Paul Shapiro on Ethical Capitalism and the Business of Doing Good

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Living a Life in Full is a conversation you always wanted to have with that person who gave an amazing TED Talk or the author of one of your favorite books. Or that inspirational Olympian you always wanted to know more about. It's graduate level conversations with those making a difference in the world and in the lives of others. This show brings you new ideas and approaches so that you can live a life in full. I'm your host, Dr. Chris Stout and I hope you enjoy this episode. This episode is brought to you by the nonprofit I founded, the center for Global Initiatives. The center is an all volunteer organization so there are no salaries and thus all tax deductible donations can go to the work. While our key country partner is in Tanzania, our work is global and generally focused in the areas of education and healthcare. We also help others to get their nonprofits started or augment others project based initiatives. It's our goal to open source humanitarian intervention and to help make it easier for others to do more good in the world. We are proud to have been ranked a great nonprofit every year since 2011 and to have achieved a Platinum level rating by Guidestar Links. In this episode's show, notes will take you to published articles on our outcomes, a number of helpful tools and downloadable resources which are all free always. Please Visit us at CenterForGlobalInitiatives.org and be sure to watch our video at Patreon.com DrChrisStout to learn more. Thanks. Welcome to another episode of Living Life in Full, the podcast dedicated to exploring the journeys of individuals who are maximizing their human potential, aligning their values with their vocation, and making a real difference in the world. I'm your host, Dr. Chris Stout. Since the dawn of Homo Sapiens some quarter million years ago, animals have satisfied our desire for meat. But with a growing global population and demand for meat, eggs, dairy, leather and more, raising such massive numbers of farm animals is a woefully inefficient process and takes an enormous toll on the planet, public health, and certainly on the animals themselves. But what if we could have our meat and eat it too? The next great scientific revolution is underway. Discovering new ways to create enough food for the world's ever growing, ever hungry population. Entrepreneurs and investors are working to commercialize the world's first real animal products grown without animals. Whereas our ancestors domesticated wild animals into livestock, today we're beginning to domesticate their cells, leaving animals out of the equation. And the story of this second domestication is anything but tame. You know, when I think about the conversations I've had on this show with ambassadors, founders, scientists, humanitarians, astronauts, paradigm busting global leaders, I'm always drawn to people who aren't just talking about changing the world, but are actually rolling up their sleeves and doing it. And today's guest is absolutely one of those people. Paul Shapiro is the CEO and co founder of the Better Meat Company where he's literally using fermentation to turn microbes into meat within hours. Now, before you think this is some far fetched science fiction, let me tell you Paul is someone who's been thinking deeply about the future of food and sustainability for over two decades. He's founded his first animal advocacy organization while still in high school and he's been at the forefront of transforming our food system and ever since. He's the author of the Washington Post bestseller, Clean Meat how to Grow Meat Without Animals Will Revolutionize Dinner and the World, a book that explores what some are calling the second domestication of animals. In 2023, he was named one of Sacramento's most admired CEOs. He's a five time TEDx speaker and hosts the Business for Good podcast. And he's been interviewed everywhere From CNN to StarTalk Radio with Neil Degrassi Tyson. He's also published published hundreds of articles and periodicals ranging from daily newspapers like the Washington Post to Scientific American and Fortune, as well as academic journals. What I find particularly compelling about Paul is that he's not just an entrepreneur or an author. He's someone who's dedicated his entire career to a singular vision of making our food system more sustainable, more humane and more efficient. From his years as Vice President of Farm Animal Protection at the Humane Society of the United States to now leading a company that employs over 20 scientists, engineers and chefs. Paul embodies what we talk about on this show. Living a life in full, with purpose and impact. So today we're going to dig into the science and the business of growing real meat without animals. Explore what it takes to build a company in what Paul calls a Blue Ocean Market. And maybe even talk about his very friendly pit bull, Eddie, who apparently has quite an Instagram following. Paul. Hey, welcome to the show.

Chris, what a generous introduction. I really appreciate that. It's kind of you.

Thanks. Absolutely. You have earned every accolade there, my friends. So we were talking off mic before. I think we've got Tim Ferriss to thank for connecting us. You collaborated him with giving away a consumer facing sample of Rizzo Mycoprotein and I was able to get a package with my wife. And honestly, we really enjoyed it. Thank you very much for that.

Oh, I'm so grateful. You know, Tim is a wonderful guy. I got introduced to him and had the pleasure and frankly the honor of sending him a sample of our product which led to him ultimately investing in our company and then just organically writing about us in his newsletter. And I'll tell you, Chris, one benefit of that was that you and I got to meet. But also I met a lot of really great people. He has 2 million subscribers to that newsletter. And so we, when he sent that out, it was definitely like a deluge for us. As you mentioned, you know, we're a small startup. We got like less than two dozen people working here. So to have that was a really great advancement for our company. And I'm grateful to Tim for many things including the fact that you and I are talking right now.

Yeah, likewise, likewise. Big tip of the hat to Tim so that he's. He is awesome and so is his five bullet Friday and just a big fan of all of his work. So maybe for you and I to start, I sketched out some of the broad strokes of your career. Career in the introduction. But perhaps you could share with us maybe how your journey started. Was it at 13 when you decided to stop eating meat and then later on to cut out eggs and dairy too? Tell us, tell us about that era.

Yeah, I mean, it feels so long ago. I remember, you know, I used to be the youngest person in every room. Now I'm like the oldest person in every room. So it feels, it feels like so long ago. But yeah, I was, I'm 46 now and back then it was like 33 years ago. I had a friend of mine who showed me a video of how animals were treated in factory farms and slaughterhouses and fur farms and in cosmetics testing laboratories and so on. And I remember just being really shocked. I couldn't believe that we had so much violence being committed against animals. And that had a big impact on me. And so My first reaction was like, oh, it's a shame, but you know, we have to eat. But then when I quickly realized that actually there were like hundreds of millions of people all over the world who were vegetarian, and there were some cultures that have been vegetarian, like for example, in India for many centuries, and I thought, huh, maybe it's not so critical that we eat these animals. And so I did stop eating animals at that point, but it became very clear to me over time that that is a decision that most people aren't going to make. Most people want to continue eating meat. And so in the same way that most people want to continue driving, we need to find ways to make cars that don't rely on fossil fuels, right, by having EVs. And similarly, we need to find ways to satiate humanity's meat tooth, so to speak, that don't involve using animals. And so I would be elated if people wanted to eat bean and rice burritos and lentil soup and hummus wraps. Those are great foods. I like eating them. But it seems like most humans like to eat meat. And so I want to find a way that we can do this that doesn't entail causing so much suffering, so much environmental degradation, and so much public health harm too. And that's really been the North Star for my life for three decades now.

Wow, I love that. I mean, it really does seem like a, you know, kind of a one stop shopping that has so many, you know, ancillary and primary and ancillary kinds of benefits. So also, if my research is correct, so correct me if I've, I've misread, but in high school, I believe you founded Compassion Over Killing as a, as a high school club, is that right?

Yes, I did. So I was a kid and there was no animal protection club in my high school. So I thought, well, I'll start one. And you know, part of it was really a noble idea to start this group, but you know, part of the other one was like, you know, you got a stipend from the school where you got $50 per semester to hold events. I was like, oh, cool, you know, we'll get 50 bucks.

Brilliant.

Get a photo in the yearbook, you know, like so. So it's actually kind of a serial club starter. In high school I started a number of clubs. This is one of them. But shockingly, even three decades later, the organization still exists. So, wow, it very quickly. A citywide organization. Like it started as a high school club, then it became a citywide, then it became a national organization. With, with offices on each coast. And so I was proud to work there. After I was done with school, I worked there for four years full time also. Everything was volunteer prior to that. But probably like, I don't know, maybe like five or 10 years ago, they changed their name to Animal Outlook so that it's the same organization. But I've not had involvement with it for a long, long time now. But I am very grateful for any work they're doing to help make the world a kinder place. So my hat's off to them for keeping it going. And they have staff all over the country, and I'm really grateful for that.

