Can A Burger Help Save The Planet? Impossible Foods CEO Pat Brown Says Yes

By now, most of you have heard about the Impossible Burger. I imagine many of you have tried it. Arguably the ‘beefiest' plant-based patty, even the most attuned palate has trouble believing it isn't real meat. Now ubiquitous at fine dining establishments and fast food franchises alike, it's a global phenomenon. Today we explore the mission behind the burger with Impossible Foods founder & CEO Pat Brown, the man responsible for upending everything you thought you knew about plant-based meat, on a mission to forge a better environmental future for all. A world-renowned geneticist, Pat is a former Howard Hughes Medical Institute Investigator and Professor of Biochemistry at Stanford University. He is also a founder of Lyrical Foods, maker of Kite Hill artisanal nut milk-based cheeses and a founder of the Public Library of Science (PLOS), a nonprofit publisher that pioneered the open-access business model. Pat was elected to the National Academy of Sciences in 2002, and is a member of the Institute of Medicine. His numerous accolades include the American Cancer Society Medal of Honor, and the NAS Award in Molecular Biology. Moved to action by the urgent need to redress global climate change, Pat founded Impossible Foods with one clear goal: to eliminate animal agriculture — inarguably one of the biggest contributors to planetary warming — by providing delicious, nutritious, and environmentally friendly alternatives to meat and dairy directly from plants. The mission statement is ambitious, some would even say audacious. But his impact is already undeniable — and he’s just getting started. Today he shares his story. This is a broad and far-reaching conversation that covers Pat's background and the impetus behind Impossible Foods. We cover the company's initial success in converting high-end chefs, the subsequent penetration of the fast food industrial complex, and the entrepreneurial difficulties of rapid growth and meeting demand at scale. We then turn attention to Pat's mission to redress climate change. The important need to replace food from livestock with more environmental friendly alternatives. And what is required to achieve that, while meeting the finicky palate requirements of the average consumer. Irrespective of your opinion on plant-based meat analogues, the deleterious environmental impact of intensive animal agriculture is irrefutable. Seismic changes to our food systems are mandatory if we want to responsibly redress global climate change. And each of us has the power to promote these changes, beginning with our daily food choices. You can watch it all go down on YouTube. I really enjoyed this exchange. A compelling companion piece to last week's conversation with Paul Hawken, my sit down with Beyond Meat founder and CEO Ethan Brown and my episodes with Good Food Institute founder Bruce Friedrich (RRP 286 & 402), I encourage all of you to listen with an open and appreciative mind. Peace + Plants, Rich Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

Speaker names marked ? are inferred from speaking time and the show’s known hosts — they are not voice-verified.

• 0:00Rich Roll?

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• 0:44Rich Roll?

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• 1:05Speaker 01

  The mission is very simple. It's to completely replace animals in the food system by 2035. The use of animals as a food technology is by a huge margin the most destructive technology on Earth and really poses a catastrophic threat. It's a major source of greenhouse gases, more than all forms of transportation combined. It is the biggest user of fresh water in the world, the biggest polluter by far of fresh water in the world. And the biggest issue is that about 50% of the entire land surface of Earth is actively in use right now, either growing feed crops or grazing livestock.

• 1:46Speaker 01

  And that land footprint comes at the expense of all the biodiversity that previously occupied that land. You know, in the past 40 years, we've basically wiped out half the wild animals that were living on Earth back then. And it's just across the board: mammals, birds, reptiles, amphibians, fish, even insects. And that has happened so fast, and it's continuing to accelerate because the driver is the land footprint of animal agriculture and overfishing. And the demand for meat and fish is growing faster than the population.

• 2:22Rich Roll?

  That's Pat Brown, and this is the Rich Roll Podcast.

• 2:37Rich Roll?

  The Rich Roll Podcast. Hey, everybody. How you guys doing? What's the latest? How are you? My name is Rich Roll. I'm your host. This is my podcast. Welcome. Did you enjoy the Live Event Podcast with Inc. Q. and Paul Hawken? If so, did you catch the video version? I hope you did. If you missed it, please check that out. Not only am I super proud of that entire event, I'm extra proud of my team for the incredible production value that they brought to that, still basking in the glow of that experience. And we're already hard at work at planning more live events just like this for 2020. So stay tuned, and I'll keep you posted on that.

• 3:21Rich Roll?

  I gotta tell you, I'm a little bit wiped today. It's been a crazy month, to say the least. I spoke at the Nantucket Project a couple of weeks ago. I hosted conversations there with Russell Brand and Dr. Zach Bush, podcast favorites. In fact, Russell shared a short clip of that exchange that you can find on his YouTube channel. Check that out. Then I came home to perform at the Live Event, and I jaunted Telluride for another event called Original Thinkers, which was super cool. Everybody should definitely check that event out. I spoke there. I hosted another conversation with Zach Bush, came home, got another couple of shows up. Then I just drove through a big brush fire to get here to the

• 4:06Rich Roll?

  studio today. The Santa Ana winds are kicking up again, which is a little anxiety provoking after last year's experience. And what else? I'm about to head up to Stanford for my 30th college reunion next week, which is just insane.

• 4:23Rich Roll?

  All of this, in fact, is surreal. I guess I'm officially old at this point, but I gotta tell you, I don't feel old. I feel grateful. I feel energetic and super enthusiastic about my life and about today's episode. So, thank you guys for showing up. I feel very blessed to do this thing. I think the word is grateful, and I do not take your attention for granted. So, most of you have heard about this thing called the Impossible Burger. And I imagine many of you out there have already tried it. Arguably, it's the plant-based patty that comes closest to fooling people that it isn't real beef.

• 5:05Rich Roll?

  And I think it's fair to say that the Impossible Burger has become a bit of a phenomenon. It's now widely available at all manner of restaurants all across the globe, lots of fast food chains, etc. So, what's the story behind all this? How did it come to be? And what is the intention, the mission, behind it all? Well, today, I'm very excited to host the man responsible for upending everything that you thought you knew about plant-based meat: Impossible Foods founder, Pat Brown. In addition to being a world-renowned geneticist, Pat is a former Howard Hughes Medical Institute investigator, as well as a professor of biochemistry at Stanford University.

• 5:48Rich Roll?

  He's also the founder of Lyrical Foods, which makes Kite Hill artisanal nut milk-based cheeses. And he's a founder of the Public Library of Science, a nonprofit publisher that pioneered the open-access business model. Pat was elected to the National Academy of Sciences in 2002. He's a member of the Institute of Medicine. And his numerous accolades include the American Cancer Society Medal of Honor and the NAS Award in Molecular Biology. Basically, this is a guy who was moved to action, spurred into action, by the urgent need to redress global climate change. And he founded this company, Impossible Foods, with one clear goal: to eliminate, to eradicate,

• 6:32Rich Roll?

  animal agriculture, which is, as we all know, one of the biggest contributors to planetary warming. And he's doing this by providing delicious, nutritious, and much more environmentally friendly alternatives to meat and dairy, directly made from plants. So this mission statement is ambitious. Some would say it's audacious, but you simply can't deny the impact that he and his team at Impossible has already made. And Pat is a guy who's just getting started. And today, he shares his story.

• 7:13Rich Roll?

  Okay, Pat Brown. So we talked about a lot of stuff. We covered Pat's background story, the mission behind Impossible Foods. We talked about Impossible's recent successes and reaching fast food chains like Red Robin, Little Caesar's, White Castle, and most recently Burger King, which offers the Impossible Whopper nationwide, which is unbelievable. We talked about the difficulties in meeting demand at scale, the important need for replacing food from livestock. And we talked about land, water, and sun. Why you don't need to complicate technology to solve climate change. I think this is a great companion conversation

• 7:57Rich Roll?

  to my previous episode with environmentalist Paul Hawken, and also a bit of a companion piece to my conversation with Beyond Meat founder and CEO Ethan Brown. And that one's from way back in the day, episode 136, March of 2015. Check that out if you missed it the first time around. Irrespective of your thoughts on plant-based meat analogs, the impact of animal agriculture on our planet is undeniable and tremendous. Big changes are mandatory if we want to solve this dilemma. So please, I encourage you to listen, and listen with an open mind, because I believe we really do have the power to make the necessary changes,

• 8:41Rich Roll?

  and it begins with our personal choices. So with that, I give you Pat Brown.

• 8:50Rich Roll?

  Here we are. Pat Brown, welcome to the podcast.

• 8:52Speaker 01

  Thank you. Thanks for having me.

• 8:53Rich Roll?

  Appreciate you making the trip out here. I've been looking forward to this for a long time. You've got a big vision and a huge mission that I applaud, and I'm looking forward to hearing all about it. Before we even get into it, though, I have to say that I didn't realize until I started digging in, doing some research for this today, that a few months ago, you hired Dennis Woodside as your president.

• 9:22Speaker 01

  A rival?

• 9:23Rich Roll?

  Yeah.

• 9:25Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 9:26Rich Roll?

  So Dennis, I've known Dennis since like 1993.

• 9:30Speaker 01

  Oh, man.

• 9:31Rich Roll?

  We were summer associates at a law firm in San Francisco way back in the day, and have remained friends over the years. And I remember working with him very vividly, and I was just struck with how smart and capable this guy was at a very young age, and somebody who demonstrated incredible leadership skills. Even in this junior position, we were paired together to work on a few matters, and he just took total control of the situation in a way that I've never seen in anybody else. So I knew way back then that this guy was destined for big things. And he's been at Google, running the Motorola

• 10:12Rich Roll?

  division, and then he was at Dropbox as COO, and now he's with you, which is pretty exciting.

• 10:17Speaker 01

  Yeah, we're so happy to have him. I mean, he's already made a huge impact. He's a terrific leader, a complete straight shooter, you know, no BS.

• 10:28Rich Roll?

  Yeah.

• 10:30Speaker 01

  Yeah, and just a great guy.

• 10:31Rich Roll?

  He is. Super smart, and also an incredible Ironman. You know that, right? He's done like 14 Ironmans or something like that?

• 10:37Speaker 01

  Yeah, I know. I haven't followed his career, but I've heard that since.

• 10:43Rich Roll?

  Yeah, cool. So I think the best way to...

• 10:48Speaker 01

  He was just out training yesterday, so...

• 10:50Rich Roll?

  Oh, was he?

• 10:50Speaker 01

  Watch your back.

• 10:51Rich Roll?

  Oh, yeah. Trust me. I think he's, he went like 922 on an Ironman, I think. He's super fast. He's a very good athlete.

• 10:58Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 11:00Rich Roll?

  Let's talk about the mission statement, the why behind Impossible Foods.

• 11:07Speaker 01

  Sure. Well, um, the mission is very simple. It's to completely replace animals in the food system by 2035. And the why, um, I try to keep it as short as possible, but basically, um, you know, I got on the path to founding it when I realized what I should have known earlier, which I did, um, that the use of animals as a food technology is by a huge margin the most destructive technology on earth and really, um, poses a catastrophic threat.

• 11:47Speaker 01

  Um, and I thought I was pretty savvy about environmental issues and, you know, I had been on a plant-based diet for a long time, so I had no particular investment in that, in that business. But it really came as a surprise to me when I started looking for a problem to work on, um, just trying to figure out what's the, what, what's the biggest problem that I can contribute to solving. Uh, what a humongous, uh, disastrous impact that technology has. It's, um, I think as most people know, it's a major source of greenhouse gases, um, more than all forms of transportation combined.

• 12:28Speaker 01

  It is the biggest user of fresh water in the world, the biggest polluter by far of fresh water in the world. Um, and it, the biggest issue is that it is, um, occupies a huge land area, um, for land-based agriculture. Um, about 50% of the entire land surface of earth is actively in use right now, either growing feed crops or grazing livestock. And that land footprint comes at the expense of all the biodiversity that previously occupied that land. And as a result, it is by an overwhelming margin, uh, the biggest cause of this catastrophic meltdown on biodiversity we're experiencing.

• 13:13Speaker 01

  For all practical purposes, nothing else really matters. It's land-based animal agriculture and overfishing that, that are causing this thing. And that is even more of a, I think, risk to, um, the future of our planet than the climate change issue. And I think people are increasingly starting to become aware of it. But, you know, in the past forty years, we've basically wiped out half the wild animals that were living on Earth back then. And it's just across the board, mammals, birds, reptiles, amphibians, fish, even insects. And that has happened so fast.

• 13:56Speaker 01

  And it's happening, it's, you know, it's continuing to accelerate because the driver is the land footprint of animal agriculture and overfishing, which are, the demand for meat and fish is growing faster than population. And, you know, when you take pieces of an ecosystem out of the ecosystem, it's like, you know, pulling bricks out of a wall. It's extremely destabilizing and basically won't immediately cause, but is setting up for a crash. And so I don't think we've even begun to feel the full impacts of this problem.

• 14:38Speaker 01

  But anyway, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah. When I realized this, I felt that, okay, this is what I've got to work on. And I also realized that, very quickly, that you're not going to solve the problem by asking people to change their diets, telling them to change their diets, educating them, coercing them, anything like that. It's never worked. It's been tried every which way.

• 15:02Rich Roll?

  Yeah, I'm still trying now.

• 15:04Speaker 01

  No, there's no reason not to try.

• 15:08Rich Roll?

  Yeah, but I hear you. I think you're absolutely right. You have to solve this problem, you have to meet people where they are.

• 15:15Speaker 01

  Exactly, you have to meet people where they are. And, you know, I mean, China, which is used to getting what it wants when it asks its citizens for something, asked its citizens to reduce their meat and dairy consumption by half, this was two or three years ago, and what happened was absolutely nothing. The demand didn't go down, it kept going up.

