SPENCER: Bruce, welcome to the Clearer Thinking Podcast.

BRUCE: Thank you very much, Spencer. I'm delighted to be here.

SPENCER: The world eats a tremendous amount of meat today. What's wrong with that?

BRUCE: The way that we produce meat is incredibly inefficient, and as a result, it contributes to hunger and malnutrition. It contributes to a range of environmental problems. Because animals are fed so many medically relevant antibiotics, it contributes to antimicrobial resistance. It also contributes to pandemic risk, and it causes 80 billion land animals and even more sea animals every single year to suffer miserably. We've been making meat the same way for about 12,000 years, and it has a lot of significant external costs.

SPENCER: So, let's unpack those different reasons for a moment. It's inefficient. Could you explain that? In what sense is it inefficient?

BRUCE: Yeah, so the most efficient animal at turning the crops that you feed to them into meat is the chicken. It takes about nine calories fed to a chicken to get one calorie back out, so it's really the equivalent of going to your refrigerator, taking out nine plates of pasta, eating one plate of pasta, throwing eight plates of pasta in the trash. Probably all of your listeners and viewers are concerned about food waste. For every 100 calories that the world produces, something like 30 of them are wasted, but to produce 100 calories of chicken, you need 900 calories. 800 of those calories don't make it into the food supply. So that's kind of the basis of chapter one of my new book, Meat, which makes the case that this method of producing meat, the way that we produce meat today, is contributing significantly to hunger and malnutrition.

SPENCER: Sometimes you hear counterarguments along the lines that the food eaten by animals is often not food that's fit for human consumption or not the sort of food that humans eat. Does that change the calculus much at all, or is that kind of irrelevant?

BRUCE: Well, I like the former UN's Special Rapporteur on the Right to Food, a guy named Jean Ziegler, and a number of years ago, he held a press conference at the United Nations, and he called biofuels a crime against humanity. He said, "We're taking 100 million metric tons of cereals, and we're turning them into fuel that's driving up the price of land, it's driving up the price of crops, it's leading to hunger and malnutrition." In response, George Monbiot, The Guardian journalist, looked at the exact same FAO report that said 100 million metric tons for biofuels. It said 756 million metric tons are being grown to be fed to chickens and pigs and farmed fish, and Monbiot made the point, if 100 million metric tons for biofuels is a crime against humanity, what about almost eight times as much in this incredibly inefficient relationship, where at least 90% of the calories fed to farm animals are wasted? The kicker is that that happened 20 years ago. We're now producing an extra 105 million metric tons of meat, and we are feeding twice as many crops to farm animals. It's certainly true that a lot of that food, and a lot of those crops are for animal consumption, but that land could be used to grow food for human consumption, and it's not. I dive into the peer-reviewed science on this, the economics in chapter one of the book.

SPENCER: Let's talk about the environmental impact. How does the environmental impact of meat compare to growing other types of food?

BRUCE: Well, obviously, if you've got something that requires nine times the resources of something else, so nine times as much land, nine times the water, nine times the pesticides and herbicides, just in the basic inefficiency of producing chicken, that alone is going to be a significant additional environmental adverse impact. But it's not just that you're then growing all of those crops, and you're shipping them to the feed mill, and you're operating the feed mill, you're shipping the feed to the farm, you're operating the farm, you're shipping the animals to the slaughterhouse, you're operating the slaughterhouse. It's multiple extra stages of gas-guzzling pollution-spewing vehicles, multiple extra energy-intensive polluting factories. The UN Food and Agriculture Organization, again, produced a more-than-400-page report called Livestock's Long Shadow. They said, "Whatever environmental issue you're looking at, from the smallest and most local to the largest and most global, this incredible inefficiency of cycling crops through animals is one of the top three causes." So, number one for deforestation, biodiversity loss, water pollution, water use, and also a huge source of climate emissions.

SPENCER: How big a deal are methane emissions from cows?

BRUCE: The plurality of methane is coming from ruminants, mostly cows, but also sheep and goats and other ruminants. Methane as a warming gas over 20 years is about 80 times as potent as CO2, so a huge portion of climate emissions are ruminant methane emissions, and it is a significant source of global warming.

SPENCER: You also mentioned effects on antibiotics. What's the deal there? How is that relevant to the topic?

BRUCE: That's chapter three of the book, and it points out that the two main causes of antimicrobial resistance are: one, the use of medically relevant drugs in farm animals, not because the farm animals are sick, but because if you're going to cram 50,000 chickens in a shed, you're going to have massive death losses. Industrial animal farmers learned that if they keep these animals on prophylactic antibiotics, so they're dosed with antibiotics for their entire lives, they can drop those death losses down to four or 5%. What that means is about 70% globally of medically relevant antibiotics are fed to farm animals. It's driving antibiotic resistance, which already kills more than a million people per year, and by 2050 is expected to be killing more than 10 million people per year, according to an article in The Lancet. One of the top two causes is this use in farm animals of medically relevant antibiotics. The UK government says the threat of antimicrobial resistance is a more certain threat to humanity than climate change.

SPENCER: So, what's the problem there exactly? Is it that these are antibiotics that are also used with humans, and by dosing animals with them, the bacteria essentially learn how to not be killed by the antibiotic, and then suddenly, when we try to use it for human medical purposes, it no longer functions?

BRUCE: Yeah, you literally just described it. So, yes, if you are sub-therapeutically dosing farm animals with these antibiotics, what happens is the bacteria become what are called superbugs, which is to say they mutate, so that the antibiotics get weaker and weaker, and stop working. So, if your listeners and viewers want to Google the end of working antibiotics, you're literally talking about the end of modern medicine. So, something like a scraped knee could lead to having to amputate your leg. It's really a nightmare scenario, and the way that we're using antibiotics for farm animals is probably the top cause, and the Journal of the American Medical Association, The Lancet, for as long as antibiotics have been used in farm animals, they have been running peer-reviewed articles denouncing the practice, and yet year after year the number of antibiotics used in farm animals just keeps going up.

SPENCER: Is organic farming a solution to this problem?

