 Okay. Well, good afternoon everyone and welcome to the tackling global challenges series by the Tomcat Center for Sustainable Energy. My name is Matt Cannon. I'm the director of the Tomcat Center, and I'm really excited to host this event today on behalf of the entire Tomcat team, myself, Donica, Brian, and Elizabeth. I'm really honored to host our guest today and I will introduce her very shortly. But I first just want to take a minute to describe the tackling global challenges series if this is your first time joining this event or just refresh your memory on what we are trying to accomplish here. This series is really about highlighting particular problem areas in energy and sustainability and then engaging people from outside of Stanford to provide deeper insights into these problems and tell us what they are doing to address them and then give us some perspective on opportunities for additional ways to solve these problems. So this is our second episode on the problem area of tropical deforestation. For those of you who are with us in the fall for the first episode we heard from two forest conservationists and forest researchers who have spent decades in tropical forests, trying to understand the root causes of deforestation and devise different types of addressing those causes. So we were joined by Dan Nebstad and Matt Leggett. And one of the key takeaways from their presentations and their dialogue was that more than 70% of deforestation in the tropics is driven by the conversion of forests into new agricultural land. And the three biggest culprits are pasture land or beef, and then farmland for soybeans and palm oil. So today, this episode is really focused on trying to come up with a solution to this problem from the supply side. So ultimately trying to change how we make food. And so with with that backdrop. It's really my pleasure to introduce Lisa Dyson, who is the founder and CEO of air protein. So as, as a brief background to Lisa. She's a physicist by training so she did her undergraduate degree at Brandeis and physics and mathematics. She was a Fulbright scholar at Imperial College. And then did her PhD in theoretical physics and string theory in particular at MIT. So after graduating, she she came to the Bay Area for postdoctoral research, she did some work at North Berkeley, and as well as here at Stanford. And I think during this time or perhaps before she became increasingly interested in climate change and in sustainability. And eventually decided that the best way for her to try to address these problems was to become an entrepreneur and develop new technology. So she she worked for a couple years with the Boston Consulting Group she got exposed to a number of industries. And then in 2008, she co founded Coverti. And this is a company to develop really a platform technology for using microbes to take carbon dioxide and simple inorganic inputs like hydrogen and generate a variety of products including plastics and animal feed and other food products. She remains the executive chairman of Coverti, but in 2019, she spun off Air Protein became the CEO of Air Protein, and Air Protein is really focused on making the world's most sustainable meat. So, so making meat products using this core microbial technology. Air Protein has gotten a tremendous amount of momentum in the last couple of years. And actually I think more broadly this entire space of alternative meats and proteins is really at a tremendously exciting point in its trajectory. So today Lisa is going to give us a an overview of of Air Protein and kind of set the stage. And then we're going to have a an extended discussion with, I hope, a lot of input from our audience. So, at any point along the way here if you would like to ask a question or propose a question. Please submit those questions through the Q&A function on the zoom. And I will do my best to accommodate those questions in the course of the next 45 minutes or so, as long as they're not on string theory or something like that. So it's really my pleasure, Lisa, to welcome you today. And we're really excited to hear more about Air Protein and about your story. So, thank you. Wonderful. Thanks so much for having me and I would say it's nice to be back at Stanford, you know, but it's virtual. Yeah, it's been a couple years there and and happy to talk about, you know, deforestation climate change and these things and how we can create solutions for tomorrow. And so I'll talk about what we're doing at Air Protein, and I'll kick it off that way. So we're building what we aspire to be the world's first carbon negative meat company. And so in 2019 we made the world's first air based meat it was chicken, air chicken, and it's powered really by ingredients and specifically protein that requires no arable land and that can be made in a carbon negative way from cradle to gate. And so this is something that we're super excited by because it allows us to really us run a new era of meat production whereas today to make a steak it takes two years, and the, you know, you mentioned kind of deforestation being a key issue when it comes to grazing, and then also for that animal feed as well so it takes two years and it leads to a lot of deforestation. And it has, you know, that greenhouse gas footprint same as a car. Whereas with our process, you know it all starts with elements of the air, and we're able to make a really nutritious protein ingredient in a matter of days using no arable land whatsoever. So we can scale vertically think of fermentation, think of making yogurt, and making cheese, but we flip that process on his head. If you're making yogurt you're using milk as your input. You know to typical fermentation may use sugar as an input, which also requires land. And so our process we get the elements directly so co2 oxygen. So this nitrogen source and renewable power, and we use that to split water and create hydrogen which is the energy source that drives this process and so in the end what we end up is a novel way of in a carbon negative fashion making a really nutritious protein, the protein that we're scaling up today has an a an amino acid content that's about 80%. So it's really rich in amino acids, complete protein, all the essential amino acids, and the rest of the ingredient is bio available vitamins and minerals. So very nutritious outcome output of this process. And we believe that it's the most sustainable way to make protein, because it requires zero arable land, and it is carbon negative. And this is something that leads to scalability as we try as we grow to 10 billion people by 