--:-- [Theme music fades out]
--:-- David Pierce: Welcome to Today Explained. I'm filling in as host today. I'm here with reporter Kenny Torella, Vox's man on the meat beat.
--:-- Kenny Torella: Thanks for having me, David.
--:-- David Pierce: Lab meat has had a heck of a year. The FDA approved two lab meat startups to sell their stuff to the general public last June. But good luck finding it on the menu.
--:-- Kenny Torella: Yeah, it's not exactly flying off the shelves. There are a number of red states moving to ban cell-cultivated meat altogether. And even at the federal level, there are some policymakers working to ban it in school lunches.
--:-- David Pierce: It strikes me that something grown from started in a Petri dish is not as wholesome and not as good as beef raised on the farm that we've been raising for thousands of years.
--:-- Kenny Torella: Support for this show comes from ServiceNow. AI is only as powerful as the platform it's built into. That's why it's no surprise that more than 85% of the Fortune 500 use the ServiceNow AI platform.
--:-- David Pierce: While other platforms duct tape tools together, ServiceNow seamlessly unifies people, data, workflows, and AI, connecting every corner of your business.
--:-- Kenny Torella: And with AI agents working together autonomously, anyone in any department can focus on the work that matters most.
--:-- David Pierce: I've never met an AI agent. Learn how ServiceNow puts AI to work for people at servicenow.com.
--:-- Kenny Torella: Support for this show comes from strawberry.me. Be honest. Are you happy with your job? Or are you stuck in one you've outgrown? Or never wanted in the first place?
--:-- David Pierce: Labs. We have the meat. It's Today Explained. I'm David Pierce, filling in as host today. I'm here with reporter Kenny Torella, Vox's man on the meat beat.
--:-- Kenny Torella: Well, it's taking a lot of political heat. Arizona, Tennessee, West Virginia, Alabama, and Florida all have bills that are moving through their state legislatures to simply just ban the production and sale of cell-cultivated meat altogether.
--:-- David Pierce: We're going to have meat in Florida. Like, we're not going to. We're going to have fake meat. Like, that doesn't work.
--:-- Kenny Torella: And then at the federal level, you have a bill to ban the sale of cell-cultivated meat through the National School Lunch Program. The School Lunch Integrity Act of 2024 would prohibit the use of cell-cultivated meat in the government-supported programs.
--:-- David Pierce: One funny thing about all this is that the Tennessee bill goes so far to say that if you sell cell-cultivated meat in the state of Tennessee, you will be fined $1 million in violation.
--:-- Kenny Torella: It's a real, like, Dr. Evil, like, $1 million kind of move here.
--:-- David Pierce: Why are we doing this? If you look at what policymakers say when they introduce these bills, there are kind of two main reasons.
--:-- Kenny Torella: The surface level reason is that they are raising concerns over food safety. You know, the Florida bill sponsor said that there are just too many unknowns about this novel technology.
--:-- David Pierce: We need to slow it down. Simply put, it's safety. There's no long term safety data on cultivated protein.
--:-- Kenny Torella: And we're just going to pump the brakes. These startups only launched about 10 years ago.
--:-- David Pierce: But, you know, they've gone through a lengthy review process with regulators who deemed it safe to eat.
--:-- Kenny Torella: Really, what's most likely going on is that this is just being further churned up in the culture war.
--:-- David Pierce: So, you know, it's kind of being served up as red meat for the base, but it also plays well to rural America.
--:-- Kenny Torella: You know, most meat, egg, and dairy is produced in red states, not all, but most of it.
--:-- David Pierce: And it can be an effective tactic during an election year to kind of throw a bone to the farmers and ranchers and also rile up at the base with, you know, political red meat, so to speak.
--:-- Kenny Torella: So at some level, this is pure politics.
--:-- David Pierce: What do you make of those politics? What would you talk that up to?
--:-- Kenny Torella: So you have lawmakers basically saying outright. We just want to make sure that our livestock producers in the upper Midwest aren't being challenged to compete with cultured meat.
--:-- David Pierce: And I think it goes to this term that food industry reformers have coined called agricultural exceptionalism, in which the agriculture sector doesn't have to play by the same set of rules as the rest of the economy when it comes to environmental regulations, consumer protections.
--:-- Kenny Torella: Because it's seen as this essential product that is made by humble farmers and ranchers who are salts of the earth and can do no wrong.
