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Scott, have you ever considered going vegetarian?

No, until literally recently. I have a very big dog, a Great Dane, and I've been seeing these TikToks with people stroking their cows, and these cows look dog-like. My Great Dane is just so sensitive and emotional that I've started getting me feeling about just how inhumanely we treat animals. I'm not thinking about going vegetarian, but I am thinking about moving meat consumption from three times a day to maybe once or twice a day.

Have you always felt this empathy for animals, or is this a new thing because of TikTok?

Well, I like to think I've always felt a little bit of empathy for animals, but something about having a beast, a really big dog, and realizing it's probably not that different than many of the animals that we basically just abuse and slaughter. I'm not sure I bind all the health benefits. I don't know. Maybe that's the problem. I've been eating beef my whole life. But the reality is it's not that vegans are animal lovers, they're plant haters. I love that.

Do the environmental and sustainability concerns around meat and our production of meat, does that play into your decision at all?

It should, but it doesn't. It's not what's driving it. I don't want people eating my dog or anything similar to it as the bottom line. Like, methane, deforestation, climate change. You know the data. It's probably one of the best things you can do for the world is move from meat-based to plant-based calories. But my considering moving to a non-beef diet is just a function of my recent concern or increased empathy or inability to ignore what it is we do to animals.

Welcome to First Time Founders. Here's a statistic that might shock you. In the US alone, we kill 4,000 cows, 14,000 pigs, and a million chickens every hour. And every year, those numbers continue to grow. Now, we don't often cover animal welfare on this podcast, but it's an integral piece of one of the most important and rapidly evolving industries in our economy, namely the food industry. My next guest is a food entrepreneur and also one of the foremost animal rights activists of our time. As a high school student, he founded Animal Outlook, a nationally recognized animal advocacy organization. Later, he wrote the national best seller Clean Meat, and most recently, he decided to start a company. With $27 million in funding, five patterns and a 9,000-litre bioreactive facility, this founder is well on his way to accomplishing his company's mission, make meat without killing animals. This is my conversation with Paul Shapiro, CEO and co founder of the Better Meat Co. Paul, thanks for coming on and joining us.

Ed, great to be with you.

Where are you zooming in from?

I am based in and I'm zooming in from and live in Sacramento, California. We often call it the farm to fork capital of the country. However, given that I work in the fermentation space, I prefer to call it the fermenter to fork capital.

Oh, very good. How long have you been there?

I moved to Sacramento about six years ago, and I wish that I had some really awesome business reason for doing that. But the truth, because we know each other so well, Ed, I'll confess to you, the truth. The truth is I moved here for a woman who is my wife. Oh, very nice. It was a good idea. But I also started a company at that same time here in Sacramento, and so we've put down our roots or more literally concrete and steel here in Sacramento.

I love it. Well, let's get right into it because we've got a lot to talk about. So this podcast is, I want to say, four or five years old. We've had guests on to talk about basically every topic you could think of. But for some reason, I think this speaks to mine and Scott's and our team's own ethical uneasiness with this topic, we have never discussed animal welfare on this podcast. But I look at the numbers and the numbers are staggering. So just from my understanding, we kill 650 million sheep, one and a half billion pigs, and 75 billion chickens for meat every year. And those numbers have tripled in the past four decades, while the human population has only doubled. So in other words, the average human is now consuming more meat than at any time in human history. Now, I want to be upfront early with you, Paul. I am a meat eater. I have eaten meat my whole life. But I look at these statistics and I'm shocked by the scale and the proportion of death and suffering that we continue to levy on animals and at a rate that continues to increase.

So let's just start with a very general question for you. How did we get here?

Yeah, sure. So, Ed, I agree with this sentiments that you're expressing, although I wonder how much the numbers matter. So you said there's 75 billion chickens who are killing every year. If it was 45 or 25 billion, right? Those are obviously a huge, really different numbers. But to the average person, our minds are not equipped to grapple with such astronomical numbers because in our evolutionary past, there was no need to think about numbers in the billions. We don't really have an emotional difference to us when we hear 25 billion versus 75 billion. At the same time, it's important to remember that these are individuals. These are animals who feel pain and suffering with every bit as much intensity as our dogs and cats do. They are often smarter than our dogs and cats. The only reason that we subject these animals to such cruelty and violence that we don't typically subject dogs and cats to is because of the way that we view them differently, not because of anything inherent about them. It's just because we view them differently. Of course, in some cultures, they do view dogs as food, just like in some cultures, They are horrified by the thought of cows being food.