BRUCE: Yes, organic farming will significantly decrease the use of antimicrobials, although enforcement is not very good. When studies are done of antibiotic-free chicken and antibiotic-free other meats, an organization called Farm Forward has tracked this, and there still is an awful lot of antibiotics in the meat of animals that are labeled antibiotic-free. It's lower, and if we could phase out the use of antibiotics in farm animals through things like heritage breed birds, grass-fed cattle, that sort of thing, and some sort of enforcement mechanism, that would definitely be a huge step in the right direction, both for antibiotic resistance and for pandemic risk. A lot of the environmental harms would be less significant as well.

SPENCER: Yeah, I assume that wouldn't help with the other harms you're talking about.

BRUCE: It would probably decrease the amount of animal suffering. I think most people who visit an organic farm, or even a so-called free-range farm, or cage-free farm, they're still not going to like the conditions. It's not like these animals are treated well. Slaughterhouses are still pretty miserable places, but it's less egregiously bad, so it's better, but still not good. A lot of the harms continue.

SPENCER: And why are they still finding antibiotics in organic farms? Is it because some farms lie about it, or is it some kind of seepage between different animals that are in adjacent fields?

BRUCE: It's not seepage from animals in adjacent fields. My guess is it's not necessarily farmers lying. The feed industry is not particularly well regulated, so maybe it is actually farmers labeling their products organic, but not liking the death losses and wanting to decrease death losses, and so buying feed that's laced with antibiotics, even though they're organically certified, so that's a violation. They know the likelihood of being inspected and getting in trouble is just vanishingly low. So, my guess is it's significantly that.

SPENCER: And how does this impact pandemic risk?

BRUCE: In July of 2020, the International Livestock Research Institute and the UN Environment Program released a report called Preventing the Next Pandemic. They pulled together 18 of the world's leading zoonotic disease specialists, and those specialists listed their seven most likely causes of the next pandemic. The first one is increased meat consumption; every additional animal is another potential vector for the next pandemic. The second one is industrial animal farming, both because when you cram 50,000 chickens in a shed, that is basically a perfect breeding ground for disease, and also the animals are so genetically similar that they have depressed immune systems and can't fight off bacterial infections, so it really spreads. The other five of the seven most likely causes of the next pandemic are all linked to the way we produce meat today. One of the great things about making plant-based meat or cultivated meat is the antimicrobial resistance risk goes to zero, the pandemic risk goes to zero, in addition to significantly better outcomes for the environment and global poor animals.

SPENCER: When we're talking about pandemics here, we're talking about pandemics among humans but there's also pandemic risks among animals.

BRUCE: I think once you're talking about a pandemic, you're talking about something that has jumped the species barrier. There are zoonotic diseases among animals; there are probably a dozen different strains of avian flu that are just roaming in animals all over the world, and chickens all over the world. Similarly, there's a pig flu, and remarkably, the avian flu has recently jumped into mammals, which is pretty scary. That just happened in the last couple of years. Yes, those are in the background on pig farms, chicken farms, and cattle farms all over the world.

SPENCER: I think when people think about pandemics being caused by animals, they think about pangolins or some kind of animal like that. Do we have historical cases where it was more commonly farmed animals that caused a jump into humans?

BRUCE: The last major pandemic before COVID, which killed more people than World War One and World War Two combined, was the avian influenza outbreak in 1917-1918, which killed tens of millions of people, and it originated in chickens. That's one example, but most of the pandemics throughout history have come from farm animals, and although wild animals are certainly one potential source, farm animals are a far greater potential source.

SPENCER: Tell us about the animal suffering implications of raising animals for meat.

BRUCE: Yeah, industrial animal farms, it really is hard to imagine a significantly worse daily existence. The animals' lives are categorized by unmitigated misery, and it's literally 80 billion land animals, even more sea animals. Chickens are now growing three times as quickly as they did a couple generations ago because of genetic breeding and drugs. They're much higher in fat, and when you walk into one of these sheds with 50,000 chickens in it, the animals can barely walk. They're sort of Frankenstein animals. There was an issue of the Poultry Journal that said if a human baby grew as quickly as a modern broiler chicken, she would be 600 pounds by the time she was two years old. That is how much we have altered the genetics of these animals. Imagine your organs if you're two years old and you're 600 pounds. It's crippling the animals, and it's also a huge stress on their hearts, lungs, and limbs, so they're in chronic pain for their entire lives. Being shipped to slaughterhouses through all weather extremes, the slaughter process itself. If dogs or cats were similarly abused, it would be felony-level cruelty to animals. Chickens are just one example. Their entire lives are miserable because of the genetic breeding that has caused them to be so top-heavy, and it's a stress on their organs, it's a stress on their limbs. They are living in their own filth for their entire lives. It's pretty miserable.

SPENCER: Besides the way that they grow unnaturally large, what are the biggest sources of suffering for animals in factory farms?

BRUCE: Battery cages for laying hens. In an 18-inch by 20-inch cage, the United Egg Producers guidelines for welfare say each bird needs to have about 72 square inches. That's literally the amount that each of the five birds in an 18 by 20 inch cage can have — just enough space that they're each on the bottom of the cage — but the animals go insane psychologically. It's extraordinarily stressful, their muscles and bones atrophy, they can't turn around, they can't spread their wings, they can't do anything that's natural to being a chicken. So it's both physiological and psychological torment for these animals. And then the other, probably worst of the worst, is going to be gestation crates for pregnant pigs, where again the animals can't turn around, they can't do anything that's natural to being a pig — chickens and pigs, from a cognitive and emotional standpoint, are as developed as dogs and cats — things that you would never do to a dog or a cat. You'd go to jail for felony cruelty if you did it. That is how eggs and pork are produced.

SPENCER: One thing that I think is fascinating about the psychology of this topic is that so many people are actually very much against causing any kind of unnecessary suffering to animals, and they will say, "Yeah, for something that's not very important, you should absolutely not cause suffering to animals," and yet so many people are directly implicated by their daily behaviors in this kind of action. How do you think people rationalize that? Obviously, there are some people who are just, "I don't care about animals," but we're talking about the majority of people who say no, animals matter, causing suffering to them is bad.

