[Interview] Veganism: an optimistic, political interpretation of "the market for altruism".
03 August 2019 [link youtube]
From the deepest depths of the vegan demimonde… a discussion with a journalist that branches out after reflections on my recent videos attempting to demonstrate (and quantify) the decline of public interest in veganism (esp. the contraction of the vegan youtube demimonde). #vegan #vegans #veganism
Youtube Automatic Transcription
the kind of flowchart involved here is
step one is people having interest in veganism step two is that they go on the internet and learn more about veganism then step three is some talented minority those people get organized to do you know lobbying education outreach activism but it is true the metrics we're looking at here are only looking at that first step however it's also out of that broader public interest that you get donor support for the movement so on and so forth so when you have declining interest it's it's true I'm conceding the point here declining public interest is not the same as the decline of the movement however I think you have to sound the alarm when you're looking at several years of decline in interest yeah and as you know in the video I make the point if I were using these statistics to tell you the opposite which we all were just a few years ago I mean I don't know how long you've been in the vegan movement but just five years ago everyone was pointing to the same type of statistics and saying hey look the amount of interest in veganism is doubling and tripling and so on that was quite appropriate at the time I mean I think you probably know what was inappropriate or unfortunate about it was that it led people to a sense of reckless optimism about where or social media would take us so that's why I think it's so meaningful to reflect right now where is social media taking us as the tide goes down as those numbers are going down yeah right so I think it's good that the discussion that was started by the video people did follow up so you know I followed up by putting together a list of I think about 28 YouTube channels and crunching the numbers on those and then that inspired my friend Theo so I won't use Theo's full name but you know his YouTube channel was actually called activist journeys but I sent you that so the discussion led to looking for more statistics to back up what the first video showed and Theo put together the list of I think it's 286 youtubers and that is and then you folded up further so okay all right try to put this in a sign soundbite thought-form okay it's true the first step was to look at google trend data and then to look at a survey of vegan youtubers we then move that forward from about 28 YouTube channels to about 300 YouTube channels and you've got the link for the full list and then I pointed out that even though that survey of 286 or whatever it is even though that was quite compelling data at that point the real numbers were even worse because that didn't include the channels that had quit entirely the channels that have been deleted and that started a further effort to try to list the the deleted channels so now we have that data also so yeah when you when you add that together it backs up my original hypothesis so you're correct at the first step of the first video the numbers didn't prove the case when way or the other but now I think it's it's fair to say I've made my point I think there are significant numbers to back that up you okay no I do not but the so the the all the hypothesis you're hinting at would be if someone said that during the last two years the total viewership of YouTube had declined or collapsed I don't think that's true so I'm sorry you could Google around for that as well as I could I mean again in waterways we talked about a very short span of time here I think that objection was a lot more meaningful five years ago when when veganism was increasing on YouTube because five years ago you might have made the point Oh we'll wait there were more people interested in veganism but also just more people are using YouTube or then they're using it more intensively than they did previously but today I don't think that's that's true at all I think YouTube has remained you know really the dominant video platform on the internet a but you know you can google it but I don't think it's the case the number of people using YouTube is full on half but know that I think that that's actually an objection that applies well to the the optimistic side of the story when people were hopeful but I think that for millions of people the confrontation with slaughterhouse footage and with the basic facts of ecology in the way that YouTube delivered it was tremendously meaningful and changed their lives forever I was already vegan when I saw that stuff on YouTube but it impacted me and it still impacts me like I edit slaughterhouse footage no it still has an effect on me you know to this day and I think there's no doubt that hearing people talk about fitness and diet and exercise and all of those things also there's a unique power of hearing that in your own language and often someone of your own age group - you know retired people can hear elderly people talking about this stuff and get the message hey you can do it you know you can hear someone in their 60s talk about becoming vegan in their 60s and teenagers can your teenagers talk about it I think there is something uniquely powerful and significant to the role YouTube has played for veganism in the last five years the problem is that it led us led many of us into a reckless sort of self-confidence about what would happen next with the vegan movement and here's what I would emphasize to you if veganism is not increasing on that trend chart then we're losing if the line is just stagnating then that means our movement is losing because as you know millions of animals are dying every day the Earth's ecology is being destroyed and also human beings are dying of heart attacks and cancer that could be avoided it's never going to satisfy us to stagnate especially not at this stage where were a tiny despised minority but as long as the the arrow on the chart was going up up up people could delude themselves and I still hear this literally to this day I heard it just yesterday from Kerry France I own a in a YouTube video I heard it from that vegan couple a couple days ago I hear people saying optimistically if only you could go out and convince one of your friends to be vegan and then next year your friend convinces one verse to be vegan then you know within five years the number will have doubled and doubled I've heard that set at so many keynote addresses speeches lectures from academic contacts - - activist context people could delude themselves into thinking that was working when that Google trend line was going up up up when the YouTube views were going up up up okay it wasn't true then and it's not true now and if the line is either stagnating or declining I think that makes us face up to the fact that that optimism was misplaced okay um I think it's misleading misleading think about the meaning of the word misleading misleading doesn't mean anyone's lying to you it doesn't mean there's a scam you know it doesn't mean there's a fraud but people are being misled by that you could have the same number of vegans living in a city and all of them are scraping by with eating at the same restaurants as meat-eaters and you can also have the same number of vegans in a city and there are many successful vegan restaurants because they literally cater to meat eaters you know that that that commercial aspect it's not that it's bad it's just that it's misleading so I currently live