Eating Cultivated Meat: Dr. Uma Valeti’s Moonshot To Engineer The Future Of Food & End Factory Farming

29:53And it almost seems like there's a race now. Are we gonna be able to outpace the damage that we've done and through technological innovation, create a better world. And for you to say, I'm not gonna be this cardiologist that I spent all these years training for, and I'm gonna do this instead with all the risk that that entails in the many years and toil and all of the obstacles that you faced? I mean, this is a long journey that you're on. Well, I'd say this is one of the most meaningful journeys. I'm unable to think of a better way of spending my life. I've tried really hard to say, what else can I do?

30:36And when I look at the prospect of, what if looking back 30, 40 years from now, look back on my life and say, would you have rather spent time as a cardiologist and saved two or three thousand lives or would you have rather wanted to be a part of a movement that basically stood up and said let's figure out a way to have what we love but let's let it not come with this incredible downside of wreaking havoc on the planet causing unimaginable suffering for hundreds of billions of animals and trillions of animals and not perpetuating the amount of risk we are taking related to pandemics, zoonotic diseases, the superbugs from antibiotic resistance.

31:28And also maybe finding ways to have better jobs than the ones that have significant occupational risks of getting hurt or killed during work. Like it just felt like an incredible win if even I'm a part of a movement that makes that happen in my lifetime or well beyond my lifetime. And if our kids can inherit a world where they're like, boy, are we glad someone challenged the principles here. And every single time the answer came back as, this is the most risky path, but this is the most worthwhile path. And I'm not going into this naive. I'm going into this knowing that the chances of success on a transformative change like this are infinitesimally small for two reasons.

32:24One, the obvious one, it's never been done before. And until it's done, I would never be able to say there's enough people who believe in it. So that's a given. And the second one is this innovation has to happen in the face of established norms, traditions, cultures, and incumbent industries. And the hope that I have in this is we truly believe that this is a big tent moment for the world. By that, I mean, when we have a big tent. It welcomes the diversity of thought and opinions and choices. And I can see under this tent people who are hardcore meat eaters who just love the taste of meat and will never give it up.

33:12And I can see under this tent people who will basically, let's say, are completely like on the other side, they could be vegans or plant-based. And there could be people in the middle who I call are the largest group of people in the world who are the conflicted carnivores who love to eat meat, but would rather not think about the process of how meat comes to the table because we love the product, don't love the process. And truly, I think cultivated meat gives something for everyone. The choice of eating real meat, the choice of not hurting the animals or the planet, and the incredible beauty of preserving the choice And I think it's not easy, but if there is hope for it, I am running towards that hope.

33:59And fortunately, I have a few people, I can look back and say, there is a team of 200 plus people running with me on our team, saying that we are in the arena. We are the ones that are trying to make this happen every single day, despite all of the punches and the skeptics. But I don't see any other path to getting to the other side. So I think that's going to be the journey of transformation. And it's not unique to us. It's going to be what people have done in the past and lived through it and faced incredible amount of skepticism. And I'll give you examples in medicine. Penicillin, polio vaccine.

34:33In the early days of penicillin and polio vaccine, there were an incredible amount of skeptics because there were delays. There were some people who got polio because of the vaccine. But we didn't give up. And here we are. We've nearly eradicated polio across the world. and penicillin has been saving billions of lives. Now that's kind of what I think the anchor here is and that's the frame in which I would want to be thinking about this. Any change to the paradigm, any kind of new thing that has never existed before is gonna be met with resistance in the current moment, right, everything from germ theory to, you know, the planet orbiting around the sun, you know.

35:14So that's not surprising. And it's always interesting to look back and look at those case studies and realize that, you know, the people who are making the change have to think not about what the current moment is saying about what they're doing, but what, you know, the next generation or the next century is gonna think or reflect upon that kind of change. And that's a hard mind space to inhabit. Oh, yes, absolutely. I mean, I'm not saying this is easy. It has not been easy on me. has not been easy on my team, has not been easy on my family. And the ray of hope that is keeping us going is we now have a track record of having done things people said were impossible to do.

36:01You know, when we started out in 2015 and 2016, the skeptics were challenging the science and saying the science is never going to work. Then the culinaries were challenging and saying it's never going to taste good. Then the policymakers and people who knew how hard regulation was, were saying, it's never going to get regulatory approval. Guess what? All of those are behind us. And half of our lifetime as a company and an industry has been spent during COVID. And who predicted a global pandemic when we started it? And we had our aspirations and goals and saying, we think all of these things are possible.

36:42Now, they have been possible and we've had some delays in timelines. We would have wanted to be on market earlier, but we came on market maybe 12 to 18 months later than what we wanted to be. But in the face of a global pandemic and in the face of incredible challenges that we've had in general for a world that's become so polarized in just my lifetime, and I feel like this is a huge win. I mean, this is not even a small win. This is a huge win that cultivated meat exists in the world and has moved from science fiction to reality. So I'd say the first chapter is done. The success is not guaranteed.

37:17There is multiple chapters to be written. In the next chapter, I think we need to make cultivated meat available to a lot more people than the small scale at which it's available. And that is the laser focus of our team. And I have more conviction now than when we started the journey in 2015 or 16, because I've seen what the single-minded purpose of a team can get us to do. And I also have seen that when there is no precedent, it is up to the pioneers to build precedent. And that is going to come with incredible amount of heartache and incredible amount of resilience. And there's a lot more experience behind us now.

37:58Yeah, it's very different now than it was even a handful of years ago. So in terms of just the mechanics of this, essentially what you're doing is you're taking a biopsy of an animal, extracting a cell line, and then cultivating those cells in what is ostensibly like a vat, like a brewing process, correct? And there's two factors at play here. There's the tissue production piece, and then there's the suspension production. Like you have to create a lattice work for this to actually kind of cohere or create the, you know, the visual appeal and the texture that a meat would have. Is that accurate?

38:42Yeah, I mean, it is accurate. And it's also, you're going into a depth, which basically tells me you're well right into this field, but most people will not be coming into it with that level of depth of tissue and suspension. But what I'd say is the following. The proof is in the tasting. And you'll get to taste both of the products today. And you can tell me how you feel about the suspension product and the tissue product. And here's the reason why. because the suspension products we're making, which are going to be coming to market in the next generation of our release are at least a thousand times more scalable and thousand times cheaper than where tissue products can get us there right now.

39:26Which then tells me if we have to access a much larger market that is going to define us based on taste, suspension is the one that is in the near term, the solution. And then what tissue will add, as we talk about more complex products of complex steaks and marbling and all of that into the premium products, tissue is going to add that. And we are developing both those technologies. And the first product we have on the market is a tissue product. And we chose that with a specific intention to show what the North Star is and that doing the hard things first of developing a full tissue product is going to teach us a lot more about taste and what parts of it we should go to scale quickly with.

40:08And that is the journey of us at Upside, where we learned a lot making the first full chicken breast chicken filet product. And all of it is chicken tissue. It makes its own lattices. It makes its own what we call scaffolds. And the cells there are incorporating every feature and flavor of what it is to make it into the full chicken breast-like product. When we took out and broke that apart, and we realized there were some very specific learnings that let us get to a very similar tasting product with nutrition that is on par with what we have with conventional meat products, but can be done much faster.

40:48And you'll also taste those products. And we're looking to get regulatory approval for the second set of products to get to market in the very near future. And when I talk about getting ready for the next chapter, that is how we want to show proof of scale. Well, should we do a testing? We should, absolutely. Let's do it. This is a good moment to take a break and like see what we're dealing with. I have a question to ask before we take a break. Sure. What would you pay for a plate of chicken that you feel like I can get behind this because it did not have to cause the downsides that I'm against in the world.

41:28And if I just, I'm gonna push this in front of you. This is, let's say this is a menu for you. This is the menu, all right. It says menu, upside chicken filet, pan seared with a vegan white wine butter sauce, charred scallions and tomatoes and scallion oil garnish. And then the upside shredded chicken, lettuce cups with seared chicken, sauteed vegetables, miso glazed and cilantro garnish. Sounds wonderful. I don't know that I'm the right person to ask that question. I've been vegan for 17 years. So I'm not necessarily in the market to buy chicken and to consume chicken. I think that question is better put to a traditional omnivore.

42:13I'm curious about your thoughts. Like I'm going to taste your product. Yes. But this is very much, you know, out of my wheelhouse, so to say. It's been quite a long time since I've tasted chicken. Oh, how long? 17 years. Wow. Yeah, I've been plant-based for a long time. Okay.

42:37So this is gonna be an interesting experience, I guess I would say. I'm imagining this is your first stuff experience on the show. Yeah, it'll be interesting to see what the response is to this. I'm sure it will be controversial, right? I'm not somebody who, like I gave up meat and dairy a long time ago. I wasn't somebody who did it initially for ethical considerations, but that has since become a primary thing for me. And I would say I'd be disingenuous if I didn't crave meat products from time to time, but it's been so long that I rarely think about it anymore. So from an ethical perspective, I don't have a quandary tasting any of these things.

