The future of food with BRUCE FRIEDRICH

Over 50 years ago, I asked this simple question for the first time. If you saw a child drowning in a pond and saving her only cost you a ruined pair of expensive shoes, would you stop and help? Almost everyone says yes. But somewhere in the world right now, a child is dying from something as preventable as a malaria infected mosquito bite or a missing dose of vaccine. And for the cost of those shoes, the two. That question that I asked later became a book, and the book became an organization I co-founded. The life you can save. Today's podcast episode is sponsored by The Life You Can Save. They do their research to identify the charity's fighting extreme poverty that save and change the most lives per dollar given. You can choose your own charity from those recommended on their website. More simply, donate to their Maximize Your Impact Fund, which allows The Life You Can Save theme to choose the highest impact opportunities at the moment when the donation is allocated. Either way, a hundred percent of your donation will go to the selected organization. Visit TheLifeYouCanSave.org and donate. There are ponds all over the world, waiting for someone who's willing to get their shoes wet. Hi, I'm Peter Singer. I'm Kasha Delazariradeh, and this is our podcast, "Lives Were Lived." In this episode, we talk with Bruce Fredrich, who recently published an important book Meet, how the next agricultural revolution will transform humanity's favourite food into our future. Bruce Fredrich is best known as the CEO of the Good Food Institute, which he founded in 2016, to advocate a transition away from meat from animals and to plant-based alternatives or to meat grown from individual animal cells, known also as cultivated meat. Exactly why the Good Food Institute seeks to change food in this way is something we'll explore with Bruce himself. Although the Good Food Institute is only 10 years old, it currently employs around 200 people. It's a network of organizations based in the US, Singapore, Brazil, Japan, Israel, India, and Europe. Simply in terms of fund raising, that's an extraordinary success. But is it making headways in achieving its goal of reducing consumption of meat from animals? Listeners, if you want to know the answer to that question, stay tuned because we will be probing Bruce on that very question. But first, Bruce, I want to ask you how you reached the point of founding the Good Food Institute. You're already an activist as an undergraduate, but you're concerned that that time was with poverty, wasn't it? And after you graduated, you moved to Washington, D.C., and ran the homeless shelter and soup kitchen at the Dorothy Day Catholic Workerhouse, living on site on a weekly salary of $5, which even in 1990 would really only have been pocket money. What was that experience like? I spent my pocket money on 7/11 big gulps. So that's pretty much all of my $5 only went to 7/11 back then. But yeah, I mean, it was definitely an experience running a homeless shelter and a soup kitchen. It was toward the tail end, but still very much the crack era Washington D.C.'s mayor had just been hit in a federal sting operation for smoking crack. The streets were really quite violent. The shelter in the soup kitchen that I was running a lot of volunteers would tell us that their parents were afraid that they were even coming into our neighborhood. I did that for about six years, and it felt on a daily basis extremely satisfying. The homeless advocate Mitch Snyder, who's some of your American viewers who are roughly my age, will probably remember for his advocacy and one of the things that he advocated was befriending the homeless, not just serving the homeless. And so that is really the ethos of the Catholic work art to live with people who are suffering rather than see ourselves as sort of patrons, but see ourselves as cast with them trying to figure out our way forward. And I did that for about six years, and found it to be extraordinarily rewarding. Could you tell us how the experience changed your shape to? So the shelter was a sanctuary shelter. We had families. It was a shelter for families, and it was a sanctuary shelter. So 1990 to 1996, we had lots of people who were refugees from El Salvador, Guatemala, Nicaragua. Those would oftentimes be complete family units. And then we would also have lots of single moms. And really sort of understanding the perspective of people who really threw no fault of their own. Sometimes things that look like bad choices that lay in people there, but it really is, I mean, the sort of two-tier society that halves and that have nots and spending time with the have nots and really getting to know them and understand them, I found to be really sort of useful to having a broader world view. And then I spent a lot of time in the DC school system because especially people who were in the country and who are undocumented, they would, I think, very justifiably be afraid that if they enrolled their kids in school, that could be the thing that gets them deported. So helping them to understand that the DC school system was not going to deport them and then really spending lots of time in the DC school system and understanding the sort of the degree to which our broken education system entrances the inequalities was fascinating. And I did subsequently years later go and teach an inner city Baltimore through Teach for America with the hope that maybe I could figure out what are the structural things that make inner city education so bad. But really understanding that sort of inequality in a way, when I was in college, I volunteered in a shelter in Des Moines and did spend a lot of time with the people who were at the shelter involuntarily. In other words, homeless people and also a soup kitchen in Des Moines. And I found that to be like useful to broadening my horizons and sort of understanding the world that we live in, but spending six years actually living with people and becoming friends with them, all of that I think was sort of a lot more powerful and a lot more mind broadening. Right. And then you spend time with Peter, people for the ethical treatment of animals and later at farm sanctuary, which was another organization that was concerned about animals. So what led to the shift from your working for people, in particular, homeless people and refugees to thinking that you wanted to do things for reducing the suffering of animals? I read Andrew Lindsay's book, "Christianity and the Rights of Animals" and