Better Meat's Paul Shapiro: "Where's the beef? In the fermented mushroom roots"

The Times Tech Podcast

Will Morley

Business, Unknown, Technology

4.9 • 654 Ratings

🗓️ 18 February 2022

⏱️ 53 minutes

🔗️ Recording | iTunes | RSS

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Summary

The Sunday Times’ tech correspondent Danny Fortson brings on Paul Shapiro, founder and chief executive of Better Meat, to talk about making meat alternatives, (4:00), the $300,000 burger (11:00), using fungi (12:00), turning mushroom roots into steak (16:35), becoming an ingredient company (18:00), growing up an animal lover (19:45), starting an animal rights NGO (23:00), changing his approach (26:30), writing a book (28:40), starting Better Meat (31:50), experimenting with alternatives (33:45), his first hire (35:20), scaling up (39:20), the slow rate of innovation (43:10), his worst day of work (47:25), and society’s stubborn views on meat (49:05).

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Transcript

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0:00.0	Hey, everyone, before we get to today's show, just a quick programming note. There was a bizarre
0:05.1	screw up this week in that the publishing system seemed to get a gremlin inside it and all on its
0:10.8	own published a message I put out over a year ago during, you know, really at the height of the
0:15.5	George Floyd protests and when all that was happening. So this was an error. I did not do this.
0:20.5	Nobody on our team did this.
0:21.9	It just did it on its own.
0:23.6	But I do apologize if people were confused.
0:26.0	There is a pod this week because you're about to hear it right now.
0:28.9	And we've asked the company that publishes the pod to get to the bottom of why this happened.
0:32.4	But anyhow, sorry.
0:34.2	Obviously, there's a pod as normal this week. So thank you for bearing with us and do these
0:39.2	technical difficulties. And now let's get to this week's episode. Let's go. Yeah, technology.
0:50.0	What is it all about? The reason why whales were liberated from harpoons wasn't because people were concerned
0:55.2	about whales.
0:56.0	It's because we invented kerosene, and kerosene was a cheaper, more efficient way to light our homes.
1:00.8	We used to live pluck geese for their quills.
1:03.2	But nobody stopped using quills because they cared about geese.
1:06.2	They stopped because metal fountain pens were invented.
1:08.3	Right.
1:08.5	And the list goes on and on and on of these type of examples where animal exploitation
1:13.3	was displaced not by humane sentiment, but rather by technological innovation. Hello everybody and welcome to Danny in the Valley, your weekly dispatch from behind the scenes and inside the minds of the top people in tech.
1:39.8	I am your host, Danny Fortsney, West Coast correspondent for the Sunday Times.
	...

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