43:25it'll be strange to see what my taste buds do. That'll be interesting. So maybe I'll ask you the question afterwards. Okay. And give it some thought. But I think asking an omnivore is what we're actually doing. Because we know that people who have stopped eating meat are not our primary market. We know that people that are in the big zone of being a conflicted carnivore where they love eating meat, but want a potentially a better way of it coming to the table, are the initial market. So we're doing a lot of studies on this. So that's where this question came from. And there is a place for the ethical vegan.

43:59If the reason for giving up meat is purely ethics and you have removed the ethical dilemma from that decision tree, then it opens up the possibility for the ethical vegan to embrace this because there is no suffering involved. Yeah, that is something that'll be very important. I think as we advance in getting our next generation products, it's very clear to us that the only thing that is animal there is the animal cell. In the process, everything the animal cell is eating, we are gradually eliminating anything that requires an animal to be raised and provide that input to us. So in the second generation of products, the only thing we have there is animal cell.

44:39And all of the products we're using to feed the animal cell are natural products and products that are commonly used in food that the animal cell is also consuming. So we think that that is when this real ethical dilemma for vegans will actually crop up. And if people became vegan because of animal welfare issues or animal cruelty issues or environmental issues, they will be able to say, what if that is not an issue anymore? Would I want to taste the product? And I think that's incredible. Well, let's check it out. All right, let's do it. Cool.

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48:43I mean, first of all, I mean, beautiful, thank you. It's wonderful that you came and prepared this. And the smell is indistinguishable from chicken. I can tell you that right off the bat, like just going over there while it was simmering. I'm like, oh my Lord, it's crazy, right? This is a big moment, Uma. Yeah, I've had chicken in 17 years, so. Well, I mean, we are giving it to you, this is naked chicken, right? You're seeing it's fully exposed and feel free to play with your hands, pull it apart, all the shreds. I mean, if you, yeah, it's like the striation in it. I mean, it looks exactly like chicken.

49:24That's wild. Wow. I couldn't tell the difference. I mean, granted, it's been a long time since I've had it. It's not like I had chicken yesterday, so I could compare it, but there's nothing about it that feels any different than any chicken that I've ever had. That's really quite something. Trying to wrap my head around it. All right, I'm gonna eat the lettuce cup. Here, you should be having some of this too. I think I probably eat the most cultivated chicken in the world. You probably have, right? Has anybody eaten more cultivated chicken than you? I would challenge that nobody has eaten more than me, my wife, my kids, and my dog.

50:03So it's been amazing to have that for us. Unbelievable. Wow. So that chicken you're tasting now is not on the market yet. Right. That is a thousand times more scalable. This is the next generation. And this is what we've been relentlessly working on for the last year and a half since we opened our production facility in Emeryville called Epic. And if you visit Epic, you'll see very large cultivators that you've been talking about, like the wax you described, the 2000 liters and 200 liters and much, much larger ones than what the tissue was made out of. And the beauty of that is we're able to make tons of it now.

50:49And the amount of product we have is so much in terms of our testing capabilities and supply capabilities. It's more scalable, why? because of the facility that you've built or is there something about this next generation product that makes it more scalable by its nature? Yeah, two things. It's much simpler production process, faster production process. And it also allows us to be able to add some texture with ingredients that we can get from plant-based so that we can get some texture added out of it. If we can't get the full texture, we can easily pick up the piece of texture that we want and include in there.

51:30It improves the nutritionals. It gives us the ability to say, taste is king. And the next thing is price is a really important practical attribute. We can put price on this significantly lower than the tissue product. But the only reason we knew how to make that is because we made the tissue product from the ground up. Right. Right. So what is one lettuce cup cost right now currently? Oh. No, so there's, I think this is about a pound of chicken. It looks like there's about 10 shredded pieces in this cup. I'd say this is about a pound of chicken and I don't have the exact price, so don't quote me on it, but I'd say this is our target of what we're trying to do is to be somewhere in the realm of little more expensive than organic chicken.

52:15And that's the target of what we're going after and we come into the market, that's what we're going to be putting at in the range of 10,$20 for a pound. but if I look at the price of chicken on the menu right now, if I go, I just came from the Burbank airport, there was a chicken sandwich, it was$16. Yeah, that's airport pricing too. And then if I go into Shake Shack, that is not airport, it's in the range of 10,$12 per sandwich. So I think what we're trying to target is trying to get to those levels where you then have a choice to say, do I want upside chicken or do I want, you know, a chicken that comes from, let's say a vertical factory farm.

53:01That's what that product can do. And what is the time horizon on that? I mean, you have FDA approval of this product here, right? It was like June of 2023, you got the green light from them. And that opened up all kinds of possibilities. This next generation product, you have to now submit that to FDA. We have already submitted. We're waiting for approvals. That product has been on the market now for coming on eight months, nine months. We've been selling it. We are the only company in the world that's been selling cultivated meat nonstop. And the idea is to sell in places where people can recognize what it is and taste it.

53:40And then say, I am ready for placing an order. And I think we are just, I think we are filling up the order book that we need for getting the next generation products on the market. All right, so now I'm tasting the one that is approved, the chicken filet. The taste is great, but there is a texture difference. Obviously, it feels more like a patty than actual like chicken muscle fiber that you would have if you were eating chicken from a live animal. Yeah, the improvement is what we've learned from it. The flavors have been transferred. The texture on the product that we've released on the market is the most tender chicken you can get.

54:21So it's a softer texture, more tender than what you would get in the grocery store. And when we had, you know, tasters come in from, let's say, a James Beard award-winning chef who went in a stealth mode and tasted in the restaurant, the reviews we got on that was, it is the most chickeny chicken I've ever tasted. and it evokes me of the nostalgia of what chicken used to taste like in the 1960s and 70s where the heritage chickens had those flavor, fully flavorful. And that it's not the dry chicken that you get from a grocery store. So what we used from that was the best parts of it. Like how do you have the moistness and the tenderness transfer over?

55:08Add a little bit more texture because in American palate, there's a requirement for more bite. than the tenderness. So we looked at that and transferred it into the next generation of the products. And we're also trying to say, how can this become nutritionally even more stronger than the first product? So the second products will have lower fat, lower cholesterol, and also a higher amount of protein. So there's a lot of things that we're also transitioning into nutritional. So I'm really excited about getting this next generation products on the market. So you mentioned that you started your first prototype was this meatball.

55:47You're now heavily focused on chicken. Is there something inherent about chicken? Why is chicken the focus? Because you could be doing anything. You could be doing antelope or elk or whale or any animal, right? You could be cultivating. Yeah, we could. Because the science is the same. The science would be the same. We just said, look, we are trying to create transformative change without asking people for transformative change, which means I'm not asking for behavior change. We are not asking for behavior change. We are saying people love to eat meat. So what are the most consumed meats in the world?

56:23Chicken. pork and beef. So we've always been very clear about the first products that we'll release are going to be chicken, beef, and pork in some combination. And we started working on all of these cells. And we said, let's not try to pick one because we want to do beef. Let's pick the one that is closest to getting to commercial. Let's pick the ones that are performing the best. Let's pick the ones that we feel are the easiest to get into the market. and chicken won in that race. So that's why we have chicken as the first product. Beef is a close second. So in the next iteration of products that we're going to be bringing, it'll be beef.

57:07And if I just look about two different things of impact, let's just take today, for example, April 23rd, 2024. There will be a million cows that would have been sent for slaughter today, 4 million pigs and 200 million chickens. So when you think about impact on animals, chicken by far 200 times more than cows. When we think about our next product, we think about what if a beef product can come on the table? The impact on that would be predominantly related to the amount of greenhouse gas emissions that'll come out of it. So one has taste in animal welfare. The other one has taste in environment.

57:52We felt like those would be the first two products we want to bring out. But we are working on duck. We've done tastings of duck. We are working on crustaceans, things like lobster. We have a few favorite seafood things like salmon that people have asked us. So we have in the R &D that we're doing, we are working on some of those cell lines. And I think in the future, we'll see products like that coming from upside. But we're also encouraging a lot of other companies in the space saying, I mean, this is a big market. It's a$2 trillion market. And it can't be just one player in this. There could be thousands of companies.

58:30There's room for many, and there are increasingly more and more players. But I think the more players that you see, that makes change all the more inevitable over time, right? The amount of collective pressure that then is exerted on the powers that be and the regulatory gatekeepers, et cetera. it makes the path forward seem much more viable. Yeah. And the fact that so much investment money, I mean, were you the first company to go out and raise and plant a flag, but there's now like lots, you know, what's happening in Singapore and Israel and Australia, I mean, how many companies are there right now?

59:12There are a hundred plus companies now. We were the first company to say, we are laser focused on bringing and cultivated meat to the world. and we started off as Memphis Meats in 2015. Why did you change the name? That's a great question. I think when we started recognizing that this has become more of a movement across the world, one of the first questions we kept getting asked is, why Memphis? And we spent more time explaining why we picked the name Memphis versus actually telegraphing our intent of what we're trying to do. and our intent is to bring upside to food production, meat production.

