Artificial meat is harder than artificial intelligence — Lewis Bollard

Today I'm chatting with Lewis Bollard, who is the Farm Animal Welfare program director at Open Philanthropy. Open Philanthropy is the biggest charity in this animal welfare space. Lewis, thanks so much for coming on the podcast.

First question: At some point, we'll have AGI. How do you think about the problem you're trying to solve? Are you trying to make conditions more tolerable for the next 10 years until AI solves this problem for us? Or is there some reason to think that the interventions we're making in terms of improvements, like in-ovo sexing or cage-free eggs, will have an impact beyond this transformative moment?

The end of factory farming is far from inevitable. Every year, we're factory-farming about 2% more animals globally.

There are 2 possible trajectories we could go down. One is the trajectory that we have been on for the last century, which is that technology has made factory farming ever more efficient, resulting in ever more animals being abused in ever more intensive ways. There is a trajectory where we reduce the number of animals on factory farms, where we reduce the suffering of each of those animals.

Even if we get AGI, I am really optimistic that that will accelerate forms of technological progress. It will bring us better alternative proteins, and it will improve humane technology. But there are still huge cultural and political obstacles to alternatives.

The cultural obstacle is that most people want real meat. Most people already have the option of plant-based meat that tastes about as good as real meat.

Does it? I don't know. This is a debate.

That's fair. This is a debate. But I don't think that's the only obstacle that people have. There are a lot of people who say, “I'm just not interested in the alternative. I want the real thing.”

Then there's also the political obstacle. Let's say that AGI solves cultivated meat for us. Cultivated meat is already illegal in 7 US states. It might soon be illegal in the entire European Union. By the time we get AGI, will they even be able to sell it anywhere?

Again, there's a huge amount of good that technology can do in this space. I'm optimistic that AGI can accelerate that hugely. But at the same time, we should prepare for the significant possibility that AGI does not end factory farming.

This is an incredibly efficient system that has persisted through all kinds of technological changes and could persist through this technological change.

What is it that makes it so efficient?

The basic efficiency is that the animal—and the chicken in particular—has evolved over a very long time to be a being that can take in a relatively small amount of grain and convert it very efficiently into a form of protein that people like to eat.

The feed-conversion ratio for chickens—the amount of grain you put in to get meat out—is 2×. That grain is incredibly cheap. The rest of the production process is incredibly cheap because they've removed everything that costs money: treating animals well, providing comfort, and all that stuff. They've just gotten rid of it all.

They've gotten down to the point where it's insanely cheap. You're trying to beat the price of grain times 2, plus a few extra costs. That is actually a really hard target to meet. That's why factory-farmed chicken is so insanely cheap today.

Maybe an intuition pump here: We've been spending on the order of hundreds of billions of dollars a year in order to replicate human intelligence. Human intelligence has been developing—it depends on when you start counting intelligence as having started evolving—for on the order of hundreds of millions to tens of millions of years. Evolution has been trying to optimize for this intelligence thing, and we've had to spend all this effort in order to replicate it.

Converting calories into meat has been something that evolution has been optimizing for billions of years. Everything from the immune system to growth factors to delivering nutrition, texture, or whatever—this is what evolution is working on the entire time. So it makes sense why this is actually such a tough problem.

Are you ready to throw some cold water on your friends? How far away is cultivated meat actually?

It completely depends on what we do from here. It also depends on what you mean by cultivated meat.

There are companies right now that are selling cultivated meat in very small volumes at very high price points, which is incredible. The challenge from here is how to scale that and bring the price point down to compete with the incredibly low price point of factory-farmed chicken.

How long it takes to get there, and indeed whether we get there, really depends on what happens from here. We are not on a path right now when it comes to the amount of venture-capital funding available and the current startups available. We're not on a path to reach cultivated meat that is cheaper than factory-farmed chicken.

Ever?

It depends. It's contingent on AGI and contingent on what happens with AGI. I wouldn't rule it out, but I don't think it's the default path. I don't think it's the most likely outcome.

Eventually, we'll have nanotech or whatever. At that point, raising chickens can't be the thing to do.

You would think nanotech, bringing robotics in, and all these things would solve it. But unless the cost of all those things goes down to close to zero, chickens are just going to be so insanely cheap.

Maybe.

It is totally possible that these AGI technologies introduce incredible new proteins that help solve this problem for us. But I don't think we should rely on it.

First, they might not be able to solve some of these problems to the point that it is as cheap as chicken. But second, you still have these cultural and political barriers.

The reason I think this is a very interesting example is because whenever people think about the use of technology to improve animal welfare, they're thinking about cultivated meat, lab meat, and so on. They're thinking about these extremely far-off solutions.

Then it makes sense why people who are especially concerned about this space—the first thought is not to just find ways to make the existing regime more tolerable, but to come up with some moonshot that changes the whole paradigm.

If you look at how much VC investment is going toward cultivated meat, do you have some sense of how much goes into it a year, versus how much VC investment goes into, “Okay, we've already got the farms. What is it that we need to do to come up with more things like putting the eggs through MRIs? Let's do these other small improvements in welfare”?

There's a huge difference. The venture capital on humane technology is probably less than $10 million a year.

$10 million?

That would be my guess, whereas the venture capital on alternative proteins has been in the billions over the last few years.

Which has probably been motivated, at least partly, by the sense of, “We're going to make things more ethical.”

People might not realize that in the near term, to actually make things more ethical, it might be just better to increase that $10 million pool.

It's good to do both. Both of these are important.

I can see why alternative proteins have a more promising allure to investors. First, it could be higher margins. But second, it feels more like the electric vehicle or solar, which just totally replaces the old practice. It's something totally new that replaces it. It has that potential for some portion of the market.

But what I don't see happening anytime soon is the entire market switching over to these alternative proteins. We need alternative proteins to meet the world's growing demand for protein so that we don't just have ever more factory farming. And we need humane technology to reduce the suffering within the factory farming that does exist.

1. It was a mistake making this about diet

Whenever a discussion like this comes up, it's often phrased in the context of personal behavior. I think people will be assuming that what we're going to get up to is this push to make you vegetarian.

I happen to have been vegetarian. I grew up a Hindu, so I've never eaten meat. Then I just stayed a vegetarian after I was no longer a Hindu.

