 Last week saw the news that Eat Just will be able to serve chicken in the city state of Singapore. That represents a major milestone in the story of cultured meat. But what is cultured meat? And are we really on the brink of having meat without animals? With me to discuss that and more is Mike Selden, CEO of Finless Foods, a business in the field of synthetic biology and cellular agriculture, with an emphasis, unsurprisingly, on seafood. Mike, welcome to Navarro Media. Thanks, Aaron. Really appreciate it. Before we go on, I'd just like to say this interview informs part of a climate change focus conducted by Navarro Media in association with the Rosa Luxembourg Foundation. We've done some great content. It's going to finish at the end of this week. Perhaps my personal favorite was a podcast done with Kate Soper and Clare Heimer. Check that out and more at navarromedia.com. And of course, it's Christmas. 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It's going to be the first country, it's now the first country to regulate the consumption of cultured meat. They understand perhaps some of the basics around this field, but can you just isolate before we carry on? What is cellular agriculture? What is synthetic biology? And what is cultured meat? Yeah, great set of questions. So, you know, these are terms that are tossed around by a bunch of people and I think in a lot of ways they mean different things to different people. But to be really broad about it, cellular agriculture is the science of replacing animal products using synthetic biology, which I'll get into. But the idea here really is to create things that are on a cellular level, the exact same thing that people are eating today, but to eat them completely without animals. So instead of like a veggie burger replacing a beef burger, to make a beef burger, but to do it via growing animal cells outside of an animal. So you have these huge environmental advantages, you don't have to kill animals in order to get the meat products that people are looking for. Synthetic biology is a bit broader, I would say cellular agriculture is under synthetic biology. So, synthetic biology is kind of like a, it's kind of a VC term. It's not so much a scientific term, but basically it's sort of broadly like a huge suite of technologies, everything from cellular biology to molecular biology to tissue engineering and beyond that really focus on basically commercial applications of these technologies. So this goes broader than food, this builds into medicine, it goes into like everything under the sun. I mean there are people trying to make like drones out of like cells, you know. And so what does culture meet specifically? So while cellular agriculture can be very broad and it can refer to things like creating milk proteins without cows via fermentation, it's cultured meat in particular is specifically growing meat and seafood. So this isn't so much like the beyond burger, right, where you're imitating a meat product using plants. You are actually on a cellular level growing the exact same thing that people eat today. So at Finless Foods we're a cultured meat company because what we've done is we've isolated cells from a real bluefin tuna that pulled those cells out and are now growing them into real sashimi that on a cellular level is the exact same thing that people are eating today. The big differences are there's no mercury, there's no plastic, there's no animal cruelty and there's a lot less environmental complications, you know, we can stop completely destroying the oceans for our food. So maybe a bit of a longer when an explanation that I was trying to do, but those are some broad... Not at all, I mean that's probably the most precise economic description of those terms that I've seen. I want to return to the idea of cellular agriculture and synthetic biology because it can be a little bit more messy than that with things like, for instance, eat just eggs. We'll get back to that in a second because you just mentioned Finless Foods, which of course the company you co-founded. How did you enter this field? Because obviously 2008 we get Mark Post, I believe, Professor Mark Post, the first person to kind of identify the mechanism by which you can create cultured meat. 2013 we get that infamous burger patty which cost $325,000. When did your journey start in this field? When did you sort of vision what Finless Foods might be and where are you on the journey to creating that first commercially available sashimi made from a tuna steak but without any fish being killed? Yeah, so it's been a long journey. We're the first seafood company of our kind, the first salve seafood company, period worldwide. We started back in 2017, but my journey in particular started, I was reading an article called The Blood Harvest and it basically is about how in pharma we use on a mass scale the blood of horseshoe crabs, which are these really weird animals, if anyone listening hasn't seen them you should totally look them up. Their blood is really important though for global supply chains. Actually it will be a huge choke point in the COVID vaccine as it's getting produced, but basically we've run out of them. Attempts to farm them have been a failure and so scientists in trying to find more of this blood which is really important for doing quality control of any sort of vaccine production and a lot of other things in pharma as well. We're basically like, all right, well we don't have any more of these species to get. We're completely destroying their habitat and basically driving them towards extinction by a constant harvesting of them. We can't figure out how to farm them. They're very very different biologically from anything that we've attempted to farm in the past. Let's just produce an equivalent of their blood using what we now call synthetic biology, but at the time I don't think they use that term. Basically these scientists in the 70s went about creating this equivalent to horseshoe crab blood called Factor C in an attempt to basically expand our ability to do quality control of vaccines and make sure that they're safe. I was reading this article and I was like, that's fascinating. I'd been a vegan for a really long time and I've been an animal activist for a really long time. I