#not “below” as in less valuable but in that as a data scientist i pretty much have all the skills data analysts have

[wickedhawtwexler]

i'm at the point in my job search where i'm applying for jobs i am definitely overqualified for lmao

[tanadrin]

Reordberend

(part 20 of ?; first; previous; next)

The entire process of breaking down the shattered machine took three days. Katherine was impressed with the methodical approach the salvagers took. Under Andrac’s direction, everything was sorted: useful metal here, pieces too big to transport for now over there, tools in another pile, parts of tools in another. Using rope they had brought, and cables from the salvage, they began lashing together sleds from some of the spars, which they would have to drag over the rough slopes of the mountain pass, until they came to flat ground--it meant a lot of labor in the short term, but once they were back on the ice, it would mean they could bring back far more salvage than merely what could be carried on their backs. Though they would load up their packs and bags, too. The return journey would be considerably slower, but the reward for all this work, Eadwig said, was a bounty that would last them for many years. The most precious thing they found were the solar panels and some self-contained energy cells that still had considerable charge. The nuclear power plant was too heavy and too dangerous to remove--apparently some salvagers had tried that once, on a different beast, and poisoned their whole village. But the energy cells could be safely distributed among the different valleys, to power essential things like forges and the underground moss farms. At least for a little while, life in the Valleys would be somewhat easier, the threat of some sudden disaster a little more distant.

Katherine supposed that this was, in a way, what all human life had been like until not too long ago--you were one bad growing season, one bad drought or some other natural disaster away from ruin. To say nothing of more human disasters: war or tyrants or some plague brought by traders from a distant land. It was hard for her to believe that the ancestors of the People had really understood what they were signing up for. Who would intentionally condemn their children and grandchildren and great-grandchildren to a life of difficult labor and privation, even in the name of lofty ideals? But if any of the Dry Valleys People resented their ancestors’ choice, or thought it had been unwise, they didn’t show it. This was simply, for them, the Way Things Were, and there was a safety in that. The eternal, conservative urge of the human heart--and of societies schooled by scarcity--that says, we’ve got a tolerable thing going here. Let’s not upset the apple cart. It was a sentiment Katherine hardly shared, though she could appreciate the place it came from.

When they had finished with the first dragon, Andrac, Katherine, and a few others went to inspect the second. It was deeply buried; only part of its flank stuck out from beneath the ice and rubble that covered it, though the part that they could see didn’t look to be too badly damaged. A furious debate between Andrac and the others ensued, about whether they should attempt to salvage anything from this one, too. The party seemed to be of two minds: it would be dangerous, if the ground proved unstable or the repair and defense systems were still active. On the other hand, the reward was potentially greater. Even in the dry Antarctic air, which preserved much, wind and weather had rendered some of the most sensitive tools on the other platform useless. If this one had been buried not too long after it had ceased to function, it was possible it would yield even more valuable salvage.

“What do you think, Outlander?” Beonna asked.

Katherine was startled by the question. “Does it matter what I think?” she said.

“Sure it does. You’re in this same as us.”

Katherine shrugged. “I don’t know if it would be worth it or not, but even if it is, I don’t think we’re getting in to this one anytime soon. None of the hatches are exposed. There’s no interface for me to try like there was on the other one. You might be able to cut through the side there--but I don’t know how far you’d get.”

“It’s true,” Andrac said. “We can always mark the spot--come back later, with more men and tools.”

Beonna seemed to agree, and the decision was made. The haul they had was enough for the time being. The others went back to help load the sleds, but Katherine lingered for a little while, exploring the back of the great beast.

Dragon, dragon, she thought. From the Latin word, if she remembered correctly. When she was a kid she had been fascinated by old words, the way they reached out of the past and seemed to carry immense secrets within them. She had thought, when she was a teenager, that maybe languages or history would have been the thing to study--but there was nothing in that anymore, her teachers had told her. You had cybernetics and modules now. You didn’t have to spend years of your life in school, and years more of immersion in a foreign country to learn to communicate with people. The old grief of Babel had been reversed, and whether that was a good thing or a bad thing depended on who you asked, but it meant that the study of languages was as dead as the Romans. With it, too, had gone the study of ancient languages. Oh, sure, there might be modules out there for Latin or Greek, the really popular ones. But the world was no longer very much interested in the minutiae of its own history. It contended itself with the outlines. And it surely had no space for scholars to sit in dim offices in the corner of some university humanities department, poring over the work of long-dead philologists. Go into the sciences. Learn something useful! her teachers had told her. Well, maybe she hadn’t done exactly that. But she was still a scientist of a kind.

Something caught Katherine’s eye--a hatch or a compartment, a small one, just by her feet. She squatted down, and carefully pried the outer cover off, then popped off the access panel. Inside was a mess of electronic components. She poked around for a little bit, but she couldn’t make heads or tails, and there was no terminal or anything here. Something was still functioning inside this thing--there were a couple of indicator lights slowly blinking--but none of these seemed to be critical components. She poked around a bit more, then found something of interest.

It was a little black cylinder, about the size of her palm, with big block letters on it that said BACKUP DATA RECORDER - DO NOT REMOVE. Naturally, she removed it. She held it up; on the other side, it said PROPERTY OF ANTECO MINING INC - IF FOUND PLEASE RETURN - REWARD OFFERED. Some kind of retrievable storage? The equivalent of an airplane’s black box, maybe. It was a curious object, anyway, and Katherine liked curious. She slipped it into a pocket.

Underneath, in the spot where it had been seated, there was something that shined beautifully. Katherine reached in and pulled, and it came free--what looked to all the world like a dazzling, clear gemstone, set in silver. It was clearly some kind of electronic component, but despite its mundane nature, it looked like something out of a fairy tale. Perhaps she would find someone back in the Valleys who would enjoy something like this. That, too, she stuck in her pocket.

“Hey, Outlander!” someone called out. She stood and turned around; it was Andrac. “We’re almost ready to go.”

“Coming!” Katherine shouted back. She stumbled her way back down the side of the platform, and jogged over to help the others finish packing.

* * *

The first day of the return journey was brutal--a lot of pulling sleds up steep slopes, a lot of almost losing her footing and sprawling onto the stony ground, and a lot of cussing (on her part) and shouting (on others’). Mostly words of encouragement, but also some words Leofe definitely had not taught her. It took the whole expedition to get the heaviest sleds up the top of the ridge, and they could only be brought down the mountainside a couple at a time. If they lost control of one, it was likely to go careening down a slope or over a boulder--crash, bang, a god-awful mess, and, in the darkness, probably no way to recover the lost cargo. So they went slowly and carefully. But once they were on the ice again, they moved much more quickly. They all took turns helping to pull the sleds, even Katherine, though she didn’t feel like she was contributing much. Her time in Antarctica had definitely toughened her up a bit--she had muscles now in places she didn’t know you could have them before--but she still felt a little like the expedition mascot.

They didn’t head back to Leofe’s village--High Settlement, the one Katherine thought of as her home base--since that was pretty far up the Middle Valley. Instead, they made for one of the smaller outlying villages, which was barely more than a few cottages, less than half a kilometer from the edge of the glacier. They left the sleds below and staggered up the hill to the nearest house; despite the fact that nearly twenty exhausted, hungry people had just showed up, the villagers seemed happy enough to see them. They were even happier when they learned they had just come back from a salvage expedition. They began talking with the salvagers excitedly, then a few of them rushed off to their own houses.

“What’s that all about?” Katherine asked Andrac.

“They’re going to get ready.”

“Get ready for what?”

“To send word to the other villages. To bring more here. To help distribute the salvage. What, you didn’t think we were going to go around to every village ourselves, did you?”

“Well, I certainly wasn’t going to.”

Andrac laughed. “No, people will come here to get the things they need.”

“Who decides how everything is distributed?”

Andrac looked confused. “People will take what they need.”

“What if more than one person needs the same thing?”

“They’ll figure something out. Or they’ll share. Do they not having sharing where you come from?”

“Is there some kind of system of barter? Or trade? Money?”

“Money? Why would we need money?”

“Uhh--” Katherine didn’t know the word for ‘economics’ in the Dry Valleys tongue. “Your system, your system of, ah, distributing scarce resources. Some societies use money. Some exchange favors and gifts. Some rely on, er, relationships of kindred and friendship. I am curious about your people. What they use.”

Andrac raised an eyebrow. “We talk to each other. We make sure everybody has the things they need.”

Katherine suspected he was being deliberately unhelpful, but she didn’t press the question. Instead she thanked the villager who handed her a bowl of something hot and meaty, and settled herself down by the fire to rest. Every muscle in her body ached; she hoped they weren’t going anywhere anytime soon.

Within six hours, the first people from other villages began to arrive. Katherine watched as they did; everyone went up to Andrac and Eadwig first, greeting them by name, complimenting them on the success of their expedition. There was a little ritual to it, even if it wasn’t a formal one. Only then did they go down to inspect the haul, looking over it all very carefully, talking to the salvagers about what they’d found. When they came back, they made pleasant small talk about the journey, the weather, how each other’s relatives were doing--but they did not discuss the salvage itself, and this surprised Katherine a little. When one of the men sat down near her, she spoke to him.

“I have a question,” she said.

“You’re the outlander, aren’t you?”

“My name is Katherine.”

“Mine is Gar.”

“So what do you want from the salvage, Gar?”

Gar shifted in his seat uneasily.

“This and that,” he said. “Some of it could be very useful.”

“Like what?”

Gar looked uncomfortable, and Katherine wondered why. Andrac, noticing from across the room, came over and cut in.

“Now’s not the time to discuss that sort of thing,” he said. “We’ll all talk about it once everyone is here.”

Ah, thought Katherine. Maybe they want to give everybody a look first. No dibs, no deals worked out beforehand.

Over the next two days, as more people arrived, her suspicions were confirmed. The same pattern held; and only when there were men and women from just about every village in the Dry Valleys present, did they all gather in the largest house in the village; and then a great discussion began. It was like the longest, most agonizing committee meeting of any bureaucracy anywhere. First, every single item salvaged, from the smallest piece of metal to the most sophisticated laser cutter, was enumerated. Then, starting all over again, they went through every piece in order, and talked about who had a use for what. Then the competing claims had to be worked out.

There seemed to be a rough logic to this part. First, anybody who had claimed too much was pressured to pick only the things he or she really needed. Oh, Eadgifu, you don’t need the wrench, and the three loops of cable, and the plastic sheeting, do you? That’s quite a lot, don’t you think? All Thorgar here needs is a little of the plastic, surely you can give that up? And where there was really steep competition, for things like the laser drills, the expedition leaders got called in to mediate. Here, Andrac, what do you think? Eadwig, weren’t you saying the other day that our village really needs one of those? And whenever the bargaining got a little too heated--what do you mean, you need all that metal? Hasn’t your village taken more than enough already?--someone would step in, always a scrupulously neutral party, and say, wait, I’ve got something I need, shut up for a second and we’ll come back to you.

