Founder Stories: Pat Brown, Founder of Impossible Foods

I do occasionally get a chance to introduce people who have Wikipedia pages, but as I mentioned, I was thrilled to see I don't have to really write my own intro or anything because you've got such a thorough Wikipedia page, and so much so that I can't actually read it literally because it's too long. But one thing that— and first, another thing that strikes you, of course, is there's a number of Pat Browns out there. This is Pat Brown.

You can never have too many Pat Browns, let's get that straight.

Um, then you started out, uh, you know, if we're going back to '82, uh, you got your medical degree at University of Chicago, um, and then decided to go into basic research, um, where you did a postdoc at UCSF which of course is near and dear to our hearts because that's our employer, where you worked with Mike Bishop and Harold Varmus. Now, did you— it says that you defined the mechanism by which retroviruses integrate their genes into the genome. So that was like a fundamental step. And is that proved useful subsequently in developing therapies?

Do you know? It's hard for me to say that. I think that I think it probably to some degree did because I developed, you know, ways of getting the reaction to go in a test tube, which makes it amenable to, you know, trying to find inhibitors and stuff like that. But I stopped working on that problem relatively early, more or less like a year and a half or maybe I don't know, 2, 3 years after I came to Stanford. But there's been a lot of work by people other than me on developing inhibitors of integrase. In fact, it was just yesterday there was an announcement of results of a trial of an integrase inhibitor as a single drug that can be given every 2 months by injection. And is very effective in preventing infection. So it's going to be really important. But I had nothing to do with that other than, you know, figuring out the biochemical mechanism back in the day.

Okay, well, you know, I would personally be interested to hear about this for a long time, but your CV and your Wikipedia page is too long. So let's move a little further along. You subsequently began developing the DNA microarray, which is now like just a worldwide research tool. And by the standards of anybody's academic career, you, you know, were a roaring success. And in the late 1990s, criticizing the scientific publishing— I don't know, what's it called— the scientific industrial complex, right? You, you know, you were a co-founder of Public Library Science. Along with a few others. Now, were you with Nick Cozzarelli at some point?

Yeah, I did my PhD with Nick at the University of Chicago, and that was figuring out the mechanism of type 2 topoisomerases. Basically figured out that they pass DNA strands through one another.

Nick was a terrifying figure in the Berkeley MCB department. I passed through when he was a prof there. He scared the hell out of all of us.

Oh, um, but so he was actually— and then, you know, he likes to be scary, but he was actually a really sweet guy.

Um, but the point where we're all here talking about today is that you in 2009 took a an 18-month sabbatical where you reconsidered your career, and at the end of which you had decided that solving animal participation in food production was the biggest challenge that the world— biggest solvable challenge that the world faced. So we'd really like to know one more thing is that you came back from that sabbatical and having made that decision that this was the most important problem, and like any good professor, immediately convene the conference or work with other people to create a— open a conference, but the conference didn't have much effect. And this seems to be a natural academic response to a challenge is to have a conference, get people together to talk about it, and then, you know, expect things to happen. But, you know, they're academics, so nothing actually happened. So I guess we're really interested in how you made that decision to, at that point, say, I'm, you know, I'm not going to be a full-time professor anymore. I'm going to I'm going to pursue this challenge that I consider the most important thing. Tell us about that choice.

Sure. By the way, I just— you meant one thing about my Wikipedia page. It just reminded me is that Wikipedia page, I don't write the thing. The first I even knew there was a Wikipedia page was when someone told me about it, and that it turned out my son had added to my Wikipedia page a line that said, "Pat Brown's estranged son, Isaac, is a well-known West Coast rapper." Anyway, he's not really my estranged son, this is his one, but I thought that was pretty funny. That was the first time I even realized that there was a Wikipedia page associated with me. There you go.

How long did that stay up for?

I don't know. A friend of his, one of his roommates told me about it. I don't know how long it had been up, but anyway, just goes to show Wikipedia is— I love Wikipedia. So you were asking about this, how I made the decision to go the direction I did. And first of all, I think it's important to realize, and you were pushing back on this, and I welcome the pushback, but that what I realized was the use of animals as a food technology is by far the most destructive technology in human history. Nothing even comes close. Fossil fuels, everybody's thinking about fossil fuels. The impact, first of all, the impact of replacing fossil fuels is very small. It's great, I'm all for it. Let's just get that straight. With renewable energy is small compared to the impact of replacing animals as a core technology in the food system. And I can actually, if you don't, well, I'll say there's two things. Number one, there are the two greatest environmental challenges. There are many reasons to get rid of animals in food technology. I'll just stick to two. Two biggest environmental challenges we face today are, number one, climate change, And number 2, not necessarily in this order, number 2, a catastrophic collapse in global biodiversity that is less well known, but possibly an even greater threat to the viability of the Earth's biosphere. In the past 50 years, the total number of living wild mammals, wild birds, wild reptiles, wild amphibians, wild fish, probably even invertebrates, although they've been less well tracked, based on an ongoing study over the past 50 years where censuses have been taken of many thousands of species that are sort of representative of biodiversity, there are less than a third as many wild mammals, birds, reptiles, amphibians, and fish living on Earth today as there were 50 years ago, okay? It's an absolute collapse of global biodiversity. And it's not just because, you know, we regret that this is happening to those species. It's that the integrity of ecosystems depends on the biodiversity in those ecosystems. And if you, you know, do something as catastrophic to components of those ecosystems as we've done, it's not just gonna be we won't have giraffes. You know, the, the whatever, the seeds that they spread, um, you get rid of giraffes and those trees won't grow back in 50 years. You won't notice it until 50 years from now when suddenly trees die and nothing replaces them. So that's a catastrophe, and, and, um, it's almost entirely due to our use of animals in the food system.

