Will a vegan future happen because of ethics—or innovation? In this episode, Robert and Dani discuss the role of technology, government subsidies, and shifting consumer behavior in shaping the future of food. They also explore how small, consistent choices add up and why doing some good is better than doing nothing at all.
Highlights from this episode:
•How innovation—not ethics—has historically driven societal change
•The unsustainability of animal agriculture and its projected growth
•Why taste, price, and convenience are key to mainstream plant-based adoption
•Top recommended animal charities for making the biggest impact
Tune in for an honest, relatable chat that goes beyond the highlight reels and into the heart of what it means to connect authentically.
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Related Phrases:
vegan future trends, alternative protein innovation, factory farming unsustainable, plant-based food choices, cellular meat technology, government food subsidies, top vegan charities, making veganism accessible, small changes big impact, ethical consumer habits
Transcript:
[Dani:]
Hello everybody, welcome back to another episode of Vegan Protein Muscles by Brussels Radio. My name is Dani. And I’m Robert.
And this is episode 213. So, we have Robert Cheek here, who I think we mention on almost every single podcast. Your name comes up in some capacity or another.
So, look guys, I’m not making it up. He really is my friend, okay? He’s here.
So, we’re here doing the Providence, Rhode Island VegFest this weekend. And we’re lucky enough to have tables next to each other. So, how’d you feel about February in New England?
[Robert:]
Oh, it was fantastic. I mean, it was cold that one night. It was rather chilly.
Brisk, one might say. But the VegFest was phenomenal. You know, I came out here to spend some time with you guys and to do this event.
And it was one of the best book selling, book signing experiences I’ve had as an author, period.
[Dani:]
I mean, you had four of your books?
[Robert:]
Yeah, I brought four. And I sold out of basically three of them. I had one copy of Shred It Left.
And then just fewer than ten copies of The Impactful Vegan left.
[Dani:]
So, I don’t mean he had four books.
[Robert:]
Yeah, I had 36 of one book, for example. I had 36 copies of The Plant-Based Athlete that sold out hours before the event ended. I could have sold more, of course.
People were looking for that one. But they settled for The Impactful Vegan, so maybe that’s even better.
[Dani:]
Well, try not to be jealous, but I sold 13 of my own book. So, there’s that. Just kidding.
That’s not really what we’re there for. Our book is like a kind of bonus thing that’s on the table. But it is always funny.
Whenever we’re on tour with Corinne with VeganStrong, he was so good at selling my books that he printed his own book. And now I don’t sell a single book on the VeganStrong tour anymore.
[Robert:]
Yeah, Corinne can sell pretty much anything.
[Dani:]
Yeah, it’s pretty impressive actually. So, we could have done this podcast on a million topics. I mean, we have probably had like eight hours worth of conversation just since you got here, you and I.
[Robert:]
But we had like six hours in one night. Yeah, that’s true. Counting the airport ride and staying up till midnight.
So, we’ve probably been closer to 20 hours since I got here.
[Dani:]
But we haven’t talked about this specifically. So, what we’re going to talk about, and I have mentioned this on the podcast, and I even had planned to do an episode about this, maybe even like earlier when your book first came out by myself, trying to explain what it was and encouraging people to read your book, The Impactful Vegan. So, this came out last year.
Last year?
[Robert:]
Yeah, June of 2024.
[Dani:]
And it is completely different than the other books that you have published, which have all been about fitness and nutrition as a vegan. But this is completely different. So, tell us what is an impactful vegan?
What is this book about?
[Robert:]
Yeah, well, this book, the idea came from, well, initially reading a book by Peter Singer, The Most Good You Can Do. And then that led me to William McCaskill, Doing Good Better. And then Nick Cooney, How to Be Great at Doing Good.
And it was this whole theme of doing good, helping others. And I was out. I was very inspired by those books, for one.
And then I was out harvesting walnuts on the farm I grew up on, and that’s where I think. That’s where I get my ideas. That’s where I got most of the ideas for all of my books or other major endeavors that I’ve embarked on.
I’m out there thinking by myself, out in nature for hours at a time, and that’s when I realized that, you know what? I have dedicated my life to being impactful, to being effective for the cause, whatever that cause is. It’s even one of the reasons why I got into lifting weights and bodybuilding was to combat this idea that vegans can’t get enough protein three decades ago when the internet was just being born.
So I’ve always had effectiveness on my mind. And basically, an effective altruist, which is kind of the foundation of this book is effective altruism or what I coined effective vegan altruism, is simply someone who tries to do the most good. How can I use my time, my energy, my resources, my connections, my network, all of these things, my financial donations, my volunteering skills, my generosity?
How can I make the biggest difference? That’s simply what it is. When you look at the definition, it even states something just like that.
How can I make the greatest difference in the lives of others? And how can I use an honest and scientific approach to discover what that is? And then remove my own bias.
So whatever that turns out to be, that’s what I should do because the evidence suggests that’s the most effective thing. It’s not always the most fun or the sexiest thing. But when you put your time, energy, money, resources into that cause, it will make a greater difference than doing something else.
[Dani:]
So would you say that being an effective altruist or an effective vegan altruist is finding the forms of activism that sort of give you the most bang for your buck?
[Robert:]
Yeah, that’s precisely what it is.
[Dani:]
And a lot of people go vegan and they think that’s enough. And your book says that that’s just the beginning. So give some examples of what the next steps would be for someone who is already vegan but hasn’t really given this particular idea much thought before.
[Robert:]
Sure. Okay, Dani, so think about this. The typical vegan is going to spare about 365 animal lives per year.
Pretty good. One per day. It’s pretty impressive.
That’s with the foods that you choose to eat, the products you choose to buy or not buy, the types of shoes, belts, purses, hats that are coming from non-animal sources and don’t require exploitation of animals. Even with all that, even the products that you use for skin care and shampoo and everything else that are not tested on animals, still you’ll spare about one animal life per day. I argue in The Impactful Vegan that everyone, vegan or not, could and maybe should change their behaviors in a way that can spare 10,000 animal lives or more per year.
Well, how do you do that? Well, one of the biggest ways to do it is something that people are often not willing to do. But it’s not just opening your heart and mind.
It’s opening your wallet. So there are animal charity organizations that have been around for decades, many, many decades, that have people that have been in their roles and in their positions for many, many years. They come from different industries.
Maybe they’ve been for-profit CEOs and know how to build a business or create impact, if you will. They know how to create change. They know how to change consumer behavior and purchase decisions.
Maybe someone else is really, really good at fundraising, and then they come into this movement and they infuse it with hundreds of millions of dollars. There are all sorts of ways to do this. But one of the most important things we can do is open up our wallets and donate to the most efficacious animal charities in the world.
And what I learned from reading Peter Singer’s work and William McCaskill’s work, and they’re two of the best around. I mean these are like Oxford scientists, philosophers that are really, really brilliant. Peter Singer is, of course, one of Time Magazine’s most 100 influential people in the world.
And William McCaskill is a brilliant Oxford philosopher. And one of the points they make is that when you take a step back and look at charities aimed at helping humans, there’s over a million just in the United States alone. It’s unbelievable.
Whether it’s raising money for prevention of cancer or helping people with blindness or certain disabilities or poverty or learning, getting books to schools, whatever. There’s millions of them. And some are not just two times better or 10 times more effective than others or even 100 times more effective.
Some are thousands of times more effective. And that can be said for animal charity organizations as well. We all can think of some that are completely mismanaged.
Their hearts are in the right place, but they don’t know what they’re doing. Some types of vegan activism might even be counterproductive and actually are, which we know from surveys. Surveying omnivores who are perhaps interested in leaning towards this lifestyle and are turned off by certain behaviors or activism approaches.
And so what effective altruism does is they create systems and methods to evaluate effectiveness. So for example, William McCaskill who co-founded the effective altruism movement 12, 13 years ago, he actually helped put in place animal charity evaluators. So ACE, Animal Charity Evaluators, is an organization that has evaluated and scrutinized over 3,000 animal charities over the last 14, 15 years, and they come up with their top 10 or top four or top whatever every single year.
They usually have their top four best charities of the year based on like 30 points of criteria that they evaluate and then their next six or 10 runners up and then honorable mention. So they kind of create a top 15 list or so every year and some charities emerge. Some are there every single year because they’re just that good and that effective.
And so when you look at it that way, you’ll understand that some charities that do particular activism and education work like the Humane League can spare a chicken’s life for as little as $0.33. That’s really impressive. Whereas some animal charities, and let’s just say, again, we’re taking an honest approach. Let’s say you’re working on saving elephants.
Maybe that’s more close to your heart. You care more about an elephant than a chicken. But I’m just going to make up a number here.
Maybe it costs $600 per elephant. Maybe it’s $6,000 per elephant. Maybe it’s $60,000 per elephant.