BRUCE: Yeah, even in Gallup surveys of what people think about farm animal suffering, people are overwhelmingly in favor of laws to stop farm animal suffering. There have been a couple of ballot initiatives — one in California, one in Massachusetts — that not only banned the use of gestation crates and battery cages and veal crates, but banned the sale of eggs and pork that came from these systems anywhere in the country, and both of those laws passed overwhelmingly, just a landslide. The California legislation passed by a greater percentage — got more votes than any other ballot initiative up to that point in California history. The really interesting thing about that, that was in 2008, and there was another proposition on the ballot that banned gay marriage the same year, so the same people who turned out to ban gay marriage voted overwhelmingly to ban gestation crates, veal crates, battery cages, and multiple newspapers in California came out against the legislation on progressive grounds. They said it's going to cause the price of eggs and pork and veal to go up, and that is a sort of penalty for being poor. Nevertheless, progressive California said, "No, it shocks the conscience to treat animals this badly. We're going to ban it," and the remarkable thing about all of that is that the sales of those products that didn't come from those systems were really low. I think that's because when people are shopping for groceries, when people are thinking about their food choices, it really boils down to deliciousness and affordability. It's what Daniel Kahneman calls System 1 thinking, a sort of click-world thing, where food is concerned. But when people are voting, when people are in the ballot box, they're in System 2 thinking, they're in ethics, they're considering who they are in the world. They don't want those choices to be available. They don't think that American society should treat animals with such egregious abuse.

SPENCER: It seems to me that social norms do a lot of work here, where everyone looks around at everyone else and thinks, "Oh, they seem okay with eating animals," and that actually lets you off the hook psychologically, even if, when you think about it, you're like, "That seems wrong."

BRUCE: Yeah, I think that's absolutely right. One of the things that I point out in the book is that the UN Food and Agriculture Organization started measuring global meat consumption in 1961, and every single year since we've hit a new global record. It just keeps going up and up and up, and that is expected to continue as long as GDP is going up. Per capita meat consumption is going to go up. That's always been true. It will continue to always be true.

SPENCER: And that's even per capita, right? Adjusted for the number of people in the world?

BRUCE: Yeah. Then it goes up by even more because the population continues to rise. This is one of the reasons that making plant-based meat and cultivated meat is so critically important. For whatever reason, I don't know if it's social norms, psychological, emotional, biological, or physiological, human beings just really love meat. It's certainly the case that even people who adopt a vegetarian or vegan diet, something like 75% of them go back to eating meat, and that's probably your social norm. If we can make meat from plants and cultivated meat that competes on price and taste, I think just as renewable energy can replace fossil fuels, and just as electric vehicles can replace gas-powered cars, we can replace conventional meat with plant-based meat, and even more successfully, I suspect, cultivated meat.

SPENCER: Obviously, a lot of people find meat really delicious. Is there anything else good about it? I guess it has a lot of protein, but maybe it's not a very efficient way of producing protein.

BRUCE: Yeah, it's definitely the case that if somebody is malnourished, meat is likely to be incredibly calorically dense. It is very high in protein, and that protein is very bioavailable. If somebody is literally malnourished or starving, the fact that it's high in fat or saturated fat is going to be neither here nor there. It does have B12, zinc, iron, and other essential micronutrients. In developed economies, we don't need to eat meat, but in developing economies, especially for people who are on the verge of hunger or malnutrition, meat is a pretty effective caloric delivery vehicle. Plant-based meat can be just as effective. I talk about that in chapter one of the book, and cultivated meat is even more effective, mostly just because it's so much cleaner and healthier.

SPENCER: So, what are the things driving the increase in meat consumption? First of all, tell us what the projections are over the coming decades, and then what are the fundamental drivers of that? Is it just that when people are wealthier, they want to eat more of it?

BRUCE: That is literally it. There are few things clearer in economics than that as income rises, people eat more meat. So far, that's always been true. The expectation is that it's going to continue to be true, and that's why even in the US, the five highest years for per capita meat consumption are the most recent five, and meat consumption is just skyrocketing in places like Asia and Africa and other places. It does seem to be true that as people have more money, they eat more meat.

SPENCER: And what do the numbers look like over the next 20 years?

BRUCE: Yeah, I mentioned the UN FAO report on Livestock's Long Shadow about the environmental harms of industrial animal agriculture, and one of the top three causes of literally everything from the smallest and most local to the largest and most global. The thing about that is it's also like the Jean Ziegler story; it's 20 years old. We're now producing 40% more meat than we were 20 years ago. In 20 years, the projection is that we're going to be producing and eating another 40% more meat. For all of the issues that people who are listening or watching care about, 80 billion land animals, for people who are concerned about animal welfare, it's going to be another 40% of 80 billion.

SPENCER: On an annual basis?

BRUCE: Yes, that is 2,500 animals per second, and every single year it goes up. Because a lot of the meat that people are consuming is shifting from beef to chicken, the numbers are even disproportionate in terms of how they're going up relative to the total volume of meat. It doesn't seem like there's a plan B. Environmentalists, global health experts, and animal activists have been begging the world to eat less meat for at least 55 years. That's when Diet for a Small Planet came out. That's the book that turned me vegan, literally 39 years ago. But meat consumption every year since that book came out has just been up, up, up, and that's going to continue to be the case. It's very much like energy keeps going up, cars on the road keep going up, so we need renewable energy, we need electric vehicles, and I would contend, Good Food Institute (GFI) contends that we need alternative meats.

SPENCER: What are some things that animal activists have tried so thoroughly that at this point you can say, "Okay, these definitely don't work. It's just that it hasn't gone anywhere."

BRUCE: Well, I don't think there's a "hasn't gone anywhere." I wouldn't go that far for probably any of the interventions. Maybe there are some that haven't gone anywhere. But what I think we can say is that trying to convince people to adopt a vegetarian or vegan diet or to eat less meat has not, so far, and is unlikely to change the massive upward trajectory globally of meat consumption. It is why I'm here. It's why all of the people who started the plant-based meat and cultivated meat companies started their companies. I really take a lot of joy in thinking that each person who adopts a vegetarian or vegan diet is saving an awful lot of animals who would have otherwise been leading really miserable lives. It's not quite as easy as that, obviously, but at a macro level,

SPENCER: On average, right?

BRUCE: Yeah, at a macro level, that becomes true. But what it doesn't seem likely to do is change the massive upward trajectory. Maybe the trajectory would have been even worse if not for the diet change advocacy, but that can't be the only tool in our toolkit. Unless we want to see the number of animals, the amount of environmental harm, the amount of antibiotics, and pandemic risk continue to go up, we really do need something that can replace like for like in the same way that renewable energy and electric vehicles do, and I think that's plant-based and cultivated meat.