maybe 1993, 1994 or something like that while I was at the shelter. I actually adopted a vegan diet in 1987, my first year of college, when I read diet for a small planet. And diet for a small planet makes the environmental case and it makes the hunger and malnutrition case that the way that we cycle crops through animals, and trenches hunger and trenches malnutrition harms the world's poorest people. And that resonated for me back in 1987 and then I read "Christianity and the Rights of Animals" by Andrew Lindsay and he basically has a liberation theology for animals in that book. And he did go on to write another book called "Animal Theology", which is explicitly sort of takes Matthew 25, which is what the Catholic worker is based on, works of mercy, feed the hungry, house of homeless, clothe the naked, visit the second and present. And the sort of theme of that, passage is what we do for the least of God's human children we are doing to Jesus essentially, and the call is to lead our lives with the focus on helping the people who are most downtrodden. So that's the entire thesis, well it's a lot of the thesis of the Catholic worker. And then Andrew Lindsay sort of recalibrates that and says, "Hey, wait a minute, animals, you know, they have the same five physiological senses that humans do, they were designed by God to, if their pigs were running in the soil, if all animals raised their young, there are all kinds of things that animals were designed to do. And industrial farming denies them literally everything that's natural to them, pumps them full of drugs, so that they're in pain for their entire lives, and then slaughters them in just like the worst imaginable way. And he says, in terms of moral atrocities, what's happening to animals on industrial farms, what's happening to animals in slaughterhouses is heresy, makes a mockery of God to treat God's animals so abusively." And that resonated for me. When I decided I was going to do something other than the Catholic worker, the homeless shelter in the Sioux Kitchen in DC, I was looking at two principal options. One was Teach for America, and this was 1996. So I might have been like the third cohort of Teach for America or something like that. It was very early in the TFA days. Teach for America is a program in the United States that takes people who don't have teaching degrees and puts them in some of the worst schools in America where they're struggling to find teachers. And I was assigned to Houston and really preferred to stay on the East Coast. So I ended up between Teach for America and PETA. I ended up going to work for PETA, which I found to be deeply- rewarding experience. So, of course, Peter, that's where you and I met for the first time, I think, probably in the late 1990s. Yes, I think so. You worked for years with organizations making a moral case against factory farming. But at some point, you concluded that moral advocacy alone was not sufficient to change the direction of global meat consumption. What brought you to that conclusion? And do you think that the years you spent doing advocacy against factory farming and against animal suffering were wasted in some way? Well, go well, I'll address the second question at first, as they know, I think there is tremendous value to helping to shift the world in the direction of a more consistent ethic. I'm completely convinced of the case of animal liberation and also the case in Christianity and the rights of animals and think that helping our species to evolve has tremendous value. What I also think, though, is that since 1961, which is when the UN food and agriculture organizations started measuring, every single year the world has set a new global record in terms of meat and seafood consumption, farm fish plus farm land animals. There were for land animals, there was a teeny little blip for BSE, there was a teeny little blip for African swine fever and then COVID. But if you look at the trajectory, like those blips, they go away. And literally every agricultural economist looking into the future says that as long as global GDP is going up and as long as population is going up, if GDP is global GDP is going up, per capita meat consumption is going to go up, if population is going to go up, it's going to go up even more than whatever its per capita increase is. And we really need a solution to meet inexorable rise that is a systematic way of addressing this. And if we take a page from renewable energy and electric vehicles, I think most people who are in favor of solar and wind and nuclear or in favor of VVs would say absolutely we should be encouraging people to ride bikes and we should be advocating for bike lanes and great public transit. We should be encouraging more energy efficient, everything from light bulbs to buildings and encouraging people to be more conscious about their consumption. But at the end of the day, energy consumption has been going up forever and it's going to keep going up. Myles driven and cars sold cars on the roads have been going up and they're going to keep going up. So we absolutely need if we're going to address the fossil fuel impact, we need renewable energy, we need electric vehicles, we need to produce the things that consumers want in a new and less harmful way. So that's essentially the brain storm of the Good Food Institute is we believe that with science, we can create plant-based meat that is indistinguishable from the advantage of the consumer. And the fact that it is so much more efficient means that at scale, it will cost less. And then cultivated meat basically the same argument. It requires a fraction of the resources, a fraction of the stages of production at scale. We believe that it will, it is literally the exact same thing, just produced in a factory instead of producing in a slaughterhouse and not requiring industrial farms, but because it's so much more efficient, it will cost less. And that's the brain storm of renewable energy and electric vehicles, and that's the brain storm of alternative meats. And obviously that's the book I wrote and also the organization that I founded. Okay, let's then talk about your book. So in meat, you argue that developing alternatives to conventional animal agriculture is essential for four distinct reasons. Global food security, climate change, antibiotic resistance, and pandemic prevention. We don't have time to go through each in detail, but could you give us one or two key points from each of those arguments? Absolutely. So the most efficient animal returning