But it’s only $0.33 per chicken. Does that chicken deserve, or that baby chick, the same type of care and protection as an elephant does regardless of your bias? What animal you prefer to help?
The exotic wild ones that you see on safaris are really cool. And yes, there’s factors of extinction and all of that. But for the same cost, we’re only talking about financial implications here.
We’re starting there with financial donations. We’ll move on to many other topics. But when it comes to financial donations, think about all these things, Dani.
I write about and I make arguments in the book that we should be open to and deliberately involved in supporting international animal charities. The U.S. dollar stretches incredibly far in the continent of Africa, throughout most of the continent of Asia, in Central and South America, in certain parts of Europe, and other places worldwide. Maybe not Australia.
Pretty expensive place. So imagine the work that we can do here in the U.S. for whatever animal you care about. Dogs, cats, chickens, cows, pigs, turkeys, chickens, whatever.
You can do exponentially more in India, Sri Lanka, Bangladesh, Botswana, wherever you are. And we should remove our regional bias, our proximity bias, to our own city, town, state, country. Because so often – and I put these examples in the book and there’s many throughout the book – let’s say your neighbor’s cat gets hit by a car.
It’s unfortunate. It’s still living. It may cost hundreds and hundreds, maybe a thousand dollars for a surgery.
You have an emotional bias to your neighbor’s cat. You’ve seen your cat, maybe you’ve pet the cat a few times, maybe more than that. The cat comes to your house sometimes and says hi, looks through the window.
But on the other side of the world, out of sight and out of mind, there are cats all over the streets, sick, struggling, dying, whatever. And we don’t seem to care because it is out of sight and out of mind. And you could help one cat here in the United States for your thousand dollars.
Or you could help rescue, protect, prevent disease, help spay, neuter, whatever. A thousand cats in a poor country with the same amount of money. Take farmed animals, which is really what The Impactful Vegan is aimed at.
It’s the underappreciated. That’s why there’s a hen on the cover. The underappreciated animals that suffer in the greatest numbers to the greatest degree.
Think about it again, your dollars. You want to help some chickens here in Kentucky, one of the big chicken breeding states in America where barns have sometimes over 100,000 chickens in a single barn. Now imagine whatever animal that is, that farmed animal.
Imagine in a poorer part of the world where weather conditions are far more extreme in many cases, where air conditioning is harder to come by, where cleanliness, clean water, clean air, clean facilities, veterinary care, medical care, transportation comfortability, the methods of slaughter are all less desirable. In many cases, being broad and without trying to stereotype a certain area but just generalizing the reality of it. We know that to be true in many of these countries.
And is it worthwhile and is it worth our time and consideration to factor in those implications and say, you know what? I’m not scared of letting go of my $100 donation or $500 donation or this – I had a good year – this $3,000 donation or tax write-off to an international organization because I trust them even though they’re outside my regional bias. And once the money is gone, I don’t know what happens to it.
But we can trust in those organizations because Animal Charity Evaluators, ACE, has already done the work for the last 15 years with very smart and competent people letting you know that this organization in India is really high quality and worth supporting. This one in Thailand, Vietnam, a really, really good one. This one in Turkey, there’s a great one in Turkey.
This is one worth supporting and then making those decisions to do the most good.
[Dani:]
So there’s so much to kind of pick apart from here. I totally understand what you’re saying. I was thinking a lot of these things before you got there like our dollar stretches a lot further in other countries so maybe it makes more sense if you’re going to donate to donate to other countries.
And I think that most people listening will be able to wrap their heads around this concept that $600 to save their neighbor’s cat could save way more animals if it went somewhere else. But I think even if people are able to understand the concept, I still think – and I’m curious to hear your thoughts on this because I know you and I know that if your neighbor’s cat was hit by a car or your family’s pet needed veterinary care, I know you would likely, if you were able to, step up and do that. And I know that I would as well.
[Robert:]
And I have in that exact scenario. Actually, I raised money from my vegan bodybuilding community to help a friend’s cat. Of course, that was 15 years ago before I thought about these concepts.
[Dani:]
But I mean if it happened right now, even understanding this concept, I don’t think I could have looked at a family dog and been like, sorry little buddy, this money will go a lot further somewhere else. So there is certainly like a personal emotional bias that I don’t think many people would be willing to sort of let go of, nor do I think they would want to because I do think there’s like – one of the criticisms of effective altruism is that it can come across as kind of cold and callous sometimes for the reasons that you mentioned. And I don’t think a lot of – I feel like there’s a humanness about helping those in your community and maybe it’s a self-preservation thing like this is my community and I want to bring it up as well that I think would make it hard for people to just sort of step away from that.
I don’t think that’s what you’re suggesting but I want to hear your thoughts on it.
[Robert:]
Can I clarify? You don’t have to choose. What I’m saying is donate monthly or throughout the whole year or during the times when donations are matched, doubled and tripled by a wealthy donor.
I explain that all in the book. There are certain times of year. It’s around Giving Tuesday.
It’s at the very end of the year before taxes. It’s on certain days during World Vegan Month. All types of times where your donation is actually matched.
Not just matched but doubled and often tripled because of wealthy donors who are very altruistic and they’re philanthropic people who care about animal issues. So the idea is that you don’t have to choose. One way to do that is to donate monthly.
We all know whether it’s a business that has a subscription model like everything in the world that we shop with whether it’s our Amazon Prime or Netflix or magazines if people still read those or not throwing shade although providing shade would be nice for those in the hot sun. But any kind of subscription service, television, cable, internet, whatever. A box subscription.
The same kind of thing. You could even maybe do one fewer subscription. You could cancel one that’s just not really serving you.
Maybe you belong to two gyms. Maybe you don’t need to have two. And that money could then go to just every month.
And so then when your dog or your neighbor’s dog gets hurt or your neighbor’s cat gets hurt, you can pull from other resources, other funds, other savings if you want to help them but you’ve already allocated and committed to helping those that are suffering in the greatest numbers to the greatest degree throughout the world. And also there’s a concept called earn to give. Many people don’t want to pursue a – I don’t want to say thankless job because it’s certainly not thankless but a just grinding out job trying to help animals in a nonprofit or in some other – they tend to be nonprofits but whether it’s an animal sanctuary, animal shelter, animal advocacy organization, animal charity of some sort, they don’t want to do that.
But they want to use their inherent skills, talents, and natural ability in let’s say finance or something else that is – maybe they’re a professional athlete, something that’s a high earning income. They’re a singer, entertainer. They’re a major YouTuber.
There’s this whole concept of earning to give. In fact, I know people who are literally doing this, some of my friends. They’re skilled as engineers.
They can make six or seven figures or more. They do that in order to then go write big checks to organizations that are doing the great work. And so that’s another thing too where you don’t have to make those decisions on the spot.
Do I help this animal that I’m more biased towards because I like dogs and cats more than pigs or I just really like supporting my own neighborhood and lifting up my own community versus something that’s many continents away? You don’t have to make those decisions and you can do the things that I mentioned that I did when I came across an exact scenario where my friend’s cat got hit by a car, couldn’t use two of his legs, had to wear a diaper and rehabilitate, try to get a wheelchair thing or whatever. I turn to my community, people who are also open to but not currently donating, people who care about the cause but don’t currently contribute to it.
Hey, would you mind contributing some money? I raised a bunch of money quickly and we can all do that kind of thing as well, whether it’s in lieu of gifts for my birthday. Shout out, I got a 45th birthday coming up soon if you want to donate to a cause that I care about.
Not that I care about but one that’s effective and efficacious. You can do those kind of things. In lieu of birthday gifts, please donate in my name to this organization.
There’s so many ways to do it where you don’t have to pick and choose.
[Dani:]
So a lot of what we’ve talked about so far has been financial and I’m sure you’re aware that one of the biggest, I would say, criticisms of effective altruism and in this case effective vegan altruism is that it seems like it’s all about money and who has the most money. A lot of the biggest effective altruists are really just the people that make the most money and of course have decided to put it towards good but it kind of excludes people that are not privileged enough to be in a position to even give $10 a month to something which those are very real people. So I want to hear about some non-financial ways to pursue this idea.
Yeah.
[Robert:]
Well, I’m glad you brought that up Danny because that’s one of my biggest criticisms and critiques as well. I’m not someone who has a lot of money and who historically has not had a lot of money and someone who doesn’t always have the best relationship with money yet I have claimed in my book that’s been read by thousands and thousands of people that I personally am able to spare over 100,000 animal lives per year when the typical vegan, not the typical non-vegan, I’m talking about the typical vegan spares 365, less than 500.
I claim based on mathematics and probability and calculations and things that I can back up and I’ve shared in my book that I can spare over 100,000 animal lives per year without having a lot of financial resources. Well, how do we do that? There’s so many ways and I gave so many examples in the book but let’s just start…
[Dani:]
Can you give us just a couple?
