YouSaid · the spoken record

Lewis Bollard

lines on the record: 80
first: 2025-08-07
most recent: 2025-08-07
sittings or episodes: 1
sources: podcast

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“This is not always the case. And I think, for instance, one thing that is wild to me is where you have people out there telling people to switch from beef to chicken because it's better for the climate. Literally that switch is 23 more animals per year you'll be consuming, costing several years worth of suffering in these factory farms for a pretty marginal climate impact. I do think there is often this tendency that climate just gets total presence. It's just seen as like, well, obviously that's more important than any number of animals suffering. And I actually think that that is more of an elite narrative than it is what regular people think. I actually think regular people are just pretty horrified by animal suffering and do prioritize that.”
2025-08-07 · Dwarkesh Podcast · Artificial meat is harder than artificial intelligence — Lewis Bollard · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Into this area. I think a lot of people care about multiple things, right? They care about an welfare and they care about sustainability. And it is true that in certain cases these things go hand in hand. So alternative proteins are both better for animal welfare and have a smaller environmental footprint. So they are more sustainable.”
2025-08-07 · Dwarkesh Podcast · Artificial meat is harder than artificial intelligence — Lewis Bollard · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“I think ESG stuff, I think they've all made these targets that they need to implement, and those targets are getting much higher priority than the targets they made on animal welfare.”
2025-08-07 · Dwarkesh Podcast · Artificial meat is harder than artificial intelligence — Lewis Bollard · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“And what they told me was, yes, we know from internal surveys that animal welfare is actually more important to consumers, but we are far more responsive to what the fast food companies and the investors are telling us. And the fast food companies and the investors are obsessed with climate.”
2025-08-07 · Dwarkesh Podcast · Artificial meat is harder than artificial intelligence — Lewis Bollard · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Yeah, I mean, there's been this weird conflating, and there's even been this very cynical exploitation of the climate issue by producers to not do animal welfare reforms. So something that Tyson Foods will say is we can't move to these higher welfare breeds because they would have a slightly bigger carbon footprint, because they eat a little bit more. And also, if you let the animals move around a lot, they expend more calories. That's got a bigger carbon footprint, right? It's this total absurdity. I had a conversation with the SVP for sustainability at one of the largest meat companies.”
2025-08-07 · Dwarkesh Podcast · Artificial meat is harder than artificial intelligence — Lewis Bollard · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“That when it comes to sustainability, animal welfare is the top thing people care about. So for all this talk we see from companies about climate change and prioritizing climate change, both the McDonald's and the Tysons and so on, they've all said this is the thing that consumers actually care about.”
2025-08-07 · Dwarkesh Podcast · Artificial meat is harder than artificial intelligence — Lewis Bollard · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Their voters. I think politicians have decided that they need to be responsive on the 10 issues their voters care most about. Maybe it's fewer than that. But that on low salience issues like this, they can just ignore what their voters want and do what their donors are telling them what to do or what's easier to do. Whereas I think what corporations are finding is actually if consumers are really outraged about this, then we need to act. And maybe this is higher on the list of salience for consumers at a retailer because they're not worried about what's their taxation policy. For a retailer actually, what is the quality of the goods you are selling? Or that is a pretty critical factor. And we know one of the things I'll say is we know from surveys”
2025-08-07 · Dwarkesh Podcast · Artificial meat is harder than artificial intelligence — Lewis Bollard · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“I think it's been phenomenally successful with these consumer facing brands like the retailers, the fast food chains. Advocates have been able to secure over 3,000 corporate animal welfare pledges now globally, including from all the biggest retailers, all the biggest fast food chains, affecting hundreds of millions of animals. I think the reason for that is twofold. The first is there's a totally different structure from the structure in place on the legislative side. On the legislative side, if you want to pass an animal welfare reform in Congress or in any state legislature, it goes to the Agriculture Committee. The Agriculture Committee is dominated by a bunch of people who are in the pocket of big ag and they kill the bill. It never even gets out of that committee, let alone getting to the whole legislature. If you go to a company, you go to someone who is a decision maker who is not being lobbied by industry. Or if they are being lobbied, it's far less susceptible to that lobbying than they are. I also think companies have just proven more responsive to consumers than politicians, artists.”
