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

Isha Datar: Thanks for having me back, Paul.

Paul Shapiro: It has been almost four years since you were last on, but I tell you, you look the same, you, you look the same to

Isha Datar: me. I did not expect you to be saying four years.

Paul Shapiro: a lot's happened. I think you, you have a child now, but I think your child is more than four years old, if my memory is correct.

He's, he's

Isha Datar: four and a half, so. Okay,

Paul Shapiro: so you were a very new mother at that time. How is motherhood going for you?

Isha Datar: It's going great. It's really, it pushes you to do things you didn't know you could do.

Paul Shapiro: If you weren't being recorded now and it weren't going great, would you say it was going great or would you, would you confess that it's challenging?

Isha Datar: I mean, there were periods in that last four years where it wasn't going as great. For sure. but no, it's good. I, I don't sleep very much. That's the only not great part about it.

Paul Shapiro: And is that because you're running an organization or because you're running a family here?

Isha Datar: You know, that's a, that's a good question.

It's [00:01:00] probably a combination of the two.

Paul Shapiro: Yeah, it makes me think it makes me think of the line from Ben Horowitz, the, the founder of Andreessen Horowitz with a co founder, where he says in his book, the hard thing about hard things, because when you start your own company, or in this case, your own organization, you will sleep like a baby because you'll wake up every two hours and cry.

And

Isha Datar: I can

Paul Shapiro: assure you, it always makes me think like whoever said the, whoever coined the term sleep like a baby probably never slept near a baby, you know, it's like, it's like the last thing they do is sleep like a baby. It's, it's right. okay, let's get down to things. The New York times had this, very lengthy opinion column recently that you were quoted throughout.

And it was a very negative, piece, basically negative about the prospects, I should say of cultivated meats, actual viability. And Joe Fassler, the author of that column, who has written numerous other stories, basically writing the obituary for cultivated meat, his essential argument is like, this just isn't possible, right?

Like, it may or may not be a good idea, but he's arguing, look, it's just not technologically [00:02:00] feasible to do this at scale at a cost that is going to you. ever be anything near conventional animal meat. Do you agree with that? Or do you think that he is misguided in that belief?

Isha Datar: I think Joe actually goes so far as to say, not that it's not feasible, but he says it is never feasible, which I consider to be really, really unfair.

And so, you know, I, I appreciate Joe's kind of. role in this space is kind of the, you know, naysayer deepens the conversation, gets us to think things we don't think about normally, but I do fundamentally disagree with that. I think we've barely gotten started and I think there's so much research that can be done and so many discoveries that are honestly on the horizon and not that far from being discovered.

They're just kind of things we haven't done yet. That to say that, We won't get there is way too premature and to say that we'll never get there is beyond, you know, is unfair,

Paul Shapiro: unfair. Okay, yeah, I [00:03:00] mean, it does remind me of the people who said electric vehicles will never be there, right? Or there's so many technologies that we now have that smart people declared were not possible.

Now, of course, admittedly, there are also lots of things that people said weren't possible that we still don't have, like flying cars, right? So like, you know, maybe cultivated meat is like flying cars, or maybe it's more like electric vehicles, you know, 10 or 15 years ago when they were still more of a futuristic technology, or maybe it's more like, Nuclear fusion, right?

That it's something that we can do, but not really at scale yet or whatever. I don't know. I'm not suggesting that's true, but I wonder whether which one of those it's more likely. Do you have a thought as to which one of those it may be the most like?

Isha Datar: Well, okay, so you know that my my kind of boundaries are what we talk about a cellular agriculture because I think cultivated meat is in there, but I think there's all these other kinds of things we can grow from cells that.

Reduce our dependence on, on industrial animal agriculture that are just as valid and save just as many animals and have just as much of a positive impact as [00:04:00] cultivated meat. And so I think, you know, it's really interesting. You bring up this question about, or this, kind of parallel about the flying car versus the electric car.

Vehicle. I don't, I mean, I personally don't know if cultivated meat is the flying car or the electric vehicle. but say we were trying to make a flying car, what are all the inventions that would make along the way that would kind of fundamentally do the same thing or fundamentally give people the same benefit or make the world a better place along the way?