[Robert:]
Yeah. Let’s just start with our strong V. It’s something I created.
It’s an acronym that I made up and that describes our skills, talents, resources, other strengths, network, generosity, and volunteering. So I am a gifted writer. I just am.
I’m sure I got it from my dad. I am very, very good at writing. There’s a lot of other things that I like to do like goofing around on social media and spending time sitting in the sun and watching basketball and all of that.
But if I could find the focus and allocate my time and write really quality books and do really quality work, you know the results of my books. I’ve got one book that’s a New York Times bestseller. It is in nine languages worldwide including in numerous poor countries and developing countries and in major countries throughout the world.
It’s impacting people, which then influences their decisions, their thought process, their purchase power, their ability just that one book alone to build their bodies and challenge the narrative that you can’t build your body with plants, which then inspires the next person. They’re an example for the next person. I mean you showcase and reveal all these professional world-class athletes who are doing it and this idea spreads and then people change the finite amount of calories they’re going to consume in their lifetime.
And that affects supply and demand and animals that are going to be bred and raised specifically to be slaughtered for human consumption. So I use my skill as writing to share that. Now, that may not be your skill.
I know it is but someone listening, that may not be your skill. I’ve also used fitness as a vehicle. When I became vegan, I barely weighed over 100 pounds.
My true authentic goal, aside from personal interest in getting bigger and stronger, was to show people unequivocally that you can build your body without animal protein, fully on a plant-based side. I became a champion bodybuilder as a vegan. I basically created the vegan bodybuilding movement.
I opened doors for so many other people who have come and far exceeded anything that I ever did. But someone had to kick that door open and I did it. And I was on magazine covers.
I’ve written six books, working on a seventh. I’ve toured for my 21st year on tour. I’ve been to five continents.
I’ve been in probably five to ten documentaries. I use fitness as a vehicle and so do so many other people. I give examples in the book of someone I met just randomly at an animal rights conference.
We kind of exchanged info. Maybe he recognized me. What do you do?
Again, a very tangible example. This guy is a very skilled website designer. So much so he has – I don’t know his page.
But last time I talked to him, he had 400,000 YouTube subscribers because he’s good at web design and web stuff. It’s not my area of expertise. I barely know how to use a computer.
But this guy donates, volunteers his skills and his team’s skills and talents to build websites for some of the major animal charity organizations in the world. That would normally cost them tens or hundreds of thousands of dollars. They cost him his time.
Right? And other people still. You know somebody.
I know you do. You know somebody who is in a management position or is in charge of catering for event planning no matter what it is or who purchases products and could empower and encourage that person to make compassionate choices. Here’s one example.
I don’t even know if it’s in my book. I can’t remember. But when I was in high school and I became vegan, I was very passionate about it of course.
I met with the physical education department. My PE teachers. And I asked them if they would please order synthetic leather, basketballs, footballs, soccer balls, and they did.
I also started a recycling program in the school. I organized an animal rights week after my older sister had done so two years prior. Any of us, any one of us can do these things.
You can put on an event. You can distribute recipes. You can bring tasty vegan food to holiday gatherings and introduce it to people.
But very specifically using this strong V, which is really the foundation of the book, is that it’s basically in a nutshell, you have far more power than you think you do. I didn’t know that I could spare 100,000 animal lives per year but because of my books, my gift as a public speaker, my ability to build muscle and to communicate that, my ability to network. Dani, I don’t have a lot of money but I have raised a lot of money.
I have raised a lot of money, not just for my book launches but for even some of the organizations that we have worked with together. I’ve raised a lot of money because of my network. I know people who are very, very wealthy.
I’m not. But I can communicate with them authentically about causes that I care about and not only that I care about and they can very easily see that I’m passionate about but causes that actually scientifically are proven to be effective. I’m able to raise money to help those.
[Dani:]
I have a few questions here. So I’m really glad you brought up the person that builds the websites because I’m thinking about how not everybody has it in them to be the activist guy, the guy that’s out front doing all these things, even starting a recycling week at your school or something like that. So I’m wondering, you know, I’m thinking my brain is spinning and I can think of like a million things now that you mentioned the website.
Like, okay, people that have this skill could do this and they never even need to put their face out there at all.
[Robert:]
Or make any extra effort. They’re just doing what they do but do it in a way that supports different organizations.
[Dani:]
So I have another question.
[Robert:]
Please.
[Dani:]
For a lot of people, you know, they might be vegan and already kind of be doing some of these things that you just mentioned. Bringing really tasty food to vegan potlucks is a good example that I think most of us just do because we’re like, this can only be good, right? Only good things can come out of this.
So is there even a line between just like what we have historically thought of as activism versus effective altruists type of activism?
[Robert:]
Yes.
[Dani:]
Okay. What’s that?
[Robert:]
I will tell you. Again, I don’t even know. No, I think I put some of these examples in the book and that’s the thing.
When you write a book, I literally had five complete chapters completed, edited with an editor and everything removed. I wrote 1,000 pages actually and only 300 made it into the book. I mean I have an actual document of 500 pages that’s just backup material.
Didn’t make it.
[Dani:]
Part two.
[Robert:]
40 pages I never even typed up. I hand wrote, never even typed up. There’s a lot of material out there, but I do believe I put some of these examples in the book.
A lot of us have our favorite forms of activism and we’re convinced that what we’re doing is the best thing because we like it. It makes us feel good. In fact, it makes me feel really empowered.
So some examples I gave that there are people that I know who go out there and hold signs about animal suffering and all of that. Here’s just one very clear example. I saw someone post on social media that they were out there holding a sign about animal cruelty in a town square or whatever.
After two hours, they had two conversations with people. Two people stopped to talk to them. My initial reaction was, well, thanks for putting yourself out there, but what a profound waste of time.
Because what could you have accomplished in two hours of writing a letter to the editor that gets published in a newspaper who’s looking for new material or an article you could write for a magazine or even posts you could make on social media that are inherently going to reach more than two people? Or conversations you can have with your colleagues or at work and changing things to – we can talk about it later. I’d like to.
Like a plant-based by default approach, a greener by default approach where the default option is plant-based food. You actually have to request animal-based foods. It’s a new and emerging form of advocacy and activism for the benefit of reducing animal suffering in the food system, which is where – I should have stated up front.
But we’re 99.9 percent of animal suffering is in the food system. Sometimes we think like we’re really empowered. Like I’m the voice for the voiceless.
I’m out there. And my point was, and I forgot to actually conclude with it, is that the person who said, yeah, I was out there for hours and only talked to two people, but I’m going to get back out there again tomorrow. And people are like, yeah, you go.
You get out there. Keep fighting the good fight. Keep doing your thing.
And I’m thinking there’s so many other ways you could have spent those two hours, including volunteering, including fundraising, including physical work on an animal sanctuary, helping out that way, talking to people in other scenarios where they’re not repelled by your sign that intimidates them. And furthermore, we also understand that most people in today’s society are not persuaded by images of animal suffering because we see it every single day of our life on social media and in videos, both human and non-human animal suffering. We see it all the time.
In fact, I wrote – I interviewed a young college student. It’s in the book. And she even – some direct quotes from her were something like, I’m 45.
She’s 25. I don’t know what their life is like necessarily, but she told me what it’s like. And she said we’re desensitized to this stuff.
We see even death, animals getting hit and dying, people getting shot and dying in videos on social media every day. That’s what gets posted on the news feed. She was – you’re out here showing videos of animal suffering, animal cruelty.
A lot of people don’t care. They see it every day. And they don’t want to change their behaviors.
They feel like they’re going to be missing something. There’s a social cost built into this that they’re going to be the odd person out. They’re not going to fit in anymore, and they don’t want to do it.
When it comes to – and I think maybe to answer your question even more clearly, there’s an organization called Faunalytics. They’re also one of the top recommended animal charity organizations to consider supporting. They are the largest animal research library in the world, animal advocacy research library in the world, online at Faunalytics.org I believe. And they do a lot of surveys. And so they’ve actually calculated and have been able to determine what’s more effective. Billboards, documentaries, celebrities, 30-day vegan challenges, news stories, social media, holding signs, throwing red paint on people like it’s blood.
But not only what’s best, they’re able to rank all of those because they’ve surveyed omnivores and have determined – thousands of them by the way – and have determined their likelihood to change not just their emotion but change their behavior of exploiting or eating animals based on a given type of advocacy. I don’t know if you’ve read that part of the book, but would you – I have read the whole book, yes. Do you know or remember what those best practices are?
[Dani:]
I don’t. Donating money.
[Robert:]
But as far as the activism part, as far as the media, billboards, celebrities, besides donating.
[Dani:]
I mean I don’t remember the actual list, but I would think documentaries, not necessarily animal suffering documentaries, but documentaries as a whole. They seem to be very impactful from my interactions with people, public speaking, things like that, looking up to people that are also plant-based. I mean probably some climate change information being out there as well, but I’m curious.
