Give us the premise.

Well, first, thanks so much for having me here.

I know I'm like the skunk at the garden party.

But I am the Lorax.

I speak for the yields.

Because that does speak for the trees.

Look, agriculture, there are so many farmers who are doing their best to be good stewards of the land, but collectively, you're stewarding a mess.

How are we measuring all of

But there's one problem.

The first lab-grown burger was unveiled in 2013, and it cost $330,000 to manufacture in the lab.

Today, this stuff is just getting to market and it's clearly still going to be a premium product.

You know, you're talking about maybe $20 a pound, $30 a pound.

And, you know, that's just an extraordinary accomplishment.

But until it's as cheap as the chicken or beef that you can get at the meat counter today, it's going to be very hard to make a case for it because most people aren't interested in eating something just because it's 90% less land use or 100% less animal slaughter.

That doesn't serve their needs.

I

Meaning we need to eat less meat, 'cause that takes up a lot of land.

E-exactly.

Three-quarters of our agricultural land is either pasture or it's growing crops that we feed to animals before we eat them.

Um, so yes, so we have to eat less meat, and also on the demand side, we need to waste less food, right? Because we waste about a quarter of our food.

That means we waste about a quarter of the land we use to grow the food.

We, we use a land mass the size of China to grow garbage.

[laughs] But then, as you said, you know, this isn't just gonna be s- ... solved on the demand side, and we are going to have to make more food with less land.

[laughs]

So what do you think is real? And what do you think is hype?

You know, I wrote about dozens of pretty promising solutions in this book, and none of them really have any traction, at least not yet.

You know, in many ways, we have not solved the fossil fuel problem, but we do know how to solve it, right? We need to electrify the global economy and run it on clean electricity.

And we've made some progress there, right? We're having this incredible clean energy revolution.

Where 90% of the new power plants built in the world last year were wind or solar or some other zero-emissions technology.

While with food and agriculture, it's still getting worse.

And we really don't know what to do.

And so rotational grazing helps them move around in a way that other animals and other livestock do where they make better use of the plants

So it's really interesting to watch it play out that way.

I would just say that those of us who do care about government, I mean, Ted, you're probably right about what the Trump people are probably trying to do, and they're trying to make Snap look bad.

But another thing that makes Snap look bad is this idea that, you know, sort of poor people are spending all our money on crap, right? um in the same way that like those of us who have real concerns about about farm subsidies you know we hate the idea that we're just throwing money at rich farmers to uh you know to to grow very few strings attached yeah exactly and we're saying like hey you know there should like if we're going to give 20 billion dollars a year to uh you know to some of the wealthiest you know people in rural america um you know maybe we should attach some strings we should have some conditions some environmental conditions um all you know some Economic conditions.

You choose it.

But I do think that those of us who believe in government should want to, you know, setting aside what the Trump people are doing, if you want to have a program to help low-income people afford food, you should try to make it as good a program as possible that works well and that also is something that people are going to be proud of and not pissed off about.

So I do think that, you know, this is one area where it's like, huh, it is a little bit hard to justify, you know, whether or not you think sugar is poison.

And this is one thing I actually do agree with RFK about.

So why don't you lead the way? Well, look,

Meaning we need to eat less meat, 'cause that takes up a lot of land.

Exactly.

Three-quarters of our agricultural land is either pasture or it's growing crops that we feed to animals before we eat them.

Um, so yes, so we have to eat less meat, and also on the demand side, we need to waste less food, right? Because we waste about a quarter of our food.

That means we waste about a quarter of the land we use to grow the food.

We, we use a land mass the size of China to grow garbage.

Uh [laughs] but then as you said, you know, this isn't just gonna be s- solved on the demand side, and we are going to have to make more food with less land, and that means we are gonna have to increase our yields.

So what do we do right now?

Michael says in the US, we get about 3% of our calories from beef, but it uses about half of our agricultural land.

It's just this very simple notion that basically the animals that we eat are using an awful lot of the earth.

(laughs) Um, and it's- it's one of those things that once you see it, you can't unsee it, right? We- if you ever take a cross-country flight and you see all those squares and circles out the window, I mean, you can tell that there's a lot of agriculture out there, but there is a lot of agriculture out there, (laughs) right? It's now two of every five acres on earth.There's just not going to be room for the forests and wetlands that store so much of the carbon that's stabilizing the climate.

You know, even if we stopped using fossil fuels tomorrow, um, just through deforestation from the expansion of agriculture, we're on track to blow through all of our climate targets by 2050.

