The Journey of Jason Matheny
I like every episode of Business for Good that airs, but sometimes there’s an episode that I think is particularly meaningful, interesting, or worthwhile. In the case of our latest episode, it fits all three.
I’ve known Jason Matheny for more than 20 years, and even profiled him in my 2018 book Clean Meat. While I think I’m his first biographer, it’s highly likely I won’t be his last.
Twenty years ago, Jason Matheny was a public health student who in his spare time was crusading to create a meat industry that would be less reliant on animals.
In 2004, after he founded New Harvest to popularize cultured meat, his fame grew. The New York Times profiled him in its annual “Ideas of the Year” feature in 2005. That same year Discover magazine named cultured meat one of the most notable tech stories. For the next several years, Jason was the face of the movement to grow real meat without animals, traveling the world to persuade governments and food companies alike that they should be investing in a future where people would eat meat, but not animals.
By 2009, now armed with his BA, MBA, MPH, and PhD, Jason began turning his attention toward preventing the more immediate and potentially catastrophic risks humanity faces. After leaving New Harvest, he eventually rose to become the director of Intelligence Advanced Research Projects Activity (IARPA), a federal agency that develops advanced technologies for national intelligence. Running the federal intelligence agency would eventually lead Jason to helm a national security center at Georgetown University that he founded, followed by a high-profile national security role in the Biden White House, to now being the CEO of the Rand Corporation. He was even named one of Foreign Policy’s “Top 50 Global Thinkers.”
As you’ll hear in this interview, Jason shifted from his work on cultivated meat toward national security as he became convinced that technology can vastly improve both human and animal welfare, and that the only real threat to technological advancement is an apocalyptic catastrophe like a synthetic virus or asteroid. He still cares about the welfare of those of us living today — human and nonhuman alike — but Jason’s primary preoccupation has become reducing civilization-threatening risks so that our species can keep progressing into the deep future.
I think you’ll find this conversation with this leading thinker as riveting as I did. Jason even talks about what technologies he hopes listeners will pursue to mitigate existential risks, so be sure to listen closely!