SPENCER: So, we'll get into that in just a moment, but let's walk through the logic there for a second, because sometimes I hear people say things like, "Well, look, the animals that I'm going to buy, they're already dead," or, "Oh, but one person's effect is so small in the grand scheme of things that it rounds down to zero," and I'm actually fairly persuaded that those arguments are false, but it's a bit complicated to think through. So, how do you think about that?

BRUCE: Yeah, it's a very defeatist argument that denies the power of numbers, and it would really point toward doing basically nothing to lead an ethical life on a day-to-day basis, because your one vote of donating 10% of your income or more, or whatever else, is not going to have a sufficient consequence at the amount of money that somebody like you or I makes to make a big difference. But the power of lots of people taking the giving what we can pledge, or the power of lots of people choosing to live their ethics on a day-to-day basis by making choices not to pay for the abuse of animals, adds up to impact, and it also can start to change the zeitgeist, I think, in really useful ways. It points toward people starting companies like Beyond Meat, Impossible Foods, and Upside Foods. All of these were started by people who were moved by the argument to shift in the direction of a vegetarian or a vegan or a less meat diet. So I think overall it ends up being not just a powerful statement, and not just living your values, but also having an impact.

SPENCER: Yeah, I would add to that. If you're talking to someone and they say, "Oh, but any one person doesn't matter enough to change anything," you could ask the question, "Okay, well, how many people is enough to change it? Let's say 100,000 people no longer eat meat. Do you think that will cause a reduction in the amount of meat produced? If you do the supply and demand curves, standard economics says 100,000 people should move the amount of supply of meat produced." It won't move it one for one; maybe reducing meat consumption by one unit actually reduces it by 0.6 units or something like that in the amount supplied. Once you have that logic in place, you could say, "Okay, well, then what's the average impact of one of those people going vegetarian?" You realize, yeah, it's just 1/100,000th of the total 100,000 people, and you realize, "Oh yeah, actually, on average, each of those people does matter." Even though you can never know which of them matters, on average, you actually can say that they each matter quite a bit.

BRUCE: I think that's a powerful argument, Spencer. You put it incredibly well. The one thing I would add is that a lot of those people are going to influence other people, so it's not just your individual living according to your conscience and decreasing your support for egregious cruelty, which feels inherently good to do. Leading a life that's focused on minimizing the amount of suffering that you're causing also influences lots of other people in that direction, which I think is going to have a powerful impact. You might influence the next person who starts the cultivated meat company that is the most successful cultivated meat company ever. There are lots of powerful ways to have an influence, and certainly changing one's diet and how that causes you to go through the world seems to me like it's one of them.

SPENCER: Yeah, and so far as social norms help hold this all together, where people act against even their own values, not acting in the social norm actually begins to shift social norms, so that's kind of a boosting effect. Okay, let's jump into the main dish, so to speak. Let's talk about alternative meats. Maybe you could start by breaking down what we mean by alternative meats?

BRUCE: Yeah, I focus on two predominantly. The first one is plant-based meat, which comes from the observation that the founder of Beyond Meat, Ethan Brown, is fond of making: meat is made up of protein, fat, minerals, and water; that is all meat is. Plants also have protein, fat, minerals, and water. We should be able to apply science to the question and precisely mimic the meat experience, but because the inputs and stages of production are so much less as it scales up, we should also be able to win on price. From the vantage of the consumer, it's identical and less expensive, and hey, it's also healthier. That's plant-based meat. Cultivated meat is just like you can take a seed or cutting from a plant and bathe the seed or cutting in nutrients and grow a whole plant. You can take a small amount of animal fat or animal muscle, bathe that in nutrients, and grow basically unlimited additional animal fat or animal muscle, and that's cultivated meat. There's also fermentation, and in particular biomass fermentation, so mycoprotein, but in the book, I really just sort of fold that into plant-based. In the introduction, I say, if you want to learn more about this, you can go to our website. We've got overwhelming amounts of information on it, but even the people at Quorn, the plant-based meat company, it's actually not a plant-based meat company; it's a biomass fermentation company, but they will oftentimes self-identify as plant-based meat because otherwise it just gets confusing for people.

SPENCER: What's the distinction there? Is it not technically a plant? Is that why?

BRUCE: It's fungi, mycoprotein. Yeah, so plants photosynthesize, and mycoprotein does not.

SPENCER: Yeah, I think to normal people mushrooms, fungus, or plants, but they're not actually plants. Why is this such a big deal? Why focus on alt meats?

BRUCE: Well, I think that if the reason people are eating meat is that it's delicious and affordable, certainly for cultivated meat you're producing literally the exact same thing, but it requires a fraction of the land and a fraction of the inputs, so it lessens support for hunger and malnutrition. That also, with the fraction of the water inputs, land inputs, fertilizer inputs, lessens its contribution to soil desertification, biodiversity loss, deforestation, climate change, the range of environmental issues. It doesn't require any antibiotics, doesn't contribute to antimicrobial resistance or pandemic risk, and doesn't require live animals, so it eliminates support for cruelty to animals. It's very much the same theory as renewable energy or electric vehicles. The world's going to consume more energy, they're going to drive more cars, they're going to eat more meat, so let's use renewables instead of fossil fuels, EVs instead of gas-powered cars, and let's make meat from plants and cultivated meat directly in something that looks like a meat brewery instead of a slaughterhouse.

SPENCER: Putting aside the questions of the complexity of manufacturing and the cost of these kinds of things, are cultivated meat and plant-based meat equally good from your point of view?

BRUCE: Plant-based meat is going to require fewer resources than cultivated meat. Plant-based meat is likely to be healthier, so it's going to have less fat and less saturated fat, some fiber, no cholesterol, so it's probably an all-around better product. A lot of people really want to eat meat, and a lot of people are going to continue to want to eat meat, so from an impact standpoint, I think cultivated meat could completely replace industrial animal meat. Plant-based meat seems unlikely to achieve that. In developing economies, there probably are things we need to address until we solve hunger and malnutrition, which hopefully we'll solve even before plant-based meat and cultivated meat become the norm. As long as we have hunger and malnutrition, cultivated meat is probably going to pack a more powerful health punch than plant-based meat for those communities.

SPENCER: Is the idea that cultivated meat, in theory, could just be a straight-up one-to-one replacement for meat in a way that plant-based meat probably will never quite be?