Um, so in many ways, the, the energy problem, it's a really big problem, but we kind of know what to do with it, do about it, right? We just need to electrify the global economy and run it on clean electricity, right? Simple, right? (laughs)

And here you are telling me that they're not, or at least they're not as good as we thought they were.

The fact is that the real environmental disaster of agriculture was the initial transformation of nature into those nice rustic farms.

That's when we lost the carbon.

When it comes to meat alternatives, he's seen a lot of hype before.

There was that moment in 2019 where Beyond Meat had the biggest popping IPO of the 21st century, and its stock went to $250 a share, and it was worth a third as much as Tyson Foods.

People were so sure that these meat alternatives might upend the whole industry, but then came the bust.

Beyond went from $250 a share to $2, and all of the investment dried up, and now people have decided that was just a fad, a dumb idea, how could we even think of taking on this trillion dollar industry? And I do think there's some discomfort with the idea that food and agriculture should be somehow tied to technology.

Ultimately, I think these things go in cycles, and venture capitalists tend to follow the herd.

Yeah.

... um, which is kind of the convening for all the different kinds of fake meats and fake milks.

Everybody who's trying to replace animal agriculture.

And it was right after Beyond went public, and the exuberance was just off the charts.

There were kind of serious conversations about whether we're gonna get rid of the entire $1.5 trillion meat industry in-

Yeah.

(laughs) And we haven't come up with a better way to do it, and-and, you know, we should appreciate that our farmers, they do, they do hard work, they, they, you know, the, you know, 0.5% of us who farm make it possible for the other 99.5% of us to have cool shows and write books about the problems with agriculture-

... who don't know who Michael Pollan is, tell people who Michael Pollan is, so.

Yeah.

He wrote the, uh, The Omnivore's Dilemma.

Um, he's a, he write, he's a beautiful writer who, who essentially is sort of calling for kind of old-fashioned farms, like old McDonald, where, uh, you know, without all these chemicals, without these terrible feed lots.

Um, without the, you know, the modern monoculture.

A more bucolic, natural, um, kinder and gentler kind of farming.

Um, that unfortunately, uh, doesn't make as much food.

Yeah.

And we have banned it, and so have six other states.

It really is...

I mean, the earth is becoming an animal farm, right? I mean, I talked about how, you know, two of every five acres of, uh, of, of the, of the planet are now, are now agricultural.

Well, two of every three acres of agricultural land are pasture.

And if you include all the crops that we feed to animals, really, like, 3/4 of our agricultural land are basically to, you know, to provide stuff for animals to eat before we eat them.

Um, so, you know, again, we're eating 350 million tons of meat every year, and, uh, and it would be really exciting to have, to be able to keep doing that without having such a dramatic impact on the planet.

But, uh, but, you know, that's woke.

(laughs)

So, can you talk about, like, some of the feel-good agricultural solutions a bit deeper and w- why they have caught on and why people think that they are a solution, and what the actual reality is?

Sure.

What, what I would say is I try not to be prescriptive about how people should farm.

Um, you know, the specific practices, uh, you know, whether we should be regenerative or industrial.

Um, but I am, I do think it's really important that it needs to be productive and efficient and high yield, um, because otherwise, we're gonna eat a lot more of the Earth.

We need, we're gonna need 50% more calories by 2050.

Right now, we're on track to deforest another dozen California's worth of land, uh, to feed, you know, nearly 10 billion people.

I mean, the other piece of this, obviously, was in the first Trump administration, you had this trillion trees effort that people were kind of, you know, sort of backing, right? And so, like, you know, how does this work not just from a technology standpoint, but from a politics standpoint?

the rainforests in Brazil and, and, and, and that area of the world?

Yeah, that's a big part of it.

We're essentially kind of outsourcing our deforestation, right? 'Cause we already, you know, Indiana used to be 85% forest, and, uh, you know, we already tore down our Amazon.

Um, but it's true, and right now you hear a lot from both on the left from the kind of Bernie Sanders and, uh, you know, Cory Booker types.

I saw you just had him on.

But also some on the right from, uh, from Joe Rogan or, uh, or Robert Kennedy Jr., this idea that, "Oh, well, we just need these kind of twee organic farms with no chemicals," um, and, uh, and there are some nice things about that.

But if you're making less food per acre, you're gonna need a lot more acres to make food, and that's essentially gonna eat more of the Earth.

So you actually come down on the side of big agriculture?