Speaker 1: Welcome to the Bloomberg P and L Podcast. I'm Pim Fox.
Speaker 1: Along with my co host Lisa Bramowitz. Each day we
Speaker 1: bring you the most important, noteworthy, and useful interviews for
Speaker 1: you and your money, whether you're at the grocery store
Speaker 1: or the trading floor. Find the Bloomberg P M L
Speaker 1: Podcast on Apple Podcasts, SoundCloud, and Bloomberg dot com. Humana
Speaker 1: has joined together with TPG and Welsh Carson and a
Speaker 1: four point one billion dollar bid for Kindred. It is
Speaker 1: a healthcare and hospice and various medical service provider. Here
Speaker 1: to explain more and better than I could is Max Neeson,
Speaker 1: who covers the biotech, farma and healthcare industries for us
Speaker 1: here at Bloomberg gad Fly and always has fantastic insights
Speaker 1: into these worlds. So give us your take on this transaction. Sure,
Speaker 1: So it's some kind of pretty interesting and complex transaction.
Speaker 1: They're gonna take this business, which is, you know, the
Speaker 1: combination of those home care and hospice assets and then
Speaker 1: specialty hospitals and kind of splitting them in half. So
Speaker 1: those those private equity companies will run a new special
Speaker 1: specialty hospital company, and human Uh is gonna enter into
Speaker 1: joint venture with them on the home care stuff. And
Speaker 1: the reason that Human had got involved is, um, they're
Speaker 1: really big into Medicare, Medicare advantage, and um, you know
Speaker 1: they want these kind of home care assets in order
Speaker 1: to basically care for more people at home, prevent them
Speaker 1: from getting to the hospital, and generally find ways to
Speaker 1: to bring costs down because once you get into the hospital,
Speaker 1: as anyone who's ever made it their nos, it gets
Speaker 1: really really expensive. Quickly, can you comment on this idea
Speaker 1: that Medicare which obviously available to people over the age
Speaker 1: of sixty and in some cases younger than sixty, But
Speaker 1: if Medicare is going to cover certain kinds of hospitalization
Speaker 1: but not certain types of home care, is that going
Speaker 1: to have to change in order to make this merger
Speaker 1: make any sense? This combination. Yeah, so so reimbursement with
Speaker 1: with Medicare is always pretty tricky, but I imagined Human
Speaker 1: had that in mind. You know, certain things that at
Speaker 1: the end of the day, even if they have to
Speaker 1: cover more of the costs themselves, the cost of paying
Speaker 1: for some of the home care relative to being built
Speaker 1: at the hospital is probably so vast that they'll they'll
Speaker 1: take that any day, I want to ask you about
Speaker 1: this concept that Humanna as an insurance provider, is getting
Speaker 1: into the healthcare business directly. I mean, we kind of
Speaker 1: saw that, um with the CVS merger, but this is
Speaker 1: a whole new ball game, right, I mean, what's the
Speaker 1: what's the logic here? Um, So this is the logic
Speaker 1: that that particularly United Health has been following for a
Speaker 1: long time. Basically, when you have kind of this integrat
Speaker 1: aided model where you're both to insure and the provider, UM,
Speaker 1: you can direct people to to your kind of in
Speaker 1: house providers, which you know, it's it's a lower cost option.
Speaker 1: They're not taking, you know, an extra bit of profit.
Speaker 1: It's all the same company, and UM, they're gonna basically
Speaker 1: do the the procedures that you want in the order
Speaker 1: you want them, for the people you want. I also
Speaker 1: provide you a lot of data about your enrollees and um,
Speaker 1: you know, the marketplace in general, so you can provide
Speaker 1: care at a lower cost and price your insurance products better.
