YouSaid · the spoken record

Pat Brown

lines on the record: 73
first: 2020-05-11
most recent: 2020-05-11
sittings or episodes: 1
sources: podcast

Every line below is reproduced as it was said and linked to the record it came from. Nothing here is summarised or generated. Directory · Search · Corrections

“Might convince people to change their ways. But then I realized that actually, no, nobody, I don't want to sound cynical, but none of these kinds of, you know, all the facts in the world don't move a needle on public policy. And so I realized that no, what you have to do is something more subversive. And the other thing that I think is kind of a no brainer, but I'll just say it is that you're not going to 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 opposed to just the good of the world. They don't. And China about three years ago asked at citizens to reduce their meat and dairy consumption by half. And what happened? Absolutely nothing.”
2020-05-11 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · Impossible Foods: Pat Brown · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Oh, absolutely. So that was the obvious thing to do. And then the question is, how do you do it? And I organize a National Research Council workshop to just look at how the world might be affected if we could switch to an entirely plant-based diet, figuring that if we got a bunch of a very objective people who had no conflict of interest to just look objectively at the data, the answer would be so overwhelming that it's better for the economy, it's better for the environment. Better for food security and so forth.”
2020-05-11 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · Impossible Foods: Pat Brown · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“If you could snap your fingers and make that industry go away, which I would do in a heartbeat if I could, the recovery of biomass, trees and shrubs and grasses and so forth whose growth is suppressed by animal agriculture would immediately start pulling carbon out of the atmosphere because the ultimate carbon capture technology is photosynthesis. That's the opportunity cost of using all that land for animal agriculture. So the bottom line is there's nothing even comes close in terms of its destructive impact on the environment.”
2020-05-11 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · Impossible Foods: Pat Brown · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“I mean, I'm kind of embarrassed that I wasn't more aware of it ahead of this. I just was basically reading about environmental problems and what are the contributing factors and so forth. 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. And because of its huge land footprint, It is responsible for a catastrophic meltdown in global biodiversity. And the other thing that relates to land footprint.”
2020-05-11 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · Impossible Foods: Pat Brown · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“So I had decided that for my sabbatical that I was going to try to identify the most important problem in the world that I could contribute to solving. And it could have been anything, but I was pretty confident that it was going to be something about avoiding environmental catastrophes, basically. And I was looking at a variety of different things relatively early on. I was looking at what's the state of research in making more efficient solar energy devices and stuff like that. But relatively quickly, I would say within a month or so, I had zeroed in on what is unquestionably the most important and urgent problem the world is facing right now. And that is the catastrophic environmental impact of our use of animals in the food. System.”
2020-05-11 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · Impossible Foods: Pat Brown · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Which is, I think, a lot of companies would regard that as kind of a risky bet. And since our mission requires us to Average double in volume every year for the next 15 years, we're going to have to be making that big bet on our success again and again. And that's something that a lot of businesses would say, well, let's go more slowly, but we'll never achieve our mission if we don't go for it. And so, you know, the lesson, again, is bet on your own success.”
2020-05-11 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · Impossible Foods: Pat Brown · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“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. But the thing I learned was I believed it would be super successful, and the lesson I learned is, which is something I repeat all the time at Impossible Foods, 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. For impossible foods, the analogy is, if we believe we're going to be as successful as we intend and do believe, we have to make huge investments in production capacity. Couple of years in advance that are predicated on the idea that our volume will be 10 times greater, you know, in a year and a half.”
2020-05-11 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · Impossible Foods: Pat Brown · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“It was a lot of work. But I mean, I was so motivated. Like, a lot of these things, if you're doing something because you want to do it, it doesn't feel like work.”
2020-05-11 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · Impossible Foods: Pat Brown · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Yeah, exactly. That infuriated me. And the reason that the public Library of Science, the reason that I and my co-conspirator, Mike Eisen, and my former postdoc mentor Harold Varmas founded it was basically as much as anything else to throw a wrench into the business model of scientific publishing because it was so perverse and antisocial and we felt that if we create a vehicle where scientists could publish free to everyone in the world, scientists would flock to it and it would pull the rug out from under these conventional publishers. And it did to a considerable extent, although the job still isn't done, unfortunately.”
2020-05-11 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · Impossible Foods: Pat Brown · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Well, I mean, that's the way that I saw my job or, you know, my purpose, I guess it wasn't defined in terms of some particular scientific problem I was working on. You know, if you see something that you can A positive impact on, I was in the very fortunate position that I could do it. And it was kind of like understood to be part of my job. In that case, I realized that to most of the world, if a parent gets sick and they want to read the best current medical literature on the subject, as many people do. I mean, many people who are not physicians, when they have a family member who has a medical problem, they'll go and try to read it. You can't. You have to pay 30 to 50 bucks to read a crappy paper.”
