The Mikhaila Peterson Podcast - 157. The Case for Ethical Veganism？｜ Alex O'Connor

00:00:00.000 If you do weigh, let's say, the taste of milk, that's what you have on one side,

00:00:08.000 and then the difference between like oat milk and normal milk to the suffering of a cow,

00:00:14.040 those are on your two sides. What if the problem with reducing your animal intake is actually

00:00:19.740 chronic health problems, and then what you have on one side is an increase in chronic health

00:00:23.880 problems. And then that's suffering compared to the life of an animal. And chronic health problems,

00:00:30.300 like that's a different story, right? Welcome to episode 157 of my podcast. I'm Michaela

00:00:39.060 Peterson. In this episode, I spoke with Alex O'Connor. Alex is the founder of the Cosmic

00:00:44.680 Skeptic YouTube channel and an ethical vegan. He uses his channel to facilitate philosophical

00:00:50.740 and ethical debates that range in topics, but often focus on animal rights advocacy and religion.

00:00:57.100 Alex is a recent graduate of Oxford, where he studied philosophy and theology. The last time

00:01:02.020 I saw Alex, the first time we met in person, was at the Beyond Meat debate at Oxford, where I spoke

00:01:08.220 about why we shouldn't ban meat altogether. Alex was at the debate, and I like him quite a bit,

00:01:14.140 so I'm glad we could finally speak. It was a fun episode. I don't agree with veganism. I think the

00:01:19.360 way forward is through regenerative agriculture. But I think we covered some very interesting

00:01:24.320 topics. And I think I'll have Alex back on to discuss religion as well. Let me know what

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00:02:33.820 sent you. Enjoy this episode. Alex O'Connor, welcome to my podcast.

00:02:43.960 not in person, virtually. It's good to see that you're doing well.

00:02:47.720 Thank you very much. I feel like this podcast has been a long time coming, so it should be good.

00:02:52.300 It has, yeah, a very long time. I think the last time we saw each other was at Oxford, right?

00:02:59.340 Yes, it was. And I have a bit of a bone to pick with you about that, actually,

00:03:03.040 because I remember not long after that event, which anybody who has seen or is familiar with

00:03:09.540 the both of us might not know that I was there because you were you were speaking and I was just

00:03:14.880 kind of there as a guest in my in my fancy black tie and there was one particular speaker on the

00:03:22.020 other side to you who it got kind of people were making a bit of a song and dance out of this out

00:03:27.880 of this woman's speech and I found it quite funny because I remember being in the room and I'm sure

00:03:33.960 people will have seen this because I'm pretty sure you took the the clip and put it on your own

00:03:37.220 channel, right? Yeah. Yeah. With some sort of inflammatory title. Yeah. And, uh, I know your

00:03:43.480 dad talked about it too, uh, quite, quite a bit about this, this crazed woman, this crazed feminist

00:03:49.040 woman who is doing this ridiculous vegan speech. And I must say it was a bit fanciful. A bit

00:03:54.820 fanciful, a bit fanciful. I'm going to insert a clip here and then we're going to see what,

00:04:00.220 what people think about a bit fanciful. I guess I'm, I'm trying to be diplomatic here because

00:04:05.560 I did think it was hilarious because of I was sort of sat on this on this front bench and I was

00:04:10.760 directly opposite your dad and I thought like what watching this speech is funny enough like

00:04:16.000 it was quite an entertaining thing to do and I but I thought of all the people to do this speech

00:04:19.660 in front of of all the people on planet earth it was just hilarious so I sort of seeing him just

00:04:25.340 like like shriveling and it's like cringe and pain yeah but so there was this funny so I remember

00:04:32.040 sort of you and him both posting about it a lot. And I don't know, I wondered if you were sort of

00:04:37.740 posting about it as if to say, hey, look at this, this wokeness, or whether you're posting it to say,

00:04:43.660 hey, look at this sort of veganism. I didn't know if it was more the more the veganism part or more

00:04:48.760 the woke part that you're trying to warn of. 100% more the woke part. However, I do think that there

00:04:56.100 is an overlap now i don't think you embody that overlap um but i do think that there is an overlap

00:05:02.420 especially with people who are really interested in like uh protecting the climate veganism like

00:05:08.580 wokeism i think there's an overlap but what i was trying to portray with her video was was the woke

00:05:15.060 part for sure i think most of her like most of the language she used had more to do with that than

00:05:20.580 veganism. Yeah, yeah. It's actually one of the main things that I try to promote whenever I'm

00:05:28.760 talking about veganism or just the ethics of animal suffering more broadly is to try and

00:05:33.760 separate it from, I want to say political connotations, but that's a little bit too broad.

00:05:39.320 But there's this idea that to be a vegan, you have to take up yoga and wear loose clothing and grow

00:05:44.660 your hair and this kind of thing. I think we need more vegans who wear suits. We need more vegans

00:05:50.560 who are sort of culturally on the right. Not because I think it's good to be culturally on

00:05:58.120 the right, but just because I think it's important to separate the issue of animal exploitation as

00:06:02.880 being bad from being a kind of fringe woke phenomenon, which is what at least veganism

00:06:08.260 certainly is at the moment, which is why I'm glad that you're willing to have me on to talk about

00:06:14.280 this, because I know that the perception of veganism is pretty negative. I mean, the biggest

00:06:20.380 problem that the vegan community faces is probably a PR problem. And I guess I'm just trying to

00:06:26.140 contribute to removing that problem. It's quite difficult to know why exactly it is that it's

00:06:34.220 connected in that way. I think it's got something to do with the fact that people on the left and

00:06:39.400 people who are part of this woke phenomenon are certainly more inclined to be in favor of radical

00:06:47.740 revolutionary thought. It's something that sort of gives them something to fight about. And this

00:06:51.920 is what a lot of it's about. And of course, veganism is a wonderful example of this,

00:06:57.580 because you have this huge problem of animal exploitation and factory farms that definitely

00:07:01.900 need solving. And so it makes sense to me that this would be like, you know, music to the ears

00:07:08.040 of people who are wanting a social issue to to fight strongly for but i resent to see that it's

00:07:15.280 often reduced to that that this sort of it's intrinsically connected to this this wokeness

00:07:21.520 which wokeness itself has become a bit of a meme it's not even clear exactly what it what it means

00:07:26.400 um but i guess i'm trying to sort of move the perception away from that and say that no what

00:07:31.380 veganism really is about at least ethical veganism or the kind of veganism that i would promote

00:07:35.780 is the rather simple proposition that if we can avoid inflicting unnecessary suffering

00:07:40.980 then we should do so that's what it breaks down to for me so you know thanks for having me on to

00:07:45.120 talk about it i do appreciate it yeah no problem at all um i think i think part of the issue is a

00:07:51.220 lot of people who are pushing veganism from what i've seen like the people with the viral videos

00:07:56.360 online i don't know if they're interested in veganism to reduce animal suffering or to make

00:08:02.460 themselves appear as if they're doing something virtuous, right? Like that's the main goal of

00:08:08.140 their veganism. So I think what you're doing, it puts you in a different camp than what a lot of

00:08:13.360 people are doing. And I think that's maybe where the overlap with wokeness is, which is there are

00:08:18.720 some, I wouldn't even call them woke, but there are some people, a lot of people on the left that

00:08:23.940 are actually interested in equality and reducing suffering really. And then there are people who

00:08:29.740 are just interested in it so that they appear virtuous. Yeah. But then, of course, that's the

00:08:35.620 problem with any ethical issue. It can be difficult to separate those people who are

00:08:41.500 doing it for the for the sake of really caring and those who don't. But equally, because,

00:08:46.800 you know, if you do something long enough, especially if you make it sort of your job.

00:08:51.920 So for quite a while, advocating for veganism and making noise about animal suffering was

00:08:57.120 essentially all I was doing all the time, talking on podcasts, giving talks, this kind of thing.

00:09:02.220 And it gets to a point where you're sort of talking very emotively about the suffering of

00:09:07.700 animals, but you're talking about it so, so, so much that it's almost like you don't really feel

00:09:12.340 it anymore. And so, you know, I like to sort of take breaks and make sure that I'm constantly

00:09:18.280 rethinking what I'm saying and not being, I guess, dogmatic about it. But I think, you know,

00:09:22.960 sometimes you might see people who look as though they're just doing it for the sake of it. They

00:09:27.460 don't really care about animals. They're just doing it because they think it looks good or

00:09:31.120 something like that. But I think that that can actually often be just a result of the fact that

00:09:36.600 these people are talking about it so much that you basically become insensitive to it.

