157. (Thanksgiving Replay) Meat the Future: How Paul Shapiro is Brewing Superfoods at Better Meat Co.

Paul [00:00:00] I TEASER

Paul started wondering, is it possible that rather than what I'm doing, maybe biotechnology is going to create better types of meat experiences where we can have our meat and eat it too, where we can create meat without animals. INTRO

Karl Hey rum, what's going on?

Erum Oh, a lot here at Grow Everything where we talk about how biology is transforming every industry. I'm doing great. How are you doing? You had this incredible TEDx talk at MIT, so tell us a little bit about that. How'd it go?

Karl It was amazing. That's all I could say. the guy who organizes it is a guy named John Warner.

Karl He is an MIT professor. it's called actually Planetary Action. It goes on for three days. I was part of a group called Bio Fabricate, probably no surprise there. ginger, who's been on the podcast, was one of the speakers, so was Chris Mason, who's also been on the podcast. And we were introduced by Danskin, who's also been on the podcast.

Karl it also included some other [00:01:00] people who I really didn't know, but were super interesting and their names escaped me, unfortunately.

Karl But the whole thing was amazing. And John Werner has curated a really incredible group of people. Are really focusing on the things that are needed to make a difference in the world. You might think, grow everything, listener or general listener, that the world faces so many problems and this is true, and we're all kind of looking for a magic wand to solve all of those problems.

Karl Unfortunately, that's not the way it works. There's lots and lots of little problems and what I walked away from MIT was. There's a lot of people working on solving those little problems and solving little problems adds up in a big way. Just for example, there was a guy who's an MIT professor talking about.

Karl Highways and how reflective they are. And if you just change the surface of highways so that they're either more or less reflective, you actually have a huge impact on the planet in terms of the amount [00:02:00] of sunlight that is reflected off. Just like little things that we don't normally think of just kept coming up.

Karl And I kept being just really blown away by that, and I felt super inspired and. Proud and humbled by being there. So it was fun. When the video comes out, you'll check it out and you can point out where I could have done better.

Erum Oh no, I'm sure you're amazing. And yeah, we'll put it all in the show notes 'cause we've been gearing up for this talk and you know, I can't wait to hear it and share it with everybody.

Karl as you listen to this listeners last week, he had published our, which it was a little bit of a long episode with Michael Levin, which was a lot to process erum. You and I've been talking about this all week.

Erum Oh yes. Wow. I just. I can't stop thinking about it, Carl. Just all the different topics we went on.

Erum You know, we went down this journey about the philosophy of mind and what does it mean, to be, you know, conscious and what is it, what's consciousness? We went down that route a little bit. [00:03:00] What does biology and how does that. Look, when you're thinking of intelligence and this idea that intelligence is all the way down, meaning like, yes, we are multicellular organisms, we're humans, we are saying from our subjective experience.

Erum Yes. we're conscious, but then what about our tissues and organs and our cells and the molecular pathways within the cells? And so I start talking about agency, where does the decision making start and end, and the topics that were brought up in that our previous podcast with Michael Levin.

Erum I just, I can't stop thinking about it. And then it kind of, for me, compounded, because I'm reading this incredible book that I mentioned. The mountain in the sea, and it talks about octopus intelligence, which we did talk about with Michael Levin. He brought it up because he pointed out that, , octopi or octopuses have, decentralized nervous systems so that their arms actually think for themselves.

Erum So it doesn't come from a central command. Like for [00:04:00] us, our brains, and we are like, all right, I'm gonna move my hand here. You know, our hand doesn't think for itself, but right. The octopus arms do. And so there's bunch of that in this book. And there was this one quote in the book that I thought really summed it up and I actually shared it with Michael Levin.

Erum And, we were a part of this WhatsApp group that is about the topic of computationally designed organisms. And so I was like, I have to share this quote with them. And it goes, there was no silence in the living nervous system. The electrical symphony of communication streams through our neurons. Every moment we exist, we are built for communication.

Erum Only death brings silence. Wow. I was like chills, and then I shared it with the WhatsApp group, and then it just kicked off this. Crazy conversation, Carl. I mean, people say when you're writing a text can be brief. These were not brief texts. These were just like pages of ethics and [00:05:00] philosophy.

Erum I mean people from Harvard, MIT, and I was like, wow, I set off a storm. But hey, you know what? Let's talk about these things because it changes perspective.

Karl Absolutely. I read that book a while back. I completely forgot. What it was about, which is terrible. So when you're done with it, I'm gonna read it again and I recommend that our listeners go back and listen to that, Michael Levin episode because it did cover a lot of ground.

Karl I'll say this for me, one of the most important things was just. The need for deep thinking , and the need for more people to look at biology is something to think about because there's so much there and so much that we just don't understand. And I think with Michael as deep of a thinker he is, it still also just scratches the surface of what's possible.

Erum yes. The edges of biology let's you know. Exactly. That's what we like to talk about here on the podcast with everyone, you listener, our friends, our network, and this is what we do.

Karl So we're recording this episode right before [00:06:00] Thanksgiving. we're gonna do a replay, but you know, we've got holiday parties and holiday events in front of us.

Karl Is there any that you wanted to shout out for, or do you wanna go straight into talking about what you're thankful for?

Erum Oh, well, I mean. Both. I am thankful that we have these, this amazing community where we do have holiday parties and events and I'm gonna give a quick shout out to our friends at the Home World Collective and Cascade Bio.

Erum we're co-hosting, holiday happy hour here in New York City to bring together our friends in climate biotech to just be thankful for an amazing 2025 and. Share our aspirations for 2026. So, I'm sure everyone has their events with their networks, and, if you don't join one, I mean, we're really lucky to be in New York City where we have, Surplus of people, I guess. I dunno how to say it. but we have so many people here, from all walks of life. Not just meaning like your ethnic [00:07:00] background, but just your disciplines and your ages and just everyone comes in and just shares their ideas and it's a beautiful thing. So I think I did a good job of blending both of those topics about the holiday parties.

Erum One of the things I'm thankful for. What about you, Carl?

Karl Well, I'm thankful for you, IAM and I'm thankful that we have had this podcast for more than three years and that we can still work together on it. and you know, we've had a great, 2025 has been a really fantastic year. and what I was gonna say to add to the holiday party thing.

Karl It's like no matter where you are, you know, in any city or any place, there's gonna be other biotech people around you. And if you feel like you don't have a scene, you should be the person to create it because the other people who are around you are thinking the same thing. They wish they had other biotech people to talk to.

Karl And you will become the center of this scene that you create, because [00:08:00] that's the way it works. It's not like you are chosen to do this, or maybe you're chosen, I don't know. But if you don't do it, you know that no one's gonna do it. So step up, invite a bunch of people who you don't know, get together so you can talk about biotech and be thankful for what we did in 2025, and look forward to what we're doing in 2026.

Karl Yeah.

Erum . Pick yourselves up and just go do it. But, I do have, another thing I'm thankful for, and I'm gonna take a page out of Snoop Doggs philosophy of being thankful for, well, I wanna hear

Karl this.

Karl Yeah.

Erum And I am thankful for me. I'm thankful that I am passionate about. This industry about biotech across the board that I'm passionate about the work that we do, Carl, that I love my family and friends so much that I, bring us together as much as possible. And I'm there for them. And I am thankful that I have, you know, motivation to be healthy and, be happy and appreciate.

Erum [00:09:00] Everything that I have in my life. So good job. Thankful for iam. So

Karl thank you. Thank you Iam, for saying that. I'm also thankful for Carl and all the things that you say, I completely affirm. So, I would love to hear from our listeners what they're thankful for, just because it's always a good exercise, to have the attitude of gratitude.