But the difference is how we perceive them. Now, to me, the real concern, yeah, I'm concerned about the number of animals who are being used, and that's a major environmental point because it takes so much land and water and greenhouse gas emissions to raise all these animals for food. But I think the bigger concern for me is just how much suffering they endure. If you think about the US alone, 99% of the animals who we raise for food are raised on factory farms. We have this myth about animals being out in buccolic pastures. That's really not true. For the vast majority of animals, nearly all of them who we raise for food, they're living inside of typically windowless warehouses packed beek to beek where they are living in their own feces. They can barely move, and In the case of the chickens who are raising for food, they've been selectively bred to grow so big, so fast, that many of them can't even take more than a few steps before they collapse underneath their own unnatural bulk. Even if they were in really bucalic, beautiful settings, they would still be prisoners in their own bodies because they're so big that they're in constant pain.

Then when you consider the fact that we take nearly all of the eggling chickens in the world and confide them in cages where they can't spread their wings, or we take pigs and lock them in cages where they can't turn around for their whole lives. You recognize that these are customary agricultural practices. It's not a case of a few bad apples. It's not a case of just some rogue farmer. That customary agricultural practices are so inhumane toward animals that if you were to subject dogs or cats to those practices in the United States, you would be criminally charged with animal cruelty. Part of the reason why I think it's so important that we develop alternatives to meat and eggs and dairy is just that we cannot satiate humanity's demand for these products without inflecting wide-scale torture on animals. Even independent of the number of animals, which is, again, astronomical, it's just a torturous existence for them, and we shouldn't be doing it.

We'll get to the Better Meat Company, which is your company in a moment. But I first want to just explore your career in this industry, which dates back actually to when you were in high school. At the age of 14, you decided to become vegan, and then you started this nonprofit organization Mission Compassion Over Killing, which is now known as Animal Outlook. How did that all begin for you? What was the inspiration behind launching this career in animal protection and animal advocacy?

I have a lot to thank my mom for. She worked at a local animal shelter when I was growing up, and so I was sensitized to the plate of dogs, at least. We always had three or four of these dogs from the animal shelter on our house, and they were like siblings to me. They weren't just pieces of property. They were like real siblings. Back in the early '90s, somebody showed me a video of animals inside of factory farms and slaughterhouses. I remember thinking as I was watching these animals being hung upside down, having their throats cut, and I was thinking, What if those were my dogs? What would I Of course, the answer is that there's nothing I wouldn't do to prevent that. I started thinking, Well, if I wouldn't want it to happen to my own dogs, why would I want it to happen to any animal? There was no animal protection club in my high school, so I started this one called Compassion Over Killing that over a period of years transformed into a national nonprofit organization that I ran with offices on both coasts. Eventually, that led me into a career of lobbying for animals in the state legislatures of the country, and then eventually into authorship about the alternative protein industry, and finally now to running my own alternative protein company designed to recreate the meat experience without animals.

So that's the past 30 years of my life, Ed, pretty much summed up in like two minutes there.

That was a good summary. I want to pivot to one thing that I know that you speak about a lot, which I find fascinating and also very true, which is that you have said that exploitation actually rarely ends because we decide that it's immoral or that it's socially unjust. And your point has been that it almost always ends because of some technological innovation that makes it irrelevant, makes the exploitation obsolete in some way. Could you take us through what you mean by that?

