This is the End of the World: the Failure of the Vegan Movement.

this is the end of september 2021.
some of you are thinking about how you're going to pay your rent and so you're asking yourselves is this the end of the world or what um obviously the discourse about global warming has just been renewed in the international headlines because of the elections that unfolded in germany and you know both sincerely and in sincerely the question of what if anything we're going to do about global warming it's become a uh a political football in pretty much every set of elections that unfolds in every western capitalist democracy we just had the least interesting elections in the history of canada where i'm living right now and again whether sincerely or insincerely these kinds of questions were bandied about now for the most part as a vegan i watch all this with my arms folded and my face frowning in a kind of disapproval kind of agonized disapproval because if you are vegan from your perspective you have to ask how question pardon me how serious can any of these questions be when none of you seem to be willing to stop wearing leather shoes [Laughter] i just want to say at the start of this video it is completely surreal the extent to which people are willing to entertain the hypothetical possibility of abolishing airplanes of traveling by canoe from los angeles to tokyo instead of by airplane as if that's a viable substitute but they have no interest whatsoever in substituting a vegan chocolate bar for a milk a cow milk chocolate bar they have no interest in substituting uh tofu or black beans for beef etc etc so you know i am not going to pretend that it is easy to replace you know meat with a vegan diet for some people it's agonizingly difficult you know for cultural reasons due to unfamiliarity due to the sentimental attachments they have to eating turkey at thanksgiving in this kind of sense but you know what however great your sentimental attachment is to turkey if you compare that to the type of transformation of our society that would be entailed by replacing aircraft travel with boat travel with abolishing or exponentially reducing the number of cars on the roads such that private car ownership cease to exist and cease to part of our society such that 90 of people 90 of the time are traveling by bus a prospect that might seem a little bit different now in the year 2021 when we've all been made more acutely aware than ever of the extent to which transit by bus and subway spreads disease you know maybe you didn't think about that so much i did i did i mean it was growing up as a teenager in toronto uh you know my first year of high school it was really horrifying to recognize the extent to which you had a head cold all the time you had a cold six months of the year because you were traveling by bus and subway and i really resented it that you were being in this tight confined space with other people well in the year 2021 our perspective on those issues has doubtless changed in deep in a little bit okay is that is that what you want is that what you want us to build a society in the future where there are no airplanes where there are incredibly few cars or none at all where we i mean i hate to say this but if you really do the research if you're really familiar with what the trade-offs are do you really want to abolish coal power plants do you really want to abolish gas powered power plants really really do you want to live in a society where electricity is scarce or expensive you know where it becomes a luxury to have the lights on in your house or a good example already we stopped baking bread because the electricity pill went up too much when we were baking bread and electric i'm not joking it was more expensive for us to bake bread in our own house from scratch than to buy it from a bakery because of the cost of electricity what happens when the cost of electricity doubles now you start thinking about how much electricity you're spending to boil rice or or boil beans is that the kind of society you want to live in and do you want to make those sacrifices to leverage this flagrantly immoral destructive unhealthy unnecessary diet that's based on the endless exploitation of of cows and pigs okay so look i i rarely look at these things in this kind of um apocalyptic framing but i was talking to an old friend recently a friend i hadn't spoken to in a couple years and she was really saying how amongst her colleagues who are generally kind of overeducated people the people with master's degrees and phds how really over the last three years but i don't know i'm saying three years the last few years five years or something like that the discussions about global warming have shifted from hope and optimism to questions of relative hopelessness or people are sitting around and talking about okay look so when we're 60 years old how bad is it going to be like to what extent within our lifetimes when i'm when we're 60 years old when we're 80 years old are we going to be looking at a world where major cities that we once knew are permanently underwater to what extent in our own old age are we going to be looking at these whole moral fables and parables we've been talking about now for decades and decades talking about since at least the 1980s really i remember the 1980s we knew about the stuff in the 80s you know to what extent are we in our old age going to live to see the terrible nearly apocalyptic consequences of our actions and our relative inaction in in coping with this and changes now the other thing about making this video in the year 2021 is that most of us have lost faith in the vegan movement and note that i say movement all right it's not that i've lost faith in veganism as a diet or something it's not that it is harder to buy vegan ice cream in 2021 than it was in 2015. vegan ice cream has become more readily healthful than ever a lot of these kind of vegan food substitutes are available on store shelves everywhere however yeah we're now living through a period of time where we have to look seriously at veganism as a failure so i want to talk about that in terms of optics i want to look at that in terms of tactics and then i want to look at that in terms of intellectable realities meaning realities we can't extricate ourselves from realities we can't change at this stage of the game in 2021. you know so i can ask you you know you don't have to answer you got people in the audience right now you could answer you know do you have any faith do you have any positive hope or expectations that veganism as a movement is going to have a major decisive impact on global warming within the next 20 years we don't have more than 20 years to talk about this is 2021 already imagine if we were having this conversation back in 1985 okay we're not it's not 1985 it's not 1995. you know it's not very hypothetical it's not very conjectural between 2021 and 2041 how much is going to change and how much is veganism going to have to do with it again some of you will be watching from europe alexa what's the time in berlin in berlin it's 1208 am by the way i wish i could tell you that this mug was made by my eight-year-old daughter but it's not my mother bought me this as like an art object so it's like you know some adult intentionally made this look like a child it's a very amateurish looking bug um if you crunch the numbers and do the math the greatest pardon me the greatest accomplishment of the last 20 years has been the dramatic reduction of poverty on planet earth and this is very inconvenient for left-wingers because left-wing and marxist ideology is based on the notion that capitalism is making poverty worse and worse all the time that class struggle is getting worse and worse of the time until it hits a breaking point and there's a revolution and then this ushers in the next era of marxist so-called materialist historical development okay the reality is contrary to the last contrary to all the left-wing propaganda over the last 20 years to an astounding extent the amount of poverty on planet earth has declined the the quality of life of poor people has increased the total amount of wealth on earth has increased and a significant part of that has been communist countries giving up on communism and adopting free market capitalism so you know more than one billion people in china emerged from extreme poverty and i just want to be very clear on this very briefly i can talk about history and politics china all day i do have expertise in formal education in that area as well as informal education at the end of the mao zedong era in china the people of china were poorer than the people of communist russia they were poor than the people of communist yugoslavia they were poorer than the people of communist east germany the people of china at the end of mao zedong's life they were actually poorer than the people of mongolia and mongolia was also communist country so you're saying communism produced extreme poverty over a huge part of the planet earth but in terms of the sheer number of people living in poverty china was a huge part of that and then they gave up on communism they now have a completely cynical communist party political system with a capitalist economy one billion people emerged from extreme poverty into moderate affluence the whole continent of africa basically took up a series of failed experiments in socialism few of them went all the way to communism but there was so-called moderate socialism which failed and failed and failed south america too there were some experiments with outright communism in south america like cuba central america you know but socialism rather than communism failed so in just the last 20 years the year 2000 to the year 2021 we have been largely living on a post-communist post-socialist planet earth and so that's also been in terms of just crunching the numbers it has been the triumph of capitalism that is in large part brought about a dramatic reduction in poverty worldwide from 2000 guess what the problem is they eat more meat no exceptions no exceptions thailand is a theravada buddhist country as they emerge from poverty they eat more and more meat india religiously is a mix hindu buddhist jain muslim significant number of christians too in india it's religiously divided as india becomes less poor whether or not they want to admit it to you they eat more and more meat all right these are we're talking this adds up to billions of people the whole super continent of africa the population itself has dramatically increased just the number of people in africa has increased to an unbelievable they eat more meat ever heard of japan they eat more i mean the point is even in contexts where culturally people did valorize vegetarianism and veganism even in contexts where there's there's a real reason for them to refuse meat or to take pride in eating very little meat or none at all even in those cultures people in the last 20 years have been eating dramatically more meat so you have two very simple problems there one the amount of meat eaten per capita has increased meaning the amount of meat eaten per person on planet earth's increase and the second problem is there were more people right so you have a triumph over poverty that in and of itself can simply foretell the end of planet earth that's it guess what from an ecological perspective poverty was better this is not this is like hyper-malthusianism or malthusianism if that's you're pronounced if you're that's your preferred pronunciation you know hypermeltousianism hyper malthusianism um people starving to death living in poverty and not being able to afford meat was preferable because even in the countries where there's an acknowledged cultural value on vegetarianism or veganism that's what happened last 20 years so tell me what's going to happen in the next 20 years do you have any hope or optimism whatsoever that this tiny failed movement that's primarily based in california and tel aviv israel these are the centers of strength right in the like top three places on earth for veganism los angeles calif tel aviv israel taipei taipei taiwan like dude i've been there is there is no vegan movement like politically it's dead i mean i think all three places is dead you know what i mean uh used to be back when there were statistics for this used to be within north america number one was california and the number two was vancouver vancouver canada it's dead trust me and i knew people were part of that scene too it's it's dead you know what i mean but anyway so so you think a bunch of eccentrics clustered in just a few areas this way do you think they're gonna lead a transformation of the material culture of planet earth you know because that's really what we're talking about we're talking about something much more profound and widespread than changing the way electricity is generated you know what i mean most of you today you wouldn't notice the difference the electricity coming out of your light bulb if it switches from a coal power plant to a solar power plant your life doesn't change in any way no the electric it might become more expensive the bill might go up but you know your life qualitatively doesn't change okay you are talking about qualitatively and quantitatively changing everything for billions of people and it is the opposite transformation that's going on everywhere okay so just to give you guys a quick example i can dive with this all day and i'm happy to read your comments anything you guys want to say that's on my level i'm i'm totally happy to read and reply i lived in a little third world country called cambodia you ever heard of it just south of laos just west of vietnam just east of thailand coziest little place on earth it blew my mind that cambodians were eating chicken breast imported from the united states of america uh purdue chicken shout out to the corporation purdue corporation p-u-r-d-u-e they are so efficient at farming chickens of course factory farming however in the united states of america that the richest country in the world is able to export chicken meat at a profit to the poorest country in the world all right and if you talk to cambodians themselves they tell you like the value for money was better with buying the american chicken so this comes down to like the size and how much of it's edible and like you know i i don't eat meat i've already been vegetarian for a million years at that point whatever you know so like you know i'm not i'm not into it on that level but you can imagine what the differences are that when you buy this american chicken you get this blob of perfectly formed relatively enormous fat chicken meat and when you actually buy like a whole chicken from a cambodian farmer even if they've cut the head off for you or something you have a lot of work and it's scrawny and you like it maybe more weight but how much of it can you actually eat or how much of it you have to put in a stewing pot you know it's it's just kind of a different deal a dollar for dollar pound for pound so there i was in a country where cambodians were eating american hamburgers for the first time they had american fast food they had french fast food they had donuts uh cambodian refugees who had gone to california and worked in donut stores came back to cambodia we're making and selling donuts they had they had coffee in disposable paper cups for the first time and i'm just saying these are these little things these are the signs of modernity as they emerge from post-war swallower and emergency communism you get coffee in a paper cup and a doughnut you know you know mass-produced paper box you know this this is it they've caught up with the 21st century right and they're dying dude the diet is killing them could see the the obesity and that they couldn't cope with it they'd gone from a situation of scarcity and eating green vegetables because there was nothing else that could eat to you know on a massive scale people uh gorging themselves on this rich western food cambodia is a profoundly buddhist country deeply deeply buddhist what do you think stronger guys what do you think is a stronger interest what do you think is a stronger influence for the next 20 years on planet earth buddhism or veganism it's pathetic how little power animals do that and i'm going it's been getting worse in the last few it's been getting worse not better we've been in decline you know i mean that in terms of optics tactics inelectable realities veganism is in decline okay here's another context what do you think is more influential on planet earth on the scale of billions i just said veganism versus buddhism how about veganism versus communism we can call communism a failed ideology okay i don't care where you are whether you're in california whether you're in communist china whether you're in southern india you can just see looking around youtube the communists have numbers the communists have millions and millions of passionate followers and supporters and they're hyped they they're playing to win those guys are optimistic they think in the next 20 years they can make utopia on planet they're willing to kill for it bro they're willing to go to jail and die they will do all kinds of we're not we're not willing to do jack [ __ ] i mean vegans we're we're barely motivated to take pictures of ourselves in bikinis on instagram to save the world right that's what we've been doing right so uh you know you've got to calibrate your claims right people who tell you oh veganism is a really powerful successful movement like over the last 20 years now looking at the next 20 years okay well i'm saying we're powerless compared to buddhism or powerless compared to communism and the reality is even much more massive well-funded movements with a huge passionate following like buddhism and communism they are powerless relative to the overall tide of increasing wealth increasing consumerism the triumph of capitalism globally right which has resulted in people even in africa even in cambodia even in china now eating more hamburgers than ever and also more donuts than ever like it's not it's not just meat and dairy and eggs but cultures where cheese either didn't exist at all or cheese was a rare luxury right cheese is now part of their diet three meals a day that would include a place like japan by the way where it's the emergence from poverty is less dramatic but right after world war ii the end of world war ii how many japanese ate cheese even once a week it was like they didn't it wasn't totally unknown to them but like cheese was not a regular part of that well guess what you know and japan is not the most extreme example of this kind of transformation so you want to talk about global warming um the difference that could possibly be made by elon musk promoting rooftop solar panels compared to the increase in per capita consumption of meat and then the number of heads the total population growth more people eating more meat on the on the planet it's a joke right so we are in a position now where we can't win i mean that sincerely so the title of this video i'm asking you is this the end of the world and i'm saying to you yes it's game over we lost bangkok is going to be under water listen let's be clear there are two possibilities here one is that the scientists are wrong right which they have been repeatedly um now what do i mean by wrong i mean that like the the estimates have been exaggerated that you know bangkok will only be a few inches under water instead of a few meters anywhere okay we can luck out and by the way i've heard some legit scientific arguments about that the extent to which the calculations for the amount of solar radiation coming in they can be i you know i'm obviously i'm i'm not a global warming denier or something like that but they could be inaccurate by significant margins we could luck out not by any virtue of ours but it could be that the actual effects on ocean levels are not as bad as as anticipated i'm saying it could also be that we use purely technological forms of intervention so you guys might have heard you can use satellites to reflect away more of the sun's radiation again this is not a moral or ethical thing it's just you start putting satellite arrays up that uh you know reduce the total amount of sun's the sun's energy that's warming the earth and you can also allegedly uh chance of gases in the earth's upper atmosphere the more i've read about that the more skeptical i am about it it seemed like the early pro were incredibly optimistic that you could just dump you could just modify the concentrations of gases and and solve