Lewis Bollard: evaluation

Transcript context

…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 2x. 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 and 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 two, 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. And human intelligence has been developed—it depends on when you start counting intelligence as having started evolving—but on the order of hundreds to tens of millions of years ago, 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, etc, 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?…

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