Impossible Foods: Pat Brown

When he was nearly 60, Pat Brown left a dream job to pursue an ambitious mission: to create delicious meat from plants. As a biochemist, he'd become alarmed at the destructive impact of meat production on the environment, so he set out to make a burger so juicy and flavorful that even meat-lovers would crave it. After some painstaking research, Pat's team created the Impossible Burger, and famous chefs started to feature it in their restaurants. In 2019, the Impossible Whopper launched at Burger King, and today Pat's company, Impossible Foods, is valued at nearly $4 billion. See Privacy Policy at https://art19.com/privacy and California Privacy Notice at https://art19.com/privacy#do-not-sell-my-info.

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• 0:00Guy Raz?

  Hey, it's Guy here. And before we start the show, I wanted to let you know about a short anonymous survey that you can take to let us know what shows and podcasts you're listening to. If you want to help, you can go to npr.org/podcastsurvey. It won't take up too much of your time, and this is a great way to support your favorite shows. That's npr.org/podcastsurvey. And thanks.

• 0:26Speaker 01

  We had half the company, basically, to some extent, going out to soybean farms for the better part of a year. And it was, in retrospect, a bad idea. But this is the kind of thing you have to do. You have to be not afraid to try things that may fail.

• 0:47Guy Raz?

  Yeah.

• 0:48Speaker 01

  I can tell you for certain, we are going to have more expensive failures in the future. And if we're afraid, well, we shouldn't be trying to do this.

• 1:04Guy Raz?

  From NPR, it's How I Built This, a show about innovators, entrepreneurs, idealists, and the stories behind the movements they built.

• 1:16Guy Raz?

  I'm Guy Raz, and on the show today, how Pat Brown's mission to slow climate change led him to launch Impossible Foods and to invent a plant-based burger that tastes and even bleeds like beef.

• 1:33Guy Raz?

  Along the 101 freeway in San Francisco are tons of billboards that advertise startups that can deliver cannabis to your home faster. There are ads for enterprise software to help you manage projects, and even a company that has robots to prepare your made-to-order pizza. That company, by the way, raised $375 million before it went bust. And recently, yet another media company was launched, one that raised more than $1 billion with the goal of bringing us 10-minute video clips. Now, I have no problem with any of these businesses, and I wish them well. But every once in a while, when I'm strolling through San Francisco, I think about how much brain power in the tech sector is spent

• 2:17Guy Raz?

  on scaling lifestyle and productivity products, and how little is spent trying to solve world-scale problems. Now, there are a few notable exceptions, of course. Say what you will about his quirky personality, but Elon Musk is 100% committed to ending human dependency on fossil fuels, and he's trying to do it at scale. Another exception is my guest today, Pat Brown. When Pat set out to start a business, he didn't just want to solve a problem he had or make a better, more efficient product. He literally wanted to change the world. For most of his career, Pat was a biochemist at Stanford. He was even involved in groundbreaking genetic research.

• 2:59Guy Raz?

  But around 15 years ago, he heard a statistic that floored him. Worldwide, agriculture and forestry, and particularly livestock production, is responsible for more greenhouse gas emissions than all the emissions from transportation, all the emissions from cars, planes, ships, and trucks combined. Our love of beef and poultry and lamb and pork is one of the biggest drivers of climate change in the world, and I am as guilty as you are because I eat those things too. Anyway, all of this got Pat thinking. Could there be a way to stop producing meat from animals? A way to make meat that would taste as good as animal meat but require considerably less water, land, and waste?

• 3:44Guy Raz?

  And he knew from his biochemistry background that, in theory, it was possible, that you could do it from plants. So when Pat set out to make meat from plants, he wanted to make beef that beef lovers would love, beef that looked and smelled and even bled like beef, even though it didn't come from a cow. In short, he wanted to make plant meat that was indistinguishable from animal meat, with the hope that if more animal meat lovers could come to love plant meat, greenhouse gas emissions would go way down. And the story of how Pat built what came to be known as the Impossible Burger is amazing, and not just for how he and his team figured out the science of it all,

• 4:25Guy Raz?

  but also because when Pat set out to do this, he was almost 60 years old, and he walked away from an incredibly successful career to take a huge risk. And now, just a few years later, the Impossible Burger is in fast food restaurants across the country. And Pat's company, Impossible Foods, has been valued at $4 billion. Now, these days, during the lockdown, like so many of us, Pat is not going into the office.

• 4:53Speaker 01

  I'm sitting in a room that was originally where my three kids shared a bedroom, and most recently was my youngest son, Isaac's, room, which I've usurped as my office.

• 5:08Guy Raz?

  And that's where you're running Impossible Foods out of right now?

• 5:10Speaker 01

  Pretty much, yeah.

• 5:11Guy Raz?

  Later in the episode, we're going to hear a bit more about how the pandemic has affected Pat's business. But let's start at the beginning, when he was growing up, which kind of happened all over the place.

• 5:22Speaker 01

  My dad worked for the CIA. I didn't realize that until I was quite a bit older. And his job sent him to various overseas posts. So we lived in Paris for four years. That's where I started school. And then came back to the States, and then he was sent to Taipei.

• 5:43Guy Raz?

  Was he a spy, or was he more of a sort of a desk?

• 5:48Speaker 01

  I mean, he was an intelligence officer, I guess you could say, and was gathering intelligence on mainland China and ran various operations. But he never did any, you know, sketchy, bad business. So he is as sweet as most altruistic guy. He was like the opposite of what you'd, if you have this notion of, you know, the CIA and spies being very sinister and unethical characters, he was the dead opposite of that.

• 6:20Guy Raz?

  So when you were a kid, what did you think your dad did?

• 6:23Speaker 01

  Well, it's embarrassing in a way. I mean, he would just say, you know, when I asked him what he did, he'd say, oh, you know, I work for the government. And I thought, OK, that makes sense, works for the government. I only found out what his real job was when one of my good buddies somehow mentioned that his dad worked for the CIA. And I thought, well, that's kind of weird because he works for my dad. Anyway.

• 6:48Guy Raz?

  And you had a pretty big family, right?

• 6:51Speaker 01

  Six siblings, yeah, pretty big.

• 6:53Guy Raz?

  Wow. I have to assume the answer is yes. Were you a pretty good student as a kid?

• 6:59Speaker 01

  I was actually not a pretty good student as a kid. Actually, when I was, when we came back to the States, I felt like I'd just been sent back a grade. And I just became very disengaged because I thought it was kind of like, why am I wasting my time? And I was a chronic cutter of classes. And, I mean, when I was in Taiwan, we, my classes were in a three-story building that had this kind of concrete grill work on the one side of the building. So one thing I would sometimes do would be just randomly walk out of class and go climb on this, it was like a climbing wall. In retrospect, I just feel like it's amazing that you didn't kick me out.