But then I started prepping to interview you, and I'm like, “I don't know how valuable this is, especially if you look at some of these online charity evaluators and you're just like, ‘A dollar of your donation will offset this much meat-eating.’” You're like, “What are we doing here?”

Vegetarianism overrated?

I think we made a mistake as a movement making this about personal diet. It's great when folks want to make a personal diet decision, whether that is eating less meat or meat from more humane sources, but the focus should not be on the individual. This is not how large-scale social change occurs. We need government reform.

We need corporate reform. People can be a part of that regardless of what they eat, regardless of what their diet is. We need people to be advocates, funders, and supporters of this cause.

How did we end up in this position? When people think about animal welfare, they think PETA. They think of protesters who are encouraging individuals to give up meat consumption. At the same time, these charities, which are so effective at corporate or policy changes, are just so neglected. How did this end up being the landscape of animal welfare activism and funding?

It's a puzzle. It seems so obvious that you can have far larger-scale change at the level of governmental and corporate change. Instead, we get fixated on whether someone is completely vegan or vegetarian.

I think what happened is that when people started learning about this issue initially, it was just a few people, and they felt totally powerless to achieve larger-scale change. They understandably focused on themselves. Then it started to become a self-fulfilling prophecy. It started to become an end in itself, where it was about personal purity as much as about the impact you're having on the issue.

It's much easier to measure your own personal purity than it is to measure your total impact on reforming factory farming. It just became this inward focus. The good news is that has changed tremendously in the last decade. The movement has gone from being one that was obsessed with personal purity, obsessed with dietary choices, to one that is much more obsessed with impact.

2. Tech that’s sparing 100s of millions of animals/year

This is why I really wanted to do this episode. I think people will be aware that there's a general problem here, but the actual politics, the actual economics, and the actual state of the technology landscape here—there might be interventions which are stupendously effective, which we overlook just because people are not aware of what's actually happening in this space.

On that point, to use an analogy from global health and poverty, the Against Malaria Foundation estimates that it saved on the order of 180,000 lives, which is a lot. But then you compare it to China liberalizing, which brought a billion people out of poverty. That's just many, many orders of magnitude bigger an impact.

In animal welfare, do you have some big take about what the “China-liberalizing” equivalent in this space is?

There have been 3 large-scale drivers of progress so far. The first has been government policy. Advocates got the European Union to set basic animal welfare standards. That is billions of animals every year—billions every year.

Then there are corporate reforms. We see the same thing. There's this incredible scale across these corporate supply chains. McDonald's just implemented its pledge to go cage-free in the US. That alone is 7 million hens every year out of cages, just in the McDonald's supply chain.

The third lever is technology. One example would be in-ovo sexing, a new technology that can get rid of the need to kill male chicks. In the egg industry, the unwanted chicks are killed at birth. In-ovo sexing has already spared about 200 million chicks from that fate.

So there are these giant drivers. The good news is we're just getting started with them. There is the potential, I think, to help tens of billions of animals through these drivers.

I want to go into in-ovo sexing. Just the fact that you can have a new technology and basically have Pareto improvements, where things aren't getting more expensive—maybe in the future they'll actually get cheaper because of this technology. At the same time, you're having improvements in animal welfare.

The problem, of course, with this industry has been that in the past, increases in efficiency have been coupled with increases in cruelty. I want to understand: whenever the trend goes in the opposite direction, what causes that to be the case? What is the history of this technology? How does it work? Why did it take so long for it to come into common practice?

The historical basis is a story of technology doing harm. Initially, the egg industry and the meat chicken industry separated because they realized they could grow meat chickens to be optimized for weight gain and laying hens to be optimized for laying eggs. That meant that the laying-egg industry had no need for male chicks. They couldn't lay eggs, and they couldn't grow fast enough to be meat chickens. What they decided was to just kill them on the day they were born.

The standard practice is that about 8 billion chicks globally every year are just thrown in a giant meat grinder or suffocated in bags the day they're born.

Crazy.

This new technology is basically the application of existing technologies to scan the eggs in advance and work out whether they're going to be male or female. Then you can just get rid of the male eggs very early in the incubation phase.

This technology went from, 10 years ago, just being a vague idea to today, where it's already a third of the European egg industry. It just got introduced to the United States. We've got the first eggs coming out in the United States now. This is a technology that is growing rapidly. I'm really optimistic it can ultimately end this problem globally.

How much was this driven by policy versus the tech being mature enough for it to be economical?

It was both. First, there was some policy up front, because advocates had drawn attention to this practice of killing male chicks. There was real impetus by governments and philanthropists to support kick-starting this technology.

My estimate is it was about $10 million—a very small amount of public and philanthropic money that kick-started this technology and got it to a point where startups could start to implement it.

I'd be curious to understand exactly. MRIs have existed for a while, and PCRs have existed for a while. Why did it take this long for this to be economical? What was the nature of that cost curve?

I'm especially interested to understand this because it seems to imply that we didn't have to come up with some brand-new tech in order to enable this. Are there other things where somebody who is somewhat familiar with the technological landscape—people are always looking for startup ideas—should just spend a couple of days at a big poultry farm or pig farm or something and see if things can't be improved?

I think there's huge potential for technologists here. There is a lot of low-hanging fruit. This is primarily a commodity business that has only done things that reduce the price or increase production levels. It has not invested in animal welfare. As a result, you find these things it's doing that just seem archaic.

The way that it is castrating piglets is with a blunt knife and with no pain relief. In that case, there was a new technology of immunocastration—an injection that achieved the same effects—and it was very easy to develop.

I think there are a whole lot of other practices like that out there. There's a whole lot of these archaic practices being done where someone could come in and, with a little bit of smart work around this and an actual focus on animal welfare, bring in solutions that could potentially help billions of animals.

One important dynamic to this industry that you've pointed out is that whenever we have to ruthlessly optimize for efficiency in one domain, it causes all kinds of other problems that we have to then make up for with even more cruelty.

Think of what we've done to pigs. We took pigs inside from outdoors, and we selected them to grow faster and to have this inadvertent greater aggression. The first thing they started doing was getting bored and biting each other's tails. That was a problem, so then we said, “We'll cut the tails off.”

Well, that didn't work. So then we had to start clipping the teeth and cutting part of their teeth off. That still wasn't enough when it came to the sows. So then we had to put them in crates to protect them from any other animal, and that wasn't enough. So then we gave them antibiotics and other drugs.