was just thinking, well if you can create horseshoe crab blood without horseshoe crabs, can't you just create any animal product without animals? That's just got the gears spinning. I started googling because I was just like, am I completely nuts? I found, like you mentioned, like Mark Post had already made his burger at that point, but there was very little else. It was really just new harvest, which is this great non-profit that exists in New York City. They are funding public research in cellular agriculture, a really important organization. Other than those two things, Mark Post and New Harvest, that's kind of it. I was like, all right, well I'm not totally crazy. It's just very few people are working on this. I ended up moving to New York for separate reasons and then starting to volunteer at New Harvest, trying to help them. I have a background in biochemistry and their executive director, Isha Dattar, basically just took a liking to me. I don't really know why. She basically was like, do you want to do a PhD in this subject? Because you only have a bachelor's in biochem and the next step is generally getting a PhD. I said, yeah, that would be great. We started designing what this PhD would look like. We found a professor who seemed willing to take me on to do it. In the process of looking through this thing, I ended up going to a bunch of conferences with Isha, met a bunch of investors who were all just like, I want to figure out how to put money into this field. And me as a young activist, anti-capitalist, I was like, I don't really know what that is. I don't know how that works. I don't know how to help you. I'm sorry. So they'll give me their cards and they're like, well, if you can find anything or think of anything, let me know. Sorry to interrupt you, Mike. What year is this? This is 2015, I think. No, 2016, early 2016. And basically, so it was like, Memphis Meats had just been founded in 2015. They were the first cell-based meat company to exist. Before them, there was Modern Meadow. Modern Meadow has since pivoted. It's complicated. They do leather now. But basically, I went back to New York and a friend of mine was talking to me about this and he was like, so what happens if you don't do this PhD? And I said, well, the grants are very competitive. Somebody else will take the money and do the work in cellular agriculture. And he said, what happens if you don't take this investment capital? Where does that money go? And I was like, apps? I don't really know. That sounds pretty lame. You should take that money and put it towards the project that you really care about. I said, yeah, it's a really good point. And there's basically no point in me doing the PhD other than just me wanting to feel involved. So anyway, dropped the PhD. It went to an extremely talented scientist who actually now just founded her own company. Her name is Jess Krieger. But basically, I ended up founding Finland's Foods with my co-founder, Brian. We met 10 years ago in university, UMass Amherst out in Western Massachusetts, a big public school. And yes, we just like we took money from Indie Bio, which is an accelerator in San Francisco. So we moved from New York to San Francisco, a place that we'd never lived, and started getting to work. And so in San Francisco, we created the world's first fish to ever be grown and eaten outside of a fish. It was carp, which I know is not incredibly exciting, but it was just step one in our process. Since then, we've pulled in a bunch of money, we've built ourselves a big old 500 square meter or 4,000 square foot facility in Emeryville, which is right outside of San Francisco. We have like a big pull time team now. We just raised our series A. So we've pulled in another $10 million. We've gotten to work. We I think are fairly far along. Like we've been able, we've basically created a platform by which we can go towards fish species that nobody else can do. And that's why our first like test is Blue Ventuna. All the other companies in our space are really focused on things that are very farmable. This is because they're going off of research that's already in the public domain. What we've done is instead of going off of like this primary cellular biology research, we've sort of taken a step back and built a platform that allows us to iterate very quickly in systems nobody else has ever touched. And so we think that Blue Ventuna is a good like first entry to market. The wild caught equivalent has tons of mercury, tons of plastic. They're not currently farmable. And so we're not actually even fighting with much of an industry. It's on and off the endangered species list. And it's also just high quality. And a lot of people haven't had it because it's crazy expensive. So it's very easy for us to hit those price points because we're working with essentially medical technology. But basically, we're leading the charge on the seafood side. We're part of a coalition of companies working to get regulatory approval in the US. We're also talking to the people in Singapore as well. They're really eager and I can talk about why if that's interesting. But basically, we are able to now produce Blue Ventuna and we believe we're the only people on earth who can produce Blue Ventuna that's not wild caught or these few farmed research facilities that exist. Now we're working on getting the price down a little bit to make sure that it's actually affordable for people working out some of the last like things in terms of tissue engineering to make sure the texture is completely correct. We should be on market when we get regulatory approval with everybody else around 2022 in the US. So so many questions to ask out of that. What does the timeline look like? So when did you first develop the equivalent of Blue Ventuna? Obviously not perfect, but something which more or less replicated that. And what are the first products you're going to get to market? Are those going to be fish cakes? Like we're seeing at the moment, that the products coming to market, for instance, with each just last week was effectively a chicken nugget. So, you know, is it are we talking about a tuna sashimi like, you know, a piece of tuna, which is quite complex, complex thing to mimic or would it be a process product that would come