Fellow Climate Warriors,

This episode I drink 🇨🇺 Cuba Libres with Ryan Bethencourt, Co-founder and CEO of Wild Earth.  

Join us as we discuss why dogs should be vegans, euthanasia drugs in pet food, the biohacker movement, life extension, Mark Cuban, launching and scaling IndieBio, how to pitch billionaires, psychedelics, bio-fabricated nipples, storing digital data in DNA, how food is leading the way in bio-innovation, and so much more!

📻 Listen to the episode on Spotify, Apple Podcasts, Amazon Music, Google Podcasts, Audacy and Substack👉

Please see below about the newest podcast episode and the 🥃upcoming CTC Happy HourS on 9/30 in Berkeley!  Already 100+ awesome people registered so far! This is going to be epic.  

Thank you for your continued support, and keep up the good fight with a cool beverage in hand.

⚡️ New to CTC? Sign up here!👉

📲 Follow us on Twitter, Facebook  and  Instagram👉

📝  Show Notes Below👇

🎧 New podcast episode:

Ryan Bethencourt, Co-founder and CEO of Wild Earth

“The more I looked into it, the more broken the pet food industry was.  It accounts for 25-30% of meat consumed in the U.S...it just makes no sense because we can make protein out of yeast, out of fungi, out of plants...and so I’m like, somebody needs to start this company.”  -Ryan Bethencourt, Co-founder and CEO of Wild Earth.  

Ryan Bethencourt (@ryanbethencourt) is a co-founder and CEO at Wild Earth (@wildearthpets), bringing years of experience in leading, building and advising high-growth food and biotechnology companies. Ryan is a biotech entrepreneur, investor, and one of the founders of the biohacker movement. He’s a co-founder, former Program Director, and Venture Partner at IndieBio (@indbio) and has invested in over 110 early stage biotech startups and served as the head of life sciences at the XPRIZE Foundation (@xprize). As an ethical vegan, Ryan is passionate about the future of biology as a technology, applied across all industries to solve some of humanity’s most intractable problems. Ryan fosters dogs for Rocket Dog Rescue and is passionate about mindfulness, meditation, and mentoring. 

🍹 What we drank during the episode: 🇨🇺 Cuba Libres 

Enjoy the show!

Listen to the episode on Spotify, Apple Podcasts, Amazon Music, Google Podcasts, Audacy and Substack.

Interested in sponsoring? 

Please reach out to m@climatetechcocktails.com

🥃 September Bay Area Climate Tech Cocktails Happy HourS:

Thursday, September 30th, 5:30-7:30pm at Cell Valley Labs in Berkeley to celebrate the release of Ryan Bethencourt’s, Co-founder and CEO of Wild Earth, Climate Tech Cocktails Episode.  The happy hours will include a guided tour of Cell Valley Labs and samples of foods from cool companies like Climax Foods.  RSVP coming soon!

Companies/Startups mentioned during the show:

🐣 Bacardi

🐣 Boylan Bottling

🐣 Pfizer

🐣 Genentech

🐣 Amgen

🐣 Johnson & Johnson

🐣 Gilead

🐣 IQVIA

🐣 Parexel

🐣 SENS Foundation

🐣 Buck Institute

🐣 Founders Fund

🐣 a16z

🐣 Biocurious

🐣 Counter Culture Labs

🐣 Berkeley Biolabs

🐣 SOS Ventures

🐣 IDEO

🐣 IndieBio

🐣 HAX

🐣 Y Combinator

🐣 Clara Foods

🐣 UPSIDE Foods

🐣 Modern Meadow

🐣 Mosa Meat

🐣 Geltor

🐣 BioAesthetics

🐣 SynBioBeta

🐣 EAT Just

🐣 Khosla Ventures

🐣 Impossible Foods

🐣 Beyond Meat

🐣 Shiok Meats

🐣 Whole Foods

🐣 Bark Box

🐣 At One Ventures

🐣 VegInvest

🐣 Big Idea Ventures

🐣 Tesla

🐣 BioEnTech

🐣 ATAI Life Sciences

🐣 Compass Pathways

🐣 Beckley Psytech

🐣 MushLove

🐣 Whole Foods

🐣 Y Combinator

People/places/things mentioned during the episode

🧠Cuba Sugar Cane Economy

🧠Robert Heinlein

🧠Isaac Asimov

🧠Ursula Le Guin

🧠Working Draft of Human Genome

🧠Craig Venter

🧠Devil Docs

🧠DARPA

🧠NSF

🧠Cambridge University

🧠University of Edinburgh

🧠Dolly the Sheep Clone

🧠George W. Bush Stem Cell Research Ban

🧠Aubrey de Grey

🧠Peter Thiel

🧠Vitalik Buterin

🧠Ethereum

🧠Marin County

🧠Starfleet Academy (Star Trek HQ)

🧠Gene Roddenberry

🧠Laura Deming

🧠Biohacker Movement

🧠The Homebrew Computer Club

🧠Steve Jobs

🧠Steve Wozniak

🧠Ron Shigeta

🧠Sean O’Sullivan

🧠Research Triangle Park

🧠Cher

🧠CATALOG

🧠Intel

🧠Josh Tetrick

🧠Vinod Khosla

🧠Pat Brown

🧠Ethan Brown

🧠University of Minnesota

🧠Bramble the dog

🧠Michael Pollan

🧠Mark Cuban

🧠Mark Cuban experiences rugpull with Titan

🧠Paul Wesley

🧠Finite and Infinite Games

🧠Hypercompetition

🧠Zero to One

🧠Christian Angermayer

🧠Zero to One

-TIMESTAMPS-

[0:00] Intro

[2:00] Drink of the show

[4:23] Growing up in London + Miami

[5:27] Sci-fi as inspiration to pursue biotech

[8:30] Discovery of human genome

[12:00] Leaving his PhD program

[14:30] Working on biotech clinical trials

[16:30] Longevity

[22:20] Biotech crash and the biohacker movement

[26:30] Launching IndieBio

[34:00] Clara Foods putting IndieBio on the map

[37:00] Biofabricated nipples

[40:00] Storing digital data in DNA

[42:30] Food leading the way in bio innovation

[45:00] Epoch shift in food innovation and his own angel investing

[47:40] The moment Ryan decided to launch Wild Earth

[49:00] Euthanasia drug found in pet food

[50:00] Importance of pet food and size of market

[54:00] Longest lived dog and why dogs should be vegans

[56:50] Wild Earth science for dummies

[60:00] Difficulties Wild Earth has faced along its journey

[1:06:00] Mark Cuban as an investor

[1:10:00] Just closing a $23MM funding round

[1:12:30] Tips and tricks for closing a billionaire

[1:15:00] Top 3 favorite books

[1:18:30] Top 3 startups exciting Ryan the most

[1:20:00] Psychedelics 

[1:25:00] Conclusion