And why is it not, uh, pesticides, say, or for—

oh, pesticides, pesticides are a drop in the bucket. Um, the, the overwhelming reasons, and, and I can refer you to the, the published report on this that is a joint effort of World Wildlife Fund and Zoological Society of London and various academic groups and so forth for the causes. But to just get right to it, for fish, for aquatic species, it's almost entirely due to overfishing, okay? Just direct depletion by overexploitation. For terrestrial species, it's almost entirely due to habitat destruction and degradation. Pollution, pesticides, and so forth has an effect. It's very small by comparison. Climate change, you might think, is a huge player. It's increasing. It's still very small by comparison to habitat destruction and degradation. And I refer you to the report, and I can send a link if you want, But basically, the problem is that 45% of the entire land surface of Earth— actually, let me do this, if you don't mind this share screen thing, and to this. So 45% of the entire land surface of Earth is currently being used raising animals for food. It's either being actively grazed livestock or growing feed crops to feed them. That land footprint comes at the expense of previously healthy biodiverse ecosystems and at the expense of all the biomass that was stored in the plant matter on on that land that was, as you see happening live right now in the Amazon, that was removed to clear the land for farming and grazing and so forth. And I'll get back to that in a second. But just to give you an idea of the craziness of this, the total biomass of just the cows living on Earth today, is more than 10 times greater than the cumulative biomass of every wild mammal, bird, reptile, and amphibian, every terrestrial vertebrate left on— every wild terrestrial vertebrate left on Earth, okay? More than 10 times that biomass in just cows. And, you know, so that, I think, gives you an idea of how incredibly disruptive and destructive the use of this ridiculous technology to produce food has been to our planet. Let me just— I'll just— sorry, if you don't mind, with respect to greenhouse gases. Yes.

Again, coming at this from a position of somebody who doesn't know anything about it, I would think, okay, well, if you're going to replace the cows with something else that provides the protein, um, what's the footprint of that?

I love that you asked that question. Thank you, thank you. And that's the first question that most people, especially scientists, will ask. And the answer is, not only do we get rid of the footprint that, of, you know, directly attributable animal agriculture, actually the total amount of plant crops we need to grow is greatly reduced. Even so, I'll just give you— I, I could go into more detail if you want to go more, more deep into this, but just to give you an idea. So again, 45% of Earth's surface used to raise animals for food. By the way, about 0.1— about 1% of Earth's surface holds every city and highway and factory on Earth. Okay, so people think, oh, cities and suburbs getting bigger is the problem. No, completely wrong, not even remotely close. It's animal agriculture, about 50 times the footprint of every city on Earth. But then in terms of the crops, just to give you one metric of this, the global soybean crop contains 50% more total human usable, corrected for amino acid composition and digestibility, 50% more total protein than all the meat consumed globally in just the world soybean crop. And it occupies 0.8% of Earth's land area. And, you know, the U.S. soybean crop contains more than 5 times the total protein content of all the meat consumed in the U.S. So I'm not representing the soybean industry, but it just illustrates the point that a very large fraction of the crops grown globally are not consumed by humans. They're only consumed once they've been turned into pigs and chickens and cows. And the conversion efficiency, you know, for cows is like 3%, and for pigs and chickens, it's about 10%, meaning you need to grow vastly more crops if you're turning them into animal flesh before humans consume them. —and I'll just add one more thing, which is that you can take all the grains, all the staple grains, wheat, rice, and stuff like that, all the vegetables, all the fruits, everything that humans consume, including the soybean crop, which has more protein than all the meat in the world—they add up to about 7% of Earth's land area. So the bottom line is, you replace that 45% of Earth's land area footprint with 7%, it's more than 85% decrease, not just in the footprint of agriculture, 85% decrease in the entire land footprint of humanity by replacing animals as a food technology. So great.

Now, we've got an audience of, you know, largely composed of entrepreneurs, some of whom, as you so humorously pointed out, probably not too many of them are actually in food tech because You claim there aren't many food tech entrepreneurs. The audience would probably beg to differ. So tell us about, you've made that decision, you've recognized that problem. Like, yes, it seems like a tremendous problem and very ambitious, which is terrific. It's like world-changing insight and initiative. Now tell us, how do you get started solving that problem? How did you get started solving that problem?

