Paul Shapiro: [00:00:00] Alan, welcome to the business for good podcast.

Alan Perlstein: Thanks Paul for inviting me here. glad to have a chance to chat with you.

Paul Shapiro: It is my pleasure. you know, we have been in many of the same circles for many years. We haven't gotten a chance to talk that much, so I'm really glad that we're getting a chance to do it here.

And, you, you first crossed my consciousness when you were running Miraculex, which now, which became Joywell and eventually Oobly. And, you were really interested in sweet proteins. So before we get into what you're doing now, what got you into biotech and synthetic biology in the first place that you thought, Hey, let's make sweeteners out of proteins?

Alan Perlstein: Yeah, so that sort of took a long and winding road. I originally got excited about the food tech space around the early 2000s. I was involved with one of the very first cell cultured meat labs in the US. In a tiny lab in Bayshore, Long [00:01:00] Island, trying to grow a cell culture or cell culture goldfish. So, I was involved with a lot of the early, some of the early work that went into that type of technology.

And that's where the idea,

Paul Shapiro: you know, the, so, you know, a lot of the people, when they think about cultivated meat, they think, oh, well, the first burger was in 2013. if they have read the book, clean meat, they know that actually the first Cultivated meat was around like 2000, which I didn't realize you were involved in where they grew goldfish in a NASA funded project to see like, could you grow meat in space?

So that's riveting that you were involved in that 24 years ago. What was your role where, I mean, you, you must've been a pretty young guy.

Alan Perlstein: Yeah.

While I was in undergrad, I was looking for a lab job, and evidently I was one of the very few people to apply for this for this really unique role. Many people who applied to it didn't even understand what does it mean to grow [00:02:00] cells or for food, but once I sort of started to understand what its implications were, it sort of Allowed me to start, really diving into this type of technology and sort of starting to, like, mentally explore where the, the next steps of this technology were will evolve into, and, it's very exciting that now,your company, many others are sort of still working on this cutting edge, new food technology, which is just constantly improving year by year.

Paul Shapiro: Well, that's generous of you. So before we get into the more modern era, so a quarter of a century when you're working to grow goldfish cells, were you thinking, hey, this is something that's going to be useful for long distance cosmic tourists? Or did you see an on earth application to try to displace conventional animal based meat production?

Alan Perlstein: Well, the only thing that made sense at the time [00:03:00] was for interspace travel, just because of the tremendous cost, even then we, we sort of saw there were three massive, technological hurdles to get through. And the thought process was NASA could at least pay for a little bit of them so it could get started.

And just like many different NASA innovations. There was obvious quite a bit of potential for earth based applications, so we saw that it was going to take definitely a good generation or 2 for some of this technology to be created, tested, and, we're definitely very surprised that. vcs, sort of bit into it and They allowed a lot of this technology to be de risked a lot of the story to be told and basically educated most of the world in in why cell culture cell culture meat and [00:04:00] alternative meats are important, not only for human health, but also Planetary health as well.

Paul Shapiro: Yeah, it's pretty amazing what you helped to ferment along with the researchers who were engaged in that goldfish product. I remember I had Jason Matheny on this podcast, who is now the CEO of the random corporation, but he became the founder of new harvest and it was. News reports about the goldfish research in 2000 that inspired him to go on and found new harvest and become a evangelical for cultured meat so you in many ways have helped to foment the culture beat revolution which as you point out led to billions of dollars in venture capital.

Flowing into this space. So, hopefully it all comes to fruition so far. It hasn't really made a dent in meat production, yet, a quarter century on, but you said one to two generations. So maybe there'll be another quarter century from now. It will be a major part of, of humanity's meat consumption.

We'll see, but that's enough on, on your [00:05:00] 2000 work. Cause fast forward like 15 years or so, and you're into sweet proteins of what happened? Why were you thinking, Oh, you know, we need a better sweetener that isn't based on a carbohydrate. Great.

