Hello everyone, my name is Ryan and you are listening to The Vegan Report.
Today we are shedding light on the challenge of raising a vegan kid in a non-vegan world
and to discuss this topic I have with me Adam Walsh, an animal rights activist, a long time
vegan and a father who has deeply thought about how to successfully transmit his values
to his son.
He shares those thoughts in this beautiful book titled Bacon is a Vegetable, which is
available for order now, I left a link in the description.
Adam is also a colleague, a fellow animal rights podcaster, I highly recommend his show,
Easy for Animals, again link in the description below.
Okay so Adam, welcome to the show, thank you so much for being here.
Of course, thank you for having me.
I was really looking forward to this conversation because I wanted to talk about the book, yes,
but also you're a fellow vegan podcaster and we connected on social media and I thought
yeah, let's talk about this, what it's like to be a podcaster in the vegan space.
Yeah, yeah and I think we started our podcast at a very similar time as well.
We've I think done about five times more episodes than I have, so quite a bit more experience,
but yeah, it's been very interesting.
I think initially I started my podcast as a way of increasing my experience I suppose
in things like public speaking and putting yourself in front of the camera instead of
behind it and these kinds of things.
But I ended up learning quite a bit from the guests as well, so I hope other people have
learnt some things from it, but I feel like I've taken a lot from the guests.
Yes, that's a good way of putting it.
This podcast is for me something like a vegan school where I'm just learning so much about
everything that has to do with animal rights and about myself.
Yeah, yeah, especially when guests often say things that makes me think a little bit and
think well would I put it in that way or do I even think that or is that a new idea.
I often find myself not getting stuck but having long pauses after they finished answering
a question so that I can contemplate their answer.
Yeah, I think another aspect of mine that I tried to do as well was to prove that you
can have conversations with people who you may be, as animal activists or as vegans,
who we may be actively opposing.
So I've had people on who are essentially the mirror image of us, I suppose, that they're
advocating for the use of animals in particularly biomedical research.
I did two episodes where in one of them we talked about the use of non-animal methods
in their labs and the other one we talked about transparency and researchers talking
more about the animals that are used and the need for statistics and things like this.
So even though we don't agree on a whole bunch of things, I think I've proved to myself and
hopefully to other people that we can still have conversations with people on the other
side of the fence, I suppose, so to speak, that we can find some common ground and work
towards those things potentially together or at the very least, I guess, in the example
to have a conversation about those things.
Do you have any plans for your podcast?
Not at the moment, life has started getting in the way a little more.
So I think I've only this year I did about three or four episodes.
And one in particular, which I often think about quite a lot, I would like to get back
to it and revisit a little bit.
I think I have these like grand ideas for it and that every episode has to kind of approach
a big subject and talk about parenting or communication or whatever it might be.
But maybe just having more organic conversations, some of those things might come out a little
bit as well and people talk more about those experiences.
So yeah, maybe I need to relax my approach to it a little bit.
When I started podcasting, I looked for other vegan podcasts and there are so many lists
out there and I would go through those lists and most of those podcasts were inactive,
had been inactive for years for some of them.
It's hard to keep a podcast active, live, afloat.
I don't know.
I wish more vegan podcasters were present in the podcasting scene.
I know another podcast that was born at the same time as ours was Sanctuary Life Podcast
and they did like I think 10, 12, 8, I don't remember, but a few episodes and then they
stopped and they were successful.
It surprised me.
Yeah, yeah.
At least here in Australia, there's very, very limited opportunity to be a professional
animal advocate, I suppose.
Depending on what your definition of that term is, we have RSPCA, which is quite problematic,
but people who work there may still see themselves as animal advocates.
The proper real activist groups, there's maybe a handful at best of employment opportunities
in those.
We all do these things in our spare time, I suppose, in our evenings and our weekends,
which at some points, I suppose you can carve out the time for them.
But as we know, life kind of ebbs and flows a little bit that one month you'll have every
weekend free and you've got a lot of time to sit and edit and obsess over the way that
people said certain things and whether we need to include that in the final conversation
or the next month, every weekend is so full that you don't even have time to make a cup
of tea for yourself.
So to maintain a schedule is quite difficult, but I think at least from our side of it,
getting the time that is spent putting into even when everything goes well, when you reach
out to someone and they say yes, and you meet at a time and you record it and it goes well
and there's minimal editing, that could still be a 10-hour investment for a one-hour episode.
And then sometimes we get the times wrong, the audio quality is not very good and you
have to re-record certain bits.
Because all these other factors that come into it as well, so it could often turn into
a part-time job just for one single episode a week is a part-time job sometimes.
Oh my gosh.
Thank you for saying that.
Yes, that's now my life.
It's very kind of thankless as well, isn't it?
That I mean, like we say, I feel that we learn a lot from it and we hope that other people
get a lot from it, but we'll sit there and I'll refresh Spotify sometimes and see if
anyone else has rated it or check the morning of a release and see if anyone's listened
to it on the first day.
But it's kind of the, apart from friends and families, the only feedback we get is a listen,
but then we don't know how anyone's even received the episode or whether someone stumbled across
it because it had a keyword in it that matches their other podcasts.
But usually they listen to Joe Rogan and not animal activism.
It's very difficult to stay motivated apart from the fact that we do it for animals, I
guess.
That's the hard part.
At first I almost quit this podcasting business because I kept focusing on the number of downloads
and how many people were listening and I was thinking, I'm putting so much effort and energy
in this episode for what?
For a few dozen downloads?
I mean, yeah.
And episodes that you think.
I did one with an Australian activist.
He is, as far as I understand, like the group or regional leader for We the Free in Australia
and New Zealand, I believe.
And we had a conversation and I was inspired by one of the episodes that you did about
conservatives because I think particularly in Australia, we have this big gap between
even like the left side, the animal appreciating left side and everybody else.
And most of the everybody else is conservative.
So I kind of talked about him with this and I added it as a bonus episode.
So it was only about 10 minutes.
I thought that was a good trial to see how a shorter episode might go.
It was more conversational and I thought, wow, this is really good.
I learned a lot from this.
He mentioned a few really good things.
This one's going to like impact people.
People are going to love this.
And again, I'm sitting there like refreshing.
I'm like, why is it not taking?
Why is it like, I feel like I invested so much of my hope in this episode that this
was the one that I was going to change the world with.
