Making Sense - Sam Harris - #28 — Meat Without Misery

Uma Valeti is a cardiologist turned entrepreneur who is now running a company called Memphis Meat, and he is trying to bring to market what he calls cultured meat. This is meat that is synthesized from cells of cows or pigs or any other common food animal, but is grown by processes that do not entail whole whole animals to be born and to live and die under the terrible conditions of factory farming or other conditions this is meat grown outside the usual biological process of being attached to a full animal so it entails none of the animal suffering or as you'll hear, the other environmental and health-related concerns that come with factory farming. In this episode, we talk to Uma about how he stumbled into cultured meat, why people are worried about synthetic meat, and what he hopes to accomplish with his company, Memphis Meat. We also talk about his background and why he thinks synthetic meat is a good fit for the growing demand for vegetarianism and veganism around the world. To find a list of our sponsors and show-related promo codes, go to gimlet.fm/OurAdvertisers and use the promo code: MONDREAMS to receive 10% off the first month of your first month when you sign up for the Making Sense newsletter! We don't run ads on the podcast, but we do make it possible to become a supporter of the podcast by becoming a patron of Making Sense. We don t run ads, and we don't ask for any other sponsorships, we only make it by pledging $5 or more than $10 a month. We make the podcast listeners get 10% of the price of the making sense podcast, and get 20% off in future episodes, plus a free ad discount when they become a patron only, up to $50 or more, they get a discount of $100 or more of their choice, and they get access to the podcast makes them get the same thing, plus they'll get a chance to access the podcast for the podcast only they can access the full episode for the full making sense of making sense, including the podcast they're listening experience, and a discount, all for free, in the future, making sense. Thank you for listening to this episode. Make sense? This episode is made possible thanks to the work of a man named Sam Harris, and it's made possible entirely through the support of our listeners, and you'll get the chance to hear the first part of this conversation.

00:00:00.000 welcome to the making sense podcast this is sam harris just a note to say that if you're hearing

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00:00:39.220 today i'm going to give you a podcast that i really just stumbled into i was on a phone call

00:00:53.280 with a man named uma valeti a cardiologist who is now running a company called memphis meats and he

00:01:00.980 is trying to bring to market what he calls cultured meat this is meat that is synthesized from cells of

00:01:07.860 cows or pigs or any other common food animal but is grown by processes that do not entail

00:01:16.360 whole whole animals to be born and to live and die under the terrible conditions of factory farming

00:01:24.100 or any other conditions this is meat grown outside the usual biological process of being attached to a

00:01:31.040 full animal so it entails none of the animal suffering or as you'll hear the other environmental

00:01:37.440 and health related concerns of factory farming so in any case i was on the phone with uma and the moment

00:01:45.380 we got into the conversation i realized this is something that you guys should know more about

00:01:50.340 and so i just converted a phone call into a podcast and that's how i'm bringing you now uma valeti

00:01:56.840 cardiologist turned entrepreneur and food producer enjoy

00:02:01.940 well i'm here with uma valeti the ceo and co-founder of memphis meats and as many of you know i've been

00:02:14.460 been interested in vegetarianism and veganism and the the ethics of factory farming and i stumbled

00:02:20.780 into an interest in the emerging possibility of synthesized meat and uma is now uh running what

00:02:29.920 appears to be the most prominent effort in this area so uma thanks for coming on the podcast

00:02:35.160 thank you sam i'm delighted to be here so tell me a little bit about how you got into this and

00:02:40.300 your background you and i just got thrown together on twitter maybe i should get into how we come to

00:02:45.880 be talking to one another i saw a tweet from the philosopher peter singer who as many people know is

00:02:51.720 a um a very outspoken defender of the rights of of non-human animals and has been probably more

00:02:59.900 influential than anyone in philosophy to sensitize people to the the ethical problem of what we eat and

00:03:06.860 how we get food to our table and so he sent out a tweet that contained a link to a wall street journal

00:03:13.960 article about your company memphis meats and so that's how i heard about you and and and i was

00:03:18.660 inspired on the basis of reading that article to put out a poll on twitter asking people that if

00:03:25.200 synthesized meat was molecularly identical to natural meat to beef and pork and the other meats we eat

00:03:32.940 and it tasted the same would you switch to eating it and the results of that poll were something like

00:03:38.840 85 percent said they would switch and then i asked you know those who said no the reasons why and the

00:03:45.320 reasons why were pretty encouraging some said they were already vegetarian about a quarter said they were

00:03:49.720 already vegetarian and therefore weren't interested so that's obviously not the market you're you're

00:03:55.000 worried about and then we'll get into the the reasons why people are worried about synthetic meat but

00:04:00.480 let's get into your background and tell us uh what you hope to accomplish sure sam first of all i want