in a very small city in Taiwan here I'll just google and give you the population here population I live in a city of 80,000 people and there were about 50 vegan restaurants here about five o if you include variously if you include like small hotdog stands as restaurants we only include like a big building maybe the number is more like thirty in Chinese culture a lot of restaurants are very informal more like hot dogs damn um all of those restaurants are making their living selling vegan food to meat eaters who sometimes eat a vegan meal that's the mass market so that's not evil but that has become normalized in Chinese culture the vast majority of Chinese people eat tofu several times per week they also eat pork several times per week so it's very misleading to point to tofu sales and say people are buying more tofu and to conclude that more people are ethical vegans or even that more people are V are non ethical vegans but who have some kind of mandate to create a vegan society to support the being a movement well that's it that's why they use the term yeah they're conscious flesh it's West yes I think they're also sleepwalking what's those are people have really chosen to describe himself that way see yeah they've actively rejected rejected veganism well look so I just made a video now like within the last hour um and I already just got hate mail for it before if it's two seconds for conversation but you know I'm fundamentally optimistic because I do not think veganism needs to have 10% of the population supporting it to succeed so I just repeat that what I didn't misspeak I don't think veganism needs a hundred percent I don't think it needs fifty percent I don't think it needs ten percent in the same way that the gay rights movement was enormous ly successful in Canada and not even one percent of people really supported it like in terms of being activists involved in it you know in the same way you can have a talented organized minority of vegans who really effectively advocate for victims that's what my hope rests on so I am actually very optimistic about the future of the vegan movement what I'm not optimistic about is lifestyle activism on the Internet which has dominated veganism for approximately five years now I could reflect even within my own life I'm 40 years old I can remember other waves of vegan and animal rights activism that really had a very different character you you may or may not remember within England especially there was the anarcho primitive esta period totally different character and some of those guys are still around here but that was really big in England they had publications and everything and that was framing that was framing animal rights in terms of being anti civilization and anti-technology very different men so you know um different one of course within England you guys had the whole al F the sort of militant tattoos on the side your head style of home vegan active not even animal rights activism whether or not there with you you know rescuing dolphins from from zoos and stuff and getting put in prison for it so I mean different waves have come and gone I think you know what I'm trying to do is draw people's attach to the fact that this wave actually is on the way out now and it's it's really time to ask what's next but I am fundamentally optimistic because I don't see the objective of veganism being convincing people to eat a vegan diet who don't want to I really see the phase right now as being recruiting talented hard-working people to get out and make the same kind of difference that somebody like Ralph Nader made Ralph Nader was an activist for car safety in the United States nobody cared about car safety he didn't have 50% of Americans supporting him he didn't even have 10% of Americans Boreum less than 1% of Americans cared at all about car safety but they cared a lot because a lot of them were people where you know their cousin had died or their brother had died in a car accident yet a small well-organized passionate minority of people who really had a big impact politically including through public education okay so the I'll answer in a way that draws it back to my original video so the original video where I'm in black and white you notice at one point I put up on screen the number of supporters people have on patreon isn't it amazing that you only have to convince 300 people that you have a good idea to get enough funding and support to take action on that idea that's what I'm optimistic about so think of how hard it would have been in 1965 to photocopy some pamphlets and convince 300 people to support you like financially ultimately you know maybe with their time and effort also mmm the threshold for success when you're looking at veganism ethically and and politically like in terms just pure plug is now really low like I only know gee I only need to commit to 300 people I've got a good idea that's powerful so that's that's where the potential lies and I think that's that's obviously a really pause development that's come out of the silliness and the exuberance of the last five years of vegan activism being preoccupied with the internet this way yes money fame power sex not necessarily in this order these are really powerful motives and they they have you know driven people and rewarded people to devote their devote their lives to YouTube and in some cases to vegan activism in a way that nothing else would have now if you talk to people who are really honest those elements were always present in politics and in even in dissident activist politics in the 1960s and 1970s I met a very sincere anti-vietnam war protester but he you know he heated a lecture to her he was a famous quote he wasn't just an overdose he was a leader or whatever and he admitted to me that you know he slept with an unbelievable number of young women in that period and they I guess literally 1970s going around being a charismatic speaker for you know against the Vietnam War and what a contrast this was to other their political causes in his life you know so I mean those those elements have always been there maybe it's ultimately healthy that the Internet has forced us to face up to those things in a somewhat a transparent way that it kind of holds up the mirror for us to see that and to see you know who's motivated about what so look whether or not using the article I just say I am really aware the United Kingdom and England specifically has a unique history in veganism vegetarianism and animal rights it's unique for better and worse you guys were also the home of the most extreme animal rights terrorism that I think really set the movement back by the years it created many negative stereotypes about animal rights and haunted us for many years you have a lot of terrible cases please that way however England has a uniquely powerful history with animal rights and it's the country where the word vegan was created the first vegan society created so and so forth my concern is this what percentage of the people who now eat a vegan diet are in any way supporting vegan activism or the future of the movement I am right now living in the most extreme case study possible where vegan restaurants are everywhere vegan food products are everywhere they literally have vegan beef jerky at 7-eleven here ok but the vegan movement is nowhere it's non-existent there's no vegan movement here where veganism has just settled into the economy and the culture as a type of restaurant and a type of debt and chill some of these people are ethical vegans but they're still not part of a movement they're still not pushing for social change they're still not trying to achieve a vegan society I should even say that a vegan