Bruce Friedrich Is Innovating The Future of Food

7.5 billion people currently share this spinning blue planet we call Earth. By 2050, that number will escalate to 9.7 billion. By 2100? 11 billion. How can we possibly feed 11 billion people sustainably? To answer that question we must turn our gaze to the industrialization of animal agriculture. On the surface, what we commonly call factory farming appears incredibly efficient, creating massive economies of scale. But peer just below the surface and you'll discover a vast operation of mass suffering that is irreparably polluting the environment, eviscerating our dwindling natural resources and destroying human health to boot. Beyond wasteful. Utterly unsustainable. Indefensibly cruel. Ladies and gentlemen, our food system is in dire need of innovation. So let's talk about it. This week I sit down with Bruce Friedrich, a man who has devoted his life to reforming animal agriculture and innovating the future of food and food systems. Bruce is the executive director of The Good Food Institute and founding partner of New Crop Capital, organizations focused on replacing animal products with plant and culture-based alternatives. He graduated magna cum laude from Georgetown Law and Phi Beta Kappa from Grinnell College, holds additional degrees from Johns Hopkins University and the London School of Economics and was inducted into the United States Animal Rights Hall of Fame in 2004. A popular speaker on college campuses — including Harvard, Yale, Princeton, Stanford, and MIT — Bruce has appeared on NBC's Today Show, CNN, Fox News Channel, MSNBC, and Court TV. As compelling as it gets, this is an extraordinary conversation about animal agriculture, planetary health and human well being. It's about the politics of agriculture and the subsidies, corporations, representatives and lobbyists that support it. But mostly, this is an optimistic forecast of food system innovation — how technology, urgency and popular demand are rapidly converging to create healthy, sustainable and compassionate solutions to help solve our current food, health and environmental crises. Incredibly intelligent, considerate and measured, it was an honor to sit down with Bruce. May our exchange leave you inspired to invest more deeply in where your food comes from and how it impacts the precious world we share. 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

  Yeah, times are changing. And I mean, one of the things that we're trying to do at the Good Food Institute is to help the meat industry transition away from animal-based meat and toward plant-based meat and clean meat, both of which have much less of a carbon footprint, both of which are far more exponentially more sustainable, neither of which uses antibiotics, which probably is an existential threat to humanity on par with climate change, and of course, both of which are friendly to animals. So if we can convince the meat industry, you know, through creating products that are taste-competitive and price-competitive, to simply shift over, that certainly changes the landscape on Capitol Hill as well.

• 1:49Speaker 01

  I mean, the opportunity in this space to start companies, to join companies, the opportunity for entrepreneurship, for food scientists and tissue engineers and plant biologists and entrepreneurs, is a colossal opportunity to both do a tremendous amount of good and save the world. That's Bruce Friedrich, this week on the Rich Roll Podcast.

• 2:19Rich Roll?

  The Rich Roll Podcast. 7.5 billion, that's how many people are currently walking around on planet Earth. But consider this, by 2100, there's going to be somewhere in the range of 10 to 11 billion. That's a lot of people. How are we going to sustainably support this many people? How are we going to feed this many people? Well, historically, currently, our system for feeding the planet is based on factory farming, industrialized animal agriculture. But there's only one problem with this. It's a system that's really just broken. It's incredibly wasteful, it's inefficient, it's ecologically polluting beyond measure. Essentially, it's just unsustainable when it comes to effectively utilizing our dwindling

• 3:02Rich Roll?

  planetary resources and our diminishing supply of available arable land. Most people don't realize this, but industrialized animal agriculture is actually responsible for more greenhouse gas emissions than all of transportation combined. So, all of this leaves us in a bit of a conundrum. How are we going to feed this escalating population without irreparably damaging the planet that supports all of us? Well, the solution lies in moving to a more plant-centric, a more plant-based approach to our plate, as well as innovating new ways, new foods, and new systems that move us beyond our current addiction to an animal foods-based diet. I'm Rich Roll, and this week, I sit down to talk about all of these issues with the

• 3:47Rich Roll?

  amazing Bruce Friedrich. Bruce is the Executive Director of the Good Food Institute, GFI.org, as well as the founding partner of a venture fund called New Crop Capital. These are both organizations that are focused on replacing animal products with plant and culture-based alternatives. Bruce graduated magna cum laude from Georgetown Law, as well as Phi Beta Kappa from Grinnell College. He also holds degrees from Johns Hopkins University. And the London School of Economics. He serves on the Advisory Board of the Christian Vegetarian Association and is a founding member of the Society of Ethical and Religious Vegetarians. This is essentially a guy who has spent his entire life working to reform animal agriculture. He's a popular speaker on college campuses. He's spoken at Harvard,

• 4:31Rich Roll?

  Yale, Princeton, Stanford, MIT. He's been all over television on The Today Show, CNN, Fox News, MSNBC, Court TV, and he was inducted into the United States Animal Rights Hall of Fame. I didn't know there was such a thing. That's very cool. In 2004. He's a great guy. This is an incredible conversation. But before we get into it, a couple quick announcements. As some of you guys know, I have three online courses on Mind Body Green, The Ultimate Guide to Plant-Based Nutrition, a course called The Art of Living with Purpose, which is all about goal setting, and also How to Build a Conscious Relationship, that course I did with Julie, as well as The Ultimate Guide to Plant-Based Nutrition. They're both, they're all, I should say, amazing. All multiple hours of instruction,

• 5:14Rich Roll?

  broken up into structured video modules with downloadable resources and online support community, and tons more. And the reason I'm making this announcement right now, I haven't talked about these courses in a while, is because right now through May 4th, they're offering 10% off when you use the promo code MINDBODYGREEN at checkout. So all you got to do is go to mindbodygreen.com, click on Classes, or search my name, you'll find my courses there, and you'll get 10% off any course that you buy by using the promo code MINDBODYGREEN at checkout. All right? So, check that out.

• 5:57Rich Roll?

  All right, back to Bruce. Again, this is really an extraordinary conversation about many, many things. It's about the pitfalls of factory farming, of industrialized animal agriculture, and its deleterious impact on the environment and human health.

• 6:12Rich Roll?

  It's about reimagining how we're going to feed the estimated 9.7 billion people that are going to be walking around by 2050. It's a conversation about the politics of agriculture, government subsidies, regulatory policy on Capitol Hill, the impact of lobbying on policy and legislation. And it's about clean meat, so-called clean meat, quote unquote, clean meat, and plant-based meat alternatives. I've been following Bruce and his work for quite a while. He is an extremely impressive individual. I truly believe that the work that he and his team and the companies that they work with are doing is truly changing the world, making the world a better place. So you guys are in for a treat. Without further ado, please enjoy my conversation with Bruce Friedrich.

• 7:00Rich Roll?

  All right, Bruce, so nice to meet you.

• 7:02Speaker 01

  It's awesome to meet you, Rich.

• 7:03Rich Roll?

  Yeah, really happy to talk to you. This has been percolating for quite some time and finally our paths, our paths crossed. And I've been excited about this conversation for quite a while. You're into so many super interesting things at the vanguard, I think, of the plant-based movement and technology innovations and investment. And there are just so many areas to explore, so it's pretty cool.

• 7:28Speaker 01

  Yeah, I'm delighted to be here. It's remarkable to me that it's taken such a long time for our paths to cross.

• 7:34Rich Roll?

  I know.

• 7:34Speaker 01

  I've been a big fan for a really long time, super excited about who you are and what you're doing and how you're doing it. It's, it's really just such an inspiration for the vegan movement. So I'm delighted and humbled and honored to be spending time with you.

• 7:47Rich Roll?

  That means a lot to me. I appreciate that very much. So I think maybe the best way to kind of launch into this might be to do a kind of brief synopsis of where we stand in terms of food production.

• 8:02Rich Roll?

  Factory farming, industrialized animal agriculture. And sort of systemically, you know, what's happening across the planet in terms of environmental impact, et cetera.

• 8:15Speaker 01

  Well, it's not good.

• 8:16Rich Roll?

  Yeah, I think we can all agree.

• 8:18Speaker 01

  So, I mean, we're going to need to feed 9.7 billion people by 2050.

• 8:24Rich Roll?

  And We've got 7.3 right now, I think, last time I looked.

• 8:28Speaker 01

  Yeah, I think it, I think it might even be just a little bit more than that. But, um, yeah, I mean, the predictions are that we're going to have to feed 9.7 billion people by 2050. And we're simply not going to do it with the degree of inefficiency that is inherent in growing crops to feed them to animals.

• 8:44Rich Roll?

  So why, why, why is that?

• 8:47Speaker 01

  Well, I mean, it's just, uh, think about you, uh, or me, we eat however much we eat. You know, you probably eat 4,000 plus calories a day. I eat like 2,500 calories a day. Is that right?

• 8:59Rich Roll?

  Uh, it's not as high as you might think, actually.

• 9:01Speaker 01

  Okay.

• 9:02Rich Roll?

  But either way. Maybe three or 35, I don't know.

• 9:04Speaker 01

  All right, well, we're eating thousands of calories a day and we're not gaining weight. You know, we're, we need those calories in order to survive. And the same sort of thing exists for farm animals so that the most efficient meat is chicken. And it takes nine calories into a chicken to get one calorie back out in the form of that animal's flesh. They burn off most of it. They turn some of it into blood and bones and feathers and other things that aren't consumed. So, most people are consumed about, concerned about food waste, right? You ask people, you know, do you care about food waste? I was at a food conference, uh, just yesterday and I said, who here cares about food waste? And everybody raised their hands and we should be concerned about food waste. About 40% of everything that's produced in the United States is thrown away.

• 9:48Speaker 01

  But think about the ratio for the chicken that we consume. You know, you're throwing away eight calories, 800% food waste, eight calories for every calorie that you consume. It's a vastly inefficient system and it needs to change.