• 15:38Rich Roll?

  Yeah, it's going up. Well, the rise of the middle class there is contributing to that. And I think Asia accounts for something like forty-six percent of all meat consumption.

• 15:46Speaker 01

  Yeah, Asia as a continent, absolutely. And it's, Asia and Africa are where most of the growth is happening, Asia in particular because of the big population.

• 15:57Speaker 01

  So that's a big target for us. But I think the real take home message, though, is that, yes, I was in education for most of my life. I'm all for education, and I think it's very important for people to understand what's going on in the world. But the people who understand this problem the most, I was at the COP21 climate conference like three years ago, and you have hundreds of the most dedicated environmentalists in the world at this event. And literally, almost to a person, they went out and had steak for dinner.

• 16:31Rich Roll?

  Yeah.

• 16:32Speaker 01

  So I think that pretty much tells you that knowing about the issue, caring about the issue, is still not enough to get people to change what they love in their diet. And so what that meant for me is that the only way to solve it is to basically frame it as a technology problem. The world is going to continue to demand these foods, but we're making them the wrong way, using incredibly inefficient and obviously quite destructive technology that underperforms in every way that matters, including economics. So because

• 17:10Speaker 01

  it's so inefficient, on a nutritional basis, the foods we get from animals are more than an order of magnitude more expensive than any plant-based equivalent. That's a huge opportunity to come up with a new technology that outperforms in every way that matters to consumers. Most importantly, deliciousness, but also nutritional value, affordability, and so forth. And I was sure that's completely doable back then, and I'm even more sure now.

• 17:45Rich Roll?

  Right.

• 17:46Speaker 01

  So that's how we're going to solve the problem.

• 17:48Rich Roll?

  Right. So here we are. I mean, the disconnect and the dissonance is huge when you look at the statistics. As you said, something like 50% of all arable land on the planet is devoted to animal agriculture in some respect.

• 18:03Speaker 01

  And a very large fraction of the non-arable land is heavily grazed.

• 18:08Rich Roll?

  Right. 14.5% of all greenhouse gas emissions are attributable to animal agriculture, which is basically on parity, if not exceeding, transportation, which is what everyone wants to talk about. But the mass species extinction is something that you don't hear that much about. And truly, like 50% of our species have gone extinct in like the last 50 years or something like that.

• 18:34Speaker 01

  Well, it's not, just to correct that, it's not species extinction, it's the total number of individual wild animals, pretty much across the board, mammals, birds, reptiles, amphibians, is down by more than 50%. But it's a precursor to species extinction. Basically, you know, you reduce the populations, they become more and more unstable. And once you get to a certain size, basically, they're, you know, just on a slippery slope to extinction.

• 19:09Rich Roll?

  Right. You pass a threshold and then you can't come back from that. And when you look, it becomes evident when you kind of look at what's going on in the Amazonian rainforest, right, where we're decimating these, you know, beautiful ecosystems at the rate of like one football field a minute or something like that. And that's all going towards cattle grazing and clearing land to raise crops for these cows, pretty much, right? I heard you talk about the biomass of cows alone, like exceeding every other animal on the planet by some ridiculous number.

• 19:47Speaker 01

  By tenfold.

• 19:47Rich Roll?

  Tenfold, right?

• 19:48Speaker 01

  Yeah. And the biomass, so, and that's, I think, just...

• 19:54Speaker 01

  A striking symbol, you could almost say, of how out of control this system is. That the dominant species by biomass overwhelmingly on Earth's land surfaces, cows. And it's completely consistent, I think, if you, you know, a lot of people say, how could that possibly be? And all you have to do is think, okay, when was the last time I drove any distance? Doesn't matter where you are in the world, what animals did you see? Cows, cows, cows, the occasional sheep, a squirrel, maybe, you know, a crow, more cows.

• 20:31Rich Roll?

  You'd probably see pigs and chickens, but they're all inside, you know, these Caifos where you can't actually see them.

• 20:38Speaker 01

  Yeah, that's actually a very good point. So the pigs on Earth today outweigh every remaining wild animal on land by more than a factor of two.

• 20:47Rich Roll?

  That's crazy.

• 20:48Speaker 01

  The pigs outweigh them all.

• 20:49Rich Roll?

  Yeah.

• 20:50Speaker 01

  And you're right, we don't see a lot of them wandering around because they're in Caifos. And chickens outweigh every remaining wild bird by more than a factor of two. So, you know, it's wacko.

• 21:04Rich Roll?

  It's completely out of whack.

• 21:05Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 21:06Rich Roll?

  Yeah. All right, well, you're a very unlikely entrepreneur. You come from this academic background. You had a very, you know, nice situation all set up for you at Stanford where you were a tenured professor in biochemistry and genomics, right? And you were somebody who had been vegetarian at least, or plant-based for some number of years. You got interested in the environment and you decided to take this sabbatical. So I'm interested, it's a very interesting journey to get you to impossible, like this evolution in your thinking to how you arrived at this point. So walk me through that a little bit.

• 21:45Speaker 01

  Sure, yeah, well, I was looking for something new to work on. I just wanted to start with a blank slate. And that's one of the great things about the job I had at Stanford is I could pretty much do anything.

• 22:02Speaker 01

  Constructive that I wanted. And I wanted to pick the most important problem I could work on. As I said, it very quickly became clear that this is not just the most important problem I could work on, it's overwhelmingly the most important urgent problem in the world. And once I realized that, I spent some time thinking about how to do it. I made one false start, which is that the first thing I did was I organized a conference where I wanted to bring together economists and environmentalists and food security experts and so forth, to just look at the hypothetical scenario in which the entire food system is plant-based.

• 22:47Speaker 01

  And the question is, what are the economic impacts, you know, locally and globally? What are the environmental impacts? What are the food security impacts? What are the public health impacts? And I organized it, kind of, you know, bringing people with no preconceived notions, but with pretty high confidence that the answer was going to come out. It's a win-win-win-win-win on every axis, and that that would persuade policymakers that this is something to try to achieve. Well, then I came to my senses, and I realized that, you know, abundant evidence that a policy change would be good for the world, you know, rarely makes it happen. And we don't have time-

• 23:31Rich Roll?

  It's so disappointing.

• 23:32Speaker 01

  Yeah. Yeah, I mean, just look at all the things we need to do to avoid a climate catastrophe. And I think even, you know, at this point, most people in the world, including most politicians in the world, acknowledge that this is a very real, serious threat, and yet-

• 23:51Rich Roll?

  We can't marshal the political will to even make tiny steps towards the solution.

• 23:56Speaker 01

  Yeah. So, anyway, the point being that I did this kind of academic thing of, you know, bringing a bunch of people together to kind of look at the issues. And then I realized that that was a complete waste of time, and- And that the only way to change it, basically, is to accept that policies aren't going to change fast enough, people's food preferences aren't going to change fast enough, if at all. We need to find a way to meet the huge demand for these foods with a much lower environmental footprint and compete in the marketplace and, basically, make these destructive industries

• 24:39Speaker 01

  go away, not by attacking them, but by beating them in the marketplace, the good old-fashioned American capitalist way.

• 24:48Rich Roll?

  What's interesting about the journey that you then embarked on is, rather than just trying to come up with a plant-based alternative that tastes good, you took a very, you know, biochemistry approach to solving a very hard problem, the hard problem being, what makes meat taste like meat? Like, what is it inherent in this food that we, as a culture, embrace and love that creates that craving or that desire to continue to eat it? Like, really getting into the minutia and the building blocks of this product to understand it at a cellular level?

• 25:31Speaker 01

  Yeah, well, I think that the starting point was realizing that, you know, there have been, for millennia, basically, or at least for centuries, plant-based foods that are intended to approximate meats, okay? But they do, by and large, you know, kind of nice try, but a pretty crappy job of it. And it's just not going to work. You're not going to, if you're competing for meat lovers who are not looking for an alternative, those foods are good enough for someone who's looking for an alternative or someone on a vegetarian diet that wants something vaguely meat-like, we need to...

• 26:12Speaker 01

  Outperform meat from animals in every way that matters to meat lovers. And I knew we just don't know how to do this. And we don't really understand what is the kind of molecular, you know, biochemical basis of the craveability of meat. And but it's an answerable question. And I felt like it's actually an easier question to answer than a lot of the kind of big medical problems that I was involved in working on and others involved in working on because basically, the things that we eat as meat are incredibly complicated as biological systems. But as food, you know, like it may have started as a muscle tissue, doesn't need

• 26:56Speaker 01

  to move, doesn't need to produce energy from simple nutrients, doesn't need to keep the cell membrane potentials active and all the kinds of things that a tissue does. It just needs to do a few simple things that are producing the flavor that consumers love and the textural properties. And I felt like that's that's a hard problem. I felt it's a hard scientific problem. We need the best scientists we can possibly hire, but it's the most important scientific question in the world. And I still believe the question, why does meat taste delicious in micro terms, is by far the most important scientific question in the world right now.

• 27:36Speaker 01

  Because if we can answer it and use that knowledge to make the most delicious craveable meat products in the world, using more sustainable ingredients, we can save the world from, you know, environmental catastrophe that we're headed toward right now. So and actually, scientists get that. And so when it came to recruiting scientists, we've been incredibly successful in recruiting awesome scientists because the way you recruit a great scientist is give them a really important problem that's really challenging. And the best scientists in the world just, you know, gravitate toward that.

• 28:21Speaker 01

  So.

• 28:22Rich Roll?

  You have like, yeah, you have like a hundred out of three hundred and thirty employees or something like that?

• 28:26Speaker 01

  Yes, we have about a hundred and ten people in our R and D team. We're actually just about to start hiring a bunch more people to roughly double the size of the team. And so if you're a scientist and want to work on the most important scientific problem in the world.

• 28:46Rich Roll?

  Email Pat directly.

• 28:48Speaker 01

  Yeah, you know where to go.

• 28:50Rich Roll?

  So, the beginnings of trying to answer this question, how does that work?

• 28:56Speaker 01

  So, there are different attributes that have different molecular bases in meat. But focusing on the one that I think is, that most uniquely separates meat from any plant-based food, is the flavor and aroma profile. That based on the flavor and aroma profile, irrespective of texture, whether it's just ground up into a mush, or, or, you know, however you want it, and irrespective of what species it comes from, you will recognize as being meat and not a plant. And, so that was a really important question. And, you know, I had a hypothesis as to what might be important for that, that could have

• 29:41Speaker 01

  proven wrong. But basically, the premise was, it's based on, it's based on an observation, actually, that when you cook meat, something magical happens that never happens with plants, or a veggie burger, or anything like that. Which is that there's this dramatic transformation of the flavor and aroma profile. It goes from being something very mild flavored with almost no aroma, to something that is, has a potent, you know, cooked meat flavor, and all the aromas that come with it. And that, and nothing like that happens with a plant. I mean, you cook broccoli, it gets warmer and mushier, and, and, you know, maybe a

• 30:25Speaker 01

  little caramelized, or something like that. But meat as a category does something magical. And that suggested that there was a catalyst, that's catalyzing the chemical reactions that happen during cooking, that produce this explosion of aroma and flavor. And one of the best biological catalysts known is heme. And animal tissues, categorically, have a lot higher heme concentrations than almost any plant tissue, like 100 or 1,000 times higher concentration.

• 30:57Speaker 01

  So a potent catalyst, super abundant in the things we call meat was, you know, a suspect. And our R and D team, we immediately started working on heme on day one, basically, because it was a suspect. But our R and D team did some experiments over the first few months that very clearly established that heme is the magic ingredient that takes simple nutrients that are just like the things that you would find in vegetable broth, amino acids, vitamins, sugars and fats. Throw in heme and instead of a mild brothy taste, you get meat.

• 31:36Rich Roll?

  And heme is, is, is what binds to oxygen in our red blood cells and carries oxygen to our respective organs, et cetera. It's what makes red blood cells red.

• 31:47Speaker 01

  Yes.

• 31:48Rich Roll?

  And I think it would come as a surprise to a lot of people to discover that heme actually also exists in the plant kingdom.

• 31:57Speaker 01

  Yes.

• 31:58Rich Roll?

  Because we, we just associate it so heavily with meat products.

• 32:01Speaker 01

  Yeah, absolutely. And you associate, you know, you, it's, it's got a very distinctive red color. You don't see that almost anywhere in plants. But yeah, every plant cell and every cell pretty much on earth requires heme because it's part of the system that cells use to burn sugars and simple things for energy, to react them without, you know, well, it's, it's, it's a downstream part of that. But basically, it's part of the system that generates energy for the cell. And so it's, for example, the reason that cyanide will kill you in two minutes is that it binds to heme and shuts down those pathways that

• 32:43Rich Roll?

  Right.

• 32:44Speaker 01

  cell depends on for energy. So yeah, it's ubiquitous in nature. It's, it's one of the most important molecules on earth. But it hadn't, nobody thinks about it in plants. It happened that there was a particular part of legumes, the part that fixes nitrogen called root nodules, that is the one plant tissue that really has a high concentration of heme. And that's because the nitrogen fixation kind of chemistry is sensitive to oxygen concentration. So they have to be buffered. And

• 33:20Speaker 01

  I knew that, and so I actually, in the first about year of the company's existence, I spent a very large fraction of the money that we had raised to start the company, trying every which way to figure out how to harvest root nodules and extract the heme protein from the root nodules. And it was really the major, single major effort in the company. And it basically was a dead end. It got us enough of this heme protein, like hemoglobin, that we could do the experiments to prove that it could generate the meaty flavors and so forth, but it was never going

• 34:05Speaker 01

  to be scalable or economical. And I use this as an example to people in the company of, you know, you've given our mission and the hugeness of it and all the problems we need to solve to achieve it, where we don't know the answer, we don't know the root, we have to do a lot of things that are risky. Mm-hmm. You know, when you do, if you know the answer, it's not an experiment. Right. And we have to be quite fearless about it and not talk ourselves out of what seems like a good experiment or a good project just because it might fail, because any good experiment might fail.