And sometimes I think cultivated meat is kind of like that, that I think it is a very important thing for us to aim towards, but we should not discount all the things that we have to discover on the route there. so, you know, I, I think that we have to keep thinking about that, keep thinking about, you know, what this end product is, but not be too fixated on this kind of holy grail idea and also be really open to.

You know, pivoting where we need to pivot to find these products that can maybe have some more near term value, but still put us on the path there.

Paul Shapiro: [00:05:00] I see. if it is like the electric car, which is certainly what my, what my hope is. That, you know, if you think about 15 years ago, electric cars were determined to really be something that was never going to take off, I was going to say never fly, but that was too close to flying cars,

Isha Datar: they were

Paul Shapiro: never going to get into fifth gear, I shouldn't say.

which is ironic for an electric car also, but either way, they're, they're never gonna, you know, they're, they're never going to make it to the speed limit. if they are like that, do you believe that the technology has already been invented or, and they only need money, right? So as the technology men invented.

And they just need more money to scale up like if you were to give the companies in this space hundreds of millions of dollars each would they still have to make new inventions or would they just be able to scale or do you think that still. More research is needed before this can be considered economically viable.

Isha Datar: So I've, I've spoken to enough kind of technical [00:06:00] leaders in the space in the companies that I feel that there is still a lot of research that needs to be done. I don't think it's just a scale issue and also we can't, we can't think of the science and the scale up as separate. They happen in a very linked way.

And so you may want you may want to change some of your fundamental laboratory science in order to get you better suited for scale up. A good example of this is, even on the fermentation side. We're used to only a few organisms being used to grow proteins at scale, you know, like your milk and egg proteins and all the other kinds of proteins you might grow at scale.

but those may not be actually well suited for these types of food proteins or functional food proteins. And we might actually be needing, you know, more model organisms to be discovered outside of the ones that have kind of been traditionally used for medicine to use them for food. And that's kind of an example of something that very much influences scale.

But needs to be done at the laboratory level. So I, it, it's, it's [00:07:00] both. And I think the real takeaway is that if I had hundreds of millions of dollars, I'd put it into research that would actually get all of the companies in a better spot to scale up rather than rely on each of them to scale up separately.

Paul Shapiro: Great. So, you, you're bringing me to exactly where I wanted to go, which is your response to the New York times column, where you talked about that, where you talked about the 3 billion, right? Cause Joe fast, the rights, you know, it's been 3 billion basically invested across, you know, 100 to 200 companies in the space.

Interestingly, you know, only a handful of them probably represent like 80 percent of that funding. there's just a few of them that have most of that funding. and you know, you wrote that you thought that 3 billion would be better spent. By doing the types of activities that New Harvest does, then basically the companies in the space.

So my question for you is, how do you make that happen? Right? Like, obviously, SoftBank and Tomasic and the other major venture capital companies are not [00:08:00] going to be donating hundreds of millions, let alone billions of dollars to charities, right? They are, they're trying to get a return for their investors.

So how, how does this happen? Like your vision, Of having hundreds of millions or even billions of dollars going into the foundational research that could lift all boats. What is the pathway for that that you see actually making it occur?

Isha Datar: well, I think a culture shift is really important. I think there is this broader movement outside of SALAG, which is about the idea of how do we advance mission driven science.

And it's things that people are in the climate space are thinking about. A lot of people are trying to study DARPA and say, you know, how could we do a DARPA for climate? How could we do a DARPA for medicine? How could, you know, like things where there's been a really effective ways to advance science very quickly, but to do it for this kind of mission driven stuff.

Cause I think our system is really good for, Market oriented things and created things where where competition makes sense, but when it comes to creating a livable world, you know what, who wins? We all win [00:09:00] if someone wins, right? So I think one thing is that kind of broader mission change, which I see a lot of evidence of and kind of suggestions of out there.

The second thing is structural change. You know, even though there are funders, you know, billionaire funders who are really excited about this different way of advancing science, a lot of the time it does require weird things to happen, like a for profit entity to do only basic research. You know, this is You don't tend to think of things that way.