• 10:01Rich Roll?

  And chicken is the most efficient of all the animals?

• 10:04Speaker 01

  Yeah, no, exactly. It gets, it goes to 13 to 15 if you're talking about pork. It goes to 25 if you're talking about beef. So, yeah, the most efficient meat is chicken and it's 800%.

• 10:17Speaker 01

  Waste for every, you know, eight calories thrown away for every calorie you consume.

• 10:21Rich Roll?

  And just to kind of really paint the picture for somebody who might be brand new to these ideas, that is because of all the inputs that have to go in to raise these animals as sort of an intermediary, right? Like a clearinghouse for all these calories. So it's the land, it's the water, it's the feed.

• 10:37Speaker 01

  I mean, that's just the calories in, calories out. That's just that you have to grow all of this wheat or soy or alfalfa, whatever's going to go into the chicken feed. You have to put nine calories into a chicken to get that chicken to slaughter weight to get one calorie back out in the form of that animal's food. And the environmental consequences are quite a bit worse than that because you're growing the crops and you're shipping the crops and you're operating a feed mill and you're shipping the feed to the farm and you're operating the farm and you're shipping the animals to a slaughterhouse and you're operating the slaughterhouse. I mean, once you crunch the numbers, whether you're talking about energy inputs or climate change outputs or water use or land use or whatever else, I mean, every animal, the inefficiencies,

• 11:19Speaker 01

  you know, the numbers vary. The most recent UN number in terms of climate change is one example, is that global climate change is 13.5% directly attributable to the inefficiencies of raising animals for food. And, you know, there's a World Watch report done by a researcher from the International Finance Corporation and the World Bank that says it's over 50% because they include respiration.

• 11:42Rich Roll?

  So what is, explain respiration.

• 11:45Speaker 01

  Yeah, so they, so the World Watch, the researchers who wrote the paper for the World Watch Institute argue, and I think convincingly, that every animal, whether human or farm animal, every animal by simply existing, we breathe and we produce carbon dioxide. So in the United States, we bring nine billion land animals into the world. All of them are breathing. And they break out of the carbon cycle because they're we're bringing them into the world simply to eat them. And all of that respiration causes a lot of CO2. They take issue basically with the numbers coming out of the United Nations and say that actually

• 12:25Speaker 01

  once you factor in all of the efficiencies and all of the production inputs and respiration, you get to over half of climate change attributable to animal agriculture. Although for me, I mean, I like to break it down meal by meal. So even if you take the UN's numbers and so you take the really conservative numbers, 13.5%, if you break it down meal by meal, the animal who causes the least climate change again is the chicken. And chickens, on a per protein calorie basis, they produce 40 times as much CO2 equivalent per protein calorie when compared to legumes like soy or wheat or well, not wheat's not a legume, but like soy or peas, 40 times as much, 4,000% on a per meal basis. So you eat a veggie burger

• 13:08Speaker 01

  from Beyond Meat and it's made out of, you know, pea protein, or you eat a Boca burger and it's made out of soy protein, that causes 40 times less climate change than does eating a chicken burger. And of course, it gets even worse if you're talking about fish or pigs or cows.

• 13:23Rich Roll?

  It's unbelievable. And this is something that the documentary Cowspiracy did a pretty good job of pointing out. I think they used 15 or 18% in that in that movie.

• 13:35Speaker 01

  I think they tagged both numbers. I think they talk both about that. They talk about the World Watch Institute paper and they talk about the previous UN report, Livestock's Long Shadow, which comes up with 18%. And UN, the UN has since revised that down a little bit.

• 13:49Rich Roll?

  And they, I know from Kip and Keegan that they erred on the side of being conservative just to be, you know, sort of as buttoned down as possible. So to hear the numbers that you're snoring around, it's really quite blasphemous. And by comparison, you know, this is trumping all of transportation combined. Is that correct?

• 14:07Speaker 01

  Yeah, transportation's at about 13%. So whether you're going with 14.5 or 18 or obviously 51, it's a lot more climate change that's attributable to the meat industry than that is attributable to all transport combined.

• 14:21Rich Roll?

  Right. And, and we're beginning to talk about this, but Bruce, why isn't this, you know, being discussed on a broader policy level than it has been historically? Like, why is it so difficult to get this into mainstream consciousness and, and to get these ideas, you know, really debated on Capitol Hill?

• 14:41Speaker 01

  Yeah, I mean, I think Kip and Keegan did a really nice job at presenting why it's difficult. I mean, I, you know, they focused a lot on the environmental groups and I'm not positive that the environmental groups taking this issue more seriously would get it, you know, more attention on Capitol Hill. Like you look at something as basic as PAMTA, which is the bill that Louis Slaughter has introduced every two years and it would ban the use of dual-use sub-therapeutic antibiotics. So antibiotics that are also used in human medicine and that are used to keep animals alive through conditions that would otherwise kill them. In other words, the animals aren't sick. It's just, you know, they're dosing them both for growth promotion and because the conditions would kill them if they weren't

• 15:22Speaker 01

  dosed. So, sub-therapeutic, dual-use antibiotics, every two years it's proposed. It's got literally hundreds of endorsers. All of the environmental groups endorse it. All of the big health groups endorse it and it never ever passes. And the people who handicap legislation basically give it about a 1 to 2% chance of passing every two years. And everybody thinks it should. And that's the power of animal agriculture on the Hill. I mean, another example is agricultural subsidies. You've got bipartisan support for getting rid of agricultural subsidies. Barack Obama didn't like them. George W. Bush didn't like them. Most people in both the House and the Senate don't like them, but the House and Senate Agricultural Committees, I mean, those guys, they know where their bread is buttered and it won't even get out of the

• 16:06Speaker 01

  Ag Committee. So, it's certainly possible that even if, you know, this became priority number one for Sierra and EDF and Greenpeace and all of the other sort of environmental groups that are on the Hill, we still might not make a lot of progress.

• 16:19Rich Roll?

  Right. I mean, I don't want to, you know, veer into being like a conspiracy theorist, but this is like the reality of, you know, real politics on Capitol Hill and kind of defending the base and the status quo. So in terms of, you know, the heads of state with respect to the big food companies, I can't imagine that, you know, they're going to kind of give up too much ground on this, right? But times are changing.

• 16:43Speaker 01

  Yeah, times are changing. And I mean, one of the things that we're trying to do at the Good Food Institute is to help the meat industry transition away from animal-based meat and toward plant-based meat and clean meat, both of which have much less of a carbon footprint, both of which are far more exponentially more sustainable, neither of which uses antibiotics, which probably is an existential threat to humanity on par with climate change, and of course, both of which are friendly to animals. So if we can convince the meat industry, you know, through creating products that are taste-competitive and price-competitive to simply shift over, that certainly changes the landscape on Capitol Hill as well.

• 17:27Rich Roll?

  Right. And I want to get into all of that. But before we do, I think it's sort of worth exploring the antibiotics issue a little bit. Can you talk a little bit about, you know, how that functions and the sort of health threat that that poses currently?

• 17:43Speaker 01

  Yeah, I mean, anybody, anybody who wants to really be terrified, Google "the end of antibiotics" and you will read just so many stories. Even in the mainstream media, they end up on like, you know, A32 or whatever where they belong on the front page. But basically, about 70% of all antibiotics that pharmaceuticals produce in the United States, about 70% of them are fed to farm animals. And it's not because the farm animals are sick. They're not treating sick animals. They're feeding them, for example, to the nine billion chickens who are slaughtered. They're crammed 50,000 in a shed. They're crammed in not just their excrement, but the excrement of generations of chickens. And the conditions are so filthy and disgusting that the animals would all be getting sick

• 18:28Speaker 01

  and dying if they weren't dosed with essentially prophylactic antibiotics. So that's where 70% of antibiotics go. The antibiotics go into the chickens and then the antibiotics, the bugs that they're designed to kill, so the bacteria and the contamination that they're designed to kill. End up mutating so that they can get around the antibiotics that are being used in animal food. So then you get sick or I get sick and the pharmaceuticals that have been used in the farm animals, the bacteria have figured out how to beat those bacteria. And it ends up that you or I get sick, we take the doses of antibiotics and they don't work because factory farms have created superbugs.

• 19:13Speaker 01

  And if you Google the end of antibiotics, what you'll find is an awful lot of reflection on what it means when antibiotics no longer work in human medicine. Like you get a cut, it gets infected and it literally kills you. You know, you fall that your kid falls down on a skateboard, on a skateboard and scrapes her knee, penicillin's not going to work. It literally leads to death. Like the end of working antibiotics is a true nightmare scenario, except that it's a very real possibility on the basis of the use of antibiotics in farm animals.

• 19:45Rich Roll?

  It's insane. It's almost like this systemic program to create superbugs that we are subsidizing.

• 19:51Speaker 01

  No, it's exactly like that, which is why it makes it, I mean, you know, you look at something like the, the PAMTA bill that Representative Slaughter keeps introducing and you've got the American Medical Association, you've got literally billions and billions and billions of dollars in lobby money. Okay, maybe not billions, hundreds of millions of dollars in lobby money, all of the top health charities, all the entire medical establishment, the entire environmental establishment, like just hundreds of cosponsors. And it would pass if it got to a House and a Senate floor vote. And yet they can't get it out of the ag committee, which is where it has to start.

• 20:26Rich Roll?

  Right.

• 20:27Speaker 01

  And, you know, the ag committee, that those people, I mean, and there are two issues with the ag committee. It's not just that they get an awful lot of donations, it's that when they retire, they know that they have six-figure jobs waiting for them or board, you know, board seats waiting for them that are extremely lucrative, like they are set forever. So a part of it is the campaign contributions and that's substantial from both the pharmaceutical industry and to the factory farming industry. And a part of it is just the revolving door that exists between the, these Capitol Hill offices, not even just the senators and representatives themselves, but also their chiefs of staff and so on. It's revolving door.