• 7:41Guy Raz?

  But you must have been a good enough student because you went, you would go on to the University of Chicago, which is a pretty hard school to get into.

• 7:49Speaker 01

  Well, I mean, first of all, a lot of people don't realize, back in the day, I think getting into college was much less competitive. But I had good SATs, so I think that that made up for my grades to some extent. But, yeah, I mean, I was just lucky that I grew up at a time where you could be a less dedicated student and still get into a good college.

• 8:14Guy Raz?

  When you got to University of Chicago, was it clear to you that science was going to be the thing that you would do in life? Was that already just a given as far as you were concerned?

• 8:25Speaker 01

  I think I was kind of open to a lot of things when I was in college, but I tended to gravitate toward science and math. I mean, there was a period of time when I thought I actually might, I loved math. I loved sort of higher-level math classes in college. But I felt like I wanted to do something that... Made the world better and I didn't think it would be as satisfying for me in this in the sense of feeling like I was contributing something.

• 8:54Guy Raz?

  I'm curious about something that that happened when you were in college or like right as you graduated from college, which was you you ate your last burger. I guess you became a vegetarian in 1976.

• 9:08Speaker 01

  Mm hmm.

• 9:09Guy Raz?

  Which was kind of a hippie thing to do in 19. I mean, you were 21, like it was not that common.

• 9:15Speaker 01

  It was not a hippie thing. I mean, so really what it came down to was a nontrivial fraction of kids at some point in their lives try to become vegetarian, try to stop eating meat.

• 9:27Guy Raz?

  Right.

• 9:28Speaker 01

  Primarily because of discomfort with the ethics of it. And in my family, that was true of pretty much most of my siblings and myself. And there was a time when we all sort of in concert decided to stop eating meat.

• 9:45Guy Raz?

  Hmm.

• 9:46Speaker 01

  You know, I felt like if if I don't need meat to be completely healthy and well nourished, then I'm only eating it for aesthetic reasons. There's no physiological reason why I need to do this, purely the aesthetics. And I felt like that was, I just couldn't justify the killing and making animals miserable for my pleasure, basically, as opposed to for my sustenance. And I think that was kind of the way my siblings and my parents felt about it, that that was, that was why we all just like bam, like a square wave, decided to stop eating meat.

• 10:22Guy Raz?

  Wow. So but when you made this decision, you you had no idea that one day you would be involved in food or food production. You're, you get your bachelor's degree in chemistry and then you jump into a PhD program in biochemistry, also at the University of Chicago. So presumably, you're thinking, all right, I'm gonna, I'm gonna do a lot. My life is gonna be about, you know, working in a lab and and pursuing scientific research.

• 10:49Speaker 01

  Yeah, I mean, the direction I was going was, so I was in the MD PhD program and I wanted to go into research to help people by basically understanding human biology and human diseases. And the PhD part was kind of related to that, but it was also just, I love the idea of discovering things for the first time.

• 11:13Guy Raz?

  Yeah. So you did your MD, PhD, and you actually did a residency in Pediatrics during that time, right?

• 11:20Speaker 01

  Mm-hmm.

• 11:21Guy Raz?

  But from what I understand, you didn't go into Pediatrics. You eventually landed at Stanford and you went into basic research. I think, in fact, I think one of the first things you worked on was the AIDS virus. Is that right?

• 11:31Speaker 01

  Yeah, exactly. It was timely and important. And it was the reason, one of the main reasons I felt like I had to go into biomedical research is that, as opposed to staying in clinical medicine, is that if you're a clinician, you keep coming up against problems that you don't know how to solve. And it's just incredibly upsetting, you know, when you're taking care of a sick kid and you just don't know how to help them.

• 11:57Guy Raz?

  Yeah.

• 11:58Speaker 01

  And so I felt like that's much higher leverage if you can work on really hard, important medical problems and find solutions, you know?

• 12:08Guy Raz?

  Yeah. So Pat, basically, from what I've read, I mean, you had this incredible trajectory. I mean, you eventually became a young tenured professor at Stanford. You created a lab, you worked on something called the DNA microarray, which is so complex and could be its own podcast episode itself. We won't be able to go into it now. But, I mean, you worked on all this groundbreaking research that helped with things like ovarian cancer detection to gut microbiome and all these incredible things. I mean, this must have just been a dream life for a scientist like you, right?

• 12:42Speaker 01

  Yeah. I mean, it was the job I would have created for myself if I'd been able to completely write the specs for the job. You know, you get the joy of discovering things. If you get a new idea, you can, you know, immediately start working on it. I had great colleagues, great students. It was, I used to say this all the time, it was my dream job.

• 13:07Guy Raz?

  All right, so you, and I should mention, you also cofounded the Public Library of Science, which is now one of the biggest open source scientific journals out there, which caused a lot of, I should talk about this for a moment, because when you cofounded this, you create a lot of friction, because the academic publishing world is a for-profit industry, and they don't want everyone having access to their papers unless they pay for it. You basically created this new model and had a lot of people saying, hey, what are you, Pat, what are you doing? You're an academic, and what are you wasting your time with publishing for?

• 13:42Speaker 01

  Well, I mean, that's, the way that I saw my job, or, you know, my purpose, I guess, it wasn't defined in terms of some particular scientific problem I was working on. You know, it's, if you see something that you can have a positive impact on, I was in the very fortunate position that I could do it, and it was kind of like understood to be part of my job. In that case, I realized that to most of the world, if, you know, if a parent gets sick and they want to read the best current medical literature on the subject, as many people do, I mean, many people who are not physicians, when they have a family member who has a medical problem, they'll go and try to read it. Well, you

• 14:26Speaker 01

  can't. You have to pay, you know, 30 to 50 bucks to read a crappy paper.

• 14:32Guy Raz?

  Right, because especially back then, like, in the early 2000s, many medical journals were behind paywalls.

• 14:39Speaker 01

  Yeah, exactly. That infuriated me, and the reason that the Public Library of Science, the reason that I and my co-conspirator, Mike Eisen, and my former postdoctor mentor, Harold Varmus, founded it was, basically, as much as anything else, to throw a wrench into the business model of scientific publishing, because it was so perverse and antisocial. And we felt that if we create a vehicle where scientists could publish free to everyone in the world, scientists would flock to it, and it would pull the rug out from under these conventional publishers. And it did, to a considerable extent, although the job still isn't done, unfortunately.

• 15:21Guy Raz?

  I mean, you, so you create this academic journal. By the way, you had to Find funding for it. I mean, this is an entrepreneurial venture. You were a tenured science professor at Stanford, and you weren't doing this to make money. This was going to be a nonprofit, right? That was an open science, an open source.

