The Real Cost of Meat (Vegan vs. Vegan)

so we just got done watching like the
vegans new video the real cost of meat and one of the first questions that he asks in his video is well he he says that everybody hit everybody who is vegan has walked through the grocery store and looked at a package of meat and wondered how can this be so cheap this is scary and the rest of the video doesn't really answer this question why is the price of meat so cheap it goes on to talk about a lot of other issues that don't answer the question so he goes off topic quickly and becomes a parade of miscellaneous and spurious vegan complaints about American politics on life on Earth yeah so it never gets back to answer and I want to ask you more about some of the specific things that he talks about in this video but I wanted to record a video with you about this because at the end of it I was like okay so why is me it's so cheap of course I thought about it before I remember having a conversation like this with my dad one time and saying that we're eaten we need to have more subsidies for fruits and vegetables to even out the cost so that people are more inclined to buy fruits and vegetables to buy I mean rice itself is so cheap and so is beans but people still aren't buying it so I just wanted to make a video about this topic in particular why is meat so cheap and kind of answer that question because Mike the vegans video didn't accomplish this right now so aside from expressing my complete contempt for Mike the vegan I would answer this firstly by answer the question of why would I know my university degree is political science but and I always had interest in these issues like Melissa I really started off being interested in ecology and then being interested in veganism for that reason when I was living in Laos Laos is a third-world post-war communist dictatorship in Southeast Asia country very much recovering from being bombed and destroyed by the US Army the unique set of political economic services when I was in Laos I really applied the knowledge I've gained in university and asked and knew all these questions both in contrasting animal agriculture to vegetable and grain agriculture and also in contrasting fruit agriculture to opium that was the alternative so that's why I didn't when Melissa asked me this just a couple minutes ago off the top of my head I listened up all of these factors for why farming something like apples or strawberries is actually more expensive seemingly on a per unit basis for and settle again for you know the uninitiated it just seems unjust that apples are so expensive or strawberries are so expensive well meat is so cheap and then when you start to go through what what the factors are did by bid it starts to make sense mm-hmm yeah likewise as you say so like in Laos I was dealing with a couple of different sources of Mythology sort of intentional disinformation about agriculture and then dealing with a certain number of inconvenient truths that related both to meet in Laos it was mostly beef we're looking at weren't real looking at chicken or pork um and it has bearing on opium and opium eradication policy right so people would often present so sorry I just a positive one second you remember there was a hit movie called and Inconvenient Truth yeah we as vegans have to deal with some inconvenience right leather production is incredibly profitable in many cases in many countries the profitability of leather supports the less profitable or sometimes loss making beef and veal industry right you can also be in a country where it's dairy production at something like butter production is more profitable that's supporting the price of producing beef and beef what have you you know different stages of the process can be more profitable than supporting others yeah I just wanted to say like that you know we I think one time we watched a short documentary about how government buys and this is mentioned in this video yeah the government will by excess dairy you know access Terry Brooks so you're supporting the price yeah it must be so cheap to produce milk right there's this oversupply it the when the place gets too low the government intervenes try to maintain the price of it at a certain anyway right like so they were they were they were trying to encourage me right really raising me well let's just let's just talk about who they is right this is this is why I was so intimate about this in Laos and this is a real and Commedia truth for me as a vegan for me as someone who cares about ecology there inconvenient truths I have to face up to also United Nations agencies and international charities more encouraging people in a third world country to stop farming rice stop farming I know nuts or beans or garlic garlic was another local crop and to instead go into producing beef right animal agriculture so of course I'm horrified and I want to believe this is an economic disaster I want to believe it's not profitable I want to believe it's bad for these people and I'm meeting with and talking to face-to-face government officials and in my last period there it especially was government officials who were agricultural engineers and involved in agriculture for poverty alleviation but I are you know hide yourself were you gonna deal with are you gonna deal with real facts and the inconvenient truth was by god access to when I looked at the math the same math United Nations growing in the same math other charitable agencies like USAID United States aid agency no no it's just it's an international charity run by this government USA eat another EU cherries rolling in and guess what these government officials were not lying to me when they said that you know raising cattle raising beef was the number one catalyst for farmers escaping poverty that is a ladder I would have liked that they based that rice farmers locked in poverty and that when they were given assistance to get into beef agriculture they would suddenly be able to afford things like motorcycles and what-have-you and education for their children health care and