It was tedious in the extreme, but there was a ballet to it: nobody’s feelings were hurt, everybody’s opinion was taken into consideration, and everybody was set to go home with something. A few of the really big ticket items--the power cells were one--were divided up according to preexisting rules. Nobody got to claim those. But anything else, anyone in the room was entitled to make a claim on. And a particular phrase was repeated more than once--everything’s up for grabs. Nothing is to be held back.

Only as this process was winding up did Katherine think of the two little objects she held in her pocket; she had been fingering them absentmindedly, turning them over out of sight, when she realized one might very well consider them part of the salvage, too. And might consider that at least one of them might have non-trivial value. She began to worry more, as she saw the intense discussion over the last few items, which very nearly broke out into an actual argument more than once.

“Hey, hey. Enough!” Andrac finally said. “We’ll all sleep on it, okay? No use in getting mad, there’s enough to go around. Here, shake his hand, Alfstan.” He pushed one surly-looking man toward another. They shook, and the room relaxed a little; after that people began filing out, heading over to the other houses or to tents they’d brought along. “Back here in the morning!” Andrac called out. “Eadwig and I are heading home after breakfast. So let’s get the last of the business done early!”

Katherine had been watching this from the back of the room; she slipped through the thick knot of people over to Andrac, and tapped him on the shoulder.

“Can I talk to you? Outside?”

“Sure, outlander.”

She took him around the side of the house to a quiet spot.

“I have a question about the salvage.”

“Go ahead.”

“If someone held something back from the salvage, what would happen? How would people react?”

“I don’t know. Nobody would do that.”

“Nobody?”

“It would be… strange. Selfish. Really wrong. I’ve never heard of it happening.”

“Is there a law against it?”

“There doesn’t need to be. It just wouldn’t happen. Why? You’re not accusing somebody of something, are you?”

“No, not at all. I was just curious. You know me. Nosy outlander.”

“Hm.” Andrac didn’t seem convinced by this. “You sure everything is all right?”

Katherine winced. “I’m sorry. It was me.”

“What?”

“I took something. Just before we left. I didn’t think about it until just now. It didn’t seem important. But I think I violated one of your customs by accident. I didn’t mean to cause offense.”

She took the data module and the jewel out of her pocket, and held them out to Andrac.

“You should take them. Tell the others--I don’t know, tell them you found them in one of the sleds or something. Or tell them I didn’t know your rules, and I didn’t mean to steal.”

Andrac took the objects from her, and turned them over in his hand.

“They say a thief brings a great curse down on themselves when they steal,” he said. He tapped the data module with one finger. Then he handed both objects back to Katherine. “But you’re right. You didn’t know. You’re not a thief, just a stranger to our ways.”

“You should still take them.”

“We don’t buy and sell among ourselves--but we’re familiar with the concept. Consider these your payment for your help. Honestly, I don’t think anybody here has a use for these trinkets. If for some reason someone does give you trouble about them, just tell them to speak to me.”

“You think it’s really okay?”

Andrac nodded seriously. “Yes. It would be different if you had not spoken to me--but you have shown understanding and sympathy to our customs. I respect that.”

“Thanks.”

“Now go get some rest, Katherine. We’re heading home early tomorrow.”

[ezatluba]

A brown-throated tree sloth and her baby rest in Costa Rica's Aviarios Sloth Sanctuary in a file photograph.

Why this rare video of a sloth giving birth has scientists excited

The baby dangles dramatically from the umbilical cord, a behavior so little seen experts are unsure if it's an evolutionary strategy.

JASON BITTEL

MARCH 2, 2020

Tourists in Costa Rica recently witnessed a magical and elusive event—the birth of a three-toed sloth.

Steven Vela, a guide with the company Canoa Aventura, spotted the brown-throated sloth (Bradypus variegatus) out of his car window near La Fortuna, not far from Arenal Volcano National Park. When he pulled over, he had no idea the animal was in the late stages of labor—or of the drama that would unfold next.

Seconds after the baby sloth emerged, it slipped out of its mother’s grasp. But instead of plummeting to the forest floor below, the baby dangled from its umbilical cord, prompting gasps from the onlookers. Perhaps surprising for the world’s slowest mammal, the mother then promptly reached down and hugged the baby against her body, licking her newborn clean. (Learn more incredible facts about sloths.)

“That was something amazing,” Vela, who videotaped the event. “I think I will die and I will never see something like that [again].”

He’s probably right. Witnessing such a birth is extremely rare, says Rebecca Cliffe, executive director of the Costa Rica-based Sloth Conservation Foundation. “Not many people have seen this, especially in a [three-toed] sloth,” she says.

For starters, sloths are secretive and sedentary creatures, almost always hidden in the treetops. Three-toed sloths, of which there are four living species, are also much harder to spot in the wild than their cousins, the two-toed sloths.

Less clear, however, is whether the umbilical cord usually acts as a life-saving device for the tree-dwelling mammals—there simply aren’t enough observations to know for sure.

But the video illustrates why citizen science is so important: It offers a valuable glimpse into a species’ behavior that can help scientists fill in knowledge gaps about a particular species. What’s more, such observations can provide data for experts in crafting conservation plans.

The brown-throated sloth, which is widespread among protected areas in Central and South America, is not in danger of extinction—but other sloth species are, such as the critically endangered pygmy three-toed sloth. See "Pictures: Pygmy Sloth Among 100 Species Most At Risk.")

Baby lifeline?

As luck would have it, Cliffe has also seen a brown-throated sloth giving birth in Costa Rica, back in 2013.

In that case, when the baby fell, its umbilical cord got tangled around a branch. “It was all pretty dramatic,” she says. That mother sloth also simply reached down and scooped her young back up. “Then she ate all of the amniotic sac, and the cord, and then she ate the placenta,” Cliffe says.

“I don’t think [hanging from the umbilical cord] happens in every case,” adds Cliffe. “But I suspect it’s quite common and doesn’t really cause a problem. Just makes everyone watching a little nervous.”

Sam Trull, director and co-founder of The Sloth Institute, based in Costa Rica, suspects otherwise. (See Trull’s adorable photos of baby sloths.)

“I don’t think the baby dangling from the umbilical cord like in the video is the norm,” Trull says in an email.

For example, the placenta—to which the umbilical cord is attached—is usually delivered rather quickly after the baby, which means the mother may only have a short amount of time in which to reel her little one back in. Trull also notes mother sloths place their hands below their bodies in anticipation of their newborn, suggesting they’re not meant to hang from the cord. (Watch a video of sloths mating in captivity.)

“However, it being able to tether mom to baby is a great function! So I wouldn’t be surprised if sloths have extra-strong umbilical cords.

“I’m so jealous I wasn’t there to see it myself,” she adds. “Of all the skills sloth need to have, now we know catching a slippery baby is yet another one.”

[jeroldlockettus]

The Future of Meat (Ep. 367)

Over 40 percent of the land in the contiguous U.S. is used for cow farming. Can scientists build a more sustainable burger? (Photo: Scott Olson/Getty)

Global demand for beef, chicken, and pork continues to rise. So do concerns about environmental and other costs. Will reconciling these two forces be possible — or, even better, Impossible

?

Listen and subscribe to our podcast at Apple Podcasts, Stitcher, or elsewhere. Below is a transcript of the episode, edited for readability. For more information on the people and ideas in the episode, see the links at the bottom of this post.

*      *      *

Let’s begin with a few basic facts. Fact No. 1: a lot of people, all over the world, really like to eat meat — especially beef, pork, and chicken.

Jayson LUSK: If you add them all together, we’re actually higher than we’ve been in recent history.

That’s Jayson Lusk.

LUSK: I’m a professor and head of the agricultural economics department at Purdue University. I study what we eat and why we eat it.

DUBNER: In terms of overall meat consumption per capita in the U.S., how do we rank worldwide?

LUSK: We’re the king of meat eaters. So, compared to almost any other country in the world, we eat more meat per capita.

DUBNER: Even Brazil, Argentina, yes?

LUSK: Yes, and part of that difference is income-based. So, if you took Argentina, Brazil, and adjusted for income, they would probably be consuming more than us, but we happen to be richer, so we eat a little more.

The average American consumes roughly 200 pounds of meat a year. That’s an average. So, let’s say you’re a meat eater and someone in your family is vegetarian: you might be putting away 400 pounds a year. But, in America at least, there aren’t that many vegetarians.

LUSK: I probably have the largest data set of vegetarians of any other researcher that I know.

DUBNER: Really? Why?

LUSK: I’ve been doing a survey of U.S. food consumers every month for about five years, and one of the questions I ask is, “Are you a vegan or a vegetarian?” So, over five years’ time and about 1,000 people a month, I’ve got about 60,000 observations.

DUBNER: Wow. And is this a nationwide data survey?

LUSK: It is. Representative in terms of age and income and education. I’d say on average, you’re looking at about three to five percent of people say “yes” to that question. I’d say there’s a very slight uptick over the last five years.

So, again, a lot of meat-eating in America. What are some other countries that consume a lot of meat? Australia and New Zealand, Israel, Canada, Russia, most European countries. And, increasingly, China.

LUSK: One of the things we know is that when consumers get a little more income in their pocket, one of the first things they do is want to add high-value proteins to their diets.

DUBNER: What is the relationship generally between G.D.P. and meat consumption?

LUSK: Positive, although sort of diminishing returns, so as you get to really high income levels, it might even tail off a little bit. But certainly at the lower end of that spectrum, as a country grows and adds more G.D.P., you start to see some pretty rapid increases in meat consumption.

Meat consumption is of course driven by social and religious factors as well; by health concerns, and animal welfare: not everyone agrees that humans should be eating animals at all. That said, we should probably assume that the demand for meat will continue to rise as more of the world keeps getting richer. How’s the supply side doing with this increased demand? Quite well. The meat industry is massive and complicated — and often heavily subsidized. But, long story short, if you go by the availability of meat and especially what consumers pay, this is an economic success story.

LUSK: So prices of almost all of our meat products have declined pretty considerably over the last 60 to 100 years. And the reason is that we have become so much more productive at producing meat. If you look at most of the statistics, like the amount of pork produced per sow. And we’ve taken out a lot of the seasonal variation that we used to see, as these animals have been brought indoors. And you look at poultry production, broiler production: the amount of meat that’s produced per broiler has risen dramatically — almost doubled, say — over the last 50 to 100 years, while also consuming slightly less feed.

That’s due largely to selective breeding and other technologies. The same goes for beef production.

LUSK: We get a lot more meat per animal, for example, on a smaller amount of land.

