Making Sense - Sam Harris - #244 — Food, Climate, and Pandemic Risk

00:00:00.000 Welcome to the Making Sense Podcast, this is Sam Harris.

00:00:24.520 Okay, well today I'm talking about some fundamental questions of human existence, but they are

00:00:33.660 rarely thought of as such. This is not the mystery of being, or the nature of consciousness,

00:00:40.500 or what happens after death. No, this is a conversation about a far more basic question

00:00:46.940 than those, and it's the question of what we eat and how that affects the prospects of our

00:00:54.500 survival here. It does it in two ways. How we produce food, in particular how we produce protein,

00:01:03.300 affects climate change and pandemic risk very directly. And on both counts, the status quo

00:01:13.080 really is unacceptable. So today I get into that topic with Bruce Friedrich and Liz Specht,

00:01:21.000 both of whom work at the Good Food Institute. GFI is an international non-profit that is reimagining

00:01:28.880 the process of protein production. Bruce oversees GFI's global strategy. He is also a TED fellow and

00:01:36.240 a Y Combinator alum. He has published in the Wall Street Journal, USA Today, the Los Angeles Times,

00:01:42.440 Wired, and in many other places. He has a TED Talk that some of you may have seen, and he is a graduate

00:01:49.840 of Georgetown Law, Johns Hopkins, and the London School of Economics. Liz is a scientist who works

00:01:56.560 to identify and forecast areas of technological need within this field. She has a degree in chemical

00:02:03.320 and biomolecular engineering from Johns Hopkins, and a doctorate in biological sciences from the University

00:02:09.140 of California, San Diego. As we are discussing such a pressing need here, at what one hopes is the

00:02:16.500 tail end of the COVID pandemic, we're releasing this episode as a PSA outside the paywall, and we're

00:02:23.440 also giving a significant donation to GFI through the Waking Up Foundation. As always, if you want to

00:02:28.980 support the podcast and get access to full episodes in general, you can subscribe at samharris.org.

00:02:35.260 And now, without further delay, I bring you Bruce Friedrich and Liz Specht.

00:02:47.240 I am here with Bruce Friedrich and Liz Specht. Bruce and Liz, thanks for joining me.

00:02:52.640 Thanks for having us.

00:02:53.680 We're delighted to be here.

00:02:55.240 So, we have a lot to talk about. These can seem like unrelated issues, but they intersect in ways

00:03:03.160 that will be immediately obvious to people. I think we'll probably focus on how global health

00:03:10.420 concerns, especially with respect to things like pandemics and antibiotic resistance, coincide with

00:03:17.520 a concern about climate change, and how innovations in food production really seem like a silver bullet

00:03:25.820 of sorts to help deal with both of these problems. It's not to say that it subsumes all of our efforts,

00:03:32.700 but it will subsume some very important ones. And then I guess that all of this just relates to how

00:03:38.940 we can intelligently solve problems in the world. These are problems that we have thus far not been able

00:03:46.140 to marshal sufficient resources to solve for reasons that are, at this point, somewhat inscrutable.

00:03:53.940 But before we dive into that nexus of concerns, maybe you guys can just summarize how you come to

00:04:00.320 focus on these problems. I'll start with you, Bruce. How did you come to focus in these areas?

00:04:05.800 Well, I've been concerned about resource economics for a bunch of decades, and have been concerned about

00:04:13.180 the external costs of industrial beet production for quite a while as well. And about five years ago,

00:04:20.380 I started thinking about whether we could use food technology to address the harms of industrial

00:04:26.820 animal agriculture. And I think the answer to that question is absolutely yes. So these are some of the

00:04:33.400 questions that we'll be diving into. But I started working on the Good Food Institute just a little over

00:04:38.580 five years ago to answer what are really the two big questions in global food. And the first one is,

00:04:45.540 how are we going to feed close to 10 billion people by 2050? And the second part of that is without

00:04:51.960 lighting the world on fire. And GFI and food technology and markets are kind of what we came up with as the

00:05:00.640 solution to both those questions and expanded it into global health, the other topics that we'll be

00:05:06.620 talking a little bit more about subsequently. And how big is the Good Food Institute at this point?

00:05:12.700 How many employees do you have? And what's your annual budget? Our budget for 2021 is $18 million.

00:05:19.600 We have $8 million spent in the United States on programs. We have about 65 full-time scientists and

00:05:27.660 lawyers and lobbyists and others on the team in the United States. And then we have about 45 across our

00:05:34.040 international affiliates, which are in India, Israel, Brazil, Asia Pacific, out of Singapore,

00:05:40.260 and Europe. We have teams in both London and in Brussels. And about $8 million for U.S. operations,

00:05:48.240 about $5 million for international operations. And then we have a scientific granting program.

00:05:54.600 We'll be spending about $5 million this year on open access science, plant-based cultivation,

00:06:01.540 and fermentation, focused on basically replicating the entire experience of meat eating, but using

00:06:08.780 plants or fermentation or cultivation.

00:06:13.520 And Liz, why do you come in here?

00:06:15.060 I came to the Good Food Institute straight out of academia, but I've long had a sort of altruistic

00:06:21.100 and for many years, ultimately, global health or public health kind of bent to my work,

00:06:26.880 really kind of trying to leverage technology as a means of having easily adoptable solutions to

00:06:34.180 what are otherwise really sort of wicked societal problems. So I started in chemical engineering in

00:06:42.160 my undergraduate work, had the opportunity to go abroad for several summers to work in places like

00:06:48.620 slum environments in India on global health issues, and just really saw sort of that nexus of

00:06:55.740 societal intersection with technological solutions and gravitated towards biotechnology as a means of

00:07:04.280 trying to find solutions that are easy for people to adopt and easy to really scale and deploy globally.

00:07:11.880 So I went to graduate school in molecular biology, was working in an algae lab that did a little bit

00:07:18.480 of biofuels work. This was sort of during the, you know, the rise and subsequent fall of the

00:07:24.180 the algae biofuels era. But what really drew me to that lab was that they were also using algae as

00:07:30.140 an expression platform for producing oral edible vaccines for malaria that, again, could be extremely

00:07:37.620 low cost, extremely easy to deploy. You don't need quite cold chain or sophisticated healthcare

00:07:43.760 infrastructure and so forth. I then went to do a postdoc in a biochemistry lab where my focus of my

00:07:50.320 project was, you know, trying to develop a biosensor system that could be used as sort of a remote

00:07:57.780 diagnostic for low resource settings. So again, this sort of bent towards, you know, how can we use

00:08:04.440 relatively low hanging fruit in the biotech space to solve the issues that would have massive global

00:08:11.440 impact has always been sort of the driver behind my interest in science and biotechnology.

00:08:17.520 And a couple years into my postdoc, I sort of went down a bit of a rabbit hole of learning about

00:08:25.460 all of these multifaceted implications of animal agriculture, specifically industrialized animal

00:08:31.960 agriculture on our global health system, on the environment, just the sheer resource utilization

00:08:39.680 inefficiency of it. And, you know, for a long time, I feel silly saying this in retrospect, but

00:08:46.540 for a long time, it really wasn't obvious to me that there was a biotech solution or a technology

00:08:53.440 driven solution to these, these multifaceted issues of animal agriculture. I considered this to be in

00:09:00.480 the realm of, you know, public policy or consumer education or something like that. And it wasn't clear

00:09:06.900 to me how I could use my background to really solve this issue that had almost overnight become my real

00:09:14.380 passion project. The thing that I felt, you know, I have to spend my career working on this. And it

00:09:20.020 was sort of a beautiful, you know, coincidence, honestly, that GFI was founded just a few months

00:09:27.360 before I started kind of trolling around for career opportunities. And, you know, they had just posted a

00:09:33.720 role for their first couple of senior scientist positions. And immediately upon seeing that and sort of

00:09:39.560 reading about this theory of change, you know, it was that light bulb moment for me. Yes, this is

00:09:44.940 imminently solvable. And yes, we can use a technology technology approach to do it.