That is so cool. I didn't realize the longevity of it. That is just really awesome. So, you know, again, doing background, your connecting thread through a lot of your activities seems to focus around activism. Were there adults who encouraged that kind of activism? Were there role models? Or were you just that determined as a teenage your time? Where, where did that come from?

Yeah, probably there were a number of inspirational figures for me. And, you know, some of them were just people who I met who were working in nonprofit organizations at that time. And I, and you know, like, I was a kid who really liked animals, right? I was like one of these kids who, when I'm walking down the street and somebody's walking their dog, like, I stopped to go pet the dog, right? And, and I just literally loved animals. And I thought at that time that if you are somebody who likes animals, everybody tells you when you're a kid, oh, you should be a veterinarian, right? And so I was like, okay, well, I guess I'm going to be a veterinarian when I grow up. That's what people who like animals do. But then, like, when I was in high school, I met these people who were not veterinarians, but they were devoting their lives to helping animals and they were working at, you know, wildlife advocacy organizations or other types of nonprofit charities. And meeting them made me, made it clear to me that actually you can, you know, help animals and the planet without being a veterinarian. And that you don't have to do like six years of school and be really good at science and all this stuff. I was like, oh, yes, sign me up. You know, that sounded a lot better than me. So anyway, that was my, that was my really revelation was, was meeting these people who were devoting themselves full time to trying to provide a voice for these voiceless creatures. You know, most, most people don't like to think about what happens to animals. It's easier just to leave them out of sight and out of. But when you start actually trying to look through, look at the world through non human eyes and look at what the world looks like from their perspective, it's not so pretty. It's not so pretty. And it was very inspirational to me to meet people who shared that same worldview of a world in which we view the animals on this planet as not being here merely for us, but rather living here with us. And that, you know, maybe we could have a world where we tried to live in peaceful coexistence as much as possible. You know, it's not always possible, but right now, you know, we treat them in ways that are so deplorable that if we treated murderers and rapists this way, we would, you know, we would not permit it. Right. Like, you know, we don't take murderers and rapists and put them in prison cells where they can't turn around or lift their arms for their entire lives yet. That's normal, right? That's normal. In the egg and the pork industry is to keep animals confined in cages where they're literally immobilized their entire lives for months and months or even years on end. And of course they've not committed any crime other than being BO of the wrong species. And so when you think about that, it just, it becomes very clear that perhaps in the same way that we look back on past generations and we wonder what were they thinking? How do they possibly allow some of these things to happen that went on back then? I think that probably future generations are going to look back on us and think how did they ever allow these types of cruelties to occur? And I hope we can get there sooner rather than later.

Yeah, Here, here. For folks that don't know me, I think I was vegetarian for probably about 30 years. Pretty, pretty strict. And then the last 10 that shifted into being plant based and kind of have never looked back and really, you know, kind of don't miss it. It's interesting as you describe that too. There was some little sci fi thing. I don't know if it was a black mirror or what it was, but I remember it just tickled me. There was this person that had kind of traveled back into time from the future and you know, sort of in the, the, the cleaver's kitchen, so to speak. And this, this person from the future went to the refrigerator and got this glass of milk and tasted it and like spit it out and goes, oh my gosh, is this actually from a cow? You Know, it seems so, you know, barbaric, archaic. You know, I just thought, yeah, that's, that's cool. I. So I share your feeling about that.

So that is, that is really cool. And I'm a huge sci fi fan. I would love to know what that was. I'll have to also.

I have to look it up for you.

I was a big Star Trek Next Generation fan when I was growing up, and there was this one scene where they come across an alien race who was disgusted to learn that the. The Voyagers did not, on the SS Enterprise, were not eating actual animals. Right. They wanted like, you know, so called, you know, natural meat. They're like, no, no. And he's like, no, we. It looks like meat, but it's all synthesized. It's all created by machines. Here. Here we don't go out and capture animals to eat them. You know, that's like, that's. We've left that off. Like, we left off slavery and, and it's like, you know, you look at that and you're like, wow, like, this is amazing. The decades ago, people were thinking about this idea of trying to recreate meat without animals. And in fact, you know, even longer than decades ago, people have been talking about this idea. But now it's not just sci fi, it's actually science fact. We can do this. Not only can we do it, but. But many companies are doing it right now.

Yeah, I love that and I want to dig deep into that. I'm going to still pull at the thread of your activism things because I want to talk about your education a little bit more. So we've shifted out of high school now. So peace studies at George Washington University, is that right?

Yeah. I was really influenced by a Gentleman named Coleman McCarthy. He was a Washington Post columnist for a very long time, and he also founded an organization called the center for Teaching Peace. And I was very fortunate to have Coleman as a teacher in high school where he taught peace studies. And I thought, wow, like, you know, I had learned all this cool stuff that I really liked learning about the Civil War and World War II and the War of 1812. It's like every, you know, all of history, it's like you're just learning about wars. Like everybody can name, you know, General Grant and General Lee and General MacArthur. Right. But very few people know much about the people who waged peace. And I'm not suggesting it's bad to learn about war. In fact, I liked it. But, but you very rarely learn that much about people who waged peace. Like Gandhi and Martin Luther King and Cesar Chavez and so on. And so I was very attracted to the idea that you could also learn about the peacemakers, not just the war makers. And that led me to not only study peace studies in college and to major in it, but also to teach it. So I taught in a D.C. high school, taught peace studies as well, and it was of great interest to me. How useful is it for my work today? Decades later, I would, you know, I'd say it's of great personal interest to me. Whether it's, you know, useful in helping me accomplish my job, I don't know. But I'm glad to have done it. And I'm grateful to Colin McCarthy for inspiring me to do it, honestly.

Yeah. How nice to be able to have that kind of a mentor there in the classroom, have that experience. So to the policy work then. You did policy work at Humane World for Animals, which I guess formerly was the Humane, known as the Humane Society. Was that where the insight crystallized, prompting you the transition to, like, from high impact policy advocacy to biotech entrepreneurship? I mean, that doesn't seem like a natural career path. I don't think high school counselors say, here's how you do that, Paul. So how did that come about?