crops in the meat is the chicken. According to the World Resources Institute, it takes nine calories fed to a chicken to get one calorie back out. So most people who are listening or watching are probably concerned about food waste. And we should be for every hundred calories that you produce, something like 30 of them are wasted, which is I think most people would even consider that a moral concern. But if you produce a hundred calories of chicken, you have 800 calories that don't make it into the human food supply because they were grown and fed to chickens and the chickens burned off those calories, essentially existing. So you're literally talking about 800% food waste from the chicken, farmed fish, pork, beef, all of that is worse. And what that means, chapter one of the book, what that means is that land demands and crop demands are artificially really high food prices are driven up. And you're literally in a situation in a global agricultural economy where people starve because there's this competition for land and grain between affluent feed eaters and the developed economies and a global poor. So that's chapter one. Chapter two is the environmental argument for the same reason that it's inefficient to use something that requires nine times the resources of something else. And it's not just the resources. So you've got nine times the land nine times the water and nine times the pesticides and herbicides and fertilizer and everything else. But you're growing all of this crops, you're shipping them to a feed mill, you're operating the feed mill, you're shipping the feed to the farm, you're operating the farm, you're shipping the animals to the slaughterhouse, you're operating the slaughterhouse. It's multiple extra stages of gas, gasoline, pollution, speed and wind vehicles and it's multiple extra factories, which are both energy intensive and polluting. And when the UN food and agriculture organization, when they looked at all of this inefficiency, they put out a more than 400 page report called livestock swung shadow. And they said, whatever environmental issue you look at, from the smallest and most local to the largest and most global, animal agriculture is one of the top three causes. Number one for deforestation, number one for biodiversity loss, number one for water pollution and top three across the range. And the thing about that is that came out in 2006, we're now consuming an extra 104 million metric tons of land animal meat relative to when that came out, 40% more land animal meat than that. The third issue is antimicrobial resistance, which the UK government says is a more certain threat to humanity than climate change. From antimicrobial resistance, we're literally facing down the end of modern medicine. And 70% of human relevant antibiotics are fed to farm animals, not because the animals are sick, but because you can have 50,000 chickens on a shed, your death losses are going to be really, really high. But if you drug them up, your death losses will be a lot lower. So this is driving antimicrobial resistance. It's been identified by the World Health Organization. I mean, been identified by scientists since we first started using antibiotics and farm animals. It's been a key priority for WHO since about 1999. And we are going backwards every single year on this issue. And then pandemic risk, the International Lifestyle Research Institute joined with the UN Environment Program. And they released a report in July of 2020 called preventing the next pandemic, 18 of the world's leading zoonotic disease experts. They listed the seven most likely causes of the next pandemic. The first one was increased meat consumption. More animals means more potential vectors to create a disease that will jump the species barrier. And the second one was industrial treatment of farm animals, because if you have 50,000 chickens on a shed and they're all genetically so similar, both A, you've got a breeding ground for disease and B, you've destroyed their immune systems. So that's basically the first four chapters go a lot more in-depth, but that's the nutshell version of those arguments. Thanks, terrific. Yeah, thanks, Bruce. That's a very powerful case on all of those four reasons why we should be having alternatives to meat from animals, like totally agree. I'm still a little bit puzzled by with those four points, you didn't add a fifth chapter on animal welfare since that's something that you're obviously familiar with. It did work, as we said, with people for the ethical treatment of animals and farm sanctuary. Wouldn't it have added to the case that you're making against meat from animals if you would include something about the suffering of animals, in fact, we found? Our goal at GFI, so we think that as you know, in chapter nine and ten and really kind of also eleven at the book, our focus time, how do we get to price and taste parity? And we think the fundamental challenge is going to be a science and engineering challenge. So we're looking at what governments spend money on, what governments consider to be top priorities. Governments are interested in global health. They put a lot of money into the world health organization. They're interested in hunger and malnutrition. They're interested in climate to the tune of many billions of dollars. If not for government support, there would be no solar industry and wind energy industry, no nuclear industry for that matter. And unfortunately, the most we can hope for from governments is that they will outlaw some of the most egregious abuses. And even that is asking an awful lot. So when I was thinking about what do I want to focus the book on, like the ultimate goal of the book, the ultimate goal of GFI is to build a maximally robust scientific ecosystem, scientists and engineers working on these problems. The way that we think you do that is you get governments to fund both the research and then also the scaling, the same sorts of programs that have made pharmaceutical industry successful in the countries where it's successful and so on. And so I think animal protection, it's just not something that's going to resonate at the government level. But personally, it's a significant motivation. and it also feels a bit more intuitive. Almost nobody who's working on any of the four things that I lay out in chapters one through four, none of the major organizations are devoting effort to alternative proteins, or really, meaningfully, effort to any kind of systemic solution to meet massive upward rise and the inexorable