Hello!
Is everybody enjoying the conference?
Yeah, it's great.
Me Too.
Thank you very much for, for coming out.
Delighted to see so many people here.
So, I love meat.
I grew up in Oklahoma and among my friends
in high school, McDonald's Big Macs and Dairy
Queen Blizzards were pretty much a religion.
If the faith had a holy trinity, the Big Macs
and blizzards would be joined by pretty much
bacon-anything.
Then in 1987, I met this guy who blew my mind.
He told me he didn't eat meat.
Didn't eat meat?
I thought maybe he had a disease.
The idea of voluntarily not eating meat absolutely
did not register, and quite honestly it seemed
more than a little freakish.
Flash forward 30 years and as Rox just mentioned,
I now run an organization that ACE has said
is one of the top three charities for basically
helping animals, by moving people away from
eating the products of industrial animal agriculture.
So I was asked to share my story as a case
study in trying to do the most good.
I'll explain how I came to work on ending
factory farming, a few of the mistakes that
I made along the way and I'll talk about why
I think food technology is one of the most
effective ways of removing animals from the
equation and thereby helping animals not to
suffer.
So let's start with how I decided to make
it my mission to end factory farming.
The year is 1987.
I've just arrived in college and I have nothing
but time for the really big questions in life.
So Socrates' adage, "the unexamined life is
not worth living", Spoke to me.
It's a powerful concept and really most philosophy
of the last 2,500 years has basically been
a variation on that theme.
What does it look like to lead an examined
life?
So I arrived at campus at Cornell College
in Iowa, and I joined an organization called
Poverty Action Now.
At Poverty Action Now, we organized fasts
to raise money for Oxfam International and
we volunteered our weekends at a soup kitchen
in the big city, Des Moines.
The main organizer of the soup kitchen trips
gave me a book called Diet for a Small Planet
by Frances Moore Lappé.
And the book clocks in at about 500 pages,
but the cliff notes version is: Farm animals
have to eat, and they are extraordinarily
inefficient at turning the crops that we feed
to them into meat.
And this just makes intuitive sense.
So I weigh about 185 pounds.
If I do nothing but lay in bed watching reruns
of the Jerry Springer show, I'm going to burn
like 2,400 calories a day.
Except when something awesome is happening
on screen, I'm like "Jerry!
Jerry!", you know?
Then my caloric intake ticks up just a little
bit.
And that same sort of relationship is true
for farm animals.
Not that they had to have the bad taste or
the good good taste to watch Jerry Springer,
but that the vast majority of what you feed
to a chicken or a pig or a cow or a farmed
fish, the vast majority of what you feed to
them, they expend simply existing.
So Gandhi said probably 20 of the most powerful
things that were ever said.
One of the things that Gandhi said that had
a really powerful impact on me, he said, think
of the face of the poorest person you have
ever seen and ask yourself if the action you
contemplate will be of use to that person.
Think of the face of the poorest person you've
ever seen and ask yourself if the action you
contemplate will be of use to that person.
For me, the idea of cycling massive amounts
of crops through animals.
Well at that point it was 40 million people
dying every single year from starvation related
causes.
Hundreds of millions of people living in nutritional
deficit, just absolutely did not register,
and I went vegan immediately after reading
that book.
When I got out of college, I was so taken
with the soup kitchen work that I moved to
Washington DC and I joined a catholic worker
soup kitchen and the largest homeless shelter,
and the largest soup kitchen in Washington
DC.
So basically Matthew 25, I was feeding the
hungry, housing the homeless, like Jesus told
us to.
It was also decided I wanted to look like
Jesus.
Handsome devil.
At the homeless shelter, one of the other
people in the shelter gave me a book called
Christianity and the Rights of Animals by
an Anglican Priest and professor of theology
at Oxford University.
And the book puts its arguments into a faith
context, but it's really just about the nature
of the human relationship with other animals,
this sort of eternal concept that is applicable
to people of every religion or no religion
or whatever.