Yes, I'm going to condense this story because I don't want to take up too much time with it. But I'll tell you what happened. I was working as a lobbyist to pass laws to protect animals from cruelty, especially animals who are used in farming. And I was very glad. We were passing a number of laws, like more than a dozen of these state laws. And we were working on federal bills and working to defeat bad legislation that would have been harmful to animals. But around like 2015 and 2016, I was watching the rise of Impossible Foods and Beyond Meat and Eat just. And it was becoming very evident to me that these food companies were doing a lot to help animals. And they were doing what I thought could be even more than what we were doing. And I started reading about different ways that animals have been displaced in the economy in the past. I'll give you just a couple brief examples. You know, for thousands of years we whipped horses to have them transport us and our goods all around. The animal welfare movement in the United States really was founded because of concern about cruelty to carriage horses. And they campaigned for all types of reforms in the 1860s and 70s and 80s. They wanted watering stations for horses so they could drink while on the job. They wanted resting hours for them so they couldn't be worked all day and night. They wanted Sabbath days where they would get one day off. There were all different types of reforms that they were seeking, but they never sought to actually stop the use of horses. And that's, of course, what Henry Ford accomplished. Henry Ford did not care about horses. He didn't think about horses. He simply created something that rendered the exploitation of horses totally and completely obsolete. And the same thing has happened time and time again. If you look at how we lit our homes for literally centuries, we massacred whales in order to get whale oil to light our homes. And there are lots of concerns about the sustainability and ethics of whaling, even in the 19th century. But what liberated whales from harpoons was not sustainability sentiment. It wasn't humane sentiment. It was the invention of kerosene, which created a cheaper way to light our homes. And after the commercialization of kerosene, the whaling industry was totally decimated. Similarly, for millennia, we used to live pluck geese for their quills in order to write letters. In fact, Thomas Jefferson even had his own flock of geese at Monticello because he was such a prolific letter wr that he needed all these quills. Wow. And. And it's a very inhumane thing to do to wives. Pluckies of their feathers. But nobody stopped because they cared about geese. They stopped because metal fountain pens were invented. And it was a much more efficient way to write. And this list goes on and on and on and on. The number of examples of animals who've been displaced because of new technology is almost endless. Whereas the number of, of animal exploitative practices that have ended because of humane sentiment is nearly zero. And wow. This. And so this led me to think, well, I am like one of these people calling for watering stations for horses when there are these Henry Fords out there who are going to displace horses altogether. The problem for me was that I did not perceive myself as a potential Henry Ford. Right. I. I viewed myself as a lobbyist and, and somebody who was maybe, you know, working in communications also. But, you know, I didn't have an MBA from Harvard. I didn't have, you know, a microbiology degree or a food science degree. I didn't have millions of dollars to invest in venture capital. Like, I just thought, like this was for other people. These were for different superheroes who are not me. And over time, I started getting to know the people who were actually starting these companies. I was really impressed by them. And I thought, well, if I am not capable of doing what they're doing, at least I can help promote what they're doing, doing. And I thought maybe I'll write a book. And so I decided kind of hubristically to write a book about the scientists, the innovators, the entrepreneurs, the investors who are all racing to commercialize the world's first slaughter free meat. And it was again hubrisc because I had never published a book before. But I thought, well, you know, this would be my contribution to this, this effort. And so I wrote the book Clean Meat How Growing Meat Without Animals Will Revolutionize Dinner in the World. And I got very lucky. I caught lightning in a bottle. Simon and Schuster purchased the book you generously mentioned. It was on the Washington Post bestseller list. It got reviewed in Wall Street Journal and npr. And I just, I got very lucky. Like, I, I'm not saying that I did something so great. I just feel like I got very lucky with this book and I, I caught this lightning in the bottle. And it, and in researching that book, it became very evident to me that many of the people who are starting these companies had as little experience, if not even less than I did. You know, like, it was like really like the scales fell off my eyes. Wow. Is these people are as dumb as I am. So that is what gave me the confidence to actually say, you know what? I'm going to leave my current profession.

Wow.

And just start, and start a company. And I, I thought, I thought maybe I would write another book. And in fact, I still hope to. In fact, interestingly, I have written a novel, Chris, about human animal relationships. It's like a sci fi dystopian novel and I hope to publish it. I need to get a publisher for this thing. So if anybody, if anybody's listening is interested in this, I'd love to talk to you about it. But I have written another book that I hope to do that I hope to publish. So we'll see what happens with that. But the point is that I started this company, the Better Meco, in early 2018, so essentially nearly eight years ago. And most startups, you know, never make it to their third birthday. Less than half make it to their fifth birthday. By the time you get to your eighth birthday, the mortality rate is so high. Right, right. Mortality is so high for startups by the, by year eight and we're still going. And I'm very proud of that. We've never done late, we've never done layoffs. We've just kept on pushing forward despite many adverse events in our history here. But we keep going. And I think we're going to do some really Great things for humanity and for the rest of the world too, with the work that we're doing once we are successful.

Wow. Well, and I think you already are. So. Okay, I got a lot of. Let's put a pin in this. I want to circle back to the book, but there's a lot of things I want to react to from what you just said. One of the things is that I've had the opportunity to do some stuff with Dean Kamen years ago.

What a great mentor.

Oh my gosh. Yeah, he's just amazing. And one of the things that he made a point similar to what you were talking about is the fact that with the advent of not having horse drawn carriages going through urban areas, that we no longer had the horse's urine and feces being a breeding ground and a petri dish for all the kind of urban ills that came from that and all the public health issues. So it's sort of funny because people think about, I get it with EVs vis a vis internal combustion and air pollution, but even, you know, the, the internal combustion engines were a greater benefit to public health, you know, 100 years ago. So it's sort of interesting those kinds of evolutions. And next obviously will be. Will be EVs. And the other thing you said, which I pulled a quote because I'm a just a super fan. I had an opportunity to, to interact with Buckminster Fuller. And you. Yeah, you quote what exactly what he said was what you were describing with the quills and with the, the kerosene, et cetera, to change something. To quote him, to change something. Build a new model that makes the existing model obsolete. And man, I mean, that's kind of like must be on your, you know, superhero T shirt or something.

Well, almost. Almost quite literally, Chris, because when you walk into the Better Meet co, the first thing that you'll see when you walk into our lobby is a real 19th century whaling harpoon on the wall. And underneath that, underneath that whaling harpoon emblazoned on the lobby wall is that quote from Buckminster 4.

Oh, excellent. Oh my gosh. Wow.

You know, yeah, I'm a big fan of his and at Dean Cayman's. By the way, if you want to read a really good book, check out Quirky by Melissa Schilling. It's a profile of some of the greatest inventors of all time, including Dean and okay, I really enjoyed that book. But it looks at like the best inventors like Marie Curie and Elon Musk and Dean Kamen. And it tries to weave A narrative as to what they all have in common, basically.

Oh, okay, good. I will look that up. Yeah, I had a chance years ago. He and I had met a couple of times, World Economic Forum and TED and whatnot. And then I got invited by him to be a part. He does the first robotics and I got to be a judge for that, which was just the most heart touching, you know, just such a fun thing to see, you know, these teams of kids, you know, kind of, you know, being engineering athletes, so to speak. And then I had this, two interesting experiences vis a vis Bucky, maybe two and a half, I guess. Amy Edmondson, whose name may ring a bell. She's a Harvard professor. She and I met, we did a consultation to the White House. Good Lord. 30 years ago or more with the Department of Education. And she had just been working with Bucky Fuller and she wrote a book called A Fuller Explanation. It was kind of like the codex to understanding what the heck he was talking about most of the time. So. And she was just. She's a rock star in her. In her own spheres. But anyway, so should there be like

a biopic about Fuller by now? Like, doesn't that seem like something that should have happened there?

Yeah, there should be. I went to in Chicago at the Museum of contemporary art probably 15 years ago. They had a retrospective of his work. And it took up like at least a floor or two, which was just. I was in la la land. I had a opportunity. I wrote his biography for the Encyclopedia. I was invited to do that. He and I had corresponded about, for a period of time before, probably about two to four years before he passed away, at which I just, I have. Those are, those letters are like the most. One of the most precious keepsakes I have. And then I was out in, at Stanford where his archive is and being able to access, you know, some of his papers and things to be able to do what I did for the write up. And I tell you, you know, there's limitations of how many words you can use to, you know, do these encyclopedic reviews and, and to try and spin down what Buckminster Fuller is all about, you know, into, you know, 2,000 words is just about impossible. But I just, I feel like, you know, I'm glad you're doing what you're doing because I feel like there needs to be a resurgence around people, you know, appreciating, you know, what a pioneer he was. So I'm glad, you know, it's sort of like you doing it with the ethos of Your company. I'm. I just, I applaud that. That's. That's great. And I hope whoever's listening to this who has never heard of Buckminster Fuller, go check him out, because I could. I could talk for five hours about, you know, his life and how amazing it was. So good to. Tip of the hat to you for doing that. That's. That's great.

So I gotta go read. I gotta go read your stuff on him.

That's cool.

Please do know it's me.

It will do. Will do. So, okay, now we got a lot of stuff to talk about, so I want to. We're in the businessy part of this, so check my facts. Joanna Bromley and Adam Yee, are you guys the co founders then of the Better Meat Company? Is that correct?

That is correct. So what's funny is, as I mentioned, like, I thought that my experience was not sufficient for what it would take to start a company. So I wanted to start it with people who had many things that I lacked. And so Joanna, unlike me, was like, well, pedigreed, right? She's somebody who I knew because of her interest in plant based eating. And I had met her through the Good Food Institute, which is a non profit in this space. But she actually, you know, went to Harvard Business School. I worked at Bain as a management consultant for seven years. And I asked her, I was like, hey, you know, would you consider quitting your job at Bain and moving to Sacramento to start this company with me? And she said, well, you know, what, what's the company called? And I said, you know, to be honest, I don't have a name yet, but here's the idea. And totally the company. And to her great credit, she quit her job and moved to Sacramento. And we started this company together. And Adam Yee is a food scientist who did the same. He also quit his job and moved to Sacramento and helped to launch this company.

