Within Reason - #13 ⁠— Joey Carbstrong | Why Won't Vegans Just Shut Up?

Episode Date: May 24, 2020

Joey Carbstrong is an Australian animal rights activist and vegan. Formerly a criminal, Joey turned his life around and now campaigns for animals, his views having been widely syndicated across various platforms including national television, radio, and his own highly popular YouTube channel. Joey speaks to Alex about how to advocate for veganism, and whether the forthright methods employed by many activists does more harm than good. Should vegans calm down? Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Summer is Tim's Ice Latte season. It's also hike season, pool season, picnic season. And yeah, I'm down season. So drink it up with Tim's ice lattes, now whipped for a smooth taste. Order yours on the Tim's app today at participating restaurants in Canada for a limited time. This episode of the Cosmic Skeptic podcast is brought to you by you. To support the podcast, please visit patreon.com forward slash Cosmic Skeptic. So welcome back to the Cosmic Skeptic Podcast everybody. This is the second time I've tried to record this intro because I messed up the first one. Today I'm joined by Joey Carbstrung, who is a vegan activist, and as I said a moment ago, it seems that every single time I'm looking on the television and I see some story about veganism, certainly on kind of UK news stories and things. Your face seems to come up all the time on shows like Good Morning Britain and this morning and that kind of thing.

Joey, first, thank you for being here. Thank you for having me. I'm interested in how that side of things got started. I mean, I know that you've been a vegan activist for a long time, but how do it, how did you kind of, because it seemed like once you were on one of these shows on TV, you seem to be everywhere all of a sudden. How did that come about? How did that start? In terms of my public vegan advocacy going on to mainstream media. Yeah. That was a very interesting time in my life. I'd come to the UK and planned a tour. But I guess one of the things that had changed

was my mentality towards making a difference. I really started to believe in my inner self that, that, you know, this really is possible. And I started to kind of manifest in my mind what that would look like. So that began the 1st of January, I think it was 2018 now, 1st of January 2018, just as a sort of New Year's resolution how I'm going to take this to the next level. And kind of a couple of weeks into my tour, I was approached by lady from the BBC who wanted to do a documentary on the upcoming rise of veganism in the UK. And, you know, she interviewed me and followed us around and made a peaceful Victoria Derbyshire. It aired on Victoria Derbyshire and it ended up being a very controversial piece because at that time,

some farmers were allegedly receiving death threats from activists and a farmer was telling her story, a sheep farmer was telling her story. I was speaking in my very candid manner about the abuse that happens to animals and it was very uncensored. and I do speak very directly. So that coupled with the controversy with the farmers at the time was kind of the perfect recipe for this to blow up in the media. And I think it was the ethical animal rights message was really new. So that's where it sort of took off.

And then following that, Earthling Ed did a discussion with a dairy farmer, kind of a debate on TV, and then that gathered more of an audience. and then a little time later I was approached by the Jeremy Vine show and he has a radio show which was getting around 7 million listeners per show and he got me on there and he had a ham sandwich on the table which he kind of made a point of waving it in my face and when we went on air I made a point of talking about his ham sandwich

and how he wouldn't think it was very funny if he heard the pig screaming from the gas chambers and I said that's a dead pig who didn't want to die and because of my sort of confrontational method in that discussion, very direct, the British public weren't really used to that, you know, and it made worldwide news across the globe, even in Australia and Europe and things like that. So that's sort of what kicked it off. And the media, you know, become aware that this topic drives traffic to their page. And especially when you have a controversial figure who's speaking so candidly, you know, this creates discussion. and advertising for them.

So they sort of saw that as like, oh, way, this guy's really good for ratings. He's saying really blunt things and he doesn't sort of censor his language about the things that happens to animals. And that's sort of how it began. And I've sort of had media contacts from that point onwards.

I think that the waving of a ham sandwich in a radio studio is kind of the real-life equivalent of commenting a gif of bacon underneath some Twitter post or something, right? Yes. I think the first thing to stress here, Joey, is that, I mean, so I imagine you've probably been a vegan activist, certainly, I mean, longer than I've even been vegan.

It's something that you've got a lot more experience in than I have, but we're on the same page here about how bad the exploitation of animals is and how much of an imperative there is for us to do something about it. Absolutely no disagreement there. But this is the interesting point, right? This is the dilemma that we're faced with when we have a moral cause. And although we'll talk about veganism, this also just applies generally. more broadly to moral causes and how best to advocate for them, that when you have a forthright

approach like you do, when you just say, look, that ham sandwich came from a pig who was killed, who didn't want to die, maybe forced into a gas chamber. That kind of thing, a lot of people accuse vegans of that putting up barriers with people. You know, they don't want to hear it, and so they're pushed away, and they're less likely to really take you seriously, even though what you're saying is true. But on the other hand, you're left with a situation whereby, in talking in this manner, you're making national news and you're bringing more attention to the topic. Now, the common trope is that all publicity is good publicity. Do you think that's true here?

Or do you think that there are kind of ways of advocating for veganism which would do more harm than good? Because the attention that we're bringing to the cause is bad attention. Well, the thing is, we need to bring attention to the cause. And if I wasn't for threat in those discussions, then I wouldn't have brought the ethical message to the forefront of the mainstream media. And never before, or since I've been around, have I seen so much discussion about the ethical implications of veganism.

So more to do with maybe some of the environmental or health discussions and more of a wishy-washy discussion about, you know, surface-level plant-based dieting or something like that. So I do believe it's absolutely necessary to be forthright to get people talking. are there certain things that could be overall worse, you know, for the advocacy? Yeah, I do think there are certain things that are bad, like I would say like acts of violence or something of that nature, you know, saying things that are just patently false, you know, which is the worst thing you could probably do say things that are incorrect.