• 21:05Rich Roll?

  Right, in between administrations and then going back into high-level executive positions at these, at these powerful companies.

• 21:11Speaker 01

  Yeah, that's exactly right.

• 21:13Rich Roll?

  It's kind of crazy when you look at, you take sort of a bird's eye view of factory farming, because on the one hand, they've created the most efficient economies of scale possible, right? But then you have to contrast that with the incredible inefficiency of just the system itself. And I think that's sort of something that bends people's noodles, because they're like, "Look, it's so efficient. Look at, look at how it..." You know, basically, they're using the least amount of time and resources possible to blow these animals up as big enough until they can be food. It can't be done any more efficiently than it is when you're cramming all these animals into these small spaces. And yet, you know, sort of fundamentally, it's unsustainable.

• 21:55Speaker 01

  Yeah, I mean, it's just inherently, you know, it's impossible to raise an animal without feeding the animal. The majority of the calories fed to the animal are by necessity going to go into existing. Like, you can only get an animal's physiology to operate to a certain degree of efficiency. And you can't get past the fact that you still have to grow the feed and ship the feed and ship the animals and operate the extra slaughterhouses, etc. Like, it can only, it can only get to be so efficient. But what they've done with the genetics of these animals is really quite something. I mean, it's extraordinarily unnatural. Chickens' upper bodies now grow more than six times as quickly as they did 75 years ago. And, you know, their, their hearts and their lungs and their limbs can't

• 22:38Speaker 01

  keep up. Like, the genetics have done a lot with the upper bodies, but they haven't, you know, they haven't kept up with the organs and the limbs. And so, the animals suffer from astronomical death losses.

• 22:48Rich Roll?

  As a counterpoint to this, there is a very popular idea that's circulating around right now that has to do with the ideas of Alan Savery and repasteurization and sort of, you know, grass-fed animals. And you're seeing more and more people interested in, in procuring their meat from these sources. And the idea behind that is this is the path forward, right? Like, this is the way we're going to solve this problem. So, can you, like, sort of comment on your perspective on that?

• 23:19Speaker 01

  Well, I mean, I think in a lot of ways, the folks in the regenerative community should be our allies. I think their science is good, but it is a tiny fraction of animal agriculture, and it's expensive. So it's certainly the case that regeneratively farmed, grass-fed cattle are, if somebody is going to eat meat, the one meat that I think you can eat while still being an environmentalist. And if you're not an animal rights person, but you are an animal welfare person, the animals are generally treated quite well. But that is not, I mean, more than 99% of farms are not regenerative agriculture. And even the farms

• 24:04Speaker 01

  that are regenerative, oftentimes, they will have pigs, or chickens, or other non-remnants. And 75% of the feed is oftentimes GMO, sort of monocropped feed. So even the farms where you know, you might be able to get a regeneratively farmed cow, those same farms are still a part of the problem through their, you know, non-regeneratively farmed animals. There's David Bronner, from Dr. Bronner's, recently wrote an op-ed, or I guess it's a blog, you can find it pretty easily by Googling "Regeneratarians Unite." And he talks about precisely these issues, and it's extraordinarily interesting.

• 24:45Rich Roll?

  It seems to me that, that ultimately, you know, as we sort of opened this, talking about, you know, the escalation of the population, that that idea becomes an elitist sort of, you know, concept, in the sense that there's just not enough land, right? Like, we can't, we're not going to be able to feed the planet in that regard.

• 25:05Speaker 01

  Well, I mean, if you brought meat down to, you know, 5% of what we're consuming now, and that would still be an astronomical growth in regenerative farming. I mean, it is teeny tiny at the moment. But if you cut meat to like 5% of what it is now, and you used exclusively grasslands that can't be used to grow crops, to feed them, to farm animals, I mean- There could be some small percentage that is regeneratively farmed. And at the end of the day, you don't have to do that. Like for, for people who believe that we shouldn't eat cattle anymore than we should eat dogs or cats. For people who believe that animals have interests that matter like I do. I mean, I've been vegan for 30 years and a big part of that is a belief in animal rights.

• 25:48Speaker 01

  So I'm not going to eat a cow or a chicken or a pig anymore than I'm going to eat a dog or a cat. But from an environmental standpoint, they do have to some degree a point, but it would require that we cut way, way back on the amount of animal products that we're consuming.

• 26:05Rich Roll?

  Right. So before the podcast began, I was sharing with you that I, the, the, the primary reason that I came to New York was to speak at Goldman Sachs, which I did yesterday, which was an amazing opportunity.

• 26:17Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 26:18Rich Roll?

  Uh, I got a little blowback and flack, like, how could you, you know, speak to these guys? But it's like, I relish that opportunity. I think you need to, you know, work with everybody and, you know, if McDonald's asked me to come and speak, I would do that as well.

• 26:30Speaker 01

  Me too.

• 26:32Rich Roll?

  But it was very interesting because I had, I did discuss many of these ideas that we're, we're talking about here today. And then we went out for a beautiful dinner afterwards and I had my, you know, vegan meal and a couple of other people did. And we had a very lively, interesting, dynamic conversation and they were all very moved by my presentation. And yet the guy to my right ordered a steak for dinner. Perfectly nice guy. He couldn't have been a sweeter, you know, human being.

• 26:59Rich Roll?

  But I couldn't help but think, well, how persuasive was I? You know, I think fundamentally we can understand intellectually these ideas. And yet there's a gap between the intellectualization of it and, uh, and behavioral change. And this is something I think where you're living and, and breathing and really trying to innovate. Uh, new and compelling ways to get people to move that needle. So let's talk about the Good Food Institute.

• 27:27Speaker 01

  I would love to, but I want to start by saying it just, it makes me sad that anybody would give you or anybody else and, and any kind of movement flack for talking to anybody. Like the idea that you would be invited to speak at Goldman Sachs or McDonald's for that matter, um, and not take advantage of that opportunity. It's just like flummoxing to me that anybody would suggest that. Like, we should be talking to everybody and.

• 27:53Rich Roll?

  Of course, of course. I think that's a, a case in which, you know, perhaps, uh, the vegan community can be its own worst enemy, you know, by sort of, uh, I think those are old ideas, like the idea that we're really going to change culture fundamentally and on a mass scale by preaching to the choir or remaining in the echo chamber is a pipe dream.

• 28:13Speaker 01

  Yeah, we need to get out of the echo chamber and talk to everybody else.

• 28:16Rich Roll?

  And that's one thing that you have really, you have done in a, in a very profound way.

• 28:20Speaker 01

  Yeah, thanks. So the, the Good Food Institute, as you're nodding to, the Good Food Institute, um, is a 501(c)(3). We're a nonprofit organization. People can dive into what we're up to at GFI.org online. And we were formed to use markets and food technology to transform agriculture away from the use of animals and toward plant-based alternatives and clean meat alternatives. So clean meat is simply growing cells in essentially a cell fermenter. So we, we envision essentially meat breweries, uh, plant-based meat and meat breweries, and both of them are significantly better. And the idea is, you know, for the guy who was sitting next to you, who was ordering

• 29:03Speaker 01

  the steak, if they had had a plant-based steak that was taste identical, a little bit healthier, um, and cost the same, maybe he would have ordered that if it was taste identical and, and price competitive. Um, and certainly after your talk, if they had had a steak that was produced through cellular agriculture, if they had had a clean meat steak, uh, he would have absolutely chosen it if it were cost competitive. So we're attempting to use concepts of behavioral economics. So, uh, everybody, when they're thinking about what they're going to eat, they think about taste. They think about price and convenience is important. They might not be thinking about convenience, but if it's not on the menu and it's not in the grocery store, they're not going to buy it. But everybody's thinking about taste. Everybody's thinking about price.

• 29:47Speaker 01

  If we can create products that compete in those two ways, we can save a ton of animals, cut back on a lot of carbon dioxide and other global warming gases, create a much more sustainable and healthy food system.

• 30:00Rich Roll?

  So let's talk about clean meat. At the vanguard of this super fascinating movement is your friend Uma Veletri at Memphis Meats, who's doing some truly extraordinary work in kind of finding technological advances for this problem. I'm sure you listened to Sam Harris's conversation with Uma.

• 30:29Speaker 01

  I did.

• 30:30Rich Roll?

  Which was absolutely fascinating. So before we even get into that, maybe explain in a little bit more in depth, what you mean by clean meat. It's sort of anecdotally known as lab grown meat. And I know language is important. You're going to avoid that term, but that's sort of colloquially like what people understand it to be. And I think there's going to be a learning curve here in getting people acclimated to understand exactly what this is.

• 30:57Speaker 01

  Yeah. And then let me start by saying, the reason that we don't call it lab meat is the same reason that we don't call Cheerios, lab Cheerios, or Budweiser, lab Budweiser. Like every processed food starts in a food lab. So technically, every processed food is created in a lab. But at scale, this will be created in a factory, just like every other food that starts in a food lab is created in a factory. And what it will look like is it will look like a meat brewery. So you picture a beer brewery, those vats, instead of creating beer, they will be creating meat. And that has some huge advantages over the current system. It's three times more efficient than chicken, which is the most efficient

• 31:41Speaker 01

  meat, causes 95% less climate change, doesn't include all of the extra stages of production, it's exponentially cleaner, doesn't require antibiotics. I mean, according to the Centers for Disease Control, there are tens of millions of cases of meat contamination, foodborne illness. There are more than 100,000 hospitalizations. There are thousands of deaths every single year. All of that goes away because the process is cleaner. It's also clean meat as sort of a nod to clean energy, the environmental benefits. So just like clean energy is more environmentally sustainable energy, clean meat is more environmentally sustainable meat. And the two sort of pioneers of this movement, one is this guy Mark Post, who is a former

• 32:25Speaker 01

  medical school professor at Harvard Medical School. And now he's a tissue engineer, he's a PhD in tissue engineering and an MD. And now he's teaching tissue engineering at Maastricht University in the Netherlands, which is one of the top medical schools in Europe. And previously, he was, I think, about a decade at Harvard Medical School. The other one is also a medical doctor, Dr. Valetti, who was on Sam Harris's podcast, which I highly recommend, really just a fascinating conversation. And Valetti is a cardiologist. He was trained at the Mayo Clinic. He was a professor of medicine at the University of Minnesota. He was the president of both the American College of Cardiology and the American Heart Association, the Twin Cities chapter. Like, you know, these guys are brilliant.