• 15:43Speaker 01

  It still is.

• 15:44Guy Raz?

  Right? Anyone could have access to it. And this must have been a pain. It was a lot of work to get off the ground.

• 15:50Speaker 01

  Yeah. It was a lot of work. But I was so motivated. Like, a lot of these things, if you're doing something because you wanted to do it, it doesn't feel like work.

• 15:58Guy Raz?

  Yeah. I think that was in 2001 when you founded it, co-founded the Public Library of Science. And just give us a sense of scale. How big is it today? Because there's tons of, like, plus PLOS1, and there's a bunch of, like, PLOS Medicine, right? I mean, how big is it?

• 16:16Speaker 01

  Well, when that journal was launched, within a couple of years, it was by far the highest-volume scientific journal in history in terms of publication volume. But the thing I learned was, I believed it would be super-successful. And the lesson I learned is, which is something I repeat all the time at Impossible Foods, you have to bet on your own success. If you expect and intend something to be super-successful, even when it's not, you have to make that investment that you're betting on your growth. For Impossible Foods, the analogy is, if we believe we're going to be as successful

• 16:57Speaker 01

  as we intend and do believe, we have to make huge investments in production capacity a couple of years in advance that are predicated on the idea that our volume will be 10 times greater, you know, in a year and a half.

• 17:13Guy Raz?

  Yeah.

• 17:14Speaker 01

  Which is, you know, I think a lot of companies would regard that as kind of a risky bet. And since our mission requires us to, on average, double in volume every year for the next 15 years... We're going to have to be making that big bet on our success again, again, again. And that's something that, you know, like a lot of businesses would say, well, let's go more slowly, but we'll never achieve our mission if we don't go for it. And so, you know, the lesson again is bet on your own success.

• 17:47Guy Raz?

  Okay, so here you are, it's the early 2000s, you have this incredibly impressive career that you forged, and you could have continued doing that kind of research and teaching and publishing. And then around, I guess, 2008, you took a sabbatical, which turned into a kind of a detour. Can you tell me what, like, what was the thinking behind that?

• 18:09Speaker 01

  So I had decided that for my sabbatical that I was going to try to identify the most important problem in the world that I could contribute to solving. And it could have been anything, but I was pretty confident that it was going to be something about avoiding environmental catastrophes, basically. And I was looking at a variety of different things relatively early on. I was looking at, you know, what's the state of research in making more efficient solar energy devices and stuff like that. But relatively quickly, I would

• 18:47Speaker 01

  say, within a month or so, I had zeroed in on what is unquestionably the most important and urgent problem the world is facing right now. And that is the catastrophic environmental impact of our use of animals in the food system.

• 19:05Guy Raz?

  And how did you, by the way, how did you know about that? I mean, lots of people know about it, but not everyone knows about it. How did you come to that understanding that agriculture, particularly raising livestock, was so damaging to the environment?

• 19:21Speaker 01

  I mean, I'm kind of embarrassed that I wasn't more aware of it ahead of this. I just, I was basically reading about environmental problems and what are the contributing factors and so forth. I became aware of the greenhouse gas emissions from the livestock industry, which are huge. They're greater than all forms of power transportation combined.

• 19:48Speaker 01

  And because of its huge land footprint, it is responsible for a catastrophic meltdown in global biodiversity. And the other thing that relates to land footprint is if you could snap your fingers and make that industry go away, which I would do in a heartbeat if I could, the recovery of biomass, trees and trubs and grasses and so forth, whose growth is suppressed by animal agriculture, would immediately start pulling carbon out of the atmosphere because the ultimate carbon capture technology is photosynthesis.

• 20:29Speaker 01

  That's the opportunity cost of using all that land for animal agriculture. So, bottom line is, there's, nothing even comes close in terms of its destructive impact on the environment.

• 20:43Guy Raz?

  So you're thinking, all right, if I can figure out, if I can focus on this thing, livestock production, and I can figure out, I don't know, maybe how to think about solving this problem, then we can really push the needle, right? That could actually potentially make a difference. Is that where your mind was in 2008, 2009?

• 21:02Speaker 01

  Oh, absolutely. So that was, that was the obvious thing to do. And then the question is, how do you do it? And I organized a National Research Council workshop to just look at what, how the world might be affected if, if we could switch to an entirely plant-based diet. Figuring that if we got a bunch of very objective people who had no conflict of interest to just look objectively at the data, the, the answer would be so overwhelming

• 21:28Guy Raz?

  Yep.

• 21:29Speaker 01

  that it's better for the economy, it's better for the environment, better for food security, and so forth.

• 21:36Guy Raz?

  It'll convince people to change their ways.

• 21:38Speaker 01

  It might convince people to change their ways. But then I realized that, actually, no, nobody, nobody, I don't want to sound cynical, but none of these kinds of, you know, all the facts in the world don't move the needle on, on public policy. And so I realized that, no, what you have to do is something more subversive.

• 21:58Speaker 01

  And the other thing that I think is kind of a no brainer, but I'll just say it is that you're not going to, you're not going to be able to persuade people by education or, or nagging to change their diet significantly, to significantly reduce meat consumption or consumption of animal products. Look at how well people follow nutrition recommendations for their own health as opposed to just the good of the world. They, they don't. And China about three years ago asked its citizens to reduce their meat and dairy consumption by half. And what happened? Absolutely nothing.

• 22:33Guy Raz?

  Right.

• 22:34Speaker 01

  So the bottom line is that doesn't work. Public policy doesn't work. Education doesn't work. When you go to an environmental conference where every single person knows how problematic this is, they're all having steak for dinner.

• 22:46Guy Raz?

  Yeah.

• 22:47Speaker 01

  So you need a more subversive solution. And the subversive solution is create products that compete successfully in the marketplace against the products that are produced by animal farming. And if you can do that, effectively eliminate the economic incentive for this ridiculous industry, you can solve the problem quickly.

• 23:13Guy Raz?

  So I guess what fairly quickly you came to the conclusion that, that you basically wanted to make meat, but not from animals. You wanted to, basically you, you accept the fact that many people still want to eat meat, they're going to eat meat, it's going to be hard to get them to stop eating meat. So why not just give them meat, but don't make it from animals? That was your conclusion?

• 23:35Speaker 01

  It was exactly the conclusion. And here's an interesting fact about meat consumers. Pretty much around the world and, and all across the US, they don't actually like the fact that it's made from the corpses of animals. That is not part of the value proposition of meat to pretty much anyone. They love it because they love the, you know, special kind of deliciousness they get from it. They like the, you know, high protein and iron and familiarity and convenience and so forth. They like it in spite of the way it's made. And it stands to reason, why would anyone actually feel like, you know, what I particularly like about this product isn't so much that it tastes good, it's that it's made from the corpse of a, you know, cow that had a miserable life.