00:09:51.140 Well, I think I discovered the two of you independently. So if memory serves, Bruce, you reached

00:09:57.920 out to me and I found you through the effective altruism network. Your foundation, the Good Food Institute,

00:10:05.860 is in high esteem among effective altruists. Founders Pledge recommends it as a charity and

00:10:12.100 Founders Pledge is also advising my foundation, the Waking Up Foundation at this point. But Liz,

00:10:17.060 I noticed you on Twitter as an especially sane voice on COVID just when the pandemic was kicking off,

00:10:25.900 I think you put together a thread or two, which many people found very valuable. And so, yeah,

00:10:33.960 Bruce, when you reached out, when I saw the association between the two of you, it seemed

00:10:39.540 like there was a lot to talk about. You know, I don't know if this is too pessimistic for you,

00:10:44.360 but, you know, I've drawn a lesson from COVID that is really pretty gloomy with respect to the

00:10:52.720 prospects of our marshalling a political response to climate change. The idea that we are ever going to

00:11:00.060 convince ourselves that this is an emergency that we need to respond to, given that we couldn't

00:11:07.520 convince ourselves to respond to COVID even when Italians were shrieking from their ICUs that this

00:11:15.640 wave of contagion was coming, even when it was hitting New York and the rest of the country

00:11:21.440 couldn't seem to care or take it seriously. I just don't know how we break this spell of

00:11:28.240 misinformation and hyper-partisanship in response to a threat that really strikes me as at least an

00:11:37.280 order of magnitude more difficult to get your mind around. Pandemics can be hypothetical until they

00:11:45.300 arrive, but climate change seems to just persist in this zone of hypothesis, even if most of the

00:11:54.460 science is fairly settled and I just don't see people responding to it. So it seems that we need

00:12:01.360 to find a way around this which solves the problems without actually having to convince people that

00:12:08.880 these problems are anything like an existential threat that must be responded to like an emergency.

00:12:14.640 I mean, which is to say that I think we just have to build the cars and produce the technology

00:12:19.440 and produce the food that people want and take whatever friction that we can find out of that

00:12:28.000 system of gratifying people's desires as opposed to convincing them that the house is on fire.

00:12:36.160 I don't know if you think I'm being too pessimistic about the political avenues here, but that's a

00:12:41.800 lesson I feel like I've learned from the last year under COVID.

00:12:45.500 I don't know. I mean, listening to you, Sam, it feels to me like your indictment, and I think

00:12:51.840 it's absolutely right, and it's the observation that led to the founding of GFI is that convincing

00:12:58.820 individuals to change is going to be very, very difficult. So what we know about meat is just one

00:13:05.680 example, and we can dive a little bit more into this, but we know that it is an extraordinarily

00:13:10.340 inefficient way of producing food. We know that it is the most likely cause of the next pandemic.

00:13:17.860 We know that more than 70% of antibiotics are being fed to farm animals, which is driving

00:13:24.400 antibiotic resistance, which could lead to the end of modern medicine, and we know that it packs a mega

00:13:30.480 climate wallop relative to alternatives. And these things, people may not know the intricacies,

00:13:36.660 but people are basically aware of these issues, and yet per capita meat consumption goes up and up and

00:13:43.400 up. Even in the United States, 2019 was the highest per capita meat consumption in recorded history,

00:13:49.740 and globally, the UN says we're going to have to produce 70 to 100% more meat by 2050. So that's a

00:13:57.080 pretty thorough indictment of behavior change. But I think if you look at your question with regard to

00:14:03.520 climate and you look at U.S. funding for climate solutions politically, EU funding for climate

00:14:10.120 solutions politically, what China is doing in terms of addressing climate issues, it certainly may not

00:14:17.140 be enough, but it is billions and billions and billions of dollars spent on renewable energy and

00:14:25.020 climate mitigation and other strategies for addressing climate that don't require that individuals make

00:14:32.300 big changes. So switching to an electric car and incentivizing that switch or switching to

00:14:38.920 renewable energy as the price comes down and governments incentivizing that switch, that's

00:14:44.260 really what GFI was designed to focus on. We think science and markets are the way to go,

00:14:52.200 but science and markets left to their own devices, just like science and markets left to their own

00:14:56.820 devices with renewable energy are going to be a very slow road. So most fundamentally, GFI exists to lift

00:15:05.900 this entire space. And a big part of that is helping entrepreneurs be more successful, helping investors

00:15:12.900 be more successful, helping big food recognize this as an opportunity rather than a threat. And really,

00:15:20.060 our organizational battle cry is that governments should be putting resources into both open access

00:15:26.860 R&D to create meat in these alternative ways. And it's got to be meat that eventually tastes the same

00:15:33.520 or better and costs the same or less. Further to your point, it has to give consumers everything that they like

00:15:40.260 about meat, and it has to cost less. And we're very optimistic that governments will get on board with this

00:15:47.400 theory of change. And then that gets past the sort of behavioral modification that I think your pessimism around

00:15:54.360 that is pretty on point.

00:15:56.200 You guys take an interesting angle here with respect to the dietary focus, because this is not a vegetarian or vegan

00:16:05.380 argument, per se. I mean, obviously, the ethics here are virtuous in that direction, right? So it is a matter of

00:16:15.040 reducing animal suffering and ending the current practices of factory farming. But you aren't emphasizing

00:16:24.780 the ethical case. It seems to me you're emphasizing more the pragmatic case, that given the role that

00:16:31.880 meat production plays in climate change and raising pandemic risk, we have to make these changes. And the changes

00:16:39.000 are producing plant-based meat and producing cultured or otherwise known as clean meat, which is real

00:16:47.080 meat, but just it's cell-based, rather than derived from a, you know, slaughtering animal after animal

00:16:53.080 in an abattoir. It sounds like that is a conscious decision. Is it a practical one? Is it just that you think

00:17:01.200 it's much more effective to talk about the pragmatics here? Or is there more behind this angle you're taking?

00:17:09.000 I mean, I think it's primarily observational. So Daniel Kahneman talks about systems one and systems

00:17:14.980 two thinking, as you know, and it just seems super clear that food is systems one thinking. And some

00:17:21.600 people will change their diets on the basis of ethical considerations. And one of the really

00:17:27.160 interesting observations, I think, is that a lot of people will change their vocations based on systems

00:17:33.420 two thinking. So education is how somebody like Uma Valeti or Pat Brown or Ethan Brown forms their

00:17:40.480 company. But education as a method of sort of radical dietary change just absolutely has not

00:17:49.440 worked. And if education worked, we wouldn't see the, you know, the, the charts, the color charts of

00:17:55.340 obesity where they keep having to get all new colors because people just keep getting more and more

00:18:01.020 overweight and more and more obese. There just seems to be something about human physiology and

00:18:07.420 physiological needs where food is concerned that people, you know, everybody cares about cost.

00:18:14.500 Everybody cares about taste. And for the vast majority of people, that's kind of where it ends.

00:18:20.700 So when we're thinking about solutions that work globally, even in countries where education levels

00:18:27.160 around external costs for meat are very, very high. And a lot of people know, nevertheless,

00:18:32.760 most people don't change their diets, but we also need a solution that works in, you know, rural China.