But I think as long as your message is true, if you've got a short amount of, of time to sort of talk about this topic. Saying really true, quick sound bites when you've got millions of listeners, those seeds plant in people's minds. Now, the goal of that is not to persuade someone to go vegan right then and there. The goal of that is for them to take the abuse that happens to animals seriously and to leave something in their mind that would flourish later on. So the movement is so vast. There's a collective group of different personalities and characters and in different fields. You might not like the way I approached it, but my message is still being said by thousands

of other people in different ways. So that's why I think the strength of the message is what's most important. And, you know, obviously there's certain strategies you can take to minimize backlash, but also there's no, I haven't really seen much evidence to suggest that the backlash does more harm than good if the message is true. Yeah. Yeah. See, my understanding is that when people say something like, look, your approach here is only going to put me off going vegan, I only ever tend to hear that from people who've already decided that they don't want to go vegan. It's not really that I hear it from people who are on the fence, who really are kind of thinking about the issue seriously. And then here you say something forthrightly and go, ah, well, that, you know, that does it. I'm not going to be a vegan now. It seems like it's only coming from the people who are already not going to be vegan. exactly true another like a perfect example is it is it's more about the person's willingness

to hear the message than it is about the person's um say demeanor when they deliver that message because you could be as aggressive as i am sometimes perceived and the person is completely willing to hear the message and they'll be like well thank you for being so forthright and honest with me about this i needed to hear this but if they are already blocked off and you're as peaceful as Earthling Ed is in his conversations, then they're just going to, whatever, apathetic or they already don't want to hear the message. You could get the backfire effect from being polite, which I have got. I've been accused of being aggressive when I've just been polite. So it's more about the person's willingness to receive the message more so than

the activists telling the message. But I mean, do you understand the idea, let's say, of two comparative ways of putting forward a point that let's say they just take up the same amount of time. Let's just say that it's a difference in approach. You're on a radio show and somebody asks you why something's bad and you can either kind of say, you know, well, you wouldn't put a kid, a human child into a gas chamber or you could say something like, you know, animals in the vein of someone like Earthling Edge, you might say, well, animals can feel pain like we can and so we should afford them the same kind of privileges. You're making the same point that, you know, for the same reasons we wouldn't want to harm a human, we wouldn't want to harm an animal. But if you just

say something like, well, you wouldn't put a, you wouldn't put a child in a gas chamber, you open yourself up to people saying, how dare you say that it's the same thing as putting a pig into a gas chamber or whatever, which are obviously besides the point. But I guess what I'm trying to say here is that you are in every way justified to make the point that you're making. It's not like we're doing something wrong by making these points. Yeah. But because of another person's either failure to want to understand or perhaps misinterpretation of what being said, even though you're justified in saying it, perhaps it might be tactful to change the approach and adopt a more ed-like approach in approaching it calmly.

Certain situations for sure, but like, if you're saying, well, we wouldn't put a dog in a gas chamber while we put it in a pig in the gas chamber, I mean, that there's a little bit easier for people to grasp, but I understand what you're saying, you're going to meet people where they're at. And, you know, if you're saying something like, oh, some vegan activists might say, dairy farmers are rapists. Now, if you're going to make that claim against the dairy farmer without logically leading someone to the reason why, then obviously people are going to say, well, they're just accusing a dairy farmer of being a rapist without any evidence.

But if you were to say, you know, what happens to cows, if that were a human woman, that would be considered rape and you're doing this to a cow without their consent and cows can't conceptualize consent and they're being, you know, abused sexually here, that's why it's rape. that's a lot differently, different to saying, say, a dairy farmer is a rapist. So I understand, you know, what you're saying there. There's definitely ways you can strategize your message. There's definitely things that, you know, you might say bluntly that you haven't given much

context too that could be taken the wrong way. But I guess that comes with experience and going, oh, maybe I could have said that better. And in retrospect, things that I've said in the past, I've kind of recollected my thoughts and gone, well, maybe I could have said it like this and still been just as impactful, but without, you know, so many people in disagreement. And you think that doing so would have been better for the message that you were trying to get across?

Yeah, definitely. Yeah, definitely. I've been, I've reflected a lot of some of the things I've said in the ways that I've said them. And I thought, well, maybe I could have led them there a little bit more, you know, cleverly. But also, like, in the moment, in the heat of the moment, you're trying to do, I'm trying to do my best with what I have and what I know. And, yeah, and sometimes it works out amazingly.

and sometimes there are things, obviously, that could have gone better. I wonder if part of the problem or part of the accusation that you'll receive when talking about dairy farmers and rape, for example, is not so much a definitional problem. Because as you say, you could make an argument that says that if we define rape in a certain way, that's what's happening to cows. I mean, there are arguments against that, such as rape needing sexual intent, as well as sexual consequence.

But let's say that we just kind of agreed that it was. Perhaps the problem that's being identified is not so much saying that a farmer is a rapist because, you know, they're not a rapist, but rather because you're kind of placing blame on an individual who perhaps because of the situation they grew up in or their cultural environment, it's not appropriate to blame them for the action, especially in action as grotesque as that, and that perhaps we should be more lenient, not because what we're saying is not as bad as we're suggesting, but because the implied blame that is in attributing it to a person like a farmer is in fact the problem yeah well this is the thing this is

the balancing act we're trying to sort of do here it's like we're trying to speak for the animals from their perspective here right and we're trying to not just place blame on the dairy farmer for committing this act of you know sexual abuse to this animal but also the the consumer's responsibility factor in that so a good activist or advocate it would be like, well, you're not sort of dismissed from blame here either. It's the system which you're in support of is the reason this dairy farmer is providing this product. So without the demand, the dairy farmer isn't doing this. So you always got to bring it back, the accountability back onto the consumer that the reason the people are even working in these slaughter

houses or dairy farms is because they want to supply the public with a cruel product. So So this leads me to a line of thought to say that we could land in a position where actually the position of a dairy farmer, for instance, although they are treating animals in a way that you and I would both consider to be nothing short of abusive. That says the least of it. I think we can be led by this line of thought to a position where we don't actually blame the farmer at all. Reason being, let's say, for example, Joey, that you were offered a job as a dairy farmer or as somebody who would drive pigs to slaughter or something. Now, immediately you'd want to say, of course I'm not going to to take that job. It's an immoral thing to do. But if we consider the fact that the demand is there and will be economically met, whether or not you take the job, someone is going to, right? And if you take the job, then perhaps you can, you know, drive a bit more smoothly because you actually care about the pigs in the back. Whereas if you say, no, I'm not going to take that job on moral grounds, somebody else ends up taking the job who doesn't even worse job because they really don't care about the animals. In that respect, it may actually be kind of a good thing for you to do to accept the job

as a dairy farmer or as a cattle driver or something like that because someone's going to do the job and you're going to do it in the most humane, although not humane way possible. In other words, that's kind of one consideration on its own, but relevant to the question at hand is that if the only reason why a dairy farmer would actually commit the acts, literally the only reason is because of the economic incentive,

then does it make sense to place the blame squarely on the consumer, on the person buying the product, rather than on the farmer himself? I try to do a bit of both, but as an advocate trying to persuade people to change, I am more so doing it on the consumer. So I show them the horrific acts of violence in these industries, and then I bring it back to accountability on the consumer,

because otherwise it makes it so easy just to place blame on the farmer or just to place blame other people in the slaughterhouses, when that's not going to get people to change. It's sort of pushing responsibility onto the system and the industry versus taking responsibility into your own hands, which is the most powerful thing you can do. You can't change what happens in the system without changing the demand first or even push for legislation without changing the minds of the people first. So, yeah, I think it's definitely both are culpable, the farmer and the consumer,