Think about it like this. For thousands of years, the fastest way to get around was by whipping horses. So we basically had horses as our forced laborers, and they worked under threat of violence. Nobody stopped whipping horses because they cared about horses. In fact, if you go back to the mid-19th century, there were all types of animal welfare campaigns to get better conditions for horses. The ASPCA and other animal welfare groups that were founded in the 1860s and '70s were really founded for the purpose of trying to get better conditions for horses. They wanted resting hours, sabbath days where they could be rested for a whole day, mandatory watering stations, and so on. And yet it wasn't those animal welfare campaigners who really liberated horses. It was Henry Ford. Through the creation of the car, or what was then called the Horseless Carriage, he liberated horses in a way that nobody ever dreamt of. These animal welfare campaigners weren't even trying to liberate horses. They were trying to just ameliorate some of their suffering. As a result, we now consider a horse-trunk carriage, a relic of an archaic past. Similarly, for thousands of years, we lit our homes with whale oil.

Even if you go back 2,000 years ago, the Romans rendered some species of whales extinct in their waters because they whaled them to such a vigorous degree. In the end, it wasn't humane sentiment or sustainability concerns that freed whales from harpoons. It was the invention of kerosine, which is a cleaner, faster, and cheaper way to light our homes. We used to live-pluck geese, which is a torturous thing to do, but that's how we wrote letters. Nobody stopped using quill pens because they cared about geese. They stopped because metal fountain pens were invented and it was an easier way to write. The question is, if we used horses and whales and geese for thousands of years and then quickly stopped using them, might the same be true for chickens and pigs and cows, where we were using them as food sources for thousands of years? Then within a matter of decades, will we find new ways to create the same experience where we can enjoy high-protein delicious foods that don't require subjecting these animals to this type of torment.

Which I think brings us nicely to your company, the Better Meat Company, which you started back in 2018. I mean, you had a long career in advocacy and nonprofit work. It sounds like you might believe that actually technological innovation starting this company would be a more effective way to protect animals. Would that be right?

Yeah, I certainly hope so, Ed. That's the goal. I think that it's very unlikely that humans are just going to give up carnivory and switch to lentil soup and hummus wraps and bean and rice burritos. That would be awesome. I would love it if people did that. Those are great foods to eat. But humans seem to really like meat. Meat demand is going up, not down. That's because people are escaping poverty. In China and India, you have hundreds of millions of people who have left poverty and joined the middle class. One of the very first things that people do when they escape poverty and join the middle class is they eat more meat. Of course, we want people escaping poverty, needless to say, but there is a side effect, and that side effect is a much heavier environmental footprint. The question is, can we feed all of these people, the 8 billion of us who we have today, and there's going to be Another 2 billion of us joining the planet between now and the year 2050. So 25 years from now, we're going to be another 2 billion people on the planet. We don't have another celestial body to farm.

We're not going to be farming the moon, we're not going to be farming Mars. In the next 25 years, we're going to have one celestial body to farm, and that's planet Earth. We've already deforested a huge part of Earth just to raise animals for food. The number one cause of deforestation is raising animals for food. The number one cause of wildlife extinction and biodiversity loss is raising animals for food. A leading cause of climate change is raising animals for food. In fact, according to the United Nations, the animal agriculture industry contributes more greenhouse gas emissions than the entirety of the transportation sector combined. More than all cars, more than all planes, all trains, all boats, all combined is animal agriculture. The question is, how can we actually reduce the number of animals who we are using for food in a way that still allows people to enjoy the foods that they really crave? I believe that trying to recreate the meat experience without animals is the way to do it. It's similar to needing to wean ourselves off of fossil fuels. But while it would be great if people wanted to walk and bike more, people really seem to like cars.

People seem to like driving. We need to create cars that don't rely on fossil fuels. Well, similarly, it would be great if people wanted to eat bean rice burritos, as I mentioned, but most people want to eat meat, and so we need to create the meat without the animals. That's what my company, the Better Meco, is seeking to do.

I think when people think of meat alternative company as the first two that come to mind, for me, would be Impossible Foods and Beyond Meat. But I know that Better Meat is quite different. Tell us what you're doing at Better Meat, and tell us what you're doing that other meat alternative manufacturers are not doing.