• 24:20Speaker 01

  Nobody wants that. So that basically means that it just comes down to a simple thing. Give meat lovers the things they do love about meat, which is the very particular kind of sensory experience and the sensory pleasures, the nutritional value, protein and iron primarily, other micronutrients, and convenience and affordability, and you win.

• 24:44Guy Raz?

  Let me ask you this question. Given your background in biochemistry, you must have thought in your mind, because if you asked me, right, and I'm not a scientist, obviously, but if I thought, you know, I really want to solve this, I wouldn't have been able to say, you know, I think we can make meat from plants, because I wouldn't know that. But did you know that it was theoretically possible to do this? Did you already know that in 2009?

• 25:09Speaker 01

  I can't say I knew it in the sense that there was incontrovertible evidence, but-

• 25:12Guy Raz?

  But you had a hunch.

• 25:13Speaker 01

  But I would say with very high confidence, I believed it was doable. Because really what it comes down to is the components that are in meat, you know, the amino acids, the other small molecules, lipids, many of the proteins are extremely conserved. They're found in plants as well as animals and so forth. It seemed to me that if we could understand what were the salient characteristics of that kind of molecular composition, salient in the sense of the deliciousness aspect, that there's no reason why we couldn't find sources from plants of ingredients that we could assemble into something

• 25:56Speaker 01

  that, from a sensory perspective, was essentially indistinguishable from the animal product.

• 26:02Guy Raz?

  Yeah.

• 26:02Speaker 01

  Basically, meat made from plants. It's just like, you know, a camera is a camera, whether it's using film or digital imaging. So that was all just thinking. But I just felt like, okay, of course this is doable. It's hard. That's for sure. It's going to be really, really hard. And the hard part is figuring out the deliciousness part of it. The rest is easy.

• 26:24Guy Raz?

  Well, but Pat, I want to just kind of gut check for a sec because you are, at this point, you're a tenured professor. You have a lifetime job, right? You're almost 60. I don't believe you were independently wealthy and you decide to, between 2009 and 2011, to actually launch this company. But surely there were people who were saying, "Pat, I don't know. Are you sure you want to do this?"

• 26:51Speaker 01

  Of course, yeah. Yeah, I mean, a lot of people thought I was a little wacky. But I believed it was doable, you know? Like, to be a scientist, you almost have to be insanely optimistic. Because, you know, if you're doing science that matters, you're doing experiments that you don't know will work, but you have to be an inherently insanely optimistic person. So I was sure we'd figure out a way to make it work.

• 27:18Guy Raz?

  I mean, did your colleagues at, you know, in the biochemistry department at Stanford, any of them say, "Pat, you're this distinguished academic. Like, you want to be a businessman? Really?" Did any of them say that to you?

• 27:33Speaker 01

  There is, there is a bit of that. I mean, I looked at business and I feel like, you know, business is really important and it's not like it's some inferior thing to be doing, except that I just felt like going into business, for the sake of going to business, I would hate it.

• 27:50Guy Raz?

  Yeah.

• 27:51Speaker 01

  It's, it would just be insanely boring. And so I never had the slightest interest in that.

• 27:57Guy Raz?

  Yeah.

• 27:58Speaker 01

  I didn't think of it all as, "Oh, I'm going into the business world." It's that the only way to solve this problem involves competing in the marketplace and that requires starting a for-profit business. And everybody expected me to come back very quickly. And in fact, you know, when I first started, I thought, "Well, maybe I'll just kick this into gear and then I'll just go back to my Stanford job." But what I realized very quickly is, no, this is not a hobby. I have to be all in.

• 28:33Guy Raz?

  When we come back in just a moment, how Pat and a team of scientists spent a year looking for the molecule that could turn a plant burger into an Impossible Burger, and how that eventual discovery turned into an expensive failure that burned through a year of cash. Stay with us. I'm Guy Raz, and you're listening to How I Built This from NPR.

• 29:11Guy Raz?

  Hey, welcome back to How I Built This from NPR. I'm Guy Raz. So it's around 2011, and Pat Brown will soon be walking away from a 10-year job at Stanford to create meat from plants. But before he can even begin to find the ingredients and do the hard science to create an Impossible Burger, Pat has to raise a ton of money. And so he starts just down the road from Stanford with a well-known investor named Vinod Khosla. You went to Vinod Khosla, and you pitched him, what, like you had a deck, like a pitch deck with slides? And what did the-- what was your-- give me your elevator pitch. Did you have an elevator pitch?

• 29:52Speaker 01

  Well, it was-- no, the funny thing was, it was extremely amateurish, OK, from a business perspective. Because basically, it was like mostly a lecture about how incredibly destructive the, you know, animal-based food industry is. And then practically, my last slide was, oh, by the way, this is a 1.5, at the time, trillion-dollar global market. You know, in retrospect, that could probably have been my first and only slide, but I buried the lead. Yeah.

• 30:28Guy Raz?

  So you raised the money. You raised some money from Khosla to launch a company that would kind of reimagine a way of producing meat. And by the way, how did you come up with the name Impossible Foods?

• 30:43Speaker 01

  So when I started the company, first, we just had a placeholder name, meat 2.0. And then when we decided we were going to, you know, launch a product, we felt like, OK, now we need a name that actually works as a brand name. And we engaged a naming company as an advisor.

• 31:01Speaker 01

  And we were, they told us, by far the most difficult clients they ever had because they were, they would give us 20 names and we say, those all suck. Those are terrible. And then in the fourth round, one of the names they had was Impossible. And as soon as I saw that one, I felt like, okay, we're done. It's perfect. Because we wanted something that was, you know, memorable, that actually looked good in type, that was a, an impactful word, a word that gets a little bit of an emotional response and that captured some of the challenger spirit of the company. And a lot of our investors thought it was

• 31:44Speaker 01

  a bad name because they said, wow, Impossible, that's such a negative name.

• 31:47Guy Raz?

  So when you first sort of launched this thing, you've got, it's 2011, how, roughly how much money did you have? Do you remember?

• 31:54Speaker 01

  Uh, we had nine million dollars.

• 31:56Guy Raz?

  Wow, okay. So you had nine million dollars and who do you, who do you recruit to, to help you? I mean, you wanna, you, you have this hunch, pretty strong hunch, that you can basically replicate animal meat from plants. And we're not talking about like a tofu burger. You're, you're literally talking about a completely new kind of meat.

• 32:20Speaker 01

  It only works if hardcore meat lovers.

• 32:24Guy Raz?

  Love it, right.

• 32:25Speaker 01

  Prefer it, prefer it to what comes from a cow. Because otherwise, we're not gonna outcompete the incumbent industry.