As you can imagine, people concerned with animal welfare may not celebrate these efficiency improvements. And then there’s the argument that, despite these efficiency improvements, turning animals into food is wildly inefficient.

Pat BROWN: Because the cow didn’t evolve to be meat. That’s the thing.

Pat Brown is a long-time Stanford biomedical researcher who’s done groundbreaking work in genetics.

BROWN: The cow evolved to be a cow and make more cows and not to be eaten by humans. And it’s not very good at making meat.

Meaning: it takes an enormous amount of food and water and other resources to turn a cow or a pig into dinner — much more than plant-based foods. And as Pat Brown sees it, that is not even the worst of it.

BROWN: The most environmentally destructive technology on earth: using animals in food production. Nothing else even comes close.

Not everyone agrees that meat production is the environment’s biggest enemy. What’s not in dispute is that global demand for meat is high and rising. And that the production of meat is resource-intensive and, at the very least, an environmental challenge, with implications for climate change. Pat Brown thinks he has a solution to these problems. He’s started a company—

BROWN: —a company whose mission is to completely replace animals as a food production technology by 2035.

The meat industry, as you can imagine, has other ideas:

Kelly FOGARTY: We want to keep the term “meat” to what is traditionally harvested and raised in the traditional manner.

Today on Freakonomics Radio: everything you always wanted to know about meat, about meatless meat, and where meat meets the future.

*      *      *

What determines which food you put in your mouth every day? There are plainly a lot of factors: personal preference, tradition, geography, on and on.

LUSK: So, take something like horse consumption. It’s almost unheard of to even think about consuming a horse in the United States.

Jayson Lusk again, the agricultural economist.

LUSK: Whereas, you go to Belgium or France, it would be a commonly consumed dish.

But there’s another big factor that determines who eats what: technology. Technology related to how food is grown, preserved, transported. But also: technology that isn’t even related to the food itself. Consider the case of mutton. Mutton is the meat of an adult sheep. The meat of a young sheep is called lamb. I am willing to bet that you have not eaten mutton in the last six months, probably the last six years. Maybe never. But if we were talking 100 years ago? Different story.

LUSK: It’s certainly the case that back in the 1920’s and 30’s that mutton was a much more commonly consumed product.

Mutton was a staple of the American diet; one of the standard items shipped to soldiers during World War II was canned mutton. But shortly after the war, mutton started to disappear. What happened?

LUSK: A sheep is not just meat. These are multi-product species and they’re valuable not just for their meat but for their wool.

Oh yeah, wool. And unlike leather, which can be harvested only once from an animal, you can shear wool from one sheep many times, over many years.

LUSK: So anything that affects the demand for wool is also going to affect the underlying market for the rest of the underlying animal.

And what might affect the demand for wool? How about synthetic substitutes? Nylon, for instance, was created by DuPont in 1935, and became available to the public in 1940. A year later, polyester was invented.

LUSK: So, you know, any time you had new clothing technologies come along, that’s going to affect the underlying demand for sheep and make them less valuable than they would have been otherwise.

So an increase in synthetic fabrics led to a shrinking demand for wool — which meant that all those sheep that had been kept around for shearing no longer needed to be kept around. Also, wool subsidies were repealed. And America’s sheep flock drastically shrank: from a high of 56 million in 1942 to barely 5 million today.

LUSK: It is amazing. I’ve worked at several agricultural universities across the U.S. now, and often the largest sheep herds in those states are at the university research farms.

And fewer sheep meant less mutton for dinner. Is it possible Americans would have stopped eating mutton without the rise of synthetic fabrics? Absolutely: if you ask a room full of meat-eaters to name their favorite meat, I doubt one of them will say “mutton.” Still, this is just one example of how technology can have a big effect on the meat we eat. And if you talk to certain people, it’s easy to believe that we’re on the verge of a similar but much larger technological shift.

BROWN: My name is Pat Brown. I’m currently the CEO and founder of Impossible Foods, whose mission is to completely replace animals as a food production technology.

Brown grew up in the suburbs of Washington, D.C., as well as Paris and Taipei — his father worked for the C.I.A. He studied to be a pediatrician and in fact completed his medical residency, but he switched to biochemistry research.

BROWN: I had the best job in the world at Stanford. My job was basically to discover and invent things and follow my curiosity.

Brown did this for many years and was considered a world-class researcher. One of his breakthroughs was a new tool for genetic mapping; it’s called the D.N.A. microarray—

BROWN: —that lets you read all the words that the cell is using and effectively kind of start to learn the vocabulary, learn how the genome writes the life story of a cell, or something like that. It also has practical applications, because — what it’s doing, in a sort of a deterministic way, specifies the potential of that cell, or if it’s a cancer cell.

Some people think the DNA microarray will win Pat Brown a Nobel Prize. When I bring this up, he just shakes his head and smiles. It’s clear that his research was a deep passion.

BROWN: For me, this was the dream job, it was like in the Renaissance, having the Medicis as patrons or something like that.

But after many years, Brown wanted a change. He was in his mid-50’s; he took a sabbatical to figure out his next move.

BROWN: It started out with stepping back from the work I was doing and asking myself, “What’s the most important thing I could do? What could I do that would have the biggest positive impact on the world?” And looking at what are the biggest unsolved problems in the world? I came relatively quickly to the conclusion that the use of animals as a food-production technology, is by far. And I could give you endless reasons why that’s true, but it is absolutely true. By far the most environmentally destructive thing that humans do.

There is indeed a great deal of evidence for this argument across the entire environmental spectrum. The agricultural historian James McWilliams, in a book called Just Food, argues that “every environmental problem related to contemporary agriculture … ends up having its deepest roots in meat production: monocropping, excessive applications of nitrogen fertilizer, addiction to insecticides, rain-forest depletion, land degradation, topsoil runoff, declining water supplies, even global warming — all these problems would be considerably less severe” if people ate meat “rarely, if ever.”

LUSK: You know, there’s no doubt that meat production has environmental consequences. To suggest that it’s the most damaging environmental thing we do is, I think, a pretty extreme overstatement.

But what about the greenhouse-gas emissions associated with raising meat — especially in the U.S., which is the world’s largest beef producer?

LUSK: Our own E.P.A. — Environmental Protection Agency — suggests that all of livestock contributes about 3 percent of our total greenhouse-gas emissions. So, I mean, 3 percent is not nothing, but it’s not the major contributor that we see. That number, I should say, is much higher in many other parts of the world. So the carbon impacts per pound produced are so much smaller here than a lot of the world that when you tell people, “the way to reduce carbon emissions is to intensify animal production,” that’s not a story a lot of people like to hear.

DUBNER: Because why not, it sounds like it’s against animal welfare?

LUSK: Well, two reasons: Exactly, one is there are concerns about animal welfare, particularly when you’re talking about broiler chickens, or hogs — less so about cattle — and the other one is, there are concerns about when you concentrate a lot of animals in one place you can get all this waste in a location, that you have to think about creative ways to deal with that don’t have some significant environmental problems.

DUBNER: So, the E.P.A. number, livestock contributing three percent, does that include the entire production chain, though? Because, some of the numbers that I see from environmental activists is much, much higher than that.

LUSK: The U.N. estimate that you often hear from — originally was created in this report called “Livestock’s Long Shadow,” is something around 19 percent. But that 19 percent, roughly, number, is a global number. Actually, there was a study that came out pointing out some flaws in that, so they reduced it somewhat.

In any case, there is a growing concern in many quarters over the externalities of meat production.

LUSK: Over the last 5–10 years, there’s been a lot of negative publicity — stories about environmental impacts, about carbon emissions, about animal welfare. And if you just look at the news stories, you would think, “Boy, people must be really cutting back, given the sort of frightful stories that you see on the front pages of the newspapers.” But if you look at the data itself, demand looks fairly stable. And that suggests to me it’s hard to change people’s preference on this.

There’s something about meat consumption. Some people would argue that we’re evolved to like meat, that it’s a protein-, vitamin-packed, tasty punch that we’ve grown to enjoy as a species. There are some people that even argue that it’s one of the reasons we became as smart as we did, the vitamins and nutrients that were in that meat allowed our brains to develop in certain ways that it might have not otherwise.

Pat Brown saw that same strong preference for meat when he decided that the number-one scientific problem to solve was replacing animals as food.

BROWN: And it’s a problem that nobody was working on in any serious way. Because everybody recognized that most people in the world, including most environmental scientists and people who care about this stuff, love the foods we get from animals so much that they can’t imagine giving those up.

Brown himself was a longtime vegan.

BROWN: I haven’t eaten meat for decades, and that’s just a personal choice that I made long before I realized the destructive impact of that industry. That was a choice I made for other reasons. And it wasn’t something that I felt like I was in a position to tell other people to do. And I still don’t feel like there’s any value in doing that.

Brown makes an interesting point here. Many of us, when we feel strongly about something — an environmental issue or a social or economic issue — we’re inclined to put forth a moral argument. A moral argument would appear to be persuasive evidence of the highest order: you should do this thing because it’s the right thing to do. But there’s a ton of research showing that moral arguments are generally ineffective; people may smile at you, and nod; but they won’t change their behavior. That’s what Brown realized about meat.

BROWN: The basic problem is that people are not going to stop wanting these foods. And the only way we’re going to solve it is not by asking them to meet you halfway and give them a substandard product that doesn’t deliver what they know they want from meat or fish or anything like that. The only way to do it is, you have to say, “We’re going to do the much harder thing,” which is we’re going to figure out how to make meat that’s not just as delicious as the meat we get from animals, it’s more delicious and better nutritionally and more affordable and so forth.

In other words: a marginal improvement on the standard veggie burger would not do.

BROWN: It’s been tried. It just doesn’t work. It’s a waste of effort.

So Brown start fooling around in his lab.

BROWN: Doing some kind of micro experiments just to convince myself in a way that this was doable.

Those early experiments were fairly encouraging.

BROWN: I felt like, okay, there’s a bunch of things I thought could be useful, and then I felt like I could just go in with a little bit more confidence to talk to the investors.

“The investors” meaning venture capitalists. Remember, Brown’s at Stanford, which is next door to the biggest pile of venture capital in the history of the world.

BROWN: And basically my pitch them was very naive from a fundraising standpoint, in the sense that basically I mostly just told them about how there’s this absolutely critical environmental disaster that needs to be solved and—

DUBNER: And they’re probably expecting to hear something now about carbon capture, or—

BROWN: Yeah, that’s the thing. And most people still are. So I just told these guys, “Look, this is an environmental disaster. No one’s doing anything about it. I’m going to solve it for you.”

So how does the almost-pediatrician-who-became-a-freewheeling-biochemist build a better meat from the ground up? That amazing story after the break:

BROWN: Okay, bingo, this is how we’re going to do it.