everything else the economic reality was for me an inconvenient truth right right and I I agree with that completely and that's I feel like that was how Mike the vegan was trying to convince people and I agree that like as a vegan I want to believe that it is more expensive than then the price day yeah and when he opens my huge admission right he opens with the admission that if you do the math in the United States of America a little bit there India's America the government subsidies various forms of state intervention maybe lower the price of meat products by 2 percent up to 5 percent a range of 2 percent to 5 percent that is a huge own-goal that's a huge concession and he then spends the rest of the video kind of invisible or like just artist I don't know imaginary statistics make you feel like the cost is really higher than it is you know he goes on to talk about all the you know as you said all the horrible things about animal agriculture like the cost of psychological assistance like this isn't really the cost this isn't talking about why meat is so cheap and I think this is really important to face up to as vegans that is more expensive in some ways to be vegan than it is to not be vegan and obviously it is cheaper to buy and yeah well I meet from from the store that it is to buy vegetables and fruits I only said this stuff about Laos and production of median Laos as really explaining why would my opinion be well informed about this I already had an interest in it when I was in Canada and then I went to this third world country where I really did an enormous amount of reading on how farming worked and didn't work there and what government policy was and then with the policy of international aid agency was United Nations agencies and other actors in the game and I wasn't just interested in meat but meat was a huge flush when another crop was much debated with rubber rubber agriculture then another one was as mentioned opium you know so this familiarized me with a lot of the factors I just talked about with you without reference to that Millia so a lot of people would again this is about convenient half-truths versus an inconvenient whole truth a lot of people would present these statistics saying oh look it's so much more profitable to farm apples it's so much more profitable to farm strawberries than it is to farm opium so all we need to do is get out there and educate farmers in Laos and they're all going to switch to being apples and strawberries right so we just talked about this at the con to me OPM doesn't need a refrigerator OPM doesn't even need a truck opium in its raw form it's like it's like a rubber ball and they produce this almost indestructible rubbery substance that's extracted from the opium plants and you can load it on the back of a donkey carriage and you know a donkey can pull a wooden cart and that's it no if you do that with strawberries those strawberries are not going to reach market in a form that anyone wants to buy right right no that's so obvious I mean that was one of the things that we talked about was now like that animal agriculture it isn't it isn't ruled or governed by schedule it isn't governed by like what the schedule of seasons you can you can schedule as you said to have more turkeys slaughtered around Thanksgiving or around Christmas and and as you said like in where where oranges are grown they're basically worthless but then like right yeah anyway in medieval or ancient times all farmers were slaves to the season but the switch to modern factory farming we want to say modern intensive meat agriculture it has broken the relationship between farmers and the schedule the seasons so one of the excited appointed melissa's look factor number one producing corn one time of sweet corn here for human consumption is categorically different from producing what Americans call cow corn for towel consumption for animal consumption food that is at a grade or quality or even level of safety and hygiene for human beings to eat where human beings are going to pick it up in the shop and look at it it's color it's condition and they're gonna pay money for it and they've gotta compared to competition - okay so here's some sweet corn imported from here and assume and they're gonna pick which one's best you have to produce it at a very very high grade and what animals are fed especially in a factory farm system especially modern intensive my culture they are fed often the garbage of other crops you know it can be the chaff separated from the inedible parts of grains you know the garbage produces a byproduct of basically any other form of plant agriculture and the the nutritional deficits in that feed whatever it may be I mean where I was in Southeast Asia again you could literally could be interment ear of sweet corn it could be that the sweet corn feeds a human and the ear feeds a pig you know that you take off the the rapping or the stalks that was also a famous thing he used to chop up the stalks of all the animals oh sorry it would chop up the stalks all the plants and feed them to pigs and so on um this kind of waste part you know those lemurs they're not nutritionally complete for pigs or cows or chickens but the modern feed business is precisely mixing this in with basically a vitamin pill were you providing you with a sack of supplement you can google this right G 12 is right at it we're not even inject it into animals because it's not me well right yeah but the cheap way you just have a trough and in the feed trough they put in a few scoops of this nutritional I didn't stir it in and then the animals take it from there so you know the the value of the feed being given to the animals is as close to zero as science and the free market in conspire to make it the the the distribution so that that's factor one factor to look if you farm strawberries within a given continent they're only going to be a few places where the climatic conditions are correct for farming strawberries right and then let's say I'm just simplifying let's say once a year the strawberries come in season