to market first? Sorry, two questions there. So a timeline and then what would your first product look like? We're actually aiming for our first products to be Blue Fin sashimi specifically. So something that could be consumed raw, something that isn't a hybrid or a mixed or a ground product. You know, and I could eat my words there, but I mean, it seems that basically based on the regulation timelines and the way that our technology is functioning, we don't have to quite hit the price points that other companies do. And so a lot of the companies that are aiming for more of a blended product or focusing on things like chicken, you know, as like a contrast, you know, chicken is just wow, the cheap pork is so unbelievably cheap. It's like single dollars per pound. It is, that's hard. That's something that really nobody has ever done before. But what's nice about working with Blue Fin at least is that animal cell culture is not a brand new field. It's been going on in pharma for a long time. And if we just take the efficiencies that they've already done for pharma production of animal cells and just apply that to Blue Fin, we actually already undercut the entirety of the Blue Fin tuna market because that instead of wholesaling at like one or two dollars a pound, it's $40 a pound. So for us, there's less incentive to go towards this ground product, which I think is another advantage because we want people to see like where this technology really can shine. You know, plants have really done a great job of replicating ground products like the Beyond Burger, the Impossible Burger. These things are great. And I really like both of them. But I think where plants really fall short is that plants are not quite capable of recreating the texture of meat. Plants can't form muscle fibers, but we can. And so I think they're really showing this off as a full like tissue engineered thick tissue product, something like sashimi or steak, is a better showcase of what this technology is extremely good at. And so when did you get that first fish meat product without fish? What year are we looking at there? The first time that we ever had anyone eat any of our seafood was 2017 in September. Bluefin, the first time that we were really eating that, I believe was late 2018 or early 2019, something around that point. And if you don't mind me asking, what was the price then if you were to sort of, you know, because obviously, obviously nobody's buying it, but you had the Mark Post Burger 2013 was $325,000. Memphis Meats were offering a meatball, I think in 2015, 2016 for $1,000. You know, what's the ballpark for the Bluefin tuna at that point? Yeah, I mean, the meatball also was like less than I think 30% animal cells, like it was in large part plants as well as more. And it was also very small. It was like they're like, it's $1,000 for the meatball, but the meatball is like this big, mostly plants. It was actually all on the exact same price scale as the post burger. Everybody kind of starts off around the same point. What's great about our tech is that because we're able to use other species and then take that data and apply it to a new species, we didn't have to, we started off in carp at that, the $300,000, $300,000 a pound mark, which obviously is insane and nobody will ever buy. But with Bluefin, we were like way less than a third of that right off the bat, which still makes it completely unaffordable, right? Like $100,000 a pound for meat. No one's ever going to buy that. But it just sort of showed that like even right off the bat with our first test, we were able to reduce the price considerably using basically what we've developed. And why are more people, this is a very obscure question for quite a few of our audience, but why are more people going towards fish? Because like you say, there's more health concerns. It's a wild, it's still something we hunt in the world, which is obviously very rare for animal products generally. And obviously, there's not much fat with fish. And so a complex product like a pork chopper, a T-bone steak is going to be incredibly difficult to replicate. A chicken less so, and similar with a tuna, because it's obviously got such a high protein density there. The high price point and the relative ease of manufacture would suggest that actually fish would be the most competitive part of this. But you're saying you're the only people really operating there? Yeah, it's funny. That's my pitch that I give to investors, just like this is a lot simpler from a texture perspective. Why aren't people focused on seafood? I think that there's a myriad of reasons. I think one of which is just that a lot of the founders of these companies come from the animal rights movement, which I think has a bit of an unfair focus on land animals. I think in part because it's just easier to like anthropomorphize these animals, like it's much easier to feel for them, whereas fish feel I think very alien. Also, it's a very different like market dynamic, like pork is an absolutely enormous market just on its own. Seafood is a big market, but there's many different things within seafood, and so it's a bit more complicated to do it faster because you have to basically have more of a platform play like we do than like we do this individual species, and we've really optimized the crap out of it. And then it's also a bit of a harder sell specifically in America. Americans don't eat as much seafood as a lot of other places do. We're just not that into it, like really like the red meat as a culture for whatever reason. And on top of that, like it's also very specific. 