*      *      *

It’s estimated that more than half of the greenhouse gas emissions associated with all animal agriculture comes from cows.

LUSK: And that is due to the fact that beef are ruminant animals.

The Purdue economist Jayson Lusk again.

LUSK: Their stomachs produce methane. It comes out the front end, not the back, as a lot of people think. And as a consequence — we look at carbon consequences — it’s mainly beef that people focus on, not pork or chicken, because they don’t have the same kind of digestive systems.

There has been progress in this area. For instance, it turns out that adding seaweed to cattle feed drastically reduces their methane output. But the scientist Pat Brown is looking for a much bigger change to the animal-agriculture industry.

BROWN: If I could snap my fingers and make that industry disappear right now — which I would do, if I could, and it would be a great thing for the world.

It is very unlikely to disappear any time soon; it is a trillion-dollar global industry, supported in many places by government subsidies, selling a product that billions of people consume once, twice, even three times a day. Pat Brown’s desire would seem to be an impossible one; the company he founded is called Impossible Foods. It’s essentially a tech startup, and it’s raised nearly $400 million to date in venture capital.

BROWN: So, we’ve only been in existence for about seven years and we have about 300 people. We started by basically building a team of some of the best scientists in the world to study how meat works, basically. And by that, I mean to really understand at a basic level the way, in my previous life, when I was a biomedical scientist, we might be studying how, you know, a normal cell of this particular kind becomes a cancer cell, understanding the basic biochemical mechanisms.

In this case, what we wanted to understand was: what are the basic biochemical mechanisms that account for the unique flavor chemistry and the flavor behavior and aromas and textures and juiciness and all those qualities that consumers value in meat? And we spent about 2.5 years just doing basic research, trying to answer that question, before we really started working on a product. And then decided for strategic reasons that our first product would be raw ground beef made entirely from plants.

DUBNER: Because burger is what people want?

BROWN: Well, there’s a lot of reasons why I think it was a good strategic choice: the largest single category of meat in the U.S., it’s probably the most iconic kind of meat in the U.S., it seemed like the ideal vehicle for communicating to consumers that delicious meat doesn’t have to come from animals, because it’s sort of the uber-meat for a lot of people.

DUBNER: Uber, lower-case “u.”

BROWN: With a lower-case, yes.

DUBNER: People are not hailing burgers, riding them around?

BROWN: No, thank God. And beef production is the most environmentally destructive segment of the animal agriculture industry. So, from an impact standpoint, it made sense as a choice.

So Pat Brown set about repurposing the scientific wisdom he’d accrued over a long, fruitful career in biomedicine. A career that may improve the health and well-being of countless millions. And now he got to work on a truly earth-shaking project: building a better burger. A burger that doesn’t come from a cow. An Impossible burger. So how did that work? What ingredients do you put in an Impossible burger?

BROWN: That’s an interesting aspect about the science, which is that we didn’t look for, “What are the precisely specific choices of ingredients that would work?” We studied, “What are the biochemical properties we need from the set of ingredients?” And then we did a survey of things available from the plant world that matched those biophysical properties of which there were choices.

So what are the main components of this burger?

BROWN: I can tell you what it’s made of right now. What it’s made of right now is different from how it was made two years ago, and that was different from how it was made two and half years ago and the next version we’re going to launch is a quite different set of ingredients.

We first interviewed Brown several months ago. The main ingredients at the time included:

BROWN: A protein from wheat; a protein from potatoes — not a starch from potatoes, but a protein from potatoes, it’s a byproduct of starch production. Coconut oil is the major fat source. And then we have a bunch of other small molecules, but they’re all familiar things: amino acids, vitamins, sugars. Nutrients.

But all these ingredients did not make Pat Brown’s plant-based hamburger meat taste or act or look like hamburger meat. It was still missing a critical component. A component called heme.

BROWN: Heme is found in essentially every living thing and heme in plants and human animals is the exact same molecule, okay? It’s just one of the most ubiquitous and fundamental molecules in life on Earth, period. The system that burns calories to produce energy uses heme as an essential component, and it’s what carries oxygen in your blood. And it’s what makes your blood red.

And none of this we discovered — this has been known for a long time and — so animals have a lot more heme than plants. And it’s that very high concentration of heme that accounts for the unique flavors of meat that you would recognize something as meat. It’s the overwhelmingly dominant factor in making the unique taste of meat and fish.

DUBNER: Is it involved in texture and mouthfeel and all that as well, or just taste?

BROWN: Just taste. Texture and mouthfeel are really important and there’s a whole other set of research around that. Super important — it kind of gets short shrift, because people think of the flavor as sort of the most dramatic thing about meat. But you have to get that other stuff right, too.

Brown and his team of scientists, after a couple years of research and experimentation, were getting a lot of that stuff right. But without heme — a lot of heme — their meatless meat would never resemble meat.

BROWN: So there is one component of a certain kind of plant that has a high concentration of heme, and that is in plants that fix nitrogen, that take nitrogen from the air and turn it into fertilizer. They have a structure called the root nodule, where the nitrogen fixation takes place and for reasons that are too complicated to explain right now they, that has a high concentration of heme and I just happened to know this from way back.

And if you slice open the root nodules of one of these plants:

BROWN: They have such a high concentration of heme that they look like a freshly cut steak, okay? And I did a calculation about the concentration of that stuff — soy leghemoglobin is the protein, which is virtually identical to the heme protein in muscle tissue, which is called myoglobin — that there was enough leghemoglobin in the root nodules of the U.S. soybean crop to replace all the heme in all the meat consumed in the U.S. Okay? So, I thought, “Genius, okay. We’ll just go out and harvest all these root nodules from the U.S. soybean crop and we’ll get this stuff practically for free.” Well, so I raised money for the company and we spent half the money trying to figure out how to harvest these root nodules from soybean plants, only basically to finally convince ourselves it was a terrible idea.

But if you’re a veteran scientist like Brown, a little failure is not so off-putting.

BROWN: You know you’re going to be doing things that are pushing the limits and trying entirely new things and a lot of them are going to fail. And if you don’t have a high tolerance for that and realize that basically, the way you do really really important, cool stuff is by trying a lot of things and not punishing yourself for the failures, but just celebrating the successes, you know, you’re not going to accomplish as much.

And the idea of buying up all the root nodules of the U.S. soybean crop wasn’t a complete failure.

BROWN: I mean, we got enough that we could do experiments to prove that it really was a magic ingredient for flavor. But then we had to start all over, and then what we did was: we said, ”Okay, we’re going to have to engineer a microorganism to produce gobs of this heme protein. Okay”? And since now we weren’t bound by any natural source, we looked at three dozen different heme proteins, everything from, you know, paramecium to barley to Hell’s Gate bacteria, which is like this —

DUBNER: That’s a plant? Hell’s Gate?

BROWN: It’s a bacteria that lives in deep sea vents near New Zealand that survive with temperatures above the boiling point of water that we mostly just looked at for fun, but funny thing about that, the reason we rejected it is that it’s so heat-stable that you can cook a burger to cooking temperature and it still stays bright red, because it doesn’t unfold. But anyway — and then we pick the best one, which turned out to be, just coincidentally, soy leghemoglobin, which is the one we were going after—

DUBNER: So your terrible idea was actually pretty good.

BROWN: It wasn’t really a brilliant idea, it accidentally turned out to be the right choice.

Through the magic of modern plant engineering, Pat Brown’s team began creating massive stocks of heme. And that heme would help catapult the Impossible burger well beyond the realm of the standard veggie burger — the mostly unloved veggie burger, we should say. The Impossible Burger looks like hamburger meat — when it’s raw and when it’s cooked. It behaves like hamburger meat. Most important, it tastes like hamburger meat.

Alison CRAIGLOW: I would like the American with an Impossible Burger.

WAITER: And how would you like that cooked?

CRAIGLOW: Oh, I didn’t realize — I’ll have it medium … medium. Is it pink in the middle when it’s … it is?

The Freakonomics Radio team recently ate some Impossible burgers in a restaurant near Times Square.

Zack LAPINSKI: I mean, I actually can’t taste the diff —

CRAIGLOW: It tastes like a burger

Ryan KELLY: Good day for the Impossible Burger

Greg RIPPIN: Yeah, approved by Freakonomics.

Their meal happened to coincide with the release of Impossible Burger 2.0 — an updated recipe that uses a soy protein instead of a wheat protein and has a few more tweaks: less salt, sunflower oil to cut the coconut oil, and no more xanthan gum and konjac gum. In my own tasting experience: Impossible Burger 1.0 was really good but a little slushy; 2.0 was burger-tastic.

These are of course our subjective observations. Here’s some actual evidence: Impossible Burgers are already being served in roughly 5,000 locations, primarily in the U.S. but also Hong Kong and Macau. These include very high-end restaurants in New York and California as well as fast-food chains like Umami Burger and even White Castle. This year, Impossible plans to start selling its burger meat in grocery stores.

BROWN: We’ve grown in terms of our sales and revenue about 30-fold in the past year. And our goal is to completely replace animal as a food technology by 2035. That means we have to approximately double in size and impact every year for the next 18 years.

DUBNER: Are we to understand that you are taking aim at pigs and chickens and fish as well?

BROWN: Yes, of course. So when we first started out, we were working on a technology platform and sort of the know-how about how meat works in general; we were working on understanding dairy products and cheeses and stuff like that. And then we decided, okay, we have to pick one product to launch with, and then we have to, from a commercialization standpoint, just go all in on it for a while.

DUBNER: As the scientist, or as a scientist, were you reluctant to kind of narrow yourself for that commercial interest, or did you appreciate that this is the way in this world things actually happen?

BROWN: Both. I mean, let’s put it this way: I would like to be able to pursue all these things in parallel, and if I had the resources I would. But if we launched another product right now, we’d just be competing against ourselves for resources for commercialization, so just doesn’t make any sense.

We put out an episode not long ago called “Two (Totally Opposite) Ways to Save the Planet.” It featured the science journalist Charles Mann.

MANN: How are we going to deal with climate change? There have been two ways that have been suggested, overarching ways, that represent, if you like, poles on a continuum. And they’ve been fighting with each other for decades.

The two poles are represented by what Mann calls, in his latest book, The Wizard and the Prophet. The prophet sees environmental destruction as a problem best addressed by restoring nature to its natural state. The wizard, meanwhile, believes that technology can address environmental dangers. This is, of course, a typology, a shorthand; a prophet doesn’t necessarily fear technology any more than a wizard fears nature. That said: if there were ever an embodiment of the wizard-prophet hybrid, a person driven by idealism and pragmatism in equal measure, I’d say it’s Pat Brown. Which means his invention has the capacity to upset people all across the spectrum.