Karl so I think with that, we can get into this episode. we are doing a replay. We've been lucky that many of the people who've been on this podcast have been named, times Best Inventions in 2024 prolific machines who's been on the podcast was named here this year, sway was named. They have a algae based drop in plastic substitute.

Karl And we've got an upcoming episode with Lauren of gob. who has been creating, very eco-friendly, disposable products. And today's company was also in the Times best inventions of 2025. [00:10:00] That company is better meat co., who we interviewed more than a year ago, right? Iro?

Erum Yeah. Yeah. We interviewed Paul Shapiro Better Meat Co.

Erum Actually, I think it was two years ago. So, time keeps slipping, slipping, slipping. Into the future. And, and Paul Shapiro, wow. he is a force, not only building a company, an entrepreneur, but also a podcaster. So we'd love him that, you know, he had the same mentality we'd do, sharing science, sharing ideas, bringing people together.

Erum So it's an incredible episode and he's been doing great. He's still killing it.

Karl Yeah. So as we record this episode just a couple weeks ago, better meet co raised $31 million in a series A financing. And for those of you who don't know what better Meet co does, Paul's gonna tell us. So I think let's let Paul take it away. INTERVIEW

Erum Hi Paul, welcome [00:11:00] to the Grow Everything podcast. How are you doing today

Paul here, erum, Carl, so nice to be with both of you. Thanks for having me.

Paul Okay. So better miko. you've been interested in combating animal cruelty and promoting food sustainability for a long time now. your first venture was compassion over killing an organization that began as a club.

Erum You started in high school, which is so cool. but what we want to know is where did this interest come from and how has this interest evolved over your career? How did it lead you to co-found better Meet co? So let's,go down that journey.

Paul What a, what a journey. So, I don't know how I became like a middle-aged person because I still feel like a young person.

Paul mentally, I feel like a young person. My body knows it's not a young person. I'm like very physically risk averse. Now I don't wanna like go skiing or anything, because I like my skeleton the way that it is. But, there was a time when I was young. it was like the world was black and white. it snowed all the time. We had to walk uphill both ways to get to school back then. and it was a very sad era [00:12:00] before YouTube and the internet. And at that time. I was very passionate about what happens to animals.

Paul I grew up with a mother who worked at our local animal shelter, and so she was always instilling values of compassion in us. We had rescue dogs all the time, and they were like my brothers and sisters. they were not like pieces of property. They were members of our family. Like they slept in bed with me.

Paul Like it was very much like we treated them as members of the family. And my mom, while she's not particularly religious, she would always note that Jews are never supposed to, eat before feeding your animals. There's a lion in the Talmud apparently that says you have to feed your animals before yourself.

Paul So every day we'd wanna eat dinner, I'm like, gotta feed the dogs first. Gotta feed the dogs first. And you know, it's funny because like, she didn't even follow like the 10 commandments, like all these other rules, but that was one that she felt really strongly about. And so I, loved animals, and.

Paul It was around 1993 when somebody [00:13:00] showed me a video of what happens to them in factory farms and slaughter plants. And I was very shocked. I, I just couldn't believe the type of violence and cruelty that I was seeing. And, there was no YouTube or like, DVDs even like, this is like on a VHS tape.

Paul And for those of your listeners who aren't familiar with that, it was like a rectangle with a piece of plastic and you stuck it inside of a box called A VCR and then you got images. It was amazing. and I watched this, you know, it was probably 10 minutes long, but I just couldn't believe how these animals were being treated.

Paul And I kept thinking. What if those were my dogs? what if we farmed dogs in tiny cages where they couldn't turn around their whole lives? And I was started thinking like, we're treating the animals who we raise for food worse than we would treat violent criminals. we don't take murders and rapists and put them in jail cells so small, they can't lift their arms or they can't turn around.

Paul Like at least they can walk around a little bit. They can get outta their cell every once in a while. yet, we treat the animals, we raise their food as if they were even more heinous than those type of violent criminals. And so that led me, really to the [00:14:00] path where I'm today and to make a very, multi-decade story very short.

Paul you know, I started this group, as you mentioned, Droman when I was in high school. It's called Compassionate Over Killing. And we basically, did a lot of educational activities and we started doing, undercover exposes at factory farms and slaughter plants. We get jobs there and use hidden cameras to document what was going on, and that was generating a lot of news attention.

Paul And I, at that time, I naively believed, well, if we just raise awareness that will change people's behavior. I thought, well, if we just let people know what's happening, clearly they'll be so upset that they'll stop and, the situation will be resolved. Unfortunately, that didn't happen.

Paul meat demand continued to rise we were raising at that time in 1993, just for perspective, about 6 billion animals went through slaughter plants in the US each year. Today the number is about 10 billion, and that's not just because of population growth. It's because on a per capita basis, Americans eat way more meat today than we did 30 years ago.

Paul So anyway. fast forward to about 2005 and I started thinking awareness raising, you know, probably insufficient. We probably need laws that are going [00:15:00] to, help to correct this problem. And so, I started, working as a, lobbyist and trying to pass laws to help protect animals. And we're also working on legislation relating to a whole variety of food and agricultural sustainability issues, including climate change.

Paul And I did that for about 13 years. I'm very proud that we passed a number of laws, we defeated a number of bad bills, we passed a number of good bills. but around 2015 or so, I started wondering, is biotechnology and food tech in general and innovation and entrepreneurship, are those going to do more than what I was doing to try to enact laws to make these animals lives better?

Paul And I thought the answer was clearly yes, and here's why. If you think about. All the ways that we used to exploit animals, that we don't do it anymore. It was never because of humane sentiment or sustainability concern. It was always because technology rendered an old practice obsolete. we used to whip horses to get around [00:16:00] for literally millennia and nobody stopped because they felt bad for horses.

Paul They stopped because the horseless carriage was invented. We now call them cars, and it was a much better way to transport ourselves. Nobody stopped wailing because they cared about whales. They stopped because kerosene was invented and it was a cheaper, cleaner way to light our homes. Nobody stopped live plucking geese for quills, which was a big industry, for riding.

Paul Because they cared about the geese. They stopped because metal fountain pens were invented and it was a much better way to write than aquill. 'cause a metal fountain pen doesn't need to be dipped into an ink glow and you stop and you know all that. So all these, and the list goes on and onand on.

Paul That's only three examples. So the whis goes on of all these areas where we used to exploit animals for economic purposes and we stopped because new technologies rendered or practices obsolete. And so I started wondering, is it possible that rather than what I'm doing, maybe biotechnology is going to create better types of meat experiences where we can have our meat and eat it too, where we can create meat without animals.

Paul And I've been familiar with the cultivated meat scene for a long time, which is growing real animal meat without animals. And I'd been a [00:17:00] consumer of plant-based meats for decades at that point. and I certainly also was familiar with fungi based proteins too, but I wasn't quite sure what I could do.

Paul Like I thought, here I am, or I know something about public policy, but I'm not a microbiologist. I'm not a multimillionaire venture capitalist. I don't have an MBA from Harvard. Like, it wasn't so clear to me what I could do as somebody who had devoted my life, essentially, my adult life to public policy.

Paul So I thought, well, you know, maybe what I can do is write a book, and that will attract interest the states that will attract the type of smart people, bio technologists, venture capitalists and so on to get into this space. So rather than going into pharma or biomedicine, they might go into this and help to forge this new path.

Paul And so I pitched a book. I'd never published a book, but I pitched a book. It got purchased by Simon and Schuster. I got extremely lucky. The book did much better than I ever dreamt. The book is called Clean Meat, how Growing Meat Without Animals Will Revolutionize Dinner in the World. And as I said, I got very fortunate and opened up a lot of opportunities for me.