Well, first of all, Impossible Foods and Beyond Meat have done a very good job. They've helped to develop this industry in a way that just hadn't happened prior, and we all owe them, I think, a great deal of respect. But what they're doing, as you pointed out, is different from what the Better Meat Co does. So Impossible and Beyond both make plant-based meat, meaning they're taking plants and converting them into things that look like animal meat and taste like animal meat. The way that you do that, let's just take Beyond as an example, their star ingredient is a texturized pea protein. How do you get that? Basically, you grow a field of pees, you harvest a field of pees, you mill it into a flour. That flour is very low protein. You have to strip out the fiber, strip out the fat, and then you concentrate it down into a pea protein powder that an athlete might take as a supplement. But that powder, while being proteinatious, It is not textured like animal meat. Then you subject it to something called extrusion, which is a fancy way of saying lots of pressure, lots of heat.

As a result, you get a texturized pea protein that has a more animal-like texture, and you add other ingredients to it, and you get the Beyond burger. Now, that's fine. I like the Beyond burger, but there's a lot of things to do to get a pea to look and taste like beef. That's why the Beyond burger is more expensive than slaughter-based beef, because it's not just made of pees, which are obviously cheaper than beef. It's made of a tiny portion of the pea and all these other processes happen to it. What we at the Better Me Co do is we don't rely on plants at all. We're relying on a different kingdom entirely of microbial fungi, otherwise known as micoprotein. The micoprotein that we grow here in Sacramento is textured like meat naturally. No processing entailed. It simply happens through fermentation. We have a three-story tall fermenter where inside of it there is a fermentation occurring that transforms these microscopic spores into foods that look and like animal-based meat. They have that texture and straight out of the fermenter without any isolation, fractionation, extrusion, none of it. Just simply in its whole food, all-natural, unprocessed state, you have a micoprotein that not only is textured like animal meat, but has more protein than eggs, more iron and zinc than beef, more potassium than bananas, more fiber than notes, and it naturally contains vitamin B12.

In other words, you get all the things about meat that you want without the things about meat that you don't want: saturated fat, cholesterol, animal cruelty, environmental degradation, and more. This is a promising way to make a whole food, all-natural, alt meat ingredient that can not only compete on texture, but also can compete on price because it is a whole food.

We'll be right back.

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We're back with First Time Founders. It sounds like you get basically the best of both worlds with this fermentation process using fungai. Two things. One, how did you find out about this and how did you know that this was the idea to pursue when you wanted to start a company? And two, why isn't everyone doing this? Why wouldn't beyond an impossible start using your process?

There's a company called Corn, Q-U-O-R-N, in Britain, that for the last 25 years has been doing something similar. Now, they use a different species in a different process, but still they're We're using microbial fungai to create high protein products. It's a good product. I like it, I eat it, but it doesn't really taste like meat. It tastes good if you like it. I liken it to tofu. Not that it tastes like tofu, but it's like if you like tofu, you like tofu, and you eat tofu because you like tofu. You're not eating it because you can't tell the difference between it and beef. You obviously can. You happen to like tofu. The same is so with corn, Q-U-O-R-N. I think if you like corn, you eat corn, and that's that. But I wondered, was there different species or a different process that could create a more meat-like experience? Because corn has been marketed to vegetarians, and those are people who don't necessarily think it needs to be a spot on replacement. They just want something that tastes good and has a lot of protein. Corn has built a very successful business. They sell several hundred million dollars worth of product every single year, but it's all based on one organism.

They control about 99% of the microprotein market today. Imagine if you only ate pork and you didn't eat chicken or beef or turkey or fish or anything. Yet the world of animal protein is very diverse. All of those species I just mentioned have different flavors, different textures, different nutritional profiles, and so on. The same is so with plant-based proteins. Imagine if you only ate pea protein, you never ate wheat or chickpea or fava bean or soy or whatever. Those are all different. The same is true with microbial fungal. There's thousands of species out there, and they all have different nutritional profiles, textural profiles, growth rates, and so on. What we did in the early days at the Better Meat Co was basically screen large numbers of strains to see which ones were the highest protein, fastest growing, and most meat-like texture. Then we developed a process around those strains. We were awarded numerous patents for our technology. Then we built a pilot facility here in Sacramento to prove that this technology can scale outside of the lab, which we've now done. The next step for us is to raise the capital needed in order to build a full-scale commercial production facility, which is the next thing that we intend to do.

