Today we chat with Yuki Hanyu, Founder and CEO of IntegriCulture Inc., a cellular agriculture platform company developing cell-based meat and the technologies needed to produce it efficiently at scale.
He is also the Founder of the Shojinmeat Project, a citizen-science nonprofit organization dedicated to advancing an open-source, inclusive future for cellular agriculture.
Before starting Integriculture, Yuki started the Shojin Meats, is a project Yuki started that allows you to create cultivated meat from home. Yuki explains the unique process in the episode which I find quite insane.
If you had no money, and no expertise to create cultivated meat, how would you do it? Yuki gives us a playbook in this episode on how you could create it, in your house!
Yuki talks about crowdfunding a movement by using out-of-this world marketing tactics such as posting on video and putting a manual at a comic convention and reminds me of the early days of Apple, where a bunch of scrappy enthusiasts gathered together to create something amazing.
I first met Yuki in California at Alex Shirazi’s Cultured Meat Symposium where in his presentation, he showed a video of him making cultivated meat in his apartment.
If you get overwhelmed by technical jargon, you’re not alone! Yuki is an extremely smart and hyper-energetic drive.
We also talk about some of the frustrations of regulation of cultivated meat and the governmental understanding and perception of cultivated meat is well, across the board. There is some hope that Japan is being proactive about this type of technology.
We also talk about a lot of different anime and manga, science fiction shows and scenarios! So again, if you get lost don’t worry, it’s all part of the interview on how Yuki finds inspiration in his work, by the way, you might notice why Adam knows so much about this topic? Well… hard to explain
Yuki is amazing. His transparency, his brain, his drive and his geekiness is really magnetic. You’ll also see a geeky side of me, which I think was quite useful when talking to Yuki.
Links
Cultivated Meat
Doremon
Anpanman
Three-Body Problem
Tohoku University
Interstellar
Mark Post Demonstration
Shojin – Devotion to Path
NicoNico Video
Comiket
Dr. Iko CTO of Integriculture
Integriculture Raise $17 million
METI Governmental Branch
Ministry of Agriculture
Tyson
Cargill
JBS
Shiok Meat
Next-gen Meats
VR Chat
One Piece
Naruto
Umari-chan
Otaku
Hatsune Miku
Gatcha Games
Waifu
Cultivated Meat
Akihabara
Comiket
Ghost of Tsushima
Tsushima Island
Shonan Er
Slam Dunk Manga
Shojin meat VR Chat
Twitter
Integriculture
By the way, not the first time I heard of someone who wants to eat celebrities using cultivated meat
What’s up with Adam
One of the cathartic joys I get is writing. Whenever I write, it’s like releasing all of the pressure form my head onto paper and putting it down. I also get great joy and validation when people read or listen to my work.
So I generally write every week but in different mediums. When I was really rolling with My Food Job Rocks, I would write 1000 word articles weekly. This took a sharp turn when I started getting into ficton writing.
Even now, I’m reading this off of a script I’m writing. This podcast sometimes takes a lot out of me in terms of how I spend my time writing.
But I have a writing battery in that I feel like every week I write a good amount of stuff, but it’s very hard to expand it.
By the way, I’m a terrible writer when it comes to spelling errors and grammatical tricks. I’m sure you’ve noticed it.
Anyways,
So last we left off, I went and visited my friend in Okinawa. Thomas is someone I met at high school who kinda didn’t know what to do with his life so he went and joined the military. Over there, he had a pretty chill life and eventually went to Japan. There, he met a nice Japanese woman and settled down where now he has 3 cats and plays with Bonzai tree. His lifestyle is just so chill. A mix of Hawaiian beach attitude and Japanese calmness. I think it’s so interesting, talking to him and talking about his calm, stable and joyful life and complaining it to my hyperenergetic, chaotic, and rollercoaster of emotions. It gives a great perspective on how one can enjoy happiness and it’s nice how both of us were amazed at how we’ve grown throughout the decade.
After that, Taiwan opened up so I quickly booked a 2-hour flight from Okinawa to Taipei. Where we will start our final country interview in Taiwan.
A side note about pop culture
So we talk a lot about pop culture in Japan and Japanese pop culture is absolutely amazing. I’m sure none of my audience actually knows how Japanese pop culture has influenced my life. Some of the references you may not get, because it’s about two nerds talking about Japanese anime.
End of Show
Embracing your geekiness.
So I admire Yuki a lot because he basically has no shame in how others perceive him and I think he embraces his geekiness.
My dad also embraced his geekiness. Instead of an obsession with manga and anime, my dad is obsessed with comics and superheroes. He wears superhero emblems on most of his clothes and still reads comics. I credit my dad a lot on igniting my imagination and reading fictional stories throughout my childhood.
I think being a geek is a lot more mainstream than in the past but I sometimes struggle to embrace it myself.
I do know that being very passionate on an obscure hobby flares up creativity and I’ve always found the power of fiction to help me be creative. Reading fiction, writing DND campaigns, listening to great stories, and watching anime have all been ways to help me embrace the many ways to tell a story that tells us about how people think and reminds us of the potential we can accomplish.
Fiction allows us to think in different ways and the ideas that it teaches us and the vision it shows us, pushes us forward to make a world we want to live in.