Joanna, let me stop you for a quick second. So why was it the. There was the gravitational pull to what you wanted to do was a gravitational pull. You are such a enthusiastic, soon to be founder. You know, what, what do you think was the secret sauce? And you know, because I'm sure for where from whence they came, you know, was probably, you know, very appealing to them as well. So what was, what was the seduction that Paul was able to do with them to, to take a flyer on this Better Meat Company idea?

Yeah, maybe it is a flyer. I mean, they're quitting their jobs and moving to a new city for it. So It's a pretty substantial risk, but it's a question for them. I don't want to speak to them. But what I believe is the problem, this is a very good idea. It is a white space. If you look at the opportunity to help make the food industry better, helping major food companies use fewer animals is one of them. And we are. The whole premise of the company from inception to the present is creating an ingredient that meat companies can utilize to put into their, their meat products so they can use fewer animals. You know, it's not asking them to stop using animals, it's not asking people to stop eating meat, it's asking them to make better meat. And that is why we exist. And I think it's a really great idea that can do a lot of important things for the world and could be very lucrative at the same time.

So how was it then? That was, was the, the, the mushroom part of this, the mycoprotein? Where did, did that come into play here?

Yeah, that came in about a year later. So we were spending our time trying to figure out how to turn plants into functional ingredients that could enhance meat in a way that would be both economic and dysfunctional. The problem is plants are really different from animals. Plant tissues are very different from animal tissues. It's really hard to get peas and soybeans and wheat and other types of commodity crops too, to actually function like animal flesh. And I was aware of mycelium, which is the root like structure of fungi, because there's a company in the UK that has a business based on selling my son based products. And they are already industrialized. They have hundreds of millions of dollars of revenue. They had a big acquisition in 2015 where they were acquired for inflation adjusted dollars, more than a billion U.S. and so, so I thought, well, you know, that's pretty cool that they're doing this, but imagine if you only ate one animal, right? Let's say you only ate beef and you never ate pork or chicken or crab or fish or whatever, right? Or imagine if you only ate one plant. Let's say you only ate soybeans, if you never ate wheat or peas or chickpeas or papa beans, et cetera. But that is a very. That ignores a vast part of the animal and plant kingdom that are edible and pleasurable to eat. Oftentimes the same is true in fungi. You have this one company in the UK that has commercialized a species of Mycelium, the Latin name of which is Fusarium venanatum, and they're doing great with it. But there's thousands of species of fungi out there and no one else has commercialized any of it. How could that be? Now of course people are eating mushrooms and I'm talking about mice. Mycelium, right? Just growing mycelium. Mycelium is not a mushroom, right. It's the root like structure of fungi. And the mycelium that we grow and many other species too are extremely packed with protein and fiber, unlike a mushroom which doesn't really have much protein at all. And so for example, the species that we use has, you know, when we grow it the way that we grow it, all natural, straight out of the fermenter, with no additions at all, all as a whole food, it has more protein than eggs. It's a complete protein. It has all the essential amino acids. It's got more iron than beef, more zinc than beef, it's got more potassium than bananas, more fiber than oats. I mean it is a true superfood, right? And so I was aware that there's a world of fungi out there that nobody has even explored, let alone commercialized. And so we started experimenting with growing different types of mycelium, seeing what we could do that might have like types of texture that would grow very fast and that would be high in protein. And that is how we came to create rhizomecoprotein. We tested hundreds of strains of mycelium and eventually got to a place where we had a strain that we really liked. It was a fast grower, produced a lot of protein, and very importantly, on its own, with no further processing necessary, had a meat like texture.

Wow.

And so, you know, if you think about like plant based meat today day it suffers from what I call the three P's, right? The price, performance of perception. So it's too expensive, it doesn't taste as good as animal meat, and the perception is that it's too processed. Mycelium, on the other hand, at least the type of mycelium that we grow is the antidote for all three of those. We can grow it at scale, at prices that are less expensive than many meats. We can grow it in a way where it's a whole food. It's not just not processed, it's a whole food food. It's more natural and more intact than most foods that people ever eat. And it has a far more meat like texture than plants are capable of achieving. So when you think about that, I just thought, you know, this is really cool, but it's hard to do. It's very capitally intensive to grow Mycelium. This is not like just setting up a farm, right. This is creating stainless steel fermenters. It's almost like. It's like creating a brewery, except instead of brewing alcohol, you're brewing protein. So the conditions are even higher grade than what you would need for a brewery. So instead of sanitary conditions, you need sterile conditions. People in the food industry will get that distinction, but just know it's harder and more expensive.

Sure, it sounds like it. Yeah.

So. So, in short, we started switching from using plants to using mycelium in early 2019 and have have grown a business from there. And now now have come to a place where we're operating our own mycelium fermentation facility in America. In fact, it is the largest operational mycelium fermentation facility in North America right now.

Wow.

And it's not enough though. We need to build. So we're actually building a much bigger facility as we speak because the ability for us to satiate our customer demand is not met by our current facility by even close to doing it. So we're looking to build a massive mycelium ingredients company right now. If you go to the major ingredient suppliers on Earth, adm, Cargill, Roquette, Ingredion, mgp. If you go to all them, you can buy all types of plant proteins. Soy protein, pea protein, wheat protein, fava bean protein, chickpea protein. You can't buy any fungi. No fungi proteins, though. None. You cannot fight funky selenium.

Wow.

There really is virtually no B2B supply of fungi proteins. Obviously there's people selling mushrooms and mushroom extracts, but that's not what I'm talking about. High protein mycelium, it's very hard to do, but we're doing it. We are now received six different patents that have been granted to us with numerous others still pending related to our processes. And we're working to keep on scaling so that you can go to Cargill for your plant proteins, but you'll come to the veto. Me?

Wow. Well, you're really channeling your inner Buckminster Fuller to then create a new model that makes the existing model obsolete. That is. That is fantastic. Congratulations.

Yeah, well, yeah, thank you. I really appreciate that. And I am, you know, I'm extremely enthusiastic about our capability to actually do this. This is not something that is science fiction. Like, we are already, like right now, we produce in a three story tall fermenter the fungi proteins that we grow and we're selling it all over the world. The question is, you know, how do we scale this to something where we can actually, you know, start making real revenue, you know, tens of millions of dollars a year and, and upwards soon after. Right, Tens of millions starting out once we have our new facility. But we'll keep on building and get to a point where we would be doing vastly more than that as well. Because, you know, the goal is not to create some niche ingredient that's going to be, you know, an expensive premium product. The entire premise of our company is to turn the current paradigm on its head. The current paradigm is that there's a green premium. You pay more for something that's more sustainable. We are working to create something that is a green discount. We know the only way that we're going to actually become the make to make the, the only way we're going to make the dent in the world that we seek to make is if we can be cheaper than meat. And there's a clear path to that for us.

Gotcha. So was, was Purdue Farms the kind of the stepping stone, the beginning of, of this to work? Is that, is that correct? Okay, tell us, tell us if that's true, then tell us what the Purdue pitch was like. How did you even get through the front door?

Yeah, so Purdue Farms, which is the massive chicken company, was like our first big customer. Customer. And we were a very small company at that point. We had three people working here and. Wow, three people, including myself and Purdue, heard about what we were doing because there were some news articles on us and they were referred to us by somebody who we knew and they contacted us to say they contacted us. We didn't come. They said, you know, can we learn more about what you're doing now? Keep in mind, this is really funny. Like we, you know, we didn't even have like our, a real office at that point. Like we were kind of working from our homes and we had a, we had a co working space. We didn't really have anything meaningful. And so producer, they were going to come out to Sacramento and meet us and so I was too embarrassed to have them come to our co working space. So instead of like I like rented a conference room at a hotel so they could meet us there.

