 Okay, ladies and gentlemen we're going to get started so we can go back to our seats So I'd like you to welcome back Professor Jeffrey Sacks who's obviously the professor of Sustainable Development in Columbia University, but also it's going to be a conversation With Pat Brown the CEO of impossible food, so I'd like to give you give them both a warm welcome Please thank you I gotta ask how many of you have had an impossible burger All right Get a picture of that wait a minute hold up your hands Wait a minute as of today you can buy it at Fairway Raise your hands impossible burger, okay Okay, you too, all right Pat, thank you. You gave me my first hamburger in 25 years as I told you earlier because I Went off hamburgers in 1993 and went back on hamburgers with impossible burgers when when You brought them to market. Could you give us an update including the launch you were just Telling me about backstage Sure, well, I don't necessarily assume that everybody here knows the backstory but basically you know impossible foods has been around for About eight years now and and we were founded with the mission of completely replacing animals in the food system by 2035 and Doing so the only way that I think could possibly work which is Not asking people to change their diets, but making our job to figure out a way to produce uncompromisingly delicious meat that delivers everything consumers want and has to outperform in Serving consumers meat from animals so that we can compete in the marketplace basically and remove the economic incentive for covering the planet with cows and and in all the catastrophic impact of that We launched our first commercial product three years ago in New York City In a restaurant, we've now scaled to about 17,000 restaurants across the US and in Three international locations in Asia Last week we we've always just been in restaurants last week. We launched in a grocery store For the first time in LA In a small chain gelsons if you know LA Today we launched in fairway and Wegmans, which was our east coast launch and just the big the latest update And I'm going to shut up because turning turning into a spiel that the We need your spiel, so it's okay the The launch in LA three days in we got a report from the This chain that it was their biggest launch in 50 years. We outsold meat from cows Every single day in every single store and And our product was the best-selling package Product by a huge margin more than six fold more sales than the second best, which was a dozen eggs, so So it was super successful for them, so we're very happy with it, and I think it's going to be Equally successful in New York City, so go to your local fairway store and check it out. Okay. Can you? very interesting Linguistic twist Meat from plants and meat from animals Can you justify that and explain? Oh, yeah, it's a it's a clever marketing point Is it a valid point a valid way to discuss this? Well as I always say for all of these things It's basically we don't get to choose. It's it's it's ultimately consumers get to get to decide but but yes, I think it's completely valid because We've talked to lots of meat-eaters and actually I'll take a poll from the audience. Okay. I'm assuming No judgment the vast majority of you are regular meat consumers the same as true of 95% of the people buying possible Burgers by the way have have consumed meat from animals in the previous month, so That's all good. Let's do a quick survey. How many of you do not eat meat? Wow Wow, we see we have to change that okay But but what we found and I'm interested to hear your opinion is well, but let me ask the question, okay how many of you love meat because You love its unique delicious flavor and the protein and iron and the convenience and versatility Familiarity stuff like that among the meat-eaters. Okay, probably majority How many of you love the fact that it comes from the cadaver of an animal? With all the environmental impact associated and health issues zero no hunters out there hunter-gatherers I Have to give you a statistic because I Somebody once asked me this question like okay, maybe we should just go back to hunting and and just to give you a perspective on that You know, there's a there's a meltdown in biodiversity right now that we are in a very far-exit advanced stage of The total number of wild animals living on earth today is less than half what it was 40 years ago Very well documented and it's across the board mammals birds reptiles amphibians fish even invertebrates Okay, and what they're this is based on a long-standing study Overwhelmingly this is it's virtually entirely due to the use of animals in the food system fishing hunting is a very small factor and the and the catastrophic destruction of habitat by the Land footprint of animal agriculture, which is 50% of earth's surface and as demand grows notice the earth isn't getting bigger That's why there are fires in the Amazon. That's the second-hand smoke from your burger That's that's kind of the situation that we're in anyway that That is the driver of this biodiversity meltdown, but sorry. I went on a rant here, but but the hunting thing So someone once asked me oh, maybe we should just go back to hunting Well, if you do the math it turns out that if you produce the meat supply that the world currently consumes By hunting wild animals There wouldn't be so much as a shrew or a sparrow left on earth in two months Every single wild animal on earth would have been consumed for food That's that's how big the demand is and how ridiculously Beyond the scale that our planet can support the cows on earth outweigh every remaining wild animal wild vertebrate living on land By more than a factor of ten, okay cows outweigh every remaining Wild terrestrial vertebrate remaining on earth by more than a factor of ten It's the most horrific invasive species you could possibly imagine and it's crowding out all the biodiversity with its huge mass and the voracious demand for for You know food and land and water and so forth that goes with it, so Can you can you give us just like this, but a few key? Quantitative points of the difference of going of having a zero meat Economy in 2035 from having a business as usual in terms of whatever scale whether it's greenhouse gases or land area or other such an interesting question and and and and Sometime I'll talk offline about this because