the problem as a short-term fix and it seems to me as people have done more research it's like well you know you can maybe you can maybe shave five percent off or something but it's uh it's not it's not gonna help that much so so uh you know just say you guys it's cool you guys are having a conversation with yourself someone just said what about the health benefits all right i'm just pointing out what we're talking about in this video are not benefits all right we're talking about bangkok being underwater we're talking about i'm i'm not that old we're talking about within my lifetime within the next 40 years that i'm telling my children or grandchildren yeah i remember what bangkok was like before it became a scuba diving attraction all right now a very short story i told before when i worked in bangkok i worked for the government of thailand and we were building a new museum it's a complex project with several museums uh actually complex of different museums and i could talk more about it but it boils down to building museums and i was shocked when i visited one of the construction sites and i saw them digging into the earth and so what's called a backhoe it's a big robot that reaches down with its giant metal claw when it was pulling up just a little bit of land there was water right there it was like millimeters below ground level it's salt water too it's not fresh water it's semi-saline it's a mixture of ocean and uh it's brackish water i think people say right i was like wow all of a sudden i feel like i'm standing on a lily pad like i didn't realize the earth i'm standing on like it's it's millimeters above sea level in downtown bangkok and the guy i was just literally standing next to talking with he was he was that kind of engineer so i forget what architectural engineer or something like this and he was like oh yeah and he starts talking me through like all the technical problems they have to deal with when making skyscrapers in bangkok because of the the way the the ecology already is the way the water table already is et cetera and the city does frequently flood i mean it goes up to people's wastes just with rainwater being excessive from that so i mean yes yeah you know health problems ethical problem you know sure that's normally what i talk about is talking about as an ethical movement but here we're talking about the failure of veganism as a political movement and what that means in this palpable way within the next 20 years within the next 40 years given what's happened in the last 20 years and let's really talk about failure on that level you know what i'm saying and what and what happens next yes because of the failure of veganism more people are going to have heart attacks more people are going to be obese more people are going to have diabetes more people are going to have brain aneurysms they're going to have uh atherosclerosis of the brain they're going to have reduced mental capacity if so what's the term yeah the dementia and so on vascular dementia pardon me people are going to have all kinds of horrible health problems because they're not vegan and i'm going to be telling my daughter that there used to be this wonderful place called bangkok and now if you go and you rent scuba gear you can dive down and see what it looks like under water right so this this is the scale and nature of the failure we're talking about look at your comments for a sec so scarface senior says quote i thought haiti was poorer so look i just uh just being honest i was i was uh indulging in some uh rhetoric in referring to cambodia as the poorest country in the world in america is the richest country in the world i actually neither neither is true america is not literally the richest country in the world nor is cambodia the poorest country in the world i was i was just exaggerating for rhetorical effect there i was simplifying um but it is you know obviously one america is an incredibly wealthy country and cambodia is an incredibly poverty certain country uh depending on how you measure it you know luxembourg is much wealthier in the united states so on and so forth so i'm sorry i'm just literally reading your comments guys so obviously a lot of people in this audience have heard my my critiques like my criticism of what's been going on the vegan movement over the past five years i've been on youtube for more than five years talking about what's going on in the in the movement raphael comments quote from my perspective veganism has been mismanaged and needed to be watered down to survive the backlash what was once a political movement has become a consumer choice i assume you mean consumer choice movement uh quote the idea of changing supply and demand through boycott has been rigged by the meat and dairy industry that is profiting off of the overwhelming majority of vegan products the market adapted all right so close quote um so raphael regardless of how optimistic people might have been about veganism as a boycott movement in 1985 or 1995 right we're now at a point where we can say it failed right now to be fair we can also talk about the ways in which has succeeded right uh you can get on an airplane and you can select a vegan meal this is a success right like it's an option um it is possible to get a vegan meal on an airplane not always easy sometimes it's you're pissed off and it's not very impressive what you get you get nothing but an apple but it is an option so like if those are your standards for success and failure it's a success here's the problem every time i take an airplane so whatever there are 300 people on the plane or something you get these big flights and you get to see exactly how many people are vegan because they come around with them like oh so on this whole airplane there are only two people who are vegan like every time you're doing a poll so you know we're not talking what's hypothetical here we're talking about what's what's actual um before writing a science fiction novel you know what could work is one question and then what actually did work and what's happening next in the in the next 20 years is what we're really talking about this video so i'm not i'm not really disagreeing with you i'm just trying to kind of frame and direct uh the conversation like melissa yeah i i also tend to be like blinded by this because i'm not thinking about it i don't see it every day i'm not working in a restaurant that makes that serve me right however i was just reading an article in new jersey migrants from afghanistan immigrants right afghanistan there are 8 000 of them living in tents a big tent city okay they serve them 6 000 pounds of chicken and beef in one day six thousand pounds six thousand pounds of meat a day so this is a refugee camp with eight thousand people and they have six thousand pounds of meat per day that's the stuff yeah do it eight thousand people and 8 000 people is considered a small town i mean you know to be a city we're talking about many tens of thousands of people eating many many tens of thousands of pounds of meat and cheese per day yeah quote so many things here like you know thank you guys these are sympathetic comments and by the way if you have a second hit the thumbs up button some more people can join the conversation more haven't it quote the problem with the vegan movement is humans don't actually gain anything from it so you're peddling this difficult lifestyle where you have to sacrifice all of your favorite foods and get nothing as a result uh sammy continues quote the majority of people are selfish and greedy and won't make sacrifices especially not for a creature they consider as lowly as a chicken or a fish so sammy again i'm not talking about what's hypothetical i'm talking about what's actual what if you lived in a culture where people convince themselves that sparing the life of a chicken the difference between going to heaven and going to hell lived in that culture i was a scholar of theravada buddhism baked into that culture bedrock part of that religion is that you shouldn't even kill a mosquito to kill a mosquito to kill an ant to kill a cockroach is immoral all right so they are committed and and their childhood fables like what they're taught as children right it's all of it is very compatible with veganism okay and guess what you know some points even there even in a buddhist culture you were looking at rising and accelerating levels of meat consumption per capita cheese and dairy consumption per capita right thailand cambodia laos sri lanka all of them now i just say specifically as you may know in hindu cultures uh in india and also the kind of hindu-influenced buddhism of sri lanka today they also regard cows as sacred this is not even to mention myanmar aka burma really depressing example in myanmar so they they have a little bit of an extra special sentiment in their hearts for cows look at the statistics you know look at the reality of how much more they're eating so look uh even if you believed that this sort of question of personal motivation mattered even this has you know utterly utterly failed you know so even in these contexts um the prospects of the vegan movement in the next 20 years are zero and what actually happened in the last 20 years is a terrible failure okay um okay so this is what i want to want to come back to i am reading your comments guys raphael said further uh quote i think the problem is that veganism isn't offering anything not doing something harmful can't be the best we've come we're coming up with to change the outcomes of the future um scarface senior says to me this is a related comment uh vegan gains was horrible for the movement so starting with my fellow youtuber and competition uh vegan gains so we have a grocery store here with a magazine rack now you can ask yourself this in your grocery store is the magazine rack at the front of the store like is it is it an important part of the store or is it way back buried in the back of the store today in my grocery store the magazine rank it's not a major important part of the grocery store anymore they don't really expect many people to buy magazines it's back with the children's toys and dog toys i think they have pet food and stuff back there it's kind of in an obscure corner of the store yeah that's a whole other topic the culture of pet ownership and these things right um you know what what happens if you walk over to that magazine rack and say i want to buy a magazine that has beautiful women in bikinis it's not hard to find there are so many different excuses for magazines to have beautiful women in swimsuits or other kinds of revealing attire you know some of them are movies about pardon me some of them are magazines about the movie industry some of them are magazines about fashion some of them are magazines about health and fitness some of them are magazines about kind of romance or your sex life some of them are pornography i suppose you know this kind of there's this huge range of topics uh various pretexts and excuses to show beautiful women in flattering poses now you can say something similar about men how about men you know showing off their muscles a whole bunch of different magazines for that under different headings some of them you know more or less explicitly pornographic some of them about health and diet and fitness and what have you how do you think it could be possible for the vegan message to break into that already crowded market based on vanity right how do you think we could possibly get ahead by having one more magazine on that shelf with a picture of a woman in a bikini or one more magazine on that shelf with a man showing off his muscles and how lean he is this sort of thing that is exactly the path that veganism tried to walk in the last 20 years now i'm going to come back to buddhism for a moment okay you could go to a very different kind of bookshelf and look at all the religious and political ideologies of the world and you could say well okay there are a whole bunch of different political ideologies here that have claims to being pure and morally superior and upright and sober and you know certain kinds of uh very different kind of vanity being catered to by various hippie new age religions and traditional religions competing for your attention on that bookshelf i think you could ask a very different question to what extent could veganism break through by competing with transcendental meditation mormonism hinduism as reinterpreted for white people with dreadlocks you know what i mean like you know there are many different bookshelves and many different ways in which veganism has tried to break through and reach a mass audience and change the world and every single one of them has failed including you know the strategy vegan games adopted now vegan gains he personally became wealthy and famous so you can say it worked for him how about aaron janus aaron janice personally became famous and i think very briefly she was wealthy she didn't make that much money over that long but she made a lot of money in a in a short time right there are people who have changed their own lives uh james aspie you know transformed his his own life right but how much of a difference can james aspie possibly make in the world by peddling his message in terms of here is a woman in a bikini here is a man with his shirt off showing off his muscles here is somebody competing for this thing of really vanity of vanity he's physical vanity there's also a certain extent to which he's doing kind of lifestyle vanity a life of leisure or a life of luxury so on and so forth and then trying to associate that with the vegan movement and trying to get mass support for that again support so powerful so overwhelming that it's going to change the tide of you know basically consumerism the triumph of capitalism the reduction of poverty the fact that people have more money to spend and that they're spending it on meat because they perceive meat and dairy meat and cheese as part of the enjoyment of life i think they're also probably spending more money on drugs and alcohol i mean probably globally sobriety is in decline as never before too in the last 20 years and in the next 20 years how much do people just spend their their relative affluence both money and and free time on altered states of consciousness uh shall we say now i just say we can stick with james aspie as an example it's totally possible james aspie will switch strategies many vegan leaders have it's possible he will start to style himself as more of a guru that he will become ostentatiously humble and spiritual and appeal to these kinds of ethical arguments you know instead of saying look great feel great you know go on vacation and this exotic island swim on this beach go snorkeling he's into a lot of snorkeling footage you know as opposed to appealing to your uh your your lust for women in bikinis and your your snorkeling envy or have you you know this this kind of lifestyle activism it's possible that he'll start to present himself more like hitomi mojuzuki he's going to present himself as this overly serious humble naval gazing self-examining self-pitying kind of you know new age religious leader there's plenty of that going on how much of a difference has that made in the last 20 years how much of a difference can it make in the next 20 years i'm here to say to you it has been a failure it is a failure it's going to keep on failing and especially when you calibrate the outcomes when you're no longer just saying oh how much easier is it to get vegan ice cream than it used to be oh it seems like veganism is a huge success but that's standard now i know there are five or six different vegan ice cream options that you're at your grocery store but when you're actually facing up against the enormity of the challenge with uh global warming it's clear that this has been this has been a total failure it still is failing and it's going to go on to fail even more melissa if you want to jump in you can jump in i'm i'm i'm going to look at the the comments and so we have people saying here too uh so sammy is a vegan he's been vegan since the the 1980s and he says i'm one of the only channels talks about this honestly he says quote the health the health benefits aren't that huge you can still be healthy you know with a non-vegan diet within certain limits and so on so look especially when you're talking about people under 50 of course that's true that's always been the weakness of trying to argue like the only the only way to be sexy is to be vegan petta still does that freely the banana girl still does that well guess what go to the beach and interview all the sexy people in bikinis about their diet you're going to find out there are a whole bunch of different diets that let people look great in a bikini you know male male and female but you know if we're just talking about women uh for the sake of it you know use the example a million times every issue of cosmopolitan magazine is telling you about another diet that another woman in a bikini swears has changed her life and helps her look beautiful enough to appear in cosmopolitan magazine every month there's a new issue of this magazine with another beautiful woman on the cover who will tell you about the diet sheets and like 99 of them are not vegan whether you're talking about runway models or athletes or movie stars almost all these people are not vegan now you can look into what their diets are there's a whole variety of them but you can be a gorgeous movie star athlete and not eat a vegan diet so the claims that we can make an argument for veganism as if we are exclusively the only healthy beautiful people in the world of course it's going to fail now the question about whether the health benefits are tremendous or not it does vary a little bit from person to person um okay but again we're calibrating this this discussion is about global warming uh the futility of it how dramatic would the health benefits have to be to motivate people to become vegan on this huge scale necessary for it to have an impact on on global warming right that's that's the problem that's when it becomes futile you know i do think i have health benefits from being on a vegan diet i do think you know i can give you different examples of specific people who did have really significant perceptible benefits from a vegan diet but you know you would have to be talking about something unbelievable unbelievably dramatic self-evident uh health benefit where you walk through a crowd and you can tell oh that person's vegan you know like you would you'd be glowing compared to everyone else or something that's not the case at all as a drug yes as attractive and beneficial well i was thinking about that the other way around you know people look so much worse when they smoke cigarettes drink alcohol and use drugs you know it changes your appearance for the worse dramatically but that still isn't enough to motivate people to become sober to quit drinking quit smoking quit using drugs you know so you know the benefit you'd have to get from a vegan diet as opposed to a you know self-discipline non-vegan diet it would it would have to be unbelievably transformational and it's not and and again if it were we can look back at the last 20 years i think everyone here can remember the year 2001 this ain't new i mean if that strategy worked it would have worked in the last 20 years you know and it's uh it hasn't worked it's not going to work and looking forward we are pretty much talking about in this sense the end of the world the end of the world as we know it you know and and by the way um you know in terms of vegan intellectuals i'm not saying this on any kind of ego trip who is more prominent than i am in the english language in 2021 i can't talk about japanese vegans or something you know i do not have a lot of competition and most of my competition is very very seriously tainted like they were they got attached to uh corporate interests and sponsorships and made corrupting compromises that taints their significance in the movement now so as a great example tobias leonard tobias leonard tried to present himself as an intellectual leader for the beacon movement he became totally despised but he would be he would be one of my competitors for who is a significant intellectual in the vegan movement okay so you know what um if this is such a big deal guys like you know veganism and global warming and the end of the world do you think i've had one email about this in the last six months i get more email about the civil war in syria i get more in the last six months i've had more email about afghanistan