This series originally aired in 2024.

It's a warm summer's day, 2019, in Redwood City, California.

Inside a brightly lit conference room at Impossible Foods headquarters, a sweaty Pat

Brown tugs at the collar of his

t-shirt. It's emblazoned with a no-cows logo. Pat, the biochem professor, who is this company's

founder, isn't just hot. He's bored. He and a team of executives are attending an employee review.

The executives want to promote some

employees who have been working hard to get the impossible burger into grocery stores for the first time.

But Pat just wants to get back to his research. Hey, let's move this along. We have a lot of work

to do in the lab that's more important than yammering about job titles. Pat's outburst

momentarily silences the meeting's leader. He's Dennis Woodside, a square-jawed gray-haired

middle-aged attorney turned executive who left his job as chief operating officer at Dropbox

to become president of Impossible Foods and ramp up the company's operations ahead of its grocery

store debut. Woodside glares at Pat.

I'm sorry, Pat, but this management stuff is important, too. We've got ten people who've done a

great job here and need to be recognized with raises and new titles. But why do we need

tiered titles at all? That's how IBM does things. We're not IBM.

No, we're not IBM, but we can still be a professional organization. I mean, just look at the

working title you chose for this year's annual report. That's not exactly what IBM would choose.

A wry smile comes across Pat's face. I love that title.

The meat industry. And that's exactly what we're trying to do here. We're on a mission to push

the beef industry into a death spiral. And after we do that, we'll tell pork and chicken that

...