Education and Revolution: Ex-Vegan "Expert" Savanna Stanhope (Savy Menke).

suppose you knew someone around the age
of 25 who wanted to transform the world of architecture someone who's highly motivated passionate but architecture someone who felt that all the colleges teaching architecture and handing out the credentials necessary to practice in the field were really teaching a very corrupt and inadequate form of the art and science of architecture and that this young person with their tremendous vision of a new embedded world was going to shake things up was going to innovate it's gonna change things the problem was this ambitious young person you knew had never gone to university to study architecture he or she had just sat in his own apartment primarily with access to Google maybe a few books ordered off amazon.com in the private confines of his or her own study he or she had developed some sense of expertise this happens a lot in the science of nutrition there are a lot of people who convince themselves that they have a vision of human nutrition that's fundamentally at odds with what is taught in academia that's fundamentally incompatible with whatever the process is to become a formally registered as a dietician in your country and they get into their heads that by looking around the internet and maybe ordering a few books online they've cultivated themselves as an expert that they are now in a position to give advice to others to sell ebooks to have a youtube channel to do a podcast to earn money by doing consultation over Skype or the hour whatever the case may be they decide their own expertise is better than what the respected institutions have to offer without ever really going inside those institutions to see what they're missing on today is the day that I found out through the wonders of YouTube that savvy Menka is ex vegan not only has savvy Menka gone back to eating meat and eating fish she has bought into the unbelievable mythology propounded by ex vegans and anti vegans here on YouTube the unbelievable notions about anti-nutrients lurking in plant foods just laughable notions about how animal fat saturated animal fat is supposedly extraordinarily good for your health despite mountainous country and savvy Menka was someone who considered herself a great expert in the science of nutrition she was someone who did sell ebooks and offer advice she was someone who met me over the internet through Facebook at a time when she had bless her heart the self-confidence to challenge the orthodoxy of freelee and durianrider and say that the nutritional advice freelee and durianrider were giving was wrong wrong wrong you can live in a society where it's the blind leading the blind you can also live in a society where it's the blind quarreling with and correcting the blind now savvy Menka certainly knew enough about nutrition to see what was glaringly wrong with the advice being given by Duran freely her critique of during Ryder freely I quoted on my own channel and I went much further in pressing that critique forward time is maybe five years ago now when I spoke to Savi was a very memorable conversation for me I asked her about the possibility that she would now go back to college and gain the formal credentials to practice as a dietitian as a nutritionist in the Canadian system it's a government controlled profession just like being a nurse or being a surgeon even you have to get certain credentials in order to call yourself a dietician and practice whether that's in a hospital or in and I talked to her about the long hard road ahead because you know some of us would have to go back to high school and take courses in chemistry we didn't take and then to chemistry courses in university yeah it's you know it's it's partly an art and partly a science much like much like architecture um but yeah there are some hard science requirements to get ahead on that path and what she told me was she felt that she knew too much she felt that she was too advanced already she felt that she knew more than the instructors in the university freely felt the same way you remember have you read or heard some of those interviews this freely where she's asked why she didn't get formal credentials doctrine and she said that when she went to some school of nutrition that allegedly she went to at some point she found that what they were teaching was so far back in the in the Dark Ages now again if you were a visionary young architect who wants to change the world you might feel that way about your professors do and you might feel incredibly self-confident emboldened just by the independent study you've done alone at home or in the library or you might feel your own critique of what's going on in architecture as they write this is what I told Savi at the time you may feel confident that you already know what's in that University textbook but the fact is you haven't read it yet right like I know that feeling of calm I know what you're talking about but if you don't actually enroll in that course or at least go to that University bookstore and buy the textbook and read it yourself if you don't actually get a copy of the exam what you can do at some university sometimes without taking the course you can get a copy of last year's exam and look at what's on the exam you can't tell me that you already know what's on the exam and if you really do have this background if you really do know more than the professors if you really do already know what's in the textbook and what's in the exam then it should be a joy for you to jump through those hoops right it should be a relaxing enjoyable process for you to show up and prepare and write those and have that experience because you are as you claim so far beyond the professors but what I suspect is this if you make that effort if you actually roll in the courses if you actually start studying at the University what you're gonna find is that your own knowledge and expertise is narrow but deep that there have been a few things that interested you personally there have been a few topics that you were passionate about that you paid tremendous attention to and that you work very hard on but then there were broader questions that are important for the dis one as a whole that you never answered and that you don't know the answers to right that there are various kinds of boring but necessary practical knowledge and experience that you haven't been rehearsing that you haven't you know you may have very very strong feelings about architecture but then if I ask you what is the maximum size of swimming pool that I can put on the twelfth floor of this building without the weight of the swimming pool causing a problem for the columns how do you calculate the distribution of the weight on that floor with sueing pool that's the kind of technical somewhat boring problem that may be on your exam if you're studying architecture and where there's a lot of reading and a lot of research and a lot of preparation and a lot of kind of nonspecific competency that you in the privacy of your own home in the pursuit of your own passions you probably will not have researched those things you probably will not have tested yourself in that way by the same token if you became passionate about how eating red meat causes heart disease you might have researched that tremendous detail now again Savi Mecca is one example somebody like vegan gains is another example he researched some isolated issues like this in great detail the relationship between animal fat consumption and heart disease okay you might go into the university and find that you know more about these specific issues that you were deeply passionate about you might find that you know more about them than the professor and you might know more about those specific issues than will be in the textbook or test on the exam but then they're going to be so many other issues that you don't care about that you didn't even think to investigator research and those are covered in the textbook those are in the exam and they're part of the reason why we have this kind of formal educational requirement for your comp to ensure your competence to ensure public safety before you can you know practice as a dietitian as a nutritionist or before you can become an architect who designs a building with a swimming pool on the 20th floor that could well collapse and kill all the people who are living with it okay hmm your ability to make a positive difference in the world your ability as an activist as a creative artist as an intellectual it hinges on having these paper credentials your ability to influence the future of nutrition and dietetics as a field of the sciences as you know as a service industry even your your ability to influence the future of nutrition Dietetics rests on you having this this kind of paper credential your ability to be a part of the debates about what the future of architecture should be you can't really be a part of that debate you can't contest the future of architecture without proving you know what's in that text book without sitting down and in writing that exam and you know life is long but I know just how hard it is to commit to getting another BA to commit to getting a master's degree to commit to getting these kinds of credentials especially when it's linked to this kind of aspirational activism and I know how hard it is to compare those long years of boring humiliating work getting university credentials to compare that to the instant gratification of uploading your lecture about meat eating and heart disease hum to YouTube and maybe not just immediately getting positive comments back and fan mail but maybe also you're making money maybe you're selling t-shirts maybe your cell ebooks maybe you're selling you know PDFs with your advice or Skype coaching or whatever it is maybe money starts rolling in in addition to fame and an appreciation and all those students who are sitting there studying that textbook and preparing for that exam they get absolutely none of that but the fragility of the vegan movement in the year 2020 can't you just feel it can't you just feel that you've got this bronze statue standing on feet of clay precisely because like the best and the brightest people in the vegan movement were people like savvy Menka who were self-made experts who didn't have these credentials like I can't say savvy was one of the worse that she was one of the best she was one of the people who stood up to freelee and durianrider and said no more she was one of the people who stood up and said no I did the math I did the fact-checking I got that book off the library shelf and I read the sources you were citing and quoting and I found that what you were saying is wrong wrong wrong you're giving people a formula for weight gain and you're selling it as weight loss and you're misrepresenting the vegan diet and this is all pseudoscience she was right and in her small way she was a heroic figure in the movement at that point right but what she didn't have was any actual depth of confidence what what she had was the product of her personal passions just like some kid who's into architecture and only reads about the things that fascinate him right she didn't build up that generalized foundation of real competence in nutritional science and so here we are just a few years later and she had a few episodes of irritable bowel syndrome or some kind of digestive problem and she gets her head turned around by a new category of pseudo-scientific hype on the internet the same way that once many years before she was drawn in by freelee and durianrider before she debunked them and refuted them now she's been drawn in by these excuses for saturated animal fat and the notion that animal protein is somehow superior to vegetable protein so on and so forth all the usual excuses and they're the same excuses that she seemed to be wise enough to criticize and reject just a few years ago I don't know what the future of the vegan movement is but it's been my role for more than five years now to come on YouTube and point my finger and say not this was nice knowing you savvy Menka now savanah Stanhope the future of veganism is not you