i've had more email about buddhist philosophy i got a bunch of email about ancient chinese philosophy like confucianism and taoism you know people write to me they want to know my opinion they want to talk to me about quite a variety of things do you think there's any interest do you think there's any initiative and again i'm not saying this to brag i'm saying who else are you gonna turn to who else you're going to work with let's see let's let me narrow this down within canada how much competition do i have who else is there if you wanted to make a difference and some people are elderly there are some people who are old and wealthy what are they going to do call up paul bashir like who else is there to talk to in veganism if you want to make a difference now if you want there are some people there are you can call paul bashir see what kind of [ __ ] answer you can talk to paul bashir but i'm just saying it like in the past five years almost nobody has ever talked to me but i can definitely say to you in the last six months or two years there is no initiative coming from anyone else anywhere of of this kind so the the extent and the depth of the despair it's it's significant and no nobody's giving voice to that i mean it's implicit it's tacit um [Music] now you know what have people talk to me about in veganism basically bikinis it's basically what what's going on is people say oh well we're gonna have this festival we're gonna have a music festival like there's there's partying there's celebration going on but this is pretty much what we could call you know fiddling well rome burns now look in terms of the ethical argument also just visualize how many animals are being tortured to death for no good reason every day one of my favorite examples is talk about leather shoes so at the beginning of this video i said look it is not reasonable to imagine a world where people use a canoe to get from los angeles to tokyo instead of flying an airplane now i also want to say when you actually do the math calculate how much food you're going to eat how many days it's going to take to travel by boat between los angeles and tokyo whether using a gas-powered boat or a or canoe and the ecological difference starts to disappear like if you just compare the amount of jet fuel burned that's one thing okay but what about all the ecological impacts of having thousands and thousands of people who are spending like a week of their life sitting on a boat eating meals and not going to work you know they're eating and flushing the toilet and everything for all the time that they're in they're in transport instead of being one day of transportation maybe talking about seven days of transportation these are also significant impacts and to some extent you guys will know this if if for example within the united states of america you just had to drive from from los angeles to new york if you decide to drive across the country it's not just the cost of gas it's not just you can't just measure ecology that way you're going to stay in hotels you're going to eat food yeah so there were other costs and there were other impacts including other ecological impacts to to estimate well you know what i've got to tell you if you look at nike air force one sneakers this is just a specific brand of basketball shoe look at the leather shoe and the vegan shoe the same design the same shoe functionally there is absolutely no disadvantage to you as a basketball player or in terms of fashion or function of the shoe by eliminating leather in the shoe right and i've already mentioned this a million times the u.s army they got rid of leather boots for everything except some decorative uses like parade boots it was actually more functional to have vegan boots than leather boots you can imagine materials like a rubber are just more effective for what you actually need boots to do you know rubber and canvas and steel these other these other materials so you know whether you're talking about construction boots or you're talking about uh you know sports sneakers or have you not there is no disadvantage and there are actually some advantages to using the the vegan version well what if you actually believed that the world was going to end due to our indifference in the face of global warming what if you were actually trying to eliminate the leather industry when 50 years from now it's gonna be too late and if you say 50 years maybe it's going to take 500 years when are we going to eliminate leather shoes guys now imagine imagine if we were having this conversation back in the year 1985 it might have all seemed pretty far off in the distant future like well this is 1985 we have a few decades to play with i think it's quite possible people in 1985 would say well let's try to eliminate leather boots by the year 2015. you know i mean it would have seemed like plenty of time 1985 to 2015 it's plenty of time to make this change right well it didn't happen and now it's and now it's too late really now in every sense it's like so how's it gonna how's it gonna happen guys who's gonna make it happen i just wanna say not one person has ever written to me so in the whole what were eight years for the teacher not one person has ever written to me with any initiative any proposal not even wanting to have a meeting not wanting to have a skype call not wanting to have a phone call not one person including you people in the audience right now [ __ ] you you have no initiative okay none of you are trying you know i've been talking about it for for eight years and i've been saying again again who's with me who wants to get organized and who wants to do something the next five years all right now look these kinds of things that can happen at a small scale they can happen at a huge scale i used to live in a small town in england called saint nietz so not worth describing well okay i guess it is worth describing saint nietz is on the road that connects cambridge england to oxford england so if you're living a life that's connected to both cambridge and oxford it's a great place to live you know any of these smaller cities like that do you think it would mean nothing to make leather shoes illegal in saint nia's i think it would be tremendously meaningful and you make it really clear from day one you say guess what you're next uh you'll be the poster you know and to actually enforce that law and let people know no no if you set foot in this town you literally can't walk on the sidewalk here in leather shoes and to brutally enforce it so just give you an example you could have the cops charge you a 50 fine and hand you a pair of galoshes like one size fits all rubber boots you know if you wear leather shoes here you're fined the shoes are taken off your feet you're giving galoshes so you can keep walking and that's it no guys we're not could be worse could we put you in prison give you a life sentence you know what no okay and you start of course everyone will be talking about it if you're just one town makes leather shoes illegal and enforces it it would be a sensation be talked about around the world you've got to start asking what the [ __ ] is the point of having an animal live its whole life in a steel cage on a concrete floor just to suffer and die to have its skin turned into this object and again the reality is after a very short time leather develops creases and wrinkles and it's such a hassle polishing leather to try to make it look good after it lasts a very very short time i know i know a lot of guys in hip-hop culture they they buy leather shoes and they wear them for like one week you know it's most famous air force ones a lot of the men's shoes yeah wrappers and stuff they only wear it a couple times and throw it out or give it to their give it to their cousin or something because it's not it doesn't look fresh anymore it doesn't look good it's terrible material to make shoes up it's not effective you know um okay so i'm just saying guys you know i used to i used to give all kinds of other examples about ways to do vegan activism the mix of positives i used to talk about having a pancake stand or a waffle stand or whatever each http all this stuff if you guys think i've been turning down opportunities to collab if you think there is one person in the city of vancouver who's ever offered to work with me you're wrong if you think there's one person in los angeles when we went to los angeles even if briefly if you think there's one person in taiwan one person in israel one person in athens greece one person in all of france one person in all of germany i'm here to tell you not even one person all i've had from the vegan movement is sexual harassment and [ __ ] mythology and rumors and innuendo made up about my life by obsessive stalkers people like quote-unquote vegan revolution this guy josh who made up the story that i secretly work for the cia then i'm a double agent but people like that he's one example but there were a whole bunch of oh they get fascinated with my youtube channel and oh what was he really doing in cambodia okay when you're done being fascinated when you're done literally and figuratively masturbating about the [ __ ] you've made up about my sex life you know what i mean okay now can we save the planet like now like now do you want to save a billion animals now do you want to make leather shoes illegal like okay you done jacking off like you know see i care about the other stuff too money fame power respect sex okay but there are 24 hours in a day right well we were supposed to be the people who are trying to save the world look at the last 20 years look at the next 20 years what the [ __ ] is gonna happen all right i'm so sick and tired of coming on this microphone and saying the future of veganism is you and i'm just being real with you whether we're talking about vancouver of course victoria ottawa toronto i was in toronto heavily i met [ __ ] every vegan in toronto i went to that conference there it's not worth describing i met [ __ ] john sachar's in toronto uh los angeles you know london england berlin paris we were in paris we put out all these messages you know on youtube and whatever other social media website hey we're going to be in paris if there's anyone connected to veganism not one person not one phone call not one person on skype right and if you think we can't make a difference of course we [ __ ] can whatever you make a difference through lawsuits there's all kinds of [ __ ] you can do you can start suing you know slaughterhouses for polluting the river and [ __ ] whatever there's all kinds of things you can do that aren't [ __ ] street protests right um you know and again if you can't do it here do it somewhere else what if the first city to make leather shoes illegal is in india or is in sri lanka or is in taiwan i'm down within the last five years what the [ __ ] else is i do with my life you know so i'm just saying you know you can call me lazy all right my channel is a litmus test i've had more than 5 million views i don't know how many hundreds of thousands of actual viewers that were adding up to those 5 million views not one of you has ever shown any initiative to do anything with me or even to tell me about something you're gonna do without me like you're just telling me about a great project you're doing that you don't need my help with you don't want people you're just telling me about symposium not one so like the the depth and extent of the failure here you know it can't be exaggerated now what has happened instead what is going on it's just the pursuit of money fame power respect sex i see one generation after another of frankly beautiful young woman in the bikini trying to be the next test bag so i always digress that for once if you don't know who tess begg is um she's apparently quit youtube but she was someone who briefly like for maybe two years was was making a lot of money out of out of youtube and you know showing herself in very revealing attire in bikinis and what have you and with the photograph taken at just the right angle and talking about the food she eats and selling cookbooks and advertising jewelry advertising uh different kinds of products that we're vegan they're vegan products you know so for maybe two years she was making a lot of money doing that and when the money dried up she stopped uploading she stopped being in in this incredibly low-key sense of vegan activist now i gotta tell you something um if there are 10 more women who become the next test bag it's not going to make any [ __ ] difference okay we probably in the last 20 years how many test bags have there be how many have come and gone all right if there are ten more nina and miranda's it's not going to change anything it's not and there probably are i mean probably if you look around i mean in the last 20 years how many nina and randa's have there been in the next 20 years how many events and i just want to say this explicitly today my youtube channel gets more views per month than test bag today my youtube channel gets more views per month than nina and miranda their fame came and went with their youth and their sex appeal right like they had a brief period where a lot of people wanted to look at them naked or as close to naked as they could get and then it's over so you know whatever what little i have to brag about i know i know that some of my viewers masturbate listening to these videos i know because they've written in and told me all right i'm i'm sorry kids sorry some people are under 18 watching this i literally know that i have viewers who jack off watching my videos uh there are women sorry male and female but you know there are there are i have gay male fans too there are literally people who've watched it saying that they watch these videos for autoerotic purposes okay but i can say the vast majority of my audience is not here putting up with morality lectures from me hearing me think and talk about politics you know for those reasons for why they're tuning into you know and test bag right but looking back at the last 20 years and looking ahead at the next 20 years it doesn't matter how how could a hot chick in a bikini the next test bag whoever it's going to be who's the maddie lynn burner mad fit okay if you think the future of the vegan movement is the next test bag the next maddie limber the next freely how could the next chicken a bikini the next beautiful woman in a bikini to endorse the vegan movement how could she have more impact than oprah winfrey okay overall winfrey for several years promoted the vegan diet more than any of us ever could okay oprah winfrey featured on her channel reaching millions of people repeatedly and for the whole episode the authors of the skinny [ __ ] diet book remember that it's forgotten now the skinny [ __ ] like seriously what were the most influential books about veganism in the last 50 years you may hang your head in shame but one of the most it may be the number one most influential book in the last 50 years on veganism was the skinny [ __ ] and why in significant part in large part because it was promoted by oprah winfrey okay none of y'all can compete with none of you in the next 20 years i don't care i don't care how hot you are i don't care how good you look in a bikini we've done that we've been through that right we have exhausted the upper limits of what's possible hey guys who's the next richard who's the next vegan gaines you know like there's a point of diminishing returns this [ __ ] ain't new i don't think there can be another richard like i don't think i don't think the next oprah winfrey is gonna have the same impact the last oprah winfrey had like this is true in many different media i don't think the next michael jackson can ever change the world as much as the first michael jackson did you know what i mean like something i mean this unrelated to veganism right um you know there's never going to be another elvis presley in that sense you know what i mean in terms of the dawn of the record industry the recording museum all the different social and political factors that made that the kind of unique turning point that it was and made his fame as deep and influential as it was okay the next freely it's not going to have the impact of the last really partly because everyone's heard this [ __ ] before it's old okay there's nothing new there's nothing new in a bikini for you to see there is nothing new in softcore porn and there hasn't been since the invention of the camera okay there is there is nothing new you can possibly show on instagram that we haven't seen before there's nothing new on only fans there's nothing new on pornhub it's the same vagina again and again and again it's it can't possibly change the world we can't possibly win that way all right let's go to the opposite extreme in the vegan moon what are you going to do peddling meditation you [ __ ] what the [ __ ] are you gonna do what are you gonna do that wasn't already done in the 1960s or the 1880s okay none of you were going to have the impact of the transcendental meditation movement in the 1960s and 1970s it's impossible it's impossible to start a new cult based on these same promises about meditation and enlightenment that's going to be more influential than what was already done in 1960s and 1970s same thing right you can't be that there is never going to be another elvis presley you know it's just going to be exponentially less influential and sorry conversely there will be another elvis presley there will be another uh whatever the example is there will be another michael jackson there will be another 50 cent in hip-hop but it will never have the same impact that the that the first one did right there's this kind of cultural cycle of diminishing returns right whoever you are you're not going to have the impact oprah had when oprah took the vegan diet and including ethical arguments for veganism and put them on mainstream television reaching millions of viewers for the first time people had never heard the word vegan before oprah took it on right this is huge it's a turning point right well guess what all this [ __ ] about meditation it has not changed since madame helena blavatsky okay none of you are going to have the impact of levatsky none of you are gonna have the [ __ ] impact of a complete piece of trash like elrond hubbard the founder of scientology good luck it's 2021. you want to start a new cult based on reincarnation and [ __ ] meditation let's see you do better let's see you be more successful than l ron hubbard let's see you be more successful than hell up helen blavatsky that is like you saying to me all you're going to do is hold a microphone and ask people their opinion and you're going to be more influential than oprah winfrey [ __ ] you it's it's literally impossible it's completely [ __ ] impossible you'll never eclipse oprah winfrey you'll never eclipse you know what you're never going to eclipse jesus christ you're never gonna eclipse siddhartha gotama the buddha okay you can't this [ __ ] ain't new you know you can't influence the world as much as the buddha himself and i started this video off by saying look at the reality in cambodia look at the reality in thailand and the cultural force of buddhism it's still so weak it's still so trivial and so pathetic compared to these rising levels of wealth rising levels of corruption you know uh so on and so forth you know yeah we got one comment from the audience someone's saying they remember that book the skinny [ __ ] so melissa if you want to if you want to jump in you can jump in obviously we got a lot of we got a lot of comments to the audience i can't keep up with oh my god okay sorry a lot of these people know my work going back for five years or something so raphael says i know you love the example of m-a-d-d so that's mothers against drunk driving so mother's gonna drink trap that was season one eisel mozart this is season two all right guys i'm i ain't oh i've given up on a lot of my own i've lost a lot of my own optimism a lot of my hope for the future you know that's but anyway so he's saying referring to my videos some years ago quote i know you love the example of mothers against drunk driving is a good example but can we also say the approach of going into schools talk about veganism was a failure so gary yourofsky it all failed it all failed every single strategy selling out and compromising failed like you know someone like unnatural vegan failed uh people with ethical treatment of animals failed organizations with multi-million dollar budgets failed organizations that were very principled failed organizations that