but the consumer is more culpable, I feel. So what would you say to somebody who, let's call them the noble dairy farmer? You might consider that a contradiction in terms. let's say that you met someone and they said they were a dairy farmer and you gave this argument to them saying why you thought their industry was immoral. Imagine they just turn around and said, Joey, I completely agree with you. I'm actually like, I'm a vegan. I don't eat any of these products. I don't buy the products. I just realized that if I take this job, then I'll be able to treat the animals slightly better than somebody else would have taken it. Do you think that that person is

still even slightly immoral here because they are taking a job by, they are abusing the animals? They are the dairy farmer. But yet their motivation seems to be good. I mean, what would you say to that person? I would say that there are much better things they could do for animals than take a job as a dairy farmer. I understand what you're saying there, but they are still forcibly impregnating the cows if they're producing dairy and taking the calves away and then doing something with the males and then sending that calf, that cow off to slaughter when their production declines. So they're still part of a very sinister industry, whether or not they're mitigating some of the pain and suffering and using that as a justification to work in a dairy farm, I would say what you could do

if you wanted to take a job in the dairy farm is investigate the dairy farm and then bring forward footage to help abolish the dairy farm and the industry and the practices. And, you know, activists do that. They take jobs in slaughterhouses. They take jobs on the kill floor and in packing bays where they're throwing chickens into, you know, transport boxes. They're filming all of this while they're doing it and they're taking the job there. But, yeah, Now, I would still say that there's better things they could do for animals than take a job as a dairy farmer, and I probably wouldn't reinforce that idea. So, in other words, something like, although that the act that we're talking about here may well, in that individual instance,

be a good thing to do or the best thing to do, thought of in a broader context in terms of what you're contributing to as an ideology, as an idea, as normalization, it would still be better not to do that. I feel like that line of thinking could perhaps apply also to the approach. You could say that if you say something forcefully, maybe in the individual instance of saying something to a person, it might put up a barrier. But if you think about it more broadly, because you've kind of ceded that idea in their mind

that later when they approach the topic, it will be kind of nagging at the back of their mind no matter what. Maybe the same kind of approach can be taken there. The reason that's interesting to me is that it would mean that if someone says, listen, when you made this point, you could have been less aggressive. Like, our answer could be, yes, you're right. Like, it would actually have been better in this individual case to be less aggressive. But in terms of the effect that it has overall, in terms of how seriously people take our message, for instance,

it's going to make a big difference. Yeah, I, my approach is consistent with the way I view animal abuse. And it's a very serious topic. and you know I'm delivering a message that is so brutal and violent and such an injustice which I'm faced with every single day going through footage I've been on farms I've been in farrowing sheds I've seen I've held dead piglets in my hands I've been on the front lines at hundreds of slaughterhouses seeing individuals go into slaughter I've been inside slaughterhouses while pigs are being hung from their hoof and stabbed in the throat and drained out of their blood and dunked into a scolding tank and you know I've seen cats Oursby slaughtered the Hilaue way where they had their head cut off fully conscious and blood spray all over me. So when I'm delivering this message to someone, as an animal rights activist, I want them to take the message seriously. So I don't want it to appear that I'm letting them get off with half measures and, you know, from the animal's perspective, they need this,

they need action now. And if you think about it, like, it's been many, many, many years of this industry being put in place. And we're trying to force social change. And we want animal abuse to become socially unacceptable like child abuses. So the reason that people criticize an activist and animal rights activist approach is because we're putting the responsibility on the consumer and they don't, no, no, no, I'd rather point to this other country where there's evil things happening to that child in Syria and not take responsibility for what's happening to these animals here. And of course, you're going to get people go, well, you did that too aggressive, you know,

you could have done it like this. And then I go, okay, okay, how about I change my approach slightly and talk to a bit nice? So how could I deliver this message to you so that you change and stop funding this animal cruelty? And the truth is they probably won't. They probably won't. Some do. Some hear my message. They get the backfire effect and then they find some moderate, a more moderate activist.

But that seed that are planted stays with them, whether they get turned off or not. If the message is true and they do really feel a sense of outrage by that message because of its truth, and they really do reflect and that pushes them away slightly, once their emotions subside okay and they calm down and you know the thing the way i made them feel sort of softened slightly they're all they're left with is that message and that reflection and this is how this phenomena of change starts to happen it's not always you persuaded them in that one conversation you you plant the seed that leads them forward and that's the beauty of having such a wide range of different activists because you Alex can influence so many

in the philosophical arena and I might influence more of the working class people who like to be told straight and you know and Ed influences people in his own way and he's very successful at that but I think being authentic to yourself is very important like be authentic like if this angers you then show a little bit of passion

not to not to the point where you're throwing things at people and things like that but you know show a bit of passion this is a passionate topic and be true to who you are when you're speaking for these animals and you know I feel like we baby people a little too much. I feel like this is a message you need to hear. I'm predominantly speaking to adults and you know, you need to be direct with these adults

and say, look, look, listen, if you're against animal cruelty, so find that out first, you're against animal cruelty, or are you completely apathetic to it? If you're against animal cruelty, then stop paying for it three times a day and that's basically as simple as it is.

I mean, I've always considered it quite patronizing to kind of tailor your language to the person you're speaking to. It's like, don't worry, no, I'm not going to be too harsh on you. I'm not going to tell you how things are. I'm going to give you a nice, happy message and we'll talk about it. It's like I feel like I'm being condescending to the person if I don't tell them what I actually think. I suppose if somebody asks me what I think, then I'm fully justified in just telling them. But if they don't ask, if I'm the one saying it, maybe that's where it causes a bit more difficulty. But it sounds like implied in what you're saying is that

there simply is no polite way to tell somebody that they're contributing to something inhumane and incredibly immoral. There just isn't really a way to do that. There has to be a level of forcefulness in the message. There has to be a level of discomfort delivered upon a person because if there was no discomfort, that could only be because they don't have any kind of any investment in it. And so by the nature of trying to make people change,

you have to make them feel uncomfortable. But there are multiple ways of making people feel uncomfortable. This is what I want to talk about here is that there's making people uncomfortable in terms of having a forceful message that seems extreme in terms of the rhetoric, like animals are dying, animals are being killed. Now, we've just spoken about that, and we're on the same terms here. We agree that that's totally justified. But there's a different way that vegans can come across as extreme, which is in the kind of circumstantial approaches. So, for instance, saying that there are

never any exceptions, nobody should be able to eat animal products. For instance, one of the most common that comes up, since you mentioned being working class a moment ago, is the idea that veganism is somehow a middle-class thing or something that only rich people can partake in and it's kind of harmful to the working class. Now, I'm from a working-class background myself. I don't agree that it is harmful, but let's just say in a hypothetical world,

let's imagine that there is some society or some city in the world where it genuinely is more expensive to be a vegan for whatever reason it may be. Would you have a similar kind of forthrightness in just saying, tough luck? you've just got to find the cash or would you be less quote unquote extreme in that respect and kind of say well maybe there's some room here for for legitimacy in buying these products well in the hypothetical scenario where veganism actually is more expensive then obviously