Brilliant.

But they gave us the specs for what they were looking for. And they wanted to do a hybrid chicken nugget. So it'd be 50 plant based and 50 chicken. And we started working on lots of different formulations for them. And ultimately led by the gentleman who you mentioned, Adam Yee, created something that ultimately worked for them and began selling to them. And that product became Purdue Chicken Plus. So you get the, you know, your kids get the chicken that they want, but also plus all this vegetable nutrition, nutrition. And it looks like a chicken nugget, it tastes like a chicken nugget, but it's 50 plant based. It's 50 fewer chickens are used, and the product is now in seven. It's still being sold today. Six years later, six years going strong. It's in 7,000 supermarkets.

Wow.

And several years ago, I was very proud to say that food, excuse me, Food Network named it the best tasting frozen chicken nugget in America. I want to be clear, they didn't say the best tasting of alternative nugget. The best tasting. The best tasting frozen chicken and frozen chicken nugget in America was the Food Network.

Wow.

According to Food Network, it was Purdue Chicken Plus. And so this is a real example of how the parents just continue buying the chicken nuggets that their kids want from the brand that they love, but they do it in a way that is far more sustainable. And I would like to replicate that with every meat production on earth. Yeah, that would be the goal.

Wow. It would be interesting to compare the nutrition facts of the plus versus the plain. Just to kind of see the boost in protein and things like that that I would expect to see. One of the other magical things about the fungi protein is that I remember from reading the package that I received that, you know, it's sort of like you, like you made note of, you know, very high protein, very high fiber, but it's not high in calories. I mean, that's kind of always the trade off. When I've looked at protein supplementation, you know, be it a bar or a mix or something like that. And again, it just, you know, speaking to the superfood aspect of it and all the, you know, branched chain amino acids and things like that, it's really kind of amazing. So Obviously the relationship B2B with Purdue is continuing on. Is that another. Are those other markets that you're looking to get into with other producers or what's, you know, as you scale and obviously kind of in a bootstrappy kind of way too. What's business wise for growth of the company? What. What are you looking into?

Yeah, well, first I just want to address the point about calories to protein. Like a lot of the times these protein bars are basically candy bars with protein powder added to them. You know, it's like, it's really not a good trade off. Whereas the mycelium that we grow, I mean, on its own is for 280 calories. It's 51 grams of protein, right? So like this is, you know, like a true superfood. And again, this is a whole food. So I mean, I can't stress this enough. You know, when people buy all these protein enhanced things, they're buying, it's, it's generally either boosted with whey protein, which is an isolate, it's a, it's a ultra processed isolate, or it's like pea protein, which is also an isolate, right? So they're, they're stripping out the fat, they're stripping out the fiber, they're concentrating down that product into something, something that is not a natural whole food. Now that's not a reason to that you should never eat it. I'm just saying that though it's not the natural whole food, right? It's better when possible to enjoy eating whole foods than isolates. And in this case, you get the best of both worlds. You get the whole food nutrition that's packed with all this fiber and other good nutrients in there that you want, the iron, the zinc, the potassium and so on, but you also get all that protein. And so this is one of the benefits of using mycelium instead of of using animals or plants. Like it's an entirely different kingdom of life, right? It's not like a lot of times people think of fungi as being part of the plant kingdom, but actually biologically, fungi is more closely related to animals than to plants. And so this is just an entirely different kingdom. And so much that we can do, like, think about it like this, Chris, people, most people are not familiar with fungi in any meaningful way. In fact, you know, there's like animal science and plant science or like botany, but very rarely do you see fungi science in any university. Right? But the world is huge. And just think about like this, like plants, you know, they put themselves out in the sun and they, they photosynthesize. That's how they eat, right? And whereas animals have to go out in the world and collect food and digest it. Well, fungi are so much more like us that they do the same. They go out and they collect food and they digest it. That's what happens, right? That's what my soil does. It eats food. That's why mushrooms aren't green. I'll photosynthesize. Similarly, you know, plants breathe in CO2, they breathe out oxygen. Animals do the opposite. We breathe in oxygen, we breathe out CO2. The fungi are so much more like us that they also breathe in oxygen and breathe out CO2. So my point is like evolutionarily, like fungi are just way closer to the animal kingdom than to the plant kingdom.

Wow.

So it shouldn't be surprising that there are some species of fungi that are far more simple over to the flesh of animals than our plants. In fact, many mushrooms have been used as meat substitutes for centuries, like, you know, portobello and so on, because they have a more meat like texture. Now, don't get me wrong, nobody's eating a portobello sandwich and saying they can't tell the difference between that, obviously. But when you start using mycelium and not mushrooms, it becomes far harder to tell.

Wow.

Far harder to tell.

Wow. All right. So good. This is great. So let me maybe do a segue now into, into clean meat, into the book. So I want to discuss that, but I first want to kind of nerd out on a couple of things. I want to say what some others have had to say about it, Paul. So buckle up here. Eric Schmidt, executive director, Executive Chairman of Alphabet and former CEO of Google, said clean meat could be a huge win for animal welfare, human health and the planet. If you want to learn more about the scientists, entrepreneurs and activists that are leading this revolution, read Paul Shapiro's compelling and optimistic book. Michael Greger, MD, best selling author of how not to Die, said, clean meat offers an enthralling look into the near future where many of our most dangerous food safety risks could be all but eliminated. Paul Shapiro tells a tale in this important book that could just save your life. And John Mackey, CEO of Whole Foods Market, said, the meat we sell at Whole Foods Market is rated on an animal welfare scale of 1 to 5 plus. But when clean meat hits the market, I'd like to put it in our meat section with an animal welfare rating of a 10 since that means no animals were harmed or killed, which to me seems very revolutionary. Read Paul Shapiro's captivating account of the entrepreneurs working to enable us to sell that meat soon. And then I also have to say, Paul, it could be the rest of this episode just giving all the kudos to your book, but you got high praise from Wall Street Journal. No surprise. But maybe a little more surprising is the director of unicef, two former US Secretaries of Agriculture, and a former US Secretary of Health and Human Services, which to me, the latter ones is kind of amazing because I would think there might be some kind of pro beef, pro cattle bias. So am I mistaken in that or what are your thoughts about their endorsements?

Well, first of all, my thought is that I'm grateful to them for endorsing the book Queen Meat. But second, second, this is an opportunity to have another green revolution. If you think about what the first green revolution did, led by Norman Borlaug and other scientists, they prevented vast numbers of people from starving to death, right? By hybridizing wheat and getting much bigger yields out of crops, we've been able to feed way more people than we could have, right? An acre of land for produces far more food today than an acre of land 50 or 100 years ago. And it may be a quaint notion, but just to underscore this, higher yield means less deforestation, right? There is a zero sum, right? Higher yield means you have to cut down fewer trees to grow the same amount of food. And so when we think about how the earth in the last hundred years has gone from, you know, around 1 billion to 8 billion people, yet we are producing way more food with way fewer acres. And so that is an amazing testament to how much more efficient we've become. The problem is that we've taken up much of the earth for agriculture now, and there's 8.3 billion of us walking around today. And yet by the year 2050, so just 24 years from now, presuming no catastrophes between now and then, we're projected to be adding another 2 billion people, 10 billion. Now where are we going to go in to feed? You know, so yes, there'll be 2 billion more mouths to feed, but also the standard of living is going to go up for humans, and that means more meat consumption. One of the first things that poor people do when they get money is they eat more meat. So as there are people in hundreds of millions of people escaping poverty in places like China and India, India, when they start escaping poverty going into the middle class, one of the very first things they do is adding meat to their diet. And of course we want people to escape poverty, obviously, but it would be great to do it in a way that didn't create such a much bigger footprint on the planet. And so when you compile both of these facts, so there's going to be 2 billion more of us, and there'll be billions more people who are going to want to eat more meat. Also of those, you know, initially billion, you recognize that we have to get a lot more efficient about how going to feed people. If we want to feed humanity without destroying the planet, we need to divorce meat and protein from livestock rearing. We have to find better ways to feed ourselves that don't require so much. Huge tracts of land, deforestation, greenhouse gas, Emissions, animal cruelty and more. And so I think that the secretaries of agriculture are looking at what the future meat is going to bring and the fact that we are to going, going to have to produce a lot more food for more people while using less land. Like, you know, think about that. We have to produce more food for more people with less land. And the way that you do that is by moving away from animals as a food production technology. Again, for thousands of years, horses were our best technology for transportation for thousands of years. Whales were a very good technology for lighting our homes. For thousands of years, animals have been a good tech. Chickens and pigs and turkeys and cows have been a good technology for producing protein for humanity. That will not be the same in the future. Yeah, we will find better ways. And I think that's why so many people who are involved in agriculture and in feeding the world are excited about these types of technologies, because it is like another green revolution.