75% of seafood in the US is eaten in restaurants. We don't really like cooking this stuff at home. And so it's just sort of like a and most of the companies were founded in the US for a bunch of reasons. So yeah, it's a I think it's a complicated answer, but there are other companies. We're now one of I believe six that are funded worldwide that are focused specifically on seafood. That said, the entire industry of all cultured meat and cultured seafood, I think we're at about 50 companies that are funded at this point globally. Returning to the news from Singapore last week, how big is it that you've now got a nation state, a city state, but still a nation state, which is willing to allow domestic consumers to eat this stuff? How big a breakthrough was that? It's huge. I mean, it's amazing. It was like such a celebration for us, even though it's not even our company, you know, but not only that, but I mean, Singapore is doing it for reasons that I really that really justify my theory of change here. I think that like trying to, you know, in most places of the world like pressure people to change their diet based on like moral and ethical reasons, it hasn't really worked. And I think that like that's a very like, like liberal concept of like how the world works. So like, oh, we'll all just vote with our dollars the right way and the world will change. And like, that's like never happened. And so I really like that Singapore is basically like, we're not even doing this for the environment. We are doing this because we want to create food security for our people and increase their material conditions and like lift ourselves up as a country. Because like that makes my pitch much easier. Like we don't want this to be branded as a charity because we don't think that it's then going to get wide adoption. Like vegan food already exists. You know, like that's not a new thing. Like our whole thing is like, there's lots of food out there that's ethical and moral, but it doesn't meet people where they're at in any other way. So it's very much like among the privileged rich that like we are able to choose to eat that kind of food. And we have like the capital to spend on that kind of thing. But people choosing to invest in this technology like Singapore has, for other reasons, really, I think is why it will take off. If we were only ever competing on morals and ethics, I think we'd be relegated to like a whole food shelf like a veggie burger. But because we actually like are able to get things like cheaper, more efficient, like more stable, especially in a change in climate, I think that's why this technology will really win and accomplish all the moral and ethical goals that like we care about as founders of these companies. But it means we can get a much, much broader coalition because they care about things that our technology directly answers. That's so interesting. The idea that food security, sort of rail, politic would drive what people would generally see myself included, something which is powered by a moral impulse. I mean, you yourself said you came at this originally as a vegan. What other countries are we looking at that might join Singapore and sort of being the early adopters regulating for this stuff? It's a really good question. New Zealand has put a bunch of money towards R&D in this field also for not quite the same reasons, but they're trying to, because the New Zealand economy is so much based on animal agriculture in a bunch of different ways. They're realizing like, oh man, if the world goes against animal agriculture, we're in a lot of trouble or if climate change makes that more difficult, we're in a lot of trouble. And so they're funding R&D there. That might end up blossoming into like a space where they end up getting a regulatory system in place very quickly. That said, I think it just might be America, which you know is a very boring answer. But just a lot of the companies are here. We've formed a coalition, the Association for Meat Poultry and Seafood Innovation, where basically we're talking to people in DC to try and get this passed. Basically, just like have a process that is like efficient and meets like the climate needs that I think the world has in terms of getting this to market, but also is safe and like genuinely make sure that what we're producing has people's trust because it's genuinely safe as ascertained by like third parties. And then a lot of other countries I think are watching this. Other close followers might be Japan. I'm not as familiar with their government and regulatory system, but they are fairly far along. There's this new thing being formed called Jacka led by this guy Yuki Hanyu, who's the CEO of a company called Integra Culture. That's a really fascinating cellular agriculture company. And they have just progressed things really quickly. Canada, I know is interested. India has had a decent amount of progress. That's all. The Netherlands has funded a lot of research, but the EU does make it extremely difficult. I mean, all of this stuff by EU rules is GMO. It's not GMO by any other country. Maybe India, I'm not 100% sure. But the EU is defined. I mean, GMO is not a scientific term. It's a regulatory term. It doesn't really mean anything. But the EU is defined it in a way that basically makes it impossible for us to get it. I mean, wheat is GMO, right? You know, bananas are GMO if you want to, if you want to, well, I mean, maybe you might not agree. But when people recognize that, you know, for instance, what we take as modern wheat was effectively the hybrid of various wild grasses. This idea that you have some rarefied natural food independent of human intervention, I think is a bit silly. But anyway, that's just a personal opinion. In terms of the food security thing, I mean, I find this fascinating, you know, because and it does, like you say, get into the real sort of bare essentials of economics. So if you're a country and you're running a big trade deficit and it's because you're importing a whole bunch of food, it's clearly a big, you know, historically, economists call this import substitution. But you've not really been able to do that with food. If you're a small country, say, Britain, if Britain wants to become completely sort of self-sustaining with regards to meat production, probably could do that now. But historically, that's been quite difficult. You could look at smaller countries still, a Malta, Netherlands, Belgium, and so on. And all of a sudden, this offers them a real opportunity to actually massively cut imports. So you think that that economic argument might actually propel this forward and see real industrial strategies in the field. Because right now, of course, and we'll talk about this in a second, it's really dominated by VC and private capital. But you think that might at some point stimulate governments to get involved in this field? Yeah, I think that's exactly right. And, you know, this type