Latest / Uncomfortable Conversations with Josh Szeps / "End Animal Cruelty. Don't Go Vegan" with Aidan Alexander

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"End Animal Cruelty. Don't Go Vegan" with Aidan Alexander · Uncomfortable Conversations with Josh Szeps

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Hey humans, welcome to the safe space for dangerous ideas.
1:57
It's one of the most uncomfortable conversations that many of us wrestle with inside our heads
2:02
when we sit down to a delicious meal of animal flesh.
2:06
What's the provenance of the animal?
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What kind of life did it lead?
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Should we feel guilty about the process that we're all implicated in?
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Well, one of the least effective ways to address cruelty against animals is wagging your
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finger at people and preaching at them to go vegan.
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That is the conclusion of today's guest.
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Apparently, it doesn't really help if you're ethically conflicted about industrial animal
2:29
farming to just go cold turkey and try not to eat any animals or eggs or milk.
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Look, it works for a vanishingly small minority of people, but it obviously isn't the way
2:41
to enact change on a massive scale.
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So eight in Alexander today's guest co-founded a nonprofit that donates to a small basket
2:50
of effective charities, which lobby and create opportunities for companies and for governments
2:57
to implement cruelty-free options for millions of farmed animals every year.
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This is a fascinating conversation about essentially how we can enact systemic change
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in order to improve the welfare of really some horrifyingly barbaric practices.
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And don't worry, this is not an episode where we spend an endless amount of time talking
3:15
about gruesome ways that animals are treated in factory farms.
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In fact, I'm the one who asked to generally encourage Aiden to even go there because he's
3:22
so reluctant to talk about the problems in some enthusiastic talk about positive solutions.
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But if you care about pigs being locked in crates and hens enduring miserable, painful
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lives just in order to shave a few cents off the cost of a pound of flesh that you buy
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at a supermarket or a grocery store?
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This episode is your practical solution.
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The organization that Aiden co-founded is called Farm Kind.
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It's independently funded through philanthropy, so all of the money goes to the charities
3:53
that don't skim any off the top.
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And until the end of this year, until the end of 2025, they're doing a deal for our listeners
4:00
where if you donate at Farm Kind and use the code Josh, they will match one for one using
4:06
their other philanthropic funds to effectively double the impact of every dollar that you
4:11
donate.
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If this sounds a little bit like an advertisement, it's not, I'm not getting paid any
4:15
money for this, I just really believe that fixing factory farming is a gigantic problem
4:21
and a pretty easy problem to solve with a lot of low hanging fruit that Aiden is helping
4:26
to identify and to make change on.
4:29
So go to farmkind.giving and use the code Josh before the new year if you want to double
4:34
your contribution.
4:35
I hope you enjoy this conversation.
4:37
Aiden and I talk about why animal rights activism hasn't worked and the problems of preaching
4:43
veganism and the different sentience of various different species, whether we should care
4:48
about prongs and shrimps less than we care about cows, the strangely elevated status of cats
4:55
and dogs in the moral imagination of humankind, the negative externalities of industrial agriculture
5:02
and the subsidies they're in and most importantly practical ways that we all can fix this big
5:09
but thankfully relatively easy to solve problem.
5:13
Hope you enjoy as much as I did the one and only Aiden Alexander.
5:23
So the idea that a lot of people have about eating meat is like yes, we know that there
5:28
are bad things that go on in factory farms but we can sort of consciously try to be a little
5:34
bit more mindful about where we saw how meat from eating meat is a natural part of the
5:38
ecosystem, animals eat other animals, humans are animals where omnivores, there's nothing.
5:44
There's almost something like hyper technical about the idea of extracting ourselves from
5:49
the food system and saying like we're not going to be part of the natural order of animals
5:56
eating other animals, we're going to think ourselves out of that.
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What's your response to that idea?
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Yeah, I mean, I'm here to talk about factory farming but like the thing I want to make
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very clear because I think a lot of people, as soon as you raise this topic, they start
6:12
thinking about diet, I'm not here to tell anybody what to eat.
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I think this is a distraction actually, I think telling people to go vegan is a really
6:19
bad strategy for fixing factory farming and we have like far better alternatives.
6:23
So mostly the focus on diet is distracting is what my response would be, there's better
6:28
things we could do and I think that it kind of mostly backfires, telling people to change
6:33
their diet for a bunch of reasons, in fact this has been my hobby horse I've been trying
6:37
to convince other people working on this issue about for a couple of years now.
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But why are you fatalistic about not getting people to change their diet?
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I know lots of people who've gone vegetarian or vegan because of either of the climate
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implications or the moral considerations or the health implications.
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Look, I'm not fatalistic about it and I think there has been like times when it's been
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particularly invoked, even like especially as a health trend veganism over the past
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few years.
7:04
But if you kind of zoom out, you look at like Gallup polls.
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The rates of veganism have been 1% for decades, they're not moving.
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This is not working overall and it's not to say that going vegan isn't a great way to
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do something about this issue, it is.
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But the point is that we shouldn't be biopically focused on this one issue, that it's just
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one thing that you can do about it, it is in fact not the biggest thing you can do about
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it and it's like one of the hardest things most people find to do about it.
7:27
So why is that all we can talk about, what's the biggest, easiest thing?
7:32
Yeah, I mean, I think when it comes to, like I'm a big component of the fact that there
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are a lot of issues that are competing for our time and energy and like moral energy.
7:43
And so we have to prioritize, I like to think about things I kind of like to 2 by 2 where
7:47
on one axis you have like how easy is it and the other access, how impactful is it.
7:52
And veganism, you know, very impactful, most people find not so easy posting something
7:57
on social media, very easy, not so impactful.
7:59
I think one of the things that sits at the best kind of sweet spot of the two is donating
8:03
to some of the organizations that are working at a systemic level to actually fix this
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issue.
8:08
How do you fix it without eating less meat?
8:11
Yeah, I mean, so what depends what it is here and the thing that I would like to stop
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is factory farming.
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And you can be, you don't have to be against animal farming to be against factory farming.
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And the thing about factory farming is it's actually entirely soluble because it's not
8:29
this like force of nature.
8:31
This thing, it's happening to us like malaria or poverty or a tsunami, like it's a man
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made system that we invented less than a hundred years ago.
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And we chose to create it and we can just as easily choose to do otherwise by changing
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a few practices.
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And yes, I can hear you thinking there are like a bunch of very powerful vested interests
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that want to keep things the way that they are.
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And yet advocates have found strategies that really do bring them to heal a bit.
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They're just like woefully underfunded.
8:57
Well, there are, I mean, there's, there is the problem of vested interest, but there's
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also the moral problem that people who argue for cheap meat say that it's a priority for
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poor families to have the ability to feed themselves, protein and meat would be a lot
9:12
more expensive if it wasn't factory-farmed.
9:14
Yeah, I mean, I think that there's a sense in which factory farming makes animal products
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cheaper because what it does is it takes real costs like the cost to animals welfare, the
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cost of public health, the cost of the environment, these externalities, not built into the cost
9:28
of the product and it will trade off as much of those things as possible to save you
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a few cents on your product.
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Because there are people that struggle to put food in the table and if the only thing
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that they can afford is factory-farmed meat, then they got to do it.
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They got to do it.
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But that's not everyone.
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And I think a lot of people, when they consider the full cost of the product, including some
9:47
of those externalities versus the alternatives, the alternatives actually look pretty good.
9:51
And because it's actually really cheap to make things a lot more humane, well, I can speak
9:57
about at a macro level because one of the ways you're going to achieve this, right,
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we globally spend $800 billion a year on agricultural subsidies.
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And most of that is going to, is that an Australian figure or a global figure, 800 billion
10:11
a year, and it would cost less than $10 billion to completely transition away from battery
10:17
cages for hens in the U.S. and less than that still to, I get it, a gestation crates
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for pigs.
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So we don't need to spend much more expensive, sorry, then eggs would be much more expensive.
10:26
Well, so it needs to implement, but then it's expensive to continue, isn't it?
10:29
It talks to a New Zealander about how much eggs cost after they got rid of battery cage
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hens.
10:34
Yeah, I don't have the numbers off the top of my head on a unit basis.
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I don't think the cost difference is that high.
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And if you can pay the upfront cost of the change this way, not by paying more, but just
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by redistributing how we already subsidized agriculture to subsidize the things that we
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want, which is transitioning to more humane products, it really, I mean, wait, the cost
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has to be more because the whole point of the battery cage is that you can cram lots and
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lots of hens into a particular amount of square footage.
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So if you've got fewer hens because they're living a more tolerable life and they're wandering
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around clucking happily in the sunshine, yeah, there is more cost in terms of that.
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Absolutely.
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As I said, the way it's been able to be made as cheap as it is is through trading off
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externalities for real financial costs, but it is less, less, less more expensive than
11:22
I think people.
11:23
Right.
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Right.
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So the main practices that are going on, in fact, like what do we mean by factory farming
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in the most, in its most demonic incarnation, you want to get rid of?
11:32
Yeah.
11:33
Good question, but I also don't want to dwell on the depressed stuff for too long because
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I think it's actually a really hopeful story here.
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But like, you people throw around this word factory farming, what does it mean?
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It's there is no like technical agreed consensus definition.
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It's kind of a no when you see it sort of thing.
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And some of the hallmarks of factory farm is when the animals spend their entire life
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confined indoors, they never see the sun, they never touch the ground, they never breathe
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fresh air, often confined in incredible density, their life, they're, you know, selectively
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bred to grow unnaturally fast to the point that they think of chickens, they can often
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like barely walk.
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I don't want to actually dwell on the details too much.
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I think it, no, I think you have to and want to make the moral case.
12:14
Well, I mean, you can't make a moral case without, but the thing about saying what you're
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trying to reform.
12:20
Absolutely.
12:21
The thing about factory farming is an issue is I don't actually think I do need to make
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the moral case because almost everybody agrees that this thing is bad, right?
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Like this is the frustrating thing about factory farming.
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As I mentioned before, it's entirely solvable.
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And also we all agree that it's bad.
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Basically everybody loves animals.
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And if you do surveys, 75% of Americans, this, this survey that the sentience institute
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ran, found that 75% of Americans are uncomfortable factory farming.
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And in fact, say that it's one of the most pressing issues of our time.
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Well, it depends, I think this is why the details are important.
12:52
It does depend how you ask the question.
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I think if you ask people, are you in favor of industrial agriculture that makes meat cheap
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for working families, then they would be supportive of that.
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If you said, are you in favor of chopping the beaks off little chickens, I don't know,
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to fit them in cages and electrocuting them to have, you know, then to have eggs, then
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the valence becomes different.
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So I think you're right that a lot of people have this vague idea that they're opposed
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to factory farming.
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But one of the reasons why you have, for example, agricultural, ag gag laws in the states,
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which actually criminalize whistle blowing in concentrated animal feeding operations.
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So that, you know, you can be penalized for taking a hidden camera into a factory farm
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is precisely because the industry knows that if the reality did get out, then people
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would be even more against it than they already are.
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So I mean, I do think it's worth putting some flesh on the bones, if you'll pardon
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the metaphor, of what it is that is wrong with it.
13:55
Because I don't see anything obviously wrong with introducing efficiencies into a traditional
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farm, even if they include a slight, you know, slightly deleterious life for the inhabitants
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of that farm.
14:09
Yeah.
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It's the torturing of the animals bit.
14:12
Yes.
14:13
That is the way you object to.
14:15
You object to.
14:16
Exactly.
14:17
Yeah.
14:18
And I think you're right to point out that how you frame the question, make what you
14:21
make salient for people.
14:22
Make a huge difference to what their answers are.
14:25
And so if you speak in generalities, you might hear that 75% of people oppose it.
14:28
A majority even would support a bound on factory farming.
14:30
But what does that mean?
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And if you get into more specific practices, the level of support actually goes up.
14:35
So 88% of Americans agree that confining pigs in these cages where they can't turn
14:39
around or walk is unacceptable.