2050, where are we going to get all the land from really to continue with our current practices continue with taking two years to make a stake, and you know contributing to the greenhouse gas emissions problem and clearing land for cattle grazing. So in this case, you know you can scale vertically you can deploy in any geography, a desert rain or shine day or night you're continuously producing really nutritious ingredients. And so we're able to take these ingredients and make the world's first carbon negative meats everything from a chicken where we started to air scallops air halibut and beyond and so what I believe and what the company believes and many people actually in this new alternative meat and alternate protein industry believe that we we want to envision a world where we define me as the experience that people have when they're fighting into a juicy steak or chicken breasts. And it's not about the fact that it took two years to make that steak it's not about the source but it's about that experience. And so our goal our mission is to create recreate those experiences for people, so they will come back over to enjoy a new way of producing and experiencing those same flavors. So that's what we're doing and building an air protein. Terrific, thank you. So, yeah, I would love to to start by talking a little bit more about the technology, and then we can kind of flow from there to to impact and scaling. You mentioned hydrogen as that's the soul energy input into your into your process for producing these proteins for the culture. Yeah, that's the soul energy. So do you envision sort of, are you building fully integrated systems where you where you will, you'll basically have your own dedicated renewable power source electrolysis system fermentation unit and any sort of downstream or, or how do you, how do you envision this on sort of the pilot scale and then, and then as you go beyond that to sort of commercial scale with is it going to be fully integrated or you sort of basically take pieces from different sources. It will be integrated. And so what is something that we're following this macro trend that renewable power is becoming more and more abundant and lower and lower costs and in fact the lowest costs renewable power or power today is renewable it's wind energy. And so that's something that, you know, we're leveraging, we will leverage as we grow. And so the renewable power is the key starting point. And as you said it's like process we split water. And then we feed that plus, you know, oxygen carbon dioxide, and a few other inputs into our air air fermentation process. And then we end up with downstream we end up with a finished flower and air protein flower for that first step, but we actually as a company don't stop there that's our unit of innovation that's what makes us different and distinct is the fact that we can, we can grow protein in a matter of days using zero aerobic land, but then we want to make the products that people find delicious and want to eat my husband being kind of the main customer for me. He liked it that I know we're good. He's from Turkey and they there's meat in every, every dish. His mom was convinced that she was going to convince me to become a meat eater again, I just hadn't had the right preparation, but so yeah so he's he's my guide. And so we then take that that protein flower and we apply culinary techniques think of going from your wheat flour to pasta. Pressure temperatures just culinary techniques to then get to the textures that you're used to experiencing when you bite into, you know, a piece of animal based meat. Yeah, and so the, so to get to where you are today. And these these microbes of course are quite old and the idea of using them you mentioned in the on the air protein website, you know, NASA was exploring. I think they still are today exploring the use of some of these microbes to generate food on space missions. What would you say was the biggest technical hurdle you had to overcome to get to where you are right now in terms of bringing this fermentation process to work as as efficiently as it needs to for production. Yeah absolutely and just to just to highlight double click on the origin story is that NASA and the space program 60s and 70s they were, they had a question to answer which was, if we're going to send people humans out to Mars or humans, how can we ensure that we're able to feed those people the whole time and, you know, the steak example it can't be two years and lots of land in order to do that. So they thought of different ways to grow food more efficiently. And one of the ways was to use these class of cultures is a way of recycling the carbon that the astronauts would breathe out into these nutrients that they then would eat so creating closed loop carbon cycles essentially. And that program ended the space program ended and they, you know, by and large research on this stop, you know, of course there's always a few press professors here and there that work on things, but by and large that that ended. And so myself and Dr john Reed, a colleague that I knew from my, my graduate school days. We decided to pick up off the shelf and see if we can make different things, you know, other than what they were thinking about originally using this type of process. And so when we first started we actually went to contract manufacturers and said hey here's what we want to do here's the cultures that the microbes we want to use and here's what we want to do. And what we the hardest thing was that, you know, I'll just say no one knew how to work with hydrogen. And so it's the ability to actually grow these cultures in traditional fermentation contract manufacturing facilities that was the hardest thing. And so we had to build it in house that was a case where we didn't want to build it in house but we had to. And so we had to build the knowledge the capabilities and know how around how to use these different elements, as an input into a, you know, a fermenter, how to retrofit that fermenter, so that it would then be able to deal with these, these gasses that have low solubility, for instance. So a lot of technical challenges along the way, and then we were able to kind of hit and solve many of those challenges and get really high productivity is 10x the productivity is that NASA scientists were able to hit, and that's when we knew we're on something. So, so you had to become something about chemical engineering company I would imagine to solve that problem. Early on in terms of getting the gas delivery at the rates you need to sustain the right