59:49And we wanted to have a global name that can be telegraphed quickly. And the intention behind it is that the symbol is a heart. It speaks to mission. It's a company with heart trying to do the things that we believe matter in the world. And the idea of talking about upsides to food production was more important to us than talking about downsides. So therefore, we wanted to telegraph that and switch the name from Memphis Meats to upside. So right now we have occasional tastings that you're doing in San Francisco, right? Is it Bar Creme? So we have done tastings in Bar Creme continuously for seven months and we've sold in California.

1:00:31And what we've done is we've had a number of diners come through and had the experience. Now we wanted to take it on the road. So we said the next seven months or 12 months is about taking the chicken on the road. So we took our chicken to New York and sold it in New York in February. And in March, we took it to Texas and sold in Texas around South by Southwest. And then we have a few more events planned in many areas of the country. And the idea is we'd like to be able to get to sale in most states in the United States before the next set of regulatory approvals come so we can show people what's possible.

1:01:08And then we are also starting to show this is what's coming next. and our laser focus is to be in the 50 United States. By when? Are you out of the time prediction business at this point? I'd say all of that, to be able to sell in the 50 US states with the next set of scalable products, I would say, look, I would venture out and say, we wanna be able to accomplish that in the next two years. Wow. Right. So the next chapter is a five-year chapter in my mind. In this five-year chapter, there will be a definitive proof of scale being done showing that under one roof, people can produce millions of pounds of meat.

1:01:47And that millions of pounds will start showing a pathway to a profitable business. And that's really what our laser focus is on. And while we do that and start producing these millions of pounds, we wanna be able to sell it in the 50 United States. Right, and it will come at a certain price point, but with scale and over time. I mean, all of the resources that you've raised have gone into the science, the R &D, but also into building a facility that makes room for that scalability. Because it is only through scale that you're ever gonna approximate price parity. And price parity is really the game in terms of making progress in this world.

1:02:28Yeah, I think ultimately there is a path to getting to price parity. And we can't try to step down multiple levels without being able to sustain that price. And the idea is to show that as we get to scale and we show that the end-to-end production can be seen by someone, tasted by someone, and they can then get deep into saying, will this be ultimately a more profitable business than investing in more feedlots or slaughterhouses or typical way of how we get meat to the table? Will it be less expensive, not just for direct costs, but the externalized costs of the environmental impact. I think we just need to show some data points for this.

1:03:12And infrastructure investments in this are significant. And so far, the investment in this field has been tiny, tiny, tiny compared to major change that we've witnessed in other industries. In the last eight years, a total of$2.7 or$8 billion has gone into this industry directly into companies like ours and companies that are supporting companies like ours. That's not even the cost of a single battery plant to make an electric vehicle. And when we're thinking about the scale of the industry, it's a$2 trillion industry every year. And that industry size is doubling. And this investment is so tiny.

1:03:53In order for us to become real in the world, there has to be significant public-private partnerships, significant ability of governments to say, hey, this is worth living in this world. This innovation is a must have. And let's not try to make it harder, but let's try to figure out how, just like innovations like refrigeration, just like innovations like manufacturing of antibiotics, manufacturing of electric vehicles, all of these things have been supported. I think the next big transition is supporting the food transition. And that's what we are trying to provide data points for. We want a lot of companies in this space to be successful because the ecosystem will then thrive.

1:04:39And we want lots of people choosing to go into this field, which has already started happening, by the way. The major food and ag universities have undergrad and postgrad programs in the space. And thanks to nonprofits like Good Food Institute, I think they're singularly ahead of everybody in this field in order to get visibility of the promise of doing science and research, collaboration between academia, between governments and industries, and bringing people to solve problems which previously were just deemed by experts are not solvable. I'd say this industry would not be here if not for Good Food Institute, literally saying this is worth investing your time into.

1:05:21And I wish a lot of other nonprofits also join them in a very collaborative space. because we need that. We have universities like UC Davis, UCLA, Tufts, and a number of other universities in the US. This is talent building. And as we are starting to build this industry, in parallel, talent has to build, in parallel, the governments have to get involved. And it needs to continue to appeal to the big tent, people on the left, people on the right, people in the middle. And I feel like it's positioned well. There are some challenges that we have in terms of communicating this really well, trying to make sure that the balance between incredible amount of hope and hype is it's always a very delicate line to walk because when you're in the arena, you see incredibly hopeful things.

1:06:07And then you also see struggles, but to communicate all of that at the same time live when it's happening because we're trying to be transparent is a super significant challenge and I don't want to underestimate it. But the only way to make progress is to start setting ourselves goals and say, I'm not gonna lose sight of my North Star for this next scale, next chapter of scale, the chapter after that is cost, the chapter after that is health. So we're just kind of breaking it down in those segments and trying to march forward. Your critics have been quite vocal about the fact that this is never gonna happen.

1:06:45This is a pipe dream. I had Pat Brown from Impossible Foods on this podcast say, forget about, you know, it was called lab-grown meat then. It's never gonna happen. He was saying, this is just a pipe dream. It's fool's errand. There certainly have been articles written critical of this mission that you're on. Yet at the same time, you cannot deny the viability. I mean, I just tasted it. It's a real thing. It's unbelievable the way it tastes. It exists in the world. There are plenty of companies out doing this. There is a lot of money pouring into this space, perhaps just a teardrop compared to other areas.

1:07:24But we are seeing that collaboration amongst competitors to put pressure on government entities in the form of the FDA approval in 2023. That opens the door to future approvals. The cooperation with Good Food Institute and the role that that organization is playing as sort of a semi-lobbying arm, I suppose, on some level, but also an educational arm to help government and industry and the financial sector understand what is happening right now. On some level, it feels like an inevitability. And it's gotta feel very validating and exciting for you as the early mover in this space to actually start seeing these changes.

1:08:11But I brought up Bar Crem and this sort of roadshow that you've been on with Tasting. tastings just to kind of underscore the fact that, you know, short of that or going to Singapore and enjoying Josh Tetrick's, you know, eat just fair in, you know, one restaurant there, this is not accessible to the public yet. There is still a long road before this is gonna be, you know, on people's plates and average homes across the world. There still is a long way to go. So I guess the question I have is, why is this problem so hard? Why is the degree of difficulty so challenging, this path towards price parity and scale and availability?

1:08:55Yeah, first of all, I want to point out that the skeptics and the critics and the statements you talked about, what Pat Brown said on the show maybe, are some of the kindest words that we hear. There are even worse critiques and even worse skeptics. And one of the things I tell my team is, I have been waking up to criticism every single morning and going to bed with more criticism and skepticism every single night for the last eight years. And - That's a lot. How do you manage that? I think this is the proof in front of you, right? This is like you say, proof is in the pudding, the proof's in the chicken in front of you.

1:09:33These are things that people were saying virtually impossible to do. and here it is sitting right in front. A physical thing. This is not software. This is literally things that we've made with our own hands, blood, sweat, and tears against all skeptics. Like, okay, now when you have something behind you on that as a track record like that that I'm putting in front of you, it gives me and my team an enormous amount of hope that is real. And we feel like that is the only way to make progress and it solves this incredible dilemma of, will anybody ever care about it? Because now there's people wanting to buy it and they're willing to pay a significant amount of premium, another validating thing.

1:10:17And we know that, okay, what's the next thing the skeptics are saying is not possible. It is like, you'll never scale. I'm like, okay, all right, challenge accepted. That's what we're going to go after, right? So that's about the skeptics. You know, if we really want to think about but why is this so hard to do, right? That's the question you're asking. It's because this is not a quick remodel. This is literally building things from the ground up, taking the building blocks of food and saying, I'm going to take the animal cells. I'm going to feed them what they love to eat. I'm going to let nature, which is what the cell by itself is programmed to do because every animal cells has its own program already written.

1:10:59They grow, they grow and they grow and they accumulate the fats and the proteins and the aromas. And then there's the nurturing of those cells in a very safe environment. Trying to build the nature and the nurture around it and the building blocks to make a product we fall in love with involves a lot of scientific, technical, engineering, funding, communication, things that need to come together. And because we've also elected to be transparent while doing this, it creates a level of interest, anticipation, and also at the same time, oh, I can't get it. And I don't know of a better way to bring an innovation like this into the world unless conversations start very early, even before people can access it.

1:11:44Let's say in my hometown in India, where I grew up. It might take 10 years to get there, but people have to start socializing this idea that, hey, this is coming because this is a cultural change. It's not something that can just be like an iPhone that's released and you get the next model upgrade. This is literally a cultural change. It's going to take time. And I think there is no shortcuts here. We just have to be able to say there'll be good days, there'll be good months, there'll be good years. But this is something that for us to live in the world, it's going to require, you know, patience and persistence and funding.

1:12:18I mean, that's it.