• 34:49Speaker 01

  If they're not failing a pretty decent fraction of the time, you're not bold enough at all. Right. You're not doing really interesting stuff. So I remind people of that because it's really important for people not to be afraid to take on something that could even be expensive. We spent, you know, like half the money that we started out with pursuing this idea. It was my idea, so I can acknowledge it's a bad idea without hurting anyone's feelings on something that ultimately failed. And it won't be the last time.

• 35:23Rich Roll?

  And it failed because extracting an adequate amount of heme from this root nodule in legumes became too like cost intensive or labor and it was just

• 35:34Speaker 01

  It was multiple things. First of all, the root nodules inconveniently live underground. Okay, so I thought I'd done a calculation that the US soybean crop in the root nodules contains more heme than all the meat consumed in the US. And that, I think, calculation was correct. The only problem is that it's a very inconvenient place for that stuff to to live. Because you have to dig up the soil. These things are loosely adherent to the roots of the soybean plant. So you have to it's kind of a fragile system. Now you when you do that, you have a bunch of dirt with the root nodules embedded in it. And you have to separate out

• 36:18Speaker 01

  the root nodules in order for it to be food safe. And and then you have to biochemically purify the heme protein. And you concatenate all those steps. And it basically becomes extremely difficult to scale and expensive. On top of which, you know, from an environmental standpoint, it's not a good idea to be turning over the soil because it releases, you know, carbon stored in the soil and so forth. So there were a bunch of reasons why, you know, I ultimately came to the conclusion that this was not a good idea. And so we moved to producing it by fermentation. And and that's how we produce it now.

• 37:02Rich Roll?

  Right. So it's through a genetically modified yeast, correct? Is that is that how it works?

• 37:10Speaker 01

  Yeah. So basically, I knew that we could I knew that we could produce it by fermentation by just introducing the gene for this plant protein into some organism like yeast. It wasn't clear how economical it would be, just that it would certainly be more economical than than digging these root nodules out of the ground. And so we pursued that route. And we then, one interesting thing that that opened up is that, well, we don't need to just use soil like hemoglobin. We can just look at all the interesting heme proteins that we know of and try a bunch of them.

• 37:51Speaker 01

  Because, given this approach, it's basically just, we can pop the gene in for whatever heme protein seems the best, and produce a lot of that for our use. And we looked at like, three dozen different heme proteins. Heme proteins from everything from paramecium, to mung bean, to barley, bovine myoglobin, which is the heme protein that's in beef, et cetera. And what we were optimizing for was the one that performed best in food. And people often say, "Well, why didn't you just use bovine myoglobin?"

• 38:36Speaker 01

  Well, the cow did not evolve to be delicious, did not evolve to be food, okay?

• 38:41Rich Roll?

  Right.

• 38:42Speaker 01

  Evolution was not selecting, was not optimizing the cow for, you know, or heme protein for performance in food. And it's really not very good for that purpose. It oxidizes very readily, it's got a narrower solubility range, and so forth. So ultimately, after looking at a bunch of heme proteins, including one that I loved, although it was never going to be good for food, that was a vivid fuchsia color. So it was like, unbelievably beautiful to look at, but no one would probably want to eat it. And we arrived at soil like hemoglobin, which is the same thing we'd been looking at as really the best one from a food standpoint. And so we put the soil like hemoglobin gene into yeast, and that enabled us to produce

• 39:27Speaker 01

  it at very large scale.

• 39:28Rich Roll?

  Right. So you don't have to till the soil in the same way, and it's not, it doesn't involve that kind of labor intensity.

• 39:36Speaker 01

  Yes, exactly.

• 39:37Rich Roll?

  A different kind of labor intensity.

• 39:39Speaker 01

  And it's actually a safer way to produce it because we use an organism that's already been well-studied for its safety for use in food. It's actually even used as to produce some protein-based drugs for, you know, therapeutic purposes and so forth. So the FDA and the regulatory agencies, you know, have already kind of scrutinized it and basically know this is a safe system. Whereas a root nodule, who knows what's in there?

• 40:06Rich Roll?

  Mm-hmm.

• 40:06Speaker 01

  So there's more question marks. The other thing is that the yeast have their own system for producing heme. They make their own heme. And the heme itself, which is a small molecule, a cofactor, it's a little nugget of a molecule that's held by the protein, which keeps it soluble and sort of protects it against off reactions and so forth. Yeast makes its own heme. And so in terms of heme production, all we did was we kind of like amplified up its own genetic system for producing heme.

• 40:42Rich Roll?

  Mm-hmm.

• 40:42Speaker 01

  And then gave it this soybean protein to hold on to the heme.

• 40:48Rich Roll?

  So are the nodules themselves red, or is it just because the heme is in such low concentrations that these things, these plants that have heme in them don't appear to be red?

• 41:01Speaker 01

  No, actually, the nodules are vivid red.

• 41:04Rich Roll?

  Oh, they are?

• 41:05Speaker 01

  Yeah, you cut open a root nodule in sort of early summer, when the sort of the peak growth of soybean plant, you cut it open and it looks like you just cut open a steak. I could show you pictures of it. Literally, take a close-up of it, you might mistake it for a freshly sliced steak.

• 41:24Rich Roll?

  Oh, wow.

• 41:24Speaker 01

  And...

• 41:28Speaker 01

  But, you know, no other part of the plant has that kind of high concentration. And, um, yeah, which is why it was so tantalizing to me because, you know, you, you look at these things. When I first start, realized that we needed a heme protein, well, I didn't realize then that we needed it, but I was kind of suspicious that we would. I looked at a, you know, literally, one of the very first things I did on this project was I pulled up some clovers from a little hill that's, that's in my neighborhood and, uh, and pulled up a bunch of them and then just cut up, cut up the root nodules. Basically, just because I wanted to see for myself, you know, is there really a lot of heme in there? And they're bright pink.

• 42:10Rich Roll?

  Wow.

• 42:11Speaker 01

  And, um, uh, yeah. So it was very tantalizing, um, to me that, oh, man, these things are like practically for free because no one's using them for anything.

• 42:23Rich Roll?

  Yeah. Well, no one, it hadn't even occurred to anyone to even look in that direction.

• 42:28Speaker 01

  There are actually, it's interesting, there are soybean farmers, uh, who've been growing soybeans their whole life that have no idea that the, that they're bright red on the inside.

• 42:37Rich Roll?

  Yeah, it's super interesting.

• 42:46Rich Roll?

  So you figure out this heme thing, um, and then how do you figure out the rest of what ultimately becomes the Impossible Burger? The other ingredients to create that kind of texture and the way that it cooks and the aroma and everything else that, you know, is necessary for you to deliver on your promise?

• 43:05Speaker 01

  Well, we're still in the process of, of, um, we're still trying to understand how meat works better and better all the time. But, um, we knew relatively early on, um, some of the features of the, the proteins responsible for texture that we needed to match. So. We don't, we don't need to use identical proteins. There's nothing, you know, the, the proteins in muscle tissue, again, they didn't evolve to produce any particular texture or juiciness. It's just an incidental property that when you cook them, which they didn't evolve to be cooked, uh, you know, they, they undergo a textural transformation and they leak some

• 43:50Speaker 01

  juice and stuff like that. So we, um, sort of understood what, by studying meat, we understood what were the salient kind of biophysical properties of a protein that we needed, um, you know, to produce those characteristics, the textural change with cooking, the juiciness.

• 44:11Rich Roll?

  The binding.

• 44:13Speaker 01

  The chewiness, yes, the cohesion. And then fats, there are also things about the fats that are important to understand because the fats are important for mouthfeel, they're important for, um, the cooking properties because the, the melting fat contributes to cooking and the kind of like, um, you know, bubbling, so to speak.

• 44:40Rich Roll?

  Right.

• 44:41Speaker 01

  Um, kind of dis- disperses the aromas and so forth. And because most of the flavor molecules, uh, that, that confer meaty flavor are fat soluble, it, it literally is kind of a delivery system for, for those molecules.

• 44:58Rich Roll?

  Uh huh.

• 44:59Speaker 01

  To produce the taste. So, but you've got to tune it right. You can't just use any random fat to, to get those properties right. So anyway, there are a bunch of, a bunch of, um, properties that we, you know, identified that were important and then needed to find a plant-based way to, uh, match them.

• 45:18Rich Roll?

  Um, so you arrive at, you're using potato, right? And coconut oil are the other two main things?

• 45:27Speaker 01

  Uh, coconut and sunflower oil.

• 45:30Rich Roll?

  Uh huh.

• 45:31Speaker 01

  I think they're, I, I'd have to look, um, Roughly equivalent amounts. So sunflower, so the sunflower oil contains a lot of unsaturated fats and they participate in the flavor chemistry. The coconut oil modulates the melting temperature, which is important for mouth feel and some of the cooking behavior. The potato protein is there because of a textural property that it confers. So we, you know, not just any random protein will, will match the characteristics that we need. So we searched a lot of plant proteins to, to find the right ones.

• 46:08Rich Roll?

  Right.

• 46:09Speaker 01

  Found the potato protein. We found some others, but the potato protein was, there was a readily available supply chain for. We actually found some other proteins that, from a performance standpoint, and, and, and in many ways are better, but there didn't exist a supply chain for them. We're actually in the process of trying to create a supply chain for, for some of those better plant proteins that are potentially more scalable and actually better performing.

• 46:37Rich Roll?

  So this is a process of constant iteration?

• 46:41Speaker 01

  This is the, the decisive advantage that we have over the incumbent technology. It's that the cow stopped getting better at what it's doing, you know, a million years ago, and we get better every single day. And when we can make a product, whatever product, that's as good as the best version that ever came from an animal, a week later, we can make it even better. And, and this is just the way, this, this is, you know, the advantage of a technology shift. You can say that the, a parallel would be in transportation, the first mechanized transportation system.

• 47:25Speaker 01

  Famously lost a race to a horse, okay. Um, it was a locomotive.

• 47:30Rich Roll?

  Uh huh.

• 47:30Speaker 01

  And, uh, in eighteen thirty-five, I think.

• 47:33Rich Roll?

  Doomed.

• 47:34Speaker 01

  But, but the point is, it never lost again. Because the horse never got any faster.

• 47:40Rich Roll?

  Uh huh.

• 47:41Speaker 01

  And you switch to a technology platform that gives you the ability to optimize every important feature of it. Um, and continue to optimize it. And that's what we've done is that, you know, if, if, if we identify some flavor component that, uh, we think makes our product better, we can dial it in immediately.

• 48:02Rich Roll?

  Right.

• 48:03Speaker 01

  Or, or find a way to make the texture juicy or, or, um, whatever is desirable there. And, um, and that's a huge advantage. And also the economics and the nutritional profile and so forth. So, you know, we don't have cholesterol, we have lower saturated fat, um, we have, uh, actually slightly higher quality protein in terms of essential amino acids, uh, and a whole bunch of things that, that, um, consumers care about.

• 48:32Rich Roll?

  Right. You can continually tweak that. Uh, in addition to all the, uh, geniuses and PhDs that you have on your R and D team, do you bring in people that are expert in taste? Kind of like how a fragrance company have these people with these special noses that can smell things that ordinary people can't? Like, how do you evaluate taste in a scientific way?

• 48:55Speaker 01

  Yeah, that's a really good question. Um, and it's, it's also a really complicated question. So for one thing, you know, everybody has their own notion of what the, you know, ideal burger tastes like, or the ideal steak tastes like and so forth. So there's not like an agreed upon, uh, um, target. That's just something important to keep in mind because our goal is not to perfectly match the cow version, it's to outperform it in flavor and everything that consumers care about. Um, and we have people who are trained tasters, um, that can, can give us, and the trained

• 49:39Speaker 01

  tasting is not only kind of like... They've trained their ability to discriminate particular features, you know, in a food product, in this case meat, but also they've been trained on a particular vocabulary for communicating that. Because that's almost equally important is that, you know, you can't just make up your own random metaphors.

• 50:01Rich Roll?

  You can't understand what they're talking about.

• 50:02Speaker 01

  Or something like that, it's not useful. And it gives you away then, you can more objectively measure your progress, you know, in a particular direction. So we do use trained testers. We also rely heavily on testing where we get one or 200 just random consumers who are meat-eating consumers from the world, and we ask them to rate our, you know, each version that we're trying out on flavor and texture and appearance and overall likability and so forth. Because that's also very important.

• 50:41Rich Roll?

  Yeah.

• 50:42Speaker 01

  In other words, we're not trying to please these highly trained tasters. We want to please as many consumers as possible. Yeah, so that's really important. And then we also use analytical instruments that give us very quantitative and objective measurements of sort of the chemical composition of the aroma and flavor. And where we've annotated a lot of the compounds based on their, how they smell and what they contribute and so forth. And that enables us, it's more agile than bringing 100 people together in a room to test, you know, a bunch of prototypes that you're looking at.

• 51:24Speaker 01

  It's no substitute, but it kind of gives you a surrogate measure to tell you if you're going in a good direction.