You tend to think of this like binary, like all public research happens in academia, all private research happens in industry, but actually those are just kind of arbitrary things we came up with one day. We can, we can create whatever structures we need to. So that kind of creativity on the structures is really important.

and then the, and of course, everything I'm saying that needs to change are very huge, gigantic changes and are not the practical answer that I think you and I hope there was. but I think another thing is, you know, 3 billion is really not that much money. it's a, it's a drop [00:10:00] in the bucket for biotech and I've, I've said this a million times, you know, the, the rule of thumb for advancing a small molecule drug to market all the way from discovery to commercialization is 1 billion.

And 10 years to bring that one drug to market. And, I was going around saying this for like 10 years and last week I saw someone give a presentation and now the number is 2. 7 billion and 10 years to bring one. Drug to market. So I was like, okay, we, we've barely even raised enough money to bring one drug that would make like one pill that someone would take for one disease to market.

Like that, that is tiny compared to the vision of what cellular agriculture and cultivated meat is, where we want to bring something to everybody's table all over the world to change the way, you know, we eat and produce food and consume food and everything. So 3 billion is really nothing. And so, you know, That kind of parallel to the pharma industry, I think, causes me to want to [00:11:00] parallel to the pharma world again, where, you know, how many disease research entities, you know, cancer foundations and so on, regularly raise millions and millions and hundreds of millions of dollars for research like that.

That is not. Out of out of line as an expectation and so I think there is a world where we can map that on to what we want to do with cellular agriculture, but that also requires a bit of a, a culture shift because we need to see the very deep importance of changing the way we consume food and how that actually affects like all human life on earth, in a way that Potentially is even more impactful than creating, you know, cures to certain diseases.

Paul Shapiro: I looked up St. Jude's funding because, during, right now, just to see what they make because they're doing, you know, so much research and they're trying

Isha Datar: to.

Paul Shapiro: Trying to help, sick kids and it's too, it is, it's 2 billion, right. And yeah, I don't know where that comes [00:12:00] from. I don't know if it's all coming from private philanthropists or not.

I don't know. but it goes here. So, so yeah, I mean, obviously you don't think that the VCs are going to be, you know, making philanthropic contributions that are comparable to their investments. But you're saying you think that there might be other sources where we could be promoting this foundational research.

Let me ask you a provocative question about that. What if it's the case that. These companies have actually accelerated the amount of research money that goes into this. Like, do you think that yeah, Tufts and UC Davis would be getting the government grants that they're getting right now if it weren't for having an actual industry admittedly a pre revenue industry, but still a for profit industry existing.

And, and, you know, when you think about the new harvest fellows, like presumably their goal was to get jobs with the companies in this space.

Isha Datar: Absolutely. Yes. No, I, yeah, while I wouldn't do it that way, I do think we, this is the way it was going to go. This is the way it had to go. And, we, you know, if [00:13:00] you have a contest of who's going to do something first, the entrepreneurs are going to do something first.

Academia is not going to do something first and government certainly is not going to do something first. So it had to go in this order of events where it was really entrepreneurs going out there, telling a story. That kind of people who are willing to take risks would take a risk on and then that kind of de risks things for academia and that de risks things for government.

So we did need to have it there. And I, I would never frame it like, this was the wrong way. And, you know, it was not my favorite way, but I also think the way the world is structured, you know, this is the way that was going to, to unfold. And this, this was a comment that I actually gave to Joe when he was doing the research of the New York times article, but got cut.

So this is, you know, what the New York times does not want you to hear is, It's like, I can't remember exactly the quote that I put in that, New York Times. Oh yeah, I said, you know, this is a bubble that's going to burst, but I didn't want to, you know, I didn't necessarily want to say it like that was a bad thing.

It was more just a [00:14:00] kind of reflection of the moment thing. You know, it was a, an observation type of thing because the comments I added were that this is how it was going to go. Like this. We saw it coming this way because this was the only way that would have allowed transformative science to get on the radar of funders and get funded.

You know, how long would we have to wait if we were trying to go for government funding first? I don't know, forever, forever.

Paul Shapiro: Yeah, I'm sympathetic to that point of view as well. I think that if you hadn't had the founding of MosaMeat and Upside Foods or then Memphis Meats back in 2015 and 16, I, I think we'd still be waiting.