of shift has happened before. And this isn't an example that people in that field really like using for a bunch of reasons. But I think it's very relevant, especially on a show like this, you know, around World War II, America, in order to continue fighting the war, basically really was trying to get off of a bunch of natural resources that we were using, like rubber. And we had this vast network of colonies that we don't like to talk about and pretend that we've never had. But basically, they imperialized all of these places in order to get their natural resources. This was a weak supply chain. It involved a lot of importing. And it had a lot of bad effects on our fighting capacity. But if you want to think about it in today's terms, it also wasn't great for the environment to ship these things all around the planet. And so America basically created a concentrated government spending project in order to replace things like rubber. And that's where all these synthetics came from, essentially. We wanted to be able to produce these things domestically. We wanted it to be a robust and local supply chain that allowed us to actually produce things very quickly and not have to rely on, you know, boats, planes, etc., to get things to us. And it got the world off of a bunch of different things. I think that this could be another version of that if governments decide to invest in it. I really think that most innovation does happen in the public sector. And it's a shame that this field in specific is so incredibly underfunded in the public sector. You know, we're developing technology internally at Finless Foods that I know is being developed in parallel and other companies. We could have pooled our resources if this were a public effort. You know, I think that would have been much better off. It's not the conditions that we were given. And so we're working with what we've got. But some governments have seen, you know, the light, I guess. Like, the Netherlands has put money into this in the public sector. New Zealand has. Japan has. Singapore definitely has. And hopefully America will as well. You know, we're not great at public spending. We hate it. But we have New Harvest as a charity, which is not public spending. But it's a way of basically creating more open research. And then I don't think I answered the last bit of your question. I'm sorry. No, no, that's fine. I was going to ask you actually, I was going to say actually, you know, when it comes to national security technologies, America tends to be quite good. So I wouldn't be surprised if the United States in 10 years is leading on this while Europe is in the dust. Do you think that the adoption of state agriculture, and this is big and speculative, but do you think it could lead to the sort of de-globalization of food supply chains? Because, you know, there is this sort of liberal argument, and maybe this will be lost on you as America, but here in Britain most certainly, because of the whole debate around Europe, leaving the European Union, a lot of people seem to fetishize their globalized production. Actually, you think, hold on, this is incredibly wasteful. Why are we growing a lettuce in North America to be flown to Britain? The thing is, practically zero kilo calories, and we're burning hydrocarbons to get it from one place to the other. Clearly, that's a crazy way to run things. Do you think that just this potentially decarbonized kind of energy supply could lead to a de-globalization of energy? Could something similar happen with food and state agriculture? It definitely could, and actually you're talking to probably the only American who actually knows what you're talking about, but yeah, I mean, like in terms of sort of like a left argument basically for Brexit or for de-globalization type stuff, like, yeah, I mean, you could really make that argument here where it would basically allow people to create like a wider variety of food in a locality without needing to import that, because the inputs, right, like we don't make something out of nothing, you do need inputs, but it does allow you a wider variety of choice in your inputs, and a lot of them are very basic. I mean, like what we feed these cells, sugars, salts, proteins that are produced by fermentation, that fermentation is also using sugars and salts generally. These things can be produced in a lot of different places or at least like if you're importing them, you're just importing like one type of ingredient. It does create like a more robust food system, which helps in a lot of ways, right? It does allow places to be, you know, it does allow places to remove themselves from sort of like this global hegemony. It also allows us to, you know, eschew like massive carbon output by like flying around the world. It allows places to be a lot more resilient to things like climate change, because it allows them to produce everything like right where they are and have a wider variety of options when producing their food as inputs. I think it can create more resilience, which is super helpful as we like have to deal with climate change and deal with mitigation from that. But also it can allow for more independence of a lot of places that are being, you know, that have neocolonial relations with like the global, you know, economy. So on the issue of climate change, how big a difference could culture and meat make for climate change? Because again, our audience, when they think of the things driving climate change, they probably think planes, cars, the fossil fuels industry. But maybe can you can you just talk briefly about how big a variable agriculture, animal agriculture is in climate change? And again, it's entirely abstract. But if there was a large-scale adoption of these technologies, instead of historic animal agriculture for dairy and meat, what kind of a difference that might make? Oh, it would be massive. I mean, I have very like American-centric numbers and I apologize. That's fine. Good. But like we, yeah, I mean, we're pretty big, we're pretty big drivers of climate change, right? The single largest source of carbon emissions in America is animal agriculture. It's over 16% of the carbon of the carbon that we emit. And switching off of that into something like this allows us to get off of