negative impact that's going to have on all four of those issues. Whereas on animal protection, it feels pretty obvious that if you no longer slaughter animals for food, that is going to address all of those cruelties. I don't think anybody would find that controversial and probably also all that interesting, relatively speaking. - So in a recent article in The Atlantic, it quoted you as saying your book, and I quote, "It's absolutely not a diet change book." And that again, quote, "To the degree it has a stance on meat, it's promete, it just suggests a shift in how meat is produced. You've been vegan for close to 40 years," you said. "Why would you take a stance that it is explicitly promete?" And the next question, "Do you personally miss eating meat?" - I mean, it's promete because it is not about telling anybody to change. And I think the fundamental sort of challenge and thesis of the book, sort of building on Daniel Kahneman and systems one and systems two thinking, is that for the vast majority of people, energy consumption is systems one thinking. They're going to consume energy if they have the resources to do it. Meat is also systems one thinking. The vast majority of people are not going to take ethics into account when they're making a decision about what to eat. So meat is not the problem. If you have plant-based meat, it's indistinguishable and less expensive. You eliminate meat's contribution to most of those, first for heartens. You eliminate meat's contribution to cruelty to animals, cultivated meat is basically the same, maybe a slight step down. So the issue is not meat. It's how meat is produced. And the book recognizes that the vast majority of humanity just like really loves meat. And so instead of sort of an addition to maybe beating our head against that, tell people what to eat. Well, let's add this other option, which is make meat differently. The same way we would make energy differently or make cars that are powered differently. So let me ask you personally, if we did have meat that was identical in taste to meat from animals and that didn't come from animals, would you cease to be a vegan? Would you go back to eating meat? I mean, I'd be interested in your answer, Peter, to the fact that I eat cultivated meat pretty regularly. So it's not widely available, but I am on the board of C4 organization in the United States, which also has a pack. We do events for both Republicans and Democrats in the United States. And we serve them cultivated meat. So I find myself in situations where I'm eating actual animal meat, but with no animal slaughter pretty regularly. And that's been true for I guess close to a year now. So do I need to hand in my vegan card? - Okay. - Peter, but you've tried that meat too. Would you change your diet? - Yes, I have tried it. I was in Singapore shortly after a Singapore government approved cultivated chicken and I tasted it there. And more recently here in Melbourne, actually there is a company that is producing cultivated minced lamb. And I had a sort of meatball of minced lamb served to taste. I, what you said about handing in your vegan card, I don't have a vegan card. I don't think the important thing is to be strictly pure in this. So I certainly don't blame any of you Bruce or anyone who's interested in tasting cultivated meat. That's fine. And I applaud the goal of producing cultivated meat that is as appeals to the taste of meat eaters and is hopefully will become competitive in price. But I don't think that I would go back to eating it as part of my daily diet. I've been perfectly happy on vegetarian and largely vegan diet for many years and I enjoy it. I also suspect that it's probably healthier than diet eating a lot of meat. Although I know that's something to be debated and not really an expert in that nutritional aspect. So I think my view is no, I would not change my diet significantly if there were cultivated meat available competitive prices to meet from animals. - Yeah, I think that's going to be true of me too. My wife is Indian. She's been vegetarian in her whole life. She's not interested. But I imagine it might change the range of things I eat. But when I eat out, what's cultivated meat is broadly available. But yeah, I mean, it's definitely not something that I am like super enthused about for myself. I'm super enthused about it for my cats. I have to say that. But yeah, I've been like you, Peter, vegan for a really long time. And I've been perfectly content. But that's not true for the vast majority of people. - Right, I mean, I was just thinking of a good piece of bacon cultivated. That would be something probably that I would eat quite regularly if available. And so the next question, what is your realistic timeline for cultivated meat becoming cost competitive with conventional meat? And what are the key technical obstacles still standing in the way? - Yeah, I mean, we have technical obstacles on both the plant-based meat side and the cultivated meat side. And then we have even bigger scaling obstacles on both the plant-based meat side and the cultivated meat side. And I argue in chapter nine that the sort of real way that this becomes viable as quickly as possible is that governments recognize the economic opportunity and the food security, food systems resilience, food self-sufficiency. So all of the benefits that make alternative proteins better for the global poor and better for the environment also make them better for countries like the United Kingdom, Switzerland, Korea, China. Countries that are very concerned about how much food they're importing. We watch the straight-of-ermose closing and suddenly fertilizer is disrupted globally or when the war in Ukraine started and 50 million metric tons of wheat were disrupted. And then think about the fact that 1.4 billion metric tons of cereals and soy are fed to farm animals, you know, funneled through chickens and farmed fish and other animals and that incredibly inefficient manner. Countries that are concerned about food security, food self-sufficiency, food systems resilience, the fragility of the food system, it's a really important and appealing concept that they might be able to make plant-based meat and cultivated meat which satisfy their populations with a fraction of the resource needs, a fraction of the land use needs. And China when they joined the WTO was food self-sufficient, now they're under 70% protein sufficiency and that's why they are looking very seriously at plant-based meat and cultivated meat from a food