Ryan Grant Little: 0:42

Welcome to another Climate Tech Podcast interviews with the people trying to save us from ourselves. I'm not easily starstruck, but getting to meet Bruce Friedrich, founder of the Good Food Institute, is a really big deal for me. As you'll hear in this episode, it's because of him that I'm involved in the food tech space at all. Bruce dispenses Yoda-like wisdom with Buddha-like compassion and is, as far as I'm concerned, the most influential voice on the future of food. I reached him in Washington DC. I'm Ryan Grant Little. Thanks for being here, bruce. It's really a true honor to have you on this podcast. I'm thrilled that you're here.

Bruce Friedrich: 1:23

I am absolutely delighted to be here, Ryan. I appreciate the invitation. Thank you.

Ryan Grant Little: 1:28

You are the founder and president of the Good Food Institute, or GFIs, We'll be calling it throughout the podcast. You've written op-eds for the Wall Street Journal, for a Guardian, for USA Today, for the Los Angeles Times, for Wired, CNN, foreign policy. I could go on and on. These are just some that I was able to find. You've been on some slightly more famous podcasts than this one the New Yorker Radio Hour, Recode, Decode, the Ezra Klein Show, Making Sense with Sam Harris. I'm a subscriber to all of these. We also have a TED talk that's been viewed at this point more than 2.3 million times. My question for you is with all of these outlets and talking through all of these different media outlets, what is GFI trying to say?

Bruce Friedrich: 2:16

Thanks very much, ryan. That's a great opening question. Gfi's mission is to create a world where alternative proteins are no longer alternative. We've got 27 years until we're in 2050. Over the last 27 years, meat production has gone up more than 80%. It is predicted to go up somewhere between 60 and more than 100% by 2050. It is already the case, according to the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, that unless meat production goes down, paris climate goals are going to be impossible. The meat industry will eat up the entirety of our carbon budget.

Bruce Friedrich: 3:00

Despite an awful lot of conversation around food systems, the only things that anybody is doing to try to change the massive upward trajectory one is convince people to eat less meat and two is alternative proteins. I am a fan of educating people about the external costs of meat production. I'll just note that we've been doing that for well north of 50 years. It's not obvious how those efforts, even if they're wildly successful, it's not obvious how they scale so far. I'm sure they've made a dent. I think they're important. They're why I'm here, they're why people start companies in this space a lot of people in the space. But at the end of the day, I think the only way we decrease the production of industrial animal meat and keep humanity within the Paris climate targets is if we shift meat production to plant-based and cultivated meat. And I'm happy to dive into some of the science and numbers, or not, as you like, but that's one of the central questions and I'll say there's a similar story to be told about antimicrobial resistance, about pandemic risk, about cruelty to animals, about biodiversity loss, like all of these things are significantly exacerbated by meat production and consumption.

Bruce Friedrich: 4:21

And out of 11 peer-reviewed studies, the lowest prediction for meat in 2050 is 62%. More Alternative proteins is basically it's like renewable energy. It's like electric vehicles. We know the world is going to consume more energy inexorably through 2050. We know the world is going to travel more and buy more cars and other vehicles. Part of the solution is energy efficiency to fossil fuels. Part of the solution is encouraging people to walk and consume less energy and walkable cities and great public transit. But part of the solution has to be renewable energy and electric vehicles. So, too, here, part of the solution has to be making meat from plants, cultivating meat from cells, which causes fraction of the climate change and uses a fraction of the amount of land.

Ryan Grant Little: 5:10

I like what you're pointing out there is we can tell people to stop or we can make it easier for them to do something else. And one of the things I love about alternative protein space and people who listen to the podcast know that I'm an investor in the space is that you can remove all this negative stuff about the food industry, but without affecting the end user's experience. And so the fact of the cow and the slaughter of the cow is not an intrinsic part of the enjoyment of a hamburger, and it could actually be a detractor and it could also, you know, it has lots of downsides, as you know. We can probably guess, but if we can replicate the taste, the price and the accessibility and I think and I know GFI agrees, because I just had your managing director of Europe speaking at an event that I hosted here in Vienna I know that those things are, these are the ones, these are the three holy grails for me taste, price and accessibility but if we can kind of mimic these or improve on these you know of that hamburger through alternative proteins, we've won the battle for the consumer, right?