were purely scientific failed organizations that were religious failed organizations that did quote unquote lifestyle activism bikinis weight loss enjoy your life failed the green party failed everywhere including including germany it's a total failure every example across the board and again you got to calibrate what you mean by failure i mean compared to communism it's a failure i mean compared to buddhism it's a failure i mean compared to the enormity of the challenge of really dramatically having an impact on global warming in the next 20 years it's a failure and that's why i'm staying to you confident look at that look back at the last 20 years look in the next three years it's going to keep on failing just really brief i don't know but like i i remember the dawn of the internet in 1997. i remember walking into the university library i could describe even the angle i was seeing this guy's screen at and i got this pile of books and i'm reading all this serious stuff about philosophy and politics and political history and i'm you know that's my headspace and i'm walking through the library and i see this guy's computer screen and at that time people people really went to the library to do their email i i did i i don't think i had internet at home at that time you know it was internet was more scarce and more expensive so there's a guy sitting at a computer watching the brand new britney spears video from memory i would guess that was her second album maybe was i don't know britney spears catalog well but it wasn't her it wasn't her very first hit song it was a new song came out at that time so i don't know 1998 or something like that you know that's the first time i'd seen video on the internet ever that had seen a moving picture like that as opposed to a still picture and i looked and thought wow that's the way the world has changed like this dude which also i have some contempt for him you're an adult man and you want to see the new britney spears video i don't know i don't know what's up with you bro but you know um you know when i was a child people were excited for the new michael jackson music video or actually a better example was prince when prince came out with the batman music video and they would just sit and watch tv for hours until it came on because there's no way to look it up people the kids would live like oh wow i want to see the new prince music video so i'm just going to sit here with the tv on until it comes on because they know it's a hit song they know sooner or later it's gonna sit there for three hours it's like okay now you go and you look at the internet okay i understand 20 years ago it would have completely makes sense to say hey hey now it's different because now we have the internet i relate to that optimism on many different levels because i lived through this [ __ ] all right i remember when people thought the best way to change the world was to get a [ __ ] photocopy machine and make a xena zine meeting a low cost when you would write your ideas on paper and you would photocopy them and you'd [ __ ] distribute them around anarchist bookstores and hope you could change the world i remember when people made vhs video cassettes and they would buy what used to be called a head-to-head reader that's probably not the correct term but that's what where i was that's what people called it and slang they would they would one of these head-to-head duplicators which is like a semi-professional way of copying vhs cassettes i think it's not as good as really making them in a factory and you'd buy a bunch of blank vhs cassettes and you'd copy this movie you made and you distribute that around to try to spread your ideas in the world people did that with like jfk conspiracy theories you know who killed jfk and you know they couldn't get it on tv they'd make this vhs cassette and shared okay so i totally understand how in the year 2000 you see the way the internet has changed from 1997 and 2000 and you say yeah you know what that was before and this is now well here we are in 2021 and we've run out of time and we've run out of optimism we the vegans have run out of optimism so we've run out of optimism how about these other [ __ ] how other how about the non-vegans in the [ __ ] green party how about the people who joined the green party because they like duck hunting they're trying to conserve the [ __ ] swamp so there were enough ducks for them to shoot me how [ __ ] hopeless are those people about curing global warming in the next 20 years you hit me what do you say i was just reading an article about the siblings in germany they took german chancellor angela merkel's government to court over a mission yeah uh okay what do you what do you think about that what do you think about that what do you think about doing that in terms of about in order to propound vegan values lawsuits i mean like is that the future is that the only thing that we can do okay so look i think i have to give an answer that's within the time scale we're talking about in this video a lawsuit that goes to supreme court minimum five years minimum so i think it's irrelevant on this time scale like i'm just saying i think that that question if you were asking me in 1985 or 1995 you know how about 100 years of lawsuits yeah but no i mean i think it's a joke and i really feel that if someone was just getting older i'm in my mid-40s you got 10 years to go to court now the other side of it is it's different in every country i'd like to sit here and cynically say that i don't know any examples of lawsuits like that trying to hold the government to its theoretical responsibilities that i don't know any examples that made a difference it's totally different in taiwan than it is in ireland or america or what have you i do know i mean as someone who does political science i do know examples that have made a difference but in terms of what you can do in in 20 years i don't believe in it and if that's what we're talking about if you want to save the world in 20 years you won't have a dramatic impact on global warming in 20 years i don't think that could make the difference and i think it's slow compared to i mean i know it's a surreal example but it's viable in one town just taking over the government in one small town and at the city hall level making leather shoes illegal having one town that brutally enforces that principle and then the impact that makes you know what i mean because i've seen the extent to which court cases that take on these things in principle many times they make too little difference for the sacrifice and time money do you not feel the woman you you can tell me you may know i'm you know i mean this is not something that i'm saying i'm absolutely right about what i'm saying if we're talking about the next 20 any years taking a leader or to suing suing them for important rights because the idea is that angela merkel knew about this for so many years if she continued to let uh fossil fossil fuel burning industry continue in germany uh producing cars and now daimler has announced that they will only make electric cars after 2030. so like we're willing to like you know make these huge sacrifices change a complete industry into you know from uh you know combustible engine to electric cars but we aren't willing to make any kind of make any lawsuits you know suing somebody okay so so melissa's raising an interesting question this is not one i really want to talk about today do you remember my old videos babe where i talked about smoking so you may not know but there was a hit movie um starring that scientologist [ __ ] as the lead actor the guy who was in saturday night fever now the guy was the you know saturday fever you know someone in the audience who is the lead act i was going to ask alexa alexa who is john travolta alexa stop john joseph alexa stop alexa stop anyway there was a movie starring john travolta about a lawsuit against the tobacco industry um [Music] you know basically when you look at the chart of how many cigarettes are consumed per capita or in total for society it has declined very little in the last 30 years it's it's remarkable how little yeah right yes so i just mentioned briefly guys there's more than way to measure the prevalence of cigarette smoking very commonly people are just asked verbally did you smoke cigarettes this week or something like a question but if you look at the number of cigarettes that are actually being sold it's a much more reliable indication just like the total number of tons of tobacco that they're produced and consumed it's remarkable how little it has declined um you know so look you know let me ask you so there's this particular drama and it's not the only one there have been many lawsuits against the tobacco industry um what has been their impact on a time scale of 20 years in terms of really impacting the culture and reality of smoking my my answer is too little too late now i do think so i've said this in many videos i think one of the forms of cultural change is stigma right and i said this like you know if you're a father and your daughter brings home her new boyfriend to introduce you and he's smoking a cigarette how do you judge him how do you how do you just say to someone no i won't let my daughter marry someone who smokes cigarettes or no how can you possibly you know where you just regard this as a red flag you regard this as a serious judgment on their character i do think that is much more effective and more important than those lawsuits against the the tobacco industry so you can get into a discussion do i think lawsuits make zero difference no i'm not claiming that but i'm saying we're talking about a time scale of 20 years looking back at the last 20 years we had the next 20 years you can call that 40 years to me most of that stuff no matter how much hollywood tries to glamorize it it's a joke there's another hit movie aaron brockovich and so on you know there are these many attempts to dramatize the legal system that way but i've got to say this is this is trivial compared to the the type of cultural change we're talking about what what isn't trivial okay look at the fall of the roman empire all right you went from having a society that worshiped a polytheistic you know system of gods based in ancient rome you know um to the monotheistic system of christianity you know you the society was totally transformed and that led to the dark ages you know it totally abolished democracy and republicanism and went into a period of christian kingships total unbelievable indescribable transformation of society accomplished in just a few generations i mean you can debate how long that that took you know that's not trivial that's the kind of scale of transformation we're talking about now of course i regard that as a transformation for the worse overall i don't think christianity improved uh europe how about islam so the area that's now afghanistan used to be buddhist it was buddhist and there were a variety of local animistic cults so buddhism is normally quite friendly to just diverse superstitions local gods and deities okay well it was transformed to an extremely uncompromising form of islam indonesia same comment indonesia used to be mahayana buddhist became a muslim society everything changed um total revision total cultural transformation that's what we're talking about so you know no offense but if you want to talk to me about erin brockovich and her lawsuit all right forget the john travolta case but it was one of these one of these glamorized lawsuits oh [ __ ] i'm you know what i'm screwing up it's not john travolta it was the guy who was in [ __ ] gladiator do you remember him russell crowe it was a russell crowe movie about the series i'm sorry screwed up john travolta george voted was in another movie like that but there was there was another movie which you know russell crowe was in a movie about suing the tobacco ministry you know but if you want to talk to me about a lawsuit against the tobacco industry or a lawsuit against the meat industry or a lawsuit against the german government to me on that scale the scale of the challenge and the amount of time we're talking about to me that's a [ __ ] joke right and go on yes you're a critic of yes yes right you know right but that's what happens when you're thinking of short term right i know i know but this video is addressed to exactly that hopeless scenario it's addressed to what's possible in the next 20 years given what happened in the last 20 years that's what i'm trying to get real about in this video right and of course i don't think terrorism is the answer i think that would be a total [ __ ] joke too i'm just being real with you i mean nobody nobody in the audience has proposed it nobody has nobody said oh well therefore terrorism would make a difference no yeah again compared to my my example of banning leather shoes and really unfortunately of course veganism is not offering an afterlife like any religion it's not offering what an organization oh oh but let's let's be real too it's not even argue it's not even offering what irish terrorism used to offer [ __ ] irish separatism or irish nationalism and that that inspired terrorism for decades yeah you know no no no there's nothing to to offer and it's never going to make the change people want to accomplish i mean like so again that calibrates it so i i used to live in the united kingdom i was in scotland more than england but i had experience both in scholarly i remember when there were warnings above basically every trash can about bomb threats because one of the ways the irish used to bomb things was leaving a bomb and a public uh garbage bin so just mentioned unlike the muslims the the the irish were normally trying to have a very small number of casualties and not at all they're trying to disrupt things without killing people that's just their their method generally speaking but they were extremely disruptive you can imagine the whole city of london gets shut down because of a bunch of bombs going off i remember the level of terror and terrorism you know in england that time you know there's there is absolutely no way veganism could win if it started carrying out that level of terrorism and of course i also think it shouldn't win that way i don't think it's immoral but i totally believe it would be ineffective or counterproductive it's only you know i don't think you can like i really do not think you can motivate people to do the right thing because it's the right thing to do through terrorism i don't you know and to me that's nothing like even my proposal of making shoes illegal they're willing to go to jail to do something totally counterproductive and pointless right right right right right no i know that's not i i i tend to agree with you okay well all right we have a hilariously appropriate commenter brandon asks what if logan paul went full-on vegan so but look you know this is the scent the reason i quote this now is as as silly as that is of course i think that would have more of a positive impact than terrorism i mean terrorism it's very obvious what's bad about it how it's going to make the situation worse but i mean that's the sense in which this kind of meaningless lifestyle activism seems positive it's because you're comparing it to the complete horseshit of what of the forms of violence that vegans have indulged in in the past well no i think you can measure it i think you can measure the outcomes too i mean you know look guys has anyone attempted a quantitative evaluation of the impact of tana mongeau tana mongeau was vegan and promoted veganism to millions of people i think it was just one or two years wasn't for that long you could do a quantitative study how many people are vegan today because tana mongeau became vegan okay and now you can do a [ __ ] analysis of the last time vegans used a bomb to destroy a fur shop because that shit's real there's one guy on youtube and he went to jail for that he was involved in a bomb plot they set off bombs in a fur you know fur coat store you know well guess what as as pathetic as trivial as the positive outcomes of logan paul or tana mongeau being vegan may may seem they compare positively to that that's that's such a total loss but i'm sorry but keep on trying i'm trying to calibrate this on a different level i'm talking about in the next 50 years having a transformation culturally and politically so dramatic that it's going to have an impact on global warming and then all this stuff is a [ __ ] joke i mean then tana mongeau is a drop in the bucket she's a drop in the ocean this is nothing yeah do you think people really appreciated the environment and do you think they would have any more chance of appreciating it given that it is getting worse for people and and um the sacrifices that are entailed with adopting a vegan diet okay look i'm gonna answer for myself i would feel totally differently about veganism if what if we lived on a planet where the total population of the planet was five hundred thousand was half a million people okay so i don't know if you guys know this if there were only half a million people on planet earth we could all drive ferraris and it wouldn't [ __ ] matter for the environment we could have half a million people driving the most polluting cars just the total impact on the environment when the global population is only half a million you know what i mean you uh you know just the total amount of lumber we'd require is so much less the total amount of farming the total impact of everything we're doing would be so much dramatically alexa what's the population of planet earth okay so my robot assistant tells me we're now at 7.7 billion we call it 8 billion and wrong numbers so the difference between uh half of what was i saying was i say half a million sorry it's it's it's unimaginable so if we had half a million people on the whole planet half a million homo sapiens think about how you know we there'd be no problem with the number of uh dolphins and whales and elephants there'd be plenty of habitat for elephants that would be you know so you can imagine yourself i mean frankly i know it's gonna sound ridiculous it doesn't really matter if you say half a million or half a billion you know within that range of humans on earth half a million all the way up to half a billion our environmental impact would be so little that we could sit here and talk about veganism in a totally different way and we'd be in a position to say hypothetically and pragmatically look this culture of everyone eating meat every day can go on forever but it shouldn't that would be our position and we'd be looking at a much more long-term strategy of saying look over the next 500 years how can we advocate this you know ethical cause and blah blah blah okay well that's not the [ __ ] situation we're in we're in a situation of eight billion people who are dramatically less poor today than they were 20 years ago and they aren't slaves yeah right the end of slavery increased yeah labor rights and everything else things things have improved in all these ways okay well guess what more people with more money means more of them are going to have children you know more birth i mean africa is the most dramatic example but it's true globally even look at the way afghanistan the population increased dramatically under american domination compared to what it was under the taliban before you know okay more people having more babies owning more cars you know buying more products that are delivered to them in airplanes and with trucks and i think all everything i buy gets delivered to me by an airplane everything i buy off the internet you know we live on an island things are if it doesn't come by airplane it comes by an amazing combination of you know truck and and boat and what have you you know you know you have more people eating more meat more per capita that's the reality of what we're of what we're living through so we're in a situation where the arguments of a veganism are in a situation where we say look um and guys i remember the old days when people used to say oh well we could have a plague just had a plague guys all right do you think do you think we're gonna cut the world's population in half through a plague you just saw alexa what's the total number of people who have died from coronavirus might answer your question according to johns hopkins as of today september 28 2021 there are 232 million cases of coping 19 worldwide okay alexa stop okay anyway so we're past four million deaths uh due to the plague of uh 2019-2020 so yeah so out of eight billion people four million