that. A lot of it comes from animal waste products, so cow farts, manure, et cetera. These are things that like don't really need to happen with our type of system, especially because there's already tons of work done in recycling systems for this exact type of production system due to pharma wanting to recycle things to reduce their costs. This also allows us to like get off of using the ocean as a resource, get off of using massive tracts of land as a resource, and instead put this on what will hopefully be eventually a renewable grid. So it's like it doesn't immediately solve every single problem, right? Like it even complicates things. So, you know, as a bit of an argument against finless for a second, like, you know, we're trying to make it so that people aren't completely destroying the ocean anymore and destroying this endangered species, bluefin tuna population, eventually expanding into others. That means that, you know, while it wouldn't be destroying the ocean, it means that basically a carbon-free food production, fishing, becomes something that does use carbon. So it's nice though, it does give us an opportunity to then get off of that. You can think of it kind of like electric cars, right? Like electric cars themselves don't solve the problem because you still are then hooking them into the grid. If the grid is still using dirty energy, well, your electric car is actually worse than a gas car, but it gives us the opportunity to decarbonize that kind of thing. It's one step in the process. And if we don't make this step, even if maybe the transition itself might be a little bit messy in terms of carbon emissions, we're not going to get off of it, period. There's a bit of a divide, isn't there, in the sort of cellular agriculture field, in so much as some people I've spoken to or read about or listened to, they want these new forms of agriculture to exist alongside older ones. And there are other people who are just sort of ethically and politically opposed to the idea of animal agriculture. Historically, they think it's wasteful. They think it's unethical. It causes unnecessary suffering. Where do you sit in that argument? And what do you think is a more valuable disposition generally in terms of advancing the field? You know, I think that there's just a million valid positions on this, right? But I want to work with basically like the world that we're given, right? And I'm not much for utopian hypotheticals and stuff. I'm like, this will become a large chunk of the food that is eaten, ideally. But I think that it can replace a lot of things that are very harmful. Do I think this is ever going to completely wipe out animal agriculture? I think it's kind of a fantasy. I think some people are always going to appeal to natural as something that is automatically good, and they're going to buy things that they see as natural. They're going to buy things that are made from animals. But my hope is that we don't have to completely eliminate these things in order to make a difference. We can basically just provide food that gets the majority of people off of this, off of animal agriculture. That can really change the entire planet. So some of the more pessimistic studies on adoption of cellular agriculture puts it at about 30% people willing to eat it, which is very different for people willing to try it. The more optimistic things say 80%. So it's obviously all over the place. But basically, if you take that number 30% of people switching from animal-based meats and moving towards cell-based meats, just that alone would stop an enormous amount of climate emissions and actually put us on, and if that happens globally, it would actually put us on the right track. It would actually mitigate climate change to the point where we might actually have time to build in better processes across other things. So basically, will it reach 100% adoption? No. But do we need it to also know? Yeah, I find this interesting because people say, oh, no, you know, I want real meat. And it's like, look, I can understand the argument if you want, you know, like an aged T-bone steak. Fine. You know, maybe this technology can never even replicate that. But when you go to a barbecue at your friend's house and they're using, you know, budget sausages and burgers, you don't know what the hell's in that. You know, it just seems like it seems like a strange thing to say. And I agree that I can see why a certain part of the market will always want to go for quite and quite natural foods. But most of us most of the time aren't eating that kind of stuff. Does it annoy you when you see people that say, well, we don't need cultured meat? This was repeated recently in the Guardian article, which was published after the news came out of Singapore. When we say we don't need these products, people just need to quit meat and become vegans. I mean, do you think that's a valid argument? And if it isn't, why isn't it? I think in our, my friend's Marxist reading group, we'd call that idealist. I think it's a very nice thought. I think that, yes, that would definitely solve the issue. But it's not going to happen. And I think that we need to work with the world that we have and work with the people that we've got and meet people where they're at. You know, Finland specifically is aiming to target people who just absolutely do not care. We basically, you know, some vegans don't even like this. They're just like, this is not natural. This is going back to meat. It is bad for you, X, Y, Z. You know, if you believe that meat is bad for you, this stuff is bad for you. It is the same thing as meat. But basically, we're not aimed at them. You know, I don't have any interest in changing the way that vegans eat. They're doing what I want. They're already not participating in this. But I think that vegans who think that we can really change the entirety of the world and move towards a world that all has like chosen to buy the right thing. I would ask them to point at a time that that's ever happened for anything, not just for food, but like a time where an ethical consumerism movement has actually changed the entire world and gotten rid of some mode of production. It just hasn't happened in the past. And so I'm very skeptical that we're going to have some