3. Brainless chickens and higher welfare breeds

At each step, there is a new solution that can't solve the fundamental underlying parts of the problem and sometimes just makes it worse. Could we make chickens or pigs with no brains? Because it's the suffering we care about.

The suffering is, in some sense, inefficient. If they're pecking at other animals, if they're catching on wires, etc., this is something that it would be better, even economically, to eliminate.

You're right. The suffering is uneconomical at the level of an individual animal. The animals that we have selected for and the way we have treated them result in more of those animals dying and more of them having all kinds of welfare problems. The problem is that it is collectively more efficient. If you can cram twice as many animals into a barn, it doesn't matter if 10% more of them die. That's been the underlying model of this industry.

The reason welfare gets neglected is that it has a slight cost, but the efficiency gains are so much greater. I agree we should try and find things to reverse that. I am personally more optimistic about these kinds of incremental reforms.

The average person listening to this is not thinking, “Oh, yeah, I'm really pumped for the brainless chickens to come along and just persuade me.” But they're not pumped about the cultivated meat either, right?

No, sure. This is why you need a whole bunch of different approaches. There's no one solution that's going to satisfy everyone.

What I would say on genetics is that what feels way more achievable to me in the near term is to get rid of the genetic physical problems that ail these animals. For instance, we've bred these chickens to be mutants that collapse under their own weight. We know that we can breed for far higher-welfare birds that are still commercially viable.

Indeed, there are companies, and there are places like Denmark, where the industry has already moved entirely toward these higher-welfare birds. They have way better welfare outcomes; they suffer way less.

What's different about them?

The first thing about them is that they are more balanced overall. Whereas the industry has just selected for rapid breast-meat growth and really efficient feed conversion, these birds have been bred for robustness. They have broader legs, so their legs don't collapse. They have better cardio systems, so they don't develop all these cardio problems. In general, they've just been bred for welfare outcomes.

We're just like, “Let's just breed a bunch of birds and find the ones that die less.”

Are they less economical?

They're slightly less economical. This is why you need advocacy to get people to adopt them. There has been huge advocacy in France, in Germany, and in Denmark to get this. In fact, just last month, the largest French chicken producer, the LDC Group, committed to moving its 2 main brands to these higher-welfare genetics.

Why not think that they will just be eaten up in terms of their welfare impact? To the extent that the economics in the industry for a century have been to cram more things in, to figure out how to optimize along axes that just make the animal incredibly unhealthy and immiserated for longer and in more extreme ways, okay, we'll come up with in-ovo sexing, but then there will be another thing that's the equivalent of gestation crates.

Why think that even technologically, the thing that's favored is the suffering-free optimization? Potentially, we could find ways to make animals even bigger with the future forms of biological progress that some of my guests talk about. It's already the case that it's better to eat beef than chicken, because cows just have so much more meat per brain.

What if we just got rid of the myostatin-inhibitor genes or whatever, and now there's even more meat per cow? Is that better because you have more meat per cow, or is it worse because it's potentially going to lead to the same dynamic of these overgrown, more-suffering animals? Which way does that tilt?

I think you're right. This is the story of a lot of the industry's efforts to improve welfare. There was a study back in the 1990s where they taught chickens how to select pain-relief-laced feed. They found the broiler chickens were all selecting the pain-relief-laced feed, suggesting they were all in chronic pain.

The industry said, “Don't worry, we'll address it. We'll strengthen their legs.” So they went away and strengthened their legs for a bit. Then they were like, “Wow, it's great. The chickens have stronger legs now. They can go and eat more stuff, and we can put more weight on those legs.” So then they made them bigger and essentially undid those gains.

In recent years, we've seen the mortality rate in the industry rising again and getting worse. So presumably, they've just pushed so far again in that direction. That's a major risk.

This is why you need the government or corporations involved. This is why you need the government setting out a baseline standard saying, “You can't go below this welfare floor.” For instance, in Denmark, the government is strongly encouraging the move toward these higher-welfare breeds and looking to ban low-welfare-outcome breeds entirely.

You need to maintain those higher-welfare outcomes. This is what you need in corporate supply chains, too. This is also what you see with the French retailers moving away from these low-welfare breeds. You need them to maintain those standards. Because you're right, the industry left on its own will always find a race to the bottom.

But the consumption might have gone up regardless. So actually, then it's not clear. To the extent that we hold consumption constant—and maybe we shouldn't—they would have to be suffering 4x as much as a chicken in the 1950s for it not to be a net improvement. I don't know if you disagree with that.

There is an in-between solution now. The higher-welfare breeds that we are advocating for producers to adopt are not at 1950s growth levels. They grow almost at 2025 growth levels, scaled back slightly in a way that enables much larger welfare improvements.

You don't have to go backward to the level of these incredibly slow-growing animals. Some people will want that. There'll be a market for heritage chickens and people who are willing to pay for these extremely slow-growing animals. But the more realistic thing at scale is going to be these ones that still grow fast and still get big, but do so in a way that doesn't totally destroy their bodies and cause them to suffer so much.

This would already be just incredibly immoral: finding creatures in the wild, then caging them up and putting them through awful tortures. Rather, we are manufacturing creatures basically optimized for suffering.

It's not even like, “We found this chicken and now we're going to put it in this little cage.” It's like, “We have designed this chicken to basically suffer as much as possible. We have literally genetically changed it as much as we can plausibly change it, given the technology available to us today, in this Frankensteinian way, to suffer as much as possible.” That framing just makes it especially gruesome.

I agree. This is the story of the chicken-meat industry. They have just bred and bred so that these animals suffer more and more.

I'll give you another example of that, which is breeder birds. The birds that they raise for meat are optimized to only survive until about 7 or 8 weeks of age. Even by that age, a lot of them are keeling over, getting lame, or collapsing. But they're not at puberty yet.

So they need to raise some of these birds past puberty to raise the next generation of birds. For those birds not to totally collapse under their genetics, they have to starve them. What they do is give the breeding birds about 30% of the feed that the birds would eat on their own. They're starving them 70%, because that is the only way to stop these birds from completely collapsing under the genetics that they've inflicted on them.

In just reading about the accounts of, for example, pigs in gestation crates, and the medical symptoms like swollen ankles, broken bones—obviously from chewing the iron bars—all the bruises that cause ulcers, tumors, cancers, pus, etc., these are not rare medical emergencies, but the regular, anticipated, expected outcomes across populations of pigs.