self-sufficiency. - You're clearly right to look at China as a country that is moving in that direction and of course China has immense scientific resources, huge numbers of people who can work on this. But isn't what's happened in the United States into some extent in the Western world generally, rather looking that there's less private capital, less venture capital going into this area than there was, five or 10 years ago? - Yeah, less private capital, but the science is going absolutely in the right direction. I mean, if you look back, I mean it's interesting to just like sort of flashback 10 years, 10 years ago right now, there were, I think all told there were four peer-review science papers on cultivated meat. Last year there were more than 170. Seven years ago there was no government support outside of Singapore and Israel. Now there are dozens of government support of the 20 most active patent holders in the last five years. Eight of them are in China, three in South Korea, three in Israel, three in the US. So the scientific enthusiasm and growth is really incredibly exciting. And the number of government supporting this is really exciting. Like in all of time cultivated meat has gotten about $3.4 billion. That's spread across 150 companies in the decade and the full decade that the industry has existed. That's less than the cost of one EV battery factory in the US. That's about the cost to bring two drugs to market. If you've already got pharmaceutical company and pharmaceutical giant worth $50 billion, it's going to cost you about $3.4 billion to bring two drugs to market. So bringing down costs by a factor of 100,000 and the amount of government support from zero seven years ago to dozens of governments today, it feels like we're moving in the right direction. So yes, the private sector is a struggle because the products are not good enough yet on the plant-based side and they cost too much. But the scientific focus and the interest of governments, all of that is working, is moving in the right direction. There's more and more science every single year and more and more enthusiasm from scientists and from governments. And then you take the incentive to make meat in this new and better way. It's a $2 trillion industry and that's only going to go up. And then the food systems, resilience, food security arguments, that's only going to go up. So feeling, it's not, I mean, the book sets out to both say, the science looks good. The first thing I did writing the book was sent a survey to 30 plant-based meat scientists and 30 cultivated meat scientists and said, can we get? Is it scientifically possible? Does a science and engineering work such that we could get to plant-based and cultivated chicken and fish decks, so the least expensive thing? that tasted identical and costless in the answer was yes. And then part two was, well, how do we get there? And the answer was, it's going to be really hard. And so the book sets out to say, we can get there. That doesn't mean we're going to get there. The trajectory looks good. And here's why the world should be all in on this endeavor, why it's so important. - So do you think that AI will help in that? - So my question really is the hard stuff about technical things or rather about motivating people to eat meat, what we would say from a glass, yes? - Yeah, I don't think motivation is going to be, I mean, it's interesting like people will say, meat is about culture, meat is about tradition, meat is about all of these other things. And that's absolutely true. And I think that's why convincing people to not eat meat is such a challenge. But think about how industrial animal farming happened. Like nobody chose that. The end product is actually even a little bit worse, but it's cheap. One of the great things about plant-based and cultivated meat is we can make it like the best meat you ever had. I don't know what your experience was, Peter, but Andy Jarvis, who runs the future of food program for the Basis Earth Fund. Like the first time he tried cultivated meat, and we've had this experience with lots of members of Congress and other people too. It's like the best meat, you know, like the best, like heritage-free chicken, like really good. Meat right now is pretty variable. You can get dried out meat, you can get meat with veins in it, and all kinds of other things. With plant-based meat and cultivated meat, you can have a consistency that is just like completely excellent. So as long as the end product is identical, the consumer can't, literally can't tell the difference. And as long as the price is the same, you're literally looking at two products, one of which, you know, in the U.S., there are literally 100 drugs that have a daily allowed allowance by the FDA and the USDA, things like Ivermectin and Ractopamine, all kinds of antibiotic residues. So if it's fish, you know, mercury and dioxins, are people going to want to pay more to have mercury in their fish or Ractopamine in their pork? I think as long as the products are identical and the prices are the same or the plant-based and cultivated meat is less, I mean, the industry will just shift. This will be how meat is made in the same way that nobody chose industrial animal farming. - We're just to answer your question of my experience. The chicken I had in Singapore, I did not think was particularly tasty. Of course, I hadn't eaten chicken for 50 years or so, but I was actually eating it with someone who is a meat eater. And he also said, yeah, it's a little bit dry, a little bit stringy, it's not a really good juicy chicken. On the other hand, the meatball that I had more recently in Melbourne made by Magic Valley, I don't know if you know that company. I thought it was very tasty, actually, and it was quite juicy. Again, I haven't eaten lamb for this period, and I don't think I ate minced lamb very much. When I was a kid, it was in Australia, it was like lamb chops that you threw on the barbecue. Although when I see people barbecue, you know, I have to say it's the smell of it, puts me off a bit, it's very fatty. And I wouldn't know that you want meat quite as fatty as those lamb chops were. Yeah, but so I can see that it could get there in terms of taste for some of these products. Of course, I suppose a minced product is a bit easier than for people who want a whole steak. That seems to me likely to be further away. But yeah, it's possible that we will get there. Just, it just seems to be taking a long time, right? I mean, we heard, I think it was Mark Post in 