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And try and find something else that 88% of Americans agree upon today.
14:45
I think this is an uncanny level of support.
14:48
And these are, so these sound cages, these are, but they're not, they don't exist in
14:54
Europe, right?
14:55
They've been outlawed there.
14:56
Is that the kind?
14:57
Oh, I think they're outlawed.
14:59
So there's firstly, there's two types of ways that pigs are confined in cages at different
15:02
points in their life.
15:03
You're making me dwell on the bad.
15:04
That's not what I wanted to do.
15:07
One is called a gestation crate, and this is when the pig is pregnant.
15:13
This is the, especially, especially small one where it can barely move at all.
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And then once the pig gives birth to piglets, they then have the luxury being upgraded
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to a ever so slightly larger type of cage called a flowering crate, where they do the
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breastfeeding of the young piglets.
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And when those young piglets are grown up, then they get put back into cage one again and
15:35
on it goes for the rest of their life.
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And I heard an anecdote from somebody that I know that they grew upon a farm and they
15:43
know many people that work in the sector, and they have the opportunity to go and visit
15:49
one of these farms.
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And you see the way that the pig fights as hard as it can to not be confined again in
15:56
this tiny cage.
15:58
I don't think there's any question whether it's suffering in there.
16:03
Right.
16:04
And pigs are quite smart and quite sociable, and they're like rummaging around, and so
16:07
they go kind of crazy in these squares, and they ignore their teeth on the bars and
16:12
like, yes.
16:13
And then so yeah, we, in fact, you find many often try and solve some of the problems
16:17
that they create, but these solutions create further problems.
16:19
So they're confining pigs, you know, these very complex animals that want to look after
16:24
their young.
16:25
Imagine how traumatizing it would be to be pinned down and be unable to care to your young.
16:30
They want to socialize that it would be confined with so many of their peers.
16:35
And so this leads to aggression, which leads to tail biting, and so what do they do?
16:39
They now cut off the pigs tails without anaesthetic.
16:42
So often the so-called solutions to some of the problems that factopharmic causes just
16:47
create further problems.
16:48
Right.
16:49
And one of those crates, I don't remember which one is on its way out in a lot of jurisdictions.
16:54
Yes.
16:55
Don't think it exists in Australia or certainly doesn't, one of them don't in the EU.
17:00
In Australia we, both are totally legal, as far as I'm aware, yeah, there are a lot
17:05
of pushes to, for example, in like California, these are banned.
17:09
There are several states in the US where they are banned.
17:11
I think in the UK they are banned.
17:13
Yeah.
17:14
There's a lot, there are many different practices to try and suck a game of whack-a-mull to try
17:18
and knock out across the world.
17:19
Yeah.
17:20
And of course the problem is that, I mean, you know, in the people who are buying most
17:24
of the pork and bacon in California are probably buying it from the Midwest where the crates
17:30
are in existence and they're unaware that they're eating that.
17:34
Similarly in Australia, you often see, I mean, try finding Australian pig flesh in a supermarket.
17:40
You know, you go in and you see a packet and it'll have a big Australian flag on it and
17:43
you'll look at the back of it and it'll say, made from at least 8% Australian ingredients,
17:47
which is the water.
17:48
Yeah.
17:49
Like it comes from a pig that was raised in Asia or something.
17:52
And there's such a double standard on the part of the factory farming industry when it
17:56
comes to labeling because, you know, when you want to like, I don't know, sell a plant-based
18:00
burger.
18:01
There's this law that's being passed in Europe right now that bans the use of the word
18:04
burger to describe something that wouldn't contain beef, for example, or the use of the
18:07
word milk because they're saying, oh, the people will be confused.
18:10
They need to know as if anyone has ever been confused about the almond, whether almond
18:13
milk comes from beef.
18:14
Exactly.
18:15
Exactly.
18:16
And yeah, when you say to them, to the industry, okay, we give us country of origin labeling.
18:19
Suddenly, this is far too hard and obviously like people aren't confused about this.
18:23
So yeah, there's a lot of having it both ways.
18:27
Yeah.
18:28
So that's pigs.
18:29
Anything else before we get off the macabre and onto the onto your optimistic sunny vision
18:33
of a glorious future where lion lines with lamb and we all drink from rivers of honey.
18:38
Okay.
18:39
If you're pushing me to dwell on some some negative ones.
18:41
About chickens.
18:42
You mentioned factory hens because this is one of the things about vegetarianism, right?
18:48
I mean, one thing that I find interesting is that a lot of people who have a problem with
18:52
eating meat will start by not eating red meat.
18:58
And they'll say, I'm only going to be chicken or maybe they're only fish, but they eat milk
19:01
and eggs.
19:02
Yeah.
19:03
But from an, if you're looking strictly from an ethical perspective, not necessarily from
19:06
a health one, if you just buy a cheap pint of milk and a regular like dozen eggs, it
19:16
could be argued that the suffering that went into the eggs and the production of the eggs
19:20
and the milk is worse than the suffering of a steak, absolutely, especially if it comes
19:25
from a cow who is wandering around in the sunshine, eating grass.
19:28
Yeah.
19:29
I think that's not just arguable.
19:30
I think that that's the case for like two main reasons.
19:34
One is just the nature of how those animals are farmed.
19:36
So the life of factory farm chicken is far worse than the life of a cow.
19:42
One of the biggest drivers of this that I think people don't know about, I'll try and
19:44
focus on things people, unless I can don't know about because they're a bit more interesting,
19:48
is the kind of genetic aspect of it, because we've selectively bred these chickens are all
19:52
like genetically near identical at this point, to grow so, so fast that they're, there's
19:59
two issues with this.
20:00
One is their lives are brutally short, so these are babies, essentially, by the time they
20:04
are at the end of their life, but also they're growing so fast that their bones can't really
20:07
support them.
20:08
They can barely stand.
20:09
They live with bone fractures as a result of their own weight, panting to try and breathe.
20:14
They're basically morbidly obese, right?
20:17
Because there's kind of nothing you can do in terms of the treatment of the animal that
20:21
can solve for this.
20:22
This is like genetically baked in, suffering at this point, which is why some charities
20:26
are doing really great work to push corporations to commit to phasing out these fast growing
20:31
breeds and use more humane breeds.
20:33
That's just one example, throw out a couple others that, and the reason why we've done
20:38
that is because they have gigantic breasts and people like it and say just get more meat
20:42
off them, right?
20:43
So if you put, as the factory farming industry, you put zero value on animal welfare, then
20:48
you will trade off infinite amounts of it to save any amount on your operating costs.
20:52
So let's get to what they do.
20:53
I mean, you can even tell that just by looking at what a free range chicken costs.
20:57
I mean, I don't really buy chicken anymore because to buy a chicken that actually led a
21:03
healthy life, it's 35 bucks for a chicken in Australia.
21:09
And the ones that you get at the supermarket are six dollars.
21:13
It's like, you know, six times the price for an actual product that is free range chicken.
21:19
It's subsidies as well, like going in the wrong direction, right?
21:22
Because the more factory farm, the more intensively farms an animal is, the more they're just
21:27
being fed grain, basically.
21:29
And grain is the biggest beneficiary of these large agricultural subsidies.
21:32
And you kind of don't reap the benefits of that if you are not feeding your animals
21:36
grain.
21:37
Right.
21:38
Just one of the ways that subsidies can work in a negative way.
21:40
But to your previous point as to like why a lot of people start with red meat if they
21:44
are doing diet change, which I stress is not the most important thing that's not focused
21:49
on diet change.
21:50
But people start with red meat and this can often be perhaps a mistake because one, the
21:57
smaller animals like chickens are often treated way worse.
22:00
But most importantly, they are just smaller.
22:02
Think about how many animals need to be farmed, kind of, per serve for your chicken burger
22:06
versus your beef burger.
22:07
So this is called the small animal replacement problem where people replace that say beef
22:12
with smaller things like chickens and fish and this can actually be not great from an animal
22:16
perspective.
22:17
Right.
22:18
In the sense that if you take the sort of experience of the animal as being one unit of
22:23
sentience, then your moral, the kind of karma that you own from sitting down and eating
22:30
an entire chicken, well, you are only karma of that entire chicken's life and death.
22:35
Whereas if you sit down and you eat some four steaks and your whole family only gets
22:40
through less than a kilo of steak, then you can do that on probably 59th of the year
22:47
and that's only the karma of one.
22:49
Yeah.
22:50
I mean, I probably wouldn't put it in such karmic terms, but the point is that the small
22:55
of the animal, the more animals are farmed per meal and if the more of it you eat, the
23:00
more of it you eat or the more animals you eat for the same amount of food.
23:05
Yes.
23:06
Got it.
23:07
Yeah.
23:08
But can I talk about why telling people to go vegan is the distraction on, yeah.
23:12
Well, basically, I think that I've thought a lot about this because the people that have
23:16
been trying to address factory farming, this has been the main thing they've been saying
23:20
for decades, go vegan, subtext, go vegan or you're evil, right?
23:24
This is bad because it triggers what I call the three Ds.
23:27
The first of these is denial.
23:30
When you tell somebody to go vegan, you trigger this emotional tension that we look for a
23:35
way to resolve and the most common way of doing that is by denying the issue and by looking
23:40
away from it entirely.
23:41
And this emotional tension I speak about is because of something psychologist call the
23:45
meat paradox.
23:46
Have you heard of the meat paradox?
23:47
So basically, this is like two facts that are true at the same time.
23:49
On one hand, we love animals, hate season suffer and yet animals are suffering to create
23:55
the products that end up on our shelves and that we end up buying.
23:58
And when people make this salient to us because we do a pretty good job of not thinking about
24:02
it most of the time, that's cognitive dissonance and it doesn't feel so good, right?
24:06
And I think a really an example that brings us to life for me.
24:10
Do you remember in 2022, there was this Premier League footballer Kurt Zuma who got in
24:14
trouble for kicking a cat?
24:15
Yes.
24:16
Is this ring about?
24:17
Yeah.
24:18
This guy, not the sharpest tool in the shed, apparently, has brother videoed him kicking
24:21
a cat and they uploaded it.
24:22
I'm not sure what they were thinking there.
24:24
But as you can expect, there's like national outrage, international outrage.
24:28
The French sports minister was denouncing this guy and while he was eating horse on a
24:33
live television.
24:34
Just a joke about the French eating horse.
24:36
Oh, yes.
24:37
Well, ultimately, this guy was sentenced to community service given a massive fine.
24:42
He was banned from playing football and the same day he was sentenced, you know, hundreds
24:45
of millions of animals are experiencing far worse than a cat being kicked and this doesn't
24:49
get any media coverage.
24:50
Just another Wednesday.
24:51
This is the meat paradox.
24:54
And when it's brought to light by telling somebody to go vegan, they then want to do something
24:58
about it because if you listen to your listens right now might be feeling some of these not
25:02
so nice feelings that this conjures.
25:04
And so how can we resolve the paradox?
25:07
There's two options.
25:08
One is change our actions so they're in line with our values and if you're telling
25:12
somebody the only way they can do that is to go vegan, that's a tall order.
25:15
The other option is just make excuses.
25:18
And there are a few quite great ways we can do this.
25:20
One is we can say, well, look, it's just not so bad.
25:23
And then systematically ignore the like photos and videos of what's really going on that
25:27
would force us to conclude, hey, actually, this is quite bad.
25:30
Or we can make arguments about like, yeah, look, this is this is this thing.
25:34
I agree that this is what's happening on the farm, but that's justified.
25:37
And this is actually quite a hard conclusion to argue for and so people end up making some
25:41
pretty crazy arguments like the, you can sum a couple of the worst ones up as a, but
25:47
lions eat meat or but plants feel pain or some, some classic bad arguments.
25:51
And the third and maybe the most common way that people can deny the issue is just to
25:55
say, yeah, obviously this is bad, but I don't buy these products.
