S6. E8: Michael Selden: Making Fish Without the Fish
Today’s episode is the second of a four-part series on the future of food, sponsored by VegFund. VegFund empowers vegan advocates worldwide through grant funding and supporting effective outreach that inspires people to choose and maintain a vegan lifestyle.
“There isn't going to be chicken farming on the moon or on Mars, but there could be cellular agriculture. And so, if people are going to eat meat in space, it's going to be produced like this…”
– Michael Selden
Michael Selden is the CEO and co-founder of Finless Foods, the world's first cellular agriculture company. Meaning they make fish without the fish and without the mercury, plastic, herbicides, ocean habitat destruction, and cruelty.
Finless Foods grows fish and other seafood products from cells. In 2017, they produced the first-ever fish that was grown outside of a fish and eaten. Since then, they have produced 13 other types of fish, including bluefin tuna, with the goal of producing bluefin that’s healthier, better tasting, more affordable, more sustainable, and much more ethical, allowing the bluefin to stay in the ocean and to not go extinct.
The goings-on at Finless are astonishing. They are creating the future of seafood, and it’s a future that will be better for the animals, for the planet, and for all of us.
Learn More About Finless Foods
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Transcript:
Michael: [00:00:14] There isn't going to be chicken farming on the moon or on Mars, but there could be cellular agriculture. So if people are going to eat meat in space, it's going to be produced like this, this is my take.
Elizabeth: [00:00:27] Hi, I'm Elizabeth Novogratz and this is Species Unite. Today's episode is part of a four part series sponsored by Veg Fund. Veg Fund empowers vegan advocates worldwide through grant funding and supporting effective outreach that inspires people to choose and maintain a vegan lifestyle. For the months of May, June and July, Species Unite is celebrating plant based eating with vegan nights. All that really means is that we would love for you to cook dinner for your friends or your family or your neighbor and make it vegan. On our website, we have downloadable ghost packs with recipes, tips, information to make your vegan night all the more fun and better. So go to our website SpeciesUnite.com and download a host pack and you'll be entered to win one of six, two hundred and seventy five dollar vegan gift baskets, that are filled with all sorts of incredible plant based products. This conversation is with Mike Selden. Mike is a CEO and co-founder of Finless Foods. Finless Foods is the world's first cellular aquaculture company, meaning they make fish without the fish and without mercury, plastic, herbicides, ocean habitat destruction and cruelty. Mike, thank you so much for being here. It's awesome to have you on the show.
Michael: [00:02:20] Thanks for having me. I really appreciate it.
Elizabeth: [00:02:21] So I want to talk about everything you guys are doing at Finless, which is just mind blowing. But before we even get there, I want to talk about how you got here? How your life ended up starting, this incredible, world changing company, that's truly going to change the future for many fish and many humans across the world.
Michael: [00:02:45] I really hope so. That is our goal for sure. So for me, I grew up a little bit outside of Boston, in Salem, Massachusetts and from a young age, I really always saw the environment as this big issue that just affects absolutely everybody. It's sort of a thing that's going to change a lot, especially in my lifetime as I get older and I really see it as somebody who lives in the developed world who's really using a lot of resources. I really felt that it was sort of my responsibility to fix it. As someone who has the power to fix it and has the resources to at least attempt fixing it. From a young age. I got really excited about veganism and as a teen I was incredibly passionate about it. It was like a huge thing for me. But as I got older, I kind of realized that we needed to do more to supplement that, the Vegan Movement, which didn't seem to be solving the problem at a rate that was going to solve it in the timelines that we need to solve it in.
Elizabeth: [00:03:43] Yeah, OK, I'm going to stop you right there because you must have been just a remarkable kid that you even felt like the weight of the world to figure this stuff out. You know, this is how your brain was interpreting everything like we're screwing the environment up, and it's on us to fix it. I mean, which is very true, but not a lot of kids walk around with that heaviness of I need to fix the planet. Which I mean, this is who we need, the people like you who think this way. So I'm just saying you must have been a pretty amazing kid.