I'd be taking that into account I'd be a different type of activist I would have worked out a strategy to deal with that but the truth is like in my day-to-day interactions it really is isn't more expensive. I mean, you can design a meat-eating diet to be more expensive than another meat-eating diet. You can design a vegan diet to be cheap as beans and rice if you are coming up against these financial difficulties. So I guess it's about meeting that individual where they're at and answering their objections as they come up, which isn't the same for everyone. Now, another thing is like set and setting matter. So like if you're up there having like a discussion, just chill for an hour, then you've got a lot of time to give context and answer

different objections. If you've got five minutes with someone who's walking past and they're looking at their watch, then you want to deliver this message very quickly as strategic as possible, but as blunt as possible just to get the message in them before they leave. And what we do is we show slaughterhouse footage to them on the street. So we got the signs and the computer set up showing slaughterhouse footage and we're having a really quick interaction with them. So it might be five minutes, it might be 10, it might be three. So how can I make this person feel accountable for what's going on on the screens in this short amount of time. So part of that, I don't really want to pander to grey area arguments and things like that too much because I want to keep it

on topic. This might be the first time they've heard about this. I want to keep the core message strong for this individual in that moment. When I'm not got a seven-minute debate on Good Morning Britain or something, there's three against one. Then I'm trying to get these sound bites forced through before I get completely overtaken because they've got me on their outnumbered each time to make me look like a fool they're trying to or they're bringing up aspects of my past, my criminal history, things like that. So I've really got to force in and get it done. There are also times when I am actually a little bit worked up and I might have done three or four debates that day and someone's not playing ball and then I've got that residual energy in me.

So you might see a debate with me and you might go, well, Joey, you could have been a bit calmer, but you don't see the four debates beforehand and I've let myself get worked up and I haven't worked back down. So the thing is, Alex, like not everyone, is going to be a perfect activist and not everyone is going to have the best communication and social skills but what you need to focus on is that that message is strong okay for everyone so you don't have to look at oh my god look at this activist how does he do that he's so amazing how does he articulate himself so well like obviously everyone should work on their craft but everyone can do this as it's as simple as hey look at this cruelty you know the easiest way to minimize most of the

harm we do by existing is to abolish this evil industry animal agriculture and adopt a vegan lifestyle. So I don't want people to be sort of warned, sort of cordoned off or sort of sort of like, oh wow, like I can't do this myself. We want to keep it simple nuts and bolts. But sort of when you get to my level and you're exposed to lots of people, you go, wow, well, I'll definitely probably could have done that better. And I look back in retrospect and there's certain things or certain attitudes that I've taken that kind of are reflected and gone, well, maybe I'll could have gave them a bit more leeway there. But it is a difficult task when, you know, you're faced with so much opposition

and you can come across defensive at times because you've just heard the same argument in your comment section for the last, you know, three or four weeks. And then someone innocently asked you a question and you might come across a little bit defensive. These are things I'm always trying to work out and become conscious of. And so the point is, again, Alex, I'm not a perfect activist. and there are always things I could improve on, but you don't have to be a perfect activist

to speak for the animals. I think that's about right. Trivially, different approaches work for different people, and it's good to have all of them available. And I don't think we should expect individual activists to have each shade within themselves, but rather for each individual activist

to represent one of the shades. So you have one person who can do the aggressive, forthright message. You have the activists who can do the calm, relaxed conversation. You have the activists who can do the philosophy, rather than expecting all three of them to be able to do all three, because they'll do each of them less effectively. This is the problem, people conflating the message of animal rights, because it's not even really a message of veganism, because the connotations with the word veganism makes it a bit of an unfortunate term to use. People think of a diet. People think of environmentalism or something. The message,

is one of animal rights and people are mixing up the message of animal rights with vegans with the people. I'm interested, I don't know if you'll agree with me here, but I feel like veganism, certainly when it's called by that name, has a terrible public image. And I wonder why you think that might be the case, if you think it's the case, why it's the case and what we can do to change that, whether it might be worth moving away from the term, because like myself, you won't really see the word vegan anywhere on my social media, for instance. I prefer to call my myself an animal rights advocate or something like that, just to avoid the negative connotations of the word vegan. What should take in all this?

Yeah, I mean, I've had discussions with people before about this and they've said, well, people are more likely to change if they don't hear the word vegan. If you just ask them to reduce and things like that, the word vegan has too many negative connotations and it's confusing and people don't know or they might stir up some emotion or they might just think of a plate and lettuce and that's all they get to eat and they might have all these stereotypes about a vegan in that stop them from changing. But I think that that more stems from the message of what a vegan actually is being sort of muddied, you know, muddied, like as in our veganism is about the environment.

It's about, you know, who can be the healthiest. It's, you know, a vegan is, they don't have the right idea about what a vegan actually is. And I think with education and, you know, because it's still basically, it's very early stages for this publicly, like in the media and it's picking up, it really is picking up. And of course there's going to be a lot of pushback at the start from this word vegan. But I think once it becomes more socially accepted, you know, over time, people are going to be like, well, that's a vegan. Oh, my brother's a vegan.

Oh, my sister's a vegan. Oh, yeah, I've seen that vegan guy on, you know, YouTube. Or, you know, so once people become more accustomed to it and they actually understand what a vegan is, it becomes less, you know, stigmatic and less, you know, pushing people away. What I wanted to do was what I want to do and what I always do is I never steer away from the word vegan. I want to normalize it. I want to get it into people's minds and get them to understand what a vegan actually is. It's to do with this animal rights message against the animal exploitation industries. So I think the more we push it and the more we normalize it is a good thing because that sort of breaks through that psychology and people stop sort of pushing back on it so hard.

I know you can explain the message though without using the word vegan. you could say, well, animal abuse is wrong. These industries exploit animals and you can get them to understand the true vegan message without even using the word vegan. But then they need to be able to identify products that align with their lifestyle, which are all labelled vegan.