died what do you what do you think so you know anyway i'm just saying so it does it contextualize the whole discussion very differently where instead we're looking at this and saying um this culture of eating meat can't continue um and yet it it does and yet it will and yet nobody cares and yet you know i was coming on with so much passion back when i was a student in kunming you remember those days you used to watch me i was coming on so passionately and saying look the future of the vegan vegan movement is you let's get organized let's make things happen for years i came on that way and saying who's with me hit me up let's make this happen not one person not one women got in touch with me want to have sex with me you know money fame power respect sex you know okay well you know what when you've had your orgasm like what now guys you know bangkok is going to be underwater you know uh [ __ ] athens can be underwater too you know i mean i'm sorry but you know we're going to lose some of the world's great heritage you're going to be telling your grandchildren oh yeah athens was this really important place in the history of democracy i saw it before was underwater oh you can still go scuba diving there um you know i mean you know what what is you know what is the future we're presuming you know i'm so flattered that you want to [ __ ] me but you know what about the future of planet earth and you know again i'm sorry this particular video is not especially about the the animals the suffering of the animals but i do care about the suffering of the animals i do care that literally billions of pigs are living and dying on a concrete floor in a steel cage and sometimes in a wooden crate you know this unspeakable uh you know just ethical horror for no good reason that's going on and on and uh all right brendan williams sister this is not what this video is about but brandon williams says smoking is twice as prevalent today as it was 10 years ago so i've got to put on my political science hat here and say brandon the main thing that changed is that we started getting statistics from eastern europe we started getting statistics in places like russia ukraine poland uh hungary etc so i i don't believe you i'm sorry this is my old field i'm not in that field anymore but i used to look at you know really crunch the numbers for health science research now also i think china is another example i think probably the statistics we got from china 20 years ago were just [ __ ] they were communist party fraud or something but a big part of what's changed is just um where we get statistics from large parts of africa and south america too we just haven't had statistics so long so i just say part of what's changing is that we know how much people are smoking in more of these places around the world but uh greece italy all of eastern europe there are huge parts where smoking is massively prevalent today and then you know there are there are some countries like france where i'm sorry it's been ages since i looked but in france smoking had declined but not enough you know it declined but it declined a little bit you know so yes globally normally when you're looking at these things you are looking at in total terms and you know by the way um you just look at the new york stock exchange look at uh look at how well still this day american tobacco producers are and they they export around the world they don't just sell tobacco um this is consistently over time it's the single most profitable industry in the united states of america like if you're generalizing over the last century or last 50 years but still today those are stocks you can make a lot of money out of and they're always included in the best performing stock list you know so yeah sorry going what exactly i was just going to say i think you're right and right now yeah it's definitely totally acceptable to eat meat you will be you will not be a social alcoholic if anything you're a social outcast right so what about hobich on on joe rogan um you remember the chick uh she she was vegan for like 10 years her father is a [ __ ] country western singer yeah ho [ __ ] yeah miley cyrus who is a whole [ __ ] jesus christ our contempt for miley cyrus i have miley cyrus i have no respect for you as a creative artist let me tell you but you know um i think the way miley cyrus was received when she gave up veganism after preaching it for years and then just became a total hypocrite and everyone embraces that you know i think that shows the reality of stigma and counter stigma you know what i'm saying that you know people actually regarded very positively even when it makes you specifically you into a hypocrite you know that's still celebrated and impressive she didn't have any kind of sophisticated excuse i mean anyone could look at that and say you're just a [ __ ] idiot and a hypocrite and you've been lying to us for all these years you know there's all kinds of reasons other than veganism to be mad at miley cyrus for being ex-vegan and for revealing it in the way she did on the joe rogan podcast and everyone including joe rogan warmly embrace it so that's where we're at so we are not remotely at the point where you know if a girlfriend pardon me if a young woman brings home her boyfriend to meet her parents so they come as a couple girlfriend and boyfriend where the father says you eat meat like [ __ ] you can't be serious you can't marry this guy you can't be with who would want to be with a guy awaits me obviously people will regard cocaine that way they regard heroin that way no no parent is going to say well he's a heroin addict now but he'll quit once the marriage gets rolling once you guys settle down settle down rent an apartment he'll be fine he'll straighten out now some people do in reality some people do but no one would take an optimistic view of that right my point is there would be stigma whether it's rational or irrational say this guy smokes cigarettes this guy uses heroin whatever his story is say there's no way you're marrying my daughter there's no way i'll approve of this marriage so no stigma is going the other way or you are the target of suspicion and hatred for being vegan rather than rather vice versa yeah for me a moment like miley cyrus revealing that she's not vegan and in a major sense never was vegan you know that shows that now the the stupid stunt guy too uh steve oh so steve oh it was revealed that he never was vegan you know like literally like he never stopped you mean uh the boxer uh heavyweight champion in the world had a nintendo game uh named after him mike tyson mike tyson never was vegan he continued eating meat during all the years when he was actively promoted as a symbol of the vegan movement you know where where is the where's the stigma where are the consequences you know so again i mean you know uh this shows that the stigma is working against us not for us uh in reality in 2021. and if your perspective is that we don't have 500 years if you're talking about the next 50 years the next 20 years what's going to happen guys we're we're running out of time and look so it may seem like a joke to you guys that i even talk about people like nina and miranda who do you want me to talk about who are the most important leaders in the vegan movement during my lifetime okay it's pathetic freely durianrider nina and rita these were the people in a position to make a difference so this is who i've addressed my critiques to this these are the people i've reached out to trying to collaborate and trying to improve and trying to work for a better future for the vegan movement and these are the people i've criticized for what they were doing wrong nina and miranda did commercials for taco bell directly promoting meat and chicken tacos well okay you know what you know that's something wrong for a leader in the vegan movement you know but these are people and by the way in case you know nina miranda they're important and powerful entirely because of who their father was their father was a wealthy person who organized the the veg fest in los angeles and he had he had a powerful internet presence behind him as well as a real institutional presence for that he built up over decades so it's not any talent or hard work on their part that made them make them important but you know my point is whether you see my reaching out to people positively or am i reaching out to them negatively like criticizing them as being pathetically misdirected what do you do you think i have the delusion that gary francione is going to make any [ __ ] difference in the next 20 years you know you can look at the difference he made in the last 20 years but he is a burnt match all right whatever he whatever difference he could have made he's already made it and his chapter in the history of this movement is now over i've closed the book on that i made videos they weren't mean videos but i made videos saying well that's the end of that chapter let's let's analyze it let's talk about what we're right what went wrong but that's over so you know again like what do you think who are my contemporaries you think i look up to james aspie do you think i do you think i could possibly sit here in this video and say to you well don't worry in the next 20 years james aspie is gonna save planet earth are you [ __ ] kidding you know do you think i sit around saying wow i i wake up in the morning and i try to be more like james aspie i have nobody to look up to i have nobody to look up to at the at the intellectual deep end i have nobody look up to you at the at the shallow end nobody i have no contemporaries i have no colleagues i have nobody writing to me trying to do something positive and i never have not at any stage of the history of this of this movement of whatever my eight years you know being uh being a voice of the movement so you know i you know and when i i mean you can scale that up i think that's the reality for a whole lot of other people too and look what the [ __ ] i'm not gonna disclose anything we talked about privately the last time i talked to aaron janus what do you think we talked about so melissa you heard the whole conversation did aaron janus say one [ __ ] thing to me about accomplish something for the vegan movement in the next five years next 20 years was there any discussion about what we were going to do positively what we were going to get organ nothing now we did talk about all kinds of personal life stuff what's going on her personal life what's going on my personal life we talked about the last time we saw each other face to face we we talked and it was it was a very memorable conversation all right but like if you think the last time i talked to aaron janice she said one word to me about what she was gonna accomplish or what i was gonna accomplish or what we could do together like even on the level of encouragement not one word all right the last time i talked to henya mania the last time i talked to jason posino or something you know what i mean like sorry all these people yeah i mean it's hennya is henya still alive yeah i mean you know in 2021. so you know the last time i communicated indirectly with nina and miranda though how about the last time i talked to [ __ ] a natural vegan sorry way back we used to talk you know what i mean we've communicated indirectly since then so look and if you think it's a joke these are the most influential people in the movement i could communicate with why do you think i talked to henya i was talking to her because i care about the future why do you think i was talking to a natural vegan or any of the rest i was reaching out to those people you know try to make something happen and now it's over and and again sorry i'm sorry to keep playing this card but even if there is another freely right it's never it's never going to have the impact of the last freely even if there's another oprah winfrey special even if there is another book that's a hit like the skinny [ __ ] you know or what's his name dr greger's how not to die do you think dr greger's next book is gonna have the same impact as how not today it's impossible it can't have a greater impact it could only have a lesser impact there are there are diminishing returns no matter how big the next hit book of that kind is everyone's heard it before oh being vegan reduces the rate of heart attack oh okay yeah i already knew that well you know if you thought if you thought optimistically it was going to transform the world that once people become aware that being a vegan lowers your chances of getting a heart attack well okay look back at the last 20 years because that is a burnt match like that that the potential the positive potential that had has been spent it's done and gone okay so a question from raphael i'm sorry i don't know how long ago you wrote this um question is how do you get governments to get on board with that idea let me tell you something raphael there are some countries in the world where democracy is by the people of the people for the people okay you ever heard of navoo what is it navu indiana and naboo illinois you can go to a ghost town and you can intentionally relocate a thousand vegans there a town where now they have 28 people in there i even see that in california there are towns in california where they have population 28 you know what i mean and if you want to you can literally take over a town where people who are supporters of your movement are the majority of people living there now let's just say greater los angeles area um you could accomplish that like people who all have employment in the greater l.a area and probably most of them are driving an hour to work anyway you could accomplish that just by having them relocate within l.a we say okay all of us are going to move to the small town of 29 palms as a small town in southern california you know but whatever it is okay we're all going to move there and then we are going to elect the mayor because we are the democracy or with a plurality of people we're more than 30 of the population here and in this one place at this one time we're going to take a stand and we're going to start legislating because we're going to you know we're going to be the people we're going to have government by the people of the people for the people we are going to be the people now does that sound like an extraordinary sacrifice to you i could do that within london england too there are enough vegans in the greater london area that if they all relocate to one neighborhood you have them all in one [ __ ] apartment building probably you know what i mean you probably could you know but you just have them they keep the their same jobs but they're they're moving to to the same borough instead of being spread out all over the place that would give you enough of a democratic mass to to make something happen berlin could probably do it too there probably could be a place we could strategically okay now if that sounds like too great a sacrifice compare it to all the things vegans have done in the last 20 years and all the things we could do in the next 20 years and can and ask yourself you know does it matter if bangkok is underwater or not does it matter if we keep on with these completely ridiculous attempts at dealing with climate change that can only fail you know so you know it may sound like a big sacrifice but compared to things vegans are already doing it's not that big a sacrifice and you could actually you could actually have some outcomes you could actually have some impact you know you could basically make gerrymandering work for you by relocating the voters you need to make political change possible on that small scale symbolically well yeah but if you're actually playing to win if you actually want to control the mayor's office you know it's a different and i know examples of religious groups that did that or tried to do that you know there are towns where everyone's a mormon where the mormon church controls city government and so on and there are real advantages that you can imagine where you know religions that would be a powerless minority instead locally become powerful you know now look i'm not saying that's that's not i'm not saying that's the best thing you can do but i'm saying it's better than the other horseshit that's on the table right now and if we're talking about a 20-year time frame you know what do you want to do going to prison won't help guys won't it's not going to help that's what you know so many other stupid vegan groups have criticized hmm so i'm just reading your your comments and questions guys so raphael says that verse comes from raphael raphael says quote the only way veganism will make an impact is if there are vegan corporations that can influence political decisions through lobbying no corporations make money corporations do things to make money they're totally irrelevant the discussion we're having that's it okay nestle corporation makes soy milk because they make money nestle corporation makes vegan chocolate bars and they also make non-vegan chocolate bars because they'll do whatever makes money this is it's irrelevant it's completely irrelevant and the the the belief that veganism would basically create a bunch of elon musk like capitalist impresarios who would save the world is it ludicrous fantasy okay what do you how about microsoft were you joking you know it's just ridiculous so you know the the charity that vegan corporations can do uh especially if you talk about the next 20 years 20-year time frame this is a this is a joke you know so sorry this is a joke do you want to give me the lekis picks up on this and says quote once the mega corporations like nestle are on board with veganism they were lobbying for it were you born yesterday homie i mean i'm sorry you know nestle corporation is not charity okay that's it and what we're talking about it's a charity and what you're talking about here i'm just saying it doesn't make money it loses money and i don't i don't mean it's a charity in some other sense i just mean specifically this is about doing the right thing because that's the right way to do and look when you look back at cultural transformations of this significance is that is that what happened with slavery is that how slavery got abolished well once major corporations start rejecting slavery and paying fair wages to black people that'll liberate black people no what do you think there's going to be the the prophet motive is going to abolish slavery no women should vote oh great they should have the right to vote because they think they're going to make more money out of women having to write the book and if you look at really sudden cultural change like you know the end the fall of the roman empire christianity replacing the religion of ancient rome islam replacing buddhism in in central asia um i'm sorry there's just no there's no comparison uh so i you know i don't know what the basis for this uh frankly utopian uh dream is that that enlightened corporations will lead this transformation hey how how have corporations abolished alcohol how have corporations abolished cigarettes how about the impact of corporate i mean joking i mean you know oh oh so didn't hear that the rapper waka flocka flame is also ex-vegan now so there you go i never felt he was really vegan i just heard what he said in his own words that sounds milk he was just messing around i i also can't remember last time i heard anyone playing a song by that guy he used to appear on reality tv a lot i don't even know this is brandon williams says that mark fisher committed suicide never heard so again do you want to give him the kiss says this is just reiterating the same point i've already responded to quote why does veganism need a cult leader to be successful can it not steadily increase through industry pressure and market forces how about sewage treatment i live in a city still today that dumps untreated sewage directly into the ocean why don't you just let market forces solve the problem because there's no way to turn a [ __ ] profit on doing the right thing because it's the right thing to do the right thing to do is not to dump human turds into the ocean okay but to take human sewage and put it through a complex expensive energy intensive series of chemical treatments so that it has less of an impact on fish oh and those are run by fossil fuel burning power plants so that's bad so let's get rid of that and continue you can't turn a profit on it okay i can make a movie i can show that movie in a movie theater and people pay for a ticket to see the movie so a movie can be profitable the fish and the whales