• 51:30Rich Roll?

  Yeah. In addition to HEM, what have you discovered that people deem to be the most important aspect of what makes a burger a burger? Like, when you pull these people and, you know, try to learn, you know, what's working and what's not working, what is it that people come back to you and say? Is it texture? Is it aroma? Is it the aftertaste? Like, how have you iterated on that kind of feedback?

• 51:58Speaker 01

  Yeah, yeah. Well, the thing is that it's almost not...

• 52:04Speaker 01

  That useful to figure out which is the most important. Because they're all important, and unless you do a good job on all of them, people will be dissatisfied with it. But yeah, the flavor, the aroma, you know, during cooking, the texture, the specifics of the texture, the chewiness, the juiciness.

• 52:28Speaker 01

  The appearance is really important. I would say the, and we're constantly optimizing all of them. You know, my own view about which one is the most important, I mean, it just changes all the time based on what we're focusing on. But I think, you know, if the color were off and the flavor and texture were good, it wouldn't win the competition with the cow. If the flavor and color were good, but the texture was mushy, we wouldn't win. If we didn't nail the flavor, if it didn't have the right meaty aftertaste.

• 53:09Rich Roll?

  You have to fire on all cylinders. And it's interesting to think like, it's really important what the room smells like when you walk into the kitchen and somebody's cooking. It's not just what it tastes like in your mouth. It is the entire 360-degree experience of working with this product.

• 53:28Speaker 01

  I mean, one thing that, so early on, when we were just getting ready to commercialize it, we were giving samples of our product to a lot of chefs, okay, that, you know, were kind of meat gurus. And a recurring thing that would happen is they would cook with it and they would say, "This just blows my mind," okay.

• 53:56Speaker 01

  Why, why would that be? It's because there's something magical that happens when you cook meat. And it's, it's a big part of, I think, the pleasure that chefs get with it. That there's this transformation of flavor, there's an explosion of aroma.

• 54:15Speaker 01

  It's, it's, and it's something that you never get with a veggie burger or a plant-based product or anything like that. So it's kind of like.

• 54:22Rich Roll?

  It's mystical and magical.

• 54:23Speaker 01

  It's a magical experience, I think. And, and the language that, that people and chefs use when they do it, you know, it's very commonly, I mean, literally, it's like, this blows my mind. I've heard that multiple times. And you need to blow people's mind because meat, the behavior of meat when it cooks is, it's, it's, you know, it's just basic chemistry, but it's magical in the sense that, you know, this transformation happens. You can also, it's also the fact that, you know, you have to be able to cook it to your liking. Again, something you can't do with veggie burgers. So, you know, we had to have, the only thing that merited for our product is that it has to deliver for meat lovers.

• 55:08Speaker 01

  We don't care about anyone else. Like, I'm vegan, you know, many people I love are, are entirely plant-based, but we don't care about them from a consumer standpoint. It, it's all about delivering for the meat lover. And, and we can't kid ourselves, you know, we have to deliver what they care about. And, and the experience of cooking is a big part of it and the versatility. So they may want to serve it as tartare. Well, it has to behave as tartare. It has to have that raw meat taste as tartare. They may like it to cook their, their burgers very rare.

• 55:47Speaker 01

  Well, it has to not only look, but the texture and the juiciness and the flavor has to match a rare burger. And if it's well done, it has to match a well-done burger. And you're not going to solve that by making a kind of a pre-concocted product that, you know, tastes like a cooked burger, but doesn't have the magic. And the only way you get the magic is by understanding the kind of biochemistry, the, you know, underlying beef flavor and delivering it. And one of the neat side products, I mean, side effects of that is. When you understand how meat works as a system, the problem of producing delicious meaty flavor gets simpler.

• 56:32Speaker 01

  You don't have to kind of like take the, you know, hundreds of molecules that make up the aroma profile of meat and figure out a way to cram them into a product. You just need simple amino acids, just simple biomolecules. They're not only simple, but they're abundant and cheap. Unlike the fake flavors that go into a lot of veggie burgers. Just simple amino acids, vitamins, simple sugars, unsaturated fats, and a catalyst, bang, you get the magic, you get all those flavors for free.

• 57:08Rich Roll?

  You make it sound so easy.

• 57:10Speaker 01

  Well, it's actually, it's an interesting thing that you often find when you, when you try to understand in a fundamental way a system. It goes from, like, it's got thousands of, of things going on and complicated properties, but then it turns out that the underlying magic is relatively simple. And it goes from being, you know, a big hairy problem. Like, the problem of how do we, how do we make a food that delivers everything that meat lovers care about and does a better job of it than the cow, seems kind of like a big hairy problem. And conceivably, it could have turned out to be a big hairy problem.

• 57:54Speaker 01

  But very often what happens is when you get down to the fundamentals and you really know how the system works, it gets much simpler.

• 58:00Rich Roll?

  Yeah. Well, that's, that's something that, that I stumbled across in, in preparing to speak to you today, which is that it's easy to think of Impossible Foods as just the Impossible Burger, but in reality, your company is, the value of your company is in this database that you've created through the result of all this science that you put into it that is really drilled down into how to make all these different flavors using plants as a source, right? That you can then, you know, extrapolate on to make all different kinds of, different kinds of beef products and chicken products and ultimately fish and dairy and, and the rest, right?

• 58:44Speaker 01

  Well, first of all, the way I define the value of a company is... Our ability to achieve our mission. I mean, we're serious, by 2035, we want to have, essentially eliminate the use of animals in food technology by beating them in the marketplace and outperforming for consumers. Okay? And, and that really does come down to building the know-how, so that you have the capability of producing enough of the products that, that, that meat lovers crave, and making them better than the, than the corresponding animal-derived product, that you can win in the marketplace.

• 59:27Rich Roll?

  Yeah.

• 59:28Speaker 01

  And, and succeed. And, yes, a lot of what puts us in a position to be able to do this is, well, I would say pretty much, most of it, is just the knowledge that we've been accumulating. And, you know, we're doubling, almost doubling our R and D team side, because we don't, we're not kidding ourselves, okay? There's still, there's still a lot of hard problems to solve ahead. We've figured out a lot of things about, you know, all kinds of meat flavors, fish flavor, you know, how to control texture and juiciness and stuff like that, but we're not at a point where every meat lover is basically saying, "I'm never gonna eat anything but an Impossible

• 1:00:13Speaker 01

  Burger."

• 1:00:14Rich Roll?

  Right.

• 1:00:15Speaker 01

  And, I mean, although plenty of them do, but, and until we get to that point, we're not done. And, we have to be able to get better at flavor, at, at aroma, at juiciness, at texture. And also, another very important thing, is that we have to beat the incumbent products on cost.

• 1:00:37Rich Roll?

  Yeah. But that comes with scale.

• 1:00:39Speaker 01

  It comes with scale, but it doesn't come automatically with scale. It, it, you, you have to have a system that asymptotically is much less expensive, and then, and then with scale, you, you win there.

• 1:00:54Rich Roll?

  Yeah.

• 1:00:55Speaker 01

  But you have to make the right choices. You have to have ingredients that are inherently scalable, you have, and, and where the, you know, the economics of those ingredients work out. And, and that's something that we spend a lot of time on. It's also really important for food security. I mean, you know... Part of our goal is to improve global food security by basically making, you know, right now, meat is one of the most important sources of protein and iron in the global diet. Protein deficiency and iron deficiency are probably the two most common nutritional deficiencies in the world. There's almost a billion people who are protein deficient, almost 2 billion people who are iron deficient in the world, mostly in In the developing world.

• 1:01:38Speaker 01

  The poorer parts around the equator. And that's a huge problem. And making a product that, you know, American consumers will buy doesn't solve the problem for them. So, and asymptotically, so the ingredients that we've chosen now, based on their underlying economics, we should be able to be much cheaper when we're at scale. Right. And I think that's incredibly important, even in the developed world, because consumers are price sensitive. If we have a product that delivers on flavor, you know, outperforms in flavor nutrition,

• 1:02:21Speaker 01

  and it's cheaper, it's game over. Right. And so that's, all of those are important goals. And we see many ways to improve on all those axes, you know, going forward with our research. And also because, the other reason that we've built this big team is that we don't want to do it methodically over a long period of time. We want to solve a lot of problems fast and in parallel, and that have to do with every aspect of making the product better, the products better. And be able to launch a bunch of new products. We're, you know, one of the things that, over the next couple of years, we're going

• 1:03:05Speaker 01

  to really build up is, is work on a whole bunch of other products that we want to launch, you know, in the next few years. Yeah, there's been some press about the fish. Yeah, fish, for sure. I mean, fish, I would say, in terms of environmental impact, you know, it's, you can debate it, but I would say beef is number one. The overwhelmingly, the land footprint of animal agriculture is cows. Yeah. Like I said, they outweigh every remaining wild animal on earth by a factor of 10. And, but fish.

• 1:03:42Speaker 01

  I would say is probably a close second because, you know, the global fish populations are down by half. The demand still outweighs the ability of the population to kind of reproduce themselves. And so that's a really urgent problem to solve. And we're working on it. And, you know, we've made a huge amount of progress on fish flavor. We are going to be working over the next couple of years hard on getting textures right. Because there's different textural properties of fish tissues. And yeah, that's going to be really important.

• 1:04:21Rich Roll?

  You've made some really interesting choices as a brand in terms of how you've launched this product and introduced it to the public. And there are similarities in the way, for example, you know, Tesla began by having this aspirational, very high-end product that created a bunch of demand and then slowly over time, building scale around it to create products that are more affordable. And I thought it was fascinating that you mentioned earlier, introducing the product to some of these high-end chefs, like David Chang being, you know, probably the most prominent

• 1:05:01Rich Roll?

  of them, to get it into the hands of these, you know, people that we kind of revere culturally, who are tastemakers and are influencing culture in a pretty, you know, in a substantial way to get them on board and then get everyone talking about what's happening, which is very different from, we have this product, like, let's get it into grocery stores as soon as possible and make it as affordable as possible to everybody. So walk me through the thinking behind how you've positioned the branding of this and how you're introducing this to the public.

• 1:05:34Speaker 01

  Okay, so I would say when we launched, and still today,

• 1:05:40Speaker 01

  The most important thing we get from every sale of our product is awareness of our brand and, you know, and a change in psychology that plant-based products don't suck as meat. The biggest obstacle that we saw to our success is that every meat eater has a very strong, and this is true now, very strong preconceived notion that it is not possible to make a plant-based product that delivers what they crave for meat. And that meant that the most important thing we need to accomplish with each sale is to

• 1:06:22Speaker 01

  maximally send the message that this is something that if you're a meat lover, you will actually like to eat. And so, the most effective way to send that message is if someone whose livelihood and reputation depends on serving their consumers great food, and great meat in particular, because the chefs that we were particularly working with are people who are particularly revered as meat chefs, okay? Dave Chang famously, a few years ago, banned vegetarian items from his menu. Right. Okay, he's a meat god.

• 1:07:03Speaker 01

  And those are the people that we wanted to work with. And if he's willing deliberately, on his own, to put something on his menu and sell it as meat in a meat application, that's hugely valuable as an endorsement to us. And when we launched, we had very limited production capacity. Our entire, you know, factory, so to speak, was probably not much bigger than your garage. And so, we had a very small supply, and we wanted to get the maximal bang for the buck out of every sale. I think it was probably, I don't really know the history behind Tesla's, you know, go-to-market

• 1:07:46Speaker 01

  approach, but I think it was probably similar in the sense that they had limited production capacity, and the most important thing they needed to achieve with every sale was not the pittance of money that they get from the sale. It's the brand building value of-

• 1:07:58Rich Roll?

  Right, creating an experience that exceeds all expectations.

• 1:08:03Speaker 01

  Exactly. And then when we were able to increase our capacity, we've still focused on food service because it is, I would say, a much more, on a per-sale basis, much more effective way of exposing consumers to our product.

• 1:08:23Rich Roll?

  Right.

• 1:08:23Speaker 01

  For one thing, the restaurant has a stake in curating the experience and making sure that the way it's presented to you is delicious, okay? And the way a sleepy, you know, overworked person coming home and slapping something on their, you know, in a pan, isn't necessarily going to be able to do. So we wanted people's first experience ideally to be in a situation where someone's done a good job preparing it. The other thing is that you're more likely to be eating in a group if you're in a restaurant, at least most people are, so more people can get exposed to it by sharing.

• 1:09:03Speaker 01

  And the restaurant is doing more to advocate for the product than a grocery store. In a grocery store, there's 50,000 things on the shelves.

• 1:09:13Rich Roll?

  Yeah, that's a good point.

• 1:09:13Speaker 01

  So, so anyway, it was, I think, a very sensible strategy. And, you know, we haven't done the control, but I think it worked.

• 1:09:26Rich Roll?

  No, I think it was a brilliant strategy. And, and kind of in line with that, you, you guys have always made sure to protect the Impossible brand within the context of the restaurant. Like, it's not, they're not serving their, you know, they can call it whatever they want. They, they, they sort of have to use the word "Impossible" in it, right? Like, whether you're at Umami Burger or Burger King, it's the Impossible Whopper, right? So to kind of keep that foothold.

• 1:09:58Speaker 01

  It's interesting, though, because what happened was, from a very early stage-

• 1:10:04Speaker 01

  We established, at least within the restaurant and kind of food hyper-aware community, Impossible as a very strong brand. Most of the world, and most of the US, still hasn't heard of it, okay? But what that means is that they get value from it. That it means something to a consumer that this is an Impossible Burger and not just some random veggie patty. So, we don't, we have no power over them. So, most of our sales, basically, are just, a restaurant decides they want to put it on their menu, they buy it from a distributor.