2012 or something like that, the first tasting in the Netherlands of a plant-based burger. And we heard that, you know, this is five years, or five years on, this will be on the supermarket shells. And it's not exactly in not at a competitive price. So, let's go back to Cush's question. What's the timeline, do you think? Do you have a sense of that? Or was it when this really might be competitive in price and equivalent in taste and texture to meat for mammals? Yeah, I mean, I'll say that, you know, 10 years ago right now, there was no impossible burger. There was no beyond burger. And only one cultivated meat company had raised a penny. So, upside foods in February of 2016 was the first company to raise any money at all. Their seed round was about $3 million. So, 10 years ago right now, there really was no ecosystem. There had been two cultivated meat conferences in all of time. There had been no plant-based meat conferences in all of time. And you think about something like, you know, compare that to the electric vehicle. The EV1 was launched by GM in the United States in 1996. 10 years later, 2006, EV sales were zero. Tesla had not commercialized. There was no company producing even one EV for sale. And nevertheless, 20 years later, EVs are about 25% globally, a lot higher in some countries, well north of 50% in China, et cetera. So things can move pretty quickly once you start moving in the direction of price and taste parity. I did look back because this question comes up pretty regularly. And I looked back at like my early, gave a TEDx talk at the beginning of 2019 and also a TED talk at the beginning of 2019 and looked back at a bunch of interviews. And at least to GFI and what I have been saying since early 2019, if not before, is that it's a significant engineering challenge, it's a significant scientific challenge. Both the science is gonna take money and the engineering is gonna take money. So basically, I mean, I think we need to bring the resources and the will and how quickly we're gonna, like once we get to price and taste parity, I mean, it'll happen in steps, right? So we'll get to price and taste parity for something like burgers. And then burger adoption for plant-based work cultivated whichever gets their first will shoot up. And that will happen kind of in steps until we're looking at cheap checking nuggets and fish decks and that sort of thing. But I think it's gonna cost a fraction of what many other developments have required. And I really feel like we're on the right track. And Kasha, I think I'm not sure what I answered the wrong question when you asked about AI because AI is very exciting. In the book, I say one country like Korea with sufficient motivation could probably solve the price and taste challenge for the entire world. And one of the really exciting aspects of alternative meats is that science in one place can scale everywhere else, like diet change advocacy even if it works in Europe or it works in Australia or it works in the US. Most of the massive upward tick of meat consumption is happening in Asia. So how do we basically shift all of the success that we might have, not that we've had a lot, it's flat? How would we shift that globally? One of the great things about alternative meats similar to renewable energy and electric vehicles is that science and engineering in one country can scale to other countries and really shoot up the S curve globally. That is what's gonna happen with plant-based meat and cultivated meat. One country could do it. And I also think Google DeepMind, Anthropics, Life Sciences, Division, or Microsoft's work on therapeutics, like all of that stuff would cross apply to cultivated meat for sure and what it would look like to scale up. So one of my dreams is that one of the new AI companies decides we're gonna solve the meat problem. We're gonna apply the requisite resources to this challenge. We're gonna figure out what the R&D questions are. We're gonna figure out what the scaling questions are and we're going to basically make cultivated meat a commodity product. We're gonna do the research. We're gonna hand it to the world and then in a Tyson, Cargill, ADM, JBS, they can implement. I think that's got a very reasonable shot of being the path forward. - So let's talk about lobby. The conventional meat industry is one of the most powerful lobbying forces in Washington and in many state legislators. Several states have passed lost restricting the labeling of plant-based products as burgers or meat. How do you navigate the political opposition and how serious threat is it? - Yeah, I mean, this is an instance where you have to disaggregate the meat industry a bit. So the cattle ranchers and the dairy farmers are not excited about alternative meats. But the big companies are perfectly happy to have this be the new way that meat is made. So JBS, Tyson, Cargill, the three largest meat companies in the world, ADM, Nestle, none of them are happy about the fragility of the supply chain. None of them are happy to see fertilizer prices skyrocketing on the winds of global politics. They see opportunity and they see better profit margins and they're enthusiastic. They're not opposed to it at all. So it is a pretty limited, even within the meat industry, it's a pretty limited group that is concerned. Things are significantly different from what I just said in Europe. But in the US and the rest of the world, there is not significant opposition. Certainly at the federal level, we have Republicans and Democrats. I'm actually publishing something in foreign policy, I think next week, talking about Republican support and the national security incentive and the economic opportunity of plant-based and cultivated meat. And it starts with a letter from 11 Republican members of Congress to the heads of the directors of national intelligence and homeland security, pointing out what China's doing on plant-based and cultivated meat and saying we don't want China to dominate the global food supply. The US needs to take this seriously. And then it was Donald Trump's National Science Foundation. That was the first significant grant for cultivated meat in about 15 years back in 2019 globally. That was the first big one. And it was his, both his FDA commissioner, Scott Gottlieb and his ag secretary, Sonny Perdue, that said we do not need to promulgate new regulations. If the meat history had been opposed, alternative meats, they would would have absolutely promulgated new regulations and we could have taken a decade to get approval. So