Like we'd still be, you know, talking about, you know, Like the 2000 research that was going on with the goldfish cells, you know, it just wasn't. In my view, it wasn't considered prime time for any type of funding until you actually had companies out there saying that they were going to commercialize this

Isha Datar: [00:15:00] and new harvest was like a micro Cosm of that story because of course, our early successes were co founding perfect day in every company and we did that when we had no money at all.

I think we had like 20, 000 for the whole organization. And once those companies got started and kept growing and they were able to tell the story of how impactful this could be and how real this could be, that's when funders started funding us and we could fund academic research. So what we saw, you know, small is all what we saw that small thing happen in New Harvest and then we saw it again reflected out in the world.

Paul Shapiro: Interesting. yeah, well, you know, we've had both every and new, excuse me. And, perfect days, founders on this show before, and we'll link to those in the show notes for the, yeah, for those episodes. But as anybody who has read the book, clean meat knows that you co founded both of those companies and you donated your equity to new harvest.

And both of those companies have done pretty well. They've gotten good valuations. new harvest benefited at all from this and the companies haven't exited yet. But has there been [00:16:00] like secondary sales of the shares or any way that new harvest has benefited yet from your equity?

Isha Datar: Yes, absolutely. We, we, that, those are our rainy day funds.

I mean, it's not hard. It's not easy to start a nonprofit organization when there's no benefactor or like no foundation that started it. You know, we are ultimately kind of grassroots in that way that we're just a whole bunch of people that give money and we have a couple of big donors here and there come and go, but we don't have kind of have this kind of keeping the lights on funder.

so that, Money has really helped us, especially in this last year when I think so many organizations have experienced layoffs, have experienced kind of Poor economy, making fundraising really tough. That has been incredibly important to us. and, thank you to those guys for making that stock worth something.

Paul Shapiro: Yes, no doubt. That's actually having a conversation, with, with, my colleague, Donnie Kirkendall, she, she's an executive vice president at the better Miko, and she was commenting on. [00:17:00] the, on basically how vesting schedules work and so on with regard to this and thinking, you know, what happens when somebody leaves a company and the other people are still working hard to make their shares, worthwhile, but I'm very glad that new harvest benefited from, from that work and, and, and hopefully it'll continue to, to increase in value.

Okay, let's get back to the New York Times article, though, just briefly, because you publish and I'll link to this in the show notes that business for good podcast dot com so that people can read your entire response to the New York Times column by Joe Fassler. but I want to ask you about a specific line that caught my attention in there.

You said, you wrote in the new harvest newsletter that you believed that there were exaggerations, lies, and broken promises that were made by some of the founders of these companies. so that's, I'm not putting the words in your mouth. That's just a quote saying exaggerations, lies, and broken promises, which, you know, it's, it's pretty strong claim.

So from who, like, you know, [00:18:00] who do you think were the exaggerators, liars, and broken promise people who did this? And what did they say that you think was either an exaggeration or a lie looking back on it today?

Isha Datar: So our field has a pattern of exaggerated timelines. That is, that is the thing that we see the most exaggerations about and have seen since even before Even before I showed up 10 years ago, there was an article that actually came out, I think in 2013 or 2014, around the time I started with new harvest that looked at timelines that had expired where people had said, Oh, we're going to have this on the market in five years.

We're going to have this on the market in one year, in 10 years. And the timelines kept getting longer and longer, and that was 10 years ago. And then around, you know, the time a lot of these founders, founded the cultivated meat companies, they were putting out timelines that were also extremely exaggerated, as if, you know, as if we had not seen this already happened once before.

And so I think, I think both the exaggeration, well, the exaggeration, the lie, and the broken [00:19:00] promise is being able to say, You know, we're going to have product on the market within a year or whatever of deciding that you're going to have a product on the market. And I, there's actually too many founders that said that for me to want to pick at one and point fingers at them.

And I can see why there might be a. Reason to say that in, you know, in order to create that hype, to create that FOMO, you know, the things that motivate venture capitalists are not always, you know, talking about how you need to do research and answer scientific questions and stuff like that. You need to say, you know, this is going to happen.

And, you know, there may be, could be a world where the timelines could be shortened very rapidly, but these were timelines that were so short that even a regulatory approval could not happen within that span of time, even if the science was completely figured out. So that was the thing that I think held us back the most because With every exaggerated timeline, you make it harder to find the stuff that makes the timeline real.