00:09:40.820 Okay. I can see that. I mean, I've had that happen even just with me going on other people's podcasts

00:09:47.140 talking about my health experience. Even when I went to Oxford and talked about my health

00:09:51.460 experience it's like at a certain point i've talked about it so much that and which is good

00:09:57.020 psychologically so i've like desensitized myself to it so it's not traumatizing anymore but it's

00:10:01.380 also it also means that the emotions associated with it aren't like raw like they were and it's

00:10:06.860 just yeah yeah i i remember uh when you were in oxford and we took a picture together and posted

00:10:15.200 it on Instagram and I got quite a lot of messages from my vegan followers and even my non-vegan

00:10:22.420 followers sort of being like why are you hanging out with the antithesis of the vegan movement

00:10:27.300 because I'm not the antithesis though that's the thing it's like I stopped I had an issue with

00:10:33.000 animal suffering for my entire life I stopped eating pork when I was 14 because I figured

00:10:37.820 you know pigs are the most intelligent they probably suffer the most and I don't have to

00:10:42.140 eat that. I've always thought meat was healthy. And I think that's probably because my grandpa

00:10:45.940 hunted. So it was like in my family. But, but I mean, even since carnivore or lion diet, I've

00:10:53.560 tried to be careful about where my animals are from. And I have enough money that it's not

00:10:58.680 difficult for me to source meat from farms that raise the animals in like the best way I see

00:11:07.000 possible if you are going to end up killing an animal at least not factory farming right so

00:11:14.440 i'm definitely on board with the reduce reduce suffering and i think that that helps you know

00:11:19.960 factory farming is also an issue for the environment as well right and it's just like

00:11:26.040 not that's not a comfortable way to live and if you watch like anybody who watches videos of factory

00:11:30.920 farming it's like that's not good right nothing about that looks good yeah it seems like everybody

00:11:36.360 knows this, but it's worth bearing in mind that something like, I want to say over 95%

00:11:43.300 of animal products consumed, I'm not sure about America, I think it's higher, I think

00:11:46.300 it's something like 98%, but the vast majority of animal products consumed come from factory

00:11:51.560 farms.

00:11:52.540 Of course, if you ask people on the street, you know, do you eat meat or something like

00:11:56.180 this, and they can tell that you're sort of maybe going to raise an ethical concern, they'll

00:12:00.960 often say something like, well, yeah, but I try to make sure that I get it from the

00:12:04.220 best kind of sources.

00:12:05.700 I know that there are people in the world who do do this.

00:12:08.520 There are a lot of people.

00:12:10.060 But at the same time, I find it quite a mystery that pretty much anybody that I speak to about

00:12:14.440 this will say, yeah, I try to make sure that my meat and my animal products come from ethical

00:12:19.160 sources.

00:12:20.940 And that makes up the vast majority of people.

00:12:22.880 And yet it is simultaneously the case that the vast majority of our animal products are

00:12:26.760 coming from factory farms.

00:12:27.880 I'm not sure that people are being either totally honest, or maybe they don't quite

00:12:32.380 understand the the breadth of factory farming and the the grasp that it has over our over our food

00:12:38.480 of course if you're really tracking the food if you've got your own farm or something like that

00:12:42.200 then it's easy enough but you know if you walk into a supermarket or a restaurant or a fast food

00:12:47.580 chain into a kfc into a starbucks or something this is all factory farmed and the real strength

00:12:54.740 of the vegan movement is against factory farming right like my the reason that i'm sort of like

00:12:59.320 getting up on a soapbox, as it were, and trying to proselytize about this kind of thing,

00:13:04.940 vegangelism, as it's sometimes called, is really because of the plight of animals and factory

00:13:08.900 farms. You know, if we were still doing farming how we were a few hundred years ago, it would

00:13:13.000 still be an interesting ethical problem to solve. There'd still be, especially if we have

00:13:17.260 alternatives available, that'd be an important ethical question as to whether we have the right

00:13:20.740 to breed animals into existence and take their lives away from them and inflict certain sufferings

00:13:25.560 in their life. But it certainly wouldn't be the forefront of my campaigning. It wouldn't be the

00:13:30.600 main thing that I spend my time doing. It's really about the factory farming, which is why I say when

00:13:35.420 people were surprised to see, I mean, even if you were the antithesis of vegan, like to take a

00:13:40.480 picture together, I mean, it's hardly the most incriminating thing in the world. But I got that

00:13:45.640 impression just from talking to you then as well, that at least ostensibly we're both against, let's

00:13:51.480 say, unnecessary animal suffering. And that's what the vegan position, in my view, essentially

00:13:56.260 reduces to. And you're right to say that there's an environmental problem as well. That's actually

00:14:01.700 not something that I talk about very much, because I think that more people are going vegan now for

00:14:06.880 the environment rather than the ethics, which, sure, it's kind of admirable. But it seems to me

00:14:12.720 like it sort of misses the point. Ethically, it would be as if we were sort of stood on a hill,

00:14:17.460 and we saw this factory in the distance, it was like a puppy mill that was breeding and torturing

00:14:21.460 puppies and forcing them into cages and disbudding them and this kind of thing and you said oh this

00:14:27.220 is so terrible we need to end this i said yeah he said i mean just look at the fumes it's emitting

00:14:31.160 it's so bad for the environment it's like okay you're not wrong you're not incorrect about that

00:14:37.060 but i feel like you're sort of maybe missing the ethical point here the real the real uh motivating

00:14:42.080 factor of all of this for me is is the suffering but look we have an animal suffering problem in

00:14:48.120 factory farming, which on its own, in my view, I've said this a few times before, on its own

00:14:51.720 is a good enough reason to abolish factory farming and probably go vegan. There's an environmental

00:14:56.420 case against factory farming because they're just absolutely disastrous to the environment,

00:15:00.360 which again, on its own, the environmental case would be good enough reason to abolish factory

00:15:04.140 farming. There's also a pandemic prevention case. I did a TEDx talk about this, that while our

00:15:09.380 governments were telling us to keep as far apart from each other as possible, we're simultaneously

00:15:13.400 cramming tens of billions of disease-ridden animals into these ridiculous, ignoble hell holes

00:15:19.020 to share their diseases with each other and just exponentially increase the risk of them developing

00:15:23.460 into a zoonotic disease with the potential to infect other human beings. So the pandemic

00:15:27.720 prevention on its own, when our governments say they're doing everything they can to prevent this

00:15:31.480 kind of thing happening again, it's like, give me a break as long as factory farming is still on the

00:15:34.860 scene. It's an absolute joke. That on its own is good enough reason to abolish factory farming.

00:15:40.640 antibiotic resistance most people know that antibiotic resistance is the big fear of the

00:15:45.660 medical community but the majority the majority of antibiotics that are sold are used on livestock

00:15:51.780 not human beings right and so this is driving your antibiotic resistance so what you have here

00:15:57.420 and there's also like health concerns but i think that's a bit more technical so but just take those

00:16:00.920 right you've got the suffering case the environmental case the antibiotic resistance

00:16:04.380 case pandemic prevention case which each on their own is enough reason to abolish factory

00:16:10.520 farming, right? But we have all four of them, all of them together on one side of the scale.

00:16:15.220 And then I ask people, what's on the other side of the scale? For most people, it's a sausage roll.

00:16:21.060 It's milk in your coffee. Well, I see that. This is where we disagree. And I think this is,

00:16:27.600 this was brought up with some of the people on the vegan side for the Oxford debate. One guy was

00:16:33.120 talking about, oh, how do you weigh pleasure? How do you weigh suffering against the pleasure

00:16:38.540 you experience eating meat. And what I would argue is, especially in America, I think the

00:16:44.780 major cause behind chronic disease is diet. And I think that a plant-based push is going to make

00:16:51.500 people sicker. And I think removing meat from people's diet, I don't think we understand the

00:16:57.000 repercussions of doing that. So it's funny because everybody who's concerned about this

00:17:01.680 is concerned about suffering on some level. So animal suffering, right? For people who are

00:17:07.240 more concerned about the climate i think they're they're basically concerned about human suffering

00:17:11.440 right because if the climate gets all screwed up then eventually that leads to human suffering

00:17:15.520 and what i'm concerned about is just human suffering and i know and i'm biased from my

00:17:20.840 experience and from what i've seen for people who've gone paleo and kind of gone back to

00:17:25.420 ancestral eating is being chronically like i would i would stop the suffering of somebody who's

00:17:32.420 chronically ill and I don't even like animals don't even cross my mind like that amount of

00:17:39.440 suffering compared to a human being that's chronically ill and so I think that's where

00:17:43.420 we might differ unless I'm potentially I mean it requires a bit more digging for a start you said

00:17:50.380 that you only care about human suffering um I should I don't only care that's not true right

00:17:56.660 if we can reduce like regenerative farming and I've advertised this quite a bit hopefully I've

00:18:01.680 talked about it on my podcast we should be making a move towards regenerative farming and the more

00:18:06.660 people that buy meat from regenerative farms the more likely regenerative farms are to take off but

00:18:11.360 i would rather see a push towards regenerative farming than towards veganism because i think

00:18:15.740 those are going to have major health repercussions that we can't foresee at the moment or that we are

00:18:19.700 foreseeing but not attributing to less meat yes on an animal suffering front a regenerative system

00:18:26.920 of farming is is infinitely preferable to factory farming you're still going to run into an ethical

00:18:31.900 qualm when it comes to taking lives that don't need to be taken um i i guess i'm a bit more

00:18:37.360 relaxed than than most vegans and i don't even like using the word vegan because people are