And you know, 50 people had a go at it.
Well, you know, my I reached out actually on Reddit on the podcasting sub Reddit and
I asked other podcasters, you know, I just I guess I just rented and I was like, here's
what I'm going through.
I have this vegan podcast.
So I know most of you won't relate to it, but yeah, podcasting is hard and the people,
you know, just reach out like a wave of positive comments and advice.
And I had this particular person, you know, his name is Ryan, weirdly enough, and he's
also a podcaster and he just, you know, gave gave me attention and time as some kind of
mentor and, you know, reminded me of why I'm doing what I'm doing and to seek pleasure
in, you know, what I'm doing.
And honestly, now it's better that I guess that the podcast has taken off from that,
you know, period.
But I'm doing it for the fun of it.
That's the, you know, the bottom line.
If the day I will stop having fun, you know, having those conversations and editing everything
and then releasing it to the public, I will stop because you need this, you know, you
need something positive to get something out of this experience.
I'm not getting any money, so at least I'm getting, you know, fun.
I'm getting challenged.
I'm getting stimulated by this whole experience.
Yeah.
And I think too that like part of our activism, at least what I think it should be, and sometimes
people are very, or other activists are very hesitant to create communities with people
who are not directly involved in what we do.
Like we try not to have vegan friends or we try not to have friends who are not activists
and things like that.
That even like reaching out to other podcasters and saying, I have a vegan podcast.
Well that then gets them interested in what you're doing.
So that is another aspect of how these things can be successful.
That's finding ways, I often say that we don't need to build our own communities.
We just need to find a way into other people's communities.
And whether that's through environmentalism or through podcasting or through whatever
it might be, as long as the animals are at the core of our message, then yeah, like if
it's a podcasting community and suddenly they're interested in kind of motivating you or helping
you out or things like that, they're going to take an interest in yours.
And there'll be someone in there who will say, I might listen to this and see what,
you know, see what he's on about.
And they hear one of your episodes and that changes the way they think.
And it's, it's like another way to, like just promoting a podcast as well.
It's another way of, of reaching out to people.
Yes.
And the idea that some of the people I love the most and I admire will accept to give
an hour of their time to speak with me just because I have a podcast.
I mean, this is incredible.
This is like, uh, just amazing.
And let me give you an example.
I did an episode with whispers read, uh, who is this ASMR artist.
I have been listening to whispers, uh, read videos since back when I started college and
to have her, you know, on the show, to be able to interview her and to connect with
her was just amazing.
I thought, thank you.
Thank you for sticking to doing, you know, this podcast.
And you know, if I had left this, this whole business, um, and it's a business, you know,
starting a podcast is like starting a really small business.
But if I had left, I would not have had this, um, meeting this encounter with this amazing
person.
And I'm thinking, you know, it was worth it.
Uh, the, the pain of, uh, of everything was worth this pleasant conversation and meeting
this wonderful person.
Yeah.
Yeah, that's right.
It's an often say when we're talking about considering like businesses and marketing
and things like that, they'll say, we need to consider our strengths, our weaknesses,
our opportunities and our threats.
And I was only having this conversation with someone the other day.
I don't think we need to consider strengths and weaknesses and threats.
I think we just need to look for the opportunities because we naturally use our strengths.
We shouldn't really consider or shouldn't really worry too much about the threats.
We should just do the things that we know are right.
And weaknesses can be turned around through taking advantage of opportunities.
And that's the only thing we need to really pay attention to the opportunities because
that's, that's where it leads to.
It can lead to, yeah, sometimes meeting the people you admire the most.
Yeah, we're not corporations.
We're just one person.
We don't have time to, to design a social media plan and, uh, do this SWOT, uh, analysis
of what we're providing to the public.
You know, we're just doing our best.
Yeah, that's right.
Yeah.
And, um, I think it definitely leads to some great places, even if it's just in yourself
and it might not be a direct, um, benefit of doing the podcast, but like helping in
outreach, helping in everyday conversations, we get more confident at talking about these
things.
Okay.
Podcasting is one way to connect with, uh, people.
Another one is of course, writing a book, see the segue here.
And I have, you know, in my hand, uh, bacon is a vegetable.
First of all, how did you feel about publishing this book?
Because just, you know, doing a podcast, I get, well, I used to be really afraid, like
I'm going to put this out there.
Um, and people will hear my thoughts and you know, they hear, they will hear me talk about
what I think and what if I say the wrong thing?
What if, um, I say something stupid?
Uh, I had this fear of judgment, but at least, you know, I could edit the podcast and I could,
you know, publish another episode the week after maybe to correct myself.
That's the, the stories I would tell myself to feel better about, um, you know, posting
an episode, but your book, you can't do that with your book.
It's no, you can't take it back.
So how did you feel about publishing it?
Um, yes, it was very mixed.
Um, I think I've always put a lot of weight in books and I know there are quite a few
ridiculous books that we now have.
Um, but I've always put a lot of weight in books.
I think 99% of my knowledge or understanding of the world and things like that have come
from what I've read.
Um, and it didn't, I don't believe it started out with the intention of being a book.
It was more just me kind of having like my, my wife is pregnant while I was writing or
reading these things.
And I was kind of making notes and, and it kind of just evolved into a book, but it was
me kind of understanding the initial story was that I, my, my niece and my sister's daughter
used to rescue worms from the driveway when it rained because she didn't want them to
get squashed.
And then a few years later, like we all do, we end up eating meat when we're five or six
years old, just as part of the family, um, meals.
And I kind of, it just sat with me one day, I'm now going to have a child and I wanted
to understand how you went from caring about worms, which even as adults, we, and animal
people, we still barely care about worms through to eating meat.
So how, how do we get, get through those points?
And one of the first things I read, which is where the title came from, was about how,
um, how the language that we use, or I think I was probably quite harsh with some of my
words.
I used words like deception, um, in saying things like that's not an animal, that's a
plant.
And in this report, it was called, um, children are unsuspecting meat eaters.
There was a third of children thought that bacon came from a plant.
And I use that example as the, the title of the book, cause I thought it was a bit more,
you know, sensationalist, I suppose, I might get people to grab it off the shelf.
Um, but a more surprising one was about the same number of people, uh, children, a third
of them thought that chicken nuggets came from a plant, even though it has an animal
name in the product, they still thought it came from plants.