00:04:06.340 to thank you for the random sequence of events that that led us to talk to each other and i want to

00:04:12.360 thank peter singer for tweeting out a wall street journal article that came out on monday last week and

00:04:17.560 since then it's absolutely been a global response that has inspired us and delighted us that that there's

00:04:24.000 a large group of people in the world waiting for a really good meat product that they could get

00:04:30.860 behind and feel good about it and and having said that to give a little bit of my background um i grew

00:04:38.120 up in a in india in a family that ate meat and i really enjoyed eating meat and uh i think i had a

00:04:44.840 series of experiences since uh you know from i was a 12 year old over five years until i was 17 and uh

00:04:51.620 essentially the first one was when i was 12 um i went to my neighbor who was was a good friend of

00:04:57.280 mine for his birthday party and in the front of the house there was a you know well-organized party

00:05:02.840 people gathering dancing eating uh you know there was lots of meat out there and you know singing

00:05:08.740 happy birthday and i just happened to walk to the back of uh his house and that's where they were

00:05:14.760 slaughtering the the animals that were becoming meat in the front and to me it was one of the stark

00:05:20.980 images i remember in my head that there was a birthday and then there was a there was a death

00:05:25.200 day all in the same you know span of time and kind of disturbed me but you know i did like the taste

00:05:30.560 of meat and i continued to eat meat um growing up into my teenage years where were you in india uh in in

00:05:36.520 south india in a place uh called vijayvada in andhra pradesh and and your your family was uh or is

00:05:44.000 a muslim or christian or what what's your background so my my grandfather was a freedom fighter worked

00:05:49.860 with gandhi and uh i come from a hindu family oh so you're but you're so you're not eating beef i

00:05:55.660 presume right i never ate beef growing up but there was all other types of meat chicken lamb shrimp fish

00:06:02.660 um but um beef was not part of our you know daily menu but uh as i went to medical school after that

00:06:10.460 i went to medical school in south india in a place called pondicherry and this institution was called

00:06:15.140 jipmer and it was a group of 50 students that were selected from the 25 states approximately

00:06:20.620 about two kids per state were selected to get into this uh all india institute and uh we had to run

00:06:26.660 our own cafeteria it was all a student body led uh medical school for operations and uh i was in

00:06:33.180 charge of the cafeteria for three months and uh i worked with lots of chefs and kind of made the

00:06:38.800 cafeteria very popular because we served the best uh food out there but i also went to the market

00:06:44.060 to procure a lot of meats and uh i actually saw large-scale animal slaughter and i was disturbed

00:06:49.780 by you know a couple of things one is the inefficiency with which you know we were converting

00:06:57.060 all the vegetables and grains into a small amount of meat but what bothered me was the way it was done

00:07:03.960 and uh i told myself on that day that if there is a major problem in the world i'd love to solve

00:07:10.660 this would be right up there at the top and continued along on medical science and uh i became

00:07:16.580 a vegetarian in medical school but really missed the taste of meat and really struggled to stay a

00:07:22.060 vegetarian and subsequent to that i came to the u.s i uh wanted to train at the mayor clinic so i ended up

00:07:28.240 doing cardiology and international cardiology and advanced imaging and during that process um i really

00:07:34.960 got interested in understanding muscle and how muscle regenerates from a heart perspective when

00:07:40.660 i was treating patients that had cardiac arrest or heart attacks and i was doing procedures on them

00:07:45.260 and injecting stem cells into their hearts and watching that muscle regenerate and that kind of led to

00:07:51.600 a thought of why can't we do the same process and and develop a method to grow meat and it was a

00:07:57.980 very out of the box idea and as i started talking to people about it you know i got very curious uh

00:08:04.240 eyebrows you know lifting and saying yeah that's that's interesting but uh no one really gave it

00:08:10.340 much of a serious thought and i started searching on the internet and came across this organization

00:08:15.300 called new harvest which was founded by a you know brilliant you know thinker philosopher named

00:08:19.980 jason metheny in 2005 just about the time when i graduated from cardiology at the mayor clinic

00:08:26.020 and i wrote to jason and said jason i really think this is something we should explore and uh i used

00:08:31.620 to go to washington dc on a regular basis back then and i i met jason and he asked me to be on the

00:08:36.580 board of new harvest and after serving on the board of new harvest for three years one thing that was

00:08:41.340 abundantly clear to me was that there was a significant amount of interest globally not just in

00:08:47.380 the u.s in places you would traditionally call progressive maybe uh you know a few cities on the

00:08:52.420 coast but globally people were asking could we do this better could we do a more sustainable

00:08:58.040 meat production uh methods or techniques and uh there were academics writing there were investors

00:09:05.320 writing and just general public who were interested in in this concept and uh at that point honestly i

00:09:11.340 never thought i would start a company myself i was just trying to encourage academics or others to