--:-- David Pierce: And there's this kind of cone of silence around it in that whether you're from a red state or blue state, you can't criticize agriculture, whether it's big or small ag.
--:-- Kenny Torella: That's not only prevalent on the right, but it's also quite prevalent on the left.
--:-- David Pierce: So just as a recent example, you have Senator Tammy Baldwin, a Democrat from Wisconsin, who's introduced a bill that would make it illegal for plant-based milk companies to even use the word milk on their products.
--:-- Kenny Torella: Tammy Baldwin supported the Dairy Pride Act to stop plant-based drinks from stealing the good name of Wisconsin milk.
--:-- David Pierce: You couldn't call it soy milk. It would have to be soy beverage or soy drink. Which sounds much grosser than soy milk.
--:-- Kenny Torella: Yeah. In fact, Trader Joe's, their almond milk is called almond beverage.
--:-- David Pierce: You also have Senator John Fetterman, you know, a Democrat from Pennsylvania who's introduced a similar bill about vegan eggs.
--:-- Kenny Torella: Those companies can't use the word egg on their product, according to this Fetterman bill.
--:-- David Pierce: And of course, Pennsylvania is a major egg producer.
--:-- Kenny Torella: So there's a lot of protectionism going on around here.
--:-- David Pierce: And historically, Republicans have received a lot more money from big ag than Democrats.
--:-- Kenny Torella: It's nonpartisan to say, you know, you love me and you want to protect the meat industry.
--:-- David Pierce: It's an industry that, you know, is kind of above criticism when you compare it to, say, fossil fuels.
--:-- Kenny Torella: So this has become a big political fight, but is there anything real that we're actually fighting about yet?
--:-- David Pierce: Can you actually buy and eat and have this stuff in your fridge yet in any real way?
--:-- Kenny Torella: No and that kind of the irony of all this.
--:-- David Pierce: Okay, Republicans in these state houses are trying to ban a product that doesn't even exist.
--:-- Kenny Torella: You know, after those two startups received regulatory approval last summer, they just weeks later started to sell in two restaurants.
--:-- David Pierce: Two. Two restaurants in the entire country. One in San Francisco, one in Washington, D.C.
--:-- Kenny Torella: And one of them is not McDonald's, I'm assuming.
--:-- David Pierce: Correct. Yeah. Okay. These were more high-end restaurants.
--:-- Kenny Torella: This Michelin-level fried chicken is made from cultivated meat. That's right, cultivated.
--:-- David Pierce: They sold them in extremely limited quantities, and they sold them at a loss.
--:-- Kenny Torella: And so these sales only occurred for, you know, six months or so.
--:-- David Pierce: They've since been phased out.
--:-- Kenny Torella: So if you had all the money in the world and you wanted to go buy, sell cultivated meat somewhere, you couldn't do it.
--:-- David Pierce: There's an interesting parallel there to a lot of the stuff that we talk about with climate and environment tech right now, right?
--:-- Kenny Torella: There's the problem of solving it once and prototyping the thing.
--:-- David Pierce: And I think the interesting moment with the lab meat, it seems like, was they said, yes, we can do it.
--:-- Kenny Torella: We can make something that everyone, even Kenny agrees, tastes passably like chicken.
--:-- David Pierce: But then scaling that up to the size of the meat industry in the United States was always going to be a very different problem.
--:-- Kenny Torella: And it seems like, especially now in a very different and much tighter economy than we were in five years ago, that's a harder problem than everybody might have reckoned for a few years ago and might take longer.
--:-- David Pierce: Yeah, no company has come close to scaling this technology.
--:-- Kenny Torella: A lot of these proofs of concept and can produce it on a very small scale, but nowhere close enough to see it on supermarket shelves or restaurant menus and really compete with the industry that they're trying to go up against.
--:-- David Pierce: Why is it so hard to scale?
--:-- Kenny Torella: On the one hand, it seems like it would be easier because you don't have to breed generations of cows or chickens and find a place to put all of them.
--:-- David Pierce: This seems like on some level, it actually be easier to do at huge volume.
--:-- Kenny Torella: Yeah, there's a few things. So you can first just look at the technical challenges.
--:-- David Pierce: For one, the ingredients that you have to feed these cells for them to grow and to grow into meat are really expensive.