And the information that Linzey covered about
factory farming just totally blew me away.
I literally couldn't believe what was happening
on modern farms and what was happening in
modern slaughterhouses.
And after a couple years of conversations
with people and prayer and discussion with
my spiritual adviser, uh, in 1996, I decided
to shift my vocation from running a homeless
shelter and running a soup kitchen, and I
went to work full time on behalf of animals,
at people for the ethical treatment, at People
for the Ethical Treatment of Animals.
You know, people in EA, we get a fair amount
of crap for putting philanthropy up to the
tender mercies of cost/benefit analysis.
But even as a caricature, I think that's not
particularly fair.
I think a lot of people follow paths that
were similar to mine, where there isn't actually
that much difference between following our
heads and following our hearts.
I found the arguments against factory farming
compelling: the harm to the environment, the
harm to the global poor, the harm to animals,
but I probably wouldn't have gotten involved
if the arguments were not also compelling
to me on an emotional level and compelling
in a spiritual level.
So you could either say that I was maximizing
the expected utility of my marginal efforts
relative to the counterfactual, or you could
say I was honoring my duty as a Catholic to
care for the least of these that Jesus talks
about in Matthew 25.
And either way, you'd be right.
So after I decided what to work on next, I
had to figure out how to achieve the change
that I wanted to see.
And I started by appealing to people's moral
values.
I figured it should be easy to convince people
to stop eating animals because most people
claim to care about the environment, they
claim to care about the global poor, they
claim to care about animals.
Ninety-five percent of people, according to
Gallup, want to see animals protected from
abuse.
But I quickly realized that simple moral arguments
might not be enough.
So I started piling on the facts.
The more numbers and authorities, the better.
So here are my go-to facts.
The first one is that meat is a huge contributor
to climate change.
So most people, when they think about climate
change, they think about transportation.
So the solution is either to drive less or
to get a hybrid, but according to the United
Nations, more climate change is attributable
to animal agriculture than to all of the planes
and trains and cars, and then to all forms
of transportation combined.
On a per-calorie basis, the least climate
change inducing meat is chicken.
And yet chicken causes 40 times as much climate
change on a per protein calorie basis when
compared to legumes like soy and peas, the
primary alternatives for people are shifting
away from eating meat.
Fact two, is the basic inefficiency.
Most people in society are very concerned
about food waste.
They see food waste as a moral issue.
So who here is concerned about food waste?
Yeah, that's true in every audience.
Every time I ask that question, every hand
goes up.
And we should be concerned about food waste,
about 40 percent of all of the food that's
produced in the West, about 40 percent of
it is literally thrown away.
And yet, if you're looking at this chart,
what you're seeing is that the basic physiology
of animals, the basic inefficiency of growing
crops to feed them to animals so that we can
eat animals, means that you're talking about
700 percent food waste for farmed fish.
Eight hundred percent food waste for chickens.
Nine hundred percent food waste for pigs.
It takes eight calories into a farmed fish
to get one calorie back out, nine calories
into a chicken, 10 calories into a pig to
get one calorie back out.
We're not personally throwing away all of
those crops, but we may as well be.
That's the relationship that we're entering
into.
Fact three: The world is threatened by the
widespread use of antibiotics on these disease-ridden
factory farms.
According to a report from the UK government,
antibiotic resistance is slated to cost to
the global economy, $100 trillion by 2050,
and the threat to the human race from super
bugs is greater than the threat from climate
change.
And then finally fact four: Chickens' upper
bodies now grow at 600 percent the rate that
they would naturally.
Poultry researchers at the University of Arkansas
said that if a human baby grow as quickly
as a modern broiler chicken, she would weigh
more than 600 pounds by the time she was two
months old.
Imagine that.
600 pounds by the time she was two months
old.
The animals are living in unmitigated misery,
all of them for their entire lives.
So those are the facts.