Michael: [00:04:14] Growing up in the place that I did, I was definitely given a lot and I was very privileged. My parents, my dad's a social worker, my mom's a professor. I definitely never wanted anything as a kid. But I grew up in a place where that wasn't the case for everyone. So seeing like all of my neighbors and all of my classmates at school and how much less they had than me, it's sort of I think, at least this is my theory going now trying to do like hindsight on it, I always was in this thing of like, Ok, I'm in a position to help people and I should, and I'm not shut off into a bubble of just people like me who have whatever they need. So I think that really got me in that mindset from a young age. Even though I came from a fairly privileged background, my parents really didn't close me off to like the rest of the world and really kept me like in public schools and kept me interacting with the community. I think that was really what did that, so thanks mom and dad.
Elizabeth: [00:05:05] That sounds like they were givers.
Michael: [00:05:06] Definitely.
Elizabeth: [00:05:09] I think if you grew up with parents who are givers, your mom being a social worker, it kind of gets into the air that you're living in.
Michael: [00:05:16] Yeah, they're awesome. I mean, it was always this mindset of just like, what can we do? How do we help people? It's not about judging people, it's about fixing problems because they both specifically, they do substance abuse cases. So it's all about drug addiction as a disease and how do we fix this? It's not about good or bad people. It's about how do we solve this problem? I think that mindset is kind of infectious once you get into it.
Elizabeth: [00:05:38] So you were a young vegan and you said I got to solve this because just me being vegan is not enough.
Michael: [00:05:48] Yeah, I think especially in America, we get sort of really told constantly that like our activism is our consumption habits and that, you can change the world with your dollars. I don't really know how effective that's been. I can't really point to times where people have really changed the world via buying the right things. There's nothing wrong with it, obviously, right? Like, it's great that people are motivated. It's great that people want to try and push for change, especially in their personal lives. But I think we've got to start thinking collectively about these things. We have to start actually pushing for solutions that are bigger than our own individual purchasing choices.
Elizabeth: [00:06:26] Yeah and how we can participate in them.
Michael: [00:06:28] So I was like, we need to add other solutions in there, but I wasn't really clear on what that would be. I just sort of saw that veganism wasn't doing enough. It wasn't quite making the change that we needed. I read this article in 2014 called The Blood Harvest in the Atlantic. Which is about how scientists were watching the fact that we use blood from horseshoe crabs in pharmaceutical QA and how we're destroying this species, destroying the environment that it lives in. We don't have enough of this blood in order to actually do all the QC or QA that we need. These scientists in the 70s saw this and we're like, Let's make an equivalent. Let's make it like a synthetic equivalent to horseshoe crab blood without horseshoe crabs. When I saw that it was like a light bulb moment. I was just like, You can make horseshoe crab blood without horseshoe crabs. Why don't we just make any animal product without animals? Because I had been so passionate about veganism and so passionate about animal agriculture as an environmental problem. I had at that point gone to school for biochemistry at a school focused on agriculture. So on seeing this issue with horseshoe crabs, horseshoe crab blood, I was like, Why don't we just make all animal products without animals? Also don't I have the background to kind of figure that out? Isn't this kind of what I went to school for in some ways?
Elizabeth: [00:07:40] So you read the article about the horseshoe crabs. Do we still use horseshoe crabs or is it all synthetic now?
Michael: [00:07:48] We do. The synthetic equivalents are called factor C. With the letter C, not SEA. In fact, you see has been scaled up massively, especially in the past few years. There's actually even now been a follow up article since we started finless on this exact thing. I even got to meet some of the people involved in the project through our work at Finless, which is amazing, right? Meating the people who inspired us to do this was really cool. But yeah, so I read this article and I got to thinking about it, and I started participating in this nonprofit that's in New York called New Harvest. New Harvest is awesome. They take donations and put it towards people doing PhDs, specifically in cellular agriculture. So they're really trying to generate like the academic side of this whole field, which is super important. It's just this unbelievably cool environment with so many motivated people who really want to move the world and who just don't have, like ego about it, who are just like, I want to fix things, I am down to like to do the dirty, unsexy, important work that needs to be done.
