May 11, 2020 · 1h 3m · how-i-built-this
Impossible Foods: Pat Brown
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gold bands on the timeline = statements, start to end. Hover to read, click to jump. CC turns on captions
In this episode of How I Built This, host Guy Raz interviews Impossible Foods founder Pat Brown about walking away from a prestigious career in academia to invent plant-based meat that replicates the sensory profile of animal beef. The discussion explores Brown's breakthrough discovery of heme, his innovative go-to-market strategies, and his unwavering mission to eliminate animal agriculture to combat global climate change.
How this conversation actually went
Every chapter scored 0–10 on four independent dynamics. Hover any point for the reasoning behind the score. Guy holds 35.7% of the talking time here. How this is scored →
Guy as informed peer 2.5 Guest teaching 2.6 Guest disagreement 1.4 Guy pushing back 0.5
speaking balance: gold is Guy, purple is the guest (3 minute bins)
Sharpest disagreement ▶ 52:55 Burger vs kale salad defense
Pat Brown forcefully dismisses health critics complaining about sodium, declaring that the product is a direct replacement for beef burgers rather than a health food salad.
Hardest push from Guy ▶ 51:36 Host confronts guest with health and label criticismsGuy Raz directly challenges Brown by listing widespread criticisms regarding high sodium, saturated fats, GMOs, and opposition from state meat labeling lobbies.
Biggest teaching moment ▶ 22:18 Why behavioral nudges and public policy failPat Brown educates Raz on the behavioral reality of meat consumption, pointing out that environmental conference attendees eat steak despite knowing the ecological data.
Guy holds their own ▶ 51:36 Host catalogues industry and nutritional objectionsGuy Raz displays strong journalistic preparation by synthesizing technical nutritional concerns and regulatory battles facing alternative meat companies.
the scores for every segment, with the reasoning behind each
| Chapter | Topic | Guy as informed peer | Guest teaching | Guest disagreement | Guy pushing back | Why |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| NPR Listener Survey Announcement | 1 | 0 | 0 | 0 | The opening segment contains standard housekeeping, show intro framing, and background narration by Guy Raz detailing Pat Brown's shift from academia to entrepreneurship. The interview interaction is limited to brief introductory pleasantries about Brown working from home during the pandemic. | |
| Early Life, International Upbringing, and College Years | 2 | 1 | 1 | 0 | Raz asks about Brown's childhood overseas and academic history. Brown corrects the assumption that he was a model student, openly discussing how he skipped classes and climbed walls instead. | |
| Transition to Vegetarianism and Academic Career at Stanford | 3 | 3 | 2 | 0 | When Raz characterizes Brown's 1976 switch to vegetarianism as a 'hippie thing', Brown firmly reframes it as an ethical deduction shared across his family. Brown describes his medical training and biomedical research trajectory at Stanford. | |
| Disrupting Academic Publishing with PLOS and Betting on Success | 3 | 2 | 1 | 0 | Raz asks about Brown co-founding PLOS to disrupt paywalled academic publishing. Brown explains how the experience taught him to bet aggressively on his own growth and scaling capacity. | |
| Sabbatical Insights: The Environmental Catastrophe of Animal Agriculture | 2 | 5 | 2 | 0 | Brown delivers detailed scientific context on the environmental destruction caused by animal agriculture and the failure of public policy and awareness campaigns. He explains why only a subversive market-based competitor can dismantle the livestock industry. | |
| Scientific Foundations of Plant Meat and Taking the Entrepreneurial Leap | 2 | 3 | 1 | 1 | Raz asks if Brown knew producing meat from plants was scientifically possible and checks how colleagues reacted to him leaving tenure. Brown details the molecular logic of meat and acknowledges that scientists require extreme optimism to attempt unsolved problems. | |
| Mid-Episode Break and the Quest for the Secret Molecule | 2 | 2 | 0 | 0 | Brown humorously recounts his amateurish pitch to Vinod Khosla, settling on the name Impossible Foods, and hiring a business partner with dairy farming and MBA background to compensate for his lack of business experience. | |
| The Heme Breakthrough: Root Nodule Failure to Yeast Fermentation | 2 | 4 | 1 | 0 | Brown details the discovery of heme and leghemoglobin, describing the failed year-long effort to harvest root nodules from soybean fields before pivoting to yeast fermentation. He emphasizes that expensive failures are an inherent part of scientific exploration. | |
| Rejecting Google's Acquisition Offer to Guard Company Mission | 3 | 2 | 1 | 1 | Raz presses Brown on the rumored multimillion-dollar buyout offer from Google. Brown refuses to officially confirm the bid but explains why he would never surrender control of the company's planetary mission to an outside corporation. | |
| Recreating Flavor Chemistry and Scaling into Fast Food | 3 | 3 | 1 | 0 | Raz asks how flavor is produced and how the rollout across national fast-food chains unfolded. Brown explains the flavor chemistry of biomolecules reacting with heme catalysts and the challenge of scaling factory capacity to meet surge demand. | |
| Addressing Health Criticisms and Navigating Meat Industry Backlash | 4 | 4 | 4 | 3 | Raz presses Brown directly with public criticisms regarding sodium content, GMOs, processing, and legislative pushback against labeling plant products as meat. Brown aggressively defends his product, retorting that it is a burger replacing cow meat rather than a kale salad, and dismisses meat industry resistance as a doomed rear-guard effort. | |
| Capital Scaling, Pandemic Challenges, and Indifference to Wealth | 3 | 2 | 2 | 1 | Raz questions the capital-intensive nature of raising over a billion dollars and touches on Brown's apparent indifference to personal wealth. Brown explains capex requirements for physical manufacturing and candidly states that becoming a billionaire would likely make his life worse. | |
| Reflections on Four-Billion-Dollar Valuation and Personal Responsibility | 2 | 3 | 2 | 0 | Raz asks the signature show question about whether the company's $4B valuation was achieved through skill or luck. Brown rejects the binary framing, attributing his success to stepping up and taking personal responsibility for an unsolved problem. |
Statements from this episode (22)
Brown: Meat eating is purely aesthetic and cannot justify animal suffering
“If I don't need meat to be completely healthy and well nourished. Then I'm only eating it for aesthetic reasons. There's no physiological reason why I need to do is purely the aesthetics. And I felt like that was, I just couldn't justify the killing and making…”
Brown: Biomedical research offers higher leverage than clinical practice
“If you're a clinician, you keep coming up against problems that you don't know how to solve, and it's just incredibly upsetting, you know, when you're taking care of a sick kid. And you just don't know how to help them. And so I felt like that's much higher le…”
Pat Brown: PLOS became the highest-volume scientific journal in history
“Well, when that journal was launched, within a couple of years, it was by far the highest volume scientific journal in history, in terms of publication volume.”