00:18:38.640 We need a solution that works literally everywhere. And, you know, GFI has operations in Israel,

00:18:44.260 not because we care what the Israelis eat. We have operations in Israel because it is so advanced

00:18:50.760 technologically. And as a country, it's very interested in producing all of its own food,

00:18:56.560 food security. So Israel and Singapore are the two countries that are most advanced on both plant-based

00:19:01.680 and cultivated meat for that reason. So we operate in those places because the science that's discovered

00:19:07.520 in Singapore or Israel can change the way that meat is made literally everywhere. So we're big fans of

00:19:14.100 education, mostly to educate policymakers, to educate environmental and global health NGOs, to educate

00:19:21.220 scientists, because this is a great vocation for people who want to address global health, address food

00:19:28.160 security, address climate change. This is a great vocation. But for the vast majority of people sitting

00:19:33.940 down to eat, it's really going to distill to how does it taste and can I afford it?

00:19:39.540 I'll chime in on the consumer front as well. You know, if you look at what's

00:19:44.100 really driving the tipping point of interest in alternative proteins where there was virtually

00:19:50.480 no new activity going on, you know, just a blip on the radar in terms of new product launches or

00:19:56.860 investments or what have you until about 2015, 2016. And ever since then, you can look at any of those

00:20:05.220 metrics, investment, product launches, new startups, etc. And you'll see a very rapid uptick in the years,

00:20:13.820 in the past five years or so. And that shift is really driven not by increasing numbers of

00:20:20.040 vegetarians or vegans. Those are still small, single digit. What that's driven by is a huge swell

00:20:27.040 in the number of folks who identify as so-called flexitarians or reducitarians, people who are

00:20:33.460 looking for different, you know, protein sources for certain meals of the day or of the week.

00:20:40.020 If you look at data from Beyond Meat or Impossible Foods, they're both finding that over 90% of

00:20:47.400 consumers purchasing their products are also consuming or purchasing meat products in the

00:20:53.180 same shopping cart or in the same meal. So this, you know, the reason this space has become of interest

00:21:00.240 to the sort of global food giants and to investors and entrepreneurial folks is because we've seen

00:21:07.940 we've seen a huge broadening in that consumer base that is now interested in these products. It is no

00:21:14.540 longer relegated to these sort of niche consumer categories like vegetarians or vegans that historically

00:21:20.780 were kind of driving activity in alternative protein products. And correspondingly, we've seen obviously a

00:21:27.880 huge revolution in the sort of quality of those products with respect to how well they recapitulate that

00:21:35.460 consumer experience from a flavor perspective, from an olfactory perspective, from a texture perspective, and so

00:21:42.480 forth.

00:21:43.660 And just to build on that, so that it's sort of an interesting theory of change that we have at GFI, because

00:21:49.420 right now, the plant-based products do cost more than animal-based products. So we need

00:21:55.440 flexitarians and people who are looking to reduce their meat intake because we need people who are

00:22:00.340 willing to pay a little bit more. But the theory is that because these products are so much more

00:22:05.900 efficient, so chicken is the most efficient animal at turning crops into meat. And according to the

00:22:12.660 World Resources Institute, it takes nine calories in the form of soy or oats or whatever you're going to

00:22:19.220 feed to the chicken. It takes nine calories into the chicken to get one calorie back out. That is

00:22:24.480 extraordinarily inefficient. And that means nine times as much land, nine times as much water,

00:22:30.180 nine times as many pesticides and herbicides. As we get better at biomimicking the entire meat

00:22:36.760 experience, and a lot of people listening are going to be thinking, well, I've had veggie burgers and

00:22:40.180 they're not very good. This is not that. This is people who are literally focused on making products

00:22:45.860 that you will not be able to distinguish from animal meat, but using plants. And then as you said,

00:22:52.160 Sam, with cultivated meat, it is literally the exact same product just made through cultivation,

00:22:57.280 which is similarly three times as efficient as chicken in terms of input output. So as this

00:23:04.740 scales up, as the factories are built, as we move in the case of cultivated meat to food grade

00:23:10.500 ingredients, the hypothesis is, and we're very optimistic about this, that plant-based meat and

00:23:16.320 cultivated meat can taste the same or better and cost the same or less. And that's why this should

00:23:23.220 be seen as a massive opportunity for big meat companies like JBS and Tyson and Smithfield,

00:23:29.560 and also for big food companies like ADM and Nestle. And so far, we've been really gratified by the

00:23:36.960 degree to which the companies are seeing this as an opportunity.

00:23:39.860 Yeah, there's an interesting psychology here. There's a few threads to pick up on. One is

00:23:47.100 the flexitarian, reducitarian approach is interesting because it doesn't tend to get

00:23:54.140 much ethical standing. I mean, certainly not among vegetarians or vegans, but it is worth acknowledging

00:24:02.000 that if you're someone who reduces your meat intake by half, let's say you're someone who used to eat

00:24:12.480 meat twice a week and now you go to once a week, you have made precisely the same contribution to this

00:24:19.160 project that someone who eats meat once a week does when they go to zero and become a vegan or vegetarian.

00:24:26.760 It's the same reduction, and yet it doesn't have the ethical purity of changing your status as an

00:24:34.600 eater. And it is very interesting to know that most of the people who are buying these alternative

00:24:40.080 protein products are also still eating meat. They haven't radically changed their lives, but they're

00:24:46.000 showing that they either want to or just are interested in eating differently and could easily be

00:24:56.140 incentivized to just eat in a truly benign way if the products simply arrived in the stores.

00:25:05.260 Yeah, I think that's exactly right. I mean, that's the theory of change. It's just making it easier

00:25:10.300 and easier for people to make decisions that align with their values. But we do, I think, have to meet

00:25:17.680 people halfway. Liz was talking about five years ago being sort of the real advent of these products

00:25:25.080 ramping up and getting more successful. That is also the point at which the companies started

00:25:30.740 thinking about their mission differently. They started thinking about the fact that they really

00:25:35.780 did need to make products that didn't require sacrifice because the easier you make it for people

00:25:41.920 to switch, the more likely they are to switch. And eventually, once you have products that literally

00:25:47.900 give consumers everything they like about meat but cost less, our expectation is that you'll see

00:25:53.740 basically just a transformation of how meat is made. So in the same way that we moved from phones that

00:26:01.040 require cords to cell phones or the same way we moved from analog photography to digital photography,

00:26:07.200 we just give consumers everything they like about, in those cases, communication or taking pictures,

00:26:14.260 but we do it in a better way. And if it also costs less, that dynamic should really make

00:26:21.520 a significant impact. And eventually, the idea that meat requires live animals just becomes a thing of

00:26:28.980 history. Where are we with the cultured meat, cell-based meat, in terms of its actual availability to

00:26:38.000 consumers? I had, as you know, Uma Valeti on the podcast a couple of years ago. And

00:26:43.840 full disclosure, I actually invested in his company after that podcast because I was just so

00:26:49.160 taken with the prospect of this becoming an available technology. I mean, it wasn't even

00:26:56.260 so much a bet on its likelihood to succeed. It was more just an aspirational investment.

00:27:02.700 But where are we with clean meat, specifically?

00:27:07.400 We have now seen the first commercial sale of cultivated meat just a few weeks ago in Singapore.

00:27:13.840 by the company Just, which has been in this space alongside their plant-based work for several

00:27:19.860 years now. I think we're likely to see over the next year to 24 months, quite a sort of follow-on

00:27:28.880 effect of first, more governments approving this product. It is a new-to-market product. And in some

00:27:37.360 cases, that regulatory path is still being sort of sussed out. But, you know, there are multiple

00:27:44.420 companies that are sort of at that point of ready to move into true large-scale, commercial-scale

00:27:52.160 production in the next few years. So there are several companies building out pilot-scale facilities

00:27:57.560 right now. And we're starting to see these first commercial sales.