Individual farms will house thousands of them and, of course, around the world, a billion. I'm sure you've visited many of these places yourself or have had friends who've done so, right?

I've visited factory farms.

It is every bit as bad as it looks in the videos you can find online. The additional thing you notice is that, first, you hear the noise—the distress yelps from these animals. You smell it; it smells awful.

But the other thing I noticed when I visited an egg factory farm was that it's impossible for farmers to provide individual care to each of these birds. This was a relatively well-run farm, yet I still found a whole lot of hens stuck in the wire. Those hens are just going to slowly starve. Indeed, many had.

There were a lot of dead birds in with the live birds in other cages. That's just because of the scale. One farmer is trying to look after 200,000 hens. The only thing they can actually do is check the feed lines and check the water lines and remove some of the dead birds. In fact, that is largely the work of a factory farmer: removing dead animals.

It is just this dystopian thing where the industry presents this picture of, “Oh, we have individual care for our animals.” The scale at which you're doing it has totally prohibited having any kind of individual care like that.

This is an issue where scope sensitivity is just so insane—the magnitude. If this one battery-cage farm was the only thing that existed in the world—if there was this one farm in India that had 100,000 chickens, each of which was experiencing weeks upon weeks of pain throughout its life—that would already be a moral emergency.

But it's so easy to forget that there are 10 billion chickens alive at any point in the world. The whole problem is 5 orders of magnitude bigger than this one farm itself—100,000 times bigger than this one farm. It's just stupendous to comprehend the scale of the problem. It's crazy.

You see this total confusion in the laws we pass. For instance, dogfighting is a real evil; it's horrific, but we're talking about thousands of animals. Congress has passed multiple laws. Every state has made it a felony. It is being regulated, correctly, out of existence.

Meanwhile, the factory farming of pigs occurs on this far greater scale. We've even done the same thing with cockfighting, which is literally chickens. Again, it's literally thousands of chickens. We have rightly banned it and rightly made it felony animal cruelty. Yet when factory farmers do far worse to a far larger number of chickens, we call that commerce.

4. 1 can prevent 10 years of animal suffering

The positive spin on that can be that, because of how big and neglected the problem is, the ability of any one person to have a big impact might genuinely shock them. Let's get into that. You are the biggest funder in this space, but cumulatively, between you and the others, what is the amount of smart money being allocated to this problem?

We think less than $300 million is being devoted to all work globally around every possible solution to factory farming across every country. Less than $200 million of that is what you would consider smart money going to evidence-based, effective interventions.

To put that into perspective, philanthropic climate advocacy alone is 50 times bigger than that. The work of cat and dog shelters and rescue groups in the US alone is 25 times bigger than that. There are individual conservation and poverty charities that are 5 to 10 times bigger than that.

So this is a tiny amount of money for the purpose of social reform, yet it has achieved a huge amount, impacting hundreds of millions—billions—of animals.

What would happen if the amount of funding in this space doubled from the $200 million to $300 million you mentioned that is being spent smartly? I know you'll say there are a bunch of things we could optimize around and so many neglected issues, but is there an immediate thing directly at the margin? What would the next $100 million, or the next $10 million, enable?

Additional funding would be transformative. We have a playbook that works on a number of these issues. One of the first things would be holding companies to account for animal-welfare policies they've already made. We've got huge numbers of companies that made commitments to getting rid of battery cages and are now trying to back out of them or ignore them. With additional campaign funding, we could hold them to those commitments and, as a result, immediately improve the conditions of millions of animals.

For years, the industry used these battery cages, which are microwave-oven-sized cages. They cram as many hens in as they can and leave them there for years. We know consumers don't think this is acceptable, but the industry doesn't disclose its use of them. It's not like when you pick up a pack of eggs, it has a big thing saying, “From caged hens,” or an image of where they came from.

Advocates went to the largest retailers and the largest fast-food chains and said, “You need to move away from this because your consumers already expect this of you. This is what your consumers clearly want, and they clearly don't accept this practice.” They got pledges from almost all of the largest food companies, not just in the US but globally, to move away from these practices.

We're already seeing that this transition has spared over 200 million hens a year from these battery cages. The US has gone from less than 10% cage-free to 47% cage-free. The European Union is now 62% cage-free. This is a huge transition.

How did they do this? They captured this basic divide between what consumers expected was already happening and what was actually happening. I loved this specific example, where there's a super-tractable thing that is immediately available with the next millions of dollars in funding. Is there a particular charity that works on these campaigns in particular?

I think one great way to support them is to support a diversified portfolio of groups. There's a group, FarmKind, that allows people to donate to a variety of groups. Two of those groups that you can donate to through that platform, The Humane League and Sinergia Animal, are both working on exactly this.

I think people might just not be aware of the ratio of dollars to suffering averted in this space. Can you give some sense of what we're talking about—dollars to suffering—here?

The work to get hens out of cages has already spared over 200 million hens from cages. The work to improve the lives of broiler chickens has already benefited over a billion animals. That's just every year.

Wait, sorry—it's 200 million a year?

200 million a year.

Sorry, I missed that. I thought it was cumulative across—

No, cumulatively, we're already well north of 500 million hens. We're into the billions of broiler chickens.

If you assume these things weren't just around the corner and weren't just going to happen anyway—if you think you probably sped up progress by years or decades, or maybe it would never have happened—that cumulative impact over those years and decades is giant. We're talking billions; we're talking tens of billions.

The amount of money spent just on those corporate reforms was less than $100 million a year over a couple of years. We're talking about a ratio that is far less than $0.10 per year of animal well-being improved.

So you're saying $1 can buy more than 10 years of a better, more humane life? That is stupendous. A couple of hours of pain is just awful and terrible. You're saying 10 years for a dollar?

The reason why that's so shocking—on its face, it's shocking—is that in other areas where you're trying to do global health or something, first, the problem is improving on its own. Second, with the Gates Foundation and others, there are tens of billions of dollars already being poured into the problem. It's the same with climate change and so on.

The idea that you would find an intervention where a single dollar can go this far is just genuinely crazy. It's very unique. The reason this philanthropic opportunity exists is because this area has been systematically neglected.

Most people, when they think of philanthropy, do not think of farmed animals. Most people pile into popular areas like education, healthcare, and climate. As a result, you end up with these outsized opportunities that no one has taken advantage of. If the space had billions of dollars in it, as other philanthropic areas do, you would not see opportunities like this.