society is too big they're still not trying to end the slaughter of animals you know that's you know basically to end mechanized slaughterhouses is a reasonable minimum goal for vision ISM if you're not working towards that you know from my perspective it's like well we can have all the processed tofu beef jerky for sale you want but we're still not really making progress as a movement so that's a different kind of threat and a different kind of concern well I ask you this too because I mean this is a sincere human question again you could use this in Eric we gave it open the article biases epithet achill question have you been to a vegan picnic you know could vegan meet-and-greet where many people you don't already know and you're shocked that the people there only talk about food like there's no quit so maybe you don't maybe when you go to those kinds of events in England maybe you go to them you meet vegans and they were also concerned about you know politics in the future the milkman this kind of thing but let me says in Canada like that's 99.9 percent of the people you meet and they're people who are committed to the vegan diet and they they don't give a [ __ ] they have no interest they do not care they do not think in terms of this being a movement that's progressing towards a goal of actually closing down slaughterhouses you know they have no so again it's not even a question of active or pardon me it's not a distinction between people who are activists and people who are non activists you know it's it's kind of inert vegans versus vegans who really are working towards you know the creation of the vegan society pushing towards those goals which you know again they may do that by donating money or they may do that by watching YouTube videos let's be honest a lot of people are not going to be activists but they're still going to be vegans pushing for social change if we look I was gonna say even though you're only talking you're only talking to one person at it for one person at a time when you go to a picnic like that I think I find you can really hear in their voice like you know they'll put up with you if you're talking about ethics and politics and activism you know slaughterhouses or animals but then you see what they're really interested in talking about is like the difference between authentic and inauthentic Thai food like I know a lot of stuff about food like that but I don't care about it cuz I've lived in Thailand and you know I've been vegan and I'm sure like I really do not want to tell you the difference between Thai food in the United States and telling it is of absolutely no it I dunno I have an answer to the questions you I could talk to you for an hour about that topic and I could tell you about where the best Thai restaurants are in Seattle and you know in Paris France but I have absolutely no interest in that you know what I'm interest so I just say even though it's on that human scale it's not gonna be it's not gonna be data I think a lot of us walk away from those social engagements with the chilling sense of the hollowness of some of those statistics about about veganism so yeah when I look around at something like the metrics you've heard me discuss at such length who's actually interested in veganism and who's interested in vegan activism and you know why is it that someone someone who's genuinely famous within the movement like Gary France aione has so few people who are interested in hearing what he has to say and so on I think those are all really meaningful of warnings for us to kind of pay attention to yeah look you should mention that in the same article because I mean I think that's the same I think that's another kind of indirect metric when you're looking at the numbers for your own articles it's like well what if we actually have a problem with people just being interested in food and again it's not I'm not saying that's evil I'm saying it's misleading you know yeah you know for me it was it was really depressing going to vegan events in places like Vancouver and Victoria and you know you should ask you should ask questions if there's anything you want to know but yeah you know what when I need other people who are vegan I do have the expectation that we're gonna be kindred spirits in the sense I do think that were people who have you know we've witnessed the horror of industrial animal agriculture and we share a common motivation to one day change it to one day you know erase it from the world and you know if you're looking around saying hey wait is this what we've got to work with is this the movement the the movement is not the marketing of packaged products they're just two very fundamentally different things I went to a vegan conference here in Taiwan in the capital city in Taipei and it was an enormous event and the only thing I noticed conference is probably not the right word I guess convention it was a convention at a Convention Center all this is in Chinese of course and the actual venue you could go up about three floors and look down at the Convention Center for you get a bird's-eye view it was nothing but food industry it was absolutely nothing but history and you know included some big corporations and also some small niche corporations and change the chains of restaurants and stuff but I mean that was it there was there was I was expecting there to at least be representation of kind of Buddhist religious movements or Taoist religious movements or something no I mean it was like going to a comic book and or a Star Wars convention where it's just the industry that profits our - was this huge convention so now again as a vegan I'm not gonna tell you that's bad it's not bad it's worrying you know I'm concerned and you know when you look around when you look around the kind of projects you'd like to do as an activist and say well okay it's not just why can't I do this or how difficult it gonna be for me to do this I think you have the answer to the question why is it that nobody else is doing this already kind of thing right and I think the other question is as it gets easier and easier you get a lower and lower caliber of person with less and less motivation who's who's joining so that you might you might use this in the article so I just draw your attention this is this an interesting and true anecdote you could use in the article if you look at the statistics you know my education is in political science including this kind of social sciences if you look at the statistics it seems as if cigarettes are becoming more addictive decade by decade it's an illusion the reality is the people who find it easy to quit smoking already quit smoking so like in the decade of the 1950s 60s 70s all the people who find like once it's clear that cigarettes cause cancer and they're bad for health generally all the people who could quit smoking easily already quit smoking so as you move forward in time chronologically through the 1980s and 1990s it seems as if cigarettes are more addictive and the people who do quit a higher percentage of them have a higher recidivism rate the higher percentage return and so on you have something similar with veganism the people who find it easy to see a video of slaughterhouse conditions or read some simple facts but the ecology or whatever it is the people who can respond to the facts by saying wow I have to do the right thing because it's the right thing to do you know those people well they're it's going to seem that there are fewer and fewer of them because the people for whom that's easy they've already done it already made that change so I think I don't have any one word for that I don't have a snappy you know title to put on that phenomenon but