And I thought, well, where, where do they get this information from?
And I thought, well, if they're not getting it from anywhere else, they must be getting
it from Google because surely their parents are not lying to them adults.
We tell people to grow up as like an ambition.
You should, you know, you should want to be a grownup.
So surely grownups are not lying to their children.
They must be getting it from Google.
It's got to be the internet.
We're told all the problems are the fault of the internet.
And so I Googled it and apart from a couple of jokes, and there was an anime episode that
had a meat tree.
Um, I couldn't find anything.
It wasn't like someone had made this, you know, drawing this long line between bacon
and vegetable.
There was nothing.
So I thought the only place it's coming from is their parents or their teachers or like
someone is telling them, no, that's not, that's not an animal.
It's different.
And so I kind of, as I tend to do, I don't, when I say I read a lot, I don't just read
one or two books on a subject.
I'll read 15 or 20.
So I like, and from both perspectives as well, I'll often look at what does the other side
say?
Like I agree with this side, but you know, obviously the earth is a sphere, but what
if it wasn't?
Maybe I'll read a book about flood earth and see what they have to say.
But this one like really took me down like more of a practical part, because this was
kind of, I think I write it as more of a guide for myself of like identifying the points
along where my son's going to encounter some of these things as he grows up and what I
can do to help educate him better, I suppose.
Um, and not necessarily, you know, indoctrinate him like all of us vegans do with our children,
but um, yeah, I kind of just guide him in the right ways and make sure that he doesn't
think that bacon is a vegetable.
That's something I really love about the book that it is the trigger for it is the fact
that you are going to become a father and you have to really think totally about how
to raise your child and think about your vegan values and how to, I guess, transmit that
to, to your son.
And I love how it's a really personal and vulnerable reflection and you it's even chronological.
So you know, we follow you through that adventure, intellectual adventure.
And yeah, I guess if we stay on the theme of fear for most vegan parents out there,
maybe that's a really big fear to have a child who one day will grow up to deny, well, reject
his vegan values, the vegan values that his parents had, um, and become a one more, uh,
meat eater.
And so I think that book is also very helpful to address that fear, that legitimate fear
and problem that many vegan parents out there might be experiencing.
Yeah, that's right.
And even, um, even in referring to your previous question, um, like the personal fear of putting
these thoughts into the page that I often say that, and maybe we do all think this of
ourselves sit in this little weird spot that doesn't fit into many boxes.
Like I'm vegan and I'm atheist and I'm harshly honest, but I'm also very realistic.
So I, I think I'm accepting of the fact that it's likely he's going to eat meat.
I mean, it's almost certain that he will at some point want to try it, but given, you
know, just the makeup of our society and the friends that he's going to have and these
kinds of things, it's likely that he's going to eat meat.
But we often joke that we've got a few big farm sanctuaries, um, around Melbourne here.
And so we often joke that if he ever has a, you know, a beef burger or a chicken nugget
or something, the following day we'll be going to a sanctuary just to say, well, now you
need to talk to the chicken and you need to explain why you ate their friend so that he,
like he's got this constant reminder that this is what I'm contributing to.
And I think it's, it's kind of balancing the values, I guess, too.
That is that I would say that probably honesty is one of the biggest values that we have
and being honest about, you know, I need to pay for someone to kill an animal for me to
eat.
Well, then also with that comes a lot of other things that we maybe can't control quite as
much that even as vegans, it's, there's a quote in the book from American journalist
called Michael Levitan.
And he says, is that why we all hate vegans?
Because we agree that they're morally superior.
So even like even he's admitting that, like what they're doing is right, or it's, I don't
even turn better, but it's, you know, they've realized so that he's admitting that like
they're morally superior or he's suggesting this.
But he's also saying that's why we hate them, because we understand that they know something
that we don't know.
So I think just making sure that he, he makes that connection for himself, because we all,
we all have, maybe not all of us, but most people, I imagine most vegans, and all the
vegans who I have met have had some kind of, you know, moment in their life where they
watched a documentary or saw a chicken being slaughtered or whatever it might be that triggered
them into becoming vegan.
And so by like, I hypothesize this in the book as well, that, that may be that we need
to be exposed to animal cruelty to appreciate that animals are harmed, which is very, very
hard to accept.
But it could be that I have to allow him to eat meat and then to foster the environment
in which he will be exposed to animal cruelty, even if it's just through a documentary, so
that he can, that switch will trigger in him himself and not because he's been told to,
but because he's lying to it for himself.
What do you say to the many vegans out there who are anti-natalists, who don't want to
bother with having children because of those deep, you know, moral problems, puzzles?
Yeah, I think even, cause I was, I don't think I was anti-natalist, but I think personally,
I just didn't see much of a point in having children.
Like I kind of, maybe for selfish reasons, you know, I enjoyed my life.
I liked the things that I was doing.
I enjoy going on holidays.
And then my girlfriend at the time is now my wife, we, like, she wanted a few kids.
So I don't like to say that he was the compromise because we didn't compromise on him.
He's wonderful.
But I had this thing where I thought, I don't think most people really think about why they
have children.
I think they just have them because other people have children.
You'll often see a friend group, for example, all of their kids are the same age.
They've all had their kids at the same time.
So we kind of, you know, over the course of quite a while, and this was, you know, through
our relationship and we'd gone to Cambodia and we've gone to India for a few months.
So we kind of had a lot of time to really sit and consider this question.
And we kind of boiled it down to, because we want to pass on our experiences.
We want the next generation to be better at what they need to be better at than we have
been.
And I guess the short way of responding would be that if vegans didn't have children, then
vegans may die out because we're perpetually going to be have to, we're always going to
be trying to convince people to not eat meat as opposed to raising vegans.
And I know that kind of sounds a bit cultish because that's what some, you know, like,
for example, religious groups do.
They'll say, well, we need to have 10 kids so that we can pass on our knowledge and populate
all these kinds of things.
But I think there's like a, there's like a point where there is too many kids, but there's
also a point where there's not enough kids with the right values and the right families.
And there's, I mean, depending on which reports you read, there's some reports that, you know,
for like doctors and teachers and all these like more educated, more like people who consider
their lives a bit more and consider their impact on the world.
They're the ones who have less kids and the people who don't care about the world have
more kids.
