Wrong About Veganism. @The Cranky Vegan

this university
and someone with a fancy phd did this study that was really interesting they studied 1500 meat eaters who were like presented with an ethical argument like an argument around the killing of animals not one about health or the environment like this was intended to make them feel guilty about their food choices they were then presented with like a handful of things to eat right and a majority of the people decided to not avoid eating animals after hearing these ethical arguments but rather eating what was considered like a healthier form of flesh like skinless chicken as opposed to like fried chicken but the study found that that quote psychologically when people felt guilty about their behavior they tend to justify the behavior rather than changing it this phenomenon is more pronounced when the behavior is deeply ingrained in their lives so what are the takeaways from the study when guilt was being placed on consumers it actually drove them to eat more meat the emotional backlash the consumers felt that it ended up strengthening their justification and doing so guilt is effective it's the only thing that gets people to go vegan people say don't guilt-trip them how else are we going to get them to go vegan how else are you going to get people to take animal abuse seriously if they don't feel guilty for what they're doing you are according to these studies you're actually driving people to continue to eat meat and actually even eat more of it in marketing and even more importantly in politics we have to move past vague abstract ideas like the people who is this message for people all the people the largest number of people possible who are you trying to reach with this message who is this for what kind of feeling what kind of interest are you really trying to elicit from people there was a study done in france the netherlands northern europe what do people want in a painting and aren't gallery people most of these people have never been to an art gallery but maybe not in their lives maybe they went as school children when they were forced to go maybe they were when their parents held their hand just like going to the zoo and that as little interest in art and painting as they had in seeing a zebra at the zoo maybe less right the vast majority of people if you if you pull the people what do you want to see at an art gallery what do you want to see in a painting guess what the study found the vast majority of europeans said that they wanted to see a blue landscape a landscape with trees and animals and a blue sky that's what they want to see out of modern art no it's not the way to get ahead in painting the way to be a successful artist is not even to make a painting that a special focused study shows the tiny minority of people who are passionately interested in modern art want to see if you poll if you study if you survey the type of person who goes to an art gallery more often than once a month let's just start what percentage of humanity goes to an art gallery more often than once a month more often than 12 times a year they go to an art gallery or an art museum this is a tiny minority of people even if you go and interview them research them ask them some survey questions say what do you want out of a new painting you're not going to get the right answer because the way to succeed in art is to present those people with something they've never seen before with something they weren't expecting to see with something challenging with something new with something different with some that makes them say wow when i came to the art gallery today that's not what i was expecting to see isn't it easy to think of the purpose of marketing as being to deliver a message to the people to anyone and everyone when in fact the challenge of marketing is to reach the right people and to make them interested for the right reasons isn't it easy to think that politics is about delivering a message to the people to anyone and everyone when politics is all about getting the right message to the right people selling a painting for ten thousand dollars is nothing like selling a postcard for one dollar and fifty cents if you want to sell a postcard to the massive humanity maybe a blue landscape is going to be successful it was an interesting case study in england where the military was struggling with recruitment what we're doing in the vegan movement in many ways is much more in common with military recruitment than it has in common with selling postcards or selling paintings or market research for what's going to be appealing to people what's going to make people happy if you ask people if you do market research you present them with several different ads saying join the army just ask people just ask the general public which one of these ads caught your attention which one of these ads was appealing to you which one of these ads made you feel interested in joining the army this is just as misleading as asking the mass of humanity in general what is it they're looking for in a painting when they go to an art gallery if they go to an art gallery they're never going to go to an art gallery all right and with joining the army if you ask people who never have joined the army and never will join the army what makes them interested in joining the army you get the same kind of market research results that you get for how to advertise a chocolate bar or a bottle of beer bottle of whiskey new clothing people like advertisements that are funny and sexy and optimistic and uplifting both men and women like sexy half-naked women in advertising there's a ton of market rates to show that's what works that's what gets their attention that's what gets them interested okay and you could go ahead and have it you could have ads for the army that has a woman in a bikini saying hey see the world you know go off to a beach in some far-off exotic country and kill for the government of the united kingdom all right it'll get people's attention and will get positive results in market research but that is not the purpose of marketing okay and it's not the purpose of recruitment in the military and it's not the way we do politics in the 21st century you want to get the right people interested for the right reasons and the message you're delivering in army recruitment isn't optimistic and upbeat and funny and sexy and uplifting our sources tell us that this is a bomb factory we need to stormy now what would you do call an air support kick the door in i'll blow the wall [Music] what the british military found was that all this market research they did all this social science research they did was fundamentally wrong and bad and counterproductive because the message they had to get across was this is a hard job and it's not for everybody it's intense it's exhausting it's morally challenging but maybe it's the right job for you maybe if you're bored in the career you have now maybe you'll be interested in picking up a rifle and doing this training and dealing with these intense exhausting high pressure situations does this sound interesting to you does this challenge centers are