Ryan Grant Little: 6:11

So this is, you know, I think this is it's easier, it's an easier win to just give someone something else that actually is better for them, you know, in every possible way. Do you feel like we're at the precipice of this or that? We're? There's a. The tipping point is coming soon, where, from the consumer's perspective and I'm not talking about vegans and vegetarians here, but I mean for carnivores out there do you think we're coming up to the point where what is it in AI? We talked about singularity, maybe alternative protein singularity moment, where it tastes just as good to them.

Bruce Friedrich: 6:45

Yeah, I mean, we talk about hitting the S curve and, yes, you're exactly right. In the same way that the way that renewable energy becomes successful is it solves intermittency, and the price comes down to parity or less, because people are not going to pay more for energy, but they're also not going to pay less I'm sorry, they're not going to pay more for fossil fuels. They're also not going to pay more for solar. So, as long as you satisfy consumers in terms of energy production, renewables can win, but they only win if you satisfy consumers. Same thing with electric vehicles. Consumers are largely, by and large, you're not going to buy an EV if the battery range is 115 kilometers and there's no charging infrastructure. So you need to satisfy battery range and charging infrastructure and you hit on GFI's precise theory of change on this issue, which is that the main things that dominate consumer choice or need is concerned are is it delicious and is it affordable? So we need to get to price and taste parity for plant-based and cultivated meat, and that's pretty much our focus, and it's worth noting that that is a very new endeavor. On the plant-based meat side, it really was Ethan Brown and Pat Brown no relation that started companies in 2009 and 2011 that first had the brainstorm. Hey, meat is made up of protein, fat, minerals and water. Plants also have protein, fat, minerals and water. What would it look like for us to precisely replicate the meat experience for the consumer, using plants and because it is so much more efficient? All of the things that make it such a boon from a land use, resource use, climate, et cetera vantage also make it a colossal economic opportunity. So what would it look like to do that and see the entire population of the world that eats as our consumer-based not flexitarians, vegetarians and then with cultivated meat, it's basically, you know, you can take a seed from a plant or a cutting from a plant and you can bathe the seed or the cutting in nutrients and it will grow into a full plant. You can do that same thing with a small sampling of cells from a chicken or a pig or a fish, and again, it's a fraction of the climate change, a fraction of the water, a fraction of the land, whether you're talking about aquaculture, fish or chickens or pigs. And because it's so much more efficient as it scales up, the price will come down.

Bruce Friedrich: 9:00

What we believe to be true in response to your question is that when we hit price and taste parity and lean in on the nutrition advantages of both of these ways of producing meat, we will see a significant shootup, the S-curve. But predicting when we get to price and taste parity is going to be very, very difficult. It is going to be a function of whether we can win government support both for the science of replicating the precise meat experience at price parity and then also to get the startups across the valley of death. So the same sorts of programs that the Biden administration passed here and the big climate bill, the incentives for scaling of renewable energy and electric vehicles, we need those same sorts of incentives for alternative proteins and we're optimistic. Those things are coming and the research is happening. It needs to be a lot more than it is so far and we're moving in that direction, but it's just really it's early enough in the trajectory of the science and the scaling that's tough to predict precisely when we'll hit the S-curve.

Ryan Grant Little: 10:05

But it's late enough that it's getting the attention of lobbyists from Big Egg and Dairy and that type of thing. So it's not just about incentives from governments but it's about governments actually not standing in the way. You mentioned cultivated meat, so real meat grown from animal cells minus the animal. Lots of stuff happening there from the scientific perspective, from the commercial perspective, investment took a dip for a little while but there are some big deals that are happening again just in the past couple of weeks. But the big story at the moment is watching governments, and some you know, britain and Germany making investments into this space, italy, poland, potentially we'll see how this changes now that Donald Tusk is Prime Minister there and if this gets reversed.