Alan Perlstein: Yeah, so during this time, I was working in a lab in Columbia University in New York City, specifically on different kidney diseases, and I happened to sort of see a lot of the causes of not only kidney disease, obesity, diabetes,heart attack, stroke, many of these health elements.

We're all basically coming down from diet and especially with people's inherent love for sweet sweetness, whether it's sauces or, or candies, cookies, cakes, no, it was drinks. it's literally surrounding us day and night and during this time I was also seeing quite a bit of activity on [00:06:00] these newer proteins that companies were developing from the heme protein from impossible or alternative egg proteins, from from from Was it just at the time and, we sort of started seeing, you could replace a lot of these more destructive or unethical produced ingredients by using biotech and specifically these.

Interesting classes of proteins. So as I looked into it, I sort of discovered this area of science, specifically on, protein science where they had these sweet proteins, but they never were really commercialized. And a lot of these reasons were, oh, you had to figure this out. You had to develop a lab.

You had all these very expensive processes, but also at the same time, the cost for doing this type of work drastically [00:07:00] was decreasing. So I saw this really unique opportunity to take my skills from working in the cell culture, me industry, working in this laboratory. And putting it to trying to figure out how we could sort of solve one of humanity's oldest addictions, you know sweeteners and how we could make them better for for people and and healthier and and to me, the thought process is if you're going to start a company try to focus on something where Quite a bit of humanity is addicted to and it's currently sort of destructive and how could you significantly make it better for not only humans but also the planet at the same time.

So

Paul Shapiro: it's very clear why you would want to let's say replace animal based meat. It's very clear to me why you would wanna come up with something that sweetens without having the glycemic load that sugar has and why you'd wanna come up with a [00:08:00] sweet protein. But after six years at miraculous at me, miraculous, which again is now Uli, you know, you decided you're gonna depart and you're gonna start a chocolate company.

It isn't as queer to the average person. Why chocolate? Right. Chocolate is not, you know, Coco. Unlike sugar is perceived as very healthy, right? You're told to eat more dark cocoa. not less like with sugar where we're told to eat less. So why try to replace cocoa farming? What is the benefit of doing so?

Alan Perlstein: So during my time at Miraculox, now Ubly, we were looking to develop a lot of different chocolate products, which we, which, Ubly eventually launched. But during this time I saw, and sort of had a deep dive within the chocolate industry and saw that many of the ways that chocolate is being produced today.

Hasn't really changed in the last couple hundred years. You [00:09:00] still have for all intensive purposes, very poor farmers, under usually forced labor conditions,spending the vast majority of their life under really brutal conditions in the forest to grow harvest and process chocolate. And the conditions for doing that have gotten a lot worse.

we're now. they're using these really toxic, pesticides and fungicides to keep some insects which are spreading some of the major diseases that they and in essence, over 100 years ago, when most of the world's chocolate was produced in South America, there happened to be this weird cycle, in the 19 in the 1900s where it was hot and wet very quickly, just like we're seeing today, which led to the rise of the specifical fungal disease called witch's [00:10:00] broom, which destroyed about 95 percent of all cocoa in South America.

And we're seeing the same exact weather patterns and disease states. Happening to hit west africa. We're about 70 of the world's chocolates being produced and to make matters even worse A lot of this labor that goes into it is unfortunately forced child labor. So you have mass deforestation you have issues with these toxic chemicals issues with child labor all getting worse and worse and worse and even though that there were laws passed You People were talking about it.

These issues were never really fixed and in essence, because at the end of the day, most of the stuff is happening in the middle of the jungle where no one really knows what's happening.

Paul Shapiro: You made a couple of arguments there, Alan. The first is the unethical nature [00:11:00] of the cocoa farming industry, right? So you're accusing them of engaging in forced labor, even child labor.

you're also making an argument just about practicalities that with climate change, that it's going to be harder and harder to produce cocoa. And you're saying that, you know, basically cocoa, is in short supply because of this already. That is going to get worse. The other thing that I was surprised by when I was reading more in advance of our conversation here.