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1:14:02One of the battles that you have to wage is getting people's heads around just the idea of eating an animal product that didn't come from an animal. And despite the fact that I know all too well the ills of animal agriculture, the ways in which antibiotics are used and the fecal matter in which these animals sort of live and breathe, it's an ethical disaster that presents risks to human health through consumption and also to the residents who are proximate to these slaughterhouses. There's environmental degradation, soil depletion, and yet the system is sort of entrenched, and this is just the way that things are.

1:14:48And then it's propped up and subsidized by the government to deflate the prices and make it all the more accessible while it's the least transparent industry that we have. It's shrouded in privacy and secrecy, the way that these things operate. I know all of this, and I couldn't be more excited about a better way forward that is transparent and healthier and everything. And yet at the same time, I still have this human default where I'm like, what is this science experiment that I'm eating right now? Is this safe? Is this healthy? And despite everything you've told me, that thought still sort of lingers in my mind.

1:15:29So talk a little bit about that issue and how you hope to overcome that and win the hearts and minds of people. It's going to take time. I think there's no shortcut here. I think it's going to take time. And I think it's okay for people to take the time to join this. Because this has never existed in the world. And we as humans have always wanted comfort in the choices we make. And that happens when someone takes a one step forward and somebody else follows them. And somebody else follows them. And slowly a crowd starts building. And that crowd starts becoming a larger crowd and the larger crowd becomes even larger.

1:16:11And for the type of innovation we're talking about with basically bringing meat to the table without slaughter and without environmental downsides, as our ability to scale and lower price comes forward, the crowd could get larger and larger and larger. And so that way we can actually meet the demand with the amount of supply that we can make. Not just us, but the whole industry. So I think that's actually good. The part that's important is tasting is believing, tasting is magical. And before people taste it, there's a certain level of ick factor or there's a certain level of fear. There's a certain level of things or expectations that just get demystified, just like it happened to you, right?

1:16:58They're like, oh, it tastes like chicken. But you would not believe it until you taste it. So that's one step. It's gotta be a step. The second one is coming and seeing how the production, how is it made? So as production facilities like breweries are in your backyard and you start walking and seeing it, let's say you're walking a dog, getting coffee, then you go and say, hey, this is where meat's made. And literally everything is being made in front of you with glass walls and you can look through it. Then that's a second magical moment. The third one is having somebody that you know and trust vouch for it and say, this is good.

1:17:41I think those three need to happen. And then people will have to opt in on their own at their own comfort level. And here's the beauty of it. No one is mandating that you eat this. No one is enforcing it. It's a choice that's in the world. And when we put a choice like this in the world, I firmly believe that there will be enough people who will opt in and say, this is more aligned with my values, what I consider natural, than what we currently take for granted. And what we currently take for granted, we love to think and romanticize it as being natural, but there is nothing natural about a chicken that is literally weighing five to six times larger than what it used to weigh 50 years ago because of how it's been raised.

1:18:29There is nothing natural about forced slaughter. I mean, in the time that we finish this podcast, there will be about 20 to 30 million chickens that met unnatural death. there is nothing natural about that in the way it's raised in the way it's killed at one hundredth of its lifetime i think people will have to start questioning it from a cultural perspective and what we're trying to say is this is all okay because it's a transformative change it's not disruptive it's not coming overnight and changing businesses or taking people's livelihoods away the demand for meat has continued to grow and grow and grow despite all of the challenges.

1:19:23And in the next 30 years, it's doubling. And the value for cultivated meat and plant-based products is if we can fill the delta of doubling of the demand and not ask our farmers to raise another 100 billion more animals, but start transitioning the production into what if instead of raising 10 ,000 head of cattle or 10 million chickens a year? What if I have 10 cultivators that can grow the same amount and I'll start investing in that and transitioning my family business into that? That's the opportunity I think that's going to have to get people to start saying, this is actually better for me, better for my community, better for my family and better for business.

1:20:04And I think these things will need to happen over time. It's a choice. You can have this meat or this meat or this meat. We're telling you how it's made. We're showing you the nutritionals. You literally can come and audit every part of the ingredient that is going in there, which is not possible in the current way animals are raised because our cells are growing in two weeks. And we know every single thing the cell is eating. We can trace it back to where it's being made, where the ingredient, that level of transparency is unprecedented. But you have a choice. No one's mandating it. And I think just giving it time is the most important thing that we can do and the industry can do.

1:20:41I think that's a important distinction to make because there is this perception or this idea that we're headed towards a dystopic future in which we're gonna be forced to, you know, eat bugs and lab grown, you know, like this, you see this discourse around like this idea, right? And the truth is that nobody is forcing you to do this. this is going to be a new option. And there are so many reasons why this is a more ethical and sustainable choice to make, but that choice is not being foisted upon anyone, I guess is what you're trying to say, right? Can you talk a little bit about, or get specific on how and why it's better from like a percentage or statistical point of view in terms of like land use, resources, local economy boost.

1:21:39There's also a food security and diversification, like a national security issue at play here as well. There's a lot of threads to pull when you really start to parse the various benefits of pursuing this as opposed to the current status quo. Yeah, look, I think let's just look at a couple of stats, right? 15 % of the greenhouse gas emissions in the world come from raising animals for food. A third of all the freshwater is used for raising animals for food. And these are statistics that are out there by multiple organizations that have been vetting this. But that is today's meat production. And we also know that the meat production is going to double and the demand is doubling in the next 30 something years, which then means two thirds of all our freshwater should go towards raising animals for food.

1:22:31and the greenhouse gas emission percentage will go up significantly from 15 % to wherever it will go, much beyond that. That is not even counting for the stats of how many animals are raised for food. So there's about 70 to 100 billion animals that are raised for food right now. This is meat, we're not talking about seafood. Just imagine doubling that, right? I mean, these are stats that are so large that as a human, I think our brain shuts down. I just don't want to think about it. I want to look at the beautiful plate in front of me and how it comes to me. When I think about national security, every country wants to be self-sufficient in feeding its own population.

1:23:13And some of it is possible, some of it's not possible because not every country can grow all the animals. But they could probably, in a much easier way, get the crops that feed the animal cells because they're more transportable. that's easy to have access to and do it with significantly lower resources. For instance, Good Food Institute released a study that literally went and looked at, at scale, when cultivated meat is being produced, what would that impact be? The impact is as follows, 90 % less water, 90 % less greenhouse gas emissions and no use of antibiotics. Because right now, 70 to 80 % of all antibiotics we make is given to animals.

1:24:00That means we are not increasing the likelihood of superbug formation. When we look at statistics on food poisoning, just in the United States, 48 million people get food poisoning every year. Among that, 3 ,000 people die every year. And those statistics are not changing very much. And a lot of these are traced back to raising animals for food and where that runoff is going or where the contamination source is from whether it's E. coli or salmonella. And there's a lot of other statistics we can keep going into. For instance, bird flu, right? The one that's been in Texas where it switched from an animal and decided to get into the cattle.

1:24:50Bugs can jump from an animal to another animal. And when animals are raised in such close conditions, the risk is increased exponentially. And to me, we are taking the risk of a ticking time bomb every single day. The more and more of those conditions we are willing to accept and say we will be somehow immune to the next pandemic. I think that reality is gone. And I think we're living in a new reality. And in order for us to say food safety, food security, choice, and things that fundamentally as humans we care about, like I want delicious food, but I don't want to hurt an animal. I don't want to hurt the environment.

1:25:31This one offers a Big Ten solution. So existing incumbents can transition to it gradually over decades without any risk to their current business. governments can start planning for the next 50 years and 100 years starting to say innovation like this should exist and we should start developing a talent and workforce towards it because the same talent that is doing this is also going to be useful for medicines it's also going to be useful for biology it's going to create a lot of other knowledge jobs and in parallel to artificial intelligence growing the possibilities here to make products better are significantly significantly more with us understanding biology, versus saying I'm gonna wait seven years in an animal to have a selective trade bred in, where you can do the same thing in let's say seven days.

1:26:24So I think the speed and urgency with which we can solve problems that come our way improves very remarkably. Right, not to mention getting to a situation in which suddenly there's the opportunity to repurpose land that has traditionally been used for grazing or raising crops for animals with the capacity to regenerate the soil and do something different with that land. Assuming you can successfully transition the land owner into some different version of a career. I mean, that's some of the pushback I'm sure you get. Like, what are we gonna do with the farmers? And you can say, well, we're gonna transition them into being cultivated meat farmers, but not everybody's gonna do that.

1:27:09And even if they do, suddenly they're sitting on more land than they need for that purpose. So this is why the big tent is important, that there will be multiple production methods that will need to field a growing world. Cultivated meat is going to be one of it. Regenerative agriculture will be another one. Plant-based is going to be another one. And a combination of all of these hybrid products will be another one. I do think it's an important one. And this is where food security, food safety also comes into play, that we need to have multiple tools available for us to be able to say, no matter what is thrown at us, one of them can scale up.