[Robert:]
Go ahead. Tell me what they are. You might be surprised.
Documentaries are fairly neutral. What is a documentary? It’s a biased agenda to push an idea and most people know that.
That’s what documentaries are. It’s typically a one-sided thing to expose an idea and there’s an agenda behind it and it’s funded by whoever wants to get that idea out there. We see it in the pharmaceutical industry.
We see it in the medical industry. We see it in the conspiracy industry. We see it in the vegan industry.
We see it in the carnivore industry. Whatever it is, it’s very clearly one-sided with an agenda and people can sniff that out. It doesn’t matter.
We hear all the time, oh, I became vegan because of what the health or … Game changers.
[Dani:]
Whatever.
[Robert:]
That’s the biggest one I hear. Right, but there are other more effective methods and so it’s kind of – and again, it’s not surveying. It’s surveying people who when exposed to these forms of media are most likely to change.
[Dani:]
To make a change.
[Robert:]
Not necessarily those who are already vegan and revealing what caused that.
[Dani:]
Probably because it was animal suffering videos that made me go vegan like that.
[Robert:]
Apparently, that’s rare. Me too, but that’s – you are not your audience.
[Dani:]
Right.
[Robert:]
That’s our story. That’s not our audience’s story.
[Dani:]
I learned that very quickly as a new vegan that that did not work on most people.
[Robert:]
Yeah, and it is less likely to work today with, again, as the aforementioned …
[Dani:]
Desensitivity.
[Robert:]
Desensitivity in videos that we’re exposed to on a regular basis or just cruelty.
[Dani:]
All right, so don’t keep us waiting. What is it?
[Robert:]
So believe it or not, the most effective things are news stories that strike emotion in people that people might see on television or in the news, newspaper, online.
[Dani:]
Examples like cow escapes from slaughter truck type of thing?
[Robert:]
Yeah, or a factual news story about a link between the food that we eat and cancer and heart disease and all this kind of stuff that wakes people up to a reality. An example I use in the book is Earthling Ed. Earthling Ed – I’ll tell that quick story.
Many people may not know his vegan origin story. I used it in the book. Earthling Ed loved to eat chicken.
They had his order memorized at KFC. Just a typical Brit, I guess, or a typical person in the Western world. And a friend had – they were ordering pizza and they were ordering different animals on their pizza and he never thought much of that, putting chicken or pigs or cows on their pizza.
And a friend kind of questioned that and he kind of brushed it off like, what is this guy talking about? Like this is what we eat. But then he saw a news story.
While he had leftovers from KFC in his fridge, he saw a news story on the BBC. It was a truck carrying 7,000 chickens that tipped over and crashed, killing 1,500 of them on impact. Hundreds more had flesh ripped off their face, broken bones, broken wings, legs, all these different things, and he felt really sad about that.
He felt empathetic. And then he asked himself – or so the story goes. He asked himself, is this animal’s life – taking this animal’s life equivalent to appeasing my own taste buds?
Like for the food, he’s feeling empathy and sadness for these chickens that it just – they’re just trying to live their lives. And they’re in these tight cages on big trucks and it crashed and 1,500 dead, hundreds, hundreds more injured. Yet he’s eating them because he’s kind of desensitized, out of sight, out of mind how they’re produced.
And then he basically asked himself, is their life worth satisfying my own taste buds? And it was that news story that decided to make him change his behavior and he went on to become one of the most influential vegans today. So news stories are very effective and one – and I don’t totally get this one and I don’t love it.
But social media is one of the most effective ways to communicate. I believe it in a sense a little bit too, especially because I come from a farming background. I come from a farm town.
A lot of my friends are old high school friends, and a lot of people have told me they’ve changed their behavior because of some of the things that I post. So I can kind of get that. And things spread really easily.
Like a virus, they spread. Or like a contagion, which I wrote about in the book as well, how contagions spread. And so these ideas get spread.
And then another one is actually I’m very proud of is books. Books tend to be more authoritative, even more so than documentaries. The problem with books is they don’t get read by very many people.
So books scored the highest, the very highest as far as persuasiveness to omnivores or non-vegans.
[Dani:]
Right, but in front of a smaller audience.
[Robert:]
In front of a smaller audience, therefore less effective than news stories and social media. What might be surprising to you is that celebrities, not all that effective at all.
[Dani:]
Why?
[Robert:]
You know what celebrities do? They’re not early adopters. They wait no matter what it is, whether it’s gay marriage, Ukraine war, politics.
They wait to kind of gauge, see how their audience responds before they take a side on something. They’re very rarely an early adopter of an idea because they’re so worried about their fan base and losing what they’ve built. Interesting.
And so what celebrities do, and I gave examples in the book with Oprah and Twitter, for example. Celebrities can help push things over the edge, but they have to get to a certain tipping point first before celebrities will get behind something. So an example I gave in the book was that Twitter was brand new all those years ago, 15, 20 years ago, whatever it was.
And I actually met Biz Stone. He’s a big guy. I interviewed him.
It’s on YouTube. He’s the co-founder of Twitter. Met him once at Farm Sanctuary.
But Twitter was mostly something that people used in Silicon Valley and actually out here in Boston, Cambridge areas, real tech center, not really geographically centered. It had users, but it wasn’t really getting traction. I mean it was doing well, but not like big time, but it was doing well.
But then Evan Williams was a guest on Oprah, who at the time had the number one show in America, who you can even hear her clips I think or read them like, I’m doing this whole Twitter thing or whatever. And something like 28 million people signed up after that. There were millions already.
There were millions already, but she just pushed it over the top. But then sometimes celebrities get credit, like Oprah would get credit for that, when really the infrastructure was set up by all these hardworking people, and there were millions. And it was very likely going to get that tipping point anyway, but we lean a little bit too much on the celebrity influence of something.
And so we think that this celebrity athlete, this celebrity musician, this celebrity actor is pushing veganism further than it really is. When it’s the organizers, the grassroots people, the community organizers within the vegan and animal rights and animal advocacy communities that are doing the groundwork, that celebrities are just waiting until it bubbles up a little bit and then they push it somewhere. And then they get a lot of credit when it’s really these people who have dedicated decades of their lives to lay the foundation.
I mean I’m only thinking this on the spot and I shouldn’t even say it because it almost seems like ego based. But let’s say even the Game Changers was built on decades of the work that I had done, that you had done, that other people had done. And of course – I mean I support the Game Changers.
In fact, a perfect example, I raised $100,000 for the Game Changers.
[Dani:]
Right. And just to your point about and then they get credit. I think in the grand scheme of things, I don’t care and I don’t think you care who gets credit for – I don’t care if Game Changers gets credit for some of the work that we did way before that because it reached more people.
[Robert:]
Sure.
[Dani:]
And same thing like – I mean I don’t give a crap about Twitter. Thanks for nothing Oprah. But Oprah getting credit for Twitter blowing up, I’m sure whatever the owner guy was didn’t care because he had more people on his platform.
Just a little thing that I was thinking there. Oh man, there’s so much to say. So with celebrities, I noticed like celebrities going vegan, like 90% of them are not vegan.
They don’t stay vegan if they were vegan and that’s always really disappointing. I think in some ways it can actually hurt veganism when some of these celebrities go vegan and very publicly go back. Yes.
[Robert:]
Those are all factors to weigh in to this conversation about being effective and so there’s this – I think there’s a growing movement of in a way dismissing celebrities and their erratic behavior and their following one thing one day, one thing the next. And everything comes down to a moral and ethic philosophy anyway when it comes to veganism. Celebrities don’t really matter that much.
I mean we’re grateful and we’re all maybe guilty of it in some way of embracing when Novak Djokovic is arguably the greatest tennis player in the history of the world and he’s been on a plant-based diet for the last five, six, seven years. Of course we lean into that as like extra fuel for our arguments and for fire.
[Dani:]
But it can backfire, right?
[Robert:]
Sure because he just got injured in the last thing and now he’s out. Oh, it’s his plant-based diet. He’s injured.
[Dani:]
Or you’re thinking celebrities. I’m also thinking influencers because in reality I think influencers have a lot more influence than a lot of celebrities do. It’s literally their jobs.
[Robert:]
Yeah, I agree.
[Dani:]
And I have seen so much harm done to the vegan movement by a lot of these influencers that were huge vegan influencers then going back on being vegan. Can you imagine if you one day just came out and were like, hey guys, I’m not vegan anymore. Like it will never happen but can you imagine the waves that would happen from something like that?
[Robert:]
Well here, let’s …
[Dani:]
And you mentioned in here, what is the recidivism rate for veganism? Like 85%? I mean it’s terrible.
[Robert:]
Yeah, and I think a lot of vegans don’t want to embrace that or admit that. Look around. I’ve been doing this for 30 years.
How many people do you think I’ve met, vegans over the 30 years that are still vegan today? Yeah, it’s a short list. That’s the – and we – it does not help animals to argue with that statistic.
Look around. What we need to do is empower permanent change. And so my whole thing is not just changing hearts and minds but changing menus and meal plans.
It comes back to food.
[Dani:]
Well, let’s actually – we haven’t even touched on this and I think it’s really important. We’re talking about the recidivism rate being like 85% and it brings up this idea of how impactful is it really for 1% of the planet to be vegan versus 90% of the planet being a little bit more plant-based.
[Robert:]
Yeah.
[Dani:]
That technically would be more impactful and that’s a really hard pill for vegans to swallow. Like I think if I remember correctly, you even argued that some of the most effective vegan altruists are not even vegan themselves.
[Robert:]
Yeah, because veganism is not the endgame. Reducing animal suffering is. And that’s what people get confused with.
Reducing animal suffering is the goal of what altruism is, which is making other lives better. It’s not a label and it’s not a strict set of rules to adhere to. Now, I follow the definition of veganism.
Everything that I use, consume, where I don’t make exceptions. I don’t eat honey just because it’s convenient even though that’s a controversial topic. I don’t eat cheese when it’s accidentally brought out on my meal instead of throwing it away.
I don’t just bite the bullet.
[Dani:]
Which could also be a controversial topic, right? I do the same thing. I wouldn’t eat it either, but I also recognize it’s almost pointless for me to throw it away, but I’m still not going to eat it.
[Robert:]
Right, right. I’m the same way and it’s mostly the yuck factor, the gross factor, and actually a bit of personal ego. So I’m glad we’re talking about this because I have an entire section on the book that perfectionism is the enemy.
What I mean by that is that – and I’m just – this is by chance, Dani. I’m by chance wearing a PlantStrong shirt. It’s the only clean shirt I have left from this six-day trip.
But I do make an argument for the fact that you don’t buy – I don’t care what your spending habits are, who you are, even if you have a last name Kardashian or maybe. But you don’t buy six pairs of shoes every single day of your life, 365 days a year every year. You don’t buy six belts every single day.
You don’t buy six hats every single day. But you sit down to eat six times every single day, three meals, three snacks on average in the Western world with access to calories. That’s what we consume to the tune of 3,540 calories per day.
For the typical adult American. What that means is that your decisions about food, what you put on your fork and what you put on your plate matter more than anything else. And that’s why 99.9% of animal suffering is in the food system. I say that because there are a lot of people who follow the PlantStrong, which I’m wearing right now, or the Esselstyn family, Campbell family, or Forks Over Knives approach. They may wear leather shoes. They may even buy leather shoes.
They may go buy a leather belt. Yeah, it’s a horrible industry. It’s horrendous.
But every single day they eat plants. They never – and they stick with it. They adhere to it because they’re part of a community.
They’re part of a lifestyle system. And in fact, it might upset some people. People say, you know, I often – I became vegan for whatever reason, but I stay vegan for the animals and blah, blah, blah.
But we know that’s not true with the 84% recidivism rate. But for whatever reason, a lot of people stick with a plant-based diet for health and wellness. And the fact that they, six times a day, are not contributing to unnecessary animal suffering.
They buy one pair of shoes, leather shoes or leather belt that last them for the next three years for shoes, ten years for the belt. That person is not vegan. They are absolutely not vegan because they still exploit animals.
But are they doing greater good to reduce animal suffering?
[Dani:]
Than one 100% poor vegan that influences nobody.
[Robert:]
Right, right. And actually sometimes turns people away because they’re – like I would probably clarify. The lowest, the lowest ranking – That is one of my questions.
The lowest ranking type of advocacy is the in-your-face, what we call disruptive protests. Throwing paint on people, trashing grocery stores, making huge scenes. It’s like the people with megaphones.
Some of the highly religious people with megaphones screaming on the street. You mostly run away from them. That’s how vegans are seen when they do those.
[Dani:]
And I would put it in that category and I’m curious if the research shows this or if they even research it at all. Just the judgy, angry, vegan stereotype just even at the dinner table.
[Robert:]
Yeah. That serves you and serves your ego and serves the fact that you’re speaking up for the voiceless. It doesn’t serve animals.
And same with – if there’s a little bit of – you know when Beyond Meat was at Del Taco all those years? There’s a few little shreds of cheese on tacos. Slight cross-contamination contributes to 0% of additional animal suffering.
None. A tiny little sliver that’s not even – it’s a fraction of a calorie or it’s a calorie. This does not matter.
It’s a gross factor.
[Dani:]
It’s happened to me. It’s happened to you. If I see it, I take it off.
I’m like, ugh, and throw it away. And then I just eat it. It’s different than having like a whole Beyond Burger that has a big slice of cheese on it.
[Robert:]
Oh, sure, sure, sure. Or you have shredded cheese over your whole salad.
[Dani:]
Yeah.
[Robert:]
So those things are all personal bias and a lot of times it is an ego holier than thou. I’m more vegan than you. I’m more pure.
I won’t touch it. I mean I used to be that way. I used to – if you’re – I’m going to Subway, I would – can you please change your gloves so you don’t touch meat and make mine special?
You know, wasting resources, wasting gloves, wasting plastic, creating this image of that person goes home and tells their family I got this crazy vegan today.
[Dani:]
Vegans are such a pain in the ass. Like I hate serving vegans like that. That doesn’t help.
Then that message spreads through and I’ve worked in many restaurants. That message spreads through kitchen culture in different restaurants and they dread vegans that come in like that. No one wants to make them anything and then somebody comes in and orders a vegan meal and it sucks because they don’t care about serving that community at all and they’re like, oh, vegan food sucks.
Like the ripple effect of it can be quite big but I was also a judgy vegan. I didn’t make anybody change their gloves or anything because I worked in kitchens and I knew how that went. I would call my friends out at dinner and be like, oh, how’s your plate of suffering?
How’s that going for you? But it wasn’t – I wasn’t doing it for my ego at the time. I genuinely thought that they would be like me and have the same response to these things that I had and if I could just get that message through, they would snap to just like I did and come out of it and it never happened, not once.
[Robert:]
So can we talk about that just for a brief moment? So some of my favorite stories and quotes and thoughts in the book are from Paul Shapiro. He’s been a vegan activist for over 30 years.
He’s the founder and president of the Better Meat Company. He says some of the best things in the book. By the way, I interviewed like 40 experts for this book and there’s so many great thought leaders in there, including animal sanctuary founders because that’s something that effective altruism gets criticized for.
They don’t support sanctuaries. I do. In fact, I interviewed three of them.
I differ in a lot of ways from traditional effective altruism, which we can get to either today or in part two down the road sometime of this conversation. But Paul Shapiro made the point that I think all vegans need to take to heart, that he made the statement along the lines of we think that if we have the – if only we had better arguments, if only we had better facts, if only we could get those facts to people, they would immediately change their behavior or their light bulb goes off. It’s that whole idea that if slaughterhouses had glass walls, we’d all be vegetarians.
I don’t think so. How many people in America today don’t know how their burger was turned into a burger, at least to some degree? The note came from an animal and the animal had to go through a dying – a killing process, a slaughter process to be turned into this.
The biggest issue – and I talked to Sergeant Vegan, Bill Muir about this. Of course he uses some explicit language, but it’s the I don’t care or I don’t give a – it’s his expression. That’s the biggest thing we’re up against is apathy.
But along that note, Paul Shapiro also talks about – and that’s where I got this entire idea for this section of the book called The Social Cost of Veganism, that it comes with a social cost. It comes from being criticized by your peers, by your family, by question all the time. You’re always on the spot.
You’re always the token person who eats differently. We’ve got to change restaurants because this person in a room, maybe you’ve never met these people before. Oh, this is my friend.
She’s the vegan. Oh, can I ask you a question about protein? Every day.
Yeah, my wife gets – she works at a regular job at the university and she’s the token vegan and everyone – she gets introduced as such and it’s on the spot and she doesn’t like being on the spot and then has to defend herself where it’s like almost like that video we watched, the Jubilee video, 25 against 1. That’s one of the reasons why the recidivism rate is standing, one of the biggest reasons why, and Dr. Michael Clapper, who has been vegan longer than almost anyone we know, almost 50 years, said the same thing that people grow tired of being the odd person out. They grow tired of defending themselves all the time.
There’s this – there is a steep – that’s a word that Paul used. There’s this steep built-in social cost to living this way that you have to accept and it wears on people and it wears them down. But he also said another great quote.
I was reading it last night. It comes down to this point of like you were talking about how’s your suffering meal and let’s have a conversation. He was saying you can’t just win an argument with meat eaters.