I won't bury the lede any longer. I've always been interested in this issue. I lost track of it for a little while, to be honest, but I encountered you on Twitter and started learning more about the issue. We chatted a few times in person, and that motivated me to have you on the podcast and also to donate myself. As you mentioned, FarmKind Giving is this re-grantor.

5. Situation in China and the developing world

Let's talk about other countries. You are not only the biggest funder in this cause area in the United States, but globally. Obviously, animal suffering in Sri Lanka or China is just as bad as animal suffering here.

What is especially promising, especially given that more people in these countries will start eating meat? This problem is getting worse over time because people are getting wealthier and eating more meat. What seems like the most useful intervention, or the useful thing to understand, about what to do about that?

There are a couple of things. Countries where protein consumption is rapidly growing and there is not yet a deeply entrenched animal agricultural industry have the ability to do things differently. In particular, they have the ability to support alternative-protein work without that being politically toxic.

For example, we see China investing very heavily in cultivated-meat research. The majority of patents coming out globally on cultivated meat now are coming out from public universities in China. This is a case where the US is being overtaken because we have this entrenched industry that is ferociously lobbying.

I also think there's the potential to extend animal-welfare policies globally. We're seeing multinationals like Unilever and Nestlé, and even Burger King, saying we shouldn't have cages in our supply chain globally. This creates the potential to spread best practices, just in the same way that factory farming spread from the United States globally.

But factory farming spread because it was cheaper, not because there was some law passed that everybody else felt the need to copy.

That's right. We essentially had economic efficiency spread factory farming. In some cases, that can spread higher-welfare technology, such as in-ovo sexing technology. Once that has been derisked enough, once it has been scaled up in Europe and the US, I'm optimistic it will become cheaper and then it will just be scaled out globally for economic reasons.

But also, we can spread moral progress. We know that people in these countries also care about animal welfare. I had a fascinating conversation when I went to a trade show and talked with a company that manufactures gestation crates. I asked, "What do you think about the future sales of these crates?"

They said, "Well, we already have stopped selling them in Europe and the US." I asked, "Do you think you'll just be able to sell them in Asia forever?" They said, "No way. As Asia gets richer and is on social media and sees the images and things, they're not going to be cool with this either. We know there is a limit to how long we're going to be able to sell these things for."

I think that gives me some optimism. As countries get richer, they generally get more concerned about this issue, and that then enables them to adopt animal-welfare reforms, as we've seen in the West.

On net, is there a Kuznets curve here? Initially, they get wealthy enough to afford the most economical forms of meat, which are battery cages, and then they get even wealthier so that they can afford the potentially slightly more expensive versions of meat that are more humane. Or, on net, is it just that you keep eating more meat through this whole process?

Even if it gets slightly more ethical, the amount of meat consumption will rise 2 or 3 times. So wealth always correlates with more suffering, basically.

It's mixed. So far globally, wealth has heavily correlated with more suffering. The drive of people getting richer has led to them eating far more meat, and far more of that coming from factory farming. We have overwhelmingly seen that trend across all countries.

In a few European countries, we are starting to see the dynamic where, once countries have reached a certain degree of wealth, they are able to bring about reforms that actually reduce the total amount of suffering. I think it is quite likely that Germany has passed the top of that curve and is now on the other side of diminishing total animal suffering.

The critical thing to bear in mind is that this does not happen on its own. In Germany, this happened because there are very talented advocates who harnessed that public opinion and concern to drive corporate reforms with retailers and to drive government-policy reforms. We need to do that. I don't think you can just count on people getting to a certain degree of wealth and this happening. I think it only happens if there is advocacy to mobilize that public opinion.

6. How the meat lobby got a lock on Congress

A difficulty that these animal-welfare policies have had is that, even if you outlaw a practice domestically, to the extent that it's cheaper to produce meat that way, people will just import meat produced that way that is made elsewhere. States in the US that have tried to do this have had this problem. Countries in Europe that have tried to do this have had this problem.

How do you solve the lowest-common-denominator problem in animal-welfare standards?

It's a huge problem. Advocates in the US passed ballot measures in Florida and Arizona to ban gestation crates. Then the pork industry just imported crated pork from other states into those states.

So advocates then went to California and Massachusetts and passed ballot measures that extended the same standards to the sale of pork within the state: You can't sell pork from crated pigs anywhere. I think that is a critical move, and we're seeing the European Union now considering doing the same thing, imposing animal-welfare standards equally on imports.

That policy is critical not just to ensuring that you're not getting these laws undercut, but also to changing the political dynamic. Domestic or local farmers are going to be very opposed to any law if they realize they're just going to get undercut by out-of-state competition, rightly so. This is a chance to also change that political dynamic so they can actually support the law, knowing that they are not at a relative disadvantage.

Potentially reversed by an upcoming bill, right?

This is right. The pork industry, unfortunately, has looked at these laws in California and Massachusetts and wants to do everything it can to undermine them. It knows this is the only way it can be effectively regulated, given that it has an absolute hold on the legislatures in Iowa and North Carolina, which are the main states for pork production.

It knows that it needs to stop any other state from setting production standards or sales standards. It first went to the Supreme Court. It first said, “This is unconstitutional. The states can't do this.” The Supreme Court disagreed. We won at the Supreme Court.

Now it has gone to Congress, and it's saying to Congress, “You need to wipe out these state laws. You need to stop them from doing this.” The unfortunate thing is that the Senate and the House are both on track to do that. In the upcoming farm bill, there is language that would ban states from passing laws on sales standards—on animal-welfare sales standards for goods. Right now, the default path is that it will pass as part of the farm bill in the next few months.

If advocates are able to pass these laws or ballot measures at the state level, and they're popular enough that they're passing, why is it that at the national level they can't make a ruckus about this and prevent this from getting added to the full farm bill?

The first problem is structural. At the state level, they've had to use ballot measures to get around entrenched lobbies. In this case, things start out in the House and Senate Agricultural Committees, which are heavily dominated by agricultural interests.

The majority of House members signed a letter against this in the last Congress, but the vast majority of them are not on the Ag Committee. The Ag Committee gets to decide what's in this bill. The House Ag Committee just hosted a hearing on this. They only invited lobbyists for the industry. They didn't bother to invite a single opposing witness to their hearing.

