Aryé Elfenbein - Co-Founder at Wildtype Foods

(Joel Beasley at 00:00:00) Hello, my friends. Today we are talking to Aryé, the co-founder of Wildtype, and we discussed the process and technology needed to grow real meat from salmon cells, the emergence of cellular agriculture, and how technology is shaping the future of food. All of this right here, right now on the Modern CTO Podcast. Here we go. This is the Modern CTO Podcast.

(Joel Beasley at 00:00:35) Hello, hello.

(Aria (Aryé Elfenbein) at 00:00:37) Hey, how are you?

(Joel Beasley at 00:00:39) I'm super excited. Do I pronounce your first name Aria?

(Aria (Aryé Elfenbein) at 00:00:43) It's Aryé.

(Joel Beasley at 00:00:44) Aryé. Oh, hi. Exactly. See, my production team, when they spelled it phonetically, I was like, I don't think so. I don't think that's how we're going to say it.

(Aria (Aryé Elfenbein) at 00:00:52) Yeah, it's a bit of an unusual one.

(Joel Beasley at 00:00:55) Are you having a good day?

(Aria (Aryé Elfenbein) at 00:00:56) Having a good day. Yeah, it's a nice day in San Francisco. Having moved here from the East Coast, it's still amazing to me that in January you can just kind of walk outside and not be just completely affected by the cold in the same way. So yeah, it's nice here.

(Joel Beasley at 00:01:18) Yeah, it's cold down here in Florida too. Usually it's hot all year. This is one of the first cold seasons we have. But I just connected a couple dots. Okay, so say again how you pronounce your name.

(Aria (Aryé Elfenbein) at 00:01:27) Aryé.

(Joel Beasley at 00:01:28) Okay, so my daughter's name is Aria, and I have a bunch of friends who are acidic Jews and they're like, oh, you chose a strong male name for your daughter. And I was like, I don't know what you're talking about. I took it from the musical element of Aria.

(Aria (Aryé Elfenbein) at 00:01:42) The Italian music. Yeah.

(Joel Beasley at 00:01:43) Yeah. And so they were like, oh, how's your son? And I'm like, no.

(Aria (Aryé Elfenbein) at 00:01:51) Right. Yeah, it's, there's also a third one, which is more of the kind of Arya that's the, you know, the Aryan race. And I often, you know, many people from India will name their children Arya as well. So there's the Italian one, and mine means lion, which is usually used for a guy, although Ariel or Ariela, it's the same thing and it's the same meaning. It just means lion.

(Joel Beasley at 00:02:19) All right. Strong, strength, lion. I like it. Is that how you feel inside? Is that your inner energy?

(Aria (Aryé Elfenbein) at 00:02:24) Some days.

(Joel Beasley at 00:02:25) Yeah.

(Aria (Aryé Elfenbein) at 00:02:25) Yeah, I think when you, yeah, names are important, you know. When you go through life feeling like you're named after a lion—I know people who are named Zev, which means wolf, or Dov, which means bear—I think you definitely adopt some of these. There's something that you identify with for sure when that's your name.

(Joel Beasley at 00:02:52) And so to try to connect it back, do lions eat salmon? I want to know. So, well, this is not a podcast on the lineages of names and things of that nature. I heard my production team, they were saying, guys, you've got to check this out. They're using technology, and they're making artificial salmon. And maybe we don't like that word. I don't know. But I know nothing about this industry. I got to learn there's this whole cellular agriculture industry, if I'm saying that correctly. And when I saw your website and what you were doing, I thought the brand was beautiful. I thought it was really cool. And I wanted to just talk with you and be like, what are you doing?

(Aria (Aryé Elfenbein) at 00:03:31) Yeah, it's kind of, it's a strange thing to think about. I think for me, it really sort of just started with the question of, do we need animals to have meat? Which is a weird one because we always think about meat as coming from animals. But I think there's a time in every child's life that, you know, they sort of make the connection that when they're eating chicken, for example, that that was a chicken, or when they're eating fish, that that was a fish. And, you know, it's something that we all kind of go through. And we sort of learn to accept that we rely on animals as a source of meat. And I actually grew up in Australia and was traveling there during residency after I'd finished medical school and was thinking about this and all of the advancements that had been made in stem cell technology and how we could use these to, you know, potentially just grow the same thing that we would need to consume, the same meat and seafood, just outside of the animal. And that's where all of this kind of began for me.

(Aria (Aryé Elfenbein) at 00:04:46) So it's kind of a fascinating question. So yes, at Wildtype, that is what we do. We grow seafood and salmon in particular from their cells, but just grow the parts that we would consume. You know, typically in either farmed fish or fish that are caught wild, about half of the fish is typically discarded. You know, these are parts that we don't typically eat—the tails, the fins, the heads, a lot of the internal organs. And so why not just create what we need to?

(Joel Beasley at 00:05:21) That sounds pretty cool. You know, in I think 2011 or '12, so my brother and my stepmom are both physicians.

(Aria (Aryé Elfenbein) at 00:05:29) Oh, okay.

(Joel Beasley at 00:05:29) And so I always get to pull stuff out of technology because I know nothing about the medical stuff. I pull stuff over and then ask them questions and we have good dinner conversations. And I had seen this YouTube video of them printing a liver or a heart. And they had retrofitted this printing machine to print cells and layer them, basic concept. Right? And so my first instinct was frustration. If I'm watching a scientist in a home lab print an organ, why is it that we have shortages on these lists and it's going to take ten years for these things to get approved? Like, let's put a fast-track stamp on that. Right? And then the second thing was like, that's unbelievable how these cells can grow. Because I mean, we're just collections of these cells that are replicating. And so I thought it was absolutely fascinating that you could just grow the part of the salmon that we eat. Like, what does it look like? Are you doing this? By the way, is this already done? Like, have you eaten the salmon?