00:18:42.660 sometimes upset with exactly how i how i um use the word how i define it or the situations in

00:18:48.620 which i think it would be permissible to eat animal products a lot of people uh have told me

00:18:53.420 that it's potentially misleading really i just have a commitment to minimizing animal suffering so

00:18:58.400 coming at this from a from a from an ethics perspective more than a practical one

00:19:03.360 i quite simply just grant the conditional right if it is the case that this is going to minimize

00:19:10.420 suffering then that's the right thing to do so if it turns out let's say that sort of

00:19:15.380 hunting is actually a better way to procure our nutritional requirements because of course we

00:19:22.760 could eat plants but you know plant production plant agriculture requires killing animals too

00:19:27.260 and it's possible that in some circumstances hunting an animal might kill less animals and

00:19:31.520 it might actually be less painful for that animal like i don't know about the practicalities of that

00:19:36.360 i actually i don't know but i'm just willing to just grant easily that if it is actually the case

00:19:41.660 that that involves less animal suffering then that is the thing to do now most most people define

00:19:46.840 veganism at least the vegan society defines it as a minimization or an exclusion to the highest

00:19:51.360 extent practicable of all forms of animal exploitation um i like to use the word animal

00:19:56.540 suffering there um and and it means it's got a slightly strange implication which is that if

00:20:03.560 veganism is just excluding animal suffering to the highest extent practicable then even if you

00:20:09.760 are killing an animal for food if you're doing it in such a way that genuinely minimizes to the

00:20:14.760 highest extent practicable all forms of animal suffering or exploitation then it's not just that

00:20:20.080 you're permissibly breaking veganism or something like you're doing the vegan thing according to the

00:20:25.120 ethical definition because of course vegan shouldn't be under the the illusion that we're

00:20:30.920 not responsible for any animal suffering of course we are we need to most people know about the

00:20:35.040 problem of crop deaths right like that animals are being killed in the production of plants

00:20:38.760 of course vastly more plants are currently being used to feed to livestock and so the best way to

00:20:45.220 minimize even just crop deaths is to eat the crops directly because it takes less crops to feed a

00:20:49.140 human than it does to feed livestock. But in other words, like if you think that veganism means

00:20:53.980 that you don't harm animals in the production of your food, then what are you eating exactly?

00:21:00.220 You're probably going to be starving yourself. And so even for the vegan who eats nothing but plants,

00:21:06.040 we're still contributing to some animal suffering. We just recognize that by eating the plants

00:21:10.240 directly, we're contributing to a lot less. So we already grant the idea that to be vegan is just to

00:21:14.560 minimize animal suffering to the highest extent that we can which means that if there were a

00:21:18.800 situation in which the way to minimize the amount of animal suffering was to go and you know

00:21:22.360 shoot the elk then go and shoot the elk and call yourself a vegan for all i care i'm just

00:21:27.360 interested in the ethics of minimizing suffering here that was great i like that okay okay i brought

00:21:35.820 you on to talk about a few things not just veganism that was good though i liked that last

00:21:40.780 bit a lot i'm in agreement there i think yeah i mean i think i think we agree more than people

00:21:45.600 think that that we do i mean your your condition is is different as well your situation i mean to

00:21:50.200 say because of the the fact that like as far as i understand like the reason why i mean it's it's

00:21:57.280 funny your diet will be more restrictive than mine is as a vegan oh my gosh yeah it's awful

00:22:01.820 um which is quite strange but of course there's there's a world of difference between your sort

00:22:08.840 of average joe who like eats kfc because he thinks it's it tastes nice and animals are here for us to

00:22:13.960 to kill bro and somebody who says look i just actually need this to survive and be healthy

00:22:20.200 like these are different justifications and embedded into the definition of veganism is

00:22:24.520 practicability that's kind of the operative word so like of course if if it were going to like

00:22:30.500 when somebody says um it's not healthy to be vegan the vegan response is usually well yes it is like

00:22:37.040 look at these look at these studies look at look at the the scientific consensus or whatever like

00:22:41.400 vegans generally don't say something like well i don't care if it's unhealthy you have to do it

00:22:45.680 anyway right they say no it is healthy and that's why you have an obligation to do it but the

00:22:50.080 implication of that the corollary is that if it were not healthy if it were genuinely not healthy

00:22:54.540 and not sustainable for you then it would be permissible to to eat animals and and that's a

00:22:59.680 position that i hold and i think is a position that's embedded into the very definition of

00:23:02.940 veganism so if you look at the definition of ethical veganism look at what it's actually about

00:23:07.720 it's a it's a lot more um it's a lot more sort of inclusive and relaxed i think than might be

00:23:14.900 represented by certain vegan activists that you might see on the street screaming about you know

00:23:18.960 drinking drinking milk under any circumstances it's just about minimizing suffering which most

00:23:23.360 people are already committed to okay i like it now normally at the beginning of each episode i

00:23:28.460 ask people who they are and what they do but we just kind of got into it so so uh if anyone hasn't

00:23:35.140 figured it out by now uh can you give a brief background about who you are and what it is you do

00:23:39.140 um so i'm a i'm a vegan um which it's actually amazing that i that i haven't said that yet

00:23:45.620 that's usually it's not even how i introduce myself in podcasts it's just how i introduce

00:23:48.840 myself to anybody it's the first thing i say before my name um my name is alex o'connor um

00:23:54.640 and i'm something of a reluctant vegan actually i started life on youtube making videos about

00:23:58.380 the philosophy of religion quite embarrassing really embarrassingly really i started when i

00:24:02.700 was 16 17 something like that and so some of the older material is just embarrassingly poor but

00:24:10.080 it's been interesting to sort of be able to track this philosophical change and growth so i made

00:24:14.600 videos about the philosophy of religion which moved on to talking about philosophy more broadly

00:24:17.920 and then ethics and then somebody well people kept kind of asking me just as like a fringe issue it

00:24:24.420 was sort of like you know people would ask me about abortion or euthanasia or you know capital

00:24:29.720 punishment or veganism and i thought you know i'll get around to all of these and one day i finally

00:24:35.320 decided to sit down and read animal liberation by peter singer which is to this day the greatest

00:24:39.980 philosophical defense of the vegan position that exists um it's written in 1975 and well philosophy

00:24:47.240 is perennial the first chapter it's it reads just as well today and i just remember thinking like

00:24:54.360 I must be missing something. It was so, so straightforward. And so I made a video on my

00:25:00.200 YouTube channel saying it was called a meat eaters case for veganism. And I said, look,

00:25:04.040 here are some arguments that I'm considering. I think these lead towards, towards the vegan

00:25:08.100 position, the vegan philosophy, please, for the love of God, somebody talk me out of it, please.

00:25:12.800 I really like, not only do I want to change my mind for the usual, uh, reason of just, you know,

00:25:18.120 intellectual consistency and self-challenge, but because I actually really don't want this to be

00:25:21.720 true I'm a big fan of KFC in particular I should say taste-wise not morally and nobody could and

00:25:30.800 it's funny in that video in the beginning I said in the introduction oh don't worry everybody this

00:25:34.860 channel isn't becoming like a vegan advocacy channel or something like that I'm just making

00:25:38.520 one video it's like whoops but nobody nobody could talk me out of it and so since then I've

00:25:46.100 I've become something of a sort of vegan youtuber speaker so I'm invited to you know do talks and

00:25:51.700 podcasts and stuff. And it's probably the main thing now that I talk about, but it happened

00:25:56.260 essentially by accident. When was that? That was 2019, April of 2019. So not sort of that long

00:26:04.220 ago, actually. But I mean, it feels like it's been forever. And even in that time, like my

00:26:10.360 position has wildly changed. I mean, it started with this case of like, wow, I had no idea about

00:26:15.360 any of this. I'm just going to put a hold on all my animal product consumption until I have a bit

00:26:19.320 more time to sort of work it all out and i've spoken to people from it's the great thing about

00:26:24.240 being a being a podcaster having an opportunity as as you'll know to be able to just speak to so

00:26:28.920 many wonderful interesting people so i've been able to speak to ethicists and uh you know

00:26:33.120 dieticians and i've been able to speak to psychologists about the nature of pain in the

00:26:37.120 brain and how it works and this kind of thing and um so my sort of position has been consistently

00:26:41.960 evolving but not once have i come close to doubting the idea that if we can avoid inflicting

00:26:47.620 suffering upon an animal then we should do so um that so the main thing that that changed my mind

00:26:53.940 on that was uh an argument it was a it was a sometimes called name the trait which basically

00:27:00.980 asks there are a few ways to word it but you might want to ask something like okay so 86 percent of

00:27:06.440 pigs or thereabouts in the uk who were killed for slaughter killed in gas chambers so they're

00:27:11.020 forced into metal cages and lowered into chambers of carbon dioxide which um is i mean you can watch

00:27:16.980 it on YouTube and you can see it's a pretty painful experience it also like acidifies the

00:27:20.220 liquids in their eyes and and mouths okay so this is this is pretty gross now we would recognize

00:27:25.260 that if we force human beings into a gas chamber that would be wrong in fact it would be evocative