25:59
My products are humanly raised.
26:01
And a sentient institute survey finds that 75% of people say that they mostly buy human
26:06
products.
26:07
This is the US.
26:08
And yes, only one percent of the animals are not factually found.
26:11
And so like statistically speaking, most of these people are in denial.
26:14
Right.
26:15
They're raising a lot of goats in their backyard, if that's the case.
26:17
Yes, exactly.
26:18
I mean, there are a couple of other ways that they do it just to point out those, they've
26:22
got tricks that people might hear or might find themselves doing.
26:25
One way of aligning the dog cat versus factory farm conclusion, which not very many people
26:31
do, but which I've been known to do in the past is just to say, well, we should treat
26:33
all animals the way that we treat factory farm animals.
26:36
Yes.
26:37
I mean, in fact, one reason why I've eaten dog in Southeast Asia and I've eaten whale
26:41
in Norway is just because I feel like I would be a moral hypocrite if I had some repugnant
26:47
objection to the way that they do it when I'm actually okay with doing it equally.
26:52
Totally.
26:53
Legitimate animals.
26:54
If you wouldn't put dogs in those pig crates, then you shouldn't put pigs in the
26:58
meather.
26:59
And if you do put pigs in them, then have a dog.
27:01
Exactly.
27:02
I went through this exact same thought process because I was like in my 20s, like the typical
27:06
meat eating rugby playing bloke.
27:09
But then when I first started contending with this issue, I said, well, yeah, the wrong
27:14
thing is that is having somebody else do my dirty work for me.
27:17
If I'm willing to go out and do it, then it's fine, right?
27:19
Grab my crossbow.
27:20
Well, I started, I contacted some farms to say, hey, can I come and when it's time for
27:24
an animal at the end of their life, can I be the one to do it?
27:27
As you can imagine, not many people invited me onto their farms.
27:30
But yeah, you're right.
27:31
This is basically when the options you give people transform your lifestyle to do something
27:36
that you don't find appealing and think is really hard, which is going to be in or find
27:41
an excuse.
27:42
It's really not surprising that that's the thing that people do.
27:44
Yeah.
27:45
I mean, the other way to elevate dogs and cats is I've heard that I've heard which I
27:48
had a very long and unproductive, I think stoned probably.
27:53
I give it with a guy in New Orleans of all places who was saying that the reason why it's
27:56
bad to eat dogs and not bad to eat other animals is because dogs made a pact with humankind
28:03
thousands of years ago, which was to be man's friend and it's a betrayal of the longstanding
28:09
friendship agreement, the unspoken agreement between canimes and homo sapiens to eat them
28:15
because they are our sidekicks.
28:17
I didn't know.
28:18
I was like, yeah, but the individual pig who's being tortured doesn't know that he had,
28:22
like, isn't, isn't to blame for the misfortune of not having been born into the species that's
28:26
a human sidekick.
28:27
I mean, why don't we give the pig the option of signing the friendship pact?
28:30
Yeah, exactly.
28:31
That's right.
28:32
But nobody ever asked them.
28:34
Yeah, so I think tell people to go vegan, it triggers denial.
28:38
This is unhelpful if you want to solve a problem that most people want to solve.
28:42
The second reason it's a really bad message is that it triggers despair and I'm going
28:48
to kind of like back into this one by a bit of a weird path.
28:50
Do you know how a toilet works?
28:52
Josh.
28:53
Basically.
28:54
Yeah, so you think so, right?
28:55
Could you like draw a diagram for me, the plumbing in New Orleans?
28:57
Yes, then that goes down to stop the smell from coming out and goes down to the mains,
29:03
doesn't it?
29:04
I think so.
29:05
I mean, you know better than I do.
29:06
I think most people, you ask them if they know how a toilet works.
29:08
They'll say, yeah, because they interact with it every day, but if you ask them to get
29:11
into the real nitty-gritty details, well, I certainly couldn't fix a toilet if that's
29:14
what you're asking me.
29:15
Yeah, so, but we like to think that we know how such things work because these assistants
29:19
we work with every day and when something's familiar with you, familiar to you rather, you
29:24
assume that you understand it.
29:25
And the food system is like this as well.
29:28
You know, we go to the shop every day, we buy some food, we take it home, we cook it,
29:31
and we eat it.
29:32
So we think we understand food, but this is like the tip of the iceberg of the food system.
29:36
The far bigger part of it where the food is produced and it's processed and it's shipped
29:39
from the outside of the world to where we live, we most of us have little to no idea about
29:44
how this bit works.
29:46
And when somebody tells you to go vegan, they're placing you in this consumer frame, which
29:53
is the frame you're used to interacting with the food system.
29:55
And when there's something about the food system you don't like, like factory farming,
29:58
you figure that the only thing you can do about it, the only leverage point you have is
30:01
as a consumer.
30:03
And so what does that mean?
30:04
That means a boycott.
30:05
And the problem with boycotting factory farming is maybe you say, okay, I'm willing
30:09
to make this boycott, but I know that my name is not going to do it and my friend's
30:12
not going to do it.
30:13
And so this isn't going to work.
30:15
Factory farming, I might make a big change, but I'm the sucker and the problem remains
30:19
a lot of people reason.
30:21
And so you basically conclude, well, then there's nothing I can do then, like the only
30:25
thing I'm being told I can do is doomed so I can do nothing so I despair.
30:30
Not helpful when you have a problem that so many people want to solve it is so solvable
30:34
for them to believe that they can't, you need to believe that you can solve it.
30:37
Yeah, yeah, it's interesting, isn't it?
30:39
I mean, that is wrong though, isn't that the idea that people aren't like, it's like
30:43
casting a vote.
30:44
I mean, you know, no vote is going to sway an election.
30:49
And if everybody thinks that their vote isn't going to sway the election, therefore they
30:51
shouldn't vote, then the whole system collapses.
30:54
Like I've had this conversation with people where, you know, I'm saying, well, I don't
30:59
want to, I'm going to eat meatless tonight and they'll say, well, I'm going to have to
31:03
chicken.
31:04
I'll be like, but I don't want to kill a chicken.
31:05
They're like, well, I'm not killing a chicken.
31:06
The chicken's already back there.
31:07
It's in the kitchen.
31:08
It's dead.
31:09
It's dead whatever I'm going to do.
31:11
And I'm like, yeah, but if fewer people order the chicken at the restaurant tonight,
31:15
they're going to order fewer chickens for tomorrow's meals, right?
31:19
And fewer chicken.
31:20
And there's going to be less demand overall on the chicken farm, they're going to produce
31:23
fewer chickens.
31:25
Like it's funny that it's often kind of like the most, the people that really love markets,
31:29
I find disproportionately make this argument and this argument's basically saying that like
31:32
there's no relationship between supply and demand, which makes no sense.
31:35
So yeah, you're right.
31:36
It is, it is mistaken to say that changing your diet doesn't do anything.
31:40
It does do something.
31:41
But I think people feel like it's not going to solve the problem overall, and so they
31:46
find that disheartening.
31:47
I don't think, I think it's, it's strange that people think that way in this context because
31:51
when you, I don't know, donate to help somebody in poverty, you don't say, well, I'm not
31:55
solving poverty.
31:56
So there's no point.
31:57
No, although that was the genius of world vision coming up with the sponsor of specific
32:00
child idea whenever that happened.
32:02
Like it used to be that you just donated money and it went somewhere and then they come
32:05
up with the idea of sending your photo of a child and this is your child and this is
32:08
a big village and you know, they've got, we've got a new water well in the village,
32:12
you know, a clean water for them and he writes your little handwritten notes.
32:16
Like that was brilliant and of course, kind of bullshit because the money's all going
32:20
into a big pot and like the, you know, a whole bunch of different villages are benefiting
32:23
from it.
32:24
But it's a way of, it's a way of getting around that problem that you're talking about,
32:28
which if it sounds like I'm moralizing here, I make exactly the same logical, I guess
32:34
fallacious leap when it comes to climate change, which I think we've spoken about before,
32:38
where I just don't buy that it's on me not to fly.
32:42
Yeah.
32:43
For example, like, you know, I kind of need, I need to fly, I want to fly, I like to fly.
32:48
The planes go in there anyway, this is sort of the similar to like the chickens already
32:51
out the back, right?
32:52
The planes go in there, it makes no real difference whether I'm on it or not.
32:56
I just don't think it should be on my holders to be casting a vote against my own interests
33:00
in order to create slightly less demand for aviation.
33:03
I think there's obviously is that the whole problem has to be addressed at a societal,
33:07
systemic level.
33:08
Exactly.
33:09
I think, yeah, this is, there's absolutely a sense in which these two issues are connected.
33:14
And we need to do for animals, we need to make the transition that we did for climate,
33:19
because climate used to focus on people's individual footprints, primarily, the carbon
33:23
footprint famously being invented by BP, um, hopefully to them making us focus on what
33:28
we're doing.
33:29
And not just flying that in case people don't know that.
33:31
The term of a carbon footprint was coined by BP, the oil company.
33:35
Um, I think it was as part of some of their like, uh, purportedly, you know, like let's,
33:41
let's talk about how we saved the world.
33:43
Yeah.
33:44
So everyone is thinking about the consumer and making you think about what your carbon footprint
33:48
is rather than us as the people who are refusing to invest that equipment.
33:52
And it's the same thing as telling people to go vegan.
33:55
It puts the focus on you and the consumer frame and individuals and not on systems.
34:00
Because we've since done a whole lot less of that in climate and a whole lot more focusing
34:05
on institutional change.
34:07
And as a result, it's a far bigger movement that's making far more progress, because we're
34:11
not lambasting people for their personal actions.
34:13
We're lowering the barrier to entry so that anyone can be a part of the solution.
34:17
This is far, far better, right?
34:20
Um, yeah, there's more to be said on that, but I have a third D for you.
34:23
I'm not finished slagging telling people to go vegan.
34:26
So the two days were denial, denial, despair, and the third one is defying.
34:30
And this is like a very old psychological mechanism that goes back to Genesis, you know,
34:36
in a garden of Eden, God says, he'd have anything you want except for the fruit from that
34:40
one tree.
34:41
And suddenly the fruit of that tree looks kind of good, right?
34:43
Because when somebody tells us not to do something, we want to do it just a little bit more
34:47
to kind of reestablish our autonomy, this specific mechanism, psychological reactants.
34:55
And we know that this is true of food as well.
34:57
Like it's been, uh, there are, uh, uh, uh, studies that show it, they're not very interesting.
35:01
So I won't bore you with them.
35:03
But I think a stat that I find really interesting on this is that 97% of Americans agree that
35:09
whether to be vegetarian or eat meat is a personal choice.
35:12
And nobody has the right to tell me which one I should do.
35:14
And what's talking about this is that 97% that leaves 3%, right?
35:19
There are more than 3% of vegetarians.
35:20
So even the vegetarians agree that whether to be vegetarian or not is a personal choice and
35:24
you shouldn't tell people what to do.
35:26
And so is it a surprise that when you tell people who otherwise are sympathetic to solving
35:30
this problem that, hey, these foods that you love that you have fond memories of there
35:34
associated with your religion, maybe traditions, like Thanksgiving just passed in the US or Christmas,
35:40
these foods are bad and you are bad for eating them that we're going to take people that
35:43
would have otherwise been allies and, and, and make them try and defy us.
35:47
Who are the people who are answering that survey by saying, yes, I think that I should
35:50
be bossed around about what I eat.
35:52
Like 3%.
35:53
Like that's, I'm always, I'm always amazed.
35:55
I mean, surely they're the people that want to do some of the bossing.
35:57
And so they're like, hey, you can boss me because I want to boss you that much.
36:00
Yeah, yeah.
36:02
So yeah, authoritarian regime in which everyone only eats quinoa.
36:06
Yes, and tofu.
36:07
Or meat, who knows what side they're possible.