BRUCE: Yeah, that's exactly right. The really great thing about cultivated meat is that it's just way safer. Tens of millions of food poisonings every single year, thousands of people dying from Campylobacter, Salmonella, E. coli, Listeria, all of that goes away. The USDA and FDA have a hundred different veterinary drugs that can be at low levels in meat, including things like ivermectin and ractopamine. All of those drug residues go away, the antibiotic residues go away. If it's seafood, the mercury, the dioxins, the microplastics, all of that goes away. You literally just have the exact same product, but without all of the contamination, without the drug residues. It's just a healthier, safer product with a fraction of all of those external costs and no cruelty to animals. For people that really love meat, like Robert F. Kennedy Jr. and Joe Rogans, cultivated meat is probably going to be necessary for them to be enthusiastic about it.

SPENCER: The concept there is that you just need a small number of meat cells one time, and then you just grow all the meat you could ever want from that. Although you do need animals involved in the process, it's very few and just sort of a one-off.

BRUCE: Yeah, the jury's still a little bit out on cell immortalization. If you're willing to do genetic engineering, then yes, everything you just said is absolutely true. If you're not willing to do genetic engineering, there are people who think spontaneous immortalization without genetic engineering will get us where we need to go, and people are a lot more optimistic about that than they were 10 years ago. It was a really spirited debate, but nobody had really tried to do cell immortalization without genetic engineering, and it turns out it's looking like it is not as difficult as people were predicting. If you look at European cultivated meat producers, they are expecting that there's going to be a small number of live animals kept in sanctuary-level conditions to continue to be donors of the cells over time.

SPENCER: But it would be a very tiny number compared to the amount of meat produced. We're saying one animal for every animal that's eaten.

BRUCE: Yeah, no, that's exactly right. It could literally be farm sanctuaries, and for something like chicken meat, you can literally use a fertilized egg. It could be a farm sanctuary, and it's just animals leading their lives. Then occasionally you take an egg and get a small sample, and that produces meat for millions of people.

SPENCER: What's the way to visualize this? Is it a kind of brewery, or you've got these giant vats, and then somehow the vats are being stirred and the cells are growing or something?

BRUCE: That is exactly what it is. Yeah, and if anybody wants to look at it, you can Google it, go to Upside Foods, probably just UpsideFoods.com, go to their website or go to Vow Foods' website, and you can actually see them producing meat. One of the things both those companies like to talk about is they're producing it with glass walls; they've got nothing to hide. That's not happening in modern slaughterhouses. But yeah, it looks like a beer brewery, and you can imagine a world where meat is made by friendly neighborhood meat breweries.

SPENCER: It's so interesting how some people react really negatively to things that seem unnatural. They're like, "Oh, that's not natural, it's sort of impure." Then you look at slaughterhouses, and you're like, "Oh my god, do you think that's better? Have you actually thought about where meat comes from?" I do think a lot of people have that instinct that meat is following the natural order, and something like cultivated cells isn't.

BRUCE: Yeah, I think that's true, although interestingly, and probably counterintuitively, it's the people who eat the least meat who have that ick reaction to cultivated meat, and the people who eat the most meat are very enthusiastic about cultivated meat. One of my key challenges to people who think there's going to be an adoption challenge here is to imagine the year is 1940 and everybody gets their meat from their neighbor or somebody up the road. Then somebody comes along and says, "Actually, what we need to do is cram 50,000 chickens into sheds, and they'd all die. So, we need to use human-relevant antibiotics to keep them alive and growing." They would basically explain industrial animal farming and industrial slaughterhouses, and obviously, people would revolt. Nobody's ever going to eat that. We want to know our farmer; we want to be able to walk up...

SPENCER: We don't want these mutant friggin' chickens that grow to be a 600-pound baby.

BRUCE: Exactly. And yet that is 99% of meat in developed economies, and that's because what people really want is delicious and affordable. The thing about cultivated meat is it will be consistent in a way that makes it more delicious consistently than what it's replacing, because it requires so many fewer stages of production, so many fewer inputs. We should be able to make it less expensively, and this will just become how industrial animal meat is produced. And hey, it's safer, it's more pure, et cetera. I think we'll have lots and lots of early adopters, and then all of the people who have qualms about production methods will get on board once they see the social proofing that you mentioned earlier, once they see everybody else consuming it, and they really think about the health benefits, the safety benefits for them and their families. This will just become neat.

SPENCER: I've been hearing about cultivated meat for quite a few years now, and it seemed like a really exciting technology. People would talk about the cost coming down really fast, and then you'd even see these tests where there'd be some kind of demonstration where people would get to try it. What's happened with it? It feels like you just stopped hearing about it the same way.

BRUCE: Well, maybe the costs are down since the first burger 13 years ago, in August of 2013. Costs are down by a factor of 100,000, so costs are down by 99.999%, and they continue to fall. Six years ago, there was no government funding for alternative meat R&D or scaling, other than Israel and Singapore, which were funding their startups. They were funding the sort of innovation ecosystem, but they weren't funding any university research six years ago. Now more than 30 governments are funding and incentivizing alternative meat production, hundreds of millions of pounds in the UK, lots of development in places like South Korea, Switzerland, China, Denmark, the Netherlands, quite a bit in the US, Canada as well, and countries all over the world. At the end of 2020, there had been 24 peer-reviewed science journals on cultivated meat throughout the end of 2020, and in 2021, there were 34 in that year alone, significantly more than in all of time before that. It's gone up and up, and in 2024, there were 150 peer-reviewed articles focused on the science of cultivated meat, and it just keeps going up because government funding around the world continues to increase. The thing to say about the government funding is it has nothing to do with the issues we've been talking about, the harms of the meat industry. It has to do with the economic opportunity of making meat in a far more efficient and safer way, as well as the food security and food systems resilience benefits of shifting in this direction. The current way that we produce meat, with all those extra stages of production, in addition to being inefficient, also adds to the fragility of the system and the meat industry itself. Governments would love to see us making meat in these new, better, safer ways.

SPENCER: So, that sounds incredibly promising. Are we still on an exponential falling price curve, or has it kind of leveled off?

