um but you know did you commit some moral crime by not having a fifth kid i don't think so you didn't deprive some you know potential person no very few people would make that argument that you're somehow obligated to multiply as much as you possibly can. Has Peter Singer spoken to this? Yeah, I think what Peter would say is that right now farm animals don't have lives worth living, that their life is a curse to them, that bringing them into existence is just sentencing them to misery. But I don't think Peter would have as much of a concern if they had a very good life, were killed painlessly, and had lives that were overall better than the way that wild animals would live because they are displacing them. But I don't want to speak for him. I'd want to ask him

that. But knowing Peter, that's what I think he would say. Right. Interesting. So Uma Valetti was on the cover. Was it Fortune or Inc? Inc. Yeah. Inc. Founder of Memphis Meets. A lot of attention. Like this is part of the public discourse now in a very large and prominent way. Like this is happening. Yeah. It's amazing. What a time to be alive. Yeah. I mean, it's, I keep thinking like, well, am I going to be old enough to see something? You know, I was like, well, 80, like, yeah, I'll get to see some of this stuff. But like the, the, the lives that our kids are going to be, you know, that my kids are going to be leading. Like, I, I just, I can't even imagine it. I don't think that we can conceptualize it. We couldn't have conceptualized the iPhone beyond seeing Captain Kirk, you know, using the, you know, using their version of it. When do you think, do you really

think it's going to be 2020 before we're going to be able to have a Memphis meat burger at the grocery store that we can pick up? Yeah, I doubt that it'll be that soon where you're just going to have like burgers on the shelves because they won't be cost competitive by then most likely. Right. But I do think that we're talking about years, not decades. And it just is a matter of how much money will go into the R&D. The biggest hope is that the meat industry will get involved. Cargill's investment in Memphis Meats is a really positive sign. The fact that these big food companies are there, they know this is the future. So rather than be like the music industry and cast a blind eye to what's coming, they're investing and they're getting involved now. Yeah, a good analogy is the music industry or even the film industry. Look at the difference in the way that Canon and Kodak responded to the

digital revolution. They're both big gelatin film manufacturers and Canon adopted it and Kodak didn't and Kodak went bankrupt and now Canon is the biggest digital camera maker on earth. And I think that there will be meat companies that recognize clean and plant-based meats as the future and they will invest in them and they will slowly become non-animal meat and other animal product purveyors, whereas others will stick to the old antiquated model and they will suffer the consequences and they will go the way of a whaling ship

or of a gelatin film. I mean, I remember when I was in high school and in college, you know, you would take your film to like CVS and drop it off and come back later to get it. Those little photomat huts. Yeah, right. You know, you come back later to get your prints and hope that they came out well.

I mean, it's so archaic to think about. And when one hour photo became available, we thought it was amazing. Like one hour, oh, my God. And now, I mean, imagine if you had to wait one minute. I mean, you would be outraged. Right. Yeah, like you'd be throwing your iPhone into the toilet. Right, exactly. If it like, you'd be throwing your iPhone into the, you know, into the toilet. Right. Exactly.

If it was making you wait that long. Yeah. It's, it's crazy how that, how, how that is and how we so quickly acclimate to that, you know, like, I don't think our DNA or our genetic wiring is really suited for the rapidity with which we're undergoing these kinds of changes, which is a whole different podcast, but. And one with, and I thought with which I totally agree. Yeah. So what are the current biggest barriers that these industries are facing, whether it's technological or, or legal regulatory? Yeah. They don't face too many regulatory problems yet because they're just not getting ready to commercialize yet. The biggest barrier is bringing the cost down. They already know how to make these products.

They just have to make them much cheaper. So the first burger that was produced in 2013, which had the funding from Sergey Brin, the co-founder of Google, that cost $330,000, right? I mean, maybe the most expensive burger ever consumed. You fast forward just four years and Uma Valeti's meatball was a comparative bargain of $1,200. Now, that's still a very expensive dish to have, you know, spaghetti with meatballs where it's $1,200 per meatball. But it's a huge drop in the cost. And to use your iPhone example, I mean, the first iPhone cost billions of dollars to produce.