are not going to buy a ticket to drink clean water they're not going to pay you for a free market mechanism to eliminate sewage to eliminate water pollution polluting the water is profitable ecology is never profitable it's money losing that's politics you do it just because it's the right thing to do whether you have a democracy or a monarchy you make hard decisions about doing the right to do hey let me ask you something afghanistan do you think industry pressure and market forces are going to provide education for women think they're gonna provide equal opportunity for women how about the right to vote for women why don't you just leave that up to [ __ ] industry pressure and market forces are you [ __ ] [ __ ] i'm sorry but this is real politics this is a real political struggle all right and give whether you talk about slavery or women's equality or one religion struggling with another or atheism struggling against all the religions combined you know whatever set of examples you you want to take no i mean no what you can do for profit is just fundamentally irrelevant i mean i'm sorry it's irrelevant in the same sense that i could say to you oh well what about the lumber industry isn't the lumber industry gonna solve no they're going to keep on cutting down trees and turning them into tables what's your [ __ ] point do you think they're just going to say oh well we as the lumber industry we like we have to oppose climate change which in a sense they do because they need a planet to grow trees and turn them into deaths therefore what are you [ __ ] kidding it's ridiculous it's just ridiculous for the same reason the lumber industry didn't abolish slavery and didn't achieve equal rights for women or anything else that's all the lumbas lumber industry does is make money out of trees it's just as stupid as saying that drug dealers are going to do it drug dealers have plenty of money and leisure time probably i mean you know if you're making a lot of money out of dealing cocaine why don't why don't the drug dealers save the world it's just ridiculous if they do it's just irrelevant to drug dealing you know so i'm sorry i don't know i don't know where you get this kind of basically anarcho-capitalist pseudo-libertarian um optimism that's somehow for-profit economic activity is gonna is gonna replace real politics but it can't and it won't and historically looking back it never has worked there's no example you can look at where you can say oh well free free market forces you know oh free market forces solve this problem so we don't we don't have to all right for some reason someone has asked me to check my messages on patreon so i will want to know what's significant about this but i will do so incidentally patreon only allows you to send me text eh you can't send a picture just mentioning when you think about it doesn't make a lot of sense so i don't know why you asked me to do that here i am on patreon i got no i got no new messages on patreon so i i did check patreon but thanks okay so here's here's another kind of funny comparison melissa and i actually talked about this earlier today a couple hours ago before we came on camera um do you want to give me the kiss says with the current a global epidemic we could stop air travel basically overnight so so i'm continuing with the quotation here quote so i'm sure if the danger is great enough mainstream will come out of veganism real fast you're 110 wrong you're 110 misinterpreting the evidence what the epidemic shows is how little a difference it makes to dramatically reduce air travel so we just did it if you think you can stop global warming by dramatically reducing the number of recreational flights people take you just had a two-year experiment in that guess what it adds up to jack [ __ ] it's trivial okay and no sorry which you have to work with in politics you have to work with substitutions that are viable you cannot substitute a boat for an airplane one just is not a substitute for the other but you can substitute tofu for steak you can substitute a vegan alternative for meat you can you can eat vegan chocolate bars instead of dairy milk juggle bars you can but no i mean the exact opposite is true now sorry in the whole history of the world um the single most dramatic reduction in flights was after september 11th 2001 in terms of what is attainable by reducing um uh flights by reducing uh air traffic activity but obviously during the last two years we still have had deliveries by airplanes still had mail for example some people we still have them obviously those military flights too and so on there are many categories fights in the same but in terms of recreational tourist avertable air travel that was dramatically reduced for uh for two years and it's it's over so uh in case you had any optimism about an experiment at that time um you've seen it coming on you know it's irrelevant now again why would you take from that i mean i'm sorry i'm sorry this is an incredibly stupid comment and let me read it again quote with the epidemic we could stop air travel basically overnight comma so i am sure if the danger is great enough mainstream will come around to veganism real fast close quote so what is the [ __ ] danger what are you an idiot like what do you so what are you gonna do like what meat is going to become explosive like what's the plan you're going to nitroglycerin you know the [ __ ] beef steak exploding chicken eggs this is madness there will never be enough danger people will never defensively become vegan it's just ridiculous what do you think i mean people know the health benefits they know the health risks it's game over for that that's a spent match that's a burnt match in the last 20 years everyone learned about that they either heard it from oprah winfrey or they heard it from dr greger or whatever it is known so what what are you going to do increase the level of danger posed by a non-vegan net this is a joke you know again so we just had the we just had the elections in germany what do you think another 500 years of people voting for the green party and the green party not even caring in the slightest about you know about a vegan diet and so on and same with green party in canada green party in canada supports expanding the meat and dairy industry they want the government to support the meat and dairy industry more it's complete madness i'm sure if you look at new zealand it'll be the same thing again anyway so levy i don't know i'm just saying welcome to the crowd but i don't remember telling you someone named levy uh wrote it and said that mit uh estimates overall total social collapse in the year 2040. sounds like an interesting study um but still you know i mean we're living with all these things being known right now and you know people are not because people are becoming vegan at a completely trivial rate just relative to population growth and relative to the fact that around the whole world the amount of meat being consumed per capita is increasing so by the way guys the first time i made this argument on the internet was on the website vegan mind tricks so i had this blog vegan mind you i can probably bring it up and i said look you guys are all kidding yourselves you're saying because people were claiming on that uh on that website on tumblr vegans were uh claiming that they'd won that the total amount of meat and dairy being consumed was dropping dramatically because veganism i was like oh really here's the actual chart of how much meat is being sold and consumed in the united states of america per capita here's the chart for how much dairy like i got the actual you know those are all things measured both by the us government and by different non-government agencies uh food and agriculture organization um you know uh but but also just industry organizations like the meat industry itself wants to know how much meat they're selling you know uh and i say no no look actually even within the united states of america it's growing dramatically uh and around the world it's going right so here's here's one of them uh i made a whole bunch of these uh but anyway yeah the chart showing so this chart shows total tons of poultry meat slaughtered in the usa uh fao statistics total tons of beef consumed in china you know but anyway also with all kinds of other statistics uh year by year showing how that was increasing and it's not a minor increase increasing dramatically with time so okay you guys want to sit around and kid yourselves that your that vegans are winning you know it's not and let's be clear the context of this video it's not just that we are losing we lost we're looking at game over we had 20 years 2001 to 2021 and we accomplished jack [ __ ] and now we don't have another 20 years so what do you want to do what do you want to do next and no offense but none of you guys are going to make it happen i don't have one a [ __ ] person in my audience and i don't even know one person over youtube or over the internet it's not like i can say to you oh well dr greger is going to solve the problem oh well none of you guys are gonna help but i have so much [ __ ] faith in dr greger no dr mcgregor is a multi-million dollar budget and you might as well take that money and shove it down the toilet might as well flush it out into the [ __ ] ocean it's a complete waste of millions of dollars people with the ethical treatment of animals have millions of dollars you might as well take that money and flush it down the toilet no there's no hope for anyone coming from anyone and none of you are going to do anything i'm not going to get one email from you not one of you as a project none of you are going to hire me there was a time when i was asking there was time when i was out there looking for a job say look this is what i've got to offer this is what i'm trying to do you know regardless of whether you hire me or i hire you at this point i mean now i'm older whether i'm a leader or a follower or participant there is not not one positive thing is going to come out of this youtube video and guys this is game over that's it nice planet well it lasted i mean you know i don't think the planet's gonna cease to exist i think western civilization as we know it is gonna cease to exist i think bangkok is gonna cease to exist and you know along with bangkok a lot of other things are gonna are gonna change so you know too bad and you know i mean the the fact that you know what tiny community is preaching veganism in los angeles in taiwan in tel aviv israel right the the the influence and impact that has compared to the number of people who are eating more meat in africa in china even in japan in all of these places taiwan it's so [ __ ] depressing taiwan has the highest percentage of vegans of anyone anywhere in the world but guess what the meat eaters are eating more meat per capita and there are more of them so it's completely eclipsed it's completely dwarfed they have no ecological impact whatsoever that's the most the most vegan society on earth is taiwan and by the way i have looked up the statistics for israel i was interested in israel the percentage of people were vegan were they enough to have any impact no and it's the same thing uh so israel's population is increasing and also the amount of meat they eat per capita has been increasing to both even within israel israel is not a poverty-stricken country it's a it's a first it's a relatively wealthy country um so but there too the mediating has has gone up so the the the ecological impact is nil um of of these of the world's most successful vegan communities the world's most successful vegan communities in the context of this conversation or a total failure okay and oh look guys oh i'm i'm so [ __ ] happy that uh tobias leonard published his book let's all give him a big clap on the back oh when you did a book tour good for you tobias oh and you got a famous person to write the introduction your book and you gotta you got a real good publisher and that looks good in your seat oh congratulations you made a career out of selling out the vegan movement you know i mean you made a career out of collaborating with the so-called reducetarians and making all these excuses for eating meat dairy and eggs and all this [ __ ] oh oh unnatural vegan i'm so [ __ ] happy for you that you encouraged people to just relax and eat meat whenever they were out at a restaurant so you wouldn't have the stress of having to pick a vegan restaurant she's done that i've seen it on camera i'm so glad you were making excuses for zoos to keep [ __ ] elephants in captivity and for people to continue eating eggs as long as they're from backyard chickens and it's like oh your whole [ __ ] career consists of selling out veganism including she encouraged people to just buy leather shoes if you can't find vegan shoes that are good enough for your [ __ ] aesthetic and it's oh i'm so glad you personally became wealthy and famous well too bad we don't have another 20 years you know i'm sorry and all this other [ __ ] it's just a [ __ ] distraction brandon williams you're what what's your head up your ass quote sustainable vertical farming is the answer are you [ __ ] are you 12 years old vertical farming farming without sunshine farming indoors the only crop profitable enough to be ecologically sustainable in vertical farming is marijuana and even then only in countries where it's illegal it's better for the environment to grow weed on the ground under sunlight are you [ __ ] stupid you think you're going to grow wheat in the future indoors do you grow wheat to produce bread indoors do you know anything about farming have you have you worked on a farm have you done research about the illegal and it's also just a total [ __ ] distraction if you actually believe vertical farming is more efficient than horizontal form if you believe that which is complete horseshit how much more efficient you think it's 50 percent more efficient 70 do you think if it were more efficient to grow wheat indoors using vertical farming do you think that's going to make more of a difference than the difference between people taking a soybean and eating it directly as opposed to growing the soybeans and feeding them to cows and pigs and for several months or several years until they're whatever size you want them to be some of the pigs only live for three months or six months depends on the breeding they pick but whether you feed them to this animal for months or years and then killing that animal and eating its flesh all right the the efficiency of human beings directly eating beans instead of feeding beans to ruminant animals and then eating the flesh of those animals okay you can't even measure it in percentages this is thousands of percentages more efficient okay so thousands of you know it's incomprehensible in that sense if you think you could come up with a method of farming indoors using lamps vertical farming that you you think you can have dirt on a [ __ ] bookshelf this is what it looks like i mean on these vertical shelves and that's going to be more efficient than having earth outdoors that's why you want to grow rice so you want to grow wheat really so you want to grow beans i mean you tell me you think that's going to be more efficient than horizontal farming is it five percent more efficient you think you're going to end global warming through like if you can squeeze out five percent out of that all right i'm going to say this to you straight to your [ __ ] face bro even if you take the most flattering example where you found a particular food like peaches and you can make the case okay to do high-end luxury peaches we can get it five percent more efficient with like indoor vertical farming which is basically an incredibly counterproductive form of greenhouse farming it's a greenhouse without the sun it's what it [ __ ] is okay you say oh okay so we can actually make these peaches just like marijuana like it's possible to make some high-end peaches using vertical farming instead of horizontal farming the ecological benefit of those most flattering examples which there are [ __ ] websites up there propounding that will never compare to the ecological difference of growing peaches in a climate better suited to it as opposed to a climate less suited to it okay so the ecological difference you can make just by growing rice in a place that's well suited to growing rice and growing orchards in a place that's better suited to grow just by reorganizing like literally reallocating farm labor you can have the like you have a family that grows rice forms so look we're going to move you on to land that's better suited for rice that is has a dramatically better impact on everybody you can tell i've researched this stuff okay but anyway sorry i'm i'm just getting intimidated with this because the world is full of these [ __ ] distractions and it's all a joke the difference between reusable plastic bags and disposable plastic bags does not [ __ ] matter you're talking about one or two percentage points at best and many of in many cases it's worse to use the reusable plastic bag you know the disposable plastic bags are better for the environment than the reusable ones you know you get into these these absurdities when you actually when you actually do the math all of that is a joke the only thing here that's not a joke is veganism that's what's going to have the dramatic impact we need but we would need billions of people to do it not even millions billions we need a total transformation of our culture and economy from the bottom to the top how are you gonna make that happen by talking about vertical farming by talking about wind power like look i like wind power but it's [ __ ] it just doesn't add up okay like i like it i'm a fan like i i even support it in a sense like it's fun i like wind power it's not gonna save the world it's just not it's just not in the next 20 years it's gonna it's gonna make a tiny impact or none at all this is the reality of wind power right you can't and you know sorry i mean you can actually visualize what it is you're what it is you're replacing with wind power you know like you say okay so this is the this is our coal burning power plant and now this is the entire coast of scotland being covered with wind turbines just to make as much energy as that one coal burning power plant like you can actually visualize what it is you know megawatt by megawatt you know go on to like yeah and make these enormous projects yes in order to do everything other than yes right so that not one drop of water is fed to cows that will be slaughtered and fed to humans yeah not one soybean is going to feed these animals that go to feed human beings like end it you know and animal agriculture it's an evil horrible industry i mean you know when the biggest joke of all is that i mean animal agriculture it doesn't happen it doesn't have to be compared to some future technology to be obsolete it already is obsolete in precisely the sense that nike air force ones whatever nike air jordans that nike sports shoes are obsolete compared to non-leather vegan nike shoes like the same company so whether you use puma or nike or adidas they'll make the same shoe they make it in leather and they make it with vegan materials and it's already obsolete all we need to do is commit to eliminating leather shoes that's it you know and you can accomplish something that's far more profound than all these these kinds of distractions um and again i can't i you know i like wind power i like solar power i like it but this is like recreational like this is like talking about playing golf or something you know what i mean it's you're sorry but in terms of if you really want to change the world if you really have an impact in the next 20 years and and guys i'm saying again you have to look at the actual substitutions involved um having every so let's just say you pass an amendment to the american constitution and you say from now on every single person moving between europe and america just specifically between the european union and the united states of america they all must be by boat not by airplane we're just going to make it illegal we're going to have america and the european union pad ourselves we're going to have a massive show of of self-righteousness moral self-righteousness and we're just going to eliminate airplane traffic between the united states and europe so then think about what happens next okay there are substitutions this is the united nations substitutability hypothesis so now you have a huge construction boom creating cruise ships cruise liners what's the environmental