The Rich Roll Podcast - Leah Garcés On Turning Adversaries Into Allies — Leveraging Empathy To Change Animal Agriculture

Episode Date: April 6, 2020

Today Leah Garcés joins the podcast with a public service announcement: everything you think you know about chicken is wrong. The new president of the international non-profit Mercy for Animals, Leah Garcés has spent her life on the frontlines of the animal welfare movement exposing what actually transpires inside industrial chicken farms. Devoted to improving conditions for factory-farmed animals, she has made significant progress not through a traditional strategy of antagonism, but instead by pursuit of cooperation, working alongside some of the largest food and agriculture companies in the world -- including Perdue, Popeye’s, Panera & Chipotle -- to produce positive change. In her new book, Leah chronicles her experience teaming up with whistleblowers in the megafarm industry. Part memoir, part investigative thriller, Grilled: Turning Adversaries into Allies to Change the Chicken Industry is a great read that not only elucidates the ills of our broken food system, but also casts an optimistic lens on a better future for food, animals, and humans. Most impressive is Leah's profound empathy. Not just for the animals, but for the people most animal rights folks consider the enemy: the factory-farmers; the slaughterhouse workers; and the corporate executives that control animal intensive farming. Rather than fight against these people, Leah adopted a different approach, working with them instead. It's a tactic that might strike the hardened animal rights activist as anathema. Controversial and perhaps even unacceptable. But the cornerstone of the vegan movement is compassion. And lasting change can only come from directing that emotion not just to the animals, but to all — including the people behind the animals. Today we unpack all of it. It's a conversation about the insidious reality of industrial chicken farming. An exploration of the modern-day farmer's plight as an indentured servant. And the industrial complex that entrenches our broken and undeniable cruel system of food production. But ultimately, this is a conversation about empathy. It’s about practicing what you preach. And the strategies required to create sustainable change to forge a better world for all. The visually inclined can watch it all go down on YouTube. And as always, the audio version streams wild and free on Apple Podcasts and Spotify. Note: For those who shut down at the mere mention of animal rights, I ask only that you set aside your preconceived judgments. Because this conversation isn’t just about the suffering of animals. It’s about the suffering of people. And it’s about a system that is hoodwinking us all, including the chicken farmer with his boots in the ground. Final Note: this conversation was recorded pre-pandemic on January 31, 2020. Our world has since changed. But given what we are learning about the relationship between large-scale intensive animal farming and the propagation of disease, Leah's message, experience and wisdom is more relevant now than ever I am grateful for Leah's advocacy and passion. May you find this conversation as impactful as I did. Peace + Plants, Rich

My job on this planet while I'm here is to reduce suffering of these farmed animals. And while I would like there to be some kind of secret on-off switch that I can just make everybody vegan, that's not happening tomorrow. And so my job in the meantime, as we move towards that world, is to reduce the suffering of the 80 billion farmed animals that are raised and slaughtered every year in this world. I think when you're early on in activism, the battle feels great. Like, you're so angry, and you want to be angry, and you want to blame someone, but you get worn out that way. And at some point, you take a step back, and it doesn't feel good anymore. And you realize you're not making as much progress.

You're just being angry and just spinning your wheels. And so my main way of behaving is the way I behave with these companies, which is I'm just trying to find one step forward. Because one step forward means a lot less suffering. So even with friends, family, any discussion I have, it's not go vegan, all or nothing, like a light switch. It's a conversation about what can you do? What could be your next step? Every time you're choosing not to eat the animals, you are contributing to reducing their suffering,

to increasing happiness, joy on this planet. That's Leah Garces, and this is The Rich Roll Podcast. The Rich Roll Podcast. What's up, everybody? How are you guys doing? How are you managing? Hey everybody, how are you guys doing? How are you managing? This is Rich Roll, checking in on on about a month of sequestration at this point, facing many of the challenges we are all confronting, doing my best to manage, to stay safe, to stay sane, to take care of my family, to remain active, productive, engaged, to not let the gravity of this experience and what it is trying to tell us elude me while also recognizing that and being in touch with and having the awareness that I navigate this crisis from a place of extreme privilege because all of my needs are met. I have my family. We are together. We're safe, we're healthy, we're symptom-free. I can still do my job on some level. My personal day-to-day routine

is actually remarkably unchanged because I'm self-employed and I work from home and I make my living online. I've got my morning routine. And although all the local trails around here are closed, I can still go out and run. My AA meetings have moved to Zoom. And of course, the podcast continues.

The only difference being that people don't pop by my house a couple of times a week to talk to me, and I'm having to adapt by way of remote recording. And perhaps when this lifts, maybe I should re-examine my somewhat monk-like existence. But what I'm trying to say is that I'm extremely grateful for being where I'm at right now because so many people are having such a difficult time right now. Jobs are being lost. People are having to shutter their businesses. Worse yet, so many people have contracted this illness. Many people have

perished and are sick right now. And others are literally risking their lives in service to those in need. And the stories that are coming in from the front lines are truly harrowing. And so, coming in from the front lines are truly harrowing. And so, again, my heart, my respect is with our fearless healthcare workers putting themselves in harm's way, with our grocery workers, our food suppliers, our delivery people, the pharmacists, the scientists, everybody who is venturing out into the world daily to make sure that we have the nourishment, the goods, the services, and the solutions that we need to see ourselves to the other side safely. This is truly, I think, an unprecedented time that none of us are going to ever forget. The human toll, the havoc wreaked upon us medically, physically, emotionally, and economically is still too soon to estimate.

But I think it's clear that this is and will be severe for some time to come. So if you're suffering, you're not alone, and my heart is very much with you. Meanwhile, the planet resets, and my hope is that we can heed what it is trying to tell us, that this moment will aid us in ultimately rethinking, reevaluating, and reimagining how we live so we can chart a better path forward, a gentler, more sustainable trajectory for ourselves, for humanity, and the overall long-term well-being of the Earth. In an effort to maintain some level of normalcy throughout all of this, and as I've previously mentioned, my current plan as it relates to this show remains to continue to release episodes recorded pre-pandemic every Monday, per my normal schedule. release episodes recorded pre-pandemic every Monday per my normal schedule. Including today's episode, I have nine such conversations banked, which I'm very grateful for, and which will keep this show rolling into early June. At the same time, I'm endeavoring to supplement the regular schedule with a few extra midweek episodes every month, conversations which I am recording remotely

and contemporaneously with a variety of compelling minds with interesting perspectives reflecting on our current collective situation. As for today, there's a pretty good chance that this conversation is gonna leave you rethinking the animal products that end up on your plate, something I think we all need to do in consideration of our emerging understanding of the role that animal agriculture plays in originating pandemics, as well as the havoc it wreaks

on the environment and the enormous, of course, suffering that it produces. So should today's guest leave you a little unsure about how to swap your chicken wings for greens, fear not, as we have created a powerful and comprehensive online mobile-friendly platform that does all the heavy lifting for you to get more of nature's botanicals on your plate. It's called the Plant Power Meal Planner. It provides you with access to literally thousands of super delicious plant-based recipes, thoroughly customized to your preferences, with access to an incredible team of experienced nutrition coaches seven days a week.

In addition, it automatically creates simple grocery lists based on selected recipes and even integrates with grocery delivery service in most urban areas, which I think we can all agree at this moment is pretty awesome. So to punt the poultry, visit meals.richroll.com or click meal planner on the top of any page on my website at richroll.com.

Do it, thrive, it's that simple. Okay, on this subject of meat, I think it's fair to say that it's complicated. It's political, it's that simple. Okay, on this subject of meat, I think it's fair to say that it's complicated. It's political, it's divisive, it's heated, it's often polarizing. And the story that's most commonly told around meat tends to focus on factory farmed cows, hormone injected and antibiotic laden.

Red meat is inextricably linked to an array of human illnesses, both resource and waste-intensive. Beef is inarguably environmentally damning and perhaps the most ethically fraught. And given this, it's not uncommon for many people to swap that red meat for chicken. America's favorite meat, chicken, constitutes a staggering 95% of all factory farmed animals. The U.S. alone consumes 9 billion chickens per year, with worldwide numbers in the 50 million range. That's about 137 million chickens a day, every day. But here's the thing. Is chicken actually healthier than

beef? Is it more environmentally responsible or is it more ethical in comparison to other alternatives? Well, today, Leah Garces joins the podcast with a public service announcement, and that is this. Everything you think you know about chicken is wrong. The new president of the international nonprofit Mercy for Animals, Leah, has spent her life and her career on the front lines of the animal welfare movement, exposing what actually transpires inside industrial chicken farms. Tirelessly devoted to improving conditions for factory farmed animals, she has made significant progress working cooperatively alongside some of the largest food and agriculture companies in the world, companies like Purdue, Popeyes, Panera, and Chipotle. Leah's got a new

book out, and in it, she chronicles her experience teaming up with whistleblowers in the mega farm industry. It's part memoir, it's part investigative thriller. It's called Grilled, Turning Adversaries into Allies to Change the Chicken Industry. And it's a great read. It not only elucidates the ills of our broken food system, but it also almost ironically casts this very optimistic lens on a better future for food, animals, and humans. A few more things I want to mention about Leah and the incredible work that she's doing, but first.

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wonderful. And recovery.com is your partner in starting that journey. When you or a loved one need help, go to recovery.com and take the first step towards recovery. To find the best treatment option for you or a loved one, again, go to recovery.com. Okay, Leah. So, what impresses me most about Leah, what strikes me, is really her empathy. not just for the animals that she advocates for, of course, but for the people most animal rights folks consider the enemy, the factory farmers, the slaughterhouse workers, and the corporate executives that control animal-intensive farming. And rather than fight against these people, which is the traditional MO right out of the animal rights movement play anathema, controversial, perhaps even unacceptable. But the cornerstone of the vegan movement is compassion.

And lasting change can only come from directing that emotion, not just to the animals, but to all, including the people behind the animals. So today, we unpack all of it. the people behind the animals. So today we unpack all of it. It's a conversation about the insidious reality of industrial chicken farming. It's an exploration of the modern day farmer's plight as indentured servant and the industrial complex that entrenches our broken and undeniably cruel system of food production. But ultimately, this is really a conversation about empathy. It's about practicing what you preach and the strategies required to create sustainable change and forge a better world for all.

Final note, for those who shut down at the mere mention of animal rights, I ask only that you set aside your preconceived judgments because this conversation isn't just about the suffering of animals. It's about the suffering of people. And it's about a system that is hoodwinking us all, including the chicken farmer with his boots in the ground.