So like using Hollywood as an example, I suppose, where like that potential direction is idiocracy,
where the dumbest person in the world is suddenly the smartest person in the world.
And we're all watering our crops with Coca-Cola.
That there's like, there's a way that we can help prevent that.
And I think it's like, I always return to education.
It's all through education.
And sometimes that happens.
It has to start at home with our own children.
But it's equally valid that if other people are having thoughts that, you know, they don't
want children, they don't see the point.
Like I said, I don't think there is a need to have children if you like your life, you
like what you do, you don't see the point, then that's equally valid.
Yeah.
Yes.
That movie is amazing.
It's so insightful.
It's so ridiculous.
It's so insightful.
It's bizarre, isn't it?
It's yeah, it's the most ridiculous film.
And even watching them, I feel silly for watching this film.
Like the philosophical analysis of it is amazing.
Yeah.
Well, let me ask you this directly, because I think the ties between this movie and veganism
and this anti-natalist trend in the vegan community is far greater than we think.
And I've been pondering over that.
Do you think that there is a relationship, there's a correlation or relation between
being smarter and becoming vegan?
And I remember, you know, in the first years when I was considering becoming vegan, I would
go and look up, you know, famous vegan people.
And you had all the great minds of, you know, you had, I think Einstein was vegetarian,
you had Da Vinci, you had all of those great minds.
And so I'm really wondering, do you think that smarter people tend to consider more
seriously, you know, becoming vegan, vegetarian and so on?
But yeah, I guess breaking it down even more, it depends on what we define as like smart
or intelligent, I guess, as well.
I would probably say no, because a lot of the people that I admire aren't vegan or vegetarian.
I think they try hard to be.
And it wasn't the last time he was in Melbourne, but the time before I went to see Richard
Dawkins talk.
And this was before I was vegan or vegetarian.
And I remember someone saying to him, the whole question was just, why are you not vegetarian?
And this is from someone who I, and I still look up to, who I have admired and learned
from for most of my life.
And he's always got the answers for everything.
Like he considers things very well so that he always has the answers for things.
And even in the interview or the questions leading up to that one, he answered them so
well and like so powerfully.
And this one, there was just silence.
And he just looked up from his chair and just said, I don't know.
I don't have a good answer for that.
And I think that's part of the reason why I like him is because he does allow himself
to be vulnerable like that and admit when he doesn't have the answer.
And I put a quote in my book from him that something about the evolution of a hippopotamus.
And he said, it's going to be hard to accept, but I guess I'm going to have to.
And I kind of like that.
That he's like, even if I don't believe, he might say that he doesn't believe things,
but even if I don't believe that I'm going to have to because it's a fact.
And so I don't, yeah, like it depends on, like if we look at someone like him and say,
well, he's intelligent, he's not vegan.
So maybe it's not a smart thing.
But then, like you said, there's other, like some literal geniuses who were at least vegetarian.
I don't know.
I don't know if it's necessarily that vegans are smarter or smarter people are vegan.
I think it depends a lot on what your interests are and possibly even like your experiences.
Like I said, that I supported Animals Australia and Sea Shepherd even before I was vegetarian.
So of course I was outraged at factory farming while I was sitting there eating my chicken.
And I thought it was horrible that we're wailing in the oceans, but it just didn't click for
me until I had a personal experience.
I went to Cambodia and walked through a food market and there was scaling fish and slurring
the throats of chickens.
And it just like seeing it right in front of me was the trigger.
I don't, yeah, I think there's lots of sub communities within veganism as well, which
I was going to say troubling, but not troubling, but I think from my perspective being a realistic
based honest kind of person that, you know, like a lot of vegans are also into wellness
things and they don't take vaccines and all these kinds of things.
I know that's a whole nother conversation as well, but I think there's this maybe idealized
kind of person that's healthy and morally superior, like we were saying the quote before,
and that person has to be vegan.
But those kinds of perspectives would only come from vegans as well.
I'm not sure that we would ask if we asked a meat eater or anyone else in the population
if smarter people are vegan, their immediate response is going to be, of course not.
I'm not sure if that's really much of an answer.
It's just me thinking about the question, but it is.
And another argument against vegans being smarter is personified by Neil deGrasse Tyson.
And I know you also mentioned him in the book.
I think in the first pages.
And it's one thing to be, you know, passively non-vegan like Richard Dawkins.
It's another to push the most ridiculous arguments against veganism and be this incredibly intelligent
man.
When you try to understand what's happening here, how can Neil deGrasse Tyson be talking
about plants having emotions?
Well, I'll let you talk about it.
Yeah, well, exactly.
And I mean, even just being factually wrong saying that I think he's and I'm not going
to get the quote right, but his quote was something like there's two kinds of food,
animal based food where you don't have to kill anything or anyone, we would say.
And that's milk and honey.
But of course, exactly.
We hear that statement, we just think, well, that's ridiculous.
Of course, where do you think veal comes from?
And what do you think happens to the cows after they're too old to produce enough milk
anymore, not even no milk, but enough milk, as if they just go off and live down the back
of the farm and they have happy, wonderful lives.
And that's right.
I think that was that was exactly my point.
I think firstly, that if you're not like if it's not in your interest area to go out of
your way to say, what about this?
And then even another step further and saying, but don't plants bleed?
Doesn't a tree suffocate?
Like it's beyond ridiculous.
If that chapter of the book, I believe it was called Starry Messenger, if that didn't
have someone's name on it, we would be laughing the whole way through it.
And it's like it's a different thing when you attach someone like him to it.
And you think how is someone of that intelligence or that understanding of how not just the
world works, but the universe works so ignorant on something that's fundamentally true about
biology and about farming and all these kinds of things.
But it kind of comes back to something that we learned, or we hopefully learned during
the COVID pandemic, was that just because someone has doctor in front of their name
or PhD after it doesn't mean they're an expert in everything.
And like a good example is Australia's performance at the Olympics.
Our break dancing person has a PhD in break dancing.
Ray Gunn, I think her name was.
Yeah.
So like trying to, I believe it's called the white coat effect that, you know, someone
who's a doctor of astronomy should probably not be commenting too much on biology or evolution
beyond their general understanding of it.
Like that's for, you know, Richard Dawkins can comment on biology because he's a biologist
and Neil deGrasse Tyson can comment on astrology, astronomy, sorry, because he's an astronomer.