Paul One of which was [00:18:00] that I could continue writing about the people who I thought were gonna solve the problem that had animated my life for decades now, or I could just become one. And in writing the book and interviewing all of these pioneers in the, biotech space who were working on food, it became very clear to me that.

Paul Many of them didn't have much experience prior to doing this. they were not successful business people. They had not spent a lifetime cultivating animal cells or doing fungal fermentation and so on. and they hired lots of smart people who did. And I thought, well, maybe if these people can do it, someone who's dumb like me could do it as well.

Paul And at that point, this was in 2018, I decided I wasn't going to write another book and rather I was going to, start a company in the space. So, my friend Joanna Bromley at I, who actually does have a Harvard MBA, and is really a much smarter person than me, we started this company and we went forward and five and a half years later, we are running a biotech facility here in Sacramento, where I am right now, Sacramento, California, where [00:19:00] we churn out fungi proteins from large scale bioreactors.

Paul And it's an amazing experience and I'm eager to talk about it, but that's the general trajectory from 1993 through 2023.

Karl That is amazing, Paul. Thank you for that great summary. And there's so much there, but I think what we should do is we just stick to the book Clean Meat. I mean, you said it was published in 2018 and I'm curious, , just thinking back 2018 seems like the dark age of the alternate protein, industry.

Karl I feel like I even wonder if was the Good Food Institute even around in 2018, but, have you seen the industry evolve, , and compare alternate proteins to cultivated meat? , What's the evolution look like?

Paul yeah, Carl, so you're raising a really excellent point. So first,

Paul the Good Food Institute had been founded by 2018. It was founded two years prior, and, it was founded, by Bruce Friedrich, along with a couple other people who were, all good friends of mine for a long time. In fact, Bruce had been my former roommate for some time. So we were all part of like this know [00:20:00] you of people who were coming from.

Paul the professional animal welfare space and climate space and getting into this, this meaning alternative proteins. And as a result, you know, I was very inspired by what GFI was doing and that did have an impact on my decision to write this book. but it wasn't really different time and it was both good and bad.

Paul So, you know, if you look now like, since then, like there's been more than a billion dollars of capital investment that's come into this space since then, if you go back to, 2016 or so, like, is only one company that had been founded in the cultivated meat space, which was then called Memphis Meats and now called Upside Foods.

Paul And. There's almost no money in this whatsoever. Now there's over a hundred companies in that space alone, just animal cell cultivation that exist, at the same time. So while huge amounts of money and innovation has occurred in this as major IP races like a wild west of companies trying to garner patent protection for a whole variety of processes at the same [00:21:00] time, if you had asked me in 2018 when the book came out, will cultivated me be store shelves by 2023, I would've felt pretty certain that the answer would be yes.

Paul Five years is a sufficient amount of time for this industry to scale up, and I would've been wrong. 2023, there's extremely nominal amounts of cultivated meat being sold in the world. Only two countries have approved it, Singapore and the United States. And in both of them, the amount of pounds of that meat that are being sold each year is unbelievably di minimi.

Paul and then, upside Foods, which is the most well funded company in the space recently put out an announcement that, we're recording this in September of 2023, and they recently put an announcement saying they expect to be on grocery store shelves by 2030. So, you know, another seven years away.

Paul and so he goes back to this joke that Jason Metheny, who founded New Harvest, which is a prominent nonprofit organization in this space that he [00:22:00] would make to me ever since he founded it back in 2005 to the present, he'd say, oh, I think that, cultivated meat is always about five years away from commercialization.

Paul No matter what year you ask, it's always five years away. It's kind of like fusion nuclear, you know, it's like always 10 years away no matter what. And it's hard to swallow, but I think it's more realistic. Like in 2018, many people, myself included, thought, Hey, we're really on the verge of this starting to happen, and now it's becoming clear.

Paul The technological hurdles and the capital needed are so gargantuan that it's going to require billions of dollars and many years. To make this happen. Now, that doesn't mean it's a pipe dream, it doesn't mean we shouldn't pursue it, it just means it's gonna require government assistance. Like that's not the type of capital that venture capitalists are gonna come in with.

Paul We saw enormous investments from the federal government to help advance clean energy from, solar, wind, geothermal, et cetera. And we're gonna need the same here. And that, I think, has gotta be the key priority for the cultivated meat space [00:23:00] is to the same types of low interest loans that Tesla got, for example, which are multi hundred million dollars.

Paul and other companies. That's what's needed in order to, bring cultivated meat into actual real, meaningful commercial reality.

Erum That's really interesting. So you're in this industry, you're a leader in this industry. How far along are we in terms of getting government subsidies and getting that support from the government?

Erum what is the pro progress like on that front?

Paul pretty minimal. if you talk to some people, they'll be very optimistic and they'll say, Hey, Tufts got $10 million, from the federal government for cultivated meat and uc, Davis got like $3 million from the federal government. That, is nothing in the grand scheme of what is needed. Biotechnology is very expensive and that type of cash, while certainly good, it is a drop in the bucket compared to the kind of cash that just goes to animal agriculture alone.

Paul Like forget about Queen Energy, where it's like billions of dollars going into it through the IRA, the Inflation Reduction Act, but also [00:24:00] just looking at just the largess that animal agricultural alone gets. I mean, just as one minor example, the Biden administration, about a year ago announced, half billion dollars.

Paul Not even of loans, just a half billion dollars to expand America's animal slaughter capacity to increase slaughter plants. And, you half billion dollars of grants just to increase this, the number of animals who we can slaughter. you also have a situation where you have, like, the pork industry, which is overproduced, they have more pork than there is, demand for it.

Paul And so in normal supply and demand economics, that means the industry would, of course, contract, right? Like there's more supply than demand. So you gotta cut the amount of supply you have to be more in line with the demand. In our country though, what happened and what routinely happens. This is not anomalous, this is just a routine practice as USDA and the US Department of Agriculture stepped in with over a hundred million dollars of surplus pork purchases from the federal government.

Paul So they basically just buy a bunch of pork and put it into the school lunch program and the [00:25:00] federal prisons and federally, funded seniors homes and so on. And so you kind of have like an industry that is defying the. Economic law of gravity in that even when demand is less than supply, the federal government tends to come in and help them.

Paul Contrast that with the animal free protein space, is there's a lot more that needs to happen. We need our own inflation reduction act essentially to, go, toward the construction of biomanufacturing. And this is important, not just because of climate change.

Paul It's important not just because of animal welfare and public health and pandemic risk reduction and so on. All of those are very important, but you can see what happened in clean energy. if you have solar panels on your roof, they probably came from China. If you're getting wind turbine energy.

Paul Those turbines probably were not produced in the United States. Like the United States essentially seeded production of the queen energy sector to Asia where they were investing in these types of technologies while we were busy subsidizing our oil [00:26:00] and gas industries. And so it's bad enough that our clean energy technology is being manufactured a across the ocean in Asia.

Paul The last thing you want is for the food that we may be buying in the future to come from there also, because that puts you in a very precarious situation from a national security perspective. And you can bet that Asia is also seriously investing in clean protein production. And so should we allow what happened in energy to happen in food as well, where we essentially offshore.

Paul The materials that we're gonna be needing to feed ourselves in the future? I certainly hope not. you know, I'm from America. I love America and I would like to see us be more competitive in this sense. And so that means investment in Biomanufacturing here in the United States.

Erum I went to this alternative protein meetup and I met someone from Sentient Media, and they were telling me that the government subsidies that goes to livestock, agriculture is so high that they make more money off of that than they do the [00:27:00] revenue coming from the meat.