00:09:17.880 kind of start ventures in this area and it was very you know enlightening for me because while there was

00:09:23.280 a lot of interest among people there was nobody willing to take the step and say yes i'm going to

00:09:29.120 dedicate my career to make this a reality there were a number of experts in tissue engineering in

00:09:34.820 academic labs who had you know phenomenal grants to do medical research but for them to shift their

00:09:41.240 career focus and also their labs focus into a totally new field which did not have any federal

00:09:48.000 funding or nih funding was a big risk and essentially academics are also running their own business because

00:09:53.840 they have to run their labs pay salaries to their phds who came believing in them right and it was a huge

00:10:00.120 risk for them to shift their priorities and uh that's when i decided that look i've been thinking about this

00:10:04.640 since i was 12 i have a phenomenal career i've been building in cardiology but there are 35 000

00:10:11.700 cardiologists out there in the u.s and uh i decided that i'm going to assemble a team myself and start a

00:10:17.940 venture and you know i interviewed a number of phds who had deep experience in skeletal muscle biology

00:10:24.440 and found my co-founder whose name is nick genovese who also has been on the same mission for the last 15

00:10:31.420 years and we teamed up together and we said let's put an idea to the venture capital group in san

00:10:37.060 francisco and if there is interest in the private sector that is where we should be because we can

00:10:43.160 motivate people to really help us solve this problem and it's been a surreal experience in the

00:10:49.260 last six months we wrote to this venture capital group called sos ventures and within an hour of our

00:10:54.760 application they were on the phone saying we want you to move down here and we believe in this idea

00:10:59.400 and since then it's been um a wave of interest from all kinds of people meat eaters who love eating

00:11:07.940 meat and some who love the taste of meat but still had some some guilt eating it and then from vegetarians

00:11:15.040 and vegans who were thinking if we should redefine the definition of what a vegetarian or vegan is if

00:11:21.300 this meat comes from not slaughtering an animal it's been a you know long answer for you but i did want

00:11:27.260 to walk you through the process no it's great it's great to know how you came to this this is such a

00:11:33.020 pain point and it's it's a pain point that i think um many people are are just reluctant to acknowledge

00:11:39.780 given their attachment to and and perceive dependence on eating meat i am now rather famously one of these

00:11:48.120 people who stumbled into a kind of self-intervention on my own podcast where i was talking to the the

00:11:54.100 psychologist paul bloom and we each put on our short list of things that uh our future descendants

00:11:59.640 would be scandalized by you know as we are scandalized by the the slaveholders in our recent

00:12:05.100 past we we both said that our descendants will be horrified to know what we did with factory farming

00:12:11.900 the way we mistreated and killed billions of animals in a way that um we managed to do more or less with a

00:12:20.040 clear conscience simply because we were keeping the details out of sight and out of mind and you know

00:12:25.280 as just in that podcast i more or less confessed my hypocrisy i realized that that i i found the

00:12:32.540 details morally indefensible and i found it kind of a starkly unethical area of my life around which i

00:12:39.580 wasn't really paying much of a psychological cost because again i wasn't thinking about it you know i was

00:12:45.100 just food was magically arriving on my plate every meal and i was you know obviously i'm not an idiot

00:12:52.520 i know i know what the details are but i managed to not pay attention to them and and many many millions

00:12:59.600 of people i i would argue most people are accomplishing the same psychological experiment in their own lives

00:13:07.080 and if they were forced to meditate on the details both the ethical details and just the economic

00:13:14.680 and environmental issues which perhaps we'll go into um i mean even if even if you're totally

00:13:19.700 sanguine about killing animals and giving them miserable lives up until the moment of their deaths

00:13:25.600 it seems to me that very few people can be sanguine about the environmental and health and economic

00:13:32.240 implications of of what factory farming is doing to our world so it doesn't surprise me at all that

00:13:39.200 there is or will be a huge market for this if you can accomplish your aim so so let's talk a little

00:13:45.400 bit about just what is entailed what are the roadblocks between where you are now and and what you would

00:13:52.560 hope to accomplish yes so let me explain to you the process where at a very high level what we're doing

00:13:58.540 is instead of growing a full animal over 12 to 24 months and then slaughtering it and just taking the

00:14:06.000 meat we like and throwing away the bones and the skin and the hair what we're doing is we're growing

00:14:10.360 the same meat from the fundamental building blocks of life which are the meat cells so we identify

00:14:16.280 the best meat cells possible from whether it's a cow or a pig let's say from a pork shoulder or a top

00:14:23.100 sirloin and from these cells we identify those that are capable of self-renewing themselves

00:14:28.160 and we cultivate them in a very safe and clean environment so that they can grow just like a small

00:14:34.020 plant grows into a larger plant using nutrients amino acids peptides minerals vitamins oxygen sugars