Speaker 1: Are there any big insurance companies that haven't made a
Speaker 1: move like this that you expect to at some point
Speaker 1: in the near future. I mean, I I've been expecting
Speaker 1: that this from human or from another company for for
Speaker 1: some time, basically because you just look at how successful
Speaker 1: United Health has been. UM. I think I have a
Speaker 1: chart in my latest column. Their optim unit alone books
Speaker 1: more revenue than UM or just about as much as
Speaker 1: one bit more than most of the other large insurance
Speaker 1: companies in the United States. And also they've written the
Speaker 1: kind of cost savings and analytic benefits of that to
Speaker 1: becoming the largest health insurer in the United States. It's
Speaker 1: worked incredibly well for them. I'm a little surprised to
Speaker 1: taken other insurers so long to emulate them, and now
Speaker 1: you finally have you know, the big and a CVS deal,
Speaker 1: which which is an interesting step, and and then HUMANO
Speaker 1: were just taking kind of a narrower targeted approach aimed
Speaker 1: at a particular market medicare in this case. Is this
Speaker 1: good or bad for hospitals? Uh, this is bad for hospitals. UM.
Speaker 1: You know they're not going to say, I need to
Speaker 1: think this is terrific for them. So you know, any
Speaker 1: time when insure, you know, has UM more leverage, is
Speaker 1: doing more of the hospital's job themselves, that that's not good.
Speaker 1: I mean, part of the reason that you had such
Speaker 1: aggressive hospital consolidation. You know two reasons. One to kind
Speaker 1: of fight back about against insures that are ever larger
Speaker 1: and more powerful and have you know, can push back
Speaker 1: on reimbursement. And also to kind of prevent patient leakage,
Speaker 1: so patients from leaving your health her system to go
Speaker 1: somewhere else. Um. You know, if if you own everything
Speaker 1: in area, they can't go anywhere else. That's why you
Speaker 1: have this consultation. But now if ensures own you know,
Speaker 1: their own providers and are actively pushing people there that
Speaker 1: that's pretty bad for prospitals. And just quickly, what about
Speaker 1: for people that are not necessarily in these insurance plans? Um,
Speaker 1: you know, that gets a little trickier for them. You
Speaker 1: you don't get the same kind of discount or or
Speaker 1: synergy when you're when you're trying to, you know, use
Speaker 1: a human owned product and you're on another company's insurance,
Speaker 1: probably gonna be a little more expensive. All right, Thanks
Speaker 1: very much. Max Neeson are Bloomberg gadfly when it comes
Speaker 1: to all things related to healthcare. I encourage you to
Speaker 1: read his columns on Bloomberg dot com. Max Neison, thanks
Speaker 1: very much for being here. It's really fascinating combination, and
Speaker 1: Humana is known as the number two seller of private
Speaker 1: health coverage plans for the elder lace. This is a
Speaker 1: Medicare advantage program, so it sort of explains their focus
Speaker 1: here him, I have been struck by the degree of
Speaker 1: consensus when it comes to US stocks next year and
Speaker 1: frankly stocks globally in eighteen. Everyone seems to think it
Speaker 1: will be a great year, another banner year for equities.
Speaker 1: Here to tell us what he thinks is Alberto Gallo,
Speaker 1: portfolio manager and head of macro strategies at Algebra Algebra Investments,
Speaker 1: and he joins us now. Alberto, thank you so much
Speaker 1: for being with us. Good morning. So are you as
Speaker 1: bullish as everybody else in the world is. I think
Speaker 1: there is a lot of consensus both for equities to
Speaker 1: go higher in the US and also non US equities,
Speaker 1: as well as for interest rates to gradually move up
Speaker 1: in an orderly path. There's a lot of things that
Speaker 1: can go wrong. We are coming from nine years of
Speaker 1: QUEI with central banks holding the hands of markets, and
Speaker 1: I'm not sure the transition to a world with less
Speaker 1: QUEI is going to be so orderly. So we could
Speaker 1: have basically we have three risks. One is a sharper
Speaker 1: return of inflation rock in the market. A second one
Speaker 1: is central bankers are getting a bit more hawkish and
Speaker 1: worried about financial stability across the world. And then the
Speaker 1: third one is geopolitics with North Korea, with Iran and
Speaker 1: Saudi Arabia and a lot of other hotspots in the world.
Speaker 1: And we feel the market is underprising all the risks
Speaker 1: and still living in a goldilocks world. And that's a
Speaker 1: little bit. It's a red it's a red flag for us.