it's that's exactly the right question to ask. It's it's There are two trajectories that you're choosing What what do they look like in ten years? It's very hard for people to imagine this thing and getting it getting it into their minds. It's really important. Okay, so Again like a couple of statistics Will you need to just you know grow a lot more plants if you're replacing animals in the food system with plant-based products? No, and it's kind of self evidently know because a large fraction of all the plants that are cultivated on earth are used to make pigs and cows and chickens and in fact The world's entire soybean crop occupies point eight percent of earth's land area and just Just it another interesting statistic to me who's peeks out on these things all the fruits and vegetables grown on earth occupy point seven percent of earth's land area and animal agriculture 50% but That soybean crop contains a hundred and sixty percent of the human usable protein That's contained in the world's entire meat supply in other words you could match all the protein and all the meat consumed globally with less than With with 50 with with point five percent of earth's land area growing soybeans The problem is and that's the reason why the company was founded as a science-based company is Nobody wants to eat soybeans instead of meat and so That's the reason for this whole catastrophe. This is the biggest environmental catastrophe in history is the Catastrophic impact of of the use of animals of food technology So really it comes down to you'll have to figure out a way to take these Vastly more efficient plant-based products and turn them into something that people actually want to eat as meat But okay, so that that the land footprint of agriculture will be reduced by more than a factor of 10 About almost half of earth's land area can can return to be a healthy Ecosystems supporting biodiversity that right now is basically just barren secondly in that process the The minute if you if you made that system go away if you snapped your fingers and and it went away an instant Atmospheric CO2 levels wouldn't just stop rising they would literally start coming now and and you can do the math and and in in the period of a couple of decades Just recovering the sort of original biomass Photosynthesis the best carbon capture technology on earth optimized over a billion years is Will will pull 17 years worth of Greenhouse gas emissions the equivalent of that in carbon dioxide out of the atmosphere and turn it into Plant biomass that supports biodiversity. So there's that There's In terms of water, this is the biggest user and polluter of this industry's biggest user and polluter of water in the world, so The Colorado River hasn't reached its destination since animal agriculture Took over the Western US it ends in a in a pathetic little fizzle in the Imperial Valley in California Well, actually for the first time in decades the Colorado River would flow into the Gulf of California And the same would be true of a lot of waterways that right now in many cases Basically just end in a fizzle because they're all sucked dry by by the water demand of animal agriculture or they're massively polluted by Nutrient runoff which again is almost entirely due to the industry. So so those problems Would get better business as usual we're predicted that there's predicted to be like a 70% increase in demand for Animal products in the next 30 years so globally, so The earth is not going to get bigger The supply of fresh water is not going to get greater The capacity of the planet to absorb the massive amount of nutrients that are put in the system isn't going to increase and so basically right now and Habitat for biodiversity you notice every time you see the smoke coming from Amazon is not increasing and We're in this late meltdown. I think we're going to basically have a Catastrophic collapse of biodiversity not just not just wildlife But the plant life that depend on those flying insects birds other species for pollination for all all those wild animals for dispersing their seeds and Keeping the ecosystems healthy It's not going to happen though because we got it. It's all good, but But we don't want that outcome. Sorry. I'm watching the Twitter feed Oh, I just asked more has that been written up this kind of comprehensive comparison of the two because I think it's absolutely compelling I I Well, yes, it's been written up in massive unreadable notes that I've Totally count but but no, it's actually a really good point because I feel like All the statistics are there as we were talking before for example the UN food and agriculture organization does an incredibly meticulous job of tracking how many pounds of you know Guinea-file are consumed globally and in every country and how many pounds of pigs exist on earth and Every agricultural statistic you you can talk about and and the environmental stuff There's the the thing about pulling carbon dioxide of the atmosphere. That's that's also there are Old publications have calculated how much of the biomass that existed on on land before Agriculture came along That's now in the atmosphere and so you can just basically do the reverse calculation say we cover those ecosystems That's how much you pull out and it would it would outpace fossil fuel emissions Anyway, sorry, I haven't written it up. I'd like to I mean as a as an academic and a scientist who used job A lot of my job used to be buying scientific papers. I'd love to do it You know, it's just things that are so busy, but Yeah, one difficult question coming from the audience So they're buying into what you're saying, but then they're a little bit worried about plastic So we've had sessions we are SDG So yeah, what are you thinking about in terms of the the way you package your food now in the way So are you okay SDG about that we are we are extremely conscientious about that we we are We so for example our retail product which is Packaged and and does have a plastic package But we we put it in a much less attractive package that is as close to a sphere So to speak as we could make it so we minimize the amount of packaging Which is not the way that I mean it's it's a it's actually a square kind of block but Precisely to reduce the amount of waste and we're always trying to do that I mean it's it's complicated because you have to let you have to find