You have to win them over. So you win people over by being likable, by being understanding, by – By living by example. I mean listen.
I was – trust me. I was rolling my eyes in the back of my head, in the back of my head at VegFest when I had people come up to me just two days ago and saying they were vegan but then they moved out here to the east coast and near the Cape and now they – The seafood. They can’t stop eating seafood and then, well, I have a little bit of eggs now too and the protein and I’m just like – I’m thinking like, are you kidding me?
I’m like in better shape than almost anybody here. I’ve been in this for 30 years. I have no problem getting protein.
I’m 205 pounds. I’m very strong. I trained three and a half hours yesterday.
[Dani:]
But if you said that …
[Robert:]
They defensive walk away. You have to validate. I said, yeah.
So I asked questions. I said, yeah. So what was the catalyst or why – and then we went into this longer discussion.
She was – this particular person was worried about processed plant-based meats. It’s too processed. Yet eating high toxicity fish and so I made that point.
I said, you know what? I understand your concern which is why I would be really concerned about eating fish because bigger fish eat smaller fish who also eat smaller fish, who eat smaller fish. So by the time you get to those bigger fish, all this toxicity is compounded and so you’re getting this really concentrated form of either mercury or other toxicity that’s found in fish.
Since you care about that in your body and you don’t want to put this processed plant-based meats, which by the way – and then I brought in the analogy of the process. Imagine the processing that it takes to get a cow out grazing in the field to turn into a patty on your plate. That’s heavily processed.
That’s very high processed. But I had to – I couldn’t just fight with her and say, well, obviously you have no moral backbone. I wish you would – you clearly don’t actually care.
What are you doing here? Why don’t you go home? I’m not going to say that but some vegans will.
[Dani:]
Taryn Arrowsmith Yes, definitely. When I was 16 years old, I probably would have said exactly that but I learned quickly. Thank God.
I actually have a quote in the book not to brag but it was something along the lines of people don’t like to be told what to do. They have to feel like it was their own idea in order to feel empowered to make change. I think the way that we talk to people, live our lives, the attitudes we have when we’re around people that are not like us at all, I think that’s one of the most – it’s one of the most important things that we can do.
I don’t know if it crosses that line into effective altruism or not but you don’t need money. You don’t need special skills. You don’t need special talents to be that type of vegan that you wish you knew before you went vegan.
[Robert:]
Aaron Powell You know what, Dani? I have no idea how we’re doing on time or anything but one of the – really the easiest way to sum everything up in a 300-page book is to lead by positive example. Set the example whether that is in physical fitness, whether that is in attitude, whether that is in personal health, whether that is in conscious consumerism, whether that is with empathy and caring about others and being that person that people say, you know, I want what they’ve got.
I want some of that. Like I got that all weekend in Rhode Island with the energy that I had and the fitness that I was displaying and record-setting sales, almost record-setting. A lot of it comes down to just lead by example.
I also want to make this point just to make sure it’s not missed because it’s again something that Paul Shapiro pointed out and it’s been one of my talking points for my presentations. In fact, I have even more Paul Shapiro stories I want to share if there’s time. But one is very important.
Dani, if I were to ask you or your listeners – I’m going to look at you, listeners, for a moment. So I apologize. I’m going to look over here.
If I were to ask you why you became vegan if you’re vegan or why you eat the way that you eat or why you have your value system or why you live the way you live as it relates to veganism, you would say, oh, I’m vegan for the animals, my health, and for the environment in some sort of order. It might be health, animals, environment, whatever order it is. That’s what vegans say.
For 99% of the rest of the population, those three things are nowhere near the top of their list. They’re not even in their top ten. Why do they eat the way they eat?
You want to know?
[Dani:]
Tradition.
[Robert:]
You want to know?
[Dani:]
Culture. Social reasons.
[Robert:]
Yeah. Keep going.
[Dani:]
Convenience. Taste.
[Robert:]
Cost. Yeah. The way I say it, and you rattle off many of them, I just have like an order that I say them in, but taste, cost, convenience, religion, heritage, family structure, societal norms, social pressure, and simply what they grew up doing, inherent habits that were built in, the foods they ate from when they were born, and all the other social pressures and availability of said foods.
They don’t care about animals. They don’t care about the health. They don’t care about the environment.
They show us with their actions. People eat hot dogs. I mean, that should tell you enough right there that people don’t care about their health.
People eat an insane amount. As you know, 85% of the calories that we consume are processed junk foods and animal protein. Let me throw out some numbers for you.
80% of people surveyed claim they eat fast food once per week. 37% of people eat fast food every single day.
[Dani:]
37?
[Robert:]
37 in America. 20% of people in America eat at least one meal in their car. 73.6% of Americans are overweight. 42.5% of Americans are obese. The average individual calorie consumption is now up to 3,540 calories per person. That’s not to body shame anybody.
That is to sound the alarm that we have a health crisis because we have been convinced in conditions to eat certain foods. Why? I can tell you exactly why.
I can tell you. I can tell you exactly.
[Dani:]
I have thoughts. I’d probably go down a totally different road, but I want to hear yours.
[Robert:]
If I can go for two minutes here because I rehearsed this late last night hoping to be able to share some of this in our conversation today. We didn’t start fencing in animals to confine them, to eat them until the late 1800s. We didn’t start large-scale factory farming until the 1920s, and that was with chickens.
Chickens were the first victims. There was an agricultural law passed in 1933. I forget the name of it, but it was to create government subsidies for agricultural animal farmers, 1933.
We created an obsession with protein after the World Wars, rebuilding of a nation. Protein was seen to be so important. It was the essence of life itself.
It was discovered in 1838, and we associated in the late 1800s and early 1900s, we associated protein with animals. It makes sense. We’re eating their muscle tissue that they built through amino acids, and they built this protein.
We eat that. We invented microwaves in 1945. TV dinners came out about a decade later.
The rise of fast food restaurants and family diners was a booming industry in the 60s and 70s. In our industry, the discarded byproduct of the dairy industry, creating milk and milk products, there were curds in whey and casein in whey, and we created this supplement of really discarded product. Of trash.
Around the 60s and 70s, which now is a multibillion-dollar industry of something that’s become a carcinogen basically, with insulin-like growth factor one. But our obsession with protein and association with animal protein started in the late 1800s and into the 1900s. Then around 1992 is when they launched the Beef is What’s for Dinner campaign.
The very next year was the Got Milk campaign for the California dairy producers. These went on to become some of the most successful campaigns in history. This conditioned us, including many people who are alive today.
I’m in my mid-40s now. We grew up in an industry that normalized the industrialized factory farming system. We normalized the food system of chicken nuggets and hot dogs and corn dogs and fish sticks and milk that was required to have.
You couldn’t go to recess unless you drank your milk. These were all government subsidies. For example, a real tangible example, I worked at a summer camp for many, many years.
I was even one of the adult staff organizers after I was a camper and then a counselor and then junior staff worked my way up. I learned more of the nuances, which was that milk was free, but we had to pay for orange juice. What do you think we’re going to do with a small budget for a lot of poor kids coming to the summer camp?
We’re going to make sure everyone’s fed milk. Some of those things we overlook, the significance of individual campaigns like Beef is What’s for Dinner and Got Milk because that shaped an entire generation and how they viewed nutrition. Here we are now, only been doing this for 100 years or so of confining animals for human consumption.
Unfortunately, chickens and pigs often get the short end of the stick. They suffer to the greatest degree, which we can evaluate, which might be for a longer conversation, but it’s something called the QALY score, the Quality Adjusted Life Years, which I could explain in more detail. I have lots of examples, but it’s basically – it’s a way to evaluate the degree that someone is suffering.
It’s so interesting that William MacAskill says you can even evaluate the level of suffering that you might go through between losing your job, going through a divorce, or stubbing your toe. For animals, we can’t talk to them, but we can assign a level of suffering to them. So not to go on a tangent, but this is actually – the QALY score is one of the fundamental aspects of effective altruism.
So if I want to look at suffering, let’s say you’re feeling in perfect health, you’re a 10. Everything is going great for you on a scale of 1 to 10. Ten is perfect health, and you don’t have to answer these questions, but I’m just going to make up some scenarios.
How would you report back to me your level of wellness on a scale of 1 to 10 if I now tell you that you suffer from migraines every single day of your life? What does that number go to, from a 10 to a what? You can keep it in your head if you want, and I’m going to ask you something else.
Okay, now migraines every day of your life. Now what if I said another scenario is you suffer from chronic diarrhea every single day of your life?
[Dani:]
Okay.
[Robert:]
Okay. Maybe a different number. What if I say you suffer from debilitating panic attacks every day of your life?
And now let’s say something else. Now let’s say for whatever reason – again, I’m making this stuff up. You throw your back out very painfully three days a week, and you’re bedridden or something like that.