BRUCE: It hasn't leveled off; it continues to go down. The resources going into it continue to go up, and the prices continue to go down. It's almost certainly following Wright's law, which says that for every doubling of production, the price of something falls by a certain percentage. For solar energy, every doubling of production, the price falls by about 20%. It takes longer and longer for that doubling to happen, so it's not falling quite as quickly as it was in the earliest days, when you could double in six months, but the price does continue to come down. When I was writing the book, I started by interviewing 25 plant-based meat scientists and 25 cultivated meat scientists, asking whether it would be possible to achieve price and taste parity for the cheapest versions of meat, such as fish sticks and chicken nuggets, on the cultivated meat side and the plant-based meat side. Everybody pointed to first principles and said obviously, if something is going to require one-ninth of the resources of something else, or a third of the resources of something else, unless there's some sort of physical scientific principle that makes a task insurmountable, we should be able to achieve price and taste parity on plant-based meat. It seems absolutely clear we'll be able to get there on cultivated meat. People said up until five or six years ago we weren't absolutely sure. Now it seems really likely. We're still not absolutely sure, but it seems more and more likely with each passing year.

SPENCER: For the easiest to produce cultivated meat, I don't know whether that's ground beef or ground chicken or something like that, what's the current price relative to the regular meat product?

BRUCE: For beef, for a burger, the cost of production is roughly double, although that hides the ball a little bit, because it's roughly double, but they haven't factored in the capex costs that are going to be required to really ramp up production once they are seriously commercializing.

SPENCER: So that's a couple, that's close. That's actually surprising to me, it's that close.

BRUCE: Yeah, it's really close, and it's interesting to me. I talk in the book about the first time I ever had cultivated meat, Uma Valeti, who is one of the two sorts of fathers of cultivated meat, alongside Mark Post, who did that burger in 2013. They're both medical doctors. Uma flew from California to New York City to feed Jack Welch, Suzy Welch, and me cultivated meat in Jack and Suzy's kitchen. Jack Welch, the former GE CEO — and all he could afford for people he wanted to invest in this company, be excited about his company, helped to mentor him — we each got about a quarter of a chicken nugget, and I think it cost many thousands of dollars. Flash forward eight or nine years, and they're serving 200 people at the TED Countdown, TED's Climate Conference for my book party at Upside Foods. It was unlimited cultivated meat all people could eat, and that's a nine-year difference, well, eight years for the TED Countdown, and nine years from eating that cultivated meat to having the book party, so prices and availability have really just plummeted, and historically, nine or 10 years is kind of nothing.

SPENCER: Is there any reason to think that as the price gets to the level of regular meat, it will stop there, or should we expect it to just blow past regular meat and suddenly become a fifth the price, a tenth the price of regular meat?

BRUCE: Maybe not a fifth or a tenth the price, but yes, because it requires so much land, because it requires far fewer inputs, it should certainly not stop. There's going to come a point at which it's going to level off, but that will certainly be well below, or our expectation is that it will be well below the current price of meat.

SPENCER: Is there any way it's inferior to the regular meat product? My understanding is there can be difficulties around getting the right texture or the marbling, but maybe that doesn't apply for chicken nuggets.

BRUCE: Yeah, it definitely doesn't apply for chicken nuggets or for burgers. It's just a science challenge. Chapter eight of the book is all about the nature of innovation and the fact that nothing is perfect or cost competitive at the earliest iterations. Over time, the science and engineering challenges are tackled. Yes, getting to price and taste parity is going to be a challenge. Getting there is not self-executing. You could easily imagine the world just deciding to walk away; that could have happened with solar, could have happened with EVs, could have happened with penicillin, with mRNA, it could happen here. The conclusion of the book is basically that this is not self-executing; we need you with a bunch of unsolicited career advice for people who want to get involved.

SPENCER: All right, but it does seem like it's on the way. What's your best guess? Obviously, things are hard to estimate, but when do you think, "I'll be in New York City, I will be able to go and for the price of regular meat by cultivated meat?"

BRUCE: I'm hopeful that we'll get there in the next 10 to 15 years. It could be a lot quicker. If the folks at Anthropic decide they're going to devote part of their life sciences division to solving the R&D and engineering challenges of cultivated meat, it could be pretty fast. If Elon Musk decided, I'm just going to hire the best tissue engineers and the best chemical engineers to make this happen, in addition to Starlink, SpaceX, and Tesla, I am also going to revolutionize meat production, he could probably do it pretty fast. Similarly, a country like China or a country like South Korea, on our current trajectory, I think we are fairly likely to get there in 10 or 15 years, but if some government or some billionaire gets involved, that could probably happen a lot faster.

SPENCER: Switch to talking about plant-based meat. It seems plant-based meat underwent a really interesting trajectory, where suddenly, at least from my point of view, maybe this was sort of hidden from people like myself who weren't paying too much attention. There seemed to be suddenly tons of innovation where you go from having these old-school companies producing okay imitations to suddenly having Impossible Foods and Beyond Meat with much better imitation meat products. They're much closer to the real thing, and wow, that's really amazing — what happened there?

BRUCE: I think a lot of things happened there. For one thing, you had Impossible and Beyond, and then you had all of these copycats. Well, they purported to be copycats. I've got a section of the book that's titled, I think, something like, "You're not the next Impossible, you're the next Gardenburger." There was a lot of VC enthusiasm, a lot of companies that came along, and they had these pitch decks, and they said, "We're the next Impossible," and they didn't have a chief science officer, they didn't have a meaningful R&D budget. It's worth remembering it took Pat Brown, who is an incredibly impressive scientist, tenured professor of chemical engineering, also a medical doctor at Stanford University, five years and tens of millions of dollars to come up with the first version of the Impossible Burger. Then you had all of these companies that came along and claimed to be the next Impossible, and they didn't even have an R&D budget. Some of them claimed to be the next Impossible, but better, because they were going to use ancient ingredients and clean labels, and they really were the next Gardenburger. I think a lot of the enthusiasm sort of chilled because a lot of the follow-on companies were posing. One of the things I talk about in the book is just how challenging it is to get plant fats and proteins to behave like animal fats and proteins. We have as many tissue engineers as there are in the world. They have basically the right skill set for cultivated meat, but the only reason to try to get plant fats and proteins to behave like animal fats and proteins is if you want to do plant-based meat, and vanishingly few people have been focused on that. If the amount of money that was initially coming in with Impossible and Beyond had continued, and if the R&D had continued, I think the products would have continued to get better. Five years ago, there was only one plant-based meat product that meat eaters liked; it was the Impossible Burger. It wasn't quite to parity, but it was close. Now we have half a dozen, four of them are Impossible products, but we haven't had the robust competition that we've seen on the cultivated meat side. We also haven't had the companies that were solving key challenges with a view towards solving them for all of the companies. There are a bunch of bioreactor design companies in cultivated meat, a bunch of companies focused on sales, a bunch of companies focused on media, a bunch of companies focused on each of the things, and they want to be service companies for the entire cultivated meat sector. On the plant-based side, all of the companies have to be both R&D companies and consumer packaged goods companies selling their products. Either one of those is going to be very hard, and you're not going to solve a problem you're not trying to solve. If you don't have an R&D budget, if you're not trying to scale to reach price and taste parity, you're not going to reach price and taste parity, and most companies really just aren't even trying.