He's not a biologist, even though he would have a general understanding of that.
And yeah, there's lots of these experiments that have been done where people go into shopping
malls, for example, and have medical information on a table.
And it's exactly the same two days in a row.
The only difference is that one day the person is dressed in normal clothes and the next
day they're dressed in a white coat.
And the day that they're wearing a white coat, people talk to them more, they listen more,
they take more information.
It's the exact same thing.
It's not different, but it's just because they're wearing a white coat.
And we kind of do the same things when we go to GPs.
We think our GPs are so wonderful and amazing because they're doctors, but they're also
GPs.
Like they're not, if your leg needs to be amputated and you're not going to go to your
GP, you're going to go to a specialist.
Like they're kind of the triage and they can help a lot of things.
So I think it's understanding where someone's expertise is.
And there can be other things applied to it.
Like as animal activists, we're obviously not biologists and we're not experts in farming
practices and all these kinds of things either.
That there is some benefit to having general knowledge.
But when you're trying to educate someone, we still rely on experts.
We rely on plant-based dietitians and we rely on medical researchers who don't use animals
and the processes that they go through and things like that.
So I think it's, yeah, Neil deGrasse Tyson's an interesting one.
I think he's become so generally popular now.
He's been on like the Simpsons and Big Bang Theory and stuff like this as well.
So almost everybody knows who he is.
So everybody seeks him out for information, even if it's not relevant to the conversation.
Yeah, it's crazy that he became a vehicle for those bad ideas and those attacks that
we consider being trolling against vegans.
Yeah.
And like I say in the book too, it's not just like he, one of his defenses of a previous
I think a Twitter post that he'd made about cows.
He said, I'm just stating a fact.
But I think that's a really narrow view of it as well because there are children and
high school kids who look up to people like that and they'll say, well, if he thinks that,
I think that.
Whether they don't critically think about it or if it reinforces an existing opinion.
But I think people like that need to understand the influence that even just stating a fact,
which whether it's a fact or not, I think his Twitter post was a cow is a biological
machine created by humans to turn grass into protein or something like that, which is not
necessarily untrue, but whether it's relevant to anybody's conversation ever.
And it didn't seem to appreciate the impact that making a statement like that would have
on intelligent conversation generally.
And I think that's where some, going back to the smarter question, some smarter people
are not necessarily socially or what I'm trying to say, like they don't have the social skills
to understand how information is being perceived.
They're just putting information out into the world and letting it kind of live a life.
But we also need to understand how it's being perceived.
And I think we can use this as a self-critical thing as well, that when we use certain words
in our outreach, it can have the effect of alienating people or we can soften some of
our language to help get them on board.
And it's the same kind of lesson, I think.
And also you mentioned the king of podcasting, Joe Rogan, and he always say, you know, I'm
a comic.
Why do you go and listen to me talk about and follow my advice concerning COVID or whatever?
I'm not an expert in that.
I'm just a comic.
And I feel we should say the same about Neil deGrasse Tyson.
He's not a biologist.
He's not a philosopher, an ethical philosopher.
It's the responsibility of his audience to think of him as an expert in this field and
the rest, the things he says in the margins.
Well, let's listen to that with some skepticism.
Yeah.
And I think we can learn from that as well, that bringing it back to the book, that the
way that we talked about children, they look up to us as the source of knowledge and they
take after our actions.
And it's like, you know, Christian parents are more likely to have Christian children,
and a rugby league fan is more likely to have a rugby league child and all these kinds of
things.
There's a big influence there that I think we need to understand.
And so even just, and I mentioned a few of them in the book, some offhanded comments
and actions can have quite a lot of impact on a child's development when they're mirroring
a lot of things.
My son at the moment, he's almost two and he's mirroring everything, all of our words,
he will repeat back to us and a lot of our actions, he will repeat back to us.
And sometimes it's quite funny and other times we think, Oh, don't know about that.
But it's all very impactful when I think one example I used in the book was we're in an
electronic store one day and this kid walked up to a table full of electronic tablets and
said, what are these?
And the mom said, well, these are so people can watch videos and write and all these kinds
of things.
And he said, how did they get here?
And she said, you could tell more questions that he asked her, very quickly she lost interest
in answering to the point where she literally just walked away.
She didn't even answer the next question.
She walked away.
And I just stood there, probably very weirdly staring at this child in the middle of a department
store thinking, because he had kind of frozen as well.
It was like he was processing what had just happened.
And I thought these are like, these are lessons he's going to learn.
Don't ask too many questions.
Maybe even worse, don't ask mom too many questions.
You know, I don't need to understand how things work properly.
All these kinds of things that will then impact potentially the rest of his life, because
it's very hard to break out of some of these habits that we form.
If you learn not to ask questions, then it's very hard to say to someone, it's okay to
ask questions, even if you're afraid of the answer.
So I think as even on a smaller scale, which is probably more relatable to what we do and
what most people do to understand the little things that we do and how they have impacts
on children.
And yeah, like potentially even that they don't understand where their food comes from,
which I think is even whether they're vegan parents or not, I think having the conversation
saying we killed a chicken or we paid someone to kill a chicken for your salad is still
appropriate.
And maybe there's different ages where that might be appropriate.
But I think I would rather be honest in the communication than just forcing people to
be vegan.
And I asked this actually of a guest, one of my podcast episodes.
And yeah, we said like, if you could snap your fingers today and make everyone vegan,
would we?
And he said, no, I wouldn't because then people don't know why they're vegan.
They haven't made the journey to get there.
They haven't like we would save a lot of animals lives.
It's true, but more potentially trillions of them.
But people would very quickly fall back into other practices, I think.
And like they wouldn't understand why they're doing these things.
It's all I think education is always the always the answer.
Yeah.
Well, you are competing.
Well, at least, you know, first of all, at least your wife is also vegan.
So you're, you know, both on the same page about those values.
So you're not competing against the cultural views of your wife.
You're both on the same page, but you are competing against other, you know, exterior
agents, such as teachers or Disney.
And that I really wanted to get to.
You talk about in the book, the disnification of animals.
And that is something that just, you know, keeps coming back to my mind, you know, when
I think about animal rights and how animals are perceived, you know, and it's that story
about Nemo and how this movie, this big production.
And I know it's Pixar.