1:27:43And I think when you talk about regenerative agriculture, there are some benefits to it, which is when done well in a small scale, you could be able to sustain maybe not the amount of meat production we have, but maybe one-tenth or one-hundredth of what we have right now. by following that path. But ultimately, it's going to lead to a path of rationing or significant price that most people will not be able to pay. So I do think it's important to have the option of doing that. And as the land opens up, you can have more animals to be reared in the regenerative agriculture format. But it still doesn't address some of the things we've talked about.

1:28:23The environmental impact will still be there. And the animal welfare impact will still be there. the risk of pandemics or zoonotic diseases decreased but it's still there and it's still we are we are going to have to accept that all of this is done in service of feeding us what we love and if we have ways of feeding us that we love that is not just that then we're all much better off as you know as a species and i think ultimately those are the the first principle thinking is that government should start doing. And I'm thankful that, for two things, I'm very thankful that the United States, the US Department of Agriculture and FDA have seen the value of this innovation, have affirmed the safety of the products and very clearly said this should exist in the world because they are the flagship regulatory agencies in the world and countries are going to look at them.

1:29:20The second thing is I'm very grateful for the investors who took this incredible bet on us and the industry coming from nowhere and saying that, yeah, this should exist in the world. These are not investors who are looking for a quick buck to make. They all know that this is very risky. This is going to take a long time for them to even see any of this back. But they believe that this is the kind of innovation that should exist in the world. Because if they want a return, they can go and invest in 100 different sectors that will give them the return they want. on a timeline with a higher guarantee, but they chose to put their dollars here, which tells you this is much more than a return on investment.

1:30:03This is an important step for humanity to be able to say our species will have a better chance of being able to check out the things that we care about. And that's why I'm really grateful for the investors who have backed this industry. Yes, and the moonshots when they work out are the ones that pay off the best, right? I'm sure they're thinking that as well. These are smart, savvy people. They may have a long time window, but it's the big bets, the crazy ideas that once in a while work out that reap the returns that those kind of venture capitalists live for. Yes, and then look, thank God we have people that are willing to do that.

1:30:46Otherwise we would not be sitting on many of the innovations that we have, we would still be in, I don't know what to call it, we'll still be in the stone ages. And thank God for all of the inventions and innovations that were supported by, whether it's the government or whether it's private sector, we are here because of that. And I am certainly not going to sit and demonize these people that are saying, go, go, go, go. No, it's great. It's given birth to this entire idea, which is amazing. You mentioned regenerative agriculture and the many benefits of this kind of ascendant movement. But I also think that there's a sort of reductive binary discourse right now, an either or argument when it comes to the regenerative movement versus what you're doing.

1:31:39The regenerative movement is all about naturalism, getting back to the land, the solution to our environmental problems and our ethical dilemmas can be found in returning to this, for lack of a better phrase, like agrarian soil-based sensibility. Whereas what you're doing is microscopes and slides and scary people in lab coats who are crafting science experiments that are gonna change our genetic framework and turn us into some kind of different type of organism than a human being, right? Like this is the kind of conversation that's happening right now. And as great as the regenerative movement is to me, and I'm curious about your thoughts about this, the statistics just don't bear out that this model is going to be viable to feed the planet.

1:32:36It is an option, just like what you're doing will become an option. But in terms of solving the big problem of how do we feed the planet in a viable price parity type of way, it doesn't seem to me that the numbers bear out. I have not looked at the latest statistics from regenerative, but I've looked at the principles of it when people were repeatedly asking me about regenerative. So my takeaways are the following, and please correct me, which is regenerative has a place, but it is a really small space in being able to feed the world that there is just no way that we have enough land to be able to say we could have, the amount of per capita consumption of meat in the US is 230 pounds per person of meat.

1:33:29That's how much Americans are eating right now. In India, it's about one 10th of that. But we also know that the first extra dollar a family has, that parent is going to go and buy meat for their kids. So if India is going to continue to grow on the projected trajectory and reaches the American demand of meat, that is a tenfold increase. And there is just no way that I can think of regenerative agriculture being able to meet all of that because there's just not enough land in the world to do that. And the amount of time it takes to raise an animal, it takes two years for a beef to go to slaughter, for a cow to go to slaughter, nine months for a pig, and two months for a chicken.

1:34:11We can't shorten that, which is why I think if you're thinking about a very large scale transformation, I think cultivated meat has the ability to say, I could fill 30, 40, 50, 60, 70 % of the world's meat need as we scale. And now that's a multi-decade process. There's a lot of risks involved. Will it happen? Will it not happen? But if I look at the first principles and breakdown cultivated meat, for instance, the chicken lettuce cups that you had, that chicken was grown in five days. The chicken fillet, the chicken breast that you had, that was grown in two weeks. So when we're thinking about, imagine if we scale up, as we look at scale up, we think that chicken can be grown in three days, right?

1:34:57We are not there yet. But if we are growing it in three days, and if I'm making, like today, there'll be 200 million chickens sent to slaughter. So that's about 600 million pounds. If I'm making chicken in three days to five days versus it's taking two months to make that chicken, you can already start seeing if this technology scales, we're not going to be at a shortage of chicken or meat at all. It'll have to have the human population grow two, three, four X to be even having that conversation. But this is all a if. This has never been done before. I understand the risks and it may not be in my lifetime, but we're talking about multiple generations getting behind this.

1:35:38That's why I feel Cultivated is on a very different trajectory. With respect to regenerative, space is always going to be an issue and ethics will always be an issue. I don't think you can ever get around the ethics of killing an animal, which is not natural, which is, I think, no other technology, if you really are saying I'm going to put animal cells on the table, can get around the ethics issue except for cultivated meat. It is insane that we think that slaughtering an animal that's been injected with antibiotics and grown artificially fast and overfed in cramped circumstances and then led to its death is a more natural thing than what you're doing.

1:36:25But we do have this default like, well, I don't know, it's an unknown. You know what I mean? I think that's where the real like education piece comes in. There has to be, as you said, this long time window of us acclimating to this idea. You know, I've been thinking about the question you asked, how do I get over this feeling in me that, hey, I am more comfortable eating the meat that's on the table right now. Not this one, but I'm talking about meat that's normal. Well, conventional, I would not call it normal at this point, but conventional meat coming to the table. And I think the best analogy I can think of is for a long time, people who thought the world was round got laughed at.

1:37:06And it was just not cool to say that. And people got sent to their death because they said the world was round. I think this is what we're talking about here. For you to say, hey, there is nothing natural about raising an animal and pumping it full of antibiotics and taking all the risks that come with that process and sending it to an unnatural death. It's such a faraway concept right now because we don't see that side of it ever. We just see the beautiful cooked, whatever meat product that's in the center of plate. And there's a huge disconnect. And I think we have done a significant disservice in creating whatever barriers we have created to keep ourselves comfortable.

1:37:53And I think because we are questioning that fundamental premise that that is not natural, we will be asking a lot of people to be a lot more open than the presumptions they've had. So yeah, you're right. It's going to take time. And I believe that the people that believed the world was round ultimately prevailed. And the people that believe that ethics includes all of it, I think will ultimately prevail. Are there hidden energy considerations that you're dealing with right now? Some of your critics will say, oh, they paint this picture of sustainability, but it takes a lot of energy to do what you're doing.

1:38:37So I guess there's on some level, an analogy to electric vehicles and kind of what these batteries require and how they're actually charged and where these minerals come from. So what are some of the ecological or sustainability energy related concerns that you contend with? Yeah, look, I think at this stage right now, we are more energy intensive because we are doing it in very small scale. But when we start looking at what does it look like to produce 100 million pounds or a billion pounds of this, all of the benefits of producing meat in a significantly shorter duration add up. and it's an exponential improvement in the advantages that'll stack up.

1:39:24Because like I just said, if you can make chicken in five days versus two months, if I can make beef in five days versus two years, the amount of time I'm feeding these animal cells is so much shorter. And the amount of time I've got to keep the lights on to grow that much is so much shorter. In order to get there, there's a couple of technological things that we need to rely on for first principles. For instance, imagine you have a vertical farm with a million chickens in it. Can you plug all the chickens into an outlet? You can't. But if I have a cultivated meat facility that is making 3 million pounds of chicken every year, I can plug the entire thing into an outlet.

1:40:04And that's why I think on the first principle level, the production facilities that we are talking about are more energy intensive now because we're at small scale. As we get to solar, wind, nuclear, or hydrogen, all of this, our production facility can plug into. But you show me a single animal that you can plug into it, you can't. And that's really why I think the argument is neutral. Health and safety is obviously top of mind for the curious consumer. What do we know about the health and safety of your products? What do we still need to discover or understand? And kind of help me get my head around the health implications here?

1:40:47Look, here's what we know. We know that we put our entire production process in front of the FDA and the USDA. And they've looked at the entire production process, the ingredients that go into the production process. They've looked at the final product, the final nutritional information that comes out from the product. And they've looked at everything else that is on the market and deemed our product to be safe and that it should get on the market for sale. And the amount of scrutiny we had to go through for getting a single product out was incredible. Because I don't think this was the same standard that people had in the past when they were getting a food product out.