impact of that they're made out of steel okay what do cruise ships burn okay they they well they either well okay they actually today they burn the lowest grade of gasoline so it does come out of a hole in the ground the same way gas and it goes into cars but they use a different consistency of it this is not worth getting into the details of why that is okay but okay so you're gonna have a huge boom in actually the demand for the type of fuel that's used in the low-grade fuel used in uh you know long-haul uh cruise ships or whatever okay and now every single one of those people instead of taking a flight it basically takes one day it takes up your whole day just getting to and from the airport the actual flight takes a few hours right okay now how many days are you in transit and every single one of those days you're eating you're eating and you're pooing right so just look at the environmental impact of having thousands and thousands of new cruise ships filled with thousands and thousands of people who are eating thousands of chickens and cows and pigs every day right oh guess what the actual environmental difference you can make isn't replacing airplanes with boats it's right now you could pass a law saying all the boats we've got have to be vegan you have a bigger impact because of the nature of the substitution and the enviro the ecological impact of it right so you know and again i just say in numerous ways there there are limits to the substitutability of one technology for the other especially talking about using an inferior technology boats are inferior to airplanes you know so you know you're not talking about an upgrade you're talking about a downgrade um but there is you you are not downgrading when you switch from a chocolate bar to a vegan chocolate bar or you switch from a basketball shoe to a vegan basketball shoe so i'm sorry but you know ultimately what i'm railing against here is the indifference of my own audience and my own colleagues you know what are you going to do and i know i know look the people who are out here pursuing money fame power respect sex the people who are putting on their bikini and posing on instagram they're not the worst people they're the best people because they're trying to do something instead of nothing you know and it's vain and pathetic and counterproductive and i still reach out to those people because i think maybe well if you're willing to have this level of commitment maybe you're willing to do something more maybe maybe there's something positive we can we can do together you know and nothing positive ever has happened in my experience you know it's it's a great shame but like i can't look at james aspie and james aspie and his and his wife or something and say that these are the worst people you know the the tragedy is that they're the best they're the best we've got what hope have you got guys who if you're in my position who are you going to work with who should i email who should i phone today it's not going to be tobias leonard and i've tried i talked to that guy for years you know i believe me i've reached out to everyone i could possibly reach out to it's okay here's a great question for you guys what university should i study at where is somewhere i can get a phd or i can talk to someone with a phd who's gonna help me there isn't one in the whole [ __ ] world okay if i want to be a scholar of buddhism there were a few universities where i can study buddhist philosophy and get a phd in that they're all terrible it's a joke you know if i want to become a scholar of ancient greek where can i go and study ancient greek oh well this happens to be the single most important thing for the future of planet earth and it has to be it has to matter now it's now or never okay it's now and in the next 20 years or never and i've done the research there is nowhere i can even get a degree as a vegan nutritionist we did all the research for that for us the two of us as a couple going into nutrition nutritional science becoming advocates for veganism that way there was nowhere i can even do culinary school i can do vegan cuisine to become a vegan baker we researched the [ __ ] out of that for years and we actually spent many thousands of dollars on it i lost years of my life so i can't get ahead in the nutrition side i can't get ahead in the cuisine side and guess what i can't get ahead and none of you can get ahead on the political side which is what ultimately [ __ ] matters there's no department of political science or anything like it where there are people with phds making more people with phds to actually get organized and solve the problem and change the world now start changing the world yesterday and it's too late okay i can't i can't open my own university i can't start doing that tomorrow all right the older generation let us down the people who were doing this [ __ ] in the last 20 years you know so it's in that context i've got to say nina and randa they're terrible people but they're the best people we've got in the [ __ ] movement they're all we've got left who who am i going to look at who am i going to look to james aspie and nina and randa where's the hope for the future of the movement and i mean now my dude i mean today who am i going to phone today what are we going to do if we want to make sleep in the next five years there is nobody and there is nothing and it is time to say game over we lost you had your chance did you enjoy the last 20 years what do you think is going to happen in the next 20 years and what do you what do you think are you going to be happy to just be sitting there with your arms crossed smirking and saying i told you so as the negative consequences of global warming start to pile up is that what you want to do do you want to be right because i've said this for years i don't want to be right i want to win all right i want to make this difference in the world you know what i'm saying and and for years i said who's with me guess what nobody's with me all right including not vegan gains not vegan gains not aaron janus not henia mania like obviously not someone like freely but there were all kinds of intermediate people all kinds of reasons people who've appeared on my channel like people i had a conversation with by skype none of them not one all right i am alone homie and even if i don't know everybody in this movement trust me all of them know me i am notorious all of them know me all right and it ain't hard to find me and any of them could have talked to me at any point you know and you know what what are you going to do say well at least a natural vegan got rich at least vegan gains got rich and famous at least he got to sit and play video games for the last 20 years of his life okay so it's no big deal but i just say one of the reasons why i was so passionate about vertical farming and what [ __ ] it is is that most of the arguments for vertical farming are based on this old myth that local is beautiful that locally grown food is what's good for the environment and it's not okay and that's why they talk about vertical farming and that's why they want to in general do greenhouse agriculture so again i could make a whole video just about this topic but to me it's [ __ ] boring okay does it take a genius i guess i'm a genius because i figured this [ __ ] out when i was like 16 okay so no offense but eliza and the other people talking about this i'm sorry but this is a [ __ ] joke shout out to ron sims ron sims said quote as someone who knows and talk to farmers vertical farming is asinine at best okay so here's the thing during my lifetime we lived through a little period of history called neoliberalism we lived through a little period of history called globalization and i heard all these ecologists claiming that neoliberalism is bad and globalization is bad that it's bad for the environment that it's bad ecologically and it was all horseshit okay do you know what's bad for the environment people in south korea trying to farm mangoes that can be more efficiently grown in thailand now there's no clear it's not impossible to farm mangoes so you can you can't it's now especially you can imagine if you get into greenhouses and vertical farming and advanced technology you can basically farm anything anywhere right but what's actually more efficient economically and what's vastly better for the environment is to allow or encourage each ecological niche to specialize in producing the food they're best at for the people of thailand to farm the foods that their climate their soil conditions etc can produce better than anyone else in the world and that for the people of south korea to produce what they're best at and the whole continent of africa right and that through globalization actually the main thing we've demonstrated is that we have vastly excess farming capacity on planet earth for our needs so i don't know if you guys know but like there is no economic need for taiwan to produce rice at all they still do but they could completely shut down all rice farming in taiwan nobody needs it we globally we produce way too much rice and we're still doing it for cultural reasons you know so they're all kind of it's just total global capacity for vegetables and fruit and rice because it's vastly inexcessive now if people come vegan it's a joke because it's like ten to one more because now we're not trying to feed all these billions of cows and chickens and pigs now we have way too much capacity so no the vertical farming it is complete horseshit and most of the arguments in its favor are based on you first embracing the delusion that the ethically optimal way to live is by importing and exporting nothing that you should just have an isolated community which again for religious reasons some people want to do like some people are religious fanatics they only want to eat food that's produced locally and therefore you get into uh you know greenhouses and vertical front and all kinds of things so that you can you can produce what you need locally but no you know um in terms of the production of wheat i used to live there naturally there were gifted places that producing wheat i mean to my i think the single greatest in the world is probably um uh the ukraine and the adjacent part of russia you know there are some parts of the world but which they have the right climate and conditions to really grow wheat incredibly efficiently now sorry if i'm wrong i'm wrong i mean if you're going to tell me now no the most efficient place to grow weed is afghanistan you know whatever yeah right sure exactly yeah no no no cotton is such a depressing example okay so no no but really really briefly cotton is a great example the government of australia ruined their ecology growing cotton in australia and it's the australia is the driest con continent in the world it's the worst place to grow cotton but for political reasons they made it happen no it is better for ecology to allow cotton to be grown in africa in egypt egypt is part of africa it's going to say africa specifically egypt but anyway there are there are places in the world that are naturally gifted at growing cotton people in australia should wear clothing made of cotton from egypt egyptian cotton it's the greatest cotton in the world you know and you know the nile river delta gets all this rain and they can grow cotton and it's wonderful so cotton is one of the most extreme examples so no the way you improve ecological outcomes when we're talking about a vegan planet it's a joke anyway because we just have way too much capacity is that you allow the people of thailand to farm the things that thailand farms the best that they have the climate for you allow the people of south korea to farm what they conform the best you allow cotton to be grown in the climate we're caught in streets that is how you achieve better ecological outcomes as well as better economic efficiency and the arguments for vertical farming are a complete [ __ ] joke compared to that even when they can pick some very specific example where they can get a five percent advantage and in the vast majority of examples it's much much worse um and you know sorry that a lot of that efficiency has already been accomplished simply through globalization simply through neoliberalism simply through people with no ecological pretensions whatsoever just realizing hey we can make money by taking mangoes from thailand and sending them to europe you know now but by the way if america allowed that the the the orange production of america would would you know change but america the government prevents you from importing oranges from the rest of the world so you know to protect the orange industry so i mean there is an issue of protectionism versus free trade but no globalization itself um achieves this so look look i've alluded back to this this was part of my process of challenging what most left-wing people most green party people most ecologists treat it as established wisdom they treat it as establishes and the best way to live is to only use things that are manufactured locally and only eat things that are produced locally and believe me those same people they make it so passionate to make the argument that eating a backyard chicken is ethically and ecologically superior than a factory farmed chicken and they're wrong if what you care about is ecology it's way more efficient to produce chicken meat in a factory than in your backyard if what you care about our ecological impacts guess what the most efficient methods of producing meat are the ones that have the least negative impact of the environment and the more traditional homestead style of production it's much much worse including the impacts on water pollution yeah i'm not kidding not kidding again even the united nations uh so-called water water footprint reports they go through all that stuff no no no so the the country that is the most efficient meat production in the world is uh the netherlands and it's the most horrible factory farming that's why it's like the whole country is a [ __ ] city i mean it's a very densely populated country obviously obviously an exaggeration the netherlands does have some countryside but you know um and the worst the countries with the worst environmental impact per pound of meat produced are the ones that are still using medieval homesteading methods of production anyway all right so my heart goes out to you people richard says i assume this is richard in atlanta says quote i'm trying to pick up trash around town with a bag and stick too so look dude i remember once i went to visit this buddhist temple in northern laos laos coziest place on earth just north of thailand just south of unchina i went up to this buddhist temple that had been bombed by an american aircraft during the war there during the american war during the vietnam war so this is a buddhist temple it has a lot of meaning to me right and it's just literally a ruin it looks like an ancient ruin but it's not it's a ruin from the 1960s or 1970s i forget exactly when it was bombed uh but you know bomb was dropped on it and it burned and you get this drum these dramatic ruins left by the bombing you know and it's the remains of a of a buddhist temple and i went there and you know it's it's just a moving experience for political reasons and historical reasons whatever and you know it was so awful to see that it was completely covered with discarded candy wrappers and alcohol containers and uh emery hassip containers there's a local culture for you it's this methamphetamine drink they have over there uh yeah uh they're it's their equivalent of an energy drink but that stuff has some kind of crazy drug in it it gets you cranked up you know and i was so upset you know and i i went and got actually bought a garbage can i bought a plastic garbage can top and i went around and was picking up this stuff you know do you think you can gather your way out of global warming do you think you can gather your way from a society of meat eaters to a society of vegans do you think you can gather your way from a society of drunkards to a society that values sobriety a society that gets drunken parties at the ruins of a buddhist temple that was bombed by the americans like something i was visiting as a kind of holy site and it was obvious just from the beer and liquor containers you know there was a lot of it was candy wrappers too but you know i mean it is pathetic in the truest sense of the word right but i relate to you wanting to go around and pick up garbage but no it's it's you're doing nothing positive in a sense you you would be you would have more of a positive effect if you were filming people who were dropping the garbage and then you were taking them to court and charging them and punishing them and charging them a fine or or filming them and harassing them and putting it on youtube like that would have more of a positive impact because that would create awareness to their responsibility you cleaning up after other people who are dropping their garbage it actually makes the world a worse place right because then those people get to keep dropping garbage with impunity you're not creating negative consequences for them that's the saddest thing of all bro it's the same with veganism right like me being vegan accomplishes less than if i can create negative consequences for people eating meat if we can start enforcing fines or deterrence for people eating meat you know that's what's really going to make the difference right so terfinator says welcome to the crowd i don't remember you here nice to have you i just don't remember talking to somebody with his name before and i'd remember your name terfinator says quote you're literally the only realistic vegan i bring this up in real life vegan groups and i'm being quote unquote negative dude i know so no i mean thanks for coming i mean it's so [ __ ] depressing and that that's why again i was saying if you guys can't relate like when i say that the people wearing bikinis on instagram support veganism they're not the worst people they're some of the best go to a local vegan meetup and you'll meet some of the worst people and so i was talking to a vegan activist about a week ago um someone i don't know like we just met and i said look you know dude i'm i'm totally alone i don't know we've i don't have one colleague and she said back to me so i refer to her i refer to women as dude uh but she said back to me uh well you know that must be on you like given how famous you are like you know like the fact that i don't have any colleagues like it can't be on them it has to be like it has to be my fault and i you know i just said in a kind of detached reflective was like well if you include factors that are unrelated to veganism like the fact that i refuse to smoke marijuana then in that sense it is on me because like here sorry i live in the pacific northwest the majority of vegans are drug addicts like literal drug addicts you know and they pick up on it even if you don't tell someone like hey i think you're a scumbag because you smoke dope every day and i don't they pick up on it right so most vegans are drug addicts video game addicts you know they live totally meaningless lives of self-indulgence so yeah i mean those people the people who are like athletes in bikinis if you think they're the worst vegans you haven't met that many vegans yet it gets way worse and this is not even getting into the terrorists people i mean oh these are some of the worst people in veganism people aren't into terrorism but look you know i i don't you know the people the people we've talked to which is only a few people who are like career vegans and food services they're terrible people too you know yes oh god oh i don't want to talk about it it's a long time no so melissa just reminded me yes oh that's such a telling example yeah so we met people who ran vegan restaurants uh vegan bakeries and stuff wow yeah that brings it back vividly it's years ago now it's like four years ago or three years ago instead yeah so you know like it's one thing to say you're trying to be a vegan activist despite meat eaters or like despite your own parents but the reality is you're trying to be a vegan activist despite other vegans and like this guy says like he says i'm the only reasonable irrational vegan notes and we try to raise any of the stuff at vegan meetings other things it's just reverberative okay so guys i'm sorry to be so negative so james frederick i don't know if you're still in the audience or not sometimes people comment then they leave james frederick i'm going to answer your question