• 33:11Rich Roll?

  Yeah, he's legit.

• 33:11Speaker 01

  Yeah, they could be doing anything. And they have put their entire lives into creating a more sustainable, healthier alternative that is exactly the same thing. So if you're eating a clean meat chicken nugget, or you're eating a clean meat hamburger, or a clean meat pork chop, whatever, it is literally the exact same thing. But instead of putting feed into an animal and causing the animal's cells to grow and wasting most of the inputs, instead you're just taking similar nutrients, you're bathing the cells, you're causing them to multiply and grow. But instead of in an animal, you're doing it in a meat fermenter. And it takes away a lot of the problems of the meat industry.

• 33:51Rich Roll?

  So essentially, the process is extracting cells from live animals that are sort of healthy, raised in a very healthy way. And then culturing them, correct?

• 34:04Speaker 01

  Well.

• 34:04Rich Roll?

  In these brewery vats, like I'm trying to understand kind of the logistical process of how this whole thing works.

• 34:10Speaker 01

  A sesame seed biopsy can feed the world. So you don't need like, you know, a herd of cattle for the clean meat industry. You need a sesame seed biopsy from one cow.

• 34:24Rich Roll?

  What does that mean, a sesame seed biopsy?

• 34:26Speaker 01

  So basically you take a teeny little bit of meat.

• 34:29Rich Roll?

  Oh, sesame seeds sized.

• 34:31Speaker 01

  Yeah, sorry.

• 34:31Rich Roll?

  Got you, okay.

• 34:32Speaker 01

  Sorry, sorry, yes. Yeah, so you need a biopsy from the animal the size of a sesame seed. And that can create literally billions of pounds of meat. So it's not like you need a herd of donor animals. You just need a tiny little bit. And you can certainly take the biopsy from a live animal, or you can take the biopsy from not a live animal, but it's a very little bit of meat that you then use standard cell, you know, tissue engineering techniques. So it's common and all aspects of this are common in medicine. The problem is nobody's going to haggle over the price of a liver, you know, or an ear or whatever. So we need to, we need to improve the processes so that we can get the cost down. But the cost is down more than 99% over just two and a half years.

• 35:15Rich Roll?

  Right, it started off as like $3,000 a burger or something like that?

• 35:18Speaker 01

  Well, it was $300,000 for a quarter pound burger.

• 35:22Rich Roll?

  Yeah, okay. So some shake in UAE could order it and that was about it?

• 35:28Speaker 01

  Well, yeah, I mean, it was a, so it was $1.2 million for the first pound.

• 35:31Rich Roll?

  Uh huh.

• 35:32Speaker 01

  And it was $9,000 a pound last week. And I mean, you think about the first iPhone, the first iPhone R and D cost, I think, $2.4 billion. And iPhones are a lot less expensive than that. Sequencing the human genome, like the cost of that came down, I think, a million times over the course of a decade. So these processes are so much more efficient. It's inconceivable to me that we won't get to a place where because the processes are so much more efficient, as we get economies of scale from, you know, where they are now, which is just a couple of people, you know, not that many labs working on this, not that many companies working on this. As it scales up, the price is going to come down. It will be cost competitive. I mean, Dr. Valetti and Dr. Post think that they will be cost competitive with expensive

• 36:16Speaker 01

  meat in about four years and cost competitive with cheap meat in about a decade. And, you know, that's, that requires that the venture capital and the investments are there, but we think they will be.

• 36:27Rich Roll?

  From an environmental point of view, it's indisputable that this is a path forward and an incredibly powerful solution to sort of, you know, render obsolete the way that we've been raising animals for food. It's, you know, it's just, it's indisputably a better way. I think ethically, we get into some very interesting terrain in terms of how this whole thing can work. Because on the one hand, you have the, the very powerful argument that you're now going to be sparing all of these factory farmed animals' lives. We're not going to have to raise animals, which will significantly reduce, not just greenhouse gas emissions and everything that's built into that, but just not having

• 37:11Rich Roll?

  to kill animals. Unbelievable. And yet, at the same time, on the other hand, we have this sort of tricky new terrain that, that sort of raises the hair on the, on the back of people's necks. And the sort of acclimation to that idea that I think is analogous to the concept that we're going to be in self-driving cars, right? We have to sort of adjust to this new world. And I think Sam did a good, did a good job of trying to kind of illuminate this. And he did that poll on Twitter, like, who would eat this stuff? And, and he called it like, the ick factor, right? Because this is like, wait a minute, like, this was grown,

• 37:51Rich Roll?

  you know, in a, in a, in a, in a lab with quotes around it, or in a new and innovative way. And it's, it's a new and perhaps uncomfortable idea for people. So how do you put people at ease about this?

• 38:08Speaker 01

  Well, I mean, I think once people see it, the production method will become a huge selling point. I mean, right now, you've got people eating meat, not because of how it's produced, people are eating meat despite how it's produced. There appears to be something, you know, deep in the human psyche that wants to eat meat, which is why that very sweet guy from Goldman Sachs sits next to you after hearing everything that you had to say, and eats a steak, like all of us in, in the vegan movement. And the animal movement have experienced exactly that. Super nice people, really engaged. We go out to dinner and they order meat. It's like, have you not been listening to me for like the last two hours? It's flabbergasting. And, and this is the solution for those people.

• 38:51Speaker 01

  And that guy didn't eat that meat because he likes what happens on factory farms, because he likes what happens in slaughterhouses. Like, people don't even want to think about how meat is made, right?

• 39:00Rich Roll?

  Yeah, psychologically, like, they just don't, we just don't want to know.

• 39:05Speaker 01

  And this allows them to know, right? Because once there are two products, and one of them is, like, if you go out on the street and you say, would you want to eat chickens who grow seven times as quickly as they would naturally? Everybody goes, no. And they have the ick reaction. You say, look at this slaughterhouse video. Everybody's horrified, and they have a visceral negative reaction.

• 39:24Rich Roll?

  Or they say, I don't, I'm not gonna watch it.

• 39:26Speaker 01

  Well, right. But this allows them to watch. This allows them to know. So you've got something, you know, like Dr. Valetti or Dr. Post, live streaming the production on the web and saying, come one, come all, see how this is produced. And on the other side, you've got the sort of factory farming industry, literally passing laws to make it illegal to find out what happens on farms and in slaughterhouses. So I think if you sort of put this in a vacuum and say, what do you think of this? Some people go, I don't know about that. But if you say, here are your two choices. Which do you prefer? I think vast numbers of people go for the clean meat.

• 40:03Rich Roll?

  Mm hmm. It's gonna be really interesting to see how it plays out. And now, they're, they're more recently getting into chicken, right? So it started with the burger, and now there's, there's, there's chicken being.

• 40:14Speaker 01

  It's everything. It's the burger, it's the meatball, and now they did, just last week, they did chicken and duck.

• 40:19Rich Roll?

  It's unbelievable.

• 40:20Speaker 01

  It's very exciting. The plant-based stuff is very exciting, too. I mean, I, you know, Eric Schmidt, the CEO of Alphabet, at the Milken Global Summit just last year, he was asked to talk about six technological innovations that he thinks are going to transform life for humanity, for the good, by a factor of at least tenfold in the fairly near future. And he talked about six things. And the first one he talked about was plant-based meat. I mean, he's the CEO of Alphabet, so he's also talking about self-driving cars and watching. That alert the hospital that you're sick before you even know you're sick and 3D printing for infrastructure. But the first thing you talked about was plant-based meat and Bill Gates wrote his blog, The Future of Food, about plant-based meat. So, I mean, the clean meat is extremely exciting. The plant-based meat is probably equally exciting and it's here now.

• 41:04Speaker 01

  I mean, you look at Beyond Meat and Impossible. It's like really exciting stuff.

• 41:07Rich Roll?

  Yeah, it's great. I mean, it's amazing what Impossible is doing right now. I mean, at Crossroads in Los Angeles, like, you know, they just, they were, I think they're offering it around the clock now, but they had a limited supply of Impossible Burgers and it was first come, first served and there would be a line at the door at 10 a.m. to, for people to try this and get their hands on it. So, that's pretty interesting. So, maybe explain what Impossible is doing.

• 41:33Speaker 01

  Yeah, so both Impossible Foods and Beyond Meat, both of which were founded by guys with the last name Brown, interestingly.

• 41:40Rich Roll?

  I've had Ethan on the podcast.

• 41:42Speaker 01

  Okay.

• 41:42Rich Roll?

  So, he shared his story with Beyond Meat and it's pretty cool.