And shockingly, hurling facts at people
didn't convince everybody to immediately go
vegan.
Honestly, when I adopted a vegan diet in 1987,
and I read Diet for a Small Planet and I just
thought, I just need to tell everybody this
and everybody is going to go vegan of course,
and then I went to work at PETA in 1996 and
I thought everybody loves animals.
All we really have to do, we don't have to
win an argument with a meat eater.
All we have to do is show people what's happening
and obviously people will want to align their
values and their actions.
Everybody's going to go vegan.
We just need to tell them, and again, it didn't
happen.
What I've come to understand is that the vast
majority of people are not going to radically
change their diet on the basis of really anything
other than price, taste and convenience.
Maybe health.
There appears to be something in human nature.
I don't know if it's emotion or physiology
or biology or psychology.
I don't know what it is, but the vast majority
of people just aren't that interested in changing
their diet, and they're not interested in
hearing from me about why they should change
their diet.
So the foremost think tank in Europe, it's
called Chatham House and a couple of years
ago, Chatham House released a report.
They said the governments of the world are
not going to be able to meet their obligations
under the Paris Climate Agreement unless they
radically decrease the amount of meat that
their populations are consuming.
It's literally a scientific impossibility
that we keep climate change under two degrees
Celsius by 2050 unless meat consumption goes
down.
And Chatham House's solution was that the
governments of the world should educate their
populations and convince people that they
should eat less meat, in order to do their
part in the battle against climate change.
The Chinese government pledged to do just
that in 2015 or 2016, the Chinese government
said we're going to cut meat consumption in
China per capita in half by 2030, as the Chinese
response to climate change.
And while I certainly am excited about and
impressed by the optimism of Chatham House
and the Chinese, uh, I think most of us probably
would have predicted what's happened in China
since China made that pledge.
Meat consumption is going like this.
It's skyrocketing.
As people get wealthier, they just eat more
meat.
So at Good Food Institute, though, we think
we have found a solution.
Ben and Jerry's vegan ice cream.
Who here likes Ben and Jerry's?
Yeah, we've got unanimity for Ben and Jerry's,
and everybody in this room when I said who
likes Ben and Jerry's, you know, probably
everybody just thought Ben and Jerry's is
delicious.
Right?
That was the main thing that you thought.
If it were too expensive, if it was like,
you know, $10 or $15 a pint, probably a lot
of you would have hesitated before you put
your hands up.
Don't want to spend that much money for ice
cream.
If you didn't know where to find it, if I
put some plant-based ice cream from Europe
up here or something, you'd be going, I'm
not really sure what that is.
And that reaction really does track what consumer
researchers find.
They find that the three factors that dictate
consumer choice for literally 100 percent
of people in the developed world: it's price,
it's taste, it's convenience.
And when they do weighting.
So when they basically go for the things that
are the top three for sort of everybody: price,
taste and convenience are the only things
that go above zero in terms of what dictates
consumer choice.
So some people do care about health, which
is another talk all on its own, the degree
to which people say they care about health
and then buy unhealthy food.
And I think we can see that in this room when
I said, who here likes Ben and Jerry's?
Everybody put up their hand, and nobody thought
that's where I'm going to get anything healthy.
Like nobody thought that Ben and Jerry's was
a health food.
So the question is how do we apply the Ben
and Jerry's trifecta to the problem of industrial
animal agriculture and the solution is we
replicate meat from plants and we do clean
meat, and I'm going to talk just a little
bit about both those things.
So this is plant based sausage.
This is plant based chicken.
This is plant based burgers.
This is a beyond burger from TGI Friday's.
Bill Gates wrote a blog about plant-based
meat.
He called it the future of food.
So after he had this, Beyond Meat's plant-based
chicken, Bill Gates tried it and he said what
I just tasted was not just a clever meat substitute,
what I just tasted was the future of food
and he wrote a blog called the future of food,
and he said that plant-based meat was the
future of food because of the capacity of
plant-based meat to bio-mimic meat, but without
all of the harms.