(Aria (Aryé Elfenbein) at 00:06:35) Yeah, of course. We have, you know, on our website, those pictures are what we have created. And so we work to create the kind of muscle cells and the fat cells and the connective tissue and all the kinds of things that don't sound so appetizing on their own, but they are such an important part of what the whole experience of seafood and salmon in particular is. But you're right. You know, these kinds of technologies really only became a thing within the last decade to fifteen years. I'd say that if there was one thing, one discovery that propelled it further than anything else, it was one that came in around 2006 in a lab in Japan in Kyoto, in the lab of Professor Shinya Yamanaka. And his lab discovered that we could create stem cells from ordinary skin cells. Before then, embryos were the only sources of stem cells. And by stem cell, I mean, these are cells that have two remarkable features. They're able to double faster than any cell in the body, and they can become any cell in the body. They can become a neuron, a liver cell, you know, anything. And so for exactly the reason you're describing in terms of organ transplantation and so forth, this became, now it opened a whole new world of potential for, rather than waiting for donors. If, for example, I would need a new liver at some point, the idea is from one of my skin cells, we grow a new liver, put it back in me, and it's my cells. And we wouldn't need to go on medications to suppress the immune system and all of these things. So yeah, I thought about this a lot in residency. I actually did grad school, did my PhD, mostly in Japan in the same institute that Professor Yamanaka's group was, around the same time, and it was a very, very inspiring moment for me. And then came back to the US and finished med school, and it was in residency that I was sort of thinking about these technologies and what we could do with them beyond the biomedical sciences for food.

(Joel Beasley at 00:08:52) And with your time in Japan, it seems fitting that the picture on your homepage is sushi. Right? That's a lot of your example. Because it's like over there, it's an art. It's a very real thing. You spend years. It was like an underling.

(Aria (Aryé Elfenbein) at 00:09:07) Yeah.

(Joel Beasley at 00:09:07) I saw a very brief documentary type thing on it and I was like, woah, it's like a sacred thing to be a chef over there. And so do you know the one thing that's like would hold me up on this sushi thing or the meat in general?

(Aria (Aryé Elfenbein) at 00:09:23) What is it?

(Joel Beasley at 00:09:24) I just want to be, like, okay, so—

(Aria (Aryé Elfenbein) at 00:09:26) I want to hear it.

(Joel Beasley at 00:09:27) I'm all for it. 100%. I've got a daughter. We talked earlier, Aria.

(Aria (Aryé Elfenbein) at 00:09:31) Yeah.

(Joel Beasley at 00:09:31) And when we drive her to school, to daycare, we drive by cows and horsies, and like, trying to explain to her that's a hamburger. You can kind of feel the tension there. Right? Like, I like meat. That's cool. But it feels hard to explain it to this sweet little girl. Right? And so I'm for it. But everything I've tried is so not close to it. And I know that it's got to progress, but like, how on point is your salmon?

(Aria (Aryé Elfenbein) at 00:10:04) Yeah, no, no, that's a great question. And particularly, you know, for starting a food company, I think it's very different from, let's say, something like software where you can have betas and you can sort of—people will really judge the product based on how it tastes. And it's a very visceral feeling that people have, you know. I will say that some of the challenges that, let's say, the plant-based industry has faced is you're sort of taking plant proteins, breaking them down, and then sort of recreating something that approximates meat and seafood. And that's a very difficult thing, I'd say particularly in the case of something like salmon that has very subtle flavors. Particularly wild caught, you know, just fresh out of the rivers or the ocean. Salmon will have this very elusive kind of flavor, but it is a very subtle one. And so to the advantage we have in creating meat in this way is that we are actually working with the same cells that are growing within salmon to create that salmon meat. And more than just the taste, you know, these cells are programmed to become things like muscle and fat. And it starts with this sort of ultrastructure, the structure of the cells, how they align with each other, how they organize and mature. And from that kind of microscopic level, the wonders of salmon as meat sort of develop. And so, you know, we are still working on figuring out exactly which nutrients the cells love the most to become our favorite cuts of salmon. How do cells decide to become, to take up more fats, for example, or become more lean? And so these are things that we've had to do as part of our R&D in house. And I will say though, it tastes like salmon. It's something that needs to get better, and we are making it better every day. But that's something that I can tell you. And I hope someday very soon you'll be able to try it as well.

(Joel Beasley at 00:12:21) That's what I was asking. I said, hey, did they ship us some salmon? And then we're like, it's early. So I was like, what is it? Like, a million dollars a pound?

(Aria (Aryé Elfenbein) at 00:12:30) Yeah, you know, when we started, if we were to have made, let's say, a pound of salmon in the way that we were doing it, which was a very inefficient system just because we're using the most sort of pure refined pharma-grade ingredients and nutrients for these cells, it probably would have cost something like $400,000 a pound. So that's changed a lot since then, since 2016. But certainly, you know, one of the most important aspects of all of this is reaching a price point that is not just equivalent to salmon, but even at some point below that. You can imagine there's so many inefficiencies of our current system of producing fish and seafood. Not only do we have to either pull the fish out of the water or farm them, usually that sort of starts on land, then goes out to the areas along the coast, and then they have to be harvested and processed and distributed and all these kinds of things. And in the US, a large percentage of the fish that are caught are actually sent offshore, often to places like Asia for processing and then come back to the US. And it's just, you know, insane to think about all of these kinds of issues of traceability and just the inefficiency of all of that. And so for us, you know, we believe eventually we'll have the nutrients in food-grade formulations that we feed the cells the same things that they would be eating in the wild, without some of the toxins and contaminants that we kind of accept as a part of seafood today and get, bring down the costs in those ways.

(Joel Beasley at 00:14:28) Where's the cost at today?