And now we're all walking around with one in our pocket. iPhone cost billions of dollars to produce. And now we're all walking around with one in our pocket. In fact, I read recently that if 10 years ago you had wanted the photo editing functions that Instagram has, it would cost over $2 million. Now it's just a free download. So everybody who is involved in these companies believes they will bring the cost down. They just don't know how they're going to do it yet, but they need more money for R&D to figure that out. These companies are attracting millions or in the case of some tens of millions of dollars, but they need more than that. I mean, we need a type of like a Manhattan project to figure out how to quickly scale these up. And there are some companies that are really serious about doing just that.

Well, there is a bit of a Manhattan project, right? There's a whole chapter in your book called project Jake, which is all about this, not really a pivot, but a redirect of focus that the guys at Hampton Creek are undergoing right now. Yeah. So Hampton Creek for a long time was just known as a plant-based food technology company. And now they have a queen meat division called Project Jake, named after Jake, the sadly late dog. But Josh Tetrick, the CEO and co-founder of Hampton Creek, really envisions clean meat as a major part of the company's future. Not just a plant-based food maker with a clean meat division, but really a clean meat company. That's a huge change from even just a couple of years ago.

Definitely, definitely. I mean, they became famous for making plant-based mayo and salad dressing. And now- The big Unilever lawsuit. Yeah, yeah. Fiasco. Well, there's been a lot of interesting changes over there. Wasn't there some big board shakeup and Josh got rid of everyone?

I mean, you probably know more about that than I do. I just remember reading something about some significant executive shuffle happening there. They did have such a shuffle and the company seems to be doing pretty well now. They just released their new Just Scramble, which I actually ate in San Francisco yesterday at a restaurant. It was really excellent. Tastes just like scrambled eggs. And they have new board members and new executives. And I think the company is on the right track, but they have had some bad media attention that has shined a light in a way on them that most companies I don't think generally are treated with. I think a lot of companies that aren't so in the spotlight, they're not subjected to that type of media scrutiny. to that type of media scrutiny. Because Hampton Creek has been so successful, I mean, it was founded in 2011 and it already has a valuation today

of over a billion dollars. And because people like Josh Tetrick are so high profile there, there's been more media scrutiny on them than on other startups, which maybe have similar problems in the startup life, but just escape media scrutiny.

So they're making this huge push, huge investment into clean meat. Yeah. So Josh Tetrick basically decided that you look at the Unilever lawsuit, and it was all over whether you can call this product mayonnaise or not. They're calling it just mayo and whether you can call it mayonnaise. And if you can't call it even mayo, it's very difficult. If you have to do what Unilever had wanted, which for them to call it like a spread or a dressing. You know, that's not what people are buying.

They're buying mayo. And the same is so there are standards of identity for these other products like chicken. So if you look at what all of the plant-based meat purveyors making chicken call it, it's never chicken. It's like some weird bastardization of the word. Yeah. So it's like chick apostrophe N. There's like chicken it's like it's some weird bastardization of the word yeah it's just like chick apostrophe n there's like chicken with an i instead of an e there's always something like chicken free chicken all these words that they have to use because they're not legally allowed to call it chicken and that creates a barrier in the mind this is the same reason

why the dairy industry doesn't want the plant-based milk companies to call milk because same thing with cheese that's exactly right if you make cheese from nuts like julie's cookbook they don't want you to call that cheese they want you to call it a nut spread you think of something more repulsive than nut spread so the dairy industry well nut cheese doesn't sound so good either yeah they need better marketing in that field yeah Yeah. But with clean meat, the hope is that you will be able just to call it meat. Well, it is meat. That's the differentiating. That's exactly right.

It is real, actual meat. And that's what Josh's theory is, that plant-based chicken could do a lot. It could take over a large portion of the market, hopefully. Right now, it's a minuscule portion, but hopefully it could go to a large portion. But unless you can actually call it chicken, there does seem to be some type of a natural limitation as to how much consumer acceptance you have. The other interesting thing about Hampton Creek, and this is in your book, is akin to the way that Elon Musk has sort of approached his technological breakthroughs with batteries in the sense that he's making this information available. Hampton Creek is saying, look,