big moral awakening as a species and go from this tiny percentage of vegans to, you know, 30% or whatever we need in order to mitigate climate change. Going back to something we said at the beginning of this interview, so there's different kinds of, please correct him if I'm wrong, by the way, Mike, different kinds of cellular agriculture. And cultured meat clearly is an area you guys are in, which is effectively creating meat without the animals. Then you get products like just eggs from Eat Just, which is effectively getting a vegetable protein and editing it to use a term to make it approximate an animal protein, in this instance, chicken eggs. Do you think there's a big future for that, or do you think ultimately the sort of the replicating animal proteins without animals is going to be the way that this is done, rather than getting vegetable proteins to approximate animal proteins? Do you think products like Just Eggs will work? I mean, here in the UK, we haven't got anything like that. I've not tried it. I'd love to try it. Obviously, you're a bit more familiar with these products. What's your view? Yeah, so just quickly as a clarification of terms, I think we'll make this conversation easier, which is that Just Egg, I think is, my just saying is it's an isolate. It's entirely plant-based. And so it doesn't usually get thrown into the field of cellular agriculture. The confounding thing there is that the company that produces it just does also do cellular agriculture. Like you said, they just got approval to sell in Singapore. So it's like they're a cellular agriculture company, but not all of their products are cellular agriculture, which confuses people. So even like the Impossible Burger, because they're, so even when they're producing this thing called heme, which is otherwise it's in a vegetarian's burger, is that not cellular agriculture? Yeah, they're a really weird edge case. It's really funny because they're one of the big companies. But I personally would call impossible burger cellular agriculture. And my reason for doing that is they're using synthetic biology to produce their heme. So the heme, a lot of it is being produced via fermentation. They've edited yeast with this gene, put it into the yeast, allow the yeast to then ferment their heme. I would call that cellular agriculture. But sometimes they actually produce their heme via just isolating it from soy. And I'm like, well, that's probably not cellular agriculture. Like it's more of a process thing than an end product thing. But I think this actually goes towards what I would say is the real answer to your question, which is that I don't think consumers know or care about the difference. I don't think that there are some people like me and probably you based on, you know, you're writing books about this stuff, but like who really care about the food process and who like are interested in investigating it deeply and figuring out exactly what technologies are doing what. I don't think most people are there. And so like, you know, just anecdotally, I mean, I've had people tell me that they've had endless foods and they love it. And I'm like, we are not on the market. That is not possible. But they like swear up and down that they've had it to me. I've had people tell me that they love beyond burger because of its heme protein. And they think that the heme protein is what makes beyond burger so incredible. And I'm like, well, that's not in beyond burger. That's an impossible burger where they're competing brands. Like, and this is fine. Like people aren't going to pay attention. And that's okay. It doesn't mean they're like stupid or misinformed is anything wrong with them. I just think people have a lot to consider and everything they do in their lives. I think that people care about the output. I think that what we and that's what our industry really needs to focus on. We can't sell this stuff and succeed based on our technology. It's only where the technology actually creates things that people care about. So I think that we need to index on and focus on taste, price, convenience and nutrition. And as long as we focus on those four things, people are going to make up whatever story they want about whatever we do. And that's not to say that we shouldn't be transparent. I think that we should have all information available as much as we possibly can and try and communicate it to the public. But just understand that people aren't going to really know. And so to get back to your question of like, what is the breakdown going to be between like, you know, plant-based stuff and cell-based stuff? What's the breakdown going to be between like cellular agriculture and just more broadly alternative proteins? I think it's just going to be whatever can knock those four metrics out of the park. I think that plants have some advantages. I think plants are a lot simpler to work with. It's a lot easier to scale up and scale down. The processes are already there. The supply chain is already there. You can get it a lot cheaper. The issue is that plants can't recreate, I think, things that really rely on texture as an important part of their sensory experience. So that's why plants have been so successful at creating ground product, things like burgers and hot dogs. Like beyond sausage, I don't know if you've had it in the UK, but it's great. It's just like a hot dog. I really can't tell the difference. It's actually like a high quality hot dog, I would say. And like, same with beyond and impossible burger, they're just amazing. And I don't see where really cellular agriculture would even do much to improve the beyond burger. And some people even think that the heave and impossible burger is just a gimmick, and that it just sells on the fact that it's really, really good. Pat Brown swears up and down that it's the heave and it makes it really, really good. I don't know. I believe him. But basically, I think that plant-based where it can functionally meet people where they're at is going to win because it's cheaper and simpler. But cell-based is going to target these things that are more difficult. So cell-based will hit things like steaks, filets, sashimi, anything that has a bit more structure, because plants aren't able to form muscle fibers. And I