Well, the first order of business was realizing that it was a problem. And I have to say that, you know, I thought I was pretty well informed about environmental issues. I tried to be. And ironically, I haven't eaten meat for my entire adult life, and I haven't eaten any animal products for like the past 15 or 20 years. And so I had no particular stake in that industry, but I didn't really— I didn't realize how bad it was until I started looking into it. And then when I realized how bad it was and the opportunity that, and I'll just say that and you can challenge me on it, literally, we have the opportunity to not just slow climate change, we can turn back the clock on climate change if we replace animals with food technology. And challenge me on that if you want, but we can literally lower atmospheric greenhouse gas levels over the next 20 years if we do that. Anyway, when I realized that, I also realized that, I made that abortive attempt to do a workshop because I thought, well, maybe this is a way that we can get the world to understand the magnitude of the problem and so forth, and that actually, it would not only be good from an environmental standpoint, but actually be better from an economic standpoint, food security, public health, and all those things. Then I realized that this is a complete waste of time. No one's gonna— when we come up with a report, it'll be on page 6 of the local news and sit gathering dust on the shelves of people in Congress and so forth and forget about it, okay? Also, you're not gonna solve the problem by trying to persuade people to change their diets, okay? By telling, "Oh, it's bad for the planet to eat meat, blah, blah, blah." A proof point that that's not going to work is I went to the Paris Climate Conference, whatever, 6 years ago or something like that. You're surrounded by people who have devoted their lives to addressing climate issues and environmental issues and so forth. They're very informed about it. They understand the problem. When you talk to them about animal agriculture as a climate problem. They're acutely aware of it, and yet they all went out and had steak for dinner. So the point is, you're not going to solve the problem by educating people or persuading people that this is a problem, and you're not going to solve it by compelling them. China asked its citizens to cut back their meat and dairy consumption by half 3 years ago, and what's happened is absolutely nothing. The, the demand has just continued to increase. So the only way to solve it is to realize that it's actually not a demand problem, it's a technology problem. We're using this incredibly inefficient, primitive, prehistoric technology to turn plants into these high-value foods, meat and fish and dairy foods. And the way to solve it is to accept that the demand will continue to exist, but that we can do a better job of satisfying that demand by creating better technology. And I don't mean better just from an environmental standpoint, but from a nutritional standpoint, a cost standpoint, and even a deliciousness standpoint. When you think about the cow did not evolve to be delicious, and it hasn't gotten any more delicious in 10,000 years, it's not even working on the problem. Once you decide that we are going to optimize the technology for all these things, As soon as we have products that are as delicious as the best thing you can get from a cow, we can make them better. And, and as I said, the cow's not even trying. So that was, that was the thesis that, that the way to solve this is market competition. We develop a better technology platform. We compete in the marketplace by making products that are explicitly created to deliver pleasure to meat consumers or the consumers of the current products. Not vegetarians, not vegans, we don't care about— I mean, I'm vegan, but I don't— we don't care about them, okay? We have to focus on delivering optimal value to current meat consumers. I felt like that was doable, and that the way to solve this then was create, build a company with the mission, our mission is to completely replace animals in food technology by 2035. But the way we do it, is to build a more efficient, more continuously improvable technology platform, and then create products that directly compete in the marketplace against the products from the current industry, and basically pull the economic rug out from under it. Again, our mission is achieved through the market, but what's driving it is We want to get rid of this incredibly destructive technology ASAP. Great.

So, um, that, you know, I'm just thinking like what makes the most delicious stuff that I can think of? And I don't know why, but McDonald's comes to mind, right? So there's probably some, and they make highly, highly processed food, which nobody questions exactly what that burger is made of, right? It's, it's, I mean, my 8th grade English teacher says they're allowed to call it beef, but it's not actually what you would think of if you what you consider be. But, you know, here we've got a bunch of people watching and listening who are early-stage entrepreneurs. They want to hear the, the story of how you got started and, and ideally some mistakes that you made and learned from. So there you are, you've made this decision in your head, but nobody else knows you made that decision. Who do you start working with to make this reality?