Speaker 1: One of the title of one of your most recent reports,
Speaker 1: The Silver Bullet, is irrational complacency. Then how do you
Speaker 1: invest for irrational complacency? It is It is a conundrum
Speaker 1: for a portfolio manager to construct a portfolio in an
Speaker 1: environment where there is a lot of assets which are overvalued.
Speaker 1: You have to try to distinguish assets that are overvalued
Speaker 1: versus bubbles. And I think the behavior of investors is
Speaker 1: very important. Where you see assets where you have flipping,
Speaker 1: where you have financial engineering, where you have investors have
Speaker 1: never invested in their lives going in, then you're looking
Speaker 1: at the bubble. Other assets are simply a little bit overvalued,
Speaker 1: but may have more room to run. So we are UM.
Speaker 1: We don't know when the crisis, when the next correction
Speaker 1: will will strike, but we're trying to construct our portfolios
Speaker 1: with less exposure to UM downside and buying upside exposure
Speaker 1: through options by limiting potential downside by investing a limited
Speaker 1: premium in UH upside optionality, but having a limited loss
Speaker 1: if things go south. Because we have we've come from
Speaker 1: an environment of very, very low volatility. Let's let's remember
Speaker 1: q not only moved us the prices higher, but also
Speaker 1: pushed investors to sell volatility. Alberto, you said that you
Speaker 1: are concerned about financial stability and at the risk of
Speaker 1: some kind of threat to it next year could be
Speaker 1: more significant than the markets are currently pricing in. What
Speaker 1: asset class is particularly vulnerable in some sort of disruption
Speaker 1: to financial stability right now? I would say there is
Speaker 1: a pyramid of asset classes that have been distorted by QUEI.
Speaker 1: At the bottom you have rates markets bonds, so you've
Speaker 1: got eleven trillion of bonds globally that have negative interest
Speaker 1: rates as central bankers normalized interest rates. These are are vulnerable.
Speaker 1: Then there is a middle section of the pyramid, which
Speaker 1: is the assets that people bought because they couldn't find
Speaker 1: yield in government bonds. So these are high yield bonds
Speaker 1: or investment greate debt. There's eight trillion of them, and
Speaker 1: they are not a negative interest rates, but they are
Speaker 1: very very low credit spreads. Then the tip of the
Speaker 1: pyramid is strategies that are designed to sell volatility. Basically,
Speaker 1: they bet that tomorrow the market that will be as
Speaker 1: quiet as good as today, and this is something that
Speaker 1: we estimate to be around two point one trillion dollars. Now,
Speaker 1: to put this into context, subprime was two point four
Speaker 1: trillion dollars when the credit crisis struck in two dozen
Speaker 1: and eight. So two point one trillion dollars in short
Speaker 1: volatility strategies is a substantial amount um and it could
Speaker 1: cause a risk to financial stability. So if investors tomorrow
Speaker 1: um realized that the future is not going to be
Speaker 1: as calm as it has been for the last nine years,
Speaker 1: then these strategies may be unwound more quickly than the
Speaker 1: market is expecting today. So we are we are worried
Speaker 1: about this, this pyramid of trades, at the bottom of
Speaker 1: which there is kewy. Okay, So this these two point
Speaker 1: one trillion dollars of short volatility funds? Are these hedge funds,
Speaker 1: are these mutual funds? What are the forms that you
Speaker 1: see them in and who are the biggest asset managers involved?
Speaker 1: But there's a variety of strategies. Some directly sell volatility,
Speaker 1: so shorting futures, and we are talking about a small
Speaker 1: amount in the range of a billion. But there's also
Speaker 1: strategies that are more institutional and larger and UM routinely
Speaker 1: sell volatility for yield or strategies that reliab alatility to
Speaker 1: stay low UH to perform. So there's a variety of
Speaker 1: UM of strategies we we we UH don't have an
Speaker 1: exact estimate, but it is an amount large enough to
Speaker 1: create a problem for financial stability. Generally, I wouldn't go
Speaker 1: into specifics on on the asset managers, but I would
Speaker 1: say that regulators in two thousands and eight and following
Speaker 1: the crisis have been focusing on banks, have been regulating banks,
Speaker 1: increasing capital requirements. But in the meantime, asset managers have
Speaker 1: been taken more and more risk to justify their fees
Speaker 1: as yields have gone lower. And we think that today
Speaker 1: the asset management industry has and also, both passive and
Speaker 1: active has more risks than UM UH than the banks.