00:27:30.620 of one of the worst evils in human history and so the name the trait argument can be surmised as

00:27:34.900 saying something like well how like a pig and in what ways would that human have to be before you'd

00:27:41.360 be okay with forcing it into a gas chamber so you name the trait so some people say that well pigs

00:27:46.440 are far less intelligent than humans are and that's why we have more moral worth so okay so

00:27:50.380 the trait is intelligence so let's take a human being and let's lower their intelligence lower

00:27:54.720 their intelligence to the state of a pig so let's give them like the tiniest cognitive ability that

00:27:58.380 you can imagine can i force that human being into a gas chamber off the back of that no in fact you'd

00:28:03.300 probably consider it more evil to do that on the justification that they have a low intelligence

00:28:07.080 okay so what if i gave the human being like two new legs instead of arms can i force them into a

00:28:12.180 gas chamber? Well, definitely not. What about if I made their skin pink? You know, is skin color

00:28:17.160 the relevant factor here? Well, definitely not. Okay, so you can essentially metamorphize this

00:28:21.780 human being into a pig. You can say, well, let's take this human being, give him four legs, pink

00:28:26.340 skin, curly tail, intelligence level of a pig, you know, experiences the world as a pig, suffers like

00:28:31.320 a pig. Can I force this human being into a gas chamber? And it seems like you never get to a

00:28:36.280 point where you say, okay, now we found the justification. Now it's okay. You can put this

00:28:40.720 being into a gas chamber but you end up with a creature that's identical to the creature that

00:28:45.580 we started with which is the one that we force into gas chambers and and not to not to win a war

00:28:50.300 not to buttress the economy not to build infrastructure because we think they taste nice

00:28:55.600 and it just seemed ethically obvious to me and so i thought i must be missing something if this

00:29:02.000 is still such a sort of fringe minority view and so the past few years of my life have been an

00:29:07.560 exercise and you know trying to get people to talk me out of it you should talk to uh diana

00:29:12.640 rogers because your your argument makes sense if meat wasn't i think necessary for health and i

00:29:20.720 think i think i think that there's a lack of studies i think that the studies are there and

00:29:25.700 i think diana rogers um who's a dietician who does uh she wrote the sacred cow and she's very

00:29:32.420 interested in regenerative agriculture, regenerative farming. But I think your argument

00:29:38.540 would stand if it was just about taste and if we could get all the nutrients from a vegan diet.

00:29:43.680 But I think that the long term, I don't think long term veganism helps people. And that's like

00:29:50.080 mostly what I've read online, anecdotes, and then studies. I also know that if you put really,

00:29:56.780 really young kids on a vegan diet, that can be really harder in their brain. But if they eat

00:30:01.100 animal products it's not so i think i think your argument would stand true and would be impenetrable

00:30:07.760 if if meat wasn't such a health food yes um and of course you're right that the science is still

00:30:14.860 very much in its infancy and we must be careful okay like this is really important if there is

00:30:20.460 a risk that this is actually really not nutritionally adequate and we're feeding it

00:30:25.800 to children not really knowing what we're doing and essentially blinded by by what becomes ideology

00:30:30.340 it merges from just a commitment to minimizing animal suffering to an allegiance to vague

00:30:36.720 principles that are sort of followed no matter what, because they're just sort of thought to

00:30:40.560 be true by a community, then we run into problems. As I say, I'm sort of willing to grant this

00:30:46.620 conditional claim that if it's not actually healthy, then not only is it sort of morally

00:30:51.940 permissible to not be a vegan, as it were, but to basically eat the minimal amount that we need to

00:30:57.740 be healthy and still call yourself a vegan i mean we could probably do away with the word it wouldn't

00:31:01.340 be very helpful um but of course it's worth bearing in mind that if it's the case that we think okay

00:31:06.340 well well meat is required for a for a healthy diet or at least animal products of a kind

00:31:11.400 uh sure but this of course doesn't give us license to overindulge and it doesn't give us license to

00:31:18.520 uh procure these products from factory farms i mean even if it is the case that we need these

00:31:24.280 products in order to be healthy there is simply no excuse none for what we're currently doing

00:31:29.940 to animals for what is as i say essentially an over consumption problem the numbers involved

00:31:34.760 are just like unthinkably unthinkably huge especially when you think about sea life which

00:31:39.980 is just the most incredible i mean yeah sometimes i like to say i don't quite know how to get it

00:31:47.000 across so sometimes i just say since i started the sentence around 150 000 wild fish have been

00:31:52.460 caught from our oceans which is roughly four seconds and in the space of two minutes that

00:31:57.660 will have risen to 3.6 million in two minutes right the numbers involved are huge but also the

00:32:03.060 the lived experience of these animals pigs forced into gas chambers cows being separated from their

00:32:08.200 calves you know you everybody knows about this kind of stuff um and so it's not good i used to

00:32:13.120 talk to diana rogers like she makes a good case i um i watched her there's also documentaries she

00:32:18.880 did it's called sacred cow and she talks about how um well it seems like a good alternative if

00:32:25.800 we're to continue eating meat because i like i'm in agreement with you that factory farming

00:32:30.740 well basically what i what i tell people who watch my channel is you know

00:32:35.000 and i give them a bit more leeway i say buy what you buy the best you can afford so there's like

00:32:42.180 companies like white oak pastures that are doing a really good job and like there there are

00:32:46.120 companies out there that are doing regenerative farming buy from those guys if you can um

00:32:50.940 a lot of the people who follow me have autoimmune disorders are trying to get out of them and are

00:32:55.380 really sick and they're like in bed and so for those people i'm like do what you have to do to

00:32:59.820 survive and then once you get better which is kind of what i did because i didn't have very

00:33:04.240 much money to begin with and i just like got off my medication got better and then now well i've

00:33:11.300 been eating you know grass-fed whatever for like three years but um you should talk to her just to

00:33:17.340 see just to see if she can like poke any holes yeah i i have i have come a come a come across

00:33:22.300 her work i may have read the book actually or at least i probably own a copy somewhere at the very

00:33:26.740 least um but yeah you're quite right there's a one one of the pr problems that veganism has is

00:33:32.600 is one of being quite unempathetic for a movement that's supposed to be grounded in empathy i think

00:33:37.880 it's worth remembering this when when i say that veganism is about minimizing animal suffering to

00:33:44.020 the highest extent practicable people think about okay so if you're um if you're an inuit living in

00:33:51.160 northern canada and it's genuinely really expensive to to import vegetables okay fine you know eat the

00:33:57.380 meat because you can't afford it but i think we need to be a bit broader in what we encompass in

00:34:01.240 terms of practicability so i like to encompass things like for instance you know sometimes i

00:34:04.720 get messages from from kids who say like I really want to try this veganism thing or at least sort

00:34:09.460 of minimize my diet but but I live at home and and my mom cooks my meals for me and she she doesn't

00:34:14.740 want to hear it and they're really stressed out they're like I but I don't I don't know what to

00:34:18.240 do like I can't refuse to eat this stuff and I'm just like relax like it's okay like this is the

00:34:23.660 kind of thing that I think is included in practicability like sure okay technically you

00:34:27.700 could like you know say screw your mom and and you know steal some money and go down to the shop

00:34:31.920 but buy your own food or whatever but like no i think it's it's fine like you can talk to her

00:34:37.440 about it over the dinner table and say why you're not particularly comfortable with it and maybe it

00:34:42.300 will get her to change the cooking a little bit but it's certainly not unethical to eat that food

00:34:47.940 right and so the the practicability requirement i think should be considered quite broadly and so

00:34:53.080 it would include things like living at home with your parents it would certainly include things

00:34:56.220 like eating disorders definitely things like autoimmune diseases especially if as you say

00:35:00.620 are sort of bedridden and your life is falling to bits like that's pretty much the definition

00:35:05.840 of impracticability which i like to remind people is embedded into the definition of veganism so

00:35:10.440 it's all about empathy and we need to remember that of course humans are animals just like any

00:35:16.300 other and so we need to be empathetic to those too and understand that people will put their

00:35:20.940 health interests first um so this is but this is the interesting thing and why i thought it would

00:35:25.720 be interesting to talk to you because i think that we at least on the sort of philosophical

00:35:29.980 principles, let's say, are roughly in alignment. I think our different life experiences have

00:35:35.100 probably shaped how we think about the practicability of eating meat. I mean,

00:35:40.460 living in a city like Oxford, it's the easiest thing in the world to pop down to the supermarket

00:35:45.940 and buy meat alternatives. And I don't have any serious allergies or anything like that. So,

00:35:50.280 you know, it's sort of easy enough for me to say, you know, everybody stop eating meat, right?

00:35:54.840 But as I talk to more people and begin to understand that not everybody's in such a comfortable position, it's quite edifying and leads me to, when I speak about veganism, try to be a bit broader in terms of what might be countered in terms of the practicability requirement, if you see what I'm saying.

00:36:12.060 Interesting. Okay, that's cool.

00:36:14.840 I'm always surprised when I talk to vegans at how, like, my immune system's nuts, right?