Was about the greenhouse gas impact of cocoa production because, you know, normally if you look at a chart of foods and the associated greenhouse gas emissions per serving, you know, you've got like beef and lamb way up top and then, you know, it's like pork and then chicken and then you start getting into like tofu and way at the bottom.

It's like lentils, right? And so it's normally all these animal foods up there and then all the plant foods at the bottom. But with cocoa, I was shocked that it's actually way more greenhouse gas. Pollution emitting then, many animal foods, including pork and [00:12:00] poultry that it was really shocking to me how high it was.

And I'll share this chart in the show notes for this episode at business for good podcast dot com so that people can see it themselves from our world in data. but that was kind of shocking to me. I didn't realize that cocoa was such a driver of greenhouse gas pollution.

Alan Perlstein: Yeah, right now it's estimated for every kilo of cocoa, that's being produced roughly about 20 to 30 kilos of CO2 is released.

And there's also quite a bit of methane, which is even more impactful than CO2 being released. And a lot of this is just because it takes an incredibly long time and a large amount of resources from carbon intensive fertilizers, fuel, pesticides, fungicides. It has to go through a multi step, multi country processing.

It, it, it basically goes from in the middle of jungle from [00:13:00] Africa, get shipped to the port, goes to another location for roasting and de shelling another location for crushing and turning into a liquor and another location for then turning it into its final product. And then it goes into another location for to be sold.

So it just traveled literally around the world once to twice before it enters a consumer's, you know,pocket. And we basically see there's a lot more superior and newer ways to grow foods rather than. Technically shipping them around the world multiple times.

Paul Shapiro: So let's talk about those new ways, Alan, because you're making a case that it's really inefficient to produce cocoa the way that we've been producing it for centuries.

But what's the better way? You're growing cocoa cells in bioreactors. So why is that better?

Alan Perlstein: Yeah, we see this as A really superior way to grow it, [00:14:00] because not only do you reduce the carbon, the carbon load, you don't have to deal with these, labor issues. You don't have to worry about pesticides, fungicides, and especially into the area, into the, the time today when we're trying to also avoid lots of,really harmful ingredients.

toxins or pesticides that could sort of find a way into these food system. We're trying to avoid that completely, making sure that these products could be sold at, at a affordable prices for consumers. As well as, making these products for the 1st time, letting cadmium free, which unfortunately is sort of this big side effect of growing, in these, specific, cocoa growing areas.

So we're just trying to provide, a. Probably a lot more cleaner, more ethically provided, ingredient, to consumers and many consumers are trying to also cut these [00:15:00] ingredients, these harmful ingredients like lead and cadmium out their diet as well.

Paul Shapiro: Okay, so. You've made a case for why it's better to do it in bioreactors, but let's talk about how you actually do it, right?

So listeners of the show will be familiar with animal cell culture. We've had many episodes about this, right? So you basically take a biopsy from an animal and you have all these millions of little cells in there. You can put them inside of a bioreactor that kind of mimics the conditions within the animal's body.

The cells grow into animal based meat. That's the general oversimplified way to describe the cultivated meat process. There's another process of precision fermentation where people are taking Microbes and turning them into factories that produce something else. That's what you were doing at miraculous trying to produce these proteins from some host organism, but you're doing plant cell culture, which is not like either one of those.

So what's the difference? Like what is plant cell culture?

Alan Perlstein: So plant cell culture is the technology to isolate a cell from a specific species. [00:16:00] It's to then bring it to sort of this early stage stem cell like state and then get it to mature in a different way that it could grow inside of a bioreactor or a large vessel.

To produce a specific compound or biomass for us. Yeah,

Paul Shapiro: what you just said to me sounds like it could also be said about animal cell culture, right? So how exactly? So how is it different? Like, I presume that you believe it's cheaper and easier to do plant cell culture than animal cell culture. So why?