2025-08-07 · Dwarkesh Podcast · Artificial meat is harder than artificial intelligence — Lewis Bollard · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“So, the very best companies are advertising this, like vital farms or nest fresh eggs. They are out focusing on the animal welfare benefits because pasture raised and it looks amazing. The fundamental problem for the large scale companies is they have just made things less bad. It's still really good what they're doing. Moving from cage to cage free is incredible. But I think there are two problems. So one is their consumers already thought they weren't using caged. So if they advertise like, hey, we're cage-free now. Everyone's like, what were you doing all this time? You didn't tell us you were using caged eggs. And people still might think that even the new reality is not as good as what they thought things should be. They still would rather the animals were going outside, which they're not. And in a lot of cases, there are these phasins over time. So McDonald's is like, in 10 years' time, we're going to get rid of the cage-x. It's like, well, you don't want to advertise that too loudly. Because then people are going to be for the next 10 years. I'm meeting caged eggs and I didn't know that previously. So I think that is just the unfortunate dynamic is because this dissonance is so great between current practices and the reality that merely getting rid of the worst practices is not enough to create an advertising claim.”
2025-08-07 · Dwarkesh Podcast · Artificial meat is harder than artificial intelligence — Lewis Bollard · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“When you look at the underlying production costs, it's only 19 cents difference. And so what we see is these retailers are using this as an opportunity to get a big markup with less price sensitive consumers and are in the process massively hampering their ability to fulfill their commitments. By contrast, Costco went 100% K-tree. They followed through on their promise. And what we see is they are now selling cage tree eggs for the same price as Walmart sells its caged eggs. So there is that competitive pressure. Once cage tree becomes the new baseline, it does become the commodity market. And you do see those margins compared to the way. Same thing in states where they've banned the sale of caged eggs. Caged free eggs now cost the same thing as the caged eggs cost next door. So you do see that competed away once it becomes the commodity. It's until it reaches that point that you're seeing these crazy margins.”
2025-08-07 · Dwarkesh Podcast · Artificial meat is harder than artificial intelligence — Lewis Bollard · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“I think this is the non commodity part of the industry. But I mean, the broader context on those retailers is US retailers, almost all the top US retailers have made pledges to stop selling eggs from caged tents. What they are now saying, a lot of them were meant to do that by this year, and a lot of them have not done it. Walmart, Kroger have not followed through. And what they say is, well, our consumers don't want the catch-ree eggs because they're way more expensive. And it's true, they're way more expensive. They're selling them for like a dollar to $2 more per dozen.”
2025-08-07 · Dwarkesh Podcast · Artificial meat is harder than artificial intelligence — Lewis Bollard · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Yes. So, I mean, I think you actually see that in the egg sector in the US. So within eggs, there is clearer labeling. K-tree actually means something, pasteurized actually means something. You can't put the all-natural label on. And what we see is that the pasture raised egg sector is growing rapidly. And even then, it is still handicapped by the fact that supermarkets use this as a price differentiation tool. So they know that wealthier consumers prefer pasture-based eggs and are also less price sensitive. And so they mark them up heavily. So the price you see is way inflated beyond the actual cost difference. And yet still, that is a rapidly growing sector.”
2025-08-07 · Dwarkesh Podcast · Artificial meat is harder than artificial intelligence — Lewis Bollard · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“You're not going to get very far, right? And so I think so long as we have this rampant mislabeling, it's very hard for the other players to get ahead.”