00:28:01.420 Okay, so let's start with our farming practices and how, I mean, why are we talking about finding

00:28:10.040 other ways to produce protein at this point? Why is this a problem we need to solve? People have been

00:28:15.400 eating meat for as long as there have been people. And we've been growing it in one form or another for

00:28:23.700 thousands of years. We've lived in proximity to animals all this time. We've been dimly aware of

00:28:30.400 how this causes various pathogens to enter the human population and have grown more acutely aware of that

00:28:39.640 of late. But still, why is this not sustainable? Why is this a slow-moving emergency that is now not

00:28:50.360 moving slow enough for anyone's comfort? And how does this connect to the question of climate change?

00:28:58.980 Just how big, I guess I'm looking for some picture of how big our problem is.

00:29:04.320 Sure. So I mentioned a minute ago that the most efficient animal at turning crops into meat is the

00:29:10.040 chicken. And it takes nine calories fed to a chicken to get one calorie back out. And it's even worse

00:29:16.100 for pork and beef. And so you're talking about many times as much land. But it's not just that.

00:29:23.100 You're growing all of those crops, and you're shipping them to a feed mill, and you're operating

00:29:27.680 the feed mill. And then you're shipping the feed to the animal farm, and you're operating the animal

00:29:32.840 farm. And then you're shipping the animals to the slaughterhouse, and you're operating the

00:29:36.720 slaughterhouse. And the United Nations crunched the numbers on all of this inefficiency. And they said

00:29:43.920 that animal agriculture is responsible for about 14.5 percent of all human-caused climate change

00:29:52.800 globally. If you think about it in a meal-by-meal basis, you're looking at chicken is the least

00:30:00.300 climate change-inducing meat. And yet chicken causes 40 times as much climate change per calorie

00:30:07.240 of protein when compared to legumes like soy and like peas. So we are going to have to produce

00:30:14.820 70 to 100 percent more meat by 2050. And it is just a huge problem for the climate. So Bill Gates,

00:30:22.960 in his new book, talks about plant-based meat and cultivated meat. And in both his book and on his

00:30:27.700 tour, he was talking about how food and ag is a critical pillar of addressing and mitigating climate

00:30:34.060 change. But he was sort of scratching his head, wondering what next steps could be. And he is now

00:30:40.140 super enthusiastic about plant-based and cultivated meat as part of the solution. At GFI, we spent about

00:30:46.840 a year working with Breakthrough Energy, which is his umbrella organization, on how we can best

00:30:53.760 accelerate this transition toward plant-based meat and cultivated meat. And we're delighted that

00:30:59.060 Breakthrough Energy adopted GFI's recommendations that governments should be incentivizing these

00:31:05.800 alternative proteins, open access R&D, that the entire industry can build on. And then governments

00:31:11.120 should also be incentivizing private companies to transition their factories, to build factories,

00:31:17.400 and to shift in this direction.

00:31:20.140 I'll also mention that we don't want to be too reductive when speaking about environmental impacts.

00:31:25.900 Obviously, climate implications are huge and front and center. But there are also a number of other

00:31:32.560 implications for biodiversity and local ecosystems that are incredibly damaging, resulting from

00:31:39.460 industrialized animal agriculture. One of the biggest externalities of this industrialized

00:31:46.220 intensified system is the enormous quantities of animal waste being produced. We've seen instances

00:31:54.040 where in hurricanes, for example, in the East Coast, these lagoons of animal waste are overflowing their

00:32:01.020 fences and flowing into local waterways. There are huge zones of eutrophication, or so-called ocean dead

00:32:08.720 zones, at the outlet of virtually every river that has runoff from agricultural basins that's contributed to,

00:32:16.700 in part, by fertilizer on fields, but to a very large degree from runoff from animal waste from these

00:32:23.740 large-scale animal facilities.

00:32:27.480 The other thing we should probably address, and I don't know if you want to address, I mean,

00:32:31.060 you actually did sort of nod at it, Sam, but the global health implications are pretty colossal in terms

00:32:37.180 of how we produce meat right now. We are ushering in an age of antibiotic resistance where,

00:32:43.840 according to the former president of the World Health Organization, Dr. Margaret Chan,

00:32:48.260 she says, it's the end of modern medicine if antibiotics stop working. And about 70% of all

00:32:56.480 of the antibiotics that are produced globally are fed to farm animals. If one of your listeners gets

00:33:01.900 sick or if one of us gets sick, we'll go on a course of antibiotics that will be quite short,

00:33:07.160 but farm animals are fed antibiotics for their entire lives, and it's leading to antibiotic resistance.

00:33:13.360 The UK government released a report. They said the threat to the human race from antibiotic resistance

00:33:19.260 is greater than the threat from climate change. So if listeners want to scare, Google the end of

00:33:26.780 working antibiotics. If you want an even bigger scare, add the word China to that Google search.

00:33:33.380 There was a truly chilling cover story in the New York Times Magazine maybe 18 months ago

00:33:38.920 called Pig Zero that addresses this issue. So the way that we are raising animals right now

00:33:45.260 requires all of these sub-therapeutic drugs. If you shift to plant-based meat production or

00:33:51.640 cultivated meat production, no antibiotics required. So it's another really big benefit of

00:33:58.400 shifting in this direction. And another reason that governments should really be incentivizing

00:34:03.400 these technologies. Yeah, I must say I'm a fan of slightly changing the subject when talking about

00:34:11.840 the problem of climate change. To get around the abstraction of it and to connect with things that

00:34:20.880 people can be more easily led to care about or acknowledge they already care about. So for instance,

00:34:27.520 often when we're talking about climate change, I feel like we could do more work when focusing on

00:34:36.560 just the benefits of and the pleasure, the sheer pleasure of breathing clean air, right? I mean,

00:34:44.480 just when you think of just how much nicer it is to live in a city where the air is actually clean

00:34:50.100 and imagine what it would be like to live in a city like Los Angeles when there was basically no air

00:34:57.860 pollution, right? If we were all driving electric cars and the port of Los Angeles were not being

00:35:03.920 inundated with diesel fumes, it would just be a different life in the city. And we experienced it. One of

00:35:12.340 the, one of the epiphanies we had when COVID was first changing life everywhere in the first lockdown

00:35:19.960 and we noticed the reduction in air pollution, it was a vision of a possible future where we could

00:35:26.480 breathe clean air. And then you connect that to all of the, the health effects of bad air and, you know,

00:35:32.560 the tens of thousands of people who are killed outright by it in any major city over the course of

00:35:38.900 a year when you, when you look at emphysema and asthma and lung cancer and all the, all the other

00:35:44.660 pulmonary and cardiovascular knock-on effects of people essentially smoking cigarettes when they

00:35:50.060 didn't consent to smoke them. It's just very easy to see that kind of ancillary benefit being so

00:35:56.640 enormous that we will seem retrospectively insane not to have made these changes earlier. I mean,

00:36:02.780 it's, it will seem as crazy as we seem now when you look back at what it was like to fly on

00:36:07.920 airplanes that had smoking sections. How did we ever get ourselves into that situation to consent

00:36:13.400 to be put on a sealed tube with a few hundred other people and let them smoke for the next 10

00:36:20.300 hours on a flight to Europe? It's just sheer masochism. And yet it was our common practice.

00:36:27.400 And I got to think the spell is going to break here as decisively as that. And we will,

00:36:32.860 we will not recognize ourselves in retrospect.

00:36:35.260 I think it's probably a pretty relatable experience for anyone who's, you know,

00:36:40.080 driven cross country or across states that have, you know, animal farming operations to

00:36:45.500 know that you're coming up on an industrial animal farm and literally have to hold your nose for several

00:36:52.160 miles. And I think, you know, some of those sort of societal implications and worker implications

00:36:58.720 have been laid bare in this pandemic as well, as, as folks have sort of taken a peek behind the

00:37:05.220 curtain of how conventional meat meat is produced and the conditions on processing lines and so forth.

00:37:12.660 There really are, you know, health implications for the communities that surround these farms and for

00:37:18.600 the workers who are working in these, these processing plants.

00:37:22.780 And it's probably worth just taking a moment and stepping back and thinking about

00:37:26.200 the fact that everything we're talking about right now is domestic.

00:37:29.600 We could also be talking about insane weather events that are created by climate change.

00:37:35.960 But if we look outside of the United States and at developing economies in particular,

00:37:40.720 I mean, that's where it becomes a huge problem that it takes nine calories fed to a chicken to get one

00:37:46.260 calorie back out. We're literally burning down the Amazon rainforest in order to grow soy,

00:37:53.140 to ship that soy to Europe, to feed to agricultural animals. That is the sort of thing that is sort of

00:38:00.120 the real world outcome of this inefficiency. And you think about, you know, it's almost tautological,

00:38:06.420 but in the United States and developed economies, we will do a pretty acceptable job of acclimating

00:38:13.500 to bad climate events. The people who get hit the worst are the people who contributed the least.

00:38:21.080 It's the developing economies where people are going to be displaced, entire cities are going

00:38:26.500 to be wiped out, and it's the economies that are least able to deal with these impacts.

00:38:32.380 What do you do with the argument that in the developing world, they require more or less the same

00:38:39.180 career we had with building their economies based on an industrial, a 19th century style industrial

00:38:47.920 revolution? Now that we have grown as wealthy as we have, we are demanding that the rest of the world

00:38:56.960 that has not yet caught up to us clean up their act when only now as a, you know, at the tail end of our

00:39:04.200 development do we have the courage of our scruples here. What's our obligation to help the developing

00:39:12.540 world kind of bypass the industrial mistakes we've made? I mean, self-preservation alone should dictate

00:39:21.020 that we figure out how to do this, but how do you view that dialogue in trying to persuade China and

00:39:26.540 India and Africa to not follow all the missteps we in the utterly developed world have made?

00:39:35.700 I mean, I think at least on the meat front, you can look at cellular technology and cell phones and

00:39:41.700 the concept of leapfrogging. So making meat from plants and cultivating meat from cells, what I

00:39:47.980 think we can't do for the reasons that you just underlined is go to them and say, you need to eat

00:39:52.880 less meat. You need to not adopt practices of industrial animal agriculture. Look at the adverse harm to the

00:39:59.380 climate or antibiotic resistance or whatever else, but we can go and say, let us help you switch to

00:40:05.980 renewable energy is one climate solution that is win-win. And in the case of meat, we can help you

00:40:12.200 figure out how, in the case of India, to turn millets into palatable products that Indian consumers will be

00:40:19.960 enthusiastic about. We can do that with plant-based meat. We can also do that with cultivated meat.

00:40:25.140 And we've been deeply gratified. We operate in India and GFI India, the Modi government in India was

00:40:32.920 the first to fund through the Center for Cellular and Molecular Biology in India, cultivated meat,

00:40:40.120 open access R&D. The Chemical Technology Institute in India is also very enthusiastic. And the entire food

00:40:48.300 industry in India, ADM has been a phenomenal partner as well as other companies in India. So

00:40:54.700 and then China wants to be the global leader on addressing climate change. China should be all

00:41:01.580 in on these alternative ways of producing meat as well. We haven't even talked about pandemics to any

00:41:08.320 significant degree yet. But as you know, Sam, we kind of lucked out. COVID-19 could have been

00:41:14.480 significantly more deadly. It could have been significantly more transmissible. Scientists say

00:41:21.900 the next pandemic is inevitable. And according to the UN Environment Program, the most likely cause

00:41:28.960 of the next pandemic is the consumption of animal meat, followed by intensification of agriculture. So

00:41:36.280 with plant-based meat and cultivated meat, the chances that your food contributes to antibiotic resistance

00:41:43.080 or the next pandemic falls from very, very likely to zero, it eliminates those problems. And that is

00:41:50.600 in the best interest of governments in developing economies. But it is particularly in the best

00:41:56.560 interest of governments in developed economies to incentivize this to make it something that is not a

00:42:02.700 sacrifice for these other countries.

00:42:04.400 And this leapfrogging concept also speaks to the urgency here. You know, the vast majority of the

00:42:12.220 increase in demand for meat and animal protein will come from these emerging economies. And they don't

00:42:19.020 currently have one of the biggest challenges that the developed world's facing right now in this protein

00:42:24.740 transition, which is to say that they don't have the inertia of sunk assets into all of this

00:42:31.140 infrastructure that underlies industrial animal agriculture. So the opportunity to, you know, go

00:42:37.780 straight to production methods that are more efficient, that are cleaner, that are safer, that are more

00:42:43.940 resilient, and not have to expend all of those resources in building these incredibly damaging systems that

00:42:51.580 then, you know, the folks who invested in that are incentivized to keep that status quo in operation as long as

00:42:58.700 possible. Yeah, yeah. Well, on that point, in the developed world, what sort of partners have the

00:43:07.020 established agribusinesses been? And I got to think that and I know this was Uma Valeti's opinion when we spoke, you

00:43:15.160 have to figure out how to bring them in as partners so that they don't view these alternatives as a, a mere

00:43:21.920 subtraction from their potential market. What's that dialogue been like? And how hopeful are you that

00:43:28.440 the Tysons of the world are going to recognize that they should be in this game rather than resisting it?

00:43:35.900 We have been deeply gratified by the response of both the biggest food and the biggest meat companies

00:43:42.180 in the world. So pre-COVID, GFI had an annual conference and we had JBS and Tyson at our conference,

00:43:50.240 the two largest meat companies in the world, speaking from the dais, talking about how they

00:43:55.620 want to be protein companies. They want to supply the world with high quality protein as profitably

00:44:02.580 as possible. So literally all of the world's largest food companies and all of the world's

00:44:08.700 largest meat companies have gone into their own plant-based meat brands. So JBS, Tyson, and

00:44:16.500 Smithfield have their own brands. Cargill is supplying KFC in China, which is pretty exciting.

00:44:23.380 Tyson and Cargill, which are the two largest US-based meat companies have each invested in

00:44:29.300 Uma's company. They've invested in Memphis Meats and kudos, kudos to Uma for seeing the value and being

00:44:36.780 so enthusiastic about inviting them in because, uh, yeah, we want them to see this as opportunity.

00:44:42.720 We, their supply chains are robust. They know what consumers want from meat. They are trusted

00:44:50.880 brands. So we are just very, very excited about having Nestle, ADM, JBS, Tyson. And as far as we

00:44:58.080 can tell, they are all taking this concept very, very seriously. It's a little toe in the water at

00:45:04.600 the moment, but there has not been resistance. And it does seem to us that there has been real

00:45:08.500 enthusiasm and we're delighted by that. It's interesting to consider how few minds actually

00:45:16.220 need to change to utterly transform our practices here globally. Because as we've pointed out,

00:45:23.360 it's not a matter of successfully getting through to all the individuals to modify their day-to-day

00:45:30.820 choices. We simply have to deliver more compelling choices and they will just grab what they want.