36:09
But yeah, I mean, is it surprising that vegans, therefore, have become like one of the
36:14
most hated groups in America, like there was this 2015 surveys, I find hilarious,
36:18
which was asking people about how much they like or dislike different groups.
36:23
And people dislike vegans more than they dislike.
36:26
People have different religions and races more than they disliked immigrants.
36:29
The only group that they preferred vegans to was dog addicts.
36:33
So this is, this is the PI outcome of decades,
36:35
telling people to change their diet.
36:39
It's, and it's not rocket science.
36:40
And yet we've kind of gotten it wrong again and again and again.
36:42
So the thing I want animal advocates to take on board is that pressuring and
36:46
shaming people closes them down, empathizing with people, giving them agency,
36:50
giving them more options, opens them up.
36:53
And that's how we can turn this really massive latent support for doing something
36:57
about this issue into action.
36:59
So what are the more options?
37:01
What are the more options that you give people instead of, yeah, gilting them?
37:05
Well, so there's two senses which can give people more options.
37:09
One is in terms of things they can do about the issue.
37:11
Instead of changing their diet, they can support the best charities that are working
37:15
to fix the system.
37:16
Another is you can give people more options from a food perspective.
37:19
Like if you're a consumer that wants to not have factory farm products,
37:22
well, often you're just flat out of luck because everything at your supermarket
37:25
is actually farmed, or if it's not, the labels are so opaque that you have no idea
37:28
what is or isn't humanly farmed, then there are often just like at restaurants,
37:33
just like not very good plant-based options and we're, you know, in the process
37:37
of developing far better alternative alternatives, basically.
37:41
And, you know, I'm slagging vegans here.
37:44
I am vegan.
37:46
It took me seven years of struggle to get there.
37:50
And now I don't find it all that hard.
37:52
And what I've come to realize is that there's nothing inherent.
37:55
It needn't be inherently hard.
37:56
It's not for everyone.
37:58
It's just about the food system in which we find ourselves in the same way
38:01
that you might find it really hard to be, I don't know, halal or kosher in a given place.
38:05
But if you move to a country where the food system is built around that
38:07
because everyone wants it, it's actually just not art at all.
38:10
Yeah.
38:11
Yeah.
38:12
So giving more people more options, donating.
38:15
Can we talk about why that's great?
38:17
Yeah, yeah, go for it.
38:17
Yeah, well, before we do, I'm just interested in your experience as a vegan.
38:21
Yeah, yeah, yeah.
38:22
Because I mean, I know that you're saying that you don't want to push it on everybody.
38:26
But there is, so
38:31
extricating oneself from the sort of hideous systemic torture of animals
38:37
that is the factory farming system is one thing.
38:40
Becoming a vegetarian is another thing.
38:42
Becoming a vegan feels to many people like human civilization and culture
38:48
has built up over thousands of years.
38:51
This, these kind of rich relationships with dairy and eggs.
38:55
And you know, the use of proteins, animal husbandry, like the,
39:01
you can't make a cake without.
39:02
I mean, you can, but you can't make a good cake without any of the holidays.
39:07
Not, no, yeah, holidays, but also, yeah, I mean, just imagine going to a little
39:11
Italian village and telling a non-I that, you know, you can't eat spaghetti
39:15
because it's got eggs in it.
39:17
Yeah.
39:17
Or you, so how do you, I guess, feel like you're, when you say that you're not missing
39:24
out on anything, it's just like moving to another country that's halal and eating
39:28
halal.
39:29
And I think it's quite true because you barely notice the halal components of halal.
39:35
You might sort of notice kosher that you really notice vegan when you're not
39:42
a vegan and you eat vegan.
39:44
You either have to engage in a isn't it a cool magic trick?
39:48
How they managed to pretend that this isn't vegan because it's trying to replicate
39:53
something that is not naturally vegan.
39:55
Or you just have to be satisfied with eating a bunch of nuts and berries.
40:00
Yeah.
40:01
Where did, how did you get to that over the seven years?
40:03
Yeah.
40:04
I mean, and to be clear, I didn't say I don't think I'm missing out on anything.
40:06
I just said that it doesn't have to be hard.
40:10
And that has become my experience now that I don't find it hard.
40:13
In part, because it's so much of your, you know, there's a saying you're the kind
40:17
of the average of your five closest friends.
40:19
And I like the work, the office I work from in the UK where I'm living is like a vegan
40:24
by default office and just when you're not surrounded.
40:26
Like when there's plenty of good options and you're not surrounded by the things
40:28
that might otherwise tempt you, I have found it now easy.
40:31
But I really didn't, right?
40:33
Like it took me, as I mentioned, seven years because it went and I first started
40:38
grappling with this issue, which I'd managed to kind of put in a box in my head.
40:40
Like I think most of us do the only thing I thought I could do was to change my diet.
40:45
And so I said, mom, partner, you're not going to see me eating meat anymore and
40:50
saying it, that was an easy bit.
40:51
And then doing it like I struggled.
40:53
And as a result, I often ended up kind of eating meat in secret when nobody else
40:57
kept seeing me.
40:58
And I obviously felt really guilty about this both because I was doing something I didn't
41:04
want to do for the animals, but also just I felt guilty that I couldn't live in line
41:08
with my values.
41:09
Like that just felt really shit.
41:11
And meanwhile, I wasn't actually helping any animals.
41:13
So it's like a lose, lose.
41:14
Animals are still not being helped and I'm feeling shit.
41:16
So telling, thinking that I had to go vegan was not working for me.
41:20
And I kind of hit my, with the secret meat, I hit my like rock bottom moment when I
41:24
told my partner I was going to see a friend or whatever.
41:27
She caught me sitting in the front seat of my car, eating half a chicken with my bare
41:31
hands.
41:32
And I was like, something's got to give.
41:34
This is just not working.
41:35
That's amazing.
41:36
It's like you're a meth addict, she gets bored with the crack pipe, you know, in the
41:40
front seat.
41:41
It's what it felt like at first.
41:42
Chicken drumstick, grease, dripping off your fingers.
41:46
Yeah, yeah.
41:47
And so was the, and what was the biggest thing, what was the toughest challenge?
41:50
I mean, I went pescatarian for almost a year and I felt worse because I guess I wasn't
41:57
doing it right.
41:58
I mean, I was mainly just eating processed grains as a result.
42:02
So pasta was, it passed easy, you know, rice and, you know, vegetable stir fry is easy,
42:07
but you're not just consuming, I end up consuming a huge amount of carbs and felt as sluggy
42:13
and sluggish and groggy as a person who eats a lot of ton of carbs is worth it.
42:18
I mean, I think part of the problem I experience this as well is that we decide we want to do
42:22
something about this.
42:23
We think we can only change our diet and then we go cold turkey for one and we have no
42:27
idea what we're doing.
42:28
And so we eat a bunch of pasta.
42:30
There are actually more foods than pasta than the vegan, you know, like so many like
42:34
traditional foods around the world, like protein rich and plant based and we just don't know
42:39
about them.
42:40
And we don't know how to cook them.
42:41
And so there's a bit of a learning journey and like, like what, I mean, quinoa, I guess,
42:46
chick peas.
42:47
The whole cornucopia of legumes out there, right?
42:51
Like in South Asian cuisine, in the East Asian cuisine, there's just like so much you
42:55
can do millions of types of beans and lentils and chick peas and so on and tofu.
43:01
And you can, like this food can really slap if you're doing it right.
43:05
And it's just the most, like Australian culture, not known for its traditional plant based
43:10
food.
43:11
Indian culture is, you know, most of the world has only recently started really a
43:17
adopting eating meat at scale.
43:18
So they know how to do it.
43:19
That's true, but that's mainly because most of the world was dirt poor and they were
43:22
eating rice.
43:23
Well, many of them were eating rice, many of them made things or, you know, some other
43:28
weak based ones.
43:29
We didn't go on a journey from like only eating staple grains to where eating the diet
43:33
we have now.
43:34
We went through a lot of the like healthy, diverse plant based cuisines.
43:39
We just, they just get a lot of air time.
43:42
But yeah, what was the hardest part?
43:43
I think for me, I mean, we're firstly trying to go called Turkey.
43:46
It was a bad idea.
43:48
Residivism rates.
43:49
We call it that.
43:50
Yeah.
43:51
A higher.
43:52
This has been shown.
43:52
And I think also, like you can just, we shouldn't be thinking like purists, like you
43:57
can get far more than 80% of the benefit to animals by cutting out the 20% worst products
44:02
actually.
44:03
Yeah.
44:04
But I think the hardest thing for me was as this like, you know, 20 something rugby playing,
44:09
weightlifting guy thought of myself as a bit of a carnivore, steaks my favorite.
44:13
Food.
44:14
Is this like identity and like masculinity?
44:16
Yeah.
44:17
Ideal that we is like in the ether that I like, what is it based on?
44:22
But nonetheless, I grappled with it.
44:24
And I think that's a, that's the thing that I found hard to kind of overcome.
44:27
That's interesting.
44:28
I mean, that reminds me a little bit of quitting drinking as well.
44:29
We're like, you know, it's, there's all this, it's not just like you're just stopping
44:33
doing this thing that is not serving you anymore.
44:36
Yeah.
44:37
It's all of a sudden, this rejection of a, of a fundamental cultural precept about what
44:41
it means to have fun and to be a devil-make-air person in the country, the life of the party.
44:48
Yeah.
44:49
Yeah.
44:50
Yeah.
44:51
Yeah.
44:52
You know, New Zealand descent.
44:53
Yeah.
44:54
Who are all heavy drinkers.
44:55
And yeah, similarly, I can imagine that if you give up red meat, like what are you
44:59
pussy?
45:00
Like what's the thing?
45:01
Yeah.
45:02
Especially I was still playing rugby at the time, you know, it didn't go over well with
45:04
the team.
45:05
Right.
45:06
But yes, I struggled for years and eventually I got there, but I only discovered afterwards
45:10
I kicked myself about it now that this whole time, there were far easier things I could
45:14
have been doing that are just as impactful, namely donating to the right charities.
45:18
And yeah, this is part of what inspired me to start the nonprofit that I find kind that
45:23
I run where we identify these charities and recommend them to the public because I know
45:27
that there are hundreds of millions of people out there that don't feel comfortable with
45:29
this issue.
45:30
They want to do something about it.
45:31
They don't realize that there's other things that they can do.
45:33
Yeah.
45:34
And I just want to make it easy for people.
45:35
So let's talk about those donations.
45:36
Where do they go?
45:37
Yeah.
45:39
You mentioned World Vision before.
45:41
I had an experience with World Vision.
45:42
It left me very jaded about charity entirely as a, I think it was 12 and they have the like
45:47
40 hour famine campaign to do that as a kid.
45:50
Yeah.
45:51
I signed up with a bunch of my school mates.
45:54
We actually, it was, it was, it went poorly from the start because when I called up World
45:58
Vision to give your, your team name, I went to a school called Grammar, I said, we'll
46:02
be grammar boys.
46:03
And they misheard me and they put on all of my material dragon love, which is not a name
46:06
you want for your, your team when you're a boy, you're a grandma boy or something, sounds
46:11
like grammar boys.
46:12
Dragon love.
46:13
Yeah.
46:14
I mean, dragon love is actually a pretty cool name.
46:16
How old were you?
46:17
When you were 12, yeah.
46:18
Oh boy.
46:19
Yeah.
46:20
I think I was just old enough that I didn't want to be called dragon.
46:22
Right.
46:23
Dragon's a lame now.
46:24
Yeah.
46:25
Yeah.
46:26
So anyway, I'm called Batman Boys or something.
46:27
Yes.
46:28
Oh, I was so cool 18 months ago.
46:29
Batman Boys.
46:30
That was the, the cool kids when I was in primary school.
46:32
Right.
46:33
Didn't that be one of the Batman Boys?
46:34
Is that true?
46:35
It is true to bring it up.
46:36
You can see the PTSD across your face.
46:39
Anyway, you should see the Batman Boys now.