Ryan Grant Little: 10:49

But some countries you know here in Europe pushing against it, austria, where I am I've just done a big post with, also with Evo from your organization with his fact sheet, hoping that the Austrian government here will look at the science behind it and not go the way kind of of Italy. But so what's going on? Why has cultivated meat become this electric rail just you know, the electrified third rail of alternate proteins right now? And is this a coincidence or is this lobbyists kind of lining up and working together in concert.

Bruce Friedrich: 11:21

I mean, I definitely think there's some degree of a sort of viral nature to it. It's confusing and it's surprising that this would be a priority for some European governments. It's where we are. In the US, we've been successful in keeping this as a bipartisan issue. We're focusing on the fact that this is jobs in the heartland, its choices for consumers, its choices for farmers, its global economic competitiveness. So the Center for Strategic and International Studies did a report that was focused on the US government and, in addition to talking about the climate, biodiversity, amr, pandemic benefits of shifting toward alternative proteins, their director of global food and water security and their director of energy and climate co-authored a report on alternative proteins and they said that this is about food systems resilience and economic competitiveness, and they recommended that the US government prioritize its alternative protein industry. In the same way, the US government prioritizes biopharma, clean energy and advanced chips for artificial intelligence, so they're really leaning in. If this is going to be so much more efficient, it is consequently going to be extraordinarily lucrative.

Bruce Friedrich: 12:44

The US lost the EV battery race. They lost the solar panel race. The US has four gigafactories for lithium ion batteries. China has worth of 100. The US, I think, now makes something like 1% of our solar panels. I think 80% of them come from Asia, something like 60% from China. So this is a massive manufacturing, jobs and economic activity endeavor and it really is the sort of thing that governments governments that fight this industry are going to lose over both the short and median term and absolutely over the long term. So it's unfortunate and it's going to be really counterproductive for industry and for farmers.

Ryan Grant Little: 13:26

Also feels like this cognitive dissonance with the meat industry and big egg in general, where I feel like they're both trying to embrace and eviscerate the alternative proteins industry at the same time, and some of them are investing in the space while also lobbying against it. Is this just the kind of the sign of the transitionary time that we're in? I mean, I know both GFI and it's my view as well that we need these big companies to come along with us. We're not trying to put them out of business. We're trying to just change the input for their protein rather than kind of remove them all together. And you've got really a front row seat to all of this. What are you seeing? What are your thoughts on some of these big meat companies and traditional egg companies?

Bruce Friedrich: 14:09

Well, I don't think the meat companies and the traditional egg companies are doing anything unsupportive of alternative proteins. I do think it's. I mean, there's a degree to which it's anti-tech activists, which is ironic because the things that they purport to care about are going to be literally impossible if we need to produce 70% more industrial animal agriculture. But there is a strain of sort of food activist that is happy to let the perfect be the enemy of the good, and so they just keep their eyes on the prize of perfection and consequently oppose anything that basically is not anti-capitalist. So if you are friends with, if you are working with, the meat industry and the food industry, there's a little bit of the friend that my enemy is my enemy element to it. So that's some of the just sort of anti-tech, anti-capitalism food activists. And then there is, I think, in places like Italy and Poland, it's the farm lobby, not the meat industry. So ADM and Cargill both sponsor our big annual conference at the Gold level, so did Giviton, with a focus on their Mista brand.

Bruce Friedrich: 15:18

All of the major meat and food companies are investing in both plant-based and cultivated meat, and we work with these companies, we work with their lobbyists. I don't think any of them. I mean, obviously the bulk of their profits come from the current system, so they're not going to do things to break themselves up and they're not going to do things that are going to harm what is the bulk of their profits, but they're certainly not doing anything antagonistic to plant-based and cultivated meat. They recognize they are in the process of producing protein profitably and they see this as likely to allow them to produce protein even more profitably than they are now. But yeah, there are different parts of the farm sector, different parts of the meat industry, and it's definitely my strong impression that it's not the income of the meat industry that is behind any of the anti-alternator protein work.