2025-08-07 · Dwarkesh Podcast · Artificial meat is harder than artificial intelligence — Lewis Bollard · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“So there were people who are trying. So, Nyman Ranch, for instance, has done this with independent pork farmers. There was a big effort to do this by Cook's ventures with pasture-raised chicken. And unfortunately, they just went out of business. And I think the reason they went out of business is because there is such huge mislabeling across the industry that it's very hard to separate out what's actually better. So, for instance, much factory farmed chicken in the US is sold with the label all natural. And we know from surveys that people think all natural means the chickens were outside. It actually means nothing. But if you're trying to sell your product as like pasture raised next to a product that says all natural and people think it means the same thing, and your product costs $2 more,”
2025-08-07 · Dwarkesh Podcast · Artificial meat is harder than artificial intelligence — Lewis Bollard · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“I mean, I think ideally we would see pasture based farming in those places. And it doesn't require that much land, for instance, to have a pasture-based chicken farm. The problem is you would need to find a processor that you could work with. And normally that just doesn't exist. So normally you've only got the giant players in an area and they say, We just want commodity production. We don't want to fund you to do this pasture raised stuff. And so you get locked into that contract. Oftentimes people who are doing pasture raise production have to create their entire supply chain by themselves. They literally have to build their own slaughterhouse and create their entire supply chain around that, which dries up costs massively.”
2025-08-07 · Dwarkesh Podcast · Artificial meat is harder than artificial intelligence — Lewis Bollard · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“And so I do think you've got a bunch of these people who are stuck in the situation, and there aren't easy alternatives, because normally in one area there will only be one processor that has a slaughterhouse in that area. There's not effective competition going on. Also, often you're locked in these long term contracts as well. There is an element of people being locked in this, and then there's an element of people just not having better choices.”
2025-08-07 · Dwarkesh Podcast · Artificial meat is harder than artificial intelligence — Lewis Bollard · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“But, you know, I mean, I was chatting with this guy, Craig Watts, who was a chicken contract farmer for Purdue. And he told me that when he got into the business, they made all these exorbitant claims to him. I mean, they said you're going to be making over $100,000 within years. They said, just get out this loan, and it's going to be incredible toward them all the things that could go right. And then he got into the business, and they slowly started eroding the payments to him. So they slowly started paying him less and less. They slowly got to a point where he was making less and less money, and he wanted out. But by that point, he couldn't get out because he had this giant loan hanging over his head.”
2025-08-07 · Dwarkesh Podcast · Artificial meat is harder than artificial intelligence — Lewis Bollard · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Yeah, so it depends. I mean, for some people, it is just the least bad option they have, right? And especially if someone just has a little wee bit of land and they want to preserve that land and they don't have other skills they can use.”
2025-08-07 · Dwarkesh Podcast · Artificial meat is harder than artificial intelligence — Lewis Bollard · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Yeah, this is a great point. I think most people don't realize that the way these factory farms are structured is you have these giant corporations like Tyson Foods or Smithfield. They mostly don't own their own farms. Instead, they have these contract farmers who are essentially indentured laborers. I mean, they have a huge loan hanging over their head and they're farming. And so why would those people support this? The answer is they often don't. And I think the agribusiness lobbying associations have done a very good job of pretending they do. They present themselves as representing the farmers. But if you look at their boards, if you look at the people who are actually leading these organizations, it's made up of people from the giant agribusinesses and the very largest industrial farmers. They do not have small contract farmers on the boards of these organizations. And so I think it really is a bit of a bait and switch where they claim to be representing those family farmers, but they're not.”
2025-08-07 · Dwarkesh Podcast · Artificial meat is harder than artificial intelligence — Lewis Bollard · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“You know, there's this children's kids book, Rule of Politics, which is you should never mess with a character in a children's book. And, you know, that's the police, that's the doctors, that's the farmers. And I don't think there are any tech bros in the kids books yet.”
2025-08-07 · Dwarkesh Podcast · Artificial meat is harder than artificial intelligence — Lewis Bollard · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“I think there are a couple things going on. So I think the first thing is it's not just them. They are fighting alongside of the entire agriculture industry. There are allied industries like the insurance industry, the pharma industry that have a big stake in factory farming. It's not just the money. So they appeal to this mythos of the American farmer. People think the American farmer is the good, hard-working, soul-of-the-earth person. They sell the image at this person out in the fields tending to their chickens and their pigs. They don't realize these are factory farmers. And they're extremely well organized. I mean, they have a very formidable lobbying presence in Washington, D.C. and across state capitals, and they have effectively used that to block any”
2025-08-07 · Dwarkesh Podcast · Artificial meat is harder than artificial intelligence — Lewis Bollard · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Yeah, it's a real puzzle. I mean, this is an industry that accounts for less than 1% of Americans. It's trying to defend wildly unpopular practices and doesn't even get that much money. And yet somehow they have this total lock on the legislative process where they can stop any animal welfare legislation from passing.”