• 41:45Speaker 01

  Yeah, yeah. So, Beyond Meat and Impossible Foods, they, you know, Beyond Meat, he's explicitly saying, "We want to be the next great American meat company." Impossible Foods, Pat Brown is this former biochemist professor at Stanford University, like extraordinarily successful, much like The Lettuce Post. And he took a year sabbatical. He wanted to look at what are the big causes of climate change and what can be done to fix them. He decided that it was, you know, the big cause of climate change is animal agriculture. He didn't decide, he discovered. And he decided he wanted to tackle it by replicating, basically biomimicking meat, but doing it with plants to really challenge the meat industry. And his first product is

• 42:28Speaker 01

  the Impossible Burger and I think he, I think he did extraordinarily well with it. He's, I mean, it's mostly plant-based, well, it's all plant-based, although one of the ingredients is heme that he produced through synthetic biology. So, you take a yeast and you program, basically, what are the genes of heme proteins and the yeast instead of producing, you know, other things that produces, it produces heme. And so, anybody who's read about the veggie burger that bleeds, that could be either the Impossible Burger, or it could be the Beyond Burger, which Beyond Meat is making. They're both fantastic.

• 43:01Rich Roll?

  Right. My, my understanding was that he began with the, the premise of trying to understand what it is, what is it about be for a hamburger that makes it taste like a hamburger? And how come these veggie burgers can't really approximate it? And it boiled down to the heme, right? Like it giving it that like juicy, you know, for lack of a better word, like, you know, the, the, the, it's the blood, right? It's the blood that it, it's the heme iron in the blood that is giving it that special something that makes it taste like a burger.

• 43:32Speaker 01

  Yeah. I mean, I, he, uh, what for both, for both beyond meat and for Impossible Burger, like their idea is meat is made of amino acids, lipids, minerals, water. Like it, the constituent parts we can replicate with plants. And that's the thing that, that Eric Schmidt and Bill Gates are incredibly excited about for the capacity. I mean, for, for Schmidt, like the reasons that he discussed this as so groundbreaking is there are hundreds of millions of people who are living in nutritional deficit right now. Getting high quality proteins to them. This is a way to do it. And it's a way to do it that doesn't, doesn't tax the planet in the same way that raising animals for food taxes the planet.

• 44:13Rich Roll?

  Yeah. It's not utopian to say like, what if we could, all these, all these crops that were currently growing for animals, what if we could suddenly feed them to people? We're already growing them, right? And we just switch the way that we're allocating and distributing, uh, these food products. That would almost, I mean, if you could flick a switch and do it overnight, you could solve world hunger almost immediately.

• 44:35Speaker 01

  Yeah. There, a number of years ago, the global envoy on food to the United Nations, this guy, Jean Ziegler. He said that biofuels are a crime against humanity because they take a hundred million metric tons of corn and wheat. And turn them into biofuels, put them into gas tanks. That causes the price of those crops to go up. And it prices out those crops for people who are starving. But that same food and agriculture organization report from the UN. Noted that 756 million metric tons of corn and wheat in the same year were turned into feed for chickens and pigs and other farm animals in that vastly inefficient relationship. And more than 85% of the global soy crop, so that's another 200 billion metric tons of soy, are fed to farm animals. So it's 10 times as much as went into biofuels.

• 45:19Speaker 01

  Biofuels, he called a crime against humanity. I mean, you know.

• 45:22Rich Roll?

  Right, but it does, it does conjure up the idea that this is a human rights issue as much as it is an environmental issue.

• 45:30Speaker 01

  Yeah, I went vegan actually 30 years ago this year. This is my 30 year vegan anniversary.

• 45:35Rich Roll?

  Congratulations.

• 45:36Speaker 01

  And after I read a book called Diet for a Small Planet, and in Diet for a Small Planet, Francis Morlepe lays it out. She says, this is an inefficient system and the areas of the world that are plagued by starvation are growing feed crops for the first world. It makes absolutely no sense. And whether you're talking about global poverty, or you're talking about food security, or you're talking about the treatment of slaughterhouse workers and contract laborers in the chicken farms and the pig farms in the United States, then it's absolutely a human rights issue. It's a human rights issue for the global poor, and it's a human rights issue for workers who are treated basically as serfs here in the United States. There's a former AP Agriculture reporter, I'm blanking on his name, but he

• 46:18Speaker 01

  wrote a book called The Meat Racket, and it's just a devastating indictment of the way that contract growers are treated.

• 46:25Rich Roll?

  Wow, that's amazing. And it's interesting to kind of canvas how ideas work. Like, this is an idea that had been posited 30 years ago through this book that was obviously super impactful on you, and how long it takes for these ideas to gestate and kind of percolate into public consciousness and then to kind of provoke change. So why now? Is it that the technology is catching up? Is it that, you know, we're at a crisis point with the environments? Like, why do you think all of these things are suddenly finally occurring when this is something you've been working on for, you know, your entire career?

• 47:06Speaker 01

  I do think that there's a lot to be said for the idea that people are looking at market solutions to global problems and there are all of these impact investors and they're saying, you know, what do we do about climate change? What do we do about food security? Like, the big questions in impact investing focused on food are, how do we feed 9.7 billion people by 2050? And what do we do about climate change? So, for example, how do we meet our obligations under the Paris Agreement to keep climate change under 2 degrees Celsius by 2050? Well, the foremost think tank in Europe is Chatham House, and they said it isn't going to be a literal impossibility for the governments of the world to do it unless they address climate change. So, at least with plant-based meat and with clean meat, we look at what happened with plant-based milk, and we say there is

• 47:51Speaker 01

  a colossal market opportunity. Like, you know, there's a lot of good that can be done there. There's also a ton of money that can be made there. So, it's sort of that confluence of factors. I mean, plant-based milk is 10% of the milk market now. Plant-based meat is a quarter of 1%. It's within the, you know, it's within the margin of error of not existing, so.

• 48:09Rich Roll?

  But the market cap for plant-based meat has got to be even higher than plant-based milks.

• 48:14Speaker 01

  Oh, yeah, absolutely. And in fact, there's something called Lux Research, which is the former research arm of a VC called Lux Investing. And, and they think that plant-based meat will be a third of the entire meat market by 2054. I actually think we can do quite a bit better than that, but even if it's that, that's a $70 billion a year market in the United States that is less than 500 million right now. I mean, the opportunity in this space to start companies, to join companies, the opportunity for entrepreneurship, for food scientists and tissue engineers and plant biologists and entrepreneurs, it's a colossal opportunity to both do a tremendous amount of good and save the world.

• 48:52Rich Roll?

  It's interesting to see these, these venture capital firms popping up that are solely focused on this space, right? Just investing in basically plant-based alternatives or, you know, plant-based businesses to innovate.

• 49:07Speaker 01

  Yeah, I mean, there are a bunch that are popping up that are just focused on, on plant-based businesses, and then there are some of the really big ones that are thinking, yeah, I mean, I think there's like a billion-dollar VC that Bill Gates and some others formed, and it's focused exclusively on climate solutions. And Gates was talking about, the first time he was talking about it, he was talking about plant-based meat as one of the innovations that he thinks should be supported.

• 49:30Rich Roll?

  And yet, this is not without a little bit of pushback. You know, we famously saw the Unilever case with Hampton Creek pushing back against the use of mayo and that kind of blew up in their faces. But now we're facing kind of a new iteration of that with this dairy, with this proposed dairy law, right? Saying that you can't call soy milk soy milk, or you can't use the word milk. Can you kind of explain what's going on with that?

• 49:54Speaker 01

  Yeah, this is, so the Good Food Institute, we're extremely gratified by the amount of support that we've gotten. And we've had the capacity. We were, we launched last February with two people. We're now 15 people. By the end of the year, we'll probably be close to 40. And we have a policy department, which includes a policy director who was a food lawyer. She was teaching food law at Valparaiso Law School for the last five years. And we also have a lobbyist. And one of the things that they're working on is the standards of identity. And the fact that some people in the dairy industry, as well as some of their friends in Congress are trying to stop soy milk from calling itself soy milk, and almond milk from calling itself almond milk. And if you're making nut cheese, you can't use the word cheese.

• 50:38Speaker 01

  If you're making plant-based mayonnaise, you can't use the word mayonnaise, and so on. And their reason for that is that in the 1930s, under the Food Drug and Cosmetic Act, Congress gave the FDA the power to make what were called standards of identity. And so they can, so the FDA says, this is what cheese is. And if you make something that doesn't include exactly what they say this is what cheese is, under some interpretations, you're not allowed to use the word cheese on your label. So, one of the things that we did just at the beginning of March was we filed a 40-page rulemaking petition that says, as long as you've got a modifier, so just like bread

• 51:21Speaker 01

  has a standard of identity, but you can have gluten-free bread, which violates the standard of identity. And noodles have a standard of identity, but you can have rice noodles that violate the standard of identity. And exactly the same way, you should be able to have almond milk and soy milk and nut cheese and all of these things. So we're asking FDA for a clarification. At the same time, there's actually legislation that's been introduced that would go beyond the standards of identity, and it would codify into law. The interpretation of the dairy industry. It's clearly unconstitutional. So even if it passes, I mean, we're going to work very hard to stop it from passing because that would be a big hit to the plant-based makers of these alternative dairy products.

• 52:04Speaker 01

  But even if it passes, we will immediately sue to have it overturned. On First Amendment grounds, it's censorship toward no useful government purpose. But anyway, that's the, that's, that's the battle. It makes absolutely no sense. It is the nanny state on steroids. And we've been really, we've been pleased to see the people on the far right laughing at this. So, you know, you look at the people who are sort of libertarians and the people who are anti-regulatory, they are holding to their anti-regulatory guns on this and saying this is just absurd.

• 52:37Rich Roll?

  It's a conservative ideal at its core, really. And it seems like a sort of desperate last ditch attempt to kind of, you know, hold down the old guard.

• 52:48Speaker 01

  Yeah, I mean, it is, it is, it is sort of an industry in its death throes. This is, this is definitely a desperation move and it's not something that a healthy industry that was, you know, doing robust business would be trying. And we think they'll fail in Congress, but even if they don't, we think they'll fail in the courts.