• 32:33Guy Raz?

  So how do you recruit a team? I mean, you've got some money and a runway now. You've got probably a runway of, who knows, maybe a year at least before you have to raise more money. And just to be clear, and this is not a knock on you, I think this is actually a great compliment because you're a science, you're a scientist, but obviously you showed some entrepreneurial spark throughout your career at Stanford, but you did not have a business background. So you had to start to build a business. Who, how did you find the people to help you out?

• 33:02Speaker 01

  Yeah, I mean, I literally was, you know, I would say the large majority of people in the, in the, in the US probably. Have more business savvy than I had when I started this company. Seriously, seriously. In fact, you know, my wife manages all our finances. Thank God she does. So we needed someone who actually knew what they were doing because there's obviously a lot of, a lot of expert management required to, to run a business, even one that's, that's not making money. So, um, the very first person I hired was a guy who had just, uh, was about to graduate from Stanford Business School, very sharp guy.

• 33:42Speaker 01

  Um, he had grown up on a dairy farm and had actually worked as an engineer at, uh, General Mills. So he knew something about the food business. He understood the problem we were trying to solve.

• 33:54Guy Raz?

  And he had an MBA.

• 33:55Speaker 01

  And he had an MBA and he, he, and he was, and he was a very smart guy. So yeah, so that was taken care of. And then the rest was pretty much all scientists. And we were hiring people basically who had a hardcore, basic science background, sort of molecular biology, biochemistry, biophysics. And they went to work basically studying meat in molecular terms, the same way they would study, you know, a disease or something like that.

• 34:23Guy Raz?

  So you and all these scientists were, were going after this idea that you could make meat without animals, right? So what did you do? Like, well, where, where did you start to look?

• 34:33Speaker 01

  Well, before I founded the company, I had an idea that a particular molecule in meat, myoglobin, which is a, a heme protein. Um, and it's what makes meat red.

• 34:47Guy Raz?

  Myoglobin, is it what it's called?

• 34:49Speaker 01

  Myoglobin. It's, it's very, it's closely related to hemoglobin. It's a heme protein and heme is what carries oxygen in your blood. It's what makes your blood red.

• 34:57Guy Raz?

  And he, the heme molecule is found in, in all animals?

• 35:01Speaker 01

  Not only all animals, but in pretty much all plants and bacteria and fungi and every form of life.

• 35:10Guy Raz?

  It's a building block of life.

• 35:12Speaker 01

  It is pretty much a basic building block of life. So heme is a very obvious aspect of meat because it's what makes meat red or pink. Okay.

• 35:21Guy Raz?

  Okay. Yep. To get the color right.

• 35:24Speaker 01

  Okay. But there's another aspect of heme, which is it's one of the most potent catalysts uh, in nature. And when you think about meat, when you cook meat, something really dramatic happens that doesn't happen when you cook broccoli. And that is, it transforms, you know, if you cook broccoli or a veggie burger.

• 35:46Guy Raz?

  Gets soft.

• 35:46Speaker 01

  Yeah, it gets warmer, it might get mushier.

• 35:49Guy Raz?

  Yeah.

• 35:50Speaker 01

  Nothing magical happens. When you cook meat, you get in the cooking process, this real absolute explosion of aroma. That's, you know, this meat that in the raw form has minimal odor, maybe a slight bloody odor in taste. Suddenly becomes potently flavorful and generates this explosion of aroma.

• 36:10Guy Raz?

  Yeah.

• 36:11Speaker 01

  And I knew that there is a molecule in legumes. The root nodules contained a lot of molecule called leg hemoglobin. That's a heme protein. It's actually very similar to myo.

• 36:22Guy Raz?

  Huh. And so you're saying that legumes like peas or soybeans have these root nodules? And inside them, there's something called, what's called again?

• 36:34Speaker 01

  So for soybeans, it's called soy leg hemoglobin. And I suspected, so there's one obvious thing that heme does, which is it gives the meat its red color. But what I suspected was it had a role in the flavor, because heme is such a good catalyst. So anyway, I did some calculations and concluded that there's as much heme in the root nodules of the US soybean crop as there is in all the meat consumed in the US.

• 37:03Guy Raz?

  And if you could isolate it, if you could get it, then you've got the holy grail here.

• 37:08Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 37:08Guy Raz?

  That was the thinking.

• 37:09Speaker 01

  Yeah, we harvest a part of the soybean plant that nobody really cares about. Therefore, we felt like we could get it practically for free and get this molecule that was going to be important for meat. Anyway, so when I had raised the money, one of the first projects we started was figuring out how to isolate leg hemoglobin from soy root nodules.

• 37:31Guy Raz?

  And can I just ask you a stupid question? So forgive me. You're literally pulling out the root nodules, right? Physically, it's a something that you hold or touch, and then you've got to extract the.

• 37:42Speaker 01

  Extract this leg hemoglobin.

• 37:44Guy Raz?

  That's the idea, from these tiny little nodules on the roots of a plant.

• 37:49Speaker 01

  It was a cockamamie idea.

• 37:51Guy Raz?

  Why is that? How come this was so complicated?

• 37:53Speaker 01

  Well, it's, let's put it this way, it's totally doable. But the problem was that it was just a very difficult scaling problem. First of all, these root nodules. You know, are these little tiny balls, they're mixed in with the soil. You have to separate them out. You have to get rid of all the other stuff to get pure enough like hemoglobin. That's food safe and all this sort of stuff. It just, all those, all those-

• 38:18Guy Raz?

  You could not scale that.

• 38:20Speaker 01

  Exactly. It's to- it's totally doable. It's just not scalable in any practical way.

• 38:25Guy Raz?

  Yeah. It's like trying to pick leaves off a, off thyme. Have you ever done that? Little thyme leaves. It's a lot of work.

• 38:31Speaker 01

  That's a very good analogy in terms of the- The seeming simplicity and the actual challenge of, of doing it at scale. So it was, in retrospect, a bad idea, which I'm 100% responsible for.

• 38:46Guy Raz?

  Bad idea because you had to burn through a lot of cash to figure that out?

• 38:49Speaker 01

  Right. We had half the company, basically, was to some extent, involved in this, going out to soybean farms for, you know, the better part of a year.

• 38:58Guy Raz?

  Wow.

• 38:59Speaker 01

  But this is the kind of thing you have to do. When you're working on an unsolved problem, where you don't know the root to the solution, is you have to be not afraid to, you know, try things that may fail. And, uh, accept that as part of the job. My feeling is, this is not the last expensive failure we're gonna have in our history by a long shot. You know, as of today, we are going, I can tell you for certain, we are going to have more expensive failures in the future as we try to figure out, you know, how to achieve our mission. But, you know, the point is, we don't have a map to, to where we're going. It means we have to explore.

