Ep. 52 | The Business of Election Security with Aaron Brantly
Release Date: 10/29/2020
Fishing for High-Margins in Cultivated Seafood: BlueNalu’s Path to Scale
Business for Good Podcast
BlueNalu is one of the better-funded companies when it comes to cultivated meat. Having raised more than $100 million, including about $35 million toward the end of 2023—a notoriously difficult time to fundraise—their founder and CEO Lou Cooperhouse is optimistic about their path to success. But as you’ll hear in this episode, Lou isn’t working to compete against the commodity meats like chicken, pork, and beef. Rather, he’s pursuing a strategy to compete against products that are exponentially higher-cost, like bluefin tuna, which can often sell for more than $100 a pound. In this...
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Is the Future of Cultivated Meat in Thailand? Aleph Farms is Betting on It
Business for Good Podcast
When you think about cultivated meat, Thailand isn’t exactly the first country that comes to mind. Sure, you may think about the US, Netherlands, Israel, and Singapore. But the Southeast Asian kingdom is where Israeli cultivated meat juggernaut Aleph Farms recently announced its first commercial factory will be. Having just received Israel’s first regulatory approval to sell cultivated meat—and the world’s first regulatory approval for cultivated beef in particular—Aleph Farms CEO Didier Toubia discusses his company’s rollout strategy with me in this conversation. As you’ll...
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Flying Cars or Electric Cars? Isha Datar’s Thoughts on Where Cultivated Meat Tech Stands Today
Business for Good Podcast
When the New York Times recently ran an declaring the infant fatality of the cultivated meat industry, Isha Datar, CEO of , was quoted as saying of the sector, “this is a bubble that is going to pop.” Given that New Harvest is intended to promote and advance the field, what did Isha mean by this? She expounded on that thought in a asserting that while she disagrees with the columnist’s conclusion that cultivated meat can never become a viable reality, she believes that the sector has been plagued by “exaggerations, lies, and broken promises.” In this episode, Isha and I talk...
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Mark Post, A Decade After the First Cultivated Burger
Business for Good Podcast
In 2013, Dr. Mark Post when he debuted the world’s first-ever burger grown from animal cells. Weighing in as a quarter-pounder, the burger carried a price tag of a mere $330,000—all of which was funded by Google co-founder Sergey Brin. A decade later, what does Mark think about the movement and the industry he helped birth? When his burger was debuted, a grand total of zero companies existed to commercialize what would come to be called cultivated meat, no serious investment dollars had flowed into cultivated meat research, yet hopes were high that such meat would be on...
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Are Smaller Cultivators the Answer for Cultivated Meat’s Success? Niya Gupta Thinks So
Business for Good Podcast
Some of the companies in the cultivated meat space are betting that massive stainless steel cultivators—think 100,000L to 250,000L—are the path to commercialization. Niya Gupta, CEO of , is thinking smaller. She argues that there may be a more realistic path using a , void of the impellers that agitate the more conventionally used reactors in the sector. Founded in 2018, the company was spun out of , the first-ever cultivated animal product company which is now focused on materials like leather rather than meat. Having raised more than $20M in its first six years, Fork and Good...
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Josh Tetrick on the Future of the Cultivated Meat Movement
Business for Good Podcast
If you listened to the , you already know that there’s an updated paperback edition of my book that’s coming out April 9, 2024. I announced in that episode that, aligning with that release, this show will be devoted for a couple months exclusively to interviews with leaders in the cultivated meat space, many of whom are profiled in the book. And there’s perhaps no person in the cultivated meat sector who’s generated more headlines than Josh Tetrick, CEO of both and . Along with people like Mark Post and Uma Valeti, both of whom will also be guests in this podcast series,...
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Brief thoughts on the alt-meat movement and my role in it
Business for Good Podcast
I’m excited to announce in this short new podcast episode that there’s a new, updated, that’s coming out on April 9, 2024. Published by Simon and Schuster’s Gallery Books, the new Clean Meat is now available for preorder everywhere books are sold. Aligning with this new edition release, for the next couple months, this podcast is going to focus squarely on the issue that’s animated my life for the past 30 years: how to wean humanity off our animal-centered diets. The extraordinary suffering of the literally trillions of animals who we farm and kill for food has plagued me for...