We're also seeing that the industry is much better organized and funded on this effort than advocates are. The industry is constantly flying out a bunch of big industrial pork farmers, claiming they speak for the entire industry, telling legislators this is their number-one priority and absolutely has to be done. By contrast, animal-welfare groups are not getting the same hearing. Legislators are not taking them as seriously as they take these agricultural lobbies.

Shouldn't there be some political constituency formed by the pork producers who are using more ethical standards and who are themselves being undercut by these Iowa farmers? Why aren't they getting flown out to these congressional hearings?

That's exactly right. There is a large constituency of family farmers who support these laws because they have created a new market opportunity for them, where they can sell their already higher-welfare meat and not be undercut by the industrial stuff.

The problem they have is that they are far less wealthy and organized than the industrial pork interests. They don't have the money to just fly themselves to D.C. They can't stop farming. The people who are actually doing family farming can't just go to D.C. and hang out for a week because they need to be farming and looking after the pigs on their farms.

But with the meat lobbyists also, given that it's a commodity business, you would think that there wouldn't be that much surplus they can dedicate to political lobbying. Everybody here is not doused in cash. We can't subsidize a couple of plane tickets for these family farmers. What's going on?

There are people who are funding some of these family farmers to go to Washington, D.C., but we could see a far bigger effort. That voice is being hugely neglected in the debate.

The other thing I'll say about the money the pork industry has is that, yes, it's a commodity business, but it's also an oligopoly. You've got a very small number of firms that process the vast majority of pigs, and they do seem to make outsized profits. So they don't make the kind of profits you would expect.

Across these industries, we constantly see price-fixing scandals and other antitrust scandals because it's a very small number of companies. It only requires minimal coordination for them to make greater profits than you would think they could.

That might be good for animal welfare, in the sense that if they can extract greater surplus, it makes it more possible for them to potentially invest in animal welfare.

Not that they're necessarily doing it, but it would make it possible.

It completely makes it possible. That's right. The absurdity of this is that the egg industry has been saying, “We can't possibly afford this transition to cage-free eggs.” They, over the last few years of high egg prices, have made insane profits.

How much?

Cal-Maine is the biggest egg producer, and its share price has doubled over the last few years. It's because the price elasticity for eggs is very inelastic. You can just keep cranking up the price on even a very small reduction in supply, and you can then take all that surplus. They've been doing that. As a result, you see that a whole lot of these industries are actually flush with cash.

But is it on the order of hundreds of millions or billions?

It depends on the company. A lot of the egg producers are actually relatively smaller. It's Tyson Foods and companies like that that are in the billions. But they have the money to do these reforms. That is not the constraint. The constraint is the willingness to do the reforms.

If the majority of House members have written this letter, apparently saying that this should be taken out of the farm bill, they're the people who are going to vote on this. So why is it still going to pass?

The problem is that this bill, which would stop states from meaningfully regulating farm-animal welfare, could not pass on its own. If it were put on the floor of the House and the Senate, it would lose. This is why they're putting it in the farm bill.

The farm bill is this huge piece of legislation that includes all the farm subsidies and all the food-stamp assistance. This is a bill that is considered a must-pass piece of legislation and is decided based on issues that most politicians consider far bigger than the issue of whether the state laws are wiped out.

What the industry is banking on is that once they've got this in the text of the bill, people aren't going to sink the bill over this one provision, and it will sail through even though it's a deeply unpopular policy.

I want your guide on how to corrupt the political process in the opposite direction. What insights do you have on how to actually have an impact on how people in Congress or state legislatures vote?

The good news here is we have public opinion overwhelmingly on our side.

That's good. Let me ease the foot-in-mouth moment I caused by saying the word “corrupt.”

That's right. That's right. We don't need to be corrupt. The industry needs to be corrupt because they are trying to get politicians to do something that their voters strongly disapprove of.

What we need to do is mobilize that base of support and show how real it is. We need, for instance, to mobilize animal-welfare advocates. We need to mobilize farmers who benefit from higher-welfare standards. We need to provide them with an equal footing to the footing that the industry has provided to the very small number of factory farmers who have a stake in the system.

That requires the same things the industry is doing. It requires flying people to D.C. It requires getting people to go and talk to their politicians in their local district. Yes, it also requires money, because the industry is putting up so much money. Politicians need to see that there is also money on the other side of this issue.

What would it actually take? It's not clear what exactly you would do if you wanted to get this message in front of them. Abstractly, you can give money or whatever, but how does that actually transfer to political influence?

My sense of what the industry does is that they get a whole bunch of their executives to max out on donations to politicians. The politicians then give them meetings. I wish this wasn't the way the system worked. I wish instead that politicians were actually just responsive to what the voters want.

But given this is how the system works, I think that what people need to do is bind together with a couple of other friends who care about this issue, max out on your donations to a politician, and then meet with the politician and say, “I really care about this, and I'm watching what you do on this issue.”

Frankly, you don't even need to just start donating. There are a lot of people listening to this who probably already donate significant amounts to politicians. If they started saying to those politicians, “By the way, this is something I really care about, and I'm watching what you do on this issue,” I think you would start to see the political dynamic change.

You wrote in one of your recent blog posts that the meat lobby spends on the order of $45 million in any given election cycle. They seem to be able to have influence on the topics they care about, which would be astounding and make all of us in tech jealous. There are probably people listening to this podcast who could spend on the order of that kind of money on politics. But the ability of tech to have an impact on the kinds of issues that they care about is quite minuscule compared to the meat industry. What's going on here? What's the political economy of meat here?

It's a real puzzle. This is an industry that accounts for less than 1% of Americans. It's trying to defend wildly unpopular practices and doesn't even get that much money. Yet they somehow have this total lock on the legislative process, where they can stop any animal welfare legislation from passing.

There are a couple of things going on. The first thing is, it's not just them. They are fighting alongside the entire agriculture industry. There are allied industries, like the insurance industry and pharma industry, that have a big stake in factory farming. It's not just the money.

They appeal to this mythos of the American farmer. People think the American farmer is the good, hardworking, salt-of-the-earth person. They sell the image of this person out in the fields, tending to their chickens and their pigs. They don't realize these are factory farmers.

And they're extremely well organized. They have a very formidable lobbying presence in Washington, D.C., and across state capitals. They have effectively used that to block any kind of regulation.

You're telling me that tech bros aren't as politically sympathetic as a salt-of-the-earth farmer?