Now, to answer your second question, Ed, about why other companies don't do it. First of all, it's very hard. We're talking about biotechnology here. It's not just like you can set up a farm and grow mushrooms. This is not like that at all. We're growing microbes, and we're growing them inside of large stainless steel fermenters, sometimes known as bioreactors. It's not to say that other people can't do it. Obviously, we did, and corn has done it. It is to say, though, that there's a very big entry cost because you have to buy these fermenters. It's millions and millions of dollars as of CapEx. That alone is prohibitive for some companies because they don't want to take that risk. But then the second problem is it involves years of research that many companies just probably don't want to do. Those type of companies are the type of companies that have an R&D cycle for product development that may be one to two years before they launch a new product, whereas this is a much longer time frame. You're talking much longer, much more expensive, just because you're basically inventing new crops right Yeah, I mean, the idea of it being prohibitive from a CapEx and time perspective for companies is interesting, but it also appears to me that that would be a constraint for investors, too.

I know that you've raised money from big names, including Steve Jervitson. How do they feel about this?

I think back in 2020 and 2021, which has only raised most of our capital, there was a lot more enthusiasm for these type of patient capital long-term bets. Today, it's harder in the venture capital world where there's a greater demand for profitability, whereas there was much more patient capital, I would say, when the money was fear-flowing and when interest rates were lower. Now, at the same time, people like Steve Jervison are futurists. His fund is called Future Ventures. He's concerned not necessarily about the technologies of, let's say, 2025, but rather the technologies of, let's say, 2035 and 2045. For him, he recognizes that, first of all, we're deep-spoiling the planet by by raising all these animals for food, and so we need an alternative to that. But it's also very apparent that if we are ever going to escape our Pale Blue dot and start traveling the Cosmos, they're not going to be carrying Noah's Ark in tow. They're going to have to grow meat if they want to eat meat in space if you're on long-distance cosmic tourism. If you're on the ISS, it's one thing we can ship you up beef jerky. But if you're going to be traveling to Mars or if you're going to be traveling for any extended period of time where there's not a supply chain coming from Earth, you're going to need some way to grow meat or to grow protein.

This is a very, very promising way to do just that. I think that for people like Steve Jervison, who really is one of the smartest people I've ever spoken to in my life, honestly, is He's like a polymath. He knows so much about so many topics. But the point is that I think for them, what they see is, yes, this is a way to try to make life more habitable on our own planet, but it's also a way that in the future we're going to be feeding ourselves in long distance cosmic tourism.

On health and safety, I think one thing people are concerned about with these plant-based alternatives is just how many ingredients there are and how many unrecognizable, processed names go onto the label to make them feel like meat. I'm just going to name a few of the ingredients that I saw in the Impossible Burger list. Methylcellulose, dextrose, lagemaglobin, niacin, sunflower oil, and I know there's a lot of negative press around seed oils at the moment, overall, 21 ingredients in total. You compare that to a steak, the ingredients are steak, which feels as a consumer actually healthier and more organic to me in a lot of ways. So my question to you would be, do you have any concerns about the amount of processing and biochemical engineering that is required to produce these meat alternatives? And if not, how do we remove the negative stigma around them? Yeah, sure.

I think, look, there's some people who have a fear of anything to do with science and food. You hear a term, let's just take the first ingredient you mentioned, methylcellulus. You hear that and it sounds something like you don't know what it is, but it's just plant fiber. All it is is just a scientific way to describe plant fiber. I mean, imagine if you found out that the local restaurant was lacing its food with sodium chloride and you'd think, Oh, my God, what are they doing? Well, of course, sodium chloride is just table salt. If methylcellulus just had a name, that plant fiber, that just sounded more natural, even though it's the same exact thing, I don't think that there would be a concern about it. Now, at the same time, let's think about how meat is produced. These animals are genetically selected to grow so big, so fast, so they can barely walk. They're pumped full of antibiotics. They live wing to wing, peak to peak by the tens of thousands. When it comes time to slow them, most people don't want to know what happens. In fact, the raw meat is so dangerous that you're warned to treat it like toxic waste.