Elizabeth: [00:08:46] What exactly does New Narvests do?
Michael: [00:08:48] Yes, New Harvest does a whole bunch of stuff, but one of the main things it does is it funds people doing academic research in making animal products without animals. So they're funding a wide array of people doing PhDs all over the planet right now in different universities. Basically, what was cool about New Harvest was when I started volunteering there. As an example of how they work, their executive director was like, Why don't you do a PhD in cellular agriculture? I was like, that would be a dream come true. I would love to do that. I have a degree in biochemistry. I do not have a PhD. I really want to do this field. What's really cool is most scientists just apply to grad school. Then once you're in grad school, you go through rotation like do a little bit of work in a bunch of different labs, see which one you like and then try and work your way into one that's doing interesting work to you. But New Harvest offers grants. So what's cool is you can go to New Harvest, get a grant for cellular agriculture, and instead of doing it, the normal way of like applying to school and then deciding what to do, you can just go to professors and be like, Hey, I already have money and I want to do this work in your lab. Professors are very receptive to that. Like academia is very underfunded. They're like, You want to bring money to my lab and do very high-profile work, cool. I was speaking with this really fantastic professor over at Mt. Sinai who is helping me design this project because it's like the back door into academia basically deciding what you want to do, getting money to do it and then finding a place to do it in.
Elizabeth: [00:10:12] Was it seafood from the start or did that come later?
Michael: [00:10:16] It depends on where the start is. I would say it was food fairly close to the beginning because I already saw that there was work going on in land based meats. There were a few companies doing things like Clara Foods working on eggs, Perfect Day working on milk. By the time I joined New Harvest, Memphis Meats had started and they were working on chicken and duck. So seafood was kind of like a natural fit. I mean, like growing up in Boston, growing up Jewish like seafood is such a natural part of my life, both from the outside and from sort of like my family and cultural traditions and stuff. Then also, no one was working on it. It was a totally white space and it's really, really important. I can go into all the ways in which the ocean is being totally devastated. I feel like everyone listening to this probably knows alot about this already.
Elizabeth: [00:11:00] I think some do, but I think even if you just talk a little about the seafood industry like where it is right now and why companies like Finless are in such massive need.
Michael: [00:11:12] Yeah. So what's really interesting about working on the seafood side is that, like the seafood industry itself, it is like welcoming us into the fold because they're just like, We currently fish the ocean completely clean, every single year. We get every single fish that we can out of the ocean without fully collapsing it. Even in some places, I would argue we are collapsing it. But basically, you can see that production of wild caught seafood has been leveled off for decades. There is growing demand for seafood, but not growing supply. That's where things like fish farming have come in to try and answer that, and there's been really great progress on a bunch of different species of fish farming. Now about 50 percent of seafood consumed globally is from farms. But fish farming hasn't grown fast enough yet to cut into wild caught catch. So the seafood industry itself is like seeing that demand is still rising, but supply can't meet it and on top of that, the amount of fish in the ocean has decreased drastically. We have ten times more ships than we had a few decades ago, and we're getting like less fish out of the ocean. We're fishing it more and more intensively,
Elizabeth: [00:12:16] Yeah, absolutely. So now you start, you're just like, ok, I'm going to do this, I'm going to start. How does this happen? Hey, I'm going to create the world's first cell based seafood?