Pat Brown: Founders must bet on their success by investing ahead of demand
“You have to bet on your own success. If you expect and intend something to be super successful, even when it's not, you have to make that investment that you're betting on your growth.”
Pat Brown: Impossible Foods must double production volume annually for 15 years
“And since our mission requires us to, on average, double in volume every year for the next 15 years, we're gonna have to be making that big bet on our success again, again, again.”
Brown: Livestock emissions exceed all global transportation emissions combined
“I became aware of the greenhouse gas emissions from the livestock industry, which are huge. They're greater than all forms of power transportation combined.”
Brown: Education and nagging cannot persuade people to cut meat consumption
“You're not gonna be able to persuade people by education or nagging to change their diet significantly, to significantly reduce meat consumption or consumption of animal products. Look at how well people follow nutrition recommendations for their own health as…”
Brown: Being made from animal corpses is not part of meat's value proposition
“Pretty much around the world and all across the U.S., they don't actually like the fact that it's made from the corpses of animals. That is not part of the value proposition of meat to pretty much anyone.”
Pat Brown: Meat's core biomolecules can be replicated from plants
“Really what it comes down to is the components that are in meat, you know, the amino acids, the other small molecules lipids, many of the proteins are extremely conserved. They're found in plants as well as animals and so forth. It seemed to me that if we coul…”
Pat Brown: Solving animal agriculture requires a for-profit business
“The only way to solve this problem involves competing in the marketplace, and that requires starting a for-profit business.”
Brown: Global meat market was worth $1.5T in 2011
“And then practically my last slide was, oh, by the way, this is a 1.5 at the time, trillion dollar global market.”
Brown: Plant meat must outperform cow meat among meat lovers
“Prefer it to what comes from a cow. Because otherwise, we're not going to outcompete the incumbent industry.”
Brown: U.S. soybean root nodules contain enough heme to match all meat
“So anyway, I did some calculations and concluded that there's as much heme in the root nodules of the U.S. Soybean crop As there isn't all the meat consumed in the U.S.”
Brown: Yeast Fermentation of Leghemoglobin Scales with Strong Economics
“Then basically you just, Grow giant fermenter tanks full of the yeast, and break open the yeast cells, and extract the leg hemoglobin, and it's very scalable, the economics work well.”
Pat Brown: Impossible Foods Will Not Risk Its Mission by Selling to Acquirers
“The mission is to eliminate the need for animals as a food technology, and by doing so, to save the planet from an environmental catastrophe. Nobody cares as much about it as I do and my colleagues do. And I don't want to put the mission at risk by putting it …”
Brown: Chef menu placements are the most valuable product endorsements
“There's no More sincere and valuable endorsement than to put our product on a menu, for a chef to put it on the menu, because every, when a chef puts a dish on the menu, they're putting their livelihood and their reputation on the line.”
Brown: Impossible Burger flavor comes from simple biomolecules catalyzed by heme
“The flavor is almost entirely from simple small molecules like amino acids, vitamins, sugars, things that you can find in vegetables, animals, whatever. Same simple, you know, ubiquitous biomolecules. Plus, Heme as a catalyst, and that's most of what's behind …”
Brown: State bans on plant-based meat labeling will fail constitutional tests
“The smart money is that they're not going to pass a constitutional test.”
Brown: Matching beef industry scale will be game over for meat producers
“When we get the economies of scale that they have, and, ah, when we've, you know, expanded our suite of products and so forth, that it's going to be game over for them.”
Brown: The beef industry asked lobbyists to shut down Impossible before launch
“Even from before we had our first product, I know from a direct source that a representative of that industry actually reached out to a lobbyist and basically Said to, you know, ask that, ask the lobbyists to get Congress or the USDA to shut us down.”
Brown: Impossible Foods sells tens of millions of pounds annually
“We sell on the scale of tens of millions of pounds a year.”
Pat Brown: Diffusion of responsibility prevents valuable innovation from happening
“I think that's the most important thing, and I feel like it's the one thing that, that keeps a lot of valuable things from happening, is people feel like, you know, someone else must be, this is someone else's job to solve. You know, why would I be the person …”