--:-- Kenny Torella: So they need to figure out how to build out a huge supply chain of affordable food for their cells.
--:-- David Pierce: The second is that it can be challenging to grow massive amounts of this cell-cultivated meat and prevent bacterial contamination.
--:-- Kenny Torella: So they grow them in these big bioreactor tanks. They're large stainless steel tanks.
--:-- David Pierce: But they can be prone to contamination.
--:-- Kenny Torella: And so that's another challenge, because if one tiny bacteria infects the batch, it all has to be thrown away.
--:-- David Pierce: You know, a third challenge is also just figuring out how to make this process more efficient, make the cells grow faster so that they can cut down the time it takes to produce a batch.
--:-- Kenny Torella: Secondly, this is a really capital-intensive project.
--:-- David Pierce: You know, if you think of our meat industry, it's developed over the last, well, you could argue over the last 10,000 years or so.
--:-- Kenny Torella: Yeah, we've been doing this a while.
--:-- David Pierce: But over the last century, we've seen what we would consider the factory farming or industrialized model really scale.
--:-- Kenny Torella: And it's scaled with the help of a massive ecosystem of government research and funding of land-grant universities.
--:-- David Pierce: And the self-cultivated meat sector just doesn't have that infrastructure.
--:-- Kenny Torella: And it would also take it decades and decades to get the capital to build these massive factories.
--:-- David Pierce: So there's all of these kind of technical and economic realities that are stacking up to kind of cause this reckoning moment within the sector.
--:-- Kenny Torella: That the promises they made over the last decade that this is around the corner, that we're going to be able to start to scale once we get regulatory approval, just aren't going to come to fruition just yet.
--:-- David Pierce: And if this does succeed, it's going to be decades from now.
--:-- Kenny Torella: So it's bad times for alternative meat, really, however you want to look at it, both politically and technologically and just in terms of whether people like it.
--:-- David Pierce: Yeah, we're kind of in an alternative meat winter.
--:-- Kenny Torella: Yeah, okay. So what does that mean for our non-alternative, non-lab, old-fashioned meat consumption?
--:-- David Pierce: It's going up and up and up.
--:-- Kenny Torella: Meat consumption has reached about 225 pounds of meat a year in the United States, which is higher than virtually any other country in the world and is the highest it's ever been in the U.S.
--:-- David Pierce: That has massive implications for climate change and the environment, animal welfare, and public health.
--:-- Kenny Torella: And cell-cultivated meats, along with plant-based meats, were really hailed as a way to kind of alleviate these problems that stem from meat production, but without having to change consumer behavior.
--:-- David Pierce: The thought was you could just change meat itself.
--:-- Kenny Torella: And so now you have critics of these industries saying, look, this was never really going to work out.
--:-- David Pierce: And that theory of change is really in question now.
--:-- Kenny Torella: Coming up, why the source of our meat matters so much.
--:-- David Pierce: Support for today's show comes from Adio. What is Adio?
--:-- Kenny Torella: Adio is an AI native customer relationship management system built specifically for the next era of companies.
--:-- David Pierce: They say it's extremely powerful, adapts to your unique data structures and scales with any business model.
--:-- Kenny Torella: According to Adio, Adio takes less than a minute to set up, and within seconds you will have your email and calendars synced.
--:-- David Pierce: You'll see all your relationships in a fully-fledged platform, they say, all enriched with that actionable data.
--:-- Kenny Torella: And they say you can build AI-powered automations and use its research agent to tackle some of your most complex processes.
--:-- David Pierce: So that you can focus on what matters, building your company.
--:-- Kenny Torella: You can join industry leaders such as Flatfile, Replicate, Modal, and so much more.
--:-- David Pierce: You can go to adio.com slash todayexplained to get 15% off your first year.
--:-- Kenny Torella: That's A-T-T-I-O dot com slash todayexplained.
--:-- David Pierce: Support for this show comes from Macy's.
--:-- Kenny Torella: It's almost fall, and that means it's time to cycle your wardrobe to the cold setting.
--:-- David Pierce: Because while everyone loves a breezy summer outfit, let's be real, layering is even more fun.
--:-- Kenny Torella: That's why Macy's Fall Fashion Guide has everything you need to piece together the perfect look for you.
--:-- David Pierce: It's your one shop for fall latest trends and must curated by their experts.