we're going to crack the code on this clean meat stuff, and then we'll just license you how to do it. Like we want everybody to do it rather than protecting that IP and locking it down and trying to control the market. Yeah, that's exactly right. Josh Tetrick has zero interest in being the only clean meat purveyor. He wants to help really solve this problem of factory farming. And so their goal is to become a licensor of clean meat technologies to big meat companies rather than just being a clean meat producer themselves. And I think that goal is shared by a lot of other people in this space too, because nearly everybody who's involved as an entrepreneur in this,

sure, they want to make money, but their goal is to solve a problem. It's to get into the game and provide an alternative that renders the current system of animal agriculture obsolete so that we can move beyond these problems that are plaguing humanity and the planet. I mean, right now we're sitting just miles away from raging wildfires that are almost certainly, if not caused by, exacerbated by climate change. And we all know, at least listeners of this podcast probably know, animal agriculture is a leading cause of climate change,

a leading cause of greenhouse gas emissions. And at what point do we say we need an alternative? We cannot just rely on people just to do the right thing because it's the right thing. I wish that we did that, but sadly we're humans and humans are very fallible, certainly myself included. And if we don't have an alternative that is convenient, that is better than the current system, that is cost competitive with it, I don't see how we win. Yeah. On the greenhouse gas emissions, just so we're super clear, it's something like 15% attributable to animal agriculture, more than the transportation sector combined. And you do a great job in the book of kind of canvassing all of the environmental implications and all of the resources that need to be marshaled to create these animal products, especially

water, right? Like, what is it with, you even broke it down by egg whites, I think, like how much water is required to just create an egg? Yeah. Well, first, dude, I'm honored that you read the book so closely. I can tell from the interview that you really read it. You know, sometimes you do an interview and people, they really haven't. So my hat is off to you. I'm grateful. But second, yeah, I mean, it takes about 50 gallons of water to produce one egg, just one egg, 50 gallons of water. Think about that. I mean, think about if you were, for example, to every time that you ate one egg, you had to open up 51 gallon jugs of water and dump them out on the ground first.

Nobody would ever do that. Yeah. That is what that is, what it takes. And it's important to remember that. And the feed and the amount, like Bruce has this example that you have in the book, too. Like if you're going to eat a plate of pasta, you're going to throw out nine plates of pasta, you know, and that, that kind of is a, you know, a demonstrative way of showing you how much, how much has to go into these products to create them and how much waste and byproducts there are. Yeah. Huge amounts. I mean, water is

just one of the inputs, but feed land oil. I mean, it goes on and on and on. It's such an inefficient way to produce protein for us and we need a better alternative so are you going to be a consumer of these products i don't know i mean i don't have a great desire myself to eat it honestly i ate it for the book i think i guess i and i kind of thought it was cool too like i thought like it would be an interesting story but i don't you couldn't write the book without trying it yeah i agree i agree. I totally agree with you, but I don't have a big desire to eat meat. Um, so I, I, I do like plant-based meats, but I don't eat them that often. Um, and I like eating them. If somebody offers me some, I eat it if it's a holiday, but I don't like go to the supermarket and just buy them on a regular basis. Cause I just don't have a big

desire to eat meat. Yeah. I'm with you. Like it's, I'll have a beyond burger every once in a while. Like if we're at veggie grill or something like that with the kids, but, uh, I'm, I'm like past it. Like I'm not the consumer. I'm not the market for this product, but I recognize that there's a massive market and a massive need for this. I'm just not going to be the person who's going to be lining up to eat it. Yeah. Well, interestingly enough, the consumer surveys show that there is an inverse relationship between how much meat you eat now and whether you're interested in eating clean meat. So the less meat you eat now, the less interest you have in eating clean meat. The more meat you eat now, the more interest you have.

So what is that about? Well, it just shows vegetarians don't want to eat meat. I mean, it's not that radical of a notion. But, I mean, I find that even vegetarians tend to be really thrilled about products like Beyond Meat and so on. I mean, I was giving a talk at the Kansas City VegFest recently, and, you know, this is a vegetarian festival, and the longest line was for the Beyond Burgers. You know, like even coming there, people aren't getting quinoa and lentils. They're getting uh beyond burgers but for the most part i think vegetarians are not that thrilled about the idea of eating actual animal meat and so they're not the target

you and i are not the target for the clean meat companies uh the shoppers who are buying conventional meat from fast food companies and from big box grocers, those are the target. Yeah. I actually, I've tried the impossible burger now three times and all three times I was like, this is not for me. It freaked me out. Like I didn't like it. It was just, it just, it was weird. And, and God bless them. Like, I'm glad that company exists and they're doing good in the world. And I'm, you know, I'm, I'm hopeful that, you know, a lot of people will discover and love their products and switch accordingly. But like, yeah, I was like, no. I think I like the idea of being able to walk into a restaurant and order a burger as if I were like a normal person. Well, from a social perspective, that's a big deal. Like when

Ben and Jerry's came out with vegan ice cream, there's plenty of vegan ice creams on the market. But the idea of being able to just go to Safeway and buy Ben & Jerry's, it was a very attractive idea to me because I could feel like I was just like a normal person rather than this vegan who doesn't eat most of the things that you find in there. So I like it for that reason for myself, but I wouldn't really care if I never ate it again, honestly. Right. So what's the biggest takeaway that you want people to have from this book?

This is a nascent industry, this field of cellular agriculture, that has the potential to address many of the most pressing sustainability problems that we face as a species. We ought to welcome it with open arms. We ought to encourage it. issues. We ought to welcome it with open arms. We ought to encourage it. We ought to tout it. And we ought to encourage those who have the capital to invest in it, to help bring it to commercial reality. It's still too early to predict what's going to happen with the clean meat industry, but it's one of the most hopeful solutions we have to one of the worst problems that we are enduring. And so my hope is that anyone who is concerned about addressing climate change or animal cruelty or environmental degradation or food safety

problems will look at this with an open mind and think this is a cool, promising solution that deserves my support. Beyond your book, where are the other places people can go to learn more about Clean Meat and these issues? So cleanmeat.com is the website with lots of information about it where you can not only see more about the book, but you can also, if you're interested in working for one of these companies, they all have lots of job openings. That's right. You put the job postings. I saw that for all the companies on that website. Dozens of job openings right now in this field. You can learn a lot more also at cleanmeat.org, which is the Good Food Institute's website about clean meat. So there's cleanmeat.com and cleanmeat.org, both of which are great websites.

And I would encourage folks to not only read the book, of course, buy copies for all your friends and your family, to not only read the book, of course, buy copies for all your friends and your family, but to when you're engaging with people on social media, because there's gonna be a lot more news attention on this as these companies get closer and closer to commercialization, to get active in the conversation. A lot of people have what you were calling the ick factor, and they think just instinctually, oh, that's gross. But when they start considering just how unnatural current meat production is, all of a sudden clean meat seems like a much naturally preferable option. And when we talk about it in those type of terms, I think it opens people's eyes and their hearts up to these products in a way that it doesn't otherwise. Yeah, I think education will solve that. is, you know, we're kind of in the midst of this debate or discourse around the implications of

GMOs in our plant foods, right? That kind of what doesn't get discussed is the fact that we're eating meat that has been eating all of those GMOs. But at the same time, like, that's an important conversation to have. And I don't know that we really have the answers that we need at this point. So like I said earlier, I think it is good to be asking these questions about the implications of these new products on human health. But from what I understand reading your book and the more research that I do into this, I'm more and more comfortable with the idea of it. That's cool. And I think that if you look at GMOs, they were introduced into the market in a quiet way where they just took over the food supply and people didn't really think. Nobody goes out and buys GMO corn. They just buy corn because it became all of the corn basically. And the reality is that the companies

involved in the clean meat world don't want that. They don't want to go stealth under the radar. They are into radical transparency. They want people to know how they are producing their foods. They're putting videos of their production processes up. They want to have public tours of their facilities. They're basically taking the exact opposite tactics as the GMO purveyors did when they started introducing these products a couple decades ago. And I think that type of radical transparency will go a long way in showing that there's nothing to hide. I mean, if anything, what's to hide is the current way of producing meat, not the new way.

Yeah. And I think that millennials and the generation beneath that, these are people that demand that kind of transparency. They expect it. and the idea that a company is not going to be telling you exactly how things are being done, it just doesn't work anymore. You know? And so I think that's really cool that that is that sort of industry wide, all of these companies agree that that's the path forward. Yeah. Unanimous agreement. Yeah. That's cool. Yeah. All right, man. Well, we got to lock this down, but the book is clean meat and it doesn't look like this binder clipped printout version. Simon and Schuster did a better job. It has a really nice cover on it.