I'm grateful for Leah's advocacy and her passion. And may you find this conversation as impactful as I did. So without further ado, this is me and Leah Garces. Well, delighted to have you here. Thank you for making the trip out here. I'm excited to be here. Yeah, it's going to be cool. So, so many things to talk about, but why don't we just start at the beginning? And I'm going to ask you questions I already know the answer to, but the people that

listening don't. How did you get started in this whole world of animal advocacy and activism to begin with? Like the beginning? Yeah, the beginning. Let's like, you know, set the stage. Set the stage. Well, like most human beings, my first encounter with animals was as a child. And I grew up in the swamps of Florida where there were ducks in my backyard. And if anyone is to blame or to thank for my life of animal activism. It is a family of ducks. Yeah. And they would hatch in my mother's prized flower bed, which we were not allowed to touch, of course, but the mother ducks were. And they would come in and, you know, push around all the flowers and make a nest. And these eggs would hatch. And it was right on the other side of a screened-in porch. So my brother,

sister and I used to lay in our bellies and watch the lives of these ducks unfold, hatch, go out for their first swim and all the dramas. And there are dramas when it comes to ducks that unfold. So I grew up with no question in my mind that animals, that we were not talking, we were just talking about degrees of difference between us and ducks and dogs and cats and cows and pigs. And they were worthy of good lives and worthy of protection. And when I grew, you know, discovered that animals are horribly abused in our food system, totally disregarded as sentient beings, rather than be really sad about that, I became, I just, a fire was ignited in me to do something about it. What was your upbringing like with your parents? Did they instill in you a sense of responsibility?

Or how did that engine come about? Was that something that you saw in the way that your parents conducted themselves? Yes. So two examples related to the ducks, of course. My father, you know, this was in the 80s, and he would, dressed in his suit and tie, the first time the ducks would go out into the canal, he would be very concerned about this because it is not a happy place for ducks necessarily. Ducklings, there's otters and gators. And he used to follow them in an aluminum canoe with a net.

And if one of them kind of got too far behind, he would scoop up the ducks, careful not to touch them, get his scent on them, and make sure that they got reunited with the pack and the flock of, you know. Oh, that's sweet. Yeah. And on the other hand, my mom also sometimes the ducks would lay the eggs out of season. And in the winter, it sometimes gets cold in Florida. And they would bury, my mom and the mother ducks had this thing going on. And she would lay the eggs underneath the dryer vent. And my mom, if the mother duck went out to get food or do her thing and have a break,

my mom would turn on the dryer vent. And make sure it was like her personal responsibility. This is like, you know, an extended family. Yeah, they really were an extended family. I knew about the ducks. I didn't realize it was so intense. It was, it was. Well, there was this thing where you move away from Florida and then you move back a couple of years later or something like that, right? And then suddenly the ducks were no more. Right. A couple of years later or something like that, right?

And then suddenly the ducks were no more. Right. I moved to Spain and then moved back when I was 17. And I remember I was looking around and I didn't quite know what I was looking for. And I realized the ducks weren't there anymore. And in that time, the chemicals that are put on lawns to keep them green and weed-free had run into this canal and turned it into a pea soup. It was just algae and stink. Like an alcohol bloom. Yeah. And the ducks had left. And in some ways, I was very sad, but I was also very glad that they could leave because later that I would discover not all animals have that choice. Right. And your first kind of stab at activism

had to do with manatees, right? Yes. The beloved manatee. Oh, I love manatee. If I could be any animal, I would be a manatee. Why is that? You just get to chill in the Florida waterways and eat vegan food and-

Eat vegan food. Yeah, they're the best. food and yeah they're the best manatees are they you know i i love the florida waterways i love the wildlife and the nature and manatees are this unlikely animal to be in these waterways these giant sea cows that just hang out so i worked for Save the Manatee Club as my first job. Yeah. And that's where I discovered policy makes a difference. Government policy makes a difference because the battle for the manatee was also the battle for prime real estate in Florida, which was waterway real estate. And the law was that they were classified as an

endangered species. And therefore, if they were on a property, you cannot build a marina there. And that was a valuable property. Yeah. Well, that seems to sort of presage or set the stage for your particular perspective on advocacy, your particular perspective on advocacy being one of working in cooperation and partnership with these institutions to shift them from within, which is considered by some to be a radical departure from the traditional methodology of trying to win the hearts and minds of the individuals and consider these institutions as emblematic of the enemy. Yeah. Right?

Yeah. I think I very quickly realized that if you want to change things, you have to convince the enemy to join you and get on your path with you, even if you start a little further back than you'd like. It's a more sustainable, long-term change that ends the battle. It really, you know, you don't, I think when you're early on in activism, the battle feels great.

Like you're so angry and you want to be angry and you want to blame someone, but you get worn out that way. And at some point you take a step back and it doesn't feel good anymore. And you realize you're not making as much progress. You're just being angry and just spinning your wheels. Get probably getting angrier and angrier because you're facing more and more resistance because there's a, there's a certain futility to it as well. I think. Definitely. And. And I still get really angry.

I think that the mistake is that I'm not endorsing what's happening. And engaging doesn't mean endorsing. And that's an important distinction. Right. I think people get confused about that. They do. And I get plenty of the hate. And I get where it's coming from.

It's a fear that we're degrading or losing our position, but that's not what it is. Engaging is at worst, you're going to understand better how to fix the problem. And at best, you find a common ground that you can build from. Right. Well, it seems elemental to me that understanding is foundational to creating change. If you don't understand the playing field and the players, and you don't find a way to, you know, at least empathize with them in some way, then you're starting from, you know, behind the starting line in terms of your ability to really,

you know, create the change you seek. I mean, the industry we're trying to change, factory farming, it's super secretive. But the people who do it, the industry, the farmers, they know everything we want to know but can't know unless we get to know them about changing it. And that's what, as I started to work with these farmers, all of the questions I had wanted to know were being answered just by befriending these people and trying to understand their perspective and them giving me open tours of their factory farms. I could ask the questions, like, how often are these chickens dying? Is this normal? You know, how often do these disease outbreaks happen?

What happens when the disease outbreaks happen in your farm? Who helps you? Do these go onto people's plates? Like all these questions you just can't know the answer to unless you step inside the problem. You can't even get the opportunity to ask them, though, unless you engender some level of trust. That is a good point. And that probably for a decade was the most frustrating thing for me, is we would have these questions and we couldn't ask anybody. Nobody would even pick up the phone, answer an email. And that's when we started switching from, when I started switching really from hardcore advocacy to more engagement and more, let me just write a nice email instead of a nasty one. I know. Imagine that. Imagine. Yeah. Well, let's work our way up to that. I mean, first you go to college and then you go to London, right, to get a graduate degree in like sustainable development.

Yeah. And was part of that motivated by just trying to learn as much as you could about agriculture and farming? Or was there a sense that this was going to be your path? I feel like the path chose me. Probably a lot of people feel that way. I felt pulled towards something. And I didn't know what, but I was just following the doors as they opened. And when I finished, I did a zoology degree at University of Florida and I really cared about the waterways of Florida.

I really thought that's what I was going to do, that I was going to do environmental protection. I thought I needed to be a vet maybe. I would do veterinary, wildlife, rescue, be doing really fun wildlife marine rescue work. And my mentor at the time took me aside and he said, Leah, that's not what you want to do. Vets are plumbers. They fix animals once they're already broken. You're more interested in getting to the root of the problem, the root of the suffering. And that was probably the most important thing

anyone's ever said to me in terms of defining my path. He doesn't probably even know that. And it was Dr. Louis Gillette. And that made me look at master's degrees. At the time, there were not really sustainable development. That was just an emerging concept, really. It was 1999. And there were two degrees one was in london we were the first batch of students and the other one was in boston

university and i just looked at the cost of those and i was like okay london and i went to london there's probably a lot of those programs now there There are tons. And the program now has, you know, a thousand kids in it. Wow. And it's part of University of London, King's College that I went to. But there were seven of us in the program, and we kind of got to define it a little bit ourselves. And it was fantastic. But of all places, England, right? I chose a kind of random place, a random country.

I had been born and grown up partially in Spain. I wanted to get back to Europe. And when I got there, I discovered this whole farm animal movement happening that I had no idea that aligned exactly with my values. And I just, I had no idea that was a possible career option. that was a possible career option. So more than getting my master's degree there, I was exposed to Compassionate World Farming, the Royal Society for the Protection of Animals,

a bunch of really hardcore groups like Viva or other animal rights, farm animal rights organizations that not only were, they were professional. They were a professional movement of like CEOs and communication specialists and lobbyists fighting for farmed animals. And they had already won lots of things. Like they had banned the worst practices, which we still haven't banned in this country.

Right. Like battery cages and these crates that mother pigs are kept in and veal crates banned. And they had succeeded. And I just got, I fell in love. And then you just, you ended up working with them for a while, right? And then coming to the United States and kind of opening up the satellite office from one Gainesville to another.

Yes. Yes. I apparently have a thing for Gainesville. Yeah. I worked for 10 years in Europe, in London. I worked for Compassionable Farming. And then I worked at World Society for the Protection of Animals, where I oversaw all of the global campaigns and programs. I went to 30 countries before I was 30 and saw every form of suffering that human beings inflict on animals, whether it be dolphins and dolphinariums, bear bile farming, stray dogs,

horses being used for work, working horses used in Columbia, and then farm animals. And I really thought after the birth, some of them, my son was born in London. And when he was born, things really switched for me because I really thought about the world I wanted to hand him. And I thought my time is also very precious now because he's precious. And, you know, when your kids are born, you have this moment where you're like, And, you know, when your kids are born, you have this moment where you're like, time is now really precious. Like in 18 years. Only 18 years. You got 18 years.

You seem to have a very finely, acutely calibrated clock, though. Like you're, you know, like you don't have a lot of patience and you're very, you know, sensitive to how time is passing and time is short. Yeah, it is much to the annoyance of many people around me. I just did this like three, we just did this 360 degree review internally for Mercy for Animals. And it was all very positive for my team, but all of them were like, can we please slow down? Please, can we go slower? Well, it's an interesting dynamic because my sense of what it must be like to try to shift these gigantic institutions from within requires, you know, a deft hand and, you know, a sort of mature diplomatic disposition. And with that, patience, right? These things don't turn around on a dime.

So how do you reconcile like the patience that that demands with your impatience to see the change that, you know, you envision in your mind in the world? That's a very astute observation that I have never thought about. I guess I think it's worthy of my patience if it's going to move a large number of individuals from and reduce their suffering. So I have patience for if I'm working with a company and I know they're in charge of half a million animals. And if I, so working with Purdue, for example,

they produce, they raise and slaughter 680 million animals every year. So having patience with them is worth it because even a tiny step is a monumental reduction in suffering for those animals. And that makes it more worth it. But you have to go into those meetings thinking, okay, I have to be patient. I have to clamp down on my impatience. A little bit. Yeah. Yeah. I stay very goal oriented and come up with two or three things. And I'm like, these are the things I really want to move them on. And staying focused like that helps me stay patient, I guess. Right. So your husband gets a job offer from the CDC,

right? So this is going to take you to Georgia. Yes. And at that time, were you thinking, well, this is going to allow me to explore the belly of the beast in terms of the chicken industry? Or how did that, it seems perfectly aligned, right? That he would get this job offer and it would sort of intersect perfectly with this thing that you're super interested in. Yeah. Like I said, I feel like the path pulled me. And I had proposed to the Compassionate World Farming CEO, this satellite office. And I said, we're probably going to move.