--:-- Kenny Torella: Add a statement shoe to your collection like the calf loafers from Steve Madden.
--:-- David Pierce: Or tap into your romantic side with flowy dresses from Cece and sheer pieces from INC.
--:-- Kenny Torella: You can even throw in some textural layers for contrast, like a faux fur bomber jacket from Karl Lagerfeld Paris.
--:-- David Pierce: Whether your old favorite sweater or coat is on its last threads, or you're just craving a new vibe to switch things up, Macy's has got you covered this season.
--:-- Kenny Torella: Find the perfect layering pieces for you by exploring the Macy's Fall Fashion Style Guide.
--:-- David Pierce: Shop in-store or online at Macy's.com.
--:-- Kenny Torella: Support for the show today comes from Life Kit, the podcast from NPR.
--:-- David Pierce: What's in your life kit?
--:-- Kenny Torella: I'm asking.
--:-- David Pierce: They didn't ask that.
--:-- Kenny Torella: Every day you have to make choices that might shape the direction of your life, but you can't flip to the back of the book to find an answer key.
--:-- David Pierce: Instead, you can listen to the Life Kit podcast from NPR.
--:-- Kenny Torella: Life Kit offers real stories about common issues like relationships, finances, parenting, and your career.
--:-- David Pierce: If you're looking to move with more intention or just need thoughtful guidance on living better, Life Kit delivers strategies to help you make meaningful, sustainable change.
--:-- Kenny Torella: From fitness routines to mental resilience, navigating personal goals to tackling burnout, each episode is full of relevant insights and clear takeaways about things we all could use a little help with.
--:-- David Pierce: LifeKit wants to help you approach your own life with confidence and clarity and walk away with a game plan you can implement right away.
--:-- Kenny Torella: Enough from me. Go listen to the show, LifeKit.
--:-- David Pierce: It's a podcast from NPR.
--:-- Kenny Torella: What's more American than a cheeseburger?
--:-- David Pierce: This cheeseburger, loaded with a hot dog and potato chips, in the hands of all American models.
--:-- Kenny Torella: David Pierce. I'm filling in as host today on Today Explained.
--:-- David Pierce: Okay, Kenny, when we left off, you were saying that Americans are actually eating more meat than ever and not the lab-grown variety.
--:-- Kenny Torella: Remind us why it's such a bad thing that we're eating so much meat.
--:-- David Pierce: First, there's the environmental case.
--:-- Kenny Torella: So if you look at this broadly, there's the climate change aspect of it.
--:-- David Pierce: Around 90% of Amazonian deforestation is a result of livestock production.
--:-- Kenny Torella: It's the number one user of antibiotics worldwide, the number one user of fresh water worldwide.
--:-- David Pierce: Plus, it's more greenhouse gases than the whole of the transport sector, planes, trains and automobiles.
--:-- Kenny Torella: Looking just at the United States, we raise about 10 billion animals for food.
--:-- David Pierce: That's mostly chickens.
--:-- Kenny Torella: And the emissions come from a few sources, primarily cattle and their belches.
--:-- David Pierce: In digesting their high-fiber diet, cows emit methane as a byproduct, making them one of the least climate-friendly sources of food on the planet.
--:-- Kenny Torella: The second is the animal's manure. contains high levels of nitrous oxide, which is also a very potent greenhouse gas.
--:-- David Pierce: And then we also dedicate a vast amount of land in the United States to growing corn and soy to feed all these animals.
--:-- Kenny Torella: And we spray a lot of fertilizer and pesticides to make that corn and soy grow big and fast.
--:-- David Pierce: But producing all of that fertilizer and pesticide also produces a lot of emissions.
--:-- Kenny Torella: So it's the animals themselves, but it's also emissions from all the food we have to feed them.
--:-- David Pierce: And you mentioned there's also a pollution problem on the other side of this too.
--:-- Kenny Torella: Yes. So the 10 billion animals we raised for food, they generate a lot of manure, about one trillion pounds annually.
--:-- David Pierce: That's twice as much as humans in the U.S.
--:-- Kenny Torella: And a lot of that manure ends up in rivers and streams.
--:-- David Pierce: In Iowa, manure runoff is thought to be a major contributing source of bacteria, which forced beach closings during the summer.
--:-- Kenny Torella: So you have all of this waste, whether it's from the crops or from the animals themselves, that is essentially trashing America's rivers and streams.