• 53:07Rich Roll?

  And as somebody who lives in Washington, you know, sort of inside the Beltway with your eye on what's happening on Capitol Hill, you know, what's your take on the impact of the new administration on the regulatory bodies and quasi-regulatory bodies like the FDA and the EPA, like, you know, we're hearing about the dismantling of, of these and, you know, the impact that that's going to have, the, the sort of trickle-down effect of that. Like, what are you seeing and, and, you know, what's your prognosis for how this is going to play out?

• 53:40Speaker 01

  Depends a lot on the issue. You know, you look at somebody like Scott Pruitt in charge of the EPA or, I mean, a lot of the, a lot of the regulation, the deregulatory nature of the current administration and an awful lot of the Congress is going to be bad for things like humane slaughter and clean water and climate change. On the other hand, If what your goal is, is to use markets and food technology, I mean, that's got bipartisan support. So we don't need a deregulatory tone in Washington in order to be successful with plant-based and clean meat alternatives.

• 54:19Rich Roll?

  Mm-hmm.

• 54:20Speaker 01

  But it's not going to hurt. You know, the deregulat-- it's hard to imagine a Congress and an administration that are making all of these noises about the nanny state, then going ahead and passing legislation that says you can't call almond milk almond milk.

• 54:35Rich Roll?

  Mm-hmm.

• 54:36Speaker 01

  And that's the sort of thing that everybody should be laughing out of in a hearing room.

• 54:41Rich Roll?

  Right.

• 54:48Rich Roll?

  So on the one hand, we have, it seems to me that there's two fronts here. We have, you know, a population of people that are kind of in our collective space, who are trying to modify behavior through kind of understanding the ethical and environmental and health implications of an animal-based diet. And then on the other side, we have technology trying to innovate out of this. And in terms of how those two things impact behavior, you're somebody who, who kind of went from one and is now more in the other. Because I think the idea that suddenly everybody's going to get struck vegan, and this is how we're going to solve this, at least the environmental problem, is, you know, it's

• 55:30Rich Roll?

  not, it's probably not going to happen. You know, as much as I would like that to happen. And yet, at the same time, I find myself feeling like, you know, the idea that as human beings, we want to just, we create, I guess, the way I think about this is, as human beings, we get ourselves into these huge messes, and then we're like, all right, well, don't worry about it, because we're going to innovate our way out of it. We always do, right? Create a mess, innovate our way out of it. And so-- How can we avoid getting into these messes going forward is kind of how I try to think about it. And I understand like, look, you know, as much as I go around and give talks and do what I do, that only a small fraction of people are actually going to modify their

• 56:12Rich Roll?

  behavior in a really significant way. And we do need the technological innovation to really shift culture on a mass scale. So how do you like, think about those two ideas as somebody who, you know, you began your career at PETA, which is a very different type of organization than, uh, you know, the organization that you're involved in now?

• 56:30Speaker 01

  I mean, I think they work in complement. So we certainly need to be explaining to people the environmental consequences. We need to be explaining, uh, the global health consequences, the antibiotic issue, the animal protection consequences. But our work doing that is going to be a heck of a lot easier if we're giving that guy who ate the steak something else to choose that doesn't require that he deny whatever deep-seated desire caused him to order the steak, despite the fact that you were sitting right there. So, um, we have as a movement been putting a ton of effort. And as you noted, I was 15 years at PETA. I've been vegan for 30 years. I spent 29 years of my veganism, talking about the health and environmental and animal protection and global poverty reasons to

• 57:15Speaker 01

  be vegan. And a lot of people change as a result, but not enough is part one. Um, a lot of people who don't change, don't change because it's difficult. There are social pressures when you're out, um, to eat meat because that's what everybody else is eating. If we are creating the products that are taste competitive and price competitive and making them convenient, it makes it so much easier for the folks who are raising awareness and encouraging people to change for, you know, the reasons that it makes sense to change. And at the Good Food Institute, we don't see ourselves as primarily consumer-facing. So we really are trying to create the products that will just make it easy, make the default choice, basically, the choice that's good for animals and the environment and sustainability

• 57:58Speaker 01

  and global health. Um, but a big part of what we do, we have four program areas. And the first one is fostering innovation. And half of fostering innovation is actually starting new companies. So last year, we started two companies from scratch, from scratch. And we encourage people to reach out to us and we look for people who are entrepreneurs and scientists to help us make these companies that fill white space. And then the other half of it is going to top Schools for entrepreneurship and tissue engineering and synthetic biology and plant biology go into these schools. And that's where we do play the moral card because people want their lives to mean something. I mean, people want to do well by their families and they want their lives to mean something. And so we go to the MIT School of Management or Harvard Business School or the Stanford

• 58:43Speaker 01

  School of Business and we go and we say, you know, look at this colossal market opportunity. And if you take advantage of it, if you fill it, if you join one of these companies or start one of these companies, you'll do very well for yourself and your life will have meaning. You'll be on the cutting edge of solving these really big problems, climate change and food security and the end of antibiotics and animal protection. So that's a big part of what we do and that's where the moral card comes in for us. But for the people, for the consumer on the street, you know, we need to make it as easy as possible for them because what we found is you tell them, they resonate with it. You know, we're talking about the fact that people don't want to see how meat is made. Like, nobody wants to support that cruelty. But we need to give them an easy option that in the sort of cacophony that is our daily

• 59:27Speaker 01

  lives, we need to give them an option that's easy to choose and that's what we're focused on.

• 59:31Rich Roll?

  Right. I think that with the millennial generation and even the generation below it, you see tremendous receptivity to all of these ideas and, and actually a demand for that kind of transparency. You know, they're, they're so much more conscious about how they spend their consumer dollars than people from my generation. And I think that bodes really well and makes me optimistic for the future. The trickier, the trickier demographic are, you know, people in their 40s and their 50s who've just been doing what they've been doing their whole life. And I think in that, you know, when you look at that sector of the population, it's going to have to be about convenience and price and taste.

• 1:00:13Speaker 01

  Yeah. I mean, I think convenience, price and taste are going to be a pretty big deal for everybody.

• 1:00:16Rich Roll?

  Right. Yeah, yeah, yeah. But I think, you know, you do see, you know, there is a, there is a different sensibility with a young person.

• 1:00:23Speaker 01

  Sure.

• 1:00:23Rich Roll?

  Where they are thinking about these things in, in, in different kinds of ways than, than older people are.

• 1:00:28Speaker 01

  Yeah, I mean, I spend a, I spend a fair bit of my time right now on college campuses. So we're hiring a couple of people to sort of do, we're hiring two people to just be like full-time focused on, focused on schools to like just create the next generation of innovators and scientists who are dedicated to this. But it's been me for the first year of our organization. So I spend a lot of time on these campuses. And on the one hand, you have a lot of awareness and you have a lot of people talking about these issues. On the other hand, if you go to the cafeteria and look at what people are eating, it's the same stuff.

• 1:00:58Rich Roll?

  Yeah.

• 1:00:59Speaker 01

  So, I mean, you know, I see, you know, you read in the, in the news and it's like you ask people, how much do you care about the environmental consequences of your food? How much do you care about, you know, this, that and the other thing? And the numbers are really high and encouraging, but if you go to-

• 1:01:11Rich Roll?

  It doesn't translate into the behavior, right?

• 1:01:13Speaker 01

  Right. If you, if you go to a grocery store and you ask people, why did you buy the stuff that you buy? Or you go to a restaurant and you ask people why they ordered the stuff that they ordered, it's price, it's taste, and it's the fact that it's there. So there is a growing awareness among millennials and to some degree, there's a growing change in consumer habits. But it's not as great as the consciousness would indicate. I mean, we still need to make it easier for those people. I mean, one thing that's deeply encouraging is they do legitimately care in a way that, you know, the previous generation didn't care as much. And our hope is that that will translate into more and more of the sort of best and the brightest actually taking these jobs and being part of the transformation.

• 1:01:55Rich Roll?

  Mm-hmm. I know you did a debate at Stanford a while back with John Mackey where you had to, who was, who was the counterpoint in that discussion?

• 1:02:04Speaker 01

  Yeah, we did that at Stanford and then we also did it at Harvard a little bit, a little bit more recently. And we're going to be doing it at Yale next semester. But, um, yeah, the, the debate topic is eating meat is unhealthy and unethical. So it's sort of a negative affirmative, which is a little odd for a debate resolution. But, um, the, the opposition in both cases was the debate team. So it was two people selected by the debate team to argue that eating meat is ethical and healthy.

• 1:02:31Rich Roll?

  Uh-huh. How did that go?

• 1:02:33Speaker 01

  Oh, I mean, it was-

• 1:02:34Rich Roll?

  Destroyed. I mean, you're, you're vetted in this subject matter for 30 years. Years, right? I can't imagine.

• 1:02:39Speaker 01

  They're elite debaters from the top schools in the world. It went, it went very well. I think, I think probably both of them are available online for anybody who wants to, who wants to watch. They were definitely both recorded, but um, I mean, you know, on the, on the one hand, I mean, you know, they're, they're elite debaters. So they did as well as you can do with their side and the resolution, but it's, it's a pretty indefensible position. Like it is just physiologically true that eating animals is environmentally harmful. All of the evidence is, you know, you, you discussed with uh,

• 1:03:11Speaker 01

  I'm forgetting Kip's uh, Kip's.

• 1:03:13Rich Roll?

  Oh, Keegan?