1:41:23And we got a lot of food products that we've been eating for decades. That if you look back and say, why are we taking that as a gold standard? And my question is, I don't think we should take the existing food products we have on the market as a gold standard and measure against them. I think we should know exactly where our food is coming from, what's going into it, what the nutritional information is. And if you look at the nutritional information on the chicken that you just had, it is on par or better than what you'd get if you buy chicken from the shelf. So to me, that gives me an enormous amount of confidence that I can audit that anytime I want.

1:42:02And I know the entire thing. And that's a level of safety that we have not been used to. And I would even argue that as we get to scale and as we start putting our products and trying to fine tune them, we would argue that this is the safest chicken on the planet. Because we do not have E. Coli, we do not have salmonella, we don't have antibiotics in the production process. We can audit every single ingredient that is going into feeding of this chicken cells. And you cannot have it right now with the other side. It's not possible to get away from E. Coli and salmonella as long as the animal has a gut and it is making feces.

1:42:39It's just not possible. And antibiotics are a part of the production process. Look at the data. 70 to 80 percent of the antibiotics manufactured are actually being sold to raise animals. No one is selling antibiotics for us to go to scale. Like these are the kinds of things. And we look at the nutritional labels. If we have comparable nutrition labels, good protein, good fats, and minerals, vitamins, and you're tasting it and the taste is delicious, what else is required to prove that this is safe? In my mind, it's always an evolution because we as humans now, if I take 100 people in the room, 33 of them will die from heart attacks.

1:43:2833 will die from cancers. 20 of some will die from chronic diseases, diabetes, hypertension, and the rest from accidents. I want us to challenge that paradigm, not just with cultivated meat, but with every food on the planet and say, can we make food better? Can we make food healthier? That's the big moonshot for food of saying, what can we do to make food healthier? I don't think we should accept a third of people dying from any of these causes. And I think that's the opportunity I see in us being able to investigate and make the food better with cultivated. And I would challenge the same for any other industry.

1:44:03That's a moonshot beyond the moonshot that we've been talking about. That's why I was telling you that's the fourth chapter. That's even like meta bigger. Yeah, that's chapter five, six or seven down the line. Yeah, yeah, yeah. Talk a little bit about industry cooperation. What's happening with the Tyson Foods and the ConAgras and the conglomerates in the animal agriculture space in terms of getting on board with or kind of being at odds with? Like who are the ones who are participating and who are the ones who are still holding on to the status quo? Look, this is a great story of innovation coexisting with incumbents.

1:44:49And what better way to validate that this needs to exist in the world than incumbents saying that we want you to be successful, we want to be able to invest and help you solve some of the technological problems because we can help meet the demand for meat that's coming that we might be straining our existing supplies so much. So you name Tyson, there's Cargill. Tyson and Cargill are the number one and number two meat producers in the country. Both of them are invested in this industry. They're also invested in us. The North American Meat Institute is the largest meat and poultry trade association in the world.

1:45:27They are firmly behind cultivated meat coexisting along with conventional meat and in fact penned a letter with us to the U.S. government saying that cultivated meat should coexist with conventional meat. They are also firmly against any state in the U.S. trying to ban us from existing because they recognize that innovation should coexist along with the incumbent way of feeding people. So I'm very happy to say that the Mother Lodge conglomerates who know where the demand is coming from and what kind of stress they're putting on our planet, on our health, and the antibiotic use, they've already seen this and they want this field to move forward and be an option.

1:46:13It's an existential threat to their business model. Nobody wants to be Kodak in this battle. And I think fundamentally, it goes to this idea of whether these businesses are in the cattle and chicken and animal slaughter business, or whether they're in the business of providing protein to consumers. And if it's the latter, those are gonna be the entities that are gonna be open to what you're saying versus somebody who's holding on to a certain way of doing something. Yeah, and I'm saying that that's okay because here's the reason why. As long as we say there's a big tent way of approaching and saying, if there are people buying a product made in a certain way and there is demand for it, that industry is always going to exist.

1:47:04And if there are people that are asking for a different way and having this choice, and we as an industry can support that, that industry will always exist on its own merit. What we are asking for simply is a level playing field. Do not have laws or policies that make it very hard for us to actually exist in this world. Because guess what? Like you said, we as a planet and species do not want to face an existential threat where we have to make a choice of giving up what we love. But I'll be very honest and tell you, cultivated meat as a field does not need to exist. If people today decided that we don't need to make any more meat, or if the choice is put to you of there is an existential threat coming our way, you've got a year to decide which path you want to pick.

1:48:02there's a path if you pick that you get to live and as a path you pick you don't get to live I'm certain people are going to pick the path to live but that existential question has never been posed and that is the reason why I don't believe people will become vegetarian or vegan because the question is do you want to die or do you want to eat beans I think the whole world we'll choose beans. But that question is not going to be posed anytime soon. And until that question is posed, what I think the next best question is, if you want to protect what you love to eat and also protect the life and the planet, would you make that choice?

1:48:49And I think that's what I'm here to say is an important question to answer first and develop a solution for. And ultimately, if we end up in a catastrophic situation where we've gotta face this question of die or eat beans, I think people will pick beans. We are not there. Human beings are not very good at future casting their own health decisions though. We're mostly concerned with what we're doing today and now, and we're deferring worries and concerns about our health down the, we kick that can down the road, I think, right? So the beans versus death thing, I think is, yes, we should be doing that now anyway.

1:49:26Do people do that? Not really, for the most part. You know, they're going to the drive-thrus and eating what they like to eat. Which is related to this question that I have about what we've seen over the past, I don't know, three or four years with the plant-based analog companies. We saw a lot of excitement around Beyond Meat and impossible and all these new plays being made where there were crafting palatable analogs to meat and dairy products that now provided consumers with much more choice that allowed them to choose an option that was more ecologically sustainable, didn't involve animal agriculture.

1:50:14And with that, a spike initially, stock prices going up, lots of journalism around this, lots of excitement about what this meant, the rise of the plant-based movement. But what we've seen in maybe the last 18 months or two years is a change in that sentiment where the tide has turned and a lot of people have turned against these plant-based companies. These are unhealthy, these are unnatural. What we need to do is go back to the way we used to do things a long time ago, which kind of brings up that regen idea that we were talking about earlier. So I guess my question is, are there any lessons that you can learn from observing that, that you can then apply to kind of avoid the same fate when your products become commercially viable and available?

1:51:04Okay, it's a really good question. I don't have the answer for it. And like, I wouldn't have been able to predict that plant-based will have such an incredible meteoric, rise and also a fall in the last few years. But that is an experience worth taking a lot of lessons from. I think the lessons we took away at Upside are the following. One is, taste is king. Ultimately, taste has to be the one that wins over a consumer's palate. There were some products on the plant-based side that taste was amazing. But there was an oversaturation of the market. with wannabe products that did not taste good. And I think that turned the consumer away.

1:51:50That is the most important thing where they felt like, hey, this is somewhat an inferior product on taste. I think looking back, I think holding that bar really high for anybody who was releasing products on the market would have been great. And I think that's the lesson that this field should take away. The second one is, I think underestimating the incredible amount of coordination that existed among, I think, the incumbent industry that has been facing threats of this nature for decades. And it was a simple playbook for them to execute and introduce seeds of doubt at the most vulnerable times and points.

1:52:43And I think, who has time to go and look and see, is this real? Is this not real? Is this actually healthy or not healthy? Because I would challenge a number of studies that are being quoted that are flawed studies. And I would also say there is an enormous body of evidence that shows that you could have healthy plants and healthy plant-based foods and healthy animal-based foods, and you can have unhealthy plant-based foods and unhealthy animal-based foods. It's not a binary thing, but unfortunately the nuance has been lost. And the third thing flat out, I think there is a responsibility on the part of media also to be able to present this in a way that is not just being geared for clickbait, but actually take the time to look through and say, here's the nuance.

1:53:36You could have healthy foods on both sides. Let's try to say these are the things that should exist and more and more innovation should be put in there. And that has not happened so far. And I'm hoping that in our entry into the market, we will be open to taking any other critics and skeptics and people that do not believe. And I want to go into those arenas and talk to the people who absolutely do not believe that we are good or we should exist and have the dialogue with them. I do not want to be able to just say, I'm gonna ignore that group. And I want to actually have a dialogue. And let's go head to head.

1:54:13Let's go to science to science, technology to technology. Yeah, that's smart. The transparency, I think, is everything. With respect to what you just shared, the playbook is pretty simple. all you had to do was say, these things are science experiments. Just look at the labels. There's all kinds of ingredients here that you can't pronounce. This is not good for you. End of discussion. And that's a pretty easy sell. And like you said, some are healthier than others. There are plenty of highly processed products out there that are not so great. Others much better. But I think that really shifted public sentiment.