It's available at bookstores everywhere and it's a gift to humanity, man. I really enjoyed reading it. And I think it does a fantastic job of explaining exactly what's going on in a way where people can really not only understand all the sort of intricacies and aspects of what this is about, like you track the history of how it came into being, and we get to learn these personalities behind these companies and these scientists. And we get to learn these personalities behind these companies and these scientists. And, you know, I think it's going to really serve people in this acclimation process, which is cool. I appreciate it, man. It's a real honor to be on the show with you, as you know, but I want to declare to all listeners. When I read Finding Ultra, I had never thought of myself as being capable of doing something like a marathon.

I always thought that was for other people. And when I read it, I declared to my friends and my family after reading it, I was like, you know, if Rich Roll could do this at age 40, you know, I was in my 30s, I can run a marathon too. Now I wasn't doing Ironman or anything like that, but I thought, for me it felt like the equivalent thereof. And I went out and did run the Marine Corps Marathon. And the causal relationship was very direct from reading Finding Ultra to that.

So I'm grateful for you, man. Thanks, man. Well, you do the work. But that's very cool to hear. I had the good fortune of meeting your parents, too. Yeah. Very proud of you. We first met in Washington at the DC VegFest a

couple of years ago. Yeah. They were psyched to meet you, especially my father. You were a big celebrity to him and he, he was, he was adamant about making sure that you knew that he ran the Marine Corps marathon in 1983 faster than I ran it in 2013. He made that, he made that point abundantly clear. How is the running going? Are you still running? I'm running shorter distances because I wanted to put on more muscle mass. So I did a five. You are looking buffed. I appreciate that, man.

Thank you. I did run a 5K recently. I was psyched that I was able to keep it under seven minutes. I finished in a 6.56 average pace. So for me, that was pretty good. It's good. It's only for a 5K, but, um, I'll take it. Nice man. And, uh, what else is going on with you here in California?

Uh, well, one, my girlfriend, uh, Tony Okamoto lives here, so I'm very grateful to be out here to be able to hang out with Tony. So you're coming out here all the time? I'm out here quite often. Yeah. Like call me next time. All right, man. She doesn't live in LA, but I would love, you know, it's on my bucket list to go running with you. we can do it next time okay i'm in um so you know um i'm also though in addition to having the personal interest of being out here there's a ballot initiative uh that would improve conditions for farm animals that keeps me out here uh pretty frequently as well cool yeah and uh are you doing any like talks or there any, if people want to like come out and hear you talk about this stuff or you have any events coming up or anything like

that? There are some book related events that I'm doing and you, there'll be on cleanmeat.com and people can go check that out and get the details on them. Yeah. And I'll put up in the show links, you know, some of your, your past appearances. Oh, cool. Thank you. And the 200,000 Ted talks that you've given. So these are, these are Ted X talks. It's okay. It's still Ted. Uh, I did four of them in a period of two months, which really dramatically reduced the welfare of my close. I tried to Google it. I only could find, I found sun Valley and I found, uh, I found South Lake Tahoe. Yeah.

So they're not all online yet because they were all recent. And they are just, two of them are just getting online right now. But I loved doing them and they're all on different topics. How do you come up with like a new TED Talk and like rehearse it and get it done and execute? By, by torturing my close friends by forcing them to listen to me create these materials but um yeah one of them is on the abuse of power that humans have over other animals another one is on clean meat another one is on what future generations will think about our treatment of animals and then uh the final one um which is i think one of the most crazy ones is um whether

we're doing more to protect aliens on other planets than we are animals on our planet and so you know you think about it like we take great precautions to avoid contaminating other celestial bodies we bake our equipment and all types of really serious expensive precautions because we don't want to cause some type of extinction event on Mars or elsewhere in the same way that, for example, European colonists did in the Americas. And we don't seem to be that concerned about preventing extinctions here on Earth. We don't even know that these aliens exist up there. They maybe don't, but we seem pretty concerned about it. So that's the fourth one maybe we should start here yeah yeah i mean i'm i'm all for the taking the precautions

elsewhere i think it's very noble i just would use that mentality here on earth as well yeah this idea that we're just well this is disposable like we got to find a new place now let's just like burn it down yeah and get to mars as quickly as possible. That's, you know. Yeah. Well, there is the question of, you know, is the solar system better off with us on Mars? I don't know. We haven't done that great of a job. Right.