(Aria (Aryé Elfenbein) at 00:14:31) It's still, you know, it's something that changes from week to week. I'd say, you know, around two orders of magnitude less than when we had begun. Still haven't achieved the cost of conventional fish today but are definitely working towards that.

(Joel Beasley at 00:14:48) That is awesome. First of all, I'm very excited. Just seeing it, you know, if you had just said it cut in half in three or four years, like, that would have been awesome. But it cut even more in half. That is very, very exciting. Like, do you feel like a very rich man when you're trying it, when you're eating it?

(Aria (Aryé Elfenbein) at 00:15:08) I, you know, just knowing all of the work that goes into it. And I'd say that, you know, the team that we have at Wildtype is just such a passionate, such hardworking and just wonderful, wonderful people that it's sort of, you know, for me, it's always an appreciation of that more than anything else, more than the actual, you know, cost of what it takes to produce it.

(Joel Beasley at 00:15:40) Nice. You're good with words. I like you already. Okay. So I'm curious because I'm an entrepreneur. I own a business. You do as well. When we talk about cost of salmon, are you taking the entire cost, like, operationally of your existence and dividing that by how much is produced? Or are you talking about the cost of the goods to actually create it?

(Aria (Aryé Elfenbein) at 00:16:03) Yeah, that's a great question. You know, when we do our cost estimates, typically, we'll leave the, you know, CapEx is one thing. And we'll look at all of the cost drivers to actually produce it once those, you know, CapEx expenses are accounted for. In other words, just assuming that we have the equipment and so forth.

(Aria (Aryé Elfenbein) at 00:16:26) So for that, it's things like, what are the inputs? What are the utilities that go into sort of keeping these things going? I'd say that the inputs, and in particular labor, which maybe, you know, startups at early stages like ours often don't account for, but that labor is the one that, you know, ultimately, as we sort of increase the scale of production, those efficiencies of scale will help to reduce those costs. So it really is labor, the various inputs. And by inputs, I mean things like the nutrition that we feed the cells with.

(Aria (Aryé Elfenbein) at 00:17:05) These are, you know, just things like proteins, fats, sugars, the same kinds of things that a fish or any organism requires. And then, you know, the way that we grow them is similar to a kind of like a brewery type system. And so if you can imagine, you know, these sort of very, very similar to what we know of in the fermentation industry. And that's often a model we use to sort of, you know, think about what scaling looks like. And so that's really sort of how we calculate the costs.

(Joel Beasley at 00:17:42) Is it at a point today where you could take, like, you could take a seasoned cut of this fish cooked, seasoned, and swap it out on someone's plate at a restaurant and they wouldn't know the difference?

(Aria (Aryé Elfenbein) at 00:17:55) I don't think so. Because when we say seasoned cut, that often means something, you know, like a salmon steak. And that level of complexity is one that I believe we will achieve but have not yet achieved. And I think that if you were to look at a spectrum from, you know, at the sort of one end, it's kind of like minced salmon that you would, you know, have, like, in a spicy salmon roll, for example. And on the other end of the spectrum is like your finest salmon steak that is, you know, just absolutely perfect in every way.

(Aria (Aryé Elfenbein) at 00:18:28) I'd say that most startups in our space and us included have not yet achieved that, you know, kind of like amazing, super complex salmon steak. And so I, you know, bet when it comes to maybe less complex cuts, like what you'd see on a in different maki or nigiri type of preparations or even smoked salmon on a bagel. We've done this and, you know, just kind of with us. And it really tastes very, very similar. It's more similar than not.

(Aria (Aryé Elfenbein) at 00:19:12) I think that there's still some things that if you sort of, you know, look very closely, the cells have just grown in a different environment. And so they grow, you know, a little bit differently. Those are things that we're working to sort of make closer and closer to what you have in the wild and just sort of encouraging the cells to do the same thing that they would within a salmon. But we've gotten pretty far in terms of, you know, that kind of comparison. And, you know, importantly, I think that the nutrition is a really critical component of all of this.

(Aria (Aryé Elfenbein) at 00:19:50) One of the reasons why, so I'm, you know, I'm a cardiologist and, you know, still work in the intensive care unit and think about the health benefits of these kinds of things. And wanted to create a product that is, you know, a rich source of protein, of omega-three fatty acids, and, you know, just generally for whatever that this term means is sort of good for you, is at least, you know, nutritious. And then, of course, free of the things that we were talking about, like mercury, microplastics, and all of these other, you know, things that exist in seafood today. And so it's not only do we think that reaching equivalence in terms of the sensory aspects is important, but also the nutritional equivalence is something that we strive for.

(Joel Beasley at 00:20:39) Yeah. I love the fact that you remove the pollutant concept from it. Right? You don't remove pollutants from it. I meant from, like, the life cycle of we usually fear where we're fishing based off of potential contaminants.

(Joel Beasley at 00:20:53) But what you do is you get these, like, best of breed salmon cells. Right. And then you produce you, like, amplify those.

(Aria (Aryé Elfenbein) at 00:21:01) Exactly. Yeah. That's exactly what it is. And, you know, things like mercury should never be found in our fish. Things like arsenic and, you know, like, there's no reason why that should be there.

(Aria (Aryé Elfenbein) at 00:21:15) And so to be able to create a product with all of the same nutritional benefits and without all of those, you know, I'd say more deleterious kind of, you know, consequences of these contaminants is, I think, one of the greatest things that our industry can offer.

(Joel Beasley at 00:21:32) Are you gonna take, like, a Tesla? Like, I'm kinda seeing you as the Elon Musk of salmon.

(Aria (Aryé Elfenbein) at 00:21:40) I like that.

(Joel Beasley at 00:21:41) Yeah. And we'll say that the salmon steak is your Mars. Right? You're gonna get the whole team to go there. But do you, when will it be out? Like, do you have a price point? Like, are you going to take that concept that Musk did where he puts out like a luxury car first that helps pave the way the more affluent people will be able to purchase it that will then drive the adoption of it? And finally, the ultimate goal is low cost salmon for everybody that's extremely healthy like his with the cars. Are you going to release it soon or?