There's this "children's book" rule of politics, which is that you should never mess with a character in a children's book. That's the police, that's the doctors, that's the farmers. I don't think there are any tech bros in the kids' books yet. The front-end developers have yet to grace the covers.

7. Business structure of the meat industry

That's right. You should describe the sort of franchise-hierarchy-type structure of a lot of these meat companies. You would anticipate that the Perdues and Tysons of the world would want a particular thing to happen in terms of political processes. But the farmers who are indebted to these companies often have an adversarial relationship. Why are they able to form an effective political coalition with them?

This is a great point. Most people don't realize that the way these factory farms are structured is that you have these giant corporations like Tyson Foods or Smithfield. They mostly don't own their own farms. Instead, they have these contract farmers who are essentially indentured laborers. They have a huge loan hanging over their heads, and they're farming.

Why would those people support this? The answer is they often don't. The agribusiness lobbying associations have done a very good job of pretending they do. They present themselves as representing the farmers.

But if you look at their boards, if you look at the people who are actually leading these organizations, they're made up of people from the giant agribusinesses and the very largest industrial farmers. They do not have small contract farmers on the boards of these organizations. It really is a bit of a bait and switch, where they claim to be representing those family farmers, but they're not.

What is the reason that these contract farmers are willing to work with these large businesses? People will often say things like, "Uber is bad for Uber drivers," but I trust Uber drivers to know what's best for them. Why would these small farmers be working with these companies in the first place if it's uneconomical for them?

It depends. For some people, it is just the least bad option they have, especially if someone just has a little wee bit of land and they want to preserve that land, and they don't have other skills they can use.

I was chatting with this guy, Craig Watts, who was a chicken contract farmer for Perdue. He told me that when he got into the business, they made all these exorbitant claims to him. They said, "You're going to be making over $100,000 within years." They said, "Just take out this loan, and it's going to be incredible." They told him all the things that could go right.

Then he got into the business, and they slowly started eroding the payments to him. They slowly started paying him less and less. They slowly got to a point where he was making less and less money. He wanted out, but by that point he couldn't get out because he had this giant loan hanging over his head.

You've got a bunch of people who are stuck in this situation. There aren't easy alternatives because normally, in one area, there will only be 1 processor that has a slaughterhouse in that area. There's no effective competition going on. Also, often you're locked into these long-term contracts as well. There is an element of people being locked into this, and then there's an element of people just not having better choices.

What is the alternative use of that land? If you didn't work with some centralized processor, is the alternative use of that land for farming? If you've inherited some land and you want to figure out what to do with it, what can you do with it?

Ideally, we would see pasture-based farming in those places. It doesn't require that much land, for instance, to have a pasture-based chicken farm. The problem is you would need to find a processor that you could work with. Normally, that just doesn't exist.

Normally, you've only got the giant players in an area, and they say, "We just want commodity production. We don't want to fund you to do this pasture-raised stuff." You get locked into that contract.

Oftentimes, people who are doing pasture-raised production have to create their entire supply chain by themselves. They literally have to build their own slaughterhouse and create their entire supply chain around that, which drives up costs massively.

Why is that? There must be enough consumers, even if it's not a majority of consumers, that there's some economic incentive to set up the economies of scale and supply chains that would make it easier to set up such a farm. Why doesn't that exist?

There are people who are trying. Niman Ranch, for instance, has done this with independent pork farmers. There was a big effort to do this by Cooks Venture with pasture-raised chicken. Unfortunately, they just went out of business.

The reason they went out of business is because there is such huge mislabeling across the industry that it's very hard to separate out what's actually better. For instance, much factory-farmed chicken in the U.S. is sold with the label "all-natural." We know from surveys that people think "all-natural" means the chickens were outside. It actually means nothing.

But if you're trying to sell your product as pasture-raised next to a product that says "all-natural," and people think it means the same thing and your product costs $2 more, you're not going to get very far. So long as we have this rampant mislabeling, it's very hard for the other players to get ahead.

8. Corporate campaigns are underrated

There are normal bananas and organic bananas. People are willing to pay quite a bit more for organic bananas. I feel like "pasture-raised" should be in a similar embedding space as organic. Organic is a huge industry even though it has dubious medical benefits, et cetera.

Then the problem is not that there isn't consumer demand. If there were accurate labeling, you'd think there might be consumer demand to make this a viable, much larger industry. It's just that it's very hard for consumers to identify which is which.

Yes. You actually see that in the egg sector in the U.S. Within eggs, there is clearer labeling. Cage-free actually means something; pasture-raised actually means something. You can't just put the "all-natural" label on. What we see is that the pasture-raised egg sector is growing rapidly.

Even then, it is still handicapped by the fact that supermarkets use this as a price-differentiation tool. They know that wealthier consumers prefer pasture-based eggs and are also less price-sensitive, so they mark them up heavily. The price you see is way inflated beyond the actual cost difference. Yet still, that is a rapidly growing sector.

This is one thing I wanted to ask you about. One point you've often made is that you have to understand that meat and agriculture generally is a commodity business. In a commodity business, you'd expect all margins to be competed away. I think you said in one of your blog posts that it costs 19 cents more for a dozen eggs to be cage-free, but often chains will charge on the order of $1.70 more for cage-free eggs.

If it's a commodity business, why is it possible for supermarkets to extract this extra margin?

This is the non-commodity part of the industry. The broader context on those retailers is that almost all the top US retailers have made pledges to stop selling eggs from caged hens. A lot of them were meant to do that by this year, and a lot of them have not done it. Walmart and Kroger have not followed through.

What they say is, “Our consumers don't want cage-free eggs because they're way more expensive.” And it's true, they're way more expensive. They're selling them for a dollar to $2 more per dozen. When you look at the underlying production costs, it's only a 19-cent difference.

What we see is these retailers are using this as an opportunity to get a big markup from less price-sensitive consumers and are in the process of massively hampering their ability to fulfill their commitments. By contrast, Costco went 100% cage-free. They followed through on their promise. What we see is that they are now selling cage-free eggs for the same price as Walmart sells its caged eggs.

There is that competitive pressure. Once cage-free becomes the new baseline, it does become the commodity market, and you do see those margins competed away. It's the same thing in states where they've banned the sale of caged eggs. Cage-free eggs now cost the same thing as the caged eggs cost next door. You do see that competed away once it becomes a commodity. It's only until it reaches that point that you're seeing these crazy margins.