Paul Shapiro: So do [00:20:00] you think that they purposefully were lying or exaggerating or just that they themselves were overly optimistic? And let me give you an example. you know, recently I had Mark post on the show and he mentioned that at the 2013 unveiling of the first cultivated burger. That he declared that this was going to be a seriously on the market within a decade.

It's now more than a decade later, and I didn't bring this up. It's not like I had a gotcha question. He brought this up

Isha Datar: that

Paul Shapiro: he was wrong. Now, I find it hard to believe that Mark purposefully believed that he was lying or exaggerating it. I find it more likely to believe that in 2013, he really believed that by 2023, that this would be on the market.

That seems to me more likely than thinking that he was somehow nefariously just trying to entice venture capitalists. But what do you think? I mean, do you think Mark may have not really believed what he was saying at the time?

Isha Datar: Mark also said it would take about 50 million to make it happen, which I remember [00:21:00] back then I was like, Oh, that's so much funny.

Yeah. Anything could happen for 50 million. And now look at me saying 3 billion is not that much money. no, I don't, I don't think this is all nefarious or anything like that. And I. That's why I try to kind of reserve my observations to being observations because I'm not in a position to judge if someone knew what they were talking about or didn't know what they were talking about.

And also, the, you know, the vision of the work and the success of this is so important that like, of course, you'd want, you want it to be there, you know, after I put out that New York Times opinion piece, or like the reaction to the opinion piece, I had a couple donors email me saying, you know, I read your piece and I was, you know, I got so down because, you know, I, even I could accuse myself of being too hopeful and wanting things to happen so fast because I just want, I just believe in it so much.

And I wanted to be here yesterday. I think it's just the greatest thing. So I, you know, I don't want to assume that because I'm not in a position to know what's going on in people's minds. And I tend to think [00:22:00] we're all in it, even on this side of Even on this side of the bad news. So surely what no one's here, you know, to collect a check and disappear, you know, into the dark.

So I think, I don't, I don't think it was like that intentional, but you know, in information does come forward. And also a lot of folks. You know, maybe didn't think through the scientific perspective. You know, we do have a lot of examples from the science world where we could have, you know, looked at, okay, how long did that thing take?

And then how long did that thing take to come out? So we could have made some more informed decisions, I think. But to, to speak from, from Mark's perspective, I mean, Mark may have said, you know, what context do we all bring to the table? You know, Mark's context as someone who has worked in, academia and on the medical side of the world, or medical side of science, you know, there's so much infrastructure to support that kind of stuff.

So when you have an idea, it [00:23:00] can come to market within 10 years because there are researchers all over the world at institutes all around the world. You know, chugging along, churning along, chipping away at this problem. We don't, we just can't, don't have that in SELAG. We don't have that kind of churning science that we can all count on.

The publication's coming out all the time. And that's a really hard thing to kind of wrap your head around. If you're kind of new to the space is getting a sense of what the global, you know, number of people hours per day are churning away at this problem. It's actually not that many people. We still need to grow that a lot.

Yeah.

Paul Shapiro: Yeah, I mean, I'll confess like if you had asked me six years ago when the first edition of queen made came out, will there be any meaningful commercialization six years from now? I would have said yes. In fact, I probably did say yes. I might even be on that timeline that you're referring to. it actually reminds me of what Jason Matheny, your predecessor at new harvest who founded the organization, what he said, which I [00:24:00] asked him one time.

Yeah. You know, how long do you think before cultivated meat is on the market? And he said, whatever year you ask me, I will always say five years from now. And so, you know, it's always five years to Jason. and, and, and we had him on this show as well, which we'll link to as well. But, you know, I would have thought like, if you would ask me, I don't remember what I said.

I'm sure somebody has documented this somewhere, but if you would have asked me in 2018, will we have meaningful commercialization within six years? I would have said, yes, I believe so. I don't think I would have been. Lying or exaggerating. I would have just been saying what I believe to be true. Now, my belief might be uninformed.

it, it might be, wrong. but I don't think that people like Mark Post or Uma Valeti or Josh Tetrick or the other folks who have raised the lion's share of the money in this space. My guess is that, you know, they're not lying. Like, you know, Joe Fassar actually put this out and put out in, in his column in the New York times that Josh had said in the book queen me that, you know, by 2025, they were going to be commercialized.