(Aria (Aryé Elfenbein) at 00:22:13) So there are a lot of similarities in terms of that model. Ultimately, our goal is to have a meaningful, you know, environmental impact and one on, you know, food security. There's just the population of this Earth, you know, is just growing and the demand for meat and seafood is just increasing so much that our current ways of producing meat and seafood and in particular for seafood, you know, we've overfished most of, you know, our conventional fish stocks. Fish farming on its own has been shown to be not really a sustainable practice in many cases, although there have been many improvements that have been made since the early days. And so what we see is, you know, is another source of this kind of food that we love.

(Aria (Aryé Elfenbein) at 00:23:07) And by the way, I think there should always be a market for sustainably fished, you know, salmon. If, you know, people are true stewards of our oceans and care about the numbers of fish that they pull out of the water, and this is a, you know, a great, nutritious product, I think those people should be able to charge a real premium for those kinds of fish and it should be, you know, to cost much more. But for us, yes, we want to have that relatively inexpensive but very high quality product that's available to everybody. And so to get there, you know, obviously, you know, there's an initial release, and I'll sort of, you know, talk about that in a second to your question. But the path, you know, is one where, at least in the beginning, the amount that we're able to produce is going to be somewhat limited.

(Aria (Aryé Elfenbein) at 00:24:00) And so for that reason, we want to begin with restaurants. And when we think about restaurants versus, you know, supermarkets, and so restaurants are the place that we'd want to begin. For one reason, we're kind of co-building this with a lot of the chefs and restaurateurs that we've worked with. We've been able to pull together a really interesting community of, you know, these food creatives and love hearing the insights of, you know, how does this taste and what for, like, preparation would this work really well, what is not great about it. This is some of our greatest lessons we've learned just by, you know, handing the sample to a chef.

(Aria (Aryé Elfenbein) at 00:24:41) It's been some of the most humbling moments as well when our product, you know, in the early days in particular, didn't perform very well. But that's also part of, you know, kind of explaining the story of how this is created, of what this is because it's such a different source of foods that I think people sometimes, you know, it's not a is this a veggie like imitation? Is this like what exactly is it? And I think that, you know, just sort of releasing it in supermarkets for that reason probably isn't the best. But there's one aspect that I wanted to talk about about the timing, which is for such a new product like this, I think that what's super important, especially in a place like the US, is people's perceptions around safety.

(Aria (Aryé Elfenbein) at 00:25:35) And so the regulatory component, what do you call this even? How is it regulated? What kinds of safety studies, you know, do we do to ensure the safety? These are the kinds of conversations we're now having with regulators. And in particular for us, it's the FDA.

(Aria (Aryé Elfenbein) at 00:25:53) For other types of meats, it's actually USDA and FDA. And that's been a fascinating process to think about food safety in the same way that these regulators do. And it's been a really just actually a very enriching conversation that we've had, thinking through these things. But the bottom line is we don't know, you know, when, how, even if this type of product will be approved for sale in the United States. And so that's something that we never set a, you know, like, publicly talk about a date because I think we need to be just cognizant of the fact that it's not entirely in our control.

(Joel Beasley at 00:26:36) Oh, yeah. So give me an example. Let's talk about not your company. Let's talk about the industry. Like, when do you foresee some of the first commercially a bit like when do you foresee it that I could go into a restaurant and maybe not all other restaurants but like some of the nicer restaurants or some of the sushi restaurants, they would have some of this material or some of the salmon, like, normally. Like, is that in, like, five years? Like

(Aria (Aryé Elfenbein) at 00:27:03) Yeah. I think it's less than five years. And then, actually, Eat Just, which is another company in our space here in San Francisco, actually received regulatory approval in Singapore and made the first sale of this type of product. They made chicken nuggets. And from what I understand, it's actually, you know, just on the menu now at this one restaurant in Singapore.

(Aria (Aryé Elfenbein) at 00:27:25) And so I think we're closer than five years, you know, assuming that regulatory issues are not a hurdle here. I think we'll start to see this in, you know, a handful of restaurants within the next couple of years.

(Joel Beasley at 00:27:38) You know, it's amazing what we were able to do with COVID when with regulatory. I can't even say it. Regulation. We were able to just kinda, like, whoop, you know, and get stuff going. And I was talking even during the pandemic, I was talking to David Blair. So he is the CTO of this company called Andela. And they

(Aria (Aryé Elfenbein) at 00:27:54) Oh, yeah. Yeah.

(Joel Beasley at 00:27:55) They do, like, engineering teams are backed by, like, Zuckerberg and that foundation and everything. But they've specialized because they went into Africa, which was an emerging market. They got all these people together, train them on developers, engineers, open up these, like, schools. It was a really cool thing how they were helping the world and they're a fantastic company. I got the way I found out about them was I got a bunch of recommendations of people telling me that they use them and to go check them out and then

(Aria (Aryé Elfenbein) at 00:28:18) I was like,

(Joel Beasley at 00:28:19) oh, let's have them on the show. But they're changing the world out there. Right? You guys are changing the world out there. And I was just curious because we were talking about population growth on that episode with Africa emerging and basically millions of people getting electricity and coming online, we kinda take that for granted.

(Joel Beasley at 00:28:35) Like, in our everyday life, we just imagine that everybody kinda has a cell phone and the Internet, but large swaths of our I think it was, like, 50% of the world doesn't have Internet. Pretty crazy. But these people coming online, growing their populations and the earth growing, like, do you run these types of calculations as far as, like, how many people there are versus how many fish we need? And maybe there comes a day when it is so in demand that we need to feed the people that the regulations get sped up. Is that, like, something that's on your mind at all?