• 39:43Speaker 01

  We have to try things that we don't know for sure will work, and some of them won't work. And if we're afraid to do that, then, you know, well, we shouldn't be scientists and we shouldn't be trying to do this.

• 39:57Guy Raz?

  Right.

• 39:58Speaker 01

  And I'm proud of it, because that's the way we have to be.

• 40:01Guy Raz?

  Yeah. So, okay, so you spent a year, basically, on this idea that didn't work.

• 40:09Speaker 01

  Exactly.

• 40:10Guy Raz?

  Which I'm sure was was hard, but then I guess, I mean, you discovered a way to essentially grow the leg hemoglobin by, I read, by putting it in yeast?

• 40:22Speaker 01

  Putting it into the yeast cell, yeah.

• 40:23Guy Raz?

  And then by doing that, you can make it at scale? You can basically have lots of it?

• 40:28Speaker 01

  Yeah, then basically you just grow giant fermenter tanks full of the yeast and break open the yeast cells and extract the leg hemoglobin. And it's it's very scalable, the economics work well.

• 40:40Guy Raz?

  So you, you basically, from what I understand, like, this is around 2012, 2013, that you really kind of start to produce this stuff at scale. But that's not the Impossible burger. You can't just go into those vats of yeast and grab a handful out and form a patty and grill it. That's that is not, you are still far, far away from the actual, like, Impossible meat at this point, right?

• 41:05Speaker 01

  Well, that certainly wasn't sufficient. This was not like a sequence of things. So we were, we were working on scaling up the heme protein. At the same time, we were working on figuring out the texture and the rest of the flavor chemistry and so forth.

• 41:18Guy Raz?

  Okay, so Pat, even before you launched, even before you had a product, people were clearly paying attention because Google reportedly heard what you were doing and offered to buy your company. They reportedly offered like $200 million, just an astounding amount of money, which which you turned down.

• 41:40Speaker 01

  Yeah, so we've never confirmed that.

• 41:42Guy Raz?

  I got you, but you're not going to confirm or deny it. But let me, let me just ask you this question. Why would you have turned that down?

• 41:50Speaker 01

  Oh, well, you know, I think Google's a great company and the people there are, there's lots of super smart people there. This company, Impossible Foods, has a very simple, highly specific mission that we are completely 100% focused on achieving.

• 42:13Speaker 01

  Nobody else has that level of focus and commitment, no matter how smart they are.

• 42:20Guy Raz?

  And the mission is to get people to stop eating animal meat?

• 42:22Speaker 01

  The mission is to eliminate the need for animals as a food technology and by doing so, to save the planet from an environmental catastrophe. Nobody cares as much about it as I do and my colleagues do. And I don't want to put the mission at risk by putting it in the hands of someone who's not as committed to it as we are. That's really what it comes down to.

• 42:45Guy Raz?

  So you forge ahead and you continue to kind of iterate and work on this product until you got something pretty workable, not just workable, good enough to actually put out into the world. In 2016, the burger, the Impossible Burger, was launched. And you guys sort of formed a partnership with David Chang, the famous chef in New York of Momofuku. Tell me, why you guys decided to do that instead of like, you know, ship it to all the stores? You decide, we're going to start with this one place. How did that, what was the thinking behind that?

• 43:20Speaker 01

  I think it was something that was pretty obvious under the circumstances. So we had been in contact with a number of chefs that we would give samples of our product to, just to get feedback. Because, you know, again, the thing is, we were not interested in launching a veggie burger. If it didn't satisfy a very hardcore meat lover, it wasn't going to move the needle on our mission. So we were setting a high bar for ourselves. So we were giving samples to chefs to get their feedback and had been doing that for quite some time. And my CFO at the time, current CFO too, David Lee, belonged to some Korean-American organization that Dave Chang also belonged to.

• 44:02Speaker 01

  And he was going to that event in New York and he brought a sample in case he could see Dave Chang to have him test it out.

• 44:09Guy Raz?

  Oh, wow.

• 44:10Speaker 01

  So he brought it to Dave Chang's kitchen restaurant and he cooked it on his stove and then just like immediately started tweeting like, "My mind is blown."

• 44:21Guy Raz?

  Yeah.

• 44:22Speaker 01

  And the point is that Dave Chang is exactly the kind of person we wanted to launch with because the main value we would get from launching our product at the time when we had very limited production capacity, you know, the amount of money we could bring in from sales was irrelevant, okay?

• 44:40Speaker 01

  The only, the value of a sale to us is awareness and brand building. And the single most important message that we needed to deliver to consumers who never heard of us is delicious meat doesn't have to come from animals.

• 44:58Guy Raz?

  Yeah.

• 44:58Speaker 01

  And Dave Chang is such a hardcore meat guy that he once banished all vegetarian items from his menu.

• 45:07Guy Raz?

  Yeah.

• 45:08Speaker 01

  On principle, okay? And there's no more sincere and valuable endorsement than to put our product on a menu, for a chef to put it on the menu. Because every, when a chef puts a dish on the menu, they're putting their livelihood and their reputation on the line. For the subsequent restaurants we launched initially, again, they're not high volume, but they were high credibility restaurants because they were run by uncompromising chefs who are known primarily for their meat.

• 45:43Guy Raz?

  Yeah, you were going to like high-end restaurants in like New York and San Francisco and LA.

• 45:48Speaker 01

  Right. And the thing about chefs is that what they want is something new, something challenging.

• 45:55Guy Raz?

  Yeah.

• 45:56Speaker 01

  And the thing that's different about our product than any plant-based product is that it has the magic of meat that, that only a chef can see. And there's never been a plant-based product, because of the heme primarily, that does the magical thing that meat does when you cook it, which is it transforms completely. You can tune the flavor profile by whether you cook it, you know, rare or well-done and stuff like that. And I think for a chef, having the creative possibilities that that opens up just makes it exciting for them. So I think that's part of why we were so fortunate to be able to work with these great chefs is that it was something new for them to put their artistic skills to use on.

• 46:41Guy Raz?

  Pat, I, um... I want to talk to you. I know that obviously a lot of what you do is proprietary and patented and secret, but I'm curious, like, how do you, as you kind of improved it and got it to where it is today, how do you, is it spices? Is it, is it like, I don't know, is it, is it different, like, ingredients? How do you, how do you, is that how you get that taste?

• 47:08Speaker 01

  It's not spices at all. I mean, and it's actually, the ingredients are relatively few. I mean, it's, the flavor is almost entirely from simple, small molecules like amino acids, vitamins, sugars, things that you can find in vegetables, animals, whatever, same, simple, you know, ubiquitous biomolecules.

• 47:28Guy Raz?