00:36:23.480 I shouldn't be alive. Like things, something out there doesn't want me alive. I'm allergic to

00:36:28.520 everything in ways that's just shocking. So when I talk to people, or even when I see like other

00:36:33.700 meat eaters or just people eating like bread and things and looking like normal people, like, how

00:36:39.740 is that possible? Like, how can I be so different? Even my brother, it's like, he'll go out and have

00:36:46.380 a piece of pizza. And I was like, if I had a piece of pizza, I think I would die. Like, how is it

00:36:52.460 that different between people sometimes but it's the thing i mean i can't imagine uh having an

00:36:58.440 experience like that having to be so so careful and and it's like um oh you know like it reminds

00:37:05.020 me of people who have like serious nut allergies and the thought of you know sometimes yeah it is

00:37:09.200 that sat on a plane or something i have a nut allergy too really i don't have a nut i don't

00:37:13.880 have a nut allergy like if someone ate a nut beside me i would die but i um i can't eat nuts

00:37:18.280 without an epi pen for a long time like it's just just stupid allergies yeah and i i think about it

00:37:24.740 and i just realized like i i don't even know what it would be like to have to think every time you

00:37:29.540 get on a on a bus or a plane or something like what if somebody opens a packet of nuts and my

00:37:33.540 life is in danger it's like it's it's crazy right and and it's just it's incredibly important to

00:37:41.700 sort of be a bit human about this this kind of thing because we get a bit lost in the in the

00:37:46.400 in the abstract philosophy or in the the the ideology and the the debate um but this is really

00:37:53.820 just about as ethics always has been historically it's about sort of how human beings can live the

00:37:59.760 best kind of life um i just like to remind people that if you're committed to a vague notion of

00:38:06.120 minimizing suffering then the position boils down to something like whenever you have the opportunity

00:38:12.200 to uh let's say prevent or um you know not inflict suffering to animals you know take it

00:38:22.020 that's it i mean if you if you don't have that opportunity if that opportunity isn't available

00:38:26.480 to you then fine but as long as it is i'm just recommending that that's the course of action

00:38:30.840 that people should take and people are already on board with this in in principle um but in

00:38:37.840 practice like you walk into a shop and if you don't have serious allergies and i recognize that

00:38:42.860 your audience is going to be disproportionately different in this respect but there'll be some

00:38:45.800 people listening who have no serious allergies who have pretty good access to to all kinds of

00:38:50.900 foods in the supermarket and and live in a city where it's actually you know not going to be

00:38:55.400 more or less expensive you walk into that shop and you know you go into starbucks and you order

00:39:02.840 a latte and what are you paying for are you paying for a cow to be forcibly impregnated

00:39:08.640 separated from the calf that calf might be bolt gunned in the head turned into veal or raised to

00:39:14.000 go through a similar cycle of exploitation the dairy cow will you know go through this this this

00:39:19.340 cycle before being sold to a slaughterhouse uh to be to be killed because the dairy and the meat

00:39:25.100 industry are pretty tied up in this way where i mean if it's an islamic slaughterhouse the last

00:39:29.400 thing it will hear is bismillah allahu akbar and the sound of its own blood gushing to the floor

00:39:33.020 okay walk into the same starbucks and add one word i'll have an oat latte i'll have an almond

00:39:39.340 latte i'll have a soy latte i'll have a hazelnut latte one of the myriad options now available to

00:39:44.380 us and none of this happens on your dime you're not paying for this anymore and a lot of people

00:39:50.480 say like what we're weighing up is like the the life of a cow and it's and it's suffering and

00:39:54.500 you know i don't like to anthropomorphize when i talk about calves being separated from their

00:39:59.080 mothers i'm not trying to be cutesy like the maternal bond that animals have is something

00:40:03.260 very much pre-human and certainly sort of pre-rational um you can watch these these sadistic

00:40:09.100 videos it's almost comic there are these technologies invented like a like a truck

00:40:13.360 or a quad bike with a with a cage and an open door on the side of it and they drive around and

00:40:17.400 they sort of scoop up the calf and drive her away and you can watch these these mother cows

00:40:21.500 chasing after their children in confusion um and people say that we're like weighing this up

00:40:28.800 the suffering of the animal versus like the the taste of milk or something or or the convenience

00:40:33.700 of milk and it's not even that it's not because what it really is is like the life of an animal

00:40:39.780 on one side of the scale and then you have the the taste pleasure and the convenience whatever

00:40:43.820 minus what you can get from a vegan alternative and it's the leftover slither that we weigh up

00:40:49.460 against the life of the animal so even if you know oat milk doesn't taste quite as nice as cow's milk

00:40:54.320 which i i don't know if it does it's a preferential thing but let's say it's like 80 as nice so you

00:41:00.220 say it really isn't as nice it's like okay you're not weighing up a cow's life versus the the taste

00:41:05.520 of milk you're weighing up a cow's life versus like 20 of the taste pleasure that you get from

00:41:10.860 milk because the other 80 could have been gotten from oat milk if you see what i'm saying so it's

00:41:14.780 it's pretty um it's worse than people think uh in in other words well that i like get where you're

00:41:22.160 coming from there. But if my theory is correct, and that people can't be healthy without animal

00:41:27.420 products, and I'm actually putting dairy in a different category, because I can't tolerate

00:41:31.180 dairy without getting really bad arthritis, and like a multitude of issues. So I don't eat dairy

00:41:38.300 or eggs. They both caused issues. But if you do weigh, let's say, the taste of milk, that's what

00:41:49.880 you have on one side and then the difference between like oat and oat milk and normal milk

00:41:55.760 to the suffering of a cow that's those are on your two sides what if the problem with reducing

00:42:00.720 your animal intake is actually chronic health problems and then what you have on one side is

00:42:05.540 an increase in chronic health problems and then that's suffering compared to the life of an animal

00:42:10.920 and chronic health problems like that that's a different story right but i mean we it's not even

00:42:16.160 And it's not that useful at the moment to have a conversation about that because we need more data.

00:42:21.580 I think part of the reason I've been fighting back against kind of what I've called the vegan ideology is because my concern is we have these people who are implementing agendas in major cities.

00:42:34.360 So it's doing like Meatless Monday and things without the proper scientific background.

00:42:39.260 So we don't have proper studies on these things.

00:42:41.420 Now we have studies like, oh, an increase in meat increases your risk of, I don't know, everything, right? Like there's any study out there that you can say it increases your risk of heart disease or et cetera. Most of those studies aren't done isolating meat. They're done combining everything else you eat with meat. So the bun, the pop, like everything.

00:43:01.380 And it would make me feel a lot better if people who are implementing veganism in major cities and saying you have to reduce the amount of meat you eat, even what's been happening in the Netherlands recently was taking away kind of farmer's land saying you need to produce less nitrogen.

00:43:17.900 And that means you can't farm cows anymore.

00:43:22.100 It would make me feel a lot better if I didn't feel like there weren't studies being done as well.

00:43:28.920 It's like this issue with chronic disease in North America, it's like killing people and reducing the life expectancy of people.

00:43:35.940 And if that has to do with diet and that has to do with animal products, and we're pushing a vegan agenda to minimize animal suffering and to minimize climate change without looking at that part, we are in for a world of pain in like 10 years.

00:43:48.740 yes i mean potentially um i i imagine you probably receive similar concerns about the

00:43:56.840 the carnivore diet um about its potential health implications and that that you know there are sort

00:44:02.040 of maybe like there's sort of a bit of data on this sort of being healthy but it's 100 percent

00:44:08.000 but it's potentially sort of disastrous in the in the i mean i don't know actually about the

00:44:11.840 sort of long term has there been much research into the long-term effect of there hasn't been

00:44:16.440 any, which is the issue. Like this, the carnivore diet is ridiculously new. And the anecdotal

00:44:22.140 reports are insane. Like you have people who lost a bunch of weight are off all of their medications

00:44:26.340 and have a disease that was incurable in remission, which doesn't happen, right? You can't do that.

00:44:32.680 There are some people, you know, you hear anecdotes with people who go on the vegan diet too,

00:44:37.060 and they're suddenly in remission. And I know, and I think that there's a reason for that. I think

00:44:43.300 that if you reduce the amount of dairy you're eating or eliminate dairy and eliminate eggs,

00:44:48.040 I think that those can cause a lot of health issues for people. And if you eliminate processed

00:44:51.980 foods, that can make you a lot healthier right off the bat. And that can all happen with a vegan

00:44:55.960 diet, right? And that's something everybody should be doing regardless of what diet they're on.