It's going to be Georgia. But here's why it should be Georgia. Georgia is the largest producing state of chickens in the entire country. They produce 1.4 billion chickens every single year. It's where factory farming was born, essentially, chicken factory farming in particular. And what's the point of being another nonprofit that's pointing fingers from the city, not really getting it? Let me be in the thick of it. And he didn't say yes the city, not really getting it. Let me be in the thick of it. And he didn't say yes right away. And we moved anyway, but I started working

despite that. She's doing it. Yeah. Yeah. I just started exploring and I got on the board of the George Animal Rights and Protection and just started getting into it. And then about a year after I'd moved there, he called me and said, oh, remember that proposal? I found the money. Here's two days of pay and a laptop, go. Oh, wow. So you were kind of on your own for a whole year

before that kicked in. Yeah, well, my- And then two days a week. Yeah, yeah. Well, that's, you know, it's not- Thank you. Yeah, yeah. You know, a lot of us believe that it's just,

you know, you just hand a laptop and it'll work. Right. It does half the time. So it's worth trying. And here's where things get really interesting. You know, I knew that Georgia was a large poultry producer. I didn't realize the extent, you know, to, 9 billion chickens a year are slaughtered for human food. So 1.6 of those billion come out of Georgia.

Right. It's like a huge percentage of their sort of state GDP, right? Yeah. It's like the number one industry in Georgia. Great. sort of state GDP, right? Yeah. It's like the number one industry in Georgia. It is. Right.

And what's really interesting, and you go into this in detail in the book, is the history of how industrialized chicken farming came to be and really the roots of animal, sort of conventional factory farming can be traced back to their origins in rural Georgia. Yeah. There was this gentleman named Jesse Jewell, and he owned a feed mill. And he wanted to figure out how to sell more of this feed. So this is like the grain that we feed animals.

So his idea, and this was during the Depression, was that he would get farmers to rent chickens from him, buy his feed, and then he'd pick them up at the end and send them off to slaughter. And this would help him grow his feed business. And it worked. And this was in Gainesville, Georgia. And this is essentially how the system works today. So he got enough money that he also bought the processing plant, the slaughterhouse. So he ended up owning the whole system, which is a vertically integrated system that we see today. And why the farmers that I worked with later are essentially indentured servants. They can't get out of this system. They don't own those chickens.

The chickens are dropped off. They're chicken babysitters. And then they grow them. And then someone else picks them up and sends them off to slaughter. And that was Jesse Jewell then. It's Purdue and Tyson today. So I think a lot of people, I mean, I've talked about this on the podcast before, and we've gone into this, but not to the detail with which you kind of unpack it in your book.

Like, I think it's worth really trying to understand the predicament that these farmers find themselves in from a financial perspective. Like, you have a well-meaning individual who wants to hold onto their land. They take these loans out so that they can build these, you know, basically warehouses for these, you know, to breed these chickens. And they become indentured servitudes because although they're promised like this pathway forward in terms of being able to pay down this loan, they keep getting hit with requirements to improve their facilities, et cetera, and are required to continually take out loans and they can barely make ends meet. And it's really, it creates a legitimate

socioeconomic problem where these people are trapped in a situation that quickly becomes something I never would have predicted it would become. Yeah. I collectively, chicken factory farmers in our country owe $5.2 billion. Wow. That's how much debt that they have. And as you said, so just the example that I learned, like the really rocked my world was one farmer, Craig Watts. He lives in Fairmont, North Carolina. And when he was about 22 years old, he was dreaming for a way to stay on the land

that had been passed down five generations in his family. And many of the farmers are like that. They just want to stay there for either a way of life or because this was their family's house, land, farm for a hundred years. And in this case, tobacco industry bottomed out, North Carolina, chicken industry rolls up right behind it and offers Craig this contract. And it seems like a dream come true. He can stay on the land, he can pay his bills, he can raise his

family. And he takes a quarter of a million dollar loan out, which at 22 in the poorest county of North Carolina seems to me crazy. Yeah. But he can. The system allows that to happen. And he raises. Because these loans are guaranteed by Purdue, right? Actually, they're guaranteed by us as taxpayers. They're part of our agricultural system.

And if they fail, they are backed by the U.S. government. Oh, wow. Yeah, which is a whole other story. A young individual with no credit has no problem getting one of these loans. Right. And, you know, no degrees, like no problem. And that's added up to $5.2 billion of debt in our country. And so, you know, he took out this loan, he builds these warehouses,

and at first it goes great. And then the birds start to get sick because it's a factory farm. And these are birds that are stuffed wall to wall in a windowless warehouse, living on their own feces, ammonia-laden air, stressful circumstances, and some of them die and you don't get paid for dead birds. And so he starts to fall behind on the payments. He's supposed to be paying them off his, this loan off like a mortgage every month, the same amount every month is due. But if he doesn't raise X number of chickens, he doesn't, he gets a smaller paycheck. Right. And he starts to fall behind on that loan and he has to take out more money or he has to do something else. He has another job to make ends meet. And pretty soon he's realized he's made a mistake, but too late. And he's an indentured servant and he can't do

anything about it. And that is the typical circumstance. In his case, it was going good initially. And so then he kind of doubled down, right? Like he had two warehouses and he went to four. So he took out more debt to subsidize that. And the problems then kind of started to creep up then. Right. And the way it works is you take out these loans. Purdue is responsible for getting you the chicks, right? And you kind of cover everything else. You raise these birds and then they basically come and pick them up.

Right. And you get paid for whatever ones are usable to use, you know. for whatever ones are usable to use, you know. The farmers get paid today five cents per pound of bird, of flesh. And we pay at the supermarket, if you eat chickens, a dollar. That's the commodity price. So the farmer is getting 5% of that dollar.

And there are many, many, many of them are living on the edge of poverty. Right, yeah, there was like a crazy statistic, something like 71% of them are at or below the poverty line. Yeah, it's serious. And that was, I'm a vegan animal rights activist. Before I met Craig Watts, I was like, I'm a vegan animal rights activist.

Before I met Craig Watts, this was the person who symbolized everything I fought against my whole career. This is a person who I hated, I blamed, I was angry at, I wished ill. I did not want him to succeed in life. But he becomes the flashpoint in your career and in this movement, right? There's a decision to try to engage him from his perspective, from his point of view. Yeah. I mean, being really honest, when I went to meet him, that was not my intention. My intention was to go in there and get footage because as you and your listeners will be aware, And as you and your listeners will be aware, ag gag is a growing problem where it's illegal for us to get footage inside of a lot of farms. So here was a guy offering me to film freely in his farm.

And we hadn't seen through at that time, and this was six years ago, there had not been footage from inside a chicken factory farm for a decade. Oh, is that right? Wow. No one had been able to get in. It just was impossible. So this offer was like gold to me. Like I had to get inside, get footage, and get it out to the public. But when I got there, something else happened completely, you know. But there was a lot of email back and forth and, you know, like trying to feel each other out. And he had to get to a certain comfort level before he said, okay, why don't you come on over?

Yeah, we were texting, we were emailing. And, you know, I remember it was like a Sunday and my family were eating in the other room. And I kind of finally worked up the courage to say, can I come? Can I bring a camera? And he just said, sure. Which had never happened before, really. No. I had been writing and trying to contact these companies saying, can I get a tour?

Like very openly, trying to legally and openly see these places without doing undercover work. And they wouldn't even respond. One of the things that's interesting, you were talking to Ezra Klein about this and he pointed it out. And I don't know that I'd fully, which was a great conversation, by the way, I loved it. He pointed something out that I'm not sure I really fully appreciated, which is the fact that due to these ag-gag laws and the system being the way that it is, we've kind of normalized that, oh, in this industry, like we're just not allowed to know what's going on with our food. And we've sort of accepted that on some level, which is very odd because that would be anathema in any other industry. And yet here we are prevented from the free right to really get a transparent perspective on how our food is made. And that you have the only source of information are these, you know, underground undercover pursuits where people sneak in in the middle of the night and capture this footage. It is unfathomable to me that this is our current food and farming system.

That all of the animal protein comes from systems that are out of sight and out of mind for our country and for the world. That how can that be? country and for the world that how can that be? This is what really drives me is this insistence in my head and my mind and my soul that if people really knew, if they really saw, I just don't think anybody would want that to be where their protein came from. And it's a whole system that's hoodwinking everyone in the process, even some of the executives, even they are removed from it who are running these companies. I feel that. Right. I mean, this is the result of gigantic political and lobbying forces like moving the tectonic plates at the highest level. Yeah. It's not the farmer's decision. Right. And the lobbyists are, you know,

the, our politicians, unfortunately are being quite often paid by these lobbyists. These, it makes it very difficult. We don't have one piece of federal legislation protecting farmed animals on farm in this country. That's crazy. It's unbelievable. It is, but it's necessary to continue this, this blindness that we, that is instilled on us. What is the lobbying budget of the Purdue's and the Tyson's? I don't know that off the top of my head, but it's large. It's a lot. Yeah. Because sometimes we think about that. We think about like, what is the advertising budget we need or, or what is the lobbying budget we would need to out-compete? And it's, we can't do it. Yeah. You can't even entertain that question. No. So when you're, when you're communicating with, with Craig,

before he invites you over, was there, was there a sense like, I mean, you kind of had to approach this more from a journalist perspective than an activist perspective, right? So was there a sense like, oh, this guy, you know, is having some second thoughts about how he does what he does. And there's a little opening here. Did you think like, oh, he's gonna, he could be a whistleblower? Or you're just thinking, I got to get in here before he changes his mind and get this footage? I think I was genuinely curious, like, who is this person? Why would he trust me? And I wanted to get to know him. I wanted, you know, also to get this footage because I thought it was the last opportunity, a rare opportunity to find it, to find, to get this

footage out into the world that can't usually see how the chickens are being produced. And I don't know why Craig and I met or how, that we were introduced by a journalist, but I did go into it, I think, because of that with a bit of a journalist perspective. Well, the way it happened was Craig slipped a bunch of information to a journalist about the feed, right, which is kind of proprietary information. And then you met with the journalist and you're like, where did this come from? So there was evidence like, hey, this guy, you know, he wants people to know what's really

going on here. Yeah. And it really surprised me. Yeah. I went to the coffee shop in my town and this journalist from Reuters, Brian Groh, he asked me to meet because he heard I knew about this stuff. And he's like, what is all this? And I was like, what do you have here? He had a bunch of, he had like 10 years of the antibiotics that are put into chicken feed, like the exact records from the farm. And I thought he was going to say, I snuck it out. I had an undercover. And he said, no, this farmer gave it to me. I was like, who, what? Would he meet with me?

And I definitely thought the answer would be, no, I'm not doing that. I'll break my relationship. And he was like, let me text him. And he texted him right then and there. And that's how we got connected. The surprising thing for me from that story was that that's confidential.

Like the feed that they're giving the chicken is something that they don't want anyone to know. Yeah, they act like it's their secret recipe that they don't want their competitors to know about. That's how they excuse that. But it's really a veil to prevent the public from knowing what's going on. 80% of our antibiotics are given to farmed animals.