yes, there's some states, when I talk about in the book, the fact that state legislatures are part-time job and most states, a lot of cattle ranchers and farmers and others are in state legislatures. It's not that hard to ban something that like literally doesn't exist, but there's no prospect at the federal level for any of that stuff being passed. And my prediction is like, the companies will have plenty of market with New Jersey and Illinois and California and other states like that. And then the states that have banned it will quietly resend to their bans as the products become more popular. Be my prediction. - So you don't think that there's a possible future in which we solve the scientific and technical problems and we produce cultivated meat. It's widely available. It's affordable. It tastes very similar. People can't sort of blindfold distinguish it, perhaps even from meat from animals. But people still say, no, I want the quote, natural products. And of course, I'm putting that in quotes because they're buying factory farm products and they're not at all natural. But I can imagine people thinking, well, this has come from a chicken or a cow or a pig and somehow that's better. And I'm thinking about this because if you look at the response to the impossible burger, for example, it does seem that although, well, it's perhaps still not quite price parity, but although I know people who eat meat who say, yes, it's a good burger. It tastes as good as your typical burger better, maybe than many. But then there was this reaction about, oh no, it's ultra-processed. We don't want it. And sales don't seem to have boomed. So you don't see that as a possible threat to the scenario that you're sketching. - I mean, it'll be interesting to see once the plant-based products are at price parity because they're not yet. I think impossible. They do have the products that meat eaters like the most and they also have the most successful products. It's still the case, like it has always been the case and it's still the case that when you ask people, why have you not tried plant-based meat or why have you tried it and stopped consuming it? The top two reasons are price and taste. People don't like it and it costs too much. I think with the impossible burger, it suffers a lot from the fact that all the other products are bad. So you do have to be a somewhat discerning consumer and pay more. So I think there's gonna be a familiarity element as well. My guess is that we'll see more aggro, ecological, regenerative farming than we have now. I think industrial farming will all be plant-based and cultivated meat once we hit price and taste parity. I do think there are a significant portion of people who just are not going to want plant-based meat. They want actual animal meat, even at price and taste parity. But I would be very surprised if the meat industry continues to do factory farming of animals for animal-based, slaughter-based meat once cultivated meat is less expensive. Their profit margins are gonna be better. The headaches are gonna be significantly less. And how many consumers are gonna want to pay more for a product that is more likely to be contaminated with bacteria and drug residues? It just feels very unlikely. I could imagine Europe banning it, though, like maybe consumers in Europe in the EU don't even get to try it. But I think in most of the world, and even once the rest of the world is enthusiastically eating, cultivated meat, and because Europe is a country that cares about things like antimicrobial resistance, climate, nature, et cetera. I'm cautiously optimistic that that won't happen, but that is a concern that GFI Europe is really, really focused on and concerned about that could happen. But I would be very surprised if consumers want to pay more for the contaminated product and I would be surprised if the meat industry continues to produce the product that is likely to be more contaminated. - So let us hear it. Do we know something about health benefits or maybe health problems of such meat? - I mean, the cultivated meat, it's interesting that sort of first two pioneers have cultivated meat are both medical doctors. So Peter mentioned Mark Post, former professor of medical school and Harvard Medical School, now a tissue engineering professor. So he said dual PhD in tissue engineering and medical doctor, and he's enthusiastic about the idea of figuring out some of the elements of meat that are carcinogenic or have the worst health outcomes, et cetera, and tweaking with the view towards solving some of those challenges. And then the other, the most successful company is called Upside Foods. They've raised about $600 million. They were founded by a medical doctor trained at the Mayo Clinic named Emma Valetti. He is like Mark Post enthusiastic about those sorts of things. Now GFI, we generally really are focused and suggestion is that we create the exact same product but without the bacterial contamination rather than continuing to go and tweak. I think some of the regulatory challenges the point at which you start tweaking some of the components of meat. Like one of the reasons that a bunch of products have now been approved is that it's the same product. If you start getting into tweaking the meat, that seems like it might hit some other regulatory challenges. But the main thing of cultivated meat is it's the same product but without E. Coli, Salmonella, Listeria, drug residues, et cetera. So if you're in the camp that says we shouldn't be eating red meat, cultivated meat, red meat is probably not going to be something that you would find appealing 'cause it's the same thing. And it's not the bacterial contamination that you're worried about. On the plant-based side, in the book I talk about the fact that all of the analysis that's been done of ultra-processed foods indicates that the products tend to have a lot more caloric density. They tend to be higher in sugar. They tend to be lower in fiber. They tend to be higher in fat and saturated fat. The plant-based meats of the 14 that do best on sensory studies, they all, every single one, has lower caloric density, more fiber, less fat, less saturated fat. So across all of the macroeconomic metrics that matter, they do better. And interestingly, they also all have more protein. The impossible pot dog has three times the protein, but all of them have more protein than what they're replacing. Now that's a nutrient of concern, but for people who are protein obsessed, you can get more protein similar