(Aria (Aryé Elfenbein) at 00:29:06) Yeah. I mean, you know, there are reports every year put out by the World Health Organization by, you know, the Food and Agriculture, the FAO. These are about the state of our fisheries and where in particular, there are many communities that depend on fishing and are really struggling, not just from a nutritional perspective, but certainly also from an economic perspective. And these numbers are out there and are constantly sort of being updated. And they are increasingly, not to be a total downer, but they're increasingly becoming more and more dire.

(Aria (Aryé Elfenbein) at 00:29:48) And so when I, after moving to San Francisco, and I had met my co-founder Justin almost ten years ago. He was actually at the business school when I was a resident, and he sort of really sees things in this way of food insecurity, the actual eventual costs of meat and seafood over time versus the populations. And this is something that from this sort of like scientific, more technical perspective of mine and his, we've really influenced the way that each of us sort of sees the world. And this is something that I think about all of the time now. It's hard to imagine, you know, when we're such a small company right now, of only 20 of us, you know, that thinking about massive impact.

(Aria (Aryé Elfenbein) at 00:30:33) But I do think that this is the future in terms of having healthy, sustainable, and relatively accessible, high quality protein sources for the world.

(Joel Beasley at 00:30:45) Yeah. The future's happening even faster now. Like, before you could see a technology, you'd watch it. There was one report. You would watch it mature over ten years.

(Joel Beasley at 00:30:53) It would kinda start to come into something, then it would come out, and then it would take another decade to even spread across. Now things are coming out, refining, improve like, I was just talking the other day about, like, they're storing data inside of DNA.

(Aria (Aryé Elfenbein) at 00:31:07) Right. Yeah. It's fascinating. It is fascinating. You know, another great example of that is obviously the vaccine, the two vaccines that are currently approved in the US.

(Aria (Aryé Elfenbein) at 00:31:18) And, you know, that particular technology of messenger RNA as a therapeutic is what I worked on before starting Wild Type. And it's what brought me to San Francisco. I was working at UCSF on cardiac therapeutics that were RNA based. And I, you know, as I mentioned, I still work in the ICU. And so I was, felt very lucky to have, to receive the vaccine.

(Aria (Aryé Elfenbein) at 00:31:45) And it was a very, it was a very emotional moment for me. It was this, you know, I couldn't believe that this thing that I had worked on and, you know, was not a single therapeutic anywhere. No trials had been run just a few years ago. Now, with two, you know, companies had run simultaneous safety and efficacy studies and was, you know, our best chance at defeating this pandemic. It's incredible how quickly some of these things happen when people are really focused on just, you know, achieving that.

(Aria (Aryé Elfenbein) at 00:32:23) Yeah. It's you're right. That the future happens. I feel like the future comes to us faster now.

(Joel Beasley at 00:32:29) Yeah. And I think vaccines are a good topic conversation to talk about, like, fear too.

(Aria (Aryé Elfenbein) at 00:32:34) Mhmm.

(Joel Beasley at 00:32:34) Because I was gonna ask about fear in relation to you presenting salmon, like, whether it's to people or the corporations that fish and all of that. But with the mRNA stuff, what was interesting to me was, you know, there's the world kinda splits. Right? And we're working on unification right now. But when the world

(Joel Beasley at 00:32:53) Kinda splits, it's like, okay. Well, there's a lot of, you know, upset people. Right? And even intra family things. Right?

(Joel Beasley at 00:33:00) And so, I'm a nerd. So I was like, let's go research this. Like, I go PubMed and check it out. Right?

(Joel Beasley at 00:33:06) Yeah. And so I started getting as geeky as I could. And when I found out how the mRNA concept works, where normal vaccines actually have a version of the virus in it, but this is the signature of it, so they don't even have to manufacture the virus to produce this.

(Joel Beasley at 00:33:24) Just those small concepts that I could understand, I was like, this is a brilliant breakthrough. And then so I was hanging out with my brother who's a really, really great doctor too. I unfortunately found him on Healthgrades. I was like, you're one of the best rated doctors in our city. I was like, that sucks. I was hoping to make fun of you because we're brothers, right?

(Aria (Aryé Elfenbein) at 00:33:45) Right. Of course. Yeah. Of course.

(Joel Beasley at 00:33:47) I give him a hard time. Yeah. Yep. And so I have a lot of respect for him. I actually went and bought his name as a domain.

(Aria (Aryé Elfenbein) at 00:33:53) I love it.

(Joel Beasley at 00:33:55) It'll be worth more money in ten years. So I asked him. I was like, yeah, I think the technology is really cool. But everything I read made me think that this was the first time they've used mRNA technology. And so he corrected me. He said, no, no, no. They used to use it in A, B, and C or they have used it previously in these other things over here. It's just not like widespread use. And so for me, that was actually pretty interesting information because I'm always hesitant as an early adopter when it comes to things like health.

(Joel Beasley at 00:34:27) I'll early adopt technology all day. But the way the articles I was reading made me feel like the mRNA was a brand new technology that was just now created just for this. And it is not. It is something that existed and is already currently—you call it therapeutics—already in therapeutics and things like that. And so that made me feel a lot better about it.

(Aria (Aryé Elfenbein) at 00:34:46) Yeah. And, you know, I guess I wish that there was just more of that kind of dialogue. I don't know how to foster that sometimes. Because I think that a skepticism or an initial just suspicion or just wanting more information is great. It's healthy. It's what science is based on.

(Aria (Aryé Elfenbein) at 00:35:07) You know, it's just not taking what somebody else says as the truth and just looking for other arguments to support or not support that. And it's, that's one of the things that's just been, I think, over time, as we see in this particular case more people get vaccinated, that the sort of same number of adverse events are just on par with what all of our vaccines currently are, and that people will develop a sense of trust. And I think it's, you know, that's natural. But I do wish that there was just more of this kind of like, is this really a new technology? Like, how has this been studied?