Paul Huh, that's an interesting claim. I've not heard that, but I'd love to know the actual numbers, but either way it's a huge number. but what's interesting is like the meat industry, they'll say, oh, we don't get a lot of direct subsidies. But what they ignore is that the number one cost of producing meat is feed.

Paul The number one cost is your feedstock. And corn and soy are the primary crops that go into that. And these are highly subsidized, highly subsidized. So the meat industry can say, oh, well, you know, we're not getting these types of subsidies. Well, let's just see what corn and soy would cost if you didn't have these crop insurance programs and other types of benefits that those industries get.

Paul I have a feeling that people wouldn't be not too happy about it.

Karl Right. I think you told me, Paul, when we first met that, you could remove the subsidies. And,it would only change the price marginally, like the price of,livestock pork has basically remained very low and it's probably because of the overproduction as you say. And, it doesn't factor in anything like. The damage that they're [00:28:00] doing to the environment or things like that,

Paul right? Yeah, that's a bigger issue. Carl, is just the externalized cost. So they're not paying, for, the massive dead zone in the Gulf of Mexico from all of the nitrogen and phosphorus that washes off of these corn and soy fields and goes and creates a massive dead zone in this really important waterway.

Paul They're not paying, obviously, for the suffering of the animals that the animals are bearing the burden of. They're not paying for the pandemic risk with the risk of these factory farms. creating the next pandemic is very high. It's unreasonably high. those are all externalized costs that don't get paid.

Paul But it's important to recognize that a lot of the way that these companies have gotten meat prices down is not just by externalizing costs, but also through federally funded r and d that allowed them to improve efficiency. And so huge amounts of federal dollars have gone into r and d. For programs that benefit the entirety of these industries.

Paul genetic improvement programs where you can get [00:29:00] chickens to slaughter weight much faster than they did, let's say 50 years ago. programs looking at all types of other economic efficiencies in the dairy industry and the pork industry and so on. I think about my own company, the better meco and the amount of money that we spend on r and d, which is, from our perspective, a lot of money.

Paul But, you know, to the federal government, not even a rounding error, but imagine if you have the federal government as your RD arm. you wouldn't need to spend all that money yourself if you're a big meat producer. You just basically take that publicly funded research from a RS or the Agricultural research service, which is a r and d arm of the, USDA, and you can take that and apply that to your business.

Paul And so that would be another way to go about this. Just have a RS funding research into things like animal cell culturing, like fungi fermentation, like getting certain crops to be higher proteins. So for example,pea protein is a major ingredient in many plant-based meats, like beyond meat.

Paul And so, the problem with peas, of course, is that they just don't have a lot [00:30:00] of protein. It might be, 15 to 20% protein of that biomass. but if you could breed peas that were, let's say 40 or 50% protein, you would be able to have a much cheaper plant-based meat. Much cheaper. if you could also come up with extrusion technologies that were far less expensive to create, the texture extrusion is the technology that auto plant-based proteins go through, to texturize them so they, taste more like animal meat.

Paul that's inexpensive process. The CapEx alone on that is very high, but even the r and d costs are really,really high. I mean, you have like these, food science PhDs who are, doing all that research. Yeah. And that could be a RS funded as well.

Karl now as CEO of, the Better Meat company, you guys are using a micro protein.

Karl can you explain what micro proteins are and how was it you came upon this as being a good alternative to meat?

Paul I'm so glad you asked Carl. So, I'm a fungi fanatic and I think that fungi are the future. So, think about plant-based protein, like we're just talking about pea protein, so let's use that as an example.

Paul [00:31:00] Basically, you grow a field of peas, you harvest the field of peas, you mill it into a flower, but as I said, it's. In protein. So you gotta concentrate down, strip out the fiber, strip out the fat, concentrate it down into a P protein concentrate. That's a powder that's, you know, what an athlete might take as a supplement or something like that.

Paul It's great. It's high in protein, but it's a powder. nobody's gonna think it tastes like the texture of animal meat. So to do that, to texturize it, you have to subject it to what's called extrusion, which is a fancy way of saying lots of pressure and lots of heat. And the effect of that is that you change the molecular structure of the protein such that it goes from being globular like a plant protein, which is globular like a globe to being stringy, like animal protein, which is stringy.

Paul And so then you get your hero ingredient, which is called texturized pea protein. And then you add that to, let's say, a dozen or so other ingredients, and you get something like a Beyond burger. Now I love beyond burgers and brewing hard for the company, but it's a lot of things to do. Like there's a reasonably beyond Burger costs a lot more than peas do.

Paul Like peas are much cheaper than beef, but a Beyond Burger is much more expensive than [00:32:00] beef. And so, question is., Could you achieve a meat like texture without animals in a different way? And there's lots of researchers going into cheaper extrusion processes or maybe getting peas that are higher protein.

Paul All that is great. But the question to ask, I think, is what if you could achieve a meat like texture without fractionation, isolation, extrusion, and all these other expensive processes, and instead achieve it merely through fermentation? That's what we do. At the Better Miko. We take tiny microscopic fungi, we subject them to a special kind of biotech fermentation that within less than one single day, from the time we inoculate our reactor to the time that we harvest it less than one single day, it produces a myprotein.

Paul That's MYCO as in mycology, or the study of fungi, A myprotein that on its own straight out of the bioreactor has a very convincingly neat like texture and in its whole food, unprocessed state has more protein than eggs. More iron [00:33:00] than beef, more zinc than beef, more potassium than bananas. More fiber than, no.

Paul And it naturally contains vitamin B12, which is typically absent in a plant-based diet. So you get this super food that is not plant-based, it's fungi based, are different kingdoms altogether that is extremely meat, like extremely nutritious. And you get it with virtually no downstream processing. So the question is, why?

Paul Why would that be? And theanswer is because fungi are much closer, evolutionarily speaking to animals than they are to plants. You see, if you think about the evolutionary tree, plants on one side and animals on the other, fungi are not in the middle. They're way closer to animals than they are to plants.

Paul And so to just to name out a couple examples, plants, they put themselves in the sun and they photosynthesize. And that's why they're green. And that's what they do. That's how they consume, right? Whereas animals we all know don't do that. We search out food and digest it well.

Paul Fungi are so much closer to us that that's what they do.They don't photosynthesize. That's [00:34:00] why mushrooms aren't green. What they do is they find food and they digest it. plants, we all know breathe in CO2 and breathe out oxygen, whereas animals do the opposite. We breathe in oxygen, we breathe out CO2.

Paul Well, fungi do the same. They breathe in oxygen and they breathe out. CO2. The point is that fungi are way,way closer evolutionarily speaking to us to animals than they are to plants. And so it's not surprising that many fungi proteins naturally contain a stringy protein. So you don't have that globular plant protein that you have to force through pressure and heat via extrusion into a type of.

Paul texturized, plant protein, ISO it. You have a stringy protein already that has that animal meat like texture. And so that's what we do at the Better Miko is through the power of Fungi fermentation. We create alternative meat ingredients that we sell on a B2B basis to other companies, and they can use our fungi proteins or our myprotein for two purposes.

Paul One. They can, blend it into their animal meat. So you have [00:35:00] a hybrid, like you would've a hybrid car that relies both on internal combustion plus electricity. You have, in this case, hybrid meats that rely both on animal meat and myprotein that can substantially reduce the impact, the environmental impact of that meat, while at the same time improving nutrition and improving texture.

Paul In addition to hybridizing meat, though, we can also use it just to create totally animal free meat. And so if you wanna make a next generation of alt meats that has an even more meat like texture than plant protein, ISO isolates do, you can use myprotein. There's one company on the planet that has already scaled this type of process, and they've been doing it for several decades.