What's the difference? What's happening? That is better in that sense.

Alan Perlstein: So plants are a lot more resilient. Environmental conditions, unlike mammalian cells, they have some internal defenses, while they're still in their, cellular state there. They don't necessarily need an extensive immune system.[00:17:00]

Like animal cells usually do, that's one really big benefit. The others are it grows at room temperature. It doesn't need, it doesn't necessarily need to grow at mammalian body temperature. the medias are a lot more cheaper and accessible. For instance, we could source a lot of the active plant phytonutrients, which basically tell the plant cells how to grow from rice waste, from tomato waste, from potato, from coconuts.

for instance, one of them, the major components is a compound called zeatine. Which is found in very large amounts in coconut water. So we basically can source a lot of the nutrients, which our cells need from a lot of local suppliers, without necessarily worrying about the other ethical impacts, Oh, you need fetal bovine serum.

Or a feel of [00:18:00] bovine analog or different ways of growing these rare compounds where we could source them in a relatively abundant way and the third probably most important technology is the reactors themselves We started to figure it out how to cut out like 99 of the costs of these reactors And we saw that if you could bring the cost of these reactors Down sort of a magnitude and price, you could really change, the way the price as well as the process of how these things could be scaled.

Paul Shapiro: That's riveting. So is this special type of bioreactor something that you invented? Or is this something that's just typically used in point cell culture?

Alan Perlstein: Yeah, so we started on using some, previously available technology. but we've basically been iterating on these earlier reactors and we were very influenced by the local Sacramento beer and wine [00:19:00] industry of where they were able to take these relatively inexpensive tanks.

Use them for fermenting, for not only fermenting beer, grains and other things. We modified them quite a bit in order to be used for, for plant cell culture. And over the last two years, we were growing out of these newer ultra low costing reactors.

Paul Shapiro: That's very cool. So what's the largest reactor of this kind that you've worked in?

Alan Perlstein: right now we're in middle of, scaling up and,activating our 200 liter reactor, this is going to, this is going to allow us to start planning our next size scale. Eventually we're aiming to have about a 2000 liter reactor, and having these mass produced. Within our,with our partners.

To be placed in our facility, a sort of a pilot plant, the different companies could [00:20:00] sort of see how this could operate at scale in different locations around the world.

Paul Shapiro: Very cool. Very cool. So if you look at, animal cell culture, my understanding is that the largest mammalian cell culture tank in the world is about 20, 000 liters.

it's actually not that far from where you and I live in Sacramento. do you know, like, are there. Plant cell culture reactors larger than that. Like, yeah. Okay. So what's this? What's the state of the play in the industry right now?

Alan Perlstein: So, it, it has been, I think the record was close to 100, 000 liters with successful cycles.

There are 2. Companies in the world that have been using plant cell culture. one company's based in Germany has been growing, a anti breast cancer drug called taxol in 75, 000 to a hundred thousand liter reactors. And there was a company in South America in South Korea. Grown self cultured [00:21:00] ginseng at over 100, 000 liters and yeah, so, these types of companies saw, oh, wow, these compounds are very valuable, expensive, but they're also environmentally destructive to farm on a very large basis that they roughly figured out about 15 years ago.

How to use some, older pharmaceutical technologies that were decommissioned, and they revitalize these by reactors to grow plant cells. So we saw a lot of different technologies to grow them, and we see the next big step is. Lowering the cost by using these lower cost reactors.

Paul Shapiro: Awesome. I definitely want to talk about cost.

I just want to ask about your business model first. So my understanding is you're going on a B to B strategy, right? Like you want to create a cocoa powder. You're not trying to put chocolate bars on shelves to compete against Hershey yourself, right?

Alan Perlstein: Not not definitely not not now. We see the [00:22:00] big problem in this technology and maybe the biggest risks are making sure it tastes amazing.