The consumers and activists who might cheer a meatless meat are often the same sort of people who are anti-G.M.O. — genetically modified organisms. And the Impossible Burger would not have been possible without its genetically modified heme — which, by the way, the F.D.A. recently declared safe, after challenges from environmental groups like Friends of the Earth. Another group that might object to Impossible Foods? The meat industry. You know, the ones who use actual animals to raise food.

FOGARTY: My name is Kelly Fogarty and I serve as the executive vice president for the United States Cattlemen’s Association. And I am a fifth- generation beef cattle rancher here in Oakdale, California.

DUBNER: I’m just curious, as a woman, do you find yourself ever wishing the U.S. Cattlemen’s Association would change their name or are you okay with it?

FOGARTY: You know, it’s funny you mention that. There’s always a little bit of a notion there in the back of my mind of, you know, of course being in the industry for so long. I take it as representing all of the livestock industry. But you know, definitely having a special nod to all the female ranchers out there would be nice to have as well.

DUBNER: And what is the primary difference between the U.S. Cattlemen’s Association and the National Cattlemen’s Beef Association?

FOGARTY: As the United States Cattlemen’s Association, we are made up primarily of cattle producers. So your family ranches. You know, cow-calf operations run by producers and kind of for producers is what U.S.C.A. was built on. Whereas National Cattlemen’s Beef Association does include some more of packer influences as well as you know some of the processing facilities as well.

DUBNER: Can you just talk generally for a moment: how big of a threat does the beef industry see from alternative, “meat”?

FOGARTY: So from our end you know, in looking at the “meat” — and I appreciate you using those quotes around that term — from our end, we’re not so much seeing it as a threat to our product. What we are really looking at is not a limit on consumer choice or trying to back one product out of the market. It’s really to make sure that we’re keeping the information out there accurate and that what is available to consumers and what is being shown to consumers on labels is accurate to what the product actually is.

In 2018, Fogarty’s organization filed a petition with the U.S.D.A. to prevent products from being labeled as “beef” or “meat” unless they come from a cow.

DUBNER: Does that mean that your organization thinks that consumers are confused by labeling? Is that the primary objection?

FOGARTY: So the primary objection from the United Cattlemen’s Association is that we want to keep the term “meat” to what is traditionally harvested and raised in the traditional manner. And so when we see the term “meat” being put on these products that is not derived from that definition, what our producers came to us and really wanted us to act on was what we saw happened in other industries, specifically when you look at the dairy industry and where the term “milk” has now been used.

“Almond milk,” for instance. Which comes from almonds, not animals. Which led the National Milk Producers Federation to argue that it should not be sold as “almond milk.” The FDA agreed; its commissioner pointed out that “an almond doesn’t lactate.” There are important differences between so-called “milk” that doesn’t come from animals and so-called “meat” that doesn’t come from animals. Almond milk has very different nutritional content than cow’s milk; the Impossible Burger, meanwhile, has a similar nutritional profile to hamburger — including the iron content, which vegans can have trouble getting enough of. That’s another reason why Kelly Fogarty and the U.S. Cattlemen’s Association might not want the Impossible Burger to be labeled “meat.”

DUBNER: I am just curious about the mental state of your industry because I was looking at your Facebook page and one post the other day led with the following: “Eat or be eaten. Be at the table or on the menu. Fight or be forgotten.” So that sounds — it would make me believe that the future of meat is one in which cattle ranchers feel a little bit like an endangered species or at least under assault.

FOGARTY: I think that speaks to a lot of misconceptions that are out there regarding the U.S. beef industry. Whether it be in terms of you know nutrition, environment, animal welfare. We’ve really been hit from a lot of different angles over the years.

DUBNER: Okay, well, according to some scientific research, meat production and/or cattle ranching are among the most environmentally damaging activities on earth, between the resource-intensiveness, land but especially water, and the externalities, the runoff of manure and chemicals into groundwater.

FOGARTY: I think one of the first points to make is that cattle are defined as what is termed as upcyclers, and cattle today, they’re turning plants that have little to no nutritional value just as-is into a high-quality and a high density protein. And so when you look at where cattle are grazing in the U.S., and then also across the world, a lot of the land that they are grazing on are land that is not suitable for crops or it would be you know kind of looking as a highly marginal type of land. And the ability of livestock to turn what is there into something that can feed the world is pretty remarkable.

Fogarty believes her industry has been unfairly maligned; that it’s come to be seen as a target for environmentalist groups and causes.

FOGARTY: I would absolutely say, the livestock industry and to that matter, the agriculture industry as a whole I think has really been at the brunt of a lot of disinformation campaigns.

Fogarty points to that U.N. report claiming that the global livestock industry’s greenhouse-gas emissions were shockingly high. A report that was found to be built on faulty calculations.

FOGARTY: So, it was really an inequitable and grossly inflated percentage that really turned a conversation.

The inflated percentage of around 18 percent was really around 14.5 percent — so, “grossly” inflated may be in the eye of the aggrieved. Fogarty says that even though the error was acknowledged, and a revised report was issued.

FOGARTY: Folks have not forgotten it as much as we wish. It’s still something that it’s hard to have folks kind of un-read or un-know something that they initially saw.

The fact is that the agricultural industry is massive and massively complex. Without question, it exacts costs on the environment; it also provides benefits that are literally the stuff of life: delicious, abundant, affordable food. As with any industry, there are tradeoffs and there is friction: activists tend to overstate their claims in order to encourage reform; industry defenders tend to paper over legitimate concerns.

But in the food industry especially, it’s clear that a revolution is underway — a revolution to have our food be not just delicious and abundant and affordable but sustainable too, with fewer negative externalities. Some startups, like Impossible Foods, focus on cleverly engineering plant matter to taste like the animal flesh so many people love. Other startups are working on what’s called lab-grown meat, using animal stem cells to grow food without animals. This is still quite young technology, but it’s very well-funded. I was curious to hear Kelly Fogarty’s view of this.

DUBNER: One of the investors in the lab “meat” company Memphis Meats is Cargill, which is a major constituent of the big meat industry. I mean, another investor, for what it’s worth, is Bill Gates. But I’m curious what’s your position on that. Because the way I think about this long-term, presumably a firm like Cargill can win the future with alternative “meat” in a way that a cattle rancher can’t. So I’m curious what the position is of ranchers on this kind of investment from a firm like Cargill or other firms that are sort of hedging their bets on the future of meat.

FOGARTY: You know it’s a really interesting point, and it’s been a bit of a tough pill for producers to swallow, the fact that some of the big three, some of these big processing plants that have been so obviously heavily focused and have been livestock-dominant are now kind of going into this alternative and sometimes the cell-cultured lab meats, alternative proteins. And it really has been a point of contention among a lot of producers who are kind of confused, unsure, feel a little bit — I don’t want to say betrayed by the industry, but a little bit so…

Others may soon feel betrayed as well. A company called Modern Meadows is using similar technology to grow leather in the lab, without the need for cattle. The Israeli company SuperMeat is focused on growing chicken. And then there’s a company called Finless Foods.

Mike SELDEN: Finless Foods is taking the seafood back to basics and creating real fish meat entirely without mercury, plastic, without the need for antibiotics or growth hormones, and also without the need for fishing or the killing of animals because we grow the fish directly from stem cells.

That’s Mike Selden, the co-founder and C.E.O. of Finless. He’s 27 years old; he started out as a cancer researcher. Like Pat Brown, you could call him a wizard-prophet hybrid. He does take issue with the idea of “lab-grown” food.

SELDEN: The reality is, labs are by definition experimental and are not scalable. So this won’t be grown in a lab at all. It’s prototyped in a lab in the same way that snacks are prototyped in a lab. Doritos are prototyped in a lab by material scientists looking at different dimensions of like crunch and torsion and all these other sort of mechanical properties. So what our facility will look like when we’re actually at production scale is something really a lot closer to a brewery. Big steel tanks that are sort of allowing these cells space in order to divide and grow into large quantities of themselves, while accessing all of the nutrients that we put inside of this nutritional broth.

The fishing industry, like the meat industry, exacts its share of environmental costs. But like Pat Brown, Mike Selden does not want his company to win on goodwill points.

SELDEN: So, the goal of Finless Foods is not to create something that competes on ethics or morals or environmental goals. It’s something that will compete on taste, price, and nutrition — the things that people actually care about.

Right now, everybody really loves whales and people hate when whales are killed. What changed? Because we used to kill whales for their blubber in order to light lamps. It wasn’t an ethical movement, it wasn’t that people woke up one day and decided, “Oh, killing whales is wrong.” It was that we ended up using kerosene instead. We found another technological solution, a supply-side change that didn’t play on people’s morals in order to win. We see ourselves as something like that. You know, why work with an animal at all if you don’t need to?

Indeed: you could imagine in the not-so-distant future a scenario in which you could instantly summon any food imaginable — new foods, new combinations, but also foods that long ago fell out of favor. How much fun would that be? I asked the agricultural economist Jayson Lusk about this.

DUBNER: If we had a 3D printer, and it, let’s say, had, just, we’ll be conservative, 100 buttons of different foods that it could make me. Does anyone press the mutton button?

LUSK: Well, you know, one of the great things about our food system is that it’s a food system that, yes, makes food affordable, but also has a whole awful lot of choice for people who are willing to pay it. And I bet there’s probably at least one or two people out there that will push that will mutton button.

I also asked Lusk for his economic views on the future of meat, especially the sort of projects that inventors like Mike Selden and Pat Brown are working on.

LUSK: I have no problems with what Dr. Brown is trying to do there, and indeed I think it’s very exciting, this technology. And I think ultimately it’ll come down to whether this lab-grown meat can compete on the merits. So, there’s no free lunch here. In fact, the Impossible Burger — I’ve seen it on menus — it’s almost always higher-priced than the traditional beef burger. Now as an economist, I look at that and say, “Those prices, to me, should be signaling something about resource use.” Maybe it’s imperfect; maybe there’s some externalities. But they should reflect all the resources that were used to go in to produce that product. It’s one of the reasons that beef is more expensive than, say, chicken — it takes more time, more inputs, to produce a pound of beef than a pound of chicken.

So, why is it that the Impossible Burger is more expensive than the regular burger? Now, it could be that this is just a startup, and they’re not working at scale; and once they really scale this thing up, it’ll really bring the price down. It could be they’re also marketing to a particular higher-income consumer who is willing to pay a little more. But I think if the claims about the Impossible Burger are true over time, one would expect these products to come down significantly in price and be much less expensive than beef production. You know, this is not going to make my beef friends happy, but if they can do that, good for them; and consumers want to pay for, this product, they like the way it tastes and it saves some money, which means it’s saving some resources; I think in that sense, it’s a great technology.