00:45:37.320 So when electric cars become better than gas cars by every metric and also cheaper,

00:45:45.500 there will be no more friction in the system. You know, there'll be a few people who are nostalgic

00:45:49.540 for the, the rumble of a, an internal combustion engine, but for the most part, people want, will

00:45:55.040 want faster, safer, cheaper cars. And that's what they'll get. And, and the, the, I think we're more

00:46:03.000 than halfway to already transforming the basis of that decision. The final piece is probably price,

00:46:10.220 but how many people's minds do you think would have to change at the, you know, the decision-making

00:46:16.440 level in government, in these companies to essentially rewrite the rules of the industry here?

00:46:25.380 We're certainly not talking about millions of people. We might be talking about 10,000 people.

00:46:30.180 Mm-hmm. I think you're absolutely right. I wanted to, to squeeze in one of my favorite quotes ever,

00:46:35.860 which is, if we could make meat without the animal, why wouldn't we? And the reason that's one of my

00:46:41.180 favorites is because that was said by the CEO of Tyson Foods, Tom Hayes, in about 2018, which just

00:46:49.240 really speaks to the incentives when you approach this from a really pragmatic perspective, you know,

00:46:56.020 for, for, for a meat company that controls enormous market share of total global meat production,

00:47:01.900 to be, you know, that candid that the animal is almost the most inconvenient part of their whole

00:47:08.920 process. If they can meet, make the meat without the animal, why wouldn't they? It becomes quite easy

00:47:15.180 to sort of identify what those incentives and what those drivers are for, as you say, a relatively small

00:47:21.940 number of, of key decision makers. And I sort of feel like there might be just like one person in

00:47:27.820 China who, if they got really absolutely behind this, could steer billions of dollars into it. Or

00:47:33.760 if John Kerry got really into this, or Joe Biden, for that matter, in the United States. And there is

00:47:39.620 tremendous incentive for them to do that. I mean, you think about electric cars, which you were just

00:47:44.100 talking about, Sam, and GM has said by 2035, they're going to be a hundred percent electric. Ford has said

00:47:50.580 they'll be a hundred percent electric by 2035 in Europe. And that means they're all going to go to

00:47:55.860 China because China has 93 of these gigafactories for lithium ion batteries, and they're going to have

00:48:03.080 140 by 2030. The U.S. has four of these gigafactories, and we're expected to have 10 by 2030. So if that

00:48:12.440 happens to meat, if China goes all in on reconstructing meat from plants and cultivating meat directly from

00:48:19.140 cells, they become the global supplier of meat as well. So there should be a sort of space race

00:48:26.540 among governments to reconstitute meat from plants, to cultivate meat directly from cells, because it is

00:48:34.440 how we take the likelihood that our food causes the next pandemic or leads to antibiotic resistance from

00:48:39.740 significant to zero. It's a huge part of the climate solution. And the countries that decide to

00:48:46.720 take this on, I mean, they're going to have bragging rights until the end of time, but it'll also be

00:48:52.100 spectacularly good for their economies. So we certainly want the corporations, but getting

00:48:57.280 governments really behind this and lifting up these entire sectors, you know, could be very, very few

00:49:03.140 people who could make a massive difference. Yeah, that's one of the silver linings of having a

00:49:08.060 totalitarian approach to government. You really only have to change a couple of minds and then

00:49:12.480 everything changes. So before we close here, I want to revisit an issue I raised with Uma in my

00:49:20.280 original podcast on this topic, because I feel like people's intuitions are probably in the process of

00:49:25.580 changing here. But at the time, when this notion of clean meat was first floated, there was a concern

00:49:33.900 that there was a kind of ick factor around the concept. And this is, I've always thought, somewhat

00:49:40.180 counterintuitive or paradoxical. You tell people that a single cell has been removed from the

00:49:48.720 finest producer of steak you can find on earth, and then steak has been amplified on the basis of

00:49:55.720 that single cell. So all of the disorder and suffering has been bypassed. Literally, a single

00:50:03.800 cell has been removed from an otherwise happy animal, and that started the process. And now you have

00:50:10.160 meat that is getting grown in perfectly clean vats by people in white lab coats. And when you pitch

00:50:20.640 this to people, at least there was a kind of ick factor where they thought, that's not something I

00:50:27.640 really want to eat, right? And yet, what's so strange about this is what they're telling you

00:50:32.080 is that if you could only add all the blood and chaos and misery of a slaughterhouse to the picture,

00:50:39.720 then they would get hungry all of a sudden. Then they feel like eating that steak that had to be

00:50:44.300 reclaimed from the murder of terrified animals and somehow rendered antiseptic enough to consume.

00:50:53.560 Add to the picture the xenoviruses that now everyone has good reason to worry about.

00:50:59.560 How do you guys view the psychology here? Have we actually just blown past this initial

00:51:05.680 reservation in people? And do you think there really won't be any problem in adoption? Or do

00:51:12.980 you think people are still stuck with this, I guess it's a kind of uncanny valley of food intuitions?

00:51:19.320 What do you guys think about the psychology here?

00:51:21.480 I think people eat meat right now, not really very thoughtfully. So human beings, I mean,

00:51:31.280 again, our programming is to be wary of new foods, because for however many thousands of years,

00:51:37.500 a new food might kill you. I think once you have the two products side by side, and one of them has

00:51:45.380 basically no chance that it is contaminated with bacteria. If it's seafood, no chance that it's

00:51:52.500 contaminated with dioxins or mercury. If it's other animal products, no chance that it has any kind of

00:51:59.500 antibiotic residues. It's just a safer product, live streaming production on the internet. Very,

00:52:07.120 very boring very, very quickly, but kind of the opposite of passing laws to make it illegal to find

00:52:13.800 out what's happening on these farms and in these slaughterhouses. So I think it's natural that

00:52:18.700 people, when they first hear about it, might not be super enthusiastic. But as the products come to

00:52:25.820 market, I think people will be very enthusiastic, especially as it starts reaching price parity and

00:52:32.920 assuming that it tastes the same or better. I will just say that the initial consumer surveys

00:52:38.720 that are done, even when it's referred to as like in vitro meat or lab-grown meat,

00:52:43.800 you still have somewhere on the order of 35 to 70 plus percent of people who say they're happy to

00:52:51.520 eat it. You have a significant portion who say they are happy to pay more for it. That alone is a

00:52:58.320 colossal, colossal market. But I think we go back to what dictates consumer choices is how does it taste

00:53:06.160 and what does it cost? So I think we'll have lots and lots of early adopters. And as the products scale up

00:53:13.100 and the price comes down, I think, you know, just about everybody will go in this direction.

00:53:18.560 And familiarity goes a huge way towards this. I don't know if you've seen the charts of people's

00:53:24.500 reservations about getting a COVID vaccine prior to the approval of those vaccines. And then afterwards,

00:53:32.280 the curve drops almost immediately once the vaccines were approved and people started hearing

00:53:38.240 about friends and family members who had gotten them. I think the exact same kind of psychology

00:53:43.220 applies here, that people may say they have reservations about something just because it's

00:53:48.320 new and unfamiliar. But as soon as you, you know, know a friend who went to a restaurant and was able

00:53:54.340 to try this really cool new product, I think a lot of that evaporates right away. And as Bruce mentioned,

00:54:01.560 you know, we largely have not really seen that ick factor to a substantial degree in the last few

00:54:07.560 years, even of these consumer surveys of this product before it's on market.

00:54:13.160 Yeah, Bruce's side by side comparison does suggest a diabolical commercial that could be shot just,

00:54:19.760 you know, how one steak was made versus how the other was made and all of it culminating with the

00:54:24.340 taster not being able to tell the difference. Yeah, I do think we will rewrite our intuitions

00:54:31.080 on this front. And I mean, just shining a light on how strange they are. I mean, so, you know,

00:54:36.860 to take vaccines as an analogy, we're currently living in a country where something like half of

00:54:45.380 the population is quite sanguine about getting coronavirus, right? They think that's no big deal.