So that creates a problem too. If you're going to avoid the word vegan, we need that word vegan to distinguish from the other products in the west of the world. You're not going to see on a menu the animal rights list, you know. You'll see the vegan on it. options. That's an important point to make, I suppose, is that we want people to make that link when they see the word vegan on a menu. We want their mind to go to animal rights. And I

suppose that's something that can only be done by using the term more, not by using it less. I'm interested on something that you kind of briefly, you briefly mentioned the word reducing. Do you think, Joey, that we should congratulate vegetarians? Let's say somebody who has made that step from being a, from being a total carnivore. And although, you know, whether or not this is strictly true, they say something like, look, this is the most I can do at the moment, and I'm trying my best. Now, I hear a lot of vegans wanting to say something like, look, that's not really enough. You know, you're still abusing cows.

You're still abusing, right? But is there some room to at least, you know, for five minutes, just kind of say, listen, you've done a good thing. Congratulations. You know, we're proud of you. Or do you think we need to stay hard on the message and say, yeah, keep going. You'll get there eventually. What do you think is the best approach here?

Okay, so the reason I stay focused on the vegan message is so that they didn't go vegetarian because I as an animal rights activist told them to. So that's why I don't push for vegetarianism and I don't push for reducititarianism or just reduce or meatless Mondays or any of those things. Now, the byproduct of me pushing the vegan message is that people who are going to reduce will just reduce. but not because I told them to and that won't be where they stay if they're willing to progress and people that go vegetarian because I told them to go vegan

it's not because I told them to go vegetarian and that may not be where they stay because I gave them the true message so I think the message is most important now now if you've told someone to go vegan say in your family and friends or someone close to you and they go Joey I made this step to vegetarian I know I know that you've given me this

vegan message but I've made this step then you go a great step but this is where you need to head because being vegan is the least you can do and being a vegan activist is when you're starting to really make a better impact and undo the wrongs of your past which is what really fuels my activism

I want to undo a lot of the wrongs of my past and sort of create a bigger impact but being vegan is like being vegan is like the bare minimum you know so if vegetarianism as a concept or as a lifestyle didn't exist we wouldn't have these sort of blockades to people being vegan

so I guess we shouldn't advocate for vegetarianism, but if you've given someone the vegan message and they make that first step, many people make that step before they completely go vegan and they go, well, now it's just eggs and dairy, I can kick those. But I still would push them.

I still would push them and say, hey, great first step, but you know what happens in the dairy and egg industries. I mean, in the leather industry and 50% of the beef comes from murdered dairy cows in the UK, I mean, these are still fueling the same industries you claim to be against. If you've made the step to vegetarian, because you care about animals

and it only makes sense that you get rid of these other products. So I've had farmers come up to me, like animal farmers come up to me at debates and they've come and said, you know, Joey, I watch all your content. I want to say that, you know, I like the way that you debate, and I've reduced my consumption because of those videos.

But my videos have an explicit vegan animal rights message. Do you understand? So it's not like I told people to reduce because that would be the be all. end all. Joey said reduce, reduce is fine. And what does reduce really mean? It's really subjective. What if someone eats 10 stakes a week and now they only eat seven and they've reduced or they, you know, it's really not a good message and I want to keep the message strong and let the chips fall where they may sort of thing. Yeah, I think the point to take away

from that is that you can still push people to go further without being an asshole about it, right? Like you can, when someone says, listen, I watch your content and I'm reducing my intake of animal products, you don't have to say, well, then you weren't listening hard enough. You can say something like, you can be like somebody, somebody like, I don't know, somebody watching you in the gym do some reps and they're there just kind of going, look, this is great, but gone, one more, you can do it, you know, keep going, you can get there, you know. It's the same kind of thing. It's like, listen, what you've done is, is good or it's better than what you were doing, but I know you can do better. Many people see the response of saying, look, there's more to go as

somewhat insulting because you're kind of disregarding the person's progress. But I see it as quite a respectful thing to do because you're implying, like, you can do better than this. I believe in you. I know that you can take this further. That's the way that I view this kind of thing. But again, maybe it's important that we use our language carefully when we're dealing with an individual person. What I want to kind of push the question forward, because the comparison we're making here is between vegetarian and vegetarianism and veganism. But the same question can be asked, should we congratulate vegans, right? Because as you say, being vegan, which is of course just the minimisation of suffering to the highest extent practicable, is the most you can do,

sorry, the least you can do, right? It's like it's a moral obligation, it's a baseline. It's not like some extra virtuous act. It's something that we think that people should have to do, right? Now, does that mean that when someone goes vegan, we shouldn't be congratulating them saying, well, done, this is great. And we should instead be saying something like, well, yeah, it's about time. Like if somebody were to quit any other immorality, we wouldn't have that approach right. If someone was a domestic abuser and they stopped beating their wife and we said, hey, great job. You know, it would feel off. We'd want to say like, yeah, like, thanks.

It's about time you stopped doing that. But again, this is about tactfulness. So regardless of our justification for saying to somebody that they shouldn't be congratulated for being vegan, do you think it makes sense to do so, to say, well done, give them a pat on the back. Now, in principle, it does seem counterintuitive to say, well, congratulations, you've stopped supporting the most horrific cruelty of animals on earth at the baseline. But like, for new vegans who are really new to all of this, and they've just made that first step, I do reinforce that decision, you know, they might look up to me and say,

hey, Joey, I've taken that first step. And yeah, I do sometimes congratulate and reinforce that. And it's just, it's just the human in me, you know, I want to. And because there's so much violence and so many people apathetic towards it, in a world full of apathetic people who are, you know, sometimes consciously contributing to this animal abuse and commenting bacon, it really does give me like a sense of like happiness to know that there are still good people willing to make this change.

And because I've been doing this for a little while now and, you know, four or five years. And, you know, sometimes it's, I get really down in the dumps and depressed. and when I see, you know, that what I'm doing is working, I really do want to give them that, you know, boost at the start. And I use a Challenge 22, which is a 22-day vegan challenge, which being vegan is not a challenge. It's, you know, as you said, a moral obligation. But within this vegan challenge, there's like a support group

and they're all in there together and going, hey, okay, I'm on day three. And, you know, this sort of social support that they might not get at their home or, you know, with other friends and family who haven't made the change yet. this is all good reinforcement for them because a lot of people they don't they stop being vegan because of social pressure so i think a little congratulations or a little bit of positive reinforcement is good but i don't want people to go vegan because of positive reinforcement or because of i want them to go vegan for the animals so what i might say is that thank you for being vegan for the animals the animals need all the help they can get if i ever piss anyone off after i've turned them

vegan. I don't want them to go, oh, Joey turned me vegan and now he pissed me off and now I'm going back. I want them to go vegan for the animals, which is why I'm constantly speaking for the animals and showing footage. So they go vegan for the right reasons. Don't go vegan for people. You go vegan for the right reasons. And then anything else, nothing's going to sort of sway you from that because you know in your heart you're doing the right thing. And what in your experience has been, by and large, the most effective of the arguments that you give? Like if you could kind of pick one that had to be your headline argument that you were known for that you had to say in the two minutes of afforded to you or whatever, which argument