Whether or not you eat meat; whether or not you’re interested in eating these alternative meats, from plant matter or animal stem cells — it’s hard not to admire the creativity that someone like Pat Brown has exercised: the deep curiosity, the ability to come back from failure, the sheer cleverness of putting together disparate ideas into a coherent scientific plan.

*      *      *

Freakonomics Radio is produced by Stitcher and Dubner Productions. This episode was produced by Zack Lapinski. Our staff also includes Alison Craiglow, Greg Rippin, and Harry Huggins; we had help this week from Nellie Osborne. Our theme song is “Mr. Fortune,” by the Hitchhikers; all the other music was composed by Luis Guerra. You can subscribe to Freakonomics Radio on Apple Podcasts, Stitcher, or wherever you get your podcasts.

Here’s where you can learn more about the people and ideas in this episode:

SOURCES

Pat Brown, founder and c.e.o. of Impossible Foods.

Kelly Fogarty, executive vice president for the United States Cattlemen’s Association.

Jayson Lusk, economist at Purdue University.

Mike Selden, co-founder and c.e.o. of Finless Foods.

RESOURCES

“Tackling Climate Change Through Livestock,”  Food and Agricultural Organization of the United Nations (2013).

Just Food by James McWilliams (Little, Brown, 2009).

“Changes in the Sheep Industry in the United States,” The National Academies (2008).

EXTRA

“Two (Totally Opposite) Ways to Save the Planet,” Freakonomics Radio (2018).

The post The Future of Meat (Ep. 367) appeared first on Freakonomics.

from Dental Care Tips http://freakonomics.com/podcast/meat/

[minnievirizarry]

Top 45 Business Blogs of 2017 | Ninja Outreach

Are you looking to update your business reading list with valuable insights, case studies, and commentary from proven entrepreneurs and experts? Then we have a list of top 45 business blogs for you.

A quick Google search for “top business blogs” will show you tons of results—mostly listicles rattling off blog recommendation after blog recommendation.

We will attempt to do better. Instead of lumping everything together, we will give you a list divided into categories.

Best business blogs for news and updates about the general business community

Best business blogs with stellar founder interviews and founder insights

Best business blogs for startups and other newbie entrepreneurs

Best business blogs about behind the scenes, funding, tools, hiring, and other management practices

Top business journals and resources

Blogs by entrepreneurs whose minds you’d like to take a peek into

Distinguished business and finance publications

This should help you zero in on the business blogs that are most relevant to your needs.

A caveat: This list will not include business blog farms and blogs that contain too many disruptive ads. This list will feature only quality, clean websites, that offer real value to its readers (and not just the search engines).

Methodology

To start, I opened our Ninja Outreach tool and hit Content Prospecting.

Next, I put in my search keyword: best “business news” blogs. I put “business news” in quotes to get more accurate results.

Then, I opened filters and put in a minimum Domain Authority of 29 with a max of 100.

Below are my search results.

Next, I will manually whittle the results down to leave only the best ones.

I will take a look at each blog and check the kind of content they produce.

I will also check each blog’s SEO and traffic metrics using our Ninja Outreach chrome extension.

Now with all that said, here are my recommendations for top 45 business blogs to read.

A. Business blogs for news and updates on the business community

1. globalEDGE

Domain Authority: 87

globalEDGE is one of the most authoritative online portals for information, insights, and learning resources on global business activities.

The site was founded by the Michigan State University’s International Business Center, designated as a National Resource Center, and partially funded by a U.S. Department of Education grant.

The blog has a team of contributors and regularly publishes commentary on prevalent business news on a global scale.

See:

The Future of Agriculture in India

The United States Begins a Trade Probe Into China

Where do Cryptocurrencies Fall in the International Currency Markets?

Initial Coin Offerings: A Shady Trend in International Capital Markets

2. The Conglomerate

Domain Authority: 55

If you’re tired of self-proclaimed “gurus” and overly marketed business “influencers,” The Conglomerate can serve you the kind of fresh, well-written content from certified field practitioners.

The blog is penned by a group of business, economics, and law professors who provide expert analysis and insights on key business issues and news.

Bonus: They won’t simply link to sources for the sake of marketing or SEO. Whatever source they cite is mostly just as authoritative and reliable. Think .edu, .gov sources, established journals, publications, and other official blogs.

It seems they haven’t updated for a few months, however. As of this writing, their latest blog post was from June of this year.

See: American Airlines, Qatar, and the NOL Poison Pill

3. Bill George

Domain Authority: 45

This blog is home to all editorial pieces and other articles written by, including, or featuring Bill George—former Chairman and CEO of multinational medical technology corporation, Medtronic. He is now a Harvard Business School professor and regular contributor to business publications such as CNBC.

See:

CNBC: The Business Economy Drives our Economy

CNBC: CEOs Do Not Fear This President: Bill George

4. Virgin Entrepreneur

Domain Authority: 82

The Virgin Group is an English conglomerate founded by the well-known businessman and philanthropist, Richard Branson. So if you admire Branson’s business acumen and leadership, you may find the content of his company’s blog to your liking.

The Entrepreneur section of Virgin’s business blog provides commentary, insights, and analysis on business news and related topics.

See:

Why I Blew a Year’s Advertising Budget on a Party

Going From Freelancers to Business Leaders

How to Start a Movement: Tips From The Fairtrade Food Pioneer

5. Michael Czinkota

Domain Authority: 29

Professor Michael Czinkota of Georgetown University is no stranger to international business and economics. He previously served as deputy assistant secretary at the Department of Commerce—simply one among his other noteworthy positions in the field.

His blog features excellent commentary on the latest in international business news, marketing, and strategy. It also has pretty high engagement with some articles reaching hundreds to thousands of comments.

See:

Why International Marketing? Five Core Benefits Explain Key Rationale

Pros and Cons of Foreign Direct Investment

Migration from less developed economies and its effect on corporate and individual international business performance

B. Business blogs with stellar founder interviews and founder insights

6. Startups.co

Domain authority: 55

Startups.co is an online platform for startups looking to find customers, a community of peers, mentors, and learning opportunities.

Their blog has three sections. The first, Startup News, is a comprehensive and updated list of goings-on in the startup world. The second is Education, which hosts the site’s learning resource of in-depth lessons and videos. Third is the Questions section, which functions as a business-related Q&A forum.

The site also features some authoritative figures in their articles and learning videos.

See:

Interview with Reid Hoffman, Founder of LinkedIn

Data-Driven Decisions by Mike Greenfield, First Data Scientist at PayPal and LinkedIn

7. Signal V. Noise

Domain authority: 78

Reading Signal V. Noise is like taking a peek at the activities, opinions, and processes of the team behind the successful project management and team communication software company, Basecamp. Each article is a well thought out piece on each team member’s viewpoints and ideas about software and web design, managing the startup life, and technology and design in general.

You can pick up some great insight from articles about how the team would plan out their workflows, work on their tasks, or decide their strategies.

For example, one post talks about their teamwork (Another round of lessons learned from our new team-based way of working) while another discusses a process change that helped three team members launch a major new feature across five platforms in just six weeks (Hybrid development is how we give our teams of three superpowers).

8. Mixergy

Domain Authority: 64

As far as interviews with star tycoons go, Andrew Warner’s Mixergy can be one of your top go-to blogs. The former co-founder and CEO of the one-time million-dollar web property, Bradford & Reed, professes that his blog only interviews “proven” entrepreneurs.

Currently, his blog boasts dialogues with the likes of Wikipedia’s Jimmy Wales (Wikipedia’s Founder On How The Site Was Built & Promoted), Y Combinator's Paul Graham (How Y Combinator Helped 172 Startups Take Off), Shark Tank’s Barbara Corcoran (Real Estate Shark), and Gary Vaynerchuk of VaynerMedia.

With that star-studded lineup, you can certainly expect not to get disappointed with this blog’s content.

9. Indie Hackers

Domain Authority: 38

Indie Hackers, according to its creator Courtland Allen, is meant to be a place where founders of profitable businesses and side hustles can “share their stories transparently, and where entrepreneurs can come to read and learn from those examples.”

This blog, added Allen, is also meant to be a community where like-minded ‘indie hackers’ can gather together to support each other, share their experiences, and exchange feedback.

If you count yourself among either one of those who fit the descriptions, then add this blog to your reading list. It contains quality interviews with startup founders from various business niches.

10. Both Sides of the Table

Domain Authority: 70

This blog contains a wealth of perspectives on the startup and venture capital world, penned by Mark Suster, who refers to himself as “a 2x entrepreneur turned VC”.

Suster is an angel investor affiliated with venture capital firms Upfront and Techstars. In his blog, he writes about his own experiences in entrepreneurship, startups, and even his personal life and business lessons.

C. Business blogs for startups and other newbie entrepreneurs

11. The Small Business Professor

Domain Authority: 30

If you want to learn everything about small business—from starting up, to management, to the technology involved, head over to Bruce Freeman’s blog, Small Business Professor.

Freeman is a successful entrepreneur who founded the marketing and PR firm, Proline Communications. He is also a small business columnist for Scripps Howard News Service, a book author, and entrepreneurship professor at the Seton Hall and Kean universities.

Additionally, he also hosts a regular radio program about small business.

12. Business Law Prof Blog

Domain Authority: 30

If you want to keep your business on the right side of the law but can't afford to hire your team of lawyers yet, head over to this blog. It won't be an alternative, of course, but it's a great place to start educating yourself on laws and how it can affect your business.

The blog is managed by a group of eight law professors who regularly publish legal analysis on business topics that range from crowdfunding and social media to SEC regulations.

13. Venture Hacks

Domain Authority: 59

Venture Hacks is a blog dedicated to supporting startups and angel list companies. You can read about a broad range of topics related to startups, fundraising, venture funding, and management.

The blog is managed by venture investors Naval Ravikant and Babak Nivi, who also founded the online startup investors and jobseekers platform, AngelList.

14. Steve Blank

Domain Authority: 74

This blog by successful entrepreneur turned Ivy League professor Steve Blank discusses startup founder and investor strategies.

He also writes about his personal experiences and lessons learned, as well as some commentary about current events.

Be ready for some extensive reading because he has been blogging since 2009.

15.  The Octane Blog

Domain Authority: 72

The Octane blog is the official blog of The Entrepreneurs’ Organization (EO).

The EO is a global network of over 12k influential entrepreneurs with 160 chapters in 50 countries.

The blog is a web portal of information and articles with the goal of helping its community to learn, grow, and lead successful businesses.

D. Business blogs about behind the scenes, funding, tools, hiring, and other management practices

16. Workplace Prof Blog

Domain Authority: 92

For anything and everything related to labor laws, head to this blog. It is managed and written by a group of business law professors. So you can be sure to learn the legal matters and their impact on your business from recognized experts.