00:45:00.180 This episode is sponsored by NordVPN. If you've followed the show for a while,

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00:46:25.960 NordVPN and enjoy the rest of this episode. Um, I mean, that's, that's the funny thing about it,

00:46:32.160 especially if you go vegan for sort of health reasons, or let's say health reasons, because

00:46:37.080 you haven't been particularly healthy before or ethical reasons, because you're not that

00:46:40.240 interested in health. If you're eating an average American diet, then of course, when you eat a

00:46:45.100 well-planned vegan diet, you're going to feel healthier. And so people often report sort of

00:46:49.380 these crazy energy boosts. They feel cleaner, they feel healthier, they're losing weight,

00:46:53.680 this kind of thing for myself i kind of i i feel i want to say sort of roughly the same i don't

00:47:00.700 think it sort of makes it a huge um a huge difference either way but yeah we we have to

00:47:06.860 be we have to be careful i think of course to be a healthy vegan is going to be more difficult than

00:47:13.540 being a healthy meat eater at least in terms of sufficiently healthy so if you sort of just eat

00:47:21.120 vague animal products if you just like eat some chicken eggs a few vegetables this kind of thing

00:47:26.240 like you're not going to be in in great nutritional shape but you'll be okay if you take a similar

00:47:31.500 approach as a vegan and you just sort of like eat whatever you just have like a vegan cheese

00:47:35.400 sandwich and uh and and some pasta you're going to be in a lot more trouble and so well you know

00:47:42.460 as far as i'm aware it is possible certainly for adults and and a lot of dietetic associations

00:47:48.620 across the world are saying that it's uh you can get all the nutrients required for a healthy living

00:47:53.340 at all stages of life but you're right like we should be skeptical of these things and we need

00:47:57.480 to especially when it comes to raising children on these diets we we want to be sure right we don't

00:48:01.760 want to be sort of like well this this dietetic association seems to think it's fine so let's go

00:48:05.880 ahead and do it it's like let's let's really do some research here but just like the research

00:48:09.560 into the carnival diet which you say is like brand new i mean yeah it's science on the vegan

00:48:14.640 stuff is still in its infancy too like this is this is all fairly new so we do need to be careful

00:48:19.040 but equally a lot of the time if if you pay attention to what it is that went wrong with

00:48:24.540 people on vegan diets it's something that could at least in principle have been avoided but as i say

00:48:30.760 like the thing that i really like to stress is that it is i said a few times now is this conditional

00:48:35.920 claim that if it is actually unhealthy then i think it's permissible right but as i say i would

00:48:41.760 still be committed to minimizing our intake and certainly from um completely eliminating our

00:48:47.940 intake when it comes to factory farms okay because the fact i mean the factory farming problem is is

00:48:53.260 partly an overconsumption thing too right like if you if you think to yourself well this stuff's

00:48:57.360 maybe wrong and so everybody starts sort of minimizing their intake let's say you really

00:49:02.280 do need meat to be healthy or something like this one of the reasons why factory farming exists is

00:49:06.260 because of the the amount of animal products that people are eating it's just like not sustainable

00:49:10.980 to have apparently apparently according to this diana rogers character um apparently if everybody

00:49:18.660 switched to regenerative farming and there was no factory farming the output would be similar

00:49:24.900 which i find difficult to believe given how many animals are in factory farms but i mean i i've asked

00:49:31.440 them the people who wrote that book the same question which was okay switching to regenerative

00:49:36.280 farming is all good but say people do need meat for health and say we need the same amount of

00:49:40.700 meat we're producing can you do that with regenerative farming and she thought we could

00:49:43.860 and part of the reason we could do that is because you can put animals like goats and things

00:49:48.300 on mountainous areas where nothing else can grow anyway and they can still survive right so you

00:49:55.200 can still be eating plants on like rocky terrain where you wouldn't be able to have other things

00:49:59.360 so apparently yeah but then i would still be the same but we're talking about somewhere between 80

00:50:05.540 and a hundred billion land animals alone every single year i'm saying i'm i mean i i would say

00:50:12.500 that it's certainly possible that especially if people start eating more healthily and become

00:50:16.800 more aware of their diets and minimizing their meat intake or something like this that a global

00:50:21.280 regenerative system of agriculture would be enough to sustain healthy living for everybody

00:50:26.080 but to say that we'd get the same output i don't know i'm not sure i'll have to yeah maybe we need

00:50:32.760 to i want to ask you about oh my gosh it's been an hour already okay we might have to have another

00:50:39.880 podcast because i wanted to do i wanted to ask you about your your atheism beliefs and get into

00:50:45.640 that but that could be let's just leave that for the next one because that could be an entire thing

00:50:49.720 on its own um perhaps at at some point we should have maybe i'll watch the video again the sacred

00:50:58.680 cow video because i was surprised about like what she claimed in it but it was pretty interesting

00:51:05.400 and maybe we could have a conversation about that again to see if there's common ground there i i

00:51:10.680 think that there's a lot of overlap between how you're thinking and how i'm thinking and i think

00:51:15.080 it all kind of chalks up to you know if you could do a vegan diet and be equally as healthy even if

00:51:21.320 it's more difficult to achieve that like but if you're careful and you can be equally as healthy

00:51:25.960 then I don't see anything wrong with it. The only reason that I see something wrong with it is

00:51:30.020 because I believe that you're missing key nutrients. And I think the only way to rectify

00:51:35.420 that position are to have more studies and properly done studies. So you talked about

00:51:40.540 evidence for the carnivore diet. The only thing that we have at the moment for the carnivore diet

00:51:44.980 is a study that was done basically on self-reported symptoms from people. And so that's going to skew

00:51:52.100 towards people who are already feeling better. And like anybody in the scientific community would

00:51:56.380 just laugh at that study. However, it's enough. Those aren't, that's like 3000 anecdotes of

00:52:02.300 people saying I was really chronically ill and now I'm not at all. And that should be enough

00:52:06.340 for somebody in the scientific community to say, Hey, why don't we do a controlled study? Like we

00:52:12.420 need to do a controlled study. It's not that difficult. You take some people who are, have

00:52:16.620 autoimmune disorders, you monitor their diet for six months and then see what happens. It just

00:52:21.860 needs to happen right and then at least we could have a conversation about oh you know wow there

00:52:26.760 was overwhelming success this needs to be taken seriously or oh no this is a one-off but like i

00:52:31.780 don't see any i don't know what to do without more data yes it's it's it's pretty difficult to know

00:52:39.640 but i don't think we need really any data to know that factory farming needs to come to an end um

00:52:45.420 now we have data for that too yeah we actually we do like even just the um what it does to the

00:52:51.880 environment factory yes of course but you know you need you need only an antibiotic resistance

00:52:57.080 that enough like you said that alone could be that could be so bad for everybody on the planet

00:53:03.920 that we need to avoid that at all costs right yeah this or this is why that the covid pandemic

00:53:09.620 can sort of serve as a wake up call as people often like to not if it was leaked from a lab

00:53:17.420 not if it was leaked from a lab people have actually misunderstood the the point that i

00:53:22.640 make when it comes to covid particularly because of course covid is at least you know uh it it's

00:53:27.660 thought a zoonotic disease um kind of doesn't really matter i mean i i i would certainly not

00:53:33.540 claim that that this covid pandemic came from factory farming like that's definitely not the

00:53:38.800 case uh but we can say that like but the next one will right we can we can say if we look at

00:53:45.160 something like covid and look at how quickly we can just completely debilitate our entire population

00:53:49.980 and then we think okay how can we stop this kind of thing happening again regardless of

00:53:54.260 where these diseases have come from in the past if if we're taking disease ridden animals and

00:54:00.660 we're forcing them into close proximity in tiny cages and then shipping them around the world to

00:54:04.440 share diseases with each other, the chances of a zoonotic disease developing is being exponentially

00:54:10.720 increased. And so even if the last pandemic didn't come from factory farming, it's very likely that

00:54:15.000 the next one will. But of course, all of this, by the way, all of this about the animal suffering

00:54:22.580 and the gas chambers and the disc budding, and I haven't talked about the experience of pigs in

00:54:26.460 factory farms, which I think are the worst. Well, it's not the worst, but pigs, for some reason,

00:54:31.220 And for me, I've always been the most easy to empathize with, maybe due to their intelligence, similarity to dogs, whatever.

00:54:37.040 But like, for example, piglets who are born on factory farms, if they're too sick to be profitable,

00:54:45.480 and this is often after having their teeth yanked out and their tails cut off without anesthetic,

00:54:49.960 which, by the way, why would they do that?

00:54:52.480 Why would they yank teeth out and cut the tails off piglets when they're born?

00:54:56.580 Well, it's because as the pigs are kept in close proximity later in life,

00:54:59.340 they start to basically go insane and start cannibalizing each other out of frustration and

00:55:03.980 hunger and so they often do that by biting each other's tails at first and so they take out the

00:55:09.720 teeth and get rid of the tails but okay if these if these piglets are too sick to be profitable

00:55:13.780 then what happens to them well they'll be killed most people can probably work that out but how

00:55:18.820 are they killed well the most well one of the most common methods is a method that's colloquially

00:55:24.620 known as thumping it's blunt force trauma it's where the pigs are literally just taken by their

00:55:28.500 hind legs these piglets and have their skulls repeatedly smashed into the concrete until they

00:55:32.840 die um of course you can watch footage of this and it seems when you see this kind of stuff that

00:55:38.100 it's like you know rogue farmers picking up animals and smashing their skulls into the pavement

00:55:41.880 but this method of caving in a piglet skull against the pavement is officially approved

00:55:49.140 by both red tractor and the rspca which are kind of the animal welfare governing bodies in the uk

00:55:54.320 when it comes to farm. By the way, the same RSPCA that recently confiscated the footballer Kurt

00:56:00.060 Zuma's pet cat because footage emerged of him kicking it across the kitchen for a laugh and

00:56:04.700 filming it and putting it on Snapchat. They went and confiscated that cat, but they officially

00:56:08.860 approve as a method of slaughter for piglets who could be kept alive, but are just too sick to be

00:56:13.640 profitable to take them by the hind legs and cave in their skulls against the pavement.