And by 20, they'd have, excuse me, [00:25:00] they'd have their first full scale factory and that by 2030, they'd be the largest meat company on the planet. Now, you know, hearing an entrepreneur say you're going to be the largest meat company on the planet when you don't sell a gram of meat today, you know, that's a pretty grandiose thing.

but I think, I don't know what he believed or not, but I asked him about this in a recent interview and, you know, he made it clear that, you know, he really did think that by 2025, they would at least have a manufacturing facility. So like, it's tough for me to know, like you can't put yourself in people's heads, obviously.

But I, but there's this

Isha Datar: There's another angle there, which is the, the correction or like the, okay, we didn't know seems to only come from the outside. And that could also be, you know, a result of this venture capital funded thing, because no, No company that has received investment wants to go back and say, Oh, actually, you know, now that I have more information, I do think it's actually going to be a lot longer.

And so I think that that kind of adds to the fire that Joe Fassler is starting [00:26:00] with his article is that, you know, when these big claims come out, they aren't really followed up with. Okay, you know, we have more information and I understand why because our system does not really incentivize that kind of thing from happening.

So that does lead me to believe it becomes more of an exaggeration because when you know better, you don't kind of go back to correct it unless you have to. I think that's something worth pointing out that, you know, is a structural. Challenge with this VC invested space. Yeah,

Paul Shapiro: I mean, I, I, I don't know. I mean, I'll tell you, I run a company that's using bioreactors to make meat alternatives.

And even though we're not doing animal cell culture, I got asked by a lot of people about that. And my guess is that if I were running a cultivated meat company, That I would be asked about it a lot, so my presumption is the people to whom we're referring right now did get asked by their investors, and I don't know what they said, but my guess is that they probably answered honestly and said, Yeah, it's a lot harder, taking longer than we anticipated.

I don't know. I have [00:27:00] that's pure speculation. That's not based on evidence that I know what they said, but I mean, what else could it be?

Isha Datar: Yeah. Well, also keep in mind, okay, we don't have cultivated meat on the market in a big way where it's affecting everyone. but we do have these cultured dairy products on the market.

Those are, you know, those are things that people can buy. In the United States, we also have a lot of recently

Paul Shapiro: did I recently bought the perfect a way protein and I actually had some, not literally today, but you know, for the purposes of when people will be listening to this. It may as well be today that I had it.

It was good.

Isha Datar: Yeah. I mean, and that, that is an awesome thing that has happened and we'll scale and, you know, keep going, I hope. And then we also have seen a real movement away from FBS in cell culture. Okay. And that is something that a lot of companies have spoken to, but we've also seen a lot more companies being founded working on serum free media, which, you know, maybe sound like, oh, that's just an ingredient in cultivated meat, but actually that's an animal product that is used in all kinds of biotech [00:28:00] research all around the world.

And that is an active substitution that will make it. a big difference. So this is what I say about the aim for the moon being cultivated meat and fall among the stars is progress is happening and those are all still meaningful things and they also add up to get us to cultivated meat.

Paul Shapiro: Right. And just to be astronomically correct, you'd be aiming for the stars and landing on the moon in that case.

So, because the stars are a

Isha Datar: little

Paul Shapiro: further away than the moon. Yeah. Yeah. I'm so

Isha Datar: used to thinking of moonshot being like,

Paul Shapiro: Oh yeah, that's right.

Isha Datar: That's right.

Paul Shapiro: Yeah. I mean, it's not, so for those who weren't initiated, what he's just referring to with FBS is fetal bovine serum, which is been used ubiquitously in the industry, although now nearly all the companies have moved away from it, Actually, one of the more interesting things, if you look at Joe Fassler's first, column on this in the counter, that he wrote, of course, the counter no longer is operating, but I think the website is still live.

So you can go see it. this was a big portion of it [00:29:00] was, you know, FBS was this supposedly insurmountable, thing and now. The companies have surmounted it, and it makes me wonder what else is being said is insurmountable that these companies with enough time and capital can actually surmount, you know, the idea that, you know, cell densities or bioreactor costs and so on, like, is it just a matter of time and capital?