this statistic right now is in the new york times a lot so i think that's where you got it directly or indirectly a bunch of newspapers going so quote 90 of carbon emissions are produced by the top 100 so you misquoted it the top 100 most polluting companies in the world okay and then he says voting is the only solution close quote okay so just just mentioning it it's you're you're misrepresenting it's not that it's the top 100 richest companies in the world that make 90 of current missions it's that it's the top 100 most polluting company like the point is you can you okay you could hypothetically eliminate 90 of carbon emissions by just eliminating 100 companies that's the point that you can make a list of the 100 most carbon emitting companies okay would you like to live on a planet with no steel is that what you want to do do you want to live on a planet with no wood like what the [ __ ] are we really talking about here do you want to live on a planet with no electricity like it's just [ __ ] most of these things there is no substitution we don't have something better than steel that has less ecological impact right so no i'm sorry the last part of what you said is not stupid you said voting is the only solution so i do understand you were going on to make an important point here you're saying we've got to have democratic and political action i that your last uh five words i totally uh said this with voting is the only solution well politics is the only solution whether you're voting or not you political organization right but like the fantasy and it's a it's a specifically left-wing fantasy that we can blame the rich in order to get out of climate change and global warming like the way to solve global warming is to blame the rich the way to solve global warming is to vilify facebook the problem is facebook and amazon and microsoft the problem is big corporations dude this is such a ludicrous self-serving left-wing fantasy you know if you get rid of one company that produces steel you're gonna either you have another company that produces steel or you have no steel like this is this is just a joke the difference we can make now is veganism and i'm not kidding you there is nothing else there is nothing else that compares to it compared to veganism solar power is a joke and i like solar power it's cool why not it's fun if you own a house put some solar panels on the roof good for you but dude it's a [ __ ] joke like if you think that's how we're going to save the planet do the math but it's a nice thing it's a great hobby it really is like i'm cool with solar power is better than skiing instead of spending your money going on ski trips spend your money on solar power cells and for a lot of people it is actually kind of fun hobby that they get into solar power and micro wind generation and stuff but bro everything else is a joke and some of these things they're actually like a [ __ ] they're actually like a destructive evil joke like vertical farming fantasies or something you know yeah yeah yeah i don't want to get into it but yeah you know yeah you know i agree with you about that there's no point in sitting there agreeing with each other sure so who do we vote for and what do we vote for right yeah yeah yeah well i think the person was just indicating that the point was in response to earlier talking about the free market solving the problem and saying no we have to vote but the the problem with voting is that you're presuming you're in a situation where you already have the selection in front of you you already have the options set out for you like the point is if your society has already gotten to the point where you're going to have a referendum on slavery really the struggle is already over the problem is we're not remotely close to that referendum we're not going to have a referendum on veganism and vote for it right if your society has progressed to the point where there's a referendum on whether or not women should have the right to vote even if they lose the referendum let's say it's a 50-50 vote it's a close vote you know the clock is ticking well look guys we didn't get this referendum but within 10 or 20 years women are going to get the right to vote like really when you've gotten to the point where there's a referendum on it probably probably the struggle is already over you know what i mean we are not remotely close to the point where any decision related to veganism is already on the table to be to be voted for so that's part of the tragedy but anyway i interpreted him saying that just as just as meaning that we need a real political struggle we can't rely on the free market we can't rely on the profit motive to you know we're not going to earn our way out of of global warming you know so we had a further correction that at the top 100 companies it's actually they're responsible for 71 of the emissions you know i'm sure some of those will be long-haul cargo ship companies too probably they'll be in the top 100 but what do you want you want to abolish ships evergreen might be on there the international freight company okay so this is a totally well-intentioned comment in the audience but i've got to point my finger at you elliot davies says quote i also believe that lobbying is important not just voting but lobbying also i also believe the lobbying is important and therefore support agricultural fairness alliance and nations rising close quote okay elliot okay why don't you look back at what the agricultural fairness alliance accomplished in the last 20 years and look ahead and you tell me dead serious like if we were in the same room face to face what the [ __ ] do you think they were going to accomplish in the next 20 years nation rising i did a whole bunch of videos about nationwide why don't you look back at what they accomplished just in the last five years i don't think they existed for 20 years and why don't you tell me what they're going to accomplish in the next 20 years and here's my answer to that question i think they're going to accomplish less than dr greger less than people for the ethical treatment of animals and less than oprah winfrey i think they're going to accomplish less than freely the [ __ ] banana girl okay i would not say they're going to accomplish nothing i think that in the next 20 years that is such a [ __ ] joke what those lobbying groups are going to accomplish that you might as well take your money and flush it down the toilet or better why don't you start really asking yourself what you can do with that money if you say you support them i assume you mean you give them money you know just give them thumbs up on facebook which is really gonna accomplish nothing we can all sit here giving each other the thumbs up on facebook and instagram until you know the water is up to our neck okay until you know the museum i was part of planning in downtown bangkok has become a scuba diving attraction and you know the history of you know athens greece is is underwater it's all underwater it's underwater archaeology you know what i'm saying james james frederick asks i think another well-intentioned question quote what's wrong with self-indulgence isn't the point of life enjoyment okay so james if that's your philosophy i have to ask you the same thing i would ask a devout muslim okay how many hours a day do you devote to prayer okay done praying you done praying now you know what about every other [ __ ] thing in life how many hours do you have in a day how many hours do you have in a week all right some of it is going to be devoted to self-intelligence some okay what are you going to tell me is nobody interested in doing the right thing because the right thing to do not even when it is in the classical textbook sense an existential threat nobody you know you know james you're going to hear more about afghanistan than you could possibly want to hear in the next six months it's afghanistan's going to be the news all the time you know just people are reflecting on the way the war was lost okay do you want democracy in afghanistan do you want women's education in afghanistan i do what are you willing to do to get it just an example i can give myriad examples but that's one you're going to be reminded of because even if you don't want to hear it if you listen to any news whatsoever reading news you're going to hear about this [ __ ] that goes down in afghanistan because you know the whole western world is having a self-pity party about it okay you want to play some more video games you want to play some more golf you want to go parasailing like what the [ __ ] you want to do okay that's the problem with self-indulgence all right you know you care about outcomes you care about changing the changing the world you can't change the world through self-indulgence and that i mean look this brings us back to the basic premise of the video that's what james aspie tried to do that's the methodology for vegan activism of james aspie and freely the banana girl and durianrider they thought that they could be so self-indulgent that they would attract legions of followers of other people who wanted to be self-indulgent just like them and they transformed the world well guess what you walk up to that magazine rack in the grocery store and there are 300 different magazines offering you 300 different models of a life devoted to self-indulgence and veganism is just one more magazine it's one more competing voice saying hey here's the way to enjoy your life here's the way to be a self-indulgent [ __ ] it doesn't change anything all right people who want to change the world and people who really do change the world they do have some margin for self-indulgence in their lives you know i mean i can just say when i play with my own daughter when i just sit and play with her if you play with blocks with your own daughter if you play with a pair of scissors cutting pictures out of a magazine with your own daughter you know i mean there there have to be some number of hours of the day given to self-independent okay you done you done now does anyone anyone want to save the planet anyone want to save more than a billion animals anyone want to save billions of human beings no no not any motivation for anyone because let me just think in the last six months i've had zero emails of this kind and i would have to really search my mind in the whole eight years it's very very close to zero i'm going to be honest with you right now in in eight years it's not zero but it's so close to zero it's terrifying so there's one i can remember and it happened to be a good looking woman but as far as i know that's not why she was writing me there was one good-looking woman who wrote to me and i think she was in poland but if it wasn't poland i'm sorry it was the ukraine like maybe it was the ukraine it was one of those countries this is years ago that's why i can't remember that clearly and she wrote to me and said like you know we're really just at the beginning of this struggle here in eastern europe like people here are so in favor of wearing fur coats and they're still in favor of any meat and she was trying and and i said and she said something about wanting to talk to me about like getting organized and i wrote back and let me tell you something i'm all in at that stage of my life a couple years ago i can move to poland i don't give a [ __ ] bro look i'm going to take risks in life i'm someone who will move to cambodia i don't give a [ __ ] i am all in i can go and visit poland and i could never leave i have reasons to live in europe i have a daughter in europe fine if there's a vegan movement i can be a part of i like i've learned languages a lot harder than polish you know like sorry i forget now it was poland or the ukraine or what i like living in a war zone i like living in a poverty-stricken war zone i prefer living in places like cambodia and [ __ ] you know really i don't need to live in i don't need to live in bourgeois comfort but like you know like she wrote me this one message that just said in this sense like that she really felt they were just the very beginning of trying to get veganism going challenging this overwhelmingly pro-meat pro-alcohol pro-fur culture and i was like oh well great look let's talk on skype i think it was whatever didn't say skype i said telephone like look let's let's talk like i want to talk like i want to get involved let's do it you know again i don't know what's possible never another message it was one that never heard but like like in the whole eight years i i'd have to sit here and really think like how many how many little conversations like that were there in the in the whole eight years it is very close to zero you know and that she wasn't even promising anything she just said she wanted to talk to me about it you know it was no there was no real okay i was gonna say there's no initiative there was a little bit of initiative there that's why i remember you know so look guys we had eight years hope you enjoyed it hope you feel good about yourself did you see the new star wars movie like what the [ __ ] are you doing with your life what are you gonna tell your grandkids you know you know it's it's way past fiddling well rome burns and again it's not it's not the focus of this live stream it's not the focus of this episode but every day pigs are being lowered down in those [ __ ] demonic gas chambers these vertical gas chambers and are thrashing and screaming themselves to death and every day human beings are being brutalized by it too i even feel bad just for the people who work in that slaughterhouse and watch the animals die i mean i know i know the humans are profiting from it but still i pity the slaughterhouse workers you know okay so i'm going to wrap something do you want to say things are you ready no no no no no it's cool so look uh again so guys i'm trying to just calibrate this around a frame this way you can see why uh someone from the audience called i love animals says welcome to the audience i haven't seen you before i love animals says quote maybe veganism needs a new branding to change the narrative to food justice or something like that i presume most people have a negative reaction to world vegan because it feels judgmental or that you're an immortal spirit okay great theory how much of a [ __ ] difference do you think that's going to make in the next 20 years we've already done all this [ __ ] guys i'm sorry we tried rebranding animal rights in different ways we tried rebranding veganism the plant-based diet like i'm not saying this to ridicule you but it's ridiculous all right like it is ridiculous if you think that transforming the vegan movement by changing the the optics right changing the branding from vegan to food justice do you think that's going to be like a five percent improvement don't get 10 what kind of impact do you think it's going to have realistically i don't i i don't even think it's going to be 1 but like you know what i mean that kind of difference in brandon what if peta changed what if you change the names of peta that's a great example people for the ethical treatment of animals they could change their name to people for food justice maybe they would be five percent more successful maybe they'd be ten percent more so maybe maybe ten percent less successful okay like i i get it what you're saying here but in this context looking at the last 20 years looking the next 20 years and calibrating this in terms of real world outcomes that are relevant to global warming outcomes that are going to impact billions of people fast right this is a joke this is less than nothing i just want to say guys every single one of the people who were more hardcore than me okay the people i knew in the movement who felt that i was too soft core in my approach to veganism you know every single one of them burnt out and disappeared accomplishing nothing all right you know you you might not remember josh quote-unquote vegan revolution you know that guy used to look down his nose at me like i'm a sellout like i'm a moderate as opposed to him because he's an extremist do you remember the girl i did a long video and i break down weeping in the video called the agony of activism with a girl named zaria right so she was supposedly hardcore and looked down her nose at me like i'm a moderate like i'm not serious about vegan accident where is she now so i know i mean i know she's not on youtube she deleted all her youtube stuff yeah well she burnt out she accomplished absolutely nothing i mean of course there are also all these people who actually went back to eating meat uh what's his name the vegan prince what was that guy's name that piece [ __ ] that that athlete uh tim timothy sheaf timothy sheef the prince of the vegan movement believed in the flat earth theory where are they now okay like i'm just saying all the people who thought they were more hard body than me who thought they were more hardcore thought they were more real all the people who thought they were the future of the vegan movement you know down to and including freely the banana girl okay they're burnt out they're broken they gave up they quit you can look back at the last 20 years you can draw all the conclusions you want you can draw up whatever analysis you want when you're calibrating this discussion in terms of real world outcomes the ineluctable outcomes of climate change and the scale on which we would need people to commit to veganism not thousands not tens of thousands not millions but billions that we need billions of people to be vegan and why why why why because if only 10 percent of the population becomes vegan that doesn't eliminate meat production it just makes meat production cheaper all you do with the laws of supply and demand if people eat 10 percent less beef in the united states of america the other i'm sorry sorry i should i can't say that if 10 of people stop eating beef in the united states america the other 90 percent just enjoy cheaper beef and quite likely they'll even eat more they'll either eat the same amount or eat even more all right 10 becoming vegan will not have the ecological outcomes we want never never ever ever i already gave you examples of this you can look at taiwan you can look at israel small countries that have the largest percentage of vegans in the world those two taiwan and but guess what at the same time the total population of humans is increasing and the amount of meat per capita consumed is increasing and the ecological impact of the vegan minority is absolutely nothing so when we calibrate the problem in this way and we're talking about the next 20 years we're talking about running out of time before global warming has unspeakable civilization altering impacts on our lives right look back at all the vegan leaders who were look back at all the vegan commentators and everything else look look at the the legal change as you guys are are mentioning that would be necessary look at the challenge to our culture to our more race to our assumptions that that needs to happen absolutely nothing positive is going on there is nothing and nobody to be believed in all right there's nobody to support okay the future of the vegan movement is not dr greger all right and it's not freely the banana girl and it's not nina and it's not randa and it's not gary francione and it's not gary yourofsky there's a guy who thought he was more hardcore than me who burnt out there's another example of that horse [ __ ] gary gary yourofsky when the going gets tough the tough gets going holy [ __ ] yeah right everybody's [ __ ] hero everybody's [ __ ] vegan gary yourofsky what's he gonna accomplish in the next 20 years nothing what did he accomplish in the last 20 years more harm than good in my opinion you know okay okay so you know so what now what next you know tragically all i can say as always the future of the vegan movement is you or else it is nothing at all okay any time you trust a charity anytime you trust a foundation anytime you give a donation to someone else you're basically making the judgment that you are not competent to do that thing yourself you can't do it with your own hands with your own mind with your own judgment right right now there is nobody else you can trust there's nobody you can give money to to make this happen either you and i whoever you are watching this video either we are going to make something happen ourselves or else nothing is going to happen at all and we will be in the position of standing around with our arms crossed smugly smiling and saying we told you so we can be the most smug of [ __ ] corpses floating as the ocean levels rise