--:-- David Pierce: So we don't just have a meat problem, we have a pooping, burping animal problem.
--:-- Kenny Torella: Yeah, it is, you could call it a really shitty problem if you wanted to.
--:-- David Pierce: But, you know, it's not just climate change and pollution.
--:-- Kenny Torella: It's also resources.
--:-- David Pierce: You know, it takes an incredible amount of resources to grow all this meat and dairy.
--:-- Kenny Torella: We often call the fossil fuel industry extractive.
--:-- David Pierce: You could apply that same word to animal agriculture, which uses about 41% of U.S. land.
--:-- Kenny Torella: It is devoted to meat and dairy production in one way or another.
--:-- David Pierce: Most of that is for cattle grazing, but also a lot of it is to grow corn and soy.
--:-- Kenny Torella: You know, when you're driving through the Midwest, all that corn and soy, it's not being turned into tofu and corn on the cob.
--:-- David Pierce: It's mostly being turned into livestock feed.
--:-- Kenny Torella: So is this a known thing?
--:-- David Pierce: I feel like we talk all the time about celebrities in their private jets and we yell at Taylor Swift for how she moves around the US and everybody's mad at Joe Manchin in West Virginia over coal.
--:-- Kenny Torella: But I don't recall any congressional yelling or protests about cattle burping.
--:-- David Pierce: Why aren't we yelling about this?
--:-- Kenny Torella: I think there's a few reasons.
--:-- David Pierce: One is the reason I mentioned earlier, agricultural exceptionalism.
--:-- Kenny Torella: You see agriculture largely exempt from the Clean Water Act and the Clean Air Act.
--:-- David Pierce: So those laws have been really effective at cleaning up pollution from coal plants, from factories.
--:-- Kenny Torella: But because they're largely exempting factory farms, we just have a huge amount of pollution stemming from meat production that does not get regulated.
--:-- David Pierce: But the bigger reason, I would argue, is that this is such a politically sensitive issue.
--:-- Kenny Torella: And that has caused most of the environmentalist community to totally avoid campaigning against giant meat companies.
--:-- David Pierce: To calling for regulations against factory farming, to stop pollution, you know, to avoid the science that says rich countries really need to embrace a more plant-based diet to meet the Paris climate agreements.
--:-- Kenny Torella: You know, Americans love meat, and no one, even environmentalists, want to be the messenger of this bad news that something that we love to eat is harming the planet and we need to change.
--:-- David Pierce: Okay, so it seems clear that you can't environment shame politicians into making new, better laws or people into eating different kinds of meat.
--:-- Kenny Torella: Is there another move?
--:-- David Pierce: Are the folks working on this figuring out some other plan that might work?
--:-- Kenny Torella: Their response to the factory farming system is not necessarily to go up against it but try to promote what they call regenerative agriculture.
--:-- David Pierce: Ooh, what is that?
--:-- Kenny Torella: I wish I could easily define it, but there is no formal definition.
--:-- David Pierce: And if you kind of ask one group, they might define it one way.
--:-- Kenny Torella: Another group would define it another way.
--:-- David Pierce: But the way would kind of define it for the lay reader is that it's kind of organic 2.0.
--:-- Kenny Torella: It's a more holistic way of farming that stands in opposition to the industrialized ag model with the crowded factory farms and the chemical fertilizers.
--:-- David Pierce: And it's been championed by everyone from Joe Rogan.
--:-- Kenny Torella: And it's an agriculture where everything works in symbiosis.
--:-- David Pierce: Is that a safe thing to say?
--:-- Kenny Torella: It's a great thing to say.
--:-- David Pierce: To Representative Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez.
--:-- Kenny Torella: Ms. Boyd, indigenous farmers have taken a regenerative agriculture approach to their relationship with the land for millennia, correct?
--:-- David Pierce: To Walmart.
--:-- Kenny Torella: General Mills and Walmart have a shared vision to help make farming more sustainable.
--:-- David Pierce: You know, there's a lot of buzz around regenerative agriculture in the air right now, but its impact and its potential to kind of clean up the problems we've talked about so far are kind of dubious.
--:-- Kenny Torella: So what is that focused on?
--:-- David Pierce: It feels like, as we've been talking about, this industry is huge.
--:-- Kenny Torella: It goes a lot of different directions.