that's because it's not the same as a point of diminishing returns if the point is that the people who are highly motivated have already done it the people who find it easy psychologically have already done it and then you're getting deeper and deeper into the part of the population who are reluctant or unable or you know who lacked whatever peculiar form of talent it is to take that step right oh okay your point with another point or answer your question with another question um what about the difference between a movement where you think you could have real outcomes you think you can make a difference and one where you can't so one reason why people showed up for anti-vietnam War protests was that they really had the delusion that they could end war that they could have an impact in American politics you know actually I would actually say that was a dilution I think I really do not think that protesters marching in the street with signs had any impact on when the Vietnam War ended and now but the belief that you can make a difference or that there are real outcomes now you know I am opposed to the old illegal methods of of animal Rights Act I really am I'm totally morally poseable however you can see that obviously part of what motivated those people was the fact that if they stole a dolphin you know they got to see that dolphin go free and I saw an interview with a multi-millionaire you could google this you probably have the story on on PBS there was a multi-millionaire who was one of the co-creators of the TV show The Simpsons you know the Bart Simpson Lisa Simpson so he had millions and millions of dollars and you know he got so frustrated with other forms of activism that at the very end of his life the less Cochlear's he spent all his money on Direct Animal Liberation but which I mean like buying all the animals in a circus and setting them free so sleek is either multi billionaire but like we literally like buy elephants you know I would and stuff and he said you know the reason I do this now is because all the other forms of charity I donate it to and although the good forms there was no tangible outcome there was nothing you could see there was no impact so this this has a double-edged sword for us you know five years ago people said vegans said come here on YouTube do you uh in skin tight clothing show off your body tell people how happy you are being vegan and you'll get outcomes to go to see Theo comes and we all know there's a sense in which that's true and there's a sense in which it's complete [ __ ] you know K now what happens when all the money disappears from that game what happens when all the other motivations disappear from that game you know now we're left really you don't wondering we're having to look at at a new chapter for veganism in many ways as you know I think that was kind of a dangerous distraction for the movement but you can also say okay so what are the lessons learned now going forward because people are very profoundly motivated by outcomes they can see or touch or hear and even if that outcome is just that a bunch of people send you email saying hey I saw you doing yoga in your skin tight outfit and you know what that motivated me to try going on a vegan diet you know I'm going to understand people did get some positive encouragement from that that made them feel this really was a viable form of activism people really believed it was going to save the planet and it was going to change the world yeah I think the next step is going to be challenging education and children's entertainment I think that's the next step the challenge to education I think is literally gonna be vegans organizing to challenge whats in textbooks in schools everything from health to you know how the slaughter of animals is depicted various things having to do with ecology and what-have-you and yeah sorry so there's a whole range of things I think they'll formally challenge in school curricula in how how schools teach ecology animals what-have-you and then I think there's gonna be a war so that that's obviously a more hostile process of negotiations and objections what-have-you and then I think there's gonna be a more positive and creative element of vegans having to create new storybooks and new movies and new cartoons and if trying to challenge the culture that way I think that's I think that's probably the the next the next step yes and comic books - sir comic books are another very important example yeah I do and I mean for me I can now look back on my life in my childhood and I can see how many ideas about the world I got from from comic books as a child you know the extent to what's your view of the world is shaped by these one of the examples really for my grandparents generation was the original movie Bambi showing people shooting a deer you know you know it's corn it's something it's no matter a joking thing but no whole generation of people were shocked and horrified by watching Bambi die in that cartoon yeah well I think I think you're getting into a great topic for a separate article here but you know um another example I like to point to is in black American culture the significance of kung-fu movies so really is starting in the 1970s black Americans started watching Hong Kong Chinese kung-fu movies and like many famous rappers and black celebrities most of them became vegetarian because of those movies and then 20 years later they became vegan a lot of those guys are vegan now and you know I've heard them talk about this this is not me putting words in their mouth it was really meaningful for them as black Americans to have these action heroes who were not white and not Christian and who talked about Buddhist philosophy broadly speaking you know that they got interested in vegetarianism not in a soft-hearted sense of saving Bambi you know not in a kind of affair or sympathetic sense this was part of a tough you know um aggressive aesthetic a heroic aesthetic the you you know the action hero you know was vegetarian that vegetarianism was part of being a tough guy and these kung fu movies so you know my point being here there's a whole range that includes Bambi and includes Dumbo and probably includes things like kung fu movies or you know science fiction movies in which you know the future is just implicitly vegan or that comes up in some sense you know yeah I mean I do think that's that's an area that we're now you know there's there's a lot of progress that can be made but look I mean you asked me you asked me what am i optimistic about you know I think that it would be quite reasonable for someone to criticize me and say well that's that's really not all that optimistic okay should we wrap it up for now the next couple days I'm running off of airplanes so it's not a good time to talk to me but in general you know I have nothing better to do and also I am really sincerely passionate about the future of the vegan movement this is true yeah I completely lack the delusion that what I do on veganism would be interesting to a mass market yeah and you know I think you can see this is consonant with everything I've just been talking about this conversation I look at my audience like that that video in black and white 2,000 people saw that video you can say 2,000 people as a small number of people well it's enough people to make a big difference if you really want to do something it's a lot a lot of ideas get started with fewer than 2,000 people who believe in that idea you know so right right right and you know the message on delivering is not easy to take but you know most of what we need to do is cheap it just requires you know highly talented hardware being dedicated people to do it and as they say that's that's the really optimistic message buried in that video is hey look to be successful at this you only need to convince 300 people that your project is worth funding and then you know a project can get off the ground yeah [Music]