And this is in a time when they're becoming ineffective. Like we are quickly and rapidly approaching a time, a post-antibiotic period again, like before penicillin. And that's frightening. And we're wasting it on farmed animals. I mean, right now we're in the midst of this coronavirus, you know, outbreak. And so it's very much on my mind, the impact of all of these antibiotic fed animals and the downstream impact of that and creating a situation in which we're producing a scenario where an outbreak like that is almost inevitable, like some kind of antibiotic resistant strain of something will emanate out of all of this that's going to create like

havoc. Yeah. And I mean, the coronavirus is very frightening and it came from an animal market. And that's- From like a bat, bats, I think. It's, yeah. And it's been spread, you know, the recommendation, if you look on the CDC's page is don't eat animals from markets, don't eat animals right now from this region. We're not precisely sure. And I'm like, why can't that be the general advice from the CDC? In general. Don't eat animals.

Right. Yeah, and a lot of the disease outbreaks we've seen, avian flu, they have come from the trading, the eating, the production of animals in a totally unhealthy and unsustainable way. So you get slipped this information, you got this opening from Craig and you go visit him. So tell me what happens well uh we drove there with my friend reagan hodge who's a filmmaker and in the hallway there he is writing really strange text messages to us it turns out he's a very jokey kind of guy but we didn't know him at this stage so we just thought maybe he is like screwing with us unhinged or

something and here we are two women like headed into God knows where. And we're meeting with this man who by all, you know, any other scenario would be my enemy. That's the normal, the media pitches us that way as sworn enemies. I sent, I remember I sent my husband the address and said, I'm going here. If I don't come back, look for me buried in the chicken litter. I might actually be rotting away. That's where I might be. And it was like not a joke.

I really thought this is a little scary. And we showed up and he led us into his living room. And we sat there for hours and hours and hours. And he was showing me everything. And I had this, as he's telling me his story, you know, I was waiting for the right moment to say, can we go to your houses? But it just didn't come for hours because I was so enthralled and engaged by his story as a human being, how he was showing me footage of the disease inside of his houses, how he had tried to get

rid of it, how there was no help and no answer. And all the while he's falling behind on his payments, how he had been awarded as a top grower. He showed me his like hats for being at the top of the tournament system they have where they get growers to compete against each other. He showed me the pictures of his children, of his parents, his grandparents.

He talked about the deed of the land from the Queen of England that had been given to his aunt. And this is the land, you know, he showed me the gravestone. We walked on the property to his gravestones of his family. And I just, you know, sitting there, I remember looking out the window and thinking, if I had been born Craig Watts, would I have done anything different? I don't know. You know, it just seems you have these moments when you meet people who are very different than you, where you realize it's really chance that you were born where you were born,

and how unfortunate that he was born into a situation where there were very few options. And I genuinely believe he chose the best one for himself and his family. And it was a mistake and he can't get out of it now. Yeah. Wow. I mean, to have that kind of, um, awareness, I think is super important. You know, the cornerstone of, of the vegan movement, the animal rights movement is compassion, right? And if we can't figure out a way to identify, you know, with the person that we're communicating with, if we can't develop compassion for that person, how do person, how do you expect to create sustainable change? I think it's really powerful to understand that these farmers are people and they're living in, these people are not the enemy. They're just trying to live their lives and make

good choices. And they're dealing with the deck that they've been given. to live their lives and make good choices. And they're dealing with the deck that they've been given. Right. And it's the same with slaughterhouse workers. Yeah. Very similar where a lot of these are immigrants or migrant workforces, immigrant workforces that are coming from Central America with very few choices. And they're the jobs nobody else wants because they're dangerous, especially Latinx women are abused in these processing plants, these slaughterhouses. So this system is not just about the suffering of the animals. It's also about the suffering of the people that are producing our meat. And it's immense. Right. But what was different about Craig? I mean, he's in a community where there's

lots of people doing what he's doing who are in the same situation that he's in, essentially. So what was it that tipped him over and compelled him to, you know, make this decision to want to share this, his plight and the kind of systemic things that he was dealing with. He was towards the end of his debt. He was getting close to it. And I think he said, so he said to me that the thing that really made him switch was he was watching a commercial on TV and it was a Purdue commercial. And it was Jim Purdue saying in a pickup truck, like all our chickens are super happy and all our farmers are super happy and yay eat chicken. And he, he like something blew up in

him. Right. And he's like, I just can't, I can't, I have kids. Like I cannot look them in the eye and be a part of this. And he, and I, the funny thing is I watched the same commercial and it became the subject of our video because I was like, you cannot call this humanely raised. I know it's not. You're not being transparent. There's no information. I had gone probably at the same time as him in a parallel explosion in my head about being mad that the consumers were being lied to. Yeah, because in parallel with all of this, there is a sensibility that consumers, you know, nobody wants to think about the fact that these animals are killed for their food, let alone, you know, harmed or, you know, treated poorly. And so to address that rather than kind of, you know, rectify that in a real way, there's a lot of greenwashing going on and a lot of labels getting thrown around that, you know, aren't regulated and aren't, you know, if defined at all or poorly defined.

And you talk about that in the book, right? Like going to the store and saying, tell me what this means. And like nobody being able to actually, you know, give you a proper definition because truly there isn't one. It's just marketing. Yeah. And it's playing on the good intentions and goodwill of the public who, like you said, they don't want to buy a tortured, nobody wants to buy or eat a tortured animal. Nobody. They want to believe and will go to great lengths to convince themselves that the animal had a good life. So it's not very hard. You just have to put a green logo on there that

makes it look modern and maybe say the words cage-free chicken on there. Now, mind you, all meat chickens are cage-free. So they're also, then you can see that on labels a lot, they're playing off the fact that people want cage-free eggs. And most of the eggs were coming from caged hens. And so they look for these labels that are really tricking people. And the companies, there's a lot of, they're doing it legally in a lot of cases. So the case of calling chicken cage-free was brought to a judge. And the judge said, well, it's a fact they're cage free, but people are buying it because they think they're a pasture. Right. Right. It's not, it's not the technical, you know, definition of it. It's the intention

behind it, which is to convince people that, that these animals are living happy lives. Yeah. And unfortunately our legal system is more on the side of those companies than on the side of what are the consumers really seeing here? What are they really intending? Why is it so hard to get effective labeling laws and some appropriate regulation here? Like what is the relationship between the USDA and the industry? And, you know, where does political will sit and how difficult is it to move that needle? It's a revolving door between animal ag and the USDA. You can actually see, and I forget the percentage, but a large percentage of the people that are in USDA used to be in industry.

The people in industry used to be in USDA, and they just go between the two. They know each other well. They're all buddies. They hang out. And the financing of the campaigns of the politicians is done by the ag industry to ensure later when they're on the ag committee, they're resisting the progressive laws and they're keeping the laws that maintain the status quo in place. It's disheartening to hear that because you want to believe, and I feel like it would be expected as a consumer and a citizen that the USDA is the regulatory body and they're providing the oversight to make sure

that everything is copacetic so that when it ends up on the plate, it's safe and everything is kind of vetted. But, you know, tell me the reality of this. Well, I'll give you a really very concerning example that's happening right now, which is the USDA just approved, allowed for slaughterhouses to speed up their line speeds. Right. This is recently, right? In the Trump administration. Correct. Rolling back these regs. Yeah. What used to happen, and this is still ridiculous, it's 125 birds per minute can go on a line. Now they've allowed, you could go up to 175 birds per minute. That is three birds a second. So one, two, three, that's nine birds

that just got slaughtered. That's insane. Not only that, they have the USDA are saying, you know what, we don't need to police these places anymore. We're not going to check for food safety. And they're allowing companies to police themselves, grade their own papers. That's super insane. It's going to have human health repercussions. There will be outbreaks. There will be Campylobacter, Salmonella, E. coli. That's the USDA's job is to stop contaminated meat from getting into our food system mostly

because we don't have laws to protect farmed animals, chickens especially. So their job is mostly one of making sure they're following health and safety regulations. So also the people that are working there, that they're being treated safely in a healthy work environment. So we actually, and this is the same for pigs also, they just allowed the line speeds to be increased for pigs. And we are suing, Mercy for Animals is suing the USDA over this. Oh, wow. When we think about animal rights and animal welfare, the typical, you know, what typically comes to mind are cattle and pigs. We kind of overlook chickens, right?

And fish, for reasons I want to, you know, explore with you. But the truth of the matter is like chicken is the number one protein in the country, if not the world, right? How do we, before we even get into that, like how do we get to this point where chicken is like overwhelmingly the number one animal product in the United States? Unfortunately, the animal, the chicken lends itself to the industrial setting and is a victim of its survivability, of his or her survivability. So they're able to grow through selective breeding, very fast, very large birds. So the birds we eat are 40 to 45 days old babies. They're obese babies.

And they can do a ton of them in these warehouses, these darkened warehouses, all in a row, 30,000 birds in a house. A typical farm has two to four of these houses and they're doing that five or six times a year. So it was just more scalable than anything else. Right. Yeah, I think I read that if it was a human,

so how old are the chicks when they're slaughtered? About 42 days old. 42 days, right. So if it was a human baby, that baby, it would be the equivalent of like blowing up a human baby to like 600 pounds by the time they're like six months or something. Two years old, yeah, it's insane.

Yeah, so like how we breed dogs for qualities that we like in dogs, they did the same with the birds. So, and the thing that they bred for was giant breasts because that's what we like to eat. That's the kind of part that people enjoy eating. And everything else was an unintended consequence. So, we selectively bred these birds until they were bigger and bigger and bigger and bigger and grew faster and faster and faster. But their lungs and their heart did not get selectively bred for. And they can't keep up with the muscular skeletal demands of these strange frankenchickens.

They collapse under their own weight. of chickens. They collapse under their own weight. 3%, when they get to only 40 days of age, can't even walk. And about a quarter of them have great difficulty walking. And I've seen the birds, so sometimes birds fall off of trucks and people will adopt them and try to get them better. They'd never live beyond six or nine months because they die of heart attacks. They look like turkeys. They're just abnormal. And the industry has created a bird that they only want to survive to 40 days and they can't even do that. So there's in a flock of 30,000 birds

in one of these warehouses, about 1,500 of them are guaranteed to die. They won't make it, about 5%. Yeah, so when you make this video with Craig, which we're going to get into, I mean, one of the shocking things is, well, first of all, like he has to kill so many, you know, there's so many sick ones. Um, but then because they can't support their own weight, they're just, they're lying on their stomachs and kind of shuffling around. They get chafed and all the feathers are, are, are rubbed off their belly and they have these open sores all over them. Yeah. Yeah. And, and those are the considered,

that's like normal. Those are the ones we will eat. And that's very normal. So the, a lot of people think, I remember talking to my mom about this and trying and telling her like, this is how it is. And she said, well, they, they changed the litter, right? Like every day or so, like a birdcage. And I was like, mom, no, they never changed the litter. Many, many flocks live and poop and die on that litter that's on the bottom. So we were talking about like wood shavings that are mixed with like feed and feces. And what they do is they're living on a composting bed of stuff of feed and shavings and feces and feathers and all kinds of other things. And that starts to compost and heat up. And when I was with Craig, at one point I asked him for a thermometer and I put the thermometer in the bedding and it was

about 87 degrees. So then on top, so the chickens are sitting on top of an 87 degree bed of bacterially decomposing stuff and they can't get up. And then they're, and they're also stuffed wall to wall. So every time one of them moves, it's shift, shift, shift, shift, shift, shift, shift, shift, shift, shift. So that's happening all day, this slight rubbing of their chests on hot litter. And they can't get up very easily. They get up very, with great difficulty to get food and water, and then they sit back down. And so the rubbing becomes constant. And I don't know why, but I had this impulse to pick one up and look at her. And it was a raw red belly with sores and easily where bacteria can enter,

where they definitely are feeling sick and hot and uncomfortable and in pain. And then they take that runoff and then they just spray it on the fields, right? Yeah. And- It gets, it becomes almost like an aerosol. It's in the air. Well, maybe that's more pigs you're thinking of. Oh, yeah, yeah, yeah. I'm thinking of the scene in Cowspiracy where they're spraying that and-

That's more pigs. And the surrounding families are like inhaling this stuff. Yeah, the pig manures are the manure lagoons. I don't know why they call it that. Like it's something beautiful and like you'd pull a beach chair up to and relax. But they call them manure lagoons and they are lagoons next to big pig factory farms. And that's just liquid slosh going into a pool. And then they don't have a way to deal with that.