(Aria (Aryé Elfenbein) at 00:35:52) What truly are the concerns when we think about using a vaccine like this for the first time? It's probably different from—the scientists probably have different, or the physicians have different, ideas of what might be problematic about it than others might. And so I think that just, yeah, more of this kind of conversation is what we need.

(Joel Beasley at 00:36:17) And we need more nutrients. Because I was watching this Origin series, and they were explaining to us how some of the nutrients actually improved our brain and our cognitive abilities. And you mentioned that several times. So there's truth to that?

(Aria (Aryé Elfenbein) at 00:36:30) Nutrients in general, I think just like anything else, it's probably more in the details and how much, you know, which ones and what doses and so forth. But certainly I think that when it comes to the evolution of our brains and certain nutrients have been critically important in being able to create these kinds of complex networks and so forth that have given us the intelligence that we have. Still more intelligence that we need, but...

(Joel Beasley at 00:37:04) Well, yeah. I was driving yesterday, and I was actually thinking about that. There's a spectrum of intelligence and we kind of are always default because there's so much input. Our brains are trained to focus down on our small communities, our families and things like that. But, you know, sometimes I'll do volunteering stuff or get to experience the spectrum that is humanity.

(Joel Beasley at 00:37:27) And it's just, it's amazing. And so when I then go watch a documentary on how nutrients impacted our evolution and our abilities to think critically or control emotions, and then I can go out into public and I can see a spectrum of people of all shapes and sizes. I can just see the variety. And it's so interesting because I just, I don't know, whoever created this game, whatever's going on here with life, I think it's absolutely fascinating. I don't mean to get too far...

(Aria (Aryé Elfenbein) at 00:37:56) No, I'm actually glad you said that. You know, it's, it's one of the—I think it's exactly what you just said is probably the reason that I've stayed with medicine throughout this. And even if, you know, I'm not working in the hospital nearly as much as, you know, I was during residency. As you can imagine, Wildtype is, you know, feels like three full-time jobs. But it feels like a really special place to be in, you know, in the hospital and particularly to be part of patients' lives in this way and to feel part of that humanity that you're describing. And it's a really amazing thing. It's why I went into medicine in the first place.

(Joel Beasley at 00:38:46) It's amazing how adaptable we are across social structures and all types of boundaries. I can connect with pretty much anyone who can have a conscious conversation.

(Aria (Aryé Elfenbein) at 00:38:57) Yeah. Isn't that amazing that, you know, and what's always amazing to us more than that is, you know, we imagine that there's something about growing up in, let's say, the US or something. But these are things that if you're put in another country, in a completely different cultural context, in a totally different part of the world, these things really are universal. And we can, you know, create these very deep bonds of just, you know, understanding with pretty much anyone. It's fascinating to me as well. I'm so glad you said that.

(Joel Beasley at 00:39:34) Yeah. When I started, I got the first opportunities to travel internationally. You have this whole, before you get to do that, you have this whole mental image of what it might be or what you've heard and everything. And then you go there and you're like, this is just like over there.

(Aria (Aryé Elfenbein) at 00:39:49) Right.

(Joel Beasley at 00:39:50) Right. There's more in common than there are different things. I mean, over there, we've got people in our city that speak multiple languages. Over here, there's people that speak—the food is different, but there's some really great stuff and there's some stuff I already know. It's just amazing how, you know, I really think that this act of—we're in this sort of technological puberty right now where we basically all just turned on at the same time and are learning how to be mature with that.

(Joel Beasley at 00:40:20) But I'm—

(Aria (Aryé Elfenbein) at 00:40:22) It's a great analogy. I like that. Yeah.

(Joel Beasley at 00:40:25) That's what I feel like we're in.

(Aria (Aryé Elfenbein) at 00:40:26) Yeah. It's true. I wonder what a more sort of mature version of us incorporating technology in our lives will look like in the future. Hopefully a more mature and not, you know, an even more rebellious teenager doing more destructive things.

(Joel Beasley at 00:40:44) I think—growing—I don't like the way it sounds. I don't like the sentence "growing meat in labs." We have to find a better way to say that, right?

(Aria (Aryé Elfenbein) at 00:40:53) Nobody likes that.

(Joel Beasley at 00:40:55) Nobody likes that. Nobody likes it. But, uh, how about not slaughtering animals? I'm cool with that. You know, nobody likes the sound.

(Joel Beasley at 00:41:03) If you talk—I've been experimenting with this since I knew you were coming on the show. I'll be around friends or in some setting or something and I'll say something along the lines of, oh yeah, you don't like the sound of me saying I shot a cow in the head with a bolt gun and cooked it and ate it, but eat hamburgers. We kind of find this way to bifurcate what the action is and what we're doing so that it's like diffused responsibility. And, but I also struggle with my internal stuff. I feel like I'd have no problem hunting. It would not be a great moment. It would not be an exciting moment to have to kill, but to kill and prepare the animal, you would honor the animal and you would do that. I'm okay with that, but at the same time it's like if we don't have to do that. If you can produce something that's indistinguishable in a more economical way or in an equally economical way or even in an unequally economical way—if you could just produce it—it's the texture, man. That's what it is.

(Joel Beasley at 00:42:06) Yeah. Aryé? It's the texture. If you can give me the texture and the taste, everyone would be on board. I don't—there's nobody that's gonna be like, oh, now I love the fact that when I hunt wild animals, I have to get my own meat tested that I cook because I don't know if those specific deer have this issue. The hunters would even like it, you know?

(Aria (Aryé Elfenbein) at 00:42:24) Yeah. It's true. I mean, you know, when social scientists have asked people, what is it that you like about meat? For the overwhelming majority of people, it's not the fact that it comes from a dead animal. That's not what people like about meat.