What number is that? Let’s say you suffer from intense – again, I’m just making these things up, but this is all part of the philosophy of understanding suffering. Let’s say you suffer from very severe – let’s say like poison ivy in certain parts.
Let’s say in an embarrassing part of your body.
[Dani:]
Okay.
[Robert:]
Let’s say like your butt crack or something, and you work in public. Let’s say you work in a – no, this is all part of it.
[Dani:]
And all of these together.
[Robert:]
No, no, how you compare one to the other.
[Dani:]
Oh, okay, gotcha, because I was like we’re down like near one right now.
[Robert:]
Oh, yeah, yeah, no, sorry.
[Dani:]
I want to die.
[Robert:]
I’m going to off myself soon. Do we need to redo this? No, okay, I gotcha.
So what’s worse out of all that stuff? Hey, you compare it because that’s what we do with animals. That’s why we can have an honest conversation about do egg-laying hens suffer more than beef cows?
The answer is yes because we can assign – is it worse to never, ever be able to spread your wings and be on a wire cage and be crammed in with a whole bunch of peers for the entirety of your existence or to have some sort of pasture to go in and to live a longer life? Chickens only live like 42 days or something. Cows need more time.
Yeah, they get more time. They get more fresh air. They get more space to roam around.
And then can we say do dairy cows suffer more than beef cows? Well, the answer is yes. Why?
They have their babies taken from them and then they – They’re strapped to machines. They become milk-producing machines. They’re artificially inseminated every year based on – And they also basically meet the same end, right?
They’ll be slaughtered, yeah, after they produce a different calf every year only if that calf, their child, be taken from them and guess what? That calf is then killed within a few weeks to be served as veal in expensive restaurants throughout the Western world. So we can determine that some animals suffer more than others, which is why we prioritize and give preferential effort towards helping some more than others because some simply suffer in larger numbers like chickens.
Like if I were to ask listeners here, this is an easy one, a little softball. If you could only choose, you have to choose. Just in this scenario, you have to choose.
Do you use your – all your strong V, your skills and talents and all that stuff, your funds, your network to support chickens or support cows? The answer would be you support and help chickens. It takes about 175 individual chickens to create the same edible meat as one cow.
To me, it seems like the number should be even higher.
[Dani:]
Yeah, it does seem like you’re probably throwing away a lot of cow then.
[Robert:]
Yeah, yeah. There must not be a lot of edible stuff on there because I would think more hundreds. You can do the math of the body weight.
But then again, chickens that are Cornish crossbreed that are bred for meat, I raise them. I, Robert Cheek, raised them and sold them at the auction. I know.
I come from 20 years of farming. Like I know this. They are pretty big.
Those are big chickens. So the numbers in that case do make sense. But I mean 175 lives to one, that’s why we focus on some animals over others as far as getting them the help and resources that they need.
[Dani:]
So a lot of the stuff you’re saying, it’s obviously very true. But it is also incredibly depressing, right? And there are a lot of vegans and vegan activists I know that they get burnt out.
And they feel like they’re just screaming into the void. Yes. And I know you felt like that.
I know I felt like that. And, you know, how do you get to the other side of that and still believe that what you’re doing can make any kind of a difference? Can it make a difference?
If you never actually get to see with your own eyes the fruits of your labor, so to speak, and the animals that are saved and the animals that are just not bred into existence in the first place, how do you keep going?
[Robert:]
I love this question. And we didn’t rehearse this, but you set me up for one of the points that I really wanted to make.
[Dani:]
Beautiful.
[Robert:]
And so I’m glad we get to finish with this. One, can I add to the depressing aspect for a little bit? Please.
So you’re right. This is very depressing. It takes a lot.
It takes a very strong person to stick with this fight for a long time. It’s tough. But to add to the depressing statistics, there have been 11 peer-reviewed papers that show that industrialized animal agriculture is going to increase by anywhere from 62% to 242% between now and 2050.
[Dani:]
So I just wanted to interject real quick the answer when you were like, oh, why is this happening? My answer was going to be rampant, unregulated capitalism. And I still stand by that.
And you kind of touched upon it quite a bit. But what you just said, 64%?
[Robert:]
62% to 240% more animal agriculture between now and 2050.
[Dani:]
Does it give a reason? Does it explain why? Because my answer is always going to be, oh, well, money, bottom dollar capitalism.
Someone needs to make money for this.
[Robert:]
The biggest reason is because we’re going from 8 billion people to 10 billion people. We need to feed 2 billion more people. We’re currently slaughtering 90 billion land animals and over a trillion sea animals, mostly shrimp and small fish and some large fish too.
So that’s the direction we’re headed in. We’re headed in this direction of 10 billion people on planet Earth by 2050 who eat a lot of meat and agriculture going up by as high as 200 – animal agriculture going up by as high as 242%, 11 peer-reviewed papers. That is very sobering.
I even wrote in the book. It’s difficult to write this. It’s difficult to write this in the book when you actually place value on what that actually means for the animals.
Take a step back and realize the scale of suffering that is going to ensue because of our insatiable desire to eat animals. That is tough. So how do we have any kind of faith moving forward?
Let me ask you some questions, Danny. We just came back from the Rhode Island Veg Fest. Did we get there by way of horseback?
[Dani:]
Nope.
[Robert:]
We took a car, right? It was cold, was it not? It was freezing.
It was cold there. Did we heat our hotel room with whale blubber? No.
We did not. I signed a near record-setting amount of books. Did I go outside and pluck a goose feather or confine the goose and kill the goose to use the feathers to sign the books?
No, I had a pen from the comfort inn. Why do I say that? We didn’t stop – this is from Paul Shapiro by the way.
We didn’t stop riding horses because humans said enough is enough. We need to let these beautiful creatures live and let live. And people did not rise up and protest.
We invented the bicycle and the automobile, and riding horses became obsolete aside from the cowboys out west that still – by the zero point something something percent who exploit horses in that way. We stopped harpooning whales because we invented kerosene and other methods of heating our homes, right? We stopped using goose feathers and other animal feathers and squid-based inks and all this stuff because we found better ways.
And so the reason I stay optimistic is because we reinvent ourselves all the time. We’re innovative. The internet has only been around for 25 or 30 years.
These platforms, we can even do this stuff. It’s been around just for a couple decades. AI has been around for a few years.
Electric cars have been around for a few decades. Things change all the time, and my father is a brilliant PhD professor in animal science. He has some great quotes in the book too that – and he studied.
He actually got a PhD in – it’s kind of funny. And he even said he had passion for it. I’ve been reading his memoir.
He had a passion for forages. He was passionate about alfalfa and wanted to learn all about alfalfa, which is a very common crop for dairy cows, and it’s very water-intensive. My father made the point, and his brother is a PhD physicist who honestly many, many, many, many, many years ago predicted all of these hurricanes that are happening now throughout the southeast United States because he’s a cold-temperature – he’s like a cold-temperature-water physicist who predicted all this stuff.
My dad, same thing. He said this is just not sustainable.
[Dani:]
Well, that’s what I was going to say.
[Robert:]
We can’t keep – we’re going to – we cannot keep raising 90 percent of all soybeans that are fed to animals, all this alfalfa that’s way more water-intensive than almonds or the things that people try to get us to care about, avocados or whatever, to feed the dairy cows, and then there’s a feed conversion ratio.
[Dani:]
But we also like – if there’s 2,000 – I’m sorry, 2 billion more people on the planet, and we’re going from 60-something percent to 240, 220 percent of …
[Robert:]
Of the current rate of animal agriculture.
[Dani:]
We would need a whole other planet to do that. So like literally – even if that’s like the projection, I don’t – how could that even be physically possible? We don’t have the space for it.
[Robert:]
We do. You remember the state of Wyoming you drove through?
[Dani:]
Yeah, yeah, yeah. Montana.
[Robert:]
They’re massive, and nobody’s there. We would have to just encroach on all these other areas.
[Dani:]
But even some of those places you can’t farm to make the food, to feed the animals. Like, okay, maybe it’s like very technically possible.
[Robert:]
This is a point my father made, and this is a point that some carnivore people make. In defending raising animals is that you can grow grass in some of those areas, and that’s something that animals can graze on and convert into muscle tissue, which calories fuel for humans. I mean I’ve seen – I’ve been in all these.
I mean I live right next to Wyoming. I drove through it recently. I’ve seen just bizarre places where cows are, where you think there’s nothing around.
There’s sagebrush. There’s dirt. There’s dust.
But grass grows certain months out of the year, and then they use hay that’s been harvested elsewhere, and they use other feed supplements, a lot of grains, soybeans, corn, that kind of stuff. So that is – there are many parts of the world that are not very populated. The entire continent of Australia, I’ve been there, barely anybody.
The entire country of Canada, it’s massive. Nobody is there.
[Dani:]
Nothing is going to grow up there. It’s freezing.