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Incubating Tomorrow’s Alt-Protein Unicorns: The Kitchen
Business for Good Podcast
If you’ve spent any time in the startup ecosystem, you start realizing pretty quickly that the US isn’t alone in producing a lot of startups, but that there are some very small countries, like Israel and Singapore, that consistently punch above their weight when it comes to new company creation. In fact, Israel is often known as the startup nation, and there’s even a on the topic with that very title. And if you’re in the startup food technology space, whether in Israel or elsewhere, there’s one name you’re sure to know: . Founded a decade ago, The Kitchen has...
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When Nonprofits Start Businesses: Garden for Wildlife and the National Wildlife Federation
Business for Good Podcast
Most startups are founded by entrepreneurs hopeful that their idea will be the next big thing and pad their bank accounts in the process. Yet sometimes companies are started not by enterprising capitalists, but rather by a far less likely progenitor: nonprofit charities. That’s exactly what happened when the nonprofit decided to spin out a for-profit corporation devoted to advancing the charity’s mission to protect wildlife. The company, , is already selling native plants to homeowners seeking to make their yards a bit more nonhuman-friendly. The basic premise is this: Too much...
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Can Tech Improve Farm Animals’ Lives? Robert Yaman Is Betting On It
Business for Good Podcast
Many times when we talk about technology that can improve animal welfare, we’re talking about innovations that either have displaced or could displace the use of animals. Think for example about cars replacing horse-power, kerosene replacing whale oil, and animal-free meats displacing factory farming of animals. But can technology also be used to make better the lives of animals who are still being used? Long-time tech enthusiast and animal advocate is betting on that idea, and has launched a new charity, , designed to help the animal-use industries implement such new technologies. In its...
info_outlineThis is of course a historic election for many reasons, one of them being that there’s very high concern about how the votes will be counted. We’re just days away from the final day to vote and we’ve got news stories about the Russians and Iranians gaining access to certain voter records in the US — it’s crazy!
One need look no further than 20 years ago when disputes over how to count the ballots in Florida led the US Supreme Court to step in and end the state’s recount, handing, by a 5-4 ruling, George W. Bush the presidency over Al Gore.
Well, the events of 2000 may seem tame compared to what could happen on election night 2020 and the following days. This time we have not only a pandemic gripping our nation, but a president who regularly rails against mail-in voting as allegedly fraudulent and who assuredly will claim that the election results are fake. Recall that even after his electoral college victory in 2016, president-elect Trump maintained, without providing any evidence, that his loss in the popular vote was only made possible by millions of so-called fraudulent votes.
Turns out, however, that there’s one thing everyone should be able to agree on: We need better technology to improve the security of our elections, from the news people are seeing during election season to the counting of the actual votes on election day and beyond.
In this episode, we have one of the nation’s foremost experts on cybersecurity, Dr. Aaron Brantly, the founder and director of the Tech4Humanity Lab at Virginia Tech. In addition to having worked at the U.S. Army Cyber Institute and at West Point, Aaron has written four books on cybersecurity and has traveled the world to promote democracy and protect elections abroad. Few people understand the cyber threats we face better than Aaron, and the opportunities for businesses to create technology that can help safeguard our electoral processes and therefore our democracy.
As you’ll hear, Aaron and I talk about everything from what threats he sees as the most serious, to why we don’t yet have secure online voting, to how other countries handle their election security. And at the end of our conversation, Aaron gives his wish list of startups he hopes will be founded that could be both financially lucrative while also protecting the integrity of our voting systems.
So if you care about protecting our democracy’s electoral process and how digital innovation can help, this is the episode for you.
Discussed in this episode:
- Aaron Brantly’s personal site
- Aaron’s four books on cybersecurity
- The Tech4Humanity Lab at Virginia Tech
- Aaron recommends both Reset: Reclaiming the Internet for Civil Society by Ron Deibert and Attack Surface by Cory Doctorow
- Two documentaries: The Social Dilemma and All-In: The Fight for Democracy
More about Dr. Aaron Brantly
Aaron Brantly, an assistant professor of political science at Virginia Tech, has worked on issues related to cybersecurity from multiple angles, including human rights and development, intelligence and national security, and military cybersecurity. His interests span the political science and computer science divide. He is currently working on a yearlong project on cyber deterrence funded by OSD Minerva R-Def. He also is the founder and director of the Tech4Humanity Lab at Virginia Tech.
Aaron holds a PhD in political science from the University of Georgia, and his principal areas of research include cyber conflict and security, terrorism, intelligence, big data, and Internet governance.