So all of us, everybody who likes meat just
continues to eat products that are delicious,
that are convenient, that are affordable,
the exact same factors that we have been using
to figure out what we're going to eat up until
now - we just keep doing that.
But the nature of the meat becomes better.
So I'm convinced that changing the way that
we make meat is the solution to factory farming.
But to be fair, I imagine some people are
thinking yeah, well you were wrong every other
time.
Why are you convinced now?
And it's true, I was both convinced and wrong
previously as well.
And the first thing is that it's been done
before.
So, plant based milk: think about soy milk
and almond milk.
When I adopted a vegan diet in 1987, soy milk
and almond milk, they were not in any grocery
stores.
They were not in any coffee shops.
If you did track down, a carton, a dusty carton
of the stuff in the sort of nether regions
of the, you know, dirty health food store,
the stuff generally tasted pretty bad, and
it was expensive.
And now, plant based milk, a lot of people
like it more, it actually costs more and it's
gotten up to 10 percent of the milk market.
We do 10 percent with plant-based meat, that's
10 percent less of the climate change, 10
percent less of the inefficiency.
It's more than a billion animals just in the
United States who are taken out of industrial
animal farming.
But Bill Gates didn't call plant-based meat,
the future of food because he thinks we're
going to get to 10 percent.
He called it the future of food because plant-based
meat, because it is so much more efficient.
It will be able to taste the same and cost
less, and it will be 50, 60, 70 percent.
But for people who simply want to eat real
meat, for people who are not going to eat
plant-based meat... and I will tell you, even
at someplace like Harvard Medical School,
I'm talking to somebody who's going to be
working on clean meat at Harvard Medical School,
and he's like, yeah, I'm not gonna eat that.
There are a surprising number of people who
just want to eat real meat and for those,
for the people who want to eat real meat,
we have clean meat.
And clean meat, I hope a lot of you went to
Natalie and Marie's session.
If not, watch the video.
It's fascinating.
But clean meat is basically just real meat
grown directly from cells and it's called
clean meat mostly as a nod to clean energy.
So clean energy is energy that's better for
the environment.
Clean meat is meat that's better for the environment.
It's also just cleaner.
It doesn't have the same bacterial contamination.
It doesn't have the heavy metals.
If it's clean meat fish, it doesn't have the
mercury, and so on.
And this is a clean meat meat ball.
Here is some clean meat duck.
And this is what clean meat will look like
at scale.
It's basically your friendly neighborhood
meat brewery.
That's where meat is going to come from and
I'll spare you the photos of the industrial
farm and the industrial slaughterhouse.
But suffice it to say the clean meat brewery
is a lot nicer to look at.
And so my third, and that brings me to my
third reason for optimism and that is that
big money agrees that people whose job is
to figure out what the next big tech thing
is going to be, they're all in with plant
based meat and clean meat.
So, it's not going to surprise you to learn
that people like Sergey Brin and Bill Gates
and Richard Branson, they are investing in
and singing the song of the promise of these
technologies.
Also Google Ventures, DFJ, Kleiner Perkins,
a lot of the top venture capital funds in
Silicon Valley.
What's more surprising is the degree to which
the meat industry agrees.
So Tyson Foods, which is by far the largest
meat producer in the United States.
About two years ago, they launched Tyson New
Ventures, their venture capital fund, and
three of their first four investments: their
first investment was beyond meat.
The plant based meat that got Bill Gates so
excited.
Their third investment was Memphis Meats,
the first of the clean meat companies.
And their fourth investment was an Israeli
clean meat company called Future Meat Technologies.
Not just Tyson, but Cargill has invested in
Memphis Meats.
They're the third largest of the meat producers
in the United States.
PHW Group, which is the largest chicken producer
in Canada.
When Tyson invested, their CEO, he said, plant
protein is growing faster than animal protein.