17. The Entrepreneurial Mind

Domain Authority: 40

The Entrepreneurial Mind is the blog of Dr. Jeff Cornwall. Dr. Cornwall has broad expertise in entrepreneurship as the inaugural Jack C. Massey Chair in Entrepreneurship at Belmont University. But he is currently interested in entrepreneurial finance and entrepreneurial ethics.

In this blog, you will find not only his articles but also interviews with business owners who share the behind the scenes stories of why they started and how they manage their business.

18. The Business Ethics Blog

Domain authority: 47

This blog about business ethics (if the blog name isn’t already a dead giveaway). It features the owner’s commentary and analysis of news about corporate ethics.

If this seems a little intimidating, know that the blog is written in broader terms to benefit entrepreneurs who are not as well-versed in legalese.

The blog owner, Chris MacDonald, Ph.D., is a business ethics educator, speaker, and consultant, as well as Interim Director of the Ted Rogers MBA at Ryerson. He is also a Senior Fellow at Duke University's Kenan Institute for Ethics.

19. TaxProf Blog

Domain authority: 92

The TaxProf Blog is for business owners looking for expert advice about taxes, tax laws, assets, and financial management.

The blog has a team of well-versed contributors and is managed by Paul Caron, who is a Duane and Kelly Roberts Dean and Professor of Law at Pepperdine University School of Law.

The blog’s articles break down legalese for business owners to get more perspective on the impact of certain laws (see: The Evilness Of Section 6511) and even natural disasters (see: The Tax Consequences Of Hurricane Harvey (And Other Natural Disaster) to their business and finances. There are also commentary and analysis by Caron on current events (see: Macroeconomic And Distributional Effects Of U.S. Personal Income Tax Reforms).

20. Entrepreneurs On Fire

Domain Authority: 60

Entrepreneurs on Fire is a blog by entrepreneur and podcaster John Lee Dumas, where he interviews a featured entrepreneur for each day of the week. Each interview shares the story of an entrepreneur’s challenges, motivations, and lessons learned and are meant to help the website’s community, which Dumas calls the Fire Nation.

Dumas’s podcast, which holds over 1.7k interviews with well-known entrepreneurs such as Seth Godin, Gary Vaynerchuk, Tim Ferriss, and Barbara Corcoran, was awarded Best of iTunes.

See:

Tony Robbins helps us master the MONEY game with value bombs galore!

Barbara Corcoran shows why she is a shark in sheep’s clothing

E. Top business journals and resources

For this section, we will focus on sites of peer-reviewed journals that you can use as a resource for finding statistics, case studies, papers, analytical pieces, and even expert thought pieces. These are written by the world’s best: professionals, professors, and researchers affiliated with world-class universities and companies.

If you want to go the academic route, no other blogs can beat the resources below. Just look at those high DAs and traffic.

21. Harvard Business Review

Domain Authority: 93

The Harvard Business Review (HBR) is a 23-year old institution and non-profit subsidiary of Harvard University. It is home to thousands of regularly updated case studies, statistics, articles, and journals from experts affiliated with one of the most prestigious Universities in the world.

The good thing about HBR is they also have articles that not only tackle hard facts, but also give advice on other topics related to business, management, and careers, such as an article about motivation (What to Do When Your Heart Isn’t in Your Work Anymore) written by an Organizational Behavior professor and author. You’ll see more examples of articles written by relevant experts as you go on their blog.

HBR is a paid resource, however, and a non-member only gets three free articles while a registered but non-paying subscriber gets six a month.

22. MIT Sloan LearningEdge

Domain Authority: 95

LearningEdge is a free online resource established in 2009 mainly for educational purposes. It is affiliated with the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) business school, Sloan School of Management, and is home to open access case studies.

These case studies, to quote, “highlight the decision-making process in a business or management setting.” While others are more “descriptive or demonstrative in nature, showcasing something that has happened or is happening in a particular business or management environment.”

23. OMICS International Business and Economics Journal

Domain Authority: 78

OMICS International publishes open access journals and houses over 700 peer-reviewed, open access journals. With an editorial team of business, finance and economics academics from prestigious universities around the world, this publication is one to watch.

Since one of two primary goals for the site’s launch was to “disseminate the free articles in Economics and Business Studies for research”, the site acknowledges readers to link, share, cite, and quote the published journals freely and frequently. The content is also “readily accessible to readers immediately after publication in several formats (HTML, PDF, and XML) for abstracts and full texts.

24. The London Business School Review

Domain Authority: 75

If you’re looking to quote respected experts in the business world, this is also a good place to head to.

The London Business School Review is the flagship publication of The London Business School—widely considered to be the best business school in Europe and among the top ten MBA providers globally.

The site contains videos, articles, and editorial pieces about business, management, and finance from some of the foremost thought leaders from London Business School.

See:

The quad effect: where to spot strategy traps

Are commodities worth investing in?

25. Stanford Graduate Business School

Domain Authority: 95

The Stanford Graduate Business School repository has a rich collection of business case studies that you can cite in your articles or research. This strong pool of case studies was created by the school’s faculty.

However, you can only view as much as the abstract because the full case study is accessible only to Stanford students and alumni. But if you need just the quick facts and don’t depend on the detailed breakdowns and analysis as much, you can cite straight from the abstracts. They do have the option to contact their Case Writing Office if you want to make a query.

See:

The Pfizer-Allergan Tax Inversion

Repsol and YPF (C): Recovering Value

F. Blogs by entrepreneurs whose minds you’d like to take a peek into

There are some entrepreneurs who, by the weight of their achievements, have turned themselves into a brand that many other wantrepreneurs aspire to. Here are links to some of their blogs.

26. Bill Gates

Blog name: GatesNotes

Domain authority: 79

The blog of the iconic Microsoft co-founder and consistent richest man on Forbes’ billionaires’ list. He writes about his experiences and thoughts on global issues, technology, business management, his recommended reading lists, and advocacies.

27. Guy Kawasaki

Blog name: GuyKawasaki

Domain authority: 80

Also another iconic businessman, perhaps most well-known for authoring the New York Times best-selling Rich Dad Poor Dad series. In his blog, Guy Kawasaki writes about his personal business experiences, lessons learned, advice, and also the products, services, reads, and other things that he recommends.

28. Tim Ferriss

Blog name: FourHourWorkWeek

Domain authority: 82

Tim Ferriss authored four New York Times and Wall Street Journal bestseller books, two of which are The 4-Hour Work Week and his most recent release, Tools of Titans: The Tactics, Routines, and Habits of Billionaires, Icons, and World-Class Performers.

Tim Ferriss hosts the Tim Ferriss Show podcast, which was named Best of iTunes. In his blog, he writes mostly about prominent entrepreneurs and self-improvement as it relates to business.

29. Gary Vaynerchuk

Blog name: GaryVaynerchuk

Domain authority: 75

Gary Vaynerchuk—or Gary Vee, as he is now more popularly known, is a serial entrepreneur, author, and founder of digital agency VaynerMedia. He writes mostly about motivation and self-improvement tips for entrepreneurs.

See:

Being Selfless by Being Selfish

30. Richard Branson

Blog name: Virgin.com/RichardBranson

Domain authority: 81

If you’re an entrepreneur/aspiring entrepreneur and you don’t know who Richard Branson is, you need to get outside the rock you’re living in. Richard Branson is the founder of Virgin Media (which we’ve already talked about earlier). In his blog, he writes about his advocacies and other personal advice based on his experiences.

See:

The Night Before Hurricane Irma Arrives

Update After Hurricane Irma in the BVI

31. Chris Ducker

Blog name: ChrisDucker

Domain authority: 60

Chris Ducker writes about and offers services related to personal brand building, such as hands-on training and access to a community of like-minded entrepreneurs. He has written a 4-time, top bestselling book on Amazon.com, Virtual Freedom, and oversees his group of companies with over 400 employees.

See:

How to Prepare for a Speaking Gig

How to Pivot into a Personal Brand

32. Chris Brogan

Blog name: ChrisBrogan

Domain authority: 80

Chris Brogan is a speaker, social media marketing coach, and author. His book, Trust Agents: Using the Web to Build Influence, Improve Reputation, and Earn Trust, made it to the New York Times and Wall Street Journal bestselling list. He is also a contributor to Entrepreneur magazine, and he writes about social media marketing, business advice, and interviews with other entrepreneurs.

33. Neil Patel

Blog name: NeilPatel

Domain authority: 78

Neil Patel is one of the most ubiquitous names in the SEO, online and digital marketing industry. He is co-founder of the website heatmap software Crazy Egg, business and marketing blog Quicksprout, and currently has his own blog, neilpatel.com, where he writes about SEO, content and online marketing. Neil also regularly writes about startups and marketing for top online business magazines Entrepreneur, Forbes, and Inc. He has worked with the likes of Microsoft, IBM, and Thomson Reuters, and he counts Ben Huh, Gary Vaynerchuk, and Guy Kawasaki, among his peers.

34. Seth Godin

Blog name: SethGodin

Domain authority: 90

Seth Godin is the founder of online direct marketing company Yoyodyne, which was acquired by Yahoo in 1998; an event that also led to the hiring of Seth as Yahoo's vice president of direct marketing. Seth Godin eventually became one of the first iconic influencers in the digital marketing space.

He has since authored 18 bestsellers about marketing (All Marketers are Liars, The Dip, etc.) and has also been inducted into the Direct Marketing Hall of Fame in 2013. His blog contains his short, personal insights about entrepreneurship, management, and marketing.

35. Avinash Kaushik

Blog name: kaushik.net/avinash

Domain authority: 73

Avinash Kaushik is considered one of the leading experts in web analytics. The entrepreneur, author, and public speaker started out as Director of Research & Analytics at Intuit, Web Analytics. He has since written two smash hits: Web Analytics, An Hour a Day, and Web Analytics 2.0. He co-founded the online marketing education company Marketing Motive and is currently a Digital Marketing Evangelist for Google.

His blog, Occam’s Razor, is a treasure trove of insightful and analytical articles about using web analytics to measure and improve business performance.

36. Bamidele Onibalusi

Blog name: WritersInCharge

Domain authority: 45

Once upon a time, Nigerian national Bamidele wanted to earn money writing, but all he got were cheap pay and discrimination for being a non-native English speaker. Now, he is a successful blogger, freelance writer, and owner of Writers in Charge—one of the most useful and comprehensive resources for freelance writers. He has also been featured in top business and marketing magazines such as Forbes, Digital Journal, and Millionaire Magazine.

37. Pat Flynn

Blog name: SmartPassiveIncome

Domain authority: 75

Pat Flynn was an architect and had a job that he loved—for a time. But the economic downturn changed his life, uprooted him from his comfortable job, and forced him to look at other avenues to pay the bills. Serendipitously, one of Pat’s old websites—a blog about architecture that he wrote to help others reviewing for architecture exams, became his lifeline—earning money for him at a time when he needed it most. Realizing the power of this channel, Pat started his journey into starting an online business in the pursuit of passive income.