00:54:53.120 And yet they're afraid to get vaccinated for coronavirus. That's how upside down it is for,

00:55:00.180 I don't know if it's half, but it has to be tens of millions of people. I know some of these people

00:55:05.580 personally. I know people who have taken basically no precautions to avoid getting COVID, but are highly

00:55:13.720 vaccine resistant. And these people are not uneducated either. So it's this sort of an imperative

00:55:22.840 to shine a light on how discordant these beliefs are or should be. In the case of a COVID vaccine,

00:55:32.320 I mean, this is basically someone expressing a preference for taking into their body whatever

00:55:37.820 it is that naturally came out of a bat so as to sicken and kill millions of people to the thing we

00:55:46.180 have consciously engineered that is well understood not to be a complete virus that can sicken you.

00:55:53.720 And whatever side effects one gets from getting a vaccine, at this point, this experiment has been

00:55:59.520 run on millions and millions of people. And we know people are not being sent to the hospital and dying

00:56:06.300 based on their reaction to the vaccine, whereas they are to the disease proper. And it's still,

00:56:12.680 it's a hard conversation to have with people. So it's fascinating how clear the path to daylight

00:56:19.080 should be on so many questions and how difficult it is to actually get people to walk in the only

00:56:25.800 reasonable direction. I think one salient point here that's different is that this transition towards

00:56:33.400 alternative proteins is currently and should remain entirely apolitical or bipartisan. And we've seen,

00:56:41.460 you know, support from sort of libertarian leaning folks who recognize this as, yeah, this is just a

00:56:48.080 free open market solution to an inefficiency, as well as folks who are kind of driven by some of those

00:56:55.200 those larger societal implications. Yeah. And I mean, you look at somebody like Sonny Perdue,

00:57:01.140 who was Donald Trump's Secretary of Agriculture, or Scott Gottlieb, who was Donald Trump's FDA

00:57:06.760 commissioner. And further to Liz's points, they were both all in on alternative proteins. So I think

00:57:12.820 socializing it, what Liz says is absolutely true. It's just also the case that if you're thinking

00:57:19.020 about meat with cultivated meat, and I guess I will also just take a step back and say this is a fairly

00:57:24.440 small thing. The term that GFI is using is cultivated. It allows us to talk about cultivating meat and

00:57:30.580 doing it in cultivators. And it's a familiar term that we think is also helpful. Not a big thing. As

00:57:37.220 I mentioned, even the polls that talk about in vitro meat or lab-grown meat, the numbers are pretty good.

00:57:43.880 And when it's explored why people might not want to eat cultivated meat, their answers oftentimes are

00:57:50.380 things that we can disabuse them of fairly quickly. So it's going to cost too much, or it's not going to

00:57:56.840 taste good enough, or whatever else. But once we actually do have the product available, it is

00:58:02.380 literally the exact same product in the case of cultivated meat. And with plant-based meat, it's

00:58:08.820 made up of things that people are used to consuming. The reason that people are resistant to plant-based

00:58:13.840 meat is generally they, you know, maybe they had a bad experience with a veggie burger or something.

00:58:18.720 So again, we can educate people and move them in the right direction, I think, with both these products.

00:58:23.960 Also, there must be two markets here. Obviously, there's the market of people who eat meat and want

00:58:30.520 things to taste the way they used to taste under the odious regime. And if you can give them that,

00:58:37.400 then they'll be happy. But then there must be vegetarians and vegans who don't want their

00:58:42.740 meat substitutes to be too realistic, right? Isn't there a preference that has now grown up for

00:58:50.540 millions of people that you want a veggie burger to taste great, but you actually don't want it to

00:58:56.320 taste exactly like a burger? Yeah. I mean, I think at least at GFI, it's a little bit of a laugh line,

00:59:04.100 but it's also true when vegetarians or vegans say, well, I don't want to eat that. It's like,

00:59:08.960 we really don't care what you want to eat or don't want to eat. The value to all of the positive

00:59:16.600 qualities of a shift to plant-based and cultivated meat is zero if you're eating that instead of

00:59:22.620 beans and rice or whatever vegetarians and vegans are eating. So we are pretty laser-focused at GFI

00:59:29.580 on something like 98% of Americans who continue to eat meat. I mean, it's a sort of funny thing that

00:59:37.120 something like 6% of the public self-identifies as vegetarian. But when the Vegetarian Resource Group

00:59:42.760 asks people, what did you eat in the last month? A significant portion of those have eaten fish or

00:59:48.200 chicken in the last month. The arithmetic doesn't work yet. I think you're absolutely right, Sam,

00:59:53.180 that some people don't want the tastes exactly the same. But for those people, they have a range of

01:00:00.220 products that they can consume instead. For the positive benefit of this shift, what we're really

01:00:06.460 trying to do is that holy grail. It needs to satisfy meat eaters. It needs to taste the same or better.

01:00:12.760 And then eventually, as it scales up, it needs to cost the same or less.

01:00:17.600 Okay. So is there anything that people can do at this point to help? Again, we're trying to change

01:00:24.080 the minds of decision makers here. But what can people do to effectively change the timeline over

01:00:32.280 which this is bound to happen at this point?

01:00:35.200 Well, I will start by saying that the Good Food Institute operates as sort of a think tank and open

01:00:41.980 access resource hub. So we operate across three programmatic areas, our policy department, and we

01:00:50.280 are hiring in our policy department. But people can get involved in lobbying their members of Congress

01:00:57.500 to support the work that GFI is doing and others are doing to incentivize this shift and also to fund

01:01:06.260 open access research. We operate in terms of industry engagement. So we work with the really big

01:01:13.120 meat and food companies. If somebody works at one of those companies, you have a huge lever to try to

01:01:19.760 help make change. We also work with entrepreneurs and investors and encourage people to check out all of the

01:01:26.640 resources that we have on our website at gfi.org for entrepreneurs and investors. We work with scientists,

01:01:33.840 and I'll let Liz talk a little bit about what people can do if they're interested in getting

01:01:38.780 involved and they have scientific acumen.

01:01:41.760 Yeah, one of the biggest bottlenecks we hear over and over for what's hampering the growth of the

01:01:47.820 alternative protein industry is a gap around technical talent. A lot of folks from sort of adjacent

01:01:54.360 technical fields, whether it's tissue engineering or biochemistry or bioprocess design,

01:02:01.180 have relevant skill sets. But this may not be on folks' radar as, you know, an up-and-coming sort of

01:02:07.920 career vocational calling. So that's a big area where we support with resources to help folks plug

01:02:15.600 into this industry. We do a lot of work on campuses. As Bruce mentioned before, we are funding grants to

01:02:23.400 get new researchers and new investigators pivoting some of their research focus towards the biggest,

01:02:30.260 highest-impact knowledge gaps in research questions in this field. So almost at any career stage,

01:02:37.280 there's sort of an inlet to figure out, you know, how that technical talent can go to serve

01:02:43.160 some of these needs. And I do just want to reiterate how utterly tractable this field is.

01:02:50.660 There is a great need for research and research funding, but this is not rocket science.

01:02:56.140 If you look at the improvement in the quality of products and the breadth of products that has

01:03:02.520 happened in the last few years, that's really been on a complete shoestring budget. So there's immense

01:03:08.780 capability here. You know, as we've touched on a couple of times, we don't bat an eye at the hundreds of

01:03:16.320 billions of dollars going into renewable energy R&D every single year. But in our tallying,

01:03:22.940 the total public funding that we estimate has gone towards alternative proteins across all time,

01:03:30.320 across all governments, is on the order of tens of millions, not trillions or hundreds of billions.