00:56:18.140 This is obviously insanity, but what I wanted to say was that all of this stuff that I'm talking

00:56:23.140 about is if the farmers are abiding by the law right these are all legally approved practices

00:56:29.940 except i think um the the tail docking and the teeth um i think is illegal in the uk at least

00:56:37.040 but you know farmers still do it but but that's that's my point is that like sans that everything

00:56:41.720 else i've talked about everything is legal this is this is industry standard practice and yet every

00:56:49.080 single time we send hidden cameras into factory farms we find that farmers are routinely breaking

00:56:54.540 even the most sort of basic and ridiculous uh legal guidelines that are in place already so

00:57:00.240 all of this this horror and and moral embarrassment is already occurring even if they're following the

00:57:05.600 law and then factor in the fact fact factor in the case or the consideration that in in a in a great

00:57:11.500 many cases they're not and the problem gets only worse there was a there was a farm in i think it

00:57:17.520 was Aberdeenshire I'll check that and make sure that's correct because I can't remember which

00:57:21.120 farm it was that recently it was a red tractor approved farm which was was discovered by sort

00:57:29.500 of undercover investigators to be thumping piglets to death by caving in their skulls against the

00:57:35.900 bars of the cages that their own mothers were being kept in this kind of stuff is crazy and

00:57:44.060 And so when people say to me kind of like, yeah, you know, I try to make sure my meat comes from a good source.

00:57:48.700 It's like, do you? Are we? Are we actually on board about this?

00:57:51.380 Because when I ask people, what do you think about this kind of treatment of animals?

00:57:54.840 They say, oh, that's horrible. That's terrible.

00:57:56.720 It's like, well, let's make some noise about it then.

00:57:58.740 Let's stop buying factory farmed animal products.

00:58:01.260 Let's engage in protests.

00:58:03.260 Wouldn't the right way to encourage people to stop eating factory farmed, to give them alternatives rather than saying just stop?

00:58:09.980 like wouldn't that be a better even just sales like sales of trying to stop factory farming

00:58:15.440 if i was going to market that idea what i would do is hey hey look at what's happening here this

00:58:20.840 is bad but look at this farm and what they do it's only a little bit more you can order it from this

00:58:26.680 place it's only a little bit more and you get to reduce this amount of suffering and hey it's

00:58:31.480 carbon negative isn't that a better sell than like just stop it's definitely a better sell uh in that

00:58:38.660 I actually think that this is maybe what we're going to begin to see happening as veganism

00:58:44.120 grows in popularity, the response there's likely going to be cropping up, at least when

00:58:50.160 it becomes significantly economically viable, because there are enough people who are willing

00:58:55.100 to sort of go vegan, you'll have companies cropping up saying like, hey, all of the

00:58:58.420 problems that the vegans are raising about this horrible treatment that they tell you

00:59:01.320 about in the footage they show you, here's our farm, we don't do any of that, we keep

00:59:04.480 the calves with the mothers when they produce their milk, all this kind of stuff, and this

00:59:07.920 is fine and definitely as you say that's definitely going to sell better than only eat plants so it's

00:59:14.560 definitely going to be more likely to convince people to stop eating meat and also it is genuinely

00:59:19.360 obviously infinitely preferable to to factory farming of course when you start really engaging

00:59:26.420 in animal ethics and sort of vegan activism and animal ethics i see as two totally different

00:59:34.440 spheres vegan activism is about as you say what's going to get people to stop eating meat what's

00:59:38.640 going to sort of bring down factory farming this kind of thing whereas animal ethics is like this

00:59:43.240 interesting academic study into the the nature of pain and what morally matters once you sort of

00:59:48.800 engage in that for long enough you realize that there are arguments to say that even if we're not

00:59:52.560 factory farming animals there might be good reason not to be killing them unnecessarily and so you

00:59:57.420 might be committed ethically to the view that you know farms that uh that aren't factory farms that

01:00:04.120 produce so-called sort of ethically produced meat um are still unethical they're still as long as

01:00:10.620 you've got sort of plant-based alternatives available to you uh but as i said earlier that

01:00:14.820 would become become almost like more pedantic it would be kind of like yeah like because sort of

01:00:22.640 taking the life of an animal without its consent is is wrong we should probably be eating plants

01:00:27.360 instead but it wouldn't be this like huge obvious moral emergency that that factory farming is so

01:00:33.960 yes i agree with you that it that it sells better but it's it's difficult for somebody who's

01:00:39.300 ethically committed to the view that essentially exploiting animals is always wrong to advocate for

01:00:45.060 that right people have often compared it to other ethical issues um you know talking about how they

01:00:50.080 want no cages rather than bigger cages this kind of thing it's like if you advocate for incremental

01:00:55.440 steps you seem to sort of be legitimizing um legitimizing the process i mean you can imagine

01:01:04.060 imagine somebody talking about like abortion imagine like a pro-life activist and there was

01:01:09.380 some way to sort of make you know abortions slightly less painful for the for the fetuses

01:01:15.020 or something you know presuming that the fetus is at a level where it can feel pain and we say

01:01:18.840 we've developed this technology where as as they're being killed they they feel like 50 percent less

01:01:23.800 pain or something like that but they're still in pain and the pro-life will probably say no this

01:01:27.000 is still horribly immoral and i said to them well but don't you recognize that this would be a better

01:01:30.880 sell if you told somebody who was you know uh who wanted to have an abortion like hey if you use this

01:01:36.460 procedure you know that the child's going to feel less pain they're going to say yes and they're

01:01:39.320 going to be far more likely to say yes to that than they are to just bringing the baby to full

01:01:43.980 term i think the pro-lifer would still have a hard time sort of advocating for this technology for

01:01:49.760 the technology that sort of 50% reduces the pain involved in abortion or something like that. Do

01:01:54.780 you see what I'm saying? It would be impossible to do that. So for someone in my position who

01:01:59.620 sort of does deeply care about animal suffering more broadly than just factory farming,

01:02:05.920 it's still troublesome to me, the idea of animals being bred and confined and killed.

01:02:12.380 But it's way, way better than factory farming. So I'd celebrate a move from factory farming to

01:02:18.120 more traditional forms of agriculture. But I still think that I would be in the camp of arguing that

01:02:24.500 plant-based agriculture is the way to go, or at least cultivated meat, which is the next big sort

01:02:29.800 of exciting development in the conversation, which is if we can produce sort of, you know,

01:02:37.100 essentially biologically the same matter without causing any animal suffering,

01:02:40.720 then the problem essentially just disappears. Yeah, well, if that's a possibility, and it is

01:02:45.060 just meat but it's from a lab then hooray but i feel like that's the most viable yeah but it

01:02:52.900 doesn't exist but not really no yeah i mean you can you can probably buy like a lab grown burger

01:02:58.040 for like half a million dollars or something at the moment because the technology is there but

01:03:02.160 this is how all technologies start and so to answer your question because it's a bit of a

01:03:05.820 long-winded answer and i don't want to be seen like i'm avoiding uh the question you said well

01:03:11.040 isn't like sure like advocating for veganism is is great and all to stop factory farming but it

01:03:16.160 wouldn't actually just be more effective to advocate for but it wouldn't just be it wouldn't

01:03:20.960 it wouldn't just be more effective it would also mitigate the risk that long-term veganism isn't

01:03:26.520 healthy for people and that and it's it's not just that i think that i and i do believe this

01:03:32.100 i think if you'd gone back say say to the 1940s this is just a theory here but i feel like if

01:03:39.220 you've gone back to the 1940s and you put somebody on a vegan diet it's possible that they could do

01:03:44.240 it properly to be healthy longer term like I'm willing to go that far I think the amount of

01:03:50.280 chronic illness we have now and how sick the average person is like the percentage of people

01:03:55.980 with autoimmunity it's skyrocketed that mental disorders obesity right it's bad right now I

01:04:01.740 think the average person right now is sick and that's why we're seeing such restrictive diets

01:04:07.240 work for people like i don't think the carnivore diet there are there were some anecdotes of people

01:04:12.680 in like the 1910s on a carnivore diet they went to visit um inuits and then they already ate like

01:04:18.760 that so set aside i don't think you'd see so many people on a carnivore diet 60 or 70 years ago when

01:04:25.960 people didn't have these chronic diseases i don't think my diseases would like existed exactly back

01:04:30.680 then but i think if you're dealing with people now uh pushing for regenerative farming also mitigates

01:04:36.360 the issue that we could potentially be pushing a diet that's going to increase chronic disease,

01:04:41.340 which I think it might. And at least I think we need more studies to prove that it doesn't.