productivity. Yes, so it's definitely multi disciplinary so it's not just your typical fermentation scientists we had to get people that understand chemistry the chemistry of hydrogen and gases and chemical engineering as you mentioned. So, we were able to build kind of that group of partners and, you know, people team that kind of brought those different skill sets together in order to solve the technical challenges that needed to be solved. And I wouldn't say that we're there I'd say that that we're going to keep, we're in the process of scaling happily we've hit the technical metrics that we need that when once we plug those into our technical economic assessment, then it's a very attractive economics and so we're scaling. There's so many opportunities to continue to advance this technology to make different ingredients using different cultures and beyond. Yes, it's interesting you said, you know, hydrogen was sort of the challenge the people didn't know how to work with it. A lot has happened in the hydrogen space over the past, you know, 1015 years and it seems like there's there's now sort of tremendous momentum for scaling hydrogen and bringing down the cost of electrolysis. Did you anticipate that. So in other words, did you sort of focus on organisms that take hydrogen as the input as opposed to perhaps some other gas energy source, thinking that that down the road, you know, looking at the trajectory of renewable electricity that perhaps hydrogen was going to be the most, you know, readily accessible, simple fuel for these types of systems or or was that just a function of sort of the organism that you that you chose to focus on. So I'll say that if we could predict the future that would be great. But so but we did believe that hydrogen the hydrogen economy, you know, we would want to be a part of building it because this type of technology is a way of basically synthesizing long chain molecules well and we started off looking at oils. And we were, you know, we demonstrate that we can make like a beef at replacement as an example, a palm oil replacement. And that was poverty. And then when we decided to go into fuels, not fuels food. We decided to go in food we created a new company your protein really to focus on that that problem and really start focusing on protein in particular, but it's more it's around understanding that, you know, protein oils they're made out of hydrogen and carbon, these are the building blocks and so if you had a process that can take these building blocks directly and synthesize them biosynthesize them as it were, then that would be a way to unlock the potential from a perspective of decreased land utilization from the perspective of using, you know, CO2 directly. And so that's what drove us. And so speaking about sort of converti and some of these early products and, you know, oils palm oil, or I think I saw that they make an aquaculture product as well. So what really drove the decision to to focus on meat and to create air protein, as opposed to sort of focusing on some of these less complex products, perhaps like an oil or or an ingredient or a feed that you know you don't have to to give you don't have to market to a consumer ultimately, and perhaps would be a little bit, at least from an outsider's perspective we are you know should be easier to produce. So why go all the way for the chicken or the scallop. If you could make the animal feed or aquaculture feed. So we already have a B2B business model so converti is that that ingredient that you don't know about convert is making that and we're partners really with large corporations to help them solve their their technical challenge with challenges with that with this technology. So that is what converti does and converti's business model. What, what we decided is that there's an opportunity. The market is right. Consumers are voting with their dollars, and they're looking for alternatives in the food area food wasn't a focus of converti, but food became more of a focus of the world of many different organizations and governments would have you over time and we saw that there was an opportunity really to go directly to the consumer with our story with our message. And so that's why you know we created air air protein as a separate company to really build that that brand and that that messaging really just to say hey here's, here's a new way of producing things and here's, you know, when you buy this product, you're actually doing something better for the planet and here's why and really be able to tell that that story and catalyze the industry catalyze others to know that carbon negative manufacturing is possible of everyday products. I think that's that's that's a really important point that that engaging the consumer and enabling them to make a choice so that they can decide to what extent they're willing to pay for a product that's more sustainably sourced Yeah, I guess if you're if you're farther up the supply chain, and you're replacing aqua culture but but the consumer doesn't know it right they don't know with the fish they're eating with what it was fed, maybe a lot harder to get traction there so Yeah, and the more they know and the more they choose to buy those products the more industry will change. Right. Yeah, the more that we forced to respond. Yeah, absolutely. So what I don't know if you can comment on at what scale. You talked about the sort of techno economic projections. What is the scale of a commercial plant where that really starts to look favorable and other like what what's sort of the target scale for our first commercial plant or that in plant if you prefer. I think that gives us a sense of what what the footprint of these would would look like and you know how much power, perhaps would would be needed to to produce the proteins how much solar or when we're talking for one of these plants. Have you have you sort of projected that far in thinking about what this looks like into the future. I think that fermentation of course is as old as when we realize it but beer and wine tastes tastes good. So if you look at a brewery if you look at a fermentation facility, yogurt manufacturing. So you know if we, you know we're looking at going up to say 100,000 liter plus scale. So that would be able to allow us to make millions of pounds of meat, or I'm sorry, tens of millions of pounds of meat per year five million pounds or so per year and so that that's, that's, I'm saying 550. There's another zero that I'm leaving off 50 million pounds or so a year. And so at those scales, you know we're both having an impact in terms of