For us, we want to be where the consumer is.
Pretty much all of the corporate executives
who GFI talks with, all of the foundations,
all of the government, policymakers and regulators,
people are excited about the fact that plant
based meat and clean meat are so much more
efficient, which means that as they scale
up, they will taste the same and they will
cost less.
But folks are also really, really excited
about the capacity of plant-based meat and
clean meat to solve some of the really big
global problems.
So Eric Schmidt, who is the former CEO at
Google, a couple of years ago, he was at the
Milken Global Summit and he was asked to reflect
on half a dozen tech innovations that he thinks
will improve life for humanity by a factor
of at least tenfold in the fairly near future.
And this is Eric Schmidt, so he's a tech guy.
So he talked about mostly things you would
expect.
He talked about 3D printers for infrastructure.
He talked about watches that know you're sick
before you know you're sick.
But the first thing Eric talked about, he
talked about plant-based meat.
And the reason Eric is so excited about plant-based
meat is that it solves two of humanity's biggest
questions.
The first is how do we feed 9.7 billion people
by 2050?
And the second is, what do we do about climate
change?
He called it nerds over cattle.
Richard Branson also super excited.
He predicted in 30 years all meat will be
either plant-based meat or clean meat.
If you want, um, it shouldn't just be the
venture capitalists though.
It shouldn't just be the corporations.
It shouldn't just be the private sector.
One of the things that GFI is really focused
on is getting more and more government money
into this space, because obviously this is
something that solves problems that governments
recognize that they have.
My concluding lessons, for this talk: if you
want to explore a career in plant-based or
clean meat, there are a lot of ways to do
it that don't involve half a dozen years of
soup kitchen work.
My basic advice, the three main pieces of
advice are if you can go into science, please
go into science.
One of the really big obstacles at this point,
is the tissue engineers and the synthetic
biologists and biochemists to actually people
these companies, if you're going the business
route, look for experience that will make
you invaluable.
Simply applying to do a job that somebody
else is going to do is probably not the best
use of your talents.
Go into food.
I was talking to somebody yesterday who majored
in Chinese Studies.
He's fluent in Mandarin, and he's thinking
about going to China and actually getting
a job in the food industry in China.
I mean, that is a job that if he doesn't do
it, somebody with his sensibilities isn't
going to do it.
Absolutely invaluable.
And if you decide to make the world a better
place in some other way, four other take homes
that apply just across EA: the first one is
you don't have to choose between your head
and your heart.
Diving deeply into critical research is part
and parcel of profoundly caring about the
world and its inhabitants.
The second is, accept that we might not make
the right choice the first time.
If you're doing something and it's not working,
don't be afraid to admit you're wrong and
try something else.
The third is keep an eye out for unconventional
partners.
Hardcore vegan, soup kitchen running, Jesus
bearded me would have never guessed that,
twenty years later, I'd be friends with people
from Tyson and Cargill, and working with them
to make the world a better place.
And then finally look for win/win.
If you can figure out a solution to a problem
that doesn't require a radical change in how
people view the world, that's going to help.
So for me, I thought my goal was to convince
everybody to see the world the way that I
did.
It turned out it's a lot easier to change
the world than to change people's ideology.
So just like freezer-made ice has replaced
natural ice from lakes, and cars have replaced
horses and buggies as our primary means of
travel, I'm convinced that plant based and
clean meat can and will replace the products
of industrial animal agriculture.
That's why I went from agitator to innovator.
And that's my case study in EA career choice.
Thank you.
We have time for a few questions.
I have office hours in about 30 minutes, if
anybody wants to chat more.
Great.
We'll take a couple of questions now and then,
yeah, feel free to speak with him one on one.
Um, a lot of questions from the audience.
Someone said, you mentioned that a significant
proportion of people won't eat plant-based
meat because they want real meat.
What makes you think that they'd be happy
with clean meat then?
Because it has associations with weird technology,
GMOs, chemicals, that sort of thing.