• 1:10:41Rich Roll?

  Uh huh.

• 1:10:42Speaker 01

  We can't compel them to do anything.

• 1:10:43Rich Roll?

  So you're not contractually obligating them to use your name?

• 1:10:45Speaker 01

  No, with, but, but, but the thing is, it's greatly to their advantage. It's like, you know, if you go to a restaurant and basically they sell beer, full stop, or wine, or, you know, some no-name coffee, or whatever, you don't, you don't expect it to be as good, and you probably won't pay as much for it. If it's got a brand that means something, it's more desirable to consumers. So, so, we don't have to compel the restaurateurs to do it, and we can't, and we don't. But they see the same value to it. They, they lose all the, the value of the brand that we've been building if they just put it on there anonymously.

• 1:11:30Rich Roll?

  Yeah, I mean, we've all had the experience of going into random restaurant, X, Y, or Z, and you order the veggie burger, or the veggie patty, and it's some nondescript, you know, hockey puck kind of thing, versus, oh, they have the Impossible Burger, and this is something that, you know, you can only get in a few places, which kind of increases intrigue and, and, and, you know, consequently, demand.

• 1:11:53Speaker 01

  Yeah, yeah. So, anyway, so we've, we've been, I mean, we put a lot of effort into How we launched to really focus early on, not on generating revenue, but generating positive brand awareness and so forth. And that, that has created the incentive for restaurants to put it on the menu as a branded product, which kind of becomes a positive feedback loop. And, and it's going to help us when we launch in retail because, you know, at least a lot of consumers who've had our products in restaurants and, or, or know about it and, and recognize

• 1:12:33Speaker 01

  it as a meaningful brand and something that they, they like, will seek it out in, in grocery stores in a way that if it was just some whatever generic thing, it, you know, it would be the best thing in the, in, in the meat department, but, but there'd be no way of people particularly to know that.

• 1:12:51Rich Roll?

  Yeah, yeah, yeah. Well, the gradual rollout, yeah, I think it definitely has, has fed into, you know, intrigue and interest in what you guys are doing. I remember when you could just, I think Umami Burger was the only place in LA where you could get it, except for Crossroads or maybe one or two other high-end restaurants.

• 1:13:09Speaker 01

  Yeah, I think those were the first two.

• 1:13:10Rich Roll?

  Right. And now slowly, you know, it's becoming, you know, it's not ubiquitous yet, but you're seeing more and more places. You guys have raised $750 million, something like that to date, and you're now in, how many restaurants? 9,000, 10,000?

• 1:13:25Speaker 01

  I would say it's either 10,000 or approaching 10,000. And by the time this is out, we'll be in National and Burger King, they have about 8,000 restaurants. So add about 8,000 to how many we're in now.

• 1:13:40Rich Roll?

  Wow.

• 1:13:41Speaker 01

  And, and then we have other.

• 1:13:42Rich Roll?

  You have White Castle.

• 1:13:44Speaker 01

  We have White Castle, we have Red Robin, we have a lot of other really great burger chains, Fat Burger in, in the LA area.

• 1:13:55Speaker 01

  You know, umami burger.

• 1:13:57Rich Roll?

  Uh huh, and you're doing like a sausage product with Little Caesars also?

• 1:14:01Speaker 01

  Yes, so we have, uh, um, we have actually an amazingly delicious, um, sausage product that, uh, I mean, it's, people are crazy about it. And, uh, we did our first kind of test launch with Little Caesars. We're talking to quite a number of other customers about, about launching it in various form factors on pizza or, um, as a breakfast patty or things like that. And it, it really is incredibly good.

• 1:14:36Rich Roll?

  Wow.

• 1:14:37Speaker 01

  You've got to try it.

• 1:14:37Rich Roll?

  Uh, yeah, I haven't tried that yet.

• 1:14:39Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 1:14:46Rich Roll?

  So here we are, I presume that Burger King then becomes your biggest customer. They have to be, right?

• 1:14:54Speaker 01

  Yes.

• 1:14:55Rich Roll?

  Yeah, and they're huge internationally, right? So I would imagine there's plans for, you know, I don't know if you can speak to that, but ultimately some kind of international rollout with them. Meanwhile, you have, you know, Beyond Meat aligning with Carl's Jr. And you're seeing this kind of coalescing of the fast food industry, you know, kind of canvassing what's available in the plant-based meat sector. It's undeniable that this is a growing trend. It's only going to continue to grow. I mean, you know, there's varying reports on what the market cap is here, but it's in the, you know, it's in the, I don't know, uh, $600 billion or something like that they're projecting in the next decade. So it's not going away.

• 1:15:35Speaker 01

  Well, that's good.

• 1:15:36Rich Roll?

  Yeah, I don't know, I mean, I probably have that wrong.

• 1:15:38Speaker 01

  We'll be able to pay our bills.

• 1:15:38Rich Roll?

  I came across some crazy numbers.

• 1:15:40Speaker 01

  Well, I think that there, there is one number that's worth keeping in mind is that right now, the global market for foods made using animals is, uh, about a trillion and a half dollars. And by 2030, it's projected to be a $3 trillion global market. So there's plenty of money to sustain, you know, to sustain this industry and, um...

• 1:16:06Speaker 01

  And that's important because, you know, we need to scale fast.

• 1:16:11Rich Roll?

  Yeah.

• 1:16:11Speaker 01

  And, you know, scaling fast, basically you have to spend ahead of your growth to get square production and, and, and every, you know, supply chain, et cetera. So this is why it's, it's, it's, this is why we've raised a bunch of money because, because you need that for, for being able to scale. But I think the thing that we're just at the beginning of what I think will be just a continuing and probably accelerating surge toward plant-based products replacing animal-derived products. And there's so many interesting things behind that. First of all, the, the, the reason that it's kind of been just a totally marginalized

• 1:16:53Speaker 01

  thing until very recently is, to be frank, the products from a media's perspective just totally sucked. And, and this is even true of dairy products and other stuff, is that they're just not there yet. But they will, they're getting better all the time. There's a lot happening, you know, to make these products not just incrementally better, but vastly better. Consumers' perceptions are correspondingly changing from thinking, okay, it's a plant-based product, I'm not even gonna try it because it's gonna be terrible. We actually, you, you should watch this, there's this, there's this radio show, no, it's a, I don't even know what it is because I never actually watched it, but someone sent

• 1:17:34Speaker 01

  me the link of this guy Glenn Beck, he's a right-wing pundit kind of guy. His producer kind of pranked him by, and his sidekick by giving him, Hopdaddy is one of the chains that sells our product in Texas, they're very big in Texas, very good chain actually, make great burgers, and gave him two Hopdaddy burgers, one was made with the cow, the other was made with the impossible patty, and gave him a blind taste test and asked him, okay, which is which? And he and his sidekick kicked it around and eventually they said, well, this is a pretty good. Pretty good try, but this is clearly the one made from the cow. And that was the impossible.

• 1:18:13Rich Roll?

  You got it wrong.

• 1:18:14Speaker 01

  And then, and then he was kind of carrying on because he's a rancher. He's a Texas rancher and, you know, raises his own beef cattle and stuff like that. Et cetera, et cetera, et cetera. But, but basically the point is those kinds of things where, where people who are absolutely uncompromising meat lovers are basically realizing that this is actually really good as meat. And it's getting better. I think there's a positive feedback loop here. And we also learned something really interesting in, in talking to meat lovers. They don't love the fact that their meat comes from animals. This is a really important point. Meat lovers love their meat because it's delicious, good source of protein and iron,

• 1:18:58Speaker 01

  convenient, affordable, in spite of the fact that it's made from the cadaver of an animal. Meat lovers almost, almost universally, it doesn't matter where in the country or the world, do not consider the fact that this is made from the cadaver of an animal to be part of the value proposition. It's actually a negative. It's not enough of a negative to outweigh all the positives of the sensory pleasures they get from it. But, but what it means is that if you focus on in plant-based products, delivering the things that are important to consumers, deliciousness being overwhelmingly the number one, but nutritional value and affordability, you win.

• 1:19:42Speaker 01

  You're not at a disadvantage, you're at an advantage.

• 1:19:45Rich Roll?

  I think that's right, although I would say that there is a caveat to that, which is, you know, I don't know how large this sector of the population is, but there is a swath of people who, who have an emotional connection to the meat that they eat. And it's infused with like gender politics, what it means to be a man and be masculine. And that has a lot to do with meat, even if they're getting it at the grocery store. You know, they're barbecuing it at home. And there's something about that emotionally or sociologically that I think still, you know, needs to be redressed. I mean, ultimately, I think we, yeah, none of us like the fact that an animal has to die for our food, but there's still that thing.

• 1:20:30Speaker 01

  I think that's much more fragile and superficial than, than people give it credit for. You know, 200 years ago, you could have said the same thing about the horse, right? I mean, even more so, because it wasn't just that it came from a cow in some farm 1,000 miles away, and you're somehow emotionally connected to that animal. In this case, basically, this is an animal that you live with every day, and you're taken care of and so forth, and is part of the household. And you would have said, wow, you know, yeah, we have motor vehicles, but, but we got this emotional attachment to the horse, and it's gonna be... No, it took about a decade for the, for, for the automobile to completely flip from,

• 1:21:10Speaker 01

  you know, 90% horses to 90% automobiles in households, because what they really cared about was not that, you know, their, the power in their transportation had four legs and a tail and, and ears, it was that it made the vehicle move. And what meat consumers really care about ultimately is that it's as delicious as it can possibly be, it has the nutritional value they care about, and you can do what you want to do with it and so forth. I think that, that you deliver that, you, you outperform in the things that

• 1:21:48Speaker 01

  consumers care most about. And, and I think we'll, we'll find that that, you know, association with an animal as the production system is not valued much, even by the hardest core meat lover. And the association with masculinity, I think that it's just something that's, you know, kind of, in some societies, sort of culturally programmed, and it can just as easily be, you know, with cultural shifts, history.

• 1:22:16Rich Roll?

  Well, when you, when you have a guy like Glenn Beck, you know, I mean, that's, that's huge for a certain sector of the population, to see somebody like that, you know, kind of get on board with it, and...

• 1:22:26Speaker 01

  Well, I wouldn't say that he became our big supporter.

• 1:22:29Rich Roll?

  But just the fact that...

• 1:22:30Speaker 01

  He accidentally, he accidentally gave us a really good endorsement.

• 1:22:34Rich Roll?

  He came and do it.

• 1:22:35Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 1:22:36Rich Roll?

  And then there's the, the, the video of the, the, the people coming out of Burger King, and, you know, that, I don't know if people have seen that, I'll link it up in the show notes, but, you know, these consumers who were convinced that they had just eaten a normal Whopper, and were surprised to find out that...

• 1:22:51Speaker 01

  Yes, and regular, regular Burger King Whopper-loving customers. And, yeah, and that's... That's really what it comes down to is you've got to give the consumer the pleasure and satisfaction that they need and, you know, all those sorts of things. And it becomes a non-issue that this is made from plants. The reason it's a big issue is that that people just think it cannot possibly deliver the things they value from meat if it's made from plants. But that is that is going to change a lot as consumers see more and more evidence that that, you know, the most delicious meat in the world can come from plants.

• 1:23:33Rich Roll?

  Right. What about the argument that comes up that protein from animals is superior to the protein that you get in plants?

• 1:23:43Speaker 01

  Well, I mean, first of all, it's complete bullshit. And there's and there's, you know, this is not something that has been ignored by scientists or anything like that. There's there's, first of all, protein, protein is a class of molecules made up of a string of amino acids. And from a nutritional standpoint, protein is just, it just depends on those amino acids, and particularly the essential amino acids, and their relative proportions and so forth. That's that's what defines the nutritional value of a protein.

• 1:24:23Speaker 01

  There are lots of plant-based proteins that from the standpoint of the proportion of essential amino acids are better than beef. And that's, you know, that's simple and demonstrable. Even soy is one of them. Then people, a lot of media just think that there must be some kind of, yeah, but, okay, maybe it's not the protein, maybe it's something else, that magic ingredient in meat that that, you know, you need for optimal health.

• 1:24:54Rich Roll?

  Right. IGF-1 or something like that? I mean, is the hormonal content?

• 1:24:59Speaker 01

  You do not want more IGF-1. I mean, if you if you look for like, what are the what are the strongest markers of

• 1:25:12Speaker 01

  You know, risk for a shorter life, IGF is one of them. But anyway, the point is that here's the experiment that you should look at. There are people who have never had meat in their entire lives, including my three kids, maybe your kids. They're incredibly smart, excellent athletes. I think my son could beat you in a race, in a running race, and probably an uphill bike race too, because he's an incredible climber. I don't want to, I don't want to throw down the challenge because he hasn't been warned.

• 1:25:49Rich Roll?

  Well, I am 52, but all right.

• 1:25:51Speaker 01

  Yeah, no, that's true too. But anyway, but that's not the point. The point is, and I think this is a point that you try to make all the time, that there's no compromise in terms of your health and nutrition if you have no meat in your diet.

• 1:26:04Rich Roll?

  Right.