Actually, I can— so you asked me to pull up some slides that are just very unpolished stuff that I just threw together literally in the past 2 hours, related to the past history, which I will pull up, and I'm going to go backwards here, sorry, so that I can go through this. Basically, before I started the company, when I started thinking about how we would do this, I started doing experiments in my house or in my lab that were just a reality check. Are the things that we're going to need to be able to do feasible? This is an illustration of one of them, one of the early experiments, which is, I was thinking about, okay, we're going to need to replace cheese, just one of many things. But plant milks don't naturally curdle because mammalian milks have evolved a specific system. They've evolved to curdle in baby animals' stomachs, and that's what enables cheese to be made. I wanted to figure out whether we could do the same things with plants. I won't go through the details of that, but I just had some ideas, some biochemical ideas about how we could make plant milks or plant proteins curdle. This was just 2009, which is a year and a half before I founded the company. Just testing whether that's feasible, and it is, but we don't wanna talk about that right now. Another thing I did was I was thinking about how do we, starting to think about how does meat work as a system to produce the things that, the flavors and aromas that consumers value? And it's clear we didn't know how to do that. If you look at all the plant-based products that existed back then, plant-based meats, they were— to a meat lover, they were just not even remotely close. The reason was because the people who were developing those things, their whole thesis was they were making products for people who are looking for alternatives to meat. They're vegetarians or vegans or people who have health reasons to reduce their meat consumption. That meant that to succeed in that market, you only had to be better than the next best plant-based product. You did not have to be better than the animal product, and that is a recipe for inferior products. I realized we had to make something that's better than the animal product, and step one was deeply understanding where the very unique properties of meat that distinguish them from any plant-based product, including previous plant-based meat replicas and stuff like that, where that comes from. I had the idea that one of, one of the critical ingredients was heme. And I won't go through all the details, but basically, of course, people have known about heme as a molecule for centuries, or for at least a century. And it's the molecule that carries oxygen in your blood. It's what makes your blood red. It's what makes meat red. It's also essential in every living cell on Earth as a part of the energy-generating system and so forth. It's also the catalytic business end of a lot of essential enzymes in your body, including all the enzymes that are involved in synthesizing steroid hormones, or most of the enzymes are involved in that, and metabolizing toxins, caffeine, and stuff like that. Now you look at meat, it's visually obvious that it contains a lot of heme because it's pink or red. And we know that heme is one of the best biological catalysts on Earth. I had the idea, well, maybe the reason that meat is such a dynamic producer of flavor and aroma is because it has a potent catalyst in it. And when you cook meat, you know, what you realize, unlike any— you cook broccoli and it gets warmer and maybe softer. You cook meat and it transforms dramatically in its chemical composition and flavor and aroma and so forth. And it was, well, maybe that was due to heme. So in the early days, pre-Impossible Foods, this is a couple of, a year and a half before, I knew that there was one part of a plant that has a high concentration of a heme protein that's actually very similar to the heme protein in animal tissues, that's like hemoglobin. Well, the animal tissue thing is myoglobin. And so I was actually, went around Stanford campus, pulling up clover and other legumes to collect the root nodules, which are these little nubbly things that you see hanging off the roots. And the idea was to collect enough of them that I could isolate the leg hemoglobin and just test to see whether, you know, its catalytic properties and so forth. So again, this is kind of the prehistory of Impossible Foods. Let me skip that. At some point, I realized I didn't know how to do anything, but I was confident this is doable. That's when I went to investors and basically pitched that there's a clear path to replacing this prehistoric technology. It's incredibly underperforming in every measure, including economics. It's fundamentally unimprovable, hasn't fundamentally improved in a very long time. There's a path to improving it. The market— and I was very stupid about giving a pitch because I saved the punchline. I buried the lead, basically. The lead should have been, in 15 years, this is going to be a $3 trillion market, which would have been enough to get the investors to pull their checkbooks out, I'm pretty sure. But instead, I went through a labored description about the environmental impact of the industry a lot of the nerdy science and so forth before I got to the punchline. But anyway—

So this was your first experience with business? You hadn't— like, presumably at Stanford, you're interacting with people who are spinning off companies.

Yeah, but I had zero interest in that. That's the thing. I had zero interest in that. I mean, I have nothing against it, but I just feel like I got the best job in the world here at Stanford. You know, I get paid to follow my curiosity and just discovered what I would be doing for a hobby if it wasn't my job. So when I look at, you know, going to the business world with all the craziness that's involved in running a business, I just had zero interest in that. I felt like, great, go ahead and do it. I'm not that interested. And so, yes, there are people I knew that were doing that. And I had also founded a nonprofit, Public Library of Science, and that did involve creating a business plan and raising money, although in that case from, foundations and philanthropists, but nevertheless, it involved some of the things about starting a business. I felt like that experience was useful. I realized what some of the critical things were in terms of convincing people that this is a good use of their money, but I was still a complete neophyte.

And so at this point, it's just you going and talking to investors, or do you have other people on your team?

No, it was just me. It was just me. I mean, the closest I had there, you know, it was me and then my wife and daughter occasionally serving as tasters when I was, you know, prototyping, you know, cheeses and stuff like that. And then the students and postdocs in my lab and colleagues at Stanford laughing at me, for my wacky experiments and so forth. No, they weren't.

Still laughing?

No, they actually were incredibly supportive. They were sometimes laughing when they saw these centrifuge bottles full of green sludge or bright red liquids and stuff like that. It was very unlike the other research that was going on in my lab or elsewhere. But no, they were super supportive, actually. A lot of people think, oh, that should have been very complicated. No, my colleagues at Stanford and the people at Howard Hughes Medical Institute, which was my actual employer, were incredibly supportive of this endeavor, even though it was, you know, a little disruptive to them.

Who's the first person you bring in on the project?