46:42
They're nothing.
46:43
No, they're nothing.
46:44
Now you're right here on the conversation.
46:46
You made it.
46:47
Well, well, well, well.
46:49
Well, well, well, vision and being just in the illusion of charity.
46:51
Yeah.
46:52
So I didn't realize, and for people who don't know, I think the 40 hour famines everywhere,
46:57
right?
46:58
But it's a, it's a thing where it seems to be mostly young people, right?
47:01
Yes.
47:02
It's actually like teenagers will go around and it's like a reader thorn or
47:05
wanting one of these other things where you might go to your neighbors and your friends
47:08
and say, well, you sponsor me to do this thing.
47:11
They pledge a certain amount if you succeed.
47:13
And then once you've got your money raised, you go on for 40 hours, you can't eat anything.
47:18
Yeah.
47:19
Or do you get anything?
47:20
Expressing.
47:21
No, I think you can do in quarter.
47:22
Oh.
47:23
I mean, maybe got that bit wrong.
47:24
Yeah, you're alive.
47:25
Just doing it the hard way.
47:26
Yeah.
47:27
Right.
47:28
And then you've been, so for 40 hours, you don't eat and that is supposed to show solidarity
47:30
with people.
47:31
People sponsor you to do a grinding poverty.
47:32
Yes.
47:33
And then that money goes to world vision.
47:35
But I didn't know at the time, firstly, a family, a lady did sponsor a child in the extent
47:40
to which the kind of aid was tied to religious conversion.
47:44
I remember the kid that our family was sponsoring always hated their religious studies classes
47:48
and complained that they had to do it.
47:50
I didn't like that bit when I learned about it.
47:52
But much worse is just the extent to which, where is the evidence that this charity is
47:58
doing really good work to use your money wisely and help people?
48:01
Couldn't find it.
48:02
Not a letter.
48:03
Not a little letter from Boutou in Uganda.
48:06
It's written.
48:07
It's got a religion.
48:08
True.
48:09
But how much is in Boutou benefiting for that dollar compared to what else I might be doing
48:14
with it?
48:15
And so I became quite disillusioned with charity for many years until I discovered that
48:19
actually there are evidence-based charities out there that can do really insane amounts
48:23
of good with your dollar.
48:25
And so I guess the combination of that insight and the hey, telling people to go vegan is
48:29
not working.
48:30
People want to do something.
48:31
Let's make it easy for people to do as much or even more good than going vegan.
48:34
That's where fun kind came from.
48:37
And you know, the recommended charities, we have six of them at the moment and they kind
48:40
of tackle this problem from a wide range of angles and they help all of the main types
48:46
of animals that are affected by, by factory farming.
48:50
And like, where do I start?
48:51
I think a really cool example of the real progress that charities like the ones we recommend
48:56
have achieved over the past decade is corporate campaigns.
49:00
And the way these work is, if you're a consumer when you're at the shop, you might try and find
49:04
the free range eggs because you care and you want the products to be raised humanly.
49:08
But when you're buying a burger at McDonald's, you're kind of not really thinking about where
49:12
that comes from.
49:13
And so it allows big corporations to go as cheap as possible in their supply chain.
49:18
And they're serving consumers product that really, if they knew about the cruelty involved
49:22
in the supply chain, it wouldn't be happy to buy it.
49:24
This is what economists call an information failure.
49:27
And what corporate campaigns do is they address this information failure by going to, let's
49:31
say McDonald's, this is a real example, and saying, hey McDonald's, we're going to tell
49:35
people about the battery cages that you're using your supply chain.
49:37
And this is going to hurt your brand because they won't like it unless you commit to
49:41
phasing it out.
49:42
And sometimes the threat alone is enough and companies come to heal and make these commitments
49:47
and follow through.
49:48
But sometimes they say, yeah, try me.
49:50
And so then the charities will do like digital campaigns spreading the word about what's
49:55
going on.
49:56
They'll like protest that McDonald's HQ generate meteor attention.
50:01
And almost always the companies come around and realize, hey, the cost to my brand of people
50:05
understanding what's actually going on in supply chain is higher than the cost of just giving
50:09
people what they want.
50:10
And so McDonald's committed to phasing out KJGs by 2025, they achieved it in 2023, is
50:15
that globally?
50:17
Good question.
50:19
I'm not sure if it's globally, it's at least in the US, but globally, that's not really
50:24
matters.
50:25
I mean, the US is probably 60% of McDonald's sales, I would guess, I don't know, but
50:29
globally, thousands of such commitments have been achieved and followed through one.
50:34
And so at a kind of at a micro level, like donating to the humane league, which is one
50:38
of our recommended charities that does this work, you can spare a chicken from a life
50:43
of being confined in a cage for 85 cents, which is remarkably cheap, right?
50:48
But it also adds up at the macro level because 10 years ago when they started really working
50:52
on this cage free in the US was something like 5% of eggs.
50:57
Now we're at 45% of eggs in poised to overtake 50% next year.
51:01
So these little things, these little things that each individual animal like that is
51:05
a miracle that you've helped at 85 cents, but it adds up to actual systemic change.
51:10
And then when the percentage gets high enough, then actually it becomes in enough farmers
51:15
interests to lobby for it to be outlawed, to get the kind of slow movers to come into line.
51:20
And so in the UK, at the moment, whether at 80% cage free eggs, there's a real prospect
51:24
that cage degs might be banned legally in the coming years.
51:29
So these corporate campaigns can contribute to regulatory change, I'll tell you about.
51:33
And do you do the companies that you donate to, do they directly involved in lobbying
51:38
for political change and lobbying parliamentarians as well, or do they always do it through
51:42
the corporate approach?
51:43
In some cases, they are.
51:44
So the humane league, who I mentioned, I also mentioned before, prop 12, which is a piece
51:48
of law in California that set minimum standards for animal welfare and banned the import of
51:54
the sale of products in that state from elsewhere that don't meet those standards.
51:57
Oh, is that right?
51:58
So if you're in California, you aren't buying caged pig meat.
52:02
Yes, you now aren't.
52:04
And this is actually really important because another issue is if you ban something in
52:07
one country, you just get exports, it's the right.
52:10
Exactly, which are a charity that my partner works for is trying to close this loophole.
52:15
Because I think a lot of consumers don't realize when you go and you buy eggs, you assume
52:19
in Australia, the eggs you buy must meet Australian standards.
52:22
They don't, so that only applies to Australian producers.
52:25
And so it's like I have no Australian eggs in Australia.
52:27
I don't know, I assume so.
52:29
We do import a lot of animal products just by being a major exporter, which is true
52:32
of many countries.
52:33
So it's a loophole that most basically nobody realises exists.
52:38
And it's a rare case where it's like a win-win for local farmers and for consumers and
52:42
for animals.
52:43
Win-win-win-win.
52:44
Yeah.
52:45
I mean, the glaring example for me is prawns in Australia where you can get some of the
52:50
best prawns in the world out of Australian waters.
52:53
But it's not necessarily always clear if you go to a fish market, a low-line, a supermarket
52:59
where the prawns are from.
53:00
And there can be two trays of prawns on ice.
53:03
And you know, one can be two, just $2 more, which is not much, a kilo for prawns.
53:08
And it can be out of the fresh waters of the South Pacific in Australia.
53:12
Yeah.
53:13
There can be one right next to it that looks almost identical, which can be from a cesspool
53:16
in Vietnam, which is just a complete, a pond of feces with the prawns just thriving
53:22
around.
53:23
Yeah.
53:24
You're frashing around each other.
53:25
Yeah, I'm thriving.
53:26
It's not from thriving or frashing.
53:27
It's flashing.
53:28
And now I'm curious about the McDonald's thing.
53:30
Could John, can you look up the, what proportion of McDonald's sales from in the US versus
53:34
other countries?
53:35
I just think that's interesting.
53:36
And are they cage-free globally?
53:37
Yeah.
53:38
I think exactly.
53:39
I would guess that they are, but John, you can tell us.
53:41
Yeah.
53:42
Yeah.
53:43
So you asked to, so the Saudis work on their legislative change.
53:45
Yeah.
53:46
So that prop, prop 12 that I mentioned, the animal egg lobby, which is very, very powerful.
53:52
In fact, more spent on big egg lobbying in the US than defense or oil, so it's a powerful
53:56
lobby, have tried to take this to court to have it overturned.
54:01
And the humane league, one of our charities that we recommend work to defend it at the
54:04
Supreme Court and one.
54:06
But now the new US government is introducing, is it called the Eats Act?
54:10
They're trying to overturn it again.
54:12
And the nonprofit sector is working to, to, to combat them again.
54:16
So yes.
54:17
It is incredibly corrupt.
54:18
The agricultural subsidy system, if people aren't aware, like this was introduced
54:21
back when, you know, the majority of Americans worked on farms.
54:25
Yes.
54:26
That's why I'm supporting, you know, a very, an essential service that a lot of people
54:31
did.
54:32
And now it's just a boom double for the tiny number of massive companies that get huge subsidies
54:37
and tax win, win falls.
54:40
What's the answer, John?
54:43
41% of global McDonald's sales are in the US, okay.
54:49
And they're, okay.
54:52
And Australia and New Zealand and the US are the cage-free McDonald's jurisdictions.
54:58
That's interesting.
54:59
All right.
55:00
But other like giants, like, I don't know, Walmart, for example, like these are, there
55:05
are thousands of massive corporations that have come to heal.
55:07
This is what adds up to going from 5% to 45%.
55:10
Yeah.
55:11
So that's one of the ways that our charities help.
55:14
I think there's some, maybe even cooler, new solutions to factory farming that are still
55:19
emerging.
55:20
Now there are two categories of technological solutions.
55:22
One of these is alternatives and the other is like improvements.
55:26
Yeah.
55:27
So in improvements, this is tech that can make it cheaper to farm animals more efficiently
55:31
and in a way that respects their welfare.
55:36
And one is this cool technology called Inobo-Sexing and it addresses a problem you wanted to hear
55:40
more about problems that I think most people don't know about, which is when, what happens
55:45
to all of the, to lay eggs, we need egg-legging hens and they've got to be born somewhere.
55:53
And when those hens are born, what happens to the male chicks that are born and obviously
55:57
can't lay eggs?
55:59
These are considered waste by the factory farming industry and so they're killed on their
56:02
first day of life.
56:04
In some cases, I almost couldn't believe this when I first heard it, literally by just
56:07
like putting them in a bin and letting them crush and suffocate one another to death,
56:11
or more commonly through maceration, which is a nice way of saying putting them through
56:14
a giant blender.
56:15
So this is what happens to the male chicks that would, the females of which go onto
56:20
to lay eggs.
56:21
And when you maserate them, I mean, surely you wouldn't throw them out would you, because
56:24
you could at least sell them for pet food or something.
56:25
Yeah, I think they're often used, often used for pet food in this case.
56:28
Is this a, this is just a fire, a short and cruel life?
56:32
I think many people would say not, would we, would we bet out that these chickens didn't
56:36
exist?
56:37
Dogs eat their own shit.
56:38
Really?
56:39
They don't need a maserrated baby.
56:40
Exactly.
56:41
We can do bet off for our dogs and that.
56:44
So what in over-sexing is, is it's a technology that basically can scan eggs before they
56:49
are hatched to determine their sex.
56:51
And if they're male, they are destroyed before they are born, instead of doing the cruel
56:54
thing of letting them be born and then destroying them.
56:55
So this is interesting.
56:56
And it's like unbelievably cheap.
56:58
And so this is being rolled out in the EU already in Brazil.
57:03
I think soon in the US, and I know someone that's trying to work to bring this to Australia.
57:06
If you work through an Australian grossa and you want to have an over-sexed eggs get
57:10
in touch, I know someone that's trying to make it happen.
57:12
And presumably, a lot simpler as well, logistically, to just give it a bunch of eggs, then to have
57:17
to deal with squawking, chirping little male birds.