It's not Disney, but same.
But this big production that for, you know, for the first time portrayed a fish as a sentient
creature and you know, the whole plot of the movie was about animal abuse and getting out
of a tank.
If you had to design the perfect animal rights movie about fish, you could have made Nemo.
Yet when that was presented, when, you know, people watch that, their first instinct was
to go and purchase clownfish.
Right.
And you know, it's just, I can't, it's so hard to understand it.
And you tackle that problem and you talk about how we portray animals in, how we have portrayed
animals in Disney movies and so on.
Yeah.
I think it's such a good example.
I think I didn't, I didn't talk about Nemo in the book.
And even thinking back to it, I think I, from the examples that I remember putting in there
were examples that I had when I was growing up that I maybe could have learned from, like
that presented opportunities to learn from, or were some of the reasons why I thought
certain things about certain animals.
So yeah, so one of them is babe, which I guess most people talk about.
And I think there's some really good lessons in there, even just about communicating and
understanding that animals have, like animals can communicate, they have the ability to
communicate and we just need to listen a bit better to them.
And there's a really good quote as to, a really good bit in the film where the first time
babe goes and talks to the sheep.
And from my memory of the film, he's like a little bit nervous and he's like, the farmer
wants me to do this.
And the sheep, one of the sheep just respond and says, all you need to do is ask.
And I think that's one of the best moments of the film because it kind of says, like
anybody can get along with each other.
We just need to talk a little bit more.
We need to make sure we're communicating on the same level.
And there are some minor issues, I think with babe and that everyone speaks English.
So obviously sheep and pigs would have different dialects and things like this.
But I mean, there's lots of, lots even just James Cromwell being in the film, that's the
film that made him consider his impact.
And a lot of responses to the film were that if people weren't vegetarian, then they reduce
their meat intake.
And there was a report I read on the instances, I think it was called the babe effect or something
like that.
And the effect that a film like that had.
But yeah, it's interesting that, I don't know, Finding Nemo is a animated film, but it's
interesting that, and maybe we just didn't really discuss it much more, that after babe,
there wasn't like an increase in demand for pigs as pets, but there was an increase in
demand for clownfish as pets.
And I wonder if something else that maybe I neglected to explore was not just the way
that animals are portrayed in the films, but the way that the films are marketed in that
everything from a film can be owned now.
So like when there was babe, you couldn't like, at least I remember, you couldn't go
out and buy like a babe action figure.
And I feel like if it was released in 2024, you could probably go out and buy a babe action
figure.
Whereas when Nemo came out, there were a lot of like, we were just used to Disney marketing
things and especially in a time of like huge films like Toy Story, where you could go out
and buy Woody and Frozen, where you could go and buy Elsa.
Well, of course, even with a film that does have a lot of animal rights messages in it,
like Finding Nemo, if you don't get those messages, or I guess even if you do, you can
still go out and buy a clownfish toy.
But also, the next step is that well clownfish are actually quite accessible, that they do
fit into a tank that you can sit on your nightstand.
They shouldn't be in a tank that small, but they can fit into one.
So it's very easy to have one at home, a live clownfish, not just a toy.
And so yeah, there's a lot to be said about the communication or the marketing, I suppose,
between the two children of these films and whether that's the intention.
And from the book that I referenced, The Diznification of Animals, she makes a very good point that
everything in animation needs to be, is deliberate because you need to draw it, you purposefully
put it there.
So like one example that again, I didn't explore in the book is the film Madagascar, which
I watched with my son the other day.
And in it, there's the lemur population on Madagascar has a king.
But as far as like I read a book by Lucy Cook about a year ago, and she referenced this
film in it and said, but lemurs don't have kings, they have queens, like it's a matriarchy.
So the filmmakers deliberately made the head of the lemurs a king, even though they hopefully
knew very well that it was supposed to be a queen.
Like that was a deliberate choice.
And so like there's lots of conversations, I guess, around whether it's appropriate to
portray matriarchy in films when we're not used to that.
We're used to kings and princesses, not queens necessarily.
If they are queens, then they're evil queens.
And then there's even some older films where just really subtly there was in Fantasia,
there was a scene where like a toy soldier gets lost down a drain.
And like all the rats in the drain have like really sharp teeth, sharp claws, red eyes.
And for people who don't see rats, I mean, when was the last time most of us see a rat,
unless you live in like India or New York, you don't really see them that much.
So that's our impression of rats.
And maybe some of the damage was repaired with films like Ratatouille and things like
that where they're portrayed as more, you know, a bit cuter and likeable.
But yeah, I think the Nemo example is very interesting and a good one of the way that
maybe the way that we market or films are marketed to us and the dimension that they
take on after the film as well or beyond just sitting and watching a 90 minute film that
you can now incorporate all these things into your life.
You can have fish tanks and participate in the enslavement of animals or the capture
of animals that you just watched a film about releasing the animals and how much they don't
want to be in a tank.
Yeah, it's very, it's very strange.
But that's such a great insight and analysis.
I never thought about it, about how the clownfish was just a marketing toy and that it relates
to the era in which we live.
And yeah, that's the difference between Finding Nemo and Babe.
Yeah, it's truly fascinating.
And you know, likewise, there are some animals that are, I guess, attractive to us and then
other that, you know, repel us like the rats or even, you know, the pigs.
And I'm thinking of, you know, the logo of my podcast and also the cover of your book
where we see a pig.
And you know, at first that image of a pig when the illustrator presented me with that
picture of, you know, logo drafting, I thought, no, I don't want a pig on, you know, representing
my show.
And then I had like a pause and I thought, oh my, it's been like nine years.
I have been vegan for the last nine years and still this has, you know, power over me.
Those strong images, those associations are still ingrained in my mind.
Yeah, yeah.
And I have one that I particularly struggle with, but occasionally give into is that I
grew up in central New South Wales, a state here in Australia.
I think it's the second most populous state in Australia.
It may be the first, but literally right in the middle.
And there's a free, not free range, open range zoo there.
So it's still in enclosures, but they're quite big.
You know, it's not, you know, the Serengeti, but you know, they do get to wander around
a little bit, but you still do see like the tiger tracks because they're pacing back and
forward and things like this.
But growing up, that's what you did every week.
Like we would go to the zoo just about every week and go and see different animals.