SPENCER: Why is the structure of those two fields so different? Is it because of the more government funding in cultivated meat?

BRUCE: No, I think it's because everybody in cultivated meat, nobody in cultivated meat was coming from food. Everybody in cultivated meat was in tissue engineering, therapeutics, chemical engineering, mechanical engineering, or biotechnology, or something like that. Everybody understands that the assignment is to make the exact same meat, but cleaner and less expensive. On the plant-based meat side, I think there is just the idea that you think you know what's true about this, and the challenge of getting people to wrap their minds around the idea that the challenge is price and taste parity turns out to be really hard. A lot of the people who are working in this field are very committed to the older way of thinking about it, which is explicitly that these products are for vegetarians, vegans, and meat reducers, not for meat eaters. There's a really powerful profile of Pat Brown in The New Yorker by a guy named Tad Friend, I think, in 2019, and he was saying everybody else focused on, they say they're focused on plant-based meat, but they're focused on veggie burgers. I think he was right about that, and getting people to update how they think about the challenge has been a lot harder than we would have expected. At GFI, we're redoubling our efforts on this to reach out to more and more scientists and put the challenge of price and taste parity for plant-based meats firmly onto the agenda, but it has been harder than we would have expected.

SPENCER: So, is it fair to say that with the kind of new technology from Impossible, people got really excited about it? The industry got tons of VC funding, it created this whole startup ecosystem, but most of them weren't doing any R&D, they were just trying to rush their product to market and refocus more on the brand side, and then that caused a kind of collapse in the funding.

BRUCE: Yes, I think that's right. I think Beyond IPO, which really assumed that their growth in sales would continue at the same rate that it had been continuing, but their products didn't get sufficiently better, and they didn't come down sufficiently in price. The amount of money that your average meat eater is willing to pay for plant-based meat, and the premium they're willing to pay is precisely zero, and the amount they're willing to sacrifice from a taste parity standpoint is also precisely zero. So, Beyond made a lot of progress, Impossible made a lot of progress, but they were marketing their products and doing R&D; both those things are hard, and they are closer to cultivated meat companies than they are, I think, to veggie. They are closer to cultivated meat companies than I guess people really expected. It's going to be a challenge to bring down prices. It's going to be more of a challenge than I think most people expected to get to taste parity, and until you do that, you're not going to get the level of replacement you need to really be as profitable as was the expectation when the money started flowing originally.

SPENCER: Were people misled to some extent because people were excited to try this new product, but that didn't actually mean that people were willing to continue buying it month after month?

BRUCE: I don't think a lot of people expected average consumers to buy it month after month if it came at a price premium and wasn't good enough, but I do think people had unreasonable expectations. I don't think unreasonable expectations about taste parity, like the Beyond Burger and the Impossible Burger, were so much better than what had come before, and I think the expectation was that they would get to taste parity more quickly and easily than turned out to be possible. I think people just mispredicted what it's going to require to scale. People may have thought the sort of first principles argument would get us to price and taste parity quicker than seemed likely. I will say from the beginning of 2019, what GFI has been saying is that these products are not going to succeed to a significant mission standpoint until we have significant government funding to help them scale and to help them get to taste parity. The government funding didn't start flowing until the end of 2020, but it has been the number one thing we have been focused on since 2018 really, and we have been saying since at least the beginning of 2019 — I went back and listened to a bunch of podcasts to see what we were saying — we have been saying, "Without significant government funding for R&D, without significant government funding to scale, we're going to have vanishingly few products. It's going to take a really long time," which is my actual quote from an Ezra Klein article in April of 2021. My TED talk at the beginning of 2019 was all about the need for government funding, and that's also what we've been talking about in podcasts, but I think a lot of the VC money kind of expected it to be a lot easier than it turned out to be and thought startups in the private sector could solve it, but they really just were not thinking about the capex costs that were going to be required to scale.

SPENCER: There is really good research happening now to try to go from impossible to whatever the next generation is going to be.

BRUCE: There's a tremendous amount of really good research on the cultivated meat side. In the last five years, David Kaplan, who was chair of the Biomedical Engineering department at Tufts and is now a university professor, which is the highest level of professor at Tufts, runs their cultivated meat program. He says he's addressed every single critical technology element in cultivated meat over the last five years. Stuff we thought was going to be really challenging turned out to be less challenging than expected, so there is tremendous optimism on the cultivated meat side. There is also a lot of really good work happening on the plant-based meat side, and governments are funding that more and more. One of the things I say in the book, though, is that the plant-based meat science and engineering challenge is probably easier than the cultivated meat science and engineering challenge. But we don't have the B2B companies; we have far fewer scientists focused on it. There continues to be tremendous misdirection, so we're trying to solve those things and generate the same sort of excitement. It has been interesting that people who are in food or in plant biology, or at Massachusetts Institute of Technology or University of California at Davis, the people who are in food, and the people who you would think would be very enthusiastic about focusing on this, have been focusing on other things, which are good, but not this. It has been surprisingly more challenging to get lots of people fired up about cultivated meat. So, cultivated meat, the science and engineering challenges may be harder, but we've got a lot more people focused on them. So, cultivated meat may win anyway.

SPENCER: Is it reasonable to expect that Impossible Foods will be able to make further significant progress, or is that just not too likely at this point?