step one is people having interest in veganism step two is that they go on the internet and learn more about veganism then step three is some talented minority those people get organized to do you know lobbying education outreach activism but it is true the metrics we're looking at here are only looking at that first step however it's also out of that broader public interest that you get donor support for the movement so on and so forth so when you have declining interest it's it's true I'm conceding the point here declining public interest is not the same as the decline of the movement however I think you have to sound the alarm when you're looking at several years of decline in interest yeah and as you know in the video I make the point if I were using these statistics to tell you the opposite which we all were just a few years ago I mean I don't know how long you've been in the vegan movement but just five years ago everyone was pointing to the same type of statistics and saying hey look the amount of interest in veganism is doubling and tripling and so on that was quite appropriate at the time I mean I think you probably know what was inappropriate or unfortunate about it was that it led people to a sense of reckless optimism about where or social media would take us so that's why I think it's so meaningful to reflect right now where is social media taking us as the tide goes down as those numbers are going down yeah right so I think it's good that the discussion that was started by the video people did follow up so you know I followed up by putting together a list of I think about 28 YouTube channels and crunching the numbers on those and then that inspired my friend Theo so I won't use Theo's full name but you know his YouTube channel was actually called activist journeys but I sent you that so the discussion led to looking for more statistics to back up what the first video showed and Theo put together the list of I think it's 286 youtubers and that is and then you folded up further so okay all right try to put this in a sign soundbite thought-form okay it's true the first step was to look at google trend data and then to look at a survey of vegan youtubers we then move that forward from about 28 YouTube channels to about 300 YouTube channels and you've got the link for the full list and then I pointed out that even though that survey of 286 or whatever it is even though that was quite compelling data at that point the real numbers were even worse because that didn't include the channels that had quit entirely the channels that have been deleted and that started a further effort to try to list the the deleted channels so now we have that data also so yeah when you when you add that together it backs up my original hypothesis so you're correct at the first step of the first video the numbers didn't prove the case when way or the other but now I think it's it's fair to say I've made my point I think there are significant numbers to back that up you okay no I do not but the so the the all the hypothesis you're hinting at would be if someone said that during the last two years the total viewership of YouTube had declined or collapsed I don't think that's true so I'm sorry you could Google around for that as well as I could I mean again in waterways we talked about a very short span of time here I think that objection was a lot more meaningful five years ago when when veganism was increasing on YouTube because five years ago you might have made the point Oh we'll wait there were more people interested in veganism but also just more people are using YouTube or then they're using it more intensively than they did previously but today I don't think that's that's true at all I think YouTube has remained you know really the dominant video platform on the internet a but you know you can google it but I don't think it's the case the number of people using YouTube is full on half but know that I think that that's actually an objection that applies well to the the optimistic side of the story when people were hopeful but I think that for millions of people the confrontation with slaughterhouse footage and with the basic facts of ecology in the way that YouTube delivered it was tremendously meaningful and changed their lives forever I was already vegan when I saw that stuff on YouTube but it impacted me and it still impacts me like I edit slaughterhouse footage no it still has an effect on me you know to this day and I think there's no doubt that hearing people talk about fitness and diet and exercise and all of those things also there's a unique power of hearing that in your own language and often someone of your own age group - you know retired people can hear elderly people talking about this stuff and get the message hey you can do it you know you can hear someone in their 60s talk about becoming vegan in their 60s and teenagers can your teenagers talk about it I think there is something uniquely powerful and significant to the role YouTube has played for veganism in the last five years the problem is that it led us led many of us into a reckless sort of self-confidence about what would happen next with the vegan movement and here's what I would emphasize to you if veganism is not increasing on that trend chart then we're losing if the line is just stagnating then that means our movement is losing because as you know millions of animals are dying every day the Earth's ecology is being destroyed and also human beings are dying of heart attacks and cancer that could be avoided it's never going to satisfy us to stagnate especially not at this stage where were a tiny despised minority but as long as the the arrow on the chart was going up up up people could delude themselves and I still hear this literally to this day I heard it just yesterday from Kerry France I own a in a YouTube video I heard it from that vegan couple a couple days ago I hear people saying optimistically if only you could go out and convince one of your friends to be vegan and then next year your friend convinces one verse to be vegan then you know within five years the number will have doubled and doubled I've heard that set at so many keynote addresses speeches lectures from academic contacts - - activist context people could delude themselves into thinking that was working when that Google trend line was going up up up when the YouTube views were going up up up okay it wasn't true then and it's not true now and if the line is either stagnating or declining I think that makes us face up to the fact that that optimism was misplaced okay um I think it's misleading misleading think about the meaning of the word misleading misleading doesn't mean anyone's lying to you it doesn't mean there's a scam you know it doesn't mean there's a fraud but people are being misled by that you could have the same number of vegans living in a city and all of them are scraping by with eating at the same restaurants as meat-eaters and you can also have the same number of vegans in a city and there are many successful vegan restaurants because they literally cater to meat eaters you know that that that commercial aspect it's not that it's bad it's just that it's misleading so I currently live in a very small city in Taiwan here I'll just google and give you the population here population I live in a city of 80,000 people and there were about 50 vegan restaurants here about five o if you include variously if you include like small