(Aria (Aryé Elfenbein) at 00:42:42) They like how it tastes. They like the sort of, you know, cultural aspects of it. They like what it represents. There are all kinds of things, the nutrition, all of these things. And so you're right. We were very good at kind of isolating ourselves from the whole process of what it takes to harvest meat. I think in your case of, you know, hunting for your own meat, I think hunters probably appreciate the meat they have much more because of just everything that goes into hunting an animal. And I totally agree. But I'm curious actually, because you said nobody likes the sound of lab-grown meat. And from the beginning of this industry, we actually haven't really been able to come up with a great way to, a great name for it, a great kind of, you know, cellular agriculture.

(Aria (Aryé Elfenbein) at 00:43:33) That sounds really abstract. Sounds nice, but what does that really mean? And anything that says cells, I don't know how appetizing that is. Right? And then people have looked at, well, we have plant-based, which was basically a word that was created because of the negative connotations with veganism.

(Aria (Aryé Elfenbein) at 00:43:50) And so anything that was sort of vegan, people wanted another way to say, this is—and so now we have plant-based, which, you know, sounds great. And so the way of distinguishing our industry of actually growing sort of real meat in this way was to call it cell-based. But there are a lot of problems with that because everything is made of cells. Plants are made of cells. So anything that's plant-based is also sort of cell-based.

(Aria (Aryé Elfenbein) at 00:44:15) And so I'm curious. What do you think a good word would be for this?

(Joel Beasley at 00:44:21) By the way, this is my favorite thing in the world right now. Coming up with names and stuff. Oh, yeah.

(Aria (Aryé Elfenbein) at 00:44:26) We need your help.

(Joel Beasley at 00:44:27) I'm gonna work on it. I don't think I can give it to you on the spot, but I've got—I'm gonna see—right after this. Right? I'm going home, grabbing the cooler, picking up the kids from school, and we're going to drive across the state to see a rocket launch. Oh, wow. We're gonna camp out there tonight and it's gonna launch in the morning.

(Aria (Aryé Elfenbein) at 00:44:43) Oh, amazing.

(Joel Beasley at 00:44:45) Yeah. Yeah. So on the drive, I'm gonna put this to work in the back of my mind because this is a problem that needs to be solved. It's, uh, we just need to come up with the phrase that people are okay with and they're willing to give it a shot.

(Aria (Aryé Elfenbein) at 00:44:57) Right. I imagine it might be in the future something that is some new term, you know, something that people haven't used previously that now people start to understand what this is. You know, this was a big problem with the dairy industry—they really objected to the use of, you know, almond milk because almonds don't produce milk. Right? I don't know if you're familiar with it.

(Joel Beasley at 00:45:22) Oh, I am.

(Aria (Aryé Elfenbein) at 00:45:23) Yeah. Okay. Okay. I mean, the legal cases behind it, this is just fascinating to me. But the extent to which this became an issue is more fascinating.

(Aria (Aryé Elfenbein) at 00:45:37) And so I think that this will be something very, very similar. You know, if this is nutritionally the same, structurally, under a microscope looks the same, has the same DNA as fish, in every single way, is actually the same, but it's just created in a different way. How can it not be called salmon? Right? But I think, you know, people just have this idea that in order for it to be salmon, it needs to come from a salmon.

(Joel Beasley at 00:46:06) So it does. You're just amplifying the salmon cell. You're amplifying existing cells. Right? You're not manufacturing the base cells. You're amplifying existing ones, right? Or cloning them to some degree.

(Aria (Aryé Elfenbein) at 00:46:14) Exactly. We start with cells from a salmon. So that's—but that's still of, you know, an open debate, and you can imagine that there are groups of people who want to portray this as not real meat or not real salmon or not real seafood. And yet, I think, you know, ultimately, what we want is just transparency for customers to know what it is, how it was made, what it has, what it doesn't have, you know, things like that. And, um, but it's tough.

(Aria (Aryé Elfenbein) at 00:46:48) You need to have a whole hour-long conversation like this to sometimes explore that. And when it's on a restaurant menu, you know, that opportunity often doesn't exist.

(Joel Beasley at 00:46:57) Yeah. There's definitely a couple ways to do it that are running through my head. But, yeah, I ran—in our prep meeting, they extensively explained to me the battle that is the milk and there's billboards. There's billboards that say, not milk is not milk, that I was told about.

(Joel Beasley at 00:47:17) And then I was like, what is almond milk? And I'm gonna put this on Jake. This is not me. Jake said it's nut juice. And then we laughed for—I don't know if we'll cut this out, but we couldn't—I was like, that's what it's called.

(Joel Beasley at 00:47:36) But I think—for you—I mean, it's salmon cells. I think it's gonna be something really simple. You know, you're probably gonna take a word people already love and attach to it and do a lot of branding. I see one thing, the leader, whoever leads this revolution inside of your current competitive—I don't know if it's competitive. You said there was a couple other companies.

(Joel Beasley at 00:47:58) But if anyone else is doing salmon, whoever the brand name is would take over. So when I go to the store, oh, I want the Wildtype salmon. Right? And then it would just become ubiquitous and people would understand that and it would be a brand thing. You don't say I want a Tesla car. You say I want a Tesla.

(Aria (Aryé Elfenbein) at 00:48:14) Right. And, you know, we've seen that with other—you know, if you look at the Beyond Burger and Impossible Foods, people don't ask for the Beyond plant-based patty. Right? It's just the Beyond Burger or the Impossible Burger, and that's kind of what it is. You're right.

(Aria (Aryé Elfenbein) at 00:48:31) You know, branding ultimately will be what it is. But from the standpoint of regulation, again, this is something that just becomes an issue of consumer transparency, which we really believe strongly in, and I think is an important one. But it's just one we haven't really achieved the consensus yet.