BRUCE: I think they're both going to make further significant progress, for sure. They're both still focused on the right things. The scaling challenge is very real, and it's kind of a chicken and egg thing. You need to scale to bring down your prices, but you can't bring down your prices until you scale. In the book, I have a line that's something like I think that plant-based meat and cultivated meat at price and taste parity is inevitable eventually, but the word eventually is doing a ton of work in that sentence. We see GFI's goal as basically facilitating our global battle cry that governments should be funding science and engineering, and should be incentivizing and helping companies to scale up. As I mentioned six years ago, it was zero; now it's more than 30 companies and countries, and it goes up every single year. We remain cautiously optimistic, and the question is, "How do we get to this sort of tipping point moment?" I think a lot about automobiles; 500 companies failed in the first 10 years, between 1900 and 1910. Woodrow Wilson, in 1906, when he was president of Princeton University, said automobiles will never be more than a plaything for the idle rich. The reason he said that is that real cars were really hard to start. They were breaking down constantly. You basically had to be a mechanic to operate one, and there were not a lot of mechanics, and they were really expensive. Then, in 1908, Henry Ford invented the Model T, which solved those first two challenges and started the process of solving the price challenge. Twenty years later, automobiles became America's largest industry. Something similar happened with solar around 2017, and something similar happened with EVs also around 2017. What does it look like to get plant-based meat to the point at which they hit price and taste parity, and then they can shoot up the S curve? That is basically what GFI is focused on trying to facilitate. I think they eventually get there. We want to get them there as soon as possible because that's when the mission benefits start happening. Our number one goal is to convince governments to recognize the economic benefits of these technologies, as well as the food security benefits of these technologies, because that's why governments are funding, and governments could make it happen a lot more quickly.

SPENCER: I've seen some discussion in the news about labeling of these products and battles going back and forth between big food manufacturers and these companies. What's the current status of that? Is that actually a significant barrier to adoption, or is that just a side thing?

BRUCE: It's a significant barrier to adoption. It's not great, it's not ideal, but I also think until the products compete on price and taste, the labels are not going to be that important. Similarly, there have been some states that have banned the sale of cultivated meat. GFI lobbyists were able in Texas and Florida to get the original laws that banned cultivated meat, which also banned university research and state funding for R&D. We were able to get that pulled out of both of those bills. I don't think it's exactly much ado about nothing, but I don't think it's nearly as important as getting the products to taste and price parity. Once they get there, consumer demand and enthusiasm should make it possible for us to revoke those bills.

SPENCER: Have large meat companies tried to fight against these technologies, or could you imagine them doing the opposite, actually investing in them, thinking this might be the future? We want to make sure we don't miss out. We don't want to be replaced and not be part of that.

BRUCE: Yeah, so GFI operates in six areas of the world. One of those is Brazil, and our most important partner in Brazil is also the world's largest meat company, JBS. JBS has invested more in cultivated meat than any of the other meat companies. They also own Vegetarian Butcher, which is the most successful plant-based meat company in Europe. They also have a very successful plant-based meat company in Brazil. Their plant-based meat is very good. It's not Impossible level, but it's also a lot less expensive than Impossible, and it really is quite good. So, JBS, Tyson, and Cargill, which are the number two and number three meat companies in the world, have both invested in multiple cultivated meat companies and are enthusiastic. The meat industry is not enthusiastic about the fragility of the current meat production system, either. They don't have some dedication to the use of live animals. What they want to do is make profits selling meat to as many consumers as possible. Essentially, if that becomes plant-based meat or cultivated meat, they're here for it. If that were not true, our efforts with governments would be significantly stymied, and we'd be making no regulatory process progress at all. We're making quite a lot in a fairly short period of time. So, yeah, the meat industry, they don't own the animals, and they're not excited about all of the extra stages of production. If they can have even better profit margins because they can produce meat less expensively, they're enthusiastic about that as a concept.

SPENCER: What's the regulatory progress that you're making?

BRUCE: So, six years ago, right now, no cultivated meat product had been approved anywhere. The first approval was in Singapore, which is obviously super tiny, in December of 2020, so just under six years ago, and then there wasn't a second approval until April of 2023, so just a little over three years ago, the first two products were approved in the United States. Now we have a dozen products across five countries and significant progress in a bunch of other countries, including Korea, Japan, China, the UK, and other countries. So literally six years ago, no cultivated meat product had ever gone through a safety review and been approved for sale, and now we have a whole bunch, and we have a bunch of additional applications in, and I think we're going to see a lot more approvals over the next few years.

SPENCER: Before we wrap up, what would you like to leave the listener with from this conversation?

BRUCE: I guess there are two things. One is it looks incredibly promising — plant-based meat, and even more so cultivated meat at price and taste parity. And unless it happens, all of these harms get worse. So there really are just two things anybody's looking at: one is to convince people to eat less meat, and the other is to make meat from plants, or cultivated meat, cultivating meat from cells. Those are the only two things. There's not a third option, and unless one of those works, meat production skyrockets. We've been trying to convince people for decades. It's done a lot of good, but it hasn't changed the trajectory and is unlikely to, so we need to make this work, and we need to make it work as quickly as possible. For people who are concerned about animals, literally 2,500 animals per second could be saved by shifting this forward by a second. Then the second thing is it's not self-executing, so in the book I talk about things like penicillin and mRNA, talk quite a bit about solar and electric vehicles, and just the trajectory that got us from the penicillin story. Most people know Alexander Fleming discovered penicillin in 1929. It sat on a shelf until 1941. The circumstances that led to its development and deployment in 1941 required a lot of individual people to make the decisions that they made for that to have actually come to fruition. It could have been delayed another decade or more, but maybe even more importantly, Fleming, from 1929 to 1941, kept putting in grant applications and trying to get the money to develop penicillin, and he couldn't get the money to develop penicillin, and millions of lives could have been saved if people had made different choices earlier. The story of mRNA is even more remarkable. Katalin Karikó, who won the Nobel Prize for medicine in 2023, got no NSF money, ended up being denied tenure at the University of Pennsylvania, and eventually fired because she would not stop putting in these grant applications, and it really did require COVID to get mRNA developed. Individual people can make a massive positive difference by devoting themselves to this, and again, in the conclusion of the book, I walk through a bunch of examples of ways that people can plug in and maybe be the person that causes this to happen a decade earlier than it would otherwise happen.

SPENCER: Thank you for coming to the Clearer Thinking Podcast.

BRUCE: Thank you so much, Spencer. I'm really delighted to be here, and for people who want to find out more about the book or order it, the website is Meatbook.com.

SPENCER: I'll also put that in the show notes. Thanks, Bruce.

BRUCE: Thank you so much.