If raw meat gets on your kitchen counter, you have to disinfect the counter. The reason is because there's feces in meat. E coli, salmonella, campylobacter, these are intestinal pathogens that can sicken us if we don't literally cook the crap out of the meat. That's what we're doing, cooking the crap out of the meat. In the case of raising cells to make meat, you don't need Don't worry so much about all those intestinal pathogens because you're not growing intestines at all. You're only growing the muscle that people want to eat. I would do more than merely look at a list of ingredients, many of which might just be normal spices or other vitamin fortifications like niacin, which is just a B vitamin. There's not anything to it. But the question is, what's actually good for us? In the case, just take a Beyond burger as an example. The Beyond burger has no cholesterol, unlike a regular burger. It has dramatically less saturated fat than a conventional burger, and it takes up 99% less land to make it than a conventional burger. I'm more concerned about the... You're looking at the macros on a product, like how much saturated fat, how many calories, how much protein, and so on, than I am about some ingredient that may sound sciency, but in reality is totally fine.

Beyond the animal welfare, there is this other elephant in the room here, which, as you've hinted towards, is climate change. When it comes to this industry, meat alternatives, how important are the climate concerns as compared to the animal welfare concerns in your view? Which issue should we, as consumers just humans, which should we prioritize first, assuming we had to?

Regardless of whether you're concerned about the treatment of the cows or the chickens or whether you just want a survivable planet for our civilization, I think it's very clear that the answer is to reduce the number of animals who are raising for food. But considering the fact that governments around the world right now are spending lavishly to try to ameliorate the effects of climate change, this is an important issue that we should be making sure animal agriculture is part of. I mean, right now in the US, we're spending literally billions of dollars to try to onshore our clean energy system with solar and wind turbines and so on. We're not spending that money to figure out the best ways to make meat alternatives, which we really should be. I'll give you an example. If you look at certain industries right now, we basically import all of our goods from those industries from Asia. So semiconductors, solar panels, wind turbines, pretty much they're all coming from Asia and we're importing them. That's because Asia prioritized them when we didn't. And similarly, Asia is racing to become the leader when it comes to alternative meats right now because they know that this is a big part of the future.

Just in China alone, African swine fever killed one out of every two pigs in the country. One out of every two pigs died from this one element. They know we need better ways to produce protein for our populations that don't involve raising so many live whole animals. I don't want to be in a position as an American where we're going to be importing not only our solar panels and our semiconductors in our wind turbines from Asia, but we start importing our protein because they have cheaper, more efficient ways to produce it than we do. That is going to be a really big problem as from a national security perspective if it comes to pass. I think it's absolutely imperative for the US government, and any government concerned about food security for its population, to accelerate their own path toward animal-free proteins by issuing grants and low-interest loans to the companies that are trying to create these nascent industries within their domestic supply chains.

We'll be right back.

This week on The Pitch, AI versus models. My co founder and I have never been represented when shopping online. This lack of representation in e-commerce drives down conversion rate, leads to a high return rate, and is a problem for both consumers and brands. This is where Flock comes in.

I'm looking at a lip product here. It's got some up-close pictures of lips and lipstick with different skin tones, different nose shapes.

Is that AI-generated? It's fully AI generated. Got it. It's an existential question for modeling agencies. Because besides walking down a runway, what are you doing? Yeah, modeling might go away. There's just no other way to be able to do it in a scalable solution using AI. Things get existential on The Pitch. Go right now and subscribe to The Pitch wherever you listen to podcasts.

We're back with first-time founders. You are quite different to a lot of the guests that I've had on this podcast, in that you had an entirely different career before you started this company. What about starting a company has surprisingly caused you most, or perhaps caught you off guard in a way that you didn't expect?

There's a great line from Ben Horowitz, who's the co founder of Andreessen Horowitz, the Venture Capital Fund. And he says in his book, The Hard Thing About Hard Things, he says that when you start your own company, you will sleep like a baby because you're going to wake up every 2 hours and cry. And that has definitely been my experience is that this is by far the hardest thing I have done. And I don't say that in some way where I feel like a victim. I don't. I feel very, very honored to be doing what I'm doing. I chose this path, and I could leave it if I wanted to, but I don't. The reason is because I think it's so important what we're doing for the future of the world, for both humans and non-humans alike. There's just such a difficult path for entrepreneurs ownership that I liken it to the process of basically beating your head against a wall with the conviction that the wall is going to break before your head does. There are so many hurdles from raising capital to getting a product right, to getting distribution to getting marketing right, to attracting the right people, retaining the right people.