Speaker 1: Bank risks have moved from banks to to UH, to
Speaker 1: the by side, to the asset management industry. And another
Speaker 1: phenomenon that comes with this is there's been a an
Speaker 1: increase in passive investing and hurting, so everyone going for
Speaker 1: the same trade. Alberto, I'm gonna put you on the
Speaker 1: spot here because in November I read an article in
Speaker 1: the Financial Times about your boss, Davide Sarah, the head
Speaker 1: of Algebras, and he's quoted as saying, I have an
Speaker 1: Italian heart but a British brain. What what does that mean,
Speaker 1: at least to you? Well, I think the team. I
Speaker 1: think what we try to do is to have a
Speaker 1: very organized UM risk management UH culture here. While you know,
Speaker 1: investing in very risky sectors UM are DNA comes from
Speaker 1: investing in risky bonds, like how your debt, you have
Speaker 1: to have very strong I think the Italian UM part
Speaker 1: comes in having strong views on the market, but you
Speaker 1: have to also combine them with UH, you know, with
Speaker 1: numbers and risk management. And it's a bit of a stereotype,
Speaker 1: but that's what we're trying to do here. We're going
Speaker 1: in a very sky market, we have to have strong
Speaker 1: views to outperform on Um countries and names that have
Speaker 1: done well. We've you know, we've done very well this year,
Speaker 1: like Greece or Portugal, or Ecuador or Argentina. But going
Speaker 1: into next year, we have to couple that with some
Speaker 1: risk management. Thanks very much for being with us. Alberto
Speaker 1: Gallo is portfolio manager ahead of macro Strategies at Algebra's Investments.
Speaker 1: Joining us from London, I am so excited for this
Speaker 1: next segment. Joining us as Ethereum co founder Joseph Lubin.
Speaker 1: He is uh one of the founders of the Global
Speaker 1: Blockchain of Ethereum, but also he is a founder of
Speaker 1: global blockchain Specialist Consensus, and he joins us here in
Speaker 1: our eleven three studios. Joseph, thank you so much for
Speaker 1: being here. Thanks for having me. I want to start
Speaker 1: with energy consumption because there have been a number of
Speaker 1: articles talking about how bitcoin consumes so much energy that
Speaker 1: it's equal to the entire output of Denmark currently and
Speaker 1: that it will just surge continually. I know Ethereum consumes
Speaker 1: less energy, but what do you say to people who
Speaker 1: say bitcoin is killing our earth? So I'm not sure
Speaker 1: that statistic is true. UM. There are lots of people
Speaker 1: who who are a little hyperbolic about that issue. UM,
Speaker 1: but U Bitcoin and our network ethereum do indeed burn
Speaker 1: a lot of electricity. They do that in order to
Speaker 1: establish trust in these infrastructures. UM. The traditional financial industry
Speaker 1: also burns a lot of electricity and occupies a lot
Speaker 1: of real estate. And uh um it uh I would
Speaker 1: argue as many orders of magnitude less efficient than UM
Speaker 1: these systems. The theorem itself is actually aware of this issue,
Speaker 1: has been aware right from the start. We intended to
Speaker 1: move from the inefficient proof of work system, which burns
Speaker 1: a lot of electricity. Hold on, let's back up proof
Speaker 1: of work. You mean basically this idea that any change
Speaker 1: in the blockchain is uploaded at the same time to
Speaker 1: every system, uh, every network that is kind of in
Speaker 1: the in the sphere. So trust is achieved by having
Speaker 1: massive redundancy among a lot of nodes on this peer
Speaker 1: to peer network UM. In order to keep them in sync,
Speaker 1: you need some sort of consensus formation mechanism. And in
Speaker 1: these consensus mechanisms, you have to elect a leader, and
Speaker 1: you have to have people follow on behind the leader.