I get it, I get it. That gives me great optimism too that people's, you know, just sober realization of what the data are to be able to say this as opposed to certain, you know, biases or what have you. So I want to get more into the content of the book, but again, I got to be a nerd here for a second. So if people, longtime listeners, this show know I love to kind of just talk about the book stuff, not even just the content of it, but you got the author of Sapiens, Yuval Noah Harari, to write your forward. How, how did that come about? Did you guys know each other before? Was he compelled by the content of the book? How, how did you snag such a, an all star for that?

You know, it's a good lesson, it's a good life lesson. So I have a habit of, whenever I read something that I really like, I always email the author to tell them. And, and I, so I read Sapiens before it was the mega hit that, that it is today. It was, it was known, but it wasn't like a runaway mega bestseller, you know, after it was once like Obama endorsed it. And so I had read it and I really was compelled. I, I found Sapiens such a eye opening book. It was among the best books I've ever read. And so I looked up his email address at the university where he was a professor and I emailed him to let him know and he wrote back a very kind message saying thank you, you know, if you're ever in Israel, you know, love to meet you. Was that.

Wow.

And so he was at that time I was living in Washington D.C. and so then after that the book blew up and he was going to do a talk at this Mississippi, and I really wanted to just see him speak, but it was sold out. And so I emailed him, I said, hey, I see you're coming to the city where I live. I'd love to come see you, but it's sold out. If you want to get together, let me know. And very magnanimously, very magnanimously he wrote back and said you're, you're now on the, the guest list that you can get in for free. Oh, and, and yeah, let' together afterwards. So he very kindly got together with me afterwards and I was telling him about this book that I was writing and I thought, you know, I was going to ask him to write a blurb for the book and for whatever reason, I just decided to ask him to write the forward, thinking that when he said no, then I would ask him for a blurb after that. And he said to me, you know, this is a great topic. I'm really interested in the topic. I would love to read the book. The only problem, problem is I am not able to do it for like another week. Can you wait that long? I might be able to wait a week. I might be able to

just for you, pal.

Yeah, yeah, yeah, we'll do anything. Sorry. So I, I emailed him the manuscript and to his great credit, he read it word for word and read the, wrote the forward himself. I thought maybe he would want me to draft it and it's. Sure, yeah, yeah, no, no, no, no, he, he wrote the for himself and it's great, it's a really great forward. I, you know, I actually told him I gotta take the forward if people just read the for it and then read the book. So, yeah, and then I did take him up on his offer and I was on a speaking tour in Israel after that and, and got a chance to go to his house and, and he's just a very gracious, magnanimous guy who I really admire. I love his writing. I think so highly of him and I don't even aspire to be him when I grow up, but I would like to have a fraction of one, his knowledge and two, his ability to compellingly tell stories as well.

Wow, I'm so glad I asked you for that story. That is awesome. So my next question book, technology wise, is how was it that you found out that it became a bestseller via the Washington Post's review?

I, I, you know, I had no clue that this could happen to me. Like, this was something so beyond my imagination of what was possible in my life. And my friend Bruce Friedrich, who's the founder of the Good food Institute, called me one morning. He was like, hey, congratulations. And I said, great. What for? Looking at the Washington Post, and I saw that you're on the best hours list. I was like, what? Oh, I was. I couldn't believe it. I was with. I was with my then girlfriend, who was now my wife, and I. I put it on speaker. I said, hold on. You gotta hear this. And I didn't think it was a prank. There was like, you know, there's a lot of coverage of the book. And so I didn't think it was a prank, but I just thought, this is insane. And what I really was compelled by was, you know, first of all, like, being on the list was a great honor for me. I didn't envision anything like this. But I was right above Neil Degrasse Tyson's book, and I'm a huge fan of Neil's. I've been a guest on Neil's show a couple times. I really like Neil. I read his books, and I thought, man, I don't know the list, but I beat Neil. And so. And so I emailed him. So those who don't know, Neil Tyson is an astrophysicist who's very popular.

Right? Yeah.

And I emailed him. I was like, hey, Neil, you know, sorry to tell you. So in fairness, I was only on it for one week, and he was on it, like, multiple weeks in a row. So, you know, he's been on it for numerous books. So by far, he is still crushing me in the best hour game for. For one. One glorious week, I've had that distinction. And he. He wrote back a very poignant message where it was like, you know, it's like a bottle floating in the ocean, you know, basically. But anyway, yeah, I. You know, I was grateful. I mean, if it hadn't been for Bruce, I don't know, maybe somebody would have told me. But I don't know who was happier, my. Myself or my mom.

Oh, that's great.

Like, so eager to brag about her son to her friends, and so a big moment for her.

That is wonderful. That is so wonderful. So. Oh, that's great. Well, okay, so now we've had a lot of good lead up into this. So one of the things that you talk about, you know, in. In the book is this move towards cellular agriculture as the second domestication. So maybe unpack that for Us tell us the, the concept, concepts behind that and, and what you're thinking is on that.

Sure. So cellular agriculture is the process of growing not whole organisms like animals, not whole organisms like plants, but growing actual cells. Think about it like this. If you, Chris, let's say you do a very hard workout and you are creating micro tears in your muscles that are now going to repair themselves and turn into bigger and better muscles than before. Well, the way that happens is that you have latent in your muscles are these cells, they're called myosatoid cells. And they have one job task in their life is to create muscle. That's it. They just sit there waiting for you to need more muscle. And they've only one career their whole life. That's all they ever get to do is just to produce muscle. Well, interestingly, animals of all kinds have these myosatelite cells and interesting, meat is made out of muscle. And so people for a long time have fantasized, what if you could grow these outside of the body and grow muscle outside of the body. And the first time anybody ever successfully accomplished this was about 26 years ago in NASA funded research. These researchers in New York State grew goldfish. They took a biopsy from a goldfish and grew the muscle outside of the fish's body in a petri dish. And they proved that actually these, these muscle cells can grow outside of the body and create actual muscle. They could. Not surprisingly, it smelled like fish. And so the reason why NASA was doing this, of course, was because if you're going to have long distance space tourism, you're not going to be bringing Noah's Ark into it, right? You're not bringing cows to Mars.

Right.

You're not, you're not going to have like, you know, we, we have to say carry food up to the International Space Station all the time. But for anybody who's going, you know, far away, they're not going to have that option and they're going to have to produce their own protein. So NASA was looking into ways to do this. Now since then, people have made all types of meats from animal cells and they have found ways to essentially domesticate animal cells just in the same way that we domesticated animals and actually grow them inside of stainless steel cultures, activators, where you give those satellite cells the same conditions that they would have inside the body. So the cell believes it's still in the body and it does what it would do in the body naturally, which is to produce muscle. And so you create the muscle that is that is otherwise known as meat inside of these cultivators, which is why it's oftentimes called cultivated meat or clean meat. And you end up getting real meat without ins animals. And there are now, there have been probably in the last 10 years, I'd say like 150 companies that have been founded in order to achieve this dream of scaling up a slaughter free meat industry. And numerous of them have received regulatory approval from health and safety institutions around the world, from Singapore to the United States and beyond. And they, some of them are selling right now. I have been pleased to eat many of their food products dozens of times now. I've eaten and cultivated meat, or real meat grown from animal cells rather than animal slaughter. And these companies have raised collectively over $3 billion from investors now. So this is a real industry. You know, the problem is $3 billion sounds like a lot, but when you consider the fact that bringing one drug to market from one company may take two to $3 billion. Right. Like it's so hot.