hotdog stands as restaurants we only include like a big building maybe the number is more like thirty in Chinese culture a lot of restaurants are very informal more like hot dogs damn um all of those restaurants are making their living selling vegan food to meat eaters who sometimes eat a vegan meal that's the mass market so that's not evil but that has become normalized in Chinese culture the vast majority of Chinese people eat tofu several times per week they also eat pork several times per week so it's very misleading to point to tofu sales and say people are buying more tofu and to conclude that more people are ethical vegans or even that more people are V are non ethical vegans but who have some kind of mandate to create a vegan society to support the being a movement well that's it that's why they use the term yeah they're conscious flesh it's West yes I think they're also sleepwalking what's those are people have really chosen to describe himself that way see yeah they've actively rejected rejected veganism well look so I just made a video now like within the last hour um and I already just got hate mail for it before if it's two seconds for conversation but you know I'm fundamentally optimistic because I do not think veganism needs to have 10% of the population supporting it to succeed so I just repeat that what I didn't misspeak I don't think veganism needs a hundred percent I don't think it needs fifty percent I don't think it needs ten percent in the same way that the gay rights movement was enormous ly successful in Canada and not even one percent of people really supported it like in terms of being activists involved in it you know in the same way you can have a talented organized minority of vegans who really effectively advocate for victims that's what my hope rests on so I am actually very optimistic about the future of the vegan movement what I'm not optimistic about is lifestyle activism on the Internet which has dominated veganism for approximately five years now I could reflect even within my own life I'm 40 years old I can remember other waves of vegan and animal rights activism that really had a very different character you you may or may not remember within England especially there was the anarcho primitive esta period totally different character and some of those guys are still around here but that was really big in England they had publications and everything and that was framing that was framing animal rights in terms of being anti civilization and anti-technology very different men so you know um different one of course within England you guys had the whole al F the sort of militant tattoos on the side your head style of home vegan active not even animal rights activism whether or not there with you you know rescuing dolphins from from zoos and stuff and getting put in prison for it so I mean different waves have come and gone I think you know what I'm trying to do is draw people's attach to the fact that this wave actually is on the way out now and it's it's really time to ask what's next but I am fundamentally optimistic because I don't see the objective of veganism being convincing people to eat a vegan diet who don't want to I really see the phase right now as being recruiting talented hard-working people to get out and make the same kind of difference that somebody like Ralph Nader made Ralph Nader was an activist for car safety in the United States nobody cared about car safety he didn't have 50% of Americans supporting him he didn't even have 10% of Americans Boreum less than 1% of Americans cared at all about car safety but they cared a lot because a lot of them were people where you know their cousin had died or their brother had died in a car accident yet a small well-organized passionate minority of people who really had a big impact politically including through public education okay so the I'll answer in a way that draws it back to my original video so the original video where I'm in black and white you notice at one point I put up on screen the number of supporters people have on patreon isn't it amazing that you only have to convince 300 people that you have a good idea to get enough funding and support to take action on that idea that's what I'm optimistic about so think of how hard it would have been in 1965 to photocopy some pamphlets and convince 300 people to support you like financially ultimately you know maybe with their time and effort also mmm the threshold for success when you're looking at veganism ethically and and politically like in terms just pure plug is now really low like I only know gee I only need to commit to 300 people I've got a good idea that's powerful so that's that's where the potential lies and I think that's that's obviously a really pause development that's come out of the silliness and the exuberance of the last five years of vegan activism being preoccupied with the internet this way yes money fame power sex not necessarily in this order these are really powerful motives and they they have you know driven people and rewarded people to devote their devote their lives to YouTube and in some cases to vegan activism in a way that nothing else would have now if you talk to people who are really honest those elements were always present in politics and in even in dissident activist politics in the 1960s and 1970s I met a very sincere anti-vietnam war protester but he you know he heated a lecture to her he was a famous quote he wasn't just an overdose he was a leader or whatever and he admitted to me that you know he slept with an unbelievable number of young women in that period and they I guess literally 1970s going around being a charismatic speaker for you know against the Vietnam War and what a contrast this was to other their political causes in his life you know so I mean those those elements have always been there maybe it's ultimately healthy that the Internet has forced us to face up to those things in a somewhat a transparent way that it kind of holds up the mirror for us to see that and to see you know who's motivated about what so look whether or not using the article I just say I am really aware the United Kingdom and England specifically has a unique history in veganism vegetarianism and animal rights it's unique for better and worse you guys were also the home of the most extreme animal rights terrorism that I think really set the movement back by the years it created many negative stereotypes about animal rights and haunted us for many years you have a lot of terrible cases please that way however England has a uniquely powerful history with animal rights and it's the country where the word vegan was created the first vegan society created so and so forth my concern is this what percentage of the people who now eat a vegan diet are in any way supporting vegan activism or the future of the movement I am right now living in the most extreme case study possible where vegan restaurants are everywhere vegan food products are everywhere they literally have vegan beef jerky at 7-eleven here ok but the vegan movement is nowhere it's non-existent there's no vegan movement here where veganism has just settled into the economy and the culture as a type of restaurant and a type of debt and chill some of these people are ethical vegans but they're still not part of a movement they're still not pushing for social change they're still not trying to achieve a vegan society I should even say that a vegan society is too big they're still not trying to end the slaughter of animals you know that's you know basically to end mechanized slaughterhouses is a reasonable minimum goal for vision ISM if you're not working towards that you know from my perspective