• 1:03:14Speaker 01

  Yeah. Kip and Keegan, you know, they're, they're what the health movie, they point out like the science is overwhelming that it's unhealthy to eat meat. Environmentally, it's an environmental nightmare from an animal welfare standpoint. In the best case scenario, it's causing animals to die for no useful purpose other than, you know, sort of human does, you know, we like the taste of flesh and therefore animals are going to sacrifice their lives. So it's a pretty easy position for us to take. Obviously it's a position that through the way that they lead their lives, 98% of Americans, you know, appear on the basis of the way that they're living to disagree with it, but um, once you're actually having a sort of intellectual discussion of ideas, you know, we have sort of the winning side, but uh, it's a lot of fun to do and I appreciate debate teams taking us up on it and the crowds are fantastic. So it's really good.

• 1:03:59Rich Roll?

  What are the biggest challenges that you're facing in the near future with respect to, you know, winning the hearts and minds and, and getting these new innovative products, you know, into the marketplace in a, in a, in a mainstream way?

• 1:04:12Speaker 01

  There's some pretty serious scientific hurdles. Um, so I mean, it was remarkable to us to realize how much we didn't know, that we didn't know about plant made, plant-based meat innovation. So I kind of had it in the back of my mind, you know, Bill Gates has this line in his future food blog and when she says 98% of plant, no, 92% of plant proteins have not yet been explored for their capacity to turn them into plant-based meat.

• 1:04:33Rich Roll?

  Oh, wow. I didn't, I didn't know that. That's, well, that's, that's encouraging actually to me.

• 1:04:37Speaker 01

  It's deeply encouraging, but it's, it, it, no, it's incredibly encouraging and it's really interesting, but. When we jumped in, so one of the things that our scientists are working on, we have a team of scientists at the Good Food Institute, and one of the things that they're working on is technological readiness assessments for both the clean meat space and the plant-based meat space. And what that means is, you know, we're here, wherever we are, so basically no industry to speak of for plant-based meat or clean meat, where we want to get is price competitiveness and taste competitiveness. What do we need to do to get from here to there? With the clean meat field, we went into it thinking, okay, there are going to be four principal hurdles, and we need to figure out how to clear them. And that turned

• 1:05:20Speaker 01

  out to be true. That is, in fact, what we discovered to be the case. With plant-based meat, like, the number of things that we didn't know, that we didn't know about plant-based meat innovation is really quite remarkable. So, plant-based meat, up until five years ago, it was wheat, and it was soy. Now it's wheat, and it's soy, and it's pea. But there are tons of other options. And we're really, even with the wheat and the soy and the pea, we're sort of using, we're not using crops that have been optimized to be turned into plant-based meat. We're sort of using, not exactly waste products, but just about waste products. And we're using ancient extrusion technology. And the innovation just basically has not really existed until beyond meat and impossible foods. And that's because

• 1:06:04Speaker 01

  these are tiny industries. They're a quarter of 1% of the meat industry. Nobody has really dived in until these two companies to try to figure out how to compete with the meat industry. It's, all of the competition has been sort of for the vegetarian market. So there is just overwhelming innovation that needs to happen, and we need to do the science.

• 1:06:22Rich Roll?

  What are some of the other plants that the industry is looking at?

• 1:06:26Speaker 01

  Well, I mean, the industry at this point for plant-based meat innovation...

• 1:06:31Rich Roll?

  It's like, four companies?

• 1:06:32Speaker 01

  Yeah, exactly, exactly. I mean, you know, it's, so...

• 1:06:38Speaker 01

  Right now, it's just those, it's just Beyond Meat, Impossible Foods, and Hampton Creek that are really diving in to figure out how you turn plant proteins into alternatives to animal products. Although at GFI, we're doing a ton of that, and we're doing it in the public domain. So the stuff that's happening with those companies tends to be proprietary. Whereas with GFI, we're going to do everything and just put everything online in the resources section of our website. But we're hiring a lot of people. So if you have listeners who are scientists or entrepreneurs, I mean, look at our website. We have 18 job openings at the moment at GFI.org/jobs. And we are attempting to pair money with scientists,

• 1:07:22Speaker 01

  like that's one of the key things that we're doing. But, but we need the talent. We need people at these universities. We need entrepreneurs starting these companies. We need people working for GFI. And then we need significant resources from the government level and the foundation level and scientific research universities, all working in concert. And then these companies, it's pretty easy to get the companies that were excited about their initial sort of seed funding. But once they're at Series A, Series B, Series C, nobody has failed for lack of funding yet. But finding the money, the sort of impact money to make sure that these companies are successful, that's another thing that we're

• 1:08:06Speaker 01

  focused on. I am absolutely convinced that clean meat meets the goals that Mark Post and Uma Valetti have set for it in the 10-year timeframe that they have laid out, assuming the VC money is there to hire the scientists and support the research. And, you know, that's an untested hypothesis so far, although considering how much impact-based money is currently going into solving food security and climate change issues, I mean, I think it will be. Right. And in the short run,

• 1:08:40Rich Roll?

  It's about getting Impossible Foods, the Impossible Burger into a bunch of restaurants and getting consumers sort of acclimated to it and testing it and excited about it, right? So I know it's at crossroads. Is it being rolled out in other restaurants across the country or what's going on on that front?

• 1:08:57Speaker 01

  With both Impossible Foods and Beyond Meat?

• 1:08:59Rich Roll?

  Right now, they can't... Well, Beyond Meat seems like it's everywhere now.

• 1:09:02Speaker 01

  They can't meet the demand yet. Like, they don't have the production capacity to meet demand.

• 1:09:07Rich Roll?

  But Impossible just opened this Oakland plant, right?

• 1:09:10Speaker 01

  I think maybe like today.

• 1:09:11Rich Roll?

  Oh, today?

• 1:09:12Speaker 01

  So, yeah, they're... Maybe not even quite today. They haven't opened the Oakland... They're doing groundbreaking on the Oakland plant, I think, next week, actually. But, yeah, I mean, they're about to open their plant and they will produce as quickly as they can produce and they will have orders for all of it. I mean, Beyond Meat is not yet, actually. The Beyond Burger is not available, even in Whole Foods nationwide yet, and they already have other, bigger chain grocery stores lining up to buy it. We also have... So we're doing a lot of stuff with sort of import-export, and there is overwhelming demand for both the Impossible Burger and the Beyond Meat Burger. I mean, this really is. This really is a market sector that borderline doesn't exist yet, which makes it the perfect

• 1:09:55Speaker 01

  time for people who have, you know, a lot of energy and an entrepreneurial spirit for, like, really smart, dedicated, hard-working people. It's the perfect time to get involved.

• 1:10:05Rich Roll?

  It's exciting. I mean, all of these, you know, plant versions of animal products, we're now at this tipping point where they taste good, they're healthier, they're more readily available, and it becomes harder and harder to kind of defend the old way of doing it.

• 1:10:23Speaker 01

  Right. I mean, if... Once you have the alternatives, once you... I mean, like, right now, and it's... We've sort of talked about this a little bit repeatedly, but, I mean, people are living in cognitive dissonance. 100% of people don't want animals to be gratuitously... I mean, Gallup, actually, so maybe it's 97%. Gallup in 2008 and in 2013, they did this poll, and they asked people, "Do you think animals should be legally protected from abuse?" And 97% of people said yes. I mean, even the libertarians think animals should be legally protected from abuse. Those laws are okay. People are opposed to cruelty to animals and yet 98% of Americans are still eating meat. So they're living in cognitive dissonance. This allows people to actually live according to their values.

• 1:11:07Rich Roll?

  Mm hmm. And it sounds like a utopian pipe dream, but this is actually happening.

• 1:11:12Speaker 01

  It is. It's very, very exciting. I mean, both the, both the clean meat stuff, which is the exact same thing and the plant-based meat stuff that is basically biomimicry. It's, uh, it is very exciting. It is absolutely happening.

• 1:11:23Rich Roll?

  It's almost like an arms race though, because we are, you know, the, the sort of environmental, uh, issues that we're facing are escalating so rapidly and we are getting sicker and sicker, like, you know, and so these two things are butting up against each other, like, it's almost like who's gonna, who's gonna win? Like, you've got to innovate faster because these problems are ramping up so quickly and reaching their own tipping point.

• 1:11:48Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 1:11:48Rich Roll?

  So do you, are you optimistic that we're going to be able to solve this problem? Or are we going to reach that 2%, uh, you know, number that we fear so much with greenhouse gases?

• 1:11:58Speaker 01

  I, I'm, I'm extraordinarily optimistic. I mean, I, I think two things. I think one is I am extraordinarily optimistic and I'm mostly extraordinarily optimistic because there are an awful lot of people who are a heck of a lot smarter than I am, who are extraordinarily optimistic and I'm willing to just follow their lead and go, I'll be optimistic too.

• 1:12:15Rich Roll?

  Uh huh.

• 1:12:16Speaker 01

  And then two is even if that, you know, even if the pessimistic scenarios come to pass, we still need to mitigate. Like even if, even if a really bad stuff, I mean, you know, we're sort of past the tipping point on climate change. Bad stuff is going to happen on climate change. And now, like, how do we mitigate the negative consequences? So this is a way to mitigate the negative consequences. Like humanity's going to persist in some form, kind of no matter what happens. So there is still overwhelming cause to sort of stop pouring fuel on the fire. Um, and this is, you know, this is stop pouring fuel and it's taking out the garden hose and, you know, spraying it on the fire.

• 1:12:54Rich Roll?

  Right.

• 1:12:55Speaker 01

  So there is, there is already some damage. There is going to continue to be some damage, but I think we can probably stave off the worst effects, um, and mitigate a lot of the, a lot of the ill effects through these sorts of technologies.

• 1:13:08Rich Roll?

  So if somebody's listening to this and they're getting excited, these are brand new ideas. They didn't know anything about this and they're, they're ready to go. They're ready to put their dollar, you know, where it counts most.