the actual amount of products of meat that we're making and you know our projections show that we're economically attractive and competitive with other products that are out there. Wow. Okay. And so and those products would be in grocery stores or restaurants or both or what's the, what's the target sort of entry markets for us, wherever meat is found. Okay, okay, but we will launch, you know and food service first that's that's the plan, really to to deliver to be able to be a part of delivering the message and the pairing the, you know our food with other products and creating that again food is all about experiences and so we want to recreate that experience that you, you get today. So food service will be where we start and then as we grow and expand and then of course retail is where everyone purchases their their food. And are there, are there regulatory hurdles to to rolling out in food service or or beyond. What's significant are those if you're facing those. Yeah what we've chosen to do is go through the FDA, you know, grass process, generally regarded as safe and so we're ticking the boxes and making our way through that now, really to demonstrate the nutritional value of the ingredient that we're making. And so that's just a process that we're going through and happily we're making great progress through that. Okay. So, so you would, your first plans would be in California, or where you're sort of thinking regionally to roll this out. Yeah, two part answers that we are building capacity here in California and that will facilitate our launch into the marketplace. And also be you know where our innovation happens as well where we continue to innovate on new ingredients, where we continue to innovate on new products going beyond ours, our chicken and seafood offering to beef and pork and beyond. And, but there's many other geographies that we're looking at to expand to that have for instance an abundance of wind energy, as an example when of course again, some of the lowest cost wind energy that you can find now is wind energy. Electric and then increasingly solar so there's there's many different places that we've, we've been looking at as a potential expansion play locations and you know we've identified kind of our commercial extension expansion location now, haven't made any announcements about that but we'll make an announcement soon. But you're just probably a few weeks early of the announcement. Can you give us some insights a little bit on the downstream so so you get to the flower the protein flower. What, how much processing or what do you have the culinary work do you have to do to turn that into a piece of chicken and how different is that process then making the scallop, it's sort of mind boggling boggling to me how you start with the flower and you make something that looks like a piece of chicken or a piece of scallop which have very different textures very different characteristics so so can you give us some more insight into what that, what that part of your technology looks like. Yeah, absolutely. And so that goes back to this cross functional approach to really understanding what what makes me meet what makes it have that structure. Some things might be more stringy and some things you know might, you know they're there's different properties and our chicken platform actually leads nicely to our to pork, the way that we're making our chicken, you know, pork is kind of naturally a second product in that and the way that we're making our scallops we're doing it differently. You know then then something like a beef filet is a natural extension of that and so we take, we take technologies that are traditional that others are using think of extrusion if you're familiar with that. That's one that people are using today but then we also the whole, you know our whole company and our whole business is around marrying industries that weren't normally married. In this case, having to understand mass transfer and gases and all that which is typically not in the food industry, and the way that we're integrating it into the food industry and the fermentation. And so similarly we use different technologies and techniques to generate the textures for like our scallop whatever so that we do use the traditional techniques but we also are innovating and leveraging things that are not used in the food industry today to actually create the textures that you're looking for for the different meat products. And if we sort of now shift to, you know, thinking about impact and impact on ecosystems and deforestation. What, what is the, what is the product that you think would have the biggest impact on deforestation. And what are you going forward to try to ultimately address that problem. Yeah, well, for, you know, soy is using feed for many, if not most animals. So, you know, you listed that as the second biggest culprit. And so that's something that we can address is the feed to these different animals. So, but of course beef is number one. This is the biggest biggest culprit when it comes to climate change climate impact so going after the beef products will help us get there even faster in terms of transitioning our food system to something that can be more carbon negative. And that, what sort of, what sort of hurdles beyond, you know, what you've already addressed for chicken and for seafood, what are the additional hurdles for beef when I started beef, I guess is another way of asking. Well one reason is that everyone else did. So we're starting in a different area. And one thing that we want to stand out with our brand and what we're doing is that we can actually look at the nutritional aspects as well and we highlight that as being important. And so, many people in the US and some other geographies are shifting from beef and pork to chicken for health reasons. And so we decide to go after one of the, you know, perceived to be healthy as meats out there, and then to make it healthier. And so we want to demonstrate that we can deliver the taste, the texture of course the sustainability that's just given, but also that we can deliver nutritional outcomes as well with our first products. And so that was one of the reasons why we chose chicken, and then the, the seafood products, you know, again another area where people aren't focused, and where we can come and stand out stand out not just for the, you know sustainability benefit but that we can actually mimic a scallop or a halibut directly whereas we've been able to do that. Okay. And there's been some, it seems like there's some pushback in the, in the industry, maybe