• 1:26:05Speaker 01

  Period. It's demonstrably true. It's, it's, there have been, you know, there are hundreds of millions of people that have never eaten meat in their lives, and they're thriving. They're successful professionally, they're successful athletes, they're, they're, you know, incredibly smart, nothing missing. So it's just a complete myth. And also, there's, you know, lots of reviews in the, in the nutrition science literature that, that just systematically address all the evidence that not only a meatless diet, but, but an entirely plant-based diet is completely healthy at all stages of life.

• 1:26:47Rich Roll?

  Yeah. There's no, you don't have to sell me on that.

• 1:26:50Speaker 01

  No, I know.

• 1:26:51Rich Roll?

  I'm with you. But I know that comes up, and it's like, yeah, yeah, yeah, I get it. But like, you know, there's no protein like the protein that I'm getting in the animal.

• 1:26:58Speaker 01

  Again, this is one of these myths that I think is, is propagated in part, we get some encouragement from the, the industry.

• 1:27:11Rich Roll?

  Yeah.

• 1:27:12Speaker 01

  It's propagated in part by the desire to rationalize a strong taste for meat.

• 1:27:21Speaker 01

  I think that will vaporize very quickly when there are great plant-based products, when there is more and more evidence that that people you respect for all the all the qualities that you value in yourself are eating an entirely plant-based diet. And and, you know, it will look back on it and just say, what were we thinking?

• 1:27:42Rich Roll?

  Right. Well, let's talk about the industry a little bit, the big ag industry. From a legislative and regulatory viewpoint, there's some very interesting things that are happening right now. They are not going to go quietly into the night. So we have everything from, you know, famously, the ag gag laws that are preventing consumers from truly understanding how these products are manufactured and packaged and how these animals are tended to and slaughtered, et cetera, to more recent iterations of protectionism in the form of, for example, this law that just passed in Mississippi that is, from

• 1:28:26Rich Roll?

  my understanding, criminalizing labeling a veggie patty, a veggie burger, as a veggie burger. Or you can't even use the word veggie burger to describe your product. Do I have that right? And like, what is going on here?

• 1:28:43Speaker 01

  Honestly, I don't know the details of the law, but you have it close enough.

• 1:28:47Rich Roll?

  The labeling law war here is super interesting.

• 1:28:50Speaker 01

  I think I think it's a major part of the current strategy that the industry is trying to do to throw roadblocks in the way of plant-based meats.

• 1:29:01Rich Roll?

  And dairy dairy product, plant.

• 1:29:04Speaker 01

  And dairy products, although I think that in a way, that cow has left the barn, so to speak. But and I think that I expect those efforts to continue. I think that ultimately, those laws will be found unconstitutional, and there'll certainly be some court battles over them. But I think it's not it's if they wanted, look, if if they said you have to call it something completely different, okay, you have to just make up a name that makes no reference to meat.

• 1:29:44Speaker 01

  Well, people will not have any trouble figuring it out, right? I mean.

• 1:29:48Rich Roll?

  Yeah, well, it's preposterous that they would. The argument that it's confusing the consumers is just ridiculous.

• 1:29:54Speaker 01

  No, of course it is. That's why I think it's not going to hold up to any kind of a legal challenge. But my point is that even in the, I would say, virtually inconceivable but exceedingly unlikely chance that they, that these laws actually hang on, it's not going to stop. You know, consumers are not interested in our products and won't be interested in our products because of their name. If we have to educate consumers that this product, which, you know, we're calling, you

• 1:30:32Speaker 01

  know, Amethyst or whatever, is actually, you know, identical in all the ways they care about to meat only better, it'll be no problem. I mean, it's, this is, it'll just be kind of a minor, short-term inconvenience. Call it what you want. It's sitting there in the meat case. You've seen, you know, chefs cook it on TV. You've eaten it at barbecues. You know what it is. Okay.

• 1:31:07Rich Roll?

  What's the problem?

• 1:31:08Speaker 01

  Big deal.

• 1:31:09Rich Roll?

  Right.

• 1:31:10Speaker 01

  People don't love beef because they love the name, right?

• 1:31:13Rich Roll?

  I never thought about that.

• 1:31:15Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 1:31:16Rich Roll?

  I guess that's true, right? Well, in order to actualize this mission that you're on, you have to reach tremendous scale, and you guys are working your way towards that. You've recently had kind of hockey, you know, hockey stick growth that was almost, I would imagine on some level maybe unexpected because you ran into some issues with meat. The demand was so high, like you were having trouble even fulfilling on that. And so, scale is like, I would imagine, one of your huge focuses right now.

• 1:31:52Speaker 01

  Sure. So, I mean, the fundamental problem that I think we've, we learned a great lesson when the demand kind of surged.

• 1:32:03Speaker 01

  We were preparing to scale up production. We were already hiring for, you know, additional shifts at our production plant and designing, you know, additional production line and stuff like that. So we knew it was coming, but it just came much faster than we anticipated. And that was, obviously, you know, a big problem because the customers that are basically what we depend on for our whole mission and have been incredibly loyal and, you know, have, in many cases, taken a risk putting our product on their menu.

• 1:32:46Speaker 01

  Nothing is worse than if you're in the restaurant business, which is, you know, a kind of dicey business to begin with, and a consumer comes in for a product that you know is on your menu and you're out of it.

• 1:33:00Rich Roll?

  You don't have it.

• 1:33:01Speaker 01

  It's, you lose that revenue, you lose also the revenue for all the other stuff that you would have sold with it. You've alienated a consumer.

• 1:33:09Rich Roll?

  Yeah, trusting goodwill.

• 1:33:11Speaker 01

  It's terrible. And we, I can just tell you, it doesn't do any good. We feel terrible about the fact that any of our restaurant customers suffered any consequences. We did everything we possibly could, which wasn't enough, to, you know, try to get product to our customers while we were in this deficit situation. And then we just scrambled like wild to get out of it, including, you know, when we saw it coming. And also, the thing about the food distribution system is that, is that the demand signals take a while to filter back to you. Because there's these two distribution nodes between you and the customer.

• 1:33:53Rich Roll?

  So there's a delay.

• 1:33:55Speaker 01

  And then you start seeing that, you know, the distributors, your distributors running out, which means the downstream distributors have been running out of the restaurants and stuff like that. But anyway, when we saw this happening, I put out a call to everybody in our company that wasn't working in the factory, basically saying, "We need volunteers." And what we're asking you to do, it's kind of like Shackleton. Shackleton's allegedly...

• 1:34:23Rich Roll?

  All you scientists.

• 1:34:27Speaker 01

  Yeah, basically, we're asking you to volunteer to go across the bay, which isn't terrible schlep, but it's an hour maybe, and work 12-hour shifts that either start or end at 3:00 a.m. at 38 degrees Fahrenheit, you know, doing not the science that you signed up to do, but basically stacking burgers or doing something like that, so that we could add additional shifts and catch up to the demand. And within 24 hours, 100 people had signed up to volunteer to work in the plant. And, you know, for a time, more than half of the people who were working there over the course of a week were basically from

• 1:35:09Speaker 01

  our R&D team, not the, you know, people we had hired for the production team. And then we just geared up hiring like mad, and we have to have a high standard for hiring because, you know, we're producing food and it's no joke, you know. So, anyway, bottom line is, we managed to kind of restaff three shifts now, you know, 24-hour production with people with, you know, experienced faculty, factory workers, people with experience in the food industry. And, and so now we're catching up. And in fact, we've replenished the distributors, and I think that we're not going to let that happen again. But the

• 1:35:52Speaker 01

  problem, the fundamental problem is when you're growing, you know, like more than twofold a year, like really, really growing super fast. The business of, you know, you don't know for sure the slope. Some of the growth comes kind of not entirely predictably, like, you know, we didn't know whether or when Burger King would sign on as a customer, and when they did, bang, it's a big thing. We, you know, other big customers sign on, well, we can't be producing that amount when there's no customer, but then we have to suddenly be producing that amount, so we need that agility. And we need to invest ahead of the growth, meaning we need to anticipate, wow, we're going to be producing, the demand is going to be, you know, severalfold greater in a year.

• 1:36:37Speaker 01

  And we have to make the investment in extra capacity, which, you know, is quite a big bet. And since we are going to be doing this, you know, every year, on average doubling every year from now until 2035 to achieve our mission, it's going to be, it's going to be this, this is going to be the challenge all the way along.

• 1:37:00Rich Roll?

  Right, right.

• 1:37:01Speaker 01

  And what we've done is we've really changed the way we plan our business, which is very heavily focused on being prepared for a wide range of possible trajectories, so that we can be agile if the demand surges, and if the demand just stays as expected, we're ready for that, and if there's some reason that demand goes down, we're ready for that.

• 1:37:29Rich Roll?

  Yeah, it's a tricky equation, because as you grow and scale, the ability to be agile becomes under threat, right? So the fact that you've got to be super protectionist about the R and D that you're doing, and making sure that you have avenues in place where you can iterate and innovate quickly to respond, right?

• 1:37:52Speaker 01

  Well, so some of the responses don't require R and D innovation, they just require us to do, do a lot more of the same thing that we already know how to do, very suddenly, like just scale the existing production. But the other thing you're alluding to, I think, is that, that we need to make products that can compete on an even playing field successfully against the products that have been on the market for a thousand years, and win on their merits. And that's, that's a high bar, and we need to do that for, you know, all the categories of products that, that are made using animals in order to achieve our mission.

• 1:38:37Speaker 01

  And we're going to do it. I mean, I'm completely convinced, the more I know about

• 1:38:42Rich Roll?

  I love the optimism.

• 1:38:43Speaker 01

  about what's required. No, the thing is that

• 1:38:45Rich Roll?

  Because we are in an arms race and there is a ticking clock here.

• 1:38:47Speaker 01

  There is. No, 2035, it's not, we picked a time target because of the urgency of this. And, you know, of climate change and the meltdown in biodiversity and so forth. We can't just, you know, like you could say from a business standpoint, we could do the same thing with much lower risk by just kind of, you know, slow and steady growth and so forth. We can't. We have to, we have to take the risks to, you know, grow on this steep curve because that's our mission.

• 1:39:21Rich Roll?

  Yeah.

• 1:39:22Speaker 01

  And from an R and D standpoint, you know, we tell the team, okay, sometime in the next few years, we're going to have fish and chicken and pork and bacon and, and melty cheeses and, you know, all these different products that we've spent some time doing basic research on and so forth, but that's still quite a step from, you know, making a product that, that competes on an even playing field for a consumer, not just nice try. And that's why we're beefing up our R and D team. But the people who have been in this for a while, and the more you know about it, the more confident you are. Because you can see the space of possibilities, space of possible solutions. You know better what

• 1:40:03Speaker 01

  are the problems you need to solve and what's likely to be entailed in solving them before you've solved them completely. But it's, you know, it's a big climb.

• 1:40:14Rich Roll?

  Yeah. It's got to be exciting though. I mean, this trajectory that you've been on from academia to now sitting atop this $2 billion company and having, you know, being responsible for hundreds of people, has put you in a position where I would imagine you had to go on a crash course, learning about leadership and management and all of these things that were not part of your professional experience prior.

• 1:40:43Speaker 01

  Yeah, I mean, there's

• 1:40:44Rich Roll?

  What have you learned about how to run and build a company?

• 1:40:47Speaker 01

  I mean, you know, I haven't, I haven't actually taken a course. And one thing I've, I would say, one thing I've learned, or one thing I did that I, in retrospect, I think was, was an important thing to do was recognize right away, there's a whole bunch of things that I don't know how to do well.

• 1:41:06Rich Roll?

  Uh huh.

• 1:41:06Speaker 01

  And I don't have time to learn how to do them.

• 1:41:08Rich Roll?

  So you get Dennis Woodside in?

• 1:41:10Speaker 01

  So I get someone like Dennis, and, and suddenly, you know, I can, I don't have to, I know this is, this whole part of the company is in, is in the best possible hands. When I first formed the company, I, I felt like, well, I don't know anything about the, the legal issues and the, the, the basic blocking and tackling of building a business, okay? But I know where to find people who do. And I hired someone straight out of Stanford Business School, very smart guy, still working at the company, he's head of our, our international growth.

• 1:41:50Speaker 01

  And he was basically responsible for doing all the basic, doing very well, all the basic stuff of running a business and, and managing the finances and managing all the, the business operations. I know how to, you know, kind of lead an R and D team.

• 1:42:12Speaker 01

  But one thing I hadn't done even there was, so my, my lab's research has always been very kind of like, basic discovery-driven sort of research. It's, it's, a lot of the thought processes are similar, but when you're, when, when, when you're on a, on, under time pressure, having to solve specific practical problems, okay? It's a different set of things. Like when we were first operating, I ran the R and D like an academic lab, basically, which was the only thing I really knew how to do. But it was the right thing, I think, by and large, because mostly what we needed to do

• 1:42:54Speaker 01

  first was to study the problem and understand what we needed to do and do the kind of discovery research that is like what I used to do. When it morphed into, we need to still be doing all that, but now we're trying to figure out how do we extend shelf life and, you know, solve this packaging issue or whatever. It's got an R and D-ish component, but it's much more practical and it's got time pressure. And that's something that I wasn't initially that, you know. I was never in a position where the R and D team needed to do something on a timeline.

• 1:43:38Rich Roll?

  Yeah. Because that's just not part of the academic experience.

• 1:43:43Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 1:43:44Rich Roll?

  Right?

• 1:43:45Speaker 01

  Yeah. And that's something that, but fortunately, again, there are people who are good at that that could both help educate me and bring that expertise there. In terms of leading a team, I mean, I don't, the thing is that the company is successful, I think, because the basic premise of the company is right.

• 1:44:04Rich Roll?

  Mm-hmm.