Yeah.
This has been fascinating.
So, especially when GFI first started and
I was the only, I was one of two employees
- I was the only employee who was sort of
the face of GFI.
I went around and I spoke at Harvard and Stanford
and MIT and all of these schools and I would,
I would introduce people to this is plant-based
meat and clean meat.
And at the end they were thoroughly primed,
right?
And I would say who here, if plant-based meat
costs less than industrial animal meat tasted
exactly the same, who will switch over all
of your meat eating.
And they were super primed.
So the numbers were pretty good.
And I know that's probably, you know, may
or may not be true.
But the thing that I found again and again
and again was that literally 100 percent of
people raised their hand for clean meat.
Whereas it was usually somewhere on the order
of like 50 to 70 percent for plant based meat.
And this has been replicated in conversation
after conversation after conversation.
People right now, they eat meat despite how
it's produced.
They don't eat meat because of how it's produced.
So when you have meat produced in industrial
animal agriculture, which 100 percent of people
are opposed to, and they eat it anyway, or
you talk about how clean meat is produced.
I mean, I think everybody, everybody switches,
especially when the price points reach equivalency.
Great.
Very cool.
Sort of different angle.
Someone asked what kind of potential or progress
you see in the food service industry, like
supplying prisons, hospitals and schools for
plant-based entrepreneurs.
Is it possible to provide plant based meal
services at price parity in this market?
Not yet, for plant based meat.
Yes, for beans and rice are less expensive
than meat.
And USDA provides, you know, beans and rice
likely provide meat for free to prisons.
So you can get to price parity.
I mean, I guess one thing for all of the questions,
so the Good Food Institute exists to basically
help the world make this transition.
Anybody who in this room who was interested
in exploring going in the direction of plant-based
meat and clean meat, like if you have a question
like this, there are multiple people at GFI
whose job it is to work with you.
So reach out to us if you want to get involved.
If you want to explore your career choice,
if you want to brainstorm what might be the
best use of your time, it is literally GFI's
role.
It's our mission to take that call and be
sort of at your disposal for these sorts of
conversations.
So don't look at it as like an imposition.
We want you to call us.
We want you to email, and we will be thrilled
to brainstorm what your path should be and
how you can open markets into schools and
prisons.
We actually do have a whitepaper on the, on
the schools issue,
and how plant-based entrepreneurs can get
into schools. And we're working on similar
whitepapers.
Great.
And final question we have from an audience
member.
It seemed like they were pretty convinced,
but they wanted to know how you might convince
other EAs to join your cause over other things
they might be prioritizing.
Yeah, I mean, I think EA does a pretty good
job of sort of figuring out what the metric
should be.
I mean, obviously is it important, is it neglected,
is tractable and I think the cause areas that
Open Philanthropy and the Centre for Effective
Altruism have landed on are... they resonate
with me as the right cause areas.
So I'm not super excited about the idea of
trying to convince somebody that, you know,
if they've picked one of those cause areas,
they should pick our cause area.
I do think we measure up nicely.
It is critically important.
It's literally 9 billion land animals and
even more sea animals just in the United States
every single year.
It has never happened that a technology was
better than another technology and didn't
completely replace the technology that it
was better than.
So it's like super hyper tractable, and it's
neglected.
GFI, we're literally the only organization
doing the vast majority of the work that we
do.
There are a couple of organizations where
there is very slight overlap, but it's really
very slight overlap, like the guy who I hope will go to China and get a
job in China, he's literally the only person
on the planet probably who's going to go to
China with the idea of figuring out how to
bring plant-based meat and clean meat to China,
working in China.
And there are a lot of other opportunities
like that and plant-based meat and clean meat
where it's literally the case.
If you don't it, it won't get done.
It's tractable and it's usually important,
and again, I'm delighted to have that conversation
with, with really anybody here.
Great.
Thank you so much.
Thanks Rox.
Thank you.