from some of the incumbents saying that okay these alternative meat products and I realize there's a whole spectrum of them some of them plant based all the way to technologies like your are not healthier or you know then then traditional meat products or in some cases there's a notion that they're less healthy because of additives. How do you, how do you address that. And how do you respond to that. Again that was why one of the reasons we chose chicken so that we can create something that's, that's not only comparable to something that's already, you know a healthier meat, as it were, but make it even healthier so as we're making our protein ingredients for instance, you know all the essential amino acids we start off with complete proteins. We start off with protein ingredients that have bio available vitamins and minerals bio available minerals as well as we start off with a nutritious and then as we're building that and converting that into applying the culinary techniques to get to a meat product, we add a minimal set of additional ingredients so that we have clean label minimal ingredients, you know low sodium, no cholesterol, we're targeting all those nutritional outcomes with the products that we're making. And how do you, I guess, how do you think about these perceptions of you know what's a, what's a good meat, you know what's a healthy meat to eat versus, versus a an unhealthy meat or what's a healthy food product is that is that well down for you just to, you know, sort of managing the ingredients and getting that message out there to your consumers or do you think that there are some, some perceptions that may be hard to change that will take sort of different tactics over time to try to address. Yeah, so, so in terms of animal meat, you know we we leave the debate to the animal with me people about which is healthier and which isn't going to bring in the new generation the next generation of healthy meats and so we're focused on bringing nutrition no matter what the products are, while bringing that flavor so people are really looking for a certain flavor, when they're they're sitting down to have a specific piece of meat. We want to deliver that flavor but but we're building it ourselves so you have to remember that's what's the difference is the pig is the pig. And you just eat the pig but we can understand well what makes that pig taste like what makes that bacon taste the way it really cause people causes people to come back that and then you know work with our food scientists to like deliver that and deliver it in a way where we're starting with just great ingredients so so our focus is to build the next generation and I'll pause and say that my grandparents were farmers my aunts and uncles were farmers and so I come from a family of farmers and as I was talking to my aunt the other day, you know we see ourselves as just the next generation we're continuing it but we're doing it differently and so air bacon should be good for you as well. Yeah, from my perspective it seems like you know recommendations about what is and isn't healthy to eat. They evolve over time right and the science of understanding the effects of different diets is not perfect and it takes a lot of data over many years so I appreciate your perspective that actually you can respond as as as the science evolves and and we learn about what components of different foods are healthy. As you said that the pig is the pig there's not much you can do about that but you're in a position to respond to that so I think yeah. And if you look at how animals are farmed today. There's ways of doing it that maybe or even less healthy so there's you know hormones antibiotic so our process is hormone free antibiotic free herbicide free pesticide free so all those different things that people are concerned about as well impacting, you know the quality of their food. We start off in a very different way. There's a question from the audience about genetic engineering so so are the are the organisms that you're using genetically modified. They are not they're non GMO. Okay. There's another area that from my perspective that doesn't. It wouldn't concern me at all but obviously it's an area that that many consumers are concerned about but that's good that you don't have to deal with that. The final products that you that you're making so the chicken. It's cooked presumably when you know in the product that the consumer would buy or does it need to be cooked or how does that work. Yeah yeah two part answer one is, you know we can deliver, and we will deliver kind of, you know the quote unquote raw version into the marketplace primarily when we get to retail. But also we can deliver kind of signature dishes as well so we work with chefs and we will continue to work with chefs to, to create those experiences that's, that's the benefit of what we're doing is we're, we're sitting down with consumers and we're trying what they're looking for with flavors are looking for what do they want paired with with their food kind of spices they want. And so we can deliver the raw products but also the signature dishes as well. Okay. So, getting back to to deforestation and sustainability. Ultimately it seems like you would, you need to have a, you know, lots of production in the developing world, where. Well, there's perhaps, you know, greater stress on agricultural lands so there's, there's a built in demand for new technologies perhaps that can produce food more efficiently. But second of all, and, you know, in countries where, where there is, you know, massive deforestation. What are your plans for sort of expanding internationally and how do you see, do you see any significant barriers to deploying this technology really anywhere in the world where, where it's needed. Yeah, we definitely we're starting in the US of course, but we already are talking to regulatory bodies because that's kind of the key thing that will as we go into different geographies we have to go and work with their different regulatory regimes. And so that's we've already started some of those conversations, and we're doing our grass process now in a way that trans transfers nicely to, you know, the places where we're in conversations with, with different people. And you know, this is a new way of farming. And so we hope to create this as a new way of farming for people in different countries across the world and people in the US as well. And so a way of growing protein, vertically, quickly, and efficiently, and creating products creating meat from that a new way of making a meat farm so not animal