Speaker 1: So a proof of work system which burns a lot
Speaker 1: of electricity is what enables the election of that leader
Speaker 1: or the the winning of the leading position. That's true
Speaker 1: in bitcoin, that's true and Ethereum currently the theorem is
Speaker 1: moving away from expensive hardware, burning of electricity, a lot
Speaker 1: of wasteful computation to a system called proof of steak
Speaker 1: which replaces all of that waste with a system that
Speaker 1: is facilitated by an economic bond basically money that you
Speaker 1: place in a smart contract on the blockchain in order
Speaker 1: to enable um YouTube probabilistically be selected to be a
Speaker 1: leader for a next round. Joseph Luban, I'm gonna just
Speaker 1: sort of take a off ramp for just a second
Speaker 1: because I need and just to mention as the founder
Speaker 1: of consensus, Uh, you're working in a variety of different
Speaker 1: kind of areas of related to block chain. What how
Speaker 1: would you describe or is there a good analogy that
Speaker 1: you can offer so we can understand what is a
Speaker 1: distributed application platform and why is that relevant to understanding
Speaker 1: all of this conversation about bitcoin or blockchain technology. So
Speaker 1: Ethereum is a platform that enables decentralized applications. UM we
Speaker 1: like to think of it as one element of becoming
Speaker 1: decentralized Worldwide Web or the Web three point oh. It
Speaker 1: will be the infrastructure for trusted transactions, for automated agreements.
Speaker 1: There are other elements of decentralizing technology like decentralized storage,
Speaker 1: decentralized bandwidth, decentralized high throughput compute, UM and UH. These
Speaker 1: sort of elements will enable us to move away from
Speaker 1: a business versus consumer kind of infrastructure for delivering services
Speaker 1: to infrastructures on protocol driven open platforms that have lots
Speaker 1: of different actors in different roles in insided markets and
Speaker 1: basically emerging ecosystems that offer sets of services to consumers.
Speaker 1: So none of those will there be um an actor
Speaker 1: that's overly controlling or overly monetizing. So, for example, let's
Speaker 1: say you wanted to make a purchase of a product overseas.
Speaker 1: The bank or banking institutions, whether they be with the
Speaker 1: buyer and the seller, they currently are in between the
Speaker 1: two intermediaries to intermediaries, right, So you what you're saying
Speaker 1: is that this new platform is a step in the
Speaker 1: direction of getting rid of those banks in between, so
Speaker 1: that now you can in a trusted way transact business
Speaker 1: financial business directly between the buyer and seller with knowing
Speaker 1: to me absolutely. So we've stood up a bunch of
Speaker 1: different platforms. They're in different states of maturities. Some of
Speaker 1: them are launched on the Ethereum blockchain already. Um they
Speaker 1: enable certain intermediaries to be squeezed out of the situation,
Speaker 1: or certain amounts of value that intermediaries pull from the
Speaker 1: infrastructure to be right sized because there's less friction less,
Speaker 1: less rent seeking possible. So we built platforms for prediction
Speaker 1: markets or wisdom markets. We built an adjacent music industry platform.
Speaker 1: We've built a supply chain platform. We've built a fixed
Speaker 1: income reference data platform. So we're kind of all over
Speaker 1: the map. We've got about twenty five different projects along
Speaker 1: those lines. You're gonna have to spend more time with us,
Speaker 1: because I'm just slightly beginning to understand and that's dangerous,
Speaker 1: as I'm sure you know. Thank you very much for
Speaker 1: being here. Joseph Luban is the founder of a Consensus
Speaker 1: and he can be followed on Twitter at Ethereum Joseph,
Speaker 1: or at Ethereum project or at Consensus. Thank you welcome
Speaker 1: a burger that doesn't have any meat in it that
Speaker 1: doesn't require killing an animal that tastes as good as
Speaker 1: one that does. Impossible or perhaps the impossible Burger? Would
Speaker 1: you would you think of that him? He's really his eyes. No,
Speaker 1: I'm smiling. I like the Impossible Food enjoining us to
Speaker 1: talk about the impossible foods. The Impossible Burger is David Lee,
Speaker 1: chief operating officer and chief financial officer of Impossible Food. So, David,
Speaker 1: what is the impossible Burger? Well, the impossible Burger is
Speaker 1: the only plant based burger that half the time hardcore
Speaker 1: meat eaters prefer blind versus a burger from a cow.