• 1:13:21Rich Roll?

  What kind of action points can you give that person, given the fact that, you know, they can't get the Impossible Burger yet? I mean, they perhaps, you know, a lot of people can get Beyond Meat and Hampton Creek products. I'm sure there's places where you still can't. But what should people be doing or thinking about in terms of how they're spending their, their hard earned consumer dollars?

• 1:13:42Speaker 01

  Well, I think Hampton Creek products are available everywhere.

• 1:13:44Rich Roll?

  Are they, are they?

• 1:13:45Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 1:13:46Rich Roll?

  Is it international too, or just in the United States?

• 1:13:49Speaker 01

  I'm not sure. Um, I know it's, I know it's, I mean, they've hit, hit every nook and cranny of the United States. They're in Walmart, they're in Target, they're in, I think everything. Um, and Beyond Meat does have products in every Whole Foods and most other grocery stores as well. The Beyond Burger isn't everywhere, but their chicken strips and the Beast Burger and other things I think are everywhere. Um, I mean, for individual consumers, you know, it's the Whole Foods plant-based diet is certainly going to be the healthiest and the best and the most environmentally sustainable. But for friends and family who are not yet vegetarian or vegan, this is a fantastic transition food. These, these plant-based alternatives, um, not as good as the Beyond Burger or the Impossible Burger.

• 1:14:32Speaker 01

  But really, I mean, Tofurkey is great, Field Roast is great, Boca Burgers are great. There are a lot of plant-based options that meat eaters have never tried and that they will try if you encourage them to. I mean, these are what I've been leaning on for 30 years and

• 1:14:45Rich Roll?

  Right.

• 1:14:46Speaker 01

  Uh, they're not perfect, but they work well.

• 1:14:48Rich Roll?

  So as somebody, so you're celebrating your 30 year vegan anniversary.

• 1:14:52Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 1:14:52Rich Roll?

  Right? So I gotta ask you, have you been, have you tried the Memphis meats?

• 1:14:59Speaker 01

  I have.

• 1:14:59Rich Roll?

  You have?

• 1:15:00Speaker 01

  I have.

• 1:15:00Rich Roll?

  So you still consider yourself vegan? This is like getting into an interesting terrain, right? So you've, you've eaten this quote unquote clean meat. It's still, you still consider yourself vegan?

• 1:15:11Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 1:15:11Rich Roll?

  So then it goes back to language, right? Like, how are we defining vegan? Uh, and what does that mean? Like, for me? I don't, like, I'm not somebody, like, I feel like I've kind of moved past that. And so I don't know, you know, like, I've had Beyond Meat, and I've had all these products. Um, I haven't had the, the Memphis meat, uh, clean meat yet. Um, but I don't know, like, I'm thinking, like, do I want to try that? Do I not make, I don't know that I want, I don't know that I want, like, I don't crave it, I don't need it. Um, and I understand the power of it for somebody transitioning. Um, but it's an interesting dilemma for me, like, I don't know, maybe, like, what would that mean if I suddenly started eating that, that meat?

• 1:15:51Speaker 01

  Yeah, no, it's true. It's, it's a conundrum for sure. And people say, well, is it vegetarian? Well, no, it's meat, it's not vegetarian.

• 1:15:58Rich Roll?

  Yeah, it's meat. It just doesn't involve a sentient animal.

• 1:16:02Speaker 01

  Yeah, I actually, I actually wrote something, uh, we haven't, we haven't figured out where we're gonna submit it yet. But I wrote something about the fact that I've been vegan for 30 years. And, um, a couple of times at Taco Bell, they put beef in my taco and, you know, I bit into it and I was like, ah! And, uh, and once at a, at an animal rights gala, the people who were working the gala had meat pizzas. And those of us who are-

• 1:16:23Rich Roll?

  Oh my god.

• 1:16:23Speaker 01

  I know. Those of us who are animal rights activists just assume this is a, you know, this is an animal rights gala, it's got, you know, everything's vegan. And, um, it turned out that the pizza wasn't. So I think I've had, you know, three or four times when I accidentally ate meat. This is the only time I've intentionally eaten meat in 30 years. And, you know, I mean, veganism can't just be about an ingredient list. Like, veganism is an ethic, and there is no animal suffering in this. And the potential positive consequences are just overwhelmingly good. I suppose if I were eating meat on a, you know, regular base, I mean, eating clean meat on a regular basis, I probably wouldn't call myself vegetarian or a vegan. But I, you know, tried it once and, uh, and I still consider myself to be vegan.

• 1:17:06Speaker 01

  And I still count it at 30 years, even though it's actually, you know, been a couple of months.

• 1:17:10Rich Roll?

  Right, amazing. Well, it was great talking to you, man.

• 1:17:13Speaker 01

  It was awesome to talk to you, Rich, really just such a, such a pleasure. I'm a huge fan-

• 1:17:17Rich Roll?

  And all of us at GFI are such a huge fan of your work and everything that you're doing and love the podcast and just who you are and what you are and how you are in the world. It's really inspirational. I really appreciate that, but you're the one who's out there in the trenches, really provoking change in a very profound way. And I applaud your work and I appreciate your advocacy and everything that you're doing. It really is changing the world and I can't wait to see how this continues to unfold and shape culture and consumer habits. It's really exciting and I, like you, share that optimism and it's gonna be, it's a cool time, really, really cool time. It's a really cool time. It's awesome to be a part of this movement with people

• 1:17:59Rich Roll?

  like you. It's really, it's just so many, so many beautiful people doing so many beautiful things. Awesome. So if you're excited about Bruce and his work, the best way to learn more is to go to Good Food Institute's website, which is GFI.org. GFI.org, yep. And if you go to the our team page, there are links for everybody's emails right there. Uh huh, cool. And you're at Bruce G. Friedrich on Twitter. That's right. Uh huh. Friedrich I E and C H. Exactly. All right, cool. Awesome, man. Thank you. Thank you. Peace. Blatz.

• 1:18:36Rich Roll?

  All right. I hope you guys dug that. Blew my mind a little bit. I hope it did the same for you. Please share your thoughts on this episode with not only me, but also with Bruce. You can find him on Twitter. Again, he's at Bruce G. Friedrich. Friedrich is I E D R I R I C H. And also, again, all three of my online courses, The Ultimate Guide to Plant-Based Nutrition, The Art of Living with Purpose, and How to Build a Conscious Relationship. All three of these are available at MindBodyGreen.com and they're on sale through May 4th, 10% off. You can find them by just going to that website, MindBodyGreen.com, clicking on Classes or searching my name. And when you use the promo code MindBodyGreen

• 1:19:16Rich Roll?

  at checkout, you'll earn that 10% off. So check that out. Again, only through May 4th. Also, Plant Power Ireland, it's coming up, July 24th through 31. We're going to Ballyvallane, which is this amazing James Bond-like manor that sits on 90 acres in the Irish countryside.

• 1:19:35Rich Roll?

  Seven Days of Transformation with Julie and I, as well as special appearances by the Happy Pair guys. We're gonna cook, we're gonna eat, we're gonna run, we're gonna meditate, we're gonna do tea ceremony. We're gonna have intense, incredible workshops on a variety of subjects, Ayurvedic treatments. It's gonna be intense, it's gonna be fun, it's gonna be amazing, all designed to really help you unlock that best self and transform your life wholesale. So if that sounds like something you would be into, you can learn more at ourplantpowerworld.com. Still some spaces available. If you'd like to support this show and my work, share it with your friends on social media, leave a review on iTunes, click that subscribe button on iTunes. If you're gonna buy something on Amazon, click through the banner ad at richroll.com,

• 1:20:18Rich Roll?

  or just type in richroll.com/Amazon, buy whatever you're gonna buy on Amazon. Amazon throws us some commission change, doesn't cost you anything extra. Also, you can support my work on Patreon through a financial contribution, which is amazing. People are doing that. I'm so touched and honored and really appreciate that tremendously. If you would like to receive a free, short, weekly email from me, I send one out every Thursday. It's called Roll Call. It basically contains five or six just resources I've come across over the course of the week, usually a couple of articles I've read, a podcast I listened to, a documentary I watched, a video I saw on YouTube, a smattering of all kinds of, I don't know, across the board ideas, essentially.

• 1:21:02Rich Roll?

  No affiliate links, I'm not trying to sell you anything, I'm not trying to make a profit off this. No spam, totally free, just fun, cool information. And this is just a way for me to kind of connect with you guys more directly as social media gets kind of washed out. And I know some of you guys who listen to this aren't on Facebook, aren't on Twitter, and these are some things that I don't always share online anyway. So, check that out. You can subscribe anywhere on my website where you can type in your email address, lots of places to find that. Also, while you're there, richroll.com, we've got signed copies of Finding Ultra, Plant Power Way, we've got t-shirts, we've got tech tees, we've got some schwag and merch, like sticker packs and fun stuff like that. So you can check that out there as well. I want to thank today's sponsors.

• 1:21:43Rich Roll?

  Health IQ, reward your healthy lifestyle with life insurance that makes sense and never overpay again. To learn more and get a free quote, go to healthiq.com/roll. Also, Harry's, a superior shave at an affordable price. Friends of the Rich Roll Podcast can visit harrys.com/roll to redeem your free trial set, which comes with a razor, five-blade cartridge, shaving gel, and post-shave shell. And post-shave gel. All you pay is shipping. Also, mad loved everybody who helped me create this podcast this week. Jason Camiolo for audio engineering, production, show notes, and just general good vibes. Shawn Patterson for generating all the amazing graphics. He's the guy who does those super cool motion graphics on Instagram that you guys have been enjoying.

• 1:22:27Rich Roll?

  And theme music by Anna Lima. Thanks for the love, you guys. See you back here soon. Until then, have a great week. Peace.