Well, I had to raise money. It happened, actually, okay, this is a bit of an arcane thing, but because I had been doing some work on figuring out how to make cheeses from plant ingredients, I connected with a couple of chefs, Tal Ronen and Monte Cassino, a guy who taught cheesemaking at the Cornue Blue Academy in Boston. And I shared with them a kind of a technical breakthrough I'd made that enabled— that made it possible to make very cheese-like curds from plant milks. And so, they had started working in the background on this, before I founded the company and working with me. I would just send them the critical enzyme, and I did some— I prepared the raw materials and I sent them to Monty and he made cheeses out of them. But apart from that, it was only after I founded the company I had money, I hired— I started hiring a few people, First person I hired was a recent Stanford Business School graduate, who I hired to be basically the entire business team. And Nick Hollis is his name, and he's still at the company, and he's leading our international expansion now. Because I didn't, like I say, I didn't know anything about, you know, the practical mechanics of starting a business. The legal requirements, getting the permits, you know, balancing the books, you know, any, any of that kind of stuff. And Nick was, you know, good to go. And he was very— he was— he had grown up, but he was very, very, you know, he was very, very quickly bought into the mission.

And so, so building a team, I know you were going through some slides here, but that's of huge interest to a lot of these early-stage entrepreneurs is how, how do you get the right people on your team? So how did you proceed to build that nucleus of Impossible?

Um, well, part of it was that, um, I knew that we needed, you know, we needed someone who, who was, uh, a business operator who knew how to, you know, who knew the ins and outs of of running a business. Um, and, um, but then the main thing that we needed was, um, scientists and engineers. And so I focused primarily on hiring people, and they were mostly very young people who were just out of graduate school or college, uh, or, or postdoc in some cases, because that was a constituency that I I knew well and had access to and could find talented people, and also people who were really all in on the mission. That was critical. It was important for them because basically, when I founded the company, my fundamental belief, which I still absolutely believe, argue if you want, is that this is by far the most important science and engineering project on Earth, full stop. And, um, and so it's a science and engineering project, and I need to find the best talent I can readily put together. And like I say, initially it was young, young people fresh out of school who also needed to understand that basically as soon as they're hired, their job is whatever needs to be done. So, um, you— I wanted to hire people who were generalists. In fact, some of the people I hired, they immediately had to start working on something that was categorically different than the scientific problem they were working on. They'd been working on arcane aspects of gene regulation in mammals or yeast or something like that. Now, you're working on flavor, or you're working on isolating hemoglobin from Root nodules, let me just show you another picture that just illustrates something. And this kind of gets into mistakes made. So this is within the first year of the company. I had the idea and I spent a pretty large fraction of our bandwidth and money on the idea that we would isolate leg hemoglobin from root nodules as this critical flavor and color, you know, component in our products. And so these are, you know, what you're seeing here are basically super smart people who had— Nick is the guy on the left, but others are scientists who had been trained in very different fields. And basically in these images, you can see they're out on a farm harvesting root nodules from a soybean farm in Minnesota. And you look in the right, there's a contraption that we built out of a street sweeper propped up and a bunch of plywood that was our crude device for removing the root nodules from the roots and stuff like that. Like, this is not what anyone went to graduate school to do, okay? What I was looking for in the people I hired was people who were just like, I'm all in on the mission, and I'll do what it takes, whatever it is. My job is whatever needs to be done. They're great problem solvers, great generalist problem solvers, but I wasn't hiring for their special skills. I can do more explaining about what what the things in this picture are. Let me just—

So, you know, one thing I do know is that you're hiring now. So what kind of people do you need now at this stage? How many people are on at Impossible Foods at the moment?

It's about 700, including people in manufacturing. There's a couple hundred there. And then our R&D and business teams. I don't know why this thing is auto-advancing. Let me just escape so that stops doing that because it's annoying. Yeah, so there's about 700 total. The core R&D team is probably— there's a fuzzy boundary between the R&D team and the product development team and so forth, but I'd say it's probably between 50 and 100 people in the core R&D technology platform team, and then about an equal number that are involved in inventing, developing new products. And then the rest is business, you know, business functions. And yeah, so an important message, if there's anyone out there who is interested, who finds the notion of working on the absolutely most important science and engineering project in the world right now, and possibly in history, because we're talking about saving our planet from environmental catastrophe, which is literally what the company is founded to do. Like, people think of it, you know, it looks from the outside like a food company. From the inside, it's all about saving the planet, basically, by using science and engineering. And, uh, we're hiring. We're on a hiring blitz right now. We're looking for scientists at every level, every career stage, from very advanced in their careers to just out of postdoc or graduate school, or even just out of college. We've got an endless set of super interesting scientific and engineering problems. When I went into this, I thought, wow, food's going to be— I got to do this because we got to save the planet. Food's gonna be boring. I really thought food was boring. But once you get into it, you realize, no, it's only boring because there haven't been any innovation in the food system of any meaningful kind for, you know, as long as I've lived. Nothing changes, nothing fundamental changes. Oh, we have, you know, we've added BT to corn to help it be resistant to insect pests, or we've, you know, made a new flavor of Twinkies or something like that. But, um, but that means it's wide open for innovation. I mean, there's thousands of years' worth of interesting problems that are just sitting around to be solved. And, and they are— a lot of them are, you know, deep molecular problems, um, uh, and, you know, just everything from, uh, um, you know plant physiology, plant genetics, to agricultural engineering and technology, ecology, all the way to the molecular biophysics of proteins. There's very little understanding of the relationship between protein structure and sequence, and the kinds of materials those proteins can make, when you denature them or expose them to various changes and forces. Most of the physical properties of food are the result of multi-protein assemblies that produce material properties, and how that works as a whole area of protein structure and function and biophysics is virtually unexplored and really interesting. And it's extremely— it applies very broadly, obviously, in the food system, but also across a whole variety of other things where protein-based materials are relevant. And then there's the flavor chemistry.