Michael: [00:12:29] Yeah and I think being a little bit younger probably gave me the confidence to do it. Like, I think if I knew how complicated it would be at the time, that would have really discouraged me. I think I thought it was simpler than it was. Now, it's amazing how much progress we made. I think it's fantastic. We're very within reach of bringing this to market right now. So the way this started when Aisha, the executive director of New Harvest, was like, You should do a PhD in this field, they started building up a workflow. I ended up going, I have a very close friend whose name is Brian. We went to school together at UMass Amherst and we were in a lab together. We were doing basically protection of bananas, which is a crop that can potentially be in danger from this big pass, which wiped out all bananas on Earth in the fifties. Now the thing that we eat that's called a banana is actually a different plant. We've just renamed it. So we were working to protect the new banana from getting wiped out again the way this other one was in the fifties. So serious scientists are really committed to agriculture and to trying to create a sustainable food supply. It's sort of a typical founding story, the atypical part was we went out and got Impossible burgers. There were two restaurants in New York City that sold it, and we specifically waited to get them. Went out to a bar and I was telling him about this project and this idea of what I was doing. How I was starting to transition towards it, being a company at this point rather than a PhD project, as I learned over the ensuing weeks.
Elizabeth: [00:13:54] You were really young at this point. How old were you?
Michael: [00:13:59] I was 25. So, yeah, so I really was. I was very naive about a lot of this stuff. I mean, I'm 30 now, so I'm still, I guess, on the younger side. But the past five years I've learned a lot. But basically in talking to Brian, this college friend of mine, I was sort of laying out the workflow that I was going through and he was like, Oh, you're doing primary cell culture. That's what I do every day at Weill Cornell Medical College. Here's actually the workflow that you'll probably want to do in making this PhD or company or whatever you're talking about. I was like, Do you want to just do this together? It sounds like you know exactly what to do, and I kind of don't. He was like, yeah, sure. So from then on, we were co-founders and Brian became my co-founder. We’ve known each other for 10 years now. We met when I was 20 and he was 19, and we ended up founding Finless. We took money from the individual accelerator, moved out from Brooklyn to San Francisco, and there we created the world's first fish to ever be grown and eaten outside of a fish.
Elizabeth: [00:14:57] For people who don't know. How did you make this fish? Start to finish: how do you make a fish without a fish?
Michael: [00:15:03] Yeah. So what we did was we took a sample from a fish. So in this case, we were just proving that our technology so this is with carp because it was simpler based on the IP that we were working with and we took a sample of muscle from a real carp, took those cells, put them through a complex series of filters to basically just keep the strongest ones. We then grew those out in bulk until we had a good amount of them. At that point, we couldn't even really form muscle. We were just growing out muscle cells. Then we used that as an ingredient in fish cakes that we fed to our reporter from the Guardian and a bunch of potential investors, our coworkers and colleagues. So I mean, that's sort of the core of what we still do today. We take a sample from a fish, and get those cells really functional. From there, we don't need to go back to a fish ever again.
Elizabeth: [00:15:51] The first time you actually made fish right and people ate it. Was that the first time in the world this has ever happened, like someone's made fish out of a cell? How was that experience?
Michael: [00:16:05] Yes and it was terrifying. I mean, because we were like, what if it doesn't taste like anything or like, there are so many things that could possibly go wrong. But yeah, it went great. I mean, we had this really nice event. It was obviously a V one. Were people like, this is the best fish I've ever had? No. But was this definitely fish created outside of the ocean and outside of an animal? Yeah. So we were really, really proud of it.
Elizabeth: [00:16:28] How long ago was that?
Michael: [00:16:29] That was in fall of 2017.
Elizabeth: [00:16:32] Really, in the big picture it was not that long ago. So since you made the carp, over the past four years, what can you make now?
Michael: [00:16:42] Well, we can make all sorts of stuff. We actually have now 13 fish physically in our library, so cells from 13 different species that we can grow out. The one that we're moving to market first is bluefin tuna. We isolated these cells from a real bluefin tuna off the coast of eastern Japan off of a small island. But now at this point, actually, our team hasn't seen a bluefin tuna for over two years now. We have these cells culturing out in our lab and actually in our HQ right now. I actually just finished a tasting, but so we have this big old lab to my left through this wall. Now we just have these cells in the bank and we theoretically can use them forever without ever having to go back to the ocean.