is the best way, for an audience that's never considered it, let's say, for just a fresh meat-eating audience, what is the inn for them? Well, I think finding common ground is really good because most people, you know, abhor animal abuse and animal cruelty. So when someone sees a post of, you know, that's happening in say Yul and China where they're abusing a dog killing them for food and there's those angry comments in the comment section then that's a natural human reaction to seeing something unjust and you know so I always try to say hey you're against animal cruelty right most good people are but when you pay for these products you're paying for the worst animal cruelty on earth so wouldn't it just be more consistent you

know with your moral belief towards animals that you know you sort of abstain from that So I guess that there is a very powerful thing, finding common ground on their position of animal cruelty and getting them to align their actions with their sort of morals. Yeah, but I'm sure you've had this yourself that when I make these points, I mean, you'll probably have seen not long ago, I use this example a lot, a YouTuber called Brooke Houts, I think is how you pronounce her name. She accidentally uploaded this video of her beating her doc onto YouTube. I don't know if you saw this. And her channel just got destroyed. everybody just seething hatred to water. And I remember tweeting, look, it's good that you're upset about this.

It really is. But incalculably more suffering was inflicted upon an equally intelligent creature for your breakfast this morning. But the response that I get, especially on somewhere like Twitter, is, come on. Look, I am allowed to, I am allowed to criticize this one thing, even if I'm not perfect. You know, let he without sin, cast the first stone, this kind of thing. It's kind of like, I don't know, I had responses to people saying, oh, so are you saying that I can't condemn child slavery because I don't give to charity all the time? Come on, like, nobody's perfect.

Now, I see that there are differences here. You see that there are differences here. Hopefully my audience can see that there are differences here. But to the person who makes that message, it's just not getting through to them. So, like, how can we respond to that kind of accusation in a way that will make sense to the person who's made that accusation? I don't know I'm not sure that it didn't get through to them because what you said is pointing out an obvious truth

or contradiction and you know just because your response in that moment was one like that that doesn't mean that it didn't get through to women sink in because later on is when these seeds flourish now just because you're met with opposition for saying something that's true and obvious doesn't mean that on that just because they weren't persuaded in that moment

that they won't be persuaded in the future now you planted a very powerful seed in them they reacted with anger for seeing a dog being abused and so they should now when they go to the supermarket and they pay for bacon they're paying for much magnitudes more cruelty magnitudes more suffering in you could even argue a more intelligent being a pig you know they're more intelligent than dogs scientifically and you know they suffer horrible lives of mutilations and covered in their own feces their whole entire life they never see the light of that day 90% of pigs in the UK will never see the light of day they're born in factory and, you know, and then they're slaughtered in the gas chamber. You pointed out an obvious truth. Now, just because the initial backlash was like that, I would say that people who react like that are more likely to change in the future

because they had this response of outrage. Like, how dare you point out this obvious hypocrisy in my, you know, my actions versus my morals? Now, how do you know how they are thinking about this six months down the track, whether they see something else to do with animal cruelty and they remember what you said in that Twitter post, which is how sort of psychology works. So, yeah, I'm not sure that that way.

wasn't effective. And I suppose by the person saying, you know, nobody's perfect, they're at least implicitly accepting that they have an imperfection, right? Even if they're putting up a barrier and saying, well, look, I, you know, I'm not the perfect human being. Doesn't mean I can't criticize that. It's like, well, hold on, why are you not the perfect human being? What's, what's the problem? It's like, yeah, I eat meat. It's like, so are you implicitly accepting there that there's a problem with that? I suppose that might be another way into the conversation. It's a tricky, it's a tricky place to navigate somewhere like Twitter, because everything's so quick. Everything is so fast and unnewance that sometimes it's almost not worth making the argument at all.

I mean, there are times when I think I could retweet something, like with the Brooke Houts case. And as I'm typing it, I'm thinking, this is, this is accurate, this is true, this is fair. But it might actually just do more harm than good. I almost don't want to send it. I don't know. I got in the same kind of trouble when the Australian bushfires happened. And you see all of these posts that about, you know, you see people about people moving, leaving their homes, people dying, firefighters, this kind of stuff. But as well as that, you see the pictures of the koalas and people going, the koalas are dying.

This is horrible. And I just kind of say, look, if you care about the koalas, you don't want to know how many animals have been killed for the fact that they taste nice. And people say, you're stepping on a human tragedy. you are trampling that underfoot in order to promote your ideology what's the response to that should I have made that tweet 100% you should

and you should not let those things hold you back from speaking the truth because this is so like there's about 650 million animals murdered every single year in Australia alone and I think around what was a there was hundreds of millions of animals

died in those fires I think it was about a billion died in those fires you know what I posted Alex which was a bit more direct and you know than yours was was was a kangaroo who had been burnt in the in the fire was holding onto a fence who had passed away and this was going viral this picture so I sort of juxtaposed that with a video of a pig screaming for their lives begging for mercy suffocating in a dungeon field with an Australian gas chamber like an Australian gas chamber and this is what you're paying for every single day so it seems it's like an injustice don't point

to those animals suffering while you're causing magnitudes more suffering on your plate. And I just think there are, look, if you're going to worry about how everyone is going to emotionally respond to you speaking truths, then you're going to, it's going to chip away at you. You're probably not going to make it very far because there's always someone who's going to be offended by speaking those truths. Now, you could try to mitigate that as much as possible, but if you can't, you shouldn't compromise the message to make people feel good or comfortable. This is an uncomfortable message.

So, of course, there are things you can do to your strategy, but just don't compromise the message for it. No justice movement in the history of mankind has ever been successful if it tailors its language to the oppressors. That's a historical truth that I think needs to be applied here as well. But it's difficult when you're on this side of it. I mean, that's easy enough to say when you're on the right side, when it's in the past. Because you talk about social progression. and the only examples people give a historical ones, women's rights, you know, the abolishment of slavery, this kind of stuff. It's more difficult when that tide of progress is ahead of you to make those kind of comparisons.

It can be seen as quite distasteful, in fact, to make a comparison to the liberation of animals, to something like the liberation of slaves or the liberation of women or anything like that. What's your take on making those kinds of comparisons? Yeah, well, I guess the problem comes in when you're comparing the victims. uh when you're saying uh you know this you know human slave here and this pig but i think when you compare the action and you share what we have in common with the animals like look the reason animals deserve moral consideration and a reason that they're enslaved as well you know is because of they they desire their life of freedom and they desire their sentience and we shouldn't rob that from them and cause them suffering and if you look at what we do to animals we subjugate them

and murder them on mass, 74 billion land animals a year and between one and three trillion marine animals per year. Now that adds up. That adds up. That suffering adds up. Now, if you start comparing two victims, I think that's when you might get into a bit of trouble.