There's many, many people with questions, and I know we're not going to have enough time for them all. You have to go at one. Correct. So let me just start with just a couple, because people, several people have wondered about different sources of protein, alternate sources of protein. So there's, there's plant-based meat, there's lab-grown meat, and then, of course, the long thought about but not really scaled up insect-based protein. How do you, where does Impossible stand in relation to these other alternatives and which are any of them morally or economically or environmentally better?

Well, I'm not going to get into what's morally better. I feel like that's a completely individual perspective and irrelevant to that question. But what I'll say is, from an environmental standpoint, one-to-one conversion of nutrients in plants into human food cannot be beat, okay, in terms of efficiency, both from an economic and environmental standpoint. So anything you do that gets away from that, you know, by definition is basically not going to be as efficient. When you talk about, so, you know, cell-cultured meat, first of all, I applaud the people who have chosen to work on that problem. And I will be their biggest fan for life if they succeed in it. But I think that there's fundamental problems with it. Number one, I think it's irreducibly too expensive to be competitive with animal-based meat, which is what you need to do, okay? Maybe they'll make a product that a few wealthy people who find it cool will want to buy. But all you have to do is just think about the fact that Here's a thought experiment. Imagine that I said, okay, we're going to take a fetal calf, and we're going to wipe out its immune system and then feed it intravenously until it's full grown, and that's the future of beef production. You'd probably say, well, that seems wacky and hard to imagine that's going to be economical, because being immunodeficient and fed intravenously is expensive. Yeah, okay. This is harder because now on top of that, you have the problem of you have to get stem cells to differentiate into a tissue with very exacting specifications. Something that's vaguely pink and mushy and muscle-like is not going to compete against a steak. We are so far from being able to do that. If you could produce something that's a reasonable facsimile, for example, of muscle tissue, I think that from a business standpoint, the smart move would be to sell it for $1 million a pound as a therapeutic, as opposed to $5 a pound as food. But that business doesn't exist, because it's fundamentally hard and fundamentally expensive, and I don't think it'll be economically competitive. But there's another thing also I'll just add, which is, I think there's a logical flaw there, which is that the moral equivalent 200 years ago, if someone had said, well, the way we're, you know, using horses as a power system for transportation is, It's environmentally destructive, which it actually is. Therefore, we're going to come up with a better system. Here's what we're going to do. We're going to culture horse muscle cells and hook them up to gears and pulleys, and that's the powertrain of the future. Well, the problem with that is that you have failed to recognize that the problem you're solving, which is moving a vehicle, funny, has nothing to do with a horse. The horse is just the technology we've used for the past 1,000 years. There's no reason that if you're stepping away from the horse, you still have to hang on to some little— because what happens is now you're locked into the fundamental limitations of the horse, as opposed to saying, no, what we're trying to do is solve a transportation problem, and that's what we're optimizing for, not a horse-based transportation problem. In this case, the problem we're trying to solve in the food system is to make the most delicious, nutritious, sustainable, healthy, affordable meat in the world. Not the most— all of that that we can make from animals. And when you step away from the requirement for an animal, suddenly you're in control of all the knobs. You can dial in any flavor you want. You can optimize the texture to some space that no animal has ever has ever done. You can make it juicier than, than any cow can be. And, um, you know, you, you're not stuck with the limitations of cow. You're not stuck with cholesterol. You're not stuck with the, um, the sugars that are in animal tissues that, that are potential cancer risk factors and stuff like that. You can do it from the ground up molecularly. So that's my feeling about it. But I think— but I honestly, I don't want that to come across as disparaging to the people who are trying to do it. Because I would love for them to prove me wrong. And like I say, I'm going to be their biggest fan if they do so. But I don't think it'll ever work, and for fundamental reasons.

One question that we had a couple varieties of was, how do you experience the tension between the environmental movement and the anti-GMO activists. You must— you're right at the intersection of that. You're trying to save the planet. You're also faced with people who think that any kind of alteration in natural food is an abomination. And this brings us into the larger question of marketing, which is—