Elizabeth: [00:17:24] Talk about bluefin tuna, the ones that live in the ocean, and why this is so remarkable that you never have to go back to the ocean?
Michael: [00:17:31] They’re on and off the endangered species list, like all the time, and people have been attempting to farm them for decades and not just bluefin, but all tuna. But while aquaculture has made really massive strides in farming, all sorts of different species. Tuna currently still can't be farmed. If you ever see farm tuna on a label, what they really mean is it's ranched. So the tuna are caught wild as juveniles pulled into a farming situation and then fattened up. Apparently, there's like an economic gain to doing that, but it's not a closed life cycle. So it's not actually like increasing the amount of tuna that can be made on Earth. That's one of the reasons why we were invested in by a Japanese seafood company. They've been doing research in tuna farming for decades now, and this is not working. It's very complicated and there's a lot of factors involved. This is just a much simpler, faster, more high throughput process. So we can bring bluefin to market.
Elizabeth: [00:18:25] And bluefin is incredibly expensive.
Michael: [00:18:27] It's one of the most expensive meats on Earth.
Elizabeth: [00:18:28] How much?
Michael: [00:18:30] It is. In a restaurant, like the cheapest you're really going to find. It is somewhere between 10 to twenty five dollars for two pieces of sashimi. That's over two hundred dollars a pound.
Elizabeth: [00:18:40] Wow. And you guys are making this now in a lab?
Michael: [00:18:44] Yeah.
Elizabeth: [00:18:45] That's insane. It's really good for so many different reasons, but also just for the bluefin.
Michael: [00:18:49] Hopefully, we can save the species. I mean, that's the idea. There's been some really fantastic conservation efforts. Actually in the past few years, bluefin tuna populations have even jumped back up a little bit, which is really exciting. But we just want to create a world where it's not even a worry or we don't have to fight for their conservation because there's no economic incentive to even take them out of the water. We want to make tuna that is sustainable and ethical, and that's like our core goal. But the real thing I think that Finless wants to do, is we want tuna that tastes better, is more affordable, is healthier and is easier to get. I think if we can hit those metrics, we're not even going to just be appealing to vegans. We want to be appealing to people who will never go vegan. People who just like, want to eat animals have no interest in compromising on anything,
Elizabeth: [00:19:36] Which is most people. I mean, to me, I love Vegans, but there's just not enough.
Michael: [00:19:43] Yeah, agreed. If everyone was vegan, we shut the company down. I mean, this kind of no point. But, you know, they're not. So we have a lot of work to do.
Elizabeth: [00:19:51] Is the bluefin that you're making now, if it were regulated, would that be what you would be selling or are there still more steps in the kind of refining process?
Michael: [00:20:03] We are at a point where if we were through the regulatory system, we could sell what we make right now, it would be a V one. It would be a little bit expensive. It wouldn't be perfect, but there's lots of examples of V ones going great, like Impossible Foods when they first launched, their burger was fantastic. Was it exactly the same as a burger from a cow? Not quite. But that's OK. I think you can get these like really activated environmental consumers at the beginning who are psyched about it and then expand outwards from there and once you can get a V two on the market.
Elizabeth: [00:20:34] And what are some of the other 13 fish that you're working on?
Michael: [00:20:37] It's everything from, like, really farmable stuff like salmon and carp, tilapia. We've worked with mahi mahi yellowfin. We've even done some weirder stuff. I mean, we've worked with lobster, we've worked with fugu like poisonous pufferfish. We think there's this really cool potential for us to take any exotic species of fish and localize it to any geography and make it something that can be locally produced no matter where you live?