And that's, I think in hindsight, I probably look at that as where I first appreciated
animals, even if it wasn't to the point where I didn't want to eat them, but it's still
something that I can't shake.
Like even we'll watch, you know, a documentary on TV and I'll think, oh, we need to take
Desmond my son.
We should take him to see a tiger.
Like again, just the first thought is let's go to the zoo because that's what I did for
like, you know, with my family, I did that for 15 or 16 years.
And then even after that, I bought a house just down the road from the zoo.
So it was nice to go and get a coffee, or nice for me to go and get a coffee and sit
in front of a tiger for an hour and drink a coffee just staring at a tiger.
That was, that's a nice place to drink a coffee for a human.
It's not nice for the tiger, but it's something that yeah, is so deeply ingrained into me
that my first thought is let's go to the zoo, even to the point where I don't realize what
I'm doing sometimes until we get into the zoo.
And I'm like, that's right.
This is where they keep the animals in cages because it's just, it's just part of my nature.
It's like the education that I had growing up.
And it's like, again, it's not like I blame my parents for forcing me to, you know, accept
that we need zoos or anything like that.
It's just, it's just what you did.
And yeah, I'll still like, I'll go to the zoo and you know, I'll still look at the cage
and I'll say, Oh God, they're a little bit small or, you know, that's not an endangered
species.
Why are we breeding them as if it makes me feel a little bit better about being there.
But you're right.
It's very, I think if we're honest with ourselves, it's very hard to remove some of those things.
And it's much easier to, you know, to, well, I feel like being vegan, whatever the definition
of vegan is, at least being plant based, that having a plant based diet is easy.
I don't feel like it was hard to get rid of animal products from my diet.
But some of these like entrenched things are really quite difficult to shake, especially
when I'm looking at educating my child.
And I'm like, with animals like tigers, it may be that by the time he's old enough and
has enough money to travel to Asia to see tigers that they don't actually exist anymore.
They might be extinct except in zoos.
So if I'm to teach him about a tiger, do I tell him that they don't exist anymore?
Or do I take him to the zoo to show him a tiger, but also saying that the tiger shouldn't
be here.
That was stolen from their home.
And it's very, it's very tricky.
And it's the same with rats.
I, rats are one of my favorite, I've kind of, I guess, you know, having an interest in particularly
animals in labs.
Rats are kind of one of the ones that I've gravitated towards most.
But yeah, still, it's still like this impression of a dirty rat, even though I know that they're
not dirty at all, they're very, very clean.
And they're incredibly adaptable to their environment.
And that's why they've survived so well in places like New York, because they just adapt
so well.
But yeah, there's still like these impressions of, you know, get a little shiver when you
think of a rat or a cockroach or whatever it might be.
And a lot of it, I think I mentioned it really briefly in the book, a lot of it is this misinformation
that we had when we grew up that we thought, you know, dogs are colorblind, I still often
look at my dog and think, how does he see the world?
But he's not colorblind.
He just can't see all of the colors in the way that we do.
And it's very difficult to break out of some of those, those ways of thinking.
And I think saying the word pet is a good one as well.
Like, how many vegans do we chat to in our conversations?
It will still say my pet at home.
But then when we're talking to someone in outreach or in other conversations, we'll
kind of check every single word before we say it out loud and we'll make sure we say
companion animal, whether it makes that much of a difference to the conversation.
I'm not sure.
But it's like just these things just flow off our tongues.
And then so much easier than I think we would admit to.
Yes.
I absolutely agree with everything you just said.
And yet about the zoo part, you know, they are fascinating places.
You know, I often hear vegans talking about zoos as open air prisons.
But at least with prisons, you have criminals in them.
People who, you know, most likely have done things to deserve to be locked in, or at least
they're there not to harm the general population.
But those animals are innocent of any crimes.
So I guess, you know, a better analogy would be it's like the Truman show with those zoos.
Yeah, well, yeah, that's true.
But yeah, in the criminal system, I mean, it's very different in Australia than it might
be in a lot of other places that, yes, about hopefully about rehabilitation.
But yeah, that's right.
Like if you're born into a zoo, it's not like even through these breeding programs.
And like I said, I'm often amazed when they'll have a baby giraffe, for example, but giraffe
are not endangered.
It's obviously there to get people into the gates and they won't ever be released back
into the wild because they're just not going to be able to fend for themselves.
Like they know when they're getting food and they know when they're being cleaned and all
these kinds of things in a zoo.
They're very, I guess the word was probably institutionalized maybe.
So like sending them out into the, you know, sending them back to where they should have
been born.
They're never going to be able to survive there.
They have to stay in a zoo once they're in a zoo, which is very hard to think about and
often have this argument or discussion with people.
It's like if we were successful in all of our campaigns tomorrow and they say, we're
not using animals for anything anymore.
That is a really quite, I mean, it's better than killing them, but also there's going
to be billions of animals that are going where?
So if we release all the animals for labs in Australia, we use between eight and 10
million a year.
Most of those animals have already been bred and most of them are rats and mice and fish.
So where do the animals go if we just end medical research tomorrow?
And I think it would be the same with zoos.
If we shut or if we stopped zoos, if we outlawed them and made them illegal, then like the
animals are going to have to live out their lives in a zoo anyway.
I think maybe a better way of approaching it would be to stop breeding programs in zoos,
unless the animals were definitely going to be reintroduced into the wild, certain rhinos
and things like that, which can be.
But yeah, I think there's still an argument even from an animal rights perspective.
I guess they'd be called sanctuaries then and not zoos maybe.
Yes.
But I have no problem with zoos or sanctuaries that understand that and become a tool for
advancing animal protection, advocacy.
Yes.
Just for that and for creating that contact that children and adults need with animals
to stop thinking of them as legumes.
Yes, exactly.
Yeah.
Yeah, we I think we need to find a better way.
Yeah.
And another good example is dinosaurs.
I was going to say we need to find a better way of appreciating animals without necessarily
needing to capture them or breed them in captivity.
And dinosaurs is probably a good example that every two or three year old at some point
is going to be obsessed with dinosaurs to the point they can name them these horrible
big Latin names that we're all supposed to know.
But they've never met a dinosaur.
You can't go to a zoo and say dinosaur, but they still have this really huge appreciation
of them.
They know all about them.
They know where they lived.
I think there's more lessons in that.