Ryan Grant Little: 16:09

Interesting. Ok, so it's much more on the farm. It's sort of the dairy lobby coming from these, like through these check-off programs and that type of thing. You just came back from COP28, which ended today, the day that we're recording this, and speaking of lobbyists. So last year there were 120 registered food industry lobbyists. This year there were 350 or something like that in that order of magnitude, so we're talking about triple. I wonder if you felt that kind of presence there and I wonder also what your everybody's kind of surprised and sort of hesitantly or cautiously celebrating today that 200 countries have agreed to transition away from carbon-based oil and gas economies. No clarity on kind of when or how, necessarily, but still in 30 years. It's the first time that they've said that. But we're always focused on this kind of carbon question and not necessarily some of the other things. Like oil and gas always gets the front row and the food industry might need a little bit more visibility as well. What are your impressions of this?

Bruce Friedrich: 17:11

Yeah, I mean it's been a little perplexing to us, just sort of generally, how little the global policy community that's focused on the Paris climate agreement takes into account food. And I remember a couple of years ago Bill Gates said that until alternative proteins came along, everybody was just scratching their head because there wasn't anything else that scaled. So we're back to my renewable energy and electric vehicles analogy where if you're doing something, I mean you look at the trajectory of how solar got cheap. There's literally a book by, I think, exactly that title and it talks about the science and scaling that started in the US, then moved to Germany, then moved to Japan, then moved to China and it really was the story of not exactly cooperation, but it was a story of science. Anywhere can scale to everywhere. Scale-up capacity anywhere can scale to everywhere, and the climate community has not seen anything like that in food until alternative proteins came along. And so in a GFI as an example, we have six GFIs around to the world. We have GFI US, and then we also have India, israel, brazil, asia Pacific, based out of Singapore and Europe, we operate at the EC level in Brussels and then we also operate in the UK and Germany.

Bruce Friedrich: 18:29

Our central goal organizationally is we are a science think tank. We have about 215 full-time team members. The plurality of our team members around the world are scientists, and there's a little of a chicken-eggy thing, because our goal is to create the most robust scientific ecosystem possible. We're pretty sure the way that happens is through government support for science. So we literally have two metrics just two that cost us to figure out the six areas of the world that we want to operate in. The first one is does the government fund a lot of science? And the second is are there world-class scientific institutions to take that money? And so our global battle cry is that government should be funding the transition with a view toward recognizing. You know, we're not in Singapore because we care what people in Singapore eat, or they are because they have government that cares a lot about food security. This is a huge food security solution. The government recognizes that and they're leaning in and they have world-class science institutions.

Bruce Friedrich: 19:27

So so far the global policy climate community has not even been hand wavy about the problem of increased meat production. So the IPCC has recognized, the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change has recognized that unless meat production goes down it's not going to be possible to meet Paris Climate Agreement goals, and it has literally no plan. There's not anything hand wavy, there's not anything that they're like saying might work, they just go. Meat production needs to go down. Similarly, their methane targets are just completely impossible and loss of room in a production goes down, and yet they're not even hand wavy about what it might look like for that to happen. But we're making inroads. This caught for the first time ever, the Emirates have a declaration on sustainable agriculture, resilient food systems and climate action, something I think 156 maybe, governments so far and counting have signed on to add agriculture to their nationally determined contributions First time that's ever happened.

Bruce Friedrich: 20:21

I had an entire day focused on food First time that's ever happened. Kudos to Mary M Elmari, who is the climate and environment minister for the UAE. At every available opportunity, she was talking about alternative proteins and food, and so, yeah, I'm optimistic that we turn to corner at this COP in terms of both A putting food systems onto the agenda, and then that will allow us to point out that, yes, there are many different things that need to happen in food systems. Alternative proteins are not a silver bullet. They don't solve every problem, but it does look like they're the one food systems intervention that scales, so they absolutely need to be a part of food systems transformation and we can chat about some of the science and work that's been done that proves really strongly points in the direction of what I just said, or we can go wherever you would like to go. I feel like I'm doing quite a bit of monologuing and I apologize.