  Yeah.

• 47:29Speaker 01

  Plus, heme as a catalyst, and that's most of what's behind the flavor. We don't put spices in. There's no, like, meat flavorants in there. It's pretty straightforward. It's, it's the, the way that we approached the problem was, we basically asked the question, how does, how does meat do it? How does meat from a cow produce that flavor? Because if meat from a cow can produce that flavor with the biomolecules that, that it contains, which we knew at the time were extremely similar in composition to the things that are found in plant cells,

• 48:09Speaker 01

  if we can figure out how meat does it, then we don't have to fake the flavors. We can build in the exact same flavor chemistry into our product so that it does the same thing. And it, it literally creates the flavor in real time when you cook it.

• 48:24Guy Raz?

  Yeah.

• 48:24Speaker 01

  In the raw form, which you can, you can actually eat it raw, which I wouldn't recommend for the cow version, the flavor is completely different from the cooked version. And that's unlike any plant-derived food before. And it tastes bloody.

• 48:37Guy Raz?

  Yeah, that's so weird. Yeah.

• 48:39Speaker 01

  Because heme gives it a bloody taste.

• 48:40Guy Raz?

  That's my question. Like, you have not eaten a beef burger since 1976. And I've talked to a lot of people who are full-on vegans, and they're freaked out by Impossible Burgers, because they taste so much like beef. Do you eat them? Do you eat Impossible Burgers?

• 48:57Speaker 01

  I mean, I've, let's say, I've outgrown my craving for, for meat a long time ago. But I do like Impossible Burgers. In fact, my sister, who's been vegetarian as long as I have, can't bring herself to eat one.

• 49:12Guy Raz?

  Because it's too meaty, too beefy, right?

• 49:14Speaker 01

  Yeah, exactly, exactly. It's just, it's just, even though she knows, of course, everything that's in, there's nothing from an animal, it's, it's just like a visceral thing. People have very visceral reactions that are, it's, it's, it's not your frontal lobe, you know, calling the shots.

• 49:30Guy Raz?

  And, and I should just mention, Pat, that, that last, just last year, you, you upgraded the recipe for the burger, and then you began rolling it out at grocery stores, and then Burger King, which introduced the Impossible Whopper that people went crazy for, and then Applebee's and White Castle and, and all these other chains started selling it, and people loved it. I mean, I think even, even like Glenn Beck, you know, people like who are, like you, you would imagine would go after vegetarians are like, like they, they loved it, right?

• 50:02Speaker 01

  It was, it was hilarious. Did you see that video?

• 50:05Guy Raz?

  Yeah.

• 50:05Speaker 01

  Oh, it's hilarious, yeah.

• 50:07Guy Raz?

  Yeah, Glenn Beck is like, this is, I eat this, this is great. I can't tell the difference. And you went from like, just, you know, David Chang and a couple of restaurants in 2016 to now, it's, they're everywhere, like 7,000 Burger King locations, right? Impossible, and, and there were, there were shortages. People were waiting in line, they couldn't get them. So, how do you, how much do you have to produce of this stuff to meet demand now?

• 50:30Speaker 01

  Unfortunately, that's one of those numbers I think I'm not supposed to talk about, but I can just tell you, lots, many millions of pounds.

• 50:37Guy Raz?

  Are you able to meet demand?

• 50:40Speaker 01

  Well, the, as a, you know, a big part of our fundraising is that it's exactly this, betting on our success. We, we have to be building capacity on the premise that the demand will be, you know, manyfold greater than current sales, and have to keep doing that to stay ahead of the demand. What happened a year and a half ago was, we were, you know, planning on building capacity, but we weren't prepared for this surge in demand that happened over a very short period of time. It happened so fast that then we, you know, basically we were playing catch up, because, you know, this is, this is a problem of being in a business that produces stuff, you know,

• 51:23Speaker 01

  it's a big investment to build capacity, it takes time, and you're guessing, you're doing something that's never been done before, where there's no roadmap, and we have to say, okay, what's demand going to be in two years?

• 51:36Guy Raz?

  Yeah. As you started to get more popular and people started to say, hey, this is great. Then came all kinds of pushback. Okay, let me talk about some of the pushback. And you know what I'm going, you get people saying, look, this is unhealthy. It's full of sodium, it's full of saturated fat, this is, you know, it's, it's full of a bunch of, you know, GMO stuff. Then you had the meat industry saying, you can't call this burgers. There's states in the US where I think you can't call it, unless it comes from an animal, you can't call it a burger. And, you know, other groups saying, you know, you know, you're, this is Frankenfood or lab grow, all this stuff.

• 52:20Speaker 01

  Sure.

• 52:20Guy Raz?

  When you hear people say, hey, you know, this isn't healthy, what do you say?

• 52:24Speaker 01

  I would say, from a health and nutrition standpoint, we have been extremely deliberate and conscientious to make a product that we believe is substantially better for the consumer than what it replaces. And it has the same protein bioavailability, the same bioavailable iron. People make a big deal about the fact that the sodium content is higher, but you could say, yeah, and the sodium content of a pear is higher than a peach. But the fact is that the sodium content in a four ounce Impossible Burger is, I think, one-sixth of the sodium allowance in a sodium restricted diet. Okay?

• 53:09Speaker 01

  So this is not a kale salad.

• 53:12Guy Raz?

  Hmm.

• 53:13Speaker 01

  It's a burger. And it's targeted at someone who would otherwise be buying the animal version.

• 53:18Guy Raz?

  Yeah.

• 53:19Speaker 01

  We want to make it the healthiest, most nutritious product we can possibly make. And still have it be a burger. Okay? If you want a kale salad, please go buy a kale salad. If you want a burger, you're better off buying our burger than the kale version.

• 53:39Guy Raz?

  When you hear about these states that are proposing to prohibit companies like yours from using the word meat in their packaging, I mean, what happens if you can't call it a burger in like Missouri or some state? What are you gonna do?

• 53:54Speaker 01

  Well, first of all, I think that those, most, most of the bills that have been proposed to restrict our labeling have not passed in the state legislatures.

• 54:06Guy Raz?

  Yeah.

• 54:06Speaker 01

  And those that have, I'd say that the smart money is that they're not going to pass constitutional test. But even in the hypothetical case where someone tells us we can't call it meat, well, whatever. The point is that consumers will figure out what it is and we'll, we'll call it whatever we need to call it.

• 54:25Guy Raz?

  Do you think they're threatened, the beef associations, that they feel threatened?

• 54:29Speaker 01

  Incredibly threatened by us, incredibly.

• 54:31Guy Raz?

  You're still tiny compared to them, but you're tiny, tiny, tiny.