1:54:46And I think the media was, complicit's the wrong word, but certainly was in service to that narrative, I think in a big way. Yeah, and I'm hoping that there's a lesson to be learned from all of these and saying, look, there is a playbook that could have been pushed back very easily, but not easily. If it was easy, it would have been done. I'd say there's a playbook that we know is coming at us and getting out there in as many venues as possible and saying the why we need to exist without disparaging anybody else and saying this is why we need to exist. We offer a different solution. We offer choice.

1:55:28We may not be as good as where you want us to be, but you have a choice not to eat it. I think just positioning it as choice, I think is an important piece. The reason we try to be very careful in saying that we are a big tent company, that we just want to exist here. regenerative can exist, conventional meat production can exist, plants can exist, and a hybrid of all these can exist. And I think that mindset is the top, the most important message I want to leave today with the podcast also, that this is a big tent movement. And giving space for innovation like this ultimately is good for all of us and everybody in these industries.

1:56:13And I think politically, government staying out of it is a really important piece. So freedom and choice can exist. And things like bans don't exist in this field. Unfortunately, one or two states in the US are trying to say they want to ban the existence of cultivated meat based on misinformation. And you pointed out earlier in the show that there are gag laws. You cannot go to a slaughterhouse and take a camera out. There's literally no, There's no starter house in the country that has glass walls. If so, people will be asking for change, even more versiferously than what they're asking for now.

1:56:49But all I'm asking is, I'm not asking you to change your gas glass. Just don't ban us. Do what you have to do to protect your incumbent industry, but let us live. It's like, I want to go back to an example of something called the Apgar score. Have you heard about, you've had kids, right? Yeah. APGAR, A-P-G-A-R, basically is the rating you give when a baby is born. And it's basically on five things. Appearance, A, P for pulse, G is for grimace, and another A is for activity, and R is for respiration. You look at the baby and say, is the baby pink or blue? And you look at the baby and then say, does it have a good pulse?

1:57:38Or does it look like it's grimacing or not moving? Is it breathing? Is it crying? Right? You get a 10-point scale. The state at which this industry is, it's just been birthed, and we're looking to take the APGAR score. And we've only been eight months since the first ever regulatory approval of this kind has come in the United States. And there's a lot of learning that we have. And we're literally trying to survive and exist in this world. And then suddenly imagine if somebody comes and says, I'm going to put a big pillow on you and try to suffocate you. Or somebody is going to say, I'm not going to give you this little oxygen you need to just to take your first breath.

1:58:19Or, you know, I'm just going to not feed you. Like these are all the things that are happening to this industry right now, where it's too much force that's coming in and saying, I'm going to ban you from living. And the importance of this is an innovation that's just been birthed like this, it's going to have to go through its growing pains. It's going to go out to have to make some mistakes, get up, fall, get up. But the potential is immense. And it's just very puzzling to me that on one hand, we have skeptics writing off and saying, this industry is never going to scale. These people are exaggerating it.

1:58:57There is hype and there is all of these things. And then at the same time, the irony is, there are a couple of states in the US that are trying to ban us from even existing. How can you hold both those realities at the same time that we can never scale and then, oh my gosh, what if they scale, let's ban them, throw the baby out of the bathwater. Yes. That is an incredible reality. This is never gonna happen, it's impossible. Oh, this is a looming threat that we have to quash. We gotta give it a low APGAR score and put it in the NICU until it perishes. It just dies. Because it's a tidal wave that's coming in our direction that is a threat to our way of life.

1:59:35Yeah. And what the most important thing for us to remember, and this is the people in the arena, people on my team and people on companies on these teams, it's really important to not get distracted by this. Because ultimately, it's the people in the arena that will make things happen. People that are in the arena with two feet planted solidly and saying, I'm not going anywhere. I'm going to figure this problem out. You can throw a lot at me. I may not always be perfect, but I am here to live and I'm here to make a difference. There's a lot of people in the audience that are throwing things at us.

2:00:07There's a lot of people in the audience that are cheering us. And there are people that are fair weather people that'll come in and go based on the tidal wave where like, hey, lots of investments coming. There's fair weather investors. There's fair weather media. People are like, well, media wave, lots of things to write about. Then the wave goes down. Lots of things to be skeptical about. Fair weather employees even who are like, I'll be there because it's cool to be in this company. but when the going gets hard, boy, there's some people that are like, I'm out, right? All of these things are happening in the arena.

2:00:38But you can't be influenced by the daily weather pattern, basically is what you're saying, right? Yeah. It's about the macro climate. Yes. That takes a certain kind of stoic sensibility, right? To focus on the important things and not get caught up in and discouraged or even influenced by that weather pattern that is always shifting. Yeah, it does. And I am incredibly grateful for people who opted into this journey and are sticking with the journey. I'm also grateful for people who opted into the journey, gave their best and left because it was too much for them. I would love to be able to have people that recognize the weather pattern and say, hey, there'll be rainy days, there'll be sunny days, and there'll be thunderstorms.

2:01:29And I think the industry is going through all of that. But through all of this, I feel like we're getting closer and closer to the light that's been shining. and it started off as a tiny, tiny crack of light. It's become a little bit larger. I think the closer and closer we get to it, I think it's gonna be a big gaping hole. Like we can walk through and say, oh my gosh. And look, that's kind of what we are in this for. It had to be massive though when the FDA gave you that approval in June. I mean, what if that had gone the other way? And it could have easily gone the other way. And that's really why, like when we started this work, there is a company out there called Aqua Bounty.

2:02:08and they had this idea of having a really fast growing fish, like a salmon, by introducing a gene from an eel and thought that it'll be more efficient. And it took them, I think like close to two decades to get FDA approval. And that was just for an existing animal and people kept throwing it at us and saying, look, if they took two decades to get it, there's no chance that you're going to get it. So that - That wasn't for a cultivated animal product. That was for introducing an eel gene into a factory farmed fish. Is that what you're saying? Yeah, yeah, yeah. That is a little weird though, it's scary.

2:02:45But look, when there's no precedent, right? People point out to the worst possible thing and you have to succeed despite people's fears of the worst possible thing. And that's what we were being thrown at. We kept saying the exact same thing. You said, hey, that has got nothing to do with this. But they're like, well, who knows? What if they go that way? And thus what if is the introduction of doubt? and the hardest part of the resolve in pursuing things of this nature where you're pioneering and you don't know the answer. We don't know if we'll be successful. We don't know if we are the company that'll get to the finish line.

2:03:16It's a really hard thing to hold in mind and stay focused. So all I'm telling our team is like, look, this is the burden of pioneers and we are never going to get away from it because this industry is just being given birth to. So you can work your entire lifetime, but you mentally have to be prepared to have a pioneer mindset. Because we are literally blazing the trail. And sometimes we might go down the rabbit hole. We need to recorrect and come back. And if that mindset and mental model doesn't exist for everybody in this industry, I don't think the industry is going to have a chance. What have you learned about entrepreneurship in general from this?

2:03:54This is like a case study in and of itself on trying to pioneer a new market, right? being a first mover in a brand new idea and sector of the economy? Like what could you share with a budding entrepreneur who's listening to this or watching it who has maybe nothing to do with the food space? I'd say an entrepreneur really will be asked the deepest of the depths of anything that they thought that they had in them. and that they're prepared for, to be prepared for something that is a thousand times more than that and have that explicit conversation with the people around them, their family, their friends, and say, hey, look, I think this is going to be incredibly hard, harder than anything else I've done in my life.

2:04:46And I'm hearing that it'll be a thousand times worse. Are you going to be able to support me in my lowest moments? Oh, there'll be plenty of those lowest moments because the mental health challenges or entrepreneurs, I think are probably one of the hardest for any choice of profession you can pick. If you read this book by Alex Honnold, Alone on the Wall, it feels so lonely. Although you're surrounded by your friends and family and your team members, it's a very lonely moment that you'll get to. And asking for help is important. Saying that, hey, there are moments I'll have blind spots. There are moments where I'm literally not going to be able to get out of my own way.

2:05:30I need you to be there for me during that time. I think it's a conversation people will need to have, especially if they're taking entrepreneurship in an area that has not been done before. So I've started two medical device companies, right? It's hard still, but the work I'm doing for the other medical device company or had to do is a thousand times less than what I'm doing for this. And that's also hard. but I'm not belittling what entrepreneurship in an established field is. But if you're picking entrepreneurship in a non-established field, where literally everybody is betting you'll fail and they're most likely gonna be right, and you're waking up every morning to do that work, yeah, better have your mental health ready.

2:06:12Yeah, no blueprint, no blazed road ahead of you. Like the medical device, it's like, oh, there's a way that you do this. I did this before. Other people have done it. This is how you do it. But you're trying to basically bushwhack your way. Yeah. Yeah, I can imagine it's lonely and you're shouldering tremendous amount of, how's your sleep? Are you getting some sleep? I am starting to wear this thing. Oh, you got, I noticed you got the whoop on. What's your sleep and recovery score today? Oh, I don't wanna look. There are some days that I'm - Yeah, it's that thing, it's like some days maybe don't look at it in the morning because you still have to do the things you have to do, right?