It has the cleanest label possible and a relatively competitive price. Once we basically solve that, we can explore other options, but many of the largest. chocolate companies in the world want a more sustainable, want a higher quality chocolate while still being able to provide it at a very fair and affordable price.

And that's what we're working with some very large companies to provide

Paul Shapiro: cool. So let's talk about that pricing issue, because obviously that. So if you don't ever outcompete cocoa on price, it's unlikely to ever become anything more than a niche product. And I know you are interested not just in in the margin, but also you're interested in making a dent in the problem that you're trying to solve here.

So I was actually reading about recently when. Kerosene displaced whale oil. And I was wondering how [00:23:00] much cheaper did kerosene have to be in order to displace whale oil, right? And because it's kind of the same thing, you put a liquid in your lamp at home and you light it up and that was it. And it, in effect, kerosene, it was patented in 1853.

And at first it wasn't cheaper, but quickly it became cheaper. And it was about within a couple of decades, it was literally half the price. And this is why the whale industry was decimated so vigorously and so rapidly after kerosene came on to the market. In your case, I've read news reports to say that you guys intend to at first be, have pricing that is commensurate with like high value nutritional chocolate on the market.

I wasn't sure what that meant. But what do you think? I presume this is the highest end chocolate today. How long do you anticipate it might take for you not to, let's say, outcompete Cocoa, but at least to become somewhere in the ballpark of competing on price with commodity cocoa.

Alan Perlstein: Just like the, the advent of kerosene and thousands of [00:24:00] oil derricks and supporting technologies that allowed it to scale, we're aiming to do the same thing with our technology.

we don't necessarily have to go searching for oil and, and drill a well. our biggest challenge to get this price down is about scale and how many systems we could set up. And finding the right types of industrial partners to work with as we reduce the price. So we see this taking somewhere between 3 to 5 years.

To start scaling up to the levels necessary to start approaching prices that you see on the supermarket shelves. So it's not that long, and it doesn't necessarily take that large of a. Scale up to get there.

Paul Shapiro: What's the CapEx associated with that? So it's three to five years to get to somewhere around price parity with commodity cocoa.

What's the cap? What's the capital expenditure needed? Do you think to scale up [00:25:00] to the level that you want to get to, let's say 75, 000 or 100, 000 liters of capacity?

Alan Perlstein: Yeah. So for us to get the capacities we need, we're most likely looking at In the, in the low tens of millions of dollars for us to start generating, the cocoa and cocoa butter and our other ingredients at relatively close to commodity prices.

And we see that this technology can even be today's commodity prices, let alone what it's going to be looking like in the next couple of years.

Paul Shapiro: So it's pretty affordable compared to other types of biotech scale up a low tens of millions may sound like a lot of money to somebody not initiated in the biotech world.

But that's a pretty low amount of money for creating something of that type of magnitude. So it has to be. Yeah. So it sounds like you believe that you are within striking. range of a few years away, perhaps of competing on price. But earlier on, you mentioned taste, and if it doesn't taste great, then obviously, you know, [00:26:00] that's, it's not going to work.

So if you're not yet there on price, are you there on taste now? Or are you still working toward taste parity with cocoa?

Alan Perlstein: Cocoa has roughly over 2000 unique compounds that are responsible for its unique aroma, taste, creaminess, and we've already been working very hard, to actually produce the vast majority of them.

We think we've have about 70 to 85 percent of the flavors. there and what we're working on is pushing up These levels of these fleet natural flavor compounds at the same time. So as of today we are probably About 80 to 90 percent of the way of the way there when we formulate with many different products such as different chocolate bars or candies or confections.

It's basically, [00:27:00] identical in many of the flavor and tasting components. And our focus right now is mostly on those single origin, unique chocolates that you can find that have creamy notes. Cherry notes, plum notes, these really rare varietals that are very difficult to produce. That's where we're focused on now, and probably in the next year to 2 years, we're going to be releasing more.