Elizabeth: [00:21:01] Do you have days where you're in the lab going, Wait, we just made whatever you made that day and you're just like astonished. Does it still shock you?
Michael: [00:21:09] Yeah and part of my job is to convey that to the team because I feel like for them, it's so mundane. They're like in here every single day and it's like a fairly small team. We're still under 20 people right now. I'm like, You don't understand, like what I go out and tell people in public like they're blown away by what you're doing. This is absolutely the cutting edge. I'm trying to bring in media articles and like people who are psyched about it to show the team because I want them to really feel what I feel which is just like, holy crap, like this is absolutely incredible.
Elizabeth: [00:21:39] And it's going to change the world. This is the future.
Michael: [00:21:41] I really think so. Yeah. What's cool at this point is like, we're not even alone anymore. Like, there's so many companies working on these problems at this point that when I first started finless like we were the first cell culture and seafood company. There was no one else before us. Now there's a bunch of others and like when we started, there were only two cell cultured meat companies. Now there's 50 globally. So for me, I'm just like, cool, like, we're going to succeed. We're going to win. But like, this movement is happening no matter what. Like, this is going to be the future of food, which absolutely is just so cool. What I was saying earlier about, like I couldn't find any examples of individual consumerism changing the world, like this type of technological change. There are examples of this working. We don't really hunt whales much anymore as a species. That's not because people had a moral awakening where they're like, You know what? Killing whales is wrong. We should stop doing that. That happened after we stopped using whales because we started using things like kerosene instead of whale blubber. So like this, making a technology that accomplishes the same function as the animal product but doesn't come from the animal that really has actually changed the game. Now, whales are conserved, like there's all these laws protecting whales and so many different parts of the world, they're still endangered because of a lot of things. But like the fact that we've been able to even move that conversation and allow the mainstream opinion to be, we should save the whales. That was only possible because a technology took the place of the animal product, and that's like the theory of change that we're working on.
Elizabeth: [00:23:12] And that is what shifts everything, technology. I mean, for all of history, right? It's happened so many times. Are there big differences in doing seafood versus chicken and beef?
Michael: [00:23:25] In some ways, yes. In some ways, no. I mean, like the basics of what I described as the process. That's the same, but there are some cool differences. Seafood cells are much easier to grow. Marine animals are really high in this thing called telomerase. Some people listening to this have probably heard of telomerase as something that gets talked about in the anti-aging industry. Telomeres these caps at the end of your DNA. Every time your DNA gets replicated, they get shorter. When they get really, really short, every time your DNA gets replicated, the DNA itself actually gets damaged rather than these caps. That's one of the mechanisms that aging functions on. So people talk about lengthening telomeres, using telomerase in order to prevent that process. Marine animals just naturally have very high levels of telomerase, which makes it very easy for us to grow out these cells for long periods of time effectively infinitely, without needing to continuously go back to sample. That's unique to seafood. There's also tons of other things. Our experiments are a little bit easier because a seafood cell is culture very well around room temperature for where we're at in the Bay Area, whereas like animal cells need to culture at thirty seven Celsius. I really hope that's not room temperature. Anywhere the science is being done, it's really hot. So like for them when you take the cells out of the incubator, you have to work with them very quickly to make sure you don't temperature shock them before you then put them back in. We don't have to worry about that kind of stuff. It also means that we won't use as much power to heat these tanks. So there's also sorts like little changes, but the basic process remains the same.
Elizabeth: [00:24:51] That's what I was going to ask, is this easier to scale or is it the same hurdles?
Michael: [00:24:57] Similar hurdles, in a lot of ways. We still need a lot of bioreactor space and the whole synthetic biology industry. It's actually kind of funny like we are at all these conferences, everyone in synthetic biology was basically talking about how there isn't enough bioreactor capacity worldwide to really do a lot of this stuff that we want to do. Then along came COVID and this massive need for vaccines, which are produced using bioreactors. So the whole world is building all this bioreactor capacity to build this vaccine, and it's not going to be as useful once the whole world is vaccinated fully. So the infrastructure is kind of just being built right now, which solves a huge problem for us. Not that COVID is good, but that's sort of a silver lining.