Paul It's called corn, Q-U-O-R-N. Yeah. And runs an extremely impressive operation in the United Kingdom where they have hundreds of thousands of liters of bioreactor capacity and they sell hundreds of millions of dollars of myprotein based products. Corn though, you know, has a CPG brand, right? They're a consumer packaged goods brand.

Paul So you can go to the store and look for corn on the shelf. we [00:36:00] at the better miko are a B2B ingredients company. So think about like Cargill, right? You can go to Cargill and you can get soy protein and pea protein and wheat protein and chickpea protein, and AVA bean protein, all these things. But you come to the better miko, you get fungi, proteins, very different, very functional.

Paul and so we use a very different process than corn. Like the myprotein that we make is very different from corns. They use a different species, in fact, a different genus altogether. but there's a whole wide world of fungi out there. We've barely started scratching the surface. Like we know about the, functional characteristics of soy versus pea versus wheat and what they all do.

Paul They're different proteins with different functionalities. In the psychological world, we barely had any idea. About the functionality of all these, it is like a wild west and it's gonna take time and money to figure it out and catalog all of these different fungi that we can grow and some are gonna be better for our dairy replacement.

Paul Some are better for egg replacement, some for beef or chicken or fish or a pork or crab or whatever. But that's [00:37:00] what we are beginning to pioneer a new future where we can harness the power of the fungi Kingdom to help reduce humanity's reliance on animals and create a much lighter footprint on the planet as a result of it.

Erum Yeah. I think we're, um, getting hit to the fungi world. There is a bit of a renaissance I've been noticing, I go down to the coffee shop and they have a chug of Chino. , Of course psilocybin has its own little world, going on. So, what species are you using?

Erum , What kind of mushrooms are you guys, leveraging?

Paul Well, first of all, ccino sounds really funny and interesting. I hadn't heard of that, so I'm glad you've told me about it. is there any coffee at all in Ccino or it's just water and Chaga mushrooms? I

Erum think chaga is like a, the powder that they put into like a coffee

Paul drink, water.

Paul Oh, there is coffee in it. Okay, interesting. how interesting. Yeah, my guess of course, I don't know, I've never heard of this until right now, but my guess is that it's like coffee with like a minuscule little like, droplet of chaga powder. It's like, fairy dust. So they sprinkle on and then they call it chaga.

Paul 'cause it chagas very expensive.

Karl Yeah. And you also don't need a lot [00:38:00] of chaga. I mean, I drink it every day, but Nice. I drink a little tiny bit, We're near the source.we've got the Birch Boys up in the Adirondacks, producing Chaga. we've known about them and I just put a little bit in my water

Paul and so Carl, I presume you're actually like 95 years old and you only look this young because of your Chaga daily consumption habit,

Karl actually, 195. 195, yeah. Wow.

Paul Amazing. all these like biotech longevity startups should be looking at you and figuring out what to do. to answer your question directly, IAM, we use a genus that's called Neurospora.

Paul So this is a very common, genus of fungi throughout the world. and we really like it 'cause it does a good job of producing a meat like texture in a very short amount of time. As I mentioned, we have a very short, fermentation. Time and time is money when it comes to fermentation, right?

Paul Because you're using energy to, run these fermentors. So the shorter the batch time, the cheaper the cost of the finished good. but Nora is a great genus. We love it, but it's not all. [00:39:00] We have an entire bank of lots of different genea, lots of different strains that we use to make all types of really great products.

Paul And our vision is not for the better meat code to be a one trick pony where you can come to us and just get neuro based products. Our goal is to be akin to the Cargill of fungi. As I said earlier, you go to Cargill, you can get soy protein or pea protein or wheat protein. Under the better Muco, we'll have a menu of fungi protein options for you to select from, depending on what your product application needs actually are.

Paul So if you're a crab replacement company or you're an egg replacement company, it might be different strains altogether. so our primary use right now is one particular genus that we absolutely love. It's a great workhorse. but it's not the entirety of what we do.

Karl And you said that you guys are able to inoculate, this is fascinating to me.

Karl You can inoculate in the morning and harvest in the evening. this mycelium grows

Paul that fast. Yeah. It [00:40:00] depends on how you're defining morning there. So it'd be about like 16 or 17 hours. the morning is 1:00 AM sure. it's less than a day.

Paul Less than a day. It's extremely rapid and that's particularly helpful for us. And, speed kills and I always say speed kills cogs, right? So if you can speed this thing up, your cogs or your cost of goods sold is gonna be lower. if you think about take chickens,the Southeast Asian jungle foul, which is the animal from whom we domesticated chickens, they grow to adult weight in a matter of like over a year.

Paul Whereas, even 50 to a hundred years ago, it would've taken about like 90 days for them to grow to slaughter weight, and today it takes only about 40 days, and that time is money. For this chicken industry, it means less feed and less energy to get them from shell to shelf. And it's sad from an animal welfare perspective because these chickens have been bred to grow so big so fast that many of them can't even take more than a few steps [00:41:00] before they collapse because they're in so much pain because their bodies are so gigantic, yet they're essentially still babies.

Paul so from an animal welfare perspective, it's pretty horrific, but it's extremely efficient and it's why chicken is so cheap. Chicken didn't always used to be cheap. You remember, Herbert Hoover, since you're 195, Carl, you'll remember, Hoover's campaign,

Paul It's like a chicken. Every pot. Like you know, today in America people eat chicken whenever they want. You get three times a day and it's a very cheap meat. But back then, you know, it's expensive. so a chicken in every pot on Sunday was perceived as this like aspirational way for people to feel wealthy, to be able to eat chicken once a week.

Paul and. That all changed because it became way cheaper to grow chickens because we changed their genome and other, feeding regimen to get them to slaughter weight so fast. That is what we need to do with our microbes. fortunately our microbes are not sentient like chickens, so they aren't capable of suffering.

Paul And so I don't have a lot of moral qualms about doing that. but we're all using. Wild isolates of these fungi, like there's no real [00:42:00] domestication program. Even k which has been doing it for decades is basically using the same strain that they used decades ago, when they selected it and isolated it from the wild.

Paul So, what I want to see is like real domestication programs. almost like a second domestication, you know, the first domestication, we were domesticating plants and animals. now we can start domesticating microbes and getting them to do things that are particularly useful for us.

Paul So, you know, maybe instead of a one day fermentation, you could really do what you suggested Carl and, inoculate at 9:00 AM and harvest at 5:00 PM that would be miraculous. you'd be creating the cheapest form of protein in the planet I had ever seen. so that is just one way in which let's say people who might be interested in science and technology could go like, let's say you're a microbiologist.

Paul That's a wonderful. Wonderful goal for you to have as a career goal. And it doesn't mean you have to bioengineer them, although you certainly could. but even just, conventional selective breeding, like what happened with chickens, it's not like the [00:43:00] chickens had their, transgenic, bioengineering occur like that didn't happen.

Paul What happened is they've just selectively bred every decades to be growing bigger and faster and, you know, that's what we need are like super microbes that are just really efficient protein producers really rapidly.

Karl Yeah, it's amazing because, we have had on the podcast and we're friends with a firm called, cult Barium, whose whole mandate is to develop.

Karl Tools to make it easier to work with unknown bacteria. And I just gave a talk where I was, talking about e coli, people ask, you know, well, why is it that e coli is so popular to use? And I said, well, because it, divides every 20 minutes. And our friends at Calvarium, they got their start working with Vibrio Nitrogens, which divides every eight minutes.