57:20
And the operating cost of these things is like approximately zero, so it's very, very cheap
57:24
to do.
57:25
So there are technological solutions like this.
57:28
They're just to clarify.
57:29
Yeah, not to sound like an anti-abortion lunatic, but is there that much moral difference
57:34
necessarily between killing a live chick and killing a chick that's still in the egg?
57:38
Like, if it's a fertilized egg, and the chick is growing in the egg, it depends.
57:42
At what stage of development you're discarding the egg.
57:46
Yes.
57:47
I mean, it may still feel pain if it's about to hatch.
57:49
Yeah, I'm not sure exactly when in the developmental process they do it, but given the goals of the
57:53
people creating the technology, it would be as early as possible.
57:56
Right.
57:57
And how big is the difference?
57:59
I don't know.
58:00
Is there a difference?
58:01
Would you rather destroy the eggs very, very early on or have it be born in the chuck
58:05
and in the blender?
58:06
I think most people would say yes in the same way they would say yes about that if it was
58:10
that about a baby.
58:13
So yeah, not to make this, that's not a solid abortion today, but that's for another conversation.
58:18
Yes, yes.
58:19
Clearly, it was just like a five day old blastocyst and an eight month old embryo that's about
58:25
to be born.
58:26
Yeah.
58:27
Okay, that's cool.
58:28
Cool, right?
58:29
Yeah.
58:30
So there's text solutions when it comes to just making farming more humane, but then there's
58:34
also alternatives and people, you know, you've seen your plant-based burger, perhaps not
58:38
that exciting, some of them are getting pretty good, but then there's kind of cultivated
58:42
meats and like precision fermentation is the thing I find crazy, which is, I'm not an
58:46
expert on how this works, but they're basically able to take a certain kind of yeast, I think
58:50
it is, and feed it biomass and it produces milk, like actual, literal, and a cellular
58:55
level milk, and no animals are involved.
58:58
What?
58:59
So I think like there are technologies like this that are being developed and support
59:04
for these technologies comes from one of our charities, the Good Food Institute that
59:07
works on removing regulatory bottlenecks, making sure that when, you know, these technologies
59:14
get a fair cut of like subsidies for like food and R&D tech and helping bring about these
59:20
replacements sooner, because I think the future looks like more humane raise animal products.
59:27
It looks like eating more plants because our doctors tell us we need to for our health
59:31
and for the like sustainability of the planet.
59:34
And it also looks like some amount yet to be seen, how big of an amount of these kind
59:38
of alternatives.
59:39
So, you're talking about alternatives that again are not like a plant burger, they're alternatives
59:44
meaning they are actual meat or milk in terms of their biology, but they didn't come
59:49
out of a sentient creature, they were grown.
59:51
Yeah, there's, I guess there's two types of alternative here, there's like functional
59:54
alternatives, which is like your plant based milk, which many people are very happy with
59:57
and there's increasing increasing its market share globally.
1:00:01
And then there are the like literal cellular identical substitutes.
1:00:06
Do you know where that is in terms of like lab-grown meat?
1:00:08
I feel like for 10 years, we've been talking about this for a while, yeah, just around
1:00:12
the corner.
1:00:13
Yeah, I mean, it exists, like the beef burgers, for example, chicken nuggets, I think the
1:00:20
next challenge is bringing it, it's easy to make something that's kind of like minced
1:00:24
like a burger, bringing it the same sort of structure of like a chicken breast as I understand
1:00:28
it is far harder, and there are various technological hurdles to be overcome, and I think part
1:00:33
of like a lot of people are a bit down on old proteins at the moment, I don't know, you
1:00:37
were chatting with Sam Harris about this and he was complaining, where are my lab-grown
1:00:42
burgers?
1:00:43
And I think there was just a massive hype wave as that is for a lot of new technology,
1:00:47
especially around COVID time, this is when like plant-based sales peaked.
1:00:50
Right.
1:00:51
And so when you look at where we expected things to be, when you look at the short, the
1:00:55
recent trajectory of like sales of these products, it doesn't look that good.
1:00:58
Right.
1:00:59
When you zoom out a bit and you look at like what exists now versus what existed 10 years
1:01:02
ago, it is, it is wizardry, what we can create now, so if you like, project that forward
1:01:07
another 10 years and see where we might be.
1:01:09
Yeah, I mean, certainly in terms of things like sausages and chicken nuggets and burger
1:01:13
patties, there's no, surely there's no impediment there.
1:01:16
I understand that it's probably going to be a long time before you can construct a steak.
1:01:19
Yeah.
1:01:20
No, because that's a different kettle of fish or kettle of meat.
1:01:23
The charity that you were talking about that works to improve the regulatory environment
1:01:27
for that kind of research, do they directly fund R&D as well, or is it mostly about making
1:01:33
sure that stupid laws like Florida's, I think Florida's band, it is always right, and
1:01:36
Florida's band even research into.
1:01:39
Yeah.
1:01:40
So there's like certainly the sale of live grown meat.
1:01:42
Yeah.
1:01:43
Some of the efforts are about like leveling the regulatory playing fields like, you know,
1:01:48
that just getting rid of flat out bands on these products or unfair labeling rules like
1:01:54
the one that's just been passed in or being passed in the EU to make you unable to call
1:01:58
something milk in case somebody thinks that their almond milk came from a cow, then there
1:02:03
is also, I think in some cases, directly funding, but the better place of getting leverage
1:02:08
is accessing government funding that would go to maybe something kind of stupid and have
1:02:12
it go to this technology instead or at least give it a proportional amount of subsidies
1:02:17
and R&D support to factory farming, which gets the vast majority of it at the moment.
1:02:24
Yeah, because the amount of ridiculous ways in which it is not a level playing field
1:02:30
for factory farming just bothers me so much.
1:02:32
I mean, there's the subsidies, there's the unfair labeling, as I mentioned, there's
1:02:35
the bands, but even like in the US, for example, the Clean Air Act and the Clean Water Act industries
1:02:42
have to abide by these.
1:02:43
Factory farming gets a carve out why?
1:02:46
You tell me a carve out from the Clean Water Act and the Clean Air Act ridiculous or like
1:02:51
they get kind of state subsidized insurance because, you know, with bird flu, it's been
1:02:58
going around in the US at the moment when you lose your flock, sorry, when your flock
1:03:02
becomes infected, you have to kill them and you don't bear the cost of this as a farmer,
1:03:07
you get government provided insurance and this basically means that you can then take
1:03:12
a massive risk and farm your animals in a way that makes it far more likely for them
1:03:16
so that it'll be an outbreak of disease and not bear a fair amount of the costs.
1:03:20
Yeah, which reminds me, I mean, we've been talking about this issue in terms of animal welfare
1:03:27
and there are some people there rare who say don't like animals, don't care, but it doesn't
1:03:33
really matter, I don't think for this issue because it's also a catastrophe for the environment
1:03:37
and for public health. If you care to, yeah, I mean, I'll try and keep it to the things
1:03:44
people might not know about and public health is one of them because factory farming is
1:03:50
a major pandemic risk. We can find like basically these really cramped and unsanitary conditions
1:03:58
is the perfect breeding ground for diseases that can then jump from animal to human and
1:04:02
become the next pandemic. And if you think about it, we're talking about like hundreds
1:04:05
of thousands of genetically near identical animals immunocompromised because of the
1:04:10
stress they're under, cramped together in these giant farms. Obviously disease will be rampant
1:04:15
and we can manage it with antibiotics and we do. In fact, three quarters of global antibiotics
1:04:20
are not fed to people, but to animals, which are most people don't know about. And that's
1:04:24
prophylactically, that's not even them being fed to animals who are sick. It's just a
1:04:29
thing. Just put a slow dose into the feed to supposedly prevent them from getting infections,
1:04:36
which of course everyone, you know, every time you've ever gotten a dose of antibiotics,
1:04:40
the doctor says, make sure you finish the dose of antibiotics because you don't want
1:04:43
to give yourself a low dose because then that helps to breed antibiotic resistance bacteria.
1:04:48
Yes. And we're doing that on a massive, massive scale constantly every single day, just rolling
1:04:53
the dice to generate new strains of bacteria in animals by giving them small amounts of bacteria
1:04:59
to acclimatize themselves against. Yeah. And we lose the dice for all the time. Like, I think
1:05:04
it's 1.27 million people die a year already due to antibiotic resistant diseases that overusing
1:05:12
antibiotics drives. And some people predict this could be the major, like the number one killer,
1:05:17
in fact, in 2050, because at a certain point, you run out of antibiotics that work and then
1:05:21
it is incredible when you think about like it was only, you know, a century and a bit ago,
1:05:25
that antibiotics were discovered. Yes. So before that, you know, you've got to, you've got to cut
1:05:30
and you could die from a cut. You'd lose your leg from, you know, a scratch. And then all of a
1:05:35
sudden, we've just enjoyed this incredible period where you don't have to worry about bacterial
1:05:40
infections. Yes. And now we could be entering another period where we go back to the pre-penicellin
1:05:45
days and everything has to be antiseptic because you never know if you're going to, yeah,
1:05:49
and this is what I mean when I say that factory farmers trade off
1:05:54
externalities for a little bit of profit because the fact that we have antibiotics that work,
1:06:00
this is a public good that needs to be preserved. But when you feed 75% of our antibiotics to animals
1:06:05
to save yourself a buck or two, they're squandering something that we all have the right to enjoy.
1:06:12
But like back to the point about pandemics, you can manage disease with antibiotics,
1:06:18
but that's only bacteria. You can't kill viruses. And that's why we have bird flu running rampant
1:06:22
across the US right now. And if you look back since the 1940s, half of zoonotic diseases,
1:06:28
which are diseases that come from animals to humans, have been traced back to animal agriculture.
1:06:32
I think of the H1N1 bird flu, swine flu, mad cow disease, SARS, these all come from animals
1:06:38
COVID, depending, you know, this is controversial, but the like original hypothesis of it coming from
1:06:43
a crowded wet market in Wuhan. This is like intensive animal agriculture.
1:06:47
A lot of people will be thinking, sure, but it's not really our way of treating animals that's
1:06:52
doing that. Isn't that isn't it? Isn't it more unsanitary and even more cramped in the wet market
1:06:57
case? Yeah, well, exactly. Yeah. I mean, you know, and MERS came from camels in the in Arabia,
1:07:03
like you don't hear of a lot of examples to you of pandemics originating from a concentrated
1:07:09
animal feeding operation in Wyoming. Well, I mean, mad cow disease, was that not
1:07:13
the UK without a merge? That was. I can't tell you where these other diseases emerged,
1:07:17
but that was viral, but that was because of an insane practice of feeding, like,
1:07:22
cow's cows, feeding cow brains to cows. Yes. But, you know, factory farming, this worst
1:07:28
way that we chewed animals that is the creates the most, you know, of a vector for the spread of
1:07:34
pandemics. This is a US invention. So I don't think we can put this on other cultures. I mean,
1:07:39
where the US is certainly exporting it and, you know, like the growth in China is very,
1:07:44
is very disheartening, but I don't think we can say that factory farming is another culture's thing.
1:07:48
Right. Also, just on antibiotics, before we leave that in case, people are going to get freaked
1:07:54
out about the fact that they're all going to die of bacterial infections. There is a,
1:07:58
there is apparently a range of antibiotics that we could be discovering and inventing,
1:08:03
but we're not because drug companies don't have an incentive to do so because it's not a very
1:08:06
profitable thing to invent because people only take it once in a while, but drug companies,
1:08:10
if you're going to spend billions and billions of dollars on something, you want to be curing a
1:08:14
disease that people have to take, you'll peel every single day for 20 years or something. So,
1:08:18
you know, it's much more useful to invent cures for cancer and things that have widespread and
1:08:24
long lasting rather than I'm just going to take one course of antibiotics for four days and then
1:08:29
be done with that. But hopefully, we will invest properly in R&D. Like, there is, it is not
1:08:36
inconceivable that there's a whole other spectrum of antibiotics that we haven't.