Interesting. If these companies are already making these commitments, in many cases following through on them, to move towards more ethical ways of procuring meat, procuring eggs, et cetera, I think I learned from you that McDonald's has made these commitments, or that Chipotle has made these commitments. I didn't learn from McDonald's.

What is the reason that this is not a more prominent part of their own advertising, given how much consumers care and how universally popular animal welfare is?

The very best companies are advertising this, like Vital Farms or NestFresh eggs. They are out front focusing on the animal welfare benefits because they're pasture-raised and it looks amazing.

The fundamental problem for the large-scale companies is that they have just made things less bad. It's still really good what they're doing. Moving from caged to cage-free is incredible. But there are 2 problems.

One is that their consumers already thought they weren't using caged eggs. So if they advertise, “Hey, we're cage-free now,” everyone's like, “What? What were you doing all this time? You didn't tell us you were using caged eggs?” And people still might think that even the new reality is not as good as what they thought things should be. They still would rather the animals were going outside, which they're not.

And in a lot of cases, there are these phase-ins over time. So McDonald's is like, “In 10 years' time, we're going to get rid of the caged eggs.” You don't want to advertise that too loudly, because then people are going to be, for the next 10 years, saying, “I'm eating caged eggs, and I didn't know that previously.” That is just the unfortunate dynamic.

Because this dissonance is so great between current practices and reality, merely getting rid of the worst practices is not enough to create an advertising claim.

Given how fast you're able to secure these commitments from different corporations, from retailers to restaurants, et cetera, it seems like corporate campaigns are even more successful than policy. Corporations are much more receptive. Obviously, Perdue and Tyson are corporations as well. But the rest of the actual industry of getting food to consumers just seems incredibly receptive to these kinds of pressure campaigns. Maybe that's a lever of change that's especially salient.

It's been phenomenally successful with these consumer-facing brands, like the retailers and the fast-food chains. Advocates have been able to secure over 3,000 corporate animal welfare pledges now globally, including from all the biggest retailers and all the biggest fast-food chains, affecting hundreds of millions of animals.

The reason for that is twofold. The first is that there's a totally different structure from the structure in place on the legislative side. On the legislative side, if you want to pass an animal welfare reform in Congress or in any state legislature, it goes to the Agriculture Committee. The Agriculture Committee is dominated by a bunch of people who are in the pocket of Big Ag, and they kill the bill.

It never even gets out of that committee, let alone getting to the whole legislature. If you go to a company, you go to someone who is a decision-maker who is not being lobbied by industry, or, if they are being lobbied, is far less susceptible to that lobbying than politicians are.

I also think companies have just proven more responsive to consumers than politicians are to their voters. I think politicians have decided that they need to be responsive on the 10 issues their voters care most about. Maybe it's fewer than that. But on low-salience issues like this, they can just ignore what their voters want and do what their donors are telling them to do, or what's easier to do.

Whereas I think what corporations are finding is that, actually, if consumers are really outraged about this, then we need to act. Maybe this is higher on the list of salience for consumers at a retailer, because they're not worried about what the retailer's taxation policy is. For a retailer, actually, what is the quality of the goods you are selling? That is a pretty critical factor.

We know from surveys that when it comes to sustainability, animal welfare is the top thing people care about.

So, for all this talk we see from companies about climate change and prioritizing climate change—both McDonald's and Tyson, and so on—they've all said this is the thing that consumers actually care about. Then what is the reason that the animal welfare movement has gotten so wrapped up with that?

You go to most landing pages for animal welfare stuff and it'll be, “We're improving animal lives and we're making farming more sustainable. We're addressing climate change.” That just seems really strange to me. Okay, we're torturing tens of billions of animals a year, but then also we're reducing emissions. We'll figure out some other way to reduce emissions, right? Whatever. How did this become the same issue in the first place?

There's been this weird conflating. There's even been this very cynical exploitation of the climate issue by producers to avoid doing animal welfare reforms. So something that Tyson Foods will say is, “We can't move to these higher-welfare breeds because they would have a slightly bigger carbon footprint, because they eat a little bit more. Also, if you let the animals move around a lot, they expend more calories, and that's got a bigger carbon footprint.” It's this total absurdity.

I had a conversation with the SVP for sustainability at one of the largest meat companies. What they told me was, “Yes, we know from internal surveys that animal welfare is actually more important to consumers. But we are far more responsive to what the fast-food companies and the investors are telling us. And the fast-food companies and the investors are obsessed with climate.”

The ESG stuff?

The ESG stuff. I think they've all made these targets that they need to implement. Those targets are getting much higher priority than the targets they made on animal welfare.

But then why do animal charities? It's not just a cynical attempt by the meat industry. If you go to animal charity websites, they'll often also emphasize sustainability on their landing page.

I understand other people's psychologies are different, so I don't want to project the way I think about it. At least whenever I see that, I'm like, “Oh, wait, are you actually optimizing for the thing that makes this a really salient issue for me? Or are you just going to optimize for carbon footprint rather than this incredible amount of suffering that this industry produces?”

So why are they doing this? Why have your friends roped sustainability into this area?

I think a lot of people care about multiple things, right? They care about animal welfare and they care about sustainability. It is true that, in certain cases, these things go hand in hand. Alternative proteins are both better for animal welfare and have a smaller environmental footprint. They are more sustainable. This is not always the case.

One thing that is wild to me is where you have people out there telling people to switch from beef to chicken because it's better for the climate. Literally, that switch is 23 more animals per year you'll be consuming, costing several years' worth of suffering in these factory farms, for a pretty marginal climate impact.

I do think there is often this tendency that climate just gets total precedence. It's just seen as obviously more important than any number of animals suffering. I actually think that that is more of an elite narrative than it is what regular people think.

I actually think regular people are just pretty horrified by animal suffering and do prioritize that.

Lewis, thank you so much for coming on the podcast, and thank you for the work you do. You are allocating the largest amount of philanthropic funding in this space. You're a cheery fellow, but I'm sure day in and day out, this is not pleasant work to do—to learn about these gruesome details and how we can make the situation better. But it's awesome that you're doing it. Thank you for coming on, and thank you for your work.

Thank you very much. And thank you for both being willing to take on this tough topic on your podcast and for making such a generous donation match. I'm really excited about the impact you can have there.