• 1:44:05Speaker 01

  Okay? And there's huge potential there. And I think if you hire great people, like literally, I would say the make or break thing you need to get right is to hire great people. And if you hire great people, then they want to hire other great people. And if you hire great people who are not just smart, but great, like they're kind, they're great collaborators.

• 1:44:36Speaker 01

  You can build a team and a culture that's incredibly strong and without a lot of micromanaging by me can, you know, can grow itself.

• 1:44:47Rich Roll?

  Right.

• 1:44:48Speaker 01

  And.

• 1:44:49Rich Roll?

  And you attract those great people by having a huge mission and giving people interesting problems to work on.

• 1:44:55Speaker 01

  That's, that's it. You, you can hire mediocre people by offering them a big bucket of money, but to hire great people, you have to give them a hugely important problem that's challenging. And that's what, that's what great people.

• 1:45:08Rich Roll?

  Right. And have them feel empowered, like they actually, you know, have the, the agency to work on it.

• 1:45:15Speaker 01

  Yes, exactly. And the, I mean, this is, this is your, you know, this is for the people working at the company, their opportunity to be part of the most important, I really feel like our mission is the most important mission in the world right now and arguably the most important mission in history because the fate of the planet is in the balance and we're not going to solve climate change or this biodiversity meltdown any other way. And actually, I'll just say one thing about climate change, even though you didn't ask me about it, but there's, there's a very interesting aspect about the land footprint

• 1:45:57Speaker 01

  of animal agriculture, which is the opportunity cost in terms of climate change mitigation. People are talking about, you know, here's this very complicated technology for carbon capture. Okay, there's a lot of work on carbon capture and so forth, very capital intensive, very hard to imagine how it will ever scale. We have the most scalable, the most highly evolved carbon capture system in the world right at our disposal. And it's basically, all it requires is land, water and sunlight. Okay. And the, we got water and sunlight.

• 1:46:39Speaker 01

  Fifty percent of Earth's land area is being used to raise animals for food. The amount of biomass on that land, and it's actually, you know, been research on this, represents about seventeen years' worth of fossil fuel emissions, okay? Meaning that if you could snap your fingers and make that industry go away, the recovery of biomass on that land, just without doing anything, will immediately start lowering atmospheric CO2 concentrations. You don't need fancy technology, you just need to kick the cows off the land, basically. And at the same time, you're going to be solving this biodiversity meltdown, because it's all about habitat destruction and degradation.

• 1:47:21Speaker 01

  And if you allow, if you just, if you just get the feed crops and the cows out of the equation, you basically get back about half of Earth's entire land area to capture, capture carbon from the atmosphere automatically and, and rebuild healthy ecosystems. So...

• 1:47:45Rich Roll?

  Yeah, it's incredibly compelling. And, and it seems unassailable to me, but what I find interesting is, you know, in the same way that, that big food, big ag will not go quietly into the night, and there's a couple more things I want to say about that, we're seeing this sort of small groundswell of people who are, you know, adopting this carnivore diet, and it goes hand in hand, in some respects, I guess loosely, with the regenerative agriculture movement, which I think there's a lot that's great about that. So I'm interested in how, you know, you're shaking your head, I want to hear about this, like, how what you're saying kind of squares with people who are trying to, you know,

• 1:48:30Rich Roll?

  reclaim what the farm is and can be, as a means of regenerating the soil.

• 1:48:38Speaker 01

  Okay, so I've spent a lot of time looking at the literature. I've dug into the data and so forth surrounding regenerative agriculture. It's a longer conversation, but what I can say is there is zero evidence. So what happens is that people are extrapolating from the wrong kinds of experiments to say, "The best thing we can do is put more cows on the land." Okay? If you take land that has been depleted by farming and you convert it to growing grass, how do you do that? Well, first of all, it involves putting a ton of fertilizer on the land. And then you have cows grazing on the grass.

• 1:49:21Speaker 01

  What has worked is putting fertilizer back into the soil, the depleted soil, and letting grass grow on it. They give the credit to the cows. There's zero evidence for that. Okay? So there's no...

• 1:49:39Rich Roll?

  The idea being, the core idea being that the cows being on the land is what's regenerating the soil.

• 1:49:44Speaker 01

  Right. And honestly, you just have to look into what the raw evidence is that's cited in favor of that. And there's lots of scientific literature on this in many, many ecosystems that have looked at whether this works. And there's just no evidence for it. The other thing is that the experiments are asking the wrong question, which is, the question they're asking is, is this system, instead of growing soybeans or whatever was grown on the land, planting grass and putting cows on it, is it better from a carbon capture standpoint than continuing to grow those crops?

• 1:50:29Speaker 01

  The real question is, is it better than a healthy ecosystem that would otherwise exist on that land?

• 1:50:36Rich Roll?

  If nothing was...

• 1:50:37Speaker 01

  And support biodiversity and store biomass, not just in the soil, but above ground. And like I say, this is one of these things where there are these...

• 1:50:51Speaker 01

  These claims being made that ecologists have no respect for, okay? But they're claims being made by people who are in that business. And they're just being repeated over and over again. And a lot of people just think, okay, well, I keep hearing about this. It must be a good thing. But the scientific foundation for it is essentially nil. And if you think that we'd be better off with, instead of having 10 times the total biomass of every wild vertebrate on earth, 15 times, you know, as cows, I mean, you're smoking crack.

• 1:51:35Speaker 01

  It's just a completely ridiculous idea. Now, one thing I just want to say is, there are people who are doing this. I'm not questioning their good intentions. You know, a lot of people who are in the farming and ranching business, they care deeply about, you know, protecting the planet and protecting the, you know, taking care of the land they farm and so forth. So it's not a question of bad intentions. It's just a question of, there's no data to support this.

• 1:52:01Rich Roll?

  Yeah. So this is, this is something that I think was initially launched into mainstream awareness by Alan Savery. I believe he did a TED Talk on this. There's a lot of, you know, people that are following him. But on a very elementary, elementary level, when I look at it, I just can't get around the idea that it's incredibly land intensive. Like, it's not scalable. Like, we're not going to be able to feed 10 billion people on the planet in this way. There may be a place for a very high-end, you know, like the Joel Salatans and people want to, you know, spend a premium amount of money for meat. But in terms of feeding the planet, you need an unbelievable amount of land.

• 1:52:45Rich Roll?

  For these cattle to graze and we're already at 50%, right? There isn't that much more land available and where are like where's the water coming from like where I don't you know I don't know that it accounts for everything and maybe I'm missing something here but it just doesn't seem to make sense as a solution that's going to work at scale for you know a quickly escalating population of people where we're already struggling to meet the demand.

• 1:53:11Speaker 01

  Well, I think that you you hit on the main thing, which is that, yes, it's incredibly land intensive, forgetting about whether there's any evidence that this is better than, you know.

• 1:53:22Rich Roll?

  Even if you presume it is.

• 1:53:24Speaker 01

  Virtually anything else, but here here's the thing, if if instead you allowed the original biomass that existed on that land before it was cleared for farming and grazing and stuff like that to recover, and there are lots of publications that address what happens when you when you take a take a land that's being used to raise cattle and you you turn into a national park or state park and so forth, it actually can recover over relatively short period of time, a lot of its native flora and wildlife and so forth. But the amount of carbon that gets stored there, okay, instead of just a little layer of grass that's being continually grazed and so forth, that you have, you know, trees

• 1:54:08Speaker 01

  and tall grasses and all this biomass, that's how you pull carbon out of the atmosphere, not by having cows, you know, tromp the grass into the soil.

• 1:54:20Rich Roll?

  Yeah.

• 1:54:20Speaker 01

  And anyway, I don't even want to get it, you know, this is one of these debates where it generates a lot of heat and it's it's I'm always kind of, even though there's nothing, nothing to that.

• 1:54:36Speaker 01

  You know.

• 1:54:37Rich Roll?

  I gotcha.

• 1:54:38Speaker 01

  Culture thing. I don't want to get too much into it because it it it it alienates people who are trying to do the right thing, but but um and the way that we achieve our mission is not by winning arguments. It's by focusing relentlessly on making the most delicious meat in the world and letting it speak for itself.

• 1:54:59Rich Roll?

  Right. On that subject, um, I think uh it's safe to say that Wall Street is paying attention. The Beyond Meat IPO was massive and now we're seeing, you know, big players move in to the sector. We've got Nestle, Tyson, Purdue. All of these giant conglomerates are recognizing that this is the future and they're stepping in to, you know, they're they're they're starting to uh enter your space here. So how do you think about that? And, you know.

• 1:55:30Speaker 01

  I honestly, here here's how I think about it. If if someone who uh is a current meat eater decides that um they would rather eat something made by Nestle or whomever, um, a plant-based product, my feeling is, congratulations, that's great, um, keep eating that. We're going to go after the people who are not satisfied with that product because that's where the action is. And um, I think that it will be up to them to make a product that really reaches into the meat consumer market, which is the vastly greater than the veggie burger market, let's

• 1:56:15Speaker 01

  say. And um, and those consumers are, you know, are not looking for um another veggie burger.

• 1:56:28Speaker 01

  They're looking for meat.

• 1:56:29Rich Roll?

  Yeah.

• 1:56:30Speaker 01

  That delivers what they get from meat.

• 1:56:31Rich Roll?

  Yeah, it's a big distinction there.

• 1:56:33Speaker 01

  And, and so if, if those guys can come up with something that really performs for meat lovers, then my feeling is, thank you for doing this, you know.

• 1:56:46Rich Roll?

  It feeds your mission.

• 1:56:47Speaker 01

  Where, yes, exactly. What it does is, the, the problem is something else, which is that if there's a lot of hype and, and the products don't deliver, which is kind of my concern, it reinforces the biggest obstacle to, to trial of our product.

• 1:57:04Rich Roll?

  Yeah.

• 1:57:04Speaker 01

  Which is the strongly held notion that nothing made from plants can possibly be good as meat. And if a bunch of these big companies put a lot of hype behind a product that's basically just a glorified veggie burger.

• 1:57:17Rich Roll?

  Makes your job harder.

• 1:57:18Speaker 01

  It just makes our job harder.

• 1:57:19Rich Roll?

  Yeah.

• 1:57:20Speaker 01

  But, but we are not interested in competing with them. That's the most important point is that, that their success, we don't want their customers. We want the customers who are not satisfied with their product.

• 1:57:32Rich Roll?

  You're making a Maserati and they're gonna churn out a Toyota Corolla.

• 1:57:37Speaker 01

  I think it's more like a Tesla, but yeah.

• 1:57:40Rich Roll?

  Okay. Yeah, no, I get that. Yeah, yeah, yeah. What's going on with McDonald's? Why are they like the last, all these fast food chains are getting on board here, one by one. McDonald's seems to be biding their time here. Do you have any sense of what's going on with them?

• 1:57:57Speaker 01

  I don't know what's going on in their heads. I think historically, they, they move at a very deliberate pace in making any kinds of decisions. They're such a big, so, so big at scale. It, it, for them, I think the robustness of your supply chain is really important.

• 1:58:26Speaker 01

  You know, they, they need to have guaranteed access for product at scale, you know, at a very large scale and so forth. So there's a lot of, a lot of things that, that are a bigger deal for them than from us anyone else. Well, Burger King is, is, is, is pretty close, but they're, they're actually incredibly agile. They are, they've really impressed me. They're, they're, um, they make decisions quickly. They make them well. They do, they really do their homework. They're very analytical.

• 1:59:05Speaker 01

  And, and I think they recognize that this was a big opportunity that, that they didn't, they wanted to get it right. They were very methodical in looking at the alternatives when they were deciding what to, you know, to put a plant-based product on their menu. But once they did, they moved very quickly.

• 1:59:25Rich Roll?

  Yeah.

• 1:59:26Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 1:59:26Rich Roll?

  One thing I need to ask you about is, is something you've been transparent about, which is that you, you use GMOs in your product. So how do you speak to that or speak to the person who has wariness around, you know, that issue, which is a sensitive issue for a lot of people?

• 1:59:48Speaker 01

  I think the most important thing is we do speak to them about it and we engage in any conversation, answer any questions they have about it. We are extremely candid, even to the point of, you know, kind of being out there about making sure that people know that we have product, you know, products in our, ingredients in our product that are produced by genetic engineering. And what I've found is that basically consumers

• 2:00:22Speaker 01

  When they understand what's actually being done, and I've had probably a thousand of these conversations, where someone, you know, has this concern, is there something I should be worried about? And if you just talk them through it, and they understand exactly what we're talking about here, and why we made this decision, and why it's the best decision we could make, it's taken off the table as an issue. Now, I mean, I think there are some people for whom they're absolute fundamentalists. It's basically, it doesn't matter what the scientific evidence says, GMOs are bad inherently, and I'm not even interested in listening. But for most consumers, that's not the case.

• 2:01:06Speaker 01

  And the other thing to keep in mind is that products made by genetic engineering are ubiquitous in the food system. I mean, you know, more than half of all the cheese in the US is produced using rennet, which is normally an enzyme in the stomach of baby, you know, cows. But it's actually produced by yeast that have been engineered with the cow gene for that protein. And that's been true for 25 years. And, you know, a very large fraction of products made from grains are made from genetically engineered crops. If you drink sodas,

• 2:01:50Speaker 01

  that corn syrup comes from genetically engineered corn.

• 2:01:54Rich Roll?

  So the genetically engineered aspect of what you do is, has to do with the yeast, correct? Like, I just want to understand.