And then they don't have a way to deal with that. So they spray it onto our crops and onto our fields, which is when you have a lettuce outbreak of E. coli, it's not because lettuce produces E. coli, it's because that lettuce has been sprayed with feces from a farmed animal. That's so disturbing. It's horrible. But with the chickens,

so they don't do that with the chicken manure. It just stays there. They tend to compost it. So what they do is after each flock clears out and goes to slaughter, they push it all into the middle. They take the, they cake it. There's a cake on the top and they take the cake off and then they put that aside into a kind of pile that

they're composting out. Then they put it in the middle, they let it get really, really hot and compost, and then they spread it back out and they say, oh, that's really good. It kills the bacteria and all of that. And then they put new chickens on that same, that same. Well, looking at how this has scaled up, like you're talking about how it was, you know, it was the animal that lent itself to be able to be vertically integrated in that way. But at the same time, there has to be a corresponding consumer demand, right? So I would imagine these things, you know, dovetail with this idea of chicken being a healthier alternative to beef and pork, right? Where suddenly people are like getting off the red meat, but eating more and

more chicken. Yeah. And in no way do I want to blame the animal for like saying that they lend themselves. I'm yeah. I want to be right. Yeah. Thank you for that. I'm not, I'm not implying that. No, I think I said that. And I realized it's, you know, it was an unfortunate result of them being able to survive horrible circumstances. But yeah, one of the big shifts that happened is the nugget, the chicken nugget that McDonald's created. And this shifted the convenience factor of eating animals, where before it was on a bone and it had to be produced like whole chickens, where chicken used to be something that we was on a bone and it had to be produced like whole chickens were chicken used to be something that we ate on a Sunday as a roast. And we roasted the whole chicken.

It was special. And we ate the whole thing. And then the nugget came around. And that was a McDonald's invention. And this changed the landscape for how chicken could be produced. It drove that white meat, that breast meat demand. And that changed a lot. And the other factor was, you know, KFC doing the fried chicken buckets, like being able to bread and fry it in these deep fryers that allowed for the convenience factors. The fast food industry

had a lot to do with the explosion of chicken and then people demanding and wanting this convenient fast food. And that really changed things. Right. We've all seen the pink sludge videos of how the McNuggets get made. I mean, they just take all parts of the chicken and grind it up? Like, how does that work? Well, it depends because after that pink sludge video, companies changed their tune a little bit.

And so some companies say they don't do that and they mostly use white meat. And you'll see, oh, we use 100% breast meat. But a lot of nuggets, you don't know what's in there. You know, it's like a hot dog. You also don't know what's in there. On top of that, chickens suffer from speciesism, you know, because, you know, we,

you know, we love our dogs. And if you spend any time with cows or pigs, you can see their, you know, inner personalities and, and their character. And you understand that they have empathy and feelings and they experience joy and pain and suffering and all of these things. But human beings have a harder time identifying with poultry in the same way. Yeah. And, you know, getting back to our first part of our conversation, I, because I had this first, you know, hand encounter with ducks, I knew them. I had looked into all of their eyes and maybe had this sense of their sentience more than the average person because of this firsthand knowledge. Well, you talk in the book about some crazy superpowers that chickens have that I did not know about. So explain that.

Well, they can see colors that we can't see, which blows my mind. I saw an advertisement the other day, like, is there a color you haven't seen? And I was like, chickens have. Chickens have seen color. They're on top of that. Chickens have seen colors you haven't seen. And they can see far away and close at the same time, whereas we have to do one or the other, which is why they can spot,

you know, a bug in the grass and move for it real quick, which, you know, I think often my joke is I can't even find my keys most morning. There's no way. But the coolest thing I think they do is they can orient themselves in a magnetic field of the planet, which that's a trip. That's real. What does that mean? They can, we need a compass to tell us which way is north and they don't essentially. And they can sense direction and find places without Google Maps. Right.

What about joy and a sense of belonging to a community, like all of these, you know, anthropomorphic experiences that we think are innately human? Like, what is the chicken experience? Yeah. being bad or that we've been, and I feel like that concept is really being rejected because it assumes that humans aren't animals. And of course we are. And therefore these are degrees of differences, not kinds. We've evolved with emotions and therefore they have emotions too. And these help them in social settings. So any animal that needs to communicate and survive, they're going to need to have things like empathy and to understand if their fellow flockmate is suffering. And there have been some really great studies like Joanne Edgar

from University of Bristol did a really great study to show that mother hens have the ability of this empathy, have empathy. And what she did is she did these puffs of air on the chicks, on the babies, and they would be very distressed. The babies didn't like the puffs of air in their face. They didn't enjoy that. And then the mothers would have a reaction to that. And then it became very clear that just by showing the device that the mother would start Getting agitated. Agitated. Like, and when I was with Ezra Klein came up

with a great analogy of like, it's like when you see your kid about to get a shot and your heart, your heartbeat goes up, it's the same thing. This is empathy. This is your ability to understand the suffering of another, which we often think is our unique skill. Right. And on the flip side of that coin, if you can have empathy, if you can have sadness, if you can have suffering, of course you can have joy. Of course.

And for a long time, animal welfare studies just looked at suffering and pain. And more recently, they're like, well, the other side of that is joy. And animals can also have joy. And our objective should be, if we're going to eat or raise animals, is to give them lives worth living where they get to enjoy themselves. And that's very controversial, of course. But we also don't, we don't really want to believe that, right? Like the other thing that Ezra pointed out is like, oh, I feel like, like he started to tense up. Like I, he had this sense that everybody's going to start tuning out. Right. Cause we, it's like we clench up when we start hearing this because we're on the receiving end of information that is at odds with our,

you know, innate, you know, the, the compassion that is innate to all human beings. And we don't like the idea that we're making choices that contravene our inherent value systems. Yeah. It's a very hard one to navigate because essentially, because the vegan vegetarian is about five, 6% of the population, essentially everyone is engaging in this behavior. Everyone is allowing this to happen and is part of it and paying for it. And that's a really hard discussion to have. It's very hard to have it with your friends who you like and you care about, and they're progressive and they're good people. And it's hard to navigate a world like that. Yeah, because the minute you bring it up,

there's a sense of defensiveness or a feeling that somebody is being, you know, personally assailed or attacked for their choices and, you know, quickly becomes uncomfortable. Yeah, and over the years, I swing between my main way of behaving is the way I behave with these companies, which is I'm just trying to find one step forward. Because one step forward means a lot less suffering. So even with friends, family, any discussion I have, it's not go vegan, all or nothing, like a light switch.

It's a conversation about what can you do? What could be your next step? Well, it feels like cultural awareness is at an all-time high in terms of, you know, people being open to these ideas, making personal changes in their own lives. Like everywhere you go, there's vegan options. The fast food industry, which we're going to get into is really, you know, moving in the right direction in terms of providing alternative, you know, plant-based options. And yet at the same time, like the meat, the meat consumption is also at an all time high, right? Like there's this kind of, um, you know, arms race going on. Totally. It is. So, you know, we're talking the weekend of Super Bowl Sunday on Sunday.

And 1.4 billion wings will be eaten on Sunday. Just in one day alone. One day. That's, you know, 700 million birds. Right. I think you say in the book, like if you were to line them up end to end, it would go across the globe a couple times. Three times. Yeah.

And that stat I get from the National Chicken Council website where they are advocating. They're proud of it. They're very proud. They're like, Sunday is a national holiday where it should be called National Wing Day, you know, because. holiday where we, it should be called National Wing Day, you know, because, so while yes, there's awesome things happening like the Impossible Burger at Burger King or all of these products. Beyond Meat at Carl's Jr. Right. You know, yeah. I mean, there's, KFC is doing a pilot program right now. Right. And you did something with Popeye's recently, right? Yes. That was so, that, that made, that was a happy day for me. So in Atlanta, they trialed the Beyond Chicken Nugget

and it was one day only. And we got the notice from Beyond Meat the night before. They're like, get there, we'll have you press with you and you can do a whole video on it. I get there at 10 o'clock when it opens and there's like lines wrapped around the corner, the traffic, they have police like directing traffic. They've painted the KFC green, like lime green.

I saw that. It was insane. You would think they were giving out free Beyonce tickets or something. It was. It's so interesting that that's happening. I mean, who would have predicted that? Not me. It's crazy.

So clear, like I think, was it Burger King that said their launch was like, it's like the most successful like new product launch that they've had in decades or something like that. It's bringing customers back to an industry that if it would have gone the way of the dinosaurs, like it was on its way out. Right. And this is the argument that we make about plant-based products is look at the demand. People are ready for this shift. They want it. Meet them or you're going to go out of business because people are going to find

another way. They're going to move away from this. Right. I think it's such an important message. And I get disheartened when I see, I think there was the, you saw that like somebody sued Burger King because their burger was cooked on the same grill as meat products. I feel like things like that are counterproductive to the broader mission of what I think we can all agree we're trying to accomplish here. Yeah, and it's not for vegans. Right. Yeah, that burger is not for that guy.

He should be doing his own thing. Like Burger King, like these offerings are for the meat eater. Yeah. I can't tell you how often I get like a text from somebody who is like, hey, I was in the middle of nowhere and I got the Beyond Sausage at Dunkin Donuts. It was good. I'm going to get it again. My cousin who's like, he's in the Marines, you know, not the kind of guy you would think who would be interested in vegan products at all. He wrote me the other day, I tried the Impossible Burger.