Elizabeth: [00:25:36] That's awesome. How far out is like being regulated and that sort of thing? I mean, is it years and years?
Michael: [00:25:43] One company actually now has approval in Singapore and has done some limited selling of their product over there in sort of an invite only situation. So I don't think they're fully scaled, although they did get regulatory approval for us in the U.S., just two months ago. The US regulatory system was fully set in place, and so now companies are beginning to travel down that. I'd be lying if I was trying to get a full, accurate estimate of exactly how long it would take to travel down it. But you could see things hitting the market as early as next year, that's what it's looking like in the United States.
Elizabeth: [00:26:16] Once things are on the market and then how long does it take for prices to start coming down? If you were able to sell anything you're making on the market, how much would it be right now, like right out of the gate?
Michael: [00:26:33] For bluefin, we're at restaurant prices and I don't mean restaurant prices. I understand there's like these crazy fish that get sold in Tsukiji Fish Market in Japan for like three million dollars. But that's not what I'm talking about. We are right now around restaurant prices for bluefin, for our cogs. So that means if we sold it at cost right now, we'd be around the same price. We do need to do a little bit better than that. I want to pull us under wholesale prices so we can actually undercut the industry and not just be sort of a feather in the cap of a restaurant that wants to act sustainable. But I think that we're going to get there within the next two years. I believe that we can drop our costs below wholesale prices.
Elizabeth: [00:27:12] That's fast. Wow, that's really fast.
Michael: [00:27:13] We started off at $300,000 a pound, so it's been a really fast journey.
Elizabeth: [00:27:17] And when was it $300,000 a pound?
Michael: [00:27:20] We had bluefin for $300,000 a pound two years ago.
Elizabeth: [00:27:23] That's incredible. So it'll go fast then, like in terms of coming down.
Michael: [00:27:29] Yeah and I think that once these companies get on the market and start selling things, it's so much easier to then get the funding to do the research to drive the cost down into commodity goods space. I think you're seeing an acceleration right now, and that's evidenced by like larger and larger rounds being raised. It's evidenced by more and more companies getting into space. It's evidenced by more and more actual food players, seafood companies, meat companies getting involved. All the major meat and seafood companies now have a cultured meat team internal to their companies. That did not exist when we started the company four years ago.
Elizabeth: [00:28:02] They're not looking at any of this as something that's going to take them down, but something to get behind.
Michael: [00:28:07] Yeah, I mean, you know, they want there to be a larger supply of seafood and there isn't. We can actually fix that problem. So yeah and then also we can answer this supply problem with all these unfavorable species like tuna.
Elizabeth: [00:28:19] The lobster work, can you do lobster?
Michael: [00:28:22] We don't have plans to release the lobster just yet. We'll probably stick with fin fish for a bit. But yeah, I mean, you'll see us hitting the market with our bluefin and from there expanding outwards. We're trying to decide what makes the most sense to get into. We only want to release something that's farmed if we can really do better from a sustainability perspective than the farmed equivalent. We don't want to release something that's worse than fish farming, and that's hard in some ways. Farming is very low in carbon, so it's very good for the environment in a million different ways. So, you know, you might see for the first few fish that we do, sticking to wild caught only fish that can't be farmed and trying to help take the burden off of the oceans in that way. Then eventually, we hope to move into things that are more easily farmable.
Elizabeth: [00:29:12] How long do you think it'll be before it's kind of the whole world's eating, eating this? Where it's just kind of normal.
Michael: [00:29:19] I think you can see that like normal, you could see it as early as within the next 10 years, I would say. I think definitely within the next 20 to 30 years, it'll be global and it'll be very normal.