1:08:39
There are. I mean, so I hang out with a lot of charity nerds. I know some people working on
1:08:44
exactly this problem. They're called armor and they're trying to solve this incentive issue through
1:08:51
pool incentives where basically you get governments to pre-commit funding. We will buy antibiotics
1:08:56
from you for this price. So that's, oh, sorry, not that they will buy them from you. We will
1:09:00
remunerate you for every antibiotic sold at this price so that they do have an incentive
1:09:05
to generate them because yeah, and this is a way we can we can we can solve this problem. Yeah,
1:09:10
um, um, you mentioned like about in terms of health, public health as well as, uh, you know,
1:09:15
an environment and the environment. So as well as like the viral question, there's also just the
1:09:19
health of what we're eating question, which is like after having kids, I started becoming aware
1:09:25
of how shitty the options are in terms of just buying food in most places like in most shopping
1:09:32
center food courts. It's pretty hard to find food that isn't industrialized shit.
1:09:38
You stop at a service station or gas station and like it's hard to find a banana. It's really easy
1:09:44
to find a huge amount of processed stuff. Now obviously this is just supply and demand. I assume
1:09:49
that they wouldn't sell a lot of bananas and they go rotten before they did whereas they can keep the,
1:09:52
you know, the chocolate bars there forever. But is there a way of addressing the range of
1:09:59
different foods that we can consume? I mean, yeah, I had thought that it was not just supply
1:10:05
and demand either, but I had a conversation with a famous American chef and now, uh,
1:10:10
writer Mark Bittman, who has written books on this issue. And he argues that in the same way that
1:10:17
it was in many ways, policy decisions around subsidies that drove the industrialization of,
1:10:24
of animal agriculture. It did the same in incentivizing the production of like really low nutrient
1:10:30
like grain slop that is then, uh, all right, because there's a whole bunch of subsidies on corn.
1:10:38
There's a whole bunch of subsidies on. Yes. So the point that it's like really not that profitable
1:10:42
in the US to make people broccoli or something like that. Yeah, right. And yeah, it's really easy
1:10:47
to turn this take this corn and process it and add some MSG and make it hyper-palatable.
1:10:53
And you're the kind of manufacturing demand and hacking are evolution in a lot of ways with
1:10:59
these foods. I think it's amazing that people can just, that the transportation costs and the
1:11:05
industrialization yields so many efficiencies that it's more effective and more profitable for
1:11:11
the food system to be shipping in, even just getting back to the question of meat, you know,
1:11:16
styrofoam containers of chicken breasts from thousands of miles away, then it would be to have a
1:11:23
farm. I mean, obviously in the middle of a city like Sydney, you're not going to have farms, but,
1:11:27
you know, where my in-laws live in rural New Hampshire, when my father in law was growing up,
1:11:33
there were farms and like you would go and you would get eggs from a farm and there would be like,
1:11:38
you know, when you bought steak, it would come from a cow that you could dry it, you could have driven
1:11:43
to and there were farmers markets. There's none of that now. It's just huge big box stores and
1:11:47
supermarkets and people, you know, with massive trolleys going through the fluorescent aisles of
1:11:52
Walmart and picking off pieces of flesh that came from the Midwest and shipped in and refrigerated
1:11:59
trucks. Yeah, the small farmers who are making food the way people want it to be made are
1:12:03
just increasingly being squeezed out by like larger and larger mega corporations that get most of
1:12:10
the benefits from these subsidies. And you were speaking before about like processed food.
1:12:14
A thing that I find really baffling about processed food when it comes to the debate around like
1:12:21
plant-based burgers, let's say, which a lot of people, I think it's like reasonable to say that
1:12:26
this is a highly processed food and I think that nutrition is hard, but like the kind of rule of
1:12:31
thumb that all else equal less processed good, fair. But the bit that I can't understand is why
1:12:38
taking a bunch of grain and additives and turning it into a plant-based burger and a factory,
1:12:42
that's ultra-processed food. Taking a bunch of grain and antibiotics and turning it into a chicken
1:12:47
and in a factory farm, this is not ultra-processed food, even though afterwards, they both go through
1:12:53
factories and processing plants. The chicken is genetically engineered in the US. It's literally
1:13:00
bathed in chlorine before it gets to us. Like these are both like that's just that's
1:13:04
be consistent here folks. These are both ultra-processed foods. Right. Well, maybe it's not ultra-processed.
1:13:10
Oh yeah, this is a term of rice anyway. It's like superfoods. It doesn't actually.
1:13:14
Yeah. I mean, that also comes back to the funny way that people think about lab-grown meat.
1:13:20
You know, a lot of people have an ic factor when it comes to the idea, oh, I want to eat meat
1:13:24
that was, you know, a chicken breast grown in a lab, a chicken nugget that was cured in a
1:13:29
petri dish from stem cells or something. This is disgusting. This is like franken foods,
1:13:34
but if they actually saw the state, the conditions of the chickens and the way that they're killed
1:13:40
and slaughtered and all the part and the guts and the shit and everything. No more natural.
1:13:45
Well, yeah, I mean, even if it were natural, it's certainly not less icky. Like a clean sterile lab
1:13:52
producing my food, I would rather that than the hellscape of an abattoir.
1:13:57
Personally, sign me up for the cultivated meat, but I understand a lot of people do have the sick
1:14:01
factor. And I think that's fine because I do think that the future world we've solved this
1:14:07
looks like a combination of more humane raised animals, more plants, and some of these alternatives.
1:14:12
Right. And in any other donations that you want to get to, you want to think about?
1:14:16
Well, I mean, on the topic of, I think I haven't really painted the picture of just how impactful
1:14:22
donations are compared to diet change because the thing is we built a calculator that allows you
1:14:29
to plug in your diet and it will tell you how much you would need to donate to do an equivalent
1:14:32
amount of good to basically boycotting factory farming altogether. And for the average omnivorous
1:14:38
person in like the Anglophone West, like the US, Canada, Australia, New Zealand, UK stuff,
1:14:45
23 bucks a month, US dollars a month. This is like the price of a Netflix subscription.
1:14:49
And that means then that if you donate more, you're now doing more good because the thing about
1:14:55
diet changes, you can only help as many animals as you would have eaten. But there's no theoretical
1:14:59
limit on the amount of good you can do through donating to the right charities. And I stress the
1:15:03
right charities because most charities suck. Right. In most charities suck. But there are good ones
1:15:07
out there. Yes. That's also an important point to make because I think a lot of people are jaded
1:15:12
and disillusioned about the whole about all charities. I mean, if you talk to people who don't
1:15:17
donate to charity, their excuses never that it is bad to do good to you know, to be nice to other
1:15:22
people. Yes. support causes that you believe in. It's always that, you know, some dictator is
1:15:28
going to get it. Some bureaucracy is going to end up squirreling it away. You know, only a
1:15:32
fraction of a penny is going to end up making it to the right place. And even then is it going to
1:15:35
do any good in the long run that you don't might alleviate something in the short term. But of course
1:15:39
more problems down the road who even knows what where it's going. And so what is your yardstick
1:15:44
of your working? I mean, I think you my when it comes to charity, my view is that you don't work
1:15:49
until proven otherwise because fundamentally the incentive, the incentive structure in charities
1:15:56
are entirely different to a business. If you're a business, you get money from your customers.
1:16:02
If you're not serving your customers, theoretically, they stop giving you money. You go out of
1:16:05
business. You have a built-in feedback loop. Whereas when it comes to charity, the person you're
1:16:09
supposed to be helping the beneficiary is different to the place you get your funding from. And so
1:16:13
it's possible to, on one hand, be not serving your beneficiary for years, but be great at fundraising
1:16:19
and bringing in the money. And you can survive forever. On the other hand, to be great at serving
1:16:23
the beneficiary and be really horrible at communicating that you're doing that and how you're doing that.
1:16:28
And so not getting any funding. So you don't have this built-in feedback loop of revenue and
1:16:32
profit. So you have to build it yourself. You have to measure does this work. And so that's why
1:16:37
looking at track records is really important. And looking at the email league, for example, I mentioned
1:16:42
how much have they spent on these corporate campaigns over the past decade, how many commitments
1:16:47
have they scored as a result. And let's not even assume that they caused it entirely. Like let's say,
1:16:52
like, well, how many of them would have happened anyway? Or maybe they're just speeding up progress.
1:16:56
Let's say they only speed it up by five years. It still looks unbelievably cost-effective. So that's
1:17:01
how I try and think about it. Can I keep ran to you about, Chad? Please.
1:17:06
Because it sounds unbelievably cheap. Like the 85 cents of free chicken from a cage,
1:17:11
that's not even the most staggering number. I mean, you this morning moderated a debate about
1:17:16
shrimp and one of the charities that we support that stuns shrimp before death. And they can stun
1:17:22
1500 shrimp per dollar per year. And just verify for people if people are like saying, what are you talking about?
1:17:28
Shrimp. So we eat billions of shrimp or prawns as a strength. 440 billion. Farmed a year.
1:17:35
Right. 440,000 million a year. Just think of this quantity that is four times more than humans
1:17:41
have ever existed. Right. And presumably that's more than any other animal that we commonly eat.
1:17:48
So it's like this massive Holocaust of shrimp. And the point is that we do all of these things like
1:17:56
we cut off the, we crush the females' eyes because that makes her more fertile. We don't know how
1:18:02
we're going to stop this. But it shouldn't laugh. It's just that we had no sense of it. They
1:18:06
crush the females' eyes to get more eggs. Yes. For some weird reason that we don't understand.
1:18:12
And they don't bother killing them humanly. They just throw them on ice and they flatten them.
1:18:17
If you're lucky on ice, they slowly suffocate. If you're unlucky, what do they do?
1:18:21
No ice. Well, basically, depending on the temperature of the ice, it can make it better.
1:18:27
But if it's not cold enough, then now you're just, if it's cold enough, it numbs you.
1:18:34
Right. And that's helpful. If it's not cold enough, then now you're just freezing and suffocating.
1:18:38
Right. And so you can stun them with an electrical stunner.
1:18:43
Right. And just stuff. Is that in the water? Do you just stun them in water?
1:18:47
No, you take them out of the water and run them through this stunning machine.
1:18:50
Okay. I can show you some footage later. It's quite cool actually.
1:18:54
And you can stun 1500 shrimp per dollar per year.
1:18:59
Yeah. Very, very, very cost effective. And the reason that it is so cheap to help animals
1:19:05
is basically because this problem is just so neglected. The low hanging fruit has not been picked.
1:19:12
Because globally, less money goes to fixing factory farming each year than Harvard has spent on
1:19:18
renovating a single building. It's less money than McDonald's receives in revenue in a week.
1:19:23
Like, it's pitiful amounts of money up against a $2 trillion industry. And so people often
1:19:27
talk about this like David versus Goliath battle. But that really undersells it, right? Because like,
1:19:31
I did the math. If David's a normal dude, and this is the charity's working to fix factory farming,
1:19:36
and Goliath is the industry, he's up against. Then Goliath is so tall that the Earth's
1:19:40
atmosphere only goes up to his belly button. That's the David and Goliath you got to imagine.
1:19:45
And yet, David is scoring some wins with barely any resources. So just imagine what we could do
1:19:51
if we doubled that. I mentioned the thing about offsetting your diet with $23 a month.
1:19:57
If 0.3% of the US population did this, that would double the amount of money going to fix this issue.
1:20:02
It really wouldn't take a lot of people making this really easy change to completely tilt the
1:20:07
scales. And I said we've already gone from like a 5% cage free to 45% of the decade with nothing.
1:20:12
Imagine what we could be doing. This is why I think this is actually a really hopeful story.