• 2:02:03Speaker 01

  No, there's two components. So at first, we made the decision very long before we launched commercially, that we would use genetic engineering to produce our heme protein. Because it was by far the safest, most scalable economical way to produce it. And we needed it. It was the essential ingredient for mead, so that was a no-brainer. And recently, because of the surge in demand, basically, we had initially been using non-GMO soy.

• 2:02:39Rich Roll?

  Right.

• 2:02:40Speaker 01

  Well, there wasn't enough non-GMO soy.

• 2:02:42Rich Roll?

  So in order to scale, you had to pivot to GMO soy.

• 2:02:46Speaker 01

  Yes. Now, is there a reason to be concerned about that? No, actually, there's not. The reason we were using non-GMO is because that was, you know, for the leghemoglobin, we had no choice. That was the only way to produce it scalably and safely and affordably by genetically engineering yeast. There was this, for the soy protein, we didn't need to use the GMO soy, and we felt like, well, we don't want to pick any fights we don't need to pick, so we'll just use the non-GMO soy that's existing on the market. And, you know, we don't need any additional controversy. But now we needed to scale up, and we needed the GMO soy.

• 2:03:27Speaker 01

  So the question is, and we have a blog post on this where you can read all the details, but we had actually, even before we made that decision, we looked hard at it in terms of what are the real issues. So in terms, and, you know, I think the reasons that people are concerned about it, unless you're a GMO fundamentalist, where you basically just feel like genetic engineering is bad, is the main genetic modification of soy is resistance to glyphosate.

• 2:03:58Rich Roll?

  Right.

• 2:03:59Speaker 01

  And, and so the reasons for concern are, is this causing more glyphosate use with greater exposure in the environment or to workers and so forth to this herbicide? And are there residues on the, on the food that would pose a health risk to the consumer?

• 2:04:20Speaker 01

  Okay, so the total amount of herbicides used on soy, you know, the non-GMO soy gets treated just as heavily with herbicides and actually more toxic herbicides than Roundup. There, it's not like the non-GMO soy doesn't, doesn't get herbicides on it. Absolutely not. There's, there's good data on that and, and the total burden is very comparable, possibly greater than for the GMO soy. Second thing is, if you care about that issue, in our case, the question you should ask is,

• 2:05:03Speaker 01

  if I buy an Impossible Burger, will I be worsening or improving the problem to the extent it exists with, with herbicide use? Well, our herbicide footprint is about 10 times lower than the herbicide footprint of beef from a cow. Because those animals are fed corn, soybeans, alfalfa, all these feed crops that are treated with herbicides and in fact, a lot more of them than our soybeans. So from an environmental standpoint, you're way ahead. From a residue standpoint, the, the glyphosate residues, well, we've measured glyphosate, we're just gonna have a blog on this, but we've measured the glyphosate residues in

• 2:05:47Speaker 01

  our product. And many times in our earlier version, we've done it, since we switched to the GMO soy, we've, we've measured twice. There's no detectable pesticide residues of any kind with a detection limit that's like thousands of times lower than the dose at which there's any health risk. Thousands of times lower.

• 2:06:13Rich Roll?

  Yeah, that's good to know. I mean, that would be my concern is that, you know, am I ingesting glyphosate? And, you know, I do have some concerns about that, so.

• 2:06:21Speaker 01

  Well, I think it's legitimate to, to, to be concerned and aware of it, but I think that the thing to, to consider is, for example, the, the detection limit of the assay we use, if it detected something, it's, it's like...

• 2:06:38Speaker 01

  I think a couple of hundred times below the level that's allowed in organic soybeans. Okay. So there is, and, and by the way, I'm, one of the good reasons for doing what we're doing is reducing the herbicide, the pesticide footprint of the food system. So our, our, you know, pesticide footprint, so to speak, is like tenfold lower than, than the cow. Okay.

• 2:07:08Speaker 01

  So it's not that, you know, we're, we're indifferent to it. But in terms of consumer exposure, the, the, a quite high fraction of organic foods have measurable levels of glyphosate, just because it's kind of ubiquitous. And, but it's far below the level at which there's any, any toxic effects, like maybe 10,000 times below the level at which you could be exposed to it every single day for your entire life without any health consequences. So, again, I'm not advocating for the herbicides, but people freak out about these things when

• 2:07:51Speaker 01

  if they actually knew what the data said, they wouldn't worry.

• 2:07:55Rich Roll?

  Yeah, I got you. So good. Well, I'll link that initial blog post you mentioned in the notes. If there's another one, let me know and I'll put that up there as well. Yeah, yeah, yeah. All right, cool. Well, I gotta let you go here in a few minutes, but walk me through, okay, you, it's, it's 2035. We've eradicated cows on the planet. We have, you know, introduced plant-based meats and meat alternatives and dairy alternatives to the global population. What does the world look like? Walk me through the, the, the

• 2:08:32Speaker 01

  That's great.

• 2:08:32Rich Roll?

  Successful vision of this mission.

• 2:08:35Speaker 01

  So if we don't succeed, if it's business as usual, we are going to be in the, basically, late stages of biodiversity meltdown. And, you know,

• 2:08:47Speaker 01

  Catastrophic climate change and so forth. If we achieve our mission, which we will, we will be far along in restoring healthy ecosystems and that support biodiversity because the 50% of its land area that's being used to raise animals for food can recover its biomass and its wildlife and, you know, biodiversity. Secondly, we will have turned back the clock on climate change, will have reduced ongoing emissions by at least 15% and will have been, will have turned back the clock on climate change by at least 17 years. So, how far in the future is 2035?

• 2:09:30Rich Roll?

  That's, uh...

• 2:09:31Speaker 01

  It's less than 17 years.

• 2:09:32Rich Roll?

  What do we do, like 16 years?

• 2:09:33Speaker 01

  Okay. So, basically, basically, we will have put a significant halt to progression of climate change. And these are, you know, this may sound like hype, but you can just do the math. This is not, you know, a made up scenario. The recovery of biomass on the land that's being used for agriculture will pull 17 years worth of carbon dioxide out of the atmosphere just by photosynthesis and growing the plants. And, um, yeah, so I think we'll have a more livable planet, we'll have averted climate

• 2:10:14Speaker 01

  catastrophe, we'll have vastly reduced the demands on the water supply, water security because it's like about a third of all water use. Waterways will have much less nutrient pollution. We won't have dead zones in, in river deltas, which is all due to agricultural runoff. And, uh...

• 2:10:38Speaker 01

  Lower risk of foodborne illnesses, lower risk of influenza epidemic because those influenza epidemics that are the biggest fear of public health professionals, almost invariably start in poultry farms and/or pig farms. And get rid of those farming situations, the risk of a new epidemic strain of influenza goes way down.

• 2:11:08Rich Roll?

  Also, the antibiotic intake of all the people that are eating these animal products, right?

• 2:11:15Speaker 01

  The antibiotic, it's not the antibiotic intake because you don't get much antibiotic residue from meat. The problem is that the massive amount of antibiotics that are being fed to livestock select in those animals bacteria, many of which are, can infect humans, that are resistant to those antibiotics.

• 2:11:37Rich Roll?

  So we're breeding the superbugs?

• 2:11:38Speaker 01

  You're breeding superbugs. And yeah, so that is kind of like the system that is sort of like the optimal thing you could possibly do, create this huge culture of bacteria where you're selecting for antibiotic resistance on a massive scale. Yeah, you'll get rid of that.

• 2:11:57Rich Roll?

  That's terrifying.

• 2:11:58Speaker 01

  Reduce the, reduce the risk of multidrug resistant bacteria getting into the human population.

• 2:12:05Rich Roll?

  It's a pretty good list.

• 2:12:09Speaker 01

  It's one of these things where, I mean, to me, it almost sounds ridiculous when you list all the advantages of it. Like, how could that possibly be? That, well, it's because we're so used to this system that we don't realize how catastrophically bad it is for public health, for the environment, you know.

• 2:12:30Rich Roll?

  It's hard to telescope out and see it for what it is. It's almost like you have to be, if you were, I've said this before, but if you were an alien and you landed on planet Earth and you said, "Take me to the people who make these decisions about how you're making your food," and it was explained to them, and they looked around, they'd say, "What are you, you're insane."

• 2:12:50Speaker 01

  Yeah. Well, I, the way I think about it is that, you know, in 20 years,

• 2:12:56Speaker 01

  We, and particularly kids, will look back on what we're doing now and just think, "How could you possibly have thought this was a reasonable thing to do?" Like, "What?"

• 2:13:06Rich Roll?

  Yeah.

• 2:13:06Speaker 01

  "What?" You were literally covering the planet with cows so you could kill them and eat them, when you can just make better tasting, healthier, more nutritious food directly from plants? Like, "What?"

• 2:13:21Rich Roll?

  Yeah. I think that's a good place to end it.

• 2:13:24Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 2:13:25Rich Roll?

  Thank you, Pat.

• 2:13:26Speaker 01

  Okay, thank you.

• 2:13:27Rich Roll?

  I appreciate it.

• 2:13:28Speaker 01

  I'm talking to you.

• 2:13:29Rich Roll?

  Yeah. All right, I hope you guys enjoyed that. For even more on Pat and Impossible Foods, check out the show notes on the episode page at richroll.com and let the people at Impossible know how this one landed for you by sharing your thoughts with them directly on Twitter or Instagram @impossiblefoods. And you know what? Before we end today, I want to shout out my friend Colin Hudon at Living Tea. Tea is the most widely consumed beverage in the world, but chances are, you've actually never had a real cup of tea, living tea. Less than 2% of the tea in the world can actually be called living tea. So what makes living tea living? Well, it's the fact that the leaves are sourced from something called

• 2:14:12Rich Roll?

  old-growth trees, some of which are up to 1,200 years old, if you can imagine that. These leaves are chemical-free and harvested from trees with room to grow in their naturally biodiverse environment versus monocropping. And this is just about a few reasons why living tea is the only tea I will drink. If you're an avid listener of the show, then living tea should ring a bell for you because Colin, who is a physician of traditional Chinese medicine, as well as a gifted tea master, he's been a guest on the show a couple times. Aside from the divine taste, the healing properties of these leaves are phenomenal. This eastern antidote to western stress inhibits free radicals more effectively than vitamin

• 2:14:55Rich Roll?

  E, and it also contains polyphenols, which are powerful antioxidants that can ward off diabetes, cancer, and many other things. Right now, Colin and the folks at Living Tea are gifting my listeners a 15% discount on your order of living tea. All you got to do is go to livingtea.net, not .com, .net, livingtea.net

• 2:15:17Rich Roll?

  /Richroll to take advantage of this awesome offer. That's livingtea.net/richroll. And while we're at it, if you're struggling with your diet, if you really are trying to master your plate, but feel like you don't have the skills in the kitchen, or the time, or the budget to really manage this appropriately, I highly suggest you check out our Plant Power Meal Planner. It really is an amazing product we worked very hard to create that solves a basic problem, which is how to make healthy eating delicious, nutritious, affordable, and accessible. When you sign up at meals.richroll.com, you get access to thousands of delicious and easy to prepare, plant-based recipes. Everything's totally customized based on your personal preferences.

• 2:16:00Rich Roll?

  You get unlimited grocery lists, grocery delivery in most metropolitan areas, and access to an incredible team of nutrition coaches who are basically at the ready to guide you to answer all your questions seven days a week. And you get all of this for just $1.90 a week, literally the price of a cup of coffee when you sign up for a year. So to learn more and to sign up, go to meals.richroll.com, or click on Meal Planner on the top menu on my website. If you'd like to support the work we do here on the show, subscribe, rate, and comment on the show on Apple Podcasts. That really helps us. Tell your friends about your favorite episode, share the show on social media, hit that subscribe button on YouTube, Spotify, and Google Podcasts.

• 2:16:42Rich Roll?

  And you can also support us on Patreon at richroll.com/donate. I appreciate my team that helps put on this show every week. Jason Camiolo for audio engineering, production, and show notes. Blake Curtis and Margot Lubin for videoing the podcast. Jessica Miranda for graphics. Ally Rogers for portraits. DK David Kahn for advertiser relationships. And as always, theme music by Anna Lemma. Appreciate the love, you guys. I will see you back here in a couple of days with four-time obstacle racing world champion, ultra runner, attorney, does that sound familiar? Amelia Boone, really looking forward to this. A lot of anticipation about this conversation. It's great, can't wait to share it. And here's a little sample of what you're in for.

• 2:17:27Rich Roll?

  Until then, eat plants, save the planet. Peace. Plants, namaste.

• 2:17:35Speaker 02

  Cuando he pensado en hablar de mi discurso de alimentación, siempre en la cabeza es como que no puedes desbloquear ese sonido cuando finalmente hablas de ello. Y he tenido a varias personas que me dicen eso. Y no es tanto eso, creo que mucha gente dice que el discurso prospera en la vergüenza. El discurso prospera en, tipo, usted sabe, mantenerlo cerca y no estar abierta al respecto. Pero al mismo tiempo, también te preocupa cómo todos van a ver a ti ahora, ahora que lo saben. Y, ¿cómo van a tratar de ti de manera diferente? Y es muy difícil algo que ha sido, usted sabe, una danza difícil de averiguar. Como que no quiero ser como la chica de recuperación de discurso de alimentación.

• 2:18:19Speaker 02

  No quiero ser la atleta. No, como, esto es solo yo. Como, soy muy flota, soy muy compleja, como todos los demás ahí. Y esto es solo otra pieza, usted sabe. Así que estoy tratando de vivir auténticamente y estirando por y averiguar esto todo.