it's like well we can have all the processed tofu beef jerky for sale you want but we're still not really making progress as a movement so that's a different kind of threat and a different kind of concern well I ask you this too because I mean this is a sincere human question again you could use this in Eric we gave it open the article biases epithet achill question have you been to a vegan picnic you know could vegan meet-and-greet where many people you don't already know and you're shocked that the people there only talk about food like there's no quit so maybe you don't maybe when you go to those kinds of events in England maybe you go to them you meet vegans and they were also concerned about you know politics in the future the milkman this kind of thing but let me says in Canada like that's 99.9 percent of the people you meet and they're people who are committed to the vegan diet and they they don't give a [ __ ] they have no interest they do not care they do not think in terms of this being a movement that's progressing towards a goal of actually closing down slaughterhouses you know they have no so again it's not even a question of active or pardon me it's not a distinction between people who are activists and people who are non activists you know it's it's kind of inert vegans versus vegans who really are working towards you know the creation of the vegan society pushing towards those goals which you know again they may do that by donating money or they may do that by watching YouTube videos let's be honest a lot of people are not going to be activists but they're still going to be vegans pushing for social change if we look I was gonna say even though you're only talking you're only talking to one person at it for one person at a time when you go to a picnic like that I think I find you can really hear in their voice like you know they'll put up with you if you're talking about ethics and politics and activism you know slaughterhouses or animals but then you see what they're really interested in talking about is like the difference between authentic and inauthentic Thai food like I know a lot of stuff about food like that but I don't care about it cuz I've lived in Thailand and you know I've been vegan and I'm sure like I really do not want to tell you the difference between Thai food in the United States and telling it is of absolutely no it I dunno I have an answer to the questions you I could talk to you for an hour about that topic and I could tell you about where the best Thai restaurants are in Seattle and you know in Paris France but I have absolutely no interest in that you know what I'm interest so I just say even though it's on that human scale it's not gonna be it's not gonna be data I think a lot of us walk away from those social engagements with the chilling sense of the hollowness of some of those statistics about about veganism so yeah when I look around at something like the metrics you've heard me discuss at such length who's actually interested in veganism and who's interested in vegan activism and you know why is it that someone someone who's genuinely famous within the movement like Gary France aione has so few people who are interested in hearing what he has to say and so on I think those are all really meaningful of warnings for us to kind of pay attention to yeah look you should mention that in the same article because I mean I think that's the same I think that's another kind of indirect metric when you're looking at the numbers for your own articles it's like well what if we actually have a problem with people just being interested in food and again it's not I'm not saying that's evil I'm saying it's misleading you know yeah you know for me it was it was really depressing going to vegan events in places like Vancouver and Victoria and you know you should ask you should ask questions if there's anything you want to know but yeah you know what when I need other people who are vegan I do have the expectation that we're gonna be kindred spirits in the sense I do think that were people who have you know we've witnessed the horror of industrial animal agriculture and we share a common motivation to one day change it to one day you know erase it from the world and you know if you're looking around saying hey wait is this what we've got to work with is this the movement the the movement is not the marketing of packaged products they're just two very fundamentally different things I went to a vegan conference here in Taiwan in the capital city in Taipei and it was an enormous event and the only thing I noticed conference is probably not the right word I guess convention it was a convention at a Convention Center all this is in Chinese of course and the actual venue you could go up about three floors and look down at the Convention Center for you get a bird's-eye view it was nothing but food industry it was absolutely nothing but history and you know included some big corporations and also some small niche corporations and change the chains of restaurants and stuff but I mean that was it there was there was I was expecting there to at least be representation of kind of Buddhist religious movements or Taoist religious movements or something no I mean it was like going to a comic book and or a Star Wars convention where it's just the industry that profits our - was this huge convention so now again as a vegan I'm not gonna tell you that's bad it's not bad it's worrying you know I'm concerned and you know when you look around when you look around the kind of projects you'd like to do as an activist and say well okay it's not just why can't I do this or how difficult it gonna be for me to do this I think you have the answer to the question why is it that nobody else is doing this already kind of thing right and I think the other question is as it gets easier and easier you get a lower and lower caliber of person with less and less motivation who's who's joining so that you might you might use this in the article so I just draw your attention this is this an interesting and true anecdote you could use in the article if you look at the statistics you know my education is in political science including this kind of social sciences if you look at the statistics it seems as if cigarettes are becoming more addictive decade by decade it's an illusion the reality is the people who find it easy to quit smoking already quit smoking so like in the decade of the 1950s 60s 70s all the people who find like once it's clear that cigarettes cause cancer and they're bad for health generally all the people who could quit smoking easily already quit smoking so as you move forward in time chronologically through the 1980s and 1990s it seems as if cigarettes are more addictive and the people who do quit a higher percentage of them have a higher recidivism rate the higher percentage return and so on you have something similar with veganism the people who find it easy to see a video of slaughterhouse conditions or read some simple facts but the ecology or whatever it is the people who can respond to the facts by saying wow I have to do the right thing because it's the right thing to do you know those people well they're it's going to seem that there are fewer and fewer of them because the people for whom that's easy they've already done it already made that change so I think I don't have any one word for that I don't have a snappy you know title to put on that phenomenon but that's because it's not the same as a point of diminishing returns if the point is that the people who are highly motivated have already done it the people who find it easy psychologically have already done it and then you're getting deeper and