Or is there actually like Joe suggests? Just it's just not possible. and I, I hope I'm not technically knowledgeable enough to know, but I hope it's the former. And my true belief is that the people who are running these companies are really good people. Like I've known Uma Valeti long before he started Memphis Meats, now Upside Foods.

And I just can't imagine him that he would ever, if he thought it wouldn't work, I can't imagine him wanting to keep on doing it. What a waste of time that would be like, why do it? You know, it's not, why do I keep doing this? It's so hard to run a company. Why do it? If you think it's not going to work.

Isha Datar: Yeah, I think that's one thing I would hope people take away is I'm not trying to say You're a bad person or you're a bad person or [00:30:00] anything like this We're all in this journey together and we're all trying to make something happen And at the end of the day, I do think Most of the founders and most of the people in this space are really they're there for the mission It's there are way easier ways to make a living In this life, and we've chosen some of the hardest ways to do it.

And so I, I hope that is not seen as a takeaway that it doesn't boil down to being something as simple as that. It's more that, it takes all kinds to advance this science and the conversation that is required to do it means confronting, you know, this works, didn't work, this is how we could do things going forward.

yeah,

Paul Shapiro: I'll tell you for my own company, the better Miko, if I thought that we could not achieve what we're trying to do, I would definitely go do something else

Isha Datar: and,

Paul Shapiro: you know, every, every day it's like pushing a boulder up a hill. It's like, very Sisyphean, in fact, amusingly, I had commissioned this art that I keep on my desk, which, listeners will not be able to see it, but I'll show you, which is Sisyphus finally [00:31:00] triumphant.

So, you know, he's finally, he's got the border at the top of the hill and, Sisyphus has finally triumphed. And that's, that's what I like. And not only my, existence too, but so many of the other founders in the space are trying to do something really difficult in the face of enormous, headwinds and adversity, you know, a few years ago, capital was very free flowing in the space.

Now it's more like a famine and You see, you know, some companies like new age eats or, you know, now no longer in existence. there's an article recently about finless foods, basically going down and into kind of what they alleged was like a hibernation state, essentially in the hopes that they might be able to raise money at some future point.

You know, there's so many other companies that are either doing layoffs or going under, like, it's a really difficult thing to do. And so. You'd have to be, you know, you'd have to really have some mental problems if you wanted to continue doing this, without, without, without the faith that you really believe that you could achieve.

Isha Datar: Yes, absolutely. No, it's, it's really, I mean, that feast or famine thing, I also want to [00:32:00] normalize a bit. Cause it's not, it's not specific to Salach. It happens for any technology that. Is big and hairy and audacious. That needs a lot of movement. Like there's going to be these ebbs and flows, and the people who stick around to kind of connect those ebbs and flows together at the, I mean, they're adding a lot of value to the space.

Paul Shapiro: cool. So speaking of adding value isha, let me ask you if there's any value that you would like to offer for our listeners. Now, when I asked you this question four years ago, you recommended reading the generosity network by jennifer mccrea. So we can link to that again if you would like. But if there's anybody out there thinking about maybe joining a company, starting their own company, joining a nonprofit like new harvest or starting their own nonprofit, are there any resources that you would recommend that you hope that they would,check out that have been useful for you?

Isha Datar: that's a great question. So I, you know, you're going to link to my response in the New York times article. And in that [00:33:00] response, I talk about how some of the, in, in these ebbs and flows and ups and downs that happen in kind of long tech development spaces. when there is less money, we try and go towards more institutionalized places to advance the technology.

So the advancement for the past, you know, 5, 10 years or so, I think happened a lot in companies, but I think over this next period, it's going to be a lot of government support, a lot of academic. Growth that kind of keeps things moving and consistent. So for folks who are interested in joining kind of more of that public research movement, that is something that's very on top of my mind here at New Harvest.

You know, we've funded through our grant programs, we funded 60 researchers. In 37 institutions in nine countries around the world, who I think have all laid this kind of really awesome public foundation for the field, 60 papers, original research that all those companies read have influenced the space and influence people to join the space.