2020-05-11 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · Impossible Foods: Pat Brown · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“I mean, it was the job I would have created for myself if I'd been able to completely write the specs for the job. You get the joy of discovering things. If you get a new idea, you can immediately start working on it. I had great colleagues, great students. I used to say this all the time. It was my dream job.”
2020-05-11 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · Impossible Foods: Pat Brown · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Yeah, exactly. It was timely and important. And it was the reason, one of the main reasons I felt like I had to go into biomedical research is that as opposed to staying in clinical medicine is that 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. You just don't know how to help them And so I felt like that's much higher leverage if you can work on really hard, important medical problems and find solutions.”
2020-05-11 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · Impossible Foods: Pat Brown · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Yeah, I mean, the direction I was going was, so I was in an MD PhD program and I wanted to go into research to help people by basically understanding human biology and human diseases. And the PhD part was kind of related to that, but it was also just, I love the idea of discovering things for the first time.”
2020-05-11 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · Impossible Foods: Pat Brown · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“I felt like 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 it. It's purely the aesthetics. And I felt like that was, I just couldn't justify the killing and making animals miserable for my pleasure, basically, as opposed to for my sustenance. And I think that was kind of the way my siblings and my parents felt about it, that that was why we all just like, bam, like a square wave, decide to stop eating meat.”
2020-05-11 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · Impossible Foods: Pat Brown · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“It was not a hippie thing. I mean, so really what it came down to was a non-trivial fraction of kids at some point in their lives try to become vegetarian, try to stop eating meat. Primarily because of discomfort with the ethics of it. And in my family, that was true of pretty much most of my siblings and myself. And there was a time when we all sort of in concert decided to stop eating meat.”
2020-05-11 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · Impossible Foods: Pat Brown · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“I think I was kind of open to a lot of things when I was in college, but I tended to gravitate toward science and math. I mean, there was a period of time when I thought I loved math. I loved sort of higher level math classes in college, but I felt like I wanted to do something that made the world better. And I didn't think it would be a satisfying for me in the sense of feeling like I was contributing something.”
2020-05-11 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · Impossible Foods: Pat Brown · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Well, I mean, first of all, a lot of people don't realize back in the day, I think getting into college was much less competitive. But I had good SATs. So I think that that made up for my grades to some extent. But yeah, I mean, I was just lucky that I grew up at a time where you could be a less dedicated student and still get into a good college.”
2020-05-11 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · Impossible Foods: Pat Brown · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“I was actually not a pretty good student. When we came back to the States, I felt like I'd just been sent back a grade. And I just became very disengaged because I thought it was kind of like, why am I wasting my time? And I was a chronic cutter of classes. And I mean, when I was in Taiwan, my classes were in a three-story building that had this kind of concrete grill work on one side of the building. So one thing I would sometimes do would be to just randomly walk out of class and go climb on this. It was like a climbing wall in retrospect. I just feel like it's amazing they didn't kick me out.”
2020-05-11 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · Impossible Foods: Pat Brown · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Well, it's embarrassing in a way. I mean, he would just say, you know, when I asked him what he did, he'd say, oh, you know, I work for the government. And I thought, okay, that makes sense. Works for the government. I only found out what his real job was when one of my good buddies somehow mentioned that his dad worked for the CIA and I thought, well, that's kind of weird because he works for my dad. Anyway.”
2020-05-11 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · Impossible Foods: Pat Brown · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“I mean, he was an intelligent Officer, I guess you could say. Was gathering intelligence on mainland China and ran various operations, but he never did any sketchy, bad business. So he is as sweet as most altruistic guy. He was like the opposite of what you, if you have this notion of the CIA and spies being very sinister and unethical characters, the dead opposite of that.”
2020-05-11 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · Impossible Foods: Pat Brown · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“My dad worked for the CIA. I didn't realize that until I was quite a bit older, and his job sent me to various overseas posts. So we lived in Paris for four years. That's where I started school. Came back to the States, and then he was sent to Taipei.”
2020-05-11 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · Impossible Foods: Pat Brown · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Sitting in a room that was originally where my three kids shared a bedroom and most recently was my youngest son, Isaac's room, which I usurped as my office.”
2020-05-11 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · Impossible Foods: Pat Brown · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“We had half the company basically to some extent going out to soybean farms for the better part of a year. And it was in retrospect a bad idea. But this is the kind of thing you have to do. You have to be not afraid to try things that may fail. I can tell you for certain we are going to have more expensive failures in the future. And if we're afraid, well, we shouldn't be trying to do this.”
2020-05-11 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · Impossible Foods: Pat Brown · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT