One Good Human: Eric Schulze on Cultivated Meat’s Past and Future
Release Date: 11/15/2024
The Incredible, Edible… Pea? How Meala is Using Biotech to Render Eggs Obsolete
Business for Good Podcast
If you’ve ever checked the ingredients on a baked good, you know how ubiquitous eggs are. They bind, they lift, they emulsify, they hold moisture — they’re simply the structural engineers of cookies, cakes, and muffins everywhere. But they’re also volatile: prices spike, supply chains break, and for anyone with an egg allergy or who’s avoiding eggs for animal welfare or environmental reasons, eggs aren’t exactly a welcome ingredient to find on the ingredient deck. Enter Hadar Ekhoiz Razmovich, CEO and co-founder of , an Israeli startup that’s figured out how to make peas...
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From Oil Wells to Oak Trees: Ben Dell’s Half-Billion-Dollar Pivot to Carbon Offsetting
Business for Good Podcast
What if planting trees could be not just good for the planet, but also a profitable business? In this episode, I’m talking with Ben Dell, the founder and CEO of — a company that’s raised nearly $400 million, including $250 million of that in 2025, to turn farmland back into thriving native forests across the United States. And he’s already forging major carbon removal deals with the likes of Microsoft and Mercedes F1. Ben’s journey is a fascinating one: he began his career in oil and gas private equity, helping fossil-fuel companies optimize their operations. But during the...
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Ready for a Carpet Made of Human Hair? This Entrepreneur Turns Salon Waste into Textiles
Business for Good Podcast
What if one solution to fashion’s waste problem is literally growing on our own heads? Every day, salons around the world toss out millions of pounds of freshly cut human hair — a clean, protein-rich, renewable resource that mostly ends up in landfills or incinerators. But what if that so-called waste could become the next sustainable textile? My guest on this episode, Zsofia Kollar, is the founder and CEO of , a Netherlands-based startup turning salon hair waste into a high-performance fibre that behaves like wool — but with 43 times lower CO₂ emissions, 20 times less water use, and...
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From Fashion Model to Fission Mission: Isabelle Boemeke’s Nuclear-Powered Future
Business for Good Podcast
When you hear the word nuclear, does your mind flash to mushroom clouds, Chernobyl, or maybe the glowing three-eyed fish from The Simpsons? Well, what if nuclear electricity — far from being an environmental villain — is actually one of the safest, cleanest, and most land-efficient energy sources we have? It turns out that former fashion model Isabelle Boemeke is on a mission to change how we think about nuclear energy. When she and I met a few years ago, in Italy of all places, she was known by many simply as , her online persona that blends fashion, futurism, and fission to make nuclear...
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Fungi-Filled Diapers: How Plastic-Eating Fungi May Change Child-Rearing
Business for Good Podcast
If you’ve ever changed a diaper, you might’ve wondered what happens to it after it goes in the trash. The answer, unfortunately, is that it’ll sit in a landfill for hundreds of years—certainly longer than the baby who briefly wore it will live. In fact, every diaper you wore when you were a baby is still sitting around, at best in a landfill, or perhaps even in the ocean. And did you know the average American baby goes through 6,000 diapers before learning to use a toilet? But what if fungi could change that? In this episode, I sit down with serial entrepreneur Miki Agrawal, the...
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Raising Capital for Alt-Protein in the Midst of the Winter
Business for Good Podcast
Recently had me as a guest on his show, the to talk about ’s . When it came out, more than one Business for Good listener heard it and told me they thought it would make a good episode to release to our audience too, so this episode is simply the conversation Alex and I had for his podcast. If you’ve been following the alternative protein sector (and the broader biotech sector), you’ve likely seen the wave of challenges that fermentation, cultivated, and plant-based startups have faced over the past few years. As recent reporting confirms, ag and food tech investment is at a...
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Bottling the Sky: Aircapture’s Carbon Capture Breakthrough
Business for Good Podcast
When you think about climate change solutions, your mind might go to renewable energy, electric vehicles, or eating less meat. These are all of course important. But even if we stopped all emissions today, we’d still have too much CO2 in the atmosphere and would need to pull a lot of our emissions out of it. That’s the bold mission of , a California-based company pioneering modular direct air capture technology. On this episode, I speak with , Aircapture’s founder and CEO, about how his company is not only working to reduce atmospheric CO₂, but also profitably supplying it to...
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Inside Mighty Earth: Glenn Hurowitz on Transforming the Meat Industry
Business for Good Podcast
What if the biggest environmental culprits were hiding in plain sight—right on our dinner plates? While most environmental organizations train their sights on the energy sector, Mighty Earth has taken a bold, and often lonely, stand in confronting the meat industry’s massive role in climate change, deforestation, and biodiversity loss. In this episode, I sit down with Glenn Hurowitz, founder and CEO of , to unpack why the meat industry typically gets ignored by the environmental movement, and what he thinks needs to be done. Glenn has spent decades fighting for the planet, from...
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Turning Waste into Bioplastic Gold with Genecis CEO Luna Yu
Business for Good Podcast
It’s rare that we contemplate where all the plastic we throw out goes, but rest assured that nearly none of it is being recycled. Simply put, it’s usually cheaper to make new plastic than to recycle old plastic, even the plastic you put in the recycling bin. Because it takes plastic centuries to break down, this means for each one of us you could build a mountain of plastic from all the packaging we use over the course of our lives. But what if plastic didn’t have to take centuries to break down, and could actually biodegrade in a matter of days or weeks? That’s exactly the...
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Turning Plants into Plastic-Free Packaging: The Xampla Story
Business for Good Podcast
Plastic pollution is one of the defining environmental challenges of our time—microplastics are now found in our oceans, our soil, our drinking water, and even in our bloodstreams. But what if we could make high-performance materials that look, feel, and function like plastic—without being plastic at all? Enter . Born out of the University of Cambridge, Xampla is a materials science innovation company that’s developed a new class of plastic-free, fully biodegradable materials that offer a drop-in replacement for the most polluting types of plastic. Their flagship line, known as Morro™,...
info_outlineEric Schulze loves the intersection of science and food so much that after many years as an FDA regulator, he decided in 2016 to leave the federal government to join the then-nascent Memphis Meats (now UPSIDE Foods). He’d go on to spend the next seven years working to advance the cultivated meat pioneer’s science, technology, communications, and ultimate regulatory approval by the agency for which he used to work.
Now, Eric’s charting a new path for himself, founding GoodHumans, a consultancy aimed at assisting and even launching biotech startups seeking to bring their new innovations to the world.
In this episode, Eric and I discuss the state of the cultivated meat movement today and where it may be heading. This includes the path to commercialization, the obituaries being written for the sector, the statewide sales bans on the product, and comparisons to other technologies. We even discuss our mutual love of sci-fi and give some recommendations to those of you fellow nerds out there.
Eric’s a wealth of knowledge on all things alt-protein, so if you want both information and inspiration, listen to what he’s got to say.
Discussed in this episode
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Eric first learned about cultivated meat after the $18,000 meatball was unveiled in 2016.
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Our past episodes on this show with Uma Valeti and Teryn Wolfe, the latter of whom Eric has jointly launched a new company, Nexture Bio.
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Eric is a big fan of British physicist David Deutsch
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Eric recommends reading The Science of Science (nonfiction) along with fiction such as The Name of the Wind, Three Body Problem, and The Maniac.
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Paul recommends Tender is the Flesh (fiction) and Frostbite (nonfiction). He also wrote a review of some 19th century animal protection literature recently.
More about Eric Schulze, PhD
Eric Schulze, PhD is a professional molecular biologist, genetic engineer, and former federal biotechnology regulator, and most recently is the CEO of GoodHumans, a full-service strategy and design firm. He served as Vice President of Product and Regulation at UPSIDE Foods, where he led both design and development of the company’s meat products as well as its regulatory-, policy-, and government affairs. Before that, he served as a U.S. Food and Drug Administration regulator, handling a portfolio of novel food and drug biotechnology products. As a civil servant, Dr. Schulze also served as a federal STEM education policy capacity within the National Science Foundation and currently works with the National Academy of Sciences on undergraduate STEM education transformation. He holds a doctorate in genetic, cellular, and molecular biology with a specialty in embryonic stem cell engineering and is trained in broadcast communication, speechwriting, and risk assessment.