Then you have to learn that people say one thing and do other things. People say they're going to make an investment, or they say they're going to place a purchase order, or they say they're going to take a job or whatever. You have to know it may not happen, and you have to be able to have a serenity that you just accept that bad things will happen regularly. I am a firm believer in the saying that is commonly attributed it into Churchill, where he said that, When you're going through hell, just keep going. That is how I feel about doing this. There are a number of very great moments, though, that I've had, whether it's particular partnerships that were forged, products launched in and so on that I've been extremely proud of. I don't mean to paint it in just a draconian light, but it can sometimes feel like a Sisyphean feat. What I did was I actually commissioned an artist to create a piece of artwork for my desk, which is a portrait of Sisyphus, Finally Triumphant. That's what I use as my North Star to remind myself that I have to have the faith that Sisyphus eventually will get to the top.

The boulder will not roll back down the hill, and he will have succeeded.

I mean, it's interesting that you say this about entrepreneurship, because I could imagine that it's a very similar feeling in nonprofit work. Banging your head against a wall, lobbying state legislature, that also sounds quite Sisyphean to me. I think a lot of entrepreneurs, when you ask them, Oh, why did you start this business? They say, Oh, the reason I started this business is because I wanted to make an impact. But when it comes to making an impact in your career, you've already done a lot of that. I'm wondering if from your experience, has being a businessman detracted from your ability to focus exclusively on impact? Are you now balancing this economic side as well? Or perhaps it's enhanced it.

I believe it's enhanced it, yeah. If you think about public service, which is a very noble field, people who are elected officials have to care about lots of things that their constituents care about. And the reality is, is that I'm really laser-like focused on one problem. That is very tough to be a single-issue politician because you don't attract a wide coalition of voters. While I agree with you, what I was doing in the public policy world did sometimes seem Sisyphean, especially because even After you win, you might still lose because laws can be repealed, they can be amended, and so on. It's a constant fight to safeguard even what you've already accomplished. My view is that in the business world, that I'm actually able to make a far bigger impact because I'm able to invent the technology that may render the problems obsolete. Instead of getting better conditions for animals on factory farms, we can just render the factory harming of animals a relic of an archaic past. That is my goal. For 30 years, this has been the issue that's animated my life because I it's so important, not only for the moral progress of our society, but also for safeguarding our own civilization into the future.

As a result, regardless of what manifestation that may take, whether it's nonprofit work or public service or entrepreneurial work, I'm so committed to this. It's hard to imagine doing anything else.

It also sounds in a way that you've been disappointed by government's response to this issue, and hence why you decided, Okay, screw it. I'm going into the private sector. I'm going to build it myself. What the government be doing more?

Sure, you're right. I did find it very frustrating that what I perceived as extremely modest animal welfare improvements took Herculean efforts to enact. But to answer your question directly, the government should be incentivizing animal protein companies. In the same way that it is incentivizing the on-shoring of semiconductors and clean energy technology, the government should be offering grants and low-interest loans for the manufacturing of animal-free proteins here in the United States. We all know Tesla would have never survived if it didn't get government assistance. Spacex, if it hadn't started getting government contracts, would have gone out of business. Now, the US is dominant in electric cars and in space technology because of those two companies. And so while for a long time, the government has dramatically supported the animal slaughter industry, it's time to start supporting the animal-free meat industry and create a new type of economy for food and protein production here in the United States It's that not only is good for our economy and our national security, but also will help dramatically reduce the environmental footprint of the food industry.

How would that play out? You mentioned low interest loans. The first thing that comes to mind for me is the EV tax credits. Is that something you could see happening, tax credits in some way to lower the cost of animal free protein and meat?