well, if that's what they think, then it's baffling that they would be trying to defend the current meat industry, which is extreme alteration from a natural system. But anyway, well, okay, getting back to your question, though, it's a good question. The fact is that I think the whole anti-GMO issue is, it's a legitimate issue to the extent that there are regulatory barriers that are specific to GMOs, that it adds another hurdle for us in terms of our products and so forth. From a consumer perspective, the anti-GMO concept is not deeply rooted at all. You hear a lot about it because people love controversy. And there are people out there who are extremely anti-GMO and they make a lot of noise about it, but to most consumers, it's a total non-issue. And, you know, you just think about, like, all the cheese, or not all the cheese, but a very large majority of the cheese in the US for the past decades has been produced using, quote, "rennet," that is from genetically engineered yeast that have had the cow gene for rennet, this enzyme chymosin introduced into yeast. That's the plant-based rennet, but that's been produced by genetically engineered yeast for decades, and it's pretty much ubiquitous. There are many, many other genetically engineered ingredients that are ubiquitous in the food system. Of course, the cows and pigs and chickens are almost entirely fed by GMO corn and soybeans and so forth. And if you care about it from an environmental standpoint, then there's that. But the fact is, and most people know that it's nonsense. And when I've talked to people, even people who start out being, oh, GMO, that's so bad. Once I talk them through it, because nobody ever talks to them like intelligent people, they realize, oh, okay, actually, there's no reason to be opposed to it. So I think that the whole anti-GMO thing is going to fade away over the next decade very quickly.

And this must be part of your, your marketing plan, because you can't go out there and talk to people one-on-one, right? So how is Impossible addressing this in its marketing efforts? Oh, simple.

It's— we are completely— we tell the truth. That's how we do it. We've— before we even had a product on the market, we were talking to the press when they became aware of us about the fact that we're using genetically engineering, genetic engineering to produce this critical ingredient. By the way, the stuff I was talking about, root nodules, that's an example of an expensive mistake I made early on, because it turns out that's not a scalable way to produce like hemoglobin, and we switched to genetically engineering yeast as our way of producing it. And we've been very forthright about that from day one. And, um, and my feeling to get the trust of consumers, the reason that people are concerned about GMOs, I really think, is that the ultimate Darwin Award for marketing should go to Monsanto because they basically treated genetic engineering as a dirty little secret that had to be kept out of the public eye, as opposed to just being honest about it and talking, talking to consumers like intelligent people. I think that as the more people become aware of, you know, and really understand the issues, the more this will just be like ancient history. Um, in terms of the actual food system, it already is ancient history. I mean, genetically modified organisms are, you know, ubiquitous.

Um, so I've got like just so many interesting questions and so little time to ask them in. One question that a friend of mine, Courtney Hodges, had asked was, the meat industry, just like any big sector of the economy in agriculture, receives governmental subsidies. And you don't, as far as I know. How, you know, how are you competing with an industry which, you know, they can possibly make their production costs lower if if they pull the right political strings. So you're competing on other factors besides price, obviously.

Yeah, well, first of all, I think something to understand is, you know, we are, we are an exponentially growing startup, okay? We don't have economies of scale. We don't have the economies that you get when you've built all your infrastructure and you're operating in steady state mode like, like, like that industry. And of course, we don't have the subsidies and so forth. But the fundamental economics of our way of producing meat are so vastly superior to the incumbent meat industry that once we get to even a reasonable scale, we'll be able to beat them on cost. And here's what you have to think about. And it kind of gets into some of the political issues, which I'd be happy to dive into. But, well, when I found the company, I said, look, we're never going to win the political arguments about their subsidies. Assume the subsidies exist and that that government is never going to help us. We have to be able to succeed anyway. Well, the advantage we have is that, for example, when we look at our environmental impact, we use 1/25th the land, we use 1/9th the water, we use 1/12th the fertilizer input, less than 1/12th the pesticide input, you know, on the crops we use, because we use less of those crops. Less labor, because the total amount of plants that need to be grown to make food directly, as opposed to feeding to an animal, is vastly less. Okay, that's why the land footprint is so much smaller. Less labor growing the plants, because we use less plants. No labor managing the animals. Everything that drives the cost, all the elements of the cost of the meat system, we are vastly better off economically. The only thing that they have that we don't have is fully paid for infrastructure and a mature supply chain and business.

This brings up two points, and one is answered Well, you probably answered them both quickly. When do those curves cross the cost of producing one of your burgers versus a cow burger? How many years in the future is that intersection?

It's a little bit hard to say because it's a function of scale, obviously. It's a function of— so one thing to realize about scaling, when you're scaling exponentially, just to realize sort of a fundamental thing about scaling exponentially, is that we're building production capacity de novo, okay? And if we're growing exponentially, we need to build production capacity that is, given the time lag in building, that's 10 times greater than we're currently using, right? And then we need to grow into it. So you're efficient, and most of your production capacity is the stuff that you're building right now. The stuff you built before is a tiny fraction of what you need. You're building ahead of your use. Effectively, you can think of it as you're only using a tiny fraction of the capacity that you're paying for at any given point. That's just a function of exponential growth. There are other things having to do with, as we grow, we have more negotiating power for the supply chain, we can move further up the supply supply chain and stuff like that, and realize more economies. The problem is, it's a little hard to say. First of all, it's easy to say that asymptotically, we cream the current industry. It's harder to say exactly when, because some of the economics that are unfavorable just have to do with exponential growth. You're always building manyfold more capacity than you're using and paying for that. But I think there's a plausible route within a low single-digit number of years for us to be competing on price. In fact, I think it is going to happen a lot faster than most people think based on the current state of play.