so you have a standard paradox of Plenty here so at one place in one time strawberries are worthless so in your little community where the strawberries are produced you have a surplus of strawberries the local price plummets the value of them in that area plummets and then you have to ship them further and further away to get a decent price so you know if it cost money and yes my refrigerator right but shipping something like strawberries especially the amount of time the number of days that can pass the conditions for shipping the quality of the road the quality of the truck the quality of road it is it's it's very very demanding right yeah and the but the points to the geographic distribution is extreme I mean it's it's almost by definition with something like fruit and vegetable culture it's gonna be the opposite of what you want you know where do we grow wheat in Canada well we grow it in Manitoba where do people eat bread in Canada they didn't Toronto in Montreal the distances are unfathomable now by car so again within the United States where do you produce oranges Florida well with the in Florida especially the minute oranges are in season when the crop comes in oranges are worthless you have to ship them to Seattle and New York and places with her they're worth money so this is a stand this is an almost universal feature of vegetable and fruit agriculture right but under the conditions of modern factory farming meat agriculture doesn't operate this way if you look at a map I've done this many times including on my old blog before I had a youtube channel so the reason this came up in the past was that meat eaters would say that they are ethical because they buy locally farmed locally slaughtered meat and I would challenge them and say go to Google Maps or Google around find a map of slaughterhouses in your country or your state or your province where as you live and what you find is there everywhere all all meat eaters are eating locally slaughtered meat all the time because the distribution of this you can set up a factory enclosure with this like for example with chickens you mean yet everyone watching this video has seen this you're talking about a metal shed it doesn't rely on any kite that doesn't rely on the local climate and it's not like growing strawberries needs to be in just the right conditions or growing coffee to grow really excellent coffee the altitude the temperature the amount of rain is all very specific you can have a shed full of chickens eating worthless refuse from other forms of Agriculture with nutritional benefits stirred into it a logo you can set that up anywhere and everywhere and that's exactly what modern animal so the the production of the chickens in the first place is distributed everywhere there are a little bit of constraints of pigs and cows but not much you just need them to be far enough away that it's out of sight hope but that's that's about it and then the slaughterhouses are everywhere they are everywhere I remember on my blog I had four maps of France and it was the the with points of light showing you all the slaughterhouses work but pretty much if you have Google Maps doesn't always list it but I was able with Google Maps to just show there were slaughterhouses not quite on every corner but every city in France was surrounded by multiple competing slaughterhouses separation plants processing plants and so on so it's everywhere so it is fresh it is local it is decentralized it is not relying on the seasons you know etc so they have these unbelievable economic advantages and fundamentally of course the animals don't get paid a salary Yeah right and once you talk about these things that's so obvious but it's not obvious because it's a living being because they're creatures like you think that's a cost it would be more that for raising cattle raising chickens than it would be for fruits and vegetables that don't require you don't require the same of course they they aren't provided any care or attention you know veterinary care is just trying to get them to survive to being in ER we were they each other if there's easy on them in to feed dogs and cats you know like that's that's really there are so many things that are profitable about the animal agriculture that I write so I I want to get back to talking about your experience and Laos because that was really interesting to me when you were talking to somebody and you talking to government officials and you were trying to say like please like you know like trying to write them that you know this is going to destroy your everyone your this is going to destroy the ecology if I know like you basically like I know this will help you get out of poverty but yeah it's fairly obvious that it's going to destroy the ecosystem well where I was I could point to that too I mean so I was in villages we could say look this village has one River the river used to have in it oh now it's got cows living on both banks children can't swim in the river anymore women can't wash the clothes and the river was traditionally they did you used to have a society or made against it sounds histrionic it sounds exaggerated sounds ridiculous to say you know meat agriculture is going to destroy the fabric of your society in the case of country closets there was really a lot of truth to that okay the river and race agriculture used to be a central this centre and organizing principle of your whole society and in becoming instead a society of cattle ranchers I mean directly you are destroying the river that everyone relies on again not just drinking water but bathing and and doing their doing their laundry and so and killing and eating fish which I'm against cuz I'm vegan you know but this is the reality these are all the things that they value and you you could see that that there it wasn't hidden away in a factory right right so those are two things that I have two things that I want to say so one is I understand the motivation behind like the vegans video when he's talking about the actual costs environmentally there was once it's just like