Mainstream milk chocolate flavors as

Paul Shapiro: well. So you're talking about releasing within the next year, you're currently going toward 200 liters of capacity and you want to get to 2000 liters. When do you think, I read a couple of articles in this past year or so that indicated that you wanted to release by the end of 2024.

Now it might be the beginning of 2025. What, what's the current state of thinking as to when you might release something, even from a pilot scale facility that somebody could [00:28:00] utilize?

Alan Perlstein: Yeah, so, as you mentioned a little bit earlier, many people when they hear about cocoa Or they're hearing about dark chocolate their mind thinks.

Oh, isn't there something healthy about that? and the answer is yes So for a very long time, there was a big suspicion that there were these healthy compounds inside of cocoa and these very large chocolate companies like Mars, Barry Calbo started doing these investigations into it. And they found that there's this compound called the cocoa flavanol that has a really profound effect on human health, in,in.

The last couple of years, there was a very large double blind study called the Cosmo study, which showed these cocoa compounds reduced,issues resulting from heart attack and stroke and AFib over 30 percent and different researchers in different universities around the world, like here, [00:29:00] UC Davis have found that cocoa flavanols are really great for joint.

pain recovery due to arthritis or athletic performance. Meji, a very large chocolate company in Japan saw that,these cocoa flavanols helped with mood relaxation and sort of feelings of wellness. And researchers in Columbia University saw that these compounds were also beneficial for short term memory.

So, if you sort of put all these benefits together, there's sort of this panacea of effects all in these really interesting cocoflavanol ingredients. So, we are intending to launch a 25 percent cocoflavanol product. With a partner by next year So these cocoa flavanols usually occur in cocoa in less than one percent and we figured out how to massively Increase these cocoa flavanols [00:30:00] in the first lead free and cadmium variant So people could actually have these really healthy compounds in the cleanest way possible today And we're aiming to make it a lot more affordable.

So many of these components sell for You 30 to 50 just for a month supply and we're looking to launch a product that's very competitive with that in the next year.

Paul Shapiro: Okay, very cool. In addition to the plethora of benefits that you mentioned, one other, interesting, Body of research that I have read actually is Coco's impact on muscle synthesis, which is pretty riveting that, studies show, and I'll include this in the show notes at business for a podcast dot com that, taking cocoa powder after an intense workout, not only reduces muscle soreness, but increases the muscles ability to grow afterwards.

So it's basically like a, a natural muscle enhancer, which is pretty awesome. And for that reason, I consume cocoa on a daily basis. And, I have eaten your [00:31:00] chocolate before a sample that you made one time. It was very good. but I hope to be able to get your 25 percent flavanol, one day, that would be pretty awesome.

So Ellen, you obviously, you know, in order to get that tens of low digit, tens of millions of dollars, I know that you raised a 4 million round in 2023, what is the company's total fund raised from inception in 2020 to the present?

Alan Perlstein: Roughly, we've currently raised a. About, 16 million in total as of, as of today, we're still in the middle of raising, a further series.

They were currently middle of it. we're using this capital. To, expand, pursue our regulatory approval and moving forward, but just like many different food technologies today, the bar to raise capital is incredibly high. I, I, I like to refer to it as milestone inflation. We're the milestones that might've been good enough in, in [00:32:00] 2021 or 2022.