Well, one thing that you have going for you is this, like, at least America, for some reason, fan of ground meat, right? Like, people want meat in a shape that doesn't actually resemble the meat. So you don't have to produce an animal, you're producing something which resembles meat. Now, I do— we're coming to the top of the hour. This one question has been brought up by a number of people and In fact, I thought it was really worth talking about earlier. A number of synthetic biology companies have repeatedly demonstrated that it doesn't make sense to go after high value— to try to produce a commodity product with high biotech. So I'm thinking like biofuels. People went in to try to produce biofuels, and they could produce a small amount, but they just could not increase the yield to any amount that made economic sense. Why is it that you are able to scale up? What is special about—

Yeah, very good question, actually. And it's kind of what I said before about the structural economics of how we're doing it. So what the biofuels company is competing against is someone pulling something directly out of the ground, putting it through a distillation process that you'd have to do probably for biofuel anyway, and selling it. It's just primary production out of the ground. Okay. It would be the analogous thing for us would be if you said, well, are you going to try to use biotechnology to produce soy protein without using a soybean or something like that? Well, that would be a heavy lift, but what we're talking about here is something very different. It's the technology platform of animals. Okay. Is incredibly inefficient. We're competing against something that's vastly less resource efficient and primary resource efficient than pumping oil out of the ground. You're growing vast amounts of corn and soybeans to produce tiny amounts of meat by comparison. That's really the issue is that we're competing, unlike someone who makes their product just by sucking it out of the ground, we're competing against a system that incredibly inefficiently transforms plants into meat and fish and dairy food. And we're trying to replace it with a technology that very efficiently transforms those primary products into consumer products. So it's—

Scaling is not a problem because your yield is higher, and you're competing with a technology which has yield problems, basically. Exactly. It's—

we're, we're, we are fundamentally vastly more efficient in converting the cheap primary stuff that is the equivalent of oil into a finished product that we can sell. So we have kind of like the opposite, opposite situation of the biofuels industry.

We're now past 1 o'clock. I hope I can ask you one last question here.

I think you can, unless, unless someone calls me up and tells me I gotta bolt to the next meeting.

Yeah, because I, I do have to go.

But yeah, that's what I figured.

So, you know, cows disappear, and then, you know, it's not that we're not just eating the meat. You know, over thousands of years, people have developed uses for those cows, the non-meat parts of the cow. Cow end up in other industries. So how do you foresee a plant— for this question that comes from Ethan Frankel— plant-based food wastes that could be repurposed to replace these, you know, glue, for example, or whatever else these cow parts are going to be?

Yeah, yeah, that's a very complicated and interesting question. And also, I thought someone was going to ask me about what happens to the farmers and ranchers, which is actually something we thought a lot about. And I think there's a very good— fundamentally simple and very good outcome for them, but we probably won't have time to talk about that. But yeah, look, here's how we're thinking about this strategically. So we launched with ground beef, because as you were pointing out, more than half of all the beef sold in the US is sold as ground beef. More than half of the muscle tissue of a cow winds up being eaten as ground beef, and most of the rest of it is eaten as steaks, basically. The way I think about it, this is hypothetical, is that if we make— and I think getting very close to it— make what would arguably be on taste and nutrition and value the most, the best ground beef on Earth, and then we can do the same for steak, just one steak, just say we'll make tenderloin or whatever, okay, one form factor of steak, but we make it more delicious and healthier than the cow version, okay, and cost competitive. And again, this is hypothetical, but that's one of the things we're working on. Um, the, the cattle industry is dead because the point is that, you know, you can't, you can't continue to run that into just selling glue and leather. Or beef liver or beef tongue. What we're trying to do is very strategically take away essential pieces of the business from that industry that they need to keep it profitable and, and frankly, cause it to collapse. Okay. We may then want to make some of those other products, but the first order of business is we have to get rid of the most destructive technology on earth. And by the way, I didn't get to show my slide, but I promise you, if we succeed in replacing that technology with plant-based technology, very simple, uh, it's very simple math based on published data that you can literally lower atmospheric greenhouse gas levels within a couple of decades, lower, lower than they are today. So anyway, you do that not by making glue or leather or whatever, guitar strings or whatever you're thinking about. You do it by taking away the big moneymakers of the beef industry so that it is no longer a profitable business to be in. Then we worry about those other things. But actually, an interesting point when I was talking about protein chemistry and how much there to learn. We could make, I think, very economically if we decided to, and there are people working on leather, and better glues already exist. It's going to be fine. If you love beef liver, you may be in for a few years of privation there.

You know, it's probably not a better off for the world constituency. Dr. Brown, this has been an absolute pleasure having you. Um, thank you so much for, for taking part. It's been fascinating. Um, and thank you everybody watching. I, I've been seeing all the questions coming in and, and doing my best to cover them. I really appreciate the, uh, many angles, many, many angles.

Um, and come join Impossible Foods. It's the most important science and engineering project you can ever work on. You'll never be able to do anything remotely as important in your life, and it's actually interesting, and we have wonderful people. So don't dismiss it just because it's food. It's about the planet. It's just incidentally food.

Great. Thank you, Dr. Brown. Bye.