Yeah.

And $3 billion over 150 small startups is really not that much money. The industry needs more and frankly it needs government support. This is, you know, the same way that we've had government supporting the energy transition from fossil fuels to cleaner energy sources, we should have government support for transitioning from animal agriculture toward cleaner protein sources as well. And that's, I think, what it's going to take for this industry, industry to succeed. And China is doing just that. China is racing to win the future of cultivated meat. There are more patents being filed on cultivated meat technology in China than anywhere else in the world. And there's government support for this because they realize that the key to national security is food security. I want to make sure that in a food insecure future that they have all the meat their country wants. And if you look at even what happened with African swine fever a few years ago in China, literally one out of two pigs in China died.

Wow.

Years ago in China, one out of two pigs in China died. Which meant, and it was a major problem for the country to the point where now in the same way that we have a strategic oil reserve in the United States, they actually have a strategic pork reserve in the United States. China frozen pork.

Wow.

And, and so the question then is, you know, how can, you know, how can a country avoid those types of shocks? And the answer is, you know, cells are not going to get African swine fever. Right. You know, that's just not, you know, they don't get the fever they don't have lungs, they don't have respiratory. That's not, not what happens. So we are, are in a position to not only do some, something that would spare billions of animals from really torturous conditions and that would improve the environment, but also help secure food security for countries in the future. And so this is why, you see, even tiny countries that don't produce a huge portion of their food, like Singapore, are also some of the most supportive of this because it's a way for them to actually produce meat without having to use all the land that is used to produce meat in countries like the United States. I'd say, you know, like right now, China, Singapore, Israel, the United States, these are the companies that are leading this, this cellular agriculture revolution right now. But China is frankly, in my view, probably, you know, at least as far as the research is going, probably the most advanced.

That's fascinating to me. I mean, in the sense of, you know, we think about, when I first think about food security, it's the aspect of just like greater population than there is to be able to be fed. And then you also made the point, you know, in our conversation about deforestation and, you know, more people taking, you know, it's, Is it the agriculture that's going to take up the acreage that used to be forest, Is it going to be humans that's taking that up, et cetera?

No, no, it's all agriculture. It's almost all, almost all of it is either cropland free for feeding animals or grazing land for feeding animals.

So, so in this context then with, you know, with what China, Singapore and others are doing, is there also going to be an issue you talked about, you know, for yourself, with your own company, with, you know, obviously with, with fungi production, the scaling issue of that and being able to increase production, isn't that going to be a bottleneck for, for the engineered meats as well, too, is that?

Yeah, yeah, it's a huge bottleneck because it's very capitally intensive. But you got to start. So think about it like this. Right now in the United States, totally dependent on Asia for our semiconductors, right? We're, we produce nearly none of them and safety, excuse me, of our own semiconductors. Similarly, we're dependent on Asia for clean energy technology. We're importing photovoltaic panels for solar, we're importing wind turbines and so on from Asia. That's a big problem. And so that's why we had the CHIPS act and the Inflation Reduction act to try to onshore and domesticate some of these important technologies for winning the future. And so now we're spending billions of federal dollars to help create semiconductor manufacturing in the United States, to help create the clean energy technology in the United States. Well, the same thing is going to happen if we don't get our act together in the US Right now. Asia will lead between protein race in the future. And it's one thing to be buying our, you know, wind turbines from, from Asia. It's another thing when, you know, a different part of the world controls your food production.

Wow.

This is a very serious national security concern.

Yeah.

And governments around the world are beginning to wake up to this fact that the race for the future of protein is on. As humanity continues to swell our ranks, we have to get more efficient about how we produce protein. And that means using fewer animals and producing more protein with fewer animals. And so it's very imperative in my view as an American. I'd love to see America lead this, this race, but for humanity as a whole. You're going to see some governments putting more into this and being the winners in the future who are going to be doing the equivalent of making all the solar panels and semiconductors.

Your book was really sort of a crystal ball to the prediction of the future of these kinds of things. I mean they're really all kind of, you know, the, from the geopolitical kind of perspective are really kind of falling into place right now. And I think you drug just now wonderful comparisons around other kinds of technologies. This certainly needs to be something that, you know, perhaps needs to do a little leapfrogging to the top of the list.

So yeah, yeah, if I, you know, if I had to work on something like if I was thinking about, in my view the two things that would do the most to help secure a better future for humanity. Now there's a lot, don't get me wrong. Two things that are at the top of my list would be finding ways to wean ourselves off of animal agriculture so that we can, you know, have cellular agriculture, fermentation derived from proteins, plant based proteins and so on, and then moving to nuclear electricity, whether fusion or fission. Actually I think those are like the two things that would do the most as I view nuclear as the, the best bet to quickly get ourselves off of fossil fuels. And if, if we could have those two, if I could snap my fingers and have the governments of war focus on three things, then that would be it. It would be, you know, a fast transition to animal free food technologies and a fast transition from fossil fuels to Nuclear electricity.

Yeah, the things that I'm aware of in those areas, like I've been paying a lot of attention to Kevin Kelly, who I respect a great deal, and, you know, talking about these new technologies that are, you know, smaller reactors and much safer. It's not, you know, it's not your grandfather's nuclear reactor kind of thing. So I would agree. And I think the demand by virtue of AI, which is, you know, ubiquitous these days, is just going to probably shove that, you know, to be a high, high demand kind of thing as well.

For sure.

I want to talk a little bit more about you and some of the things that you, that you're up to. So you also the host of a very popular podcast, Business for Good, tell the listeners about that. How did that start? And tell us, you know, who your guests are.

Oh, that's very kind of you. So I have been hosting the Business for Good podcast for eight years now, and I'm gratified that it has a listenership. I'll tell you, I, after writing the book Clean Meat, I really enjoyed being able to tell other people's stories. I really liked the idea that, that I could help give a platform to entrepreneurs and investors and scientists who are all doing really cool things to try to make the world a better place. And so when I started the Better Me Company, I thought, well, that's a shame. I'm not going to be able to write about these people anymore. I would really like to be able to do something to promote the good work of others. And at that point I thought, well, maybe I'll do a podcast instead of a book. And so that's what I've done. We're now over 180 episodes in and each the show airs on the 1st and 15th of every month. And I host generally CEOs of companies that are trying to solve some pressing problem. The goal of the show is to show is to showcase people who are making money by solving the world's most pressing problems. And so to take the example that we were just talking about with nuclear, for example, a recent episode was with a company called Deep Fish Vision, and they're a company that is working on placing nuclear electricity reactors a mile underground. And their argument is if you put this a mile underground, you can cut the cost of building a nuclear power plant by over 80%. And that you don't. Your, your storage issue is solved already. And your, you don't need all of the pressurized equipment that's around and containers because you have a mile of earth above you creating that pressure. And so if it were true that you could actually create nuclear power plants that were safer than the ones we have today and the ones we have today are very safe compared to other forms of electricity generation. But if you could create them even SAFER and for 80% less, you could really quickly expand them. Right. You know, instead of needing, you know, hundreds of billions or even trillions of dollars to build all of the nuclear power that we're going to need, need you put them a mile underground, you cut that cost by 80%, you can build a lot more of them. And so that's one example of the type of company that we feature on there. We also have on investors like Steve Joberson who's on the board of SpaceX and was, was on the board of Tesla for a while. And Steve is a well known Silicon Valley investor. He's been on the show and so you know, the goal is to bring on people who are trying to build a business better future. And I've been very gratified that people like the show and want to listen to it.