Karl And the fact is, we've barely scratched the surface of our knowledge of bacteria and probably of fungi as well. And there probably are fungi and bacteria out there that are huge protein producers that reproduce at these rates. We just haven't found them yet.

Paul or we could breed them too.

Paul the [00:44:00] animals who we eat and the plants that we eat are nothing like their progenitors. everybody listening to this is probably knows. But, you know, you look at a banana today, it has like no resemblance to the bananas of hundreds of years ago, which were tiny.

Paul They had huge seeds. Like people don't even know that bananas have seeds. Like those little black dots that you see in there, those are seeds. they used to be really big. but we made them much more convenient for us. And there's a funny video. I've seen, and you've probably have seen it too, where there's like somebody talking about intelligent design and the saying like, God created the banana to fit perfectly into our hand.

Paul It's so obvious. It's intelligent design. It's like, well, you know, if God was a bunch of like plant biologists and yes, they designed a banana to do that. but what I'm enthusiastic about is, strain improvement, and getting, yeah, you can start out with something that gives you a great headstart.

Paul gonna be like the Usain Bolt of the micro real, like other e coli or whatever you're doing. but maybe we can,breed, somebody instead of running a nine, 500 meter like us saying, well maybe they'll be able to do it in eight five. Wouldn't that be [00:45:00] cool?

Erum well there's the breeding, but then you also have the growth media.

Erum do you guys use that in your part of your fermentation process and perhaps particular parameters of your reactor to help facilitate faster production?

Paul Yeah, absolutely. What you feed a matter we feed the microbes really matters. And in, our case, like growth media is basically a fancy way of saying sugar.

Paul Like it's way simpler than cultivating animal cells, way cheaper, way simpler. Like it's totally apples and oranges or it's animals and fungi. but in that case, basically you want to use the least amount of sugar. Which means faster growth. And you know, the magic of fungi fermentation is you're basically feeding in carbohydrates and getting out protein.

Paul it's almost like alchemy. it's not literally alchemy obviously, but it feels like it because you are taking these really cheap sugary carbs and feeding them to microbes who come out as these extremely protein tenacious meat like products. And, that's almost like magic.

Paul I mean, it's not magic, it's just science, but it's really,really great. [00:46:00] And so if you could find cheaper sugar sources, like agricultural byproducts that are carbohydrate rich, which we have done at Better Meco and utilize a variety of agricultural waste streams as our feedstock, that would not only be a major sustainability win, but it would also be a major reducer of your cost.

Paul because like sugar prices are, and when I say sugar, I mean, you know, it could be coming from cane, it could be coming from corn, it could be coming from wheat. Like there's lots of ways to get. Sugar. but those prices are what really, are a major,major driver. just as an animal called agriculture, the feedstock is the most important.

Paul Cost input, the same as, so when it comes to, fungi fermentation, what you feed the microbes helps determine the cost of the final product.

Karl And you guys, you said you're a B2B company, you're not selling necessarily the consumers. and someone could come to you and say, we want to create a crab, or we want to create, something that's like, I don't know, Wagyu steak.

Karl But when you're thinking about growing these things, how important is the flavor? what are you guys doing to enhance

Paul so our [00:47:00] goal is no flavor. so we want a blank slate upon which our customers can paint their beautiful portraits. Got it. texture is really like, we want great texture.

Paul No flavor. That's the ideal. Doesn't always happen. sometimes there's like an umami flavor to the myprotein that we grow. and there's certain types of meat for which umami flavor is quite good, like beef or pork, for chicken, you know, you don't need a chicken to be that umami. so that's a bit of a limitation in that particular application.

Paul But yeah, we're not trying to have it come straight out of the reactor with a crab flavor that would be perceived as a real failure on our part if it had that strong flavor.

Karl But were someone to come to you and say, could you gimme a crab flavor?

Karl Would you be able to do that?

Paul the short answer is yes, but it would almost certainly be a post harvest processing step. it would not be innate to the myprotein. Now, maybe there's a species of fungi that just happens to taste like crab that you could grow. that would be pretty awesome.

Paul maybe like a chicken of the woods, you know, like something that's exotic that you could do. I don't know. [00:48:00] but that would be pretty fun if that were the case.

Erum That's a really good idea because the chicken in the woods does have the chicken flavor. I mean, it's Yeah.

Erum Seems like a no brainer if you can, pull that off and have it, grow very fast.

Paul and unlike chickens who do have brains, these fun, so, you know, would be literally a no brainer.

Erum Well, they have something. Yeah.

Paul Yeah.

Erum They have a decentralized system, right? I don't know.

Paul Yeah.

Paul Not like an octopus though, that has like a, multi brain, decentralized nervous system. There's no consciousness there. I would feel pretty bad if they did because it's kind of violent inside of there

Erum might be.

Paul I'm open to this possibility. There's not a lot of real firm evidence that microbes have consciousness, but it may be somebody will have some evidence that will be peer reviewed and published and, you know, not gonna be in one of like the UFO congressional hearings.

Paul And I'd be very open to that.

Karl By the way, as we're recording this, the congress is having a UFO hearing, so that's why,

Paul I couldn't believe that. Like, that last guy who was like, you know, at a u Ffo hearing it made so much news coverage and the guy [00:49:00] literally presented no new evidence at all. Like, I dunno if you guys watched this, so like, I'm a huge advocate.

Paul I hope there are extra, trust us to be thrilled. But I was like, we're, you know, this guy is a huge congression hearing, and I'm not kidding. His entire argument was. People who, I can't tell you who they are, but they're very knowledgeable with insider information told me this. And it's like,who could this be like on the news?

Paul Like a guy says anonymous people told me this. It's like, are you kidding? This is news. And that they have alien biologics. You know what that would mean? That would mean that some extraterrestrial civilization was so advanced that they mastered smic navigation and came from light years away all the way across the galaxy to get to our solar system only to come here and be so incompetent as to crash.

Paul How could that be like they manage like wormholes and radiation and cosmic voyaging only [00:50:00] to crash? Like how could that be? I just don't believe it. I don't believe it. I would like to,I'm like, I'm so biased. I would like to believe it.

Karl I didn't watch any of it today, but some of this stuff has popped up on my various feeds and, the latest ones are like, we need to be prepared because, they're coming in 2027 and the government's doing a disservice by not letting us know.

Karl So that's like the latest of what I've seen. Right.

Paul Did you guys read Three Body Problem? Yeah, I read it. like the premise of the book is like we get a message saying we're gonna be there in so many years.

Paul And then it's like, you know, how does humanity respond if 2027 they were gonna get here? I'd be thrilled. I'd be thrilled. Carl Sagan, may he rest in peace always said that extraordinary claims require extraordinary evidence. Right? I don't think that saying anonymous people told me so is extraordinary evidence.

Karl you know, there's a couple guys who, they've been collecting all this information and they're like, a lot of what we're seeing it is alien technology, but it's being used by Lockheed or, you know, general dynamics and, you know, these ships [00:51:00] and, once humanity exploded, the atom bomb, it really kind of set a signal through the universe that this planet should be watched.

Karl Of course, I was like, come on, where's all this coming from? I wanna believe

Paul Yeah. my favorite movie of all time is Contact. I love it. And just think that's far more likely than that there are biological aliens on earth.

Paul unless you count us as aliens, if you, I think Panspermia is true that we were like seated by Martian media rights and that was how life Come Earth got started. But, I just think it would be unbelievably incredible. you're

Karl saying they do not walk among us.

Karl The grays are not real. I would be so happy if they were

Paul I Me too. Maybe they're like

Erum in the deep ocean.