Ryan Grant Little: 21:19

You know I'm so happy to have you on this podcast and to just download. If I could just download your brain onto an episode, I would be very happy. It feels also like you know you've talked a lot about solar and electric cars, and maybe this is just an impression, Maybe there's some recency, bias or something, but when I look at your posts and some of the stuff coming from GFI, it feels like you're more and more using metaphors to those types of clean tech that people might be more used to, to kind of make the point about alternative proteins. So maybe you know and I do this a lot as well when I'm talking to university students or to different groups because people don't really, you know, people think of Teslas and they think of solar panels and that's kind of climate tech for the average person. They're definitely not thinking about veggie burgers, right, and so I'm looking for ways to bring this in. I wonder, is this a conscious choice, that you're trying to kind of use these analogs or metaphors?

Bruce Friedrich: 22:10

Yeah, and we've gotten a lot of positive affirmation from some of our successes by leaning into this concept, and there have been a lot of reports and analyses by economists that really lean into the idea that the amount of mitigation that's available here, the amount of land that's going to be spared, is actually significantly greater than a complete shift to electric vehicles from gas powered cars. I mean even at 50% plant based meat. According to a peer review article in Nature Communications, we're talking about four times the impact, at 50% plant based meat, of grounding every single airplane on the planet. So that's before you even get to the sequestration benefits, which double the mitigation benefits. Those kinds of comparisons and analogies really do resonate with people.

Bruce Friedrich: 23:02

I remember I was doing an interview for NPR National Public Radio in the United States which is on millions and millions and millions of listeners, and the reporter had asked me not to use lots of numbers, not to use lots of statistics, which is something that I almost inevitably do as a rule. I've known her for a while and she's like Bruce I need you to just talk, you know. Okay, I need you to give me the 10,000 feet. And at the end of the interview I said you know I really do just need to tell you that Boston Consulting Group said that at 10% plant based meat it would be the equivalent of grounding every single plane on the planet, and they led with that in the NPR story. And then she subsequently did a story for the CBSE the morning news, which is a big TV show over here, and she led with it again. So that's an indication that even people who are allergic to statistics and talking in terms of gigatonage like these kinds of comparisons.

Ryan Grant Little: 24:51

I love that. I want to shift gears a little bit. So we've talked a fair bit about GFI, about alternative proteins. I'm curious about you as well as Bruce. In an earlier part of your career, you're an animal rights activist in the more traditional sense, but these days you're much more likely to be talking about market forces and policymaking over zoom, and I wonder how your approach to activism. Are you still an activist? Is this a form of activism? Is this, maybe this is advocacy is a better word? What's that journey been like for you?

Bruce Friedrich: 25:22

Yeah, I mean, gfi is kind of full circle. So my first year of college I read a book called diet for a small planet by Francis Morleau-Pay. The TLDR on diet for a small planet is basically GFI's theory of change, more or less, or at least our reason for being, and that is that in order to eat meat, we have to feed animals lots and lots of crops. So back then it was a fraction of what it is now. The recent numbers. One story that really resonates for me is the UN Special Envoy on Food, a guy named John Ziegler, in roughly 2010,. He called biofuels a crime against humanity because 10 million 100 million metric tons of corn and wheat were being fed to farm animals, which is driving up the price of corn and wheat and was leading to malnutrition and starvation, and he said this is a crime against humanity. That same year, the Guardian journalist, george Monvio, pointed out 756 million metric tons of corn and wheat were being fed to farm animals. One year later, that number was north of a billion metric tons of corn and wheat, from 756 million to north of a billion, plus another 270 million metric tons of soy. 77% of the global soy crop is fed to farm animals, so it's literally driving up the price of food. It is requiring almost unfathomable amounts of land Right now, 3 billion hectares of land, which is the size of China plus India times two. If these numbers are going to go up, 70 to 100% by 2050, that is what is going to make meeting our SDG goals one and two eliminate poverty, eliminate malnutrition basically impossible.