00:14:41.020 and once we get the meat to a consistency that we like for the product we harvest the meat and if we

00:14:48.240 harvest the meat early on in the process of of growing the meat then it's more like tender cuts of meat and

00:14:54.180 if we wait a little bit longer it's more texturized so that's a very high level picture of what we're trying

00:14:59.680 to do and we feel pretty confident that the science has been worked out in our minds and in our

00:15:06.640 experiments so far as well as the prototypes we've been able to make and and as you know from the wall

00:15:11.960 street journal article we've completely grown cooked and tasted meatballs as well as fajitas and that was a

00:15:19.440 watershed moment in the in our company's life because while we knew we could do it we just did not know

00:15:25.300 how it was going to taste and once we put that in our mouths and also some of the investors and

00:15:30.020 tasters it was abundantly clear within a few seconds that it had a very distinct meat flavor

00:15:35.940 that i completely forgot about for the last several years because i was eating meat analogs whether they

00:15:41.460 were made from plant proteins or texturized vegetable protein and and that was a watershed moment and we

00:15:47.040 knew okay good we've got the taste issues solved and we have to continue to work on the types of products

00:15:52.820 texture formulations so to come back to your original question what are our hurdles i think

00:15:59.100 the biggest hurdle for us to get to market as fast as possible is funding and the rate at which we could

00:16:05.700 raise funding then the second one is the ability to scale up to a level where we can manufacture this

00:16:12.720 in large quantities and basically align or integrate with the current distribution systems because what we're

00:16:19.660 trying to do is to make the upstream processing that's you know really filthy or not very clean or

00:16:26.640 inhumane be replaced by this new system of growing meat but we can still continue to use all the

00:16:32.920 distribution you know meat meat distribution meat formulation packaging consumer packaging goods and

00:16:39.180 the usual route that current meat industry uses and the third hurdle i would say is perceptions

00:16:45.300 and this is where your poll and our coincidence of our paths really helped because that 15 000

00:16:52.200 members that you polled about 83 of them who said they'll absolutely switch and a few other polls

00:16:59.280 we've seen so far tell us that perception may not be such a big hurdle but i'm sure we will have some

00:17:04.960 issues with that where we have to explain why our meat is just as natural as in fact more natural than

00:17:12.000 what we're eating now because we are growing it in safe clean environments using natural substances

00:17:17.260 so for example there are there are no antibiotics there are no contaminants and i would say this and

00:17:24.120 maybe other people would also agree with me that there is nothing natural about the conventional meats

00:17:29.520 we are eating now because the chickens that we eat now grow six to seven times faster than what they

00:17:36.440 would in the natural environment the cows give about 10 times more milk than what they would naturally give

00:17:41.820 and the turkeys are so top heavy that they can't even stand up to breed and there is nothing natural

00:17:48.140 about that that's just the state of how modified genetically or environmentally they've been by the

00:17:55.280 current meat production techniques and to top that off because they're grown in such intense confined

00:18:00.540 conditions let's say a thousand pigs in a small barn that's filled with feces or waste material they have

00:18:06.060 to pump these animals with antibiotics which leads to antibiotic resistance and superbugs and also sets

00:18:12.440 up the stage for really bad zoonotic diseases like the bird flu or the swine flu we hear about every year

00:18:18.220 now none of that is there in our process so i would argue instead of calling the synthesized meat or

00:18:23.580 synthetic meat this is more a naturally cultured meat because we're letting these cells grow naturally and

00:18:29.900 providing them with a naturally safe environment and i think our work and i'm hoping lots of other

00:18:35.660 people follow us is going to define a new kind of agriculture that will change the way we approach food

00:18:41.580 in the future i want to get on to the perception issue because i think it's i think that's a fascinating

00:18:47.340 one and i and that the response to to the poll was um i think very useful there but but i don't want

00:18:53.500 people to ignore the very condensed litany of um concerns uh health concerns mostly that you just

00:19:01.660 went through because and you know we don't have to get into it at length but when you talked about

00:19:06.060 the level of antibiotic use or the emerging epidemics and even you know feared pandemics based on

00:19:14.300 our proximity to livestock and the mingling of livestock for instance you've got these you know open

00:19:19.820 air poultry markets in asia where you know wild waterfowl drop their droppings or even are caught

00:19:27.100 and sold in in confinement with chickens i mean this is the reservoir of bird flu and all of the

00:19:35.340 subsequent mutations in these viruses that um you know we are wisely worried about which would very

00:19:42.460 likely kill in the worst case hundreds of millions of people if we had a proper pandemic analogous to the

00:19:48.860 flu of 1918. that's just one reason why living in proximity to livestock or the indefinite future

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Making Sense - Sam Harris - February 20, 2016

#28 — Meat Without Misery

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