Paul Yeah. they love breathing water. Right at very high pressure. Maybe that's it. Yeah,

Erum there are living creatures all the way down there. Yeah. I dunno if they're earths.

Erum Yeah.

Paul maybe they evolved on a planet that ha was like a Europa or s where it was just an ocean planet and there's no land and they need [00:52:00] high pressure to survive. I don't know.

Paul I'll just connect the dots and say if long distance cosmic voyaging by humanity ever does occur, we're not gonna be bringing Noah's ark and toe.

Paul Right. We're not gonna bring chickens and pigs and cows and fish and so on. And so if our long distance cosmic voyagers ever do want to eat meat, they're going to have to grow it. . They're not going to be raising farm animals on the ISS. And so Myprotein is actually an unbelievably efficient way.

Paul Create a meat experience for astronauts where they can just grow mycelium in space. Highly nutritious meat like texture. this is, I believe, what astronauts on long distance tours of the solar system would actually consume.

Erum I mean you're speaking my language. I'm a big fan of space bio manufacturing,

Paul anybody who uses the term space, biomanufacturing is my type of person,

Erum yeah, absolutely. so I'm actually really curious now, so you're a [00:53:00] B2B company, this superfood, I mean, it goes beyond those boxes.

Erum I mean the superfood, all of the, benefits of the meat. So I'm curious to know like how far along are you guys is there a better meat co micro proteins on the shelves today?

Paul we're not far enough along, is the,painful answer. So, we run a pilot plant here in Sacramento. We're able to produce thousands of pounds, but not millions of pounds, and that's what we need to do.

Paul And so we are in the process of raising capital to scale up. We've demonstrated that our technology works. This is not lab scale. We're running a three story tall bioreactor where we consistently on a weekly basis, churn out myprotein , a hundred percent of what we produce, we sell.

Paul The demand is dramatically higher than the supply. And so the next step for us is to raise the capital that we need to build our own biomanufacturing plant, which will take tens of millions of dollars. And then. Produce a river of myprotein that will flow through the food industry and reduce the need for so many animals in the food system.

Paul That's the aspiration that we have. And so, yes, I mean, there are thousands of people who have eaten our product, and in [00:54:00] fact, we were at a, the good food conference in San Francisco last week where we served more than a thousand servings of our myprotein to people. They enjoyed delicious myprotein tacos and Japanese curry myprotein.

Paul It was really a wonderful, illustration of what our product can do. but no, you know, we are not on Walmart shelves. We're not a McDonald's. That's where we need to get, in order to make a dent in the problem that we are trying to solve, and that's gonna need capital to bring us to full scale commercial manufacturing.

Paul Fortunately, the internal rate of return on such a factory is actually very attractive because our process is so efficient. but it will take tens of millions of dollars to do that.

Karl And would you say, given the fact that you guys are trying to raise, what do you think some of the biggest challenges are that are faced, by people who are trying to advance, alternate proteins and also,food sustainability in general?

Paul lack of capital is the biggest hurdle. And there's only one publicly traded company in our space, which is beyond meat, and their performance has been very lackluster. And so that leads a lot of investors [00:55:00] to think, well, why would I invest in this space when the only company to have iPod is doing poorly?

Paul However, first of all, one company doesn't define an entire category, and second of all, beyond still selling hundreds of millions of dollars of product, like even if they were overvalued before, I mean, that's still amazing for a,relatively young company to be selling three to $400 million of product as a result.

Paul many investors though have, departed from the alternative protein space, even though it's so critical from a climate perspective in order to shift away from using animals for food. So this is the biggest problem, is that, two years ago it was a real feast period for the alternative protein space, just tons of capital flowing through this industry.

Paul And today it's a famine period. That needs to change. we need more investors who have the patient capital mentality and who are passionate about the mission of this field. Took a long time [00:56:00] for electric cars. They went through their own valley of death and now you can see people who invest in Tesla or being richly rewarded.

Paul and I think that something similar is gonna happen here, but there will be a lot of companies that don't succeed. We've already seen companies, going out of business just in the last couple months as they were unable to raise capital to continue their operations. That's what happens in startup plan.

Paul Lots of companies don't make it. but there's a lot of companies who are really promising, including especially the better meco, which have technologies that are too good to lay fallow.

Erum Yeah, are you gonna be pitching the government? I mean, that seems where that non-dilutive capital could come and help, get you guys going.

Paul Yeah, we definitely are, and we are pitching for non-dilutive for dilutive. Like, you know, we are out there like Oliver Twist.

Paul So, we're ready to scale up what we've done. it's time after two years of running a three story tall reactor and churning out we're really a great quality of mycelium for the market, ready to start producing millions of pounds at a time.

Erum Awesome. So you [00:57:00] are also a fellow podcaster.

Erum You have a podcast called Business for Good Podcast and you interviewed many leaders in sustainability and business. Can you share any memorable conversations or insights you've gained from the podcasting world?

Paul I'm honored, IAM, that you had asked about it. So, in my spare time, of which there is ample,I do, host this podcast called The Business for Good Podcast.

Paul And the purpose of it is to showcase people who are using the power of commerce to try to solve really serious social problems. And I did this because while I wasn't going to write another book, because it's such a hugely intensive process to do so, I still wanted to offer a platform where I could elevate and amplify the voices of those people who are trying to create.

Paul Something from nothing by starting their own companies and solve really serious problems. And so it's not all about alternative protein. Many episodes are, but there's really cool technologies that people, are doing. So I'll give you an example of an episode that's coming out only a few [00:58:00] days from now when we're reporting this.

Paul With Sublime Systems. their founder, Leia Ellis, she's their CEO, and they're making cement at room temperature. Now why is that important? Well, nearly 10% of all global CO2 emissions. Come from cement production. Now if you are like I was, and you don't know what cement is, or at least you don't really know, like what's the difference between cement and concrete as a reminder, cement is like the glue that holds everything else in the concrete together.

Paul So it's very important. and the world is using more and more cement than ever before 'cause we're building more and more construction buildings and so on. And the way that we make cement is by taking limestone and super heating it to extremely hellish temperatures, which takes a lot of energy, first of all from fossil fuels to do that.

Paul And about 50% of the mass of that limestone gets emitted as CO2 in that process. So the cement is, like half of the weight of the original limestone. So you have not only the massive amounts of energy, but also the CO2 loss from the limestone. So. Cement production is a massive CO2 [00:59:00] emitter.

Paul And what Leia OS has done is found a way through electrochemistry to create cement at room temperature so you don't have to heat calcium bearing rocks all the way up to these he temperatures, but rather no heating at all, and just through electrochemistry, convert them into cement.

Paul So that's a massive, massive,massive gain if they can make that mainstream, they've already raised about $50 million at five zero million dollars of venture capital and they've built a really successful, pilot plant and they're now looking to build a commercial factory as well. And that's just one example of an entrepreneur who is amplified by Business for Good podcast, who it's really cool.

Paul And my hope is that people will be inspired, like it's of course supposed to be informational, but it's also supposed to be inspirational. And my hope is that people who listen to the show will. Come away from it thinking I could do that too. I could go and create my own company or maybe I have a new idea.

Paul and on every show we always ask the founders what company do you wanna see exist that doesn't yet exist? And they always have really interesting ideas that they throw out to [01:00:00] audience members. And we've had audience members start companies based on suggestions from guests. so we've had guests who have had their entire seed or series A rounds funded by investors who listen to the show.

Paul so the show has a real world impact, for sure.

Karl That's amazing. we haven't had that yet. We have had people who we introduced to each other start companies,but we haven't had anybody say that they've done it based on ideas that are on the pod. but I love hearing that you guys are having that kind of impact and I think that there's a need for it.