Burger King was actually good. What's in it? You know, it is an important, I feel like we're at the initial stages of a real protein revolution where we totally reframe our concept of where protein comes from and what it constitutes. And these moments, from and what it constitutes. And these moments, while not significant relief in the moment for farmed animals, because it's not affecting that many animals, are the precursor to our total paradigm shift. Yeah. And the smart move, and this is something that you're very involved in that we're going to talk about, the smart move, if you're sitting on the throne at the Purdue's and the Tyson's and all of these gigantic animal agriculture conglomerates is to shift your business plan away from this unsustainable protein source that's creating all of these problems and also requires an

unbelievable amount of land and resources and creates environmental havoc and untold amounts of suffering to these plant-based alternatives that are very much the future and also look better on the P&A, the P&L. Right. Right? Like, they make more sense. Right. And this is where the consumer demand is leading them.

So either get on board with that and survive and innovate for the future. Or I think these other companies that are kind of recalcitrant or reluctant to do that are going to go the way of the dodo. Right. And, you know, the thing that happened with Craig, where I started to look for the win-win instead of just trying to destroy him. That started to happen with companies too in our movement more widely. And the idea was instead of trying to put these companies out of business, let's try to help them evolve into the business we do want. Right. Because they already have all the machines.

They have all of the brand. They have the money. If they get on board, it's going to accelerate the process. That's how you shift everything, right? So just walking us up to that point, Craig ultimately takes you into the chicken farms. You're able to film all of this and you put a video out and you're able to get Nick Kristof at the New York Times

to kind of align himself with what you guys are doing. And he ends up writing two op-ed pieces, right. Which really, you know, kind of blow things wide open. Yeah. He, he wrote this op-ed and we're watching the video numbers and in 24 hours it was, it was a million views. It was insane. Never expected it. People were so, uh, upset about what was happening. And as I said, this was a unique moment because it had been so long since we had seen inside of a factory farm where chickens are being raised. And not only that, this was not grainy undercover footage. These were professional filmmaking cameras that were catching the real up-close suffering of these birds. And then the suffering of this man and then the

tricking and hoodwinking of this company and then these two unlikely advocates working together it was a very powerful story that really spoke to people that it had to be true that this was not okay and this really put the put chickens on the map in terms of this is a problem we have to solve. And that began a lot of organizations working on that and moving toward what we now are. We have a coalition campaign to change the way that chickens are raised in this country. But initially, in reaction to that first piece, the Purdue response was to point the finger at Craig and say that he's mismanaging. This is his fault. This is not, you know, we don't, this is not about us. And that really backfired because the public saw right through that. Yeah. I mean, the first thing they did was send out these sort of Purdue police to come out

and, you know, write him up and say, you're a bad farmer. And then they said, you can't have any more chickens. And said, we're not gonna pay you until you, yeah. You retrain on animal welfare, which was clearly a retaliatory. Just to get him in line. Right, it was a retaliatory behavior. And so I had hooked him up with Amanda Hitt, who is an attorney and he had pro bono legal counsel

from her and they did a lawsuit, a protective lawsuit in which they sued Purdue for that. And the public were, what kept happening is Purdue wanted to act like nothing had happened. So they would put up on their, we were monitoring their Facebook site, and they would put up like, oh, here's a great new recipe for chicken. And then people would be like, what's wrong with you? Like, this is happening right now. Stop talking about recipes. What are you doing about this? And they wouldn't respond in any way. But people were relentless. it got through all the noise that is in our world, it wouldn't be like this.

And that really drives me and many advocates. So how did you go from that moment to the relationship that you have with Jim Perdue today and the changes that they've, I mean, to their credit, like they've really changed. They have, they have. And so for about a year, they totally wouldn't, they stonewalled me. They would not speak to me. And then I remember reading an article again in the New York Times about how around antibiotics and Purdue. And at the very, very end of the article, it said that Purdue had sent someone named Bruce Stewart Brown over to the UK to look at what chickens need and want. And then Jim Purdue saying, we need happier birds, which was a very strange statement coming from a chicken company. So I knew that when this article was referring to needs and wants, they were referring to a framework by a veterinarian called, her name is Marion Dawkins, who is one of the leaders in chicken welfare in the UK.

So I knew they were talking to her and that was a good thing. They knew they must be talking about how to change their practices. And at the time, Mercy for Animals had come up with two, maybe three undercover investigations on farm showing them like again and again, you're still not okay. And I wrote to their PR person and said a very like emotional, raw letter saying, I don't think we're that far apart on this. Can we talk, please? Can I talk to Bruce? Can I talk to him about what he's learning? I think there may be more in common than we've realized. Simultaneously, Mark McKay at the company, who's now the president, he said when they got the Mercy for Animals footage, they all looked at it and were horrified. And they all said,

does anybody think this is okay? No. Has anybody talked to Mercy for Animals? No. We need to talk to them. We need to talk to these advocates. And they took me up on the offer. And that's when things started to turn around. And I didn't meet Jim Perdue until a good few months later. And I didn't know I was going to meet him when I met him. And they decided to bring me on a tour of their facilities. And when I kind of came down the stairs, there he was. I had no idea he was going to be there. Well, first of all, when they invite you to come over for a tour, what's going on in your head? How is this going to go? you to come over for a tour, what's going on in your head? Like, how's this going to go? Again, I don't know why I'm invited and I don't know what's going on, but I say yes anyway. And that seems to be the standard in my life where I just go with it and see what happens.

And so what happens with him when you meet him? really kind and very human. And he, I had, you know, he asked me about myself and I had missed something, some invitation earlier. And it was because I was adopting my daughter and he remembered that. And it just showed a real human side of him that I had not expected. And I know the difference. Like I have met many, many poultry executives or food executives who are, they hate me. They see me walk in the door and the body language just says, I don't want to talk to you. Like there's no opening here. But Jim Perdue was, his energy said, I'm open. Like I would, this is something I genuinely want to talk about. And to Purdue's credit, they've made a lot of progress. And I do believe it's because Jim Purdue honestly remembers

his grandfather's way of raising things. He remembers a time when chickens were outside and free range. And today, 25% of Purdue's chickens are actually free range outside access. And they've shifted. That's a rapid shift from when we started. Right. One of the big changes was putting windows on all of these housing facilities for the chickens. Right. And that's really important for the chickens to experience the day and night differences and getting six hours of consistent sleep. Normally in the industry, they might get an hour where the lights are turned off and they want to keep them

awake and the lights on, not too bright. So they're constantly eating. So they're getting fat faster. But also simultaneously investing in plant-based alternatives, right? He said something like, you know, we're a, we're, we're a protein company and we're not a meat protein company. Yeah. I mean, that's like a, that's a big statement for. It's shocking. Somebody like that. He said, we went to, they now hold these annual summits where they bring stakeholders together and their customers together. And I've gone to five of them now. And at one of them, they asked me, I go on a stage and it's like a Q&A.

And they're like, okay, here's your, you get to say anything to us. What are you going to say? And I said, you need to explore moving into the plant-based direction. You're not going to be able to afford. So raising chickens in this way costs more money. And therefore, people are going to eat less of it. Because the most, the driving reason for purchasing chicken is because it's cheap. And as the price goes up, so we're going to eat less of it, which is a good thing.

So if you want to keep your business going, why don't you explore some plant-based? Even do blended. Even do half chicken, half and move in that direction, half plants. And within six months of a conversation, so then I was in line with him and he said, Well, you know, nothing about our brand says that we're a premium protein brand. It doesn't say anything about premium chicken brand. So if that's where consumers are going, we can follow that. And then he made an actual announcement later to a newspaper, to Bloomberg, and talked about that.

That's a seismic change. to a newspaper, to Bloomberg, and talked about that. That's a seismic change. From where we started, where they were defending that this horrible practice was humanely raised and they had a controversial label that was tricking consumers to saying, hey, maybe we'll try out plant-based. The arc of that journey to me was one

I just never would have expected. But on the subject of being controversial, to some, that move, you know, your moves would be considered controversial. Like, I'm certain there's a wing of the animal rights movement that isn't happy with all of this collaboration, right? There's a tension between cooperation and this, you know, avenue that you're devoted to pursuing and complicity, right? So how do you like, you know, reckon with those two worlds? Yeah. And it's that concept of engagement doesn't mean endorsement. And for me, the driving factor is my job on this planet while I'm here is to reduce suffering of these farmed animals. And while I would like there to be some kind of secret on-off switch that I can just make everybody vegan, that's not happening tomorrow. And so my job in the meantime, as we move towards that world,

is to reduce the suffering of the 80 billion farmed animals that are raised and slaughtered every year in this world. Right. Let's focus on the big problem. Yeah. And the analogy I often use, because I get this a lot, this it's the main, it's to some people, it's why my approach is unacceptable because they want the on off. They just want, and I get it. I want that too. I really do. But the analogy I use is imagine you're a prisoner in a horrible prison on death row, would you just want someone advocating to end the death penalty only or doing end the death penalty and improve my prison conditions? You would want both. And that's what the animals want from us. The one that's stuck today in the factory

farm, they're never going to see the benefit of the vegan world. So today we need to help them. And there is no evidence that in doing that, we are getting people to eat more meat. In fact, there is the opposite evidence because the price goes up. That is the driving factor. When we improve the conditions of the animals or we reduce their suffering, it means in that square box they're being raised in, it's less economical. You can raise less animals. Those animals cost more to the consumer and people buy less. They buy based on price. It's the main thing people buy on is the cheapness. Right. How do government subsidies work with chicken? Well, the biggest factor is the feed. So soy and corn are the biggest factor affecting chicken

prices. And the subsidies related to that are what drive the cheap chicken prices. And if we could somehow impact that, we would be in a whole other economic situation. I think the other big avenue to pursue, and I know you're already doing this, is to help these farmers find different ways of using their land that are more economically viable and free them up from this indentured servitude debt structure. So talk to me about, you started this new initiative called, what's it called? Transformation, right? And I think this is super cool. Like there's the example of this one guy who basically switched his chicken farm into a hemp farm. Right. I would imagine that if you can provide these farmers and create the incentives and make it easy. create an incentive structure that makes this not just feasible, but more beneficial for them, that that would be a massive way to influence this whole thing.

Yeah. My strong belief in terms of theories of change is we can't just be destructive forces in the world. So as advocates, we can't just come in and say, destroy factory farming. We have to construct something better. We have to come in and be constructive forces. So transformation is a constructive force. It is where we are coming in and saying, instead of doing this- The farmer is the enemy. Right. The farmer is now our partner. The farmer can be our partner. And that's the win-win. And that's the kind of, when I say, we want to create a compassionate food system for everyone, I mean win-win. And that's the kind of, when I say we want to create a compassionate

food system for everyone, I mean that farmer too. And this transformation idea is to get farmers who are raising chickens in warehouses to then transform, transform into hemp, hydroponic lettuce, mint, basil, any of these kinds of options. And there are farmers doing the, when we put out this project, we were kind of shaking the tree to see what was in there and see what fell out. And there's a lot of people doing this already. So we just discovered a farmer in Harrisburg, Pennsylvania. They were chicken farmers, and now they're doing hydroponic basil and peppermint. And they did it on their own. They just, and there's farm and they want more.

Can they do it and really meet their revenue needs? More than. Wow. More than because that the system of chicken factory farming does not benefit a farmer. Like I said, they're making five cents a pound on a bird with an astronomical debt they can never get out of. The trouble is finding for us right now, we launched this project in November. The challenge is that debt is at 5.2 billion dollars. You got to get them out of that first before you can even have that conversation. And that's going to take policy change. And so Cory Booker just put out a new initiative to ban factory farming by 2040.