And it's not something that I've explored too much.
More lessons in that and how we teach children to appreciate animals without always having
to be in front of one.
I think it's an added layer if you can be in front of one.
But I think dinosaurs teach us that you don't necessarily need to be right in front of one
to for children to appreciate them or to like them or and there may be a bit more with that
that there's like the border between fantasy and imagination I think.
Whereas dinosaurs don't really fit into fantasy because they were real.
But they still allow children to use their imagination as to what they might have sounded
like and these kinds of things.
Yeah, I think we can learn a lot from potentially exploring that a little bit more.
And I am looking forward to the next book.
I've thought about it.
I thought now that I've written this one theorizing about how we educate children on animals, I
need to put it into practice now.
How am I actually doing it and how am I dealing with the conversations that I'm having to
have and pushing back against people who think I'm neglecting my child because I'm forcing
him to be vegan and all these horrible things that I do to my child.
Yes.
And that's what I want to know.
How theory and practice clash and what is your experience now of being in that seat
of being a dad, being vegan and having to again transmit those values to your child
in a society that is not at all sympathetic to the vegan values.
And it's a true challenge.
I hope that future generations of vegans will not have to face the social pressure of being
judged for their choices from everywhere, from media to your family, to friends, to
colleagues.
Yeah.
And I think I'm very fortunate and then we have a lot of either vegan or plant-based
friends or people who understand.
It's like you do you, that's fine.
We know why you do it.
But yeah, there's definitely some challenges.
It's I guess the same thing that when you tell someone that you're vegan or you don't
eat animals, suddenly they become a dietician.
It's the same with having a child.
Suddenly they're like, but where is he getting his protein from?
And you need to make sure he's getting enough of this and getting enough of that.
And I think we're very privileged in Melbourne here in Australia to be able to have access
to so much food, real food, not animal food or animal-based food.
And so we do a lot of cooking as well.
We don't eat out a whole lot, even though there are quite a few options when we do eat
out.
And we've added extra layers to it as well.
We haven't really done things like sugar and he's coming up to his second birthday.
So he didn't have that much cake and sweet things and stuff like that.
So he likes bitter food.
He likes fruit and things like that, but he's fine with broccoli and stuff like that as
well.
So whereas other kids we seem to be hearing have this beige food phase where they'll eat
nothing but French fries and fried food.
He's fine eating rainbow food, we call it.
So blueberries and broccoli and bananas.
I think also we have the, I guess, as a parent, it's kind of the benefit.
And I don't mean that to sound horrible, of having his grandparents live away.
So my wife's from London, so her parents live in the UK and I'm from central New South Wales.
And my parents live about a thousand kilometres away.
So we've been able to kind of freely look after him, I suppose, or raise him.
Whereas most parents would have their parents very close by, they'd be coming over quite
a bit more often.
I think there would be a lot of benefit to that as well.
And they do come to visit quite a bit, which is wonderful.
But yeah, there's not, I think we don't have the same kind of influences over him as a
lot of other people might struggle with, and having people living a lot closer with them
or bringing their existing opinions and lifestyles with them.
And we've also, whether we stick to this or not, at the moment, we're pursuing a home
schooling, mostly because I want him to have, you know, often when people say they're homeschooling
their child, it's because they want to narrow their experiences.
It's like we want to raise them as a Christian or we want to raise them as a whatever, but
we want to do the opposite.
We want to expand his things.
So we want him to have more access to arts and sports and these kinds of things.
And taking him to sanctuaries, like farm sanctuaries as part of that.
And so he may not have as many influences from fixed social groups as other children
might as well.
Like his social groups are going to be quite a bit bigger and quite a bit more diverse
because he'll be going to these different places as opposed to the restriction of a
school class.
But in saying all of that, he's almost two.
So he's still very, very new and I think as far as the challenges so far have mostly just
been with some minor instances with medical people who will kind of say, oh, you should
do this or you should do that.
And of course, being half responsible vegan parents, we'll just immediately call our plant
based dietitian and say, our GP just told us we should be giving him this.
Is this true?
And of course, they'll just shake their head and we're like, okay, cool.
Thanks.
So I think I would add that to it as well to have some kind of professional support
in, particularly with diets, I think to make sure because it is a constant concern when
you're trying to grow someone healthily.
There are some of those things, like we said, they're deeply entrenched.
There's always that thought of, is he getting enough protein?
Is he getting enough iron?
And it's okay when it's you.
You can feel like when you're a bit low in iron or don't have as much energy and things
like these, you can correct it.
But with a two year old, he can't say, I don't have as much energy today.
So it's a lot more difficult, but I think it can be made a lot more easy by having access
to a few kind of professional support, particularly nutritional support.
Yeah.
Yes.
And I'm absolutely for homeschooling.
I'm a big fan of Peter Gray and his book, Free to Learn, which I recommend.
Yeah.
I even interviewed him in a past incarnation of this podcast and maybe I should release
my interview with him since we're talking about this.
But yeah, I mean, let's think about this month.
Let's think about the future generation of vegans and let's build a better world for
them.
Let's make their fight less hard and their veganism less obstructed with so many inconveniences.
Yeah, exactly.
And I think that's thinking about how we're setting up the next generation.
That's kind of what each subsequent one does.
And I think there's some generations that are a little more self-centered in on themselves
or their society or their culture or whatever it might be.
But ultimately, we want it to be set up for the next people, the next generation to, like
you said, have a slightly easier time with the things that we had a hard time with because
they're going to have a hard time, particularly with changing environments and political polarization.
And these things are going to be much harder for them.
So if we can make these things easier now, then they won't have to deal with that quite
as much as we have had to.
Those are great parting words.
Adam, did you want to add something before I stop the recording?
No, again, thank you so much for having me.
I really love your podcast.
I've learned quite a lot.
And yeah, I'm just very happy to talk about these things.
Well thank you so much, Adam.
Thank you so much for your time, for having written this book.
It's another joy of, you can't see it, but here it is.
It's another joy of, you know, podcasting, being able to meet the writers behind the
books you read.
Yeah, what an amazing treat.
So again, thank you so much, Adam.
Thank you everyone for listening.
I kindly invite you to share this podcast with the vegans you know.
Let's encourage more people to take action.
Again, thank you so much for caring, and I will see you next Tuesday for a new episode.