Yeah. Our track record would indicate that the Earth would be much better off without us. So maybe the biggest extinction event of humankind might be in the best interest of the galaxy. Yeah, I mean, it's hard to tell. The optimism of certain people like Elon Musk is that, yeah, we have a bad track record. But if you look at the future, that maybe we're going to be able to abolish suffering and be able to create these intensely blissful beings through AI and so on. um, through AI and so on. And so if you accept those premises, you can see how you might be able to say, Oh, all of this past suffering we've caused has been worth it. Cause it sets up for this great utopian heaven in the future. I don't know so much about that, but, uh, human nature

is still human nature though, but I appreciate his optimism and things are getting crazy. That's for sure. Yeah. You better believe it. So, all right, cool, man. We got to jump here but uh people can find you multiple places on the internet cleanmeat.com cleanmeat.org at paul h shapiro on twitter thank you website is just paul shapiro.com paul-shapiro.com but uh yeah just go to cleanmeat.com you'll get everything there there you go cool thanks rich thanks so much it's awesome to talk with you you want to take me out you want to take us out you know what I say at the end of these things? When you listen to the podcast at 1.5 speed? I do listen at 1.5 speed.

So doing the interview with you, I had to make sure I'm talking at 1.0 speed because I listened to you at 1.5. But there's always ads at the end. So I am not so inclined always to listen. No, I always end it with saying peace. Oh, yes, I do know that. I do know that.

Say it. Peace. And plants. saying peace. Oh, yes. I do know that. I do. Say it. Peace. And plants. And plants. And clean meat, I guess. Yeah. Peace, plants, and a future filled with breweries of clean meat. Right.

All right. Cool. All right, man. Fascinating stuff, right? The future. The future, man. It's here's here it's happening so do yourself a favor pick up paul's new book clean meat and check out this week's show notes on the episode page at richroll.com for more about clean meat the clean meat movement about paul and his life in the humane society including links to all of mark baumer stuff. Please have a look at that.

It would mean a lot to me personally, if you would explore the life of Mark Baumer on the one year anniversary of his passing. In addition, got an announcement about Julie. Julie just launched a brand new yoga video series, something she's been working on passionately and diligently and very hard for over a year at this point. Beaut beautifully photographed. It just launched. We're very excited about it. It's called jaw yoga foundational series designed to activate whole body awareness with whole body breathing. It's her own personal take on yoga, a beautiful series, good for any and all levels of aptitude. Uh, so check it out. It's available to purchase for download.

$19.99 is the price. And you can find that on the store on my website at richroll.com. If you would like to support my work, please subscribe to the show on Apple Podcasts. That really helps with the show's visibility, extending reach, growing the audience, which in turn makes it easier for me

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I am going to be doing a live Ask Me Anything video for Patreon supporters very soon. I'll be scheduling that shortly. Also, you can follow me on social media on atrichroll on Twitter and Instagram. How's your plate going? How's your diet? How are your meals? Are they healthy? Are they? How's your diet? How's your, how are your meals? Are they healthy? Are they living up to your 2018 New Year's resolutions?

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from a team of experts. We even have grocery delivery, I think in up to 60 metropolitan areas at this point, essentially every major metropolitan area in the United States. It's an amazing program. We have great feedback. Everybody who uses it, I think it really over delivers. They're enjoying it. Life-changing stuff. To find out more, go to meals.richroll.com or click on meal planner on the top menu at richroll.com. I want to thank everybody who helped put on the show today. Jason Camiolo for audio engineering, for production, for help with the show notes, for his work on the interstitial music and some of the unique compositions that he has contributed to the show. Sean Patterson for help on graphics, Michael Gibson for videography,

and theme music, as always, by Annalema. Thanks for the love, you guys. See you back here soon. Peace plants. Namaste. Mark Bauer. Rest in peace, my friend. Thank you.