Elizabeth: [00:29:32] I want to ask you about bringing this stuff into space. That is just mind blowing. Will you talk about that?
Michael: [00:29:38] Yeah, we were given this really great opportunity to go up to the ISS or I mean, to send our fish cells to the ISS, I obviously did not go. With this really cool company called 3D Bioprinting based out of Russia. They sort of selected a meat company and a fish company. So they brought us up and our cell based seafood and also Aleph farms, which is a beef company based in Israel. So we set up these cells and using this really cool bio printer that they've invented, this company does 3D bioprinting. They built this muscle. They built fish micro-tissues in space. There's a lot of firsts there. I don't even know exactly where to start, but it was a really cool experiment. Doing the experiment in zero gravity gave us such a different set of data and such a different set of expectations on how our cells are supposed to perform. In some ways, it's like, yeah, it was great PR. It was really cool. We got a lot of cool attention from it, but it was valuable, which was really fascinating. We got these pictures of these stern looking Russian astronauts standing there, floating next to the 3D bioprinter as it's working, and it was just a really cool experience all around.
Elizabeth: [00:30:42] So the point of it was that one day we'll be eating cell-based fish in space?
Michael: [00:30:49] Oh yeah, I mean, if we're going to have sustainable, I mean, that word usually gets used to talk about the environment. But if you're going to have any sort of permanent habitat for humans in space, you're not going to be bringing animals up into space. There isn't going to be chicken farming on the moon or on Mars. But there could be cellular agriculture. So if people are going to eat meat in space, it's going to be produced like this is my take. Especially something like tuna. We can't even get tuna to breed on Earth, let alone get them to breed in space. And people forget, tuna are huge fish. They are six feet long. They are monster animals. To bring a bunch of them up into space and all the water necessary to keep them swimming around. They need these huge tanks. They're so fast, they are the Jaguars of the ocean like these apex predators. It's no wonder we can't figure out how to farm them here. So, yeah, this will be the way. If you want tuna in space, this is how you do it.
Elizabeth: [00:31:45] So cool. It's really cool.
Michael: [00:31:47] Like this is, you know, I really see this as the future, and I don't think that it will become like, you're saying normal. I don't think it will become like this big international phenomenon without people like you being excited about it from the get go, without people who are interested in pushing this forward and being our first customers. We need people who are excited about this, from a real environmental perspective, in order to make this a thing.
Elizabeth: [00:32:08] It's amazing just this year, how many more people that I talked to are not freaked out by it, like they've heard of it or they've read about it. I'm in kind of a bubble, but it is becoming not as shocking anymore. Whereas a couple of years ago, if you mention anything, people are a little bit, you know, taken aback.
Michael: [00:32:33] I've seen that as well. I mean, I'm obviously very much in a bubble in that respect. Like, I mean, this whole community. Yeah, I've just seen kind of a shift. I think part of it is like the U.S. government, like acting well on this and being like, Hey, we're really going to take our time and regulate this the right way. We're going to make sure this is safe.
Elizabeth: [00:32:52] Well, Mike, thank you so much. I'm so excited about every single thing you're doing. It's just awesome.
Michael: [00:32:58] Thank you so much. I really appreciate you having me on. I'm siked that people are excited about this.
Elizabeth: [00:33:12] To learn more about Michael and about Finless Foods. Go to our website, SpeciesUnite.com. We will have links to everything. We're on Facebook and Instagram, @SpeciesUnite. If you have a spare minute and could do us a favor, please subscribe, rate, review on Apple Podcasts or wherever you listen to podcasts. It really helps people find the show. If you'd like to support the podcast, we'd greatly appreciate it. You can do so by going to SpeciesUnite.com and clicking Donate. I'd like to thank everyone at Species Unite, including Gary Knudsen, Natalie Martin, Caitlin Pierce, Amy Jones, Paul Healey, Santana Polky and Anna Connor, who wrote and performed today's music. Thank you for listening. Have a wonderful day!
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