deeper into the part of the population who are reluctant or unable or you know who lacked whatever peculiar form of talent it is to take that step right oh okay your point with another point or answer your question with another question um what about the difference between a movement where you think you could have real outcomes you think you can make a difference and one where you can't so one reason why people showed up for anti-vietnam War protests was that they really had the delusion that they could end war that they could have an impact in American politics you know actually I would actually say that was a dilution I think I really do not think that protesters marching in the street with signs had any impact on when the Vietnam War ended and now but the belief that you can make a difference or that there are real outcomes now you know I am opposed to the old illegal methods of of animal Rights Act I really am I'm totally morally poseable however you can see that obviously part of what motivated those people was the fact that if they stole a dolphin you know they got to see that dolphin go free and I saw an interview with a multi-millionaire you could google this you probably have the story on on PBS there was a multi-millionaire who was one of the co-creators of the TV show The Simpsons you know the Bart Simpson Lisa Simpson so he had millions and millions of dollars and you know he got so frustrated with other forms of activism that at the very end of his life the less Cochlear's he spent all his money on Direct Animal Liberation but which I mean like buying all the animals in a circus and setting them free so sleek is either multi billionaire but like we literally like buy elephants you know I would and stuff and he said you know the reason I do this now is because all the other forms of charity I donate it to and although the good forms there was no tangible outcome there was nothing you could see there was no impact so this this has a double-edged sword for us you know five years ago people said vegans said come here on YouTube do you uh in skin tight clothing show off your body tell people how happy you are being vegan and you'll get outcomes to go to see Theo comes and we all know there's a sense in which that's true and there's a sense in which it's complete [ __ ] you know K now what happens when all the money disappears from that game what happens when all the other motivations disappear from that game you know now we're left really you don't wondering we're having to look at at a new chapter for veganism in many ways as you know I think that was kind of a dangerous distraction for the movement but you can also say okay so what are the lessons learned now going forward because people are very profoundly motivated by outcomes they can see or touch or hear and even if that outcome is just that a bunch of people send you email saying hey I saw you doing yoga in your skin tight outfit and you know what that motivated me to try going on a vegan diet you know I'm going to understand people did get some positive encouragement from that that made them feel this really was a viable form of activism people really believed it was going to save the planet and it was going to change the world yeah I think the next step is going to be challenging education and children's entertainment I think that's the next step the challenge to education I think is literally gonna be vegans organizing to challenge whats in textbooks in schools everything from health to you know how the slaughter of animals is depicted various things having to do with ecology and what-have-you and yeah sorry so there's a whole range of things I think they'll formally challenge in school curricula in how how schools teach ecology animals what-have-you and then I think there's gonna be a war so that that's obviously a more hostile process of negotiations and objections what-have-you and then I think there's gonna be a more positive and creative element of vegans having to create new storybooks and new movies and new cartoons and if trying to challenge the culture that way I think that's I think that's probably the the next the next step yes and comic books - sir comic books are another very important example yeah I do and I mean for me I can now look back on my life in my childhood and I can see how many ideas about the world I got from from comic books as a child you know the extent to what's your view of the world is shaped by these one of the examples really for my grandparents generation was the original movie Bambi showing people shooting a deer you know you know it's corn it's something it's no matter a joking thing but no whole generation of people were shocked and horrified by watching Bambi die in that cartoon yeah well I think I think you're getting into a great topic for a separate article here but you know um another example I like to point to is in black American culture the significance of kung-fu movies so really is starting in the 1970s black Americans started watching Hong Kong Chinese kung-fu movies and like many famous rappers and black celebrities most of them became vegetarian because of those movies and then 20 years later they became vegan a lot of those guys are vegan now and you know I've heard them talk about this this is not me putting words in their mouth it was really meaningful for them as black Americans to have these action heroes who were not white and not Christian and who talked about Buddhist philosophy broadly speaking you know that they got interested in vegetarianism not in a soft-hearted sense of saving Bambi you know not in a kind of affair or sympathetic sense this was part of a tough you know um aggressive aesthetic a heroic aesthetic the you you know the action hero you know was vegetarian that vegetarianism was part of being a tough guy and these kung fu movies so you know my point being here there's a whole range that includes Bambi and includes Dumbo and probably includes things like kung fu movies or you know science fiction movies in which you know the future is just implicitly vegan or that comes up in some sense you know yeah I mean I do think that's that's an area that we're now you know there's there's a lot of progress that can be made but look I mean you asked me you asked me what am i optimistic about you know I think that it would be quite reasonable for someone to criticize me and say well that's that's really not all that optimistic okay should we wrap it up for now the next couple days I'm running off of airplanes so it's not a good time to talk to me but in general you know I have nothing better to do and also I am really sincerely passionate about the future of the vegan movement this is true yeah I completely lack the delusion that what I do on veganism would be interesting to a mass market yeah and you know I think you can see this is consonant with everything I've just been talking about this conversation I look at my audience like that that video in black and white 2,000 people saw that video you can say 2,000 people as a small number of people well it's enough people to make a big difference if you really want to do something it's a lot a lot of ideas get started with fewer than 2,000 people who believe in that idea you know so right right right and you know the message on delivering is not easy to take but you know most of what we need to do is cheap it just requires you know highly talented hardware being dedicated people to do it and as they say that's that's the really optimistic message buried in that video is hey look to be successful at this you only need to convince 300 people that your project is worth funding and then you know a project can get off the ground yeah [Music]