Karl As I said before we started, recording, we need every solution everywhere, all at once, all the time right now. Yeah. So, I think, you know, what you're doing is incredibly, important. I wanna be mindful of time, because you know, we've come up on the hour. I'm kind of curious, what do you see as the future of the cultivated meat space in say, the next three to 10 years?

Karl And what do you see as the future of biotech?

Paul Well, I'm sad to say, like just being realistic. I think a lot, like I mentioned, there's over a hundred cultivated meat startups out there in the next three years. A lot of 'em [01:01:00] are gonna struggle to get funding and they'll cease to exist. But there will be companies, the most promising ones that will exist.

Paul And not everybody needs to succeed, right? Like, you don't need all of the electric vehicle startups to succeed. You only need some too. And I think that there will be, real winners in this space. I'm not gonna predict who they are, but I think that you'll see some companies get bigger and others will fall by the wayside.

Paul in the broader alternative meat sector, not just cultivating animal cells, but also in plant-based meat and in fungi fermentation and so on. I think you're also gonna see. Coming down. One of the biggest barriers for this space is that these products cost more than animal meat. And as we saw, the adoption of clean energy technology started taking off once solar or wind became cheaper than coal or oil.

Paul And that's what we need here. we need these products to not just have a green premium, but to actually outcompete, I wish that I could say, well, we're already outcompeting them on, climate footprint or animal welfare or [01:02:00] personal health, but that's not what motivates most food buying decisions.

Paul Most people buy food because of the way that it tastes. They like the taste and because it's affordable for them. And so those are where we need to really compete on taste and price. And I think you'll see the alternative meat sector in general trying very hard to do both of those things.

Erum And can I just ask you the same question you ask all your guests, what company do you wish would come online to help specifically the alternative protein industry?

Paul Oh, great one. So I was gonna say something different until you specified and qualified it about alternative protein. I'll say this. first on the alternative protein, the best pathway to reducing the cost of products like ours is to find cheaper feed stocks than just off the shelf sugar.

Paul and so finding ways to valorize waste streams from the agricultural industry and using those as feedstocks, a lot of microbes happy to eat various waste streams that would be. You know, worth its weight in gold in order to, do that. So that's what I would say is somebody focused on figuring that out.

Paul then, I would also [01:03:00] say, fungi are amazing. Fungi are so amazing, and we use them for not enough things and. We have a massive plastic pollution problem. We, of course, need to find ways to produce, less plastic or to produce biodegradable plastic. But even if we turned off the faucet today, the amount of plastic in the environment is unbelievably massive.

Paul Unbelievably massive. And just like there's too much CO2 in the atmosphere. And we have to not just stop emitting, we have to actually remove CO2 from the atmosphere. We need to break down the plastic that's here already, and that plastic is gonna last for millennia. If we don't, however, we know that there are some species of fungi that happily consume plastic and break it down.

Paul So why not create really cool factories where you're just breaking down and by degrading plastics, with fungi, you could either,, throw the fungi on them , like a type of fungal remediation program. Or you could figure out, you know, what's the enzyme that they use to, what's the enzyme that these fungi excrete that actually breaks down the plastic?

Paul And you could synthesize that and just apply the enzyme to [01:04:00] the plastic. And so. Plastic removal, I think is a really important environmental goal. And using the power of fungi to do that, I think that would be a really cool company. I think municipalities across the world would partner with that, company to do this.

Karl Awesome. Unless there's anything that we miss, Paul, we wanna say thank you for coming on and I think we'd love to have you again because there's so much more we could go into.

Paul Carl Iam, it is my pleasure. I'm grateful for everything that you are doing. I know you've had some fantastic guests, some really cool companies like, joy Well or Billy on, doing awesome things and I'm proud to be one of them.

Paul Happy to chat anytime for any reason. I will say goodbye and grateful for all you're doing to help amplify the voices of people who are trying to solve the very serious environmental crises that we face right now.

Erum so much, Paul. Thanks so much, Paul. Bye. Hey, this episode is sponsored by Messaging Lab. At Messaging Lab, we translate complex science and [01:05:00] economics into compelling business narratives, and we have done so for the most successful biotech forward companies across pharma, agriculture, personal care and beauty materials, and the list goes on. We are here to make sure your ideas not only get heard, but resonate with your audience. So if it's time to amplify your company's voice. Elevate your business. Visit us@messaginglab.com. OUTRO Let's.

Karl Alrighty, rum. What did you think about that? Uh, episode?

Erum It was incredible. I love his whole story because it's been really going at this clean meat revolution for quite some time from the animal rights perspective, and then really trying to look at beyond. Meat, no pun intended. Not that I'm talking about beyond meat, but going beyond this vegetables.

Erum What is fungi? How do you leverage that? Really thinking of what would be a better texture, because fungi is closer to meat than plants. Mushrooms are not plants and being able to consider texture and [01:06:00] flavor and all of that in this recipe for these myprotein, but I have yet to taste better meat cos their meat.

Erum I mean, it sounds like they are able to create a large volume, which is always the challenge when it comes to alternative proteins. How do you create a high volume of product? But we'll have to pick up some myprotein from better meko whenever they have it to share. Or I guess their will also be selling it.

Erum To other companies that wanna put Myprotein in their foods. So we'll have to keep track of which brands are using Myprotein from Better Meko.

Karl You mentioned Corn with a Q. I'm gonna start looking for those products 'cause I've never had it. Which is also a myprotein company that has been around for a really long time.

Karl And I know that I've mentioned in the past that I've had the My Porous Foods bacon alternative, which is damn good.

Erum Yeah, I actually have corn. You can probably go to the store right now and find some, I believe they had some breakfast sausages. Um, that sounds right. It's good. It's really good. my big question always when it comes to any of these alternative proteins is the flavor.

Erum It always comes down to [01:07:00] flavor and we. Paul about it, and he is like, they can add flavor, but we know that adding flavor isn't the same as being able to cultivate flavor in such a way that it comes from its own environments. When it comes to meat, like beef, grass fed beef tasting, a lot different than industrial corn fed grain beef, all that flavor takes time to cultivate.

Erum So growing things really fast and then adding flavor afterwards, I'm still await those products that really gain the flavor in that method. So I am curious to try, and that is my big question mark, to see where's the inherent flavor when it comes to these products. You don't wanna add too much flavor, like people eat steak, they just want the steak.

Erum They don't wanna necessarily put a bunch of stuff all over it. So that, I think will always be a question mark when it comes to these alternative protein companies, especially when it comes to replacing meat.

Karl Definitely. Well, I don't have anything else to say about Paul. I feel like we were really lucky to have him on the [01:08:00] podcast.

Karl I felt like we could keep that conversation going for a really long time, and I'd love to have him back on. Yeah, he's super

Erum fun. He is such a super fun person. he is a podcast pro too. He has his own podcast called The Business for Good Podcasts, so I recommend people listening to that. I still have to listen to that, especially from my earlier comments about businesses leading the way when it comes to sustainability and really shifting the way that we live.

Erum So I am very curious to see who's on that podcast and hello to Paul again for being a fellow podcaster, being a fellow. Biotech entrepreneur. We are very, very happy to have you on. We can't wait to chat with you again.

Karl All right, well, I guess that's the pod. Just a reminder, if you have any burning questions for us, we do have a hotline and the hotline number will be in the show notes and we'd love to hear from you guys.

Karl We have been very lucky with some of the questions we've gotten. We're waiting to have a chunk of them so that we can answer them all at once. We've got exciting podcasts ahead of us, Iran. If there's nothing else, let's just call it the pod.

Erum It's the pod. See you later. [01:09:00]

Karl See you later.