• 54:34Speaker 01

  It's because, it's because they know this is coming. And it's just a matter of time. When we get the economies of scale that they have, and when we've, you know, expanded our suite of products and so forth, that it's going to be game over for them. And I think that's why even from, before we had our first product, I know from a direct source that a representative of that industry actually reached out to a lobbyist and basically said to, you know, ask that, ask the lobbyist to, to get Congress or the USDA to, to shut us down.

• 55:11Guy Raz?

  Wow. That means you've arrived, Pat.

• 55:13Speaker 01

  Yeah. I mean, they're fighting a rear guard action and they're on the wrong side of history.

• 55:19Guy Raz?

  Pat, I'm wondering, you've, you've now raised over a billion dollars at this point, which saves a lot of money to do this. And you've attracted investment from people like Bill Gates and celebrities and athletes and tons of different venture firms. But why is it so expensive? Like, is it, is it just like all the equipment you need and all the sorts of labs and the resources and the materials? Like, why is it so expensive? Why does it cost so much?

• 55:48Speaker 01

  I would say a large fraction is expensive. So, you know, we have an R and D team that's probably 120 people, really just as good a group of scientists as any company. Pretty much ever in history, but the work they do isn't insanely expensive. But we have to scale up production of a physical product that, you know, we sell on the scale of tens of millions of pounds a year. We had to build a supply chain for our heme protein. And, and those things are relatively expensive. There's, you know,

• 56:25Guy Raz?

  Right.

• 56:26Speaker 01

  Uh, just the, the capital investment in building a manufacturing facility and all that capacity. And, um, that's a big part of it is that, and the thing is that you have to invest ahead of growth and, and, you know, betting on your success, basically. So if we're going to increase our volume by several fold this year and several fold the next year, well, we need to be building capacity right now that's like 10x what we're selling. It's very different from if we were building an app or something like that where, you know, it's, it's, it's just, you're just paying for coders, basically.

• 57:05Guy Raz?

  Right, right. Fair, fair point, yeah. Um, Pat, obviously, um, you know, we have to talk about everything that's going on right now in the world, um, with, with the effects of the pandemic and the economy. Um, and I mean, has it, has it affected your business?

• 57:22Speaker 01

  Um, well, definitely we have to operate differently. I mean, I think, you know, the, the workspace, our workspace is deliberately designed to be effectively one large space where people are in visual contact with a lot of their colleagues. It's very, uh, it's very interactive environment. So it's quite compromising to the, to a lot of the things that are important to us. And of course, our R and D labs, the, the ability to do actual wet lab work, um, you can't do because even though it's essential to the future of the planet, it's not immediately essential to day-to-day life for us to be operating. So we're, we're, uh, so the R and D operations is basically, you know, the people are still

• 58:07Speaker 01

  getting work done, planning experiments, analyzing data, stuff like that. But it's compromised manufacturing. Um, yeah, it's complicated.

• 58:16Guy Raz?

  Pat, I want to go back to something we talked about a little earlier, which was when you turned down that giant offer from Google to buy your company. Because had you said yes to that offer, you would have been an extremely wealthy person right now. And you know, I think that every entrepreneur I've interviewed has said, you know, they don't care about money. And for the most part, I believe most of them. But I actually really, really don't think you care about money at all.

• 58:47Speaker 01

  I mean, I'm not motivated. I mean, first of all, I live in a nice place, same place I've lived in for 30x years.

• 58:56Guy Raz?

  Yeah.

• 58:57Speaker 01

  I have enough money to, you know, take care of my needs and so forth. And if I didn't, I'd probably be spending a lot of my time thinking about money and where do I get it and so forth. But the situation I'm in right now is not going to be improved a bit by more money.

• 59:13Guy Raz?

  If you become super rich, if you become a billionaire.

• 59:16Speaker 01

  It would probably make my life worse. Yeah. I'm going to tell you, I'm serious. I'm serious, because I know a lot of people who are super rich. And I would say by and large, they're not as happy as I am. Their kids are much more likely to be miserable than my kids are. It sounds like such a stupid thing, but once you have your basic needs met, I think more money adds very little value. And if you're trading, if you're talking about something that's as incredibly valuable and motivating to me as the mission of this company and so forth, and so important to the world, of course I wouldn't trade that for money.

• 59:51Guy Raz?

  Pat, when you think about it, right? I mean, if you didn't ever do Impossible Foods and you were honored after your retirement at Stanford, they would talk about the research you did and genetics and all the breakthroughs it led to and co-founding this academic journal and, you know, but you went on to do this thing after you left Stanford. I mean, you left that safe, comfortable job. I mean, you started this business. It's now reported to be valued at $4 billion. And I know, as you said, that's not your motivation, but I mean, it is a fact. It's a value of $4 billion. And I mean, when you think about all of the things that got you to this point, you know,

• 1:00:32Guy Raz?

  and the risk you took by leaving and, you know, doing this and all that happened before, I mean, do you think that your success is because of your intelligence and how hard you worked? Or do you think, you know, more of it has to do with luck?

• 1:00:46Speaker 01

  I think the most important thing is, I feel like there are a lot of people who are as smart or smarter than me, and in terms of the kind of problem-solving skills, were entirely capable of doing this. So what I think is important that I contributed is the initiative and the determination to do it. It's basically, the critical thing that I provided was that I looked at this problem, I saw that nobody was seriously taking it on, and I basically decided, I'm going to take responsibility for solving

• 1:01:26Speaker 01

  this problem. Not because I was exceptionally capable of solving it, but basically because I decided to do it. I think that's the most important thing. And I feel like it's the one thing that keeps a lot of valuable things from happening, is people feel like, you know, someone else must be, this is someone else's job to solve. You know, why would I be the person to do this? I'm so unqualified. You know, because I was unqualified. Well, the answer is, someone's got to do it. And I feel like a lot of good things would happen if people were more willing to just say, I'm going to take responsibility to solve

• 1:02:07Speaker 01

  this problem. And so I think that's the main attribute that enabled me to take this on.

• 1:02:14Guy Raz?

  That's Pat Brown, founder of Impossible Foods. In addition to plant-based beef, the company has also recently rolled out plant-based pork. The challenge still to overcome: making a nice, juicy, plant-based steak. But Pat says, quote, "There's no question we're going to get there." And thanks so much for listening to the show this week. You can subscribe wherever you get your podcasts. You can also write to us at [email protected]. And if you want to send a tweet, it's at How I Built This or at Guy Raz. This episode was produced by Rachel Faulkner, with music composed by Romaine Arablewi. Thanks also to Candace Lim, Julia

• 1:02:56Guy Raz?

  Carney, Neva Grant, and Jeff Rogers. I'm Guy Raz, and you've been listening to How I Built This. This is NPR.

• 1:03:09Speaker 02

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