2025-08-07 · Dwarkesh Podcast · Artificial meat is harder than artificial intelligence — Lewis Bollard · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“My sense of what the industry does is they get a whole bunch of their executives to max out on donations to politicians. The politicians then give them meetings. And I wish this wasn't the way the system worked. I wish instead that politicians were actually just responsive to what the voters want. But given this is how the system works, I think that what people need to do is to bind together with a couple of other friends who care about this issue, max out on your donations to a politician, and then meet with the politician and say, I really care about this. And I'm watching what you do on this issue. And I think that if enough people did that, and frankly, you don't even need to just start donating. There are a lot of people listening to this who probably already donate significant amounts to politicians. And if they started saying to those politicians, by the way, this is something I really care about and I'm watching what you do on this issue, I think you would start to see the political dynamic change.”
2025-08-07 · Dwarkesh Podcast · Artificial meat is harder than artificial intelligence — Lewis Bollard · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“And so I think what we need to do is mobilize that base of support and show how real it is. And so I think we need, for instance, to mobilize animal welfare advocates. We need to mobilize farmers who benefit from higher welfare standards. And we need to provide them with an equal footing to the footing that the industry has provided to the very small number of factory farmers who have a stake in the system. And that requires the same things the industry are doing. So it requires flying people to DC. It requires getting people to go and talk to their politicians in their local district. And yes, it also requires money because the industry is putting up so much money. Politicians need to see that there's also money on the other side of this issue.”
2025-08-07 · Dwarkesh Podcast · Artificial meat is harder than artificial intelligence — Lewis Bollard · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“That's right. We don't need to be corrupt, right? It's like the industry needs to be corrupt because they are trying to get politicians to do something that their voters strongly disapprove of.”
2025-08-07 · Dwarkesh Podcast · Artificial meat is harder than artificial intelligence — Lewis Bollard · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Well, the problem is, so this bill, stopping states from regulating farm animal welfare meaningly, this bill could not pass on its own. So if it was put on the floor of the House and the Senate, it would lose. This is why they're putting it in the Farm Bill. So the Farm Bill is this huge piece of legislation that includes all the farm subsidies. It includes all the food assistance. And so this is a bill that is considered a must-pass piece of legislation and is decided based on issues that most politicians consider far bigger than the issue of where the state laws are wiped out. And so what the industry is banking on is that once they've got this in the text of the bill, people aren't going to sink the bill over this one provision, and it will sail or throw even though it's a deeply unpopular policy.”
2025-08-07 · Dwarkesh Podcast · Artificial meat is harder than artificial intelligence — Lewis Bollard · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“On the company, right? So a lot of the egg producers are actually relatively small. It's the tice and foods and things that are on the billions. But no, they have the money to do these reforms. I mean, that is not the constraint. The constraint is the willingness to do the reforms.”
2025-08-07 · Dwarkesh Podcast · Artificial meat is harder than artificial intelligence — Lewis Bollard · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Completely makes it possible. That's right. Like, I think, I mean, this is the absurdity of this is that the egg industry has been saying, like, we can't possibly afford this transition to cage-free eggs. They over the last few years of high egg prices, they've made insane profits because this is a good, well, so Kelmain, which is the biggest egg producer, I think it's share prices doubled over the last few years. It's because the price of elasticity for eggs, it's very inelastic. So you can just keep cranking up the price on even a very small reduction in supply, and you can then take all that surplus. They've been doing that. And as a result, you see a whole lot of these industries, they are actually flush with cash. The problem is...”
2025-08-07 · Dwarkesh Podcast · Artificial meat is harder than artificial intelligence — Lewis Bollard · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Family farmers, like what's going on? I mean, there are people who are funding some of these family farmers to go to Washington, D.C. But we could see a far bigger effort. I think that that voice is being hugely neglected in the debate. The other thing I'll say on the money the pork industry has is, yes, it's a commodity business, but it's also an oligopoly. And so you've got a very small number of firms that process the vast majority of pigs, and they do seem to make outsized profits. So they don't make the kind of profits you would expect. And across these industries, we constantly see price fixing scandals and other antitrust scandals because it's a very small number of companies and it only requires minimal coordination for them to make greater profits than you would think they could.”