Like, you know, I've seen people juxtapose like a human and an animal and going, what's the difference? But the action of enslaving a sentient being is what should be focused on and the action of murdering the sense. sentient beings, what should be focused on. Now, if you're saying, like, I understand, like saying a human woman is the same as a cow is going to cause some offence, and because we're different in many ways, obviously, you know,

intelligence and sentience arguably and, you know, complexity of thought and, you know, people that care about that woman and, you know, the cow might just be an individual, no one sort of knows. But focusing on what we have in common with those animals and what these injustices have in common is a good thing. I just think there's a way of saying it that could come up. cross as offensive. Yeah, you say that people are offended when we're trying to say that a cow is the same as a woman and it's like, well, we're not saying that. That's never been said. Nobody has

ever made that claim. Most animal rights cases philosophically at least begin with the differences between humans and other animals. That's where the, that's where the analysis begins. But I think that's a key point. And I hadn't really thought of it in these terms before. But we compare the action, not the victim. That's the comparison that's being. made, right? Because the whole point of making the comparison is saying, if your action can be justified to do this, then let's see what else that action justifies. It's like saying, look, if you have this principle that you're using to justify action X, you should be aware that that could also justify action Y if you applied it to action Y. Of course. And someone

then says, are you saying that X and Y are the same? How can you compare X and Y? It's like, that's not what we did. These are totally separable events. You know, X could be much worse than why. X could be much better than why. All I'm saying is that the justification applies to both. But I think it's important to make that clear. This is another instance where we have to be careful because the point we're making may be legitimate, but because of the way that people are interpreting what we're saying, it's interpreted in an illegitimate way and therefore the point lacks force. Strength. Yeah. And if we'd have tailored our language to the person listening to, although we shouldn't have to, as it were, that might have been a, that might have been a positive thing

to do. But I guess it's about finding a balance between how much you should tailor your language without actually losing the essence of truth that lies behind the point. Also, Alex, I want to make a point that the mentality that led to humans enslaving other humans are they lesser than they are animals. That mentality that women are below men and that mentality that, you know, gay people don't deserve, you know, the equal right to marriage and all of these things. That mentality is the same mentality we use to subjugate, abuse and kill animals. So although I might I might make, you know, talk about how racism is discrimination, baseless discrimination, which can, has led to oppression. And I might make the comparison to

speciesism being discrimination, which has led to oppression. Although they're different issues with different victims, the mentality which leads us there is dangerous and the same. And we could argue that the the result of speciesism, just mathematically the sentience of suffering, the result has been much worse, like just obviously not on an individual basis, like, you know, cow versus human, but the mathematical result of the number, yeah, in terms of its number, is much worse. And it's happened during all of these human injustices and continues to happen today in modern civilized society, will we claim to be civilized? Yeah. It's a good point to make that even though the case might not be worse or might be better in an individual basis, you have to also add up to numbers, right? And I remember making this point with Peter Singer as well. We were kind of stuck on this question. And the point was this, like, look, I'm not entirely sure, or most people might not be entirely sure if there is a number of cows, for instance, that's worth one human life. Like, it's a hard thing to measure. But what we do know is that if there is such a number, we've crossed.

it. The amount of animals that are being killed is just so unfathomably high that it bears not thinking about. I'm interested in the point that you just made about the mentality, because the thing to note is that, for instance, you say that the same mentality was used to justify something like slavery. Well, what was said, it was, these people are less intelligent. These people are less capable of producing things for society, and therefore we enslave them. Now, people began to argue they're not less intelligent. They can produce a society. But here's the interesting point is that that's irrelevant anyway, because even if they were less intelligent, even if they weren't contributing to society, that's not a justification to enslave them, right? So the mindset is the same because the comparison you make there, the reason I bring this up is because somebody might say, yeah, but Joey, yeah, the same mindset was being used, but it was right to use it with animals and not right to use it with slaves because slaves are not less intelligent than masters, yet animals are less intelligent than human beings.

But the point that we're trying to compare here is whether the mentality justifies what we're doing to them. Is the fact that this animal is less intelligent? Let's just concede that. Is that got any bearing on their moral worth? This is something that Thomas Jefferson wrote about. Of course, Thomas Jefferson was a man who owned slaves, but he also wanted to get a clause to abolish slavery into the Declaration of Independence. Kind of in his heart of hearts, he was an abolitionist of a sort, I suppose. suppose. But there was this book written about the intellectual and artistic achievements of

black people. And the idea, it was kind of written in the abolitionist spirit. It was kind of like, look at the contributions that these people are making. And Thomas Jefferson wrote a review of the book and said, look, this is great. I love to see this. I love the fact that you're showing that these people are just as intelligent as we are and they can contribute just as much as we do, but it's got nothing to do with their rights. If this is supposed to be a piece of abolitionist literature, then you're missing the point because who cares, right? He says, because Isaac Newton was more intelligent than, you know, a serf, doesn't mean that he's master of the surf or has more rights or his lord of the surf or whatever. The issue of morality needs to be

the same there. I think that's a good takeaway from what you've said. Yeah. It's like the more vulnerable, the how does it go? The more vulnerable the victim, the great of the crime. Like animals don't have these defenses from us and we do have a higher complex intelligence, but we you're using that to subjugate vulnerable beings. Now, you could use the marginal case argument where there are marginal case human beings, you know, intellectually challenged or disabled and, you know, small children.

But we wouldn't deny them of their rights because of those disabilities or because of, you know, their lack of intelligence and their vulnerability. But we do use that to justify, you know, attacking these animals and or breeding these animals and, you know, taking away their right to life. And when we talk about rights and the people will use this,

they'll say, you know, animals can't contribute to society, but there are obviously those marginal case human beings that can't contribute to that to society as well. That doesn't mean that we can't give them like basic moral consideration to like the right to life and not to be turned into jackets and food when we have, you know, alternatives. Yeah. And the very thing that a lot of people use to justify a differential treatment, the fact that we're more intelligent, is also the very thing that commits us to being in a position where we should be treating these animals better. It's Like, we say, look, we have a kind of stewardship over these animals because they can't talk for themselves.

How long would it have taken for the abolition of slavery if slaves couldn't have spoken for themselves? How long would it have taken for women to get the right to vote if they couldn't have made the noise to themselves? And they had to rely on men to make it for them. And how long will it take for people to abolish the animal exploitation industries of the world if the animals can't talk for themselves? Well, the answer is it will never happen, right, because they can't talk for themselves. and we need to speak on their behalf. And yes, we are different from animals. We are more intelligent, right?