And a part of that is a federal fund for debt forgiveness for these farmers. That would be amazing. Yeah. And it's the right amount to get farmers out of this. And that's what we're going to need. We need some kind of debt forgiveness for these farmers to move away from this system. And I'm really excited that this conversation is starting to happen. The time has come for this initiative.

And when I see Cory Booker coming out with something like that and I see a farmer who's doing it on his own, it feels really hopeful to me. the psychological burden or trauma that a lot of these farmers weather as a result of raising these chickens and having to kill so many and just the conditions of all of it that it would be such a relief to be able to not have to do that. I mean, what is your sense of the toll that they pay emotionally? Really, it's not good. We have this through transformation. We have a way farmers can get in touch with us and tell us their story. And we're trying to find the right combination of lower debt and ability to speak out to become part of our transformation project. Our goal is to start with a small group and connect them with businesses that plant-based businesses that want to help them transform. So through this, we're hearing a lot of stories and talking to farmers who talk about the sadness.

One farmer referred to himself as a mass murderer, and he felt there's nothing he could do about it, that this was his job. There's nothing he could do about it, that this was his job. And when I followed Craig around, his job was to pick up dead and dying birds and to dislocate their necks. And he did that every flock, every house, about 1,500 birds over a 40-day period. That's his basic job, and then make sure the computers are running. That's it. And that's a horrible job. It's a horrible job that nobody should have to do. And we're kind of paying someone else to do that. That's what I hate about it most is consumers. And I, I struggle some days where

I'm sitting in the airport and I'm watching everyone around me tear into their chicken. And I'm thinking back and back and back and back to where that chicken came from and they are not. And it's, yeah. Well, it's that gap between information and action. It's not about facts and information. I don't know. I would imagine most of those people, if you pinned them down and said, do you know where this comes from? They very well may be able to tell you. Yeah.

But there's still a big difference between that awareness and actually behavior modification. Yeah, and I've gone through different phases of activism where I just think, if only people knew enough, and then they know. It's not about the knowing. And then they know, and then I'm super angry because I know everybody knows and they're still doing it. And then the point where I'm more at now most days is it just progress is all that matters.

Reducing suffering is all that matters. Whatever it takes to get the person there, whether it be I'm going to raise the price of chicken and then you're not going to eat it as much. You don't even care and never will where it comes from, or, you know, making it unhealthy, like saying this is unhealthy, the USDA is not covering it anymore, or making this other product seem more exciting and trendy, like plant-based KFC nugget. How do you take care of yourself in all of this

and not get burned out or despondent when you're kind of on the front lines of this? I mean, it's very emotional, all of it. Yeah. It takes a lot of work, especially being in leadership and having to lead teams through, essentially we are witnessing trauma. We're witnessing, we are bearing witness to suffering as that's what we do for a living, bearing witness to suffering and then putting it into a megaphone and shooting it out into the world, hoping for improvement. And I was really great about it for a long, long time. And then over the last year, it caught up with me somehow. And I think it was a combination. You know, I turned 40 and like really realized I could be a midway point. And what have I done?

And will it stop? And realizing for all my fast moving, it's still really slow. And feeling really down and frustrated about that. And I read a great, you know, I went to a therapist for the first time and was, I had found that what I realized is I had totally gone into work only all the time, had really almost removed myself from all social settings because I couldn't, I just get angry at people and I just never enjoy myself. I remember sitting with a bunch of friends and going out to dinner with them at a farm to table restaurant and they were discussing whether or not to order octopus. And I had to go to the bathroom and I almost walked down. These are my good friends. And I know they get it.

Talking about environmental sustainability while eating. Yeah. The merits of eating octopus. And all I'm thinking of this awesome book I read about how smart octopus are and how cool they are and why would you eat them? And I just like, you know, and realizing I'm not in a healthy place because I could do this before and I could have had a conversation, but it adds up. It's secondary trauma. There's a great book called Trauma Stewardship, which is about realizing, and it's really written for anybody who works in spaces where you're bearing witness to suffering. So it's also people who work in the ER room or social workers or witnessing abuse of children or women and how to cope with that. Because you're not, you can't just turn it off. You can't, it's in you, it's part of you. And what you have to do is take care of yourself

and do self-care, which is not something advocates allow themselves to do. Right. Because you're automatic. Because the work's never done. The work's never done. And there's this guilt and this sensitivity. Yeah. And this sense that, well, the minute you take your foot off the pedal, another harm is taking place that perhaps you could have done something about. Right. And you can drive yourself to insanity, I would imagine. Yeah. And the most significant part of that is you think my suffering is insignificant in comparison. But compassion begins with the self. Right. You have to have

compassion for yourself, especially if you want to sustain your advocacy over time. Right. And I, for some reason, had been great about that, somehow balancing all of that. But in the last year, it caught up to me. and I realized I had seen just so much suffering. I'd witnessed the undercover investigations and the slow moving change and feeling very frustrated and focusing on the negative than the positive. And as a result, withdrawing from a lot of social, any kind of, you know, social gatherings, not wanting to do Christmas or Thanksgiving or anything, you know, uh, really what happened was I lost the ability to be joyful in my life and I had to work on that. Yeah. Then you're no good to nobody. Right. And not, and not yourself either. That's not, nobody wants a boss. You know, what's interesting is it

also works conversely. Like I was very, I said this to you in an email, but I was very moved by Joaquin Phoenix's speech at the Golden Globes. And then I think he won the same award at like the SAG Awards a couple weeks later. And right after winning that award at that fancy event, he went straight to the pig vigil in his fancy tuxedo. It's almost as if he needed that counterbalance, right? As a dose of humility or to remind himself of what's most important to him because, you know, the rest is ego and it's illusion, right? That makes you feel like something that isn't, you know, really tangible. Right. And it was like, he, it was like in order for him to ground himself and be who he really is or remind himself of what his, his values are, he had to show up there. And he didn't even take a moment to change. He went straight there. I just thought that was like such a beautiful and

powerful symbolic gesture. And I know he goes to those all the time. It's not like it wasn't, it wasn't, it wasn't a symbolic thing because this is what he does. Yeah. But it's almost as if it works in reverse as it does for you. Like he, he has to make sure that he's plugged into that. Right. So that he can be his best self. Right, right. And for me, I'm trying to plug back into what makes me joyful so that I can be present for my kids who are growing fast. Because you're 24-7 on this. Right. It's never not part of how I'm looking at the world.

It's my filter. And so for me, it was trying to identify the areas that help me feel joyful. And that helps me be a more creative and innovative advocate, which is critical. Like the transformation idea came from a period of my life when I was feeling really energized and joyful. That idea came from that period of feeling hopeful and joyful about the world. And if you don't find that, if you lose that, I think you lose a lot of the solutions that you need to solve heart problems. How has it been going from, you know, being sort of like a DIY rogue, you know, agent in this movement to now running Mercy for Animals? I mean, you know, you're shouldering a lot of responsibility and you're, you know, a lot of

people working with you. That may have had something to do with me having like a little meltdown this year. Okay. Yeah. It's a lot. It is a lot. It's a lot of that. Now it's not just the issue. It's like it's managing people and projects and yeah. And it's being in the spotlight, you know, which you're the face. Yeah. And that was like what the, as you were saying, like the ego, it's like having to kind of let go, realize there's going to be this person that people think you are in the public. And then the person you just have to hold on to and separate yourself from that a little bit. And that managing an organization, this large of, now this is not like a corporation, right? These are, this is a bunch of warriors, a bunch

of advocates who are here because they're, we get every job, we get hundreds of applicants. So these are the best of the best of the best of the best people in the organization who are here because they believe in this cause and they have the skills to do it. They have the passion. So these are people, they don't like to be managed. Like these are advocates. And if I don't, you know, figure out how to respect them and give them an environment in which they can thrive, they're, they're campaigners. They know how to get rid of me. You know, this is like a collaboration. But also it's your job to put the guardrails up. Right. Exactly. And my job is to direct like the road and say, we created it right out of the gate. I created a three-year strategy to say, these are our

priorities. This is a big problem. Let's drive it into this. We're going to go down this highway and see the progress we make and work together on that. And we created that strategy together. And that felt really good because people had a say in it and they were part of it. But, you know, I feel like my job is to create an environment in which all these warriors can thrive and be their best self for animals. And that's a great privilege. Like I get to my actual job when I'm feeling good about it is to get up every day and help farmed animals and help people help farmed animals. And that's fantastic.

Yeah. I mean, you are an optimistic person. Yes. Yes. Ultimately, I am an optimistic person. And the book, you know, kind of the latter parts of the book are about that optimism and what we're seeing right now with the Beyond Meats and the Impossible Burgers and the Good Food Institute and the work that Bruce and his team are doing and Memphis Meats and the cell-based alternatives, like there's, you know, it's exciting times. It is a great time to be alive. It's, you know,

we haven't had factory farming and this way of eating animals around for very long. It's only been 70 years, you know, since. That's crazy. It is. It's World War II is when we made the switch. years, you know, since. That's crazy. It is. It's World War II is when we made the switch. It's really when we put in the subsidies that allowed for the rapid growth of factory farming and consumption of meat. And I believe we can undo it just as fast, if not faster. If you think about technology and bringing in things like Memphis Meat just last week got an injection of $161 million for their Series B, which is a, for those who don't know Memphis meat, they are about growing cellular meat. So I think we're calling it cultivated meat now. And the terms keep changing. I know they do. I'm trying to stay with this. Basically they're

brewing it. They're brewing cells into nuggets and burgers so that no animal is slaughtered ever. And you don't have to use all the resources. You're just growing the parts that we eat. And it has all the same components as the actual burger or whatever it is that you want to eat. So that's what I think we need for this rapid change. And I think I have personally had the opportunity to try cellular meat. Yeah, I was going to ask you that. Yeah. Have you tried it?

No, I haven't. I know Uma. I keep bugging him to come on the podcast. He tells me he's not ready to. But no, I haven't tried it yet. Yeah. I was going to ask you that. Yeah. Have you tried it? No, I haven't. I know Uma, I keep bugging him to come on the podcast. He tells me he's not ready to, but no, I haven't tried it yet. Yeah. So I don't know if I want, part of me doesn't want to. I know. I'm not the customer for it. We're not the customer. But I suppose I asked Bruce Friedrich, of course, you know, like Paul Shapiro also, like, you know, you kind of have to, I suppose. You know, like Paul Shapiro also, like, you know, you kind of have to, I suppose. Yeah. I went in, you know, in the Bay Area and there was a company, there's a company called Mission Barnes.

There's like 30 companies now that are doing this. Right. And that's happened really fast. That's happened in five years. Right. And less than. And they had a duck sausage. And to me, this was like the full circle of my journey.