2025-08-07 · Dwarkesh Podcast · Artificial meat is harder than artificial intelligence — Lewis Bollard · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“That's exactly right. There is a large constituency of family farmers who support these laws because it has created a new market opportunity for them, where they can sell their already higher welfare meat and not be undercut by the industrial stuff. The problem they have is that they are far less wealthy and organized than the industrial pork interests. And so they don't have the money to just fly themselves to DC. They can't stop farming. The people who are actually doing family farming can't just go to DC and hang out for a week because they need to be farming and looking after the pigs on their farm.”
2025-08-07 · Dwarkesh Podcast · Artificial meat is harder than artificial intelligence — Lewis Bollard · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“The majority of House members, I think, signed a letter against us in the last Congress, but the vast majority of them are not on the AG Committee. The Ag Committee gets to decide what's in this bill, and the people on the Ag Committee, I mean, the House AG Committee just hosted a hearing on this. They only invited lobbyists for the industry. They didn't bother to invite a single opposing witness to their hearing. We're also seeing that the industry is much better organized and funded on this effort than advocates are. So the industry is constantly flying out a bunch of big industrial pork farmers claiming they speak for the entire industry, telling the legislators this is their number one priority, and absolutely has to be done. By contrast, animal welfare groups are not getting the same hearing. So legislators are not taking them as seriously as they take these agro.”
2025-08-07 · Dwarkesh Podcast · Artificial meat is harder than artificial intelligence — Lewis Bollard · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“The first problem is structural. So at the state level, they've had to use ballot measures to get around entrenched lobbies. In this case, things start out in the House and Senate Ag committees, which are heavily dominated by agricultural interests.”
2025-08-07 · Dwarkesh Podcast · Artificial meat is harder than artificial intelligence — Lewis Bollard · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“This is right. So the pork industry, unfortunately, has looked at these laws in California and Massachusetts and wants to do everything it can to undermine them. I mean, it knows this is the only way it can be effectively regulated, given it has an absolute hold on the legislature in Iowa and North Carolina, which are the main states for pork production. It knows that it needs to stop any other state from setting production standards or sales standards. So it first went to the Supreme Court. It first said this is unconstitutional. The states can't do this. And the Supreme Court disagreed. We won at the Supreme Court. And so now it has gone to Congress. And it's saying to Congress, you need to wipe out these state laws. You need to stop them from doing this. And the unfortunate thing is the Senate and the House are both on track to do that. So in the upcoming Farm Bill, there is language that would ban states from passing laws on the sales standard, on animal welfare sales standards on goods. And right now, the”
2025-08-07 · Dwarkesh Podcast · Artificial meat is harder than artificial intelligence — Lewis Bollard · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Yeah, it's a huge problem. So advocates in the US passed ballot measures in Florida and Arizona to ban gestation crates, and then the pork industry just imported crated pork from other states into those states. So advocates then went to California and Massachusetts and passed ballot measures that extended the same standards to the sale of pork within the state. You can't sell pork from crated pigs anywhere. I think that is a critical move. And we're seeing the European Union now considering doing the same thing, imposing animal welfare standards equally on imports. I think that policy is critical to not just ensuring that you're not getting these laws undercut, but also to changing the political dynamic because domestic farmers, local farmers are going to be very opposed to any law if they realize they're just going to get undercut by how to save competition, rightly so. And so I think this is a chance to also change that political dynamic so they can actually support the law, knowing that they are not at a relative disadvantage.”
2025-08-07 · Dwarkesh Podcast · Artificial meat is harder than artificial intelligence — Lewis Bollard · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Critical thing to bear in mind is this does not happen on its own. In Germany this happened because there are very talented advocates who harnessed that public opinion and concern to drive corporate reforms to the retailers and to drive government policy reforms. And I think we need to do that. I don't think you can just count that people are going to get to a certain degree of wealth and this is going to happen. I think it only happens if there is advocacy to mobilize that public opinion.”