--:-- David Pierce: The folks working on regenerative agriculture, what are they most focused on in this industry right now?
--:-- Kenny Torella: So environmental groups have really honed in on regenerative beef because beef is the most polluting food product that there is.
--:-- David Pierce: Because of the burping cows.
--:-- Kenny Torella: Because of the burping cows, precisely.
--:-- David Pierce: The whole idea around regenerative cattle ranching is that you have ranchers who are essentially more hands-on.
--:-- Kenny Torella: And they move cows from one area of a ranch to another area of a ranch periodically.
--:-- David Pierce: And what this does is that it prevents cattle from overgrazing and destroying landscapes, destroying vegetation.
--:-- Kenny Torella: And when that happens, the soil can become healthier, there's more abundant vegetation.
--:-- David Pierce: And here's the point, that it can sequester massive amounts of carbon dioxide from the atmosphere.
--:-- Kenny Torella: I mean, this seems like a great idea.
--:-- David Pierce: Is this going to work?
--:-- Kenny Torella: There's one huge drawback to regenerative beef.
--:-- David Pierce: It requires far more land than conventional meat.
--:-- Kenny Torella: Even more?
--:-- David Pierce: About twice as much or even more, according to the studies that showed a lot of promise.
--:-- Kenny Torella: So what that means is that if we were to just switch even a modest amount of current beef production to regenerative beef, it would cause a massive spike in demand for land.
--:-- David Pierce: And again, remember, we already have 41% of the entire country devoted to growing, raising animals for food.
--:-- Kenny Torella: If we wanted to go in this direction, we would have to increase that significantly.
--:-- David Pierce: We'd have like four cities and then farmland, and that would be the United States.
--:-- Kenny Torella: It would essentially lead to the United States being one giant cattle ranch if we were to convert a lot of beef to this style.
--:-- David Pierce: Okay. So the only scalable solution, it seems, in theory, is just to eat less meat.
--:-- Kenny Torella: Essentially.
--:-- David Pierce: I mean, you know, you could bicker around the edges of all these different solutions, but ultimately climate scientists have been saying for decades now that rich countries need to change not only how they farm, but also what they eat.
--:-- Kenny Torella: And that means less meat and dairy.
--:-- David Pierce: Okay. So until now in this episode, you have convinced me successfully that it is impossible to do that.
--:-- Kenny Torella: Convince me now that it's possible.
--:-- David Pierce: So on many days, I believe it is impossible and don't really see our country changing on this.
--:-- Kenny Torella: But I think, you know, we can look to Europe for a place that is kind of going through this right now and has seen some successes and some warnings for the future of what we might expect if we were to start really regulating factory farms and trying to change the system.
--:-- David Pierce: You know, in Europe, many environmental groups and even elected officials are pretty progressive on this issue and have been pushing for a reduction in meat consumption.
--:-- Kenny Torella: They've been pushing for stronger regulations on factory farms, and it's actually starting to work.
--:-- David Pierce: So you can look at Germany, where meat consumption has been on the decline since 2011.
--:-- Kenny Torella: According to authorities, around 10 percent of Germans are vegetarians, up 4 percent from 2018.
--:-- David Pierce: And the trend is still on the rise.
--:-- Kenny Torella: Sweden is experiencing a similar decline.
--:-- David Pierce: Denmark and a number of other countries have invested massive amounts of government dollars into trying to boost the plant-based food sector, essentially.
--:-- Kenny Torella: But at the same time, there's been a lot of pushback to some of these initiatives, especially regulating livestock pollution, where in the Netherlands, you have farmers protesting in the streets and setting hay bales afire over policy that would reduce livestock pollution.
--:-- David Pierce: Farmers have said they want to paralyze the entire country.
--:-- Kenny Torella: They have announced that they want to block access to the main airports.
--:-- David Pierce: The situation has been escalating.
--:-- Kenny Torella: I think that's a preview as to how politically difficult this issue will be in the U.S.
--:-- David Pierce: But it's a policy discussion that we can no longer afford to avoid if we want to have a livable planet for future generations.
--:-- Kenny Torella: Vox reporter Kenny Torella.
--:-- David Pierce: This episode was produced by Miles Bryan, edited by Matt Collette, fact-checked by Laura Bullard, and engineered by Patrick Boyd.
--:-- David Pierce: I'm David Pierce, and this is Today Explained.