that you know it you paused the video to say something and I was like I'm confused with this because he was saying you know however many billions of dollars that it's costing that's the real cost of me because of the destruction of the environment and I'm kind of like okay does this mean like this amount of rainforest could produce this amount of wood and that's look that's what's more that's the that's the cost of it I don't know like you said that you would and also like desert comes back to a United Nations resolution that defined and in report this publishes report that defined the concept effect of ecological sustainability and the definition they favor it was debated over several meetings of the UN was basically that you had to have enough innovation ongoing that the destruction of ecological services would be replaced by the innovation of new forms of service provision so that actually said that invented the he's using here and that started people doing calculations like okay so if you start farming beef if you start raising cattle for beef what is the dollar value of destroying the river right yeah and you can calculate it I mean it's a bit surreal it's a bit ridiculous you would actually know but you could actually estimate well if we now have to build a new sewage treatment plant or new water processing facilities and provide new ways of people doing their laundry because people can't wash they literally can't wash their clothes in the river anymore can we come up with with an abstract that here's the problem why do you assume that these calculations will always favor our cases vegans this is that this is the uncomfortable truth right we have an ecological case or veganism we have an ethical case or veganism we have a health case or veganism but but guess what economics it's sure economics is not always on our side it's not and you know I once I went toe to toe with one cost which is continual cost of the continual earnings of the same you it's the same with damming a river if somebody puts a dam in the river to generate electricity and you say oh well what if you do all the calculations for all the knock-on effects guess what the electricity may be worth more money yeah it produces so many million dollars in electricity it's worth more than all this damages hey I went toe to toe a little destroying the be prohibitive I went toe to toe with Margaret on this several times Margaret is Maude vegan as another youtuber and she likes to she likes to pretend that in all cases the logic of market efficiency and economic productivity is gonna favor the vegan case and I gave her very simple counter examples like lobsters no here's how you farm lobsters you take a wooden cage that's worth five cents you put bait in it you throw it in the ocean you wait you pull it out there's a lobster you sell the lobster for twenty dollars or someone it's a lot of money it's a lot of money fast with very low labor and the labourers don't need to have any education it's horrible exploitative and unethical and bad for ecology I'm against it I'm vegan but you really think you can make an economic case for this no I mean I was in Laos and I saw the stats I saw the numbers where the United Nations and other learning agencies were supporting beef Agriculture's the number one fiber out of poverty to stop farming rice that's a really hard really inconvenient truth and and and but the other imager that startled this was when you see beef available for only five dollars or something in your in your rosary store it's a really inconvenient truth to have to accept Wow you know what factory farming is unbelievably efficient and when you go through the ecological staff that backs to the both of you you do nation by nation comparisons of water footprint water footprint means both how much water was used up and how much waste is produced right so how much pollution is produced in Oklahoma Choiza and you say wow modern Western industrialized countries are way more efficient than poorer winners guess what factory farming it's a farm with the efficiency of the factory it's way more efficient so way more can economically it's evil it's a point I'm against it but you know let's let's face up to we know what our enemy is here you know what we're against here it's not like smoking cigarettes which he also contrasts to it's like oh well what if you calculate the value of heart attacks right right you know so I my other point with with this topic specifically you've talked you've had really good videos about the production of palm oil and how females can still be vegan if they consume products that have sure palm oil and part of that argument or part of what you've said in about palm oil is that there is going to be economic development and it doesn't matter if it's a palm oil crop it could be a rubber tree crop there you can't stop the progress of a society you can't stop the progress of civilization basically and but seeing it in a crude way but I guess my question is how did you kind of deal with that when you know that Laos could be taken out of poverty you know that you know the quality of life could be improved so much if culture were you know okay so come back what was my actual point about about rubber sorry we're plantations or palm oil or any of these other forms of plant a realtor or another example is you know almonds because a lot of the one of the ecological impacts of almond farming in California art or a tremendous and so on my point isn't that there's going to be progress anyway so tech clutch with everything that's not my point my point is whether you're looking at Indonesia or Laos or California you have to be honest about what is the alternative you're comparing this to and this was one of the major complaints I made about like the vegans video I mean during it I pause that I ranted that he was making ludicrous comparisons he was comparing real world situations to ludicrous finds customs so are you in fact comparing the scenario of a palm oil plantation to a national park that exists to preserve biodiversity now in some circumstances that's a comparison worth making but we're actually looking at in the argument against palm oil is that people are talking about palm well as if somehow it will be a wonderful situation for the orangutans if that same farm in Indonesia stops farming palm oil and instead farms rubber trees or coconuts or sugar cane or strawberries or apples all of those will equally eradicate the habitat for the orangutans or any of these animals so being honest that what the alternative however you know my point I've argued throughout have a whole playlist of videos you know national policy on wildlife habitat biodiversity conservation areas and national parks it is important oh yes but let's not confuse the issue by by you know pretending these are these are one of the same thing yeah so anyway would you want to direct me back to what okay so you know you said that in Laos they had traditionally been reliant on opium and so there the alternative that is being presented to them is farming beef you know farming Kevin so in this same situation like what would the alternative be beef and would that be any better for the environment and would that you know and it wouldn't be as economically right no and and the other thing here has to do with the the time frame so you know I was with government officials who were doing the math on the proposal to farm tea green tea so the same dhoti they they drink in China they said well this proposal only really becomes profitable after 300 years they were doing the economic projections for 300 years in the future another crop that the government had favored in the past and given up on was actually teak wood this is a type of wood you make tables out of teak sorry you know the first he could you're watching this video um but that was something like a 24 year horizon like for the particular farmer before that farmer would start making money it was a belt of pods of 24 years and when they did it was a huge it was a huge experiment the government supporting teak wood forming what they found was that it massively exacerbated economic inequality a small number of people ended up getting rich and most of the people almost the farms have fought for and so so you know there are there are advantages and disadvantages to every mode and model effect so I could get into the mechanics of why that is with deep farming but for this video I think it's not you know it's it's um you know there were other people who were supporting I knew a guy who was supporting in a small pond fish raising because they felt it was more compatible with rights that you could farm rice and then of a small pond where they grow I think it was tilapia I think it was but maybe it wasn't another type of fish you could raise in a small pond which is really more of a Chinese tradition being exported to Laos you know these kinds of changes so there were a lot of people wringing their hands and looking at the the situation but you know yeah you can have a country where farmers are mired in poverty but here's the real point with opium the experience in northern Thailand which is very similar to Laos or the town's next to it is basically once you start building roads really good quality well paved roads that's when opium products starts to disappear and partly because that's when the open producers start to have better options if if you have a dirt road in the jungle OPM is your best option you can imagine you can make a flowchart diagram of supply chain analysis what are all the factors you need to be able to farm strawberries and to get the strawberries to market while they're still right and not Bruce never get so it worth and that that all starts with E peeved road connecting you to civilization connecting the the producer to the market so I mean obviously I've already alluded to the fact that there were all kinds of complexities here and also governments have to be honest themselves about what are the what are the objectives of their social policy is your objective to make the rich richer to produce a you know yeah I don't think the effect of cattle ranching in Texas was to produce an egalitarian society a small number of people in the history of Texas got incredibly wealthy out of Texas cattle rancher I mean over a period of several centuries a small number of people made use of a huge amount of land with social and political and economic and cultural consequences that we all live with today some people get rich from cattle ranching and teak plantations or what have you none of these models of agriculture is it kind of simple you know panacea for um you know for social or ecological problems but yeah I mean I think it is interesting no I mean ultimately you know if you're making arguments for ethics they have to be ethical if you're making arguments for ecology they have to be ecological if you're making arguments that are based on particular social global raising the level of education for the poor opportunities to the poor or equality or some of this you have to make those arguments in their own terms and I think everyone likes to lean on myths about economic efficiency it's it's always basically what Mike the vegan did in this video was he opens by appealing to your sense of injustice that when he says when you as a vegan go to a grocery store you feel that beef shouldn't be $5 when only five apples are five dollars these are really Canadian prices but it's true paying one dollar for Apple is common again so know you're a little bit better off in Michigan to make Michigan produces apples butts don't you think how can these five apples be more expensive than this beam but this is appealing to magical thinking about economics fundamentally on economic thinking so well guess what whether it's beef or chicken having the distributed network of sheds keeping these animals get to be year round not depend on the change of season not dependent on fertile soil which is scarce good weather conditions which are unreliable not too much rain too little rain could make a list of all these factors which are is all this time itself there is all the civilizations so these and again that not dealing with this this fundamental paradox that in the like you know the one town that produces strawberries or the one town that produces oranges the strawberries are worthless the orchards are worthless and then having to ship them over a network as far away as possible to get to the place where the market moved for us I knew a girl instead they even with me I think girl is from the the Pescador oh I'm sorry that's the wrong hand what chain she was from the remote as pescadores are in Taiwan she was from the remote islands of Portugal I'm sorry Portugal has this chain of islands that reach out towards Africa yeah this is this chain I was gonna she was from those islands and she said and her family they were all fishermen there and she said none of them eat fish all the fish are sent to Japan because where do you sell the fish you sell to the highest price you can get in the world market and that's literally the other side of the world from from Portugal all the best fish were sent to Japan and they ate chicken why because on those remote islands they had these horrible steel and concrete sheds and we're raising chicken in captivity and feeding them you know chicken feed you know chicken feed in English is used as a slang term for something worthless yeah you know and you can produce this meat at this incredible profit locally slaughtered etc etc the efficiency of it is staggering the profitability is horrifying so how do you make what did you make the argument not to raise means you know to do something else instead well the parallel universe this is why I mean there's a another guy on YouTube called ask yourself his real name is Isaac but he's a deeply flawed character I'm a critic of him in many ways but I really have sympathy for what he's doing because he tries to deal with the ethical arguments as ethical he's aroused to take seriously look if we're gonna talk about veganism as meth karma it has to be about ethics it can't be about you you know there are all these other extraneous factors that go on to get to get drawn in that's a vegan that's how I feel too but it's hard to convince Meat Is Murder ripen whether the argument is purely ethical or ecological or health based let's really be honest with ourselves about about what is if slavery is more profitable which it is does that mean you'll favor slavery or allow some degree of slavers you know does what does the profit motive justify or not justify and your in your life yeah you know for me the profit motive could never justify drinking cow milk instead of soy milk or eating cow ice cream instead of soy ice cream to me that that's that's madness right ya know again you know you may live in a situation we have to make a similar decision you say okay this clothing was produced by slavery and this clothing wasn't they I think today slavery is marginalized as such as that's you mean I have the trip you do sometimes you do and sometimes you have to make a choice okay this product is made in Myanmar and this product is made in Australia you know is there an ethical reason why I'm gonna refuse to buy something they don't want place person other the conditions of labor or what have you so em you know there are limits to economic reasoning and you know it's hard there are in to be intrudes with the in veganism there are inconvenient truths within ecology and now you know I see a guy like Mike the vegan and this is basically of what he refuses to do he refuses to be honest himself about these things yeah well we can we can end the video here if you want but I had one other thing to talk about because well I think what's interesting to you about this question is different than what's interesting to me so you know yeah sure so one of the statistics that Mike the vegan talks about in his video is about the actual cost of the waste and you said that you would known about this since since you were in high school you're like oh sure this stuff is sure the old news to me those fundamental economic concepts were both part of my becoming committed to ecology before I became vegan and they're part of my rejection of communism and socialism and far-left politics and economics Jamie we're going now I'm fundamentally complement in a way in economics that led me to other considerations in life yeah sure I mean the way that his videos are created is to appeal to a mass audience I mean I think that video will probably get many thousands of views I mean this one probably won't but I still think I have a better beard I'm biased um I think you're a better looking than him so you know he mentions the way that the argument is discussed is that economic externalities right yeah when you when you bring your garbage to the curb to get picked up there's these costs that are right that are externals the companies right right and so there so he was saying the real cost of meat you have to factor in the cost of the waste Oh even that phrasing is interesting right but you have to factor in the cost right no I mean the tragedy we're all trying to deal with is that reality is the exact opposite no you're talking about like you mentioned that like your deal with ecological or Consequences story there are many different it's just something that we like you know he holds Samiha industry to this different standard recouping industry and I think what he's being dishonest about is what is the the comparison you're contrasting it to now so he he sets you over this magical line of reasoning that ok the meat industry should be accountable for the cost of reversing global yes the industry should be accountable for the cost of replacing the rancor regrowing the rainbow 3 player was water pollution in the Gulf of Mexico these all three of these are in the videos yeah so what are you actually contrasting the meat industry to as an alternative would it be reasonable or convincing or politically actionable to claim that the aircraft industry or a specific aircraft company like American Airlines you know that they have to pay for the cost of the the ecological damage done by people flying on airplanes as opposed to everyone in the world going from A to B getting global transport by train through train networks that don't even exist now you know you do that calculation you'd actually have to calculate all those you can't just compare you know something real to something ideal you have to calculate the cost of building an unfathomable amazing international railroad network that actually made it possible to get from New York to Paris by train or something you know or you know to get on get on the road Rome which would have ecologic consequences of course would have would have all kinds of damage and all kinds of cost but aside from that no it's it's fundamentally a dishonest line of reasoning no the airline company their job is to transport people safely and efficiently and at a good price between two points and they are genuinely not responsible for ecological and social externalities of their business that includes the destruction of the world's upper atmosphere it's a real problem I'm really concerned about earlier today the same day I was looking at the latest environmental policy from Taiwan the happy democratic island of Taiwan Roga Province of China the rest of China's economy is dictatorship but not Taiwan they put over 1 billion u.s. dollars into a three-year program to fundamentally improve air pollution and includes a lot of the things other countries don't want to do like forcing bad cars and bad motorcycles to get off the roads and to replace sources of various air pollutants factories as well as vehicles but to go through the whole island and try to eliminate source circle right it's had an amazingly positive impact at least on the northern part of Taiwan which is the most population dance most economically important part it has not been as effective in the south where they have a steel industry steel smelters are still smelling steel nevertheless this has been a big big improvement in in just a couple of years I was saying to Melissa look examples like this are really important to contrast to a sense of resignation ISM fatalism you know that people can't Bosman you know in a short period of time with a large budget but a finite budget here's a small country that made a huge improvement in its air quality in air pollution you know situation now did it accomplish this through this kind of you know circular and I think circular reasoning I think dishonest reasoning that you know Mike the begin is engaged in no I mean you know poor people buy the best car they can part of the problem in Taiwan is cars being on the roads that are twenty years old who buys 20 year old vehicles you know poor people okay well buying a second vehicle we're still using a car more than 20 years old I think I know someone someone in this room I think you know it's it's not it's not the rich what are you gonna do go to those people and say you you are accountable for the economic externalities of your of your of your decision you know they're it's a mode of reasoning I understand why people want to think that way but it is actually you know I think profoundly misleading and profoundly wrong you know I mean you know the tragedy we all deal with is exactly that you can run a leather tannery you leather or factory and you never pay for the pollution that you put into the river that is the reality of the world we we live in now obviously this difference being a descriptive statement of fact and uh you know moral a description of what ought to be and laws like those that have just come around in Taiwan I think since 2017 um you know they can change the world changes in look another thing I said what we're watching like the vegan video I said that even aesthetic and artistic arguments would be more convinced to me than what's being advanced here as an economic argument I mean all sorry you guys know this even watching my channel ultimately the decision to quit smoking is not going to be economic all right ultimately this question of what kind of a person do I want to be what kind of a society we want to have certain come back to question but Laos and we got sidetracked as I said look I respect people like ask yourself you know for what he does because he really treats the ethical questions as ethical you know let's let's deal with these things in a rigorous catechol categorized way um you know I'm having to ask people and wow this is these are real conversations I had face to face with with communist government officials do you want to live in a society with zero Tigers I was in a village where they had just killed the last two Tigers there was a mated pair one male one female they killed them and they sold their their remains to Chinese people that sold the corpses to Chinese people who probably turned it into a rug and you know I asked him the historical name for Laos was LAN Xang which is the land of 10,000 elephants hundred thousand elephants but it's a number it's like an English we would say a million elephants it was the land of plentiful elephants um I said look in the past you were the land of a million elephants how many wild elephants are there today how many wild elephants they're gonna be ten years from now 20 years from now your children or grandchildren do you want them to be in a country with zero elephants and zero tigers in a million motorcycles I made a joke about that so this in the future this into the land of a million motorcycles and a million cellular phones and zero elephants and I really look at the I got a big laugh out of people with that I'm a lot lotion is one of the few languages I got to be funny and I spoke the language one wants to really make some good chucks and I don't do that so much in Chinese these days and maybe they just appreciate it my humor more over there I don't know um that I was really challenged what you know what kind of a person you want to be what kind of society you want do you want to have a society that preserves rice agriculture and again Laos is traditionally a terrible a Buddhist country a country that's morally opposed to eating large mammals especially cows or do you want to become a country that's a second-rate you know import segregate imitation of American culture American cattle farming that gets rid of these Buddhist virtues in this whole fabric of society built around rice farming it's on what do you want to do and just in asking those questions you know you could be doing something important say look this is the transformation goes there but I do but the answers are not economic and that's the tragedy of it all the answer is not gonna be oh well just look at the bottom line which is what mod vegan wants to do and won't make the beginning at least in this particular video wants to do know if it's about money now it's about money on the table right well and it's a great argument to me and it's convincing to me but I grew up in the Western world where I am you know the world that I was that I grew up and was built on deforestation was built on genocide was built on all of these you know you know and you mentioned no more elephants no right you know do you want to live in a world with no more Tigers well there are many and in the United States there are so many species that have gone extinct and you know they're basically event-driven there's one island in Canada that still has Buffalo the actual the it's an island within a river by the way that's one of the coast yeah the Buffalo is gone extinct basically all of our natural ecology and natural species the exception of arctic animals like polar bears yeah it's it's greener kind of argument in that like you know I would think yes we did live in a world where there are still Tigers roaming there are still elements roaming look then I wouldn't have the conveniences of the Internet I don't read other way so maybe this is a positive note in a video on if you look at a country like Japan and these is true of most of Europe and a lot of Canada the United States to you you get a pattern now Japan becoming a mature economy where the countryside empties out a larger and larger percentage the population is concentrated in just the biggest cities Tokyo Osaka whatever you have a lot of empty space so it's it's paradoxical but Japan is more overpopulated than ever it also has more space than ever just today we took a 1000 kilometer or train ride very approximately which is a very very long trade right across France and I was googling it through a huge empty area unbelievable amperes Wow and I mean empty this is in the in the in the middle of France you know you're googling it and getting the population statistics and checking wasn't just what I was seeing at the window there are vast uninhabited areas of France and they have ghost towns the population is declining yes Canada just just look up population density Canada man Google that Canada has huge empty areas even on the west coast you know etc etc America too right so actually in the 21st century we have the potential that societies like Japan where everyone has access to the Internet and modern technology and where people live together in cities and we actually have I think more potential than ever to devote a significant percentage of our land to wildlife habitat you know and I said that is the ultimate contrast you know it's not using this kind of United Nations technical terminology like ecological services this you know no it's committing to drawing lines in the map and saying okay this land doesn't exist for economic exploitation by anyone not for tourism not for hunting not for meat production and also not for palm oil production or almond production or you know any vegan food production either is how much we're committing that exists where the wilderness exists for the sake of the wilderness kind of full stop period and I think that the potential for that is greater than ever before and you know the economic survival of our society has become detached from the land more than ever before and we did have new stats I think I posted them to my patreon group that were new estimates done for how radically we can reduce our reliance on land how much less land we if the whole world's population becomes vegan and the researcher who did the math they were very long indeed calculations the estimates had been done before but this guy went through all the math root and branch you know and came to new you know you know new numbers and more thoroughly than ever done before he became vegan in the process of doing the the equation in the process of their doing doing the calculations which again I think is interesting it's someone who cares about ecology coming to the rational conclusion look you know if I if I'm gonna live by the tenets of my own knowledge not even believe yes the facts I'm aware of this is this is an inevitable application so we need less land than ever before and veganism is part of that fewer and fewer people as a percentage of population fewer and fewer people are employed hewing the land you know by felling trees and farming and so on and in some ways that's a that's a that's tragic and it's a challenge to our society believe me Japan's example that you may think of yourself as a country built on agriculture and rice farming and forestry and hunting and that's not the reality of who you are in the 21st century that's changed forever but there's something really wonderful and that there's a there's the potential there as we become more gathered around hubs of potential employment in in the big cities of the world that it opens up more more than map to do the most fundamentally moral thing of all which for me is not veganism believe me I spend all my time preaching veganism but still it's actually it's actually wildlife you know management wildlife preservation conservation of of the wild for the sake of the world and that's what we need I think it's an international foundation that's based on pushing countries including third world countries like Laos to commit a significant percentage of their land mass not for human use and exploitation but for the animals themselves any less worth babe no I thought that was really great