Ex-ex-vegans: when carnists come back to veganism.

i've made a lot of videos about um you
know being a vegan and then also the anti-vegan videos that i had uploaded and look you know the past is the past what you did 10 years ago is probably not what you're doing right now and the way that you thought 10 years ago is probably not the same way that you think right now i was wrong about veganism because when i started my journey in 2010 i became a quote raw vegan and i was doing way too much fasting way too much detoxing um i was in a caloric deficiency so i was not getting enough calories as i should have been getting last thing i'll say is animal welfare what about cruelty to all the religions out there who believe in peace love compassion thou shall not kill right um what about in america we eat like one million chickens every three hours it's crazy absolutely insane so a lot of people know about factory farming and the the cruelty that goes on there but a lot of people overlook family farms or small family farms or grass-fed operations because that's what i was all into free range eggs grass-fed meat wild caught fish all of it and you know what it's all bs if your friend that is a vegan activist all of a sudden says that he wants to experiment on his diet to and eat a steak because he's had a ibs issue for years and the doctors you know keeps saying that he needs to experiment because you know it's looking really bad and dark when that happens this person gets rejected a lot of times a huge amount of vegans will reject that person will reject this person from their tribe they will not talk to them they will distance themselves from them because they feel like they are completely breaking their own moral code and completely turning everything upside down and now they are just a crazy person who is just so obsessed with their own health and selfish for wanting to kill an animal to you know fix their stomach ache that's how a lot of times we look at it i'm really embarrassed and sad that i would have to make a video like this because i've created basically my entire persona about talking about how great it is to be vegan how easy it is to be vegan and i just feel like it would be really irresponsible of me to continue doing that i think that veganism is flawed in so many ways and i think that we should just go back to the way that things were and i came to this realization this weekend doing outreach at um the end of fishing day where i was a fish covered in blood and i just laid there and thought about how stupid it was what i was doing and so i'm not vegan anymore i ate mcdonald's three times today i'm gonna eat mcdonald's again tonight i'm gonna buy tons of leather shoes on april fool's day baby oh man i went uh one minute and 24 seconds on that joke we take it so personally and we would rather not even look at that person ever again and i've experienced this myself as well i have friends who just you know told me that they cannot ever speak to me again because what i did in terms of experimenting with non-vegan foods was just too much and and you know there is no way the reason why i started to go vegan the reason why i got re-inspired to go vegan was because riding on my electric bike to the community college to teach my english class and i saw a whole herd of 20 to 25 here you can check it out in one of my previous videos i posted that you can see all the deer out there they're mule deer and when i pass them on my bike you can see their ears going up down there in the grass trying to get the grass and look up you know they're all kind of you know the ears are going all over the place why because they're animals they're mammals they have feelings they have emotions they feel pain they have fear you know they feel when their life might be in danger why are we doing so much damage to the world why are we killing billions of animals every single year why are we doing damage to our bodies and we know it's not good how we explain things to others more often than not with the passage of time comes to be the way that we explain things to ourselves many vegans think about veganism talk about veganism explain veganism as a kind of new religion this is a metaphor this is an allegory in some ways useful in some ways very misleading what if we think about veganism instead as people coming together to form a rock band one person plays the guitar one person plays the drums veganism as a movement in fact is made of myriad tiny movements in the same sense that a genre of music for the most part will be made up of a whole bunch of little isolated groups of hard-working talented people how do people first decide to make music together very often whether in high school university or as middle-aged men it's just based on their style of clothing it's just based on their charisma it's just based on their appearance it's just based on a casual conversation at a party you meet someone and think they're cool and interesting and they say they play the guitar and you say oh we're actually looking for a new guitarist for our band things like this are so much the norm probably the vast majority of musical groups even only two people even just a musical duo probably the vast majority of bands do not begin with a formal audition process they don't begin with somebody writing you know filling out an application form you know they don't begin by comparing four different people who play the drums and considering who do you think plays the drums best they start by people meeting one another and thinking they have something in common thinking they're kind of cool and of course this is part of why so often bands break up musical groups don't work and don't last because there's someone you think is cool there's someone you think is interesting someone it may even just be that they're attractive or they wear clothes that you think would look good on stage they have a certain style but what you find out in the passage of time working with them is that they don't have the competence you require they can't actually do the job in the same way vegans form groups of activists veganism is not a diet it's a political movement with a diet problem these groups of activists they could be a few hundred people they could be a few thousand people but keeping it all the way real in most cases in any particular city or town it is going to be a group of six people eight people 12 people maximum 15 people just like forming a musical group that goes on tour if you include all the helpers you might get up to 20 people you know but the the people doing most of the work the people on stage it's a small handful of people right and those people probably met each other probably started working together started doing activism started the pursuit of political and cultural change just because they met at a party or they met on the internet and they thought each other were cool and interesting they thought they'd try to make something positive happen and they only find out in the passage of time oh this person they don't really have what it takes they don't have the talent they don't have the work ethic they don't have the motivation they don't have the intelligence right you don't know but through bitter and disappointing experience you find out i don't know a single vegan organization in the world that was formed by people on paper writing out an application form writing an essay auditioning do you know any vegan movement that has auditions competitive auditions for who gets to be an activist who gets to be a leader no they behave like high school cliques they behave like high school rock bands that's what the movement consists of element by element atom by adam and not everyone can be vegan not everyone can be an activist not everyone is smart enough just to make the diet work in this society not everyone is self-disciplined enough not everyone's ethical enough not everyone's positively motivated enough and then at that higher level answering those higher standards not everyone can be a leader of public opinion in the pursuit of political or cultural change not everybody can do it not everyone has that kind of confidence yeah so i think the type of disappointment people feel when someone becomes ex-vegan it's not so much comparable to a religious group like the mormons casting someone out you know when they've lost faith when they left their religion the way religious groups reject people and exclude people i think it is really much more comparable to the sense of embittered disappointment of people who put their own hard work and love and care and talent and energy into trying to make something really special happen in the music world of trying to put together a rock band and then finding out that that guy you thought was funny and charming and cool and interesting and who you hired to be the drummer that really fundamentally he doesn't have what it takes just to stay sober show up on time and play the drums my sling is editorial explicit material briefcase show 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