That's a great idea. I mean, the EV tax credit is something that the consumer gets, the person who buys the car gets. Because they're making a multi-time, five-figure expenditure, it's harder to do when you're paying 5 or $10 a pound for meat on that particular thing, as people are motivated by $7,500 coming back to them, whereas they may not be motivated by 25 cents or 50 cents coming back to them. But you could see, for example, what happened in California with credits that automakers were getting that caused many of them to have to pay Tesla because they weren't producing enough clean energy cars. You could see something like that for meat producers that could incentivize them to get into the animal-free meat game themselves. Ideally, what you would see is not a bunch of small startups like the Better Meat Co, but rather Tyson and Hormel and Mapleleaf and the huge meat companies themselves becoming the purveyors of these products, which would cause this to happen a lot faster. But we really need more manufacturing. That's really what it comes down to here, more bigger fermenters, more manufacturing plants. Those are the types of things that agencies like the USDA, the Department of Energy, and so on, should be giving low interest loans or grants to help and create that domestic supply of biomanufacturing here in the United States.

As an example, like my company, the BetterMiko, we need to spend tens of millions of dollars in order to build our own biomanufacturing plant to create our micoprotein-based products. Why should we have to go out and try to find venture capitalists to fund that, especially in a very difficult capital market like we have today for startup venture? Instead, the government could be offering 20-year low-interest loans or even grants in the way that they are now on semiconductors. They're giving literally billions of dollars of grants to semiconductor companies to build in places like Arizona and Texas.

If a mapleleaf or a Tyson, you woke up tomorrow morning and you saw a headline, Mapleleaf to build microprotein fermentation bioreactive facility. Would that be good or bad news for you just as an entrepreneur who's trying to build and make a profit off of your company?

Well, first of all, I would be elated because I think it would be really important for the world. Second, I would offer that it licensed them our technology since we already have six years of R&D that we've done in numerous patents that are granted to us that they could benefit from. And third, the fact that they were doing it, I think, would interest other venture capitalists in funding other people doing the same because the VCs would say, Hey, Tyson knows what they're doing, let's do it ourselves, too. So I think in all, it would be really good.

Final questions. What is the biggest personal challenge that you have faced while building this company?

There's so many, but I would say the frustration of being limited by the amount of capital that we have is by far the biggest problem. I always joke that people say, Oh, money isn't the answer to your problems. It's actually the only answer to the problems of entrepreneurship. That would solve every problem we have. That would solve. It's a great point. That is, I think, the biggest frustration is trying to advance biotechnology on a truly shoestring budget where we are begging, borrowing to try to get to get the equipment we need, to try to build the manufacturing capacity that we need. That's the biggest struggle. The BetterMeat co is currently fundraising, and we have a great investor base. You mentioned Steve Jervitson, but there's numerous other brand name investors who are already part of this organization and who want to continue investing in it into the future. If somebody listening here is interested in owning a part of our company and therefore a part of the future of protein, I'd love to hear from you. Just go to bettermeat. Co. Again, that's bettermeat. Co, and you can get in touch.

Final question, if you could give If you had one piece of advice to your former self when you started the company, what would it be?

Raise more money than you need. Don't worry about dilution. Get as much as you can. The number one reason that startups fail is because they run out of money. There's a theory of fundraising called the hors d'œuvres theory, which is when you're at a party and the waiters come around with the trays of the hors d'œuvs, the best time to take that hors d'œuv is every time they pass because they might not be back. You think there's an endless supply of stuffed mushrooms back there in that kitchen, but in reality, there might be a limited supply of stuffed mushrooms. Every time that they come by and offer hors d'œuvs, they should take it. It's hard to think about that at a time when capital was far more free flowing, like three or four years ago in the venture space. But now that we're in a more famine period and valuations are dramatically lower, you think back and look at other opportunities that you had and wonder, could we have done something differently and raised even more capital back then, even if we suffered more dilution?

Take the stuffed mushroom. That's a good place to end. Paul Shapiro is the CEO and co founder of the BetterMeat Co. Paul, thanks so much for your time.

Ed, it's a pleasure to be with you. I'm giving you a virtual fist bump from Sacramento.

There we go. This episode was produced by Claire Miller and engineered by Benjamin Spencer. Our associate producer is Allison Weis, and our executive producers are Jason Stavis and Catherine Dylan. Thank you for listening to First Time Founders from the Vox Media Podcast Network. Tune in tomorrow for Property Markets. Profit markets.