Bruce Friedrich: 27:06

And that's the thing back 1987 that caused me to get really interested in agricultural economics. I majored, I ran a group called Poverty Action. Now on my campus we organized FASTS for Oxfam International. I ended up majoring in economics, focusing on agricultural economics. Many earth the London School of Economics studying structural adjustment programs wrote my honors thesis in college on structural adjustment programs it was called the DICE are Loaded and a lot of it had to do with the idea that even when countries are suffering from starvation and malnutrition, their agricultural produce is being shipped to developed world economies to be fed to agricultural animals because of these World Bank and IMF structural adjustment programs. As the global economy has become even a more global economy with fewer tariffs, etc. These relationships have gotten even worse. So that was the thing that first caused me to be interested in the issues that motivate GFI now. I ran a homeless shelter and a soup kitchen for a little over six years in inner city, washington DC, and then for a while I worked in animal protection, still with a focus on industrial animal farming, and my motivation was, in addition to animals. It continued to be my original motivation for caring about these issues global starvation and just resource waste generally and then climate changes that became an issue as well.

Bruce Friedrich: 28:32

So I think my career trajectory has been how do I make a positive difference in the world? Largely motivated by my faith, which is pretty integral to how I make decisions, and just kind of at any given moment, looking around and asking am I doing as much positive good in the world as I possibly can? And when I was watching what was happening with Pat Brown and Ethan Brown and Josh Tetrick and they were saying, hey, we can make meat from plants or, in Tetrick's case, we can make eggs from plants. That'll be a lot more efficient and consequently we can win in the marketplace, thank you. It felt to me like a nonprofit organization focused on that, so that we're not leaving everything to the tender mercies of the individual companies that are focused on it. The idea of actually working for policy change, working for a most robust possible scientific ecosystem and producing materials that will allow lots and lots of companies to not have to do all of the science and work and individual silos just felt like it made tremendous sense to me.

Ryan Grant Little: 29:36

It feels like a lot of people who dedicate their lives to service of others. Often there's a split between service to people or service to animals. I feel like you've lumped in the Homo sapiens as just another mammal and treating us all with equal magnanimity, if I'm saying that right.

Bruce Friedrich: 29:56

I'll just note, though, the reason GFI. Generally we focus on climate, biodiversity, global health. The reason for that is that governments put lots and lots of money into meeting Paris Climate Agreement goals. Hundreds of billions of dollars, maybe trillions of dollars. Governments put lots of money into things like solving for antimicrobial resistance and lessening pandemic risk. Trillions of dollars into dealing with COVID-19.

Bruce Friedrich: 30:24

After it happened being able to go to governments and say, hey look, 70 percent of working medically relevant antibiotics are fed to farm animals right now 70 percent. It's already killing 1.3 million people per year. You are putting government, whatever government you're talking to, you're putting hundreds of millions or billions of dollars into developing new drugs. What say we put some money into keeping the current antibiotics working If we're already feeding 70 percent of working antibiotics to farm animals? That is going to usher in the end of working antibiotics, which the UK government has said is a more certain risk to humanity than climate change, in which the former president of the World Health Organization said will be the end of modern medicine.

Bruce Friedrich: 31:09

That can motivate governments to take the issue seriously. The economic benefits can motivate governments to take the issue seriously. Pandemic risk can motivate governments to take the issue seriously. We think that this will be a lot more successful, a lot more quickly, and it may be the difference between success and failure getting governments to lean in on the science and the scaling. That's why we are focused on the things we're focused on. The most you can hope for from governments on animal protection is that they'll make the most egregious abuses illegal, and that even is pretty consistently harder than you would expect. That's why we focus on the way that we do.

Ryan Grant Little: 31:54

I like that also. It's a very holistic view of planetary health. Human health, animal health All of these things are very interconnected and they don't have bright lines between them.

Bruce Friedrich: 32:47

That's absolutely right.

Ryan Grant Little: 32:49

There's a quote in one of the pieces that you've written before which I think really captures as well. We talk this is a climate tech podcast, and I work a lot in the investment space. In this, people talk a lot about technology, but fundamentally, the technology is there if we want it for a lot of these things. It's a lot more about I mean, you mentioned faith. It's about psychology, it's about behavior. It's about things like empathy. I just want to pick up on a quote from one of your books.