2:06:50I basically set myself a goal in 2024 that I'm only gonna measure myself on one single thing, sleep, seven hours a night. And if I can do it 80 % of the days this year, that's a big win for me. That's pretty good. Seven hours. Sticking to that? So far, April has been good. You got your monthly report. April's been good. Yeah. I wanna keep it that way. I gotta let you go. But one thing I kind of wanna make sure I understand is what the future of your imagination looks like. Understanding there are obstacles in your path and you are bushwhacking where there is no road on some level. There are known knowns or known unknowns or unknown unknowns ahead of you.

2:07:35So it becomes very hard to predict what the future two, five, 10 years from now is gonna look like. On some level, maybe there's tarot cards involved, I don't know. But if you had your druthers, understanding that you will be facing all these obstacles and setbacks. Can you share a little bit about what you hope it will look like in, I don't know, five years from now? That's a good question because I think it's reasonable to ask about five years. I'd like to be able to answer the 50-year question also, but five years from now, what I'd like to do is to climb the next hill I talked about. The proof of scale, that we could scale production of cultivated meat and use that as a model that shows path to profitability for a lot of people to get into business is what I would hope to do five years from now looking back.

2:08:25That has got a lot of uncertainty because it requires a lot of capital infusion. It requires the science and the technology and the manufacturing capabilities that we have now to be able to work at 10 to 100x larger scale than what we've done so far. That's a known unknown. I'm actually not worried about unknown unknowns. So I'm like, there's nothing I can do about it. So completely not willing. The known unknown is, will the work that we've done so far actually scale? And we'll know the answer in five years. And my hope is that it will scale because the fundamentals are very strong. Everything that we're looking at is telling us it'll scale, but the proof is literally showing it.

2:09:04So I want to be able to say, okay, I would want in five years to walk you through the production facility that literally shows you under the roof, one roof, whereas the first animal cell, becoming the first full product that you'd say, I'm ready to buy it. And there's just been zero cruelty along the way. And it's starting to show how environmental impact can be a lot lower. That's what I'd like to show five years from now. I'd also like to be available for sale in all the 50 United States. And I'd like to be able to say that we had a significant infrastructure grant and a loan that we got from the U.S.

2:09:46government to be able to say, yes, this technology is a flagship technology. It's a crown jewel for the United States not to lose its leadership in. And we are firmly investing in this. And I'd love to be able to have a, it's like the World Business Chicago, the big event where all the food producers will come through together and firmly say, we are in this together. We are not competing, but we are collaborating. and at least have like the Geneva Convention. It's kind of a statement that says, food production, food safety, food security is important. And innovation has a firm place along with incumbents.

2:10:25I would like to have a signed declaration of that at a convention in the next five years. 50 years. 50 years from now, I'd say that we are not gonna talk about shortages of meat production. and that just like, you know, I'd say if I look at the last 50 years, the things that people are incredibly skeptical of, like you could actually treat heart attacks and have people live and resuscitate and bring them back to life, that 50 years from now, we won't even be having a conversation about, can we make enough meat to feed ourselves? Can we make the trade-offs of greenhouse gas emissions? And can we make the trade-offs of zoonotic diseases?

2:11:03I would say 50 years from now, we'd be looking back and saying, I don't know why we are so worried about it. There is this production method that can scale. There is these options that we have, and we can now choose to have food coming from whether it's regenerative or cultivated or plant or hybrids, and it becomes a non-issue. That every country can feel like they have food safety and food security, and they know how to work, and we're working on very different problems by then. Humanity has to make it to 2075 though first, right? Yeah, well, I am an optimist. Look, I think at every point in this journey in the last eight years, I could have looked at this glass as half empty and everybody in the world could have looked at this as half empty.

2:11:46But I think literally everybody that's behind this industry is looking at it as half full. And I think I'm an optimist. So 2075 is half full. You wouldn't have made it this far if you were a half empty type of guy, Uma, I don't think. You have to have a natural disposition to optimism to be able to stay in this fight that you're in. Yeah, I believe so. And thankfully, it's natural. It's genetically programmed. And I'm glad that, you know, I have been born on the side where I can take the view of an optimist. And I respect the view of a pessimist because that's important to shape our approaches.

2:12:19And it's important to be able to hear, even when it's very hard to hear the critiques and skeptics, I appreciate the signal that's coming up from the noise. 99 % of all the stuff that I'm seeing is noise. But there's a signal in there, which is like, hey guys, we want you to succeed, but tell us how you will succeed. I genuinely am curious. That's the group I'd like us to engage with. And I think, you know, optimists also have to be kept practical. And I think the pessimists do that job for us. Is there anything that we haven't discussed that you feel is important for people to understand about this whole world of cultivated meat?

2:12:59Well, I think the only thing I'd say is, I think it's pretty evident from this conversation that I come from a perspective of these are problems that can be solved, will be solved, and have been solved with a track record. And there are yet more problems that need to be solved. And I firmly believe they can be solved. There's like literally no ifs and buts about it. But it's not an easy path. It's not a guaranteed path. It's not a guaranteed return on investment. So I'm just basically ensuring that the message is of hope. And when we are walking the message of hope, some people may perceive it as hype.

2:13:34but that is the part I want to be very crystal clear. I am taking the view that all of the fundamental reasons why this is going to be successful exist. We need to figure out a way to put them together on a timeframe that makes a difference for people who are wanting this to be successful, but genuinely are skeptical. And I just want that message not to be lost. The work we have to do, there's multiple chapters to it, but ultimately we are the people in the arena. The best intentions are what are driving our actions and not all actions will be successful but it is the pursuit of those actions that is going to get us to the finish line and I'm just asking people to let us do our work.

2:14:21Have a genuine mindset of inquiry. Do not succumb to the quick headline or the quick dismissal of an innovation that has transformative impact. And I'm asking people to join the journey when they feel like joining. There is no forced choice here. This is literally free will and choice. Join when you can. Otherwise, just be watching us. And if you have it in you to support us, support us. And if somebody does wanna support, what is the best way for them to do that? Approach it with a genuine inquiry. I will engage. Our team will engage. But from a place of genuine inquiry is what I'm asking for.

2:15:01I think that gives us a level playing field. And we are here to coexist and to build a big tent with people that are already working very hard to do good in this world. And I believe genuinely in the depth and sincerity of humanity. And I feel like there's a solution we're putting in front of humanity where I do think genuinely that when humans are given a choice of making the right call, that will be good for not just humans, but all life on the planet, they will make that call. And I'm just asking for a chance for it. I appreciate the integrity that you're bringing to this mission, as well as the honesty and the transparency, not just to the manufacturing piece and the sort of industry technology piece behind Upside, but with respect to the timeline that you're facing and the obstacles and the uncertainty, you know, there's so much ahead of you and it isn't an easy path.

2:16:01And I'm sure it is very lonely for you to be on this path, but to hold on to that optimism and to immunize yourself from the noise and the weather, et cetera, to stay focused on solving this very big problem is a worthy act of service on behalf of the world. You know, it is a huge problem. The way that we produce food for the planet is not sustainable, it's not ethically sound and we do need a new way forward. And as much as I would like to think that everybody would be struck plant-based or vegan, I've been around long enough to know that that's never going to happen. And we do need to meet people where they're at.

2:16:41And the demand for meat is only increasing, especially in areas like India and China, where we're seeing the ascension of the middle class and their appetite for meat. and how are we gonna meet that? We need a better way. And I think you showing up to try to meet that demand and do it in a way that is more compassionate for animals, humans, and the planet is like I said, at the top of this conversation, a most worthy investment of your chi, my friend, your life energy, this mission you're on. So thank you for what you do. I appreciate it. So I speak for humanity in that regard. And thank you for coming here today and sharing with me.

2:17:24I appreciate it very much. Thank you, Rich. I really deeply appreciate this opportunity and the long form dialogue we could have had. And I hope to come back. Good, man. And I got to taste this. Right here, you saw a vegan eat chicken. Yes. Not a chicken analog. This is actual chicken. 100%. I'm still trying to wrap my head around it. 17 years. When you have something more to share, some breakthrough or anything like that, please come back and share it with me. Absolutely. All right. Thank you, Raj. Thanks so much. Cheers. Peace. Thanks.

2:18:08That's it for today. Thank you for listening. I truly hope you enjoyed the conversation. To learn more about today's guest, including links and resources related to everything discussed today, visit the episode page at richroll.com, where you can find the entire podcast archive, my books, Finding Ultra, Voicing Change, and The Plant Power Way, as well as the Plant Power Meal Planner at meals.richroll.com. If you'd like to support the podcast, the easiest and most impactful thing you can do is to subscribe to the show on Apple Podcasts, on Spotify, and on YouTube, and leave a review and or comment.

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2:20:12you