Right, all the way back. Right, to the- All the way back to Florida. I was like, you know, I would never eat duck. Underneath the dryer. Right, and this was duck. So, you know, when I bit into that sausage, I didn't know if I was gonna do it,

and I didn't even know when I got there they were gonna offer it to me. And I just wanted to see the lab and hear, talk to the scientist and talk to them for my book about their, their vision. And they said, Oh, we just had a testing last night for some of our investors. We have a few sausages left. Do you want to try it? I was like, okay. And it was a mushroom duck sausage and I did it and I bit into it and it felt like the future. It felt, it was such a euphoric moment for me because in that bite, it was all things that are possible. Like the end of factory farming, the end of torturing animals for protein was in that bite to me.

And I was so happy to be alive for this moment. I know that it's happening. And when you think of technological changes that have happened in the last 10 years, imagine what's going to happen in the next. It blows it wide open. And for people that are listening, this is not a plant-based version of duck sausage. This is legitimate duck meat, cells grown in a fermented way, like this proprietary way, but it's basically, it is meat. Yeah, my imagination.

Without the sentient animal. Right, the animal is never slaughtered. And so just the company that does the mayo and the egg, they're also exploring. Yeah, they're doing this now too. Right, and they put out a great video that i felt really explained how exciting and strange this is like the stuff of sci-fi for and it was called ian the chicken and they had this farmer say this is ian and you think maybe this slaughter this chicken's about to be slaughtered or something like what's happening

it's like a farm to table situation maybe. And he has a feather from Ian. He's like, this is Ian's feather. And then it goes into breaking down the components of the feather into the cellular level, taking out the stem cells of this, you know, the cells that can grow into anything and growing that in the lab. And then next shot is them eating this chicken nugget made out of Ian's cells as Ian is walking around next to them. And it's-

Well, yeah, it's bizarre. I mean, I think there will certainly be a consumer adoption period phase because there's a lot of bristling like, oh, this isn't natural. Truly what's not natural, I mean, go to a slaughterhouse, that's not natural. Like, there's nothing natural about that. There's nothing natural about moving down a highway at 80 miles an hour either, you know? And this is, I think unanimously, you know, anybody who knows anything about factory farming is appalled by it. It's an abhorrent system.

And to the extent that we can do away with it, I think public sentiment would be completely on board with that. And when the Memphis Meats of the world figure out how to create these things at scale at an affordable price point, it's going to be game over. Yeah. I have every faith that the public will fully adopt this once the price point is right. And like I said, all of the marketing research is people buy on price. That's the main thing. Well, and taste. It's got to taste as good, if not better. Convenience, price, and taste are the three factors that we have to meet if we're going to compete with meat. And I think that if you're producing the same product, the taste is going to be the same. So these are just cells made into the same thing.

So then it's going to be about convenience, and it's going to be about price. And that's tough, but it will happen. Because if you think of things like the flat screen TV, right, that at one point was thousands of dollars, now is in everybody's home. You can purchase it easily. Or the car, like all of the technological advances, the phones we have, all of them, the prices start off ridiculous. And then they come right down and they become an everyday product. The first Tesla was $200,000. And now, you know, there's Model 3s all over the place. I mean, this is the way this stuff works. Exactly. And it's super exciting.

Yeah. Yeah. I mean, it's a crazy future. I mean, I wouldn't have thought you'd think flying cars, but no one thought like, are we making food this way? So it's super interesting. I mean, if I was Jim Perdue, I would have written the $100 million check to, you know, send to Memphis Meats. I hope they will one day. You know, I think they should do it themselves. And I've definitely told that to them. I think they should be investing in clean meat, cultivated meat. I think they should, you know, be investing in this world because it is the way of the future.

And the most wonderful part about it is that it doesn't just stop all that suffering. It saves our species. It saves our planet. And that's, that's such an exciting thing because on the flip side, you see everything that's happening on climate change and it causes widespread panic. You know, there's just this panic feeling in our kids growing up where the climate change is just a part of the reality. I've never known a time, my kids, when we're not talking about the catastrophic trajectory we're on as a planet. And my hope is a technology like this is going to come in and take out a big factor. It's going to take out factory farming. And our advocacy continues to be important because we have to pass the laws.

We have to educate people. We have to raise public awareness to drive these technological advances faster and ensure that this progress won't happen on its own. We have to be there to push it and pull it and fight for it as well. Yeah. And I think we need policy changes. And like I said earlier, incentivization programs for these farmers. You got to take care of these farmers and figure out a way forward for them so that they can transcend the system that they're in and make use of their land in a more productive, environmentally conscious, sustainable, and compassionate way. Yeah. And I think when I think, why this could happen faster in the relationship between animal rights advocacy and these technologies

and these advances and the farmers, I can't think of many other products like the Beyond product or the Impossible where you have like an army of advocates saying we want this to win and putting it all out in their Instagrams and all their social media channels and doing videos and in droves going to support a product to succeed for social justice.

And the consumers, yeah, they become, they're like fans. Yeah, they're like fans. And I think that, you know, you think of the IPO of Beyond being so successful this year. Well, there was an army of advocates that got the market really excited about this. And that's where the relationship between the animal advocates, the technology, and the market will drive this change fast if we collaborate, if we get it right, if we get that formula right. Right. What's going on with McDonald's? How come all the other franchises are jumping on board? They seem to be talking about patience.

I know they're dancing around it. They're thinking about it. But they haven't actually offered a product yet. I think they did a small pilot, right? In Canada. Is that what it was? Yeah. And I mean, McDonald's is behind the times.

And they're suffering for it. And they will continue to suffer if not go out of business, if they're not careful. So we have a big campaign we've been running with the coalition on chickens and the way they treat their chickens. And it's the Better Chicken Commitment. We're trying to get them to give the birds more space, natural light, change their genetics, all these basic things. We're not asking them to go vegan. We're asking them to just give the birds a little more space. Are they vertically integrated? So they're not getting their chickens from Purdue. They're basically responsible for getting their own. No, their supplier is Tyson.

100% Tyson. Oh, okay, Tyson. And Tyson is their main supplier in the United States. And we launched a big campaign against them. We've done on-the-ground, in-person meetings. They are not budging. And their competitors are. So Popeye's last week announced their first big chicken chain, said, we're going to make these commitments. We're going to do all these things you're asking us to

do. Burger King did it. Subway did it. McDonald's is refusing. KFC. KFC not yet, but I'm hopeful. And KFC at least is exploring some plant-based options. In fact, I think today they're doing trials for their plant-based nugget in Nashville and Charlotte. Oh, wow. And the same one that they did in Atlanta. So it's super exciting. But McDonald's is behind the times and I, their, their leadership needs to wake up. It's not okay to ignore the very obvious suffering that they're responsible for. McDonald's in this country is responsible for half a billion chickens in their supply chain per year they purchase. Is it just an old guard management team? Like the C-suite is just out of step with the times or? Their leadership keeps changing. They have a new president this year. And I find it difficult to

understand how they're maintaining their position. I mean, their argument is something like nobody else really believes what they're doing. They're just telling you that they're going to move in this direction to get you off their backs. And, you know, we're really looking at it. And that's just, that's nonsense. Get on it, McDonald's. Yeah. Come on, what are you doing?

Yeah. And, I mean, I think the excitement over Burger King doing the Impossible Burger is not something to be ignored. No, not at all. Yeah, I mean, that's a huge deal. And, you know, Popeye's just made this commitment and that's exciting because Popeye's, you know, is one of the, it's the first big chicken chain. And I think that will cause other, more of their competitors to say, okay, we can't keep treating chickens like this. We have to give them more space. We have to

do these basic things that we all agree in the science agrees that are necessary that the birds as a minimum should have. Right. All right. Well, we got to round this out, but the final thing I kind of want to explore with you is, you know, living inside the mind of somebody who's listening to this, perhaps this is the first time they've heard any of this. They're like, holy cow, like the chicken industry does what? Like, I didn't know, like I, you know, I need to change. the cow, like the chicken industry does what? Like, I didn't know, like I, you know, I need to change. What is the advice that you give to somebody or how do you direct that person, you know, to start to make changes in their life with respect to the diet choices that they're making? Especially if they're, look, I'm, I'm busy. I'm on a budget. I work two jobs. I got a bunch of kids.

Like, you know, I'm not going to be able to just snap my fingers and make the whole family go vegan overnight. But I really like, wow, you know, this is not okay with me. The advice we always give is one step at a time. Do one day, one meal if it's too hard to do one day. And move incrementally in the right direction. And every step is progress. Every one of those steps is progress. Every time you're choosing not to eat the animals, you are contributing to reducing their suffering,

to increasing happiness, joy on this planet. And so you don't have to do it all. Just one meal you can do, one day, one week, one month, and then it can turn into what you can achieve, what you can do. I think it's more about start with what you can and do that first, not what should I do, but what can you do? Yeah, don't let perfection be the enemy of progress. That is my motto for sure.

One step at a time and, you know, go get your Beyond Chicken, right? Yeah. It's available like everywhere now. It's exciting. You know, it's cool. And Pick Up Grilled. Pick Up Gr now. It's exciting. You know, it's cool. And Pick Up Grilled. Pick Up Grilled. That's right.

At your independent bookstore or on Amazon. It's really a great read. You did a really lovely job with the book because it's sort of part memoir, but also kind of investigation, you know, like thriller for a little bit. And then this, you know, painting this picture for, you know, the future that we all want to live in. So I loved it. You did a really amazing job. And you are a hero in this movement. I have so much respect for the work that you've done, that you are doing, and that I know that you will do. And nothing but love and support. And please consider me a resource. I want to help out in any way I can. So thank you for your advocacy and your heart and your passion.

Well, thank you for giving a platform for these issues. It's great that your heart's in this. Cool. All right. Peace. Peace. Plants. All right, people, how are you guys feeling? How'd that one go down for you? Let that one percolate, perhaps. If you like Leah's work and what she's about, give her some love on Instagram.

You can find her at Leah Garces. She's also on Twitter. Look her up at Leah underscore Garces. And as always, check out the show notes for copious resources and additional information on today's guest and all the things that we discussed. You can find that on the episode page at richroll.com. But most importantly, I encourage you to give Grilled a read

for all the activists and advocates out there. Really anyone looking to penetrate the system, consider this a guidebook and it might even help you ditch those McNuggets along the way. If you'd like to support the work we do here on the show, subscribe, rate, and comment on it on Apple Podcasts, Spotify, and YouTube. Share the show or your favorite episode with friends or on social media. And you can support us on Patreon

at richroll.com forward slash donate. I want to thank everybody who helped put on today's show, Jason Camiolo for audio engineering, production, show notes, and interstitial music, Blake Curtis and Margo Lubin for videoing and editing today's show. Jessica Miranda for graphics. Georgia Whaley for copywriting. Allie Rogers for portraits. DK for advertiser relationships and theme music, as always, by Tyler Pyatt, Trapper Pyatt, and Hari Mathis.

Thanks for the love, you guys. See you back here soon, couple days, I think. And in the meantime, it's crazy out there right now. So stay home if you guys. See you back here soon. Couple of days, I think. And in the meantime, it's crazy out there right now. So stay home if you can. Be safe. Wash your hands. Keep your distance. Take care of yourselves, but remain engaged

because we need everybody to be at their best right now. Much love. Peace. Namaste. Thank you.