01:03:37.080 So, you know, there's just immense potential here for allocating more resources, more talent,

01:03:43.440 more attention towards this field and having that manifest as a really outsized impact on the world.

01:03:50.360 And I will just toss out, Sam, for people who just want to put their toe in the water,

01:03:55.020 GFI has a couple of different monthly seminars. We have a business of alternative proteins seminar.

01:04:01.180 It's a webinar and a science of alt proteins webinar every single month. We have some newsletters,

01:04:07.740 which people can sign up for, which are sort of everything that's happening and alternative proteins.

01:04:12.080 And we do have job openings in the United States, as well as I think maybe in all of our global

01:04:17.720 affiliates, certainly in most of them. So folks can find all of that information just on our website,

01:04:22.960 which is gfi.org. We are also philanthropically funded. So this is extremely high impact,

01:04:31.580 extremely neglected and extremely tractable. And we certainly invite anybody who would like to join

01:04:36.620 our family of supporters. That's great. Actually, Liz, I want to spell that out a little bit more,

01:04:41.900 because it seems to me that we should make it crystal clear. Many people go into science

01:04:47.660 without any clear concept of what they're going to do, you know, how they're going to put it to use.

01:04:54.300 They're interested in it, and they're just kind of meandering through their undergraduate years,

01:05:01.120 following their interests, but they haven't actually connected with a more vocational sense of

01:05:08.020 how they're going to do good in the world. And so I'd like to tap into this idealism a little bit

01:05:13.680 more, because what we really want to engineer here is a kind of gold rush, you know, both purely

01:05:20.860 material. I mean, let's leverage people's greed for material success, but also a kind of moral

01:05:27.160 gold rush. I mean, we want people to feel inspired by solving a massive problem and reducing suffering

01:05:36.780 and existential risk. And this topic really does sit at the crossroads of all of that. If you were

01:05:45.160 starting college today, what courses of study would be obviously relevant to making a contribution in this

01:05:53.720 area? At risk of feeling like I'm dodging your question, it really is true that any STEM discipline

01:06:01.100 has a role to play here. These approaches are so interdisciplinary that that's actually been one

01:06:07.640 of the challenges from a technical talent training perspective is finding folks who would have, say,

01:06:14.620 a STEM cell or tissue engineering background who also understand the biochemistry of flavor in food

01:06:22.420 or the biomechanics of texture. Those are typically, you know, biomaterials folks or food scientists who

01:06:29.240 would have that kind of expertise. So, you know, what we've started to see at some universities is

01:06:36.540 students who, you know, have the opportunity to sort of create a major and pull coursework and lab work

01:06:44.780 in some cases from multiple areas to really understand those intersections, which I think is where there's the

01:06:51.280 greatest potential for these sort of innovative leaps. We have seen tremendous traction with our student

01:06:58.520 group chapters on campuses. We have 11 chapters so far with plans to scale those. And those students have

01:07:05.800 been extraordinarily influential as this voice on campus to advocate for more coursework in this area,

01:07:14.700 to go out and connect directly with faculty members, to implore them to consider applications of their

01:07:21.260 research area towards addressing these challenges. And I think there's, you know, among this sort of

01:07:27.580 up-and-coming generation of scientists, a real appetite for making sure that, you know, they're not just doing

01:07:36.020 research for research's sake, but that it's truly tapping into something that is a passion project for them

01:07:43.000 and the sort of sense of disillusionment with maybe kind of older paradigms in academia of finding your

01:07:51.620 niche and just publishing relentlessly in that sort of, you know, obscure corner of the knowledge sphere,

01:07:58.940 but rather kind of taking this holistic approach and saying, we can have it all, right? We can explore

01:08:05.900 really fascinating kind of fundamental biochemistry and biology and engineering questions, but do it in

01:08:13.480 the context of also addressing these massive societal and global issues.

01:08:18.860 How much of this is needing to get people to do doctorate research in the relevant areas,

01:08:26.380 and how much can be more along the lines of what we've seen in computer science, where, you know,

01:08:31.780 you can come out of an undergraduate computer science background and quite clearly make the

01:08:39.500 relevant contributions to the software industry. And obviously it's that people can be self-taught in

01:08:45.720 those areas. It's so modular. But is this the kind of thing that with the right undergraduate

01:08:51.080 curriculum, we could help engineer a functionally unlimited supply of relevant talent?

01:08:59.060 I've certainly seen, you know, my fair share of incredibly impressive folks who are passionate

01:09:05.360 about this field and don't have, you know, endless letters and credentials after their name.

01:09:10.480 And I think, you know, I'm glad you mentioned computational science, because I think that's an

01:09:15.160 area that has a huge role to play in alternative proteins that hasn't been quite so recognized yet.

01:09:22.200 You know, the degree to which we can automate and accelerate R&D through, you know,

01:09:28.260 simulating experiments rather than having to conduct that work empirically. There's massive

01:09:34.100 potential there for acceleration. And certainly as, you know, startup companies in this space

01:09:40.120 become more mature, they'll need talent at sort of every tier of training. You know, when you're a

01:09:47.260 startup first formulating your R&D strategy and so forth, you're typically just hiring folks

01:09:53.600 mostly at the PhD level. But once this starts to move more and more into, you know, commercial

01:10:00.140 operation, you'll need technicians to kind of maintain your cell banks. You'll need, you know,

01:10:05.660 folks who are keeping the system running, but don't need to be those sort of highly credentialed,

01:10:11.860 highly trained and skilled innovators.

01:10:15.160 And just further to something that Liz nodded at a minute ago, the GFI university focus is pretty

01:10:22.900 single-mindedly on STEM. And some of the undergrad students that are taking very seriously alternative

01:10:30.740 proteins on their campuses are making just a massive impact from sort of the bottom to the top in terms

01:10:37.520 of their outreach to professors and getting even graduate level courses considered and working

01:10:44.460 with professors on research centers. So we need people in private industry, but we also, just like

01:10:50.940 there are climate centers at universities all over the world, there should be alternative protein

01:10:56.940 research centers at universities all over the world. And that does not require an advanced degree

01:11:04.000 to be a champion of that concept. It seems like they could be incentivized financially too. I mean,

01:11:10.860 if a university like Stanford created the relevant department and that department could have

01:11:18.420 equity in whatever enterprises were spun out of its curriculum, it just seems like you could marry

01:11:26.280 the academics and the business case there and get people moving.

01:11:31.020 Absolutely. And those models do exist and have been pioneered in other fields. And I think that's

01:11:37.440 really, you know, a beautiful sort of trifecta of players in those types of research institutes is if

01:11:44.520 you have government funding, university involvement, and industry partners, and they all have,

01:11:51.880 you know, the appropriate incentives to be involved. It's, you know, value creation or job creation

01:11:58.820 from the government perspective. It's training opportunities from the university perspective

01:12:04.560 and really, you know, the ability to establish a center of excellence. And then, as you note,

01:12:10.760 these industry partners get sort of first look at new technologies coming out of that space,

01:12:16.520 as well as an opportunity to help guide those research focus areas based on what they're seeing as the

01:12:22.640 true pain points in the industry.

01:12:26.380 Well, it's exciting stuff. So I just want to thank you both for taking the time to explain

01:12:30.620 all of this to my audience and for the work you're doing. And I recommend people go to the

01:12:36.540 Good Food Institute site and get more information and support your necessary work. And I will certainly

01:12:44.360 do that myself. So both of you, thank you for your time.

01:12:47.480 Thank you very much. Thank you.

Making Sense - Sam Harris - April 06, 2021

#244 — Food, Climate, and Pandemic Risk

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