[Robert:]
But it can in certain areas and certain – and so who knows where these – and who knows where these – we need apartments and homes for these two billion people. We need societies and communities for them. We need schools.
We need all these hospitals, and that’s another thing too. We may just collapse the healthcare system too.
[Dani:]
We may just collapse as a society in general. You want that podcast, you let me know, me and Sawyer. We’re ready.
We are ready.
[Robert:]
It’s very real though. Dr. T. Kong Campbell has said this numerous times, and I quoted him I think in the past that – I don’t know.
We could cut the healthcare cost by 80% if everyone moved to a plant-based diet or more of a whole food plant-based diet.
[Dani:]
I believe it.
[Robert:]
And so, yeah, it’s sobering. It’s scary looking ahead at what 2050 might look like in a world that – in this capitalistic society, heavily government-subsidized society where taste, convenience, and cost went out. But there’s also 1,400 different companies working on alternative proteins right now and not just Beyond Meat and Impossible Foods but Precision Fermentation and cellular meat and so many other things that – what our – I think consensus approach of the experts interviewed in this book is that people will adapt just like we adapted to the way that we move our transportation methods, the way that we heat our homes, the way that we use different things, the way that we communicate through video calls now. We adapt from flip phones to a smartphone. No one liked it at first and no one wanted to use a little stylus or then a BlackBerry wheel and then a touchscreen.
I believe, and so many people I interviewed believed when I asked them about a vegan future or any hope for a more compassionate future. Everybody agreed it’s not going to be because we have an ethical worldview that we share. We can’t even agree on how people with different religious beliefs should be treated or how women should be treated or how minorities should be treated or how poor people should be treated.
And we have conflicting religious groups, 2 billion here, 1 billion here, 900 million here, 500 million here, 80 million here. We’re never going to agree on an ethical viewpoint that’s a common thread among all of us as a society. That’s never going to happen.
But we’ve seen that people will adapt to the food they eat and as long as it tastes good and it’s affordable and it’s convenient, they’ll eat it. Like I said, no one knows what’s in a hot dog, but they eat it anyway. So if we can make hot dogs and burgers and pizza and the food that a lot of people in the Western world eat, if we can make it through cellular technology, which requires very little animal exploitation, through precision fermentation, which very little, if any, animal exploitation, and with a combination of plant-based meats, all of those could eventually win out.
[Dani:]
Possibly take some of the government subsidies and move it to something else that’s more sustainable for the planet, less animal intensive, because that alone will drive the cost up, which in turn will make it more expensive and probably less convenient for most people to get it. So then a lot of it comes down to taste. If two things cost the same, are both equally convenient, and taste just as good as one another, I think there are a lot of people that would choose the plant-based option if all other things were equal.
[Robert:]
And that’s really, as we finish up here today, that’s kind of the punchline that I’m getting at is that, and I said it early on too, how do we go from sparing 365 animal lives to 10,000 or 100,000? It’s because the decisions and choices we make every single day. Oftentimes it is the same price for the product tested on animals or not tested on animals.
Just pick the more compassionate one. Oftentimes it is the chicken or the plant-based chicken that the price is pretty close these days, at least in many places. Walmart, I shop there all the time.
I don’t have a problem. I’m not above that or I don’t have an ego that I only shop at high-end groceries or I don’t anymore. I want to create demand at the world’s largest grocers.
I go and it’s comparable price. Or almond milk or other non-dairy alternatives are so price comparable these days. You just make those decisions over and over and over, and those stack up and those compound, and soon you have a more compassionate society.
Even if it’s almost by accident like a plant-strong approach or a forks over knives approach of just making those plant-based food choices, leading by positive example. And then I encourage everyone, if you can just find it within your heart, within your wallet to have an impactful vegan bucket, just put some money in there. And then at the end of the month or the end of the year, donate it to one of the most effective animal charities in the world.
[Dani:]
Name your top three.
[Robert:]
Phonolitics, the Humane League, and I will say the Good Food Institute because they’re doing so much forward-thinking research, working with international governments to prepare them for a cellular meat and alternative meat future. And so they’re doing really, really innovative work. I also like Dharma Voices for Animals.
I contribute to them, and I don’t shy away from supporting animal sanctuaries either. But I also encourage people to look through the book and look at the entire list of animal charity organizations because ultimately, Dani, and this is the last thing, and this is where I definitely stray from traditional effective altruism is that I’m a much bigger fan of you doing something rather than nothing. If you look at effective altruism as it stands, they only want to do the best, most impactful, the thing that’s going to do the most significant bang for your buck, like all the anti-malaria nets for kids in sub-Saharan Africa so they don’t get bit by mosquitoes and die and all that.
I totally get it. They want to address the biggest sources of human poverty and affect the largest number of people and all that. I’m on board.
I’m on board with all of that kind of stuff. I don’t really get all their AI stuff. I’m not – You’re not a tech bro?
No, I don’t follow all the effective altruism artificial intelligence stuff. But what I will say is that doing something, even if you can’t do the most good, do some good. Boy, that makes a difference in the lives of those who are suffering today.
And there’s a lot. There’s a lot of animals suffering today. And if you can do something today that makes their life better tomorrow, you should do it.
[Dani:]
That’s awesome. Well, I’m so grateful that we got to have this conversation in person instead of over Zoom. And of course it’s been great having you here at our house also.
[Robert:]
Yeah.
[Dani:]
Where is the best place for people to get your book?
[Robert:]
I’m very fortunate that The Impactful Vegan is in bookstores all over America. Obviously the easiest place is online at the big bookstore that everyone knows because it will get there by tomorrow. And I just encourage people to read it and apply what you learn.
I spent two and a half years writing it. I had a team of five editors. I interviewed 40 people for it.
It’s very comprehensive. It’s the best work I’ve ever done. And I didn’t want to just write a good book.
I was like, oh yeah, I read that. That was a good book. I want this to be life-changing and transformative.
I can’t tell you how many times I’ve heard from people who read the book, who donated to effective animal charities, or who volunteered at their local sanctuary, or who used their birthday money to go use ineffective ways, who vote with their dollars differently. And I can’t tell you how many organizations I’ve heard from, including animal charity evaluators who write to me, faunalytics who write to me, Humane League who write to me, Dharma Voices for Animals who write to me. Other organizations who write to me and say, Robert, we received a donation because someone read your book.
And even as we sit here today, it has only, only five-star reviews on Amazon. There’s 136 last I checked. There’s not a single four-star review, not even one.
And that’s a testament to the incredible amount of work and thought that went into it. And also the efficacy of how effective it actually is. Like my goal with this book was to raise millions of dollars, to funnel millions of dollars, especially from people who are not currently giving money to the most effective animal charities.
Like, I mean, really, if you care about animals, it is so much more effective to donate than it is to go hold a sign or do so many other things. We know that from natural disaster relief. I don’t go hop on a plane and go help, you know, fight floods or fire.
I don’t know how to, I’m not, or help rescue people or provide medical things. I don’t know how to do that, but I can, I can donate funds to those who know exactly how to allocate them the best. And that’s what we’re asking.
But for those who don’t want to open up your wallet and I get it, it’s tough. It’s difficult for me too. There are so many things that you can do with just the conversations that you have, the social media platforms that you use, the donations of even old blankets you don’t need to animal sanctuary.
So they don’t have to go buy stuff or used, you know, cook vegan cookbooks you don’t use anymore. Get those out there in thrift stores and libraries, allow people to discover them, donate them to auctions to raise money for organizations. Use your technology skills, use your people skills, use your, you know, your department manager decision-making skills to make compassionate choices and we can all get involved.
And it just starts by taking action today.
[Dani:]
Awesome. Awesome. Well, thank you, Robert.
If anybody wants to reach out to you directly, what’s the best way to do that?
[Robert:]
Yeah, well, the best way is probably by email because I deleted all of my social media apps weeks ago as the time of this conversation. Again, actually to be more effective and productive as I’m writing new books. That’s the way that I’m at my best.
And so it’s just email. Robert.Cheek at Gmail.com. I have plenty of email addresses, but they all point to that one Gmail one.
And maybe someday I’ll get back on social media. It is an effective tool, but for now, I empower all those others who have their loud voices there and let me do my quiet voice with a pen and paper and a keyboard and I’m going to produce some awesome material. I believe it.
And that’s knowing thyself and that’s what I’m good at. So I’m getting back to work to write more.
[Dani:]
Awesome. Awesome. Thank you so much for being here.
If you guys have any questions, you can leave them in the comments below. If you’re watching this on YouTube, you can email Robert. You can email us.
Always coach at VeganProteins.com. If you’re interested in any kind of coaching, VeganProteins.com. Those links are also in the show notes and description.
So once again, thank you so much for being here, Robert. My name is Dani. And I’m Robert.
And we’ll talk to you soon. Thank you so much. Bye.
