You’ll hear in this interview what role Isha Datar thinks nonprofits like hers should play in a nascent industry whose start-ups are attracting hundreds of millions of dollars of venture capital. As well, Isha discusses the fact that many of the people now working at cell ag start-ups have come through New Harvest and its ecosystem.

In many countries, walking down city streets vividly brings to life two serious problems: plastic pollution and poverty. While there are charities trying to address both of these concerns, serial entrepreneur David Katz in 2013 thought there was an opportunity to marry the two issues and build a profitable business out of it. The result: Plastic Bank.

Elizabeth Muller's company Deep Isolation has pioneered what she says is a safe method of storing nuclear waste deep underground—really deep. Elizabeth argues that such storage, which would still allow for the material to be recovered if desired, would keep ground dwelling earthlings like Homo sapiens and other living beings safe from our civilization’s nuclear waste for perhaps a million years, and she’s attracting venture capital from investors who’ve already pumped $14 million into her company.

As you’ll hear in this interview with company founder Roger Lienhard and CEO Kees Kruythoff (former CEO of Unilever North America), they intend to use their extensive food industry experience and massive capital to revolutionize the chicken industry. And it will all begin with a new, all-natural plant-based chicken that contains only four to six ingredients and, they say, will be cheaper than chicken within three years.

Today, everyone knows what plant-based meat is and chances are they’ve at least tried it. In many ways, those people have Seth Tibbott to thank. Seth, who in 1980 founded Turtle Island Foods (maker of the iconic Tofurky brand) and served as its CEO for more than three decades, is now releasing his autobiography: In Search of the Wild Tofurky: How a Business Misfit Pioneered Plant-Based Foods Before They Were Cool.

Rodrigo Garcia Gonzales and Pierre Paslier began ordering ingredients off Amazon and Alibaba and tinkered away in their kitchen. With a rough prototype in hand, they decided they’d launch a Kickstarter to see if there was interest in a new company that would make alternative packaging from seaweed. The result: A million dollars poured in and Notpla became a reality.

You already know about plant-based meat. You’re also familiar with meat grown from animal cells, often called cultivated meat or clean meat. But have you ever heard of making protein—and therefore the building blocks of meat—straight out of thin air?

The challenge of climate change can seem daunting, but trying to solve daunting challenges is exactly what Google X does. One former employee of Google’s moonshot factory, Kathy Hannun, is on a mission to help wean your home off of greenhouse gas-emitting fossil fuels. Her strategy: make it so easy for you to convert your home to geothermal energy that you just have to hire her startup, Dandelion Energy, to do it.

In many ways, Ryan Bethencourt is an OG of the biotech alt-protein scene. As a cofounder of biotech accelerator Indiebio, he was part of the team that wrote the first-ever investor checks to now well-known names in the field, including Memphis Meats, Clara Foods, and Geltor. In addition to Ryan’s pioneering work to incubate and fund companies seeking to create more sustainable protein sources, he’s now the cofounder of his own startup, Wild Earth.

Clara Foods has since raised $50 million in venture capital, and the company is about to commercialize its first products. It’s an inspirational tale, and one that proves you need not be a superhuman to do something truly super for the world.

Provenance Bio is now coming out of the shadows and is ready to start talking about its big plans to keep people wearing leather, but instead of it coming off the backs of cows, they’re leaving those cows out to pasture and making real leather, animal-free.

You’ve likely heard the Biblical story in which a small amount of fish were multiplied to feed thousands. Well, in 2020, Lou Cooperhouse is literally multiplying the fish—or at least their cells—in the hopes of again feeding the masses, and saving our planet at the same time. Lou’s company, BlueNalu, has raised millions of dollars to culture fish cells into real fish meat that looks and performs just like conventional fish, but without the mercury, microplastics, nor oceanic exploitation.

Plastic is amazing at doing so many things—except going away. As the planet increasingly swims in humanity’s plastic garbage (nearly none of which gets recycled and virtually all of which will last for centuries), Lori Goff is betting that biotech will be part of the solution to creating functional plastic alternatives that are so biodegradable you can eat them.

What if you could make coffee out of agricultural byproducts, like watermelon seeds and sunflower seed husks? Think it wouldn’t taste as good? Well, according to a Seattle-based startup called Atomo, they’ve not only recreated the exact taste of coffee, but they go on to claim that in blind taste tests of their brew vs. Starbucks, 7 out of 10 people preferred the taste of their so-called molecular coffee.

What do you get when you combine a Google leader, a dairy industry executive, and an engineer? Apparently, if you’re in Singapore, you get a new startup producing real cow’s milk– without the cow: TurtleTree Labs.

You’ve heard the folklore time and again: a group of young idealists starts a company in their garage with dreams of one day changing the world. In the case of Fenix International, they too started in a garage, but this garage happened to be in Uganda, and those idealists happened to be a group of ex-Apple engineers.

You know the story: there’s a bright college student who drops out of an Ivy League school to embark upon an entrepreneurial journey, founding his own company and building it into a major success along the way. No, we’re not talking about Mark Zuckerberg or Bill Gates here. Instead, we’re talking about Tom Szaky, an immigrant whose family fled Hungary after the Chernobyl disaster, eventually sending him to Princeton, where he dropped out to launch his startup called TerraCycle. Their goal, as the company touts, is to make “recycling the unrecyclable not only feasible but desirable and profitable!”

The man who brought you Oscar Mayer’s Lunchables and other notable products such as Slim Jim is now hoping you’ll buy his soy-based meats. After spending 30 years in the meat industry, Rody co-founded and is the CEO of Improved Nature. You might not have heard as much about Rody’s food tech start-up as some of the more well-publicized names in the field, but he’s already raised millions of dollars and is selling in the US and abroad.

For a lot of people, when they walk by someone who’s homeless, their inclination may be to look the other way. One day for Jasmine Crowe, however, she not only didn’t look the other way; she saw a profitable business opportunity in helping connect the hungry with perfectly good food the rest of us are throwing away.

In this episode, Safwan offers a history of why we have the two-week pay period in the first place, and even gets biblical on us, citing the thoughts of both Moses and Mohammed. Yes, it turns out they both prescribed that employers pay employees for their labor right away.