(Joel Beasley at 00:48:53) Yeah, that's where the brand doesn't work when it—right, you have to have an industry term that everybody in the industry holds on to, because then it would become—so you'd probably pick something like curated salmon, or you would—what I would do if there's naming exercises and branding—

(Aria (Aryé Elfenbein) at 00:49:09) And marketing. Yeah, yeah.

(Joel Beasley at 00:49:09) It's what I do. I'd look at your manufacturing process, look at what you guys actually do, see pictures of it, listen and understand and read about it, and then just kind of start writing down words and figure out—there'll be something that'll come together through that process. And that's typically how I do naming.

(Aria (Aryé Elfenbein) at 00:49:28) Yeah. I, you know, to some extent, those exercises have been done, but I still feel like this is an elusive question of how to do it right. But—

(Joel Beasley at 00:49:43) Are there other people doing salmon?

(Aria (Aryé Elfenbein) at 00:49:46) There are certainly at least two or three other companies working on seafood. I don't know to what extent salmon is—you know, when we began, there were probably four, maybe five other companies in the world working on this. And now the number is more than 50, and that's just in the last four years, which is great. You know, so many people working on this problem.

(Aria (Aryé Elfenbein) at 00:50:12) And I don't see it as competition because none of us—there's no product on the market except the chicken nugget that I was describing. So we're all kind of just trying to make the best products and work together at, you know, for the transparency of regulation at this stage. But it's been great to see this sort of really flourish into its own industry. There are now companies that are starting specifically to address some of the individual issues of scaling for companies like ours to support the industry, which is really heartening and just, I think, a wonderful thing.

(Joel Beasley at 00:50:54) What did the chicken nugget people do to get through regulatory? Like, how did they refer to their chicken nuggets?

(Aria (Aryé Elfenbein) at 00:51:00) Yeah, I think it was cultivated meat is what—but I'm not sure. You might have to check. But I think that's the term that they used when they were working with the government in Singapore.

(Joel Beasley at 00:51:14) That doesn't sound bad. That's some of the—curated salmon. It's just, you know, curated meat. Yeah. If you could make it shorter, I think curated is better than—I mean, because you're curating, you're putting the things together.

(Aria (Aryé Elfenbein) at 00:51:26) Yeah. Actually like that.

(Joel Beasley at 00:51:28) Nature putting it—

(Aria (Aryé Elfenbein) at 00:51:28) Together. Yeah.

(Joel Beasley at 00:51:30) I mean, it's what you're doing. You're curating these cells, and you're curating salmon.

(Aria (Aryé Elfenbein) at 00:51:34) Yeah.

(Joel Beasley at 00:51:35) It's not deceptive by any means. I mean, it's—definition technically correct what you're doing.

(Aria (Aryé Elfenbein) at 00:51:42) I really like that one.

(Joel Beasley at 00:51:43) Yep. There you go.

(Aria (Aryé Elfenbein) at 00:51:44) That's great.

(Joel Beasley at 00:51:45) I'll send an invoice your way.

(Aria (Aryé Elfenbein) at 00:51:47) Yep. Yep. Awesome.

(Joel Beasley at 00:51:49) No, this is great. I've got one last question, and it should have been one of the first questions. Do you have software developers or technology or computer systems? You mentioned a brewery type setup. What sort of technology, even if it's lab equipment—what sort of geeky technology exists at your company?

(Aria (Aryé Elfenbein) at 00:52:08) Oh, yeah. So a lot of it is around the biological sciences. So it's things—it's ways to analyze a lot of the data that comes from just studying ourselves. So that can be everything from which nutrients are they using and systems that are used to measure that, to when we look at very large datasets of basically sequencing the genome of ourselves to make sure that there aren't any irregularities or any problems. You know, these are often very, very large datasets that we will use a variety of different software to help us analyze.

(Aria (Aryé Elfenbein) at 00:52:47) I'd say those are the main—I mean, you know, for the cultivators or the sort of fermenters that we use, there's always little sort of control towers that have their own, often proprietary, software to control everything from the pH, the temperature, the rotational speed, and so forth. So that's, you know, those are—I think that's a pretty good sort of summary of the type of IT infrastructure that we need to do the research that we do.

(Joel Beasley at 00:53:25) Nice. You put a sign up. This is curation center instead of lab.

(Aria (Aryé Elfenbein) at 00:53:29) Right. Yeah, yeah. No, I—we don't call it the lab, and, you know, it's like—I think for the same—but, you know, a lot of foods actually start in a lab. Like, Doritos started in a lab, you know. And I wouldn't—

(Joel Beasley at 00:53:43) Pair yourself up with Doritos.

(Aria (Aryé Elfenbein) at 00:53:44) Right, right. Well, beer also.

(Joel Beasley at 00:53:46) Right. Exactly. Beer. Okay. Beer works.

(Aria (Aryé Elfenbein) at 00:53:49) Yeah. Beer works. Excellent point.

(Joel Beasley at 00:53:52) Oh, man. This is so great. This is—we made a podcast. How do you feel?

(Aria (Aryé Elfenbein) at 00:53:57) Joel, I feel great. This was awesome. It's just really fun. We should do this every week.

(Joel Beasley at 00:54:04) For sure. I'm gonna put on my calendar to catch up with you next year. I'm gonna say—I want you to be massively successful. So anything we can do to help, just let us know.

(Aria (Aryé Elfenbein) at 00:54:15) That's so kind. Thank you so much.

(Joel Beasley at 00:54:17) Alright. You have a fantastic day.

(Aria (Aryé Elfenbein) at 00:54:19) You too. Take care.

(Joel Beasley at 00:54:23) Thank you so much for listening. And if you found this episode useful, please share it with a friend or colleague who you think would get value from it. And if you have topics that you would like to hear discussed on the podcast, either add me on LinkedIn or send me an email: [email protected]. Every time I get an email or LinkedIn message, it absolutely makes my day and inspires me to keep going.