Speaker 1: It's it's this miracle burger that uses less land and
Speaker 1: only a quarter of the water and releases a fraction
Speaker 1: of the greenhouse gases. What's it made out of? So
Speaker 1: this burger is entirely made out of plants. And what's
Speaker 1: interesting about it is it's four major ingredients are designed
Speaker 1: to be affordable and accessible at scale, and they're natural.
Speaker 1: So there's nothing synthetic or strange about this burger. It's
Speaker 1: it just makes for a craveable burger for a meat
Speaker 1: eater entirely made out of plants. Okay, let's let's just
Speaker 1: talk a little bit about the science if we can. Uh.
Speaker 1: This was founded in by Patrick Brown right at the
Speaker 1: Stanford Okay. And what is the process by which you
Speaker 1: create the impossible uh burger? I want to get to
Speaker 1: this idea of using hem as a term. And it
Speaker 1: is an iron compound and iron based compound that hemoglobin
Speaker 1: is the way I understand right. So so Pat Brown
Speaker 1: to your point. Six years ago, working very hard over
Speaker 1: a period of four years, with a number of great scientists, discovered,
Speaker 1: among other things, what makes me taste and feel and
Speaker 1: smell like meat. And it turns out this magic molecule
Speaker 1: hem h E m E is the only thing that
Speaker 1: can make eat seem meaty to a meat eater. Um.
Speaker 1: And then not only did he discover this, he discovered that,
Speaker 1: you know, he is a building block of life. It's
Speaker 1: in my globe, boom and animals, it's in hem global
Speaker 1: in us, but it's also in plants. Um. Lastly, he
Speaker 1: figured out a way, using a great industrial process, fermentation,
Speaker 1: to make this magic molecule originally found in a plant,
Speaker 1: scalable and affordable and at high quality. And that's how
Speaker 1: that's how this burger is delicious for meat eaters. So
Speaker 1: Impossible Foods is still currently just selling it's uh me
Speaker 1: to put in quotes h two restaurants, Is that correct,
Speaker 1: It's not sort of in the grocery storage. Yeah. For
Speaker 1: now we are serving that half of the US ground
Speaker 1: beef market, which is sold through food service and restaurants.
Speaker 1: So I just want to talk about the vision here
Speaker 1: because I know that Bill Gates is an investor in
Speaker 1: the company. Of course, Bill Gates known from founding Microsoft. Um,
Speaker 1: what's the sort of ambition, what's the sort of longer
Speaker 1: term plan here for hospital fits? Well, our investors are
Speaker 1: aligned to the very large ambition we have. We want
Speaker 1: our impact to be seen from outer space. We want
Speaker 1: every meat eater on the planet to happily choose an
Speaker 1: impossible version of meat made entirely out of plants. Because
Speaker 1: if we can do that, then we can use a
Speaker 1: fraction of the world's resources while providing that delicious, cravable
Speaker 1: taste that we all know meat eaters are not going
Speaker 1: to forego. That's the ambition of the company, and I
Speaker 1: would imagine the ambition is also to make some money,
Speaker 1: because you've raised more than a quarter billions so far
Speaker 1: in venture capital. I believe, like two hundred and fifty
Speaker 1: seven millions that well, our investor base goes beyond venture capital.
Speaker 1: It certainly does include great vcs like CoA, STLA, but
Speaker 1: it now includes sovereign wealth funds Singapore. Right, that's right,
Speaker 1: and on our investor base to your point, they're terribly
Speaker 1: interested in the size of business we're building, and we
Speaker 1: believe this financial engine that we're creating, to your point,
Speaker 1: is what's required to fund the mission. So absolutely we're
Speaker 1: interested in business in return. What's the cost of impossible
Speaker 1: meat in quotes relative to uh similar grade of beef.