We are moral agents, right? We don't judge the lion for dining on the gazelle. But the reason we don't is because our higher intelligence and our higher moral capacity not just gives us moral worth, but gives us moral agency. It means that not only do we have worth that needs to be respected, we have responsibilities towards other people and other animals. And so the very thing that people try to use

to justify our supremacy over animals is the very thing that should justify our efforts to eliminate that prejudice from the way that we eat and the way that we entertain ourselves and the way that we dress ourselves too. I think that's a summary of the vegan philosophy in a nutshell. I don't know if you'd agree. Oh, that was very beautifully said, Alex, amazingly said. And, you know, people might look at activists and go, well, you know, why do they get into my face or, you know, why are they forcing their opinion on me? And it's exactly for that reason that animals cannot speak for themselves. So how are they ever going to live?

themselves from their suffering and if you put yourself in the animal's position as hard as that might be being a human being of superior intelligence and all of these things if you just try to empathize with them for one moment like or put someone you care about or even a companion animal that you care about in their position for one minute you'll see exactly why we speak so forcefully about this topic and you know sometimes you can be very let down as an activist because you see the good in people but then you also see the apathy and the you see a lot of people who don't care basically don't care who go as far as to attack vegans and activists for speaking up about this topic so it can you know weigh on you a lot and then the animal's suffering comes into it too but putting yourself in the animal's position as an activist is really powerful to get through some of the you know backlash that you receive and did did i did i say that right or if you always focus on the people you're saying it too obviously there's some strategy that it needs to come into play but i try to give a balance between thinking through the animal's perspective speaking from the animal's perspective like what would they say if

they wanted to express their suffering right now to this person who is causing their suffering and that's where it comes from you know when people say i don't care i said well what if someone said they don't care if you're being subjugated and chucked into a gas chamber you know how would you that would you think that that would be the right thing to say like to say you don't care in the face of such a horrific injustice does not then make it okay. So yeah, it's always this balancing act of trying to get people to put themselves in the animal's position as hard as that may be and speaking from the animal's perspective as, you know, how does that may feel as well? Yeah, it's like when we when we make the, when we make the case for being empathetic with animals

and putting ourselves in their situation, it's not just kind of imagine yourself in that cage, right? It's like imagine being the animal in that cage. So it's not like you're in the cage and you know what's going on. It's like you're in a cage. You don't know why you're there. You don't know what's happening for you. You don't know the justification. And I also think like it's good to remember that we are speaking on behalf of animals.

We're not doing it for our own sake, to put it that way. Because when somebody accuses us of kind of saying, listen, your message is a bit extreme here. I think if you toned it down, you'd be more effective. It's like, look, we're just trying to be channels for the animals here. Right. So imagine if the animals were speaking. if they could speak for themselves, and this mother cow said, why are you taking my child away from me? Why are you causing this suffering? Why are you putting a knife to my throat? Jesus Christ,

this is horrendous, this is abhorrent. And imagine the person kind of says, look, I get what you're saying. I'm with you, but like, you're just being a bit extreme here. Like, if you just kind of toned it down a little bit, maybe I'd have more empathy for you. It's like, of course they're going to have a message that's forceful, because they're in that position. And when you remember that we're trying to speak on their behalf, the extremity of our discourse will only ever be reflective of the extremity of what's being done to the animals. Yes. Yes. And like I said, it's a tight sort of line you're trying to balance here with, you know, speaking truthfully for the animals, trying to do the animals justice in that moment and then trying to be strategic so that it lands on the person. But like

I said before, like when you said you made that Twitter post and you didn't know whether or not that was the right thing to say because you got a bit of backlash, the message was strong. You analyzed it was true and these are the things we need to focus on as activists and the rest comes with experience and you know you're set and setting and the individual you're speaking to but like I said nuts and bolts for anyone listening who wants to go out and speak get that message strong speak from the animal's position okay get the other person to empathize with the animal's position get them to take the message seriously like my approach is consistent with my stance against against animal abuse, you know, so when I'm coming out, coming out strong and I'm speaking

strong, and that's because I've put myself in that situation that the animals have been through. I've stood out the front of those gas chambers for a whole day listening to those screams and those chambers go down and hearing those infant, six-month-old animals, you know, beg for them, beg for mercy. So I've put myself in these positions for years now. So, and it has made me become a better, more forceful speaker. but also I've felt that backlash times a thousand, you know, every single day. I felt that backlash, so I have to keep reminding myself of why I'm doing this.

And I see these seeds starting to sprout every single week. I get messages upon messages, dozens of messages every single week from people that are not only changing, but turning into an activist themselves. So they're not just taking the neutral position, which is, you know, a non-action to be vegan. You're just not committing these atrocities through your lifestyle. but to actually take pro-action and become voices for the animals too because of the strength of that message. Now, a surface-level diluted message might not compel someone to even go vegetarian. It might just get them to do a meatless Mondays, you know, for a month and that's it.

But the strength of that message is what turns not only people vegan, but voices for the animals. Well, Joey, I think it's a fine job that you are doing. And I hope that people listening, if they weren't familiar with you before, with you before now, and if they were and they had reservations about your approach, can at the very least understand why the approach you take is the one that you take, even if they still don't agree with it. I think this is a good place to wrap up the conversation. So, Joey, thanks for coming on the podcast. I know that people have heard me speak a lot about veganism recently, and I suppose they'd better get used to it if I can be so bold. but it's nice to be able to talk about the practicalities of how we go about this, not just why we go about it, you know,

because the why question is always the one that's approached, but we also need to think about the hows of this. And listeners will have got the essence of our points of why we do this in this conversation, but also now they can hopefully understand the how. So, yeah, Joey, thanks for coming on. Thank you so much, Alex. Stay true to yourself.

You're an amazing speaker and you're very highly intelligent, and you're reaching a demographic that not many advocates could. And I really appreciate you, give me a chance to speak to your audience. Yeah, I'm blushing now. But speaking of that audience, I want to remind my viewers and listeners that everything that I do is supported by you on Patreon. That's patreon.com forward slash cosmic skeptic. So if you've enjoyed this content, or if you haven't, but you've found it to be worthwhile nonetheless, I'd appreciate if you would consider becoming a supporter.

There are various benefits and things if you do that as well. All the information is over there. I will leave all the links to everything that you'll need to know about Joey Carpteron. in the description, so you'll be able to find his work there. But with that said, I have as always been Alex O'Connor, and today I've been in conversation with Joey Carbstrong. Thank you. Thank you.