agriculture but air protein agriculture. So, one of your investors from the recent fundraise is is ADM when one of the giants in the agribusiness. How do you, how do you envision sort of partnering with these large agribusiness companies and in some ways you're, you're a competitor, right, but, but what's sort of the strategy for engaging them. And as you grow and hopefully, you know, reach capacities that they're used to operating on a daily basis. Yeah, one thing I'll say that I'm a part of the unreasonable group of one of their fellows and air protein is one of their companies, their portfolio companies and they have this this this value of we is greater than I, and we believe that working with ADM is a force multiplier for us. They're one of the largest fermentation companies in the world they're North America's largest protein provider, and they just recently announced their their huge commitment. And in protein, you know, I think it was $300 million investment that they announced recently into a new protein innovation center and so they're investing heavily specifically and sustainability they are a food company, and they they know and believe that we need to continue to accelerate food production, and they're investing in it and so that's one of the reasons they invested in us, and we are excited about that partnership. And because they're one of the largest fermentation companies in the world we we see that as de risking, you know, our scale up working with them and collaborating with them so it's all positive. Okay, terrific. And so, in, ultimately, I guess you see the change that you're starting and the technology that you're proving sort of spreading to these bigger companies and then you know, adopting this approach, or some of their own sort of variant of this approach to to produce food products. We believe, and we want it to be the wave of the future, because what else is there. Right, definitely there's a lot of people working and so let me let me actually say that differently because we stand on the shoulders of giants and many, many people in this space that are working on alternative ways of making meat and making food that's that's much acceptable and so we're part of that community. And so, you know, we, we want to catalyze more and more of that. And in particular, we want to catalyze the carbon negative zero land version of that. And so we do see that you know we envision 3040 years from now, as this, even before then we envision air meat being just, oh that's just meat, you know, but ultimately, you know, 20 plus years that this will be a normal way of manufacturing. And do you think that the meat lovers today, perhaps your husband among them, that that they will be receptive to just embracing this as meat, or is it really a matter of, you know, sort of a new generation the younger generation, growing up eating products like this and not really even thinking twice about okay this is a meat substitute or this is an alternative meat versus versus an alternative me that is that change going to come from the young generation you think or do you believe that you can, you can really convince people who have grown up eating, you know, chicken and beef and pork that this is every bit is as delicious and and something that they should, you know, that they would switch to on a normal basis. Yeah, change change, you know, innovation leads to change constantly we see that in many industries. And I don't think this is different what's what's going to happen. So as I look at my definitely the younger generations, they're growing up understanding the environmental impacts of food and meat in particular and flexitarian they're more likely to be a flexitarian, you know, potentially than older generations but as I, you know, my, my 80 plus year old aunt and uncle grew up in Louisiana. There's there's meat and everything, you know, with my, my mother's family and their their hometown cooking that when they became vegetarians I almost fell out of my chair and and what what, you know, I think some of people are, you know, shift because of health reasons in their case it was purely driven by health, but that's what drove them to look at alternatives in the marketplace. So I think that's one side of it is that it isn't just the younger generations for various reasons other segments are also looking at alternatives, but then on the other side of the question what I say is that what's important is that it tastes good. It tastes good you can deliver that experience if I can deliver it again to my husband, then you know he's going to eat it and he's going to want it and crave it we you know we want to make things that are craveable as well. And that just our natural replacements to what you have and you can, you can eat it with the knowing that you're actually doing something positive for the environment as well. So once this the taste pieces unlocked, then you know, I believe we believe that that's how we get to the, the everyday meat eaters who aren't thinking about the environment. They're just thinking about having a great experience when they sit down for dinner. I think we brought up that vegetarians so do you do you see vegetarians as being drawn to this to this product or or something that would take some warming up for them to consider, because they're not used to sort of eating meat on a regular basis anyway so how do you think about that, that market. Yeah, so what I would say is that the role that we want to play so the biggest, the biggest impact is to is to transition the meat eaters off of traditional animal agriculture that's the biggest impact. And that's the impact we want to have. So when we're making our food, we're looking to those that actually enjoy the flavor of meat and delivering what they're looking for. And so to the extent that they're vegetarians that that also will enjoy that maybe they're recent vegetarians or they've been missing that state this whole time, then absolutely. But that's really our target because that's really where the biggest impact can be felt the vegetarians are already having their impact. Okay. I want to spend some time particularly since, you know, many of the people who who access the Tomcat content are students who are aspiring to be entrepreneurs themselves and you know interesting in applying their their skill of tackling these huge huge problems. Can you can you give us a maybe a little bit more insight into what, what drove you to go from being a theoretical physicist to to now tackling this, you know, very practical problem that requires all, you know, this very interdisciplinary