you up for the challenge when they switch to this much different form of marketing this much different form of pitch and recruitment they didn't get more interest they didn't get more mouse clicks they didn't get more people phoning up the 1-800 number for military equipment casually interested what they got was a much higher percentage of the people who phoned them a much higher percentage of the people who clicked a much higher percentage of the people who walked into recruitment offices a much higher percentage were actually interested were actually prepared and actually had the requirements necessary to have a successful military career they were increasingly recruiting the right people and they were getting people coming in to join who were interested for the right reasons not because they had some kind of misleading uplifting entertaining sexy advertisement appeal to them this is partly about marketing it's partly about politics but it's partly something profoundly philosophical my approach to this is nihilistic part of my perspective is i don't believe in these abstractions you guys use like people because we're not really talking about people and marketing is not about making a message that appeals to the people you can buy a joystick for 15 your child will be happy buying this joystick to whom are you marketing when you're trying to sell a low commitment spontaneous impulse purchase like a 15 joystick to whom are you trying to appeal when you make a postcard that costs one dollar and 50 cents that people are gonna buy think nothing of use in a day forget they ever made the purchase who are you appealing to when you want to sell a painting for 100 000 that someone is going to have hanging on the wall of their mansion and they're gonna have to look at it for the rest of their lives when they're making a commitment that changes their life forever they're buying a painting for a hundred thousand dollars doesn't matter maybe they're a multi-millionaire and it's not that much money to them guess what matters to them every time a guest comes over to their condo to their home they see that painting and asked about it they go wow oh you own a kandinsky wow why did you decide to own a kansas city people judge you people think of you as a guy who owns a multi-million dollar painting or a hundred thousand dollars you buy a piece of modern art from an artist who isn't famous and well known yet for a hundred thousand dollars people think something about you and you think something about yourself and you feel a certain way and you see that painting unlike a television you never turn it off right in a sense buying a painting is a major commitment that changes your life forever that's a lot more like adopting a vegan diet a vegan identity committing ethically morally politically to being part of the vegan movement that future it's not like buying a postcard and this same difference is evident if we're even talking about the difference between marketing a fifteen dollar joystick and a joystick that costs one hundred and fifty dollars minimum how are you gonna market a one hundred and fifty dollar joystick in a world where fifteen dollar joysticks are ubiquitous and available to everyone you don't do market research saying oh which of these ads gets people attention oh well the the sexy ad the funny ad the optimistic you can just have an ad with a woman in a bikini holding the joystick say hey sign up now that's not going to be effective marketing because the whole purpose of marketing is to reach the right people and to get them interested in your product for the right reasons again this isn't me saying this like this is study after study after study this youtube channel is changing in the past the vast majority of my videos were on a single topic like this one where you could see by the title and you could see by the thumbnail exactly what it was i was speaking about and the significant percentage of my audience who were interested in coming here and hearing me speak about vegan politics the future of the movement etc etc they would just click on those videos guess what i'm shifting over to a long format live stream based channel where i sit and talk about politics for two hours at a stretch i'm gonna talk about what's happening in china what's happening in syria what's happening in civil wars and revolutions all over the world chile is writing a new constitution right now that'll definitely be discussed next video well if you click on these new longer videos there's going to be a table of contents there's going to be a series of timestamps and if i'm talking about vegan politics somewhere there you can click and just jump to the particular moment there's going to be a big shift from this format of single topic videos to much longer videos more easily listened to while washing the dishes that cover a variety of topics where veganism may be buried in the middle somewhere i just read a book that specifically dealt with mental disability in the us armed forces to be blunt mentally [ __ ] people serving in the army especially during the vietnam war there are shocking statistics about how often men were excluded from the army or kicked out of the army or caused a problem in the army during the vietnam war because they would not shave and they would not brush their teeth you might assume that these were conscientious objectors that these were people who were morally opposed to the war or who were drafted who were refusing to shave or brush their teeth as a form of protest or something and the military requirement no the problem was that they were recruiting men who were so mentally disabled who were at such a low level of iq on the iq test problematic concept that they couldn't brush their own teeth they couldn't shave they were men who were used to being taken care of to that extent they had men in the military who couldn't tie their own shoelaces and the whole military became corrupted with the process of faking their test scores and ushering them through boot camp and getting them out to the war zone getting them to actually fight on the front lines and yes very often they didn't just get themselves killed they killed others they killed men on their own side not everybody can do military service not everyone has what it takes we have to think seriously about what the requirements are to be a vegan activist what it takes to be a part of this movement what it takes to live this lifestyle ethically intellectually and in terms of sanity and self-discipline i'm saying it to you straight to your face some people are too stupid to be vegan some people are too crazy to be vegan some people are too lazy and lack the self-discipline to be vegan and if you do this kind of market research about what people want and what people respond to in advertising in outreach in political recruitment for this movement you are never going to touch that one talented person out of 10 000 that one person out of a million that you're really trying to reach where if you're honest with them you're going to recruit them you're going to motivate them to be involved for the right reasons [Music] maybe we can we can practice