Serendipitously, one of Pat’s old websites—a blog about architecture that he wrote to help others reviewing for architecture exams, became his lifeline—earning money for him at a time when he needed it most. Realizing the power of this method, Pat started his journey into starting an online business in the pursuit of passive income.

Now, he is a successful blogger, writer, and owner of Smart Passive Income, an online resource where Pat writes about his proven strategies for optimizing and running a successful online business to earn passive income.

38. Brian Dean

Blog name: Backlinko

Domain authority: 78

Brian Dean has an interesting story. He went from nutritionist Ph.D. candidate and dietitian to a successful online entrepreneur and SEO guru. Today, he has a thriving online business on his website, Backlinko, and writes about his SEO and link building techniques. He talks about how to optimize his blog enough to show up top in search engines, boost traffic, and earn more passive income from

Today, he has a thriving online business on his website, Backlinko, and writes about his SEO and link building techniques. He talks about how to optimize his blog enough to show up top in search engines, boost traffic, and earn more passive income from his site through the products and courses that he sells.

39. James Clear

Blog name: JamesClear

Domain authority: 69

Not everything about business is about analytics, ROI, marketing, and SEO. A lot in business also depends on you—the person on the driver’s seat—the one who holds the wheel and does the steering. Do you have the right frame of mind? Are your thoughts healthy and constructive? Are your habits productive?

Enter James Clear. His work has been covered by top media outlets such as CBS, Entrepreneur, Forbes, and TIME.

With his clear, engaging writing, James weaves stories about successful entrepreneurs and influencers alongside lessons and advice about self-improvement, habit formation, and personal health—from physical to psychological. All this is designed to help you, the person managing the business, make better, well-minded decisions.

Enter James Clear. His work has been covered by top media outlets such as CBS, Entrepreneur, Forbes, and TIME.

With his clear, engaging writing, James weaves stories about successful entrepreneurs and influencers alongside lessons and advice about self-improvement, habit formation, and personal health—from physical to psychological. All this is designed to help you, the person managing the business, make better, well-minded decisions.

40. Jason Cohen

Blog name: ASmartBear

Domain authority: 55

Before being the Chief Technology Officer of WordPress Hosting company, WP Engine, Jason co-founded and sold the successful software company, SmartBear. His blog, A Smart Bear is the place to go if you want to read smart, insightful articles from a successful tech entrepreneur about business technology, how to manage startups, employees, personal health, decision-making—anything that has to do with an entrepreneur lifestyle.

G. Distinguished business and finance publications

A list of business blogs to read won’t be complete without the indispensable international publications that are best known for their business coverage. Now these are not exactly “blogs” but more professional publications, but any reading list about business won’t be complete without including these recommendations.

41. The Wall Street Journal

Domain authority: 98

What would be a more obvious recommendation than a top quality journal named after the most iconic street in Manhattan, America’s financial district, home to the country’s largest brokerages, inves, ment banks, and the New York Stock exchange? The journal is synonymous with business and financial services industry coverage. If you want to read the biggest stories in business and finance, written by the best correspondents in business and finance, then this is your top resource.

42. The Economist

Domain authority: 96

The Economist is an almost two hundred years old publication headquartered in London. Despite its magazine format, The Economist covers hard news that would benefit people in business. Its coverage is global: reporting about politics, business, finance, science, and technology, while their body of experts pen authoritative insights to make sense of how the interplay between these international issues affect the world’s economy as a whole.

43. Fast Company

Domain authority: 91

Fast Company is an online business magazine that packages itself as the more “progressive” one in this bunch. The publication focuses on more “modern” businesses—such as innovative startups in the digital, design, and tech space.

44. CNBC

Domain authority: 95

CNBC is mainly a telecommunications network. They have a dedicated business and financial news channel along with their own newswire. CNBC’s coverage is not much unlike the Wall Street Journal, but the network tries to set itself apart by taking a particular focus on financial earnings and stock market quotes.

45. Bloomberg

Domain authority: 98

Bloomberg is not an exclusive news journal, per se, but a software and information service in one. Bloomberg provides a financial analytics tool, equity trading platform, data services and news to its clients in the business and finance sector.

Wrapping up

And that's it! Did I miss anything? Let me know in the comments section.

The post Top 45 Business Blogs of 2017 | Ninja Outreach appeared first on Ninja Outreach.

from SM Tips By Minnie https://ninjaoutreach.com/top-business-blogs/

[single-gay-blog]

Online Dating vs. Old School

    I would like to share my thoughts about online dating vs. dating old school for an article online. The most common complaint I hear about both is that they’re time consuming! Dating does take a lot of time and energy. Below are my thoughts on how best to maximize your results.

What are the pros and cons of apps and online?

Pros:

They make it very easy to “meet” a large number of people very quickly. Anthropologist Helen Fisher has called these “introducing sites” rather than dating sites. She believes they’re just a new way for people to do what they’ve done for millions of years – look at a person to determine physical attraction. In my view, there’s nothing especially superficial about this when compared to spotting someone attractive across the room at a party.

Depending on the app, it’s possible to vet people far more thoroughly than if you were meeting in some random public place. Many of the apps rely on Facebook membership, and there’s no pressure to give out your number or personal data right away. You can ditch obnoxious people instantaenously – not always easy in real life.

You have the ability to target specific populations, e.g. JDate. That’s a useful filter since most of us pair off with similar people.

Online dating is successful for many people – it’s been estimated that a third of American marriages today originated online.

Cons:

The experience can be overwhelming for people due to the large number of people who match. This is in part a problem because lots of guys swipe right on everyone and then evaluate their matches. Bumble has instituted rewards for men who are more discriminating in their swipes.

It’s very difficult to judge personal chemistry after matching but before meeting IRL. Keeping a large number of conversations going is time consuming and results in a lot of “dud” matches.

It can be difficult to tell apart the guys who are looking for casual sex from the guys who are interested in a relationship. Not having face to face contact makes this harder.

But not always! Some people often receive offensive and unsolicited messages, dick pics, etc.

What are the pros and cons of old-fashioned “in real life” dating?

Pros:

Meeting is more organic, and it’s easier to judge attraction in person. 

If you go on a date, it’s more likely to be with someone you’re compatible with because some common interest or person brought you together.

Being asked out on a date is a valuable indicator that a person is interested in more than sex.

In my opinion, people are more likely to fake interest in a relationship online because it’s less personal.

Cons:

Fear of rejection. Face to face attempts to connect are riskier because the other person will observe you directly if you are rejected. 

The pool of potential dating partners is much smaller.

The perception of traditional dating is weak/muddled. Were it not for online dating, there might be no traditional dating at all. It’s rare for college students to go on formal dates – dating IRL tends to be something that happens after college graduation. And it often starts with apps or dating sites.

Which do you think results in more relationships? But more, which do you think is the more successful method?

I think that it’s worthwhile to pursue both strategies at the same time. It’s important to be social, network, pursue interests, etc. Online apps and platforms should not represent more than about a quarter of your time and effort – although they may result in most of your dates.

I know of many couples who have met online, and their stories usually reflect a quick expression on the part of both parties that they were interested in something real with one another. I get the sense that instead of the dreaded DTR that couples have IRL, people who meet online are more likely to have a “Are we on the same page?” conversation early.

Is it my imagination, or is it harder to actually settle into a relationship these days? Can the plethora of “options” in our generation be such a problem? (Or am I just doing it all wrong?)

The approach I recommend to coaching people goes something like this:

Swipe right only on the person you find physically attractive. Would you flirt with them at a party?

After matching, check pics and profile for any overly sexual or flirtatious language and unmatch those people.

Unmatch anyone who does not reach out within 48-72 hours.

Unmatch anyone who reaches out disrespectfully or in a cocky way.

Unmatch anyone using push-pull or other tactics to strengthen their hand.

Review remaining matches and unmatch any you feel “meh” about.

Engage in conversations and freely unmatch any person who does not capture your interest.

Move the convo to your phone only with the best prospects. Try to limit it to 3-5.

Agree to meet only after several days of congenial texting.

Make the first date brief and inexpensive. Don’t expect fireworks, but chemistry is important. Accept a second date only if you feel it.

Take a two week break and repeat.

Aggressively filtering means that you may miss out on a good person, but that’s better than wasting your time with a jerk or someone you just don’t find that attractive.

Are certain personalities more likely or less likely to succeed online? For instance, looks don’t do a whole lot for me. Charm and brains do… which is hard to determine from a  photo.

Agreed. apps just provides the means to an introduction. It’s the same as if you met a cute person at a friend’s party and then found them boring. The person who lose out on aps are the ones who have a lot going for them but who are not especially good looking. Still, one can get a lot of information from an app  profile – what does this person choose to highlight? Do they seem good natured? Or have a sense of humor? Or are they posting narcissistic pics and sounding boastful?

And of course you can still cultivate prospects IRL – it doesn’t have to be one or the other.

How do you make online/app dating work for you, if you’re looking for a relationship? Any general principles?

Never hide your intentions. Don’t pretend to be cool with keeping things casual if you’re hoping for something more. You can say “I don’t do casual” without signaling “I want you to be my boyfriend.”

There is enormous power in the phrase “I like you.” When you like someone, say so. Be straightforward and honest. If the person is not enthusiastic about you, move on.

I think with online dating people know what they want when they go into it. They’re either in the relationship market or the casual sex market. And no one wants to waste time, so the faster you can sort yourself into the relationship market, the less frustration you’ll experience.

For those of us with a romantic streak, approaching dating with methods and strategies can feel discouraging. But technology has changed dating dramatically and will continue to do so. Learning how to use technology to your advantage is worthwhile and gives you more opportunities to meet people.

Don’t forget what Justin Garcia, a researcher at the Kinsey Institute had to say:

“We are in uncharted territory” when it comes to apps et al., says Justin Garcia, a research scientist at Indiana University’s Kinsey Institute for Research in Sex, Gender, and Reproduction.

“There have been two major transitions” in heterosexual mating “in the last four million years,” he says. “The first was around 10,000 to 15,000 years ago, in the agricultural revolution, when we became less migratory and more settled,” leading to the establishment of marriage as a cultural contract. “And the second major transition is with the rise of the Internet.”

I would throw in the evolution of pair-bonding as pretty significant, but Garcia’s point is well taken. If you avoid dating on the Internet, you run the risk of becoming a romantic Luddite.

How do you feel about old school vs. online dating?

How do you combat feeling overwhelmed and paralyzed by so many choices?

Which method have to found more successful?

Let’s discuss!