Definitely do not cut it today. every company has to understand how to hit some significant partnerships or sales or technological breakthroughs that could allow them to really figure out how to raise. And this is sort of, I think the struggle that many companies are, are figuring out today and, and companies like yours who are launching products and finding partnerships and, and, and scaling, I think is the right way to go.

we, all the companies today, we don't have infinite amount of time to launch products like we've used to it. The, the name of the game is launching as quick as possible. Iterating. Gathering all these really great partnerships. And in essence, it's become a lot more brutal, in, in the landscape. And there's now,patent wars, which, which you guys are fighting [00:33:00] and other companies are fighting.

there's

Paul Shapiro: Yeah in our case font, we we successfully fought

Alan Perlstein: successfully fought. Yeah,

Paul Shapiro: right. Thank you. Yes yeah, I mean, you're you're obviously speaking, about an experience that's very resonant with me and I am You know, constantly impressed by the perseverance of so many entrepreneurs who, even in this very difficult environment are still finding ways to tighten the belt to continue to make progress and find ways to survive.

Obviously, not everybody survives. There's a lot of companies that have failed already in the biotech food space. but I'm, I'm constantly impressed by so many of the folks who are working really hard and just beating their head against the wall and the, with the conviction that the wall is going to break before their head does.

So, I, my hat is off to you, Alan, for the success that you've had so far, and I really hope you get a chance to scale up. It's an impressive journey that you've been on. And I'm certainly rooting for your success, and I'd love to know, speaking of success, what [00:34:00] resources have there been for you? I mean, you spent 6 years at the helm of Miraculex.

You've now spent 4 or 5 years doing, excuse me, working in the chocolate space at California cultured, but they've been resources for you that were useful that you'd recommend for others that might be beneficial for them.

Alan Perlstein: yeah, there are, there are quite a few, obviously finding the right networks or accelerator programs.

If you are into the food tech space or the biotech space, I went through SOSV twice with both my companies and was very happy with, with the quality, not only of the networks. of the program the training and the resources that they provided and they seeded quite a bit of revolutionary technologies, which are currently out on the market today, we, we basically are very happy with the Sacramento regional, investors and networks.[00:35:00]

They've helped attract a lot of, international media attention, which allowed us to attract even additional financing. we, we've seen even the local Davis and Sacramento,Startup environments have also been beneficial for us to grow. but, but quite a bit, I've also been doing a lot of reading, a lot of different books, podcasts, such as Paul's has been relatively insightful to understand, the thinking of other CEOs, as well as understanding different people's perspective when it came with food, technology, and business.

Paul Shapiro: Very good. Well, I'm, I'm glad that there are so many recommendations that you have out there for people. We'll link to SOSV for those not familiar with them. it's a very cool accelerator and a venture capital fund. And I'll, I'll link to that in the show notes. So people can go check them out and apply with them if you desire to do that.

Finally, Alan, what companies do you hope people will create that don't yet exist? You've obviously been doing this for some time now. So I [00:36:00] presume that there's something out there that you wish somebody else would do since you are occupied making chocolate. Right.

Alan Perlstein: Well, it's, thinking about sort of the big problems of today.

humanity needs a lot of. Our raw resources in order to technically to scale up. We have a lot of very big plans. We want to make more sustainable foods. We need to feed people cheaper than ever before. We need resources for AI chips, houses, computers, cars. sustainable energy. And the only way to do that is, is basically getting more resources.

and currently that means either digging in the dirt, chopping things down, which is destructive. And to me, I think, The real big next, push of technology is using a novel bio, tech, or new organisms to mine and harvest, basically the world, there's, [00:37:00] there's billions of tons of heavy metals in ocean water in the soil, in, in, in waste facilities that are basically locked in there.

And I think there's going to be a lot of interesting opportunities using a mix of microorganisms and robotics basically mine these these places in a non destructive way in order to power the future that we all desperately want. And I, I think that's going to be an incredibly important area for future entrepreneurs.

Paul Shapiro: All right. Well, hopefully somebody is going to take your advice, Alan, and they're going to start something really cool in those fields. And, we'll hear about it perhaps on a future episode of this podcast. Somebody will say they were inspired by you to go start that venture. So I appreciate all that you're doing, Alan.

I can't wait to see your chocolate commercialized and I'll look forward to getting to try my next bite of California culture.

Alan Perlstein: Thanks, Paul. Really appreciate it.