Ryan Grant Little: 33:17

To succeed in freeing people, to express their compassion, to open their hearts and minds, our interactions must be rooted in empathy and understanding, working with an individual's motivations, fears, desires and shortcomings, instead of approaching with a fighting mindset, and this is very consistent with you as a person. Right, this wasn't just something you wrote down, and I follow you closely on LinkedIn and in different places and I've seen people attack you personally and your response most of the time is hey, would you like to have a one-on-one phone call? And, needless to say, in 2023, this isn't how most people react to getting pushed back in the comments section below the line on the article, and I just wonder how do you manage to keep your head so level and, in particular, how do you manage to turn the temperature down on these heated moments? Where does the strength come from?

Bruce Friedrich: 34:14

I mean, I think maybe it comes from humility, maybe it comes from necessity. I mean it's so. I don't know if you know the any agreement, which is sort of like a spiritual version of the MyoSprigs, but my any agreement number is nine, and one of the benefits of being a nine it's the peacemaker. And one of the less noble personality traits is lack of not being thoroughly in touch with one's emotions, to put it charitably. So that means that being calm is not difficult, and so, no, I mean, I don't find it difficult when somebody is excoriating me, to respond kindly. And I recognize that if somebody is excoriating me, it means that they're a different personality type than I am. And that was really a revelation. Like I don't ever I don't ever behave that way toward anybody else. And so when somebody first behaved that way to me, I sort of you know, gosh, this is what it would mean if I behaved that way that my head would be about to explode and what on earth could have provoked this.

Bruce Friedrich: 35:16

And I realized that different people have different ways of reacting to stress. Different people have different realities that they're living through. There are a couple of really powerful stories in Stephen Covey's book, the seven habits of highly affected people that I think are really helpful in terms of recognizing that if somebody is having a bad day, that may manifest in ways that cause you to be really unforgiving, or you can think about the fact that it's significantly worse to be the person who is incredibly angry than to be the person who's receiving the anger, and it just helps to have compassion for people. Probably is another example of where attempting to live my life by the Matthew 25 story about the works of mercy probably also is helpful. Having a prayer life, having a spiritual practice, is probably also helpful, but I do think I show up with just sort of an equine entity that has both good aspects and less good aspects.

Ryan Grant Little: 36:15

I'm not an easily starstruck person, but this is my first time speaking with you, but you've been quite possibly the biggest influence on me in this stage of my life and career, and I'll tell you just a little one reason why. So actually, it was because of a podcast as well. So in 2021, I was driving through Italy, I was going to be staying for a month in a remote cabin in Umbria, just with a bunch of stuff in the trunk, my dog in the back, and you popped up on a podcast that I subscribed to, which is called People I Mostly Admire, with Stephen Leavitt, who's the author of Freakonomics, and I just the company I was working for had just been sold and I had a bit of a payout from that, and I was thinking what to do next, and this was, you know, my first time learning. This was my entry point into alternative proteins in the non-consumer way of someone who buys Beyond Progress from the you know frozen aisle. And I joined about, I think, a few weeks later, the GFI conference. It was on Zoom, it was still COVID and I loved it.

Ryan Grant Little: 37:23

I loved so many things about it, one that it was, you know. You could feel this energy from this being a new market to that. You know, people felt really values aligned. So people weren't in this industry just because of the money, you know. And coming from B2B sass, where people definitely were just there for that for the most part.

Ryan Grant Little: 37:42

And number three, you know, I remember seeing some panels where some people have just, you know, raised tens of millions of dollars and others were just kind of starting out or were kind of PhD researchers and that type of thing, and just the way people spoke at eye level and just the respect in the room you know the Zoom room or whatever at that time it was palpable and you could really feel that there's great people working in this industry. And that was the moment that I decided to get in. And you know, the past couple of years I've invested quite a bit and tried to kind of insinuate myself and whatever way is useful and helpful into this space, you know. So not everyone is going to listen to this podcast and kind of do the same thing and, you know, devote their time and money to the sector. But I wonder, you know, for people out there who want to get involved, what would be your tips for some of the first steps they can take to get involved with the solution instead of just worrying about the problem.