01:04:45.980 Yeah, I understand that concern. And I think a lot of vegans would be quick to dismiss it

01:04:51.980 with reference to, as I say, like dietetic associations saying that veganism is healthy.

01:04:58.960 It's like we need to take this stuff very seriously. You know, scientific communities

01:05:04.640 being like being like yeah we've done some studies and it seems pretty safe to be doing

01:05:08.560 this to our children it's like we need to be we need to be really sure about this stuff so

01:05:12.320 so although i'm i'm i guess i'm pretty optimistic about the idea of a plant-based diet being

01:05:18.440 nutritionally adequate i wouldn't want to dismiss those concerns and i would like to sort of amplify

01:05:23.860 that i uh care about them too uh but there's kind of a way of of avoiding both problems which would

01:05:31.600 be cultivated lab grown meat this is like if there was one thing that we could sort of all focus on

01:05:38.240 is what's actually in reality probably going to have the biggest effect it might be lab grown meat

01:05:42.980 because you still get the animal products that you want to eat you you still avoid the sort of

01:05:47.920 health concerns that you're talking about but also you now don't actually have to kill any animals at

01:05:52.500 all and so even if we're sort of not sure what we think ethically about taking the lives of animals

01:05:57.620 if they've had a net positive existence which i'm actually quite sympathetic to the view that if

01:06:01.540 they genuinely have a net positive existence and that existence is parasitic on the idea that they

01:06:07.400 will be killed eventually that might actually be good for the animal probably is good for the

01:06:10.760 animal um regenerative farming maybe which depending on the farm interestingly isn't quite

01:06:15.320 the same thing as saying that you have the right to kill them i mean it might be the case that it

01:06:18.840 is actually better for the animal to bring them into existence and then kill them but as jeff

01:06:23.320 mcmahon who was at the event in oxford pointed out in in a pretty wonderful essay on the eating

01:06:31.920 of animal products even if it were the case that this animal wouldn't exist if we didn't plan to

01:06:37.680 kill it and it was better for the animal to exist and then be killed once it exists it's still

01:06:43.500 arguable that you don't have the right to take its life because now that it exists there's like a

01:06:47.860 it's like an interest that you're upsetting by killing it it's a bit of a bit of a sort of

01:06:52.500 sidetrack. But what I was going to say is that lab-grown meat might solve all this problem.

01:06:57.680 And so I think that if we could sort of invest a lot more time and energy into lab-grown meat,

01:07:01.600 we'd be on the right track. But as you say, it's quite a long way off. So we're sort of

01:07:06.200 figuring out what to do in the meantime. But that's kind of how I see it, given the

01:07:10.320 advent of this technology and how revolutionary it could be. For me, it's kind of a case of,

01:07:15.100 well, what do we do in the meantime? You know, for the next, I don't know, a few decades or

01:07:17.940 however long it's going to take might take longer than that who knows you know how do we um how do

01:07:23.060 we manage ourselves and until then uh but i think that would probably be the best option but i've

01:07:27.740 said before um in some podcasts or interview or something that although i do think that because

01:07:35.700 you were asking about sort of what's actually going to be the most effective method of getting

01:07:38.780 people to change something like that's going to be the answer but i've said before that i do pity

01:07:43.860 the people who will have to explain to their grandchildren right when when they sort of their

01:07:48.540 grandchildren are saying to them you knew about factory farming yeah you you knew about the

01:07:54.700 mistreatment of animals that was going on in there you knew that there were healthy alternatives from

01:07:58.880 plant-based agriculture and even you know regenerative agricultural alternatives that

01:08:02.820 you may have had access to okay yeah sure and they say so why why were you still eating animal

01:08:08.180 products and you have to explain to them that until lab-grown meat came about you know you just

01:08:12.300 it just wasn't the same you know i just couldn't quite stomach that that chickpea burger or

01:08:17.140 something like that although i do think um it is the case in other words in reality that most

01:08:22.580 people will in fact change their diets based on something like lab-grown meat rather than an

01:08:27.000 ethical case it's going to be a pretty awkward conversation when they have to explain that

01:08:31.500 that's what it took because the ethical case wasn't enough for them unless it has health

01:08:36.660 implications. Of course, yeah. So for those people would be the people who are eating animal products

01:08:43.300 just because they taste nice, which I would wager, and I don't exactly have a statistic to back this

01:08:48.740 up, but I would suspect that the majority of people who are eating animal products are eating

01:08:53.660 them. I want to say, how can I word this? The majority of instances in which somebody eats an

01:08:59.880 animal product will be based on taste pleasure. But maybe because maybe the reason people actually

01:09:05.740 like the taste is because we've grown accustomed to it because it's healthy yeah no that would be

01:09:11.160 no surprise to me in fact like that evolutionarily makes sense right like it's it's the reason why

01:09:15.800 certain things are pleasurable to us you know by and large is because they're actually beneficial

01:09:20.560 to our survival um but of course like the the whole process of ethics like what is ethics what

01:09:27.320 is ethical progress well it's sort of overcoming our naturalistic animalistic impulses to act in

01:09:32.720 accordance with what we think is right and moral rather than what our sort of sensory

01:09:37.160 pleasure inputs tell us that we immediately want. It's kind of what ethics is. It's overcoming that

01:09:43.920 kind of thing. That's true. I do think that people fall into the mistake of ignoring what their body

01:09:49.880 tells them is right, though, by listening to what their brain tells them is right. I think that's

01:09:53.960 an issue that our society is seeing. And I think probably going back to what you feel is right

01:09:59.160 is probably a good way to be ethical kind of the hippie way to be ethical maybe and it doesn't

01:10:03.980 necessarily work like cocaine might feel good it doesn't mean that it's ethical or it's going to

01:10:08.320 be good for you but you kind of know when you're doing that kind of thing that it's not a good

01:10:12.580 idea right and the hedonistic stuff isn't a good idea i don't know if you get that from you might

01:10:17.120 get that from kfc that's like that's not going to make anybody feel good that's purely taste and

01:10:22.960 that's hedonism and there's nothing healthy about that that's just bad and so when when i talk about

01:10:28.780 these people who will have to explain this to their grandchildren or people who were just eating

01:10:31.820 based on taste pleasure and you come along and say but what about all the people that are that

01:10:35.560 are doing this for really like uh for the sake of their health because they need to it's like

01:10:39.880 yeah okay i i agree that that's a different story but like i'm talking there to the people who are

01:10:45.460 sort of going to kfc you know if you go into kfc and see the people sort of queuing up and and

01:10:49.140 these are like some of the most popular producers of animal products your mcdonald's and your kfc's

01:10:52.800 and this kind of thing so i do think that it is a separate ethical question or at least an adapted

01:10:58.380 ethical question when somebody is eating animal products because they genuinely need to but of

01:11:03.400 course if they genuinely need to then the definition of veganism accounts for this but

01:11:07.580 if you look at the majority of animal products that are being sold if you walk into a mcdonald's

01:11:11.220 and i was saying all of this kind of stuff i walk into a mcdonald's and say you're all going to have

01:11:15.260 to explain this to your grandchildren you know that there's a vegan alternative just down the

01:11:18.400 road and now even in mcdonald's you can get a vegan alternative but you won't do so um i think

01:11:23.820 that that that point stands but yes i mean the one thing that i wanted to emphasize and again why i

01:11:28.240 thought it was important to talk to you and reach an audience like yours, who, as you say, will

01:11:32.840 disproportionately be at least knowledgeable about health concerns as related to animal products and

01:11:39.740 the necessity of eating meat and this kind of thing, is that, yeah, I can't speak for vegans

01:11:45.360 broadly, but certainly the ethical veganism that I promote is the kind that says that if you actually

01:11:49.720 need animal products to be healthy, then not only can you break your veganism, but you can eat

01:11:55.000 animal products and still call yourself a vegan although I wouldn't do if I were you because it

01:11:58.940 comes with a lot of social baggage okay Alex that was great um I have to go but I would like to have

01:12:07.500 another conversation um because you do you do a lot yeah you can try to talk me out of Christianity

01:12:13.280 the god thing yeah yeah let's do that let's do that next okay for sure if people want to follow

01:12:20.380 you online where where should they go uh well my i don't think i even said earlier that my my online

01:12:25.400 pseudonym is cosmic skeptic as i said i made this account when i was like 16 um so it's quite a

01:12:31.360 unique name so basically anywhere slash cosmic skeptic twitter youtube youtube's the main one

01:12:35.560 tick tock now also regrettably but i'm there too so anything for slash cosmic skeptic will take

01:12:40.880 you there okay thank you again that was fun of course

The Mikhaila Peterson Podcast - August 10, 2022

157. The Case for Ethical Veganism？｜ Alex O'Connor

Episode Stats

Transcript

The Mikhaila Peterson Podcast - August 10, 2022

157. The Case for Ethical Veganism？ ｜ Alex O'Connor

Episode Stats

Transcript

157. The Case for Ethical Veganism？｜ Alex O'Connor