Yeah, I hear, hear. Yeah, I'll put links to it in the show notes as well too. Yeah, big, big fan of it. I think it's a great idea too. And I just, you know, just the, the eloquent, elegant business for good just I think totally speaks to the ethos of it. I, a while back and it sort of reminded me from something you said earlier in today's conversation about doing research and kind of figuring out, you know, scratching your own itch and trying to figure out how things work and you know, that leads to these other activities and you know, major career things for you. I, I have a 501c3 a non profit that I started that focuses on global health and back in the day.

Oh cool.

Yeah. I was like, you know, how does this work and how do you do this? And I had my, you know, I was a big fanboy of Doctors Without Borders and Amnesty International, a variety of other things like that. So and because I write a lot more so from an academic kind of space as a, as a former professor. So I sort of had this idea that actually I was able to pitch and get a contract and wound up growing to be from one book to actually a three volume set. And we called it, thank you. We called it the New Humanitarians. And the idea is similar to kind of, I think, you know, your, what your interests are that I wanted to look at, you know, there's great institutions. I did a year at the United Nations. Nations. As a special representative, I'm a big fan of the World Health Organization and the World bank and WEF and all this. But there's also a variety of kind of these less well known, maybe more skin in the game, maybe more, you know, guerrilla humanitarians, so to speak, that are out there doing a variety of different kinds of things that, you know, maybe don't make the headlines, but also are really making a difference in whatever it is that they're doing. So, plus, for me, being selfish, you know, my, my, my me search instead of research was that I wanted to know, how did they do it? How did they come about doing these things? So I got, gosh, four graduate students together, and the five of us kind of put together a game plan with my publisher, and we, you know, started knocking on the doors and reaching out some of the people, some of the founders I knew, some of them ones I didn't. And now I've become having nice relationships with them years later, like, how did this start? How did Doctors Without Borders start? And the stories behind that are just fascinating. And it gave me great Hope that the Mr. Magoo in me of not knowing what I'm doing and fumbling around and trying to get to the end of something and do something good in the meantime. So I find that it's wonderful to hear these kinds of stories. We did it in print, and the graduate students got a publication out of it, the organizations got publicity out of it. I got to learn and, you know, pick and choose what things people did to be able to help found my nonprofit, etc. So I think the fact that you bring it alive and very easy for people to consume by virtue of, you know, contemporary kinds of things that are going on in real time in the world today with, you know, with your podcast is. Is tip of the hat. I'm very proud to know you and know that you do these kinds of things. So I know we're starting to get long on time, but I do I have to ask you, what is your superpower? You write books, you run companies, you grow companies, you have a podcast. And your cadence of twice a month just blows me away because for me, one a month is big enough of a challenge.

Challenge.

You know, you. You've. You've. You've got a life, you know, and a wife. So how do you manage all these kinds of things in and not, you know, losing your sanity in the meantime?

Well, that's very kind of you, Chris. So I do have a couple secrets. Number one, I have my company, my Goal is always just to hire people who know a lot more than I do. So I, I may be the face of the company. And I can assure you, Chris, I'm not the brain. Really smart people here. And so I am grateful for that is to hire people. That is a bit of a superpower, to hire people who just are smarter than you. I think I have done that. I also married somebody who's better than I am, too. So.

Okay, same.

I applied the same in my personal life. And then also, just practically, I, I don't. I don't comprehend when I see people running companies and doing a lot of stuff who also have kids. I don't have kids. I have a dog, but I. I don't have kids. And I, like, there are two things that seem to take up a lot of time when I talk to my friends about their lives. Kids and tv. Right. And so if you don't do. If you don't do either one of them, you don't do either one. It just saves some free time, you know? And so, like, I, I have to. I, I have to say, like, I, I really think that has been. I don't know. Well, I'll put it this way. I don't know how I would have done it otherwise.

Yeah.

If I either, you know, like, people. People always complaining they don't have enough time. And then you ask them, well, tell me about your favorite TV shows, and they start telling you all the things they watch. Right. I don't want them for it. Like, there's no point. There's lots of cool TV shows.

Sure.

I'm just saying, like, you know, it just takes up a lot of time to do those activities.

Yeah.

And so I always have a lot of, like, admiration for people who are trying to do really big things while also having kids. It's like, you know, they. They do it, and I don't know how they do it, but they do it. And. And some of them do it really well.

Yeah.

In fact, here's a, Here's a fun fact for you here. This will be a wild way to bring us out here, okay. We're talking about inventors. So, Chris, here's the piece of trivia for you.

Okay?

The first. The first time a woman won the Nobel Prize who was.

Wasn't Curie. Was.

Was. Okay, good answer.

Okay. Okay.

All right. So congratulations. You're one of three right now. The second time. The second time a woman won the Nobel Prize, who was it?

Okay. I think I've. I've shot my best shot Here. So I. I give. I'm gonna have to give up on that one.

All right, well, you should have shot the. The same shot because it was Marie Curie.

Again, trick question.

Yeah. The only person to win Nobel Prizes in Nobel Prizes in science, in different fields in chemistry and physics.

Wow.

Now, here's where the relevant part comes in. The third time a woman won the Nobel Prize, I will let you take one more guest. Who was it?

It's not going to be Curie.

It was not Marie Curie, but it was her daughter.

Okay.

And so, like, you know, think about, like, I think about, like, Marie Curie accomplished more than most people could accomplish in multiple lifetimes, and yet she still had a daughter and yet raised her daughter in such a way that she was, you know, that is. Yeah, that's like, you know, like, that is like the parent of the century.

Yeah. That's a triple crown of parenthood. Yeah.

Yeah. It was like a good argument for teens, I guess. But still, you know, that is the wild thing.

Yeah.

If she could do it, obviously it can be done.

Yeah. Pretty cool.

But. But, yeah, it's tough. It's really tough.

That's. Okay. Well, fair point. Fair point. So, Paul, this has been a hoot. I've really enjoyed this, is that we've covered a lot of areas and been kind of all around the Maypole, but is there anything that we've missed that you'd like to add before we wrap?

No, I'll just say if you want to get in touch, I'd love to hear from you. I welcome it. You can visit BetterMe Co again. Better. Better Meet Co and get in touch. And as I mentioned, I've written this novel, and if you're in the publishing game and you want to work with me to get it out, I'd love to talk to you about it. It's a great novel. Great sci fi dystopia. It's really cool.

Well, hey, you know, back channel me, because I have a couple of possibilities. I don't know if it would be something I publish mostly with Wiley, and they kind of publish all over the place. My niche is obviously nonfiction, a little bit more academic, but I know that they do biographies and a variety of other things. And then I have a friend and colleague who's kind of. Actually probably two or three, now that I think about it, that might help with making suggestions or introductions or agents. So let's. Yeah, let's reconnect after. After this back channel and email or conversation.

So. Hey, Chris, It's a real pleasure to talk like grateful for all you doing

the same man same man. You are an inspiration. So I really appreciate you taking the time today to be on and fit me into your schedule. I have just really enjoyed it and a big fan of everything it is that you're up to.

The honor is mine.

As a reminder, listeners can read a summary of this episode and access links to the show notes via my LinkedIn Top Voice Companion article along with past guests as well. I hope you enjoyed this conversation as much as I have and I hope it will help you in your journey to living your life in full. Until next time, Living a Life in Full is a production of Stout Media, a subsidiary of Gordian Knot, LLC. Assistant producer Gracie Wong Music Dan O' Brien executive producer and host Dr. Chris Stout to learn more, stop by our website at lifeinfull for show notes and please recommend us to your friends and subscribe on your favorite platform. And as for the obligatory disclaimer, this podcast is for general information uses only and does not constitute the practice of psychology, medicine, nutrition or other professional health care services, including the giving of medical or psychological advice. No doctor patient relationship is formed. Lastly, and perhaps most importantly, I take conflicts of interest seriously. For all of my disclosures as well as show notes, please see livingalifeinfull.org podcast and my LinkedIn profile. Thanks and until next time.

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