Speaker 1: So we like to point out that since our burger
Speaker 1: uses you know, less land and only a quarter of
Speaker 1: the water, that small amount of resources translates into a
Speaker 1: burger that can be extremely cost competitive. Um. So, while
Speaker 1: we aren't releasing actual figures, the reality is we wouldn't
Speaker 1: be successful as a business or for our mission if
Speaker 1: we can't serve the globe extremely cost efficiently as or
Speaker 1: below the cost of commodity ground beef at scale. David,
Speaker 1: you're you've got a production facility that's being constructed, I
Speaker 1: believe in Oakland right now. It's actually for the last
Speaker 1: two months pump and running. Okay, if we went there,
Speaker 1: what would we see? What would we smell? First, you
Speaker 1: are welcome to come. Here's what you wouldn't see or smell.
Speaker 1: You wouldn't see a slaughterhouse. You wouldn't see the expense
Speaker 1: associated with shipping animals. What you would see is an
Speaker 1: extremely clean, of efficient, simple finished goods manufacturing facility. One
Speaker 1: by the way, that reused in existing bakery of all things.
Speaker 1: Because our mission is to make sure that we do
Speaker 1: things as sustainably and cost efficiently as possible. Right, But
Speaker 1: what what would we see? I mean? What is it
Speaker 1: a production line? Is it a huge extruding machines? What
Speaker 1: kind of it's nearly seventy square feet it you'll see
Speaker 1: produced off the line up to one point four million
Speaker 1: pounds a month when we're at capacity today, you know
Speaker 1: we're ramping up. It's only been open for two months,
Speaker 1: but you would see real product being shipped off the
Speaker 1: line to two more and more customers. So is the
Speaker 1: idea or is the possibility here simply ground beef or
Speaker 1: could there be some kind of replica of different cuts
Speaker 1: and sort of The more intact slices of beef are
Speaker 1: are you know, our mission and ambition goes way beyond
Speaker 1: impossible burger. You know, we have the technology to do
Speaker 1: plant based chicken, plant based fish, pork, even a dairy platform. Um.
Speaker 1: I've seen prototypes of whole cuts of steak, of prototypes
Speaker 1: of eggs um. We've already seen the products served quite
Speaker 1: well in Asia in the form of dumplings or abow um.
Speaker 1: This is a technology that spans multiple geographies and products.
Speaker 1: What's the biggest headwind for you right now? You know,
Speaker 1: I like to say that technology has now been eliminated
Speaker 1: as a headwind, and it's all about good old fashioned execution.
Speaker 1: You know, with the amount of growth and the amount
Speaker 1: of demand that's ahead of us, we have to continuously
Speaker 1: grow at high quality, and that's what we're focused on.
Speaker 1: What has been the reaction by the Food and Drug Administration,
Speaker 1: because I understand that you want them to confirm that
Speaker 1: it's safe to eat, but they've expressed concerns mainly because
Speaker 1: this stuff has not really been consumed by human beings
Speaker 1: in any quantity and might even be an allergy or
Speaker 1: an allergen for some people. Well, actually, we've been generally
Speaker 1: recognized as safe since and we have been working with
Speaker 1: the FDA for the last several years and and really
Speaker 1: a gold standard of safety that very very few food
Speaker 1: companies seek. Um in what's breaking news in in the
Speaker 1: last couple of weeks, it's actually public. We believe in
Speaker 1: radical transparency, so any consumer it can go read the
Speaker 1: over thousand page filing we recently provided the FDA, having
Speaker 1: complied with every possible test we could think of to
Speaker 1: convince the world just how safe this product is. I
Speaker 1: like to think this product maybe the most well tested
Speaker 1: food product you'll ever come across. Soy leg hemoglobin that's
Speaker 1: technical term, that's right. I mean what it really means
Speaker 1: is heam the same heame that you see in a
Speaker 1: burger from a cow, but sourced from a leg, you
Speaker 1: a plant. Well, we look forward to giving it a try.
Speaker 1: Thanks very much. David Lee is the chief operating officer
Speaker 1: and the chief financial officer of Impossible Foods, all about
Speaker 1: their plant based burgers. Thanks for listening to the Bloomberg
Speaker 1: P and L podcast. You can subscribe and listen interviews
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