And so on. Now we're working beyond just funding individual [00:34:00] researchers towards actually setting up new institutes that can be, you know, as vibrant as Tufts and UC Davis and the university of baths with the big consortium that they got funded by the UK government. And we're trying to normalize the idea that there should be institutes in many universities all over the world that are advancing cellular agriculture.

Cause that's how big this can be. Even if we had products on the market tomorrow, we would still need institutes of cellular agriculture to keep that going, keep making it more effective, keep making it safer, expanding kind of the product portfolio and so on. so I would actually track the institute that we're getting started at the university of Alberta.

maybe best way to do that is through the new harvest newsletter for now, but I'm sure some new past will emerge. the reason why I'm so excited about it is it offers kind of a suite of research opportunities that we haven't seen in the other institutes yet. It has a really great bio process situation where you can actually, there's, there's an actually place, called agri food discovery place where there are bioreactors that range [00:35:00] from one liter to 10, 000 liters that can be used for research purposes.

the way that the kind of certifications are set up is you can actually be generating prototypes in there. and testing them and working on all kinds of things that are actually really hard to find in just a laboratory setting. So that's something that I think should ignite in this next year or so, and we should get a, you know, a group of people in there working and working on some of these kind of fundamental questions in the field.

the second thing is we just got, in collaboration with about, I think, 30, I can't remember that. 35 other parties, a big grant called Feasts in the EU funded by the EU government. It's about 7 million euros, and that is a huge amount of collaborative research, which is going to touch everything from safety to establishing cell banks, to working with companies, to working on Scale up infrastructure.

that is absolutely something to follow. And that kind of website and following that should be coming online pretty soon too. So I should send you those links, Paul, when they're like a little bit more official. This is more of like the sneak preview [00:36:00] on the. On the podcast for now.

Paul Shapiro: Okay. Very cool. Well, I, I look forward to that.

So feasts stands. It's a great acronym. It stands for fostering European cellular agriculture for sustainable transition solutions. That is a great way to come up with feasts. Okay. Fostering sustainable transition solutions. Very good. Sounds like a bill in Congress. You know, they always have these

Isha Datar: acronyms.

Yeah.

Paul Shapiro: Great torture. Okay. very cool. Well, well, thanks for that. We'll, we'll certainly link to that in the show notes. And finally, Isha, if somebody was going to start their own company or their own nonprofit organization, what would you encourage them to do? sounds to me like you think that maybe some of the precision fermentation work is maybe more near term viable.

I don't want to put words in your mouth, but that's what I at least took away from what you were saying. But if somebody was going to start their own company, what do you think they should do right now?

Isha Datar: I would work on the kind of picks and shovels pieces that have to come together to make cultivated meat work.[00:37:00]

So we already have kind of seen these movements of companies being formed over the past several years. The kind of first wave where, you know, your eat just and your upsides that were kind of vertically integrated. Like the idea is we're going to make meat everything that it requires to make meat. but then we got, saw this kind of second wave of companies that were founded maybe more by a Academics that were like, we're just going to work on growth factors.

We're just going to work on bioreactor design. We're just going to work on scaffolds. And I think those companies are really well positioned to kind of weather this famine of funding because they can be super focused and super small and they always have the existing biomedical market to serve in the near term, even if their aim is ultimately food.

So they kind of have this path of sustainability. That's a little bit. More conservative that allow them to stretch out longer. So I would say that kind of thing is still very important. and we need we need a lot of variety in there because we still don't know. What cell types [00:38:00] are going to take off?

what types of growth factors we might need? And we still want to remove animals from biomedical research, don't we? So like, it's a win win, all of these things. And trying to live as long as you possibly can is really important in these next few years. so I would direct people to, to those questions.

Paul Shapiro: Got it. And just to be clear, just to be clear by live as long as you can, you're not referring to the very popular field of longevity research, but you mean just staying afloat during this capital. Yes.

Isha Datar: Stay afloat. Keep, keep chugging away. Don't die.

Paul Shapiro: Good advice for anybody. Don't die. Okay. Well, thank you.

Thank you very much, Isha. It's a pleasure to have you back on the show and I will look forward to seeing more about the Institute for cellular agriculture.

Isha Datar: Thank you so much, Paul. Great to be here.