think that's really where the breakdown is going to be. Gary has reminded me that beyond meat is in the UK, it's verbal and Tesco. And I said, no, it's that I haven't tried it just to clarify. We do have beyond products in this country. We don't have the impossible burger. We don't have just egg. We're just going to wrap up in a second. Before we do, I've got a few more questions for you. If you've enjoyed this interview, it's exactly the kind of content we want to talk more about in 2021. It's been an incredibly depressing year in 2020 for many reasons, first and foremost, COVID-19. And it's multiple kind of after effects, whether it's the high street, whether it's unemployment, whether it's mental health, but I hope and I think 2021 will be a lot more enlightening, a lot more optimistic because of the conversations we're having right now about the future of food, meat with the animals, energy systems beyond hydrocarbons, and healthcare systems which are both universal, but also far superior to what we presently have, even in the West, even in advanced economies. I said the West, the United States hasn't got a particularly good healthcare system. I could probably learn a thing or two from places like Cuba and Vietnam. Mike, we're going to wrap up with just a couple of questions now. Is it possible, and I'll talk about the time for them afterwards, but is it possible that we could replicate pretty much any food using these technologies in the next 20, 30 years? Any food, oysters, cheese, or is there any food to look at and say probably not replicable? I think anything is replicable. We already can see it being formed in the wild. I think that there are some that maybe could be very difficult. I think if it's produced inside of an animal, it's a thing that could very easily be replicated. If it's something that the experience of eating it involves the entirety of an animal, I think that that's very complicated. So I think that while it's very possible, people have already done it, including us, to produce lobster meat. I think producing the entire experience of eating a lobster with the shell, I don't want to say never, but I think it would be extremely complicated to do. 30 years is a long time. We might be able to do that for 30 years, but maybe if you said 10, I'd probably say maybe not. Bone and structure like that is a bit more complicated. Shells are a bit more complicated, not because the technology itself is more complicated, but a company like us hasn't worked on it. We're basically just like, oh yeah, we have to start the process of working on skin in order to get the experience of salmon correct. You haven't even progressed to things like bone. I think things that might not be doable with this technology are when you're eating the entirety of a fish at once. You just baked the whole thing, bones and all. I don't know how one would do that with cellular agriculture. You'd have to stretch the limits of what it means to do cellular agriculture. I understood. A manufactured meat product, obviously when I say manufactured, I'm using it in quite a specific term. A fillet steak or a tuna steak, yes, but a crab, a lobster. I'm trying to think of a strange thing that somebody might eat, or a whole turkey, something quite different. A whole turkey, this is going to get gross, I guess, but would you grow it without a brain? Is that cellular agriculture? Maybe I'm not really sure what the limits of this art are. It's not a very well-defined thing, but yeah, if you're eating the entirety of an animal, I don't really know exactly how one would do that and still call it cellular agriculture. A bit gourish, but I think a really important question as well, what is an animal? The whole ontology there of a particular animal would be up for debate, I suppose, which goes to the heart of this. Finally, the time frames. All this progress, and it's remarkably quick, from 2008 to 2020, we've seen deluge of new companies coming to market in a bunch of places. Last week, we got a country which is regulating for consumers to actually eat the product and buy the product. When will we see sausages and steaks and sashimi on supermarket shelves in North America, in Britain, in other parts of the world? When will this become a relatively mundane technology? Because, of course, that's when technology changes. It's not when it's new and innovative and fancy. It's when it's taken for granted. When do you think that will happen? It sounds like you're asking mass adoption. When is this just going to be absolutely everywhere? It's actually funny. We had a conversation about this exact thing on Twitter. Me and a bunch of other people in our industry, we're just going back and forth on it. I think the number that we landed on was around 15 years. In 15 years, I originally interpreted that. Josh, the CEO of Just, said something about this will be in 15 years. I was like, you don't think you're going to get to market. For 15 years, that's wildly pessimistic. This is before he had gotten to market. Basically, 15 years, we think it'll see mass adoption. We were saying 15 years is when it will be like Coca-Cola. It'll be just absolutely everywhere. It'll be a part of what people eat. People won't really think about it that much if they don't want to. That's so exciting. Mike, if our viewers are listeners, if they want to keep up to date with what you're doing, how can they follow you? On Twitter, I'm Mike Selden, F-F-S-E-L-D-E-N. That's the best way to follow me, Finnless Foods, is at Finnless Foods on all social media. We're actually going to end up being more and more active within the next six months. I would look out for that. Excellent. You were saying 2022, you think, is when you'll have your Sashimi out? Yeah, 2022 in the United States, that's our intent. I think 2022 will be a big breakthrough year for all of us because the regulatory process will be fully in place as of next year within the next few months, really. That's when we can start going through the process ourselves, making sure that our products are actually safe by the government standards. You'll see things in 2022. Hugely exciting. Mike, good luck, and thanks for joining us on Navarra Media. Thanks so much, Aaron. I really appreciate the questions. Thanks for having me on.