approach. What, what drove that that change in you. Yeah, so it really was driven by that that time in New Orleans, after Hurricane Katrina and just really seeing that climate change is real. And, and when, when we do have increased, not not to say specifically that that was caused by climate change but the frequency of weather events the intensity of weather events being increased really affects people's lives. And just really wanted to figure out how can I be a part of the solution is climate sciences are telling us that this is this is a problem. What can we do. What can I do so my background is is, you know, physics plus business. So science and technology, plus helping executives all business problems. And then I'll add on top of that that my dad was an entrepreneur so he at some point was a president of a chain of 55 hair salon so I just grew up seeing, you know, someone who has a lot of ideas and seeing the highs and lows of entrepreneurship and seeing him gather people to kind of execute against those ideas and so having that, that background, plus business plus technology. That's where I saw things coming together for my contribution policy makers have a role regulatory bodies NGOs they all have a role in this, but where I saw I could fit and my colleague Dr john read, we saw we could fit together, was to really focus on the technology and science. What is the same, what where's the science it, how can we turn that into a technical solution that we can commercialize. And how can we turn to turn out into something that people will will buy people are buying things every day so let's have them buy things that are better. And so that's really why we first, first bill coverty, you know, targeting, you know, different with different targets and then ultimately decided to add to our portfolio of companies as we're air protein to target the meat in food industry in particular. Yes, so you know one of the things I try to tell respective grad students or incoming grad students that you know what you learn in graduate school you really learn how to how to learn and they always look at me like it doesn't make any sense but but you're empowered, you know going through graduate school no matter what the specific discipline is you emerge sort of empowered to, you know tackle hard complex problems. And I would, I think, you know you're perhaps the best example of this because your area of deep study in your, in your education, very, very different, obviously from my, you know from fermentation processes. Was there any, and I know you had a co founder with some expertise in this area. Was there any sense of hesitation that, oh, okay I'm getting into a technology space, you know I've spent. I've spent my education studying deep physics but now I'm getting into a technology space that's that's totally different was any sort of hesitation or did you really feel like, okay all of your experiences had really equipped you to move rapidly in a in a new space space that's new to you and make progress. Yeah, I'd say no, no hesitation whatsoever. I mean, for me, just I was raised by an entrepreneur so. And you know he had ideas my dad and he would just go and go after them, you know he'd get after it as it were. And many other experiences that I had just really caused me to not put myself in a box and what what could be done in a box and so it was more that when I partnered with Dr john read. We just to your point about education teaching you how to solve problems. That's, that's what it was, and it's more with my dad it was teaching me to be bold and be courageous and not be constrained by what has has always been done. And so we, we asked the question how could we have an impact and yes it's a big ambition that we have. We are our mission is to accelerate the world's transition to climate and rainforest cleanly meets that's our issue, our mission and air protein. And, and you know, in order to do that our way of doing that is to create this carbon negative we meet and scale it as fast and as much as we can to accelerate that transition. And I would say that both my, my dad's entrepreneurial background and me seeing that, and, and being taught through all the many years I spent in school, how to solve problems, made it just something that, you know, follow your passion says it's something that I'm passionate about, you know, my colleague Dr john me was passionate about, and then I'll, and not to just focus on the beginning because we've then we're surrounded by so many great people that joined us first as advisors. You know, in our first in our garage phase, we have people coming from their day jobs to the little lab that we read it in San Francisco at night to help us figure out what we're, you know, what what we could do with this, can we actually turn this into a commercializable technology. And then we've just had so many people join us in this journey that have their own passions and their own goals in life, and they see how this fits into what they're the impact they're trying to have so I think part of it too is just seeing the ups and some we first entered a business plan competition, and then we got to, you know, we were one of the winners we placed, and we're like, Oh, maybe we're on something so and from that point forward just so many people have been a part of this journey, going to, you know, our investors and our, our current employees and our advisory groups and just so many supporters out there so these are the, these are the things that make it impossible to not do it really. That's a, that's a terrific point about advisors I think there's a speak a little bit from my own experience there's a sense when you're starting something new with a big, a big lofty goal that there's so much that that needs to be done and you need so many people you would need such a big team to solve all these complex problems but you can, and you don't have the resources to of course hire that team on day one. But you can leverage experts and advisors is something we try to encourage and facilitate at the time cut center as well. You can leverage people who are willing to put time in after work right and or that you know they have 30 or 40 years of industry directly in an area that you need and they're inspired by your mission and can can really help you solve technical problems that would otherwise require a big team to solve. And I would say that that's been probably the biggest surprise for me the biggest, the thing that I didn't expect was just how many people were out there that were just eager to help and eager to be a part of what