bioavailability if you're eating plant-based meats that's made from soy or micro-protein. There's only been one randomized controlled trial that was done by Stanford Medical School. They found that eating organic beef pork and chicken, so not even industrial beef pork and chicken, and replacing that with beyond meat, beef pork and chicken. So certainly at the tipi-top and the sort of ultra-processed metric, people lost weight to a statistically significant degree, and their heart disease metrics got better. And the lead doctor, scientist at Stanford, he said, you know, the pressure release from Stanford was just sort of like duh. If you take one thing and replace it with another thing, and you're increasing fiber and decreasing fat and decreasing saturated fat and decreasing cholesterol, and the thing you're replacing has lower caloric density. Of course, the outcomes, the health outcomes are going to be better, and it sounds good to me. It seems to me that one area where the vegan alternative has not really been very successful, certainly not in terms of equivalent protein when I look at the labels, is vegan cheeses. Is there a reason why we don't have good progress in that area? I mean, GFI is focused on meat, just because the challenge is sufficiently steep, the science challenge and the engineering challenge is sufficiently steep. That's what we're focused on. So I don't think I can't speak to cheese well. I will say that if you're looking at the milk alternatives, the soy milk and the other legume-based milks do quite well, but something like almond milk or oat milk, they're kind of flavored water, which is fine if you're in developed economies and flavored water, that's what you're going for. But yeah, I mean, they don't have the nutrient, anything like the nutrient equivalence of animal-based milk, which, again, is fine if you're getting plenty of calories, but the plant-based meats, they do better across all the key metrics. Interesting. All right. Our closing remarks always go to your private experience and you've been an activist all your life, working extremely hard for causes you believe in. What motivates you to live this kind of life? Well, for me, it's my faith, so I am Roman Catholic. I do take the Matthew 25 story, the works of Mercy, extremely seriously, and I think you get there through the utilitarian, and I think you can get there through a variety of analyses. But yeah, for me, trying to take the privilege that I have been given and try to focus on making the maximum possible, doing the maximum possible good in the world stems out of wanting, basically, to lead my life for the least of these. So you're inspired by that example? Is that either of the life of Jesus? Yeah, I'm inspired, I'm inspired by the call from Jesus. What it, it's a one time in the gospels that Jesus addresses what salvation looks like. And it is very explicitly when somebody was hungry, did you feed them? When they were thirsty, did you give them drink? When they were homeless, did you shelter them? When they were sick or imprisoned? Did you visit them? That is like the one example of what it means in the gospels to lead a life that looks like Christianity. And then when Jesus is asked, what is the most important commitment? He says there are two. And they sum up all the law and the prophets, honor God and love your neighbor as yourself. And then the sort of commentary on who is your neighbor is it's everybody, the story of the good Samaritan. So when I first started, it was a confirmation class in the mid 1980s that I decided my goal in life was to eliminate hunger and malnutrition. At that point, I thought it was gonna be a lot easier [BLANK_AUDIO] a Christian nation than it turned out to be, but that way of thinking has been essential to how I have lived my life since I was 13 or 14 years old in Pastor Klump's confirmation class in Norman, Oklahoma. I'm really glad that you are saying that because now with politics and politicians using religion in a completely different way and saying completely different things is so sad and tragic. It's heartbreaking. It's absolutely heartbreaking. Yes, it is heartbreaking. Yeah, I agree. Yeah, people do bad things for all sorts of reasons including, including ostensibly claiming religious motivation, but yeah, it's a dagger to the heart. Right, you mentioned salvation, so I want to just push a little bit. Is your personal salvation belief in a life after death that will be a reward for what you have done? Is that a factor in some way? No, I mean, I like the concept of the kingdom of God is within you, which I think is the name of a tract from Leo Tolstoy, it's a verse in the Bible, but it's also a tract from Leo Tolstoy that inspired Gandhi and then Gandhi obviously inspired King and the civil rights movement, and I think how we lead our lives is the thing that is important. I'm agnostic on whether there's something after this, but I don't think you are rewarded or not rewarded on the basis of whatever comes after this, and I'm guessing it's way beyond anything that if there is something that is way beyond anything any of us could possibly conceptualize. Right. You mentioned your wife earlier, Alkanachadna, and I know she's working for people for the ethical treatment of animals, so you're, you're another couple, if you like, of people who are activists, not long ago we interviewed a sheer hojo muckers, who's of giving what we can, and Julia Van Boven, who's from one of co-founders of the school from moral ambition, and is now working with me on a project called Profit for Good to get companies to donate more of their profits. Do you also feel, you both feel together that you're on a mission to make the world a better place? Yeah, I dedicated the book to Alka, and then the acknowledgments I talked about her being my co-conspirator and trying to lead a moral life, and that's certainly true. We're also enthusiastic pledgers for giving what we can and give it for us significant portion of our income away. Thanks so much, Bruce. It's been wonderful talking to you. I hope that the book does well. I've got a copy here, by the way, that I will show up. Thank you. It's a terrific read. You've had some summaries of it, but there's a lot more depths and a lot more detail in the books, and we've been able to cover in the Aerosau, so I would recommend people who want to be fully informed and get back all those references that you mentioned, and make those arguments themselves to get a hold of it. Thank you, Bruce. It was wonderful. Thank you.