Pat Brown explains to Guy Raz why manufacturing physical plant-based meat requires massive venture capital investment.
Prediction Not checkable as stated
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.”
Assertion Not checkable as stated
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.”
Assertion Contradicted
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.”
Opinion
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.”
Disclosure
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 …”
Insight
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…”