2025-08-07 · Dwarkesh Podcast · Artificial meat is harder than artificial intelligence — Lewis Bollard · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Yeah, it's mixed. So far globally, wealth has heavily correlated with more suffering. I mean, the drive of people getting richer has led to them eating far more meat and far more of that coming from factory farming. We have overwhelmingly seen that trend across all countries. In a few European countries, we are starting to see the dynamic where once countries have reached a certain degree of wealth, they are able to bring about reforms that actually reduce the total amount of suffering. I think it is quite likely that Germany has passed the top of that curve and is now on the other side of diminishing total animal suffering.”
2025-08-07 · Dwarkesh Podcast · Artificial meat is harder than artificial intelligence — Lewis Bollard · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“For. And I think that gives me some optimism that I think as countries get richer, they generally get more concerned about this issue. That then enables them to adopt animal welfare reforms as we've seen in the West.”
2025-08-07 · Dwarkesh Podcast · Artificial meat is harder than artificial intelligence — Lewis Bollard · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“That's right. That's right. So we had essentially the economic efficiency spread factory farming. And in some cases, that can spread higher welfare tax. So, for example, Inovo sexing technology, once that has been de-risked enough, once it has been scaled up in Europe and the US, I'm optimistic it will become cheaper, and then it will just be scaled out globally for economic reasons. But there's also, we can spread moral progress. So, I mean, we know that people in these countries also care about animal welfare. I had a fascinating conversation. I went to a trade show and I talked with a company that manufactures crates, manufactures gestation crates. And I was like, you know, what do you think about the future sales of these crates? And they're like, well, we already have stopped selling them in Europe and the US. And I was like, yeah, do you think you'd just be able to sell them in Asia forever? And they're like, no way. As Asia gets richer and it's on social media and sees the images and things, they're not going to be cool with us either. We know there is a limit to how long we're going to be able to sell these things.”
2025-08-07 · Dwarkesh Podcast · Artificial meat is harder than artificial intelligence — Lewis Bollard · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Yeah, I think there are a couple of things. So, the first is countries where their protein consumption is rapidly growing and there is not yet a deeply entrenched animal agricultural industry have the ability to do things differently. And in particular, they have the ability to support alternative protein work without that being politically toxic. And so, for example, we see China investing very heavily in cultivated meat research. The majority of patents coming out globally on cultivated meat now are coming out from public universities in China. So this is, I mean, this is a case where just like the US is being overtaken because we have this entrenched industry that is ferociously lobbying. I also think there's the potential to extend animal welfare policies globally. So we're seeing multinationals like Unilever and Nestle and even Burger King saying we shouldn't have cages in our supply chain globally. And this creates the potential to spread best practices just in the same way that factory farming spread from the United States globally.”
2025-08-07 · Dwarkesh Podcast · Artificial meat is harder than artificial intelligence — Lewis Bollard · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Yeah, in that case, we'd love to hear from you. So people can message me on X or they can reach out to my colleague, Andreas. That is, Andreas was 1A, so it is A in D-R-E-S at openphilanthropy.org. And he would love to work with you, and I'd love to work with you to help you spend that money as effectively as possible.”
2025-08-07 · Dwarkesh Podcast · Artificial meat is harder than artificial intelligence — Lewis Bollard · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“I think it's very unique. And I think the reason this philanthropic opportunity exists is because this area has been systematically neglected, which is to say that most people, when they think of philanthropy, do not think of farmed animals. Most people pile into the popular areas like education and healthcare and climate. As a result, you end up with these outsized opportunities that no one has taken advantage of. It's like if the space had billions of dollars in it, as other philanthropic areas do, you would not see opportunities like this.”
2025-08-07 · Dwarkesh Podcast · Artificial meat is harder than artificial intelligence — Lewis Bollard · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“I thought it was a cumulative across. No, no, no. So the cumulative number were already well north of 500 million hands, were into the billions of broiled chickens. And if you assume these things weren't just around the corner, they weren't just going to happen anyway. If you think you probably sped up progress by years, decades, maybe it would never have happened. Then that's cumulative impact over those years and decades is giant. I mean, we're talking billions, we're talking tens of billions. Now, the amount of money spent just on those corporate reforms, that was less than $100 million a year over a couple of years. And so we're talking about a ratio that is far less than 1 to 10 of a dollar per year of animal well-being improved.”