1:20:16
Right. Right. So it's almost like a carbon offset where you're buying your flight and it offers you
1:20:21
to pay $17 to offset the carbon. And presumably nobody clicks on it because you're like,
1:20:28
is it actually going to offset the carbon? Is it going to go into some, again, some complicated
1:20:32
carbon trading system that some Huckster in Indonesia has set up where he's just carved out a whole
1:20:41
bunch of rainforest on the map and paid someone to... Never going to cut down anyway.
1:20:45
It's like now he's saying that you can own a part of it or something and then my $17 is going
1:20:49
into a little patch of 1 billionth of a tree that was never going to cut down anyway. Who knows?
1:20:56
But here you're saying that you can offset the... I mean, it's a bit trickier when you're
1:21:01
offsetting the moral. I was like, I can't remember again, but like the moral ownership that you have
1:21:10
over the pain that you've inflicted on the animals that you're eating. That's not being offset
1:21:18
by my donation to a charity that is working to prevent that pain being inflicted in the future.
1:21:23
Like for the animals on our meeting, it still sucks.
1:21:27
Yeah, I think there's a reason why some people find this offsetting notion kind of
1:21:31
kind of icky. Other people are like, oh, this is the product I've been looking for all my life,
1:21:34
you know. Other people find it ick and I think that's fair enough. I think the question isn't
1:21:39
is eating meat and donating morally equivalent to eating meat and not donating. The question is
1:21:45
not whether eating meat and donating is morally equivalent to not eating meat at all. Oh, I see.
1:21:50
The question is whether eating meat and donating is better than eating meat and not donating.
1:21:53
And I think that doing some harm and doing an equivalent amount of good is unequivocally
1:21:57
better than doing some harm and not doing equivalent amount of good. Yeah, it's right.
1:22:01
So why wouldn't you be down for it? Yeah, right. You don't have to think of it as an offset if you
1:22:05
don't like. Think about as a way to do an amount of good that's commensurate with the amount of
1:22:09
harm. And so do people donate to your charity farm kind and then the funds get dispersed to
1:22:14
the bunch of different charities or they nominate with specific charities within your portfolio?
1:22:19
Yeah, so you have a portfolio of six charities. If you go through the calculator, then
1:22:23
it's distributed based on which animal products you're reading in proportion with those animal
1:22:28
products. But if you're just making a standard donation, which is what most people choose to do,
1:22:32
you can either just go to our impact fund, which is all six of our charities, or you can pick an
1:22:36
individual charity. Most people just go with the impact fund. I think for two reasons,
1:22:40
you don't have to like dig into it yourself. That's part of the value we add. We've done the research
1:22:44
for you. And the other is I think that you don't have to like pick a winner and say, oh, I think the
1:22:49
solution is cultivated meat or I think the solution is corporate campaigns. It's kind of like an
1:22:54
index fund for the charities like support a diverse portfolio that's addressing this problem in
1:22:59
a bunch of different ways and all the types of animal that are involved. Unless you really have
1:23:02
it in for shrimp and you don't want to donate to the shrimp stunning. Yeah, yeah, don't choose
1:23:07
that. Well, remarkably, the charity that when it is when an individual charity is picked,
1:23:12
the shrimp charity is the one that's been picked the most. I never would have expected.
1:23:15
I wouldn't be started this thing. We were like, well, the shrimp thing is really important.
1:23:18
It's a part of the problem that has to be addressed. Probably not going to like focus on the shrimp
1:23:22
in our cons. But actually, I think it's so weird that it kind of catches people's imaginations.
1:23:30
Yeah. So for people who aren't very online, this all may be new to them, the shrimp thing.
1:23:34
But this has become a bit of a thing over the past maybe 12 months or so. We're quite a lot of
1:23:40
people on sub-stack have been sort of wrestling with the moral question of our relationship to shrimp.
1:23:45
Because it is quite evocative when you think about how many of them there are and like how badly,
1:23:52
so presumably they can feel pain. They're obviously not very sophisticated. So you don't have the
1:23:56
problems that you're running into with the pigs in a crate and missing their yarn. Yes.
1:24:01
Not assume that they're going to that they're highly sociable creatures or whatever. But they're
1:24:04
a little living thingy. It's got a brain. It's got nerves. Yeah. So satisfaction when it's
1:24:12
happy with the shrimp floating around, probably pain and discomfort and agony when it's being
1:24:18
ripped apart alive, probably or suffocating, probably. And the question of like, do we factor that
1:24:26
should we factor that into our moral considerations at all has come up as people are saying like the
1:24:32
scale of that industry is just worth thinking about. We're saying, do we care at all about whether
1:24:39
or not we're inflicting masses and masses of pain on lots of tiny, very simple creatures or because
1:24:44
they're so simple, are we just going to be like, ah, fuck them. I've got to finish to pray. And then
1:24:49
if we do care about them, then we have to, how do we make trade-offs? There was like one of the
1:24:56
post that went viral was like, would you, like, it was saying, yes, you should save like a Google
1:25:02
shrimp rather than saving a human life, for example, sparked outrage on the internet, you know.
1:25:08
This is a Google meaning of an almost infinite number. Yeah, not Google, though, a company. Yeah,
1:25:12
if you could send out your boys or whatever. Right. If you could save thousands of trillions of
1:25:16
shrimp versus one human. I think I'm always 10 to 100 that many shrimp, many, many, many,
1:25:21
basically. Right. Should you do that over saving your life? And I don't think we need to actually
1:25:27
have an opinion on the matter because the question, like, I think this is the thing that a lot of
1:25:33
people who are listening to this podcast and haven't done anything about this issue before might
1:25:37
be contemplating, like, but there are so many issues that are competing for my attention. How do I
1:25:41
pick, you know, like, can I really take this one off? And I'm so sympathetic to that, like,
1:25:46
because I feel the weight of all of these issues that we need to solve. And we do just have
1:25:49
finite money, finite time, finite, like moral energy. Right. But I mean, my view is simply that we
1:25:56
should be distributing our resources amongst the world's most pressing problems in rough proportion
1:26:02
with, like, how big the problems are and how easily we can use our money to solve them. And
1:26:06
when you look at how little animal welfare and factory farming is getting, I would say we're not
1:26:12
getting that right because this is a giant issue that we can solve. And like, I've spoken in,
1:26:16
like, absolute terms about how little money it gets, but like this might bring it to life even more.
1:26:21
In the US, the last time I saw this was 2021, 3% of donations went to a category called
1:26:27
environment and animals. I'm not sure why there's too a lump together. The within that, as you can
1:26:31
expect, environment dwarfs animals. And then in the little sliver of a sliver that animals get,
1:26:37
companion animals like cats and dogs, shelters for those, I think it's 95% goes to them. I think
1:26:42
is it maybe 2% to lab animals and 3% to farm animals. So it's like a sliver of a sliver of a sliver.
1:26:50
I'm not telling you to not support these other issues. They matter too. But clearly this is not
1:26:54
getting enough when we can double it if like 0.3% of the US population pays 23 bucks a month. So,
1:26:59
I mean, that it, well, I will tell you to not. So like if you are supporting like a dog or cat
1:27:04
shelter, that is, sorry, deranged and crazy. When you think about the amount of good that
1:27:12
money could do to it, absolutely equivalent sentient creatures by donating it to something like
1:27:19
there are literally, you're literally complicit in the torture and killing of many, many,
1:27:25
many animals that are very similar to cats and dogs. And you're putting scarce funds towards
1:27:31
like a few homeless dogs. But you didn't say that. I mean, so you don't have to worry about the
1:27:36
backlash. It's also kind of harsh to be like harder on the people that are doing something for some
1:27:41
animals than the people that are doing nothing for any animals. But I mean, yeah, if you do care
1:27:45
about animals, it's worth considering this because like, you know, hate to single anybody out. There's
1:27:50
a beloved UK charity called Battersea Dog Shelter. And according to their own website, if I recall
1:27:55
correctly, it's something like $3,000 to house an animal for a year. And you can just help many,
1:28:02
many, many, many thousands of animals, farmed animals, arguably a lot more with that same amount.
1:28:09
Don't say I'm not saying you have to do one over the other, but like you should at least consider
1:28:12
doing both. Yeah, right. And it's also, I mean, you said if you love animals, I'm not even sure
1:28:16
it's a prerequisite to live animals. And perhaps we can wrap up with how you backed into veganism
1:28:21
in the first place and why people should care at all about this issue. For me, it's actually not
1:28:29
an emotional thing about loving animals. It's much more of just a philosophical and rational
1:28:36
conclusion that seems inescapable to me, which is that if we are animals and we evolve from other
1:28:43
animals, it's quite likely that the experience of being other species, especially ones that are
1:28:48
very similar to us, like other primates, for example, resembles being us with slightly different
1:28:55
toolmaking abilities and slightly different levels of communication and planning. And if you turn
1:29:00
back the pages of the book of evolution from my parents to their parents to their parents to their
1:29:07
parents to something that looks a bit like a chimpanzee and goes a bit further back and back and
1:29:11
there's obviously some continuity. And it's unlikely that the ability to have really,
1:29:17
really awful experiences that feel truly like the devil is, you know, is present because you're
1:29:25
being so badly treated. That that wasn't inserted into the evolutionary line somewhere with a
1:29:32
sharp delineation. There's obviously different experiences that different animals can have that are
1:29:37
astonishingly staggeringly traumatizing and painful and others that are the way that they live
1:29:44
in the wild. Absolutely. We should expect that pain would be something that evolved really
1:29:48
quite early because it's pretty helpful to be able to detect noxious things in your environment
1:29:53
and avoid them. I think we should expect probably like the precautionary principles suggest
1:30:00
that we should assume I would think that animals treat them as if they are sentient even when
1:30:04
they're things like shrimp. When they don't have essential nervous system at all, let's say like a
1:30:10
a clam or something like that or they don't have neurons like a plant, then I think we
1:30:15
don't have to worry about the clams and the oysters. I would say so. I mean, and even if you want,
1:30:19
you don't want to take the train all the way to shrimp town. At least mammals. I mean, you know,
1:30:23
it's obvious that the, you know, and I guess birds, but it's obvious that the birds and the mammals
1:30:31
that we eat, we just have abundance of evidence, the signs of it conserving us is clearable time.
1:30:36
Yeah, I think to deny that is to deny the science, basically. Yeah, you're right. You don't have
1:30:44
to love animals because if you think that torture and suffering are bad, then that should be
1:30:50
sufficient. Even if you don't care about that, if you're like, you know what, human supremacist
1:30:55
all the way, anything that's not a human doesn't matter. We barely touched on the public health
1:30:59
issues. And then there's also the environmental issues. This is just like not just a sustainable way
1:31:02
to produce our food when like 80% of our agricultural land is producing animal products at the end,
1:31:08
that's only 37% of our protein, 17% of our calories. This is wasteful. It's 50% of climate
1:31:14
emissions is a lot more I could rattle off about like deforestation, just like toxic pollution,
1:31:22
effects on biodiversity. If you're an environmentalist, you should care about this issue.
1:31:26
Right. But you don't have to be an environmentalist. You don't have to be an animal lover.
1:31:30
You don't even have to object to the killing of animals from meat. You just have to think
1:31:34
that something is broken when the only consideration is how cheap a pound of their flesh can be
1:31:40
with no regard to their experience of life. Yeah. And I'm not suggesting we like go back in time to
1:31:46
a previous system, although as I say, the system is less than a hundred years old, but it is now
1:31:52
it came into existence at a time where maybe it was meeting some present needs. Our needs
1:31:56
have changed, our concerns have changed, our challenges have changed, think about global warming.
1:32:01
So we need to move forward, not backwards, to a new system that's fit for purpose. And it's really
1:32:06
not that hard to do if we just give it less than the tiniest fraction of the tiniest fraction of
1:32:10
the tiniest fraction of the tiniest fraction. Let us move our resources forward, not backwards,
1:32:13
upwards, not sideways, twirling twirling twirling twirling twirling twirling.
1:32:16
Towards freedom. Exactly. Thanks for coming to the conversation.