Bruce Friedrich: 38:39

Well, I'll start by saying I'm incredibly moved by your kindness, ryan. Yeah, I'm incredibly moved. That was really. It was incredibly nice to hear and gracious of you to share. And then I think it's.

Bruce Friedrich: 38:52

I think there's going to be a radically different response to the answer depending on where people are in their career trajectory. I mean, I think the main thing that I would suggest is that people do what you did, which is dive in, become acquainted with the full spectrum of the activities, familiarize yourself with the theory of change, and I think the best way to do that is going to be to sign up for some of GFI's newsletters. So if you go to gfiorg slash newsletters, you'll find our US newsletters, which are global in scope, a little US symmetric, but we also have newsletters from GFI India, israel, brazil, singapore and Europe. Also, I have you newsletters and if you go to gfiorg, you'll see in the upper right hand corner you can click on global and find the websites for each of the six GFI's and sign up for the other newsletters as well. I do encourage people to sign up for our monthly reports, which is at gfiorg slash newsletters. You can get a sense of all the activity that GFI is working on around the world, which gives you a sense of what we think is most important. I mean, we kind of need everything.

Bruce Friedrich: 40:08

The industry is super nascent at the moment.

Bruce Friedrich: 40:10

At the end of the day, it is a scientific challenge though.

Bruce Friedrich: 40:13

So for anybody who is a scientist or is early enough career that you can go into tissue engineering or plant biologists, biology or biotechnology or biomanufacturing like these are where success is going to happen.

Bruce Friedrich: 40:29

And then, of course, the flip side of that is if you're in an area where you can help to provide funding, that's obviously like philanthropic funding. I should say GFI is a charity, so we are completely and totally funded by philanthropy, all of our work. We do not take corporate donations. Corporations do lessen the cost to GFI of our conference, so we do take corporate sponsorships for the conference, but the conference does not break even, and that is the exclusive place in which we take corporate money. And then, yes, policy work would be another place in private sector, like you are funding startups, or if you're going and working at a major food corporation and moving them in the direction of really leaning in on the work that they're doing on alternator proteins. But you know, honestly, the answer is going to vary quite a lot depending on what somebody's sort of proclivities, talents and where they are in their career.

Ryan Grant Little: 41:19

So I'll put the links to GFI in the show notes. I'm guessing the best place to reach you or to follow you is LinkedIn.

Bruce Friedrich: 41:26

LinkedIn is a great option.

Ryan Grant Little: 41:28

Usually is, it's always LinkedIn, but yeah, no one says Instagram or I don't know TikTok here.

Bruce Friedrich: 41:34

I literally posted my first Instagram photo a couple days ago and I noticed that I had not updated my profile since 2018. So I set up an Instagram account in 2018 and followed a couple of GFI Instagram accounts and then kind of forgot about it, and so I went skydiving and had a photo that I quite like, so I posted a photo on Instagram. But that's the sum total of my Instagram activity over the years I've been on it.

Ryan Grant Little: 41:59

Okay, so LinkedIn if you want to follow or get in touch with Bruce. Instagram if you want to see a picture of him skydiving five years ago.

Bruce Friedrich: 42:06

No, this is no. The skydiving is like two weeks ago oh oh, wow, okay. And I noticed I just noticed when I went to post it that I had not updated my profile since five years ago. So I updated my profile and posted a photo of me skydiving in Dubai like a week, roughly a week ago.

Ryan Grant Little: 42:24

Well, look at you, you social media. Maven Bruce, thank you so much for being here.

Bruce Friedrich: 42:29

Thanks very much, ryan. I'm incredibly grateful for your support, for all your work for the podcast and everything. Really honored to be on.

Ryan Grant Little: 42:37

Thanks for listening to another Climate Tech podcast. It would mean a lot if you would subscribe, rate and share this podcast. Get in touch any time with tips and guest recommendations at hello at climatetechpodcom. Find me, ryan Grant Little, on LinkedIn. I'll be back with another episode next week. Bye for now.