the compromise of living within an ecosystem That just does not produce the stuff that that you would like it to produce But I just want to say one more thing about plastic weight So one of our next products that we're going to hopefully launch in you know a few years if not sooner It's fish in various forms That we figured out a lot of the fundamentals of fish flavor and where it comes from naturally So that's important. Well, as you probably know if you follow plastic pollution probably half of the plastic in the ocean is Fishing nets and fishing gear that have been discarded. It's not straws I mean, I'm I'm all for getting rid of plastic straws but but the real problem is these massive amounts of fishing nets and fishing gear that that Fall apart and get discarded in the ocean and they're much worse I mean again, I'm I am no fan of of of you know plastic pollution But but it's the fishing industry is overwhelmingly the culprit here and Those are the plastic materials that trap animals and you know drowned whales and seal seals and turtles It's not, you know Not not that that plastic waste isn't isn't critically important, but but that's the big problem So getting animals out of the food system doesn't solve everything, but it solves an awful lot Could I ask you two quick questions very but I know we're out of time, but one is I know you're working on the healthfulness of the product from In terms of the fats that you're using and other things So if you could say a word about that and second China China is the biggest rise of meat consumption but it's not at a it it could be With awareness and so forth that probably stabilize so I don't know whether you So nutrition in China, okay, and I'll try to talk fast because I don't want to eat and drink one time so you know I'm an MD. I was a pediatrician for a number of years. I Absolutely feel a huge responsibility to make our product as healthy and nutritious as possible and we're constantly optimizing We did not release the product until we felt like it was better for the consumer than what it replaced It's not necessarily better than the for the consumer than you know a giant pile of fresh vegetables But the point is that the meat eaters are not going to not going to accept a giant pile of fresh vegetables We have to give it make the healthiest product that delivers as meat and So currently our product is lower calorie zero cholesterol lower set lower total fat lower saturated fat Same protein content same bio-available iron content. It's heme iron, which is the kind of iron and meat That's efficiently absorbed and so forth, but we're constantly even right now Trying to improve it. So we we did an upgrade of our the burger that we launched with We removed wheat because of 2% of the population has has gluten sensitivity So we got rid of that we lowered the salt. We lowered the calories We lowered the total fat. We lowered the saturated fat We improved the quality of the protein And also improve the flavor and stuff like that and we're always going to do that and and and even if we didn't care about nutrition We would still do it because consumers care about nutrition and we want a product that consumers choose of the animal product So that's always going to be a priority. China is is our biggest, you know, international market by far and always has been We wanted to get a launch in China as soon as we possibly can the thing for China Which is which is interesting as I feel like from their national interest standpoint We solve their biggest national security problem, which is that And it's it's not African swine fever. Although that's an exacerbation. It's that they're completely import dependent For their meat supply because they have the lowest amount of arable land per capita the lowest amount of freshwater per capita of any significant size developed country and And meat production is so land and water intensive that it just doesn't add up but the technology that we used to produce our product and you could you could you can do the math with the statistics that you know, you can find online for us is uses less than one twenty-fifth the land a tenth of water and Less than a tenth of the fertilizer inputs, which is a big problem for China because that water pollution problem And they could produce their entire meat supply with half their arable land. So Be completely self-sufficient have sovereignty over their food system, which is a big deal for China and and have much better food security because And and public health because basically animal based Meat production isn't just an environmental catastrophe. It's a public health catastrophe It's China, you know uses more antibiotics than any other country pretty much in its meat supply If you ask public health people, what are the what are their nightmare scenarios number one? Well, number one is an influenza pandemic or or a major influenza epidemic that overwhelms our health care system If it's like 1918, which there's no reason why that's not ever going to happen again It could kill 10% of the world's population in half a year That's number one Number two is basically Multiply antibiotic resistant pathogens so that all the antibiotics we've spent decades Developing are basically completely useless both of those things are our nightmares and they all trace back to animal agriculture those multiply antibiotic resistant Organisms are primarily due to massive use of antibiotics in a concentrated environment where you it's just like a you know These these crowded environments where TV used to be Communicated you're it's like an incubator for selecting antibiotic resistant microorganisms. That's number that's that's that problem every influenza epidemic and In memory has started in a pig or poultry farm they they The new strains emerge when when flu strains that can infect humans poultry and swine and various combinations Come together and recombine and produce produce a novel strain that we don't have immunity to that's why the CDC has Full-time staff camped in China basically collecting flu strains from pig and poultry farms because that's where the next disastrous epidemic that's the public at health nightmare Is going to begin and China's going to feel at first so Anyway, there's all these reasons why I think it makes tremendous sense for China now We just have to convince them absolutely compelling. Thank you