we're doing. I definitely encourage students if you are have an idea, you know, leverage the network, you know the alumni database you know contact people that are industry experts. And you know there's many people that are just waiting to be put to use and to be helpful and to extend what they're passionate about and help someone else do what they're passionate about. So, just in the last couple of minutes that we have here, returning to NASA as it were to space exploration. What do you think about the prospects of, you know, utilizing these systems I mean certainly at a high level, you have to do the types of functions that that your technology does in order to, you know produce food on a deep space mission or perhaps the Mars settlement. I understand is I understand there's sort of two camps there's one is that okay we just need to increase launch weight and then we can pack everything that we need on these on these trips and the other is that okay we do have to build the capacity to, to make things right from Earth. What, what are some of the hurdles or what do you think, what do you think what the timeline would be for really bringing this type of technology to, to deep space either on a space shuttle or on a settlement on Mars. Yeah, I mean one would want to continue to innovate to just make things as efficient as possible you have so little space and available and then of course, you know what the other factors are different. The gravitational field of whatever force, you know gravity is different in those locations and when you're flying there, you know if you want to eat while you're on your mission to Mars as it were, you know so there's there's other things to address so you know the the basis at NASA got us to the moon with technology that is so ancient comparison what's on my iPhone. So we can do it that the amazing thing about humans is that we can kind of solve many of these challenges that that that we may face, and the core, the core science, you know we've worked on the core science and gotten it to a point where it's economically attractive or at least it appears to be, we're scaling a little bit to demonstrate that you know what what we're doing here on earth but I think it's just a matter of doing more research and getting it ready for for space missions. And is that something that that you think would be a something that air protein would would participate in the future or or is there another frontier, I should say for for this company that that would leverage some of these innovations to tackle another problem. I know I'd say that we, I mean we're we're we want to be a part of feeding people wherever they are. Of course, here on spaceship earth, we have a huge need and our spaceship is going to have 10 billion people by 2050. So we have a need to figure this out here. And that is our current focus but in the process, you know we're happy to be a part of all kind of scientific explorations we convert he has been benefited from, you know grants and being a part of governmental projects across the board from a number of governmental bodies in different countries as well. And so we would happily continue to work with the government. And, and actually now it's not the government anymore it's it's all these other organizations that focus on space travel. So yeah, happily we work with any of them to bring this to fruition for long journeys. Well, you've given a lot of advice already but I guess I'll give you one, you know, one more opportunity is there anything else you would say to the sort of aspiring entrepreneurs that maybe the undergraduates are this science and engineering students. In terms of, you know how they, how they pick a problem to go after and and how how they carve out a path to doing that. Yeah, I'd say for for myself. It was, it was a bit of a journey it was a bit of a discovery process and and what catalyze what ultimately became coveredy and then would lead to the creation of air protein was was business plan was a single business plan competition that led to multiple business plan competitions and so the nice thing about that is that it forces you to actually sit down and create the full story and see how if it holds water. And then tell other people about it and see what they think does it hold water, and then if it does get other people that are interested, you know with these business play competitions often they'll have, they'll have advisors that have signed up to help support students and other participants so so for for us that definitely was a catalyst for us to just press go. Yeah, and that first plan that you put together is that basically has that been the sort of the core of converting an inner protein or has it evolved a lot since that first time you force yourself to sit down and put it together. Yes, absolutely. It's exactly as planned. This goes back to predicting the future again. Yeah. No no no of course you know they say you're once you write it all down it changes the next day or what have you. And that's true. I mean as an entrepreneur, you're going to have to pivot. You're going to face reality and reality is going to tell you oh it's slightly different than what you expected. And in the reality is we started here already in the middle of a recession. So that that impact of things and when the price of oil was dropping and all kind of things were happening so. So you have to pivot and you, if you stick with it. And if you, yeah if you stick with it then then you'll see what amazing things can result. Well, this has been really enjoyable and I think just tremendously inspirational and informative so so I want to thank you Lisa for taking the time to talk with us. Before I, but before we go. I want to emphasize for for everyone watching it live or who will access this later. We have a Tomcat center community, a networking hub through linked in that link Danica has posted that in the chat that's a great way to to connect with each other. If you are interested in connecting with air protein. Please reach out to us at the Tomcat center and we can help facilitate those those connections. And, you know, anyone who's interested either in trying to help or learning more or perhaps just buying some some chicken and scouts and you're hiring. Fantastic. Yes. So, so please, please connect through through LinkedIn, or, or reach out to us and we will put you, we will put you in touch with the folks at air protein. Thanks so much for taking the time to talk with us today and it's just really been a tremendous hour to spend with you. Thank you so much for having me. I've enjoyed it.