2025-08-07 · Dwarkesh Podcast · Artificial meat is harder than artificial intelligence — Lewis Bollard · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Sure. So the work to get hens out of cages has already spared over 200 million hens from cages. The work to improve the lives of broiler chickens has already benefited over a billion. Animals. That's just every year. And so”
2025-08-07 · Dwarkesh Podcast · Artificial meat is harder than artificial intelligence — Lewis Bollard · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Well, I think that one great way to support them is to support a diversified portfolio of groups. So there's a group FarmKind that allows people to donate to a variety of groups. And two of those groups that you can donate to through that platform, the Humane League and Synergy or Animal, are both working on exactly this.”
2025-08-07 · Dwarkesh Podcast · Artificial meat is harder than artificial intelligence — Lewis Bollard · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“So, I mean, they captured this basic divide between what consumers expected was already happening and what was actually happening.”
2025-08-07 · Dwarkesh Podcast · Artificial meat is harder than artificial intelligence — Lewis Bollard · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“So advocates went to the largest retailers, the largest fast food chains, and said, you need to move away from this because your consumers already expect this of you. This is what your consumers clearly want and clearly don't accept this practice. And they got pledges from almost all of the largest food companies, not just in the US, but globally, to move away from these practices. And we're already seeing that this transition has already spared over 200 million hens a year from these battery cages. So the US has gone from less than 10% cage free to 47% cagery. The European Union is now 62% cage free. This is a huge transition.”
2025-08-07 · Dwarkesh Podcast · Artificial meat is harder than artificial intelligence — Lewis Bollard · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“I think additional funding would be transformative. I mean, we have a playbook that works on a number of these issues. So one of the first things would be holding companies to account for animal welfare policies they've already made. We've got huge numbers of companies that make commitments to getting rid of battery cages and are now trying to back out of them or ignore them. With additional campaign funding, we could hold them to those. And as a result, immediately improve the conditions of millions of animals. For years, the industry used these battery cages that are these microwave oven-sized cages. They cram as many hens in as they can, and they leave them there for years. And we know consumers don't think this is acceptable, but the industry doesn't disclose their use of them.”
2025-08-07 · Dwarkesh Podcast · Artificial meat is harder than artificial intelligence — Lewis Bollard · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Yeah, so we think less than $300 million is being devoted to all work globally around every possible solution, a factory farming across every country. Less than 200 million of that is what you would probably consider smart money going to evidence-based effective interventions. So to put that into perspective, philanthropic climate advocacy alone is 50 times bigger than that. The work of cat and dog shoulders and rescue groups in the US alone, 25 times bigger than that. There are individual conservation and poverty charities that are 5 to 10x bigger than that. So this is a tiny amount of money for the purpose of social reform, and yet it has achieved a huge amount impacting hundreds of millions, billions of animals.”
2025-08-07 · Dwarkesh Podcast · Artificial meat is harder than artificial intelligence — Lewis Bollard · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“It's crazy. And you see this total confusion in the laws we pass. So, for instance, dogfighting, which is a real evil, it's horrific. But we're talking about thousands of animals, and Congress has passed multiple laws. Every state's made it a felony. It is being regulated correctly out of existence. Meanwhile, the factory farming of pigs occurs on this far greater scale. I mean, we've even done the same thing with cockfighting, which is literally chickens. And it's literally, again, thousands of chickens, and we have rightly banned it. We've rightly made it felony animal cruelty. And yet when factory farmers do far worse to far larger number of chickens, we call that commerce.”
2025-08-07 · Dwarkesh Podcast · Artificial meat is harder than artificial intelligence — Lewis Bollard · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“And so it is just this dystopian thing where, like, the industry presents this picture of like, oh, we have individual care for our animals. And it's like the scale at which you were doing it has totally prohibited having any kind of individual killing.”
2025-08-07 · Dwarkesh Podcast · Artificial meat is harder than artificial intelligence — Lewis Bollard · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source